When the Bough Breaks Read Online Free PDF Page B

cords, rubber-soled shoes, cashmere sweaters, robes, shorts, and pullovers.
    I had the pipes cleaned out on the hot tub that I’d never used since I bought the house. I started to buy food and drink milk. I pulled my old Martin out of its case and strummed it on the balcony. I listened to records. I read for pleasure for the first time since high school. I got a tan. I shaved off my beard and discovered I had a face, and not a bad one at that.
    I dated good women. I met Robin and things really started to get better.
    Be-kind-to-Alex time. Early retirement six months before my thirty-third birthday.
    It was fun while it lasted.

3
    M ORTON H ANDLER’S last residence—if you didn’t count the morgue—had been a luxury apartment complex off Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. It had been built into a hillside and designed to give a honeycomb effect: a loosely connected chain of individual units linked by corridors that had been placed at seemingly random locations, the apartments staggered to give each one a full view of the ocean. The motif was bastard Spanish: blindingly white textured stucco walls, red tile roofs, window accents of black wrought iron. Plantings of azalea and hibiscus filled in occasional patches of earth. There were lots of potted plants sunk in large terra-cotta containers: coconut palms, rubber plants, sun ferns, temporary-looking, as if someone planned on moving them all out in the middle of the night.
    Handler’s unit was on an intermediate level. The front door was sealed, with an L.A.P.D. sticker taped across it. Lots of footprints dirtied the terrazzo walkway near the entrance.
    Milo led me across a terrace filled with polished stones and succulents to a unit eater-cornered from the murder scene. Adhesive letters spelling out the word MAN GER were affixed to the door. Bad jokes about Baby Jesus flashed through my mind.
    Milo knocked.
    I realized then that the place was amazingly silent. There must have been at least fifty units but there wasn’t a soul in sight. No evidence of human habitation.
    We waited a few minutes. He raised his fist to knock again just before the door opened.
    “Sorry. I was washin’ my hair.”
    The woman could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty. She had pale skin with the kind of texture that looked as if a pinchwould crumble it. Large brown eyes topped by plucked brows. Thin lips. A slight underbite. Her hair was wrapped in an orange towel and the little that peeked out was medium brown. She wore a faded cotton shirt of ochre-and-orange print over rust-colored stretch pants. Dark blue tennis shoes on her feet. Her eyes darted from Milo to me. She looked like someone who’d been knocked around plenty and refused to believe that it wasn’t going to happen again at any moment.
    “Mrs. Quinn? This is Dr. Alex Delaware. He’s the psychologist I told you about.”
    “Please to meet you, Doctor.”
    Her hand was thin and cold and moist and she pulled away as quickly as she could.
    “Melody’s watchin’ TV in her room. Out of school, with all that’s been goin’ on. I let her watch to keep her mind off it.”
    We followed her into the apartment.
    Apartment was a charitable word. What it was, really, was a couple of oversized closets stuck together. An architect’s postscript. Hey, Ed, we’ve got an extra four hundred square feet of corner in back of terrace number 142. Why don’t we throw a roof over it, nail up some drywall and call it a manager’s unit? Get some poor soul to do scutwork for the privilege of living in Pacific Palisades …
    The living room was filled with one floral sofa, a masonite end table and a television. A framed painting of Mount Rainier that looked as if it came from a Savings and Loan calendar and a few yellowed photographs hung on the wall. The photos were of hardened, unhappy-looking people and appeared to date from the Gold Rush.
    “My grandparents,” she said.
    A cubicle of a kitchen was visible and from it came the