Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  Chapter Twelve

  Grace had promised to call Sam Becket after seeing Cathy, in case the visit to the house had thrown up something relevant to the investigation. At least, she was grateful to realize, she could tell him in all honesty that she’d found out nothing to help the department in any way.

  ‘Would you mind,’ he asked, ‘if I dropped by to see you later?’

  ‘Of course not. Why?’

  ‘I have some findings of my own that might just help you.’

  At a quarter past eight that evening he called again to say that he’d been held up by some urgent work. ‘I guess we ought to leave it for another time.’

  ‘That’s up to you,’ Grace told him, ‘but I tend to be a late-night person.’

  ‘How late is late?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Any time up to midnight.’

  ‘I hope it’s going to be a lot earlier than that,’ Sam said.

  It was almost eleven-thirty when he finally knocked at her door.

  ‘Are you hungry, detective?’ Grace asked, sizing him up. ‘You look hungry.’ And exhausted, she thought but did not say, noting the sagging broad shoulders, tired eyes and unshaven jawline.

  ‘As a horse in the Sahara,’ Sam said. ‘I only remembered an hour ago that I was supposed to have dinner with my family this evening.’ He grinned wryly. ‘My mother’s pretty mad at me.’

  ‘She must be used to it by now,’ Grace said, ‘with a doctor for a husband and a cop for a son.’ She paused. ‘How’d you like to share some Cacciucco with us?’

  ‘What’s Cacciucco and who’s us?’

  ‘Us is me and Harry.’ Right on cue, the West Highland came trotting into the entrance hall. ‘This is Harry.’

  ‘Hey, Harry.’ Sam bent down and put out a hand, and the dog came and sniffed at him. ‘Do I pass muster?’

  ‘Most people do,’ Grace told him, and led the way into her kitchen, which, like the food she best loved cooking, evoked the Italian half of her heritage. She might have written off her father a long time ago, but her ancestry had always fascinated her.

  ‘Sit down, detective, and I’ll show you what Cacciucco is.’ She indicated the big rustic wooden table with its matching hand-carved chairs.

  ‘Thank you, doctor.’ Sam sat down wearily, watching Grace go to the stove and light the gas under a large copper casserole. ‘I know you said you were a late-night person, but surely you must have eaten dinner by now?’

  ‘That was hours ago,’ she said easily. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of midnight snacks?’

  ‘Heard of them?’ Sam said. ‘Hell, doctor, I wrote the recipe book.’

  Grace smiled. ‘If we’re going to share a midnight snack, do you think we might graduate to first names?’

  ‘Suits me.’

  He smiled back, saw her lift the lid off the pot and give things inside a gentle stir. It was hard not to register how cool and sexy the psychologist looked in her lightweight denim jeans and pale blue cotton T-shirt. He hadn’t really noticed the delicate, feminine curves at their previous meeting. He did recall noticing everything that hadn’t been covered up by her business suit – the good face with its cool-uncool blue eyes, the almost-Deneuve-nose, the warm lips and the long legs – but the twin topics of their conversation, homicide and grief, had hardly been conducive to that kind of thinking.

  ‘It sure smells good,’ he said, turning his attention to her cooking and sniffing the air. ‘Fish soup?’

  ‘It originated as a poor man’s fish soup, but I think it tastes pretty damn good, too.’ She grinned. ‘See what a modest cook I am?’

  ‘When you’re right, you’re right,’ Sam said. ‘That’s one of my mother’s sayings. Though when it comes to me and her, it’s not often me who’s right, at least not according to her.’

  ‘Better not tell her you’re eating my dinner instead of hers,’ Grace said.

  ‘Damn right,’ Sam said.

  Fifteen minutes later, the kitchen table simply laid, glasses filled with Chianti and his first taste of Grace’s fish stew en route to his famished stomach, Sam began to feel restored.

  ‘So how Italian are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Half Italian, half American. How about you?’

  ‘Nothing Italian about me,’ Sam said.

  Grace dipped a hunk of bread into the thick, aromatic soup. ‘You don’t mind my asking, do you? Only I remember your father mentioning you – his son – a couple of times, and I knew you were a cop, but that’s all.’

