Bad Love (30 page)

“No answer,” he said.

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

He thought. “I suppose about a year or so. By coincidence. I was in a bookstore in Santa Barbara and ran into her, browsing.”

“Psychology?”

He smiled. “No, fiction, actually. She was in the science-fiction section. Would you like her address?”

“Please.”

He wrote it down and gave it to me. Shoreline Drive.

“The ocean side,” he said, “just up from the marina.”

I remembered the slide Katarina had shown. Blue skies behind a wheelchair. The ocean.

“Did she live there with her father?” I said.

“Since the two of them came to California.”

“She was very attached to him, wasn’t she?”

“She worshiped him.” He continued to look preoccupied.

“Did she ever marry?”

He shook his head.

“When did the school close?” I said.

“Not long after Andres died — eighty-one, I believe.”

“Katarina didn’t want to keep it going?”

He put his hands around his coffee cup. He had hammer thumbs and his other digits were short. “You’d have to ask her about that.”

“Does she do any kind of psychological work now?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Early retirement?”

He shrugged and drank. Put his cup down and touched the stone of his bolo tie. Something bothering him.

I said, “I only met her twice, but I don’t see her as someone with hobbies, Bert.”

He smiled. “You encountered the force of her personality.”

“She was the reason I was at the conference against my will. She pulled strings with the chief of staff.”

“That was Katarina,” he said. “Life as target practice: set your sights, aim, and shoot. She pressured me to speak, too.”

“You were reluctant?”

“Yes, but let’s get back to Grant for a moment. Hit-and-run isn’t really the same as premeditated murder.”

“Maybe I’m wrong, but I still can’t find anyone who was up on that dais.”

He grabbed the cup with both hands. “I can tell you about Mitch — Mitchell Lerner. He’s dead. Also the result of an accident. Hiking. Down in Mexico — Acapulco. He fell from a high cliff.”

“When?”

“Two years ago.”

One year before Stoumen, one year after Rodney Shipler. Fill in the gaps. . . .

“. . . the time,” he was saying, “I had no reason to assume it was anything but an accident. Especially in view of it being a fall.”

“Why’s that?”

He worked his jaws and his hands went flat on the table. His mouth twisted a couple of times. Anxiety and something else — dentures.

“Mitchell had occasional balance problems,” he said.

“Alcohol?”

He stared at me.

“I know about his suspension,” I said.

“I’m sorry, I can’t talk any more about him.”

“Meaning he was your patient — your bio mentioned your specialties. Impaired therapists.”

Silence that served as affirmation. Then he said, “He was trying to ease his way back into work. The trip to Mexico was part of that. He was attending a conference there.”

He put his finger in his mouth and fooled with his bridgework.

“Well,” he said, smiling, “I don’t go to conferences anymore, so maybe I’m safe.”

“Does the name Myra Paprock mean anything to you?”

He shook his head. “Who is she?”

“A woman who was murdered five years ago. The words “bad love’ were scrawled at the murder scene in her lipstick. And the police have found one other killing where the phrase was written. A man named Rodney Shipler, beaten to death
three
years ago.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t know him, either. Are they therapists?”

“No.”

“Then what would they have to do with the conference?”

“Nothing that I know of, but maybe they had something to do with de Bosch. Myra Paprock was working as a real estate agent at the time, but before that she was a teacher in Goleta. Maybe she moonlighted at the Corrective School. This was before she married, so her surname would have been something other than Paprock.”

“Myra,” he said, rubbing his lip. “There
was
a Myra who taught there when I was consulting. A young woman, just out of college . . . blond, pretty . . . a little . . .” He closed his eyes. “Myra . . . Myra . . . what was her name — Myra
Evans
, I think. Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. Myra Evans. And now you’re saying she was murdered . . .”

“What else were you going to say about her, Bert?”

“Excuse me?”

“You just said she was blond, pretty, and something else.”

“Nothing, really,” he said. “I just remembered her as being a little hard. Nothing pathologic — the dogmatism of youth.”

“Was she rough on the kids?”

