The Clinic (46 page)

Probably coke because her nose was a little raw. I put my knife across her throat and told her I’d filet her like a monkfish if she made a peep—”

“This time you brought a knife.”

“Definitely.”

“It had to be a knife, didn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah.” Flipping his hair.

“Because . . .”

“Reciprocity—synchronicity. Like that Police song. They cut me, I cut them.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Makes perfect sense. All I had to do to remember how much sense it made was to try a toe-touch or a sit-up and feel the pain in my back. Thinking aboutEmbassy Row and what might have been.”

His eyes turned to slits. Moving closer to the glass again, he said, “They say you only need one kidney, I can live til a hundred. But having only one makes me vulnerable. What if I get an infection and lose the one?”

“So it was time to make Mandy feel vulnerable.”

“Not feel,be .”

“Be,” I echoed. “What next?”

“She pissed her panties—Miss Tough Call Girl. I tied her up with some bicycle bungee cords I’d brought—hog-tied her, began the interrogation. She claimed all she knew was that a psychology professor from the U had hired her to pick me up, slip a Mickey in my drink. That she hadn’t known why. As if that excused it. I said which professor and she tried to hold back on me. I covered her mouth and pinched her nose the way I’d done with the waitress and she
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blurted out the name. Which I already knew, because what other psychology prof hated me?”

“Did she say how she knew Devane?”

“Yes. She said Devane had hired her.”

“For sex?”

“Games she called it. She said Hope was into kinky stuff—bondage. Had seen her dance somewhere up in San Francisco and picked her up—sick, huh? A psychologist that twisted.”

“Then what?”

“Then, I untied her and said thanks for being honest with me, baby. To disarm her psychologically. Then, I took her back outside in front of her house, told her I was going to let her go if she kept her mouth shut. She looked so relieved, she actually thanked me, tried to kiss me, showing tongue. It reminded me of how she’d kissed me in my car just before the lights went out. No one was on the street, so I took hold of her hand, held it still so she couldn’t touch me. Then I gave her the knife.”

“Where?”

“First in the heart, because they’d broken my heart by looting my body, robbing me of my entire future. Then in her cunt because she’d used her cunt to trap me. Then I put her on the ground and turned her over and stabbed her in the back. Just like she’d done to me. Right over her kidney.”

He reached behind and winced. “Never really knew where the kidney was before.”

“Still painful?” I said.

“Sitting is painful,” he said. “How much more time do we have?”

“Ten minutes. So once you’d learned Hope’s name from Mandy it was time to take care of her, too.”

“You bet.”

“And you used the same strike pattern. Heart, vagina, back.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “The only difference was that Hope tried to struggle. Not that it helped her, but it did mess me up. I’d wanted to get the fucking surgeon’s name out of her but I was afraid she’d manage to break free and scream, so I just did it.”

“When did you learn the surgeon’s name?”

“Not until last week, when that kid attacked him and the news said he’d known Devane. Light bulb on. Two plus two. So I started watching him, too, and got a bonus. The punk.”

“Casey Locking.”

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“My otherjudge. I was never really sure if he was in on the plan but I suspected because he was sucking up to Devane. Once I knew, he was history. I got his file from the psych department, learned his address. I already knew where Cruvic lived because that’s where I’d seen him with the punk—his house up on Mulholland. So I started watching Locking.”

“Saving Cruvic for last.”

“You bet.”

“Tell me about Locking.”

“Another easy one—it’s so easy.”

“Probably harder to act it out.”

“Definitely . . . where was I?”

“Locking.”

“Locking. I followed him home, walked into the house, and shot him.”

“Why a gun and not a knife?”

“Three reasons,” he said, pleased to answer. “A. I know cops are into M.O. and I didn’t want it to be obvious that the same person had done him and the girls. B. Stabbing was for the women, it just didn’t feel right for him, and C. I’d already gotten rid of the knife.”

“Where?”

“Tossed it off the Santa Monica Pier.”

“You could have bought another one.”

“Hey,” he said, grinning. “Starving artist.”

“What about the photos framing Locking’s body?”

