by Tim Willocks
“Sit down,” said Lenna.
Grimes glanced at the sofa, then chose an armchair, not too low, not too soft. Lenna Parillaud remained standing.
“A drink?” she asked.
“Nothing, thanks,” said Grimes. “What can I do for you?”
Lenna turned and paced two slow steps away from him, the palms of her hands pressed against each other.
“What do you want most from life, Dr. Grimes?”
Grimes wished he could smoke. There was a jade ashtray on a small table by his chair but he wanted to preserve all the professional poise he could muster, or at least the illusion thereof It was his best defense: an armor plate with a compassionate surface constructed, of necessity, through his years of confrontation with madness and pain.
“That’s hardly what I drove out here to talk about,” he said.
Her hair bobbed as she nodded. She turned her head slightly, offering a pale and oblique profile from which she couldn’t see him. In the candlelight the gesture was deliberately theatrical, but effective: she looked genuinely haunted and drawn. Her lashes fluttered as she dropped her eyes.
She said, “It must be hard for you to believe that I could want for anything.”
“That’s not so,” he said.
She held the profile. “Really?”
In the way she stretched the word—mournful and slow—there was a muted desperation to be heard. The desperation hammered on the door of Grimes’s better instincts. He stomped them down. Tell her to cut to the chase so you can issue your denials and leave. Grimes felt caught between his formal role as a psychiatrist and his undercover status as a hapless loser hoping not to get his balls cut off by swine.
“Yes, really,” he said to her back.
Lenna turned her eyes on him, full, frank, momentarily shocking. Her words shocked him considerably more.
“Clarence said you weren’t a man to be pushed around.”
Grimes was grateful he was already sitting down. Clarence? What the fuck had that cocksucker told her? And how? And who else had been given Grimes’s name besides her and Atwater? It was like it had been announced on the radio.
“I’m sorry, Miss Parillaud,” he said. “Who?”
His voice sounded more convincing than he’d dared hope, but the easy—almost contemptuous—familiarity with which she’d said Clarence disturbed him. He concentrated on not being the one to break eye contact.
“Clarence Jefferson,” she said.
“I’m afraid I’ve never heard of the man.”
He managed to hold her gaze without blinking. A slight pursing of her lips. Lenna flopped her head back and stared at the ceiling, debating. She closed her eyes.
“Why, should I know him?” said Grimes.
“I don’t know if you should or not,” she said. “That’s the trouble.”
She opened her eyes again. She walked to an armchair matching the one Grimes sat in and pulled it over so that it faced him at an angle from an arm’s length away. She sat down, leaned her elbows on her knees and looked at the floor. She let out a long, quiet breath. As something of an expert in the field himself Grimes recognized the sigh of someone close to despair.
“Doctor,” she said. “The only person I trust is Bobby Frechette. I would like to trust you. The rest of the world, I don’t need to.”
“Anything you might say to me is confidential,” said Grimes.
“That’s not what I mean. Fuck.”
Lenna slammed the palms of both hands on the armrests of the chair. A flash of tantrum. Grimes took it in his stride. She hadn’t looked at him since she sat down; she didn’t still.
“Excuse me, Dr. Grimes. I’m having the second-worst day of my life.”
Grimes-the-psychiatrist was intrigued by what might be the first-worst day; the other Grimes, the one who wanted a quiet life, didn’t want to know.
“Just say what you need to,” he said. “If I can’t handle it, I’ll let you know.”
Lenna rested her elbows back on her knees, grabbed two fistfuls of hair from which she suspended her head and spoke into the space between her forearms.
“If you’re lying to me about Clarence—and, shit, I can’t tell—and I threaten you, you’ll clam up. If Clarence has lied to me about you—and he lied to me for decades, except when it hurt me more not to—then I’m making a fool of myself—which is fine—and maybe endangering you in the process—which isn’t.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Grimes, stoutly.
He realized he was beginning to dislike himself.
