When the Bough Breaks (8 page)

5

I
TOLD
Milo about the encounter with Towle as we drove back to my place.

“Power play.” His forehead creased and cherry-sized lumps appeared just above his jawline.

“That and something else that I can’t quite figure. He’s a strange guy. Comes across very courtly—almost obsequious—then you realize he’s playing games.”

“Why’d he have you come all the way out there for something like that?”

“I don’t know.” It was a puzzle, his taking time out from a frantic afternoon to deliver a leisurely lecture. Our entire conversation could have been handled in a five-minute phone call. “Maybe it’s his idea of recreation. One-upping another professional.”

“Hell of a hobby for a busy man.”

“Yeah, but the ego comes first. I’ve met guys like Towle before, obsessed with being in control, with being the boss. Lots of them end up as department heads, deans and chairmen of committees.”

“And captains and inspectors and police chiefs.”

“Right …”

“You going to call him like he said?” He sounded defeated.

“Sure, for what it’s worth.”

“Yeah.”

Milo reclaimed his Fiat and after a few moments of prayer and pumping it started up. He leaned out of the window and looked at me wearily.

“Thanks, Alex. I’m going to go home and crash. This no-sleep routine is catching up with me …”

“You want to take a nap here and then head out?”

“No thanks. I’ll make it if this pile of junk will.” He slapped the dented door. “Thanks anyway.”

“I’ll follow up with Melody.”

“Great. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He drove a way until I stopped him with my shout. He backed up.

“What?”

“It’s probably not important, but I thought I’d mention it. The nurse in Towle’s office told me Melody’s dad’s in prison.”

He nodded somnambulantly.

“So’s half the county. It’s that way when the economy goes bad. Thanks.”

Then he was off.

It was six-fifteen and already dark. I lay down on my bed for a few minutes and when I awoke it was after nine. I got up, washed my face, and called Robin. No one answered.

I took a quick shave, threw on a windbreaker and drove down to Hakata, in Santa Monica. I drank sake and ate sushi for an hour, and bantered with the chef, who, as it turned out had a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Tokyo.

I got home, stripped naked, and took a hot bath, trying to erase all thoughts of Morton Handler, Melody Quinn and L.W. Towle, M.D., from my mind. I used self-hypnosis, imagining Robin and myself making love on top of a mountain in the middle of a rain forest. Flushed with passion I got out of the tub and called her again. After ten rings, she answered, mumbling and confused and half-asleep.

I apologized for waking her, told her I loved her and hung up.

Half a minute later she called back.

“Was that you, Alex?” She sounded as if she was dreaming.

“Yes, hon. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“No, that’s okay—what time is it?”

“Eleven-thirty.”

“Oh, I must have conked out. How are you, sweetie?”

“Fine. I called you around nine.”

“I was out all day buying wood. There’s an old violinmaker out in Simi Valley who’s retiring. I spent six hours choosing tools and picking out maple and ebony. I’m sorry I missed you.”

She sounded exhausted.

“I’m sorry too, but go back to bed. Get some sleep and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“If you want to come over, you can.”

I thought about it. But I was too restless to be good company.

“No, doll. You rest. How about dinner tomorrow? You pick the place.”

“Okay, darling.” She yawned—a soft, sweet sound. “I love you.”

“Love you too.”

It took me a while to fall asleep and when I finally did, it was restless slumber, punctuated by black-and-white dreams with lots of frantic movement in them. I don’t remember what they were about, but the dialogue was sluggish and labored, as if everyone were talking with paralyzed lips and mouths filled with wet sand.

In the middle of the night I got up to check that the doors and windows were locked.

6

I
WOKE UP
at six the next morning, filled with random energy. I hadn’t felt that way for over five months. The tension wasn’t all bad, for with it came a sense of purpose, but by seven it had built up some, so that I paced around the house like a jaguar on the prowl.

At seven-thirty I decided it was late enough. I dialed Bonita Quinn’s number. She was wide-awake and she sounded as if she’d been expecting my call.

“Morning, Doctor.”

“Good morning. I thought I’d drop by and spend a few hours with Melody.”

“Why not? She’s not doin’ anything. You know—” she lowered her voice—“I think she liked you. She talked about how you played with her.”

