When the Bough Breaks (44 page)

“I’m beholden to Gus,” he said, “not due to any unusual sexual proclivity. That’s his link with the others—with Stuart and Eddy. Since we’d been boys I’d known of their—strange ways. We all grew up in an isolated place, a strange place. We were cultivated, like orchids. Private lessons for this and that, having to look appropriate, act appropriately. Sometimes I wonder if that refined atmosphere didn’t do us more harm than good. Look how we turned out, I, with my spells—I know there are labels for it these days, but I prefer to avoid them—Stuart and Eddy with their strange sexual habits.

“They started fooling with each other one summer, when we were nine or ten. Then with other children. Smaller children, much smaller. I didn’t think much of it except to know that I wasn’t interested in it. The way we were raised, right or wrong didn’t seem as relevant as—appropriate and inappropriate. ‘That’s not appropriate, Willie,’ Father would say. I imagine had Stuart or Eddy’s fathers caught them with the little ones, that would have been their description of the entire affair:
Inappropriate
. Like using the wrong fork at dinner.”

His description of coming of age on Brindamoor was strikingly like the one Van der Graaf had given me. At that moment he seemed akin to the fancy goldfish in the tank at Oomasa: beautiful, showy, cultivated
by mutation and centuries of inbreeding, raised in a protected environment. But ultimately stunted and unadaptable to the realities of life.

“In that sense, the sexual one,” he said, “I was quite normal. I married, fathered a child, a son. I performed quite adequately. Stuart and Eddy continued as my chums, going about their perverted ways. It was live and let live. They never mentioned my—spells. I let them be. Stuart was really a fine fellow, not overly bright, but well-meaning. It was a pity he had to … Except for that one kink, he was a good boy. Eddy was, is different. A sense of humor but a mean one. A nasty streak runs through him. He is habitually caustic and sarcastic—that’s why I’m sensitive to that type of thing. Perhaps it’s because of his size …”

“Your tie to McCaffrey,” I prompted.

“Small men often get that way. You’re—I can’t see you now, but I recall you as being medium-sized. Is that correct?”

“I’m five-eleven,” I said wearily.

“That’s medium-sized. I’ve always been large. Father was large. It’s just as Mendel predicted—long peas, short peas—fascinating field, genetics, isn’t it?”

“Doctor—”

“I’ve wondered about the genetic impact on many traits. Intellect, for example. The liberal dogma would have us believe that environment makes the largest contribution to intelligence. It’s an egalitarian premise, but reality doesn’t bear it out. Long peas, short peas. Smart parents, smart children. Stupid parents, stupid children. I, myself, am a heterozygote. Father was brilliant. Mother was an Irish beauty, but very simple. She lived in a world where that combination served to create the perfect hostess. Father’s showpiece.”

“Your tie to McCaffrey,” I said sharply.

“My tie? Oh nothing more serious than life and death.”

He laughed. It was the first time I’d heard his laugh and I hoped it would be the last. It was a vacant discordant note, a blatant musical error screaming out in the middle of a symphony.

“I lived with Lilah and Willie Junior on the third floor of the Jedson dorhiitory. Stuart and Eddy shared a room on the first. As a married student I was given larger quarters—really a nice little apartment, when you got down to it. Two bedrooms, bath, living room, small kitchen. But no library, no study, so I did my reading at the kitchen table. Lilah had made it a cheerful place—bunting, trim, curtains, womanly types of things. Willie Junior was a little over two at the time, I remember. It was my senior year. I’d been having trouble with some of the premedical courses—physics, organic chemistry. I’ve never been a brilliant person. However, if I apply myself and keep my attention span steady
I can do quite well. I desperately wanted to get into medical school on my own merits. My father and his father before him were doctors, all had been brilliant students. The joke, behind my back, was that I’d inherited my mother’s brains as well as her looks—they didn’t think I heard but I did. I wanted so much to show them that I could succeed on my own merits, not because I was Adolf Towle’s son.

“The night it happened Willie Junior had been feeling poorly, unable to sleep. He’d been screaming and crying out, Lilah was frazzled. I ignored her requests for help, plunging myself into my studies, trying to shut out everything else. I had to bring my science grades up. It was imperative. The more anxious I got, the less able I was to pay attention. I tried to deal with it by embracing a kind of tunnel vision.