  ‘You mean, he didn’t say what colour I was?’ Sam teased. ‘Actually, I don’t think it would ever occur to him. I think he stopped noticing I was black a couple of years after he and Judy adopted me.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘1972. When I was eight years old. About a year after my parents and sister died.’ He paused, swallowed some more wine, looked across the table at Grace, saw empathy in those keen blue eyes, and figured he didn’t mind expanding a little. ‘We lived in Coconut Grove – my father was a cop, too, with good friends up in Opa-Locka. March 24, 1971, my daddy, off-duty, decided we should all take a drive up and see them. That just happened to be the day after a police sergeant up there had shot a black bystander at a robbery. A riot started that evening.’

  Grace thought about all she’d been told about the great Miami riot of 1980, the by-all-accounts terrifying ugliness that she and Claudia had missed by less than a year. ‘You got caught up in it?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Sam said. ‘We were still at our friends’ place when it started to get bad. I remember they wanted us to stay, but my father was determined to get back home. He said he was going to stay clear of trouble, go a long way around if he had to, but you know how it is with a riot – the trouble spreads, fans out like fire.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, we did get caught up in it, on the outskirts.’

  Grace waited silently.

  ‘I never saw exactly what happened,’ Sam went on. ‘I’d fallen asleep next to Angela, my little sister, in the back of the car. I only woke up for about a second before it happened.’ His eyes darkened, his voice grew quieter. ‘I heard people yelling – then suddenly my father swore and my mother gave a kind of a scream, and something hit the windshield – I found out later it was a stone.’ He paused. ‘I guess my father lost control of the car. We smashed into a tree. He and Angela were killed outright. My mother died a few hours later.’

  Grace thought about a seven-year-old boy hurtled into so much horror and grief, and felt her heart contract. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I had some cracked ribs and a busted leg, but that was all.’ He gave a small, bleak smile. ‘David Becket was doing volunteer work at the hospital up there when we were brought in. He took care of me in the hospital, and a few days later his wife Judy came in to visit with me. They found out I didn’t have any family left to speak of, and asked me if I wanted to go live with them.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Almost,’ Sam said simply. ‘David always said it was like love at first sight for them both. They fostered me for just over a year, and then they adopted me. I’m the descendant of a runaway slave from Georgia; David’s and Judy’s parents escaped from the Nazis in Europe – maybe that gave us something in common, I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you have many problems?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Some, of course. Changing schools – changing lives. Pretty heavy stuff for a kid.’ Sam’s eyes were hazy with recall. ‘They talked to me a lot during the year they were fostering me about the bad stuff they knew we might all hit up against if I became their son. Judy was more down-to-earth about it. David was an idealist. To him, there was really nothing to consider, certainly nothing we couldn’t surmount if we were together.’

  ‘David’s a wonderful man,’ Grace said softly.

  ‘Judy’s no slouch either,’ Sam said. ‘Have you met my mother?’

  ‘Not yet. You have a brother, don’t you?’

  Sam nodded. ‘Saul.’ Another smile. ‘He’s thirteen, a
bout to be barmitzvah.’ He speared a piece of squid. ‘Now that’s an endurance test I can relate to.’

  ‘You had a barmitzvah?’ Grace smiled at the notion.

  ‘Did I ever.’ He shook his head at the memories of Hebrew lessons and the ordeal of having to stand up in synagogue to be counted. ‘It was Judy’s idea more than David’s, but they both took a lot of time making sure it was what I wanted, too.’

  ‘And you did?’

  ‘I wanted to be their son,’ Sam answered simply. ‘Whatever that took.’

  ‘Did you convert?’

  ‘No. David and Judy never wanted me to feel I was turning my back on my parents’ religion – they were Episcopalian – or our culture. They found this real broadminded rabbi who understood and who was willing to teach me and let us go through the whole thing in temple, but I guess it wasn’t really kosher according to Jewish law.’ He grinned. ‘Probably still kosher enough to make me the only barmitzvahed, Friday-night-candle-lighting, Bahamian-black-Episcopalian police detective living in South Beach.’

  ‘Do you light candles?’ Grace asked, intrigued.

