"Alex is fine."

"Alex. The Great. Are you great? Wanna fuck and suck?"

Before my mouth could close, she said, "But seriously, folks."

Her smile was still on high beam and her breasts were still pushing forward. But she'd reddened and the muscles beneath one of the lovely cheekbones were twitching.

She said, "What a tasteless thing to say, right? Stupid, too, in the virus era. So let's forget about stripping off my clothes and concentrate on stripping my psyche, right?"

"Meredith-"

"That's the name, don't wear it out." Her hand brushed against the mug and a few droplets of coffee spilled on the table.

"Shit," she said, grabbing a napkin and blotting. "Now you've really got me spazzing."

"We don't need to talk about you, personally," I said. "Just about the school."

"Not talk about me? That's my favorite topic, Alex, the sincere shrink. I've spent Godknowshowmuch money talking to your ilk about me. They all pretended to be utterly fascinated, least you can do is fake it, too."

I sat back and smiled.

"I don't like you," she said. "Way too agreeable. Can you get a hard-on on demand- no, scratch that, no more dirty talk. This is going to be a platonic, asexual, antiseptic discussion… the Corrective School. How I spent my summer vacation by Meredith Spill-the-Coffee Bork."

"Were you there for only one summer?"

"It was enough, believe me."

The waitress came over and asked if we wanted anything else.

"No, dear, we're in love, we don't need anything else," said Meredith, waving her away. A wine list was propped between the salt and pepper shakers. She pulled it out and studied it. Moving her lips. Tiny droplets had formed over them. Her smooth, brown brow puckered.

She put the list down and wiped the sweat from her mouth.

"Caught me," she said. "Dyslexic. Not illiterate- I probably know more about what's going on than your average asshole senator. But it takes effort- little tricks so the words make sense." Another huge smile. "That's why I like to work with Hollywood assholes. None of them read."

"Is the dyslexia why you went to the Corrective School?"

"I didn't go, Alex. I was sent. And no, that wasn't the official reason. The official reason was I was acting out. One of you guys' quaint little terms for being a naughty girl- do you want to know how?"

"If you'd like to tell me."

"Of course I would, I'm an exhibitionist. No, scratch that. What's it your business?" She moistened her lips and smiled. "Suffice it to say I learned about cocks when I was much too young to appreciate them." She held out her mug to me, as if it were a microphone. "And why was that, Contestant Number One? Why, for the washer-dryer and the trip to Hawaii, did a sweet young thing from Sierra Madre besmirch herself?"

I didn't speak.

"Buzz," she said. "Sorry, Number One, that's not quick enough. The correct answer is: poor self-esteem. Twentieth-century root of all evil, right? I was fourteen and could barely read, so instead, I learned to give dynamite blow jobs."

I looked down at my coffee.

"Oh, look, I've embarrassed him- don't worry, I'm okay. Damn proud of my blow jobs. You work with what you've got." Her grin was huge but hard to gauge.

"One fateful morning, Mommy discovered strange, yucky stains on my junior high prom dress. Mommy consulted with learned Doctor Daddy and the two of them threw a joint shit-fit. The day school ended I was shipped off to the wild and woolly hills of Santa Barbara. Little brown uniforms, ugly shoes, girls' bunks separated from the boys' bunks by a scuzzy vegetable garden. Dr. Botch stroking his little goatee and telling us this could turn out to be the best summer we ever had."

She hid her mouth behind her mug, broke off a piece of muffin, and let it crumble between her fingers.

"I couldn't read, so they sent me to Buchenwald-on-the-Pacific. There's juvenile justice for you."

"Did de Bosch ever diagnose your dyslexia?" I said.

"You kidding? All he did was throw this Freudian shit at me: I was frustrated because Mommy had Daddy and I wanted him. So I was trying to be a woman, rather than a girl- acting out-in order to displace her."

She laughed. "Believe me, I knew what I wanted, and it wasn't Daddy. It was lean, young, well-hung bodies and James Dean faces. And I had the power to get it all back then. I believed in myself until Botch botched me up."

All at once her face changed, loosening and paling. She put the mug down hard, shook her hair like a wet puppy, and rubbed her temples.

"What did he do to you?" I said.

"Tore my soul out," she said glibly. But as she spoke she brought strands of hair forward and hid her face.

Long silence.

"Shit," she said finally. "This is harder than I thought it would be. How did he mess me up? Subtly. Nothing he could go to jail for, darling. So tell your police pals to go back to giving parking tickets, you'll never pin him. Besides, he must be ancient by now. Who's going to drag a poor old fart into court?"

"He's dead."

The hair fell away. Her eyes were very still. "Oh… well, that's okay by me, pal. Was it long and painful, by any chance?"

"He killed himself. He'd been sick for a while. Multiple strokes."

"Killed himself how?"

"Pills."

"When?"

"Nineteen-eighty."

The eyes tightened. "Eighty? So what's all this b.s. about an investigation?"

Her arm shot forward and she grabbed my wrist. Big, strong woman. "Fess up, psych-man: Who are you and what's all this really about?"

A few heads turned. She let go of my arm.

I pulled out ID, showed it to her, and said, "I've told you the truth, and what it's about is revenge."

I summarized the "bad love" murders, throwing out names of victims.

When I finished, she was smiling.

"Well, I'm sorry for those others, but…"

"But what?"

"Bad love," she said. "Turning his own crap against him. I like that."

"Bad love was something he did?"

"Oh, yeah," she said, through clenched jaws. "Bad love meant you were a worthless piece of shit who deserved to be mistreated. Bad love for bad little children-like psychological acupuncture, these tiny little needles, jabbing, twisting."

Her wrists rotated. Jewelry flashed. "But no scars. No, we didn't want to leave any marks on the beautiful little children."

"What did he actually do?"

"He bounced us. Good love one day, bad love the next. Publicly- when we were all together, in the lunch room, at an assembly- he was Joe Jolly. When visitors came, too. Joe Jolly. Laughing, telling jokes, lots of jokes. Tousling our hair, joining in our games- he was old but athletic. Used to like to play tether ball. When someone hurt their hand on the knob, he'd make a big show of cuddling them and kissing the boo-boo. Mister Compassionate- Doctor Compassionate. Telling us we were the most beautiful children in the world, the school was the most beautiful school, the teachers the most beautiful teachers. The goddamn vegetable garden was beautiful, even though the stuff we planted always came out stringy and we had to eat it anyway. We were one big happy, global family, a real sixties kind of thing- sometimes he even wore these puka shells around his neck, over his pukey tie."

"That was good love," I said.

She nodded and gave a small, ugly laugh. "One big family- but if you got on his bad side- if you acted out, then he gave you a private session. And all of a sudden you weren't beautiful anymore, all of a sudden the world turned real ugly."

She sniffed and used her napkin to wipe her nose. Thinking of her Colombian coffee comment, I wondered if she'd fortified herself for our appointment. She cut me off midthought: