Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  ‘I understand.’

  He sat down. ‘Word of advice?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Don’t think about it too much. So far as we know, it’s an out-of-date picture of a dead man.’

  ‘I know it is,’ Grace said, ‘but —’

  Sam’s hand laid over hers was tentative but firm. It silenced her just the way he’d intended it to. ‘But nothing, Grace. Don’t let Broderick obsess you.’ He glanced down at the snapshot. ‘Frankly, if you were going to recognize him it would probably have happened the moment you saw that.’

  ‘Is that the way it usually works?’ She made no effort to remove her hand. She liked the feeling of his skin on her own. She liked the slight pressure.

  ‘Most times, yes.’

  ‘I suppose afterward your imagination can start to play tricks on you.’

  ‘It can happen,’ Sam agreed.

  ‘So I’ll just put it away.’ Grace still wasn’t moving, and neither was he.

  ‘And if – and it’s a very unlikely if – you ever see anyone you think just might be the same guy a dozen years on, you call me right away.’ Sam’s eyes and tone were serious. ‘You’ve got that, Grace, haven’t you? Even if you’re only a quarter sure, you call me, and you keep your distance from him.’

  ‘You make it sound like you think it really could happen.’

  ‘If we’re not both crazy – if there is anything in the Broderick suspicion – then yes, I guess it could.’ The grimness was still there. ‘And if it does, that means he’s a very dangerous man.’

  This was not, Grace decided, a romantic conversation. She took her hand away. ‘More coffee?’

  ‘Why not?’

  She stood up, started making a fresh pot.

  ‘You remember when we talked about opera?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I do.’ She paused. ‘I said I liked listening, and you said there was no such word as like when it came to opera, and I said perhaps I needed to be taught how to listen.’

  ‘You don’t forget much, do you?’ he remarked.

  ‘Listening and remembering are both part of my job.’

  ‘Mine too.’ He waited a moment. ‘I have a rehearsal scheduled for tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Rehearsal?’

  ‘You ever hear of S-BOP? As in South Beach Opera.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ She felt apologetic. ‘I’m sure I should have.’

  ‘Not unless you’re crazy about opera, which we know you’re not,’ Sam said. ‘Only people crazy enough about it to make do with third-rate, or with close friends or relatives in the group, come to our performances.’ He grinned. ‘I’m not even offering you a performance, just a rehearsal.’

  ‘It sounds like fun.’

  ‘You haven’t asked which opera we’re rehearsing.’

  ‘Does it matter for a philistine like me?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  Chapter Thirty-three

  THURSDAY, MAY 14, 1998

  Grace’s phone rang early next morning while she was toasting an English muffin.

  ‘Grace?’

  It was Cathy from a payphone. For a split second, Grace experienced relief at hearing from her. Then she realized that the teenager was crying.

  ‘Cathy, what’s wrong?’

  ‘Grace, you have to help me!’

  ‘What’s happened?’ All kinds of alarm bells were going off in Grace’s mind. Images of beatings or rape or Christ-knew-what. She fought to ensure her voice stayed even, knowing that Cathy was unlikely to be able to stay on the line for long. ‘Cathy, calm down and tell me what you need.’

  ‘Why weren’t you there?’ The question was plaintive.

  ‘Where?’ Grace’s mind raced.

  ‘Why didn’t you talk to the grand jury or the judge?’

  ‘You know why.’ Grace was dismayed. ‘Cathy, I told you I couldn’t be there – that I had to go to Chicago. And even if I had been there, Mr Wagner told us both I couldn’t have done anything.’

  ‘You could have written something down – you could have made them keep me in the youth facility.’ For the very first time, there was real hysteria in Cathy’s voice. ‘They’re going to give me the chair, Grace – they’re going to strap me down and kill me!’

  ‘Of course they’re not.’ Grace was very firm in spite of the chills spiking through her veins. ‘Who’s been filling your head with nonsense, Cathy? Tell me who it is, and I’ll see if I can have them stopped.’

