by Keith Ablow
"Who are they?"
" Darwin Bishop."
"Never heard of him," I said.
"The billionaire? Consolidated Minerals & Metals-CMM? It's publicly traded."
"Hey, you may live in that world now, but I don't hang in Nantucket," I said. "And I don't play the market. I always liked the track better."
"They made national news last night," he prompted.
"I try to stay away from the news, too."
Anderson got to the point. "One of his little twin girls was found dead in her crib. Five months old."
I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall. I had worked with other families stricken by SIDS, an unpredictable condition that cuts off breathing in infants, taking them in their sleep. "Sudden infant death syndrome," I said.
"Maybe… We're not so sure. There are two older, adopted sons in the family-sixteen and seventeen years old. The younger one has a history of violence. Really ugly stuff, including strangling a few neighborhood cats."
I knew where the discussion was headed. And I knew that Trevor Lucas had left me without the heart to go there. "I don't do forensic work anymore," I said.
"So I hear. The chief back in Baltimore said he tried you once or twice," he said.
"Four times."
"Can't blame him. You have a gift."
"That's one way to look at it," I said.
"I'm not expecting an investigation," he said, "just an evaluation."
"The answer is still no."
"I'll sign a purchase order for whatever you think is fair."
"Christ, North, you know it's not about the money."
"Look," he said, "the D.A. here is leaning on me. He wants the younger brother arrested and charged with murder. He'll try him as an adult and aim for life in prison, no parole."
Few things outrage me more than a judicial system that bends chronology in service to vengeance, and Anderson knew it. I stayed silent.
"He's only sixteen," Anderson went on. "The Bishops adopted him from a Russian orphanage at six. Who knows what kind of hell he went through before that?"
"I've got my work cut out for me right here," I said, half to remind myself.
"I don't want to push you, but there's something that bothers me about this family-especially the way the father laid out a red carpet for me to question his son. You're the best I've…"
"I'm trying to stay focused." I was also trying to stay sober, not to mention sane. "Why don't you call Ken Sklar or Bob Caggiano at North Shore Medical Center? They work with Judith David. You know the group. They're world class."
"One interview with the boy," he pressed. "That's all I'm asking."
I didn't want to let Anderson down. But I didn't know how far into darkness I could walk without losing my way forever. "If you want me to call Sklar myself and ask him the favor, I will."
"I want you."
"No," I said, "you want part of me I left behind two years ago, the part Trevor Lucas took." I didn't give him the chance to respond. "Listen, I got to finish up rounds."
"Frank…"
"I'll give you a call some time." I laid the receiver back in its cradle.
2
I drove my black Ford F-150 truck out of the Mass General parking garage, took a right onto Storrow Drive, and headed toward the Tobin Bridge to Chelsea and East Boston. I wanted to chase North Anderson and the Bishops out of my thoughts, to keep my distance from death. That used to mean half a bottle of scotch and a gram of cocaine, but I knew I would have to settle for my ritual coffee at Cafe Positano, an unexpected collage of mahogany, marble, and brass in the middle of a run-down row of storefronts, sandwiched between a discount packie and a variety store.
I pulled up in front of the place, went inside, and stepped up to the espresso bar. Mario Graziani, a broad-shouldered, perpetually tanned, fifty-something-year-old, who wore a tattoo of the Colosseum on his forearm, was bantering in Italian with the bricklayers and bookmakers and judges who were his regulars. Without my asking him to, he steamed my milk to a cottony froth, spooned it over a couple ounces of ink-black espresso, and dusted the top with cinnamon. He slid the mug across the bar. "Qualcuna ti vuole," he said, nodding discreetly over my shoulder.
