by Leslie Glass
The phone didn’t care. It just rang on and on, as if mocking her distress. “Come on, Bobbie, pick up.”
He wasn’t picking up, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. Gunn Tram trudged up and down the three flights of creaking stairs between their apartments all Friday evening looking for him.
“Just because I have a phone doesn’t mean I have to use it,” he had told her on the other occasions when she complained about having to come down the stairs to find him. “Maybe I don’t want to be found.”
That night he didn’t want to be found. Even if Dr. Dickey hadn’t come down to her office asking a lot of questions about “people who had grudges against the Centre,” Gunn would have been worried. Bobbie had the look in his eye that something was bothering him. When something was bothering Bobbie, Gunn knew, he usually did something about it that bothered other people.
Gunn was scared for him. Bobbie didn’t mean to get in trouble. But like today, when Dr. Dickey asked if Bobbie could possibly still be hanging around the Centre—well, trouble just seemed to come to him. It hurt Gunn that Bobbie made people mad when he hadn’t done a thing. He was like a magnet for bad luck. She didn’t understand why the doctors cared so much about crazy people they couldn’t even help, and didn’t try to help Bobbie who’d been such a good nurse to them.
Around eleven Gunn walked over to the French Quarter bar on Broadway looking for him. Brian said he hadn’t been in. She sat drinking beer at the bar until midnight. At midnight she walked home slowly.
Bobbie’s apartment was in the space that used to be the kitchen when the brownstone was a private home. It was just below ground level at the back of the building. Steps up to the back door led to a long-unused garden. His two windows were not visible from the street.
Gunn knew, from the long list of grievances about him, that Bobbie often came in and out the back way, frightening the neighbors at odd hours. And she had to agree with them that the way Bobbie did things was a little peculiar. Often when he came to see her, he climbed the fire escape and entered through an open window. Gunn saw him as eccentric and attributed his strangeness to his unusual childhood in Louisiana and the terrible things he had witnessed in Vietnam.
All her life, Gunn had been interested in people. The sameness of the population in Sweden had been the real reason she left home at sixteen, all alone, to come to America. She had wanted a different kind of life from her parents’ dull repetition of their parents. Even then, she had liked all kinds of people. Their stories fascinated her, especially the sad ones. She felt she could be any one of them and her heart was filled with a powerful desire to help. Gunn worked at the Psychiatric Centre because she craved the tragedy and disappointed dreams she found there. So many sad stories made her own uneventful life seem almost joyful. At the Centre, there were very few happy stories, many damaged people. Gunn had loved Bobbie from the first conversation she’d had with him over fifteen years ago. He had come to work at the Centre with the same wish to help she had. He was good to those poor mad creatures on the locked wards, people Gunn was afraid of being too close to even though the shrinks taught tolerance, and Gunn had tried hard to learn their lessons. Bobbie cared about the little people, and so did she.
All the thirty years Gunn had worked at the Centre the docs had joked about how everybody was crazy, how it was all right to be crazy. Over the years, Gunn had watched the degree of craziness escalate. Now it was spilling out all over the place, and it was still all right. The docs, the patients, the residents—nobody complained about anybody. Even Gunn could tell that some of the young women residents coming in were very strange, very strange indeed.
In the old days, all the iffy things like attitude and sexual preference were watched very carefully. In those days, a person couldn’t be too strange and still qualify as a doc Supervisors were informed about every little thing every resident did. It was hard to get into the Centre, and even after they were in, residents were carefully screened during all the years of their training. Gunn had loved working in Personnel in those days. Little notes about any peculiarity were added to everyone’s files. But not anymore. PCness decreed that everybody had a right to keep whatever baggage they came in with and never mind how it affected the patients or the system. It was scary what people got away with now. Gunn knew for a fact that many of the doctors took a wide range of painkillers; even the great Harold Dickey himself had a weakness for Johnnie Walker that he indulged in in his office throughout the afternoon following lunch. There were a lot of things going wrong that Gunn had to worry about.
