Dead Crazy

by Nancy Pickard

  “Why are you always so unpleasant to me?” he said.

  “Why do you always ask for it?” I replied, and slammed down the phone. I then spent a few moments staring at the phone, feeling acutely embarrassed. Why did I do that? Why was I so unpleasant to him? He was a perfectly nice man, and he was only out to make a buck like any other developer. Yes, maybe it was a buck to be made at the expense of needier people, but he hadn’t known that when he got the idea. Ease off, Cain, I thought. And don’t be an ass. Call him back and apologize.

  I reached for the phone but drew back my hand.

  I couldn’t do it. I wanted to do it, I really did, but I was afraid he’d say something to set me off again.

  There was a sound of typing from the outer office.

  God, I hoped that Faye hadn’t been listening—she’d always idolized him, and my behavior would have done nothing toward removing the clay from my feet. Hung up on him. Jeez, Cain.

  I felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to call my husband and touch home base.

  “Hi, honey,” I said, when he came on the line.

  “Where’s Derek, Jenny?”

  “Derek? Oh, well, Faye was being tactful, Geof. She didn’t want to tell you that Derek seems to have said the hell with it, and flown the coop. When we arrived this morning, he had already gone. I guess he came in before the office opened and cleaned out his belongings.”

  There was silence at his end of the line for a moment, before he said, “He’s not at home either.”

  “No,” I agreed. “At least he wasn’t as of about an hour ago. What do you want with him anyway?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me he had a key to the old church basement?”

  The back of my scalp crawled, just as it had earlier that day, only now I knew why. “I forgot, but so what? It was a church, a lot of people must have old keys to it. I mean, Geof, you can’t possibly think that Derek had anything to do with that murder. Do you?”

  “You told me he was on that block last night.”

  “Well, yes, but-”

  “What time was that?”

  “Uh, well, he called me about ten-thirty, when he got home, so—”

  “How do you know he called from home?”

  “I guess I don’t, actually—”

  “Did he say anything about going into the basement?”

  “No. Why would he do that? No, of course not.”

  “Maybe he went in to look around again; that wouldn’t be so unusual, not if you’re considering buying it.”

  “Well, I guess it wouldn’t. But, Geof—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not being clear. I’m not accusing Derek of anything, Jenny. I’m worried about him. He had a key, he was in the neighborhood. There was a killing. And now he’s missing. The back door was jimmied, which is probably how the killer got in. But Derek might have used his key to get in the front door. We’re wondering if he saw something, or heard something, maybe even walked in on it. It was a particularly bloody and violent murder, and …”

  He paused, but I didn’t fill the silence. I was too upset to speak.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “You don’t need these details. I’ll shut up. Listen, Jenny, maybe Derek woke up in the middle of the night, got pissed off at you for firing him, and decided to clear out of town temporarily. It’s probably only coincidence that he’s gone. I just want to find him to be sure of that. So if he calls you, or if he contacts Faye, you tell him to call us. All right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you think of any place he might be? With parents? Brothers or sisters? Friends? A favorite place to get away from it all?”

  “Faye will know. I’ll switch you.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry about this.”

  “Break this gently to Faye, will you? Hold on.”

  “All right, but come back on the line when she gets off, will you? I have something else to tell you.”

  Great, I thought.

  I called out to Faye to pick up the phone, and then I sat rigidly at my desk, clutching the edge of it with my fingers, watching the back of her head as she absorbed this latest police bulletin. When she had finished the conversation, she wheeled her swivel chair around and stared in at me. Faye looked as if she had just been told that one of her own sons had been in an automobile accident, his condition unknown. I picked up the receiver again and punched down the button to put Geof back on my extension.

  “Okay,” I said, “what’s the other good news?”

  “In the course of questioning Mrs. Paine,” Geof said, “the detectives asked for the name of her brother’s psychiatrist. She gave them quite a list because it seems he’s been through a number of institutions and doctors. Would you like to guess who the most recent one was?”

  “You’re going to tell me it’s Marsha, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  No wonder she’d said, “We can’t talk about that now,” when I had told her the police were looking for Mob. Poor Marsh, I thought: she must have been feeling a tremendous conflict of interests.

  “Are you going to talk to her?” I asked him.

  “Yes, I thought I’d better do it personally. I’ve already set up a meeting with her after her last appointment, five-thirty, her house.”

  “May I join you?”

  “Yes, if you want to.”

  We said good-bye to one another and hung up.

  I looked at Faye, to find that she was sitting at her desk, quietly crying.

  “Faye,” I said, “we’ll find him.”

  It was an idle boast, of course, in the same category with “Everything’s going to be all right,” and “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” She looked as if she wanted to believe me, but didn’t, which was an entirely appropriate and realistic attitude on her part. If anyone found Derek, it would be the police; either that, or he’d just show up on his own, wondering what all the fuss was about.

  Outside our windows, the day was getting grayer and the snow was falling harder, making it likely that many businesses would close early. I decided we should join them.

  “Do you want to go home, Faye?”