  ‘You can’t have anything stopped.’ Cathy’s voice was suddenly harder. ‘You said that yourself – you can’t do anything for me.’

  ‘I said I couldn’t do anything about what’s already happened,’ Grace said, cut to the quick. ‘Cathy, you have to know that we’re still working for you out here. You haven’t let me come in to see you, but I’ve written to you telling you we’re not giving up on you.’

  ‘Who’s we?’ she asked.

  ‘You have been getting my letters, haven’t you?’

  ‘Who’s we?’ Cathy asked again.

  ‘Dr Becket, for one,’ Grace answered.

  ‘He can’t help me either,’ Cathy said. ‘Mr Wagner said he didn’t see who stabbed him, so he couldn’t testify for me.’

  ‘But he still believes you’re innocent, and if a man you’re accused of injuring believes in you, that means it’s only a matter of time before we convince everyone else who counts.’

  ‘What if you can’t?’

  ‘We will, Cathy.’

  ‘But if you can’t, they’re going to kill me, aren’t they?’

  ‘That’s never going to happen.’

  ‘But it could, now they’ve said I’m an adult!’ The hysteria was returning, pitching Cathy’s voice higher again. ‘I could end up on Death Row, and even if I don’t, I can’t take much more of this place! They’re all against me – they all hate me —’ She stopped suddenly.

  ‘Cathy?’ Grace could hear something going on at the other end, voices and other sounds, but they were distorted by the connection and she couldn’t distinguish what they were. She gripped the phone tighter. ‘Cathy, what’s going on? Are you okay?’

  She came back on the line. ‘I have to go.’ She was weeping again.

  ‘Cathy, who was that? What are they doing to you?’

  ‘Grace, I have to go now.’

  ‘Are you being ill-treated?’

  The line went dead.

  Grace didn’t know what to do. She had appointments scheduled for every hour that day until six o’clock, and there wasn’t one single patient among them who could legitimately be postponed. Even if she could have dropped everything and driven to the detention centre, it was unlikely she’d have been allowed to see Cathy without a prior arrangement – and Grace was afraid that a suggestion of ill-treatment, without evidence, might make life even tougher for Cathy. For all she knew, the call might just have been a hysterical delayed response to the trauma of the decision to try her as an adult. Worse than that, Cathy might be right. The stakes had unquestionably risen with that decision, and the ultimate outcome might just be a nightmare too horrific to contemplate.

  At eleven a.m., Grace tried reaching Dr Parés, who was unavailable. At five minutes to one – her next free moment – she tried Jerry Wagner who was, predictably, out to lunch. At three p.m. she left another message for Parés. An hour later, she called Sam.

  ‘I hate bothering you at work . . .’

  ‘Problem with tonight?’

  ‘No, nothing like that.’

  She told Sam about the call. To his credit, his voice betrayed the fact that Cathy’s terrors about the death penalty had pierced him every bit as deeply as they had Grace, but that didn’t mean he had anything to offer.

  ‘I told her it was nonsense,’ Grace said, ‘but it isn’t, really, is it?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ Sam said grimly.

  ‘I told her that your father still believed in her. That seemed to get through to her for a moment.’ She paused. ‘How well is David doing?’
r />   ‘You mean, is he well enough to visit Cathy?’

  ‘It did cross my mind. I’m sorry – it’s probably too much to ask.’

  ‘I don’t think Dad would think so, but I know someone who might have different ideas.’

  ‘Your mother. Does she still think Cathy stabbed him?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Sam paused. ‘I think Dad’s starting to wear her down.’

  ‘Could you please mention the idea to him? It might make a big difference to Cathy.’

  ‘Consider it done.’

  Grace threw herself back into work, commanded her brain to focus sharply and completely on her other patients. Next time she came up for air, Dora Rabinovitch, who’d come by to deliver a batch of typing, had left two messages: the first to say that Wagner had returned her call, the second that Dr Parés had left word that he was due to visit with Cathy Robbins later that day.

