Harry and I drove to the hospital to see how Pendel was faring. Given his erratic behavior and suicidal actions, he was under protective custody. We walked toward his room recalling how our last trip here had been to see Tommy Brink, the poor little kid whose mother treated him like a bag of rocks she’d been forced to carry.
We started into the room, almost bumping into a petite woman who was exiting. “If you’re here to see Willy, I’d wait,” she said in a voice tinged with Slavic vowels.
I looked past the small woman in the cream pantsuit and saw Pendel prone on the bed with his arms, legs and torso restrained, his eyes less staring at the ceiling than boring holes through the tiles. “Probably a form of psychotic catatonia,” the woman sighed. “His mind became overwhelmed and he’s hiding deep inside it.” She studied us. “Do you know Willy?”
The three of us did introductions, Harry and I meeting Dr Sonia Szekely, a psychologist and friend of Pendel and his family.
“I was one of Wilbert’s instructors at the police academy,” I said.
Szekely couldn’t hide a frown. “You were going to turn Will into a policeman?”
“Never would have happened, Doctor. To be frank, I’m not quite sure how he got into the academy in the first place.”
“Willy can be persuasive at times. And he isn’t stupid.”
I saw a chance to discover more about Pendel and his family, said, “How about we go to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, Doctor?”
A knowing twinkle in the woman’s eyes. “How about we step outside for your questions, gentlemen? I need a cigarette break.”
We reconvened at a picnic table beside the hospital, a place for employees to have lunch or just hang out and enjoy air free from disinfectant and disease. The area was landscaped with azaleas, myrtle and bougainvillea, here and there a magnolia tree. Birds tittered from nearby branches.
“What was your relationship to Ms Pendel, Doctor Szekely?” I asked after the doc fired up a Marlboro light.
“We met in the EEOSA group almost a dozen years ago.”
“Excuse me?” Harry said.
“Sorry. The Eastern European Orphans Support Alliance, a support group, mainly for Romanian orphans. It’s for children and parents, each has their own group. We work on a host of issues.”
“Wilbert was adopted from one of these orphanages?” I asked.
She nodded, pushing gray hair behind one ear. “Willy was one of the lucky ones.”
Her answer explained Pendel’s strange comments and the foreign name he claimed, Bomblescu or whatever. It also hinted at the social estrangement he seemed to project.
“Why the geographic specialization, Doctor?” Harry asked.
“You’ve heard of Nicolae Ceaușescu?” Szekely’s nose wrinkled when she said the name.
Harry nodded. “The former president or whatever of Romania?”
“An evil, brutal man. In 1966 he decided to enlarge the country’s workforce by increasing the birth rate. He made contraception and abortion illegal and encouraged huge families. Unfortunately, Romania was a desperately poor country. Children couldn’t be fed or supported, so they were abandoned. Six hundred state orphanages were built to hold the cast-off children.”
“I’m not seeing a pretty picture,” Harry said.
“Think of chicken coops for babies. Vast rows of cribs holding children fed with cheap, tasteless slop a couple times a day. They aged in their boxes, no nurturing, no interaction with others, no emotional bonding. They existed – lived is too strong a word – in filth and squalor, isolated from feeling, from discovery, from joy. The first reformers into the institutions reported children with faces incapable of projecting emotion.”
Harry closed his eyes. “My God.”
“That’s just the surface. Get below and you find what has always plagued institutions where adults control innocents.”
I said, “Pedophilia.”
“Perversion of every persuasion, Detective. Physical and mental abuse. Sex parties. This is not to say all caregivers were bad, but they were uneducated, poorly paid and overwhelmed by the volume of children. Record-keeping was poor, many children unaccounted for and easily sold into the sex trade.”
“When did it stop?” Harry asked.
“The horror began to abate in the early 1990s. But many orphanages continued with elements of the old ways deep into the decade.”
“It’s gotta be hard to enter normal society,” I said, “when you have no concept of normal.”
Szekely puffed on her Marlboro, legs crossed. “Many adoptees have RAD, or reactive detachment disorder, affecting their ability to express normal emotion. Others have fetal alcohol syndrome. AIDS is a problem. Anger issues are common … frustration at not fitting in and never quite knowing why, anger at authority figures or self-directed anger. As one might expect from barren and loveless childhoods, there are elevated levels of sociopathy.”
“Why is this such an issue for you, Doctor?” Harry said.
“I’m Romanian. My parents brought me to the US in 1976 and I took a degree in child psychology. When I heard of the orphans I started EEOSA.”
“I take it Willy had problems in the group?” I said, recalling his scream, I DON’T WANT TO GO BACK TO GROUP!
“Willy has manifestations of RAD, including problems relating with others. But he has no mental deficiency, no retardation or physical ailments from his eleven years in an orphanage. Still, he sometimes acted out in group, his insecurities manifesting.”
“The struggles must seem insurmountable,” Harry said.
“Many children thrive when given love and care. A woman who had a breakdown in her teens just received her degree in accounting. Others are successes in business, or as educators or healthcare workers. The sky’s the limit. One fellow came here almost mute, with suppressed anger and what I suspected were sexual issues. He discovered a genius-level propensity for math and now makes a good living writing software.”
“Sounds like a success story.” I’d spent a lot of time around people wounded by their pasts and was fascinated by those who had transcended horrors. “Is the man totally normalized?”
Szekely thought a long moment.
“There are still issues. He was never socialized as a child and probably never will be. He has affect problems as well, RAD. I’m not convinced he’s found a way to vent internal rage. He had a breakdown after college and spent several months in an institution. During that time his step-parent passed away, father.”
