The Clinic (5 page)

Playing roles to feel in control.

Little boxes.

Maybe Hope hadseen herself as an actress.

Returning home, I called the producer of the Costa Mesa production. His assistant checked her logs and verified that Karl Neese had, indeed, been onstage the night of the murder.

“Yeah, that was one of our better ones,” she said. “Good ticket sales.”

“Still on?”

“Hardly. Nothing lasts long in California.”

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Milo checked in at ten to five. “Any protein in the house?”

“I’m sure I can find something.”

“Start looking. The thrill of the hunt is ripe in my nostrils and I am hungry.”

He sounded exhilarated.

“The visit to the dean was productive?” I said.

“Feed me and I’ll tell you. I’ll be over in half an hour.”

No shortage of protein. Robin and I had just shopped and the new refrigerator was double the capacity of the old one.

I made him a roast beef sandwich. The white kitchen seemed vast. Too big. Too white. I was still getting used to the new house.

The old one had been eighteen hundred square feet of silvered redwood, weathered shingles, tinted glass, and half-mad angles, built from antique materials and recycled wood by a Hungarian artist who’d gone broke in L.A. and returned to Budapest to sell Russian cars.

I’d bought it years ago, seduced by the site: Deep in the foothills north of Beverly Glen and separated from neighbors by a wide patch of thickly wooded, high-table public land, it afforded a privacy that had me encountering more coyotes than people.

The seclusion had proved perfect for the psychopath who burned the house down one dry summer night.Tinder on a foundation, the fire marshal had called it.

Robin and I decided to rebuild. After a couple of false starts with miscreant contractors, she began supervising the construction herself. We ended up with twenty-six hundred square feet of white stucco and gray ceramic roof, whitewashed wood floors and stairs, brass railings, skylights, and as many windows as the energy-conservation regulations would allow. At the rear of the property was the workshop where Robin went happily each morning, accompanied by Spike, our French bulldog. Several old trees had been immolated but we craned in boxed eucalyptus and Canary Island pines and coast redwoods, dug a new Japanese garden and a pond full of young koi.

Robin loved it. The few people we’d had over said it had come out great. Milo’s appraisal was

“Tray chick,but I like it anyway.” I nodded and smiled and remembered the slightly moldy smell of old wood in the morning, arthritic casement windows, the creak of foot-polished pine floorboards.

Adding a pickle to Milo’s sandwich, I put the plate back in the giant fridge, brewed some coffee, and reviewed the notes on my most recent custody consultation to Family Court: both parents engineers, two adopted sons, ages three and five. The mother had fled to a dude ranch in Idaho, the father was furious and ill-equipped for child care.

The boys were painfully polite but their drawings said they had a good fix on the situation. The
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judge who’d referred the case was a capable man but the dolt to whom it had been transferred rarely read reports. Lawyers on both sides were miffed that I didn’t agree with their respective party lines. Lately, Robin and I had started talking about having children of our own.

I was working on a final draft of the report when the bell rang.

I went to the front, looked through the peephole, saw Milo’s big face, and opened the door. His unmarked was parked crookedly behind Robin’s pickup. From the rear came the buzz of a power saw, then Spike’shelp-I’m-choking bark.

“Yo, pooch.” He looked at his Timex. “How’s that for time? Five minutes from campus.”

“You really should set a better example.”

Grinning, he wiped his feet on the mat and stomped in. The new Persian rug was soft, with a silky sheen, and I supposed I liked it just fine. None of my art had come through the fire and the walls were bare as fresh notepaper.

Old house or new, the kitchen remained Milo’s magnet. As he continued toward it, light shot in from above and bleached him. Giant snowman.

By the time I got there, he had the sandwich out with a carton of milk and was sitting at the table.

He ate it in three bites.

“Want another?”

“No thanks—yeah, why not.” Raising the carton to his lips, he drained it, then patted his gut.

This month he was cutting back on alcohol and his weight had dropped a bit, maybe to 240.

Most of it saddled his middle and swelled his face. The long legs that stretched him to six-three weren’t particularly thin, but the contrast made them seem that way.

