Self-Defense (3 page)

The landlord said Sand was paid up for
another two months but had packed some bags and driven off yesterday. Milo got
permission to search and found the apartment scrubbed neat as a surgical tray,
reeking of pine cleaner. A little more searching revealed a disconnected hot
water heater and the seams of a trapdoor barely visible underneath.

An old cellar, said the landlord. No one
had used it in years.

Milo removed the heater and climbed down.

Straight down to hell, Alex.

Spatter and shreds and gobbets in
formalin. Needles and blades and beakers and flasks.

In one corner of the cellar stood sacks of
peat moss, sphagnum moss, planter’s mix, human excrement. A shelf of pots
planted with things that would never grow.

A background check showed Sand had given
the city a false name and ID. Further investigation showed him to be Jobe
Rowland Shwandt, alumnus of several prisons and mental hospitals, with
convictions for auto theft, exhibitionism, child molestation, and manslaughter.
He’d been in prison most of his life but had never served more than three years
at a time. The city had given him a chain saw.

He was picked up a week later, just
outside of Tempe, Arizona, by a highway patrolman who spotted him trying to
change a tire on the black van. In his glove compartment was a mummified human
hand—a child’s, not Carrie’s, and never identified.

The fingerprint on the bedpost turned out
to be a false lead, belonging to the Fieldings’ maid, who’d been in Mexico
during the week of Carrie’s murder and hadn’t been available for comparison
printing.

I sat silently through Lucy’s recitation, recalling
all those meetings with Milo for late-night drinks, listening to him go over
it.

Sometimes
my
head still filled with
bad pictures.

Carrie Fielding’s fifth-grade photo.

Shwandt’s methedrine eyes and drooping
mustache and salesman’s smile, the oily black braid twisting between his long
white fingers.

How much restoration of innocence could
Lucy hope for?

Knowing more about her background might
educate my guess.

So far, she’d kept that door closed.

I did some paperwork, drove to the market
at Trancas to buy groceries, and returned at two to catch Robin’s call telling
me she’d be home in a couple of hours.

“How’re things at the money pit?” I said.

“Deeper. We need a new main for the
sewer.”

“That’s metal. How could fire burn through
that?”

“Actually it was clay, Alex. Apparently
that’s how they used to build them. And it didn’t burn. It was demolished by
someone’s heavy equipment.”

“Someone?”

“No one’s ’fessed up. Could have been a
tractor, a Bobcat, one of the hauling trucks, even a pickax.”

I exhaled. Inhaled. Reminded myself I’d
helped thousands of patients relax. “How much?”

“Don’t know yet. We have to get the city
out here to take a meeting with our plumbers—I’m sorry, honey, hopefully this
is the last of the major damage. How’d your day go?”

“Fine. And yours?”

“Let’s just say I’m learning new things
every day.”

“Thanks for handling all the crap, babe.”

She laughed. “A girl needs a hobby.”

“How’s Spike?”

“Being a very good boy.”

“Relatively or absolutely?”

“Absolutely! One of the roofers had a pit
bull bitch chained up in his truck, and she and Spike got along just fine.”

“That’s not good behavior. That’s
self-preservation.”

“Actually she’s a sweet dog, Alex. Spike
charmed her—she ended up grooming him.”

“Another conquest for the Frog Prince,” I
said. “Want me to fix dinner?”

“How about we go out?”

“Name the place and time.”

“Um—how about Beauvilla around eight?”

“You got it.”

“Love you, Alex.”

“Love you, too.”

The beach house had cable hookup, which
meant foolishness on sixty channels instead of seven. I found an alleged hard
news broadcast on one of the local stations and endured five minutes of happy
talk between the anchors. Then the male half of the team said, “And now for an
update on that demonstration downtown.”

The screen filled with the limestone
facade of the main court building, then switched to a ring of chanting marchers
waving placards.

Anti–capital punishment protestors bearing
preprinted posters. Behind them, another crowd.

Twenty or so young women, dressed in
black, waving crudely lettered signs.

The Bogettes.

At the trial, they’d favored ghost-white
face makeup and satanic jewelry.

They were chanting too, and the admixture
of voices created a cloud of noise.

The camera pulled in close on the
preprinted placards:

LOCK THE GAS CHAMBER, GOVERNOR! ALL
KILLING IS WRONG!

NO DEATH PENALTY!

THE BIBLE SAYS: THOU SHALL NOT KILL!

Then, one of the hand-scrawled squares:
pentagrams and skulls, gothic writing, hard to make out:

FREE JOBE! JOBE IS GOD!

The marchers came up to the court
building. Helmeted police officers in riot gear blocked their entry.

Shouts of protest. Jeers.

Another group, across the street.
Construction workers, pointing and laughing derisively.

One of the Bogettes screamed at them.
Snarls on both sides of the street and stiffened middle fingers. Suddenly, one
of the hard hats charged forward, waving his fists. His companions followed
and, before the police could intervene, the workers knifed into the crowd with
the force and efficiency of a football offense.

A jumble of arms, legs, heads, flying
signs.

The police got in the middle of it,
swinging batons.

Back to the newsroom.

“That was—uh, live from downtown,” said
the woman anchor to her deskmate, “where there’s apparently been some sort of
disturbance in connection with a demonstration on behalf of Jobe Shwandt, the
Bogeyman killer, responsible for at least... and—uh, we seem to have regained
our... no, we haven’t, folks. As soon as our linkup is restored, we’ll go right
back to that scene.”

Her partner said, “I think we can see that
passions are still running pretty high, Trish.”

“Yes, they are, Chuck. No surprise, given
the fact that it’s serial murder we’re dealing with, and—uh, controversial
issues like the death penalty.”

