Ricky swayed inside the door, assaulted by all he saw and heard, unsure what to do. An officer suddenly brushed past him in a hurry, saying “Ouddadaway fella, coming through here . . .” making him step forward abruptly, as if jerked by a rope.
The woman at the sergeant’s desk raised her fist and shook it at the officer manning the reception area, let burst with a final cascade of words run together into a solid wall of insults, and, giving the child a shake and a twist, turned away, scowling, pushing past Ricky as if he were as insignificant as a cockroach. Ricky stumbled ahead and approached the officer behind the desk. Someone once standing approximately where Ricky took up his position had surreptitiously carved FU in the wood, an opinion that no one apparently cared enough to delete.
“I’m sorry,” Ricky started, only to be interrupted.
“Nobody’s ever really sorry, fella. It’s just what they say. Never really mean it. But hey, I’ll listen to anybody. So, what is it that you think you’re sorry about?”
“No, you misunderstand me. What I mean is . . .”
“No one ever says what they mean, either. Important lesson in life. It’d be helpful if more people would learn it.”
The policeman was probably in his early forties and wore an insouciant smile that seemed to indicate that he’d seen just about everything up to this point in his life worth seeing. He was a thickset man, with a solid, bodybuilder’s neck and sleek black hair that was pushed slickly back from his forehead. The surface of the desk was littered with paper forms and incident reports, seemingly tossed about with no concept of organization. Occasionally the officer would grab a couple and staple them together, punching the old-fashioned desk stapler with a bang before tossing them in a wire basket.
“Let me start over,” Ricky finally stated sharply. The policeman grinned again, shaking his head.
“No one ever gets to start over—at least, not in my experience. We all say that we want to find a way to begin life all over again, but it just doesn’t work out that way. But hey, give it a shot. Maybe you’ll be the first. So, how can I help you, fella?”
“Earlier today there was an incident at the 92nd Street station. A man fell . . .”
“Jumped, I heard. You a witness?”
“No. But I knew the man, I believe. I was his doctor. I need information . . .”
“Doctor, huh? What sort of doctor?”
“He was in psychoanalytic treatment with me for the past year.”
“You’re a shrink?”
Ricky nodded.
“Interesting job, that,” the officer said. “You use one of those couches?”
“That’s correct.”
“No shit? And people still have stuff to talk about? Me, I think I’d be looking for a catnap as soon as I put my head down. One yawn and I’d be out like a light. But people really talk up a storm, huh?”
“Sometimes.”
“Cool. Well, one guy ain’t gonna be talking no more. You better speak to the detective. Head through the double doors, keep going down the corridor, office is on the left. Riggins caught the case. Or what there was of it after the Eighth Avenue express came through the 92nd Street station at about sixty miles per. You want details, that’s where to go. Talk to the detective.”
The policeman gestured in the direction of a pair of doors that led into the bowels of the station. As he pointed, Ricky could hear a spiraling sound rising from some room that seemed alternately below and then above them. The desk sergeant smiled. “That guy’s gonna get on my nerves before the night is out,” he said, turning away and picking up a sheaf of papers and stapling them together with a noise like a gunshot. “If he doesn’t shut up, I’m likely to need a shrink of my own by the end of the night. What you need, doc, is a portable couch.” He laughed, made a swooping motion with his hand, the papers rustling in the breeze, shooing Ricky in the right direction.
There was a door on the left marked detective bureau which Ricky Starks pushed through, entering a small office warren of grimy gray steel desks and more of the sickeningly bright overhead lighting. He blinked for a second, as if the glare stung his eyes like saltwater. A detective wearing a white shirt and red tie, sitting at the closest desk, looked up at him.
“Help you?”
“Detective Riggins?”
The detective shook his head. “Nah, not me. She’s over in the back, talking to the last of those people who got some kinda look at the jumper today.”
Ricky looked across the rooms and spotted a woman just shy of middle age wearing a man’s pale blue button-down shirt and striped silk rep tie, although the tie was loosely hung around her neck, more like a noose than anything else, gray slacks which seemed to blend with the decor, and a contradictory pair of white running shoes with a Day-Glo orange stripe down the side. Her dirty-blond hair was pulled back sharply from her face in a ponytail, which made her seem a little older than the mid-thirties that Ricky might have guessed. There were wearied wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. The detective was speaking with a pair of black teenage boys, each wearing wildly exaggerated baggy blue jeans and baseball caps that were cocked at odd angles, as if glued askew on their heads. Had Ricky been slightly more aware of the ways of the world, he might have recognized this for the current style, but, as it was, he merely thought their appearance distinctly odd and a bit unsettling. Had he encountered the pair on the sidewalk, he would have undoubtedly been frightened.
The detective sitting in front of him suddenly asked, “You here on that jumper today at 92nd Street?”
