Over the Edge (16 page)

'Coming up with my Chancellor strategy was first-rate thinking, Doctor, as was your little interrogation. Perhaps you're in the wrong profession.'

I backed out of his grasp and moved toward the door.

'I don't think so,' I said, and walked away.

On the way home I stopped at the Pico kosher deli near Robertson and bought provisions: a pound of corned beef, new pickles, coleslaw, and a loaf of caraway rye sliced thick. The evening traffic was chromium soup, but I made

it to the glen by six-thirty. Once settled, I fed the koi, glanced at the mail, and went into the kitchen, where I prepared sandwiches and set them on a platter in the refrigerator. When Robin's truck pulled into the carport, I was waiting on the terrace, Grolsch in hand. She'd been sawing and planing for most of the afternoon and looked tired; when she saw the food, she cheered.

After dinner we sat in the living room, put our feet up, and shared the Times. I got as far as page three before Jamey's face jumped out at me.

The picture was a head shot, formally posed, that looked to be a couple of years old. Black-and-white photography had turned his blue eyes murky. In another context the downward turn of his lips might have seemed sad; under the present circumstances it took on a sinister cast. The article surrounding the photo described him as the 'scion of a family prominent in the construction industry' and made note of his 'history of serious psychiatric problems'. A paragraph at the end said the police were delving into Ivar Digby Chancellor's background. Souza worked fast.

THE NEXT morning I put on jeans, a polo shirt, and sandals, took my briefcase, and walked down the glen toward ULCA. The road was choked with cars -commuters making the daily pilgrimage from homes in the Valley to West Side business districts. Watching them inch forward, I thought of Black Jack Cadmus and wondered how many of them had fruit trees in their backyards.

I crossed Sunset, continued south on Hilgard, and entered the campus at Strathmore. A short hike brought me to the northern edge of the Health Sciences Center - a complex of brick behemoths rumoured to house more corridor space than the Pentagon. I'd misspent a good deal of my youth in those corridors.

Entering at ground level, I made a familiar right turn. The hallway leading to the Biomedical Library was lined with glass display cases. This month's exhibit was on the history of surgical instruments, and I glanced at the array of therapeutic weaponry - from crude, stone trepans exposing the cerebral tissue within a mannikin's skull to lasers traversing arterial tunnels.

The library had just opened and was still quiet. By noon the place would be jammed with medical students and those aspiring to be medical students, sleep-deprived residents, and grim-faced graduate students hiding behind hillocks of reference material.

I sat down on an oak table, opened my briefcase, and pulled out the volume of Fish's Schizophrenia that I'd brought from home. It was the third edition, relatively new, but after two hours of study I'd read little I hadn't already known. Putting the book aside, I went searching for more current information - abstracts and journal articles. Half an hour of peering into microfiche viewers and shuffling index cards and three more hours hunched in the stacks made my eyes blur and my head buzz. I took a break and headed for the vending machines.

Sitting in an outdoor courtyard, I drank bitter coffee, chewed on a stale sugar doughnut, and realised how few facts I'd found floating in a sea of theory and speculation.

Schizophrenia. The word means 'split mind,' but it's a misnomer. What schizophrenia really represents is the disintegration of the mind. It's a malignant disorder, cancer of the thought processes, the scrambling and erosion of mental activity. Schizophrenic symptoms - delusions, hallucinations, illogical thinking, loss of touch with reality, bizarre speech and behaviour - embody the layman's notion of crazy. They occur in one percent of the population in virtually every society, and no one knows why. Everything from birth trauma to brain damage to body type to poor mothering has been suggested as a cause. Nothing has been proved, although much has been disproved, and as Souza had pointed out gleefully, the evidence suggests a genetic predisposition to madness.

The course of the disease is as unpredictable as that of a flash fire in a windstorm. Some patients experience a single psychotic episode that never recurs. Others recover after a series of attacks. In many instances the disorder is chronic but static, while in the most severe cases deterioration progresses to the point of total breakdown.

