Bad Love (31 page)

“There
is
a moral issue,” I said. “But weigh it against the alternatives. Two definite murders. Three if you include Grant Stoumen. Maybe four, if someone pushed Mitchell Lerner off that cliff. Myra Paprock was raped, as well. Taken apart physically. She left two small children. I just met her husband. He still hasn’t healed.”

“You’re quite good at guilt yourself, young man.”

“Whatever works, Bert. How’s that for a moral stance?”

He smiled. “No doubt you’re a practical therapist. . . . No his name wasn’t Silk. Another type of fabric. That’s what made me think of it. Merino.” He spelled it out.

“First name?”

“He didn’t give one. Called himself “Mister.’ Mr. Merino. It sounded pretentious in someone so young. Awful insecurity.”

“Can you pinpoint his age?”

“Twenties — early twenties would be my guess. He had a young man’s impetuousness. Poor impulse control to call like that and make demands. But he was stressed, and stress causes regression, so maybe he was older.”

“When was the Corrective School established?”

“Nineteen sixty-two.”

“So if he was in his twenties in seventy-nine, he could easily have been a patient. Or one of the field hands — Merino’s an Hispanic name.”

“Or someone with no connection to the school at all,” he said. “What if he was just someone with deep-seated problems who sat in on the conference and reacted to it for one reason or another?”

“Could be,” I said, calculating silently: Dorsey Hewitt would have been around eighteen in 1979. Lyle Gritz, a year older.

“All right,” I said, “thanks for telling me, and I won’t give out the information unless it’s essential. Is there anything else you remember that might help?”

“No, I don’t think so. Thank
you
. For warning me.”

He looked around his small house with longing. I knew the feeling.

“Do you have a place to go?” I said.

Nod. “There are always places. New adventures.”

He walked me to my car. The heat had turned up a bit and the air was thick with honeybees.

“Off to Santa Barbara now?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Give Katarina my best when you see her. The easiest way is Highway 150. Pick it up just out of town and take it all the way. It’s no more than a half-hour drive.”

“Thanks.”

We shook hands.

“One more thing, Bert?”

“Yes?”

“Mitchell Lerner’s problems. Could they have resulted in any way from his work at the school — or did they
cause
problems there?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He never spoke about the school. He was a
very
closed person — highly defensive.”

“So you did ask him about it?”

“I asked him about every element of his past. He refused to talk about anything but his drinking. And even then, just in terms of getting rid of a bad habit. In his own work, he despised behaviorism, but when it came to his therapy, he wanted to be reconditioned. Overnight. Something short term and discreet — hypnosis, whatever.”

“You’re an analyst. Why did he come to you?”

“Safety of the familiar.” He smiled. “And I’ve been known to be pragmatic from time to time.”

“If he was so resistant, why’d he bother to go into therapy in the first place?”

“As a condition of his probation. The social work ethics committee demanded it, because it had affected his work — missed appointments, failure to submit insurance forms so his patients could recover. I’m afraid he acted the same way as a patient. Not showing up, very unreliable.”

“How long did you see him?”

“Obviously, not long enough.”

There seemed little doubt that Myra Evans and Myra Paprock were the same person. And that her murder and the deaths of others were related to de Bosch and his school.

Silk. Merino.

The conference putting someone in touch with his problems . . . some sort of trauma.

Bad love.

Taken apart.

A child’s voice chanting.

I felt a sudden stab of panic about leaving Robin alone, stopped in the center of Ojai, and called her from a pay phone. No answer. The Benedict number had been channeled through my answering service, and on the fifth ring an operator picked up.

I asked her if Robin had left word where she was going.

“No, she didn’t, doctor. Would you like your messages?”

“Please.”

“Just one, actually, from a Mr. Sturgis. He called to say Van Nuys will be getting to your tape soon — got a broken stereo, Dr. Delaware?”

“Nothing that simple,” I said.

“Well, you know how it is, doctor. They keep making things more complicated so people have to feel stupid.”