Ricky nodded. The detective picked up his phone. He gestured to a half-dozen stiff-backed wooden chairs lined up against one wall of the office. Only one chair was currently occupied, by a bedraggled, dirt-strewn woman of indistinct age, whose wiry silver gray hair seemed to explode from her head in a multitude of directions, and who appeared to Ricky to be speaking to herself. The woman wore a threadbare overcoat that she kept hugging increasingly tighter to her body, and she rocked a little bit in the seat, as if keeping rhythm with the electricity bounding about within her. Homeless and schizophrenic, Ricky diagnosed immediately. He had not seen anyone with her condition professionally since his graduate school days, although he’d hurried past many similar people over the years, picking up his pace on the sidewalk like virtually every other New Yorker. In recent years, the number of homeless street people seemed to have diminished, but Ricky always assumed that they had simply been shunted to different locations by political maneuverings so that the enthusiastic tourists and the well-heeled and well-moneyed folk making their way through midtown would not have to encounter them as frequently.
“Just have a seat over there next to LuAnne,” the detective said. “I’ll let Riggins know she’s got another live one to talk with.”
Ricky stiffened when he heard the woman’s name. He took a deep breath and walked over toward the row of chairs.
“May I sit here?” he asked, pointing to a seat next to the woman. She looked up at him, slightly astonished.
“He wants to know if he can sit here. What am I? The queen of chairs? What should I say? Yes? No? He can sit where he likes . . .”
LuAnne had grimy, broken fingernails packed with dirt. Her hands were scarred and blistered and one sported a cut that seemed infected, the swollen skin turning a dark purplish color around a deep maroon scab. Ricky thought it must have been painful, but he said nothing. LuAnne rubbed her hands together like a cook spreading salt over a dish.
Ricky plopped down in the seat next to her. He shifted about, as if trying to make himself comfortable, then asked, “So, LuAnne, you were in the subway station when the man fell on the tracks?”
LuAnne looked up into the fluorescent lighting, staring at the bright and relentless glare. She gave a little shudder with her shoulders, and then replied, “So, he wants to know was I there when the man went in front of the train? I should tell him what I saw, all blood and people screaming, awful it was, then the police came.”
“Do you live in the subway station?”
“He wants to know do I live there, well, sometimes I should tell him, sometimes I live there.”
LuAnne finally looked away from the lights, blinking rapidly and seeming to move her head about as if recognizing ghosts throughout the room. After a moment, she finally turned toward Ricky. “I saw,” she said. “Were you there, too?”
“No,” he replied. “The man who died was someone I knew.”
“Oh, sad,” she shook her head. “So sad for you. I’ve known people who died. Sad for me, then.”
“Yes,” he answered. “It’s sad.” He forced a weak smile in LuAnne’s direction. She smiled back. “Tell me, LuAnne, what did you see?”
She coughed once or twice, as if trying to clear her throat. “He wants to know what I saw,” she said, facing Ricky but not necessarily addressing him. “He wants to know about the man who died and then the pretty woman.”
“What pretty woman was that?” Ricky asked, trying to keep himself calm.
“He doesn’t know about the very pretty woman.”
“No, I don’t. But now I’m interested,” he said, trying to prod her along carefully.
LuAnne’s eyes seemed to drift off into the distance, trying to focus on something beyond her vision, like a mirage, and she spoke in an offhand, friendly manner. “He wants to know that the pretty woman came up to me, right after the man went boom! And she speaks to me very softly, saying did you see that, LuAnne? Did you see that man jump in front of the train? Did you see how he stepped right over to the edge as the train was coming through, it was the express, see, and doesn’t stop, no, never stops, must get the local if you want to get on a train, and how he just jumps down! Awful, awful! She says to me, LuAnne, did you see him kill himself? No one pushed him, LuAnne, she says. No one at all. Be absolutely sure of that, LuAnne, no one pushed the man, boom! He just stepped out, the woman says. So sad. Must have wanted to die terrible bad all of a sudden, boom! And then there is a man right next to her, right next to the very pretty woman and he says, LuAnne, you must tell the police what you saw, tell them that you saw the man just step right past the other men and other ladies and jump, boom! Dead. And then the beautiful woman says to me, she says, you will tell the police, LuAnne, that is your duty as a citizen, to tell them you saw the man jump. And then she gives me ten dollars. Ten dollars all for me. But she makes me promise. LuAnne, she says, you promise to go to the police and tell them you saw the man jump good-bye? Yes, I says to her. I promise. And so I came to tell the police, just like she said and just like I promised. Did she give you ten dollars, too?”
“No,” Ricky said slowly, “she didn’t give me ten dollars.”
“Oh, too bad,” LuAnne replied, shaking her head. “Unlucky for you.”
“Yes. That is too bad,” Ricky agreed. “And unlucky, as well.”
He looked up and saw the detective crossing the room toward them.
She looked even more exhausted by the day’s events than Ricky had first guessed when he saw her across the room. Detective Riggins moved with a deliberateness that spoke of sore muscles, fatigue, and a spirit sapped at least in part by the day’s heat and certainly by spending the afternoon laboriously helping to gather up the remains of the unfortunate Mr. Zimmerman, followed by piecing together his last few moments before stepping off the subway platform. That she managed the most meager of smiles by way of introduction surprised him.