Despite
 
all
 
this
 
ambiguity,
 
the
 
relationship between madness and murder is clear: The vast majority of schizophrenics are harmless, less violent than the rest of us. But a few are stunningly dangerous. Paranoid, they lash out in sudden bursts of rage, often maiming or killing the very people working hardest to help them - parents, spouses, therapists.

Schizophrenics don't commit serial murders.

The sadism, premeditation, and ritual repetition of the Lavender Slashings were the trademark of another denizen of the psychiatric jungle.

He's the beast who walks upright. Meet him on the street, and he'll seem normal, even charming. But he roams those streets, parasitic and cold-eyed, stalking his prey behind a veneer of civility. The rules and regulations that separate humans from savages don't concern him. 'Do unto others as you damn well please' is his creed. He's a user and a manipulator, and he lacks empathy or conscience. The screams of his victims are at best irrelevant, at worst a source of pleasure.

He's the psychopath, and psychiatry understands him even less than it does the schizophrenic. The symptoms of madness can often be altered with medication, but there's no therapy for evil.

Madman or monster, which was Jamey?

Sonnenschein, with a cop's natural cynicism, had suspected the latter. I knew he spoke from experience, because the first thing psychopaths often attempt after being caught is feigning insanity. The Yorkshire Ripper had tried it, as had Manson, Bianchi, and Son of Sam. All had failed, but not before fooling several experts.

Over the years I'd examined a fair share of budding psychopaths - callous, shallow kids who bullied the weak, set fires, and tortured animals without a shred of remorse. Seven-, eight- and nine-year-olds who were downright scary. They followed a pattern that Jamey didn't fit; if anything, he'd seemed overly sensitive, too introspective for his own good. But how well had I really known him? And though the decompensation I'd witnessed in the jail had seemed the farthest thing from fraud, could I be absolutely certain that I was immune from subterfuge?

I wanted to believe Souza, to be certain I was on the side of the good guys. But at this point I had nothing to go on besides wishful thinking and the Cadmus family history the attorney had given me - a propaganda piece that may or may not have been accurate.

It was homework time. I needed to plumb the past in order to bring the present into focus, to conduct a psychological autopsy that illuminated the fall of a young genius.

The meetings with the Cadmuses and Mainwaring were days away. But the psychology building was a short sprint across the science quad.

I found a pay phone, dialled the psych department, and asked the receptionist to connect me with Sarita Flower's extension. Seven rings later a cool young female voice answered.

'Dr. Flower's office.'

'This is Dr. Delaware. I'm a former associate of Dr. Flowers. I happen to be on campus and wonder if I could drop by and talk with her.'

'She's tied up with meetings for the rest of the afternoon.'

'When will she be free?'

'Not until tomorrow.'

'She might want to talk to me before then. Could you please reach her and ask?'

The voice tightened suspiciously.

'What did you say your name was?'

'Delaware. Dr. Alex Delaware.'

'You're not a reporter, are you?'

'No. I'm a psychologist. I used to consult to Project 160.'

Hesitation.

'All right. I'm going to put you on hold.'

Several minutes later she was back, sounding resentful.

'She'll see you in twenty minutes. My name is Karen. Meet me at the fourth-floor elevators.'

She rounded the corner just as I got off, tall and angular,

wearing a red and white Diane von Furstenberg dress that dramatised the blackness of her skin. Her hair had been trimmed to a half-inch nap, accentuating tiny ears and high cheekbones. Ovals of ivory dangled from each ear, and ivory bracelets segmented one ebony forearm.

'Dr. Delaware? I'm Karen. Come this way.'

She led me down the hall to a door labelled A.D. OBSERVATION - DO NOT DISTURB.

'You can wait in here. She should be out in a minute.'

'Thanks.'

She nodded coolly. 'Sorry for hassling you before, but the press has been hounding her ever since the Cadmus thing. We had to call campus security to eject a guy from the Enquirer this morning.'

'Don't worry about it.'

'Want coffee or anything?'

'No, thanks.'

'Okay, then. I'll be off.' She put her hand on the doorknob but stopped before turning it. 'You're here about Cadmus, too, aren't you?'

'Yes.'

'What a crazy thing to happen. It's created some real problems for the project. She's been under a lot of stress anyway, and this just makes it worse.'

