Mind Games

by Hilary Norman

  ‘I wasn’t entirely happy about the cloud she was on,’ Grace told Sam late that night, ‘but on the other hand, it was a hundred per cent better than the way she has been feeling – and I do like the sound of Dr Parés’ relaxation therapy.’

  They were lying naked in each other’s arms in her bed after making love, and Sam was gently stroking the inside of her left arm with his fingertips, letting Grace talk, knowing by now how much those visits to the prison always got to her.

  ‘I’m glad Wagner didn’t tell her about wanting her to come stay here,’ Grace went on. ‘I’m so afraid of letting Cathy down.’

  ‘Have you been having second thoughts?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No, not at all. But the judge might decide I’m not a suitable guardian.’

  ‘Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  Sam stopped stroking her arm.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  He took a moment. ‘Are you concerned about us?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Are you concerned what the judge might make of the two of us?’

  ‘No.’ Grace paused. ‘I mean, I hadn’t even thought about it.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  Grace sat up and switched on her bedside light. Sam’s face was turned away, towards the window. ‘Please look at me.’

  He turned, slowly. His expression was deadpan.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Is this something we need to talk about?’

  ‘Only from the standpoint that I don’t want to be the one to wreck Cathy’s chances,’ Sam said. ‘Not when she’s come this far.’

  ‘You’re concerned about what? That the judge might be a racist?’

  ‘The judge doesn’t need to be a grade A racist or even white to be one of those people who isn’t happy about exposing young people to mixed-race situations.’ Sam shrugged. ‘Any number of black judges might feel exactly the same way.’

  ‘But we don’t agree with that, do we?’ Grace said.

  ‘No, we don’t.’ Sam left the but unsaid.

  ‘And I thought we’d already dealt with the morals side of things.’ A few strands of hair were in her eyes and Grace pushed them back impatiently. ‘I mean, we’ve agreed that we’d have to be more careful about sex if Cathy did come here – I guess that would be a fair point for a judge to be concerned about.’ She paused again, looking straight at him. ‘Anything more than that, Sam, I don’t know about you, but I’d fight like hell.’

  At last, Sam smiled.

  ‘That, I’d almost like to see.’

  Chapter Sixty-eight

  TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 1998

  ‘Grace came yesterday,’ Cathy told Dr Parés when he called in to see her after she’d finished her shift in the laundry.

  ‘How is the lady?’ he asked.

  ‘Pretty cool, the way she always is.’ Cathy smiled. ‘Almost always. She worries too much – she was upset this time in case I got my hopes up and things went wrong.’

  ‘She’s quite right,’ the doctor agreed. ‘It’s wiser not to have unrealistic expectations, Cathy.’

  ‘I know,’ Cathy said, still smiling. ‘It’s better to stay calm.’

  They were alone in a locked room with a table, two chairs and an old, battered vinyl couch, not far from the infirmary. Privacy was a concession that Parés had won since he’d persuaded the governor that his relaxation therapies were likely to make the prison staffs lives easier all round. Lucille had been scathing about what she called ‘hocus-pocus’, but the older woman had come around to some degree, glad that Cathy had been able to find some measure of inner peace without turning into a hophead.

  ‘Much better.’ Parés sat down in a chair close to Cathy’s, picked up his bag and set it on his knees. ‘I have more vitamins for you.’

  ‘Aren’t I taking enough? I don’t like taking too many pills.’

  ‘Just one more.’ The doctor opened the bag and took out a small white envelope. ‘Actually,’ he explained in his soft, attractively accented English, ‘these are mineral supplements rather than vitamins – equally important to you as long as you’re starved of good food, fresh air and sunlight.’

  ‘I guess I can quit taking them once I’m out of here.’

  ‘Not right away,’ Parés told her. ‘Your body will need a few weeks to grow accustomed to the changes.’ He paused. ‘And you mustn’t expect everything to go entirely smoothly just because you leave this place.’

  ‘You mean because they could still re-arrest me?’