The light was on under Bobbie’s door when Gunn returned to the brownstone. She stood in the dim, cramped hallway outside his apartment and knocked timidly.
“Bobbie?”
Inside, she could hear movement, but he didn’t answer. “Bobbie, you in there? I got to talk to you.”
Sounds of the toilet flushing upstairs, then a slammed door. Gunn put her face so close to Bobbie’s door her lips almost touched the faded paint. She whispered urgently, “Bobbie, you remember Dr. Dickey, don’t you?… Dr. Dickey came to see me today. He asked about people with grudges against the Centre, people who hated Dr. Treadwell.… Bobbie, you don’t hate Dr. Treadwell, do you?”
No answer from inside. Gunn felt dizzy in the gloomy silence, but she had something to say, and she was going to finish no matter what. “Of course, I didn’t tell him anything—I didn’t know anything—Bobbie, Dr. Dickey took the files, lots of files. He said he wanted to check out all the disciplinary actions taken against staff for patient errors. He took some patient files, too.…
“Bobbie, he took the files, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop him. You know he’s the head of the Committee. He wanted them, and everybody from upstairs was already gone. There wasn’t even anybody to ask if it was all right.”
Gunn could hear Bobbie breathing on the other side of the door, but he didn’t open up. She said, “Something’s going on, Bobbie. Dr. Dickey told me somebody wants to hurt Dr. Treadwell. I feel so bad about it I didn’t know what to say.” There was a pause while Bobbie, unseen behind his door, breathed in and out.
“Oh, Bobbie, I’m afraid. Please … Tell me you don’t hate Dr. Treadwell. You wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, would you?”
Gunn did not like the dark, the tight space, the dense stillness in the decaying building, the slight wheeze at the end of Bobbie’s exhalations. She knew him, knew he sat on her fire escape sometimes in the middle of the night, not doing anything at all except breathing in and out just like this. She remembered Dr. Dickey’s own words so many times over the years: “We’re all a little crazy, Gunn. Don’t let it worry you one little bit. Most crazy people never hurt anyone but themselves.” Gunn had tried not to let the crazy things worry her.
Suddenly the light went off under Bobbie’s door, and his voice came out of the dark. “Go away, old woman. The bastard is looking for someone else, not me.”
Now she breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m glad, sweetheart, because your file was one of the ones he took.”
“Fuck!” Some heavy object crashed against the flimsy wooden door, stressing the lock and cracking the wood. Gunn jumped back, cringing.
“Bobbie? Bobbie, don’t get upset, please don’t get upset. We can talk about this—”
But Bobbie didn’t want to talk about it. Gunn heard him slam the door to the garden and knew he’d gone out again. She started worrying again, this time that he’d go out drinking and get into another fight. She felt real bad about upsetting him.
thirty
A slick of sweat gathered on Clara’s upper lip and between her breasts and thighs as she brooded about Hal’s many betrayals in the hot sun by the pool at Arch Candel’s beach house on Sleepy Key, a prime spot in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Sarasota, Florida. She had considered the situation with Hal on the plane from New York to Florida and was sure she was doing the right thing, wondered how long it would take to end. In front of her, thousands of di
amond lights from the Gulf winked between the palms that studded the thick green lawn bordering the beach.
Senator Candel himself sat farther back on the patio at an antique iron table that had been made for his family at the turn of the century. The valuable table with the signs of the zodiac arranged in a circle around its top was badly rusted from the salt and humidity and heavy rains of many summers. Its owner showed the same signs of wear. Born fair, Arch Candel was permanently reddened and freckled from a lifetime of deep and dangerous sunburns. Even now he was indifferent to the hazards of sun worship. He was shirtless at noon, wore only a pair of navy swimming trunks with a Polo insignia on them. Beneath his shrewd and penetrating blue eyes, the sun damage could be seen on jowly cheeks and a red nose that was needle-thin and peeling. His long bony legs supported a thick upper body that had begun softening many years ago. A substantial slab of gut spilled over the edge of the waistband of his trunks.
