When the Bough Breaks (2 page)

He gnawed the pear down to the core.

“Shadows, voices. That’s it. You’re the
language specialist
, right? You know how to communicate with the little ones. If you can get her to open up, great. If she comes forth with anything resembling an I.D., fantastic. If not, them’s the breaks and at least we tried.”

Language specialist. It had been a while since I’d used the phrase—back in the aftermath of the Hickle affair, when I’d found myself suddenly spinning out of control, the faces of Stuart Hickle and all the kids he’d harmed marching through my head. Milo had taken me drinking. At about two in the morning he had wondered out loud why the kids had let it go on for so long.

“They didn’t talk because nobody knew how to listen,” I’d said. “They thought it was their fault, anyway.”

“Yeah?” He looked up, bleary-eyed, gripping his stein with both hands. “I hear stuff like that from the juvie gals.”

“That’s the way they think when they’re little, egocentric. Like they’re the center of the world. Mommy slips, breaks a leg, they blame themselves.”

“How long does it last?”

“In some people it never goes away. For the rest of us it’s a gradual process. By eight or nine we see things more clearly—but at any age an adult can manipulate kids, convince them it’s their fault.”

“Assholes,” muttered Milo. “So how do you get their heads straight?”

“You have to know how kids think at different ages. Developmental stages. You talk their language—you become a language specialist.”

“That’s what you do?”

“That’s what I do.”

A few minutes later he asked: “You think guilt is bad?”

“Not necessarily. It’s part of what holds us together. Too much, though, can cripple.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I like that. Shrinks always seem to be saying guilt is a no-no. Your approach I can buy. I tell you, we could use a lot more guilt—the world’s full of fucked-up savages.”

At that moment he got no argument from me.

We talked a bit more. The alcohol tugged at our consciousness and we started to laugh, then cry. The bartender stopped polishing his glasses and stared.

It had been a low—a seriously low—period in my life and I remembered who’d been there to help me through it.

I watched Milo nibble at the last specks of pear with curiously small, sharp teeth.

“Two hours?” I asked.

“At the most.”

“Give me an hour or so to get ready, clear up some business.”

Having convinced me to help him didn’t seem to cheer him up. He nodded and exhaled wearily.

“All right. I’ll give a run down to the station and do my business.” Another consultation of the Timex. “Noon?”

“Fine.”

He walked to the door, opened it, stepped out on the balcony and tossed the pear core over the railing and into the greenery below. Starting down the stairs he stopped mid-landing and looked up at me. The sun’s glare hit his ravaged face and turned it into a pale mask. For a moment I was afraid he was going to get sentimental.

I needn’t have worried.

“Listen, Alex, as long as you’re staying here can I borrow the Caddy? That,” he pointed accusingly at the ancient Fiat, “is giving out. Now it’s the starter.”

“Bull, you just love my car.” I went into the house, got the spare keys and threw them at him.

He fielded them like Dusty Baker, unlocked the Seville and squirmed in, adjusting the seat to accommodate his long legs. The engine started immediately, purring with vigor. Looking like a sixteen-year-old going to his first prom in Daddy’s wheels, he cruised down the hill.

2

M
Y LIFE
had been frantic ever since adolescence. A straight-A student, I started college at sixteen, worked my way through school free-lancing as a guitarist, and churned through the doctoral program in clinical psychology at UCLA, earning a Ph.D. at twenty-four. I accepted an internship up north at the Langley Porter Institute, then returned to L.A. to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at Western Pediatric Medical Center. Once out of training I took a staff position at the hospital and a simultaneous professorship at the medical school affiliated with Western Peds. I saw lots of patients and published lots of papers.

By twenty-eight I was an associate professor of pediatrics and psychology and director of a support program for medically ill youngsters. I had a title too long for my secretaries to memorize and I kept publishing, constructing a paper tower within which I dwelled: case studies, controlled experiments, surveys, monographs, textbook chapters and an esoteric volume of my own on the psychological effects of chronic disease in children.