“That’s good. We’ll do some more today. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

When I arrived she was all dressed and ready to go. Her mother had put her in a pale yellow sundress that exposed bony white shoulders and pipe-stem arms. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, fastened by a yellow ribbon. She clutched a tiny patent-leather purse. I had thought we’d spend some time in her room and then perhaps go out for lunch, but it was clear she was primed for an outing.

“Hi, Melody.”

She averted her gaze and sucked her thumb.

“You look very pretty this morning.”

She smiled shyly.

“I thought we’d take a drive, go to a park. How does that sound?”

“Okay.” The shaky voice.

“Great.” I peeked my head in the apartment. Bonita Quinn was
pushing around a vacuum cleaner as if it were a wagonload of sins. She wore a blue bandana on her head and a cigarette dangled from her lips. The television was tuned in to a gospel show, but snow obscured the picture and the choir was drowned out by the sound of the vacuum.

I touched her shoulder. She jumped.

“I’m taking her now, okay?” I yelled over the din.

“Sure.” When she spoke the cigarette bobbled like a trout lure in a rushing brook.

She resumed her chore, stooping over the roaring machine and plowing it forward.

I rejoined Melody.

“Let’s go.”

She walked alongside me. Midway to the parking lot a small hand slipped into mine.

Through a series of hilltop turns and lucky detours, I connected to Ocean Avenue. I drove south, toward Santa Monica, until we reached the park at the top of the cliff overlooking Pacific Coast Highway. It was eight-thirty in the morning. The sky was clear, pebbled only with a handful of clouds that might have been as distant as Hawaii. I found a parking space on the street, directly in front of the Camera Obscura and the Senior Citizens’ Recreation Center.

Even that early in the morning the place was bustling. Old people packed the benches and the shuffleboard court. Some of them jabbered nonstop to each other, or themselves. Other stared out at the boulevard in mute trance. Leggy girls in skimpy tops and satin shorts that covered a tenth of their gluteal regions skated by, transforming the walkways between the palms into fleshy freeways. Some of them wore stereo headsets—speeding spacewomen, with glazed, beatific expressions on their California-perfect faces.

Japanese tourists snapped pictures, nudged each other, pointed and laughed. Shabby bums loitered against the guardrail that separated the crumbling bluff from sheer space. They smoked behind cupped hands and regarded the world with distrust and fear. A surprising number of them were young men. They all looked as if they’d crawled out of some deep, dark, unproductive mine.

There were students reading, couples sprawled on the grass, small boys darting between the trees and a few furtive encounters that looked suspiciously like dope deals.

Melody and I walked along the outer rim of the park, hand in hand, talking little. I offered to buy her a hot pretzel from a street vendor, but she said she wasn’t hungry. I remembered that loss of appetite was
another side effect of Ritalin. Or maybe she’d just had a big breakfast.

We came to the walkway that led to the pier.

“Have you ever been on a merry-go-round?” I asked her.

“Once. We went on a school trip to Magic Mountain. The fast rides scared me but I liked the merry-go-round.”

“C’mon.” I pointed out toward the pier. “There’s one here. We’ll take a ride.”

In contrast to the park, the pier was nearly deserted. There were a few men fishing here and there, mostly older blacks and Asians, but their expressions were pessimistic, their buckets empty. Dried fish scales were embedded in the aged wooden planks of the walkway, giving it a sequined effect in the morning sun. There were cracks in several of the weathered boards, and as we walked I caught glimpses of the water below slapping against the pilings and retreating with a hissed warning. In the shadow of the pier’s underbelly the water looked greenish black. There was a strong smell of creosote and salt in the air, a ripe, raw fragrance of loneliness and wasted hours.

The pool hall where I used to hide while playing hookey had been closed down. In its place was an arcade full of electric video games. A solitary Mexican boy intently pulled the joystick on one of the garishly painted robots. Computer noise emerged in blips and dreeps.

The merry-go-round was housed in a cavernous barn of a building that looked as if it would collapse with the next high tide. The operator was a tiny man with a potbelly the size of a cantaloupe and flaky skin around his ears. He was sitting on a stool reading a racing form and trying to pretend we weren’t there.

