Prodigy

by Charles Atkins

  “Please don’t do this,” he rubbed the sides of his head, pushing his carefully brushed silky blond hair into tangled twirls.

  “We’re going to have to talk about it sometime, Jimmy.”

  “Why? I want to forget! You don’t know how many times I’ve been asked these questions. I don’t remember, and yes, I feel terrible. If I could have it all come undone I would, but I can’t. If I could have those years of my life back, you can’t imagine what that would be worth to me.”

  “What about Nicole Foster’s life?” Barrett asked, wondering if Jimmy’s remorse was real or feigned.

  “Of course,” he said, but not convincingly, “I feel terrible for what happened to her … and her boyfriend, their families.” He glanced up at Barrett, his eyes pleading. “Couldn’t we play the Brahms instead?”

  “No.” She wondered at the fear in his eyes.

  “Why not?” he blinked and started to rock in his chair. Fred startled, jumped from Jimmy’s lap and ran beneath a couch.

  “Okay,” she eased back, “we’ll talk about something else. How did you manage to lose so much weight?”

  Jimmy’s breathing slowed and he sat still, “Once I knew they were going to let me out of that place, I pretty much stopped eating, and tried to exercise as much as I could. They’d let me take walks on the grounds and so I’d go for hours and hours. I lost a hundred and twenty pounds.”

  “That’s impressive.” Barrett studied him, generating a quick differential of how and why he could have changed so dramatically. “Losing weight can be quite challenging for someone who’s on the medications you’re taking.”

  His head shot up.

  “Are you taking your medication?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he answered too quickly. His pale eyes narrowed.

  “Are you?” she persisted, noticing that the strong lithium tremor he’d had in the hospital was absent.

  “I said, yes.”

  “You know I have to check, and I can tell you that you don’t look like someone who’s taking medication.”

  “What are you trying to do to me?” he spat out.

  Barrett tensed. “I’m not trying to do anything, Jimmy, but let’s be clear. Part of your release agreement is that you’ll take all prescribed medications and that you won’t miss a single dose without a very good reason.”

  He started to rock again, “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “That’s true, I don’t. But I do know that you were found not guilty by reason of insanity for a very serious crime.”

  “I never touched her,” he interrupted.

  “That’s what all the reports say,” she agreed, trying to keep her voice neutral and professional. She reminded herself that Hobbs was in the other room, and wondered what exactly it was that was making her skin crawl. “Jimmy, you never stood trial for whatever role you played in those murders. Instead, the court determined that because of your mental illness you couldn’t be tried; you went to Croton. Now, because of this, and I know that I’m not telling you anything new, you must follow—to the letter—your release agreement. Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now let me ask you again; are you taking your medication?”

  His nostrils flared, “Yes, Dr. Conyors, I’m taking all of my medication.”

  “Good. Then I’ll have them draw levels in the morning.”

  He said nothing, but she could see the rage behind his eyes.

  The grandfather clock clicked as the gears for the hour mechanism engaged and the chimes resonated heavily through the room. It was five o’clock.

  “We need to stop,” she said.

  “Of course,” he replied.

  Barrett uncrossed her legs and stood on shaky knees. Her thoughts were troubled by the competing bits of what she referred to as jagged data—things that didn’t fit.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asked, still seated.

  “What?”

  He reached across the small eagle-footed Federal table and opened the drawer. He pulled out a linen envelope and getting to his feet, handed it to her. “Your payment.”

  Feeling his eyes on her, she took the envelope and pocketed it unopened. There was something contemptuous in the way he gave it to her, like a john paying a prostitute.

  “This time is good for you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then same time next week.”

  He nodded, his jaw set through clenched teeth.

  Through the library’s open door she saw Hobbs and Cassidy waiting for her in the foyer.

  Without a word, Jimmy strode past them to the front door. He opened it, and keeping to the shadows he watched with hooded eyes as Dr. Barrett Conyors and her policemen left.

  SEVEN

  Barrett felt rattled as she walked away from Ed Hobbs and from Jimmy Martin’s opulent townhouse. With each step she rehashed the hour, thinking back over the pieces that didn’t fit. Almost without thought, she pulled out her cell and dialed the forensic center.

  “Give me the surveillance team,” she said, wondering why she felt so jangled.

  A woman came on the line, and Barrett told her, “I want to get some blood drawn on James Martin … today, and send it stat. Get me a lithium level, basic electrolytes, drug-screen, Risperdal level, and you may as well check his liver, thyroid, and renal function at the same time.”

  The woman read back her order; Barrett thanked her and hung up.

  Nearing First Avenue, she noticed a sickly tingle in the tips of her fingers, and a mounting nausea. It took her a split-second to realize what was happening, and by then the sensations had leapfrogged to her feet, her throat. Her pulse sped, its beats ringing in her ears. Her thoughts skidded to a stop and she clutched her chest. This couldn’t be happening; it had been years since the last one. She felt herself slipping out of her body and wondered if perhaps her therapist had been wrong all those years ago, and that perhaps this could kill her. It felt as though it were happening to someone else, as though she weren’t there, standing on the corner of First and 21st Street.

