Bad Love (10 page)

“The kinds of problems you’d expect. Documenting a good case against visitation shouldn’t be a problem. The grandmother’s opening up a bit, too. I went out to the house this afternoon. Her latest husband looks like a retired cholo — lots of homemade tattoos.” I described Rodriguez’s skin art.

“Dealing with the elite,” he said. “You and me both.” He crossed his legs and glanced down at the dog: “C’mere, Rove.”

The dog ignored him.

“Good dog,” he said, and drank his beer.

He left at ten-thirty. I decided to put off installing the dog door till the next day. Robin called at ten-fifty and told me she’d decided, definitely, to come home early — tomorrow evening at nine. I wrote down her flight number and said I’d be at LAX to pick her up, told her I loved her, and went to sleep.

I was dreaming about something pleasantly sexual when the dog woke me just after three in the morning, growling and pawing the dust ruffle.

I groaned. My eyes felt glued shut.

He pawed some more.

“What?”

Silence.

Scratch scratch.

I sat up. “What is it?”

He did the old-man-choking bit.

Ingress and egress . . .

Cursing myself for not installing the door, I forced myself out of bed and made my way, blindly, through the dark house to the kitchen. When I opened the service porch door, the dog raced down the stairs. I waited, yawning and groggy, muttering, “Make it fast.”

Instead of stopping to squat near the bushes, he kept going and was soon out of sight.

“Ah, exploring new ground.” I forced one eye to stay open. Cool air blew in through the door. I looked outside, couldn’t see him in the darkness.

When he didn’t return after a minute or so, I went down to get him. It took a while to find him, but I finally did — sitting near the carport, as if guarding the Seville. Huffing, and moving his head from side to side.

“What is it, guy?”

Pant, pant. He moved his head faster but didn’t budge his body.

I looked around some more, still unable to see much. The mixed smells of night-blooming plants hit my nose, and the first spray of dew moistened my skin. The night sky was hazy, just a hint of moonlight peeking through. Just enough to turn the dog’s eyes yellow.

“Hound of the Basketballs,” I said, remembering an old
Mad
magazine sketch.

The dog scratched the ground and sniffed, started turning his head from side to side.

“What?”

He began walking toward the pond, stopping several feet from the fence, just as he had during our first encounter. Then he came to a dead halt.

The gate was closed. It had been hours since the timed lights had shut off. I could hear the waterfall. Peering over the fence, I caught a glimpse of moonstreaked wetness as my eyes started to accommodate.

I looked back at the dog.

Still as a rock.

“Did you hear something?”

Head cock.

“Probably a cat or a possum, pal. Or maybe a coyote, which might be a little too much for you, no offense.”

Head cock. Pant. He pawed the ground.

“Listen, I appreciate your watchfulness, but can we go back up now?”

He stared at me. Yawned. Gave a low growl.

“I’m bushed, too,” I said, and headed for the stairs. He did nothing until I’d gotten all the way up, then raced up with a swiftness that belied his bulk.

“No more interruptions, okay?”

He wagged his stub cheerfully, jumped on the bed, and sprawled across Robin’s side.

Too exhausted to argue, I left him there.

He was snoring long before I was.

Wednesday morning I assessed my life: crank letters and calls, but I could handle that if it didn’t accelerate. And my true love returning from the wilds of Oakland. A balance I could live with. The dog licking my face belonged in the plus column, too, I supposed. When I let him out, he disappeared again and stayed out.

This time he’d gotten closer to the gate, stopping only a couple of feet from the latch. I pushed it open and he took another step.

Then he stopped, stout body angling forward.

His little frog face was tilted upward at me. Something had caused it to screw up, the eyes narrowing to slits.

I anthropomorphized it as conflict — struggling to get over his water phobia. Canine self-help hampered by the life-saving training some devoted owner had given him.

He growled and jutted his head toward the gate.

Looking
angry
.

Wrong guess? Something near the pond bothering him?

The growls grew louder. I looked over the fence and saw it.

One of my koi — a red and white
kohaku
, the largest and prettiest of the surviving babies — was lying on the moss near the water’s edge.

A jumper. Damn.