I had picked up a bit of Italian about five years before, treating an eighty-four-year-old Sicilian man with Alzheimer's disease. His name was Maurizio Riccio, and his cortex was so full of the tangled neurons of dementia that he had become unshakably convinced he was back in Sicily with his teenage sweetheart. This break with reality was distressing to his children, who wanted their father to know for sure that he wasn't nineteen and frolicking in the Mediterranean, that he was slowly wasting away from prostate cancer, in the Cohen, Florence, Levine Assisted Living Center, right in Chelsea. They insisted I prescribe him an antipsychotic like Thorazine. I refused, and they took his case away from me. I held on to what I'd learned of his language-and what I'd learned from him about the agelessness of the human soul.
Qualcuna ti vuole-Someone wants you. I lighted a cigarette, sipped my coffee, then turned slowly and glimpsed Justine Franza sitting alone toward the back of the place, reading a book. She was resting her head on her palm, her elbow on the table, so that her long, golden hair hung to one side, like a curtain. She was a thirty-two-year-old, upper-crust Brazilian photographer touring the United States. I had met her the night before when she'd come in with a few friends. We'd spent twenty minutes talking about the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro and the seaside resort town of Buzios, all of it a pleasant enough cover for what I really had to say. If I were alone with you on the beach in Rio or in a cliffside cottage in Buzios or down the street in my loft…
"Molto bella, no?" Mario purred.
I drank enough of my coffee to be able to walk with the mug, then started toward her table.
"Clevenger!" someone shouted.
I stopped and turned toward the door.
Carl Rossetti, a local defense attorney who looked more like a drug dealer, bounded in. He had straight, jet-black hair to the small of his back, gold bracelets on both wrists, earrings in both ears. He also had one of the sharpest legal minds in or around Boston. "You think you could analyze me, doc?" he announced. "Let me tell you: You ain't got that kind of time."
Men and women seated at the tables around me looked up at him. He threw waves and smiles back at them.
I had analyzed Rossetti, but he could count on my never telling a soul.
He walked up to me, kept shifting foot-to-foot, as if still on the move. "How about that adopted lunatic on Nantucket?"
My heart sank.
"I guess he's some piece of work. Strangled a couple cats around the island a year or so back. Nearly burned down the Bishop estate. And he's got a history of breaking and entering every place within walking distance." He grinned. "From Russia with love, huh?"
"The way I heard it," I said, "nobody has any idea whether he's involved. They haven't ruled out sudden infant death syndrome."
"C'mon. The kid's got the whole profile. What odds you want to give me he's a bedwetter?"
Rossetti was referring to the triad of bedwetting, fire setting, and cruelty to animals typical of budding psychopaths.
"He's a juvenile," I said. "And he hasn't been charged. Who's leaking his life story?"
"Who else? Harrigan-the D.A. This case is a rocket ship, and he knows it. He could ride the publicity right to the Attorney General's office."
"So I heard."
He put a hand on my shoulder, looked at the floor. "Listen," he whispered, "if I wanted to come in for a tune-up, like… You know, no major overhaul. I'm basically good. A couple sessions, maybe. That kind of thing."
"No problem," I said automatically. I was having trouble dragging my mind away from Nantucket.
He dropped his voice even lower. "I don't want to ask any special favors. But I know you been some of the same places I been in life, and I don't want to go there no more, if you get what I'm saying."
"Give me a call. We'll set
something up right away." Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Justine watching us.
She noticed me noticing her and went back to reading her book.
Rossetti slapped me on the shoulder, took a couple steps back. "You look friggin' fantastic," he half-shouted. "Still got the bike?"
We'd taken our Harleys to the White Mountains after our last session. I nodded.
"They'll throw mine in the box with me, Doc, 'cause I'm ridin' till the light turns red for good." He pointed at my head, winked. "What about one of them weaves? They're good now. You can hardly tell." He started toward the bar, where Mario, no doubt, was already steaming his milk.
I walked the rest of the way to Justine. She was reading Angela's Ashes. "Light reading?" I said.
She lowered the book. "So sad, Frank. What they went through." She pulled out a chair.
I sat down. Her olive skin, full lips, and deep brown eyes steadied me. Something ugly inside me has always retreated in the face of feminine beauty.