  “Barrett,” a man’s voice called to her.

  She turned and saw Hobbs running toward her. Could he see what was happening?

  He stopped, not at all winded by his jog. “I was thinking that maybe we could get some coffee, or something?”

  “You’re not on the clock?” she managed to ask, wondering if her voice betrayed what was happening inside.

  “Nah, Bryan can take care of the vehicle. I’m just doing this to pick up some overtime.” He looked at her, his eyes searching. “You okay?”

  “Not great,” she admitted. “I’m having a panic attack.”

  “Can I help? You need a paper bag?”

  “It’ll pass,” she said, more as a reminder to herself. “They always pass, the bitch is I haven’t had one since I was a resident.”

  “You think it had something to do with our boy, James?”

  “Could be,” she agreed, noting that her palpitations had begun to subside. “Here,” she offered him the underside of her hand, “feel my pulse.”

  Ed took her wrist, “Like a rabbit,” he commented.

  “That’s what I can’t stand,” she tried to slow her breath. “It’s such a paralyzing feeling. The funny thing is,” she started to walk, “I never get them when I’m in the middle of a crisis; they always come after. Like in medical school, I’d finish some horrible exam and fifteen minutes later I’d be holed up in the bathroom wondering if I was going to die or not.”

  “But you said you haven’t had them in a while.”

  “I know. I saw a therapist about them, and I’m pretty good at making them go away. I trained myself to where I can stop them before they take over.”

  “Until now,” he commented.

  “Lucky me, but it’s going.”

  “Greek diner?” he asked, looking across the street at a restaurant with a pink and purple neon sign that read Acropolis Rest
aurant—open 24 hours.

  “Sure,” she said, wondering if maybe she should just take the rest of the day off.

  He held the door for her, “When do you have to be back at the office?”

  “I just have some paperwork. I might blow it off,” she confessed, as a dark-haired waitress with heavy crescents of blue eye shadow led them back to a corner booth.

  They were handed thick plastic menus, which promised everything from eggs and bacon to stuffed lobster tails. They both ordered coffee and a bagel and cream cheese.

  After the waitress left, Barrett looked at Hobbs, and noted his worried expression. “It’s almost gone,” she admitted. “They never last long; I thought I was done with them.”

  “My wife used to get them,” he offered.

  “Used to?” Barrett asked, trying not to focus on his ringless finger.

  “Maybe still does, we don’t talk much. They put her on some pills, Xanax or something.” He looked at her, “But you and I haven’t talked in a while, have we?”

  “No,” she said, noting the fine lines around his deep-brown eyes, the furrows etched in his brow; those seemed new.

  He gave a bitter laugh as the waitress set down their coffee. “Not a good year.”

  “Is that why you’re on the babysitting patrol?”

  He sipped and nodded.

  “You don’t have to, Ed,” she offered, but felt curious as hell, and touched by his sadness.

  “I’ll give you the abridged version. And if I start to sound like a perp, just kick me.”

  “That bad?”

  “Not good. You might have seen some of it in the papers.”

  “I don’t read them … too much like work.”

  “Just as well. Not long after the Charlie Rohr thing, I got a heads up that one of my men was taking bribes from a smut dealer. I did what I thought I was supposed to do, because God help you if you point the finger and you haven’t done everything by the book. So I made a report to Internal and the next thing you know it blossomed into one hell of a conspiracy. Some good men—or at least I thought they were good—got kicked off the force, or resigned. And I, as their incompetent supervisor, was strongly urged to follow.”

  “I’m so sorry, Ed.” She resisted the impulse to touch his arm.

  “Not your fault, and that, as they say, was the start of the deluge. Margaret couldn’t take it, and she wasn’t about to stick with a proven loser. We signed papers a couple months ago. I get Alice and Becky on weekends and half the holidays. That is if I keep up with child support and alimony. So I let them bust me down to grade three detective, while I try to figure out what comes next. I guess I’m lucky they kept me at all. And you?” he looked up, plastering on a smile. “Please tell me that you’re still moving forward brilliantly.”

  Barrett spread cream cheese onto her bagel, “Or...we could turn this into a twisted game of I Can Top That.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, at least work’s going okay; at least I think it is.”

  “And Ralph?”

  “I don’t know,” she heard her words resonate in the space between them.

  “Really?”

  She put down the uneaten bagel, “I don’t know why it feels like I did something wrong, but I caught Ralph cheating. God, that sounds like something from a country western song.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” she snapped, sounding harsher than intended. “I came home to find him in bed with somebody I considered a friend.”

  “Ouch! You don’t have kids, do you?”

  “No,” she stared at the speckled Formica tabletop.

  “You want kids?”