Grave nod. Shuffle of papers. Chuck
fidgeted, checked the teleprompter. “Yes... and we’ll have something a little
later on the situation regarding capital punishment from our legal
correspondent, Barry Bernstein, and some face-to-face interviews with prisoners
on Death Row and their families. In the meantime, here’s Biff with the
weather.”

I turned off the set.

The death penalty opponents were easy
enough to understand: an issue of values. But the young women in black had no
credo other than a glassy-eyed fascination with Shwandt.

They’d started as strangers, standing in
line outside the courtroom door, sitting through the first few days of trial,
sullenly, silently.

The gore level rose, and soon there were
six. Then twelve.

Some press wit dubbed them the Bogettes
and the morning paper ran an interview with one of them, a former teen hooker
who’d found salvation through devil worship. Personality-cult magazines and
tabloid TV picked them as freaks-of-the-week, and that attracted a dozen more.
Soon the group was huddling together before and after each court session, a
uniformed cadre in black jeans and T-shirts, ghostly makeup, iron jewelry.

When Shwandt entered the courtroom, they
swooned and grinned. When victims’ families, cops, or prosecutors stepped up to
the stand, they put forth a battery of silent scowls, prompting protest from
the DA and warnings from the judge.

Eventually, some of them earned jail time
for contempt: exposing breasts to Shwandt; shouting “Bullshit!” at a coroner’s
sworn statement; flipping off Carrie Fielding’s mother as she got off the stand,
sobbing uncontrollably.

While locked up, they granted interviews
full of sad autobiography—all claimed abuse; most had lived on the streets and
worked as child prostitutes.

Low self-esteem, said the talk-show
therapists. But that was like trying to explain Hitler in terms of artistic
frustration.

Restricted from the courtroom during the
last weeks of the trial, they assembled on the steps and howled for justice.
The day of the verdict, they promised to liberate Shwandt at all costs and to
seek their own “personal justice.”

Milo had seen them up close, and I asked
him if he thought they might act on the threat.

“I doubt it. They’re publicity whores.
When the talk-show morons stop calling, they’ll crawl back into their holes.
But you’re the shrink, what do you think?”

“You’re probably right.”

The person who’d stalked me had warned me
first. Other victims had died without warning.

Sometimes I thought about the others and
thanked God that Robin and I had been lucky.

Once in a while I thought about the night
the house had gone up in flames and found my hands clenching so hard they hurt.

Maybe I wasn’t the right therapist for
Lucy.

On the other hand, perhaps I was eminently
qualified.

Robin and Spike came home at 4:15. Robin’s
green sweatshirt was smudged with dirt. The green played off the auburn in her
hair.

She kissed me and I put my hands under the
shirt.

“I’m filthy,” she said.

“Love a dirty woman.”

She laughed, kissed me harder, then pushed
me away and went off to bathe.

Spike had tolerated the display of
affection, but now he looked put-upon. A visit to the water bowl perked him up.
I fed him his favorite dinner of kibble and meat loaf, then took him for a
waddle on the beach and watched him ingest silica. The tide was low, so he
stayed mostly on track, pausing from time to time to lift his leg at the
pilings of other houses. Neutered, but the spirit remained.

Robin spent some time soaking and reading
and I polished a report to a family court judge, a custody case where a happy
ending was too much to hope for. I just hoped my recommendations could save
three kids from some of the pain.

At 7:30, I checked in with my service;
then we left Spike with a Milk-Bone and a rap-music fest on MTV and took my old
’79 Seville past Pepperdine University and the Malibu pier to Beauvilla.

It’s a French place on the land side,
ancient by L.A. restaurant standards, which means post-Reagan. Monterey
colonial architecture, a bit of water view past a public parking lot,
beautifully cooked ProvenÇal cuisine, genuinely friendly service, and a
slouching, smoking pianist who used to play soap-opera sound tracks and manages
to turn a Steinway grand into a Hammond organ.

We had a quiet dinner and listened to a
weird musical medley: “Begin the Beguine,” something from Shostakovich, a slew
of Carpenters’ songs, the sound track from
Oklahoma!
As we were having
coffee, the maÎtre d’ came over and said, “Dr. Delaware? You have a call, sir.”

I picked up the phone behind the bar.

“Hi, Dr. Delaware, this is Sarah from your
service. I don’t know if I did the right thing, but you got a call a few
minutes ago from a patient named Lucy Lowell. She said it wasn’t an emergency,
but she sounded pretty upset. Like she was trying not to cry.”

“Did she leave a message?”

“No. I told her you were out of the office
but I could reach you if it was an emergency. She said it wasn’t important;
she’d call you tomorrow. I wouldn’t have bothered you, but she seemed
really
nervous. When I deal with the psych patients I like to be careful.”

“I appreciate it, Sarah. Did she leave a
number?”

She read off an 818 exchange that I
recognized as Lucy’s home number, in Woodland Hills.

Peter’s sleepy voice answered my call.
“We’re unable to come to the phone right now, so leave a message.”

As I began to speak, Lucy broke in: “I
told them there was no reason to bother you, Dr. Delaware. I’m sorry.”

“It’s no bother. What can I do for you?”

“Really, it’s okay.”

“Long as I’m on the phone, you might as
well tell me what’s up.”

“Nothing, it’s just the dream—the one I
was having when I first started seeing you. It went away right after the first
session, and I thought it was gone for good. But tonight it came back—very
vivid.”

“One dream?” I said. “A recurrent one.”

“Yes. The other thing is I must have
sleepwalked, too. Because I dozed off on the couch watching TV, the way I
usually do, and woke up on the kitchen floor.”