Not knowing what to say, I smiled sympathetically.

'A real crappy thing,' she repeated, opening the door and walking off.

The room was dark. A microphone dangled from the ceiling, which, like three of the walls, was layered with acoustical tile. The fourth wall was a one-way mirror. A woman in a wheelchair sat looking through the glass. In her lap was a clipboard, stuffed with papers. She turned toward me as I entered and smiled.

'Alex,' she whispered.

I bent over and kissed her cheek. She emitted a cool, clean California scent - suntan lotion and chlorine.

'Hello, Sarita.'

'It's so good to see you,' she said, taking my hand and squeezing it hard.

'Good to see you, too.'

She sat tall in the chair, dressed casually but formally, in a navy blazer, pale blue silk blouse, and spotless white slacks that couldn't conceal the withered outlines of atrophied legs.

'I'll be through in just a few minutes,' she said, and pointed toward the mirror. On the other side was a brightly lit windowless room floored with linoleum and painted white. In the centre of the floor sat a child in front of an electric train set.

He was about six or seven, dressed in jeans, a yellow T-shirt, and sneakers, chubby and chipmunk-cheeked with caramel-coloured hair. The miniature railroad was an elaborate setup: shiny cars; silver track; a papier-mâché landscape of bridges, lakes, and rolling hills; wooden depots and semaphores; built-to-scale two-storey houses rimmed with matchstick picket fences.

Pasted to the boy's forehead and scalp were several electrodes trailing black cables that snaked along the floor and fed into an electroencephalogram monitor. The machine spewed out a slow but steady stream of paper patterned with the peaks and troughs of a line graph.

'Pull up a seat,' said Sarita, picking up a pencil and making a notation.

I sat in a folding chair and watched. The boy had been fidgeting, but now he sat stock-still. A low hum sounded, and the train began to roll steadily around the track. The boy smiled, wide-eyed; after a few moments his attention wandered again, and he began to move restlessly and look away. The train stopped. The boy returned his eyes to the locomotive and seemed to go into a trancelike state, face immobile, hands folded in his lap. There were no control switches in sight, and when the train started up again, it appeared to do so of its own accord.

'He's doing very well,' said Sarita. 'On task fifty-eight percent of the time.'

'Attentional deficit?'

'Severe. When he first came in, he was all over the place, just couldn't sit still. The mother was ready to kill the kid.

I've got another dozen just like him. We're running a study on teaching AD kids self-control.'

'Biofeedback?'

She nodded.

'We found most of them were pretty tense, and I thought the train would be a fun way to teach them to relax. It's hooked up to the EEG monitor through a wire under the floor. When they go into alpha state, the train runs. When they come out, it stops. One kids hates trains, so we use a tape recorder and music. The schedule of reinforcement can be programmed so that as they get better, they're expected to sit still for longer periods. Besides the attentional benefits, it makes them feel more in control, which should translate to higher self-esteem. I've got a grad student measuring it for a dissertation.'

A buzzer went off on her wristwatch. She turned it off, scribbled a few notes, reached up, and pulled down the mike.

'Very good, Andy. You really kept it going today.'

The boy looked up and touched one of the electrodes.

'It itches,' he said.

'I'll be right in to take it off. One second, Alex.'

She wheeled toward the door, yanked it, and rolled through. I followed her into the hallway. An old-faced young woman in halter top and shorts stood near an unmarked door, leaning against the wall. One hand twisted a strand of long dark hair. The other held a cigarette.

'Hello, Mrs. Graves. We're just about through. Andy did beautifully today.'

The woman shrugged and sighed.

'I hope so. I got another report from school today.'

Sarita looked up at her, smiled, patted her hand, and opened the door. After wheeling to the boy, she removed the electrodes, tousled his hair, and repeated that he'd done well. Reaching into the pocket of her blazer, she drew out a miniature toy car and handed it to him.

'Thank you, Dr. Flowers,' he said, turning the gift over with pudgy fingers.

'My pleasure, Andy. Keep up the good work. Okay?'

But he'd run out of the room, engrossed in the new toy, and didn't hear her.