The doors opened on the eighteenth floor and I squeezed past the doctors, hoping they wouldn’t wrinkle their noses at the stench of failure. I glanced back, but no one pointed and yelled, “Hey, that’s a Johns Hopkins dropout!” I exhaled and hustled off in search of room 1805.
After passing through a second security checkpoint, where my backpack was checked for photographs—potentially disruptive—I headed down the hall. I dodged meal carts and mop buckets and a woman in a wheelchair reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and found Jeremy’s to be the last room on the antiseptic corridor. The hand-scrawled sign on the door said, Window: Wedge. Good thing his last name wasn’t Ledge.
Sun flooded the room, making it atonally cheerful. I flashed an apologetic smile at Jeremy’s roommate, a shirtless man with a many-layered belly and Elton John glasses. I did a double take at the crisp white toque atop his head, but he kept his eyes glued to the television above him.
I peeked around the nausea-green curtain separating the two beds to find Jeremy Wedge fully dressed, shoes on, perched at the edge of his neatly made bed. His ankle was crossed at his knee as he peered through his glasses at The New York Times. He could have been riding the 6 train to work.
“Jeremy?”
“It’s Mr. Wedge,” he spat, not looking up. “Time for another interview with an incompetent resident? Or is the asshole phlebotomist who couldn’t get a job at a mortuary gonna stick me again?”
“It’s your sister,” I told him.
“I don’t have a—” He whipped around. His eyes looked hollow, and the orange glint of stubble on his face did not do for him what it does for Brad Pitt. “What the—what are you doing here?” I almost took a step back under the force of his angry glare.
What was I doing here? Good question, and one I was prepared for. I’d observed Jeremy and Hutchinson in the hotel bar enough times to learn the best route to a productive conversation with them, and it wasn’t, in fact, the price of rice in China. Impossible to pull off with Hutchinson, and just barely manageable with his slightly less offensive relation: I put on my best bashful look, bit my lip, and even cast my gaze downward.
“I was worried about you, Jeremy. Really worried.” I made my voice plaintive and shyly proffered the bag of red grapes I’d bought from the fruit cart on the corner of 27th Street.
He narrowed his eyes at me, suspicious but hopeful. “What do you mean?”
Oh, he wanted to believe I spent my nights yearning for his metrosexually manicured hands on my body. Or at least that I wanted to hear him drone on about the rare genetic mutation he’d written about in Science when he was a grad student at Columbia. It had actually been his adviser’s discovery and Jeremy was third author, but that didn’t stop him from trying to pass it off as an accomplishment on par with a solo voyage to the Arctic Circle. Vanity, thy name is man.
“Hutchinson wouldn’t tell me anything.” Technically, this was true, as I hadn’t crossed paths with him since he’d followed Jeremy to the hospital on Saturday night. “I wanted to see if you were okay.”
“I’m fine,” he said huffily, shaking out the paper and resuming reading, or pretending to. “As you can see, I’m perfectly fine. Only furious to be kept in this place full of lunatics, against my will.” It was an effort for him to keep his voice calm.
“But, Jeremy,” I said, summoning a meekness I didn’t even know I could feign. “There was—” I put the grapes on the windowsill and looked at him over the paper.
“What? There was what?” He looked at me defiantly.
“An empty bottle of Ambien.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“You didn’t take it?”
“Why do you care? Why did you say you were here?”
Because I want to know why the label was crossed out and why you were going through the Whitcombs’ garbage.
“Because,” I said, pretending to gather my courage. “Because I care about you.”
He rubbed at his face roughly. “Interesting timing to profess your undying love.”
I say “care,” he hears “undying love.” Whatever other problems Jeremy Wedge had at this moment, low self-esteem was not one of them.
“Zephyr,” he said wearily. “I did not try to kill myself. But they don’t believe me. And so here I am, in this germ factory, perfectly healthy, doomed to contract something or be victimized by an insane inmate the longer I remain captive.”
“You didn’t take the Ambien?”
“I have never needed anything beyond a glass of sherry to relax,” he said haughtily.
