by Leslie Glass
“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?”
“Well, the condom sighting is legit—”
“That’s a fucking fairy tale, too. What are we supposed to do with that? Why did Frank take the condom? Why did he give it to you? Give me a break.”
“Look, Jason says all Treadwell wants is to have the thing tested to see if the blood type matches Boudreau’s. Then we can nail him.”
“Who the hell is this Boudreau?” Joyce screamed. “How does he tie in? What do we nail him with? Shit, the victim died. Either his death was a suicide, an accident, or somebody offed him. For all we know, Treadwell could have balled this guy Boudreau a week ago and held on to the happy results for just this purpose. The woman kept it for a week. Give me a break, April. This whole thing stinks.”
“So, what do you want to do?”
“Check it out. Check it all out, every piece. Every scrap. I want to know the story here.” She sniffed toward Sanchez. “What about you? You get anything?”
“Only one tiny thing.” Sanchez shrugged. “The Amitriptyline was in syrup form. The in-patients get it in a little cup. They call it bug juice. It comes from the pharmacy on the third floor, but every floor has its own supply. Dickey apparently drank his with the scotch. There were traces of both scotch and Amitriptyline in his empty glass.”
“Dickey was a doctor. He must have known that mixing the two would be dangerous.… Suicide?” Joyce said hopefully.
Mike shook his head. “Remember, there was no bottle of scotch, no container of the drug on the scene. No note.”
Joyce tore at her hair again. Then suddenly she threw up her hands. “Get out of here. Fill in the dots by four—and get me some chicken soup for this damn cold.”
forty-eight
The bean burrito and guacamole sat heavy in April’s stomach as she headed out into the field after lunch. Lunch with Sanchez when it was his turn to choose—and he chose Mexican always—made her want to get into bed and sleep it off. Aside from the earthy spices and thickness of food in her mouth, she had to be on her guard with him all the time. He was as hot as the small red chilies on the plate you weren’t supposed to eat, and there was always another meaning to everything he said. April had no background for this kind of banter.
Playfulness was against everything Chinese. Severe punishment as a spur to improvement was the hallmark of her culture. There was no such thing as positive reinforcement. Compassion was something she’d learned on the streets of New York. And sex—well, as her Italian supervisor in Chinatown used to say, “Get outta here. Forget about it.”
Out of sight, out of mind was the Chinese philosophy on sex. Better if you didn’t have it, but i
f you had to have it, you didn’t talk about it. April had never heard her father refer to the physical aspect of married life. On the rare occasions Ja Fo Woo chose to say anything about anything, his remarks were limited to what children owed their parents, what wives owed their husbands, and what courses should be served for dinner. Occasionally, he had some things to say about his digestion. He had no sense of humor in two languages. Likewise her mother.
As for her former boyfriend, Jimmy Wong, forget about it. Jimmy used to tell April she didn’t love him enough (and didn’t do enough for him) to make her insecure about her ability to please him and motivate her, like Avis, to try harder.
At lunch Mike had reminded her of the Latinas in high school, with their pushed-up breasts and glued-on pants, the can of hairspray whipped out in the girls’ room. Always talking, laughing, teasing, spraying their hair, getting ready to hit on boys.
“You see Carlos over there? He es sooo cool. The way he look in those tight jeans—so good. You see hes bike, so low. Esta noche I take heem. Véalo usted mismo.”
Mike kept telling her that kind of thing was normal, that she should lighten up and enjoy it. It seemed an impossible assignment What if she lightened up about him and he decided he didn’t like her after all? What if he opened the wrong door and some bad guy’s Glock blew him away? It didn’t seem worth the trouble.
“Querida. Hey—wait a minute.” Mike hurried after her.
She ignored him. There wasn’t an unmarked unit available, so she was debating taking her own car over to the Psychiatric Centre, where she had three interviews lined up. The trouble with taking her own car was the Centre’s parking garage was nearly two blocks away from the Centre and the wind was fierce over by the river. But if she left her car on the street, someone might try to steal her radio.
Mike caught up with her and took her arm. “Hey, what’s the matter?”
“You know.”
“Oh, come on, can’t you take a joke?”
“Don’t play with me, Mike.”
“Oy, querida, playing is life. What else is there? Dios, I pity the guy who gets you. Can’t do this. Can’t do that.”
She punched him lightly on the arm. “Knock it off.”
“Some life he’ll have. With your sulks all the time, and never any play, I bet his cojones will shrivel up and die.”
April laughed in spite of herself. “Eat your heart out, Mike.”
“I am,” he admitted, then, “What’s the matter? I thought we had a good time at lunch.”
“Maybe you were having a good time. I don’t like the secrecy and games. If you know something, tell me.”
“If you don’t like secrecy and games, then you’re in the wrong business, baby. Go into hairdressing.”
“You know what I mean.”
He shrugged, smiling. “The whole thing is a puzzle, querida. These cases are the least of it.”
“So something’s coming down.”
He nodded solemnly. “You guessed it, something’s coming down.”
“Am I being reassigned?”
He shrugged again.
“Come on, what’s coming down? Are you telling or not?”
“How about not.” Mike looked over as more uniforms joined the first two on the sidewalk outside the fence. The uniforms were talking and laughing.
“Thanks, pal.” April watched them, too.
“Oh, all right, if you really want to know, give me a kiss and I’ll tell you.”
She shook her head. Not a chance.
“Okay, so sue me for sexual harassment.”
