Silent Partner (25 page)

"Why would he snuff Kruse?"

"I don't know. Maybe he blamed Kruse for Sharon's death—he was pathologically attached to her, sexually involved."

Milo thought for a while. "What'd you touch in there?"

"The light switch—but I used a handkerchief."

"What else?"

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"The gate... I think that's it."

"Think harder."

"That's all 1 can think of."

"Let's retrace your steps."

When we were through, he said, "Go home, Alex."

"That's it?"

Glance at his Timex. "Crime scene boys should be here any minute. Go on. Disappear before the party begins."

"Milo—"

"Go on, Alex. Let me do the damned job."

I drove away, still tasting decay through the bite of tobacco.

Everything Sharon had touched was turning to death.

Even the mind-prober, I found myself wondering what had made her that way. What kind of early trauma. Then something hit me: the way she'd acted that terrible night I'd found her with the twin photo. Thrashing, screaming, collapsing, and ending up in a fetal curl. So similar to Darren Burkhalter's behavior in my office. The reactions to the horror in his life that I'd captured on videotape, then played for a roomful of attorneys without noticing the connections.

Early childhood trauma.

Long ago, she'd explained it to me. Followed it up with

a display of tender, loving kindness. Looking back, a well-staged display. Another act?

It was the summer of '81, a hotel in Newport Beach, swarming with psychologist conventioneers.

A cocktail lounge overlooking the harbor—tinted picture windows, red-flocked walls, chairs on rollers. Dark and empty and smelling of last night's party.

I'd sat at the bar gazing out at the water, watching dagger-sharp yachts etch the surface of a blown-glass marina. Nursing a beer and eating a dry club sandwich while lending half an ear to the bartender's gripes.

He was a short, potbellied Hispanic with quick hands and a coppery Indian face. I watched him clean glasses like a machine.

"Worse I've ever seen, without a doubt, yessir. Now, your salesmen—insurance, computers, whatever—your salesmen are serious drinkers. Your pilots too."

"Comforting thought," I said.

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"Yeah, your salesmen and your pilots. But you psycho guys? Forget it. Even the teachers we had last winter were better and they weren't any great shakes. Look at this place. Dead."

Twisting open a bottle of baby onions, he drained the juice and poured the pearly balls into a tray. "How many of you guys at this shebang, anyway?"

"Few thousand."

"Few thousand." He shook his head. "Look at this place. What is it, you all too busy analyzing other people, not allowed to have fun?"

"Maybe," I said, reflecting on how dull the convention had been. But conventions always were.

The only reason I'd attended this one was because I'd been asked to deliver a paper on childhood stress.

The paper having now been read, the inevitable picayune questions fielded, I was grabbing a bit of solitude before heading back to L.A. and a night shift on the adolescent ward.

"Maybe you guys should study yourselves, pal. Analyze why you don't like to have fun."

"Good idea." I put some money down on the bar and said, "Have one on me."

He stared at the bills. "Sure, thanks." Lighting a cigarette, he poured himself a beer and leaned forward.

"Anyway, I'm for live and let live. Someone don't want to have fun, okay. But at least come in and order something, know what I mean? Hell, don't drink it—analyze it. But order and leave a tip. Leave something for the working man."

"To the working man," I said and raised my glass. I put it down empty.

"Refill, Doc? On the house."

"I'll take a Coke."

"Figures. One rum and Coke coming up, hold the rum, hold the fun."

He put the drink on the bar and was about to say something else when the door to the lounge opened and let in lobby noise. His eyes shifted to the back of the room and he said, "My, my."

I looked over my shoulder and saw a woman in white. Long-legged, shapely, a cloud of black hair. Standing near the cigarette machine, head moving from side to side, as if scouting foreign territory.

Familiar. I turned to get a better look.

Sharon. Definitely Sharon. In a tailored linen suit, matching purse and shoes.

She saw me, waved as if we'd had an appointment.

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"Alex!"

All at once she was at my side. Soap and water, fresh grass...

She sat down on the stool next to mine, crossed her legs, and pulled her skirt down over her knees.

The bartender winked at me. "Drink, ma'am?"