But Pippa had placed a few choice calls on Sunday, including one to the East Hampton residence of the chief of Bellevue’s psych department, who happened to be a fellow Lucite enthusiast she had befriended over a decade of traveling the auction circuit. Dr. Gross had confirmed that Jeremy’s blood had been filled to overflowing with the tranquilizer zolpidem, familiarly known to the rest of my socioeconomic circle as Ambien.
“But there was that empty bottle—”
“It wasn’t mine!” he shouted at me. This was a sore topic that had, clearly, already been exhausted. “It wasn’t mine. But they don’t believe me.” His voice wavered.
“So what do you think made you so sick?” I asked gently, crossing my arms.
A pink plastic water pitcher suddenly flew through the air and hit the television, sending ice chips flying to our side of the curtain.
“That is NOT how you make a fucking reduction, you stupid bitch!” Jeremy’s roommate screamed, and I held my breath, waiting to see if an army of hospital aides would rush to the scene. Nothing.
“Guy owns five restaurants,” Jeremy whispered. “Apparently it’s four too many. He’s not allowed to watch cooking shows, but there was no room for him on the floor without televisions. The staff has better things to do than keep track of Rachael Ray’s airtimes.”
“What would happen if I offered him your leftover tuna salad?” I suggested quietly. “Cardiac arrest?”
Probably for the first time since he’d been admitted, Jeremy allowed himself a wan smile. Then he tossed the newspaper on the bed and ran his hands through his bed-greasy hair.
“Can you do anything to get me out?” He looked at me like a dog begging for scraps.
“I can try,” I lied.
His eyes lit up. “Wait, did you say you told them you were my sister?”
I knew where he was going and cursed myself again for my stealth routine at the front desk.
“I did, but—”
“Zephyr,” he said, looking deep into my eyes. I resisted the urge to shrink back. “Zephyr, if you really care about me, sign me out of here. Hutchinson signed me in for an extended stay, but you, you can undo it.” He took one of my hands in his. It was such a corny gesture that I almost laughed but coughed it down. Absurdly, I was on the right track.
“Jeremy,” I said, going along with his Oscar performance, “I will. But you have to tell me everything you know. So that I can help you.”
“I know what made me sick.” He dropped my hand. “It was—” He shook his head.
“You need to talk about it,” I said, assuming the ingratiating tones of a late-night Lite FM talk-show host. “Tell me what was on your mind that evening.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Zephyr, I did not try to kill myself. It was the herbs that stupid bitch gave me! They almost fucking killed me.”
“A woman you picked—I mean met at the bar gave you herbs?”
“No,” he said petulantly. “That lady who lives at the hotel. That old lady.”
I thought for a moment. “Mrs. Hodges?” I said incredulously. “You think she did this to you?”
“I don’t know her name. Asian,” he muttered. He lay back on the bed and covered his face with his arms.
I gaped at him. The man really was in trouble—he was suicidal and delusional. A wave of sympathy washed over me and I reassessed my entire mission, which I now suspected I was handling a little too cavalierly.
/> “She gave me a special drink. In the bar on Saturday night.”
I waited and he looked exasperated. I was exasperated right back.
“Jeremy, this isn’t Mad Libs. I can’t fill in the story for you.”
“Oh, fuck, fine.” He punched the pillow and turned on his side. “A couple of weeks ago, she saw me trying to … to start a conversation with a woman. I wasn’t getting much of a response.”
“You mean you hit on someone and she wasn’t interested?” I clarified.
He glared at me, which I took as an affirmative.
“So she said she had a remedy.” He rolled his eyes at me as though I was the one suggesting such a preposterous thing.
“A love potion,” I said, trying to keep a straight face.
“USE MORELS, NOT CHANTERELLES, YOU STUPID CUNT!” bellowed the roommate.
“No, not a love potion,” Jeremy snapped. “More like, you know, like …”
“A love potion,” I repeated.
“Yeah,” he conceded, humiliated. “A love potion. I’m a scientist, a geneticist who’s been published in Science,” he whispered with anguish, his disgust with himself penetrating every syllable. “And I fell for a potion.”