“Abusive? I never saw it. It wasn’t that kind of place — Andres’s force of personality was enough to maintain a certain level of . . . order.”

“What was Myra’s method for maintaining order?”

“Lots of rules. One of those everything-by-the-rules types. No shades of gray.”

“Was Dr. Stoumen like that too?”

“Grant was . . . orthodox. He liked his rules. But he was an extremely gentle person, somewhat shy.”

“And Lerner?”

“Anything but rigid.
Lack
of discipline was his problem.”

“Harvey Rosenblatt?”

“Don’t know him at all. Never met him before the conference.”

“So you never saw Myra Evans come down too hard on a child?”

“No . . . I barely remember her — these are just impressions, they may be faulty.”

“I doubt it.”

He moved his jaws from side to side. “All these murders. You actually think . . .” Shaking his head.

I said, “How important was the concept of “bad love’ to de Bosch’s philosophy?”

“I’d say it was fairly central,” he said. “Andres was very concerned with justice — he saw achieving consistency in our world as a prime motive. Saw many symptoms as attempts to accomplish that.”

“The search for order.”

Nod. “And good love.”

“When did you become disillusioned about him?”

He looked pained.

I held my gaze and said, “You said Katarina pressured you to speak at the symposium. Why would a faithful student have to be pressured?”

He got up, turned his back on me, and rested his palms on the counter. A little man in ridiculous clothing, trying to bring color to his world.

“I really wasn’t that close to him,” he said. “After I began my anthropology studies, I wasn’t around much.” Taking a couple of steps, he wiped the counter with one stubby hand.

“Your own search for consistency?”

He stiffened but didn’t turn.

“Racism,” he said. “I heard Andres making remarks.”

“About who?”

“Blacks, Mexicans.”

“Were there black and Mexican children at the school?”

“Yes, but he didn’t malign them. It was the workers — hired laborers. There was acreage behind the school. Andres hired people down on lower State Street to come clear the weeds every month or so.”

“What did you hear him say about them?”

“The usual garbage — that they were lazy, stupid. Genetically inferior. He called the blacks one half-step up from apes, said the Mexicans weren’t much better.”

“He said this to your face?”

Hesitation. “No. To Katarina. I overheard it.”

I said, “She didn’t disagree with him, did she?”

He turned around. “She
never
disagreed with him.”

“How did you happen to overhear their conversation?”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” he said. “That would almost have been better. I walked in on the middle of the conversation and Andres didn’t bother to interrupt himself. That really troubled me — the fact that he thought I would laugh along with it. And it wasn’t just once — I heard him say those things several times. Almost taunting me. I didn’t respond. He was my teacher and I became a worm.”

He returned to his chair, slumping a bit.

I said, “Did Katarina respond at all to his remarks?”

“She laughed. . . . I was disgusted. Lord knows I’m no paragon of virtue, I’ve done my share of pretending to listen to patients when my mind was elsewhere. Pretending to care. Been married five times, never longer than twenty-six months. When I finally achieved enough insight to realize I should stop making women’s lives miserable, I opted for the solitary life. Drew plenty of blood along the way, so I don’t put myself up on any moral pedestal. But I
have
always prided myself on tolerance — I’m sure part of it is personal. I was born with multiple anomalies. Other things besides the lack of color vision.”

He looked away, as if considering his choices. Held out his short fingers and waved them. Pointing at his mouth, he said, “I’m completely edentulous. Born without adult teeth. My right foot has three toes, the left one is clubbed. I’m unable to sire children and one of my kidneys atrophied when I was three. Most of my childhood was spent in bed due to severe skin rashes and a hole in the ventricular septum of my heart. So I guess I’m a little sensitive to discrimination. But I didn’t speak up, just left the school.”

I nodded. “Did de Bosch’s intolerance come out in other ways?”

“No, that’s the thing. On a day-to-day basis, he was extremely liberal.
Publicly
, he was liberal — took in minority patients, most of them charity cases, and seemed to treat them as well as the others. And in his writings, he was
brilliantly
tolerant. Have you ever read his essay on the Nazis?”

“No.”

