Blameless

by B. A. Shapiro

  Diana stopped and watched the small red mitten disappear into the crowd. She continued to wave, somehow uplifted by the encounter, although the child was no longer aware of her. She strode more purposefully toward Mitch’s, focusing on the encouraging things she had to tell him: that Ethan and James had been heard arguing at Ken’s right before James’s murder; that Ethan had most likely been to his apartment within the last couple of weeks; that she had the feeling the bartender knew more than he was telling. And she already knew Mitch considered her discovery about Ethan’s girlfriend’s “suicide” germane.

  Not bad for an amateur, she thought, riding the escalator down toward Boylston Street. And as she walked past the towering Prudential Center Christmas tree, she was reminded that the coming of December also brought her that much closer to the birth of her child.

  By the time she stepped into Mitch’s office, she was feeling much better, almost optimistic. “So, let’s sort the germane from the irrelevant,” she said cheerfully as she sank into the chair he pulled out for her.

  Mitch raised his eyebrows in mild surprise and went around to the other side of his desk. He nodded and pulled a folder from the drawer. “You first.” As before, he took notes and listened carefully, stopping to ask her a question now and then. She told him everything she had discovered and everything she thought about each piece of information. When she finished, he seemed very pleased and declared all of her information germane.

  “Kruse never said anything to you about the girlfriend’s suicide?” Mitch asked.

  She shook her head. “Patients only tell you what they want—and there’s no way for a therapist to find anything out unless you’re told.”

  “But wouldn’t the police call you?” Mitch asked, obviously surprised.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know—like if something strange happened involving one of your patients? Or if a patient got arrested?”

  Diana smiled; the outlandish assumptions people had about therapists always amused her. “How would the police know that he was one of my patients?”

  Mitch nodded. “I’ll have Norman run a check on the girlfriend’s suicide—we just might have something here. And,” he added, pulling a small packet of computer printouts from the file, “I’ve got a few interesting tidbits for you too. Many of them based on the information you got in Norwich.” He smiled at her. “Maybe you’re in the wrong occupation?”

  Flushed with optimism and Mitch’s compliments, Diana grinned. “It’s nice to know I have a fall-back career if this one blows up in my face.” Her grin disappeared as she listened to her own words.

  “Here’s my good news,” he said quickly. “Jill Hutchins may have an alibi, but she’s looking more and more suspicious with every additional piece of information we discover about her.”

  “She is?”

  He flipped through the printouts. “According to this preliminary credit check, the woman is deeply in debt, and her credit rating is abysmal.” He tapped the desk with his pen. “But there’s something else here …”

  “Something else?”

  He locked his fingers behind his head and looked at the ceiling. “It’s subtle, but her pattern of debt seems to indicate a kind of desperation,” he said. “At various times, on a single day, she’s pulled cash from every credit card. All the cash she could get.” He turned and looked at Diana. “That and her criminal record.”

  “Jill has a criminal record?” Diana leaned closer to Mitch. “Something we can use?”

  He held up his hands. “Don’t get too excited. We don’t know if it’s germane or irrelevant yet.” He smiled at her, then continued, “But it appears that Ms. Hutchins was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon out in Des Moines a few years back. And she also had a run-in with the police in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early eighties. Grand theft auto.”

  “Molly Arell’s perfect little angel …”

  “The aunt probably never knew anything about it. The Nebraska thing happened a long time ago—and a long way from home.” He checked his pages once more. “And the Des Moines charge was dropped rather abruptly.”

  “Whom did she assault?” Diana asked, beginning to enjoy herself. “With what deadly weapon?”

  “Her husband, with a knife, in the kitchen,” he said, his voice serious, but his eyes laughing.

  Diana flashed on Jill holding a poker to her stomach the afternoon she had gone in search of her journal. She saw herself on her knees, looking into Jill’s feverish eyes. Perhaps this wasn’t so much fun after all.