“Lilah had always been patient with me, but that night she became furious, started to come unglued. I looked up, saw her coming at me, her hands—she had tiny hands, a delicate woman—rolled up into fists, mouth open—I suppose she was screaming—eyes full of hatred. She seemed to me a bird of prey, about to swoop down and pick at my bones. I pushed her away with my arm. She fell, tumbling back, hit her head on the corner of a bureau—a hideous piece, an antique her mother had given her—and lay there, simply lay there.

“I can see the whole thing clearly now, as if it had just happened yesterday. Lilah lies there, motionless. I rise out of my chair, dreamlike, everything is swaying, everything is confusing. A small shape coming at me from the right, like a mouse, a rat. I swat it away. But it’s not a rat, no, no. It’s Willie Junior, coming back at me, crying for his mother, hitting me. Only dimly aware of his presence I strike out at him again, catch him on the side of his head. Too hard. He falls, lands, lies still. Unmoving. A large bruise masks the side of his face …My wife, my child, dead at my hands. I prepare to find my razor, cut my wrists, be done with it.

“Then Gus’s voice is at my back. He stands in the doorway, huge, obese, sweaty, in work clothes, broom in hand. The janitor, cleaning the dormitories at night. I smell him—ammonia, body odor, cleaning fluids. He’s heard the noise and has come to check. He looks at me, a long hard look, then at the bodies. He kneels over them, feels for a pulse. ‘They’re dead,’ he tells me in a flat voice. For a second I think he’s smiling and I’m ready to pounce on him, to attempt a third murder. Then the smile becomes a frown. He’s thinking. ‘Sit down,’ he commands me. I’m not used to being ordered around by one of his class but I’m weak and sick with grief, my knees are buckling, everything’s unraveling … I turn away from Lilah and Willie Junior, sit, put my face in my hands. Start to cry. I begin to grow more confused …A spell is coming on. Everything is starting to hurt. I have no pills, not
like I’ll have years later, when I’m a doctor. Now I’m merely a premedical student, powerless, hurting.

“Gus makes a telephone call. Minutes later my friends Stuart and Eddy appear in the room, like characters walking onstage in the midst of a dreadful play … The three of them talk among themselves, sometimes looking at me, muttering. Stuart comes to me first. He places a hand on my shoulder. ‘We know it was an accident, Will,’ he says. ‘We know it wasn’t your fault.’ I start to argue with him but the words stick in my throat … The spells make it so hard to talk, so painful … I shake my head. Stuart comforts me, tells me everything will be all right. They will take care of everything. He rejoins Gus and Eddy.

“They wrap the bodies in a blanket, tell me not to leave the room. At the last moment they decide Stuart should stay with me. Gus and Eddy leave with the bodies. Stuart gives me coffee. I cry. I cry myself to sleep. Later that evening they return and tell me the story I’m to report to the police. They rehearse me, such good friends. I do a fine job. They tell me so. I feel some sense of relief at that. At least there is something I’m good at. Play-acting. That’s what a bedside manner is, after all. Give the audience what it clamors for … My first audience is made up of the police. Then an officer of the Coast Guard—a family friend. They’ve found Lilah’s car. Her body is macerated and bloated, I needn’t identify it if it’s too much of an ordeal. Scraps of Willie Junior’s clothing have been found clinging to her hands. His body has drifted away. The tides, explains the officer. They’ll continue to search … I break down and ready myself for the next show, the well-wishers, the press …”

The tides, I thought, the Coast Guard. Something there …

“Several months later I’m accepted at the medical school,” Towle was saying. “I move to Los Angeles. Stuart comes with me, though we both know he’ll never be able to finish. Eddy goes to law school in Los Angeles. The Heads are reunited—that’s what they called us. The Three Heads of State.

“We go about our new lives, there is never a mention of the favor they’ve done for me. Of that night. However they are far more open than ever before about their sexual perversions, leaving nasty photographs where I can see them, not bothering to hide or conceal anything. They know I’m powerless to say a thing, even should I find a ten-year-old in my bed. A rotten mutual interdependence now binds us.

“Gus has disappeared. Years later, when I’m a doctor, on my way to prominence, the bedside manner fully developed, he appears at my office after the patients have all gone home. Further fattened, well-dressed, no longer a janitor. Now, he jokes, he’s a man of God. He shows me the mail-order divinity degree. And he’s come to ask a few
favors from me. To
cash in some old IOU’s
is the way he puts it. I paid him that evening and I’ve been paying him, in one way or another, ever since.”

