The Lonely Lady

by Harold Robbins

  Millstein was silent.

  “Were they any signs of this problem when you knew her, Mr. Millstein?” the doctor asked.

  “I don’t know, but then I’m not a doctor. What I did notice was that she was highly nervous and at one point very much afraid.”

  “Do you know if she was on drugs then?”

  “Not really. But in California we assume that all the young people are on something. If it’s not grass it’s pills. If they don’t overdo it we try to look the other way. Otherwise we wouldn’t have jails big enough to hold them all.”

  “Well, anyway, I think we have the drug problem cured, at least temporarily. We cannot know what will happen when she gets outside again.”

  “You’re going to release her then?”

  “We’ll have to. She comes up for re-evaluations by the panel in another two weeks. She’ll clear it without any problems I’m sure.”

  “But you’re still not satisfied, are you?”

  “Frankly speaking, no. I feel that we haven’t gotten to the real problem, whatever it was that pushed her to this. That’s why I wanted to get in touch with her friends or family. I’d feel better if I knew she had someplace to go and people who cared about her. I would want her to go into therapy.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “She could slide back. The pressures would be the same as before.

  Millstein reflected on what a fool he had been to think there was anything he could do. He should have sent the letter and forgotten about it. He wasn’t God. He couldn’t stop anyone from going to hell in their own way.

  “Did she ever mention the name JeriLee to you?” the doctor asked.

  “No, who was she?”

  “She was Jane’s sister. Sort of an idol, I guess. The bright child in the family, the one that got all the attention. Jane loved and hated her at the same time—true sibling rivalry. Part of Jane’s problem was that she wanted to be JeriLee and couldn’t. By the time she realized that was what she wanted, she had gone too far in another direction and couldn’t get back.”

  “Did you try to locate the sister?”

  “The only way we could do that was through Jane and she said JeriLee was dead.” He looked at the detective. “We don’t have the facilities for personal investigation out here.”

  “You mean you don’t believe her story?”

  “I neither believe nor disbelieve it. I just don’t know.”

  “I see.” Millstein nodded slowly. “May I see her now?”

  “Of course.” He pressed a button on the desk. “Thank you for coming in and talking to me.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. I just hope I have been of some help.”

  “In my business, everything helps,” the doctor said as the nurse came into the room. “Would you please take Mr. Millstein to the visitors’ room and bring Jane to see him.

  “One more thing, Mr. Millstein. Try not to express surprise when you see Jane. Remember that she’s just gone through chemical and electrical shock therapy, which tends to slow down reactions and create some temporary amnesia. The treatments have been halted now but the effects will not wear off for a few more days.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind, Doctor.”

  ***

  The visitors’ room was small but comfortable with gaily printed curtains at the windows.

  She came into the room hesitantly, half hiding behind the nurse. “Jane, here is that nice Mr. Millstein come to see you,” the nurse said in a professionally jovial tone.

  “Hello, Jane,” he said, forcing a smile. She was thin, much thinner than he had remembered. Her hair was long but brushed neatly and her eyes very large in her pinched face. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  For a moment she looked at him without recognition. Then a light seemed to dawn in her eyes and she smiled hesitantly. “Detective Millstein.”

  “Yes.”

  “My friend, Detective Millstein. My friend.” She took a step toward him, the tears coming to her eyes. “My friend, Detective Millstein.”

  “Yes, Jane. How are you?”

  She took his hand and pressed it to her face. “You’ve come to take me out of this place? The way you did the last time?”

  He felt the lump in his throat. “I hope so, Jane. But these things take time, you know.”

  “I’m better now. You can see that, can’t you? I won’t do any of those foolish things anymore. I’m all cured.”

  “I know that, Jane,” he said soothingly. “You’ll be out soon.”

  She rested her head against his chest. “I hope so. I don’t like it here. They hurt you sometimes.”

  He stroked her head slowly. “It was for your own good. You’ve been a very sick girl.”

  “I know I was sick. But you don’t cure sick people by hurting them more.”

  “It’s over now,” he said reassuringly. “Dr. Sloan told me the treatments are all finished.”

  “You got my letter?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re the only friend I have. There was no one else to write to.”

  “What about JeriLee?”

  A frightened look came into her eyes. “You know about her?” she whispered.

  “Yes. Dr. Sloan told me about her. Why didn’t you write her?”

  “Didn’t he tell you that she was dead?”

  “Is she?”

  She nodded.

  “Was she nice?”

  She looked up at him, her eyes shining. “She was beautiful. Everybody loved her. Everybody wanted to take care of her. And she was so bright she could do anything she wanted. When she was around, you couldn’t see anyone else. At one time we were very close, then we drifted apart and when I went looking for her it was too late. She was gone.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “What?”

  “How did she die?”

  “She committed suicide,” she whispered.

  “How?”