Sometimes it happened. Or maybe a cat or coyote
had
gotten in. And that’s what he’d heard . . .

But the body didn’t look torn up.

I opened the gate and went in. The bulldog stepped up to the gatepost and waited as I kneeled to inspect the fish.

It
had
been torn. But no four-legged predator had done it.

Something was sticking out of its mouth — a twig, thin, stiff, a single shriveled red leaf still attached.

A branch from the dwarf maple I’d planted last winter.

I glanced over at the tree, saw where the bough had been cut off, the wound oxidized almost black.

Clean cut. Hours old. A knife.

I forced my eyes back to the carp.

The branch had been jammed down its gullet and forced down through its body, like a spit. It exited near the anus, through a ragged hole, ripping through beautiful skin and letting loose a rush of entrails and blood that stained the moss cream-gray and rusty brown.

I filled with anger and disgust. Other details began to leap out at me, painful as spattering grease.

A spray of scales littering the moss.

Indentations that might have been footprints.

I took a closer look at them. To my untrained eye, they remained characterless gouges.

Leaves beneath the maple, where the branch had been sheared.

The fish’s dead eyes stared up at me.

The dog was growling.

I joined in and we did a duet.

I dug a grave for the fish. The sky was Alpine clear, and the beauty of the morning was a mockery of my task.

I thought of another beautiful sky — Katarina de Bosch’s slide show. Azure heavens draping her father’s wheelchaired form.

Good love/bad love.

Definitely more than just a sick joke now.

Flies were divebombing the koi’s torn corpse. I nudged the body into the hole and shoveled dirt over it as the bulldog watched.

“Should have taken you more seriously last night.”

He cocked his head and blinked, brown eyes gentle.

The dirt over the grave was a small umber disc that I tamped with my foot. After taking one last look, I dragged myself up to the house. Feeling like a dependent child, I called Milo. He wasn’t in and I sat at my desk, baffled and angry.

Someone had trespassed on my property. Someone had watched me.

The blue brochure was on my desk, my name and photo — the perfect logic of trumped-up evidence.

Reading this, someone could believe you were esteemed colleagues.

I phoned my service. Still no callback from Shirley Rosenblatt, Ph.D. Maybe she wasn’t Harvey’s wife. . . . I tried her number again, got the same recorded message, and slammed down the phone in disgust.

My hand started to close around the brochure, crumpling it, then my eyes dropped to the bottom of the page and I stopped and smoothed the stiff paper.

Other names.

The three other speakers.

Wilbert Harrison, M.D., FACP

Practicing Psychoanalyst

Beverly Hills, California

Grant P. Stoumen, M.D., FACP

Practicing Psychoanalyst

Beverly Hills, California

Mitchell A. Lerner, M.S.W., ACSW

Psychoanalytic Therapist

North Hollywood, California

Harrison, chubby, around fifty, fair, and jolly looking, with dark-rimmed glasses. Stoumen older, bald and prune faced, with a waxed, white mustache. Lerner, the youngest of the three, Afroed and turtlenecked, full bearded, like Rosenblatt and myself.

I had no memory beyond that. The topics of their papers meant nothing to me. I’d sat up on the dais, mind wandering, angry about being there.

Three locals.

I opened the phone book. Neither Harrison nor Lerner was in there, but Grant P. Stoumen, M.D., still had an office on North Bedford Drive — Beverly Hills couch row. A service operator answered, “Beverly Hills Psychiatric, this is Joan.”

Same service I used. Same voice I’d just spoken to.

“It’s Dr. Delaware, Joan.”

“Hi, Dr. Delaware! Fancy talking to you so soon.”

“Small world,” I said.

“Yeah — no, actually, it happens all the time, we handle lots of psych docs. Who in the group are you trying to reach?”

“Dr. Stoumen.”

“Dr. Stoumen?” Her voice lowered. “But he’s gone.”

“From the group?”

“From — uh . . . from life, Dr. Delaware. He died six months ago. Didn’t you hear?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know him.”

“Oh . . . well, it was really pretty sad. So unexpected, even though he was pretty old.”

“What did he die of?”

“A car accident. Last May, I think it was. Out of town, I forget exactly where. He was at some kind of convention and got run over by a car. Isn’t that terrible?”

