by Leslie Glass
“It’s Healy. I know it’s Healy. He must have been rejected from medical school or something.” The Sergeant smirked at them, wanting them to know that even when she said she didn’t know things, she really did.
“High school,” Mike shot out.
“All right, all right. What about the stuff in this guy Raymond’s apartment?”
“You mean the book and the Kaminex?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a precise description of the plastic-bag suicide in the book, complete with some discussion about alcohol and tranquilizers. If you drink too much and take too many, you fall asleep before the bag’s attached. He had that section highlighted,” Mike said.
Or someone had. April thought of the neat job and wondered how a man might have a lover in for dinner, have sex, get dressed, comb his hair. Then what? Did they have a fight and break up? Was he so despondent he headed for the bathroom, popped a few pills, wandered back into the bedroom to call his shrink?
Then what?
He took the pills, put a plastic bag over his head, lay down on the soiled sheets with his shoes on, and went to sleep? Wouldn’t he want to write a note telling the shrink what had happened? Desperate people usually wanted to tell, to explain themselves.
“The book could be a plant,” April said. Could be there were no tranqs in his body.
“Halloween,” Joyce muttered. She was back on Halloween. “What’s the significance of that, huh?”
“Maybe it was just a coincidence,” April suggested.
“Lots of movement, lots of noise in the area last night,” the Sergeant was lamenting. “You know in these buildings, not all the kids trick-or-treating live there. Sometimes they bring their friends over and do it together. People open their doors without looking.”
April shifted her weight and started jiggling her other foot. Why was Sergeant Joyce fixated with Halloween? Halloween probably had nothing to do with it. The guy was unhappy. He offed himself. After a bottle of wine and dinner and sex all over the sheets? Love bite on his neck.
“Maybe it’s not a coincidence,” Mike said. “If you kill somebody on Halloween it could be a trick. The joke’s on the victim. If you kill yourself, the trick’s on the people left behind. You think Cowles had a sense of humor?”
April shook her head. Sometimes killers did, but suicides usually didn’t. Raymond’s wife had said he was seeing a psychiatrist. The same Dr. Treadwell had prescribed a tranquilizer. Maybe Ray had had trouble sleeping, but maybe he had had a mental problem. April had already dialed the number on the pad found on the table beside Ray’s body. Harold Dickey was also a shrink. According to Ray’s appointment book he’d seen Treadwell, the other psychiatrist, on Friday.
The two psychiatrists seemed to be the key. April checked her watch. It was after one. The person who had answered Dickey’s phone said the doctor was usually in his office between one-thirty and two. If they hurried they might be able to catch him.
“Let’s go talk to the shrink,” April said.
Sergeant Joyce pushed her chair away from the table, scraping new scuff marks on the dingy green linoleum floor. She scowled at Mike. “Be nice,” she warned.
twelve
The old fire room on level B3 where Bobbie Boudreau spent his breaks had been too small to rehabilitate during the many improvements and additions to the Stone Pavilion since its original construction in 1910-13. The room, a space of about eight feet by ten feet down a rarely traveled jog off a main passage, had been passed over again and again. Its door was green like all the others, but without a label to designate its purpose. Without a label, the room was ignored. It hadn’t been of use to anyone for many years until the day six months ago Bobbie found it in one of his janitorial ramblings.
When he found it, the dust in the little room was so old it was no longer furry. It had hardened into a gritty crust that refused to come off even with soap and water. Stacks of red fire buckets with clumps of ancient sand still clinging to their sides and bottoms lined one wall. A large axe and a smaller one, both badly rusted, hung on the wall above three folding stretchers made of wood and canvas piled one on top of the other. Rolls of rotting fire hoses almost prevented Bobbie from opening the door. That first day when he pushed inside and breathed the hot stale air of the forgotten room from the hospital’s distant past, he’d felt as if he had discovered another country for himself—almost like the cardboard box he’d jerry-built into his own space in a corner of the ramshackle structure the Boudreau family called home when he was a kid.
He’d stumbled on the place only a few days after his mother died in a room not so very different from this in a brownstone a dozen blocks downtown. And it was there, camped on the only cot still strong enough to support his weight, that he brooded on the bitter humiliations and injustices he had suffered in his life, culminating in the final ultimate castration by the bitch Clara Treadwell, who ruined his life and killed his mother.
It made Bobbie’s jaws hurt—set his throat afire, his whole head and brain, in fact—to think how evil that bitch Clara Treadwell was, how much he wanted her dead. After all his years of faithful service at the hospital, caring for the craziest of the crazy, people so vicious and dangerous the other nurses were scared to handle them. He’d cleaned up their shit, their vomit, dressed their wounds when they stabbed or burned themselves, stopped them when they pulled out their hair. He’d sedated them, calmed them with his touch. They’d loved and depended on him, and she’d swatted him down like a fly for a death he had had nothing to do with. Nothing to do with. He’d been scapegoated, humiliated, drummed out of his whole life when all he’d done was his job as he was told to do it, nothing more, not a thing more.
And it wasn’t the first time in his life this had happened, not by any means the first. How could life be so unfair? The answer was that people like Clara Treadwell always abused their power. They always hurt little people. They hurt anybody they felt like hurting. And good people had no way to protect themselves.