“Another bonus. Showing the world what she was like—what they were all like. Do youbelieve that stuff?Sick .”

“So what was your plan? To get Cruvic?”

“Him and the asshole using my kidney. I figured to learn everything, eventually. Perform a little surgery of my own, take back what was mine.”

The deputy said, “Two minutes.”

Muscadine mouthedScrew you to his back and smiled at me. “So how’re we doing?”

“Fine,” I said. “I appreciate your forthrightness.”

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“Hey, only way to go. Tell the truth, it feels good to finally unload.”

Oster was just outside the prison’s main door. The line was still long.

“Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“I instructed him to cooperate.”

“He did.”

“What do you think?”

“Gruesome.”

“I’ll say. So does it fit?”

“Does what fit?”

“Is there severe mental anguish?”

“Definitely,” I said, shaking my head. “No shortage of anguish.”

“Good,” he said. “Great. Gotta go, we’ll talk more.”

He hurried into the jail.

Instead of returning home, I drove to a restaurant on Sixth Street where I ordered lunch—nice big one: Caesar salad, T-bone steak medium rare, home fries, creamed spinach, their best burgundy by the glass.

While I waited for the food, I opened my briefcase and took out a yellow pad.

As I sipped the wine, I began.

PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION:

REED MUSCADINE

PRISONER#464555532

EXAMINER: ALEXANDER DELAWARE, PH.D.

I wrote for a long time.

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Special thanks to

Dr. Michael Austerlitz

A Ballantine Book

Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Copyright © 1996 by Jonathan Kellerman.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

eISBN 0-345-46376-5

This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

v1.0

To

Beverly Lewis

Turn the page for an excerpt from

Jonathan Kellerman’s

new Alex Delaware novel

Page 324

A COLD HEART

Available in hardcover

from Ballantine Books

The witness remembers it like this: Shortly after twoA.M. , Baby Boy Lee exits The Snake Pit through the rear alley fire door. The light fixture above the door is set up for two bulbs, but one is missing, and the illumination that trickles down onto the garbage-flecked asphalt is feeble and oblique, casting a grimy mustard-colored disc, perhaps three feet in diameter. Whether or not the missing bulb is intentional will remain conjecture.

It is Baby Boy’s second and final break of the evening. His contract with the club calls for a pair of one-hour sets. Lee and the band have run over their first set by twenty-two minutes because of Baby Boy’s extended guitar and harmonica solos. The audience, a nearly full house of 124, is thrilled. The Pit is a far cry from the venues Baby Boy played in his heyday, but he appears to be happy, too.

It has been a while since Baby Boy has taken the stage anywhere and played coherent blues.

Audience members questioned later are unanimous: Never has the big man sounded better.

Baby Boy is said to have finally broken free of a host of addictions, but one habit remains: nicotine. He smokes three packs of Kools a day, taking deep-in-the-lung drags while on stage, and his guitars are notable for the black, lozenge-shaped burn marks that scar their lacquered wood finishes.

Tonight, though, Baby Boy has been uncommonly focused, rarely removing lit cigarettes from where he customarily jams them: just above the nut of his ’62 Telecaster, wedged under the three highest strings.

So it is probably a tobacco itch that causes the singer to leap offstage the moment he plays his final note, flinging his bulk out the back door without a word to his band or anyone else. The bolt clicks behind him, but it is doubtful he notices.

The fiftieth Kool of the day is lit before Baby Boy reaches the alley. He is sucking in mentholated smoke as he steps in and out of the disc of dirty light.

The witness, such that he is, is certain that he caught a glimpse of Baby Boy’s face in the light and that the big man was sweating. If that’s true, perhaps the perspiration had nothing to do with anxiety but resulted from Baby Boy’s obesity and the calories expended on his music: For eighty-three minutes he has been jumping and howling and swooning, caressing his guitar, bringing the crowd to a frenzy at set’s end with a fiery, throat-ripping rendition of his signature song, a basic blues setup in the key of B-flat that witnesses the progression of Baby Boy’s voice from an inaudible mumble to an anguished wail.