I picked up 150 a few miles out of town and headed northwest on two curving lanes. Lake Casitas meandered parallel to the highway, massive and gray under a listless sun. The land side was mostly avocado groves, gold tipped with new growth. Halfway to Santa Barbara, the road reconnected with 101 and I traveled the last twelve miles at freeway speed.

I kept thinking about what Harrison had told me about de Bosch’s racism and wondered what I’d tell Katarina when I found her, how I’d approach her.

I got off the highway without an answer, bought gas, and called the number Harrison had given me. No answer. Deciding to delay confrontation for a while, I looked through my Thomas Guide for the site where the Corrective School had once been. Near the border with Montecito, several miles closer than Shoreline Drive — an omen.

It turned out to be a straight, shady street lined with gated properties. The eucalyptus here grew huge, but the trees looked dried out, almost dessicated. Despite the fire risk, shake roofs were in abundance. So were Mercedes.

The exact address corresponded to a new-looking tract behind high stone walls. A sign advertised six custom homes. What I could see of them was massive and cream colored.

Across the way was a pink and brown Tudor mansion with a sign out in front that said
THE BANCROFT SCHOOL.
A semicircular gravel drive girdled the building. A black Lincoln was parked under a spreading live oak.

A man got out of the car. Midsixties — old enough to remember. I drove across the road, pulled up next to his driver’s side, and lowered my window.

His expression wasn’t friendly. He was big and powerful looking, dressed in tweeds and a light blue sweater vest despite the heat, and he had very white, very straight hair and knocked-about features. A leather briefcase — an old one with a brass clasp — dangled from one hand. The leather had been freshly oiled — I could smell it. Several pens were clasped to his breast pocket. He looked the Seville over with narrow, dark eyes, then had a go at my face.

“Excuse me,” I said, “was the Corrective School once across the street?”

Scowl. “That’s right.” He turned to leave.

“How long has it been gone?”

“Quite a while. Why?”

“I just had a few questions about it.”

He put his briefcase down and peered into the car. “Are you an . . . alumnus?”

“No.”

He looked relieved.

“Do alumni come back frequently?” I said.

“No, not frequently, but . . . you do know what kind of school it was.”

“Troubled children.”

“A bad lot. We were never happy with it — we were here first, you know. My father broke ground thirty years before
they
came.”

“Really.”

“We were here before most of the houses. This was all agricultural back then.”

“Did the students from the Corrective School cause problems?”

“And what’s your interest in that?”

“I’m a psychologist,” I said, and gave him a card. “I’m doing some consulting to the Los Angeles Police Department, and there’s some evidence one of the alumni is involved in something unpleasant.”

“Something unpleasant. Well, that’s not much of a surprise, is it?” He scowled again. His eyebrows were bushy, low-set, and still dark, giving him a look of perpetual annoyance. “What kind of unpleasantness?”

“I’m sorry but I can’t go into detail — is it Mr. Bancroft?”

“It certainly is.” He produced a card of his own, white, heavy stock, a heraldic shield in one corner.

The Bancroft School

Est. 1933 by Col. C. H. Bancroft (Ret.)

“Building Scholarship and Character”

Condon H. Bancroft, Jr., B.A., M.A., Headmaster

“By unpleasant do you mean criminal?” he said.

“It’s possible.”

He gave a knowing nod.

I said, “Why did the place close down?”

“He died — the Frenchman — and no one was left to run it. It’s an art, education.”

“Didn’t he have a daughter?”

His eyebrows arched. “She offered me the place, but I turned her down. Error on my part — I should have done it for the land alone. Now they’ve come and built
those
.” He cast a glare at the stone wall.

“They?”

“Some sort of foreign group. Asians, of course. She offered me all of it, lock, stock. But she wanted an outlandish amount of money and refused to negotiate. For
them
, money’s no object.”

“She’s still here in town, isn’t she?”

“She’s in Santa
Barbara
,” he said.

I wondered where he thought he was, then I answered my own question: Montecito wannabee.

“This unpleasantness,” he said. “It isn’t anything that would
— impinge
upon my school, is it? I don’t want publicity, the police traipsing around.”

