The Clinic

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “She's not happy, but she'll see you very briefly. Marge Showalsky. But don't expect to learn much about Hope.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “And sorry.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “I'm sure you're not the enemy. Robin's too smart for that.”

  14

  The stretch of Olympic that housed the Women's Health Center was one of those clumsy L.A. mixes: factories, junkyards, storage barns, a trendy prep school pretending it was somewhere else by erecting a border of potted ficus.

  The clinic was a single story of charmless brown brick next to a parking lot rimmed with iron posts and heavy chains. The front door was locked. I rang the bell and gave my name. A moment later I was clicked in.

  Three women sat in the waiting room and none of them looked up. At the rear were swinging wooden doors with small windows. The walls were covered with posters on AIDS awareness, breast examination, nutrition, support groups for trauma. A TV in the corner was tuned to the Discovery Channel. Animals chasing each other.

  One door opened and a heavy, bespectacled woman around sixty held it ajar and stuck her head out. She had short, gray, curly hair and a round, pink face that wasn't jolly. Her eyeglasses were steel-rimmed and square. She wore a dark green sweater, blue jeans, and sneakers.

  “Dr. Delaware? I'm Marge,” she boomed. “I'm tied up, gimme a minute.”

  As the door closed, the women in the waiting room looked up.

  Closest to me was a black girl around eighteen, with huge, wounded eyes, meticulous cornrows, and tightly clenched lips. She wore the uniform of a fast-food outlet and clutched a Danielle Steel paperback in both hands. Across from her were what looked to be a mother and daughter: both blond, daughter fifteen or sixteen, Mom an old forty, with black roots, pouchy eyes, sunken body and spirit.

  Maybe Daughter had something to do with that. She looked me straight in the eye and winked, then licked her lips.

  She had an unusually narrow face, off-center nose, low-set ears, and a slightly webbed neck. Her hair color looked natural except for the hot-pink highlights at the tips. She wore it long and teased huge and flipped back. Her Daisy Duke cutoffs barely covered her skinny haunches, and a black halter top exposed spaghetti arms, a flat, white midriff, and minimal shoulders. Three earrings in one ear, four in the other. An iron nose ring, the skin around the puncture still inflamed. High black boots reached midway up her calves. Black hoop earrings were the size of drink coasters.

  She winked again. Gleefully furtive crossing of legs. Her mother saw it and rattled her magazine. The girl gave a wide, naughty smile. Her teeth were blunt pegs. One hand finger-waved. Foreshortened thumbs.

  It added up to some kind of genetic misalignment. Maybe nothing with an official name. What used to be called syndromy back in my intern days.

  Her legs shifted again. A hard nudge from her mother made her sit still and pout and look down at the floor.

  The black girl had watched the whole thing. Now she returned to her book, one hand rubbing her abdomen, as if it ached.

  The door opened again. Marge Showalsky motioned me in and led me down a hall of examining rooms.

  “Lucky for you it's a quiet day.”

  Her office was large but dim with moisture stains on the ceiling. Random furnishings and bookshelves that didn't look earthquake-safe. Half-open blinds gave a striped view of the asphalt lot.

  She settled behind a desk not much wider than her shoulders. Two folding chairs. I took one.

  “Used to be an electronics factory. Transistors or something. Thought we'd never get rid of the metal smell.”

  Two posters hung on the wall behind her: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at a cafe table, under the legend GIRLTALK. A Georgia O'Keeffe skull-in-the-desert print.

  “So you work for the police. Doing what?”

  I told her, keeping it general.

  She righted her glasses and gave a bearish grin. “You give good bullshit. Best I've had this week. Well, I can't tell you much either. The women who come here have very little left except their privacy.”

  “The only person I'm interested in is Hope Devane.”

  She smiled again. “You think I don't know who you are. You're the shrink who works with Sturgis. Anyway, in answer to your anticipated questions: Yes, we do terminations when we can find a doctor to perform them. No, I won't tell you which doctors do them. And, finally, Hope Devane wasn't involved with us much, so I'm sure her murder had nothing to do with us.”

  “Not involved much,” I said. “As opposed to Dr. Cruvic.”

  Her laugh could have corroded metal. She opened a drawer, pulled out a rough-textured briar pipe, rubbed the mouthpiece. “Mike Cruvic is an M.D. with excellent credentials willing to make a regular commitment to women in need. Want to guess how many other Hippocratic types are standing in line to do that? This place is run from month to month. Mostly it's nurses on their off-hours. A machine answers our phone and we try to listen for emergencies. Maybe next month we'll get voice mail: “If you are dying, press one.' ”

  She put the pipe in her mouth, bit down so hard the bowl tilted upward.

  “Money crunch,” I said.