  “You giving some away?” she tried to make a joke, but he’d honed right in on the issue. “It’s so fucked up. Yes, I want kids, and the funny thing is we’ve been talking about it. So why the hell did he do this? My eggs don’t have all that many years to go and I don’t want to be some forty-five-year-old woman with no husband and a Down’s Syndrome baby … It’s like you get up one morning and everything’s the way it’s supposed to be, and twenty-four hours later it’s all different. And then I start looking back, and maybe things haven’t been okay for a while, and maybe I’ve been walking around with a paper bag on my head. He says he’s ‘sorry,’ says ‘he loves me, wants to get back together.’ I have no clue what I’m supposed to do.”

  “No wonder you’re having panic attacks,” Hobbs offered. “Jimmy was just the straw that pushed you over.”

  “You’re right,” she met his gaze. “And that’s a whole other can of worms.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know his case?”

  “Not much,” Ed admitted. “I read through his arrest report, pulled up the court files, and even looked at his release agreement, but it doesn’t give you a strong feel for him as a person.”

  “I’d forgotten,” Barrett said, remembering Ed’s intelligence and attention to detail.

  “Forgotten what?”

  “What it was like to work with you.”

  “Those were some fun cases,” he agreed.

  “I guess, if you think that looking at pictures of people with knitting needles sticking out of their eyes is fun.” She smiled, “I can’t really talk to most people about what I do. But the sick thing is if it weren’t for work, I’d be losing it. But back to Jimmy, it sounds like you’ve got as much information as I have. Even going through volumes of evaluations and a summary from his last psychiatrist, there’s hardly anything.”

  “The one who just died,” Ed inserted.

  “Right, Morris Kravitz … any chance you could track down his death certificate?”

  “Not a problem, why? You think Jimmy had something to do with that?”

  “Just curious. You know the strangest thing—I have no clue who was in that room with me.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “When we first worked together you gave me a piece of advice that I’ve used ever since.”

  “Really? What was it?”

  “You said something about ‘jagged data,’ about things that don’t fit,” she said. “And that jagged data needs extra consideration—because if it doesn’t fit, there’s a reason.”

  “So what does that have to do with Master James?”

  “Nothing fits,” she sipped her coffee.

  “You going to tell me?”

  “Where to start? I almost don’t want to tell you about this first thing, so I’ll go with that.” She chuckled, “Somewhere deep down I have a soft spot for Freud.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Resistance, there’s something that doesn’t want to come out, so that’s probably the first thing that needs to … and it makes no sense. My boss—Anton—gave me Jimmy’s case, and it felt like he was doing me a favor.”

  “Some favor.”

  “No, it really is. This is off-the-clock work, and Jimmy is paying big bucks for door-to-door shrink delivery.”

  “And?”

  “Well, Jimmy said that he asked for me specifically.”

  “Why you?” Ed leaned forward, the banter gone, his expression worried.

  “I interviewed him a single time when he was at Croton. I was still a resident and I was working on some research on stalking. I guess he must have liked me. Although his sister sure didn’t.” Barrett looked at Ed, “She threatened to sue the medical school, me, and anyone else her lawyers could think of if I didn’t leave her brother alone.”

  “Why would she care?”

  “You know she took me out to dinner last night?”

  “Because?” letting his voice trail.

  “She’s his conservator. Arranged for his release. So I asked her, and she said she was trying to protect him.”

  “Did she tell you why he wanted to meet with you?”

  “No, and that feels jagged, too. Why wouldn’t she?”

  “So what are your options?” he asked.

  “About w
hich piece?”

  “Why he wants you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m so wonderful that after a single visit someone is going to pick me out from all available psychiatrists.”

  Ed traced a finger around the rim of his cup. “There’s an obvious reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “Look in the mirror, Barrett. Maybe the boy has a crush.”

  She shuddered, “Don’t even go there.”

  “Hey, you want to make the jagged pieces smooth, you got to roll them through the possibilities. And common things are common. Look at it this way, here you’ve got an inmate living what? Eight, nine years in a maximum security hospital.”

  “Longer—by the time I saw him, it would have been fourteen or so.”

  “You think he’s straight?”

  “He’s something. Do I think he likes girls? In some fashion and based on what happened to Nicole Foster, I’m not certain that breathing is a prerequisite.”

  “Nice. So you’ve got a perp who’s spent eighteen years in the nut house and in comes this hot, twenty-something psychiatrist who’s all concerned about his welfare. I bet he can remember everything you wore that day. He probably spent nights …”

  “Stop right there.”

  “Tears on his pillow,” Ed chortled.

  “Are all men pigs?” Barrett asked.

  “It’s the hormones.”

  “I thought that was the PMS defense.”

  “Same idea, different sex.”

  “What if he picked me because I was the only name he could think of?”

  Ed’s head cocked slightly as he mulled her suggestion, “Second choice at best.”

  “Why?”

  “How many shrinks would he have seen at Croton over the years?”

  “Good point. There would have been dozens. But if your answer is the right one, and he’s got some sort of crush, why didn’t he ask for me at the time of his release?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe he did. Maybe something changed between then and now. You said his sister didn’t want you to see him at Croton, and now she’s taking you out to dinner, maybe she had something to do with it.”

  “All of which leads me back to the beginning. Who the hell is he and what makes him go? You know that music we heard outside his place?”