“Did de Bosch’s students ever impinge?”

“No, because I made sure they didn’t. For all practical purposes, this property line was as impermeable as the Berlin Wall.” He drew a line in the gravel with the toe of one wingtip. “Some of them had been to reform school. Fire setters, bullies, truants — all sorts of miscreants.”

“Must have been difficult being this close.”

“No, it wasn’t
difficult
,” he reprimanded. “If they chanced to wander, I sent them hopping right back.”

“So you never had any problems?”

“Noise was a problem. There was always too much noise. The only
untoward
thing occurred after they were gone. One of them showed up and made quite a nuisance of himself.” Smile. “His condition didn’t speak well of the Frenchman’s methods.”

“What condition was that?”

“A
tramp
,” he said. “Unwashed, uncombed, high on drugs — his eyes had that look.”

“How do you know he was an alumnus?”

“Because he told me he was. Said it in those words: “I’m an alumnus.’ As if that should have impressed me.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Quite a while — let’s see, I was interviewing the Crummer boy. The youngest one, and he applied around . . . ten years ago.”

“And how old was this tramp?”

“Twenties. A real churl. He barged right into my office, past my secretary. I was interviewing young Crummer and his parents — a fine family, the elder boys had attended Bancroft quite successfully. The scene
he
created dissuaded them from sending the youngest lad here.”

“What did he want?”

“
Where
was the school?
What
had happened to it? Raising his voice and creating a scene — poor Mrs. Crummer. I thought I’d have to call the police, but I was finally able to convince him to leave by telling him the Frenchman was long dead.”

“That satisfied him?”

The eyebrows dipped. “I don’t know
what
it did to him but he left. Lucky for him — I’d had my fill.” A big fist shook. “He was insane
— must
have been on drugs.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Dirty, uncombed — what’s the difference? And he didn’t have a car, he walked away on foot — I watched him. Probably on his way to the highway. God help anyone who picked him up.”

He watched me leave, too, standing with his arms folded across his chest as I drove away. I realized I hadn’t heard or seen any children at his school.

Bullies and fire setters. A tramp in his twenties.

Trying to dig up the past.

The same man who’d called Harrison?

Merino.

Silk. A thing for fabrics.

Hewitt and Gritz, two tramps who would have been in their twenties back then.

Myra Paprock was killed five years ago. Two years after that, Shipler. Then Lerner. Then Stoumen. Was Rosenblatt still alive?

Katarina was, just a few miles up this beautiful road. That gave us something in common.

I was ready to talk to her.

Cabrillo Boulevard swept up past the ocean, cleansed of the weekend tourist swarm and the bad sidewalk art. The wharf looked depopulated and its far end disappeared in a bank of fog. A few cyclists pumped in the bike lane and joggers and speed walkers chased immortality. I passed the big new hotels that commandeered the prime ocean views and the motels that followed them like afterthoughts. Passed a small seafood place where Robin and I had eaten shrimp and drunk beer. People were eating there now, laughing, tan.

Santa Barbara was a beautiful place, but sometimes it spooked me. Too much psychic space between the haves and the have-nots and not enough geography. A walk up State Street took you from welfare hotels and mean bars to custom jewelers, custom tailors, and two-bucks-a-scoop ice cream. The fringes of Isla Vista and Goleta were as hard as any inner city, but Montecito was still a place where people ate cake. Sometimes the tension seemed murderous.

I pictured Andres de Bosch trolling lower State for day laborers. His daughter listening and laughing as he dehumanized those he’d found. . . .

Cabrillo climbed higher and emptied of pedestrians, and I caught an eyeful of endless Pacific. Sailboats were out in force at the marina, most of them floundering as they searched for a tailwind. Nearer to the horizon, fishing scows sat, still as artist’s models. The boulevard flattened once again, turned into Shoreline and got residential. I began checking the numbers on the curb.

Most of the houses were fifties rancheros, several of them in renovation. I remembered the neighborhood as well planted. Today, lots of the plants were gone, and the ones that remained looked discouraged. The drought had come hard to this town kissed by salt water.