Lenna said. “Either way, unless you do know what I’m talking about and you do help me, I’m fucked, Doctor. I’m completely fucked.”
By the minute Grimes was more convinced that whatever was the detail of her hidden agenda, it was personal, painful and intense; not political, not money, not “the anvil of justice.” He stamped a cold heel on the throat of his rising sympathy. Trust no one. Be professional. Neutral and calm. Just keep lying.
“If I knew what this was about,” he said, “I’d try my best to advise you, but I don’t.”
He felt like a rank scumbag.
Silence. Her face was hidden by her arms and the shadows they cast.
“Without making any assumptions you might find offensive,” said Grimes, “I should tell you that it’s no secret I have a special interest in drug addiction. Maybe your Mr. Jefferson was aware ofthat and was trying to recommend me.”
“Captain Jefferson, not Mister. He was a policeman. In vice. Clarence was the king of vice, anointed and crowned by his own hand.”
“It’s possible,” said Grimes, then hesitated.
He saw Lenna’s shoulders tense. He shouldn’t give her any threads to pull on; but it was a deception too clever to resist.
“It’s possible, if vice was Jefferson’s business, that he came to me at some point under an alias. You’ll appreciate that in my line of work that’s not unknown. A police officer, more than most, might want to protect his identity if he had a problem.”
Trust me, I’m a doctor, Grimes thought as he lied. He played his card.
“So tell me, what does this man Jefferson look like?”
No image, human or otherwise, was so readily and forever available to his mind’s eye than the face and form—the very breath and brash aroma—of the fatman: Clarence Seymour Jefferson. As Grimes congratulated himself on his cunning use of the present tense, the mounting dislike he felt for what he was doing became a full-blown contempt for his own guts.
Lenna kept her gaze on the floor and so did not see whatever was inscribed on Grimes’s face. She took a gulp of air to steady herself. Her voice shook, fluctuating between anger and disgust.
“What he looks like now, I wouldn’t like to know. Or maybe I would. He’s been missing, presumed dead, for six months.”
Grimes knew it for a fact and didn’t have to presume anything. He’d run a sixteen-inch Bowie knife into Jefferson’s belly and left the body to burn in a swamp-country cabin on the banks of a bayou a hundred and thirty miles to the west. He didn’t speak.
Lenna pushed herself on. “If you’d ever met him you wouldn’t forget him.”
Grimes blinked, again relieved that she wasn’t looking at his face.
“Big man. Fat man. Strong man.”
Her words came out in short blurts, as if she couldn’t trust herself with more than two at a time. Within their larger sound, of anger and disgust, hummed the threnody of an awful tenderness. Grimes was able to hear the hum because in a dreadful portion of his own heart he, too, knew that same tenderness: awful because it was hated and shunned, dreadful because the very fact of its existence was beyond his comprehension; for the object ofthat tenderness was Clarence Jefferson.
“I’m sorry,” said Lenna. She took more air.
“You’re doing fine.”
“Yeah. So. Clarence was around Bobby’s height and twice his weight. White guy, fifty years old. Yellow, wavy hair. Lips like Cupid’s bow, smil
ed a lot, with a honeycomb voice. His eyes were …”
She stopped, and Grimes was glad.
“Anyway, you would remember him,” she finished.
“I guess I would,” said Grimes. “I don’t.”
Grimes waited.
Behind her arms Lenna nodded, slowly.
“Forgive me, Doctor. I’ve wasted your time.”
Grimes almost let out a breath. His stratagem appeared to have worked but it had to be followed through to completion. Much as he didn’t want to, realism demanded that he express the natural curiosity of an innocent, and ignorant, man.
“My time’s no problem,” he said. “But I must ask you: if this man’s been dead six months, how did he communicate the idea that I might be able to help you?”
Another silence.
“You’re not obliged to answer,” said Grimes, hoping that she wouldn’t. “It’s just that for me this has all been a little bizarre.”
