Over the Edge (19 page)

'Where'd he go to school after that?'

'Nowhere. We kept him home until he was seven, with tutors. In one year he taught himself Latin, about five

years' worth of math, and the entire high school English curriculum. But my wife pointed out that socially he was still a baby. So we kept trying different schools. Even one in the Valley for gifted kids. He never could adjust. He always thought he was smarter than anyone else and refused to follow rules. I don't care what your IQ is, that kind of attitude won't get you anywhere.'

'So he never really had much conventional classroom education?'

'Not really, no. We would have liked to see him with normal kids, but it didn't work out.'

He tilted his head back and drained his glass.

'It was a curse.'

'What was?'

'Being too damned smart for his own good.'

I turned a page of my notepad. 'How old was he when you married?'

'We've been married thirteen years, so he was five."

'How did he react to the marriage?'

'He was happy. We let him be the ring bearer at the wedding. Heather had plenty of little boy cousins who wanted to do it, but she insisted on Jamey, said he needed the special attention.'

'And he and Heather got along well from the beginning?'

'Sure. Why not? She's a great gal, terrific with kids. She's given him a hell of a lot more than lots of natural mothers. This thing is tearing her apart.'

'Did caring for such a difficult child place stresses on your marriage?'

He picked up the whisky glass and rolled it between his palms.

'Have you ever been married?'

'No.'

'It's a great institution, you should try it. But it takes work to keep it going. I used to race yachts in college, and it seems to me marriage is like a big boat. Put the time into maintaining it, and it's something to see. Get lax, and it goes to hell in a handbasket.'

'Did Jamey cause any additional maintenance problems?'

'No,' he said. 'Heather could handle him.'

'What kinds of things did she have to handle?'

He drummed his fingers on the table.

'I have to tell you, Doctor, this line of questioning is really starting to bother me.'

'In what way?'

'Your whole approach. Like the way you just said "In what way?'' Prefab. Scripted. I feel like I'm on the couch being analysed. I don't see what my marriage has to do with getting him into a hospital instead of a jail.'

'You're not a patient, but you are an important source of information. And information's what I need to lay the foundation for my report. Just as you do when you build a building.'

'Yeah, but we don't dig our foundations one inch deeper than the geologists say we have to.'

'Unfortunately my field's not as precise as geology.'

'That's what bothers me about it.'

I closed my book.

'Perhaps this isn't the right time to talk, Mr. Cadmus.'

'There isn't going to be a better one. I just want to stay on the topic'

He folded his arms across his chest and stared out at a point over my shoulder. Behind the glasses his eyes were flat, as unyielding as armour plate.

'There's something you need to bear in mind,' I said evenly. 'A trial is a spectacle. The psychological equivalent of a public flogging. Once the lawyers get going, no area of Jamey's life or yours will be off-limits. Your mother's illness, the relationship between your parents, your brother's marriage and suicide, your marriage - everything will be fair game for journalists, spectators, the jury. If it's juicy enough, some author may even write a book about it. Compared to that, this interview's a piece of cake. If you can't handle it, you're in real trouble.'

He reddened, clenched his jaw, and his mouth began to twitch.
  
I
  
watched
  
his
  
shoulders
  
stiffen,
  
then
  
slump.

Suddenly he looked helpless, a kid playing dress up in the executive suite.

When he spoke again, his voice was choked with rage.

'We put ourselves on the line for the little bastard. Year after year after year. And then he goes and does something like this.'

I got up and walked to the bar. For his drink he'd used Glenlivet, which suited me just fine. After pouring a couple of fingers for myself, I fixed him another scotch and soda and brought it to him.

Too numb to speak, he nodded thanks and took the glass. We drank in silence for several minutes.

'All right,' he said finally. 'Let's get it over with.'

We picked up where we'd left off. He repeated his denial that raising Jamey had affected his marriage, though he admitted the boy had never been easy to live with. The lack of conflict he credited to his wife's patience and talent with children.