“Hello,” she said. “I gather you’re here on Mr. Zimmerman?” But before he could reply, Detective Riggins turned toward LuAnne and added, “LuAnne, I’m going to have an officer drive you over to the 102nd Street shelter for the night. Thank you for coming in. You were very helpful. Stay at the shelter, LuAnne, okay? In case I need to talk to you again.”
“She says stay at the shelter but she doesn’t know we hate the shelter. It’s filled with mean and crazy folks who’ll rob you and stab you if they know you have ten dollars from a pretty woman.”
“I’ll make sure that no one knows, and you’ll be safe. Please.”
LuAnne shook her head, but contradictorily said, “I’ll try, detective.”
Detective Riggins pointed toward the doorway, where a pair of uniformed officers were waiting. “Those guys will drop you off, okay?”
LuAnne rose, shaking her head.
“The car ride will be fun, LuAnne. If you like, I’ll ask them to put on their lights and siren.”
This made LuAnne smile. She nodded her head with a childlike enthusiasm. The detective gestured toward the pair of uniformed cops and said, “Guys, give our witness here the red-carpet treatment. Lights and action all the way, okay?”
Both officers shrugged, smiling. This was easy duty, and they had no complaints, as long as LuAnne was in and out of their vehicle rapidly enough so that the pungent odor of sweat, grime, and infection that she carried with her like a perfume wouldn’t linger behind.
Ricky watched as the deranged woman, nodding and speaking to herself again, shuffled off toward the exit with the policemen. He turned and saw that Detective Riggins was watching her departure as well. The policewoman sighed. “She’s not nearly as bad off as some,” she said. “And she stays pretty local. Either behind the bodega on 97th Street, in the station where she was today, or up at the entrance to Riverside Park on 96th. I mean, she’s crazy and way out there, but not nasty about it, like some. I wonder who she really is. You think, doctor, maybe there’s someone somewhere worrying about her? Out in Cincinnati or Minneapolis. Family, friends, relatives wondering whatever became of their eccentric aunt or cousin. Maybe she’s an heiress to some oil fortune, or a lottery winner. That would be kinda neat, huh? Wonder what happened to her to have her end up like this. All those crazy little chemicals in the brain just bubbling out of control. But that’s more your territory, not mine.”
“I’m not really big on medications,” Ricky said. “Not like some of my colleagues. A schizophrenia as profound as hers genuinely needs medication, but what I do probably wouldn’t help LuAnne all that much.”
Detective Riggins motioned him toward her desk, which had a chair pulled up beside it. They walked across the room together. “You’re into talking, huh? The troubled articulate, huh? All that talk, talk, talk, and sooner or later it all gets figured out?”
“That would be an oversimplification, detective. But not inaccurate.”
“I had a sister who saw a therapist after her divorce. It really helped her get her life straightened out. On the other hand, my cousin Marcie who’s one of those types always got that black cloud over her head—she saw some guy for three years and ended up more authentically fucked-up than before she got started.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Like any profession, there are wide degrees of competency.” Ricky and the detective sat down at the desk. “But—”
Detective Riggins cut him off before he could get further with his question. “You said you were Mr. Zimmerman’s therapist, correct?”
She pulled out a notepad and pencil.
“Yes. He’d been in analysis during this past year. But . . .”
“And did you detect any heightened suicidal tendencies in the last couple of weeks?”
“No. Absolutely not,” Ricky said with determination.
The detective raised her eyebrows in modest surprise. “Really, no? None whatsoever?”
“That’s what I just said,” Ricky replied. “In fact . . .”
“He was making progress in his analysis, then?”
Ricky hesitated.
“Well?” the detective asked abruptly. “Was he getting better? Gaining control? Feeling more confident? More ready to take on the world? Less depressed? Less angry?”
Again, Ricky paused, before replying. “I would say that he had not made what either you or I would consider a breakthrough. He was still struggling deeply with the issues that plagued his life.”
Detective Riggins smiled, but without humor. Her words had an edgy tone. “So, after almos
t a year of near-constant treatment, fifty minutes per day, five days per week—what, forty-eight weeks per year—it would be safe to say that he was still depressed and frustrated by his life?”
Ricky bit down on his lip briefly, then nodded.
Detective Riggins wrote a few words down on her pad. Ricky could not see what she scribbled. “Would despair be too strong a word?”
“Yes,” Ricky said with irritation.
“Even if that was the first word that his mother, whom he lived with, used? And the same word that several of his coworkers came up with?”
“Yes,” Ricky insisted.
“So, you don’t think he was suicidal?”
“I told you, detective. He didn’t present with any of the classic symptomology. Had he, I would have taken steps . . .”
“What sort of steps?”
“We would have tried to focus the sessions more specifically. Perhaps medication, if I actually thought the threat was sincere . . .”
“I thought you just said you didn’t like prescribing pills?”
“I don’t, but . . .”
“Aren’t you going on vacation? Like real soon?”
“Yes. Tomorrow, at least I’m scheduled to begin, but what has that . . .”
“So, as of tomorrow, his therapeutic lifeline was going on vacation?”
“Yes, but I fail to see . . .”
The detective smiled. “Those are interesting words for a shrink to use.”
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