  “This isn’t a parlor game,” Mitch said, as if reading her mind. “We’ve got to watch this woman. I think we should follow up on why the Des Moines charges got dropped.”

  Diana nodded. “What about Ethan?”

  Mitch pulled out another folder, flipped it open, and glanced into it. “Nice company you’re keeping,” he said.

  “That bad?” Diana asked.

  “He starts off with everything from disorderly conduct to burglary to DWI …”

  Diana nodded.

  “Spends some time in Leavenworth—but he’s released early for his good behavior, and, I quote, ‘impressing the authorities with his attitude, remorse, and plans for the future.’”

  “I believe that,” Diana said, shaking her head and smiling slightly. At least she wasn’t the only one Ethan had bamboozled. He had told stories Diana believed to be true because no one could make up anything so detailed and complicated—but she’d discovered later they were pure fabrication.

  “Kruse’s list ends with compounding a felony, arson, and rape,” Mitch was saying.

  “Rape?”

  “It wasn’t just Ethan involved in that rape,” he said slowly.

  Diana’s heart sank, and she knew before she heard the words what Mitch was going to tell her.

  “He and James Hutchins were arrested last November—November 15, to be exact—for rape. A young woman claimed they gave her a ride home from a party and then wouldn’t leave her apartment until she had sex with them both.”

  “That’s impossible,” Diana cried. “Something like that couldn’t have happened to James last year—he would have told me about it …” Her voice dropped off at the end of the sentence; as she said the words, she knew they weren’t true.

  Mitch raised his eyebrows, and Diana looked at her hands. “If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “these charges were also dropped rather abruptly.”

  “You think there’s a connection between this and Jill’s thing?” she asked. “Because the charges for both were dropped?”

  He shrugged. “Given the size of James Hutchins’s bank account, I think it’s a distinct possibility.” They looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then Mitch said, “So now are you ready for the bad news?”

  Diana smiled weakly. “I’m finding the good news hard enough to take.”

  “The police seem to be buying Molly Arell’s story,” he said quickly. “And they haven’t had any more luck than we have finding Kruse.”

  Diana nodded.

  “But it’s Herb Levine I’m worried about …”

  Diana rubbed her palms on her jumper and said nothing, feeling as if her neck were in a guillotine.

  “Word on the street is that Levine’s convinced some ADA to convene a grand jury—”

  “ADA?” Diana asked, more to slow Mitch down than because she really needed, or cared, to know.

  “Assistant district attorney. Your colleagues will be served subpoenas to appear—”

  “But how can they do this before anyone’s been arrested?” Diana interrupted again.

  “It’s a discovery suit,” he explained patiently. “The grand jury will use the testimony to determine if there’s probable cause to issue an arrest warrant.”

  Arrest warrant. The words reverberated through Diana’s brain and her fingers began to shake. She pressed her hands under her arms to still them. Arrest warrant.

  Mitch leaned toward her and asked gent
ly, “Will it be really bad for you if they talk?”

  Diana thought of the dream she had described to her group in which she and James had been living naked and happy on a desert island populated by blue trees that grew upside down. She thought of how she had told them of Craig’s anger at James’s stalking—and of his fury and threats to confront James after the car accident. She thought of the conversation she had had with Gail about James’s will. It was all she could do to nod her head.

  26

  THE NIGHT WAS CLEAR AND BRITTLE AS DIANA WALKED past the Ritz Carlton on her way home from Mitch’s office. She glanced upward in confusion, thinking she remembered the afternoon being gray, her walk overedged by clouds. But even through the city lights, she could see that the sky was now black and empty, a vacant backdrop. Was she mistaken? Had she come so unglued that she couldn’t tell this day from another? Or had the wind just blown the clouds away while she had been in with Mitch?

  She remembered a comment Mark Twain had once made about New England’s climate: that he had counted one hundred and thirty-six kinds of weather inside of twenty-four hours. But Twain’s thoughts didn’t cheer her. Helplessness and despair surrounded her like a shroud. Despite Mitch’s guarded optimism and the open expanse of the Commonwealth Avenue mall in front of her, Diana felt crowded and claustrophobic. And a little unsteady.

