by Leslie Glass
It was obvious to Jason that indeed the patient’s description of his feelings for Professor S. had the clear ring of truth. And that by year two and a half of RC’s therapy, his therapist and her supervisor were involved in a sexual relationship and were more interested in each other than they were in him. Jason didn’t sleep very well that night. Neither did Emma. Both of them rolled around for hours, periodically coming together to hold and stroke each other in the dark.
It was unseasonably balmy at six-fifty-five when Jason walked up Riverside Drive to meet Clara Treadwell. He was a little hung over from too much white wine and not enough sleep. As he approached her building, the night doorman stood outside by the curb polishing the brass on the canopy supports.
“No one goes in there,” the doorman said coldly when Jason tried to enter the building.
“Dr. Frank to see Dr. Treadwell. She’s expecting me.”
“I’ll have to call up.”
Jason nodded. So call up.
The guy jerked his head toward a man sitting in a car at the curb, then called up, spoke on the intercom, and said to Jason, “You’re okay. Penthouse.”
Clara opened the door even before Jason rang the bell, then, without greeting him, passed through the foyer to the kitchen. “Come in here. I’ll make coffee” was the first thing she said.
She didn’t look as if she’d slept much either. Jason followed her into a kitchen not unlike his and Emma’s. It was large enough to sit in, modern but not trendy. She did have a microwave oven on the counter, which they did not. Jason wasn’t sure what microwaves were good for, but only the night before Emma had said she wanted one.
He watched Clara grind some coffee beans from a Zabar’s bag and dump them into a filter without measuring. Then she found milk in the refrigerator, poured some into a pitcher, put the pitcher in the microwave. Hit a button.
“Sit down,” she said.
Mystified by the milk in the microwave, Jason sat in one of the two chairs at the kitchen table. After a few seconds the machine beeped. Clara took the pitcher of steaming milk out of the machine and set it on the table. “Café au lait,” she said.
“I don’t speak Italian,” he murmured.
“It’s French.”
“Ah. I knew that.”
She smiled. Sure he did. She set two mugs on the table with a sugar bowl. The microwave beeped when the milk was ready. The coffee machine beeped when the coffee was ready. It was a beeping kitchen. Clara poured the coffee and the milk in the proportions she felt were correct for the item she was making. Jason ladled in four heaping teaspoons of sugar, then put down the spoon.
“Ben Hartley called me here last night. Raymond’s insurance company’s lawyer called him yesterday. It looks like the insurance company has to pay the widow. I thought suicide wasn’t covered, but apparently if the policy has been in place for more than a year the company has to pay no matter what the cause of death. They’re going to sue us for the money.”
“Who’s us?” Jason asked.
“Oh, me, the hospital, and anybody else they can think of.”
“What’s the basis of their case?”
“Oh, I treated Ray eighteen years ago. I had an appointment with him two days before he died. They’re going to allege we failed to treat him properly initially and then failed to identify him as a candidate for suicide two months ago when he called and asked to see me again. The insurance company is looking for a million dollars in damages. The widow wants twenty-five million. Ben said that that sum represents a combination of what the widow believes Cowles would have earned in a normal lifetime, plus some kind of compensation for her loss of love and companionship. You know of course he was gay. He’d left her months ago.”
“Isn’t that sort of beside the point?” Jason asked. “Where does Hartley see the liability?”
Clara ignored her coffee and started chewing the lipstick off her lips. “The hospital’s insurance company may take the position that I was treating Cowles, at least this last time, as a private patient and therefore they have no liability. So it’s complicated. Have you read the file?”
Jason nodded. He didn’t ask why she had kept such detailed notes of such a botched job or why she had given them to him.
“The suit is nothing,” she said. “I’m not worried about it. That’s not why I asked you here.”
“Oh?” Jason was worried about it. He sipped the coffee and burned his mouth.
“The police are investigating Dickey’s death. Did you know that?”
“Oh? What are they looking for?”
Now Clara picked up her cup. The liquid on the surface must have been just cool enough. She drank some. “They don’t think Dickey’s death was natural.”
“What do they think?”
“They don’t know.” Clara studied her cup.
“What do you think?” Jason asked.
“I think he was murdered.” Clara let out a sigh and stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “You probably noticed the surveillance downstairs.”
“Surveillance?”
“Yes, I’ve had to call in the FBI.” She brushed her hair back with one hand, indicating her importance.
“Clara, how did the police get involved in the first place?”
She narrowed her eyes, looking back on Hal’s last moments. “Something wasn’t right. In ER, when they finally stopped working on him, I just said it seemed—medically odd. I thought it might be useful to run the toxes.” She shrugged. “I was right. Poor Hal had a lethal mixture of alcohol and Elavil in his blood. If I hadn’t asked, the murderer might have gotten away with it.”
She looked at Jason and shuddered. “Who knows, I might have been next.”
Jason frowned. “How do you know it wasn’t an accident?”
“Jason, you saw me cut my hand. You saw that used condom at the meeting Friday morning. You yourself told me something had to be done about it Well, I’ve done something. I’m having the FBI take over the case.”
