Twice Dying (6 page)

Larrabee said, “Mrs. Lutey—”

“Not anymore.”

Larrabee passed his hand over his shock of hair, embarrassed. Boyish. Disarming.

“Awfully sorry. My information’s old.” He opened his wallet and showed his PI license.

The former Mrs. Lutey stood in her doorway with her arms folded and her jaw set in a way that suggested that she was used to dealing with authorities. She was not much over thirty, which put her still in her teens at the time of her husband’s death: strawberry blond, wearing skin tight jeans that accentuated her almost anorexic thinness, and a long-sleeved sweatshirt.

“We’ve been hired by someone who’s interested in the case of Robert Vandenard and your, uh, late husband,” Larrabee said. “We wonder if you’d take a minute to discuss this with us.”

“Who’s the someone?”

“A psychologist, a lady like yourself. She’s uncovered some irregularities, and now she feels her careers being threatened. Look, Mrs.—”

“My name’s Darla.”

“Darla, please call me Stover, and this is my associate, Dr. Monks.”

Monks murmured a greeting and stayed in the background.

They were in the outskirts of Boyes Springs, a northern extension of Sonoma known for its drug subculture and population of ex-cons. The house was old, small, with checked clapboard siding and blistered paint. The yard suggested kids of all ages. A swing set and other toys were scattered around, along with several trikes, bicycles, and a Bondo-gray TransAm with the hood off.

“We know that must have been a very difficult time for you,” Larrabee said, “especially being up against a family so powerful, like the Vandenards. Did you—if you don’t mind my asking very frankly—did you feel you were treated with fairness? I mean, obviously you were deeply injured, losing your husband.”

“Are you going to open the case back up?”

“That could depend heavily on your cooperation, Darla.”

She looked from one to the other of them, making up her mind about something. It was a kind of look Monks had seen before, and abruptly he realized where: in the ER, junkies faking pain to con him for a shot of narcotics.

She said, “I’d go for it.”

“Can you tell us what happened between your husband and Robby Vandenard?”

She shrugged, her thin shoulders piercing the sweatshirt with skeletal outlines.

“Nobody saw the shooting, but probably the only person surprised was Merle.”

“Why do you say that?”

Music started suddenly inside the house, blaring metallic rock. She ignored it. “Merle was a bully. He pushed around anybody he figured he could.”

“Including you?”

“He’d get drunk and beat the shit out of me.”

“Is that why you didn’t press the case?”

She leaned back inside and yelled, “Turn that down, goddamn it!” A door slammed, reducing the volume.

She closed the front door and leaned wearily back against it.

“Why didn’t I press the case? There were two lawyers here even before the police. That’s how I got the news that Merle was dead. They were like uncles at a funeral, pretending they gave a shit. They left me a thousand dollars cash. Told me that would help me through the next couple days, and they’d be back to talk.”

Larrabee said. “Vandenard lawyers?”

She nodded.

“And they came back with an offer to compensate you?”

“Fifty thousand. It was either that or spend a lot of money I didn’t have, that wouldn’t have done any good anyway. I put up with Merle more than five years. I deserved to get something.”

“Did anybody else know about this?”

“Nobody that counted. They made me sign a bunch of papers, told me I was giving up my right to sue. I don’t know if it was true or not. I didn’t care, then.”

“Why would you be willing to come forward now?”

“I called him to ask for a loan, a couple years ago. The motherfucker wouldn’t even talk to me.”

“You mean the attorney?”

“Yeah. Capaldi.”

“Bernard Capaldi?”

“That’s him.”

Larrabee’s mouth twitched. Monks had heard the name, too. Bernard Capaldi was the kind of old-time lawyer whose strings went inestimably deep into politics, property, and possibly, crime: the major affairs of the city.

She said, “When I got that check, I thought it was going to last forever.”

Monks was willing to bet that most ofthat fifty thousand dollars had gone up her nose, or arm, or both.

“Darla,” he said, “did you ever meet Robby Vandenard?”

“A few times.”

“You think the insanity defense was a lie?”