  There was a tortured look on her face. “She took pills, fell in front of a train or jumped off a bridge,” she cried in a pain-filled voice. “What does it matter how she died? It only matters that she’s gone and I can’t get her back.”

  He put his arms around her shoulders as she sobbed convulsively against his chest. He could feel the thin sharp bones through the cotton dress.

  “I don’t want to talk about her anymore.”

  “All right. We won’t talk about her anymore.”

  “I have to get out of here,” she said. “If I don’t I will really go crazy. You don’t know what it’s like in here. They don’t let you do anything. It’s as if we’re less than animals.”

  “You’ll be out soon.”

  “I want to go back to work. When I get out I know an agent that will get me a job dancing again.”

  He remembered the typewriter in her apartment and the scripts she told him the agent was returning to her. “How about your writing?” he asked.

  “Writing?” she asked, a puzzled look in her eyes. “You must be mixed up. I wasn’t the writer. JeriLee was.”

  Chapter 22

  Policemen often spend their time walking backward through other people’s lives, retracing the steps from the grave to the cradle. It was a habit Millstein had fallen into over the years.

  After his talk with Jane he had gone back to Sloan’s office. “I didn’t expect to see you, Mr. Millstein,” the doctor said in surprise.

  “You said something about not being able to carry out a complete investigation of your patients, Dr. Sloan, and that you sometimes thought it would be very helpful.”

  “Yes, I said that.”

  “You thought that if you knew more about Jane perhaps you could do more to help her?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ve got a week off. Would you object to my help?”

  “I would be most grateful, Mr. Millstein. Almost anything you can find out will be more than we know. Do you have any ideas?”

  “I have some, Doctor.
But I’d prefer to wait and get something firm before I go shooting my mouth off.”

  “Okay. What can I do?”

  “You could let me read that commitment paper on her.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Millstein read it quickly. There wasn’t much information. He looked at the doctor. “Where would I get the details behind this?”

  “You’d have to go back to the source. In this case East Elmwood General. Back of them are the courts and the police, but you’d have to get that information from East Elmwood’s files.”

  After leaving the hospital, he had gone back to his hotel and stretched out on the bed. The time change had finally caught up to him. When he awoke it was almost dinnertime. He looked at his watch. It would be after four o’clock in California. His daughter should be home from school by now.

  Her voice was bright as she answered the phone. “Did you see her, Daddy?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How was she?”

  He put it all in one word. “Sad.”

  There was silence at her end.

  “I don’t know if I can make myself clear, Susan, but it’s as if she split herself in two parts and one part of her is dead.”

  “Poor thing. Is there anything you can do? Was she glad to see you?”

  “I don’t know if I can do anything. And, yes, I think she was glad to see me. Do you know what she told me, Susan? She said that I was the only friend she had. Imagine that. And we scarcely knew each other.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone being so alone. I hope you can do something for her, Daddy. You will try, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m very proud of you, Daddy,” she said.

  ***

  The hospital was set apart from the rest of the buildings around it. Across the street was a small park, on the corner opposite a large diner was a sign advertising breakfast for sixty-five cents. He paused on the cement steps listening to the voices of the people making their way in and out of the hospital. Most of them were speaking Spanish. Not with the soft accent of the Mexican that he was used to, but still the language of the poor.

  A few minutes later he was seated in front of Superintendent Poole’s desk in a small office on the ninth floor. To get there he had to pass through the steel-barred gate that separated the women’s psychiatric detention center from the rest of the floor.

  Mrs. Poole was a good-looking middle-aged black woman, with a warm smile and sympathetic expressive eyes. She looked down at the copy of Jane’s commitment report that he had been given by Dr. Sloan. “Jane Randolph?” she said in a puzzled voice. “We have so many girls in here, Officer.”

  He nodded.

  She picked up the telephone. A moment later a young uniformed policewoman brought in a file. “I think this is what you may be looking for,” Mrs. Poole said.

  The name was typed on the corner of the file. Jane Randolph. It was followed by a number and a date. The date was five months old.

  “May I make some notes, Mrs. Poole?”

  “Of course. If you don’t understand some of the abbreviations I’ll be glad to explain them.”

  He spread the file on the desk and took out his small notebook. Most of it was simple enough. Arrest record, charge, arresting officer, disposition. He copied the important data. It wasn’t until he reached the final page that the hieroglyphics baffled him. “Mrs. Poole?” he asked, handing her the page.

  “This is our report on her condition and treatment here. Briefly it says that she was admitted in a highly agitated and violent state apparently caused by drug abuse which had induced hallucinations. A bad trip, in plain language. She was kept under chemical and physical restraints for the two days she was here because of the recurrence of the hallucinations and the damage she might do herself and others. At the end of the second day, we were notified that the criminal charges against her had been dropped, and since we no longer had jurisdiction over her our doctors applied to the court for a commitment order. The following morning she was transferred to Creedmore for further treatment.”