'Had she worked with kids before?' I asked.

'No, she studied anthropology. Got a master's and started work on her doctorate. I guess she's just a natural.'

Shifting gears. I had him trace the development of Jamey's psychosis. His account was similar to the one Sarita Flowers had given me: a gradual but steady descent into madness that escaped notice longer than it should have because the boy had always been different.

'When did you start to get really worried?'

'When he started to get really paranoid. We were afraid he'd do something to Jennifer and Nicole.'

'Had he ever threatened them or got physical?'

'No, but he began to get mean. Critical and sarcastic. Sometimes he called them little witches. It didn't happen often because he'd been living in our guesthouse over the garage since the age of sixteen and we hardly saw him, but it concerned us."

'Before that he was living in your house?'

'That's right. He had his own room with a private bath.'

'Why did he move to the guesthouse?'

"He said he wanted privacy. We talked it over and said fine; he'd always kept to his room anyway, so it wasn't as if this were a major change.'

'But he continued to come into the main house and harass your children?'

'Once in a while, maybe four or five times a month, mostly to eat. The guesthouse has a kitchen, but I never saw him cook. He'd forage in our refrigerator, take out bowls of leftovers, and eat standing up at the sink, bolting it down like an animal. Heather offered to set a nice table for him, cook him a decent meal, but he refused. Later he became a health nut and the scrounging stopped, so we saw him even less, which was a blessing, because the first thing he always did when he came in was bitch, putting everything down. At first it just seemed like snottiness; then we realised he was going off the deep end.'

'What made you realise that?'

'As I said before, the paranoia. He'd always been a suspicious kid, looking for ulterior motives behind everything. But this was different. The minute he'd enter the kitchen, he'd sniff at the food like a dog, start screaming that it was poisoned, that we were trying to poison him. When we'd try to calm him down, he'd call us all kinds of names. He'd get all flushed, and his eyes would get this really wild look, spaced out, nodding, as if he were in another world, listening to someone who wasn't there. Later we found out from Dr. Mainwaring that he'd been hallucinating voices, so that explained it.'

'Can you remember any of the names he called you?'

He gave a pained look.

'He'd say we stank, that we were ravagers and zombies. One day he pointed his finger at Jennifer and Nicole and called them zombettes. At that point we knew we had to do something.'

'Before he became psychotic, what kind of relationship did he have with your daughters?'

'When they were little, pretty good actually. He was ten when Jennifer was born, twelve when Nikki came along -too old to be jealous. Heather encouraged him to participate in taking care of the babies. He fastened a mean

diaper, was really good at making them laugh. He could be creative when he wanted to, and he used to put on puppet shows for them, invent fantasy stuff. But when he got older - fourteen or so - he lost interest. I know it bothered the girls because until then he'd given them all his attention, and now he was saying, "Go away, leave me alone" - and not saying it all that nicely. But both of them are great little. girls - very popular, plenty of other fish to fry - so I'm sure they put it out of their minds pretty fast. They avoided him without our telling them to do so. But we still worried.'

'And that was what prompted you to have him committed.'

'That's what started us thinking about it. The straw that broke the camel's back was when he destroyed our library.'

'When was this?'

He took a deep breath and let it out.

'A little over three months ago. It was at night. We'd already gone to bed. All of a sudden we started hearing these incredible noises from downstairs; screaming; yelling; loud crashing. Heather called the police, and I grabbed my gun and went down to check it out. He was in the library, naked, hurling books off the shelves, ripping them up, shredding them, screaming like a maniac. It was something I'll never forget. I yelled for him to stop but he looked right through me, as if I were some kind of ... apparition. Then he started coming at me; the gun didn't bother him a bit. His face was red and puffy, and he was breathing hard. I backed away and locked him in. He went back to destroying the place; I could hear him smashing and tearing. Some of these books were old and worth a fortune; they were left to me by my dad. But I had to let him destroy them to prevent someone from getting hurt.'

'How long was he in there?'

