When the Bough Breaks (16 page)

“I don’t know why I’m fighting not to laugh, up to my ass in dead bodies and no apparent progress, but it seems so funny, Handler and Bruno. You send a guy to a shrink to get his head straight and the doc is as fucked-up as the patient and
systematically
puts the warp on him.”

Put that way it didn’t
sound
funny. He laughed anyway.

“What about the girl?” he asked.

“Gutierrez? What about her.”

“Well, I was thinking about those social roles. We’ve been looking at her as the innocent bystander. If Handler could connive with one patient, why not with two?”

“It’s not impossible. But we know Bruno was psychopathic. Any of that kind of evidence about her?”

“No,” he admitted. “We looked for Handler’s file on her and couldn’t find it. Maybe he shredded it when their relationship changed. Do you guys do that?”

“I wouldn’t know. I never slept with my patients—or their mothers”.

“Don’t be touchy. I tried to interview her family. The old, plump
mamacita
, two brothers one of ’em with those angry, macho eyes.
There’s no father—he died ten years ago. The three of them live in a tiny place in Echo Park. When I got there they were in the middle of mourning. The place was full of the girl’s pictures, in shrines. Lots of candles, baskets of food, weeping neighbors. The brothers were sullen. Mama barely spoke English. I made a serious attempt to be sensitive, culturally aware and all that. I borrowed Sanchez from Ramparts Division to translate. We brought food, kept a low profile. I got
nada
. Hear no evil, speak no evil. I honestly don’t think they knew much about Elena’s life. To them West L.A.’s as distant as Atlantis. But even if they did they sure as hell weren’t going to tell me.”

“Even,” I asked, “if it would help find her murderer?”

He looked at me wearily.

“Alex, people like that don’t think the police can help them. To them
la policía
are the bastards who roust their
cholos
and insult their home girls and are never around when the low riders cruise the neighborhood at night with their lights off and pop shotgun shells through bedroom windows. Which reminds me—I interviewed a friend of the girl. Her roommate, also a teacher. This one was outwardly hostile. Made it clear she wanted nothing to do with me. Her brother had been killed five years ago in a gang shootout and the police did nothing for her and her family then, so to hell with me now.”

He got up and padded around the room like a tired lion.

“In summation, Elaine Gutierrez is a cipher. But there’s nothing to indicate she wasn’t as pure as the freshly driven snow.”

He looked miserable, plagued with self-doubt.

“It’s a tough case, Milo. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“It’s funny you should say that. That’s what my mother used to tell me. Go easy, Milo Bernard. Don’t be such a
profectionist
—that was the way she pronounced it. The whole family had a tradition of low personal expectations. Drop out of school in tenth grade, go to work at the foundry, lay out a life for yourself of plastic dishes, TV, church picnics, and steel splinters that stuck in your skin. After thirty years enough pension and disability to give you a weekend in the Ozarks once in a while, if you’re lucky. My Dad did it, his dad, and both of my brothers. The Sturgis game plan. But not the
profectionist
. For one, the game plan worked best if you got married and I’d been liking boys since I was nine. And second—this was more important—I figured I was too smart to do what the rest of those peasants were doing. So I broke the mold, shocked them all. And the hotshot who everyone thought was going to become a lawyer or a professor or at least some kind of accountant goes and ends up as a member of
la policía
. Ain’t that something for a guy who wrote a goddamn thesis on transcendentalism in the poetry of Walt Whitman?”

He turned away from me and stared at the wall. He had worked himself into a funk. I had seen it before. The most therapeutic thing to say was nothing. I ignored him and did some calisthenics.

“Goddamn Jack La Lanne,” he muttered.

It took him ten minutes to come out of it, ten minutes of clenching and unclenching his big fists. Then came the tentative raising of the eyes, the inevitable sheepish grin.

“How much for the therapy, Doctor?”

I thought a minute.

“Dinner. At a good place. No crap.”

He stood up and stretched, growled like a bear.

“How about sushi? I’m goddamn barbaric tonight. I’ll eat those fish alive.”

