Mirror Image

by Dennis Palumbo

  “This is Stan Brody, WWSW News Radio. Can you just—”

  I turned down the volume and went upstairs. Stretched out on the bed, I listened to the phone ringing again and again. The remorseless clicks as the machine recorded the silent messages. I knew who’d they’d be from. The press. Worried colleagues and friends. Probably a couple attorneys offering their services.

  Finally, I roused myself and reached for the extension phone. I had some calls to make, too.

  As I flipped through my patient roster, I realized I was about to repeat the same steps I’d taken, in almost the exact same sequence, six years before…

  Calling my patients and canceling their sessions for the next two weeks. Explaining my need for some personal time. Some responded with sympathy; others got angry. As I expected, a few claimed it was fine with them. No big deal. I knew I’d have the hardest time with them when I got back.

  Then I called Paul Atwood, another therapist in my office building, to see if he could cover for me. Luckily, he’d seen the morning news and didn’t have to ask why.

  “Look, Dan, if you need anything…” His voice grew thick. “You know, I had a patient once who—”

  “Thanks,” I said, cutting him off. “I’m fine.”

  A pause. “Right.”

  ***

  The doorbell rang, waking me. I must have lain back on the bed and fallen asleep. Groggily, I turned over, pulled the bedside table clock closer. 3:15 p.m.

  The bell rang again. More reporters? Damn.

  I clambered out of bed, eyes adjusting to the afternoon light slanting into the room, and looked out the window. There was a patrol unit parked at the curb. My own green Mustang was parked behind it.

  I went downstairs and opened the door. Two uniforms stood there, both young and wearing mustaches. One of them dangled my car keys in his hand. The other had a clipboard.

  “Brought your car back, sir,” the latter said, offering me the clipboard and a pen. “You have to sign for it.”

  “No problem.” So I did.

  As I pocketed my keys, the other cop said, “Sergeant Polk said to tell you to meet him downtown at nine tonight. The Old County Building. They need you there.”

  “Okay.” What the hell was going on?

  “He says to just stay put till then. We gotta pull the surveillance on your place. Manpower’s short.”

  “Tell Sergeant Polk I’ll sit tight.”

  “Great. You have a nice day.”

  Given the circumstances, a strange comment. I stood in the open doorway and watched them drive off. As soon as the patrol car rounded the corner, I went back inside, dressed, locked up the house, and got in my car.

  I was not going to sit tight.

  Driving down the narrow, twisting roads, I opened all the windows to get at some of that storm-sweetened air. It felt good, bracing. I was starting to wake up.

  Pennsylvania is a green state, never greener than after a heavy rain. Trees glisten, leaves studded with tears. Puffs of wind push around the big clouds, sun-spackled, intensely white. The old Appalachian Hills, sloping away before spreading urban tendrils, looking as pristine and timeless as when the first settlers came over four hundred years ago.

  I turned off Grandview and headed down toward the Fort Pitt bridge. Traffic was forming in clusters, soon to be backed up on the highway all the way to the airport.

  I popped a Jimmy Smith CD into the player and cranked up the volume. Organ Grinder’s Swing. With Kenny Burrell on guitar, Grady Tate holding the sticks. For a lapsed Catholic boy, the only Holy Trinity left to believe in.

  I took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. My fingers drummed on the wheel in time to the music. I was awake, all right. The surreal, dream-like quality of the past twenty-four hours was gone.

  In its place was an aching clarity about the obscenity of Kevin’s death, and my commitment to doing something about it. Somehow making things right. But first—

  I felt the rhythmic bumps from the steel plates as I drove over the old bridge spanning the Monongahela River. I saw my exit up ahead, to the right.

  I had to smile. Not for the first time, I was driving down to the river to tell my troubles to a crazy man.

  Chapter Nine

  “So,” he said. “You gonna start talkin’ or what?”

  Noah Frye took another pull from his beer, then went back to noodling at the piano. Built like a bear, he gave equally bear-like grunts as he played, private chortles of delight and encouragement. Like a white Oscar Peterson.