  For after Mitch had told her about the grand jury and the possibility of an arrest warrant being issued, she had separated from herself. Completely detached. Suddenly, instead of sitting in the chair across from his desk, she was off to the side, hovering somewhere above the small couch, watching herself as if she were an actress on the stage.

  Diana stopped at the corner of Fairfield and Comm Ave. and grabbed a streetlamp. Although she hadn’t been frightened at the time—it had actually been a strangely pleasurable experience—she was very frightened now. And although it had never happened to her before, except perhaps for a few moments in the shower or walking on a treadmill, she knew what it was: She had dissociated.

  Releasing her grip on the streetlamp and pushing herself toward Boylston Street, Diana reminded herself that dissociating could be a perfectly normal, even desirable, phenomenon. That people aspired toward it during meditation, that artists and writers found it to be the highest plane of creativity. She knew it could be brought on by simple fatigue or stress. But she also knew it could be a sign of a serious mental problem.

  She had actually dissociated, she thought as she stepped onto the escalator that would take her to the Prudential Center mall. It had actually happened. As a detached, almost disinterested observer, she had watched herself nod agreement to Mitch’s confident declaration that they would find a way to break Molly Arell’s alibi and use both Ethan and Jill’s criminal backgrounds against them. She had also nodded her acceptance of his recommendation that they wait until they had amassed more information before going to the police with their discoveries—even the news about Ethan’s girlfriend, he had said, would be more powerful if it was presented along with all the incriminating facts. Then she had watched herself authorize him to have Norman do more intensive investigations of Ethan, Jill, and Molly. But she had felt as if it weren’t she, Diana Marcus, doing these things. Although she knew that it was.

  Then the Diana who was simultaneously herself and not herself, had agreed to go back and talk with the bartender at Ken’s—this time focusing on Jill while trying to gain Marcel’s confidence so that he would tell her whatever it was he had withheld before. And she had offered to search her records once again for clues to Ethan’s possible whereabouts.

  As she had left the office, Mitch squeezed her arm and she was tremendously relieved to find herself fused with herself once again. “Chin up,” he told her. “I’ve seen bleaker cases turn around.”

  But Diana didn’t believe him. Molly wasn’t going to crack. Ethan wasn’t going to be found. And she, Diana, was going to be punished for her mistakes in a way she never could have envisioned: She was going to prison. Levine already had her on opportunity, and once the grand jury convened and her colleagues testified—especially Gail—there would be more than enough motive. In her distraction, Diana tripped getting off the escalator on the back side of the Prudential Center. Flailing her arms wildly, she was overwhelmed by her own powerlessness. In that fleeting second of vertigo and terror, she saw herself hunched on the sidewalk clutching her stomach, blood running between her legs. She cried out and a teenage girl grabbed her arm. Diana righted herself and smiled weakly at the girl.

  Oblivious to the cold and the crowds, Diana dropped to a concrete bench not far from the escalator and stared at the towering buildings and glass walkways of Copley Place, at the flickering Christmas lights adorning the Colonnade Hotel, at the water rolling over the edge of the reflecting pool. The world she thought she knew, the city she loved, the people she had cared for, were all alien and frightening. She pressed closer to the couple sharing the bench with her. Everyone and everything was so much more dangerous than she had ever imaged.

  But Levine was her biggest threat. He and the assistant district attorney and the grand jury. None of them were psychologists; they would never understand why she had needed to discuss her attraction to James with her peers, why it had been necessary for her to confess the depths of her passion, the fire he had ignited within her—any more than anyone had understood why she had needed to write about it in her journal. And no one was going to believe that she hadn’t followed through on such powerful feelings.

  Everyone was going to think that she had had sex with James—and that she had killed him.