“Brilliant,” he repeated. “He composed it while fighting in the French Resistance. Taking the bastards’ own pseudo-theories of racial superiority and throwing it all back in their faces with good, sound science. That was one of the things that attracted me to him when I was a resident. The
combination
of social conscience and psychoanalysis. Too many analysts live in a twelve-foot-square world — the office as universe, rich people on the couch, summers in Vienna. I wanted more.”

“Is that why you studied anthropology?”

“I wanted to learn about other cultures. And Andres supported me in that. Told me it would make me a better therapist. He
was
a great mentor, Alex. That’s why it was so crushing to hear him sneer at those field hands — like seeing one’s father in a disgusting light. I swallowed it in silence several times. Finally, I resigned and left town.”

“For Beverly Hills?”

“I did a year of research in Chile, then caved in and returned to my own twelve-foot-square world.”

“Did you tell him why you were leaving?”

“No, just that I was unhappy, but he understood.” He shook his head. “He was an intimidating man. I was a coward.”

“It had to take force of personality to dominate Katarina.”

“Oh, yes, and he did dominate her . . . after I returned from Chile, he called me just once. We had a frosty conversation, and that was that.”

“But Katarina wanted you at the conference anyway.”

“She wanted me because I was part of his past — the glory years. By then he was a vegetable and she was
resurrecting
him. She brought me pictures of him in his wheelchair. “You abandoned him once, Bert. Don’t do it again.’ Guilt’s a great motivator.”

He looked away. Worked his jaws.

“I don’t see any obvious tie-in,” I said, “but Rodney Shipler, the man who was beaten to death, was black. At the time of his murder, he was a school janitor in L.A. Do you have any memory of him at all?”

“No, that name isn’t familiar.” He looked back at me. Edgy — guilty?

“What is it, Bert?”

“What’s what?”

“Something’s on your mind.” I smiled. “Your face is full of stress.”

He smiled back and sighed. “Something came into my mind. Your Mr. Silk. Probably irrelevant.”

“Something about Lerner?”

“No, no, this is something that happened after the “bad love’ conference — soon after, a couple of days, I believe.” He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, as if coaxing forth memories.

“Yes, it was two or three days,” he said, working his jaws again. “I received a call in my office. After hours. I was on my way out and I picked up the phone before the answering service could get to it. A man was on the other end, very agitated, very angry. A young man — or at least he sounded young. He said he’d sat through my speech at the conference and wanted to make an appointment. Wanted to go into long-term psychoanalysis with me. But the way he said it — hostile, almost sarcastic — brought my guard up, and I asked him what kinds of problems he was experiencing. He said there were many — too many to go into over the phone and that my speech had reminded him of them. I asked him how, but he wouldn’t say. His voice was
saturated
with stress — real suffering. He demanded to know if I was going to help him. I said, of course, I’d stay late and see him right away.”

“You considered it a crisis?”

“At the least, a borderline crisis — there was real pain in his voice. An ego highly at risk. And,” he smiled, “I had no pressing engagements other than dinner with one of my wives — the third one, I think. You can see why I was such a poor matrimonial prospect. . . . Anyway, to my surprise, he said no, right now wasn’t a good time for him, but he could come in the next evening. Standoffish, all of a sudden. As if
I’d
come on too strong for
him
. I was a bit taken aback, but you know patients — the resistance, the ambivalence.”

I nodded.

He said, “So we made an appointment for the following afternoon. But he never showed up. The phone number he’d given me was out of order and he wasn’t listed in any local phone books. I thought it odd, but after all, odd is our business, isn’t it? I thought about it for a while, then I forgot about it. Until today. His being at the conference . . . all that anger.” Shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Was his name Silk?”

“This is the part I hesitate about, Alex. He never became my patient, formally, but in a sense he was. Because he asked for help and I counseled him over the phone — or at least I attempted to.”

“There was no formal treatment, Bert. I don’t see any problem, legally.”

“That’s not the point. Morally, it’s an issue — moral issues transcend the law.” He slapped his own wrist and smiled. “Gawd, doesn’t that sound self-righteous.”