When The Bough Breaks

"It's not the first time, Milo. There was a guy back East a few years ago - very good credentials. Married into a rich family and started a clinic for juvenile delinquents - back when they still called them that. He used his in - laws' social connections to organize fund - raising soirees for the clinic. While the champagne flowed, the j.d."s were busy burglarizing the partygoers' townhouses. They finally caught him with a warehouse full of silver and crystal, furs and rugs. He didn't even need the stuff. He was doing it for the challenge. They sent him away to one of those discreet institutions in the rolling hills of southern Maryland - for all I know he's running the place by now. It never hit the papers. I found out about it through the professional grapevine. Convention gossip."

Milo pulled out his pencil. He started writing, thinking out loud.

"To the marble corridors of high finance. Bank records, brokerage statements, businesses filed under fictitious names. See what's left in the safe - deposit boxes after the IRS has done its dirty work. County assessor for info on property ventures. Insurance claims out of Handler's office." He stopped. "I hope this gets me somewhere, Alex. This goddamn case hasn't helped my status in the department. The captain is aiming for promotion and he wants to show more arrests. Handler and Gutierrez weren't ghetto types he can afford to let fade away. And he's running scared that Glendale will solve Bruno first and make us look like shmucks. You remember Bianchi."

I nodded. A small - town police chief in Bellingham, Washington, had caught the Hillside Strangler - something the LAPD. war machine hadn't been able to do.

He got up, went into the kitchen and ate half of a cold chicken standing over the sink. He washed it down with a quart of orange juice and came back wiping his mouth.

"I don't know why I'm fighting not to laugh, up to my ass in dead bodies and no apparent progress, but it seems so funny, Handler and Bruno. You send a guy to a shrink to get his head straight and the doc is as fucked - up as the patient and systematically puts the warp on him."

Put that way it didn't sound funny. He laughed anyway.

"What about the girl?" he asked.

"Gutierrez? What about her."

"Well, I was thinking about those social roles. We've been looking at her as the innocent bystander. If Handler could connive with one patient, why not with two?"

"It's not impossible. But we know Bruno was psychopathic. Any of that kind of evidence about her?"

"No," he admitted. "We looked for Handler's file on her and couldn't find it. Maybe he shredded it when their relationship changed. Do you guys do that?"

"I wouldn't know. I never slept with my patients - or their mothers."

"Don't be touchy. I tried to interview her family. The old, plump mamacita, two brothers, one of 'em with those angry, macho eyes. There's no father - he died ten years ago. The three of them live in a tiny place in Echo Park. When I got there they were in the middle of mourning. The place was full of the girl's pictures, in shrines. Lots of candles, baskets of food, weeping neighbors. The brothers were sullen. Mama barely spoke English. I made a serious attempt to be sensitive, culturally aware and all that. I borrowed Sanchez from Ramparts Division to translate. We brought food, kept a low profile. I got nada. Hear no evil, speak no evil. I honestly don't think they knew much about Elena's life. To them West LAs as distant as Atlantis. But even if they did they sure as hell weren't going to tell me."

"Even," I asked, "if it would help find her murderer?"

He looked at me wearily.

"Alex, people like that don't think the police can help them. To them la policia are the bastards who roust their cholos and insult their home girls and are never around when the low riders cruise the neighborhood at night with their lights off and pop shotgun shells through bedroom windows. Which reminds me - I interviewed a friend of the girl. Her roommate, also a teacher. This one was outwardly hostile. Made it clear she wanted nothing to do with me. Her brother had been killed five years ago in a gang shootout and the police did nothing for her and her family then, so to hell with me now."

He got up and padded around the room like a tired lion.

"In summation, Elaine Gutierrez is a cipher. But there's nothing to indicate she wasn't as pure as the freshly driven snow."

He looked miserable, plagued with self - doubt.

"It's a tough case, Milo. Don't be so hard on yourself."