Dr. Death (40 page)

"He's not a suspect," I said. "He's a potential witness."

"A witness? Guy like that, what kind of witness could he be?"

"Hard to say. Right now, I'm trying to get some rapport. We're talking about his family."

"His family? What, good old-fashioned psychoanalysis? The stuff you read about in books?"

• • •

I returned to Donny's room. He was facing the door. Waiting.

"No promises," I said, "but the resident's calling the supervising doctor."

"How long till I get my Tegretol?"

"If she gets the okay, soon."

"An eternity. What bullshit."

"You're welcome, Mr. Salcido."

He drew back his lips. Half his teeth were missing. The stragglers were cracked and discolored.

I pulled a chair next to the bed and sat down. "Why were you on your way to your father's place?"

"He never came to my place, why should I go to
his
place?"

"But you did."

"I know that, stupid! It's rhetorical— Ciceronian. I'm questioning my own motives— engaging in introspection. Isn't that good? A sign of progress?" He spat and I had to move away to avoid being the target.

"I don't know
why
I do what I do," he said. "If I did, would I be
here
?"

I said nothing.

"I hope this happens to
you
one day," he said. "Feeling this passive. Weak. You think my skin's so weird? What's weird about it? Every shrink I talked to told me skin wasn't important, the thing was to look within. Get past the surface."

"How many shrinks have you talked to?"

"Too many. All assholes like you." He closed his eyes. "Talking faces, little crushing rooms just like this . . . Get past the skin, the skin, look inside. Man, I
like
the skin. The skin is all. The skin holds it all in."

The eyes opened. "C'mon, man, get these things off, let me touch my skin. When I can't touch it I feel like I'm not there."

"In time, Donny."

He moaned and rolled his head away from me.

"Your skin," I said. "Did you do all that yourself?"

"Idiot. How could I do the back?"

"What about the rest of it?"

"What do you think?"

"I think you did. It's good work. You're talented. I've seen your other artwork."

Silence.

"The Anatomy Lesson,
" I said. "All those other masterpieces. Zero Tollrance."

His body jerked. I waited for him to speak.

Nothing.

"I think I understand why you chose that name, Donny. You have zero tolerance for stupidity. You don't suffer fools." Like father . . .

He whispered something.

"What's that?" I said.

"Patience . . . is not a virtue."

"Why not, Donny?"

"You wait, nothing happens. You wait long enough, you choke. Rot. Time dies."

"People die, time goes on."

"You don't get it," he said, a bit louder. "People dying is nothing— worm food. Time dies, everything freezes."

"When you paint," I said, "what happens to time?"

A tiny smile showed itself amid the beard. "Eternity."

"And when you're not painting?"

"I'm too late."

"Too late for what?"

"Responses, being there, everything— my timing's off. I've got a sick brain, maybe the limbic system, maybe the prefrontal lobes, the temporals, the thalamus. Nothing moves at the right pace."

"Do you have a place where you can paint now?"

He stared at me. "Screw you. Get me out of here."

"You offered your art to your father, but he wouldn't accept it," I said. "After he was gone, you tried to give it to the world. To show them what you were capable of."

His lips folded inward and he chewed on them.

"Did you kill him, Donny?"

I bent closer. Close enough for him to bite my nose.

He didn't. Just stayed in place, prone, staring at the ceiling.

"Did you?" I said.

"No," he finally said. "Too late. As usual."

• • •

After that, he shut up tight. Ten minutes into the impasse, the straw-haired nurse came in carrying a metal tray that held a plastic cup of water and two pills, one oblong and pink, the other a white disc.

"Breakfast in bed," she announced. "Two-hundred-milligram morsel with a one-hundred chaser."

Donny was panting. He forgot his restraints, tried to sit up. The cuffs snapped against his wrists and he slammed back down, breathing even faster.

"No water," he said. "I won't be drowned."

The nurse frowned at me as if I was to blame. "Suit yourself, Señor Salcido. But if you can't swallow it dry, I'm not going back to the doctor to authorize an injection."

"Dry is good. Dry is safe."

She handed me the tray. "Here, you give it to him, I'm not getting my fingers bit off."

She watched as I took the pink pill and brought it close to Donny's face. His mouth was already wide open. His molars and most of his bicuspids were missing. Putrid breath streamed up at me. I dropped in the pink lozenge. He caught it on his gray tongue, flipped it backward, gulped, said, "Delicious."

In went the white pill. He grinned. Burped. The nurse snatched the tray and left, looking disgusted.

I sat back down.

"There you go," I said.

"Now you go," he said. "I had enough of you."

I tried awhile longer, asking him if he'd ever actually gotten into the apartment, what did he think of his father's library, had he read
Beowulf.
Mention of the book drew no response from him.

The closest I got to conversation was when I let him know I'd met his mother.

"Yeah? How's she doing?"

"She's concerned about you."

"Go fuck yourself."

I pressed him about novelty shop gags, phony books. Broken stethoscopes.

He said, "What in the ripe rotten fuck are you talking about?"

"You don't know?"

"Hell no, but go ahead, talk all you want, I'm coasting now. Getting smooth."

Then he closed his eyes, curled as fetally as the cuffs allowed, and went to sleep.

Not faking; real slumber, chest rising and falling in a slow, easy beat. The rhythmic snores of one at peace.

• • •

I left Hollywood Mercy trying to classify him. Assaultive and deeply disturbed, but bright and manipulative.