  Grace had made up her mind before Sam picked her up just after seven that evening, that she was not going either to mention or even think about Cathy once, at least until she went to bed. As it turned out, there was no room for Cathy or any other baggage from the real world; Grace’s mind, from seven-thirty until a little after ten-thirty, was filled to the rafters with opera.

  The S-BOP theatre was small but intimate, decorated and furnished in warm reds and stark black and without a sharp line or comer anywhere to be seen – everything gently curved or rounded. It appeared and felt like a building upon which great love, care and infinite patience had been expended. It might have been in Italy or Spain or England or some exotic place. It didn’t look or feel like anywhere Grace had ever been in Florida or Chicago. And that was before the lights went down, and the action started . . .

  She loved theatre, always had. In her college days, she’d taken part in amateur plays whenever time and their producers allowed. She liked the way tired, often jaded students became energized the instant they hit the stage or rehearsal hall. She supposed she had expected tonight to feel much the same way, just noisier – she’d thought the S-BOP singers might even be painful on the senses. How little she had known.

  Lord, what talent was cradled in the midst of a city, hidden in those crazy streets and buildings, straining to explode out of the men and women who waited on tables or stared into computers or nursed patients or sold newspapers or performed surgery or carried bags in hotel lobbies. Or investigated sickening homicides.

  Grace had never dreamed.

  ‘When it’s going right,’ Sam said much later, up on his roof, where they’d gone with pizzas and beers, ‘it seems to wrap me up, like I’m wearing this great, warm, magic cloak, and the whole world, the real world, is gone, and I’m someone else, someplace else, and I’m filled with music, and it’s the greatest feeling I know.’ He looked at her, sideways. ‘Make any sense to you?’

  ‘Perfect sense,’ Grace said, very softly.

  ‘You really liked it, didn’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘No such word as like in opera, remember?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  Without looking at him, she could hear the smile in his voice.

  They both let a few moments pass. They were sitting close to the edge of the roof, munching on pizza with extra Jalapeno peppers and pepperoni, gazing up at the stars and listening to the late-evening buzz down on the South Beach streets.

  ‘I understand why you love it up here,’ Grace said, after a while.

  ‘I’m glad,’ Sam said.

  ‘It’s a little like the music, isn’t it?’

  ‘That it is,’ he agreed.

  It was only a matter of time now. They both knew it. Up until this evening, Grace had known how she felt, what she wanted, but she hadn’t been sure if Sam felt the same way. Now she knew. Not because he’d said a word about it, or because they’d come closer physically in any tangible way. But they had, unquestionably, come closer. Their minds had been drawn tantalizingly close, and that was the key, Grace thought, for both of them.

  Sam had apologized for the presence of his beach lounger, the air-filled makeshift bed he said he often chose to sleep on in preference to his real bed. Grace had told him it didn’t bother her, and she’d meant it, of course, at the time.

  It was bothering the hell out of her now.

  They finished the pizza and the beer. They talked a little more about opera and theatre. Sam told Grace that Althea had never much encouraged his singing; it wasn’t that she didn’t think he could sing, more that she was the kind of woman who leaned toward the best of everything. Althea loved opera, so long as it was being performed at the Dade County Auditorium, or in the Sarasota Opera House, or, preferably, at the Met in New York City. She was, at heart, a snob, who ought never to have gotten herself married to a cop.

  ‘And that’ – Sam’s voice was so low it was almost gravel – ‘might have saved a whole lot of pain all around.’

  ‘Except,’ Grace said, ‘that then you’d never have known Sampson.’

  They leaned in toward each other then. Their shoulders touched first, cotton covered. Then their arms. Bare skin. It felt wonderful. Grace looked down, saw the differences between them, so clearly defined, brown against white, and felt nothing but rightness.

  ‘Grace,’ he said, softly.

  She turned to face him, looked right into his eyes, said nothing.

  ‘Oh, man,’ he said.

  And kissed her.

  Oh, man.