  She nodded, soundlessly, and then swiveled out of my sight. Soon I heard the small shuffling, clicking, and clattering sounds of a secretary closing her desk for the night. I clicked open my own briefcase and swept Derek’s file and my own notes into it. Then I walked over to the windows, pulled down the shades, and drew the curtains across them. Thin, cool light seeped around the curled edges of the blinds, framing and illuminating the curtains from behind. I bowed my head for a moment in my darkened office. It wasn’t exactly a prayer; it was a respite. Then I gathered my briefcase and purse, walked out of my office, reached back for the light switch, shut the door, and waited beside Faye’s desk for her to finish closing up for the day.

  She worked silently. It looked as if I was the bad guy again. The way she was thinking was that if I hadn’t fired him, he wouldn’t have tried so hard to please me last night, and then he wouldn’t have gotten into the danger he might be in. Ergo: all my fault.

  Ordinarily, Faye and I would have confessed our fears and tried to comfort each other, but the only comfort she’d take from me now was news that Derek was safe at home. She was usually more fair-minded than this; I didn’t know what had gotten into her—unless her motherly instincts were simply overwhelmed by her concern for Derek.

  Finally, she sighed and pushed herself back from her desk.

  “Ready?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Will you drop me at my car?”

  Faye nodded again, so I stopped trying to get her to talk to me. Eventually, she’d figure out that her anger at me was unreasonable. I had not caused Derek’s problems. In the meantime, however, I was the principal who’d kept her child after school, causing him to walk home late, after dark, when perverts waited on street corners. I didn’t feel like trying to defend myself. When she got over blaming me, she’d come around again. In s
ilence, we gathered our purses, coats, hats, put on our boots, held open doors for each other, descended in the elevator, walked to her Volvo, and got in. Faye drove. I gave her directions to my car, and, silently, she followed them. She pulled up in the snow beside my Accord, and I got out of the Volvo. Before shutting the car door, I looked back in at her. She nodded again. What could I say? “Oh, grow up” occurred to me, but I bit my tongue on it.

  Adapting to her language, I nodded back.

  Then I stepped out of the way, slammed the door, and waited for her to drive off. When she didn’t, I realized she was waiting to see if I got my car started safely. Of course, I thought, with a sudden rush of affection for her, mothers worry about the safety of even their most maddening children. Feeling obedient, and maybe a little comforted, I climbed into my own car, started it, then waved triumphantly, foolishly, at her. She nodded—of course—and drove out of the school parking lot. I stared after her, thinking that mothers can be pretty maddening themselves sometimes.

  I drove home and slept for the rest of the afternoon.

  18

  At five o’clock I woke up, with just enough time to dress, heat and gobble a few bites of chili to sustain me, and then drive over to meet Geof at Marsha’s home. When she let me in, he was already there, waiting in her den. As Marsha and I walked past the kitchen door, there was Joe Fabian again, apron and all, washing still more dishes. He glanced up, grinned, and waved a soapy hand at me.

  “What did you do,” I asked her sotto voce, “hire him?”

  She crooked her left arm through my right one and leaned in toward my ear. “We were going to take a few days off, to go somewhere together, but I couldn’t rearrange my schedule. So he took some of his vacation time anyway, and he’s staying here with me. We’re playing house.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “He’s the mommy and you’re the daddy. He stays home and cooks while you go to work every day. Sounds a little kinky to me, Marsh.”

  “I can’t get him to do my laundry, though.”

  “Good for him,” I said.

  She squeezed my arm before letting go of me.

  Geof and I sat together on her sofa for an hour while Marsha sat on the floor in front of us—cross-legged—telling us about her patient Kitt Blackstone.

  “I would have come to you, Geof,” she said, “but I had to think a bit about the ethics of this situation. I called a few of my colleagues this afternoon—hell, I even called one of my old medical school professors—to ask them how they handle situations that put the law in conflict with confidentiality. My final decision is this:

  “I do not personally believe that anyone in this community is at risk from Mob, but because of the nature of his illness, I cannot be absolutely sure of that. I will, therefore, talk to you about the aspects of his case that I think”—and here, she looked hard at Geof, as if to underscore it—“directly impinge upon your case. I will not open my files to you. I will not talk about any other aspects of his history or treatment. You may subpoena me if you like, but I will not voluntarily go any further than I am about to do this afternoon. All right?”

  He smiled a little and shrugged.

  “No commitments, huh?” Marsha asked, and she smiled back at him. “All right. Then save us some time. Tell me what you already know about him.”

  Geof nodded. “He began showing signs of mental illness when he was about sixteen. According to his sister, Kitt suddenly changed from a bright, popular kid to a strange, angry, withdrawn boy who began to flunk out of school. At first, his parents blamed his friends, but they were all bright, popular kids, too. Then his parents suspected drugs, but they couldn’t find any evidence of them. They even thought it might be the influence of rock and roll, but they couldn’t blame it on that for long. They took him to a doctor, and then another doctor, and finally to a shrink, and to make his sister’s long story short, he was finally institutionalized, for the first time, at the age of seventeen.

