by Gorman, Ed
"Kibbe knew who was in the baby picture, didn't he?"
"Just lay off that baby picture. You don't know what you're talkin' about."
"Maybe your wife does, Giles. Maybe that's why she's upstairs slapping the hell out of Claire right now. Maybe Claire wanted to tell me who's in the baby picture but your wife doesn't want her to. She's going to load Claire up on drugs now, isn't she? You're going to kill her someday, you know that, keeping her that dosed up? Just because your wife worked at the asylum doesn't make her an expert, Giles."
"She knows what she's doin'. She won't kill Claire. Claire's our daughter. I adopted her when I married her mother, because Claire was sick by then. We love her."
Mrs. Giles came into the kitchen. She didn't say anything. She walked to the sink and washed her hands. I noticed how she washed. Like a doc. Good soapy scrubbing halfway up the forearms. And held under the hot water for at least ten seconds. The minimum is eight. Your better class of docs shoot for ten. She dried off on a new square of paper towel. She turned around and looked at me and said, "You get the hell off our property." She wore a tan suit, wrinkled now, with a frilly white blouse and a pair of brown one-inch heels. She was a little squatty now, but it wasn't difficult to imagine that many years ago the fleshy face had been sharp with classic bone lines and the body sleek and inviting. The ghost of those days still somehow hung around her. Maybe it was the sullen mouth. There's a female petulance that can be sexy. Hers would have been, anyway.
"I'd like to talk to Claire," I said to her.
"No way."
"I'm working on a murder case."
"No, you're not. You're working for that TV show. You just want to dig up dirt on people in this town so that it'll make your show better."
"I should've called the law," Giles said.
"Why didn't you?" she said.
"Because I asked him about the baby picture. The one up in Claire's room."
Her reaction was the same as her husband's. Her mouth said no, her eyes said yes. "What baby picture?"
I sighed. "I don't want to go through it all again." I stood up. "I can always get Chief Charles to come out here."
"On what grounds?"
"Abusing your daughter."
"The county people are here once a month inspecting."
"Her social worker, you mean?"
She nodded. "You can check it out if you want."
Implicit in her answer was that I trusted the opinion of social workers. I don't. I don't see them as devils, as the right wing does; but I do see them as incompetents, as most judges and cops do.
I walked over to the back door. "If she's as bad off as you say, you should put her in a hospital."
"She's our daughter," Betty Giles said.
"All the more reason to see she's treated well."
"That's our business," Giles said. The shotgun lay across the table now. He seemed to have forgotten about it. Then, "And next time, I'll blow your head off, you come trespassin' in here."
In a moment of silence, we all heard it. And looked up, as if to the heavens. But it was really the attic we were looking at. Because of the noise. The soft steady thrum of the rocker going back and forth, forth and back, and the wan Irish voice of her sad song.
"She recovers pretty fast," I said.
"Recovers from what?" Betty Giles said.
Her husband said, "He thinks we keep her drugged up all the time."
"Only when she needs it," Betty Giles snapped.
I pushed open the screen door. It was a good day for yard work. The clear sky. The smoky smell. The warm clean prairie air.
"You get going," Giles said.
I smiled at them and left.
I ducked under clothesline and walked back to the alley, where I loitered for a few minutes looking at the rear of the frame house. I wanted to see how far it was from the roof of the garage to the roof of the back porch.
She had drawn six lines under the letters NBC! And then written: Down at coffee shop for interview!!!!!! Six exclamation points.
And then I noticed the lined legal-sized yellow pad she'd left on the bed.
At least twenty pages had sketches of partial faces on them. A few of the sketches—a portion of forehead, eye, nose; a portion of chin, mouth, jaw line; and so on—resembled a male; others resembled a female.
This was how she'd worked on our previous murder case. She'd drawn sketches of possible burial sites for four days before finally settling on one. And then that sketch was enough to lead us right to the body.