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There’s women that’ll mess you

There’s those that treat you nice

But I got me a woman with

A heart as cold as ice.

A cold heart,

A cold, cold heart

My baby’s hot but she is cold

A cold heart,

A cold, cold heart

My baby’s murdering my soul . . .

At this point, the details are unreliable. The witness is a hepatitis-stricken, homeless man by the name of Linus Leopold Brophy, aged thirty-nine but looking sixty, who has no interest in the blues or any other type of music and who happens to be in the alley because he has been drinking Red Phoenix fortified wine all night and the Dumpster five yards east of the Snake Pit’s back door provides shelter for him to sleep off hisdelerium tremens . Later, Brophy will consent to a blood alcohol test and will come up .24, three times the legal limit for driving, but according to Brophy “barely buzzed.”

Brophy claims to have been drowsy but awake when the sound of the back door opening rouses him, and he sees a big man step out into the light and then fade to darkness. Brophy claims to recall the lit end of the man’s cigarette glowing “like Halloween, you know—orange, shiny, real bright, know what I mean?” and admits that he seizes upon the idea of panhandling money from the smoker. (“Because the guy is fat, so I figure he had enough to eat, that’s for sure, maybe he’ll come across, know what I mean?”)

Linus Brophy struggles to his feet and approaches the big man.

Seconds later, someone else approaches the big man, arriving from the opposite direction—the mouth of the alley, at Lodi Place. Linus Brophy stops in his tracks, retreats into darkness, sits down next to the Dumpster.

The new arrival, a man, also good-sized, according to Brophy, though not as tall as Baby Boy Lee and maybe half of Baby Boy’s width, walks right up to the singer and says something that sounds “friendly.” Questioned about this characterization extensively, Brophy denies hearing any conversation but refuses to budge from his judgement of amiability. (“Like they were friends, you know? Standing there, friendly.”)

The orange glow of Baby Boy’s cigarette lowers from mouth to waist level as he listens to the new arrival.

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The new arrival says something else to Baby Boy and Baby Boy says something back.

The new arrival moves closer to Baby Boy. Now, the two men appear to be hugging.

The new arrival steps back, looks around, turns heel and leaves the alley the way he came.

Baby Boy Lee stands there alone.

His hand drops. The orange glow of the cigarette hits the ground, setting off sparks.

Baby Boy sways. Falls.

Linus Brophy stares, finally builds up the courage to approach the big man. Kneeling, he says,

“Hey, man,” receives no answer, reaches out and touches the convexity of Baby Boy’s abdomen.

He feels moisture on his hand and is repelled.

As a younger man, Brophy had a temper. He has spent half of his life in various county jails and state penitentiaries, saw things, did things. He knows the feel and the smell of fresh blood.

Stumbling to his feet, he lurches to the back door of the Snake Pit and tries to pull it open, but the door is locked. He knocks, no one answers.

The shortest way out of the alley means retracing the steps of the newcomer: walk out to Lodi Place, hook north to Fountain and find someone who’ll listen.

Brophy has already wet his pants twice tonight—first while sleeping drunk and now, upon touching Baby Boy Lee’s blood. Fear grips him and he heads the other way, tripping through the long block that takes him to the other end of the alley. Finding no one on the street at this hour, he makes his way to an all-night liquor store on the corner of Fountain and El Centro.

Once inside the store, Brophy shouts at the Lebanese clerk who sits reading behind a Plexiglass window, the same man who one hour ago sold him three bottles of Red Phoenix. Brophy waves his arms, tries to get across what he has just seen. The clerk regards Brophy as exactly what he is—a babbling wino—and orders him to leave.

When Brophy begins pounding on the Plexiglass, the clerk considers reaching for the nail-studded baseball bat he keeps beneath the counter. Sleepy and weary of confrontation, he dials 911.

Brophy leaves the liquor store and walks agitatedly up and down Fountain Avenue. When a squad car from Hollywood Division arrives, Officers Keith Montez and Cathy Ruggles assume Brophy is their problem and handcuff him immediately.