“Maybe later, when things slow down,” she muttered.
“Bueno, I’ll look forward to it. See you at four,” Mike said, and walked away.
At three April was sitting in the academic office of Dr. Lionel Hambug gathering her thoughts. Sally Ann Dickey had given her permission to check out her husband’s private office in the Medical Office Building, so she had gone there first. She found a room furnished with leather chairs and a leather couch. It had an artificial bamboo tree in the corner that needed dusting. Books and periodicals lined the bookshelves, and in the cupboards below, the deceased had kept files and reprints of his articles. April looked through the reprints quickly. Genetics seemed to have been Dickey’s area of interest. His files were full of graphs and charts.
In his middle desk drawer she’d found an appointment book held shut with a rubber band. She opened it to check out the coming weeks. Dickey’s time had been fully booked for the whole month of November. According to his book, he planned to speak at an association meeting in Miami in mid-December. He’d made a note to himself to inform (his letters were a scrawl) about the subject of his talk. He had blocked out the following week as a vacation and written “Aruba” across the days. His wife had not mentioned any trip to the Caribbean. Nor had Sally Ann known that in the last year Harold had added two modest life-insurance policies to those he already had and named psychoanalytic associations as beneficiaries of both of them. April had not yet been able to reach his lawyer to find out the contents of his will. No medications were kept in this office, but there was a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the bottom drawer. Johnnie Walker happened to be the favorite brand of the Chinese. It was expensive, but even her father drank it—showed what a big man he was. This particular bottle of Johnnie Walker was full and had not been opened. April closed the drawer, leaving it there.
“How can I help you?”
Dr. Hambug regarded her with expressionless eyes. He had granted her six minutes of his time and by the look of his face and surroundings, it seemed clear he would not allow a second more. He was a small, curly-haired man, clean-shaven, thin as a rice cracker, and clearly a tense and aggressive person even in repose. He wore a brown glen-plaid suit with a pale green shirt and brown tie and sat in a wooden rock-and-rolling chair similar to April’s in the squad room. It was like the old railroad stationmaster’s chair, hard and unforgiving to the back and bottom, not the shrink-industry-standard padded-leather job.
The chair creaked as he rocked back and forth waiting for her answer.
“I’m investigating the death of Dr. Dickey.”
“Yes, you told me that on the phone. What exactly are you looking for?” Now there was a slight gleam of curiosity in the doctor’s eyes.
“Dr. Dickey was working in his office the day he died and it’s not entirely clear to us what happened. We’re trying to establish his state of mind so we can—”
“You think Harold Dickey might have committed suicide?” Dr. Hambug seemed surprised. “Harold?”
“It’s a possibility. That or an accident.” Or a homicide.
“Gee.” Hambug stared at the reproduction of some frenzied sunflowers on his wall.
April knew it was a famous painting but not why. She didn’t know anything about art. “Does that sound plausible to you, Doctor?”
Hambug tore his eyes away from the sunflowers and smiled at her. “Plausible?”
“Your office is next door to his. You must have known him pretty well.”
“We had lunch together two or three times a week for about twenty years. I guess you could say I knew him well.” Hambug glanced at the corner of his desk, where a small clock presented its back to April.
She guessed she had about three minutes left. “What was his state of mind, Dr. Hambug? Would you say he was a happy, contented man, or a disappointed, angry man? Was he happy, was he depressed? Was he tidying up for suicide?”
Hambug swung about while the chair complained noisily for a few seconds. His narrow mouth considered the question while his brow furrowed. “I know what state of mind means,” he said coldly.
April waited. She didn’t like being patronized by people who had dozens more years of higher education than she did and thought she was stupid because of it. “So?”
He shrugged. “Dickey didn’t like the way things were going. His position had eroded at the hospital. Things were changing. Hal found that distressing.”
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br /> “He was in conflict with Dr. Treadwell.”
Hambug ignored that. “Things were changing, but Hal had a devoted following, his students liked him, the staff liked him.”
“What about Dr. Treadwell?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“They had a relationship at one time, apparently he wanted to renew it. What about that?”
“I don’t know about that,” Hambug repeated. “He certainly liked women, always had a woman friend. As far as I know, he hasn’t had anyone special for several years. His relations with his wife, of course, were strained. His children are estranged, I gather. However, Hal was an optimist. He was enormously respected in his field. His time was filled, and he was a fighter. He didn’t have the profile of a suicide.… I’ll miss him.”
Jason had said similar things. But Dr. Treadwell had hinted that Dickey had been depressed. “Was something bothering him lately?” April asked.
Hambug glanced at his little clock again. “Well, there was always something bothering him. Hal was something of a tilter at windmills, but I don’t know of anything in particular. I can’t even hypothesize.”
April bet he could hypothesize pretty accurately if he wanted to. Now that the specified time was up, he could look her over appraisingly. He was doing that when she stood up suddenly. She wanted to leave before she was asked to, reached in her bag for a card. “Thank you for your cooperation, Doctor. You’ve been very helpful. If you think of anything else, you can reach me at this number.”
Surprised, Hambug lurched out of the creaking chair to take the card and open the door for her. It occurred to April that he hadn’t expected her to leave quite so easily. Well, sometimes you got a strike on the first try and sometimes it was necessary to work the fish a different way, come back two, three, even four times until you got all a person had to tell The heels on her ankle-high boots pounded the uncarpeted floor of the hall as she headed to her next interview.