We drove to Oomasa, in Little Tokyo. The restaurant was crowded, mostly with Japanese. This was no trendy hotspot decked out in shoji-screen elegance and waxed pine counters. The decor was red Naugahyde, stiff-backed chairs and plain white walls decorated only by a few Nikon calendars. The solitary concession to style was a large aquarium, in full view of the sushi bar, in which fancy goldfish struggled to propel themselves through bubbling, icy clear water. They gasped and bobbed, mutations ill-suited for survival in any but the most rarefied captivity, the products of hundreds of years of careful Oriental tinkering with nature—lionheads with faces obscured by glossy, raspberry growths, bug-eyed black moors, celestials with eyes forced perpetually heavenward,
ryukins
so overloaded with finnage that they could barely move. We stared at them and drank Chivas.

“That girl,” Milo said, “the roommate. I felt she could help me. That she knew something about Elaine’s lifestyle, maybe something about her and Handler. She was nailed tight, goddamn her.”

He finished his drink and motioned for another. It came and he gulped down half.

A waitress skittered over on geisha feet and handed us hot towels. We wiped our hands and face. I felt my pores open, hungry for air.

“You should be pretty good at talking to teachers, right? Probably did a lot of it back in the days when you were earning an honest living.”

“Sometimes teachers hate psychologists, Milo. They see us as dilettantes dropping theoretical pearls of wisdom on them while they do the dirty work.”

“Hmm.” The rest of the Scotch disappeared.

“But no matter. I’ll talk to her for you. Where can I find her?”

“Same school Gutierrez taught at. In West L.A., not far from you.” He wrote the address on a napkin and gave it to me. “Her name’s Raquel Ochoa.” He spelled it, his voice thickening, slurring the words. “Use your badge.” He slapped me on the back.

There was a grating sound above our heads. We looked up to find the sushi chef smiling and sharpening his knives.

We ordered. The fish was fresh, the rice just slightly sweet. The
wasabe
horseradish cleared my sinuses. We ate in silence, against a backdrop of
samisen
music and foreign chatter.

13

I
AWOKE
as stiff as if I’d been spray-starched; a full-fledged charley horse had taken hold of my muscles, a souvenir of my dance with Jaroslav. I fought it by taking a two-mile run down the canyon and back. Then I practiced karate moves out on the rear deck, to the amused comments of a pair of mockingbirds who interrupted their domestic quarrel long enough to look me over, then delivered what had to be the avian equivalent of a raspberry.

“Fly down here, you little bastards,” I grunted, “and I’ll show you who’s tough.” They responded with hilarious screeching.

The day was shaping up as a lung-buster, grimy fingers of pollution reaching over the mountains to strangle the sky. The ocean was obscured by a sulfurous sheath of airborne garbage. My chest ached in harmony with the stiffness in my joints, and by ten I was ready to quit.

I planned to time my visit to the school where Raquel Ochoa taught for the noon break, hoping to find her free. That left enough time for a long, hot bath, a cold shower, and a carefully assembled breakfast of eggs with mushrooms, sourdough toast, grilled tomatoes and coffee.

I dressed casually in dark brown slacks, tan corduroy sport coat, checked shirt and brown knit tie. Before I left I dialed a now-familiar number. Bonita Quinn answered.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Quinn, Dr. Delaware. I just wanted to call to find out how Melody’s been doing.”

“She’s fine.” Her tone would have frosted a beer mug. “Fine.”

Before I could say more she hung up.

The school was in a middle-class part of town, but it could have been anywhere. It was the old familiar layout of citadels of learning
throughout the city: flesh-colored buildings arranged in classic penitentiary style, surrounded by a desert of black asphalt and secured by ten-foot-high chain link fencing. Someone had tried to brighten it up by painting a mural of children playing along the side of one of the buildings but it was scant redemption. What helped a bit more were the sight and sound of real children playing—running, jumping, tumbling, chasing each other, screaming like banshees, throwing balls, crying out with the fervor of the truly persecuted (“Teacher, he
hit
me!”), sitting in circles, reaching for the sky. A small group of bored-looking teachers watched from the sidelines.

I climbed the front stairs and found the main office with little trouble. The internal floor plan of schools was as predictable as the drab exterior.