  “Strangulation time.” She raised a fist. “Few years ago we had government grants, staff on payroll, a damn good immunization-and-screening program. Then the government started discussing health-care reform, morons came out from Washington asking us about accountability, and things got weird.”

  Yanking out the pipe, she pointed it like a periscope. “So, what's it like working with Milo Sturgis? Only reason I agreed to meet with you was to ask.”

  “You know him?”

  “By reputation. You, too— the straight shrink who hangs around with him. He's legendary.”

  “In the gay community?”

  “No, at the L.A. Country Club. What do you think?” Her eyes twinkled. “You know, some people think you're in the closet. That if you were really a good shrink you'd realize you're in love with him.”

  I smiled.

  “Hey, we got Mona Lisa.” She smiled back around the pipestem, looking, oddly enough, like Teddy Roosevelt. “So tell me, how come he never gets involved?”

  “In what?”

  “Sexual politics. Putting his image to constructive use.”

  “You'd have to ask him that.”

  “Ho, ho, I've touched a nerve— well, he should. Gay cop, breaking down barriers, the way he went up against the department, what was it, five years ago? Broke that lieutenant's jaw because he called him a fag.” She put the pipe back in, chewed with satisfaction. “At certain bars people still talk about that.”

  “Interesting twist,” I said.

  “You know different?”

  “He broke the lieutenant's jaw because the lieutenant endangered his life.”

  “Well,” she said, “I guess that's a reason, too— so why no social conscience? He never answers calls from fund-raisers or march organizers, never joins anything. Same with that doctor boyfriend. Studs like that, they could do some good.”

  “Maybe he feels he already is.”

  She looked me up and down. “Are you bisexual?”

  “No.”

  “So what's the connection?”

  “We're friends.”

  “Just friends, huh?” She laughed.

  “Like Hope and Cruvic?”

  Her laughter died.

  “I understand your wanting privacy,” I said. “But in a case like this everything gets examined.”

  “Then get a court order— look, what if they were doing each other three times a day on top of his desk? And I'm not saying they were. Who gives a shit? Mike didn't kill her, who cares who screws who? She got killed because she got famous and pissed off some pig to the extreme.”

  “Any idea who the pig could be?”

  “Too many out there to count. I shall reiterate: She was minimally involved here. I'm sorry when any woman's killed but there's nothing I can tell you about this woman.”

  Rising
with effort, she made her way around the desk to the door.

  “Say hi to Mr. Legend. Tell him no matter what he does for his bosses, he'll never be anything to them but a queer.”

  Back in the waiting room, neither girl was there, only the little blond's mother. She looked up from her reading as I passed. The magazine was Prevention.

  I was back at my Seville when I saw her running toward me in a pinched trot. Short and slight, she had a high waist and a hunched upper body. Her lower lip was thin, its mate nonexistent. She wore baby-blue jeans, a white blouse, flesh-colored sneakers.

  “The nurse told me you're a psychiatrist?”

  “Psychologist.”

  “I was just wondering . . .”

  I smiled. “Yes?”

  She came closer, but carefully, the way you approach a strange dog.

  “I'm Dr. Delaware,” I said, extending a hand.

  She looked back at the clinic. A roar sounded overhead and she jumped. A Cessna flying low, probably a takeoff from the private airport in Santa Monica. She watched it head out over the ocean. When the noise faded, she said, “I was just— are you by any chance gonna be working here?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” Dejection. “Okay, sorry to bother you.”

  She turned to go.

  “Is there some way I can help you?” I said.

  She stopped. One hand began twisting the other. “No, forget it, sorry.”

  “Are you sure?” I said, touching her shoulder very lightly. “Is something the matter?”

  “I just thought maybe they were finally gonna get a psychologist here.”

  “For your daughter?”

  Her hands kept working.

  “Teenage problems?” I said.

  She nodded. “Her name's Chenise,” she said, tentatively, as if prepared to spell it for some bureaucrat. “She's sixteen.”

  She patted her breast pocket. “Quit smoking, keep forgetting— yeah, teenage problems. She drives me crazy. Always has. I— she's— I been all over with her— a million clinics, all the way to the County Hospital. They always gimme some student and they can't never handle her. Last time, she ended up in the guy's lap and he didn't know what to do. The schools won't do nothing. She's been on all kinds of medication since she's little, now it's gotten . . . Dr. Cruvic— he's the doctor here who operated on her— said she should see a psychologist and he brought one over. A lady. Real good, she had Chenise's number right away. Smart. So of course Chenise didn't like talking to her. But I made her go. Then . . .”— lowering her voice—“something happened to her— to the psychologist.” Shaking her head. “You don't want to know. . . . Anyway, better be getting back, she's probably almost through with her checkup.”