“Mother?” I asked, having lost mine at about the same age.
“She left three years after the children were adopted, too much of a strain. The father was a kind man, determined to see his son succeed. He died before he got the chance, though perhaps the inheritance he left helped.”
“The son left the institution a wealthy man?”
“Comfortable wealth, not major. But the son had to demonstrate the competency to manage his own affairs. It was specified in the will.”
“But basically the guy made it?” I said.
Szekely nodded. “Due, in large measure, to a sister who stayed by his side. She helped him back to reality, prodded him into finding a job befitting his skills, found him a house in a nearby neighborhood so she could keep an eye on him.”
“The sister was in the same orphanage?”
“Yes, though she came through in better shape.”
“Why the difference?” Harry asked.
Szekely shrugged. “She doesn’t talk about the orphanage. I suspect she was in a ward where the care was more humane and personal. Or perhaps female children received more nurturing because of gender.”
“Is the sister another math genius?” I wondered.
A smile. “Not even close, but she may be the reason for her brother’s stability. Ema makes a point of getting together with her brother on a regular basis, though I know Gregory finds the get-togethers grating.”
“Grating? That seemed to be Wilbert Pendel’s take on group therapy. He didn’t want to go back.”
“The more insecure patients sometimes mistake the sessions as judgemental and take them personally. Willy and the other fellow, Gregory, followed that model. They were in group together for several months until I shifted them to different sessions. They never got along and I figured they were probably too much alike.”
“What’s Wilbert’s prognosis, Doc?” Harry asked.
“His mother’s death will be a setback, perhaps a major one. He loved her deeply, as everyone in the group could see, but in his own way. Please be gentle in questioning him.”
I nodded and leaned forward for the question I’d been reserving until the right moment. “Dr Szekely, do you think anyone in your groups could have harmed Muriel Pendel?”
She stared at the distant traffic, puffing and thinking until the end of the cigarette was dangerously near her fingers. She shook her head as she stubbed it out.
“Muriel and Bert have been members for over a decade. But I don’t recall anyone ever making any threats, or showing anger toward either of them. Both she and Bert knew how to talk to the members. To adjust to their … eccentricities.”
I looked at Harry and hid the sigh. What we had wanted more than anything was for Dr Szekely to say, Why yes, I had a patient who fiercely hated Muriel Pendel. For some reason he hated the police as well, called them a Blue Tribe.
No luck. “We’ll bid you good-day, Doctor,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”
We were walking back to the car, neither bringing up the fact that it was nearing five p.m., when my comments to the media would undoubtedly be aired on the local news. “We’ll arrive at that point when we arrive at that point,” Harry had said earlier – his Philosopher mode – and indeed we would.
My phone rang, no caller identified. Somehow I knew. “Gotta take this,” I said, ducking beneath the portico of the hospital’s entrance.
“I’ll be in the car,” Harry said, looking away. Somehow he knew, too.
I opened the line with a tentative, “Hello?”
“Get to a computer,” Jeremy ordered. “Skype me and we can—”
“No,” I said, rubbing my forehead with one hand, the other propping the phone to my ear. “I’m not a television show, Jeremy. I’m tired and I need leads on our killer’s psychological make-up.”
“Rather testy today, Carson,” Jeremy crooned. “Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bimbo?”
“All I need is—”
“I’ll drop the Skype request, Carson. But you have to tell me who you’re fucking.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“You’ll miss my thoughts on your bad boy down there.”
“Why do you always need to know about my love life?”
“We have different ways of dealing with crazy daddy and hide-in-her-room mommy. I now collect money. You’ve always collected love or whatever. It interests me.”
“I date women, Jeremy. Can we get—”
“You don’t date women,” he pronounced. “You soak your pain in them.”
I tried the silent treatment. He gave it back.
“Her name is Wendy Holliday,” I finally said.
“Is she as delicious as her name?” He started the lip-smack noises again.
“Grow up, Jeremy.”
“We both know that’s impossible,” he snickered. “Do you luuuuuv your new little Holliday?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do love her.”
A long silence. His voice returned, quietly curious. “You’ve never used the word love before, Carson. It’s always, ‘We’re friends’ or a similar dodge … But love?” A pause. “Have you finally grown up, baby brother?”
“I answered your question, Jeremy. That’s all you asked. It’s your turn to answer.”
He cleared his throat and returned to his normal voice, always underpinned with sarcasm. “Your boy’s quite smart but not brilliant, making things up as he goes along. The communication started after the second killing because he didn’t consider it until then. I would have written every note in advance and they would have been far more literate. Think of a love child between Proust and the Zodiac Killer.”
“Point, please.”
“I’m not downgrading the fellow, Carson. He’s eluded you, and I have to admit that takes doing. Plus he has irony, a rarity. I loved his posting you via the blind man. Though the ploy has been used before, as you know.”
My brother had once communicated with me via a sightless man, thinking it a tremendous joke.
“Is he killing without motive?” I asked. “At random?”
A laugh. “You really can’t see these things, can you?”
“I’ve never lived in an insane asylum.”
“A pity. A decade in a nuthouse would make you a much better detective. The bottom line is your admirer knows something only a man with irony and an analytical mind can see.”
“What?”
“A murder is too good a thing to waste, Carson.”
“That tells me nothing. What do you mean by—”
“Have a nice day, Carson. Call again when you need big brother to guide you into the deep dark places. Or is your Holliday doing that for you now?”