He wore a pale green blazer over a white shirt and black tie, brown pants and tan suede desert boots. He’d shaved closely except for a small gray patch behind his left ear, and the lumps on his face stood out like unfinished clay modeling. Static made his hair dance.

As I prepared a second sandwich he began pulling papers out of his briefcase.

“Spoils of the hunt: potential enemies list.” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Nixon had nothing over Professor Devane.”

I brought him the food.

“Delicious,” he said, chomping. “Where do you get the meat?”

“At the supermarket.”

“You do the shopping, now? Hey, you can run for president. Or do you and the little lady take turns?”

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“The little lady,” I said. “Care to call her that to her face?”

He laughed. “Actually, this case has gotten me thinking. Used to consider myself excluded from the whole gender-bender thing but the truth is, all of us with Y chromosomes were brought up as little savages, weren’t we? Anyway, the dean turned out to be fun. Nice and squirrelly when I finally got in to see him. Which wasn’t easy til I started flashing the badge and talking media exposure of the conduct committee. Then all of a sudden I’m ushered into the sanctum sanctorum and he’s offering me coffee, shaking my hand. Telling me there’s no reason to bring up the committee, it was“inconsequential.’ Not to mention“provisional’ and“of short duration.’

The whole thing was disbanded because of “constitutional and free-speech concerns.’ ”

He pulled a folder out of his briefcase. “Luckily, he’s assuming I know more than I did. So I bluff, say I’ve heard differently around campus. He says no way, it’s a dead issue. I say Professor Devane’s dead, too. Why don’t you just start from the beginning, sir. Which he does.”

He shook the carton. “Any more milk?”

I got him some and he gulped and wiped his lip.

“You were right about it being a sexual-harassment thing. But not between students and faculty.

Between students and students. Professor Devane’s idea. They heard three cases, all girls who’d taken her class on sex-roles and complained to her. Devane didn’t go through official channels, just winged it. Notifying the complainants and the accused, setting up a little tribunal.”

“The students had no idea it was unofficial?”

“No, says the dean. Really ethical, huh?”

“Oh boy,” I said. “Constitutional and free-speech concerns—more like financial concerns, as in lawsuit.”

“He wouldn’t admit that, but that’s the picture I got. Then he tells me the committee couldn’t have had anything to do with the murder but when I asked him why not, he didn’t have an answer. Then he says it would be a grave error to go public, one that could cause problems for the police department, because all the participants—accusers and defendants—had demanded strict confidentiality and they might sue us. When I didn’t answer, he threatened to call the police chief. I sat there and smiled. He picked up the phone, put it down, started begging. I said I understand your position and I don’t want to make problems, so give me all your written records without a hassle and I’ll exercise maximum discretion.”

He waved the folder. “Transcripts of the three sessions. Hope taped them.”

“Why?”

“Who knows? Maybe she was planning another book. Incidentally, the dean said she put up a fuss about having the committee kiboshed. Academic freedom and all that. ThenWolves and Sheep came out and she lost interest.”

“Maybe she intended to use it as material for the publicity tour.”

“The dean suspected that, too. He said he warned her that she’d be putting herself in a
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dangerous position legally. That according to the University lawyers, since she hadn’t gotten official approval, she’d been functioning as an independent psychologist when she chaired the committee, not as a faculty member. So if she divulged information she’d be violating patient confidentiality and putting her license in jeopardy. She took issue with that and threatened to hire her own lawyer, but apparently changed her mind because that was the end of it.”

“It’s amazing none of this ever came out after the murder.”

“Everyone had a vested interest in keeping it quiet. Administration, students—especially the students.”

He gave me the file. “Read it when you have a chance, let me know what you think. I can’t close my eyes to this even though I still like Hubby. Even better, now, because I just got a look at her tax returns.”

“The book made her rich?”

He nodded. “But even before then she had some interesting extracurricular activities. Ever hear of Robert Barone?”

I shook my head.

“Big-shot lawyer, does criminal defense, porn and censorship, some racketeering cases, some entertainment work—same thing, right? Last year, he paid her forty grand in consulting fees, year before that, twenty-eight.”

