Jonathan Kellerman - [Alex Delaware 01] Read online

  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.

  “They look like seals, don’t they?”

  She giggled.

  “Could I go in the water, Alex?”

  “Take your shoes off and wade near the shoreline—where the water touches the sand. Try not to get your dress wet.”

  I popped shrimp in my mouth, leaned back and watched her run along the tideline, skinny legs kicking up the water. Once she turned in my direction and waved.

  I watched her play that way for twenty minutes or so, and then I rolled up my pants legs, took off my shoes and socks and joined her.

  We ran together. Her legs worked better with every passing moment; soon she was a gazelle. She whooped and splashed and kept going until we were both out of breath. We walked back to our picnic site and collapsed on the sand. Her hair was a mess so I loosened the barettes and re-fastened them for her. Her small chest heaved. Her feet were crusted with grit from the ankle down. When she finally caught her breath she asked me:

  “I—I’ve been a good girl, haven’t I?”

  “You’ve been great.”

  She looked unsure.

  “Don’t you think so, Melody?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I am and Mama gets mad or Mrs. Brookhouse says I’m bad.”

  “You’re always a good girl. Even if someone thinks you’ve done something wrong. Do you understand that?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Not sure, huh?”

  “I—I get mixed up.”

  “Everyone gets mixed up. Kids and moms and dads. And doctors.”

  “Dr. Towle, too?”

  “Even Dr. Towle.”

  She digested that for a while. The large, dark eyes darted around, moving from the w
ater, to my face, to the sky, and back to me.

  “Mama said you were going to hypnotize me.” She pronounced it hip-mo-tize.

  “Only if you want me to. Do you understand why we think it might be helpful?”

  “Sort of. To make me think better?”

  “No. You think just fine. This—” I patted her head—“works fine. We want to try hypnosis—hypnotizing—so that you can do us a favor. So that you can remember something.”

  “About when the other doctor was hurt.”

  I hesitated. My habit was to be honest with children, but if she hadn’t been told about Handler and Gutierrez being dead I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news. Not without the chance to be around to help pick up the pieces.

  “Yes. About that.”

  “I told the policeman I didn’t remember anything. It was all dark and everything.”

  “Sometimes people remember better after being hypnotized.”

  She looked at me, frightened.

  “Are you scared of being hypnotized?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s okay. It’s okay to be scared of new things. But there really isn’t anything scary about hypnotizing. It’s really kind of fun. Have you ever seen anyone hypnotized before?”

  “Nope.”

  “Never? Even in a cartoon?”

  She lit up. “Yeah, when the guy in the pointy hat hypnotized Popeye and the waves came out his hands and Popeye walked out of the window into the air and he didn’t fall.”

  “Right. I’ve seen that one too. The guy in the pointy hat made Popeye do all sorts of weird things.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well that’s great for cartoons, but real hypnotizing isn’t anything like that.” I gave her a child’s version of the lecture I’d delivered to her mother. She seemed to believe me, because fascination took the place of fear.

  “Can we do it now?”

  I hesitated. The beach was empty; there was plenty of privacy. And the moment was right. To hell with Towle …

  “I don’t see why not. First, let’s get real comfortable.”

  I had her fix her eyes upon a smooth shiny pebble as she held it in her hand. Within moments she was blinking in response to suggestion. Her breathing slowed and became regular. I told her to close her eyes and listen to the sound of the waves slapping against the shore. Then I instructed her to imagine herself descending a flight of stairs and passing through a beautiful door to a favorite place.

  “I don’t know where it is, or what’s in it, but it’s a special place for you. You can tell me or keep it secret, but being there makes you feel so comfortable, so happy, so in control …”

  A bit more of that and she was in a deep hypnotic state.

  “Now you can hear the sound of my voice without having to listen. Just continue to enjoy your favorite place, and have a real good time.”

  I let her go for five more minutes. There was a peaceful, angelic expression on her thin little face. A soft wind rustled the loose strands of her hair. She looked tiny, sitting in the sand, hands resting in her lap.

  I gave her a suggestion to go back in time, brought her back to the night of the murder. She tensed momentarily, then resumed the deep, regular breathing.

  “You’re still feeling totally relaxed, Melody. So comfortable and in control. But now you can watch yourself, just as if you were a star on TV. You see yourself getting out of bed …”

  Her lips parted, she ran the tip of her tongue over them.

  “And you go to the window and sit there, just looking out. What do you see?”

  “Dark.” The word was barely audible.

  “Yes, it’s dark. And is there anything else.”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Let’s sit there a while longer.”

  A few minutes later:

  “Can you see anything else in the dark, Melody?”

  “Uh-uh. Dark.”

  I tried a few more times, and then gave up. Either she had seen nothing, and the talk of two or three dark men had been confabulation, or she was blocking. In either event I wasn’t going to get anything from her.

  I let her enjoy her favorite place, gave her suggestions for mastery, control, and feeling refreshed and happy, and brought her gently out of hypnosis. She came out smiling.