“I see.” Surreptitiously, Jason added another teaspoon of sugar to his coffee. He wondered what the police had to say about that. “Well, that about does it,” he said.
“Not quite.”
“Oh?” What now?
“I’d like you to have the specimen tested for me privately, Jason.”
“What specimen?”
“The sperm from the condom.”
“You’re kidding.”
Clara shook her head. She wasn’t kidding.
He was appalled. “Why?”
“Because I know who killed Dickey. I want to make sure he’s caught.”
“Then give the condom to the FBI agent. Or give it to the police.”
Clara shook her head again. “I want to be sure there aren’t two people involved.”
“Two people?”
“Right.”
Jason swallowed the last of his syrupy coffee. He couldn’t get a fix on what game Clara was playing. He was beginning to think that Clara might be disturbed.
“Who are the two possibilities?”
Clara pressed her lips together. “A male nurse from the Centre overdosed a patient with Elavil about a year ago. The young inpatient had a psychotic incident and jumped off a terrace. The nurse’s name was Robert Boudreau. Dickey was the one who investigated the case and had Boudreau fired.”
“You think this man Boudreau was angry enough to murder Harold?”
Clara nodded. “I saw him outside the ER the day Hal died.”
Jason was silent. “What about the condom?”
Clara answered the question by retrieving a package from her freezer. She put it down on the table between them, pushed it to his side with one finger. “I think Boudreau was behind the incidents with the scalpel and the condoms, too.”
“Then why not let the FBI deal with it?” Jason suggested.
“There is a very slight possibility there won’t be a match with his blood type.”
“I see. Who else do you suspect?”
&
nbsp; “I’m not entirely sure.” Clara did not look at him.
If Jason hadn’t spent so much time reading Ray Cowles’s file the night before and seen such intimacy between Dickey and Clara, he would never have made the leap. But Clara had given him the file and Jason had studied it. He knew how deeply involved Clara had been with Dickey.
“Someone you don’t want implicated,” he said, “like the victim.”
“Yes.” Clara met his eyes. “You know Hal took advantage of me years ago. He manipulated Ray’s case, and he manipulated me. He was my supervisor. I had no choice but to follow his instruction.”
But Clara had not been acting under Hal’s supervision when she met with Ray two days before his death or when she spoke to him only minutes before he put the plastic bag over his head. Jason could see the strings. Clara didn’t want the FBI to know about her troubled relationship with Dickey. Jason had the Cowles file, which incriminated her in both cases. Now Clara wanted him to take the condom.
“Well,” he said finally. “I’ll have the condom tested if you want me to, but I’ll have to give it to the police. I have no choice about that. This is a criminal investigation. I have to cooperate with them.”
“The police are not competent to deal with this.”
“I would disagree with that view. But it’s up to you. I can’t take evidence in a homicide unless I turn it over to the police.”
Clara hesitated. He could see her weighing the pros and cons of different alliances. For some reason she wanted the protection of the FBI but did not intend to fully cooperate with them. She was playing a dangerous game. After a few minutes, however, she agreed and handed over the plastic package. Jason left with it almost immediately, pulling on the ragged growth of his new beard. He didn’t have long to reach April Woo before both their days got complicated. He wanted the thing out of his possession within the hour.
forty-seven
“Let’s get this straight.” Sergeant Joyce stopped to sneeze all over the phone as she replaced the receiver. “Jason Frank gave you a used condom that came from Treadwell’s appointment book a week ago?”
April stood in front of Sergeant Joyce’s desk and nodded. She wondered if this was a good time to tell her about the FBI.
Joyce sneezed again and barked, “Sit down—you’re giving me a headache.”
April flinched and moved over to the windowsill, where the air was still leaking cold. She knew of some Chinese remedies that might help her supervisor’s condition, but she didn’t think the Sergeant would appreciate them.
“And you did what with it?” The Sergeant honked.
“Uh, I took it to the labs to be tested.”
“Give me a hint, April Tested for what?”
“Well, to get a blood type, to try for a match with—”
The door opened and Mike came in with a funny smile on his face. “You asked for me?”
“What’s with you, Sanchez?” Joyce hacked into a paper napkin.
“What?”
“You know something I don’t?”
Mike turned to April and winked, then shook his head, looking serious. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing, just the Feebies want in, that’s all. What the fuck is going on here?”
Mike’s crooked eyebrows came together. “The feds? In what?”
“I just got a call from Special Agent”—she glanced down at the note she had scribbled, then sneezed on—“Stephen Daveys. He wants to work closely with us on the case. He’ll be in to chat with us at four. That gives us about four hours to clear it.” She barked out a short laugh.
April didn’t share her enjoyment. They’d been talking for several minutes and the Sergeant had waited until Mike appeared to mention it
Mike scratched his nose. “Excuse me, I must have missed something here. What case are we talking about?”
“It remains a little confused, a little hazy, Sanchez. What would the feds want with the case of an unnatural death of a shrink at the Psychiatric Centre? You tell me.”
“Hmmm. Could be a number of things.” He went silent, then glanced at April. “I heard you were at the labs this morning. We missed each other.”