  Out here on the deck of the converted barge, the breeze was cool coming up through the oiled boards. The riverfront bar, called Noah’s Ark, was moored at a bank below 2nd Avenue. Every afternoon before the bar opened, Noah sat out here at his old Baldwin upright and played.

  Occasionally, like today, I joined him.

  “Okay,” I said finally. “I guess you know about—”

  “Yeah, I saw it on the noon news. Never miss it. I got a thing for the weather girl.”

  “Kevin was my patient, Noah. My responsibility.”

  “’Cause he was jumped comin’ out of your office?”

  “Because he was wearing my jacket. He’d been trying to look like me, dress like me…”

  His hands paused above the keys. “So you figure the killer was really after you?”

  “It’s a real possibility. Cops think so too.”

  “So what can you do about it?”

  “I don’t know. Something. I…owe him.”

  Noah shrugged. Just then, a shift in the wind lifted his shirt collar, leaving one flap up. He’d never notice it, nor the way his belt had missed a few loops so that his pants bunched at the waist.

  Noah Frye was a paranoid schizophrenic. Without his meds, he suffered from delusions of persecution and gruesome death. So every day he swallowed 100 milligrams of Thorazine. Followed by a Cogentin chaser to quell the Parkinsonian-like tremors caused by the Thorazine.

  I met Noah eight years ago, when I was working full-time at Ten Oaks. In and out of mental hospitals since his teens, he was a gifted musician who supported himself doing construction work and odd jobs—in between bouts of delusional terror, homelessness, and street violence.

  One night, Noah was standing just inside the clinic’s rear gate when he saw one of the staff shrinks, Dr. Nancy Mendors, being manhandled in the parking lot. Her estranged husband had Nancy backed against the hood of her car. Noah ran over, spun him around, and gave him an elbow smash to the face. The crack of jawbone sounded like a rifle shot.

  After that, Noah assumed a kind of mythic status at the clinic. It was as if he’d become a trustee, instead of just a patient. After a while, you almost forgot who he was. What he was.

  Until something happened to remind you.

  Once, a new staffer screwed up his meds and Noah just…slipped his knots. He disappeared, causing a mild panic as therapists and patients alike scoured the building and grounds for him.

  He turned up later that day in a diner on Grant Street. He’d found a hammer and some old nails at a nearby construction site, and was going from table to table, asking if someone would please crucify him.

  Not long after that, Noah’s insurance ran out and he was cut loose from the clinic.

  I was the one who found him, purely by chance, a few years later. Driving to work one morning, I caught sight of a homeless guy digging in a trash dumpster. His eyes were glazed, hair dirty and unkempt. Then he grinned, and I knew who it was. Whether he knew me, I couldn’t be sure.

  I contacted Nancy and a couple other colleagues who knew Noah, and we helped find him a job at this run-down coal barge that had just been refitted as a riverfront bar. Ironically the owner, some retired mining executive, took such a liking to Noah that he named the bar after him. While Nancy, still feeling indebted, continued to prescribe and monitor his meds.

  Therapeutically, what we did was outrageous. Maybe even illegal. But it was tangible, pragmatic. A nice change for a therapist. And i
t worked.

  Noah stayed Noah, of course. There are no miracles. Just the hope, in the end, of more good days than bad.

  Sometimes, that has be to enough.

  ***

  When the wind turned icy, I helped Noah pull the waterproof tarp over his piano and we went inside.

  Despite the polished bar stools and hanging racks of glasses over the long, beveled counter, you never forgot you’d stepped into the interior of a former coal barge. Port-holes opened to the river, black tar paper hung from the ceiling. The faint scent of oil-soaked water. What Noah blithely called its “nautical motif.”

  Charlene, the bar’s only waitress (and Noah’s main squeeze), was already lighting the shaded candles at the corner booths. I took a seat at the bar while Noah went behind and started setting things up.

  At the other end of the bar, a TV was showing the evening news. Over the anchorman’s shoulder was the by-now infamous video of the Handyman’s arrest. This was followed by a shot of Dowd’s lawyer talking to reporters.

  “Wonder how the appeal’s going?” I said absently.