Combative and pigheaded, too. Eldon Mate had rejected his son unceasingly, but genetics couldn't be denied.

Zero Tollrance. He'd turned himself into a walking canvas, drifting from squat to squat, numbed his pain with dope and anticonvulsants and anger and art.

Painting his father's portrait, over and over.

Offering his
best
to his father, getting
rejected
over and over.

As good a motive for patricide as any. And Donny had considered it, he'd definitely considered it.

Did you kill him?

Too late. As usual.

Denying he'd followed through. As did Richard. Brilliant, bloody production, and no one was willing to take credit.

Despite Donny's slyness, I found myself believing him. The mental impairment was real. Tegretol was powerful stuff, end-stage medication for mood disorders when lithium failed. No fun, not an addict's choice. If Donny craved it, he'd suffered.

He'd dissected his father on canvas, but the real-life murder reeked of a mix of calculation and brutality that seemed beyond him. I tried to picture him organizing what had happened up on Mulholland. Stalking, enticing, writing a mocking note, hiding a broken stethoscope in a box. Cleaning up perfectly, sufficiently meticulous not to leave a speck of DNA.

This was a guy who got mugged and left in the gutter. Who got yelled at by an elderly landlady and fled.

My mention of the book and the scope had elicited nothing from him. His clumsy attempt to enter his father's apartment in full view of Mrs. Krohnfeld was miles from that degree of sophistication. His entire life pattern was a series of failed attempts. I doubted he'd ever gotten past Eldon Mate's front door.

No, someone a lot more intact than Donny Salcido Mate had planted that toy. The personality combination I'd suggested at the beginning— the same mixture suggested by Fusco.

Smarts and rage. Outwardly coherent but with a bad temper problem.

Someone like Richard.

And his son. I thought of how the boy had pulverized six figures' worth of treasure.

It kept coming back to Eric.

Dispirited, I headed west on Beverly and considered how Eric might've lured Mate to Mulholland. Wanting to talk about his mother? To talk about what
he'd
done to his mother
— for
his mother. Claiming to Mate that he'd been
inspired
by the death doctor. The appeal to Mate's vanity might have worked.

But if Eric had been the one in that motel room, why butcher Mate? Covering for himself? Thin. So perhaps Mate
had
been involved. And Eric, knowing of his father's hatred for the death doctor, perhaps even knowing about the failed contract with Quentin Goad, had taken it upon himself to act.

Blood orgy to please the old man.

Happy Traveling, You Sick Bastard.
The phrasing had an adolescent flavor to it. I could hear the sentence tumbling from Eric's lips.

But if Eric had slaughtered Mate, why was he now striking out against his father? Had he finally come to grips with what he'd done? Turned his anger on Richard— blaming, just as the old man was wont to do?

Father and son rolling, wrestling, snorting on the floor. Tearing at each other, only to embrace. Ambivalence. Apparent reconciliation.

But if what I suspected was true, the boy was unpredictable and dangerous. Joe Safer had sensed that, asked my opinion. I'd avoided an answer, claiming I needed to focus upon Stacy, but also wanting to avoid additional complications. Now I had to wonder if Eric's presence in the house put Stacy— and Richard— in danger.

I'd call Safer as soon as I got home. Hold back my suspicions and keep my comments general— Eric's bad temper, the effects of stress, the need to be careful.

The afternoon traffic had sludged to chrome cholesterol, cars lurching forward in fits and starts, tempers flaring. I allowed myself to be drawn into it, oblivious to petty resentments, thinking about real rage: Eric and Mate on Mulholland. Blunt-force injury to Mate's head. As in baseball bat.

Perhaps the boy had gotten Mate up there with a simple lie: misrepresenting himself as a terminally ill patient pining for the love bite of the Humanitron.

A young, male traveler. Mate, defensive about too many females, those nasty feminist jibes about his sexuality, would have liked that.

The meet, the kill, then weeks later Eric sneaks into Mate's apartment and hides the stethoscope.

Out of business, Doc.

High intelligence, savage anger. The boy had plenty of both.

And sneaking out in the middle of the night was Eric's habit, he'd done it for years.

Helen, the dog . . .

A look at the boy's phone records and credit-card log would be instructive. Had he booked a flight from Palo Alto to L.A. on or around the day of Mate's murder? Made a second trip to pull off the break-in?

Taking all those risks simply to taunt Mate's ghosts.

Or was it the cops he was out to humiliate? Because, after shedding blood, he learned that he
liked
it?

The juxtaposition of blood and pleasure. That's the way it had started for Michael Burke. That's the way it always started.

Someone that young and smart warping so severely. Terrifying.

I wanted to bounce it all off Milo.
Intriguing,
he'd say,
but all theory.

And theory was where it would freeze because I couldn't— didn't
want
to— probe further.

A horn honked. Someone screeched to a stop. Someone cursed. The air outside looked heavy and milky and poisonous. I sat in my steel box, one among thousands, pretending to navigate.

31

FOUR P.M. CORNED-BEEF sandwiches and beer in the fridge, a note from Robin pinned to a carton of coleslaw. She and Spike had gone to A&M Studios to sit in on a recording session. The bassist was debuting an eight-string she'd created. Rhythm-and-blues tracks; Spike loved that kind of thing.

The studio was on La Brea near Sunset; I'd been only a few blocks away. Ships passing . . .

Mail was piled up on the dining room table; from the looks of it, mostly bills, and hucksters promising immortality. I phoned Safer. He was in court, unavailable, so I tried the Dosses.