So Like Sleep

by Jeremiah Healy

  I parked in front of Marek’s building and entered the lobby. I walked downstairs to the basement, answering some time and distance questions I had. I also tried to find my friend the maintenance man, but he must have been off at another of the owner’s properties, “saving a dime.” I climbed the stairs all the way to Marek’s floor.

  His receptionist was typing on some short-form stationery as I came through the door. Given what I guessed Marek’s rates were, I would have thought he’d at least send out his bills on full-sized paper. She looked up with a practiced smile, not quite placing me. “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so. I don’t have an appointment, but I was here on Tuesday, and I think Dr. Marek would really appreciate hearing what I’ve found out since then.”

  “Let me … I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your …”

  “Cuddy, John Cuddy. I’m sure Dr. Marek will remember me.”

  She worked hard to keep quizzical from hardening into disapproving. “Please be seated. I’ll tell him you’re here.” She stood and made her way to and through the doorway to his office while I busied myself with the periodicals on his waiting area table. Sandwiched between last month’s issue of Town & Country and this month’s issue of Ducks Unlimited was a copy of a recent Calem Chronicle.

  She reappeared in the doorway and said, “The doctor will see you now.”

  I said thank you and passed her as she moved back to the bills.

  Marek was sitting at his desk, laying down a dictating microphone and adjusting some dial on a control panel as I sat down.

  “Well, Mr. Cuddy, good to see you again,” he said without looking up. He finally finished with the control panel and actually engaged me. “Unfortunately, I need Friday afternoons to catch up on correspondence and such, so I’m afraid that I can’t give you much time. Mrs. Porter said that you had something important to tell me?”

  Nicely done. Parameters of interview set, warm inflection on last clause to encourage me to state my news succinctly, with little time for discussion.

  “Actually, I thought you might be in need of a little counseling yourself today.”

  He canted his head toward a shoulder. “I’m not sure I …”

  “Lainie Bishop was killed last night.”

  “Yes, tragic. I heard it on the late news.”

  “Kind of an epidemic.”

  “Epidemic?”

  “Among your patients, I mean. First Jennifer, then William, as a consequence anyway, and now Lainie.”

  “I don’t think … The news bulletin suggested a burglar, I believe.”

  “And therefore how could Jennifer and Lainie be connected?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Doctor, doesn’t it strike you as at least peculiar that the ranks of your patients are thinning out so quickly and specifically?”

  “I’m afraid I’m finding this conversation a bit obtuse, Mr. Cuddy. What do you mean by ‘specifically’?”

  “That two members of a five-person therapy group are murdered within a month of each other and a third member is charged on one of them. Doesn’t that seem kind of selective to you?”

  “But it’s clear that William killed Jennifer and that he couldn’t have killed Lainie. And Lainie’s death seems certain to have been due to some startled prowler. Aside from mere coincidence, I don’t see the connection.”

  “I notice that you get the Chronicle.”

  “The local paper, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “What of it?”

  “Do you read the ‘Police Blotter’ column?”

  He gave me a tolerant smile. “Not my favorite.”

  “Too bad. I hear it covers local crime waves pretty thoroughly. Like the string of burglaries before Lainie was killed.”

  Marek shook his head, then looked down toward his microphone. “Really, Mr. Cuddy. I don’t understand what you’re driving at, and I do have a mountain of work yet to move today, so …”

  “It must be kind of lonely for you on Thursdays now.”

  “What?”

  “Without the experimental group, I mean.”

  “Mr. Cuddy, I fail to see …”

  “Of course, it also frees up your time for other things.”

  “What are you insinuating?”

  “Like house calls, for example.”

  “I think you’d better leave, sir.”

  I peeked down at my watch. “Gee, thanks. I do have another appointment. I’m going to see somebody about hypnosis. I understand it can be a very helpful device.” I stood up and moved toward the door. “By the way, Doctor, did Jennifer ever tell you what a crush she had on you?”

  When I looked back at Marek, he was giving me the tolerant smile again. “Do close the door and please don’t bother me after today. Understood?”

  If I was right about Clifford Marek, I had to admire his recovery ability. If I was wrong about him, I wasn’t sure where else to look.

  The drive into the city was pleasant, the afternoon warm and sunny. It helped that the first outriders of the rush-hour traffic were coming at me rather than traveling with me. I wound my way to the medical school’s South End location, a good distance from Boston University’s main campus on Commonwealth Avenue. I parked in an illegal space and walked to a four-story building.

  Professor—Doctor—Douglas Kirby was a happy surprise. He was bright, knowledgeable, and he tactfully ignored the passing of about an hour and a half. We discussed flurazepam and placebos, suppression states and nightmares. Especially as they related to the force of hypnosis and posthypnotic suggestions. I left his office with five books under my arm.