“Diminished-capacity reports?”

“Probably something like that. Barone has offices here in Century City and up in San Francisco.

He isn’t returning my calls.”

Drinking more milk, he said, “Her other consulting client is a Beverly Hills doctor named Milan Cruvic. He’s listed in the directory as an OB-GYN and fertility expert. Any idea why a fertility expert would pay a psychologist thirty-six grand a year? Two years in a row?”

“Maybe she screened candidates for fertility treatment.”

“Is that Standard Op?”

“The procedures can be grueling. A thoughtful doctor might want to see which patients could handle them. Or provide counseling for those who couldn’t.”

“So why not just refer to her? Why pay her directly out of his pocket?”

“Good question.”

“When I called Cruvic’s office his nurse said he was doing public service at some women’s clinic. Which could mean abortions—another potential point of hostility if Hope got involved in that, too. Abortion violence hasn’t come big-time to L.A. but we get everything, eventually. And that creep on TV—Neese—threw the issue around, pegged her as Ms. Slice-the-Fetus Radical Feminist. Who knows, maybe some nut got mad.”

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“Not Neese, himself,” I said. I told him about confirming the alibi.

“One down,” he said. “He thought she was psyching him out?”

“Neese’s term. Trying to control him.”

“So maybe she tried to psych out the wrong person . . . you think the abortion angle’s worth pursuing?”

“Not really,” I said. “Hope was no standard-bearer for the cause and a political killer would have gone public in order to make some kind of statement.”

“Yeah . . . but I do want to know what she did for Cruvic and Barone. We’re talking over a hundred grand in two years. Though after the book, she didn’t need it.”

He pulled photocopied tax returns out of his briefcase.

“Her last filing. Gross income of six hundred eighty thousand dollars, the bulk of it from advances and royalties and public speaking. The after-tax came out to almost half a mil and it’s sitting in a money-market account at Merrill Lynch jointly registered to her and Seacrest. No real debts, she had the Mustang before, and Seacrest inherited the house from his parents. Another half a mil. Not a bad investment to cash in on, especially if the marriage is sour.”

“How long were they married?”

“Ten years.”

“How’d they meet?”

“Seacrest says at the University rec center, swimming.”

“Was he married before?”

“Nope, he told Paz and Fellows he’d been one of those “stodgy confirmed bachelors,’ unquote.

In addition to the five hundred grand, there’s more coming to him. Her literary agent wouldn’t give me numbers but she did say substantial royalties were likely to come in over the next year or so. Book sales were brisk before the murder, the publisher was about to offer her a deal on a sequel. Hope and Seacrest did estate planning a few years ago, established a marital trust to avoid estate taxes, so Seacrest gets to keep all of it.His income last year was sixty-four gees, all from his University salary. His Volvo’s eight years old and he’s managed to put away some cash in his faculty pension plan. Plus there’s the house. He’s written some books, too, but they don’t pay royalties. Guess romantic elements of the medieval age can’t compete with penis-as-lethal-weapon.”

“Ten-to-one income ratio,” I said.

“Another kind of jealousy angle. What if she was going to leave him just as she struck it big?

For another guy—your love-sex-betrayal thing, plus all that money sitting there. A temptation, right? And who’d be in a better position to know her habits? To poison the dog? Hope did have one thing right: More women are killed by so-called loved ones than by all the scumbags
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combined.”

“Seacrest went all these years without big bucks,” I said. “Has he turned into a high liver recently?”

“No, on the contrary,nothing’s changed about his life: He goes to work each day and comes home. Weekends he stays home. Says he reads and watches TV. Doesn’t even rent videos. But if she was cheating on him, no telling what that could do to an old-fashioned confirmed bachelor.

Someone who studies romance—don’t forget that stab in the heart. The guy’s fifty-five, Alex.

Maybe he had a midlife crisis. And like I said, I keep thinking he’s hiding something.”

“Why?”

“Nothing I can put my finger on, that’s the problem. He answers questions but volunteers no info. He never called Fellows and Paz once, to find out how their investigation was going. When I got assigned I phoned him right away and got the feeling I was taking up his precious time.