It was actually a photograph of Clara Treadwell in the Medical Center’s newspaper that gave Bobbie the idea of cutting out letters, pasting them into messages, and delivering them to the bitch herself. Her picture appeared with some regularity. He’d seen it in the Post when she was appointed to the President’s commission. The same picture appeared in the Medical Center newspaper. A month later there was an article about her condom lectures and her proposal to put condom machines in the adolescent clinic and inpatient departments of the Psychiatric Centre to prevent AIDS. The article talked about the furor her proposal caused.
That photo had also featured Dr. Harold Dickey, Chairman of the Quality Assurance Committee—the other fuck who deserved to die. Years ago Bobbie had walked into an empty patient room on a locked geriatric-depressive ward and found Dickey and the young Clara Treadwell groping each other behind the door. Lots of things just didn’t change. In the recent newspaper photo they stood beside a condom presentation on a blackboard. Dickey’s hand cupped Treadwell’s shoulder. Both were smiling.
For a few weeks after that photo appeared in the newspaper Bobbie put condoms in Treadwell’s files, left them on her chair in the boardroom, in her desk, in the toes of the running shoes in her closet. The locks were changed in the executive suite, but that never kept him out.
He sat on the cot, staring at his collection of bitch photos taped to the wall. The one that galled him the most was the one with the smiling arrogant foolish hypocritical Dr. Dickey. Those two thought they could get away with anything, thought no one knew what their relationship really was, what they were up to. Bobbie felt powerful, knowing about them and knowing they didn’t know he knew.
Like the colonel years ago who never knew how close he’d come that day to dying, Clara Treadwell didn’t believe she was in mortal danger. She didn’t believe in Bobbie’s power. He could see it in the way she walked, in the smile in her publicity photos. Foolish woman was going to lose her old lover. He stuck the photo back on th
e wall. Since the bum had had his accident and fallen off the bridge, Bobbie had felt very calm. The pieces of his shattered life were coming together again. He didn’t like messes, knew exactly how to kill so no one suspected a thing. Accidents were his speciality. He’d gotten a bonus he hadn’t expected with the bum, and the next two were scheduled. He checked his watch. One-twenty-five. Time to go to work.
thirteen
At one-thirty P.M., in gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt with no slogan on it, Jason Frank jogged down the five flights of open stairways from his office and apartment to the main floor. The stairs, like those in an old first-class European hotel, had been a major attraction for him when he moved there eight years ago. The twenties-era building was unique. It had two ways of getting up and down: the large, old-fashioned, see-into cage elevator and the open stairs. Wide landings went all the way around the building, forming an elegant square from the marbled lobby to the fifteenth floor. The wrought-iron railings were painted black, decorated with insets of brass leaves and elaborate vines.
Once grand, it was all getting pretty shabby now. The diamond designs on the bottom half of the walls, formed from black and white half-inch tiles, were no longer perfect. Many of the tiles were chipped or broken. A few were missing altogether. The well-worn marble stairs were cracked and hadn’t been polished to a high shine in decades. The ceilings, decorated with moldings and golden rosettes, were in need of a paint job and some new gilding.
The building was a co-op. Recently the board had taken a poll to see how many owners wanted to spend the hundred-thousand-plus dollars it would take to make the necessary repairs, but the outcome hadn’t been revealed yet. As Jason hit the main floor, the doorman glanced at his watch.
Emilio was twenty-five and watched everybody’s comings and goings with an avidity that was unusual even for the chummy Upper West Side. He had seen the doctor’s last patient come down and was pretty sure the man was gay. It made Emilio worry about the doc. If the doc had gay patients, did that mean he was gay himself? It was the kind of thing you just had to ask yourself. And now, ten minutes later, Dr. Frank was in a sweatsuit heading for the door.
“Going for a run, Doc?” Emilio asked.
Jason smiled. No, he was going to rob a bank. “Morning, Emilio.”
“Not for over an hour and a half. It’s afternoon now.” Emilio opened the heavy glass-and-wrought-iron door.
Dr. Frank walked out. He didn’t look gay. He was about six feet tall, taller than Emilio’s five ten. He was also a lot thinner than Emilio. The doc had a lean runner’s body, medium-brown hair, cut pretty short. He looked kind of like a Kennedy, one of those privileged kind of people. Well-built, good-looking, with a good background and all his shit together. Except he had a beard now. More than three weeks’ worth of beard, and he was still scratching at it. Emilio studied the doc as he went out the door. Was he gay or not?
“Watch out for those raindrops now. It’s going to rain.”
Jason didn’t answer. He was very careful not to say much to Emilio. The young doorman had some problems with his identity. For a while the young man had been telling all the people coming to see Jason that he and Jason were colleagues because Emilio was studying psychology at the community college he attended at night. He said he could tell things about them just by the way they walked.
That kind of thing amused colleagues but made Jason’s patients extremely uneasy. Jason had to tell Emilio to keep his speculations to himself and not do a single thing more than open the door. That was his job and his limit, to open the door. He had considered knocking the young man’s teeth out but decided that was an overly aggressive and unproductive approach to the problem.