“It happens,” I said charitably, thinking, God, that really is desperate and stupid.
“So she gave me this drink Saturday night,” he continued. “I had wanted to have … a conversation with that Australian woman on the fifth floor.”
“You mean the one from New Zealand?”
He shrugged. “Whatever.”
I wondered how he’d feel if someone said, Yeah, that Texan, New Yorker, whatever, lives on that big continent between the two oceans.
“And I drank it and now here I am.”
Lacuna beach. Elision island. Stop playing games, you bullheaded redhead. I cleared my throat.
“Mrs. Hodges, Mrs. Kimiko Hodges, gave you a drink. What time did you drink it?”
“Around eight-thirty,” he said sullenly. “Right after she gave it to me. It tasted like lemonade.”
“You drank it there at the bar or up in the room?”
“Right there.”
“But the woman you were interested in was out to dinner.”
“You keep tabs on all the guests?” He looked at me oddly.
“They were memorable.”
“Well, anyway,” he continued, “I drank it right there at the bar.”
“Because there was another woman there?”
“What are you, some fucking morality patrol?” he sneered. “It’s not your business who I drank it for.”
“Definitely not,” I agreed. “I just want to get the whole story so I can talk to the attending and try to get you out,” I reminded him. “You drank it and then what?”
He mashed his lips together and inhaled loudly through his nose.
“I went over and started talking to her.”
“How’d it go?”
“Fine, thanks,” he snapped.
“Then?”
“Then I didn’t feel so well. So I excused myself and went to find a room to lie down in.”
I nodded and tried to make my next question sound casual.
“Why room 502?”
He looked at me sharply. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I had to tread carefully, “why choose a used room, a dirty room? Why not go somewhere nicer?”
I refrained from asking whether his cousin had been kind enough to let him in or whether Jeremy inexplicably had free access to all the rooms. Family status notwithstanding, I was pretty sure Ballard McKenzie was not in the habit of handing out master keys.
“It was open,” he said coldly. Any nascent trust he had in me vanished at that moment.
“Can I ask you something else?”
“No.”
“Why were you going through their garbage? The guests’ garbage.”
“None of your fucking business!” he roared. “Are you accusing me of something?!” He stood up and I moved toward the curtain. As if the gastronomically unhinged patient in the next bed could come to my rescue.
I remembered a diversion I’d learned from my friend Tag, the Sterling Girl who had turned a career of studying tapeworms into a tightrope of international adventure. She was the only person I knew who had required the protective services of a U.S. embassy on not one but two occasions. Whether she was in a standoff with poachers off the coast of Senegal or staring down the host of a party she had crashed because she’d forgotten to load up on local currency and couldn’t buy dinner, Tag brazenly took the high and mighty road. Turn the tables and momentarily confuse your adversary.
“I saved your life, you asshole! I’m trying to help. Forget it.” I put my hand on the curtain, hoping to distract him from his suspicion of my suspicion. “Good luck.”
“No, wait, Zephyr. I’m sorry! Don’t leave!”
But I’d asked too many questions and needed to get out before I blew my cover. Besides which, for now, I knew what I needed to know, including the fact that Jeremy Wedge was safer here in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital than he was roaming free in Greenwich Village.
* * *
Two hours later, I was at my office, contemplating the fine line between insanity and its perceived opposite. Three detectives were draped over the sides of my cubicle—which they had apparently mistaken for a break room—trading stories that could easily have kept a psych resident busy for days.