  ‘To be honest, hardly ever.’ His grin became a grimace. ‘And since it’s Passover, and this evening was our Seder, and I’m definitely going to be persona non grata with my mother for missing out, I guess that’s another thing not to confess to her.’ Sam dropped a piece of shrimp for Harry, who promptly set up a new sentry post between their chairs. ‘How about you, Grace?’ he asked. ‘Has your own mixed bag brought you many complications?’

  ‘None that have much to do with the fact that my father was a second-generation American-Italian-Catholic and my mother third-generation Swedish-American-Protestant.’ Grace shrugged. ‘Plenty that had to do with what they were like as human beings.’

  Sam looked at her keenly. ‘Not an easy start?’

  ‘Worse for my sister than for me.’ She paused. ‘They were an ill-matched, unhappy couple, and their greatest combined gift was for spreading their own misery over us.’

  ‘Does your sister live here, too?’

  ‘Claudia lives part-time in Fort Lauderdale, part down in the Keys. Matter of fact, I’m driving down to Islamorada on Saturday morning for the weekend.’

  ‘Do you like the Keys?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Sure, though I couldn’t spend too much time down there.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Sam said. ‘I like the buzz of a city around me.’

  ‘The mix seems to suit my sister and her family well,’ Grace went on. ‘My brother-in-law’s an architect who loves to fish, so he figured the Upper Keys were the perfect location for them to build their own house – most of his clients tend to be in south-east Florida.’ She paused. ‘I think Claudia’s at her happiest when they’re living on Islamorada. Probably because it’s the farthest she could get from Chicago.’

  ‘Chicago?’ Sam queried.

  ‘Where our parents live,’ Grace said.

  She waited until after Sam had finished eating before asking, as she brewed some fresh coffee, what he’d wanted to talk to her about when he’d first asked if he might call on her. The fleeting disappointment in his eyes let her know that he’d been just as relaxed, had been having just as much of a good time as she had.

  ‘It was something we uncovered,’ he answered, slowly, ‘that I figured, as Cathy’s psychologist, you probably ought to know.’

  They already knew, he went on, that Cathy had visited Beatrice Flager as a client – she had admitted that much herself – but if there had been a file with her name on it in one of Flager’s cabinets, it had been either removed by the therapist herself or had been stolen by person or persons unknown by the time the police had become involved.

  ‘Like most people these days, though, Ms Flager kept a full set of records on computer.’ Sam paused. ‘The equipment was smashed when we got to her house, but according to our experts, unless the person doing the smashing really knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t have easily been able to destroy information on the hard disk itself.’

  The coffee was ready, and Grace asked Sam if he minded moving outside on to the deck. ‘I don’t know why, but I always try to take the tricky stuff outside,’ she said as they carried out their cups. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the water, maybe I’m subconsciously trying to toss my troubles into it and watch them float away.’ She saw him watching her. ‘Or maybe it’s just a pretty spot.’

  ‘Bit of both, I’d guess.’

  ‘I’m going to kick off my shoes and dunk my feet in the water.’ Grace did just that, sat down on the edge and thought about the way she and Cathy had done much the same at the side of the Robbins’ pool that afternoon.

  ‘Looks good,’ Sam said, and did the same. His feet, Grace noted, were compact for such a tall man. As he had indoors, Harry came right over and lay down between them. For a few moments, they stayed quiet.

  ‘Want to tell me what was on the disk?’ Grace asked Sam, at last. ‘Or are you too beat? It’s pretty late.’

  ‘I feel great, if you’re okay?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I told you, I’m a late-night person. But this is such grim stuff, isn’t it? I mean, you need to take a break for a few hours.’

  ‘I don’t need a break. It’s not my own grim stuff, after all.’ His eyes were fixed on the dark water. ‘Not my pain.’

  Something in his tone – just a whisker of something, nothing more – and a tiny flicker in his eyes alerted Grace to the probability that Sam Becket knew all about great pain – something perhaps even greater, she thought with a flash of insight, than what must have crushed him as a child. For the briefest of moments she let herself wonder about that, then pushed it away.

  ‘So what did you find?’ She saw no point putting off the moment.