"Seven-Up, please."

"Yes, ma'am."

After he handed her the drink and moved down, she said, "You look great, Alex. I like the beard."

"Saves time in the morning."

"Well, I think it's handsome." She sipped, toyed with

her stirrer. "I keep hearing good things about you, Alex. Early tenure, all those publications. I've read quite a few of your articles. Learned a lot from them."

"Glad to hear it."

Silence.

"I finally graduated," she said. "Last month."

"Congratulations, Doctor."

"Thanks. It took me longer than I thought it would. But I got involved in clinical work and didn't apply myself to writing the dissertation as diligently as I should have."

We sat in silence. A few feet away, the bartender was whistling "La Bamba" and tinkering with the ice crusher.

"It's good to see you," she said.

I didn't answer.

She touched my sleeve. I stared at her fingers until she removed them.

"I wanted to see you," she said.

"What about?"

"I wanted to explain—"

"There's no need to explain anything, Sharon. Ancient history."

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"Not to me."

"Difference of opinion."

She moved closer, said, "I know I blew it," in a choked whisper. "Believe me, I know it. But that doesn't change the fact that after all these years, you're still with me. Good memories, special memories. Positive energy."

"Selective perception," I said.

"No." She inched closer, touched my sleeve again. "We did have some wonderful times, Alex.

I'll never let go of that."

I said nothing.

"Alex, the way we... it ended. I was horrible. You had to think I was psychotic—what happened was psychotic. If you only knew how many times I've wanted to call you, to explain—"

"Then why didn't you?"

"Because I'm a coward. I run away from things. It's my style—you saw that the first time we met, in practicum."

Her shoulders drooped. "Some things never change."

"Forget it. Like I said, ancient history."

"What we had was special, Alex, and I allowed it to be destroyed."

Her voice stayed soft but got tighter. The bartender glanced over. My expression sent his eyes back to his work.

"Allowed' it?" I said. "That sounds pretty passive."

She recoiled as if I'd spit in her face. "All right," she said. "I destroyed it. I was crazy. It was a crazy time in my life—don't think I haven't regretted it a thousand times."

She tugged at her earlobe. Her hands were smooth and white. "Alex, meeting you here today was no accident. I never attend conventions, had no intention of going to this one. But when I got the brochure in the mail I happened to notice your name on the program and wanted suddenly to see you again. I attended your lecture, stood at the back of the room. The way you spoke—your humanity. I thought I might have a chance."

"A chance for what?"

"To be friends, bury the hard feelings."

"Consider them buried. Mission accomplished."

She leaned forward so that our lips were almost touching, clutched my shoulder, whispered.

"Please, Alex, don't be vindictive. Let me show you."

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There were tears in her eyes.

"Show me what?" I said.

"A different side of me. Something I've never shown anyone."

We walked to the front of the hotel, waited for the parking valets.

"Separate cars," she said, smiling. "So you can escape any time you want."

The address she gave me was on the south side of Glen-dale, the down side of town, filled with used-car lots, splintering, by-the-day rooming houses, thrift shops, and greasy spoons. Half a mile north on Brand, the Glendale

Galleria was under construction—a polished brick tribute to gentrification—but down here, boutique was still a French word.

She arrived before me, was sitting in the little red Alfa in front of a one-story brown stucco building. The place had a jaillike quality—narrow, silvered windows bolted and barred, the front door a slab of brushed steel, no landscaping other than a single thirsty liquidambar tree which cast spindly shadows on the tar-paper roof.

She met me at the door, thanked me for coming, then pushed the buzzer in the center of the steel door. Several moments later it was opened by a stocky, coal-black man with short hair and a corkscrew chin beard. He wore a diamond stud in one ear, a light-blue uniform jacket over a black T-shirt and jeans. When he saw Sharon he flashed a gold-jacketed smile.

"Afternoon, Dr. Ransom." His voice was high-pitched, gentle.

"Afternoon, Elmo. This is Dr. Delaware, a friend of

mine.

"Pleased to meet you, sir." To Sharon: "She's all prettied up and ready for you."

"That's great, Elmo."