Could she really find the killer this way, through the process of sketching? But why not? The pattern was the same.
Half-realized images in her mind. Blinding headaches, each one of which brought her a little closer to a definitive view of what she was searching for, and finally a fully realized sketch.
Why?
The motel room was dark and cold. I went in and washed up with hot water. And then I went to see Dr. Williams.
FIVE
You could see faces in the windows. Some of the windows were barred. Not that they needed to be barred. A lot of the people in the psychiatric hospital carried their own prisons with them wherever they went.
Late afternoon. A lazy feeling, the kind you got at a magnificent country club, which Mentor Psychiatric strove to emulate, long shadows beginning to stalk the golf greens, the lonely thwop of a tennis ball echoing off the piney hills, the outdoor swimming pool blue-green and empty, that melancholy time just before dinner, a loneliness and yearning different not only in degree but quality from nighttime. Not quite so frantic; more reflective. But there was at least one difference between country club and asylum. You didn't see clean-cut young men in white T-shirts and white jeans strolling country club grounds, ready, with their beepers and their muscles, for any kind of trouble.
I parked and walked up the front steps. Two female patients were playing chess.
"You look like an old boyfriend of mine," one said winsomely.
"He was a lucky guy."
She giggled. "He was flirty just like you, too." She was fortyish, overweight, and emanated a sweetness that played on her Cupid's-bow mouth and in her gentle brown eyes.
"His name was Rick, and I wish she'd shut up about him," the other one said. Then she giggled. "Especially about his buns." She made a goofy face. "He probably weighs three hundred pounds now and belongs to the KKK."
"He couldn't belong to the KKK." Her friend laughed.
"Why not?"
"He wouldn't be smart enough to spell it."
I laughed at that one, too, and then went on inside to the professional marble and shadow and starched white decorum of the place. Nurses' shoes squeaked; phones rang; faxes clattered.
The reception desk was built into a corner. The receptionist wore a smart gray suit and a smart bland smile.
"I have an appointment with Dr. Williams."
"May I have your name please?"
"Sure." I gave her my name.
"If you'll just take a seat, I'll phone Dr. Williams's secretary."
"Thank you."
I sat. The Time magazine was current and the Eames chair was more than relaxing. I thought of Claire. If she was truly mad, this was the kind of place she belonged in.
A few minutes later, she said, "Mr. Payne?"
"Yes."
"I'm afraid the doctor has gone for the day."
"We had a four-thirty appointment."
"I'm sorry. I'm afraid he had to leave early. His secretary said that she was very sorry and that you should call tomorrow and that she'd reschedule you."
No sense arguing. He obviously hadn't wanted to see me.
I said good-bye and walked out of the building. The chess players were gone. The sky was bruising to the east, yellow-mauve bruise heralding dusk and all those pinpoints of distant and indifferent stars. The night chill in the knee with the rheumatism, a family curse along with arthritis and bad sinuses.
From my car I called information and asked for Dr. Williams's
home phone number. Not surprisingly, the operator told me it was unlisted. I didn't even bother to ask for the home address. I knew better.
There was a lane leading from the back parking lot. A dark blue Lincoln Town Car shot down that lane now, reaching the road. I got only a glimpse of the Einstein-mussy white hair, but it was enough to recognize the good doctor.
Most obliging of him.
I followed him for the next twenty-five minutes.
His house was a modernistic glass-and-stone environmental marvel, with three different wings, an imposing atrium, and a picture window big enough to stage a Broadway musical in. All this in the densest part of the woods. A la Frank Lloyd Wright, it was difficult to know for sure where forest ended and house began, they were so deftly entwined here in the center of a Brothers Grimm—like woods.
A narrow, unpaved road wound all the way to his double garage door beneath a wing of the house.
He put his car in the garage. The garage door went down instantly. I wondered if he knew I was behind him.
I pulled my car off the road and went a wide way to his house. A possum sat in the middle of a pile of fallen autumn beauty, watching me, its tail snake-strong as it flicked through the dry and raspy leaves.