  “Since then, his life has been a series of trips back and forth between his sister’s house and hospitals, with periods in between when he evidently just wanders, nobody knows where. Sometimes he’s fairly lucid, most of the time he isn’t. His official diagnosis is paranoid schizophrenia, which, as I understand it, is a chronic condition. Mrs. Paine told the detectives that he was finally beginning to show some improvement, under your care. She didn’t know exactly why, but something was beginning to work, and that’s why he got released from the hospital. She was angry at you about that, by the way. Do you know that?”

  Marsha nodded to confirm it.

  “She thinks you let him out too soon.”

  “I took a chance,” Marsha admitted. “You see, the reason he was beginning to improve was not because I performed any kind of analytical miracle on him, but simply because I was lucky enough to get his medications balanced, probably for the first time. Kitt is on an antipsychotic medicine that quiets the voices that speak to him and holds down the hallucinations, and that makes simply all the difference in the world in his ability to function. He’d been on the medicine before, you understand, but the problem was that it has a side effect that makes some patients extraordinarily restless. They tell me it’s awful, and I believe them. So I had worked to balance that drug with another drug that alleviates that side effect. And it was working. He felt better. He was getting better. And I thought he was ready for another try at outpatient treatment again. That’s why I signed his release from the hospital.”

  The problem and the risk, she told us, was that he had to take his medicines properly. His continued recovery—his sanity—depended on it. If he failed to do so, even once, there was the possibility that his psychotic symptoms would commence again, making it difficult for him to have enough of a grasp on reality to remember to take any medicines at all. Or he might take the antipsychotic medicine, but forget to take the pill for the side effect. Then he’d get the side effect, which would discourage him from taking the antipsychotic medicine, which would then make him crazy again. In that sense, it could be a vicious circle. If he got sick again, the voices that spoke to him might even tell him not to take the medicines.

  “And he would obey them,” she told us.

  “Do you think something like this has happened?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “because he has missed his last two appointments with me, something he never does when the voices shut up. The voices don’t like me, you understand, because they know I represent their doom.”

  “You talk about them as if they’re real,” Geof said.

  “Oh, they are very real to Kitt,” Marsha told him. They both suddenly looked sidelong at me, as if including me in the dialogue, but their gesture was more than courtesy, it was a silent, shared concern that said: How’s she taking this, is this too painful for her? It was often like that for me when people got to discussing mental illness; they worried that they were being tactless because of my mother. In response, I always feigned careless objectivity, as I did now. Probably not fooled, Marsha glanced back at Geof, who was probably also not fooled, and continued, “The voices are as real and as loud and as powerful as any voice any of us has ever heard, and they are relentless; they are a constant chorus in his mind. Plus you have to understand that Kitt’s particular voices are biblical in nature, which lends them even more authority.”

  “Why biblical?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Who knows. I don’t. They just appeared—actually, they’ve been whispering to him since he was a small boy, although nobody ever realized it until he got officially sick—and they were demonic from the start. I think the biblical influence may have increased over time, because at some point he began to read the Bible as a means of trying to understand and appease them. Eventually, he read it fanatically, almost every waking moment, because the act of obsessively concentrating on it was the only means he had of trying to shut them up. Of course, the problem was, they directed him to read all the passages about demons, over and over, again and aga
in.

  “He eventually came to believe that they were the various demons mentioned in the New Testament. When he is sick, he believes that only Jesus Christ can drive them out. Unfortunately”—she smiled sadly—“Christ has never ‘spoken’ to him. Kitt, of course, believed that was only because he was himself so evil that Christ turned his face away. That’s what the demon voices told him, anyway. But when he’s taking his medicine properly, he’s rational, and he’s able to accept that the voices are due to some physiological imbalance that we can, to a large extent, although with some side effects, control with medication.”

  “Is he a split personality?” Geof asked.

  “No,” she said, “that’s not what schizophrenia means. It’s true that he does call himself Mob when he’s sick, and sometimes he gets deep enough into his illness to confuse himself with the person in the story. It is also true that he might seem like two different people to you, if you knew him, because when he’s having a psychotic episode, believe me, he’s quite a different person from when he’s relatively sane. He can be quiet and docile, but he can also be a little frightening. In spite of that, ‘Mob’ is more like his personal metaphor. Mob is not a separate personality, as such.”

  “You say he can be frightening,” Geof said. “Do you mean violent? Have these voices ever directed him to hurt somebody?”

  “No,” Marsha said firmly. “I mean, I’ve known him to get furiously angry, and even to throw things—but who hasn’t? But he’s never hurt anyone else, at least not to my knowledge. The voices have many times directed him to harm himself. They have tried to talk him into suicide countless times, and they have nearly succeeded on several occasions. But no, they seem to be inner- and not outer-directed. That’s why I find it so difficult to believe that Kitt is responsible for this crime.”

  “But …” Geof said, letting it dangle.

  Marsha’s head dropped for a moment before she looked back up at him with a discouraged expression.