Джонатан Келлерман - When the Bough Breaks

“What happened to Larry?”

“He’s gone off to find his fortunes in San Francisco.”

Larry was a black stage manager with whom Milo had conducted an on-again, off-again relationship for two years. Their last half-year had been grimly platonic. “He’s hooked up with some show sponsored by an anonymous corporation. Something racy for educational television, along the lines of ‘Our Agricultural Heritage: Your Friend the Plough.’ Hot stuff.”

“Bitchy, bitchy.”

“No, really, I do wish the boy well. Behind that neurotic exterior was genuine talent.”

“How did you meet your doctor?”

“He works the Emergency Room at Cedars. A surgeon, no less. I was following up an assault that turned into manslaughter, he was commandeering the catheters, and our eyes locked. The rest is history.”

I laughed so hard the coffee almost went up my nose.

“He’s been out of the closet for about two years. Marriage in medical school, messy divorce, excommunication by family. The whole bit. Fantastic guy, you’ll have to meet him.”

“I’d like to.”

“Give me a few days to slog through Morton Handler’s life history and we’ll double.”

“It’s a deal.”

It was five to four. I let the Los Angeles Police Department pay for my lunch. In the best tradition of policemen the world over, Milo left an enormous tip. He patted Bettijean’s fanny on the way out and her laughter followed us out on to the street.

Santa Monica Boulevard was beginning to choke up with traffic and the air had started to foul. I closed the Seville’s windows and turned on the air conditioning. I slipped a tape of Joe Pass and Stephane Grappelli into the deck. The sound of “Only a Paper Moon,” delivered hot forties style, filled the car. The music made me feel good. Milo took a cat nap, snoring deeply. I eased the Seville into the traffic and headed back to Brentwood.

Towle’s office was on a side street off San Vicente, not far from the Brentwood Country Mart – one of the few neighborhoods where movie stars could shop without being harassed. It was in a building designed during the early fifties, when tan brick, low-slung roofs and wall inserts of glass cubes were in vogue. Plantings of asparagus fern and climbing bougainvillaea did something to relieve the starkness, but it still looked pretty severe.

Towle was the building’s sole occupant and his name was stenciled in gold leaf on the glass front door. The parking lot was a haven for wood-sided station wagons. We pulled in next to a blue Lincoln with a speak up for children bumper sticker that I figured belonged to the good doctor himself.

Inside, the decor was something else. It was as if some interior decorator had tried to make up for the harshness of the building by cramming the waiting room full of mush. The furniture was colonial maple with nubby seat cushions. The walls were covered with needlepoint homilies and cutesy-poo prints of little boys fishing and little girls preening themselves in front of mirrors, wearing mommy’s hat and shoes. The room was full of children and harried-looking mothers. Magazines, books and toys cluttered the floor. There was an odor of dirty diapers in the air. If this was Towle’s lull I didn’t want to be there during his busy period.

When we walked in, two childless males, we drew stares from the women. We had agreed beforehand that Towle would relate better doctor to doctor, so Milo found a seat sandwiched in between two five year-olds and I walked to the reception window. The girl on the other side was a sweet young thing with Farrah Fawcett hair and a face almost as pretty as that of her role model. She was dressed in white and her name tag proclaimed her to be Sandi.

“Hi. I’m Dr. Delaware. I’ve got an appointment with Dr. Towle.”

I got a smile fronted by lots of nice, white teeth.

“Appointments don’t mean much this afternoon. But come right in. He’ll be with you in just a minute.”

I walked through the door with several pairs of maternal eyes boring into my back. Some of them had probably been waiting for over an hour. I wondered why Towle didn’t hire an associate.

Sandi showed me into the doctor’s consultation office, a dark-paneled room about twelve by twelve.

“It’s about the Quinn child, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll pull the chart.” She came back with a manila folder and placed it on Towle’s desk. There was a red tag on the cover. She saw me looking at it.

“The reds are the hypers. We code them. Yellow for chronically ill ones. Blue for specialty consults.”

“Very efficient.”

“Oh, you have no idea!” She giggled and placed one hand on a shapely hip. “You know,” she said, leaning a bit closer and letting me have a whiff of something fragrant, “between you and me that poor child has it rough growing up with a mother like that.”

“I know what you mean.” I nodded, not knowing what she meant at all but hoping she’d tell me. People usually do when you don’t seem to care.

“I mean, she’s such a scatterbrain – the mother. Everytime she comes here she forgets something, or loses something. One time it was her purse. The other time she locked her keys in the car. She really doesn’t have it together.”

I clucked sympathetically.

“Not that she hasn’t had it rough, growing up doing farm work and then marrying that guy who ended up in pris–”

“Sandi.”

We both turned to see a short, sixtyish woman with hair cut in an iron-grey helmet, standing in the doorway, arms folded across her bosom. Her eyeglasses hung suspended from a chain around her neck. She, too, was dressed in white, but on her it looked like a uniform. Her name tag proclaimed her to be Edna.

I knew her right away. The doctor’s right-hand gal. She’d probably been working for him since he hung out his shingle and was making about the same amount of money she’d started out with. But no matter, lucre wasn’t what she was after. She was secretly in love with the Great Man. I was willing to bet a handful of blue chip stocks that she called him Doctor. No name after it. Just Doctor. As if he were the only one in the world.

“There are some charts that need filing,” she said.

“Okay, Edna.” Sandi turned to me, gave a conspiratorial look that said Isn’t this old witch a drag? and sashayed down the hall.

“Can I do anything for you?” Edna asked me, still keeping her arms crossed.

“No, thank you.”

“Well, then, Doctor will be right with you.”

“Thank you.” Kill ’em with courtesy.

Her glance let me know that she didn’t approve of my presence. No doubt anything that upset Doctor’s routine was viewed as an intrusion upon Paradise. But she finally left me alone in the office.

I took a look around the room. The desk was mahogany and battered. It was piled high with charts, medical journals, books, mail, drug samples, and a jar full of paper clips. The desk chair and the easy chair in which I sat were once classy items – burnished leather – now both aged and cracked.

Two of the walls were covered with diplomas, many of which hung askew and at odds with one another. It looked like a room that had just been nudged by a minor earthquake – nothing broken, just shaken up a bit.

I casually examined the diplomas. Lionel W. Towle had amassed an impressive collection of paper over the years. Degrees, certificates of internship and residency, a walnut plaque with gavel commemorating his chairmanship of some medical task force, honorary membership in this and that, specialty board certification, commendations for public service on the Good Ship Hope, consultant to the California Senate subcommittee on child welfare. And on and on.