  ‘Precisely.’ Parés paused. ‘You’ve learned many hard lessons, Cathy. You know by now how tough life can be. That’s true even out there, with all that freedom.’

  ‘I know what freedom means to me,’ she said, softly.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It means running, as far and as fast as I want to.’ Her eyes were hazy with longing. ‘It means stopping and buying a Dr Pepper or some Ben & Jerry’s when I feel like it.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ the doctor said, ‘and it’s true, as far as it goes.’ His dark eyes grew more serious and for a second or two he stroked his small, neat beard. ‘But one of the lessons I hope to teach you is that it’s wise in life to learn to recognize one’s enemies—’

  ‘I don’t want to think about enemies,’ Cathy said. ‘I’d rather think I don’t have any.’

  ‘But you know better than that, don’t you? For instance, whoever put you inside this place is your enemy, don’t you agree?’

  ‘You mean the guy who killed my parents and the others.’ All the light-heartedness had left Cathy’s face.

  ‘You think it is a man? It could be a woman.’

  ‘Everyone seems to think it could be this Hayman guy.’ Cathy looked at the doctor. ‘Don’t you think it’s him?’

  ‘I’ve no way of knowing anything about that. I just want you to be aware that you need to stay on your guard, even if things go well and you do get out of here.’ Parés opened the envelope in his hand and took out a pink pill. ‘Take this later, before you go sleep. All right, Cathy?’

  She nodded. ‘Sure, doc.’

  The doctor glanced at the couch.

  ‘Are we going to do some relaxation now?’ Cathy asked him.

  ‘I was thinking that you’ve become so adept at deep relaxation that I might start teaching you some simple self-hypnosis.’ Parés saw her forehead crease. ‘It’s really very simple and perfectly safe, and it will help you when you leave here.’ He paused. ‘Everything becomes so much easier, Cathy, once you learn how to control your own body and mind.’

  ‘Okay,’ Cathy said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Parés checked. ‘You know I never want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.’

  ‘I know that,’ Cathy said. ‘It’s cool. I trust you.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Parés said.

  Chapter Sixty-nine

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, 1998

  The first performance of the S-BOP production of Il Trovatore was on Wednesday night. Grace had seen Sam Tuesday evening, after the dress rehearsal, and it was the very first time she’d seen the man spooked by anything that didn’t involve life or death. Yet on the big night itself, when she brought a single red rose to the dressing room he was sharing with Manrico, the tenor lead, and Ferrando, the bass, Sam seemed startlingly calm.

  ‘This always happens to me just before we really get to do a show for a crowd the first time,’ he told her outside the room, speaking softly because the other two men were both basket cases from nerves. ‘I’m not sure why it is – a lot of singers throw up around this point, but I just get kind of high.’

  ‘Because you love it so much?’ Grace suggested, crazy about the way he looked in his captain’s costume with all that dramatic make-up on his eyes.

  ‘The other guys love it too,’ he said. ‘I guess it might be different for me if it was what I actually did – I mean, for a living. But singing with S-BOP just feels like a big fat treat for me. Sure I’
m scared of letting them down, but mostly I just feel like I’m coming home for Christmas.’

  Grace knew virtually nothing about opera, and less about baritones. She had never seen another production of Il Trovatore, and now that she knew the plot more or less inside out, she realized that the story was every bit as idiotic as Sam had once warned her it was.

  But she also knew that she hadn’t heard him sing better than he did that night, when it really counted, and that she had never experienced such excitement and sheer personal heat in any theatre. Of course, she accepted, they were probably all pretty great – but from Grace’s own, rather more intimate, point-of-view, Sam was simply greater.

  She told him so afterwards, when they were partying with the others.

  And then she told him again, back up on his roof, when they were partying alone.

  He seemed to like the way she told him.

  When Hector Hernandez called Sam early next morning, Sam and Grace were still asleep in bed. Sam got his act together swiftly enough to make it through the conversation, but Grace was still fuzzy when he put down the phone.

  Sam leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.

  ‘That was the captain.’

  ‘What’d he want?’

