'Do you have any reason to think she shot him?'
'I have no reason to think anything,' I said. 'That's my problem. I don't even have some nice hypothesis to work on. I thought maybe you could give me one.'
'I doubt it,' she said. 'It has been a number of years. And, of course, the therapeutic exchange is confidential.'
'I understand,' I said. 'Are you aware that she took your last name? Calls herself Lisa St. Claire.'
Dr. St. Claire nodded a shrink nod that acknowledged what I'd said without indicating a reaction. I had an impulse to lie on the table and recall my childhood.
'You found. her at the Pomona Detox Hospital.'
'Yes. I work there once a week.'
'Is she an alcoholic?'
'No. She was drinking far too much and living self-destructively. But she was not addicted to alcohol. She was able to control her drinking.'
'So she could have a drink, when you knew her, without having six more.'
'When she left me she was able to use alcohol in moderation,' Dr. St. Claire said.
'Given your knowledge of her, Doctor, is she likely to have shot her husband?'
'From ambush, you say?'
'Yes.'
'No. I do not believe she would have shot him from ambush.'
'But she could have shot him under other circumstances?'
'I don't know could or couldn't. I will say that Angela lived a very harsh life, in very difficult circumstances. She had fewer restraint mechanisms perhaps than some women might have, and she harbored a lot of rage.'
'At whom?'
'At her father, at her boyfriend, at men in general.'
'Lot of whores hate men,' I said.
'And have reason to,' Dr. St. Claire said with a smile.
The waiter arrived. Dr. St. Claire ordered the Cobb salad. I did not.
'Would she have left her husband without a word?' I said.
'I don't know. She is not the same woman she was when she was with me. She became almost totally caught up in her own rehabilitation. She never missed an appointment with me. She read every book she could about self- destructive behavior, alcohol dependency, sexual relationships. She was fairly indiscriminate about it, and I used to urge her to be selective. I'm not sure all that reading helped her.'
Dr. St. Claire smiled.
'An odd side effect was that while she was uneducated in general, because of all her reading she developed a highly sophisticated vocabulary, so that at one moment she talks as if she were a drill instructor, and the next she is discussing problems of identity and cathexis, or using words like `adroit' or `manipulative.' '
'True of a lot of self-educated people,' I said.
Dr. St. Claire nodded.
'Whether this is still the case, I don't know,' Dr. St. Claire said. 'Time passes, people grow.'
'Or dwindle,' I said.
'That too,' she said. 'But in truth I wouldn't really be able to answer your question if I had just finished with her this morning. Humans behave unpredictably.'
'There's some evidence of a former boyfriend on the scene. Guy named Luis Deleon,' I said.
Dr. St. Claire shook her head.
'The name means nothing to me,' she said.
'He appears to be a bad man,' I said. 'Record of arrests for assault, rape, and dealing narcotics.'
'That is the kind of man that would have attracted her,' Dr. St. Claire said. 'She often expressed the wish to see her father again. Her father was a drinker and a brawler, in trouble often with the police. When he left her mother he kidnapped her and kept her for several months on the run. He didn't want her. He just wanted her mother not to have her.'
'Father knows best,' I said.
'It is her pathology,' Dr. St. Claire said. 'Angela experienced love as cruelty and exploitation. Seeking love she returns to cruelty and exploitation. The boy she ran away with is an example.'
'Do you know his name?'
'I can perhaps recall it. It was an odd name. Oddly juxtaposed.'
'Elwood Pontevecchio?' I said.
'Yes, that's the name. Isn't it an odd one?'
