Mirror Image

by Dennis Palumbo

  I gave Sinclair a sidelong look. “You weren’t serious about that house-arrest stuff, right? I mean, now that we’re all best buddies again?”

  “Just stay out of the papers, okay, Doctor? And out of the morgue.”

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Outside Sinclair’s office, I remembered that I owed Harvey Blalock a call. But the lawyer beat me to it. I’d no sooner gotten behind the wheel and pulled out of the Federal Building garage when my cell rang.

  “Dan?” His tone sounded urgent.

  “Harvey,” I said. “I was just about to call you. Tell me you’ve got good news.”

  He hesitated only a moment. “I guess that depends. I just heard from Wingfield’s people about Dr. Camden. The hospital called them. Seems he’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They don’t think he’s gonna make it through the day.”

  I let his words sink in, even as I changed lanes to make the left onto Liberty Avenue, toward Pittsburgh Memorial. The midday sun flashed sharply across my windshield, like the path of a searchlight, as I turned into the logjam of downtown traffic.

  “Thanks, Harvey,” I said at last. “I’ll get back to you.”

  ***

  I got there in half an hour.

  Once again, I found myself in my father-in-law’s hospital room, standing at his bedside. Once again, I studied the blinking lights of the machinery keeping him alive, the tubes and wires.

  His eyes were closed. His proud face sunken, wrinkled like a flattened rubber mask. He was barely drawing breath.

  The attending nurse, a smooth-skinned Korean woman of indeterminate age, had told me he’d been drifting in and out of consciousness for the past few hours.

  “I don’t think he even registers that you’re here,” she murmured. “But you can try holding his hand. It’s what I do sometimes when a patient’s ready to let go. I always hope it comforts them.” A sad smile. “At least, I know it comforts me.”

  After she’d left the room, I stood looking down at him. Working through the cascade of conflicting feelings I had toward him. All the hatred and bitterness that we’d exchanged like gunfire. All the shared though unacknowledged grief that had carved the chasm between us since Barbara’s death.

  And now this. Sure as hell not the end he would have wished for. Christ, how insulting, how ignominious he’d find his own dying. Alone in a cold hospital bed, tubes going in and out. Being pitied by the likes of me.

  It was then that I reached through the bed rails and, to my own surprise, took his hand. And squeezed.

  Another surprise. Phil squeezed back. An involuntary response? Or only acknowledgement of my presence. Letting me know he was still in there.

  I listened for a few moments to the wheeze of the machines, the clicking of the monitors.

  “I’m sorry, Phil,” I said. “I’m truly sorry.”

  I was about to turn away when I felt the barest, almost imperceptible closing of his bone-thin fingers, still encircled by mine. I stared down, rooted, as his hand slowly tightened in my own. And held fast.

  “Phil…?”

  Then, just as suddenly, his fingers relaxed again. His hand felt limp, like an empty glove, in mine.

  I looked down at his motionless face. What had just happened? What did it mean?

  Suddenly, a warning bell sounded from one of the bedside monitors. Instinctively, I touched his skin, dry and thin as rice paper. I felt for his pulse. Nothing.

  I turned, my own heart pounding, eyes glued to the monitor screen. Flat lines marched in a row across its dull face…

  Before I could react, two ICU nurses and a resident were rushing into the room, pushing a crash cart. I barely got out of the way as they huddled above the bed, the resident barking orders, the nurses moving in a kind of choreographed blur of activity.

  Then, less then a minute later, the resident was calling the time of death for one of the nurses, and another staff physician—older, haggard—had arrived to survey the scene. He and the resident conferred briefly, in flat, unnecessary whispers, and then he turned to me.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, not unkindly.

  I don’t remember if I even answered him. I just stared, numb, at Phil Camden’s body on the bed. That huge presence, that iron will, suddenly no more.

  Had he been reaching out to me when he squeezed my hand? Had the chasm finally been crossed? Or had it been nothing more than reflex, the body’s last involuntary exchange between muscle tissue and nerve endings?