  “That was fun!”

  “I’m glad you liked it. You seemed to have a real good favorite place.”

  “You said I don’t have to tell you!”

  “That’s true. You don’t.”

  “Well what if I want to?” she pouted.

  “Then you can.”

  “Hmm.” She savored her power for a moment. “I want to tell you. It was riding around on the merry-go-round. Going round and round, faster and faster.”

  “That’s a great choice.”

  “Each time I went around I felt happier and happier. Can we go again some time?”

  “Sure.” Now you’ve done it, Alex. Gotten yourself into something that won’t be easy to pull out of. Instant daddy, just add guilt.

  Back in the car she turned to me.

  “Alex, you said hypnotizing makes you remember better?”

  “It can.”

  “Could I use it to remember my daddy?”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  “Never. He left when I was a little baby. He and Mama don’t live together any more.”

  “Does he visit?”

  “No. He lives far away. Once he called me, before Christmas, but I was sleeping, so Mama didn’t wake me up. That made me mad.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “I hit her.”

  “You must have been really mad.”

  “Yeah.” She bit her lip. “Sometimes he sends me stuff.”

  “Like Fatso?”

  “Yeah, and other stuff.” She dug in her purse and pulled out what looked to be a large dried pit, or seed. It had been carved to resemble a face—a snarling face—with rhinestone eyes, and strands of black acrylic hair glued to the top. A head, a shrunken head. The kind of hideous trash you can pick up at any Tijuana tourist stall. From the way she held it, it could have been the Crown Jewel of Kwarshiorkor.

  “Very nice.” I handled the knobby thing and gave it back to her.

  “I’d like to see him but Mama says she doesn’t know where he is. Can hypnotizing help remember him?”

  “It would be hard, Melody, because you haven’t seen him in a long time. But we could try. Do you have anything to remember him by—any picture of him?”

  “Yeah.” She searched in her purse again and came up with a spindled and mutilated snapshot. It had probably been fingered like a rosary. I thought of the photograph on Towle’s wall. This was the week for celluloid memories. Mr. Eastman, if you only knew how your little black box can be used to preserve the past like a stillborn fetus in a jar of formalin.

  It was a faded color photograph of a man and woman. The woman was Bonita Quinn in younger, but not much prettier, days. Even in her twenties she had possessed a sad mask of a face that foreshadowed a merciless future. She wore a dress that exposed too much undernourished thigh. Her hair was long and straight and parted in the middle. She and her companion were in front of what looked like a rural bar, the kind of watering place you find peeking out around sudden highway curves. The walls of the building were rough-hewn logs. There was a Budweiser sign in the window.

  Her arm was around the waist of the man, who had placed his arm around her shoulder. He wore a T-shirt, jeans and Wellington boots. The rump of a motorcycle was visible next to him.

  He was a strange-looking bird. One side of him—the left—sagged and there was more than a hint of atrophy running all the way down from face to foot. He looked crooked, like a piece of fruit that had been sliced and then put back together with less than full precision. When you got past the asymmetry he wasn’t bad-looking—tall, slender, with shoulder-length shaggy blond hair and a thick mustache.

  He had a wise-guy expr
ession on his face that contrasted with Bonita’s solemnity. It was the kind of look you see on the face of the local yokels when you walk into a small-town tavern in a strange place, just wanting a cold drink and some solitude. The kind of look you go out of your way to avoid, because it means trouble, and nothing else.

  I wasn’t surprised its owner had ended up behind bars.

  “Here you go.” I handed the photo back to her and she carefully put it back in her purse.

  “Want to take another run?”

  “Naw. I’m kinda tired.”

  “Want to go home?”

  “Yeah.”

  During the ride back to the apartment complex she was very quiet, as if she’d been doped up again. I had the uneasy feeling that I hadn’t done right by this child, that I had overstimulated her, only to return her to a dreary routine.

  Was I prepared to play the rescuing good guy on a regular basis?

  I thought of the parting lecture one of the senior professors in graduate school had given our graduating class of aspiring pyschotherapists.

  “When you choose to earn your living by helping people who are in emotional pain, you’re also making a choice to carry them on your back for a while. To hell with all that talk of taking responsibility, assertiveness. That’s crap. You’re going to be coming up against helplessness every day of your lives. Your patients will imprint you, like goslings who latch on to the first creature they see when they stick their heads out of the egg shell. If you can’t handle it, become an accountant.”

  Right now a ledger book full of numbers would have been a welcome sight.

  7

  I DROVE OUT to Robin’s studio at half-past seven. It had been several days since I’d seen her and I missed her. When she opened the door she was wearing a gauzy white dress that accentuated the olive tint of her skin. Her hair hung loose and she wore gold hoops in her ears.

  She held out her arms to me and we embraced for a long while. We walked inside, still clinging together.

  Her place is an old store on Pacific Avenue in Venice. Like lots of other studios nearby, it’s unmarked, the windows painted over in opaque white.