  I spent the balance of Friday night and most of Saturday at home reading the material Kirby had lent me. I grew pretty certain of the who and the how of Jennifer’s death. What I still didn’t know was the why. And with Lainie dead, I wasn’t likely to uncover that without getting on at least one plane. I called Murphy and Mrs. Daniels, advising them what I was going to do. They insisted on footing the bills, and I declined by hanging up on each. I then reached my landlord in Chicago, who said that although she was at a different hospital, she would personally call Dr. Jerome Gemelman and ask him to see me on Monday. She was going out of town to a conference, so she also gave me the name and telephone numbers of an administrative dean at a Chicago law school whom she knew and who might be able to help if I ran into any snags. “Jim’s a little weird, John, but he’s good.” I thanked her and wondered briefly, before I made my airline and hotel reservations, how weird a dean at a law school could be.

  Twenty-four

  I GOT UP AT 8:00 A.M. on that cloudy Sunday morning and thought about packing my running gear for the trip. Instead, I put it on and ran a slow but satisfying six-mile loop from the condo west to and across the Harvard Square bridge and then east along the Cambridge side of the river before crossing back over at the Mass Ave bridge. I bought the Sunday Times and some croissants and milk, then walked home and showered. While my hair dried, I ate breakfast, skimmed the Times, and filled a carry-on case. I dressed casually, called a cab, and headed to the airport. With one intermediate stop.

  “You gonna be here long, Mac?”

  I shook my head. “Ten minutes, maybe. Leave the meter running.”

  “Don’t worry, I will. Freaking cemeteries give me the creeps, y’know?”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  The sun was just breaking through the overcast as I drew even with her stone. The rays made her name on it wink at me. “That’s a pretty good trick, kid.”

  Practice, she said. Where are you going?

  “Chicago, then maybe on to Philadelphia and New York.”

  See America first?

  “Not exactly. I took your advice. I assumed that William didn’t kill Jennifer and then tried to see who could have set him up. Any alternative killer was helped most by William spilling the beans at the hypnosis session. Probably the only one with both the opportunity and the ability to set that up was Dr. Marek himself, since
he was the one who could control the hypnosis session.”

  But I thought he didn’t seem to have a motive.

  “He didn’t. And doesn’t. But there’s some indication that Jennifer was interested in him romantically. Unfortunately, there’s no real proof of it, and the doctor was very good at covering his emotions if anything ever came of it. The only person around who seems to have been Jennifer’s confidante was killed Thursday.”

  How?

  “Made to look like an interrupted burglary, but my guess is the confidante drew some conclusions from whatever Jennifer told her and then confronted Marek, or somebody else, with them.”

  Which is why you’re going to Chicago?

  “Yeah. That’s the last place before Boston that Marek worked. He also worked in Philly and New York. I’m working my way backward through his career, betting that if he had something going with a female patient here, he may have a history of it somewhere else.”

  Which would give him a motive to kill Jennifer?

  “I grant you, not much of a motive in this day and age, I suppose. But right now I don’t have anything else. And William’s got nothing.”

  He’s got you.

  The cabbie honked twice. I looked over at him and nodded.

  Rude guy, she said.

  “He doesn’t like cemeteries.”

  So stiff him on the tip.

  “No pun intended?”

  We laughed and said good-bye.

  O’Hare Airport might be bigger than the town in which you grew up. I remembered having to fly in and out of there maybe six times in my days at Empire Insurance. The terminals are designed so that every gate is at least three miles from its airline’s corresponding ticket counters when you’re departing and from the baggage carousels when you’re arriving. I carried my bag outside and waited on the taxi line for nearly an hour as a dispatcher of some kind filled only one cab at a time. Most of the travelers around me seemed resigned to the system, so I didn’t see the sense in complaining.

  When my turn came, I just climbed into the rear seat and told the back of the driver’s head, “The Raphael Hotel, please. On East Delaware off Michigan.”

  He said, “You bet.”

  I settled back into the seat, looked up at the cab’s roof, and saw a glossy eight-by-ten autographed photo of Nat King Cole. Except it wasn’t Cole.

  “That’s me,” said the cabbie, adjusting his inside rearview mirror so that I could see his face.

  It was uncanny. The features, the hair, even the easy, relaxed smile.

  “I’m a professional impersonator. I just drive the cab between gigs.” He reached into the glove compartment and passed me a recent copy of Newsweek. “That’s me there, up at the head table.”

  I could barely make him out, along with four others, seated at a table on a stage and looking down at an auditorium containing several hundred burly white men wearing white T-shirts and sporting bald heads.

  “They asked me to judge the Mr. Clean contest.”

  “How did you get started in all this?”

  “Well, when I was growing up, my family saw the resemblance. Then I entered one of these celebrity look-alike contests and came in third, and that was without any … they call it ‘cosmetic advantage.’ ”

  “Meaning surgery?”

  “No. That is, not for me. I’ve heard some of the Elvis impersonators have done that, but my bone structure and all were already okay. I just needed some teeth capped and a little work on my hairline is all.”

  “And what do you do? Photographic modeling?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Some of that. A lot of us have this agent here in town who sets that stuff up. I do parties sometimes too. You know, the host’ll get in touch with my agent ahead of time and like hire three or four different look-alikes. Then we come to the party and just mingle with the guests and the host gets a kick out of the way they react to us. Course, I don’t do all that many parties.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged. “Some folks think it’s kind of weird having a dead celebrity walk up to them with a drink in his hand, you know?”

  “I guess I can see that.”