“It’s time to stop paying,” I said. “Let’s not sacrifice Melody Quinn to him.”

“The child is doomed, as things stand. I urged Gus to put it off. Her accident. Told him it was by no means evident that she’d seen or heard anything. But he won’t be delayed much longer. What’s one more life to a man like that?” He paused. “Does she really pose a danger to him?”

“Not really. She sat at the window and saw shadows of men.” One of whom she’d recognized as her father—she didn’t know him but she had a picture. On the day I hypnotized her, right after the session, she went into a spontaneous discussion of him. She showed me the picture and a trinket he’d given her. When she had the night terrors I should have figured it out. I thought the hypnosis hadn’t evoked anything in her. It had. It had brought back memories of her father, of seeing him lurking outside her window, entering Handler’s place. She knew something bad had happened in the apartment. She knew her daddy had done something terrible. She suppressed it. And it came back in her sleep.

It had started coming together for me when I’d seen the clue she’d left behind when Ronnie Lee had come by and abducted her and her mother. A shrunken head, precious until now, a symbol of Daddy. For her to have abandoned it meant she’d kissed him off, had come to grips with the fact that Daddy was a bad man, come back not to visit, but to hurt. Perhaps she’d watched him manhandle Bonita, or maybe it was the rough, uncaring way he’d spoken to her. Whatever it had been, the child had known.

Looking back it seemed so logical, but at the time the associations had been remote.

“It’s ironic,” Towle was saying. “I prescribed Ritalin to control her behavior and it was that same prescription that caused her insomnia, that led her to be awake at the wrong time.”

“Ironic,” I said. “Now let’s go in there and get her out. You’re going to help me. When it’s over I’ll see to it that you’re cared for properly.”

He didn’t say anything. Simply sat straight in the seat, working hard at looking noble.

“Are you requesting my help?”

“I am, Doctor.”

“Request granted.”

29

I
LAY
on the floor of the Lincoln, covered by a blanket.

“My gun is pointed at your spine,” I told him. “I don’t expect any trouble but we haven’t known each other long enough for trust to be worth much.”

“I understand,” he said. “I’m not offended.”

He drove to the La Casa access road, turned left and steered smoothly and slowly to the chain link barrier. He identified himself to the voice on the squawk box and was let in. A brief stop at the guardhouse, an exchange of pleasantries, plenty of “Doctor, Sirs” from the guard and we were in.

He drove to the far end of the parking lot.

“Park away from the light,” I whispered.

The car came to a halt.

“It’s clear now,” he said.

I crawled from under the blanket, got out of the car and motioned him to follow. We walked up the path, side by side. Counselors passed us in pairs, greeted him with deference and moved on. I tried to look like his associate.

La Casa was peaceful at night. Camp songs filtered through the trees. “A Hundred Bottles of Beer.” “Oh Susanna.” Children’s voices. An off-key guitar. Microphoned adult commands. Mosquitoes and moths vied for space around mushroom lights imbedded in the foliage at our feet. The sweet smell of jasmine and oleander in the air. An occasional whiff of brine from the ocean, so close but unseen. To the right the open gray-green expanse of the Meadow. A pleasant enough graveyard … The Grove, dark as fudge, a piney refuge …

We passed the pool, taking care not to slip on the wet cement. Towle
moved like an old warrior heading into his last battle, chin up, arms at his side, marching. I kept the .38 within easy reach.

We made it to the bunkers unnoticed.

“That one,” I said. “With the blue door.”

Down the ramp. A hard twist of the key and we were in.

The building was divided into two rooms. The one in the front was empty except for a single folding chair pushed under an aluminum bridge table. The walls were of unpainted block and smelled of mildew. The floors were cold slab concrete, as was the ceiling. A square black wound of skylight marked the ceiling’s center. The only light came from a single, unadorned bulb.

She was in the back, on an army cot, covered with a coarse olive drab blanket and restrained with leather straps across her ankles and chest. Her arms were pinioned under the blanket. She breathed slowly, mouth open, sleeping, head to one side, her pale, tear-streaked skin translucent in the semidarkness. Wisps of hair hung loosely around her face. Tiny, vulnerable, lost.