  I’d never know. Phil Camden was gone.

  Leaving only a final, implacable silence.

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  As I headed up the hill toward Mount Washington and home, I glanced again in my rear-view mirror.

  There it was, a blue-black sedan without front plates. Snaking in and out of traffic, keeping just the right distance back. Never accelerating or slowing in a way that would draw attention to himself. But always there.

  He’d been following me since I drove out of the hospital parking lot, and then across town to the Fort Pitt Bridge. Maybe before that.

  The only thing I know about being tailed I picked up from the movies. And a story my old man told me once about when a manpower shortage got him pulled off the beat and assigned for one night to a detail that was following a suspected low-level gangster. There’d been a rash of bank jobs, and the cops were so desperate for leads they’d begun shadowing every Capone wannabe in town.

  “I was the wheel-man that night,” my father boasted. “The detective sittin’ next to me was some rookie kid who couldn’t even fill out his suit. Didn’t know the streets, the shortcuts. Didn’t know shit. If it wasn’t for me, we woulda lost the SOB in Murraysville.”

  He never got around to telling me what happened that night. If anything. Over the years, I’ve wondered whether the story was even true.

  Then, as always, I’d feel like shit for doubting him. Maybe I should’ve given him more of a break. Maybe—

  I glanced up at my rear-view again as I turned onto Grandview. Traffic had thinned. He’d be easier to spot.

  But he was gone. Turned off a few blocks back, I figured. If anyone had really been following me at all.

  I pulled into my driveway and looked at my quiet, empty house. Sitting behind the wheel, the engine still running, I knew what I should’ve been thinking about: Had I been followed? Was it him? The killer?

  But I was thinking about my old man. How, like a good wheel-man, he still shadowed me. Knew the streets, the short-cuts. Knew, no matter how much I protested, me.

  I grew up wanting so much not to be like him, only to find out how much I was. Prickly. Stubborn. Despite a couple degrees and a clinical license, just another hardass Italian kid from Pittsburgh.

  I imagined him sitting in that shuttered house right now, nursing a Rolling Rock, waiting for me. With those weary, blood-shot eyes. Skeptical. Unimpressed.

  And he’d be right. At least about one thing. This had all started with the brutal murder of one of my patients, a lost and troubled kid named Kevin. It didn’t matter what his real name was, who his father was. None of it did.

  Only one thing mattered. I’d promised myself I’d help find out who killed him, and I hadn’t.

  I shut off the engine and stepped out into a cool, blustery day overhung by thick white clouds. The break in the storm front had held since yesterday, and might hold another day still.

  I breathed in the sharp, wintry air. My father wasn’t in that house, waiting. He didn’t have to be.

  I’d told Sinclair that I was in this all the way, till the end. And I was. Which meant, I realized now, I had to do something I should’ve done before.

  Go back to the beginning.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  At the end of our last session, Kevin had said to me, “Hell, man, I’ve got lots of secrets.”

  During the past two weeks, I believed I’d learned what he meant. That his real name
was Wingfield. That his father had been a participant in his sexual abuse as a child. And that not only was his mother’s death a suicide, he’d experienced the horror of finding her body.

  But what if I was wrong? What if the “secrets” he referred to were about something else?

  I thought about this now, as I spread all the files relating to his case, and his prior treatment history, on my kitchen table.

  I’d made some scrambled eggs, which I ate without tasting, and was on my second cup of black coffee. Sonny Rollins’ throaty sounds from the CD player filled the kitchen, as did a somber afternoon sun.

  I pulled the phone closer. I’d already listened to my messages, checked in with Paul Atwood, and called the hospital asking after Noah. Dr. Olsen was unavailable, but the duty nurse assured me Noah was recovering nicely.

  “The perfect patient,” she added. I’d smiled at the receiver. That’s because he wasn’t able to talk yet.

  Finally, I turned my attention to the papers and files arrayed in front of me. It would take a while, but I’d have to go through it all. Again.

