Over the Edge (14 page)

'He was a visionary, foresaw the postwar baby boom and the housing shortage it would bring. Back in those days the San Fernando Valley was undeveloped - a few ranches and orchards, some federal acreage set aside for military bases that were never built, the rest dust and scrub. Jack set about buying up as much Valley land as he could. He borrowed himself heavily into debt but managed to stall the creditors long enough to educate himself about architecture and construction and hire work crews. By the time the boom arrived he'd built dozens of huge housing tracts -thousands of units, mostly five-room bungalows on forty-by-eighty lots. He made sure each one had a fruit tree -orange, lemon, apricot - and advertised nationally, selling the California dream. The houses sold as fast as he could put them up, and by the age of thirty he was a millionaire several times over. Eventually he expanded to commercial and industrial projects, and by 1960 Cadmus Construction was the third largest builder in the state. When he died, in 'sixty-seven, the company had initiated major projects in Saudi Arabia, Panama, and half of Europe. He was a great man, Doctor.'

It was a paean to a dead man, and I wasn't sure what the point was.

"How was he as a husband and father?' I asked.

Souza was annoyed by the question.

'He loved his boys and was kind to his wife.'

A strange answer. My expression reflected it.

'Antoinette was a troubled woman,' he explained. 'She came from an established Pasadena family that had lost its money but managed to maintain appearances and a foothold on the social ladder. Jack met her at a charity ball and was taken with her immediately. She was a beauty. Slender, very pale, very fragile, with huge, mournful blue eyes - the boy has those same eyes - but I always found her strange. Distant, extremely vulnerable. I imagine it was her very vulnerability that attracted Jack, but soon after the marriage the extent of her problems became evident.'

'What kinds of problems?'

'The kinds that fall within your bailiwick. At first it seemed like severe shyness, social withdrawal. Then it became clear that she was terrified of leaving the house, terrified of life itself. I'm sure there's a technical term for it.'

'Agoraphobia.'

'Agoraphobia,' he repeated. 'That was Antoinette's problem. Back then, of course, she was thought of as physically ill. Constitutionally weak. As a wedding present, Jack set her up in a glorious Spanish mansion on Muirfield, overlooking the country club, just a few blocks from here; a Pakistani surgeon owns it now. Once ensconced, she never left the place, not even to tour the gardens. In fact, she seldom ventured out of her room, staying in bed all day, scribbling verse on scraps of paper, sipping weak tea, complaining of all sorts of aches and pains. Jack had half the specialists in town on retainer, and each of them supplied nostrums and tonics, but none of it helped. Eventually he gave up and simply let her be, accepting her weakness.'

'She was strong enough to bear children,' I said.

'Amazing, isn't it? Peter - Jamey's father - was born ten months after the wedding, in 'forty-eight; Dwight, a year later. Jack hoped the joys of motherhood would pull her out of her depression, but she got worse and had to be sedated for the bulk of both pregnancies. After Dwight's birth her withdrawal deepened, and she rejected the baby, refused to nurse or even to hold it. Things deteriorated to the point where she bolted her door and wouldn't see Peter or Jack. For the next two years she stayed in her room, drinking her

tonics and swallowing her pills, writing poetry and napping. She'd cry out in her sleep, as if having horrible nightmares. Then she began to accuse everyone -Jack, the servants, even the children - of conspiring against her, plotting to kill her, the usual paranoid nonsense. When she stopped eating and grew downright skeletal, Jack realised she'd have to be institutionalised and made plans to have her flown to a place in Switzerland. It was supposed to be a secret, but she may have got wind of it because a week later she was dead, overdosed on one of her medications; apparently it contained some kind of opiate, and she ingested enough to stop her heart.'

'Who took care of the boys through all this?'

'Jack hired governesses. When they were older, they were sent to boarding schools. He did the 'best he could under the circumstances, Doctor, which is why I answered your question about what kind of father he was the way I did.'

I nodded.

'Schizophrenia is believed to be genetic nowadays, isn't it?' he asked.

'It runs in families. Probably a combination of heredity and environment.'