'Maybe fifteen minutes. It seemed like hours. Finally the police came and restrained him. It was tough because he fought them. They thought he was on PCP or something and called for an ambulance. They were ready to take him to County General Hospital, but we'd talked to Mainwaring the week before, and we said we wanted him

to go to Canyon Oaks. There was a bit of hassle, but then Horace showed up - Heather had called him, too - and smoothed things out.'

'Who referred you to Dr. Mainwaring?'

'Horace. He'd worked with him in the past and said he was topnotch. We called him, woke him up, and he said to come right over. An hour later Jamey was committed to Canyon Oaks.'

'On a seventy-two-hour hold?'

'Yes, but Mainwaring let us know right away he'd be staying there for a while.'

He looked at his empty glass, then longingly at the Glenlivet bottle on the bar.

'The rest, as they say,' he said tersely, 'is goddamn history.'

He'd been answering my questions cooperatively for more than an hour and looked worn out. I offered to quit and come back another time.

'Hell,' he said, 'the day's shot anyway. Keep going.

He looked at the bar again, and I told him to feel free to mix another drink.

'No' - he smiled - 'I don't want you thinking I'm some kind of lush and putting it in your report.'

'Don't worry about it,' I said.

'Nah, it's okay. I'm past my limit. Now, what do you want to know?'

'When did you first realise he was homosexual?' I asked, bracing myself for another bout of defensiveness. To my surprise, he remained calm, almost sanguine.

'Never.'

'Pardon me?'

'I never realised he was homosexual because he's not homosexual.'

'He's not?'

'Hell, no. He's a mixed-up kid who has no idea what he is. Even a normal kid can't know what he is at that age, let alone a crazy one.'

'His relationship with Dig Chancellor - '
  
.

'Dig Chancellor was an old faggot who liked to bugger

little boys. I'm not saying he didn't bugger Jamey. But if he did, it was rape.'

He looked to me for confirmation. I said nothing.

'It's just too damned early to tell,' he insisted. 'A kid that age can't understand enough about himself - about life - to know he's queer, right?'

His face constricted pugnaciously. The question wasn't rhetorical; he was waiting for an answer.

'Most homosexuals recall feeling different since early childhood,' I said, omitting the fact that Jamey had described those feelings to me years before he had hooked up with Chancellor.

'Where do you get that? I don't buy it.'

'It comes up consistently in research studies.'

'What kind of research?'

'Case histories, surveys.'

'Which means they tell you and you believe them?'

'Basically.'

'Maybe they're lying, trying to justify their deviance as some inborn thing. Psychologists don't know what causes queerness, do they?'

'No.'

'So much for science. I'll go with my nose, and my nose tells me he's a mixed-up kid who got led down the wrong road by a pervert.'

I didn't debate him.

'How did he and Chancellor meet?'

'At a party,' he said with a strange intensity, removing his glasses. Suddenly he was on his feet, rubbing his eyes. 'I guess I was wrong, Doctor. I am feeling pooped out. Some other time, okay?'

I gathered up my notes, put my glass down, and rose.

'Fair enough. When's a good time?'

'I have no idea. Call my girl, and she'll set it up.'

He walked me to the door quickly. I thanked him for his time, and he acknowledged it absently, casting a sidelong glance at the bar. I knew with almost clairvoyant certainty that the moment I was gone he'd head straight for the scotch.

A FERRARI Dino had stalled at Westwood and Wilshire. Two middle-aged beachboys in shorts and tank tops struggled to push it to the side of the boulevard, ignoring uptilted fingers and blaring horns and turning the afternoon traffic to sludge. Sitting in the Seville, I mulled over the interview with Cadmus and decided it had yielded meagre pickings. Too much time had been spent dealing with his defensiveness, not enough on substance; a host of topics hadn't even been broached. I wondered what secrets he was labouring to conceal - it's the ones with the most to hide who build psychic fortresses - and lacking a ready answer. I decided to pursue other avenues before approaching him again.