Lenna let go of her hair and dropped her arms. She raised her head and looked at him. Her eyes were dry now, but he saw that damp tracks marked the powder on her face.
“You think I’m crazy,” she said. “I mean insane, paranoid delusions …”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t blame you. You must have heard this kind of crazy stuff a million times.”
Again, the desperation to be heard, this time barely muted at all.
“You’re distressed but you’re not insane.”
A pause. Then the psychiatrist in Grimes spoke out uncensored, and maybe other pieces of himself as well.
He said, “It’s always hard to lose someone you’re close to.”
It was a dangerous slip. He watched Lenna’s eyes rove over his face and wondered what was written there for her to read. Maybe, he thought, some ghost of the months—those same six months that Jefferson had been dead—that he’d spent upon the floor wishing he were not alive. Of what was the ghost he saw in hers? Had Lenna loved Jefferson? Of the psychosis of love Grimes could believe anything. Did he care who she loved? No. Not really. He just hoped he hadn’t given her the thread that would unravel him.
Lenna twisted in the chair and reached into the sleeve of her iridescent dress and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She brushed a strand of hair from her eye, braced herself and unfolded it.
So: Jefferson had written her a letter, too. To be delivered on the same day.
Lenna glanced at Grimes. “This is from him.”
She scanned the letter. It clearly caused her pain. It was clear too that she didn’t intend to read the whole text and Grimes was glad. He already knew more than he wanted to. Lenna’s eyes paused as she found the passage she wanted.
“ ‘Down there in the City,’ “ she read, “ ‘you’ll find a man—a doctor—called Eugene Grimes. He, and he alone, can tell you all you need to know. But Lenna: don’t push him. That boy just won’t be pushed, believe me. So ask him to help you. And if he will not tell you, then ask him this: Is he yet the man he knows he is meant to be? Or is he, merely, the man he’s too scared not to be? Put that to him, Lenna, then …’ ”
Lenna broke off suddenly and closed the letter into her lap.
Grimes did not ask her to go on. His stratagem lay like ashes in his mouth. He tried to quell a wave of rage at another elaborate ploy by that fat bastard to goad him into doing his bidding, to make him trade his fucking suitcases of porn pics and proof for an early and unmarked grave. Fuck him. Fuck the people. They wanted a cleaner world let them raise their voices and get it done. Then let them pay the bill. He owed nothing to no man. He had already given and he had already paid. He felt his fists clench; he loosened them. Use the anger, he thought, it’ll look real. Professional anger.
“I’d have to say that whoever it was who wrote that letter is the person most likely to qualify for a straitjacket,” he said. “As you said, I’ve come across that stuff before.”
A strange calmness had come over Lenna Parillaud. Grimes wondered what else was contained in the sentence she hadn’t finished: “put that to him, Lenna, then …” Grimes didn’t dare ask. Lenna folded the paper and returned it to her sleeve. She seemed to have made some decision that required her to hold herself in.
“You came in your own car?” she asked.
“Yes.”
It was over. Lenna Parillaud wiped her face and stood up. Grimes stood up too.
“It was good to meet you,” said Grimes.
“You too.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help. It seems you’re the victim of a malicious game.”
Lenna Parillaud looked at him. “If you knew how long it was since anyone had seen me cry, Dr. Grimes, you might have some small idea of exactly how malicious.” There was less pupil to her eyes now, more green. “But I knew Clarence Jefferson, and you did not. He was a man capable of anything. And you’re right: he liked games.”
Grimes had had his fill of this place and more than his fill of the nausea induced by his own performance. He had not known it had lain within him to lie with such an expert, and total, lack of integrity, and he had used—he had disgraced—his profession in order to do so. He’d done it for his father? George had not asked him to do such a thing; George would have died screaming first.
The man he was too scared not to be.