He stood aside and we entered a waiting room floored with oxblood linoleum and furnished with orange plastic chairs and green tables. To one side was an office labeled RECEPTION and windowed with a square of yellowed Lucite. We walked past it and up to another steel door, marked NO ENTRY, Elmo selected a key from a heavy ring and sprung the latch.

We stepped into brightness and pandemonium: a long, high room with steel-shuttered windows and a fluorescent ceiling that radiated a cold, flat imitation daylight. The walls were covered with sheets of emerald-green vinyl; the air was hot and rancid.

And everywhere, movement. A random ballet.

Scores of bodies, twitching, rocking, stumbling, brutalized by Nature and the luck of the draw.

Limbs frozen or trapped in endless, athetoid spasm. Slack, drooling
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mouths. Hunched backs, shattered spines, nubbed and missing limbs. Contortions and grimaces born of ravaged chromosomes and derailed neural pathways and made all the more cruel by the fact that these patients were young—teenagers and young adults who'd never know the pleasures of youth's false immortality.

Some of them clutched walkers and measured their progress in millimeters. Others, contracted stiff as plaster statues, bucked and fought the confines of wheelchairs. The saddest among them slumped, flaccid as invertebrates in high-sided wagons and metal carts that resembled oversized baby strollers.

We made our way past a sea of glazed eyes as inert as plastic buttons. Past witless faces gazing up from the leather sanctuary of protective headgear, an audience of blank faces unperturbed by the merest flicker of consciousness.

A gallery of deformity—a cruel display of all that could go wrong with the box that humans come in.

In a corner of the room a rabbit-eared console TV blasted a game show at top volume, the shrieks of contestants competing with the wordless jabber and inchoate howls of the patients.

The only ones watching were half a dozen blue-jacketed attendants. They ignored us as we passed.

But the patients noticed. As if magnetized, they swarmed toward Sharon, began flocking around her, wheeling and hobbling. Soon we were surrounded. The attendants didn't budge.

She reached into her purse, took out a box of gumdrops, and began distributing candy. One box emptied, another appeared. Then another.

She dispensed another kind of sweetness, too, kissing misshapen heads, hugging stunted bodies.

Calling patients by name, telling them how good they looked. They competed for her favors, begged for gumdrops, cried out in ecstasy, touched her as if she were magic.

She looked happier than I'd ever seen her—complete. A storybook princess reigning over a kingdom of the misshapen.

Finally, gumdrops depleted, she said, "That's all, people. Gotta go."

Grumbles, whines, a few more minutes of pats and squeezes. A couple of the attendants came forward and began corraling the patients. Finally we managed to pull away. Resumption of chaos.

Elmo said, "They sure love you." Sharon didn't seem to hear.

The three of us walked to the end of the big room, up to a door marked INPATIENT UNIT

and shielded by an iron accordion grille, which Elmo unlocked. Another key twist, the door opened and closed behind us, and all was quiet.

We walked through a corridor' covered in the same lurid green vinyl, passed a couple of empty wards reeking of illness and despair, a door with a mesh glass window that afforded a view of several stout Mexican women laboring in a steamy industrial kitchen, another green hallway, and
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finally a steel slab marked PRIVATE.

On the other side a new ambience: plush carpeting, soft lighting, papered walls, perfumed air, and music—the Beatles, as interpreted by a somnolent string orchestra.

Four rooms marked PRIVATE. Four oak doors, fitted with brass peepholes. Elmo unlocked one and said, "Okay."

The room was beige and hung with French Impressionist lithos. More plush carpeting and soft lighting. Oak wainscotting and oak crown molding rimmed the ceiling. Good furniture: an antique chiffonier, a pair of sturdy oak chairs. Two generous, arched windows, barred and filled with opaque glass block, but curtained with chintz pull-backs and lace. Vases of fresh-cut flowers strategically placed. The place smelled like a meadow. But I wasn't paying attention to decorator touches.

In the center of the room was a hospital bed covered by a pearly pink quilt, which had been pulled to the neck of a dark-haired woman.

Her skin was gray-white, her eyes huge and deep-blue—the same color as Sharon's, but filmed and immobile, aimed straight up at the ceiling. Her hair was