  “Who gives a shit?” Noah said, stepping over to shut off the TV. His face grew dark.

  “I don’t mind the crazies,” he said quietly. “It’s the evil fucks I hate.”

  A silence fell between us.

  A few early patrons walked in then, finding a table. Charlene went over, pad in hand, to take their order. She was from out west somewhere. Big, funny, sexy as hell. She helped run the bar and handle the books. Plus she loved Noah, which could be a full-time job in itself.

  I turned back to find Noah staring at me. “Look, this Kevin kid gettin’ whacked…I mean, I’m sorry and all, but this ain’t nothin’ like what happened to Barbara. Fuck it, you weren’t responsible then, you ain’t responsible now.”

  “I know that, all right?” I kept my voice calm. “Believe me, the last thing I’d do is put myself through that hell again.”

  “Glad to hear it. ’Cause nothin’ you can do will bring that kid back.”

  “I know that, too.”

  Another long silence. Finally, I stood up, pushing off from the stool. I was vaguely conscious of other customers wandering in, their voices wafting like smoke.

  I felt light-headed. I realized I hadn’t eaten a thing in over twenty-four hours. Naturally, as soon as I had that thought, my stomach started gnawing.

  “You want my advice,” Noah was saying, “fly your sorry ass to Barbadoes and hook up with a couple horny divorcees. Think about it, man. I’m talkin’ tag-team blow-jobs.”

  “Jesus, I wish.” I glanced at my wrist; forgot my watch. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Why? Are my fifty minutes up?”

  “No, I’ve got a date with the cops. Besides—”

  Just then, I saw the color drain from Noah’s face. He was staring at something past my shoulder.

  “Well, fuck me,” he said quietly.

  I turned, as the last person in the world I wanted to see that day came through the door.

  Chapter Ten

  Dr. Brooks Riley, Chief Psychiatrist at Ten Oaks, was drunk. He steadied himself in the doorway, squinting with exaggerated horror into the bar.

  “Rinaldi! Are you hiding somewhere in this floating menace to public health?”

  I was off my stool and across the room before Riley could take another step. Faces looked up from leather booths. The murmur of voices grew still.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I said to him.

  Riley was about my height, with the kind of proud, old-money good looks that usually made me think of yacht clubs, not hospitals. At least when he was sober. I’d never seen him drunk before.

  “We’re celebrating.” He raked a hand through rich, dark hair. His tie, clasped to his shirt with a Harvard alumni pin, was undone at the throat. Despite the Armani suit, he looked, to my surprise, like hell.

  “We?”

  He glanced back in the direction of the door. “The boss and his wife. While we’re chatting in here, they’re outside, battling hypothermia.”

  “Shit.” I took Riley by the arm and marched us back out the way he’d come in.

  Outside on the sidewalk, the night air had dropped a dozen degrees. A clammy chill joined the fog wafting up from the river’s edge.

  “We were beginning to wonder,” Albert Garman said pointedly. A slight, balding man in his late fifties, he looked even less imposing swallowed up in an overcoat and thick scarf. Only his eyes, which managed to be both pale and penetrating—especially when presiding over case presentations—betrayed his intelligence and ambition. In only six years as Clinical Director, he’d turned Ten Oaks into the most successful private psychiatric facility in the state.

  His wife Elaine, mid-forties, and a full head taller than her husband, shivered next to him in her fur coat. According to clinic gossip, her rail-thin figure was the result of a diet rich in cocaine.

  I shook hands with both of them. “Come on, you two, let’s go inside.”

  Elaine’s laugh was raw as sand. “Honey, I’ve never been that desperate for a drink.”

  “We thought perhaps you’d be here,” Garman said. “I wondered if you might like to join us at dinner.”

  Highly unlikely. This had to be about Kevin Merrick.

  “We called your office,” Riley sniffed, “and your house, looking for you. After hearing on the news—”

  “Yes.” Garman glanced past me, at the bar. “Then I remembered your having an interest in this place…”

  “We’re on our way to Schaeffer’s for dinner,” Riley went on, oblivious. “This way, you’d get to explain yourself over a nice lobster.”