“A convention?”

“You know, one of those medical meetings. He was a
nice
man, too — never lost patience the way some of the—” Nervous laugh. “Scratch
that
comment, Dr. D. Anyway, if you’re calling about a patient, Dr. Stoumen’s were divided up among the rest of the doctors in the group, and I can’t be sure which one took the one you’re calling about.”

“How many doctors are in the group?”

“Carney, Langenbaum, and Wolf. Langenbaum’s on vacation, but the other two are in town — take your pick.”

“Any recommendations?”

“Well . . .” Another nervous laugh. “They’re both — all right. Wolf tends to be a little better about returning calls.”

“Wolf’ll be fine. Is that a him or a her?”

“A him. Stanley Wolf, M.D. He’s in session right now. I’ll put a message on his board to call you.”

“Thanks a lot, Joan.”

“Sure bet, Dr. D. Have a nice day.”

I installed the dog door, making slow progress because I kept pausing between saw swings and hammer blows, convinced I’d heard footsteps in the house or unwarranted noise out on the terrace.

A couple of times I actually went down to the garden and looked around, hands clenched.

The grave was a dark ellipse of dirt. Dried fish scales and a slick gray-brown stain marked the pond bank.

I went back up, did some touch-up painting around the door frame, cleaned up, and had a beer. The dog tried his new passageway, ingressing and egressing several times and enjoying himself.

Finally, tired and panting, he fell asleep at my feet. I thought about who’d want to scare me or hurt me. The dead fish stayed in my head, a cognitive stench, and I remained wide-awake. At eleven, he awoke and raced for the front door. A moment later, the mail chute filled.

Standard-sized envelopes that I sorted through. One had a Folsom POB return address and an eleven-digit serial number hand-printed above it in red ink. Inside was a single sheet of ruled notebook paper, printed in the same red.

Doctor A. Delaware, Ph.D.
Dear Dr. Delaware, Ph.D.:
I am writing to you to express my feelings about seeing my daughters, namely Chondra Wallace and Tiffani Wallace, as their natural father and legal guardian.
Whatever was done to our family including done by myself and no matter how bad is in my opinion, water under the bridge. And such as it is, I should not be denied permission and my paternity rights to see my lawful, legal daughters, Chondra Wallace and Tiffani Wallace.
I have never done anything to hurt them and have always worked hard to support them even when this was hard. I don’t have any other children and need to see them for us to have a family.
Children need their fathers as I’m sure I don’t have to tell a trained doctor like yourself. One day I will be out of incarceration. I am their father and will be taking care of them. Chondra Wallace and Tiffani Wallace need me. Please pay attention to these facts.
Yours sincerely,
Donald Dell Wallace

I filed the letter in the thick folder, next to the coroner’s report on Ruthanne. Milo called at noon and I told him about the fish. “Makes it more than a prank, doesn’t it?”

Pause. “More than I expected.”

“Donald Dell knows my address. I just got a letter from him.”

“Saying what?”

“One day he’ll be out and wanting to be a full-time dad, so I shouldn’t deny him his rights now.”

“Subtle threat?”

“Could you prove it?”

“No, he could have gotten your address through his lawyer — you’re reviewing his claim, so he’d be entitled to it legally. Incidentally, according to my sources he doesn’t have an audio recorder in his cell. TV and VCR, yes.”

“Cruel and unusual. So what do I do?”

“Let me come over and check out your pond. Notice any footprints or obvious evidence?”

“There were some prints,” I said, “though they didn’t look like much to my amateur eyes. Maybe there’s some other evidence that I wasn’t sophisticated enough to spot. I was careful not to disturb anything — oh, hell, I buried the fish. Was that a screw-up?”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s not like we’re gonna do an autopsy.” He sounded uneasy.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Nothing. I’ll come by and have a look as soon as I can. Probably the afternoon.”

He spoke the last words tentatively, almost turning the statement into a question.

I said, “What is it, Milo?”

“What it
is
, is that I can’t do any full-court press for you on this. Killing a fish just isn’t a major felony — at the most, we’ve got trespassing and malicious mischief.”