I found a back door that opened into the kitchen. I peeked in a window and the kitchen was empty. I dug out my burglary tools and went to work. If there was a security system, he'd had to turn it off to get inside.
The possum watched me with great interest.
I was inside in less than two minutes.
The kitchen looked as if it had been borrowed from the set of a high-budget science fiction movie. Everything was chrome and glass and built in. Or suspended from the ceiling. It had the unused feeling of a print ad in a magazine with great social aspirations. This was the kind of kitchen that told you that you had not only arrived but that you planned to stay for a good long time.
I had my gun out. I didn't know what to expect. If he was really Paul Renard, he wouldn't be especially happy to see me.
I heard a noise upstairs. I hesitated. Listened.
Drawers being quickly opened and slammed shut.
Doors being flung open.
A frantic sense. Escape.
I walked through the house. Even given the circumstances, I had to pay it its due. An elegant black curved staircase wound from the first floor to the second, contrasting with the white and tan motifs of huge, open living area. With all the statuary, mostly running to medieval Italian it seemed, the place combined the feel of an art gallery and a home you'd never want to spoil by living in it. For sheer cold perfection, it was gorgeous.
More drawers slamming. Cursing now. The noises floating down the staircase.
I went up after him.
For all of its loveliness, the staircase didn't provide much in the way of cover. Even crouched down as I was, he could see me with no problem. I just hoped he kept busy in his rooms.
The noise stopped. Halfway up the staircase, I stopped, too. What was he up to?
He stalked out of one room. "Where the hell did I put it?" Talking to himself the way we do when we're angry.
Just as long as he didn't decide to check out the staircase for some strange reason.
I crouched even lower. I had stuffed the faxes inside the pocket of my sport coat. They rubbed against my elbow. The sound seemed very loud suddenly. I quietly moved my elbow away. Crouched still lower.
He got busy again. His footsteps were heavy, angry on the carpeted hallway of the second floor.
A door opened. More drawers jerked open, shoved shut. More curses.
I started up the staircase again.
At the top, I hesitated and started to look to the left. And that was when he took his first shot at me.
He stood right in the center of the hallway, holding the weapon cup-and-saucer style just the way they'd taught him at the shooting range, and he let go a shot that came just close enough to knot up my innards and set my left leg to trembling.
I remembered some of my own training at that point. I pitched myself to the floor and rolled across the hallway into the open door he'd exited just a few moments earlier.
He kept on firing.
All the shooting apparently flattered him into thinking he was really in control of the situation.
He started walking slowly down the corridor toward me.
I was now inside the room, with the door angled half-shut. "I can kill you anytime you want, Mr. Payne," he said.
I smiled. "That's bad movie dialogue, Dr. Williams. You couldn't get in this room if you wanted to."
He put three bullets into the edge of the door.
And scared the hell out of me.
"I know who you are, Doctor. And if I know, that means somebody else knows, too. What's the point of killing me? You're through here, anyway. You're headed to prison."
Long silence. Was he planning something?
I'd underestimated him before. He'd done pretty well putting those bullets in the edge of the door, only a few inches from where I stood. I didn't plan to underestimate him again.
"Shit," he said.
"What?" I said.
"I said shit. S-h-i-t. You're unfamiliar with the word, Mr. Payne?"
His tone confused me. More irritation—frustration—than anger now.
"How the hell did you find out about me, anyway?"
"I didn't. Kibbe did. The private detective."
"That fat bastard. As soon as my secretary told me he'd stolen that paperweight, I knew what he was up to. He wanted my fingerprints. He wanted proof of who I really was."
"You should never have come back here. It was a great joke—the escaped inmate running the asylum. But you were bound to be caught."
"What the hell are you talking about, the escaped inmate?"
"I'm talking about you, Renard. And coming back to the place you'd escaped from."
