City of the Dead (Alex Delaware, #37)(26)

More deep breathing. She crossed her legs, placed her palms on her knees. “You probably think I’m a rotten mother.”

“Of course not,” said Milo.

“I really am not,” said Renata Blanding. “One thing I’ve learned: People do what they want to do and you can’t control it.”

Again, shifting away from her murdered child. In someone else that might’ve been denial. In Renata Blanding’s case, I suspected it ran deeper. Emotional circuits that had never fully connected.

I said, “What do you know of Carrie’s adult life?”

“Do you know about her being a phony shrink?”

“We have heard—”

“That was embarrassing to Greg,” she said. “Because he almost got set up.”

She drank.

Milo said, “Set up how, ma’am?”

“She actually had the nerve to call him and ask him to refer patients. Said she could help with headaches and tension disorders. Greg didn’t say yes or no right away. He thinks things through before he acts. He asked her for her résumé and she sent one that he found odd.”

“Odd in what way?”

“Off,” she said. “Not right. First of all, there was no formal training Greg could see and he didn’t recognize the college where she’d supposedly earned a Ph.D. I told him it was impossible, her getting a Ph.D. She’d dropped out of high school, hadn’t been to school since. I came close to my GED. She never even tried, though I begged her. I told her, ‘Look at me, how we struggled. Those years when we had nothing. Because I was uneducated. You’re a good-looking girl and a pretty smart one. Get educated, education paves the way.’?”

I said, “The résumé got your husband suspicious.”

“Not suspicious,” she said. “Greg’s not like that. He assumes the best not the worst about people. He got curious, looked up the place, and found out it was a scam—pay a fee, get a degree. It really upset him. That Carrie would do that to herself and that she’d try to get him involved. Can you imagine if he’d sent her a patient and she screwed them up and he got blamed? Or worse, sued for malpractice?”

Time for a question with an answer I already knew.

I said, “What did Carrie do between eighteen and when she claimed to be a therapist?”

Renata looked down. Fiddled with her hands. Her mouth twisted to the left. Her eyes climbed.

“I’d rather not talk about that. But I guess I need to.”

Milo said, “Anything you can tell us would be helpful.”

“Oh Lord…all right. Those years were what I call the lost years. Posing for bikini shots and probably worse. Not that I saw anything downright naked but it stands to reason, right? What’s a bikini? Two strips of cloth. Someone pays you enough, you go further. And the people she was running with. Hollywood types—not stars. Makeup girls, those guys who move sets, extras, so-called actors auditioning—marginal Hollywood losers.”

I said, “You met them?”

“Oh no,” she said. “She was too smart for that. Too…crafty. She’d send photos from her phone. Look at how much fun I’m having with so-and-so and she just worked with Ben Affleck. Or whoever. Like I’d care. My husband saves people’s hearing and speech, I was living on a different planet. Where things mattered. She’d send me that nonsense, I’d delete immediately. It’s when she sent a bikini shot to Aaron, he must’ve been ten, eleven, and it was a really skimpy bikini—a thong, you could see her— that’s when we put an end to it.”

“How’d you do that?”

“I sent her an email and told her to stop. Told her we didn’t want to hear from her unless she had something of value to say. I know that sounds harsh but we couldn’t have her corrupting Aaron.”

“How did Carrie react?”

“She obeyed,” said Renata Blanding. “We didn’t hear from her for years.”

“When did she resume contact?”

“When the other thing began. Pretending to be a doctor and wanting referrals from Greg. I never believed it in the first place. You don’t go from eleventh grade to Ph.D. But I said, ‘Great, good luck.’ Then she tried to get Greg involved and that was over the line.”

She poked the oversized cube some more. Rotated it several times. No sign the ice had melted.

“I know,” she said, “that I sound cruel and uncaring, right out of a Disney movie, the witch, Cruella, whatever. That’s not me. I loved my daughter. Did everything I could for her. She’s the one who chose to leave.”

Just as you did with your parents.

Milo and I nodded.

“When you leave,” said Renata Blanding, “there are consequences.”

I said, “Can you think of anyone who’d want to hurt her?”

Emphatic head shake. “To know that, guys, I’d have to know what her life was like, wouldn’t I? A house in Westwood? I must say that’s a surprise. I guess she was finally doing okay. Did she keep the place up?”

“Everything neat and in its place.”

“Like here,” she said. “Like me. At least we had that in common. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need a lie-down.”