  “Explain…?” I glared at him.

  “Look, Dan,” Garman said smoothly, “Elaine and I invited Brooks to join us for drinks and dinner. We’ve got good news to celebrate. Then, of course, when we learned about the death of your patient—”

  “He was the poor bastard you presented at our last case conference, right?” Riley brayed. “Pathetically mirroring you, with your encouragement…”

  Garman gave Riley a sharp look, then turned back to me. “Honestly, Dan, I just felt you could use some support. I’ve lost patients myself, and I know how—”

  “Hey, guys, I’m freezing my tits off.” Elaine bundled her coat tighter. “Can we get to the point?”

  “Elaine…” Garman gazed helplessly at his wife.

  But she’d pivoted on a high heel and was staring at me. “Look. My sister is seeing some hot-shot at the DA’s office, and he told her, off the record, that the murdered guy was found dressed like you. That the cops think you were the one supposed to get killed.”

  Garman was shaking his head. “Your sister should learn to keep her mouth shut.”

  Elaine bristled. “Don’t blame Kathy. Blame the married prick she’s sleeping with. He told her.”

  Ignoring them, Riley took a step toward me. “You know what that means, don’t you? I objected to your treatment of Kevin from the start. ‘Twinship yearning,’ my ass! Try clinical incompetence!”

  He raised a finger, stabbing at me with liquor-fueled conviction. “I was right, I knew I was right, and now the kid’s dead!”

  Garman looked up. “Brooks, for God’s sake—”

  But Riley was on a roll. “His family ought to sue, you know that? Even if they don’t, I’m going to see to it you get your license revoked!”

  He took another step toward me, glowering with anger.

  “Back off, Riley.” I placed my palm against his chest. “You don’t give a damn about Kevin. You’ve had a hard-on for me since you showed up at Ten Oaks, and now you’re seeing your chance to burn me. So fuck you.”

  “Oh, this is priceless,” Elaine said. “Three of our city’s finest mental health professionals—”

  “Look,” Garman said hoarsely. “Elaine’s right…”

  His wife turned and stepped off the sidewalk. “Hell, I’m going to wait in the car. Have fun, boys.” With
that, she hurried away across the dark, rain-slicked parking lot.

  Riley made a little side step, more like a lurch, then righted himself. No question, an amateur drunk.

  I turned to Garman. “Get him out of here, will you, Bert? For his own good.”

  But Riley swung his head up, eyes red and angry. “You don’t get it, do you, Danny boy? You blew it! The famous specialist screwed up!”

  Again, finger poking me. Hard, jabbing. Eyes sheened with bleary indignation. And something else. The thrill of liquor-fueled bravado, carelessness. Unused to the alcohol coursing through that blue blood.

  I saw all this. I should have known. And yet I still said it: “You poke me one more time with that finger, I’m gonna feed it to you.” Then I batted his finger away.

  That’s when Riley and I each made a stupid mistake: He took a swing at me, and I did something about it.

  I didn’t mean to hit him so hard, but suddenly he was sitting on the wet pavement, hand covering his mouth, blood dribbling through his fingers. On the sidewalk next to him, like a pair of thrown dice, were two of his teeth.

  “Oh my God!” Garman stared, wide-eyed in disbelief, first at me, and then down at his chief psychiatrist.

  “Shit,” I said, more or less under my breath. My right fist stung from the blow. I hadn’t struck anyone, or anything, without a glove since I was twelve years old.

  “You lunatic.” Riley’s thickening lips found it hard to form words. “You hit me! Now I’m gonna sue you!”

  “Go ahead. But Bert here’s a witness. It was self-defense. You swung at me first.”

  “A witness?” Garman could barely form words himself. “What are you talking about? We’re doctors, for Christ’s sake. We don’t brawl on the street.”

  “Right outside of a riverfront bar, don’t forget,” I added. “Ought to make a nice picture for the evening news.”

  “Go to hell!” Riley was struggling to get up, angrily waving away Garman’s offer of assistance.

  “You’re both insane,” Garman barked at me over his shoulder. “I don’t believe this!”