And then he was laughing. Not mad-scientist laughing. Not loon-crazed psycho laughing. No, this was an intelligent man genuinely amused, laughing.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because," he said, "you and Kibbe are such stupid pricks. I'm not Paul Renard. My name is Wayne DeVries."
"I seduced her, and it wasn't easy. For one thing, I was her father's best friend. And for another, she hated me. At first, anyway. Here was this beautiful sixteen-year-old girl who drove around in a Porsche convertible and slept with all the right boys at school and was apparently trying to set a record with abortions. She'd had three before her sixteenth birthday. I had just turned forty. I was overweight and depressed and impotent. My practice was the only thing I had going. My wife had her clubs and her charities and my two boys had their computer games and the matching BMWs we'd bought them for their seventeenth birthday. Our house was very much a motel. Always very busy but always very impersonal. We didn't even have dinner together. The boys always ate in the TV room and more and more my wife wasn't home when I got there. I suspected she was having an affair but I didn't care. One drunken night, I tried humping the maid. You don't think that's embarrassing, especially when you can't get it up? I finally had to fire the woman—I gave her a great severance my wife didn't know anything about. I just couldn't face her every day with that knowing look of hers. 'He can't get it up.' That's what the look said. And it wasn't paranoia. Employees love to have their superior little secrets about employers. And that was the most cutting secret of all.
"So now we come to Ellie. I'm not good at describing people so I won't even try. All I can say is that she was beautiful. And gentle and graceful and subtle. I'd been hired to be her psychiatrist, and as such that was the first thing I noticed, the contrast between her soft personality and her hard life. She was a great fan of Debussy and Monet and Emily Dickinson. And yet at night she'd change into this totally different person. The sleaziest bars. Drugs. Alcohol. Every kind of sex you can conceive of. That's why she'd had three abortions before she was sixteen.
"I said that I seduced her. I'm not
sure about that. It could well have been the other way around. After I'd seen her three months, I felt a shift in her attitude toward me. Oh, I don't mean she suddenly saw me as this paramour, but I think she did begin to see me as a person. A person she liked. I'm sure you know about transference, how the patient frequently thinks she's falling in love with her doctor. Ellie—the good Ellie, at any rate—seemed to be going through that with me. She'd write me poems. Brings me flowers that she'd picked. She even took me out for pizza one night. I tried to pretend that I was still in charge. Family man. Respected shrink. Wise and knowing sophisticate. Of course I was in charge. That's why, when it happened that first time in my office, I saw it as my doing, not hers.
"But by then it was too late to matter. I'd never been in love before. I'd never been handsome or dashing or anything like that, so I'd always been forced to be with the 'sensible' girls. Ellie was the opposite of sensible, of course. The danger was exhilarating. She taught me so much about making love. I fancied I became good at it. I saw now that I'd never pleased my wife. No wonder she'd had an affair. Or maybe affairs plural, who knows. I became saturated with Ellie. I wouldn't brush my teeth after we made love. I wanted the taste of her to linger as long as it could. When we were apart, I'd put her photograph next to a flickering candle and masturbate. It got so bad, I couldn't not be with her. She gave up the bad Ellie. So we could be together nights. I truly believe she loved me as much as I loved her. And then she told me she was pregnant.
"I spent a whole month pleading with her to have an abortion. We had terrible arguments. She actually wanted to keep the baby.
"I'd come to my senses. I looked at myself in the mirror one day and saw what a tremendous joke I'd played on myself. I was this chunky, nearsighted, rumpled cuckold who'd fallen in love with this beautiful but clinically insane girl who'd been under my care. My God, a quietly unhappy marriage in suburbia was just where I belonged. It was my fate, as the French would say, and I should embrace it. I wanted to be part of the same old monotony again. I'd destroyed my life and humiliated my family. I had to get rid of the baby. I even thought seriously for a time of killing Ellie. I came up with several different creative methods. But I knew I couldn't do it. I wasn't a murderer. I was too weak even for that.