“Detective,” Joyce said sarcastically, “why don’t you tell the Sergeant what you were doing there.”
April made a clicking noise with her tongue. It was the same noise Skinny Dragon Mother made when she was about to release her pent-up rage. April sniffed cautiously, wondering if Joyce’s cold happened to be traveling her way, clicked her tongue again. Then she cleared her throat and smiled at Mike.
“I had some sperm I wanted tested.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said. “Whose?”
“Dr. Treadwell thinks it came from the guy who offed Dickey.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mike said again. “I don’t remember any sperm at the death scene.”
April kept her face straight. “It came up before the death. It appeared at some meeting Dr. Treadwell was having to discuss the Cowles case on Friday. Someone put it in her appointment book.”
Mike chewed on his mustache. “Uh-huh,” he said. “And how did you get it?”
She squirmed a little. “Jason Frank gave it to me.”
“No kidding. How did he get it?” Frustrated, Sergeant Joyce grabbed a hank of hair to torture.
“Jason Frank is Dr. Treadwell’s consultant on the Cowles suicide.”
“And what does that have to do with this?” Joyce screamed.
“Dickey was Treadwell’s supervisor on Cowles’s treatment eighteen years ago. And Treadwell and the hospital are being sued for twenty-six million by the widow and the insurance company.”
“Oh, shit.” Joyce let go of the hair to blow her nose. “Oh, shit. I don’t like this.”
“And you think …”
April threw out a possible. “Dickey’s the only witness to Cowles’s treatment. If he’s dead, he can’t testify in a malpractice case.”
“What are you suggesting here, April? You think the Director of the Psychiatric Centre—a woman who happens to be on the President’s Commission on Mental Health—killed her former supervisor to prevent him from taking the stand against her in a case he supervised eighteen years ago? That sound plausible to you?” Joyce was still screaming.
“They getting much federal funding?” Sanchez drummed his fingers on the armrests of the chair he finally fell into.
“Who?”
“The hospital, hospital community programs—”
“Bingo, a nice fed connection. Fine—let them deal,” Joyce muttered, wiping her hands of it.
“Yeah, but it might not be that. Hell, the Feebs can come in on anything. They’ve got a thousand excuses to step on any toes they want. Hey, maybe it’s not homicide they’re interested in. Maybe it’s some kind of corruption.” Sanchez turned to April. “So what’s this about a used rubber in your possession this morning, April?”
“There’s more to the Treadwell thing,” April said. “Jason confirmed what Mrs. Dickey said about Treadwell and her husband. They did have an affair while Treadwell was in training there. After Treadwell qualified, she left for a dozen years, married, divorced, worked in California; married again, divorced again. She came back here as head of the psychiatric hospital three years ago.
“About six months ago she started dating a U.S. Senator and about the same time began getting threatening notes. Last week Jason was present when she reached in her desk drawer and was cut by a surgical scalpel someone had rigged up in there. The used condom turned up at a meeting when she opened her leather appointment book—”
“And Jason Frank told you all this?” Joyce interrupted skeptically.
“He told me about the events he witnessed. Her personal history I investigated on my own,” April replied.
“Well, good work, Detective,” Joyce said sarcastically.
April lifted a shoulder. Thanks.
“So what’s his interest?” Mike demanded.
“Jason’s? I’m not entirely sure.”
“And what’s the relationship, huh? What does he stand to gain here?” Mike again.
April shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“So, Dr. Treadwell is seeing a U.S. Senator. Whew.” Joyce blew her nose loudly. “And what about the threatening letters?”
“Apparently, she didn’t take them seriously.” April spread out her hands, palms up. “She didn’t want anyone to know.”
“And now I guess she’s changed her mind.”
“Now she thinks Dickey was murdered by the guy who’s been harassing her.” April didn’t add that Clara was responsible for involving the FBI.
“Uh-huh. Does Treadwell have a name for this guy?”
“Yeah. Boudreau, Robert Boudreau. He was a former nurse, fired last year after the death of a patient—a young guy who jumped off a terrace.… ”
Joyce’s eyes were wide. She chewed on her lip with dismay. “I remember the case. This is real sketchy stuff, April.”
April nodded. “It has a strong odor,” she agreed.
“And why did Jason Frank tell you all this?”
“I guess Dr. Treadwell doesn’t trust us. She told Jason she’s having the FBI take over the case. Maybe he’s afraid we can’t handle them,” April murmured. “But then again, maybe he likes me.” She smiled.
“Likes you!” Sanchez exploded. “Likes you? I’ll break his fucking head.”
“Shut up!” Joyce screamed, then went into a coughing fit.
“You want some water?” April asked evenly.
“I’m fine. Ghhhh.” Joyce cleared her throat and spit. “So Treadwell had a pretty strong motive for killing Dickey. And let’s not forget that she was with him when he died.”
“Let’s not forget it,” Mike said. “And maybe the Feebs are here to help her cover up.”
Joyce started plucking at her hair again. “So this mischief may be a fairy tale. Anyone see the threatening letters?”