  ***

  It was nearing four in the afternoon when I got off the phone with Admissions at the Sisters of Mercy board-and-care home. Unfortunately, as a religious charity, their records of Kevin’s treatment there were far less documented than would be required at state hospitals or private facilities. Moreover, Kevin’s stay had been brief.

  The nun I spoke with tried to be helpful. What few records they’d retained listed his name as Kevin Merrick. A good Samaritan had brought him to the home after finding him stoned out of his head and bleeding from superficial, self-inflicted cuts from a Swiss Army knife. He had twenty-eight dollars in his wallet and a Pitt student ID card.

  “According to our files,” the nun had explained, “he checked himself out about six weeks later. One of our counselors referred him for out-patient drug treatment, but there’s no way to know if Kevin followed up.”

  Now, as I sorted through my files, I realized there was just one more call to make.

  I glanced at the reports from Clearview Hospital. A sprawling, underfunded public institution on the North Side, it was the last known facility that Kevin had been admitted to, before seeing me.

  I called and got the Assistant to the Head of Records, a Mrs. Vivian Boone. I’d just begun to identify myself when she cut me off.

  “Oh, I know who you are, Doctor,” she said, in a breathless voice. “You’ve been on the news.”

  “So everyone keeps telling me. Anyway, I would like to ask you some questions…”

  “Of course.” I heard some clicks from her computer keyboard. “However, according to our files, you’ve already been sent a complete copy of Mr. Merrick’s records from his stay here at Clearview…Oh, dear, I suppose I should call him Mr. Wingfield now, shouldn’t I?”

  “Let’s just refer to him as Kevin,” I said. “It’ll be easier. And, yes, Mrs. Boone, I have all the hard copy here with me. But I was looking for something that might not be in the record. I wonder, is there someone I could speak to who happened to be at Clearview during Kevin’s stay?”

  “You’re speaking to her,” she said proudly. “I worked in Admissions. This was a few years back, when I first began here. But I do remember Kevin quite vividly.”

  “You do?” This took me by surprise. Clearview was a huge facility. “I’m amazed you can remember one patient out of so many you’ve admitted over the years.”

  “Well…” She paused. “After what happened to Loretta Pruitt…I mean, nothing was ever proven. But a place like this, you can’t help but hear the rumors.”

  “I don’t know a Loretta Pruitt. What happened?”

  “Oh, Loretta was a lovely girl, just lovely. But in terrible shape when she came to us. Drug use. Trouble with the law. Bipolar, I think the doctors said.” Another pause. “Do you need me to pull up her records?”

  “Not yet. You seem to have a good memory.”

  The flattery found its target. “Well, I am good with details. Have to be, in this job. Anyway, here’s the thing: poor Loretta was murdered. Strangled.”

  “Murdered? When?”

  “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? I mean, about Kevin and everything. See, Loretta was found one morning, on the lawn outside the east wall, wearing only her nightgown. The police said she’d been strangled during the night, up on the roof, and then thrown off. Like an old bag of garbage. Just broke all our hearts.”

  “My God, I’m sorry. It must have shaken everyone. But what does this have to do with Kevin?”

  Her voice fell to a conspiratorial low. “Doctor, most people around here think he did it.”

  Chapter Sixty

  “Here’s where they found her.” Vivian Boone, a matronly woman in a yellow rain slicker and hood, pointed at the coarse earth at our feet. “Poor thing.”

  We stood in the damp night air, breath frosting like exhaled smoke, on the east lawn at Clearview Hospital. Though it was obvious no grass had grown here in a long time. Nothing but a broad expanse of hard ground and rain-etched rivulets.

  Now Mrs. Boone was pointing to the edge of the roof, five floors above.

  “The police said she must’ve been thrown from up there. Already dead. Dear God.”

  I squinted up against the gloom, as though there was anything to see after three long years. The roof eave was a stark silouette against the black, pouting sky. Torn shingles dangled from the edge, turning in the wind.

  It was nearly nine o’clock. We stood alone in the blustery yard beneath the massive building, one of a quartet of grimy cinder-block structures covering almost a square mile of the city’s squalid North Side.