"You look tense. What is the matter?" she asked.
"Rough day," I said, and left it at that.
"What? What was rough?"
I'm used to asking the questions. Answering for a change felt uncomfortable and inviting at the same time. I pointed at her book. "People. Their suffering. Knowing what you can do for them, and what you can't."
"Yes," she said. The look in her eyes made me feel she might actually understand. "This has to be very difficult." She drank the last of her coffee. "For me this would be too much."
I motioned to Mario for a refill, took a drag off my cigarette. "Why do you think that?"
"I could not keep myself… how do you say?… apart from it."
"I've got the same trouble."
Justine used the tip of her finger to steal a bit of the froth off my coffee, licked it away. "But you see patients even knowing this. You don't worry for yourself?"
"Every day."
A few seconds of silence passed. "My day," she said, "was mostly thinking of you."
The last of the tightness in my jaw and neck melted away. I took her hand and felt my pulse slow.
I took her home. My place. A nineteen-hundred-square-foot Chelsea loft with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the steel skeleton of the Tobin Bridge as it arches into Boston. The building had been constructed as a factory when the Industrial Revolution transformed Chelsea from farmland and summer homes to coal yards and textile mills. It had stood through two fires that burned most of the city to the ground, in 1908 and 1973. It had stood as the city welcomed wave upon wave of immigrants-the Irish speaking Gaelic, Russian Jews escaping anti-Semitism, Italians, Poles, Puerto Ricans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, El Salvadorians, Guatemalans, Serbs.
My view was as raw and beautiful as a heavyweight bout. In the foreground: triple deckers, smokestacks, tugboats driving full throttle against the massive hulls of oil tankers on the Mystic River. In the distance: the shimmering skyline of Boston 's financial district.
Justine, elegant and slim in tight black cigarette pants and a fitted black sleeveless shirt, stood facing one of the windows as I poured her a Merlot and myself a Perrier.
"Cheers," I said, handing her the glass.
She noticed I wasn't joining her. "No wine?"
"I can't drink." I paused. "Actually, I can drink more than anybody I know. I just can't stop."
"Why not?"
"Why not what?"
"Why can't you stop?"
For a moment I thought we were separated by a language barrier, that she wasn't getting the fact that I was in recovery from alcohol, among other things. But then she looked at me in the same knowing way she had at Café Positano, and I realized she had intended the question- and wanted the answer. I nodded. "I can't stop because I lose myself in the booze. And I end up never wanting to find myself."
"Right."
"Thanks. I hate being wrong about my own disease. It makes me wonder whether I'm worth my hourly rate."
She laughed. As she moved, her collar gaped open enough for me to glimpse her cleavage and the top of her black lace bra. "No," she said. "I mean, I understand." She sipped her wine.
I still felt the need to explain. "It's like having a headache that finally goes away with a pill. You might have struggled through the pain before, but now you know relief is just a swallow away. So you keep swallowing. And meanwhile, underneath the waves of calm, your life is unraveling."
"I understand. My mother died of this."
I felt like an idiot. "Of alcoholism."
"Yes. They have this even in Brazil."
"I'm sorry. I…"
She left me at the window and walked over to the largest of five paintings I had hanging on a brick wall that ran the length of the place. It was a six-by-nine-foot canvas by Bradford Johnson depicting the rescue of the crew of a sailing ship by another vessel. A rope is tied between their masts, high above the raging seas, and a man dangles by his hands as he traverses the fragile connection. "I like this very much," she said.
I walked to her side. "What do you like about it?"
"Taking a risk to help someone." She pointed at the ship that was still in one piece. "That one could have kept sailing."
Her comment made me think again of the sixteen-year-old Bishop boy, probably headed for trial as an adult, facing life in prison. Would the system stop long enough to listen to him? Then I thought what it would be like to hear about the animals he had tortured, about his torture in Russia, about Darwin Bishop finding one of his baby girls dead in her crib. I thought about having to feel all the jealousy and fear and anger coursing through the family, in order to understand whether it could have added up to murder. "What if both ships end up sinking?" I half-joked.