“He was crazy, all right. But not the kind of crazy where he didn’t know what he was doing; the kind where he just did whatever he wanted. Creepy. Everybody was scared of him.”

“What kind of things did he do that scared people?”

“Besides killing his sister?”

Monks realized that his mouth had opened. He closed it.

Larrabee said, “Would you say that again?”

“It got blamed on somebody else. But that’s what the old-timers around the place thought.”

“When did that happen?”

“When he was a kid, eleven or twelve.”

“Jesus wept.” Larrabee stepped away, hands going into his pockets.

“You guys didn’t know about that?”

“We knew she’d been murdered,” Monks said. “Not that Robby was suspected. Did that information come up in the case?”

The bony shrug again. “I wasn’t invited to the hearing. But I know that’s how it got turned around. They said Robby was paranoid, that he thought Merle was the guy who’d killed Katherine, coming back for him. What bullshit.”

“Darla.” Larrabee passed his hand over his hair. “You say that Merle pushed around people he figured he could. Why would he take on somebody scary like Robby?”

The appraising stare came into her eyes again,
judging whether giving away more information was going to buy her anything.

“Merle was a good-looking guy,” she finally said. “He’d done a couple years in Santa Rita.”

Larrabee said, “Are you saying he and Robby had a sexual relationship?”

“Merle thought he was going to get money out of Robby.” She smiled suddenly. It made her look almost pretty.

“Guess he was right,” she said.

A
lison Chapley parked in the staff lot of Clevinger Hospital and lit one more cigarette. She stayed in her car, watching Psychiatric Unit Number Three, known as Three-Psych.

This was a flat I-shaped building at the center of the hospital’s grounds. It had an asphalt courtyard surrounded by a twelve-foot-high cyclone fence, topped with turned-in iron spikes and strung with razor-wire. In the corners, video cameras perched like vultures on high stalks. There was a single basketball hoop with no net, and a worn heavy punching bag hung on a welded chain.

Several men were standing inside the fence smoking or pacing, or talking to each other or to
no one visible. Even from that distance, there was something unsettling about the way they moved.

These were me NGIs: at any given time, eight to ten men on-ward who had killed or seriously injured others, had been found by the courts Not Guilty by reason of Insanity and been recommended for psychiatric treatment instead of regular prison. The program here was known as JCOG: the Jephson Cognitive Therapy for Management of Psychotically Violent Behavior at Clevinger Memorial Hospital.

Almost all the JCOG inmates had lengthy records, with several stays in prisons or institutions before new psychiatric evaluations triggered the NGI ruling. Roughly eleven percent washed out within the first weeks. Most of the rest achieved stability, enforced by combinations of Haldol, Ativan, Clozapine, and lithium, with an average stay of twenty-two months, dien were released as rehabilitated.

From her car, Alison could identify most of them: Perez, Holger, Odum—aggravated assault, child abuse, manslaughter. The fourth NGI was a good-looking man with dark spiky hair, wearing gray hospital pajamas: John James Garlick, soon to be released. Garlick was standing well apart from the others, talking to someone his body was blocking. She could not see who it was.

She got out of the car and started up the walk. Except for Three-Psych’s razor-wire fence and a
patrolling security car, the hospital could have been an aging junior college: three acres of grassy hillside with half a dozen unattractive, functional buildings surrounding the original brick structure. The afternoon was heavy with clouds, but flashes of sunlight brightened the old brick. She wondered what the philanthropist founder, turn-of-the-century
grande dame
Edith Clevinger, would think of her pretty hospital now.

Alison unlocked the main door to Three-Psych and walked down the hall to the courtyard’s inside entrance, stopping in the doorway.

By chance or instinct, Garlick swiveled with feral speed. His eyes were already focused when they met hers, hard as a stag beetle’s shell, seeming able to pierce her thoughts and perhaps her very being. Two seconds later his gaze moved on as if the contact had never happened, leaving a faint chill, as if something had been taken away.

The man he was talking to stepped aside, a hasty move that had a guilty appearance. She could see who it was now.

Dr. Francis Jephson.

Jephson said something more to Garlick, then crossed the courtyard to where she stood. He wore an expensive gray wool suit, an ecru shirt with cufflinks, and gold-rimmed glasses over pale blue eyes.