  ‘To talk to me off-the-record.’

  Grace was waking up now. ‘About what?’

  ‘Seems that Phil Kuntz – remember Phil Kuntz, Grace?’ Sam’s eyes were very dark and unreadable. ‘Sure you do. He was the guy who helped fish you out of the ocean back in May, the guy who owned the Delia.’

  ‘Of course I remember him.’

  ‘Anyway, it seems that Phil Kuntz phoned up the chief last week to tell him that he ought to give me my badge back because the Snowbird capsizing was nothing to do with me, and all I did was save your life and risk my own – I’m just quoting now, okay? – and risk my own life to try and save Hayman.’

  Grace sat up, pulling the top sheet up over her breasts. ‘That’s good news, isn’t it? And it’s all true.’

  ‘So anyway,’ Sam went on, ‘the chief called Hernandez and talked to him, and then the cap called up Kuntz and asked him how come he was suddenly proclaiming Sam Becket – that’s me – a hero? And guess what Kuntz told the captain?’

  ‘Beats me,’ Grace said, quietly.

  ‘Kuntz told Hernandez that the cute blonde shrink – ring any bells? – had come down to the Keys to see him, told him what had happened to me, reminded him what a big hero I was.’

  He stopped. Grace said nothing.

  ‘So?’ Sam waited. ‘Grace?’

  She looked him in the eye. ‘So are you going to make a big deal of this, Sam? Are you going to tell me I did something bad?’ She dropped the sheet that had been covering her.

  ‘Dirty pool, Grace.’

  ‘All’s fair.’

  Sam looked at her for a long moment.

  ‘Oh, my,’ he said.

  ‘Okay?’ Grace asked, still very softly.

  ‘Guess so,’ Sam said.

  ‘So what’s the situation now? What else did Hernandez say?’

  ‘That though I’m still a much bigger sapbrain than he gave me credit for, I’m also a halfway decent detective and he’d rather not lose me permanently if he can help it.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ Grace said, waves of pleasure coursing through her.

  Sam held up his right hand, palm forward. ‘Don’t get too excited. He also said that if – if – I do get my badge back, I’ll probably be reassigned to desk duty for a while.’

  ‘Which means what exactly?’

  ‘What it sounds like. I won’t be allowed out on the street – I’ll have to sit in the office, man the phones and do everyone’s dirty work.’

  ‘But that wouldn’t be forever?’

  ‘I hope not,’ Sam said.

  ‘Of course it won’t be forever – not after what Hernandez said about not wanting to lose a fine detective.’

  ‘He said halfway decent, not fine.’

  ‘Oh, Sam!’ Grace flung her arms around him and squeezed tight. ‘It’s going to be all right – I’m so happy for you.’

  Sam hugged her back, then drew back just far enough to kiss her mouth. ‘He said I’d have a letter of reprimand on my file.’

  ‘Is that terrible?’ Grace said, her lips still hovering close to his.

  ‘It’s not good, but it’s not permanent suspension either.’

  ‘So how long is all this going to take?’

  ‘Hernandez wasn’t saying.’ Sam shrugged. ‘My guess is they’ll make me sweat until something goes down and they need all hands on deck.’

  Grace laid her index finger over his mouth.

  ‘No sailing jargon, please.’

  On the Hayman/Broderick front, there was no big news. Martinez told Sam that he’d learned, after the event, that the Monroe County officers had found a stash of prescription drugs in the study of the Key Largo house – nothing that would have been out of keeping for a practising psychiatrist. Except that Peter Hayman had told Grace that he seldom saw patients. And since there was every likelihood that he’d never qualified, if he ever had treated patients, he had not been legally entitled to do so.

  Still, posing as a doctor might be illegal, Martinez pointed out to Sam, but it was hardly in the same league as multiple homicide.

  ‘Answer me this,’ Sam said. ‘Aside from the incident in Dania, have there been any more scalpel attacks in doctors’ officers or anyplace else since Hayman fell overboard?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Martinez answered.

  ‘So all we need is a little goddamned luck.’