"Then taking the risk was even more beautiful," she said.
In my heart I agreed. But coming close to drowning in the undertow of Trevor Lucas's terror had left me with deep respect for solid ground. I pushed the Bishops out of my mind and reached for Justine, using her beauty to anchor me in the moment. My hand found the soft curve of her arm, just above the elbow, then moved down her rib cage, not stopping until my fingers were curled under the waistband of her pants.
She touched her lips to mine, then leaned back. "Perhaps we should not start," she said. "I am in this country only one more day."
I have seen lives saved and others destroyed in less time. 1 tightened my grip and pulled her to me.
I took her to bed, a king-sized Italian creation with chrome legs and a gray flannel, upholstered headboard, all done up with pearl gray linens. She sat at the edge and lifted her arms so I could help her with her top, but I gently pushed her onto her back, moved my hands to her ankles, and pulled off her pants. The scantiest black lace thong covered her. A vertical fold in the cloth was enough to make me lightheaded.
Five or so years back, my own psychiatrist, Dr. James, then eighty-one and still razor-sharp, had challenged me to consider whether my sex life was actually driven by addiction. He was a Freudian analyst and a Talmudic scholar, and I am eternally in his debt for partly filling the holes left in my personality after it developed without a real father.
"How would I know if I'm addicted?" I had asked.
"Are you seeking the woman or the act?" he said. "Do you want her soul or her body?"
"Both," I said immediately.
"For what purpose? To what end?"
"To feel love."
"You can fall in love in a day?"
I thought about that. "In an hour."
"Again and again?" he said.
"Dozens of times. A hundred times."
"You believe these women seek this also? This union? What you call love?"
"I do."
"And you believe this is Nature's design?" he asked.
"Yes."
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he sat there looking at me, without speaking.
The quiet began to weigh on me. "What do you think?" I surrendered. "Do I add sexual addiction to m
y list of diagnoses?"
"I'm afraid not," he said. "The case is worse."
"How so?"
"You have a touch of the truth." He smiled, but only for an instant. "God help you."
Tonight my truth was Justine. In a world of artificial intelligence, transplanted organs, and cloned sheep, I knew it was my heart pounding in my chest as I looked at her, my lungs working like a bellows, my blood feeding my excitement. I reached and pulled the cloth triangle up between her lips, watched the cloth dampen, listened to her groan as my fingers moved inside her panties, then inside her. I knelt in front of her and traced her smooth lips with my tongue, moving her thong first this way, then that, teasing. When I could feel her muscles starting to tense for complete release, I stopped and stood up. I pulled her thong off. Then, never taking my eyes off her, I freed myself, lifted her knees, and spread them apart. I moved inside her, reveling in the way her flesh resisted then yielded to my thrusts, resisting less and less each time. And then I yielded, abandoning control, moving now as one with Justine, as Nature dictated, with no more thought of it than waves rolling onto a beach, soaking into soft, moist sands.
Sunday, June 23, 2002
My eyes snapped open, flicked to the bedside clock-7:20 a.m. I had the feeling we were not alone. I dropped my hand to the Browning Baby semiautomatic I keep between my bed frame and mattress, a vestige of my days tracking killers. I lay still. I had almost convinced myself I could hear the intruder's footsteps when the lobby buzzer sounded two insistent blasts, vaguely reminding me that I had heard the same sound in my sleep. I realized I had probably been awakened by something closer to a Federal Express delivery than an attempt on my life.
"Make them go away," Justine said, still half-asleep.
I got up and headed to the door. I pressed the speak button on the intercom panel. "If it's a package and it isn't ticking, leave it," I said. I hit listen.
"It's North."
I squinted at the intercom. I thought I had gotten more distance on my past. I should have known better. Anything you run from turns up in front of you, usually sooner rather than later.