“Yup.” I wondered if Robin had been faced with the
type of adjustment he’d described. Had there been a struggle that I’d been too
insensitive to notice?
“In the long run,” he said, “it’s better if both
parties feel like adults, don’t you think?”
“What I think, Milo, is that you’re an amazing guy.”
He hid his embarrassment behind the menu. “If I remember
correctly the ice cream is good, right?”
“Right.”
Over dessert he had me tell him more about Woody Swope
and childhood cancer. He was shocked, like most people, that it was the second
most common cause of death in children; only accidents kill more.
The mechanics of the Laminar Airflow rooms
particularly fascinated him and he asked me detailed, analytical questions
until my fund of answers was exhausted.
“Months in that plastic box,” he said, troubled. “And
they don’t freak out?”
“Not if it’s handled right. You’ve got to orient the
child to time and space, encourage the family to spend as much time there as
possible. You sterilize favorite toys and clothes and bring them in, provide
lots of stimulation. The key is to minimize the difference between home and
hospital—there’s always going to be some, but you can buffer it.”
“Interesting. You know what I’m flashing on, don’t
you?”
“What’s that?”
“AIDS. Same principle, right? Lowered resistance to
infection.”
“Similar but not identical,” I said. “The laminar
airflow filters out bacteria and fungi in order to protect the kids during
treatment. But the loss of immunity is temporary—after chemotherapy’s over,
their systems rebound. AIDS is permanent and AIDS victims have other problems—Kaposi’s
Sarcoma, viral infections. The modules might protect them for a while, but not
indefinitely.”
“Yeah, but you gotta admit, it’s a hell of an image:
Santa Monica Boulevard lined with thousands of plastic cubes, each one with
some poor guy wasting away inside. You could charge admission, raise enough
money to find a cure.”
He let out a bitter laugh.
“The wages of sin,” he shook his head. “Enough to make
you a Puritan. I hear the horror stories and thank God I’m monogamous. Rick’s
been fielding a lot of shit from both sides. Last week a patient came to the
E.R. with a mangled arm—bar fight—and glommed onto the fact that Rick was gay.
Probably a paranoid guess, because Rick doesn’t exactly swish, but he didn’t
deny it when this turkey demanded to know if they were giving him a faggot
doctor. The guy refused to let Rick touch him, screamed about AIDS—no matter
that he’s bleeding all over the place. So Rick walked away. But the rest of the
docs were up to their elbows in shit—Saturday night and they were wheeling ’em
in one after the other. It threw the whole system out of whack. Everyone ended
up getting pissed at Rick. He was a goddamn leper for the rest of the shift.”
“Poor guy.”
“Poor guy is right. The man was top of his class,
chief resident at Stanford, and he’s taking this kind of crap? He came home in
a
dark
mood. The hell of it is, night before,
he
was telling
me
that working with gay patients—especially the ones who came in bleeding—was
making him antsy. I did heavy-duty therapy that night, Alex.”
He spooned the last bit of ice cream into his mouth.
“Heavy-duty,” he repeated and brushed the hair out of
his eyes. “But hey, that’s what love’s all about, right?”
MILO BEGGED off the case during the drive back to the
Sea Breeze Motel.
“I can’t take it any further,” he said apologetically.
“All we’ve got at this point is a missing persons squeal, and that’s stretching
it.”
“I know. Thanks for coming down.”
“No big deal. It was a break from routine. Just so
happens I’ve got a particularly cruddy routine right now. Gang shooting—two
cholos
blown away—liquor store clerk ripped with a broken bottle, and a real
sweetheart—a rapist who shits on his victims’ abdomens when he’s through with
them. We know he’s attacked at least seven women. The last one ended up more
than defiled.”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus won’t forgive this creep.” He frowned and
turned on Sawtelle toward Pico. “Each year I tell myself I’ve witnessed the
depths of depravity and each year the scumbags out there prove me wrong. Maybe
I should have taken the exam.”
Fifteen months ago he and I had exposed a prominent
orphanage as a brothel catering to pedophiles, solving a handful of murders in
the process. He’d been a hero and had been invited to take the lieutenant’s
exam. There was no doubt he’d have passed, because he’s brilliant, and the
brass had let him know the city was ready for a gay loot as long as he didn’t
flaunt it. He’d debated it internally for a long time before turning it down.
“No way, Milo. You would have been miserable. Think
back to what you told me.”
“What’s that?”
“I didn’t give up Walt Whitman to push paper.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, that’s right.”
Prior to his hitch in Vietnam, Milo had been enrolled
in the graduate program in American Lit at Indiana U., contemplating life as a
teacher, hoping the academic world would be a setting where his sexual
preferences would be tolerated. He’d gotten as far as an M.A. and then the war
had turned him into a policeman.
“Just imagine,” I reminded him, “endless meetings with
desk jockeys, considering the political implications of taking a leak, no
contact with the streets.”
He held up a hand and feigned suffering.
“Enough, I’m gonna puke.”
“Just a little aversive therapy.”
He pulled the Matador into the motel lot. The sky had
darkened in anticipation of twilight and the Sea Breeze benefited from it
aesthetically. Take away the sunlight and the place looked almost habitable.
The office was brightly lit and the Iranian clerk was
visible behind the counter, reading. My Seville was the lone occupant of the
lot. The half-empty pool looked like a crater.
Milo stopped the car and let the engine idle.
“You understand about my stepping out of this?”
“Of course. No homicide, no homicide detective.”
“They’ll probably be back for the car. I had it
impounded so they’ll have to check in to get it back. They do, I’ll call you
and give you a chance to talk to them. Even if they don’t show, we’ll probably
find out they’re back home, no harm done.”
He realized what he’d said and grimaced.
“Shit. Where’s my head? The kid.”
