“Sure, why not. . . . Best-seller.” Shaking his head. “What is it with these intellectuals anyway? All those fools marching for Caryl Chessman as if he was a saint. Norman Mailer with his pet creep, William Buckley rooting for that asshole Edgar Smith—beat a fifteen-year-old girl to death with a baseball bat.”
I thought about that. “I suppose artists and writers can lead a pretty insulated life,” I said. “No freeway jams or time cards. Getting paid to make things up, you could start to confuse your fantasies with reality.”
“I think there’s more to it, Alex. I think the so-called creative bunch believe they’re better than everyone else, don’t have to play by the same rules. I remember once, when I was first on the force, I pulled jail duty down at the Hall of Justice, and some sociology professor was leading a tour—earnest students, pens and notebooks. They walked past one asshole’s cell and it was full of drawings—bloody stuff but very well done; the guy had real talent. Not that it stopped him from robbing liquor stores and pistol-whipping the owners. Prof and the kids were totally blown away. How could someone that talented be in there. Such injustice! They started talking to the guy. He’s a stone psychopath, so he immediately smells an opening and plays them like guitars: Mr. Misunderstood Artist, poor baby robbed ’cause he couldn’t afford paints and canvas.”
He shook his head. “Goddamn professor actually came up to me and demanded to know who the guy’s parole officer was. Letting me know it was criminal for such a gifted fellow to be shackled. That’s the equation they make, Alex: If you’re talented, you’re entitled to privileges. Every few years you see another bullshit article, some idealistic fool setting up a program teaching inmates to paint or sculpt or play piano or write fucking short stories. Like that’s going to make a damn bit of difference. Truth is, there’s always been plenty of talent in jail. Visit any penitentiary, you’ll hear great music, see lots of nifty artwork. If you ask me, psychopaths are more talented than the rest of us. But they’re still fucking psychopaths.”
“There’s actually a theory to that effect,” I said. “Psychopathy as a form of creativity. And you’re right, there’s no shortage of artistically brilliant people who had low moral IQ’s: Degas, Wagner, Ezra Pound, Philip Larkin. From what I hear Picasso was pretty hard to live with.”
“So why are people so goddamn stupid?”
“NaäivetÉ, wanting to believe the best about others—who knows? And it’s not just the creative bunch who buys into it. Years ago, social psychologists discovered something called the halo effect. Most people have no trouble believing that if you’re good at one thing it transfers to unrelated areas. It’s why athletes get rich endorsing products.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Trafficant shoulda stuck around. Somebody would have paid him to endorse cutlery.”
“Lowell set him loose on society. Dropped him in a totally unstructured situation full of booze, dope, groupies. And cute little kids.”
He laughed wearily. “Get us together, feeling like failures, and we do build a nice house of cards. I’ll grant you it’s interesting—scumbag on the loose almost always spells some kind of trouble. But like you said, Lucy could have read about him or heard about him from her brother. Maybe the goddamn dream is pure fiction.”
“Could be,” I admitted. “He got plenty of media coverage.”
“Much as I like her, she’s got problems, right? The head in the oven, this paranoid talk about someone trying to kill her. And those hang-up calls. I feel like a bum saying this, but now that I know she’s been wanting to get close to me, I’d be an idiot not to wonder if she made them up to get attention. Even the way she tried to kill herself has a touch of that, doesn’t it? Gas, with the drapes open?”
He gulped down the rest of his beer and looked at me.
“Yes, there is a hysterical quality to it,” I said. “But let’s be charitable and assume that even if she is making things up it’s out of neediness rather than manipulation. That still doesn’t eliminate the possibility that something traumatized her that summer. Don’t forget, she’s not trumpeting herself as a victim or trying to make anything out of the dream. On the contrary, she tends to minimize things, just as she did with the hang-ups. She’s an ostrich, Milo, blocking out that entire summer. My gut tells me something happened when she was four and it’s stuck down in her unconscious. Something that relates—directly or indirectly—to Lowell. She’s not the only one with strong feelings about him. The half brother called him a total sonofabitch. He’s in the real estate business and his big fantasy’s foreclosing on Dad’s land. Maybe that summer was bad for all the Lowell kids.”