  Just then, a powerful klaxon horn bleated out a series of short, biting notes.

  “Lockdown,” Mrs. Boone said.

  I followed her hurried steps toward the barred side door. Waited as she fumbled for the right key.

  Like some kind of Dickensian throw-back, Clearview was a heavily-secured public facility for the clinically insane, the indigent, and the socially inconvenient. Just twenty miles from Ten Oaks, it seemed light-years removed in space and time. The cold, looming walls were streaked with graffiti, and worse. The grounds a moonscape of broken concrete and debris.

  Outside, just beyond high barbed wire, crack houses and rusted-out cars and broken men sleeping in boxes.

  Mrs. Boone was tugging my sleeve. Her face was pink from the cold. I smiled and pulled the heavy door open, ushering her inside.

  After our initial conversation, it had taken a few hours—and another round of calls—to get permission to visit, as well as to cajole Vivian Boone into staying late and showing me where Loretta Pruitt had been found. It hadn’t been hard; the tragic events seemed to thrill her.

  “Like I said, Kevin was never officially a suspect,” she said now, leading me through the labyrinth of narrow, unpainted corridors. With lock-down, the lights had all been dimmed. “But there were rumors that he’d had a special relationship with Loretta. The kind we don’t encourage, as you can imagine.”

  Our route took us past rows of small, recessed rooms, from which came guttural cries and the occasional, wrenching sob that trailed after us like a reproach. I tried to imagine someone as fragile as Kevin in such a place.

  She seemed to sense my thoughts. Her face turned under the hood. “I know, things could be better around here. But there’s nothing we can do. Our budget’s been slashed. Place is held together by string and paper clips.”

  Mrs. Boone stopped abruptly, eyes narrowing. “But we do help these poor people. As much as anyone can.”

  I nodded, but she wasn’t buying.

  “Anyway,” she said briskly, fishing in her raincoat pocket. “I dug out a photo of Loretta, from her file.”

  I glanced quickly at the yellowing picture. She’d been right about one thing: Loretta Pruitt was pretty. Early 20’s, maybe. But thin, wan. Haunted eyes.

  I handed back the photo. “You said there were rumors a
bout Loretta and Kevin?”

  She nodded, as we continued down the corridor.

  “They’d been seen together a lot before that night. Eating together. In the rec room. Just talking, apparently. But keeping to themselves.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything. Certainly not that he had anything to do with her death.”

  “No.” Her voice cooled considerably. “But he checked himself out of Clearview the day after Loretta died. The very next day. As soon as the police were finished interviewing him, he just…vanished. A lot of people around here felt the police should have dragged him back for more questioning, but they said they had no cause.”

  We’d reached a set of paneled double-doors, leading to the staff offices. She pulled the hood back from her head.

  “Besides,” she said, “Kevin threatened to ask for a lawyer, a public defender, if they tried to hold him.”

  I said nothing, trying to picture the Kevin I knew demanding legal counsel. Demanding anything.

  Mrs. Boone clucked her tongue impatiently.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking.”

  “I know. A terrible thing. Loretta’s murder cast a real pall around here. Some of the top staff even quit. As for that Kevin—well, you’ll never explain to me why he was in such a hurry to leave the scene of the crime.”

  As I was thanking her for her time, the doors opened and a tall, slender man with a shock of white hair stepped out. Mid-sixties. A sour face behind bifocals.

  “You must be Dr. Rinaldi,” he said. “I’m Dr. Calvin. Mrs. Boone here said you’re interested in Kevin Merrick. Or whatever they say his real name is.”

  “Did you know him? Were you on staff at the time?”

  He frowned, adjusting his glasses. “I’ve been on staff since the Ice Age, Doctor. And yes, I treated Mr. Merrick for a short time. It’s in the file,” he added.

  “Of course.” Christ. “Tell me, what kind of patient was Kevin?”

  “Difficult.” Dr. Calvin gave me a weary smile. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”