“So the whole place is goin’ apeshit lookin’ for this guy’s freakin’ BlackBerry.” Tommy O. was gesticulating broadly, despite the hot cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in his hand. His face was freshly shaved and pink, growing pinker as he spun a tale of urban spectacle. “And he’s got blood down the front of his shirt, not a dribble but soaked through like a fuckin’ maxi pad—pardon my French, Zepha—only no one’s askin’ about the blood. They’re turning over the sofa cushions, people are spillin’ their hot joe, flippin’ cartwheels. Hell, people don’t look for missin’ kids this hard. And all of a sudden the guy turns to this lady and says somethin’ and SHE starts freakin’ out. Screamin’, ‘You accusin’ me? You accusin’ me of taking your goddamn BlackBerry? How fuckin’ dare you? See, I gotta Treo, whaddo I need your fuckin’ BlackBerry for?!’ and all that shit. And it’s gettin’ ugly, but what the fuck am I gonna do? Yell, ‘S.I.C., everybody freeze?’ ”
Eric, a twenty-year veteran of the NYPD, and Alex, a probie in my class who had actually run away from home to join the circus as an acrobat, before winding up here—“the other greatest show on earth,” he liked to call it—guffawed appreciatively. The SIC’s low profile was a constant source of emasculation among many of the detectives, but our cases tended to be less dangerous and at least as interesting as the best ones over at the NYPD—and the pensions on par—so they regularly washed down their pride with caffeine and alcohol.
“So I tell the guy to calm down,” Tommy continued, letting fly a drop of coffee-colored spit, “but, right, that just pisses him off even more, so I ask him his name and he goes, ‘Christmas.’ And I say, ‘What?’ And he goes, ‘Christmas,’ again. So I think he’s being fresh and I says, ‘Yuh name is Christmas? Christmas? Idonfuckinbelieveit, show me some ID.’ And now he’s really ticked off, so he whips out his driver’s license and, oh shit, the guy’s name is Chris Smith and he has a lisp badder’n my sister-in-law’s! Can you believe that?”
Tommy slapped the side of my cubicle so hard a photo of Gregory and me slipped from behind a stack of tacked-up business cards and floated to the floor.
“Aw, that’s sad, man, that’s sad. Imagine goin’ through life like that?” Eric shook his head and sipped at his own coffee, kept warm in a standard Greek cup sold by the guy at the newsstand in the lobby.
“What about the blood?” I asked, giving up on ignoring them in the hopes that they would disperse and allow me to get some work done. I eyed the photo beside my sandal and wondered if I could retrieve it without anyone noticing.
“Oh yeah, right.” Tommy took a long swig of coffee and tossed it in my trash, where it slowly stained the contents of the bin. “So for a second I think about pretending I have a lisp, too, you know, so he won’t feel so bad, but, whatever, this guy’s got so many problems, it ain’t gonna help. So some Puerto Rican babysitter finally finds his damn phone—now, don’t go gettin’ all PC on me, Zepha, she was Puerto Rican, all right. Don’t go reportin’ me to Poker Pippa for cultural insensitivity.…” Tommy’s eyes lit up and he gave my chair a little jiggle with his foot.
I knew what was expected of me—to play the part of the lily-white overeducated Manhattan innocent to their seasoned blue-collar outer-borough street smarts.
“Wha—I didn’t say anything!” I protested. “Calling a spade a spade isn’t racist!”
“Oh shit, you callin’ Puerto Ricans spades?!” Eric yelped, and they all cackled. I rolled my eyes at Alex, in particular, who had managed to obtain a master’s in philosophy during his spare moments away from somersaulting onto the shoulders of squat, muscled men in sequined unitards.
“You mean ‘spic,’ ” I said, a second before realizing it was a trap.
“Ohh, ohh, you said ‘spic,’ ” they screeched. “I’m tellin’ Pippa!”
I sighed and waited out the ribbing. They were cracking themselves up.
Finally I interrupted. “So, the blood. What about the blood?”
“Yeah, yeah, okay.” Tommy wiped his eyes. “So after the Puerto Rican babysitter finds the guy’s BlackBerry in the bathroom, he actually orders a cup of coffee and sits down! And then he starts talkin’ to himself. And it wasn’t a Bluetooth—I checked. He’s just sittin’ there talkin’ to himself. And I’m feeling sorry for the guy, so I go over and say, ‘Hey, you need any help?’ I’m thinkin’ the least I can do is buy the guy some Clorox or somethin’, right? And what the fuck, he spills this whole goddamn confession to me. He just came from stabbing his girlfriend. Upstairs. Killed her, then came down for a fuckin’ double espresso and has the whole goddamn place searchin’ for his BlackBerry.”
“That was this morning?” I asked, my mouth hanging open slightly.
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