When the Bough Breaks Read Free

professorship at the medical school affiliated with Western Peds. I saw lots of patients and published lots of papers.
    By twenty-eight I was an associate professor of pediatrics and psychology and director of a support program for medically ill youngsters. I had a title too long for my secretaries to memorize and I kept publishing, constructing a paper tower within which I dwelled: case studies, controlled experiments, surveys, monographs, textbook chapters and an esoteric volume of my own on the psychological effects of chronic disease in children.
    The status was great, the pay less so. I began to moonlight, seeing private patients in an office rented from a Beverly Hills analyst. My patient load increased until I was putting in seventy hours a week and running between hospital and office like a deranged worker ant.
    I entered the world of tax avoidance after discovering that without write-offs and shelters I’d be paying out to the IRS more than I used to consider a healthy yearly income. I hired and fired accountants, bought California real estate before the boom, sold at scandalous profits, bought more. I became an apartment-house manager—another five to ten hours a week. I supported a battalion of service personnel—gardeners, plumbers, painters and electricians. I received lots of calendars at Christmas.
    By the age of thirty-two, I had a non-stop regimen of working to the point of exhaustion, grabbing a few hours of fitful sleep and getting up to work some more. I grew a beard to save five minutes shaving time in the morning. When I remembered to eat, the food came out of hospital vending machines and I stuffed my mouth while zipping down the corridors, white coat flapping, notepad in hand, like some impassioned speed freak. I was a man with a mission, albeit a mindless one.
    I was successful .
    There was little time for romance in such a life. I engaged in occasional carnal liaisons, frenzied and meaningless, with nurses, female interns, graduate students and social workers. Not to forget the fortyish, leggy blond secretary—not my type at all had I taken the time to think—who captivated me for twenty minutes of thrashing behind the chart-stuffed shelves of the medical records room.
    By day it was committee meetings, paperwork, trying to quell petty staff bickering and more paperwork. By night it was facing the tide of parental complaints that the child therapist grows accustomed to, and providing comfort and support to the young ones caught in the crossfire.
    In my spare time I received tenants’ gripes, scanned the Wall Street Journal to measure my gains and losses, and sorted through mountains of mail, most of it, it seemed, from white-collared, white-toothed smoothies who had ways of making me instantly rich. I was nominated as an Outstanding Young Man by an outfit hoping to sell me their hundred-dollar, leather-bound directory of similarly-honored individuals. In the middle of the day, there were times, suddenly, when I found it hard to breathe, but I brushed it off, too busy for introspection.
    Into this maelstrom stepped Stuart Hickle.
    Hickle was a quite man, a retired lab technician. He looked the part of the kindly neighbor on a situation comedy—tall, stooped, fiftyish, fond of cardigans and old briar pipes. His tortoise-shell horn-rims perched atop a thin, pinched nose shielding kindly eyes the color of dishwater. He had a benign smile and avuncular mannerisms.
    He also had an unhealthy appetite for fondling little children’s privates.
    When the police finally got him, they confiscated over five hundred color photographs of Hickle having his way with scores of two-, three-, four- and five-year-olds—boys and girls, white, black, Hispanic. In matters of gender and race he wasn’t picky. Only age and helplessness concerned him.
    When I saw the photos it wasn’t the graphic starkness that got to me, though that was repulsive in its own right. It was the look in the kids’ eyes—a terrified