Addiction (9 page)

Read Addiction Online

Authors: G. H. Ephron

BOOK: Addiction
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I tried to keep my face neutral. “If you're not going to talk to me, and you won't let me talk to Dr. Smythe-Gooding, then how am I going to figure out how to help you?”
Olivia contemplated me. I could feel the wheels turning, calculating. “It's hereditary, isn't it?”
“What?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew what the it was.
“Suicide.”
I could have given her a canned response: No, suicide does not run in families. So definite and reassuring. But the research didn't support it. I hedged. “A lot of people would like to know the answer to that question. It's true, the risk of suicidal behavior is increased by a family history of suicide. But it's never the result of a single factor.” I pulled up a chair to the bed and put my face close to hers. “That's a long way from saying that because someone's mother committed suicide, because their grandmother committed suicide, they're going to do it, too. There's nothing inevitable about it.”
She stared at her bandaged arm. “I want to die,” she whispered.
I ran the words I could not ignore forward and backward through my mind. I didn't think she meant it, but still I had to ask. “Do you mean that literally, or is this a feeling that things are overwhelming?”
She picked at the bandage and sniffled. “Everything seems so … so hopeless.”
It wasn't enough to call off the suicide police. “Do you have a plan?”
She looked at me with a flicker of amusement. “You going to make me sign a contract?” she said. She must have heard her mother talk about going through this drill with patients. “You've already got them checking on me every two minutes.”
I leaned back. “I can't take you off five-minute checks until I feel comfortable that you're not a danger to yourself. I don't think we need a written contract. But you have to promise me you won't try to kill yourself while you're here. And if you have any active thoughts of doing so, you'll tell me or one of the staff immediately.”
She swallowed. “I promise,” she said solemnly.
I looked at her appraisingly. “Olivia, I also want to know about the pills you've been taking. How long have you been taking Ritalin?”
“Maybe a couple of months,” she said vaguely.
“And where did you get the pills?”
“Get? Uh … well, I …” she stammered, picking at the bedcovers. She stared at me. “Dr. Daffy.” The disdainful tone took me aback.
Bad chemistry
was how Channing had described Olivia and Daphne's relationship.
“She started you on Ritalin?”
Olivia nodded. “To see if it would help.”
“Help what?”
“My black mood, as Mother puts it.” She squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced, as if her own words sucker punched her. It would take her a while to absorb the seismic shift her mother's death would make in the way she saw the world.
“Were you having trouble concentrating?” I asked.
Olivia shrugged. “I guess.”
“How much Ritalin were you supposed to take?”
“A pill in the morning and another with dinner,” she said, addressing her lap.
“And that's what you were taking?”
Olivia looked away. “Yes.” It wasn't very convincing.
Her blood work showed higher levels of Ritalin than a therapeutic dosage. I wondered how long she'd been slipping herself extra pills. It can be a vicious cycle. Excessive doses over a period of time can produce habituation. Before you know it, you need two or three as much to achieve the same effect.
“Have you been taking anything else?”
“Just Ritalin.”
“When they admitted you, they found other drugs in your pockets.”
“Just Ritalin,”
she said, glaring at me.
“So what were you doing with …” I tried to remember what else had been found on her.
“For my friends. Easy stuff to sell.” She seemed unconcerned.
Channing would have been apoplectic. When it suited her goals, Channing had no problem flouting authority. She considered that civil disobedience. But this was breaking the law, another thing entirely. I wondered if Olivia saw it that way. Or was she using drugs as entree to kids with whom she felt like an outsider?
“We're going to wean you off the Ritalin,” I told her. Olivia looked frightened. “Gradually. We need to find out what you're like drug-free. Then we'll evaluate.”
Her eyes went left and right, and back again. “Why can't I keep taking Ritalin? I need it.”
“I know right now you feel you need it, but it's not at all clear that it's making you better. It could even be causing some of the problems you're having. Meanwhile, we're going to make sure that nothing bad happens to you. That's why you're here.”
From the white-knuckled grip she had on the blankets, she didn't seem reassured.
MACRAE WAS leaving me phone messages, every hour on the hour. He wanted to interview Olivia, and he wanted me to come in and give a statement. I hoped he'd be happy with half a loaf. I canceled an afternoon meeting and drove to police headquarters in Central Square. MacRae fetched me from the busy front desk.
I followed him through a maze of corridors to the Investigations Division. His office was a surprisingly neat six-foot cubicle. One wall was covered with Post-it notes. On the desk a standing rack contained a tidy row of manila file folders, the tabs labeled in blue marker. The way a person keeps his office can be as revealing as the way he interprets an inkblot. He pulled in a wooden chair from a neighboring cubicle.
Solid and broad-shouldered, MacRae even sitting looked as if a touch in the right place would send him springing out of his chair. He turned on a tape recorder and asked me to say who I was and then to tell what happened. I told him everything, except the part about Olivia holding the gun. Then I asked him if they'd picked up any leads from the crime scene.
