Jonathan Kellerman - When The Bough Breaks

Whatever it had been, it hadn't included really listening to the human beings who sat before him believing he cared.

It made me think of the old joke, the one about the two shrinks who meet on the elevator at the end of the day. One of them is young, a novice, and he is clearly bedraggled - tie askew, hair messed, fraught with fatigue. He turns and notices that the other, a seasoned veteran, is totally composed - tan, fit, every hair in place, a fresh carnation stuck jauntily in his lapel.

"Doctor," beseeches the young one, "please tell me how you do it?"

"Do what, my son?"

"Sit, hour after hour, day after day, listening to people's problems without letting it get to you."

"Who listens?" replies the guru.

Funny. Unless you were shelling out ninety bucks a session to Morton Handler and getting a covert assessment as a simpering whimperer for your money.

Had one of the subjects of his nasty prose somehow discovered the sham and murdered him? It was difficult to imagine someone engaging in the kind of butchery that had been visited upon Handler and his girlfriend in order to avenge a peeve of that kind. But you never knew. Rage was a tricky thing; sometimes it lay dormant for years, only to be triggered by a seemingly trivial stimulus. People had been ripped apart over a nudged car bumper.

Still I found it hard to believe that the depressives and psychosomaticizers whose files I had reviewed were the stuff of which midnight skulkers were fashioned. What I really didn't want to believe was that there were two thousand potential suspects to deal with.

It was close to five. I pulled a Coors out of the refrigerator, took it out to the balcony and lay down on a lounge, my feet propped up on the guardrail. I drank and watched the sun dip beneath the tops of the trees. Someone in the neighborhood was playing punk rock. Strangely enough it didn't seem discordant.

At five - thirty Robin called,

"Hi, hon. You want to come over? Key Largo's on tonight."

"Sure," I said. "Should I pick up anything to eat?"

She thought a moment.

"How about chili dogs? And beer."

"I've got a head start on the beer." Three squashed Coors empties sat on the kitchen counter.

"Give me time to catch up, love. See you around seven."

I hadn't heard from Milo since one - thirty. He'd called in from Bellflower, just about to interrogate a guy who'd assaulted seven women with a screwdriver. Very little similarity to the Handler case but you had to work with what you had.

I phoned West L.A. Division and left the message for him that I'd be out for the evening.

Then I called Bonita Quinn's number. I waited for five rings and when nobody answered, hung up.

Humphrey and Lauren were great, as usual. The chili dogs left us belching, but satisfied. We held each other and listened to Tal Farlow and Wcs Montgomery for a while. Then I picked up one of the guitars she had lying around the studio and played for her. She listened, eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips, then gently removed my hands from the instrument and pulled me to her.

I had planned to stay the night but at eleven I grew restless.

"Is anything the matter, Alex?"

"No." Just my Zeigarnik tugging at me.

"It's the case, isn't it?"

I said nothing.

"I'm starting to worry about you, sweetie." She put her head on my chest, a welcome burden. "You've been so edgy since Milo got you into all of this. I never knew you before, but from what you told me it sounds like the old days."

"The old Alex wasn't such a bad guy," I reacted defensively.

She was wisely silent.

"No," I corrected myself. "The old Alex was a bore. I promise not to bring him back, okay?"

"Okay." She kissed the tip of my chin.

"Just give me a little time to get through this."

"All right."

But as I dressed she looked at me with a combination of worry, hurt, and confusion. When I started to say something, she turned away. I sat down on the edge of the bed and took her in my arms. I rocked her until her arms slid around my neck.

"I love you," I said. "Give me a little time."

She made a warm sound and held me tighter.

When I left her she was sleeping, her eyelids fluttering in the throes of the first dream of the night.

I tore into the one hundred and twenty files I had set aside, working until the early morning hours. Most of these turned out also to be rather mundane documents. Ninety - one of the patients were physically ill men whom Handler had seen as a consultant when he was still working at Cedars - Sinai as part of the liaison psychiatry team. Another twenty had been diagnosed schizophrenic, but they turned out to be senile (median age, seventy - six) patients at a convalescent hospital where he'd worked for a year.

The remaining nine men were of interest. Handler had diagnosed them all as psychopathic character disorders. Of course those diagnoses were suspect, as I had little faith in his judgment. Nevertheless the files were worth examining more closely.

They were all between the ages of sixteen and thirty - two. Most had been referred by agencies - the Probation Department, the California Youth Authority, local churches. A couple had experienced several scrapes with the law. At least three were judged violent. Of these, one had beaten up his father, another had stabbed a fellow high school student, and the third had used an automobile to run down someone with whom he'd exchanged angry words.

A bunch of real sweethearts.

None of them had been involved in therapy for very long, which was not surprising. Psychotherapy hasn't much to offer the person with no conscience, no morals, and, quite often, no desire to change. In fact, the psychopath by his very nature is an affront to modern psychology, with its egalitarian and optimistic philosophical underpinnings.

Therapists become therapists because down deep they feel that people are really good and have the capacity to change for the better. The notion that there exist individuals who are simply evil - bad people - and that such evil cannot be explained by any existing combination of nature or nurture is an assault upon a therapist's sensitivities. The psychopath is to the psychologist and the psychiatrist what the terminal cancer patient is to the physician: walking, breathing evidence of hopelessness and failure.

I knew such evil people existed. I had seen a mercifully small number of them, mostly adolescents, but some children. I remember one boy, in particular, not yet twelve years old, but possessed of a cynical, hardened, cruelly grinning face that would have done a San

Quentin lifer proud. He'd handed me his business card - a bright rectangle of shocking pink paper with his name on it, followed by the single word Enterprises.

And an enterprising young man he had been. Buttressed by my assurances of confidentiality, he had told me proudly, of the dozens of bicycles he had stolen, of the burglaries he had pulled off, of the teenage girls he had seduced. He was so pleased with himself.

He had lost his parents in a plane crash at the age of four and had been brought up by a baffled grandmother who tried to assure everyone - and herself - that down deep he was a good boy. But he wasn't. He was a bad boy. When I asked him if he remembered his mother, he leered and told me she looked like a real piece of ass in the pictures he had seen. It wasn't defensive posturing. It was really him.

The more time I spent with him, the more discouraged I grew. It was like peeling an onion and finding each inner layer more rotten than the last. He was a bad boy, irredeemably so. Most likely, he would get worse.

And there was nothing I could do. There was little doubt he would end up establishing an anti - social career. If society was lucky, it would be limited to con games. If not, a lot of blood would be shed. Logic dictated that he should be locked up, kept out of harm's way, incarcerated for the protection of the rest of us. But democracy said otherwise, and, on balance, I had to admit it shouldn't be any other way.