'I view Jamey as very much the product of his genes. The superior intellect is his endowment from Jack. The rest of it comes from the other side - antisocial tendencies, paranoia, a morbid preoccupation with fantasy and poetry. Saddled with such a chemistry, how could he have turned out normal?'

He tried to look empathetic, but his rhetoric had the studied passion of a prepared oration.

Instead of answering his question, I posed one of my own:

'How did the lack of mothering affect Peter and Dwight?'

'They turned out differently, so it's hard to pinpoint an effect per se. Dwight was always a good boy, eager to please. A me-tooer. He staked out the middle road early in life and stayed on it.
 
Peter was another story.
 
Good-

looking, wild, always testing the limits. He was bright but never buckled down to studying, and Jack had to endow a building to get him into college. Once accepted, he continued to goof off and was finally expelled after three semesters. Jack should have been more firm with him, but Peter was his favourite, so instead, he indulged him. Sports cars, credit cards, early access to a trust fund. It sliced the spine right out of the boy. Combining that type of permissiveness with the nonsense of the sixties destroyed his character completely.'

'Drugs?'

'Drugs, alcohol, promiscuity - all of the counterculture idiocy fed right into Peter's natural hedonism. At the age of nineteen he had a Ferrari. He used it to cruise Sunset Boulevard and pick up girls. One night he drove to a topless bar, took a liking to one of the dancers, flashed his smile and his billfold, and whisked her away to San Francisco. This was in 'sixty-eight, with the hippie scene in full bloom up there. The two of them jumped right into it -communal living in some Haight-Ashbury dive, swallowing any drug they could get their hands on. Lord knows what else. The leeches they lived with knew a good thing when they saw it, and the trust fund started running dry.'

He frowned indignantly.

'Didn't his father try to stop it?'

'Of course he did. He had me hire private detectives, who tracked them down in a matter of days. Jack flew up to talk to Peter and received the shock of his life. The boy he remembered had been outstanding-looking, meticulous to the point of vanity about dress and appearance. In San Francisco Jack came face-to-face with a creature he barely recognised. I still remember his words: "He looked like a goddamn dead Jesus, Horace, right off the goddamn cross." As he recounted it, Peter was dirty, smelly, and emaciated, with glazed eyes and blurred speech. His hair was as long as a girl's, tied in a pony tail, and he wore a scraggly, untrimmed beard. Jack ordered him to come home and, when Peter refused, threatened to cut off the money. Peter told him to mind his own business - said it obscenely - and the two of them came to blows. The leeches got in the act, and Jack took a pummeling. He came back to Los Angeles emotionally shattered.

'Eventually the girl became pregnant. She had the baby without benefit of medical attention, used some kind of brown rice diet and home-concocted herbal poultices. It was a difficult delivery, and afterward she bled to death. Somehow the baby survived, and Peter had enough sense scared into him to bring him to a hospital. He was suffering from bronchitis, skin rashes, and other infections but eventually recovered.'

He shook his head, remembering.

'And that, Dr. Delaware, is how our boy Jamey came into this world. Not an auspicious beginning, is it?'

I paused in my note taking.

'What was the mother's name?'

'Margaret Norton,' he replied absently, as if the name and its owner were inconsequential. 'She called herself Margo Sunshine. We did some background investigation on her. 'A runaway, from New Jersey. One relative: a mother dying of alcohol poisoning. When Peter spotted her dancing naked, she was seventeen. Just another one of the aimless kids who drift out here. But she was in the right place at the right time and ended up a Cadmus.'

And dead, I thought, keeping it to myself.

Souza examined his cufflinks and kept talking.

'You can see from all this why I feel the history will support a dim cap defence. Look at what we've got: atrocious genes, prenatal malnutrition, and parental drug abuse, which could certainly lead to some kind of subtle inborn brain damage, couldn't it? Add to that traumatic birth, early infection, and maternal deprivation, and it's a litany of disasters.'

'Who raised Jamey?' I asked, ignoring the speech.

