When the Bough Breaks Read Online Free PDF

had taken a mixed bag of self-defense courses while in the army. I’d learned fencing and karate while in graduate school. We were miserably out of shape but deluded ourselves that it would all come back if we needed it. Both of us appreciated good food, good music and the virtues of solitude.
    The rapport between us developed quickly.
    About three weeks after we’d known each other he told me he was homosexual. I was taken by surprise and had nothing to say.
    “I’m telling you now because I don’t want you to think I’ve been trying to put the make on you.”
    Suddenly I was ashamed, because that had been my initial thought, exactly.
    It was hard to accept, at first, his being gay, despite all my supposedpsychological sophistication. I know all the facts. That they make up 5 to 10 percent of virtually any human grouping. That most of them look just like me and you. That they could be anybody—the butcher, the baker, the local homicide dick. That most of them are reasonably well-adjusted.
    And yet the stereotypes adhere to the brain. You expect them to be mincing, screaming, nelly fairies; leather-armored shaven-skull demons; oh-so-preppy mustachioed young things in Izod shirts and khaki trousers; or hiking-booted bulldykes.
    Milo didn’t look homosexual.
    But he was and had been comfortable with it for several years. He wasn’t in the closet, neither did he flaunt it.
    I asked him if the department knew about it.
    “Uh-huh. Not in the sense of filing an official report. It’s just something that’s known.”
    “How do they treat you?”
    “Disapproval from a distance—cold looks. But basically it’s live and let live. They’re short-staffed and I’m good. What do they want? To drag in the ACLU and lose a good detective in the bargain? Ed Davis was a homophobe. He’s gone and it’s not so bad.”
    “What about the other detectives?”
    He shrugged.
    “They leave me alone. We talk business. We don’t double-date.”
    Now the lack of recognition by the men at Angela’s made sense.
    Some of Milo’s initial altruism, his reaching out to help me, was a little more understandable, too. He knew what it was like to be alone. A gay cop was a person in limbo. You could never be one of the gang back at the station, no matter how well you did your job. And the homosexual community was bound to be suspicious of someone who looked, acted like and was a cop.
    “I figured I should tell you, since we seem to be getting friendly.”
    “It’s no big deal, Milo.”
    “No?”
    “No.” I wasn’t really all that comfortable with it. But I was damn well going to work on it.
    A month after Stuart Hickle stuck a .22 in his mouth and blasted his brains all over my wallpaper, I made some major changes in my life.
    I resigned my job at Western Pediatric and closed down my practice. I referred all my patients to a former student, a first rate therapist who was starting out in practice and needed the business. I had taken very few new referrals since starting the groups for the Kim’s Korner families,so there was less separation anxiety than would normally be expected.
    I sold an apartment building in Malibu, forty units that I’d purchased seven years before, for a large profit. I also let go of a duplex in Santa Monica. Part of the money—the portion that would eventually go to taxes—I put in a high-yield money market. The rest went into tax-free municipals. It wasn’t the kind of investing that would make me richer, but it would provide financial stability. I figured I could live off the interest for two or three years as long as I didn’t get too extravagant.
    I sold my old Chevy Two and bought a Seville, a seventy-nine, the last year they looked good. It was forest-green with a saddle-colored leather interior that was cushy and quiet. With the amount of driving I’d be doing, the lousy mileage wouldn’t make much difference. I threw away most of my old clothes and got new stuff—mostly soft fabrics—knits,