I used to wonder why all the schools I knew were so hopelessly ugly, so predictably oppressive, then I dated a nurse whose father was one of the chief architects for the firm that had been building schools for the state for the past fifty years. She had unresolved feelings about him, and talked a lot about him: a drunken, melancholic man who hated his wife and despised his children more, who saw the world in terms of minimally varying shades of disappointment. A real Frank Lloyd Wright.

The office reeked of mimeographing fluid. Its sole occupant was a stern, black woman in her forties, ensconced in a fortress of scarred golden oak. I showed her my badge, which didn’t interest her, and asked for Raquel Ochoa. The name didn’t seem to interest her either.

“She’s a teacher here. Fourth grade,” I added.

“It’s lunchtime. Try the teachers’ dining room.”

The dining room turned out to be an airless place, twenty feet by fifteen, into which folding tables and chairs had been crammed. A dozen men and women sat hunched over sack lunches and coffee, laughing, smoking, chewing. When I entered the room all activity ceased.

“I’m looking for Ms. Ochoa.”

“You won’t find her here, honey,” said a stout woman with platinum hair.

Several of the teachers laughed. They let me stand there for a while and then a fellow with a young face and old eyes said:

“Room 304. Probably.”

“Thanks.”

I left. I was halfway down the hall before they started talking again.

The door to 304 was half-open. I went in. Rows of unoccupied school desks filled every square inch of space, with the exception of a few feet at the front that had been cleared for the teacher’s desk, a boxy metal rectangle behind which sat a woman busy at work. If she
had heard me enter she gave no indication, as she continued to read, make checkmarks, cross out errors. An unopened brown bag sat at her elbow. Light streamed in through dusty windows in beams that were suffused with dancing, suspended particles. The Vermeer softness was at odds with the utilitarian severity of the room: stark white walls, a blackboard veneered with chalky residue, a soiled American flag.

“Ms. Ochoa?”

The face that looked up was out of a mural by Rivera. Reddish-brown skin stretched tightly over sharply defined but delicately constructed bones; liquid lips and melting black eyes gabled by full, dark brows. Her hair was long and sleek, parted in the middle, hanging down her back. Part Aztec, part Spanish, part unknown.

“Yes?” Her voice was soft in volume but the timbre was defensively hard. Some of the hostility Milo had described was immediately apparent. I wondered if she was one of those people who had turned psychological vigilance into a fine art.

I walked over to her, introduced myself and showed her the badge. She inspected it.

“Ph.D. in what?”

“Psychology.”

She looked at me with disdain.

“The police don’t get satisfaction, so they send in the shrinks?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Spare me the details.” She returned her eyes to her paperwork.

“I just want to talk to you for a few minutes. About your friend.”

“I told that big detective everything I know.”

“This is just a double-check.”

“How thorough.” She picked up her red pencil and began slashing at the paper. I felt sorry for the students whose work was coming under scrutiny at this particular moment.

“This isn’t a psychological interview, if that’s what you’re worried about. It’s—”

“I’m not worried about anything. I told him everything.”

“He doesn’t think so.”

She slammed the pencil down. The point broke.

“Are you calling me a liar, Mr. Ph.D?” Her speech was crisp and articulate but it still bore a Latin tinge.

I shrugged.

“Labels aren’t important. What is, is finding out as much as possible about Elaine Gutierrez.”

“
Elena
,” she snapped. “There’s nothing to tell. Let the police do their job and stop sending their scientific snoopers around harassing people who are busy.”

“Too busy to help find the murderer of your best friend?”

The head shot up. She brushed furiously at a loose strand of hair.

“Please leave,” she said between clenched jaws. “I have work to do.”

“Yes, I know. You don’t even eat lunch with the rest of the teachers. You’re very dedicated and serious—that’s what it took to get out of the
barrio
—and that puts you above the laws of common courtesy.”

She stood up, all five feet of her. For a moment I thought she was going to slap me, as she drew her hand back. But she stopped herself, and stared.

I could feel the acid heat coming my way but I held my gaze. Jaroslav would have been proud.

“I’m busy,” she finally said, but there was a pleading quality to the statement, as if she was trying to convince herself.