  “The psychologist Dr. Cruvic had her see, was that Dr. Devane?”

  “Yes,” she said, breathlessly. “So you know what happened?”

  “As a matter of fact, that's why I'm here, Mrs.—”

  “Farney, Mary Farney.” Her eyes opened wide. Same blue as her daughter's. Pretty. Once she might have been, too. Now she had the trampled look of someone forced to remember every mistake.

  “I don't understand,” she said.

  “I'm a psychologist and I sometimes work with the police, Mrs. Farney. Right now I'm working on Dr. Devane's murder. Did you—”

  Terror in the blue eyes. “They think it had something to do with this place?”

  “No, we're just talking to everyone who knew Dr. Devane.”

  “Well, we didn't really know her. Like I said, she only saw Chenise a few times. I liked her, she took the time to listen to me, understood Chenise's games . . . but that's it. I gotta get back.”

  “What about Dr. Cruvic?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he understand Chenise?”

  “Sure, he's great. Haven't seen him since— in a while.”

  “Since the operation.”

  “No reason to, she's fine.”

  “Who's checking Chenise out today?”

  “Maribel— the nurse. Gotta go.”

  “Would you mind giving me your address and phone number?”

  “What for?”

  “In case the police want to talk to you.”

  “No way, forget it, I don't want to get involved.”

  I held out my card.

  “What's this for?”

  “If you think of something.”

  “I won't,” she said, but she put the card in her purse.

  “Thanks. And if you need a referral for Chenise, I can find one.”

  “Nah, what's the use? She wraps people around her finger. No one catches on.”

  I drove away.

  Surgery. Given Chenise Farney's promiscuity, it wasn't hard to imagine what kind.

  Cruvic and Hope working together on abortions.

  Cruvic calling for a psychological consult because he cared? Or another reason?

  Promiscuous teenager with low intelligence. Minor patient below the age of consent. Maybe too dull to give informed consent? Cruvic covering his rear?

  Cruvic and Hope . . .

  Holly Bondurant had assumed the two of them had something going and Marge Showalsky's angry dismissal of the issue confirmed it.

  I realized Cruvic had lied to us— implying he'd met Hope at the fund-raiser when Holly was certain they'd known each other previously.

  Milo's hunch confirmed.

  More than a business relationship.

  But in light of Mandy Wright's murder, so what? The Vegas case pointed to a stranger homicide.

  A psychopath, still out there, stalking, watching, planning. Waiting to perform a knife sonata under the cover of big, beautiful trees.

  I was at Overland when I spotted a coffee shop with a lunch counter and pulled over. I bought a morning paper, read it while I had a hickoryburger and a Coke, then pulled out the list of students involved in the sexual-conduct board.

  Might as well finish up.

  Three who hadn't been interviewed yet— four, really, because the encounter with panicked Tessa Bowlby didn't qualify.

  I called the number for Deborah Brittain in Sherman Oaks. A machine told me to wait for the beep. I decided not to.

  Reed Muscadine had dropped out of school, so his class schedule was no longer relevant.

  I called him. His tape said, “Hello, this is Reed. I'm either not here or I'm working out and unwilling to interrupt the burn. But I do want to talk to you, especially if you're my golden opportunity—pant pant. So please please please leave your name and number. Starving actors need love, too.”

  Cheerful, mellow, modulated. The kind of voice that knew it sounded good.

  If he was HIV-positive it hadn't dampened his spirit or his attempts to stay fit. Or he hadn't changed the tape.

  Starving actor . . . even after getting the soap-opera job?

  Had something gotten in the way of the job?

  His address was on Fourth Street. If I was lucky, I'd catch him after the burn faded and learn about his health and his feelings about Hope Devane and the conduct committee.

  If my luck really held, perhaps I could find out what was scaring the hell out of Tessa Bowlby.

  15

  His address matched a white stucco cottage with castle pretensions: two turrets, one oversized over the front door, the other a vestigial nipple atop the right corner. An old woman wearing a wide straw hat stooped on the sidewalk, removing weeds by hand. By the time I cut the Seville's engine, she was upright with her hands on her hips. She wore brown canvas gardening pants with rubber kneepads and had sueded skin and judgmental eyes.

  “Hi, I'm looking for Reed Muscadine.”

  “He lives in back.” Then she stiffened, as if regretting telling me that much. “Who're you?”

  I got out of the car and showed her my police ID.

  “Ph.D.?”

  “I'm a psychologist. I work with the police.” I looked down the driveway. An apartment sat on top of the garage, accessed by steep, sk
inny front steps.

  “He's not in,” she said. “I'm Mrs. Green. I own the place. What's going on?”

  “We're questioning him with regard to a crime. Not as a suspect, just someone who knew the victim.”