The rage came upon him again, fighting down his shame. Fuck them. Suddenly the world and its brother were taking it upon themselves to tell him how to live his life. The fatman had been right about that much: from Grimes’s earliest childhood recollections, being pushed triggered in him an almost psychopathic contrariness. He’d be pushed no more. It was time to go. He’d smiled sympathetically and lied softly for long enough. He glanced over at the double doors.
Lenna caught the glance. She walked over, the blue dress whispering about her body, and pulled the doors open. Grimes joined her on the threshold. Three paces down the corridor, hands folded calmly before his thighs, stood Bobby Frechette.
“Bobby will see you to your car,” said Lenna Parillaud. “You’ll send me your bill?”
“My what?” said Grimes.
He thought: another slip-up. The neutral professional he was supposed to be impersonating would have smiled graciously, rapidly calculated the biggest hourly rate he’d ever charged, and trebled it. But Grimes was past giving a shit.
“Your bill. For your time, Doctor.”
“Sure,” he said. “If you should want to talk again, call me.”
This was insincere. If she was aware of it, he didn’t care. He knew this mood now upon him. The mood said simply: Leave me alone or, one way or another, I will hurt you. Grimes didn’t enjoy the mood but it did at least vanquish all anxiety. He glanced into the corridor. Even Bobby Frechette no longer looked like such a handy customer. Frechette sensed the violence in Grimes—as Grimes would have sensed it in him—and tensed, almost imperceptibly. Grimes stared at the bridge of Frechette’s scimitar nose. Let him try to take the fucking letter from his pocket. Grimes had had calluses on his knuckles too, in his time. At that moment physical combat—win or lose and no holds barred—would have been a grim pleasure. For Chrissakes, Grimes, justßo.
Grimes turned back to Lenna.
“Goodbye, Miss Parillaud.”
He held out his hand and she took it.
To his surprise, she smiled. “You never called me Lenna like I asked you to.”
The smile didn’t make him feel any less sour. “No,” he said. “I guess I didn’t.”
“Goodbye, Doctor.”
Grimes nodded and walked out down the hall. As Grimes approached, Bobby Frechette relaxed and swiveled and led off in front. Grimes put a lid on his thoughts and contented himself with scowling silently at the big-deal paintings on the wall until they reached the main entrance hall. Frechette opened the door for him.
“Good night, Dr. Grimes,” said Frechette.
Grimes looked at him and Frechette nodded. Frechette was a good man. The violence Grimes had felt a mome
nt before now shamed him. He added it to the pile. He nodded back.
“Good night, Mr. Frechette.”
Grimes stepped out over the threshold.
“Dr. Grimes?”
Grimes looked back into Frechette’s eyes. There was something living inside them, too, that was ten thousand years old.
Frechette said, “In your shoes I wouldn’t trust her either. But she means you no ill. You have my word on that. If you were able to help her—in any way—I’d be in your debt.”
Grimes saw in Frechette’s face how profound was his concern for Lenna Parillaud. And Grimes knew that he was being offered something that couldn’t be bought, even here: a total loyalty.
“The best advice she could take is to sell this mausoleum and get a new life.”
“I could tell her that myself,” said Frechette.
“Why don’t you?”
Frechette didn’t answer.
Grimes said, “Do you know what’s going on? What this is all about?”
Frechette shook his head. “There’s a lot that Lenna keeps to herself. That doesn’t mean she isn’t true. She is true.”
On instinct Grimes asked, “What did she do for you?”
Frechette’s eyes narrowed as he debated how much he was entitled to give away. All he said was, “I was on death row. Lenna gave me her hand when no one else would.”
Grimes didn’t doubt that Frechette was a killer; but he did wonder if he’d been guilty of murder or not. Looking at the narrowed eyes it was impossible to tell.
Frechette said, “Without her I am roninP
Grimes understood, as Frechette had somehow known he would. Ronin meant a masterless samurai: a warrior of supreme purpose who had lost his purpose for living.
Frechette said, “You are ronin. ”
Grimes said, “That isn’t an honor I deserve.”