“He could be all right. Maybe they’ve taken him to
another hospital.” I wanted to sound hopeful but memories—the pain on Woody’s
face, the bloodstain on the motel carpet—eroded my faith in a happy ending.
“If they don’t treat him that’s it, right?”
I nodded.
He stared out the windshield. “That’s one kind of
murder I’ve never dealt with.”
Raoul had said the same thing in different words. I
told him so.
“And this Melendez-Lynch doesn’t want to go the legal
route?”
“He was trying to avoid it. It may end up in court
yet.”
He gave his big head a shake and placed a hand on my
shoulder. “I’ll keep my ears open. Anything comes up I’ll let you know.”
“I’d appreciate it. And thanks for everything, Milo.”
“It was nothing. Literally.” We shook hands. “Say
hello to the entrepreneur when she gets back.”
“Will do. The best to Rick.”
I got out of the car. The Matador’s headlights striped
the gravel as Milo swung out of the lot. The truncated patter of the radio
dispatcher created a punk rock concerto that hung in the air after he was gone.
I drove north to Sunset, planning to turn off at
Beverly Glen and head home. Then I remembered that the house would be empty.
Talking to Milo about Robin had opened a few wounds and I didn’t want to be
alone with my thoughts. I realized that Raoul knew nothing about what we’d
found at the Sea Breeze, and decided now was as good a time as any to tell him.
He was hunched over his desk scrawling notations on
the draft of a research paper. I knocked lightly on the open door.
“Alex!” He rose to greet me. “How did it go? Did you
convince them?”
I recounted what we’d found.
“Oh my God!” He slumped in his chair. “This is
unbelievable. Unbelievable.” He exhaled, compressed his jowls with his hands,
picked up a pencil and rolled it up and down the surface of the desk.
“Was there much blood?”
“One stain about six inches wide.”
“Not enough for a bleed-out,” he muttered to himself. “No
other fluids? No bile, no vomitus?”
“I didn’t see any. It was hard to tell. The place was
a shambles.”
“A barbaric rite, no doubt. I told you, Alex, they are
madmen, those damned Touchers! To steal a child and then to run amok like that!
Holism is nothing more than a cover for anarchy and nihilism!”
He was jumping to conclusions in quantum leaps but I
had neither the desire nor the energy to argue with him.
“The police, what did they do?”
“The detective who ran the show is a friend of mine.
He came down as a favor. There’s an All Points Bulletin out on the family, the
sheriff in La Vista has been notified to watch for them. They did a crime scene
analysis and filed a report. That’s it. Unless you decide to push it.”
“Your friend—is he discreet?”
“Very.”
“Good. We can’t afford a media side show. Have you
ever talked to the press? They are idiots, Alex, and vultures! The blonds from
the television stations are the worst. Vapid, with paste-on smiles, always
trying to trick you into making outrageous statements. Barely a week goes by
that one of them doesn’t attempt to get me to say that the cure for cancer is
just around the corner. They want instant information, immediate gratification.
Can you imagine what they’ll do with something like this?”
He’d gone quickly from defeatism to rage and the
excess energy propelled him out of his chair. He traversed the length of the
office with short nervous steps, pounding his fist into his hand, swerved to
avoid the piles of books and manuscripts, walked back to the desk, and cursed
in Spanish.
“Do you think I should go to court, Alex?”
“It’s a tough question. You need to decide if going
public will help the boy. Have you done it before?”
“Once. Last year we had a little girl who needed transfusions.
The family were Jehovah’s Witnesses and we had to get an injunction to give her
blood. But that was different. The parents weren’t fighting us. Their attitude
was, our beliefs don’t allow us to give you permission, but if we’re forced to
comply we will. They
wanted
to save their child, Alex, and were happy
when we took the responsibility away from them. That child is alive today and
thriving.
The Swope boy should be thriving, too, not dying in the back room of some
scabrous voodoo den.”
He thrust his hand into the pocket of his white coat,
removed a packet of saltine crackers, tore open the plastic, and nibbled on the
crackers until they were consumed. After brushing crumbs out of his mustache he
continued.
“Even in the Witness case the media tried to make a
cause célèbre of it, implying that we were coercing the family. One of the
stations sent around a moron masquerading as a medical reporter to interview me—probably
one of those fellows who wanted to be a doctor but flunked his science courses.
He swaggered in with a little tape recorder and addressed me by my
first
name
, Alex! As if we were buddies! I dismissed him and he made the ‘no
comment’ sound like concealment of guilt. Fortunately the parents took our
advice and refused to talk to them, too. At that point the so-called
controversy
died a quick death—no carrion, the vultures go elsewhere.”
The door leading to the lab opened and a young woman
clutching a clipboard entered the office. She had light light brown hair cut in
a page boy, round eyes that uncannily matched the hair, pinched features, and a
petulant mouth. The hand holding the clipboard was pale, and her nails were
gnawed to the quick. She wore a lab coat that reached below her knees and
crepe-soled flats on her feet.
She looked through me to Raoul and said, “There’s
something you should see. Could be exciting.” The lack of inflection in her
voice belied the content of her message.
Raoul got up. “Is it the new membrane, Helen?”
“Yes.”
“Wonderful.” He looked as if he were going to hug her
then stopped suddenly, remembering my presence. Clearing his throat, he
introduced us: “Alex, meet a fellow Ph.D., Dr. Helen Holroyd.”
We exchanged the most cursory of pleasantries. She
edged closer to Raoul, a proprietary gleam in the beige eyes. He fought,
unsuccessfully, to erase the naughty boy look from his face.
The two of them were trying so hard to look platonic
that for the first time all day I felt like smiling. They were sleeping
together and it was supposed to be a secret. Without a doubt everyone in the
department knew about it.