  The beach lounger was too small for what they were getting up to, but they didn’t care. They rolled off on to the concrete any number of times, scraped their backs and knees and heels but hardly noticed. They were hot, they knew that, they were so hot and together, and so right together, so wrapped up in each other, body and soul, physically and emotionally, and Grace wasn’t sure they would have or could have stopped if a hurricane had ripped right across South Beach. Feeling rolled over them, swept them away, like the stormiest, the most amazing of torrents, like all the grand operas soaring around them, lifting them up in a great collective embrace. It was the finest lovemaking that Grace, for one, had ever known, and it was most certainly the best, mind-and-body-blowing sex . . .

  Until they heard Sam’s pager.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  Grace was beyond words, almost beyond breathing.

  ‘Go’way,’ Sam said.

  ‘It won’t,’ she managed to say.

  He rolled them both over so they were face to face. ‘I’m sorry, Grace.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘No, I mean I’m really sorry.’

  ‘I know you are.’ She smiled into his eyes. ‘Shouldn’t you answer it?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He started kissing her mouth again.

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Your pager.’

  It wasn’t the pager that got to Grace in the end – there was something semi-comical about being interrupted in the middle of lovemaking by a beeper, and next time she knew it might well be her own cellular phone that got in the way of things. But the sad and awful truth about Sam’s job, even more than her own, was that a call in the night was likely to mean nothing less than more violence and pain, and that was the salutary thought Grace went home with to her house on the water, and the one that kept her awake for most of the rest of the night, with Harry lying across her feet, the way he usually did. She wanted to think about Sam, about the broadness and leanness and strength of him, about his gentleness and passion and humour. But flashes kept coming into her mind instead of somebody traumatized or even injured, of a body lying on some street or on some floor or across some bed, maybe bloody, maybe strangled, maybe cut, maybe . . .

  ‘Stop it now, Grace,’ she told herself out loud in the dark.

  Harry grumbled and turned around.

  Grace wondered if it was a man, woman or child, waiting for Sam, dead or injured or merely in shock. Merely. She thought about the tenderness of the man, of the bereaved father, the disappointed husband, the kind
and grateful son. She thought about his talent, about his glorious, vibrant voice and the way he’d talked about wrapping himself in a magic cloak when he sang. It was hard reconciling those things with the man who right now might be kneeling over a dead civilian, checking for clues, maybe even already making an arrest . . . maybe in danger . . .

  ‘Cut it out, Grace,’ she told herself.

  She was a very disciplined woman when she really set her mind to it.

  She cut it out, and went to sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  FRIDAY, MAY 15, 1998

  It had been on the wall when Cathy had come back into her cell after dinner. There was no way of knowing when it had been done, or by whom. It might have happened while she was still on kitchen duty, scrubbing vegetables and floors, scraping her fingers and her knees – or it might have been done at dinner time.

  It was dark now. The lights had been turned off hours before, and though that first, terrifying blindness had long since passed, it was still much too dim to see anything more than vague shapes and shades of grey.

  Cathy didn’t need light to see what was on her cell wall.

  It was etched into her brain, right behind her eyes.

  The hideous parody, carved into the stone.

  CATHY ROBBINS TOOK A KNIFE AND SLICED AWAY HER MOMMY’S LIFE AND WHEN SHE SAW WHAT SHE HAD DONE, SHE FIGURED IT WAS SO MUCH FUN, SHE DID IT TO HER DADDY TOO . . . AND HER SHRINK . . . AND HER DOC . . . AND HER AUNTIE . . .

  Cathy had screamed when she’d first seen it, and a guard had come running, but when she’d looked at the writing, she’d just shrugged and given a mean kind of smile.

  You deserve everything you get, that smile had said.

  And she’d locked Cathy’s door and, not long after, the lights had gone out.

  And now Cathy was still sitting all hunched up on her bed, trying to keep warm, trying not to feel the walls closing in on her, trying not to see those ugly words, trying not to hear them going around and around in her mind.

  Trying not to scream.