“Gunshot wound to the head,” he said. “No bruising or other signs of force. It was her own gun. Powder residue on her hand.”
He was laying out the case, watching my reaction. “So it looks like suicide.”
“They're doing an autopsy?” I asked.
“It's been done. We'll have the results in a couple of days. Tomorrow, maybe.”
“The body?”
“Already transferred to the mortuary.”
My throat constricted. I tried to get my voice, to swallow. I pushed away the image of Channing, cold and still on a metal slab.
“I'm sorry,” MacRae said. “I know she was a friend of yours.”
I nodded, mute. I made a mental note to call Drew and check that he knew the body had been moved.
MacRae pivoted away from me, giving me a moment to collect myself. He picked up a folder from the top of his desk and pivoted back. He opened the folder and spread out some pictures. “I'd like you to look at the photos we took in Dr. Temple's office—just to be sure that everything is exactly as you remember it.”
There were shots of various parts of the room, the desktop, and, of course, Channing herself. I stared at the eight-by-ten glossies and tried to shut down my insides.
“You noticed a coffee spill?” I asked, the detail floating out of nowhere.
“We analyzed the spill on the carpet and the traces left in the mug. Just coffee.”
“Dr. Temple wasn't a coffee drinker.”
“You think someone else was with her?”
“Maybe.” The picture closest to me was of Channing. “She was sitting up when I got there,” I said.
“Was she holding the gun?” he asked.
“No,” I said. At least I could answer that question honestly.
He pointed to the next photograph. It was of the top of Channing's desk. There were the purple folders, the letter opener, the paperweight. “The computer was there, on the desk,” I said, indicating the empty space. “And that's another thing. Channing was
barely computer literate. I very much doubt that she'd know how to program a screen saver with a particular message.”
“Screen saver?”
I glanced at MacRae's computer screen. “Like that,” I said. His screen saver was hard at work—yellow scene-of the-crime tape crisscrossing the screen. “Only on hers, there were words scrolling across the screen.”
MacRae gave me a blank look.
“It was programmed to say something like ‘I'm sorry. I can't live with myself,'” I explained. MacRae looked annoyed, scratched a note. “Sorry, I thought you knew.”
“How about you just assume that I know nothing.” He glared at me. “That shouldn't be too difficult.”
Ouch. He was right. I'd underestimated him before. I'd try not to do it again.
“And another thing,” I said. “As someone who knew the devastation suicide leaves behind, Channing Temple was the last person who'd assume that a one-liner was an adequate suicide note.”
“That's your opinion?”
I just looked at him. He'd underestimated me, as well, during our last encounter. I hoped we weren't starting a replay.
“Anything else?” he asked.
I stared at the photograph. Something else was missing. I closed my eyes and tried to remember. “There was a cup on the desk,” I said.
“It was on the floor when we got there. Maybe someone knocked it over when the coffee got spilled.”
“No. The mug I saw was empty. And it was on the desk.”
“What did it look like?”
“It was another Acu-Med mug, like this one.”
MacRae looked skeptical. “And you don't think it's the one we found on the floor?”
He could be stubborn and myopic when he set his mind to it. “That one had traces of coffee in it. You told me that yourself.” My voice was strident. “Channing didn't drink coffee.”
MacRae blinked and wrote himself another note.
I stared at the next photograph, a close-up of a small, silver-handled handgun resting on the carpet alongside the chair.
“Anything you neglected to tell us?” he asked, his eyes drilling holes into me.
If I was going to tell him about Olivia holding the gun, this was the time to do it. “Why do you ask?”
He grunted and pressed his thumb down on the gun in the picture. “Just answer the question.”
“I don't think so.”
“Tampering with evidence is a serious offense,” he said. “The gun is covered with fingerprints, and they're not all Dr. Temple's.”
“I didn't touch the gun.”
“Ri-ight,” MacRae drew the word out. He narrowed his eyes at me. “You sure there's nothing else you want to tell me?”
I tried not to falter, but I probably responded too quickly. “I spoke with her husband last night. He thinks suicide is unlikely.”
“In my experience, anyone can commit suicide,” MacRae countered.
I shook my head. “In my experience, not.”
He tented his fingers and leaned back in his chair.
I went on, “There are some people whose sense of self is too solid to allow them to kill themselves, and Dr. Temple was one of those people.”
“That's not what I hear,” MacRae said, raising his finger tent a few inches higher. “Sounds more like she was falling to pieces.”
I felt anger rise out of my chest. “Who told you that?”
“People at the hospital. Didn't her mother commit suicide?”
“So what if she did?”
“Maybe you didn't know her as well as you think you did.”
I wanted to shout,
And maybe you don't know her at all.
Instead, I clenched my teeth and told myself that he was just doing his job. This was nothing personal. “Anything else?” I asked.