Outside, he sniffed the moist chilly air and shivered. He hated the cold, considered it a personal enemy he had to conquer every year. It was November already. Pretty soon he’d have to stop running outside and start traveling across town to work out at the 92nd Street Y. Jason hated that. It took up too much time. Six months of the year, when it was warm, he ran in Riverside Park. He ran in the morning before he saw his first patient or sometime between twelve and two. He had a rationale for everything he did, and in the eight years since he had qualified as a psychoanalyst, he had worked out his days and hours exactly to fit the requirements of his profession, which was unlike any other.
He taught medical students and psychiatric residents. For each hour-and-a-half lecture, it took about forty hours of preparation. He taught at three different levels. Every level had to know certain things by the end of one of his talks. Medical students got the basics. The same subject for residents was much denser and deeper. For colleagues in associations he had to write the papers in advance. Jason got paid nothing for teaching and nothing for supervising residents. The personal cost of becoming an important analyst, a mover and shaker in a rigid and unyielding field, was something no analyst talked about.
No one got paid for the thousands of hours spent writing articles for psychoanalytic journals. Nor for the hundreds of dollars it cost to reprint the articles and send them all over the world to people who wanted them. Jason was paid an honorarium for about half of his speaking engagements, but even those did not begin to cover the cost of the hours and hours it took to prepare. And the days to give them, because a speaker didn’t just fly somewhere and speak, then get on a plane and go home. A speaker had to meet students, had to have lunch with the head of the department, colleagues who wanted to interact. Sometimes it was too far to go home. He had to stay, have dinner and spend the night.
For conferences, topics had to be approved in advance by the program committees. Then presenters had to hand in papers in advance so the discussants could read them and prepare their rebuttals. Of course, one had to stay and listen to other people’s papers. Often Jason was asked to be both a discussant and a presenter. When he got back home, exhausted and drained, he was immediately plunged into a grueling round of twelve-hour days packed with teaching and patients and had stacks of unopened mail waiting for him. That was the career track for someone who wanted to make a difference in the field. Jason was on that career track, an independent attached to an institution that considered teaching an honor that shouldn’t be polluted by any recompense.
He crossed Riverside Drive at Eightieth Street and broke into a comfortable jog. Up at Eighty-fifth Street was the huge hospital complex, one building of which was the Psychiatric Centre where he had trained and where he now supervised and taught.
He passed the Centre without looking at it, didn’t feel like going in, which was the reason he didn’t have a full-time job there. Jason had never acquired the taste for politics and committees and endless meetings. The only way for an independent like him to earn a living was in patient hours. And he knew exactly how many patient hours he had to book to support his writing and teaching. He was never really idle, never without a thousand demands on his time. He had married twice. He’d left his first wife. Emma, his second wife, had left him. Whenever he wasn’t working, he was thinking about that.
He barely noticed the majestic Hudson River or the cliffs of New Jersey on the other side of it. He was worrying about his wife acting in movies, living in California, who spoke to him on the phone at a scheduled time every week and told him there wasn’t a thing about him she’d ever loved. It was at this point that he broke into a sweat.
When he reached Ninety-fifth Street, he was thinking that he didn’t have a car, a country house, a child. The question was, could he cut back his activities and spend some real time with Emma? That was the issue. It seemed that only a major sacrifice would impress her. That was how far women had come in their evolution from passive helpmate to separate working partner. It was clear that two careers meant no time for anybody. Emma had given him five years of hers and ended up desperate enough to act in an erotic film to get his attention. Now that she was successful in her own right, she thought it was perfectly fair for him to sacrifice his work to hers for the next five years.
Up
at 110th Street, sweating freely, Jason turned around and started back at a faster pace. By now he was no longer thinking of any of the things that oppressed him. The endorphins had kicked in. His energy was renewed. He felt he could run for an hour and not feel any pain later. Which wasn’t true. He felt optimistic about women in general and Emma in particular, felt somehow it would all work out. Which probably wasn’t true either.
As he passed the Psychiatric Centre for the second time, he glanced at the entrance. He almost fell over his feet at the sight of the only two cops he knew heading into his turf again.
fourteen
Shrinks were a strange species, April thought. The hospital complex was called the Medical Center, but the psychiatric building was named the Psychiatric Centre. The Centre’s towering marble entrance and vast lobby also insisted people take it seriously. A quick check before April and Mike left the precinct confirmed that both of Raymond Cowles’s shrinks had offices in this intimidating building. It was the kind of place that made cops feel like they came from the reeking lower levels of society’s dung heap.
As soon as Mike was on the other side of the revolving door, he stuck a finger in the collar of his gray shirt and pulled at his shiny silver tie, stretching his neck. He didn’t exactly fit in with the M.D.s of the world. The bulge of his holster was just visible around his left armpit. His sharp clothes and sharp watchfulness, his gleaming black hair, and the bravado in the smile under his abundant mustache didn’t help either.
April shifted her bag from one shoulder to the other, hoping the security guard having an animated conversation with a maintenance man across the wide stone floor would not suddenly realize he’d just let in two people with guns and call the cops. They headed for reception.