  “Yeah, so it’s the live ones that get the most party gigs, like the Queen Elizabeths and the Michael Jacksons and so on.”

  I was hesitant to ask him about his voice, but I didn’t have to.

  “That’s why my agent has me taking singing lessons. The real money for this stuff is in putting on a nightclub act, say maybe three of us each doing a set, you know, like a Bing Crosby and me wrapped around maybe a Jack Benny. Of course, I never …” He looked up in the mirror at me, then continued. “Were you old enough to remember his TV show?”

  “Cole’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You bet.” In the mid-fifties, the King was the first black I recalled having really his own program, not counting the stereotypical situation comedies like Beulah and Amos and Andy. On a nondescript gray stage setting, Cole would introduce his guests, play his piano, and sing his songs, all with an effortless grace under what must have been the incredible pressure of being both the first and the only.

  “I wish I could have seen that. But I got a few of his TV spots from later on tape, and I’m really trying to get his mannerisms down. My voice won’t ever be close to his, but if I can get my head to tilt right and my hands to work right …” The cabbie gave a sort of half wave with his right hand, the way I thought Cole signed off his programs. “Well, they say if you can get the mannerisms, the people, y’know, the audience like, they’ll hear what they want to hear, and they’ll leave happy because of me being able to do that.”

  “Sounds like you can justify your job a lot better than most guys I know.”

  “Thanks.”

  We pulled up to the Raphael. I tipped him five dollars on a twenty-dollar fare, and we wished each other luck.

  As I checked in, the desk clerk offered me the literature on the other Raphaels, which I already had. There are only three in the chain, and I had stayed only at this one and the one in San Francisco. If the Kansas City entry is as well run and well located as the other two, the Raphael family should be making a well deserved fortune.

  I was shown to my room, mixed a screwdriver from the honor-system stocked bar and refrigerator, and flopped on the king-sized bed. I decided to call Jim, the law school dean, just to let him know I was in town. I punched what I’d been given as Jim’s home phone number.

  After three rings, a voice answered, “City Morgue.”

  “I’m sorry, I must have dialed the wrong—”

  “Hold on, hold on. Is this Karen’s friend from Boston?”

  “Yes, is this—”

  “Yup, it’s me. I thought I recognized the accent. We get a few Boston-area people coming out here to school. Where are you staying?”

  “The Raphael. I—”

  “Hey, nice place. Karen said you were a runner?”

  “Just to stay in shape. Listen—”

  “Did you bring your running gear?”

  “No, I didn’t. I’m just going to be here today and tomorrow.”

  “Oh, no. That doesn’t give me much time.”

  “Time?”

  “Yeah. To show you the city. Chicago, my adopted homeland.”

  “Listen—”

  “I’m from Toledo, originally. What’re you doing this afternoon?”

  “I just got in and I thought I’d—”

  “Well, look. I’ve got to go set something up at the school for this afternoon, but I’ll be free by five—no, by four-thirty. Meanwhile, you … Do you like museums?”

  In spite of myself, I thought back to Beth and me roving through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and realized I hadn’t been there since she’d died. “Yes.”

  “Great. There’s a terrific exhibit called the Treasury of San Marco at the Art Institute of Chicago. Just down the street—Michigan Avenue, that is—from where you are now. Just tell a cabdriver to take you there. It’s at the corner
of Adams, maybe a three-buck ride each way. You’ll love it. Then I’ll be by your hotel to pick you up at four-thirty. Wear something you won’t mind getting stained.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t miss my car. It’s a Rabbit that looks like a square pumpkin. See you then. Gotta run. Bye.”

  I sat on the bed, stared at the phone, and finished my drink.

  The Art Institute looked the part from the outside. A massive, apparently granite building with a broad set of steps flanked by two impressive but greened-over bronze lions. There was a long but courteous line of people waiting to buy tickets for the San Marco exhibit. I paid my $4.50 and was gently ushered along with them into a veiled room of splendor.

  The exhibit consisted of maybe fifty display cases, set off individually with enough vertical electronic security cables to discourage a remake of Topkapi. All four sides of each case had identical plaques, briefly explaining the treasure within the glass enclosure. Most of the items were renderings of communion chalices and other religious artifacts in gold, enamel, and jewels. As I wound my way through the labyrinth of hanging cloth and indirect lighting, a number of things struck me. Most amazing was the quality of the craftsmanship, including a number of crystalline vessels from the tenth and eleventh centuries. Most unfortunate was the inescapable conclusion that the Treasury of San Marco was really the spoils of the sack of Constantinople, carried back to a persuasive pope by somewhat overzealous crusaders.

  I spent the balance of the afternoon at the museum wandering through some East Asian, architectural, and photographic galleries. I’d forgotten how enjoyable that could be, and I grudgingly admitted I’d have to thank my maniacal substitute host for suggesting it.

  It did look like a square pumpkin.

  “Hey, how are you?”

  I shook his hand and climbed in. “I’m fine and the museum was great.”

  Jim pumped his head and ground his gears. “Yeah, Karen and I saw it last week and loved it. The crusaders ever hit this town, there won’t be a slice of bread left on the shelves. You know much about Chicago?”