“Alison. Could you wander by my office in a few minutes?”

“Of course, Doctor.”

“We do need to talk.” It seemed to her that he emphasized the word
do
ominously.

She nodded and watched him leave: slim, balanced, moving with an athletic stride. He had been a distance runner at Cambridge and still trained with exacting discipline.

Garlick had moved to the courtyard’s far end, a lone figure staring out through the fence at the freedom which, in a few weeks, would be his.

Garlick, who had arrived twenty months earlier from the maximum security facility at Atascadero, along with a detailed report on the incident that had landed him there: gripping his girlfriend by the hair and repeatedly ramming her face into a bathroom sink until a sliver of skull pierced her brain.

Who had assaulted two ex-wives and several other girlfriends in a similar way. Who tested significantly above normal in intelligence, with two years of college and a history of success as an electronics salesman. Who was ruled schizophrenic, but whose powers of persuasion had kept a string of women unwilling to testify against him.

Whose falsified psychiatric evaluation was her first inkling that Francis Jephson had been coaching a selected few.

Garlick, soon to be released.

Alison turned back inside and stopped short, almost running into a man passing by. He raised
his hands apologetically and she smiled, but the thought flashed across her mind, as it had with Jephson, that he had moved too quickly, that she had caught him at something covert.

Perhaps, standing behind her, listening.

“Didn’t mean to scare you, Dr. Chapley.”

Harold Henley was the chief public service officer, a euphemism for guard. He stood six four and weighed close to three hundred pounds. He moved deliberately and spoke softly, and was the only person on the ward the NGIs feared as much as each other.

Abruptly, she wondered if he knew what Jephson had been doing, knew what she had found out. Harold had worked more than a decade at Clevinger, and not much in this small world escaped him.

“I’m a little jumpy today, Harold.”

“Yeah?”

Rattled, she grasped for a diversion.

“I’m on the run from the law. I shot my boyfriend.”

A flicker of respect showed in his eyes, as if she might lead a more interesting life than he had imagined.

“Fine example you set. You supposed to be showing these people how to act.”

“He was insensitive. He treated me like an object and never did the dishes. There’s not a court in the land would convict me.”

Harold grinned fiercely. “Worse than that.
They’d sentence you to some kind of codependency group.”

She walked on toward her office. He paced beside her, a thick fold of ebony skin bulging above his blue uniform collar as his head swiveled to scan the hall. His radio and nightstick hung like a child’s toys on his massive hips.

Attendants and techs passed by on missions real or feigned. The hallway’s interior colors gave the sense of having been put together out of leftovers from other buildings: the walls flat gray, the trim pink, the linoleum, heaved and uneven from decades of settling, a vague tan. The sharp smell of pine antiseptic cleaner blended with, but did not cover, the decades-old reek of urine and unwashed bodies. There were no handrails for the handicapped, for fear they would be torn off and used as weapons. Pastel floral prints, intended to be soothing, were immovably affixed. The kitchen had never contained a stove or sharp utensils.

She said, “You still want to sell that Buick?”

Harold’s interest quickened. “You finally ready to get you a real car?”

“The Mercedes is a money sink,” she admitted, “but I love it. Another bad relationship.”

“Huh.” He ruminated, then said, “Buick’s gone. Ain’t no money in cars.”

“So what next?”

“Apartment building.”

“An
apartment
building?”

He looked both embarrassed and proud. “You get in for next to nothing. Live there and manage till you own it. Then you buy another one.”

“I never realized it was quite that easy.” She unlocked her office door.

“You got to know some people. So next time you looking for an apartment, Alison, you tell Harold.”

With others around, he was the essence of formality. But alone, he would call her by her first name, lapsing into street accent to shade the L into a W and drop the I. It was a sound personalized and gently possessive. Early on, perhaps the first moment she had walked on the ward, Harold had decided that here, in this place, she was his.

She smiled again. “You’ll be my first call.”

Her office door, like the others on the ward, locked itself behind her. She exhaled, annoyed at herself for her edginess.