The status was great, the pay less so. I began to moonlight, seeing private patients in an office rented from a Beverly Hills analyst. My patient load increased until I was putting in seventy hours a week and running between hospital and office like a deranged worker ant.

I entered the world of tax avoidance after discovering that without write-offs and shelters I’d be paying out to the IRS more than I used to consider a healthy yearly income. I hired and fired accountants, bought California real estate before the boom, sold at scandalous profits, bought more. I became an apartment-house manager—another five to ten hours a week. I supported a battalion of service personnel—gardeners, plumbers, painters and electricians. I received lots of calendars at Christmas.

By the age of thirty-two, I had a non-stop regimen of working to the point of exhaustion, grabbing a few hours of fitful sleep and getting up to work some more. I grew a beard to save five minutes shaving time in the morning. When I remembered to eat, the food came out of hospital vending machines and I stuffed my mouth while zipping down the corridors, white coat flapping, notepad in hand, like some impassioned speed freak. I was a man with a mission, albeit a mindless one.

I was successful
.

There was little time for romance in such a life. I engaged in occasional carnal liaisons, frenzied and meaningless, with nurses, female interns, graduate students and social workers. Not to forget the fortyish, leggy blond secretary—not my type at all had I taken the time to think—who captivated me for twenty minutes of thrashing behind the chart-stuffed shelves of the medical records room.

By day it was committee meetings, paperwork, trying to quell petty staff bickering and more paperwork. By night it was facing the tide of parental complaints that the child therapist grows accustomed to, and providing comfort and support to the young ones caught in the crossfire.

In my spare time I received tenants’ gripes, scanned the
Wall Street Journal
to measure my gains and losses, and sorted through mountains of mail, most of it, it seemed, from white-collared, white-toothed smoothies who had ways of making me instantly rich. I was nominated as an Outstanding Young Man by an outfit hoping to sell me their hundred-dollar, leather-bound directory of similarly-honored individuals. In the middle of the day, there were times, suddenly, when I found it hard to breathe, but I brushed it off, too busy for introspection.

Into this maelstrom stepped Stuart Hickle.

Hickle was a quite man, a retired lab technician. He looked the part of the kindly neighbor on a situation comedy—tall, stooped, fiftyish, fond of cardigans and old briar pipes. His tortoise-shell horn-rims perched atop a thin, pinched nose shielding kindly eyes the color of dishwater. He had a benign smile and avuncular mannerisms.

He also had an unhealthy appetite for fondling little children’s privates.

When the police finally got him, they confiscated over five hundred color photographs of Hickle having his way with scores of two-, three-, four- and five-year-olds—boys and girls, white, black, Hispanic. In matters of gender and race he wasn’t picky. Only age and helplessness concerned him.

When I saw the photos it wasn’t the graphic starkness that got to me, though that was repulsive in its own right. It was the look in the kids’ eyes—a terrified yet knowing vulnerability. It was a look that said
I know this is wrong. Why is this happening to me
? The look was
in every snapshot, on the face of the youngest victim.

It personified violation.

It gave me nightmares.

Hickle had unique access to little children. His wife, a Korean orphan whom he’d met as a GI in Seoul, ran a successful day-care center in affluent Brentwood.

Kim’s Korner had a solid reputation as one of the best places to leave your children when you had to work or play or just be alone. It had been in business for a decade when the scandal broke, and despite the evidence there were plenty of people who refused to believe that the school had served as a haven for one man’s pedophilic rituals.

The school had been a cheerful-looking place, occupying a large, two-story house on a quiet residential street not far from UCLA. In its last year, it had cared for over forty children, most of them from affluent families. A large proportion of Kim Hickle’s charges had been very young because she was one of the few day-care operators to accept children not yet toilet-trained.

The house had a basement—a rarity in earthquake country—and the police spent a considerable amount of time in that damp, cavernous room. They found an old army cot, a refrigerator, a rusty sink and five thousand dollars’ worth of photographic equipment. Particular scrutiny was given to the cot, for it served up a host of fascinating forensic details—hair, blood, sweat and semen.