“We’d like to ride the merry-go-round.”

He looked up, gave us the once-over. Melody was staring at the ancient posters on the wall. Buffalo Bill. Victorian Love.

“Quarter a spin.”

I handed him a couple of bills.

“Keep it going for a while.”

“Sure.”

I lifted her up onto a large white-and-gilded horse with a pink plume for a tail. The brass rod upon which it was impaled had diagonal stripes running across it. A sure bet to go up and down. I stood next to her.

The tiny man was buried in his reading. He reached out a hand, pushed a button on a rusty console, pulled a lever and a rheumy rendition of the “Blue Danube Waltz” piped out of a dozen hidden speakers. The carousel started off slowly, and then it began to turn; horses, monkeys, chariots coming to life, moving in vertical counterpoint to the revolution of the machine.

Melody’s hands tightened around the neck of her steed; she stared
straight ahead. Gradually, she relaxed her grip and allowed herself to look around. By the twentieth revolution, she was swaying with the music, eyes closed, mouth open in silent laughter.

When the music finally stopped I helped her down and she stepped dizzily onto the dirty concrete floor. She was giggling and swinging her purse in joyful rhythm, in time with the now dissipated waltz.

We left the barn and ventured to the end of the pier. She was fascinated by the enormous bait tanks teeming with squirming anchovies, amazed at the bin of fresh rockfish that was being brought up by a trio of muscled, bearded fishermen. The reddish fish lay dead in a heap. The quick ascent from the bottom of the ocean had caused the air bladders on several of them to explode and extrude from their open mouths. Crabs the size of bees crawled in and around the motionless bodies. Gulls swooped down to plunder and were waved off by the horned brown hands of the fishermen.

One of the fishermen, a boy of no more than eighteen, saw her staring.

“Pretty gross, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell your daddy to take you to prettier places on his day off.” He laughed.

Melody smiled. She didn’t try to correct him.

Someone was deep-frying shrimp. I saw her nose wrinkle.

“You hungry?”

“Kind of.” She looked uneasy.

“Anything wrong?”

“Mama told me not to be too grabby.”

“Don’t you worry. I’m going to tell your mom what a good girl you’ve been. Have you had breakfast?”

“Kind of.”

“What’d you have?”

“Some juice. A piece of donut. The white powdery kind.”

“That’s it?”

“Uh-huh.” She looked up at me as if expecting to be punished. I softened my tone.

“I guess you weren’t hungry at breakfast time.”

“Uh-huh.” So much for the big-breakfast theory.

“Well,
I’m
pretty hungry.” It was true. All I’d had was coffee. “What do you say we both get something?”

“Thank you, Doctor Del—” she stumbled over my name.

“Call me Alex.”

“Thank you, Alex.”

We located the source of the cooking smells at a shabby dinerette sandwiched between a souvenir shop and a bait and tackle stand. The
woman behind the counter was pasty white and obese. Steam and smoke rose in billows around her moon face, creating a shimmering halo. Deep fryers crackled in the background.

I bought a large greasy bag full of goodies: foil-wrapped servings of shrimp and fried cod, a basket of french fries the size of billy clubs, plastic covered tubs of tartar sauce and ketchup, fluted paper tubes of salt, two cans of an off-brand of cola.

“Don’t forget these, sir.”

The fat woman held out a handful of napkins.

“Thanks.”

“You know kids.” She looked down at Melody. “You enjoy yourself now, hon.”

We carried the food off the pier and found a quiet spot on the beach, not far from the Pritikin Longevity Center. We ate our greasy fare watching middle-aged men attempt to jog around the block, fueled by whatever heartless menu the center was serving nowadays.

She ate like a trucker. It was getting close to noon, which meant that normally she’d be ready for her second dose of amphetamine. Her mother hadn’t offered the medication to me, and I hadn’t thought—or wanted—to ask.

The change in her behavior became evident halfway through lunch, and grew more obvious each minute.

She began to move more. She was more alert. Her face became more animated. She fidgeted, as if waking from a long, confusing sleep. She looked around, newly in touch with her environment.

“Look at them.” She pointed to a covey of wet-suited surfers riding waves in the distant.