'Peter did. Not that he was cut out for it. But for a while he seemed to be growing up, meeting his responsibilities. There'd been some doubt in Jack's mind about the baby's paternity; but the resemblance to Peter was striking, and when they came home, he accepted both of them with open

arms, paid for the best doctors, nurses, and nannies, built an elaborate nursery. At first the baby seemed to be bringing Jack and Peter together. They worked hard at amusing him - no easy task because he was colicky and cried constantly. When Peter's patience ran out, Jack was there to step in. They were closer than they'd ever been. Then in November of 'sixty-nine Jack became ill. Pancreatic cancer. He was gone in a matter of weeks.

'We all were stunned, but the most severely affected was Peter. He was in shock, confronted suddenly by the enormousness of his obligations. For twenty-one years his father had blunted all the rough edges for him, but now he was on his own. In addition to the baby, there was the business to run. Jack was your typical charismatic leader, poor at delegating, kept things in his head or on scraps of paper. His affairs were a mess, and poor Peter was left with the task of sorting it out.

'On the day of the funeral he came to me literally shaking with terror, wondering how he was going to run the company and raise an infant when he couldn't even run his own life. The pathetic truth was, he was right. He had no head for business. Dwight had shown some talent along those lines - he was a business major at Stanford - but he was barely twenty, and I encouraged him to stay in school.

'I set about hiring professional managers, and they reorganised the company on a more conventional basis. It took a year to get it done. All the while Peter was at loose ends. He tried getting involved in corporate affairs but was easily bored. My suggestion that he return to college was shrugged off. There was no purpose in his life, and he sank into depression and started to pull away from the baby. It was history repeating itself, and I urged him to seek psychiatric help. He refused and went rapidly downhill. I'm certain he started taking drugs again. His eyes took on a wild look, and he lost a lot of weight. He'd spend days in his room brooding, then go roaring off in one of his cars and not return for days.'

'How did Jamey react to the changes in his father?'

'He seemed to develop independent of Peter's ups and

downs. It was obvious early on that he was unusually bright. He'd come toddling around, making precocious remarks clearly aimed at engaging his father's attention. But rather than charm him, the precociousness frightened Peter, and he reacted by rejecting Jamey, actually pushing him away physically.

'I've never been a parent myself, but I knew what that could do to a young child. I talked to Peter about it, but he grew angry and called Jamey a freak, said he was "spooky". He worked himself up into a fury talking about it, so I backed off, out of fear for the child's safety.'

'Was he always that volatile?'

'Until then, no. Like Jack, he had a short fuse, nothing serious. But it began to get out of hand. Minor things - the little messes children create - what would have annoyed a more stable person enraged him. He had to be restrained more than once from striking out at Jamey with a closed fist. The nannies were instructed to keep a close watch at all times. When he lost all interest in fatherhood, no one tried to talk him out of it.'

'Was there ever any actual physical abuse?'

'No. And once Peter refused to be a father, the child was safe, because the withdrawal was absolute. As his mother had done, he shut his door on life and became a hermit. And just as she had, he ended his misery by taking his own life.'

'How'd he do it?'

'Hanged himself. The house had a ballroom with high, vaulted ceilings and thick oak crossbeams. Peter stood on a chair, threw a rope over one of the beams, looped it around his neck, and kicked the chair away.'

'How old was Jamey when it happened?'

'That was in 1972, so he must have been around three. We shielded him from the details. Do you think he could remember that far back?'

'It's possible. Has he ever talked about it?'

'Only in general terms - not having a father, philosophical questions about suicide. I spoke to Dwight and Heather, and as far as they know, he's never asked for the gory details nor been given any. Did he ever mention anything about hanging to you?'

'No. He was very closed about personal matters. Why is it important?'

'It may be relevant in terms of setting up a defence. The circumstances surrounding the slashings - especially the Chancellor murder - have made me wonder about the influence of early memories upon adult behaviour. All the victims were strangled before being cut, and Dig Chancellor was found suspended from a crossbeam. I'm not a strong believer in coincidence.'

'So you're suggesting the murders were symbolic acts of patricide?'

'You're the psychologist, Doctor. I defer to your interpretation.'

'Wouldn't it hurt your case to supply motivation for the murders? Make the crimes look more purposeful?'