Chapter 16
Chapter
As we stepped off the lift and into the lobby, Lee Lemon got to his feet and flashed bad teeth. “Get what you needed?”
Milo said, “It was big-time fun.”
That creased Lemon’s forehead.
Milo said, “Don’t work too hard,” and we left the building.
—
Back at the Porsche, he said, “Another whole bunch of nothing.”
I said, “The gym on Pico might be worth checking out.”
“Sophie met a jerk she never told them about?”
“Someone she threw over for Heck could’ve harbored resentment toward both of them. If there was someone, it had to end quickly, because Heck had only been gone for a couple of months. What if he suspected she was still in contact with Heck?”
“Some paranoid asshole strangling her and framing him? That’s big-time crazy.”
I smiled.
He said, “What the hell,” and phoned Moe Reed. “Hey, kid, not too late I hope…great. I’m calling on the other case, Barlow.”
He repeated the women’s description of the gym on Pico.
“Anything come to mind?…That many? Huh. How ’bout one relatively close enough to Sophie Barlow’s place…
say a coupla miles in either direction…okay, that’s a little more manageable.
If you have time tomorrow to help me make the rounds…
terrific. If we need to break the ice, you can always deadlift a personal trainer. ”
Clicking off, he said, “Superman says five possibles, we’ll check ’em out. Okay, homeward bound. Thanks for taking the time, Alex.”
He walked me to the Seville. “That crack about paint drying made me think of Robin working with that whatchamacallit she puts on the instruments with those cotton pads. The shiny stuff.”
“Spirit varnish?”
“Yeah. Slow process, right?”
“Definitely.”
“But she’s not bored.”
“Never.”
“Like you say, it’s all about context.”
As I got into the Seville, he said, “What I’m getting at is I’m not bored, either.”
“Good for you.”
“You think? What keeps me wide-eyed is fear of failure.”
—
I drove home thinking about two failures in progress. First Sophie Barlow. Nothing to say about that so I shifted to Martha Matthias because Milo had a suspect for her murder.
As I’d told him, a schizophrenic would lack the mental organization to do what had been done to the former detective.
But the only evidence of major mental illness in the stiff-gaited woman was Hawkins’s description.
So maybe Lynne Matthias—if that’s who she was—suffered from some sort of neurological disorder that impaired her walk but was capable of planning and carrying out calculated viciousness.
Or she was an addict displaying damage caused by years of drug abuse. Maybe homeless as Milo had wondered and dreaded.
If so, opiates were the likely culprit, rendering users passive while stoned but amoral and manipulative when hungry for the needle.
Still, either way, the lack of public records—arrest, incarceration, public assistance, rehab—was puzzling.
Then a possibility came to me.
A public or private mental health center would bill for services but a place staffed by volunteers might not. The same went for charitable shelters. Flophouses that asked no questions if you had the cash.
In terms of the penal system, drug busts had been de-emphasized for years and for the most part the cops ignored simple usage.
If Lynne Matthias’s life did consist of financing the next score and she’d discovered Martha’s hidden fortune, it wasn’t hard to imagine an explosion of violence.
But then, why the arms?
Because it had been about money but also more? The kind of rage seeded by intimacy?
Mother and daughter. Each withdrawing from reality in her own way.
A shared pathology that had eventually boiled over?
Martha Matthias had once been a bravely pioneering detective, confronting society’s roughest edges for decades, only to replace a productive life with amassing towers of junk that shrank the dimensions of her world.
Tucking herself, like a skittish rodent, into a dim corner of a fetid, cellulose nest.
I’d suggested stress as the trigger. But that had been textbook psych that explained nothing.
And yes, obsessive-compulsive behavior is rooted in the reduction of anxiety. But anxiety doesn’t cause most people to totally disengage. Quite the opposite: Humans are social animals and our instinct is to reach out for support.
If I had to bet, I’d say something in Martha’s past, or her genes—or both—had led her to wall herself in. But in the end, it likely wouldn’t matter. Whatever the reason, she’d begun an insidious process that had trapped her.
Because isolation feeds on itself in a uniquely malignant way.
People subjected to prolonged sensory deprivation inevitably hallucinate and grow delusional.
Our brains crave stimulation and once we remove the richness of the external world, the neurons keep firing, leading us into an alternative universe of buzzing confusion, perceptual warps, weird what-ifs, and, ultimately, paranoia.
So no way Martha Matthias would’ve allowed a stranger into her home. But a daughter who’d bought into the process?
Welcome to the futon in the corner, honey.
I pictured two troubled women sharing hermetic escape. Then something—an errant word or glance, a shift in vocal tone, or most likely an argument about yet another handout of dope money—turns an asylum into a charnel house.
Rats in crowded cages end up eating each other alive. Convicts murder their cellmates.
No reason the same thing couldn’t happen in a self-imposed prison.
—
By the time I got home, Robin was sleeping but when I slipped in beside her she made a soft, purring noise, reached out a hand, and laid it on mine. Her skin was warm, her pulse slow and steady.
We lay there that way for a while.
My world expanded. I slept well.