  ‘Not to mention a lot of goddamned proof,’ Martinez said.

  Chapter Seventy

  FRIDAY, JULY 17, 1998

  It took another two weeks of investigation and reports – by two independent forensic adolescent psychologists, by the governor of the Female House of Detention, by Dr Parés and by Dr Khan – before Jerry Wagner got the powers-that-were to agree to listen to his submission: that even at this early stage in the search for the truth about the so-called Dr Peter Hayman, there were more than enough grounds for believing that the wrong person had been charged with the murders of Marie Robbins, Arnold Robbins, Frances Dean and Beatrice Flager, and with the attempted murder of David Becket.

  The last-named victim gave evidence in the form of a magnificently persuasive letter written from his perspective as the physician who’d taken care of Cathy, first in the immediate aftermath of her parents’ murder, and again after her collapse during police questioning following Beatrice Flager’s death. Given Grace’s previously given guarantee that she was prepared to act as Cathy’s temporary guardian, her report as the prisoner’s psychologist was not admissible, though Grace, too, had been permitted to write a letter affirming her absolute continuing belief in Cathy’s innocence.

  The judge agreed with Jerry Wagner.

  Cathy was released into Grace’s care just before five in the afternoon of Friday, the seventeenth day of July.

  They both wept as she walked out of the courtroom straight into Grace’s arms, and after they’d run the gauntlet of reporters and photographers, it was straight home to the house on Bay Harbor Islands for Cathy’s requested dinner: a thin and crispy pizza with roast chicken and caramelized onions from Liberty Pizza in South Beach – with her own tub of whatever was the most obscene ice cream in Grace’s freezer. Harry, always a perfect gentleman, greeted Cathy like a longlost lover, and even pretended, when she dropped tiny pieces of chicken on the floor, that he was hanging around her feet for her company rather than food.

  Sam stayed away that first evening. He telephoned and talked to Cathy for a couple of minutes, but though she tried hard because Sam was Grace’s friend and because she’d always said that Sam seemed pretty cool – and because she had now learned that he was currently on suspension from the police department – he was, when the chips were down, still the cop who had arrested her right after Harry had dug up the murder weapon
in her own backyard.

  ‘Did Grace tell you’ – Cathy said to Harry right after the call was over – ‘that I said to say I didn’t blame you for digging up that thing?’

  Harry wagged his short tail and licked her hand. Cathy looked up at Grace, and her eyes were shining.

  ‘He knows I’m innocent, too, doesn’t he?’

  ‘No doubt about it,’ Grace said.

  Grace soon realized that David Becket had been right about the disruption to her everyday life. A judge had been persuaded to order the media to keep away from Cathy, but still, it was not easy having her to stay. Perhaps that was part of the problem – they were both so aware that she was with Grace as a short-term guest, not really to stay, not to live. If they had been able to say that Peter Hayman’s guilt had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, that this was now absolutely the start of Cathy’s new life, then maybe she might have been better able to set about the business of settling down, of re-establishing herself and some tenuous new roots. But neither she nor Grace could safely see any further than a few weeks into the future, and frankly Grace thought they were both badly affected by the uncertainty in different ways.

  Sam was great about it.

  ‘This is a really shitty deal for both you ladies,’ he told them one evening while they were all waiting for a table at Hy-Vong in Little Havana, mouths watering as they caught the aromas of spicy Vietnamese food. ‘You’re both scared about what’s going to happen. You’re scared,’ he said to Cathy, ‘because it’s you it’s just possibly going to happen to all over again – and Grace is scared because she wants so much for this all to be over for you – and you’re both spending most of the time skirting around how scared you really are because you want to spare each other’s feelings.’

  The line of waiting people shifted a little.

  ‘He’s right,’ Cathy said to Grace. She had, by now, forgiven, if not forgotten Sam’s role in her arrest and arraignment.

  ‘I know,’ Grace said.

  ‘What’s up?’ Sam asked her.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I can see something’s up,’ he said. ‘What did I say wrong?’