  ‘We found Cathy’s file. It was pretty short. She only went to see Beatrice Flager one time, and that was because Arnold Robbins made her go. Robbins told Ms Flager that he was very concerned about his daughter.’ Sam took a sip of coffee.

  ‘Why was he concerned?’

  ‘Typical adolescent stuff. Withdrawn, sluggish, problems keeping friends. Low self-esteem, generally. Robbins seemed genuinely worried.’ He paused again. ‘He told Flager that Cathy had been for counselling a few years back, before she and her mother had come to Miami —’

  ‘I thought Cathy had always lived here?’

  ‘Not according to the therapist’s files,’ Sam said, ‘though Arnold didn’t tell Flager where they’d relocated from.’

  Grace took a moment to sort through what she could, from the confidentiality standpoint, share with him. ‘You probably noticed that there were several family photographs in Cathy’s bedroom at the Robbins’ house, but none of her natural father. She says that she doesn’t remember him.’

  ‘Maybe that’s true,’ Sam said. ‘I gather he died when she was five.’ He paused. ‘I was two years older than Cathy when my family died, so I can’t really judge.’

  ‘I guess not.’ Grace drank some coffee and gazed out over the water at the Bal Harbour lights. ‘So according to Beatrice Flager’s records, what happened when Cathy went to see her?’

  ‘Not a great deal. Ms Flager felt that Cathy didn’t want to be there, that she resented the whole encounter. She wrote in her notes that Cathy objected to her wanting to tape their session – is that normal, Grace? Do you tape sessions with your patients?’

  ‘Not usually, though some psychologists do and sometimes it’s mandatory.’ Grace paused. ‘Cathy did tell me about that, by the way. About having been to a therapist who’d taped everything she’d said. She told me she didn’t like it.’ Grace looked more closely at Sam, wanting to be sure he understood the point she was making. ‘I mean, Cathy was quite open with me on that score – it came up because she was checking me out, making comparisons between me and her last experience.’

  ‘Did she tell you what she did after the session with Beatrice Flager?’

  ‘No.’ Grace hesitated. ‘I thoug
ht she only saw her once?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sam confirmed, ‘but Flager added some more notes to her file after Arnold Robbins called her to bring her up to speed.’ He paused. ‘Robbins said that Cathy had a temper tantrum when she got home – and that she cut the heads off all the goldfish in Marie’s fish tank.’

  ‘Really?’ Grace was shaken. ‘Cathy did that?’

  ‘According to the notes she denied it, then flew into another rage and smashed some ornaments in her bedroom. Arnold and Marie were both sufficiently alarmed to take Cathy to the family doctor, who ordered some blood tests.’ Sam looked up from the water and into Grace’s face. ‘The tests showed that Cathy had taken – ingested, the notes said – cannabis.’

  ‘What did Cathy say?’

  ‘She denied that, too, but no one believed her.’ Sam shook his head. ‘In the circumstances, how could they?’

  Grace stayed out on the deck for a while longer after Sam had left. Beatrice Flager’s notes about Cathy’s disturbed adolescent behaviour had dismayed her deeply, and however sympathetic Sam Becket might seem to her plight, it wasn’t hard to see how this had to be damaging the teenager’s credibility with the rest of his department and perhaps with the State Attorney’s office, too.

  Up until now – at least to her and, she sensed, Sam Becket – Cathy had been, above all else, a victim.

  Now, suddenly, they were being forced to look at her as a young person who had allegedly cut the heads off goldfish.

  Grace sat on the edge of the deck again and stared down into the water, trying for a few moments to visualize Cathy doing such a thing. Briefly imagining her patients in the midst or depths of their traumas was a thing she had trained herself to do over the years. A degree of detachment was essential, of course, to a psychologist, but absolute detachment had frankly always been impossible for Grace, especially since most of her work involved children – how in the name of God could anyone stay unaffected by those suffering, messed up young psyches?

  She gave up trying to imagine the sensitive girl who’d been so gentle with Harry mutilating living creatures, and thought instead about her taking cannabis. That, at least, was not so hard to envisage, nor were the reasons she might have done so: a desire to escape or simply to feel better than she had at the time.