The media latched on to the Hickle case with predictable vigor. This was a juicy one that played on everyone’s primal fears, evoking memories of the Cosmic Bogeyman. The evening news featured Kim Hickle fleeing a mob of reporters, hands over face. She protested her ignorance. There was no evidence of her complicity so they closed the school down, took away her license and left it at that. She filed for divorce and departed for parts unknown.

I had my doubts about her innocence. I’d seen enough of these cases to know that the wives of child molesters often played a role, explicit or covert, in setting up the dirty deed. Usually these were women who found sex and physical intimacy abhorrent, and in order to get out of conjugal chores, they helped find substitute partners for their men. It could be a cold, cruel parody of a harem joke—I’d seen one case where the father had been bedding three of his daughters on a scheduled basis, with mom drawing up the schedule.

It was also hard to believe that Kim Hickle had been playing Legos with the kids while downstairs Stuart was molesting them. Nevertheless, they let her go.

Hickle himself was thrown to the wolves. The TV cameras didn’t miss a shot. There were lots of instant mini-specials, filled with interviews
with the more vocal of my colleagues, and several editorials about the rights of children.

The hoopla lasted two weeks, then the story lost its appeal and was replaced by reports of other atrocities. For there was no lack of nasty stories in L.A. The city spawned ugliness like a predatory insect spewing out blood-hungry larvae.

I was consulted on the case three weeks after the arrest. It was a back-page story now and someone got to thinking about the victims.

The victims were going through hell.

The children woke up screaming in the middle of the night. Toddlers who’d been toilet-trained started to wet and soil themselves. Formerly quiet, well-behaved kids began to hit, kick and bite without provocation. There were lots of stomach aches and ambiguous physical symptoms reported, as well as the classic signs of depression—loss of appetite, listlessness, withdrawal, feelings of worthlessness.

The parents were racked with guilt and shame, seeing or imagining the accusing glances of family and friends. Husbands and wives turned on each other. Some of them spoiled the victimized children, increasing the youngsters’ insecurity and infuriating the siblings. Later, several brothers and sisters were able to admit that they’d wished they’d been molested in order to be eligible for special treatment. Then they’d felt guilty about those thoughts.

Entire families were coming apart, much of their suffering obscured by the public blood lust for Hickle’s head. The families might have been permanently shunted to obscurity, saddled with their confusion, guilt and fear but for the fact that the great aunt of one of the victims was a philanthropic member of the board of Western Pediatric Medical Center. She wondered out loud why the hell the hospital wasn’t doing anything, and where was the institution’s sense of public service, anyway. The chairman of the board salaamed and simultaneously saw the chance to grab some good press. The last story about Western Peds had exposed salmonella in the cafeteria’s cole slaw, so positive P.R. was mighty welcome.

The medical director issued a press release announcing a psychological rehabilitation program for the victims of Stuart Hickle, with me as therapist. My first inkling of being appointed was reading about it in the
Times
.

When I got to his office the next morning I was ushered in immediately. The director, a pediatric surgeon who hadn’t operated in twenty years and had acquired the smugness of a well-fed bureaucrat, sat behind a gleaming desk the size of a hockey field and smiled.

“What’s going on, Henry?” I held up the newspaper.

“Sit down, Alex. I was just about to call you. The board decided you’d be perfect—pluperfect—for the job. Some urgency was called for.”

“I’m flattered.”

“The board remembered the beautiful work you did with the Brownings.”

“Brownells.”

“Yes, whatever.”

The five Brownell youngsters had survived a light plane crash in the Sierras that had killed their parents. They’d been physically and psychologically traumatized—overexposed, half-starved, amnesiac, mute. I’d worked with them for two months and the papers had picked up on it.

“You know, Alex,” the director was saying, “sometimes in the midst of trying to synthesize the high technology and heroics that comprise so much of modern medicine, one loses sight of the human factor.”

It was a great little speech. I hoped he’d remember it when budget time rolled around next year.