  “I see. Is there anything further you can tell me about her?”

  “I’m sorry, Officer. Unfortunately she is only one of many that pass through here and she wasn’t with us long enough for us to make any kind of appraisal.”

  “Thank you for your help, Mrs. Poole.”

  She held out her hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you more information, Detective.”

  He studied his notes in the taxi on the way back to the city. Maybe he would come up with something more at Midtown Precinct North. The police there should at least remember her. Every one of her arrests had been made in that precinct.

  “You come back at eleven tonight and see Sergeant Riordan who’s head of our pussy posse,” the desk sergeant told him. “He’ll fill you in on her. He knows every cunt in the Broadway area.”

  When he returned a little after eleven that night he found Sergeant Riordan, a tall man in his late thirties, sitting in the corridor in front of the women’s holding cells morosely nursing a cardboard container of coffee.

  “What brings you here?” he asked after Millstein had told him he was looking for information on Jane Randolph. “She kill somebody out there?”

  “What makes you say that? Do you remember her?”

  “Fuckin’ right I remember her. Every time she came in here she practically started a riot. She was always on something. Spaced out of her mind. It got so I told my boys that if they came across her to look the other way. We got enough troubles in here without cuckoos like that around.”

  “Did she ever talk about herself or her family?”

  “Who could talk to her? I told you she was nuts. Nothing she said made sense. There was always somebody after her. Somebody who wanted to kill her. The last time we had her in here she had beat up on some poor tourist and wrecked his camera. She was yelling that he was a gun from Los Angeles out to knock her off. The poor bastard was from Peoria and was scared out of his fuckin’ mind. I think he grabbed the next bus home. He never showed up to file charges.”

  “What about the other times? Did she say anything then?”

  “The first time we picked her up she was brought in by one of my boys dressed like a tourist. She saw him on East Fifty-fourth between Madison and Fifth. She asked him if he’d like a massage up in his hotel room for twenty bucks. He kept on walkin’. There’s no law against getting a massage. She followed him. This time she said that for an extra tenner she’d blow his ears off. She told him she really didn’t give great massages but she was the best cocksucker in the world. He thought that was funny and wasn’t even going to pick her up because she didn’t look like no pro to him. Just a kid down on her luck. He kidded her. How about skipping the massage and just going for the blow job for ten bucks, he said and began to walk away. She came after him. Cheap motherfucker, she says, and belts him in the chops. So there’s nothing else he can do but bring her in.

  “We fill out her sheet and take her over to the tank where we keep all the whores until we can ship them downtown. She takes one look and goes berserk. You ain’t going to put me in there like a monkey in a cage, she yells as we shove her through the door. A minute later the whole tank is in an uproar. We finally manage to get her out from underneath a pile of six of the toughest mothers you ever saw, then we get her into restraint and throw her into solitary. We were glad when we could send her downtown in the midnight van.”

  “What happened to her that time?”

  “I don’t know. I heard she got bailed out but I don’t known. Once they get downtown we lose track of them.”

  “By downtown, you mean night court?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the next time you had her in?”

  “That was a funny one. We picked her up in a massage parlor called The Way Out with three other girls and seven guys.”

  “I thought you didn’t bust massage parlors.”

  “We don’t, but thi
s was different. They was making a porno movie and it got hot in there from the lights so they left the windows open and one of the neighbors called it in.”

  “How was she then?”

  “On a speed trip. Made no sense at all. Just kept yelling at all the cops to come and fuck her while she kept playing with herself with a big vibrator.”

  “What happened to her that time?”

  “Some smart shyster got them all off on a technicality about an improper search warrant.” Riordan shook his head. “I been on this job six years now and it ain’t worth a shit. You get no appreciation and the only thing everybody wants to know is how much ass am I getting.”

  “I was wondering about that. How much are you getting?”

  Riordan laughed suddenly. “You small-town cops are all alike. I get enough to keep the skin back. And even with that it’s still a lousy job.”

  “Better than pounding a beat,” Millstein said, holding out his hand. “Thanks, Sergeant.”

  “Anytime. Where you going next? Night court?”

  Millstein nodded.

  Riordan wrote a name on a piece of paper. “My brother-in-law is the court clerk down there. Jimmy Loughran. Tell him you spoke to me. He’ll give you anything you want.”

  Chapter 23

  “To your right. Apartment seventeen-B,” the elevator operator said.

  He walked to the end of the green-carpeted hallway and pressed the buzzer. From inside he heard the soft sound of muted chimes.

  The door was opened by a slim blond girl.

  “Mrs. Lafayette, please. I’m Mr. Millstein.”

  “She’s expecting you. Come in.”

  He followed the girl into the elegant all-white apartment.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “No, thank you.”