Clara studied him reading at his rusty table.
He felt her gaze and looked up. “What?”
She was mentally reliving her old grievances about Hal when she thought she loved him, and the recent incidents of Hal’s harassment now that he wanted her back. The complete bastard! The arrogant old fool to think he could get away with this. She pumped up her outrage and didn’t even hear Arch speak.
The first message she’d received had come nearly six months ago. It was composed of letters cut from newspaper headlines and pasted on a piece of hospital stationery. The neatly folded paper had been on the podium when she’d gone up to introduce a seminar. She’d silently read the words Someone you love is going to die standing in front of an auditorium full of people, then had crumpled up the paper and begun her welcome speech. At the time the episode passed immediately from her mind. She’d thought the thing was a joke, possibly not even meant for her. Someone you love is going to die. Clara had a literal mind; she didn’t love anyone, so she wasn’t vulnerable in that way. Therefore, the note probably was intended for someone else, another speaker. Only after, when there had been several more nasty threats, had she become annoyed.
“Darlin’?”
Clara shook her head, adjusting the brim of her straw hat to hide her face. She was lying on a chaise with a green-and-white-striped mattress under an umbrella by the pool. Her bathing suit was basic black, cut low in the bosom and high on the hips. She crossed her legs the other way to even her tan.
Distracted, Arch removed the reading glasses from the end of his sharp nose and twirled them between two fingers. For the last two hours he’d been studying the thousand-page committee report he’d have to debate in Senate hearings the following week. Without the ballast of his elbows, the sheaf of printed pages fell shut from its own weight, closing on his notes and the list of questions he was preparing to ask Clara to get her opinion on the issues.
“Darlin’, I know something’s bothering you. And whatever bothers you bothers me.” His soft lazy voice came from between thin chapped lips, but no one who heard it was ever fooled. Arch Candel was as tough as the ’gators he grew up with.
He was also a man who knew what he wanted. When he met Clara Treadwell, he was still reeling from the long decline and death from cancer of his wife of twenty-eight years. He had been instantly impressed by Clara’s energy, her electric smile and shrewd intelligence. He’d wanted to marry her immediately despite the undisguised misgivings of his two grown children. He’d shown Clara his houses in Florida and Washington and told her she could redecorate them as she wished, she would be the mistress of all he owned.
At the time Clara had just emerged from her second divorce, still childless and with nearly a million dollars in her pockets. Her mother, like Arch’s wife only a few months before, was in the final stages of cancer and not taking it well. On her deathbed, she reviled her daughter for abandoning her years ago, then for using one man after another to get ahead Clara’s dying mother repeatedly called her a slut and a whore. Her mother’s words never touched Clara. She knew it wasn’t any parade of men that enraged her mother. What her mother bitterly resented was that Clara had succeeded and succeeded on her own terms.
Clara was successful, but she had also been burned a few times in her rise to power. Though she would not admit it in any conscious way, deep inside she felt she had been hurt, even abused, by the men in her life. She touched the bandage covering the cut on her hand. The cut was healing and now itched unbearably. Clara knew she had reached the top of her profession. She knew there were people out there who could hurt her if she wasn’t constantly vigilant. She also knew she had to be careful who she married next. Arch was almost too eager to get her. He was crowding her, pushing.
Arch stood up, patted his belly, and stretched. Then he crossed the mossy stone patio to the pool area where Clara lay. “You’re awful quiet, gorgeous.” He lowered his bulk to the edge of her recliner and began stroking Clara’s carefully tanned thighs.
This close she could see the telltale dry patches on his leathery skin and the sweat trickling down his sagging breasts, tiny rivulets catching in his graying chest hairs. “Come on, baby, tell Daddy what’s bothering you.” Arch’s freckled hands traveled up her leg, two fingers heading toward the tight elastic bands of her bathing suit.