  Diana rubbed her arms briskly, but her external actions could do nothing to ward off the cold that emanated from deep within the marrow of her bones. The grand jury would not only hear of her sexual feelings for James, but once her peer group explained the basis for countertransference, they would also hear of his passion for her. They would learn she had been forced to end his therapy because her husband was worried James might harm her; and they would most likely wonder if Craig hadn’t also been a little bit jealous. But most damning, the grand jury would learn from Gail that James had indeed told her that he was going to change his will—and that she had actually joked about killing him for the money.

  Diana stared upward, straining to glimpse the heavens through all the earth light; but from where she sat, she could not. The couple on her left rose and wandered off toward Copley Place. The bench felt empty and cold, exposing her unprotected flank.

  Diana stood and headed home, taking the path of least resistance between the swarms of hurrying shoppers. She allowed an ample woman gripping two matching shopping bags to elbow around her. She slowed behind an elderly couple holding hands. She skirted two boys playing tag. But she knew that the path of least resistance was not going to be the road she could take for long.

  Diana forced herself to go to the Stop and Shop and pick up some chicken for dinner. She also bought some grapefruit and salad and wild rice. She headed home with the rest of the working hungry, balancing her parcel and straining to occupy her mind with the pros and cons of various recipes. But the words arrest warrant kept pushing against her mind’s debate between barbecue versus honey-mustard chicken.

  As she chopped tomatoes and cucumbers and whipped up a honey-mustard sauce, she focused on the things she could do to keep Levine at bay. Absently she boiled water for the rice and set the table. Tomorrow was Wednesday; her last patient was at noon. After she dropped Craig at the airport, she would be free. She tossed the salad and cut the grapefruit. She would go to Ken’s and talk to Marcel. Then she would come home and go through Ethan’s records to search for hints of his whereabouts.

  Her reverie was broken by the chime of the doorbell. When she saw Levine standing on the stoop, she froze.

  “Got the message that you had another Kruse tape for me,” he said. “I know it’s dinnertime, but I was in the neighborhood.” He smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Do you mind?”

&
nbsp; “No, no, of course not,” Diana said, ushering him into the house.

  He glanced around. “Your husband isn’t home yet?” he asked.

  Diana shook her head. “The tape’s just downstairs in my office. I’ll get it for you. Do you want to come down with me? Or would you rather wait?” She gestured awkwardly in the general direction of the kitchen. “I was just making dinner. Can I get you something to eat or drink?” she blurted before thinking.

  To Diana’s chagrin, Levine happily took her up on the offer, declaring he would just love a cup of coffee. Furious with herself for her stupidity, she told him to go sit in the kitchen while she ran and got the tape.

  When she came back upstairs, she handed him the plastic box and smiled in what she hoped was a perky—and innocent—manner. “Regular, I presume?” she asked, waving him into a chair and walking to the refrigerator for the coffee.

  The detective eyed the two place settings on the table and sat down in the extra chair. “You bet,” he said. “I’m on till eleven.” He crossed his long legs casually, resting one ankle on the other. As he watched her setting up the coffee maker, Levine turned the rectangular tape box from side to side, hitting it on the kitchen table, saying nothing.

  His silence and the dull clunk of plastic against wood got on Diana’s nerves. She bit her lip and kept her back to him. But when she finished putting the filter in place, scooping the coffee, pouring the water, and pushing the appropriate buttons, she had to turn around. “It’ll be a few minutes,” she said lamely.

  He nodded, still clunking the tape. “As long as I’m here,” he said, “and as long as we have to wait for the coffee, perhaps you won’t mind if I take advantage of your professional expertise again? I really could use some help understanding the more complicated psychological stuff.” He flashed her a winsome smile. “To be perfectly honest, I’m pretty damn confused.”

  Diana sat down in the chair across from him. She had to be cautious here, she had to remember not to be disarmed by his charm: Levine was sharper than he let on. He probably hadn’t come just for the tape, he had most likely chosen the opportunity—and even this particular hour—for his own ulterior motives. “I’ll be happy to try,” she said, her voice guarded.