He sat forward, put the photographs back in the folder and
shoved them into the top desk drawer. “You won't mind having your prints taken while you're here?”
“No problem.”
“And Olivia Temple.” He said it as if it were all caps and underlined. “We need to question her. As soon as possible.”
“Give her a few more days. Please. Right now, she's too fragile. She's recovering from an overdose of Ritalin, and she's still in shock from her mother's death.”
“Peter,” MacRae said, his voice weary, “we could help one another here.”
Or we could just keep butting horns. From our last encounter, I had reason to believe that underneath his policeman's badge beat the heart of a human being. “How about you come to the hospital next week,” I said. “She should be stabilized by then. I expect the funeral will be over.”
“Next week?” He made it sound as if that were a decade away.
“You'll get more out of her if you wait.”
Reluctantly, he pulled out an appointment book and slapped it open on the desk. Just then the phone rang. MacRae answered it. He turned away from me, cupped the receiver, and talked quietly into the phone. Listened. Then he stood and took the receiver around to the opposite side of the cubicle wall, stretching the spiral phone cord taut.
The facing pages of his datebook were dense with scribbled appointments. But the writing that jumped out at me was in yesterday's slot:
Annie—8:00.
I told myself it wasn't
my
Annie, and if it was, it was probably business. She was a PI; he was a detective. And even if it was for pleasure, it was only once.
He was still on the phone. I quietly lifted the page and peeked at last week's calendar. There Annie's name was again, a week ago Saturday. Annie and MacRae? Had they become an item while I'd been messing around?
Sure, he and Annie had grown up together. Their families had once been close, but I thought in recent years they'd been estranged.
I remembered Annie telling me how her father, a union activist, had been badly beaten while he was in jail after a demonstration. It broke his spirit as well as his body. MacRae's father was a cop. Annie thought he knew which cops had done it, but wouldn't say. Friendship took a backseat to loyalty to the force. The rift between the families had been permanent. Or had it? Perhaps there'd been a reconciliation after all these years. Why not?
I sat back and stared at the wall. There was picture of a boy, maybe ten years old. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, holding a soccer ball, and grinning at the camera. It had never occurred to me that MacRae actually might have a child. An ex-wife somewhere, too? I wondered if he was still dating that nurse from the rehab hospital. And what exactly was his relationship to Annie?
“Okay, I'll call you tomorrow,” MacRae said as he came back into his cubicle. “Right, right.”
He hung up the phone.
“So you'll come to the Pearce on Tuesday to interview Olivia Temple,” I said, eyeing him warily.
“What's wrong with Monday?”
“Nothing's wrong with Monday. I'll make the arrangements.”
As I was leaving, I paused to look more closely at the photograph of the young soccer player, as if I'd just noticed. “Your boy?” I asked.
He nodded proudly. “He's older now.”
“Still playing soccer?”
“Yup.”
“What position?”
“Sweeper. He's one tough hombre. Gets that from me. That's one of the few things my ex and I agree on.”
“If you see that nurse from the rehab hospital, send her my regards.” I tried to sound nonchalant, uninterested.
“Haven't seen her for months,” he said. “But will do, if I run into her.”
As I shook MacRae's hand, I tried to imagine Annie in the cubicle
with us. I knew she was shorter than I was, but was she taller than MacRae? It was a close call. If his handshake was any indication, I sure as hell wouldn't want to arm wrestle him.
When I got home that night, there was a message from Annie on my machine. “Hey, Peter, it's me. I heard on the news. Just calling to see if you're okay. Is there anything I can do? Oh, hell, I know you. You're going to tell me you're fine. Everything's fine. I'll drop by tonight.” There was a pause. “Don't eat before I get there.”
I flipped on the porch light. A while later, the doorbell rang. It was Annie. I smelled the pizza before I saw the big, flat box from Il Panino, the best North End pizzeria, which now had an outpost in Cambridge. She had a six-pack of Sam Adams, too.
We sat at my kitchen table, and by the time I was chewing on the final crust, I'd brought Annie up-to-date on the latest.
Annie touched her hand to my face. “I wish there was something I could do or say that would help.”
I covered her hand with mine. “Being here helps,” I said. “Therapists like to say, ‘Knowledge binds depression.' Talking to you helps me make sense of what's happened, so it doesn't feel so much like the world's spun out of control.” I sighed. “Again.”
After Kate was killed, I would have admitted no friends bearing pizza. Not even Channing. I'd wanted to be alone, where my conscience could eat at me from inside.
Annie pondered in silence. “You don't think Olivia killed her mother, do you?”
“I don't. But I don't much like the alternative.”
“I barely knew her, but sometimes you can have a strong impression of someone. Channing didn't strike me as the kind of person who'd commit suicide.”
“A senior psychiatrist, a woman who's been her mentor since her residency, told me she thought Channing had developed an unhealthy transference to a suicidal woman patient,” I said.

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