This one liked tight places—elevators, backseats of cars. His fantasy was pretending he was still a boy who had to grab any opportunity he could get, fight the good battle with unyielding undergarments so he could get to the magic buttons with his fingers and his tongue and hit the jackpot. Clara knew what he liked. At the moment the trusty appendage he called his dick—which hadn’t been much in use for the previous several years—was already straining against the confines of his swim trunks. Arch believed that Clara made him young again, and for that he was excessively grateful. He leaned over her, heavy and hot, his chapped thin lips and peeling nose diving first into her perfumed cleavage.
He smelled of soap and shaving cream, for he didn’t even bother to use suntan lotion or sunblock. Clara closed her eyes against the insult of his ruined skin and saw behind her eyes the mountain of edema that had been her mother in those final appalling days. Lying in her hospital bed with a hugely swollen belly and legs, cadaverous arms and face, and hair falling out by the fistful, she’d bitterly predicted Clara’s own end. “You’ve never cared about anybody but yourself,” she’d shrilled. “When you die no one will care about you.” Her mother’s last words had been a curse; Clara did not grieve for her.
She did worry about Arch, though. Clara had warned him many times to see a doctor and have his skin examined, to stop sitting like this in the sun. But the Senator was a stubborn man, focused only on what interested him, and what interested him now was a foray into the damp and musky depths of her body.
Sucking on a freed nipple, he was simultaneously working his way into the crotch of her bathing suit with two fingers and moaning deep in his throat. His concentration was complete. He was indifferent to the possibility that anyone walking on the beach and pausing to look at the splendid house through the trees could see them.
Clara squeezed her eyes shut. She allowed the familiar sensations of a man’s overwhelming and reckless lust to soothe her. She let her body take over and provide him with a feast of the senses he couldn’t resist. He loved her body, the tempting contours of her breasts, her neck and shoulders, her hips and belly unblemished by the ravages of procreation or illness. He loved the expert suppleness of her female parts well-lubricated and used to pleasure, and so did she. None of it ever failed her. She was a sex queen, a goddess meant for adoration. This old Lothario groaned and panted, another middle-aged man out of control. The excitement of his ardor enflamed her from crotch to belly. She roiled at his probing of her slippery labia, demanding more than fingerplay.
“Let’s go inside,” she murmured.
An hour later, lying on the bed he had shared for so many years with his wife, Arch Candel gazed at his beloved with the devotion she had come to expect from her lovers.
“Darlin’, let’s not wait anymore. Let’s tie the knot.”
Clara pulled up the sheet. “It’s not that simple, Arch.”
“We’re two mature adults in love. What could be more simple?”
Crows screamed in the Australian pines outside. Clara shook her head. She had to be careful, real careful, now. She had a feeling Arch had her under some kind of surveillance. He was interested in that kind of thing, talked about having friends in the FBI.
“Oh, I know you’ve been married before. I know some old patient of yours died this week. In fact, I know your whole history.” Arch waved the history away.
Clara pushed some air through her nose. “How?”
“Never you mind how.”
“What do you know about me, Arch? Tell me.”
“Darlin’, don’t argue with me. I said I know your history—let’s leave it at that.”
“You had me investigated?” Silently she dared him to admit he had.
“No, darlin’, nothing big like that. I just have some sources. Wouldn’t want you to marry me for my groves, would I?”
His orange groves? Clara laughed out loud.
“Or my money.” He laced his fingers across his stomach. “So what’s bothering you? If you can’t trust me with it, who can you trust?”
She could trust no one with all of her. But maybe she could trust Arch with a few pieces. What the hell, maybe he’d be useful. Clara cocked her head to one side and caught sight of a storm cloud gathering in the Gulf.
“Oh, I’m dealing with someone who used to be a nuisance and now is”—she pursed her lips—“getting dangerous.”
“Politically?”
“No, physically.” She sighed with irritation, her mood plunging again.
“Somebody threatening the hospital?”
“Not like that case out West.”
“What was that?”
“There were incidents in one of the genetics labs out there. Did you read about it?”