Loving Time (20 page)

“
H
i, Jason, it’s Friday around three-thirty. April Woo returning your call. Long time no see, huh? I’ll bet you called about the case at your shop, Cowles—or has something else come up? I’m here for a half an hour or so. Saturday I’m working four to one. Sunday I’m off.”

That was your last message. Doodle oodle oo
.

Jason hung up and glanced at the brass bull with the clock on its back on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, between a glass paperweight in the shape of an apple and a stack of
JAPA
journals. Jason knew the clock was at least two minutes slow. That made it three-forty-seven. He’d had back-to-back patients since the meeting at the Centre that morning. At the best of times it was exhausting having to figure out what was going on with each patient every moment so he wouldn’t slip up and make a fatal mistake about what he or she might really be saying. At the worst of times—when he had more than the needs of his patients on his mind—he felt overwhelmed.

Today, he had wanted to think only of his patients and getting some groceries in the house so that when Emma returned tomorrow from her six-month absence, she wouldn’t have to indict him for domestic incompetence. Instead, Clara Treadwell had cleverly maneuvered him into the seething cauldron of hospital politics where he’d never, ever wanted to go. He had to hand it to her. Two days ago Clara had gotten him to agree to review the Cowles case. Now, as a result of this morning’s highly unpleasant meeting, he was suddenly chair of an “ad hoc Quality Assurance Committee” with the responsibility of investigating the Director of the Centre, the person who claimed to want to be his mentor.

Jason snorted at the thought He was supervisor, and maybe mentor, to several residents every year; but he’d never actually had a mentor himself. He hadn’t wanted to be constrained in
his thinking and loyalties, so he’d trudged along, with no advice or support, his parents telling him he was crazy to go into psychiatry instead of becoming a heart or brain surgeon where the money was.

Jason glanced at his watch. The second hand advanced painstakingly around its face, reminding him of himself, trudging along all those years, listening to his own counsel every step along the way, making his own choices and his own mistakes. He had to laugh at Clara Treadwell’s arrogance. It was too late to mold him. He was already formed; she could worry and disturb him, but she couldn’t influence his findings.

The clocks ticked, and time was passing. Jason wanted to try April before his next patient arrived. He heard the door to his waiting room open and close. After a cooling-off period in his waiting room, his last patient was finally leaving. Jeannie had sobbed nonstop for forty-five minutes, apologizing the whole time. “I’m so sorry. I just can’t stop. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Jason knew what was wrong. The poor woman’s husband was selfish and no longer loved her. He’d told her he needed time to relax and was insisting on the freedom to do his thing. Jeannie had long ago given up her career and earning power to care for the two tiny children her husband had wanted and now expected her to care for. She felt heavily burdened with the responsibility for everything since her husband was the kind of man who thought his time was too precious for any kind of domestic endeavor. She starved herself in her misery and apologized for her anguish as if only she were at fault for her loneliness and pain. Twice a week when Jason met with her, he appeared solid as a rock, unemotional and calm. She had no idea that every muscle in his body ached from the tension of restraining his impulse to hug her.

Thinking of Jeannie’s tiny wrists and puffy eyes, Jason flipped open his address book to April Woo’s number. He didn’t really have to look it up. They’d worked two cases
together: Emma’s kidnapping six months before and the Honiger-Stanton sisters case three months later. By now the precinct number was burned in his memory. He smiled grimly at the thought that his quiet analyst’s life had changed so dramatically that he was suddenly the Psychiatric Centre’s crime expert. And not only that, it seemed a New York cop thought a few weeks of their not seeing each other was a long time.

As he reached for the phone, Jason heard the door of his waiting room open and close again. His next patient had arrived. That reminded him of the moment April had told him she was more scared of a closed door than a handgun with a cocked trigger aimed at her head.

“Behind the door could be anything. With a nine-millimeter at least I know what I’m up against.” He remembered her smile. “Sometimes they jam.”

April had also told Jason it took a pressure of between eight and twelve pounds to pull a trigger, depending on the gun. “But in the heat of the moment, all it really takes is a tiny little squeeze. If you have to shoot at somebody, afterwards your hand shakes for about a week.”

Things like that Jason hadn’t known before meeting April Woo and probably would never have known. He may have been a streetwise kind of kid, growing up in the Bronx with a basketball never long out of his hands, but he’d never held a gun, never had a cop on his side. Never been involved with the investigation of criminals, let alone his colleagues and peers. All this was new.

Jason had always left the door to his waiting room unlocked so his patients could come in and out. The two doors to his office were closed. His patients came in and then waited for him to open the door to his inner sanctum. He used to take comfort in the fact that he knew who was out there, but they never knew who was inside with him or what he was doing when he was alone. Now he was more like April. He couldn’t be so confident anymore about anything he couldn’t see with
his own eyes. He needed to urinate, needed to reach April before she went home.

He considered taking his portable phone into the bathroom to talk to April while he was relieving himself, decided against it. He dialed her number. This time she picked up.

“Hi, it’s Jason. I don’t mean to be abrupt, but I only have a minute. What can you tell me about Raymond Cowles?”

She didn’t hesitate before replying. “The death report came in yesterday afternoon. The M.E. says there’s no indication of foul play. As far as he’s concerned, Cowles’s death is consistent with suicide. We closed the case.” April did not waste words in the telling.

Jason let out a small groan. “Suicide” was not the word he’d wanted to hear. He said, “I’d like to chat with you about it.”

“Fine. Tomorrow?”

Emma was coming home tomorrow. “How about early next week?”

“Okay by me.”

They scheduled a time. Jason replaced the phone in its cradle, then took a moment to urinate before opening the door to his next patient.

“B
obbie, what are you up to?” Gunn Tram scolded the ringing telephone in Bobbie’s apartment as if it could hear her and pick up. “Dr. Dickey was asking about you today. Bobbie, don’t you try to hide from me. If you’re in trouble, I got to know.”

The phone didn’t care. It just rang on and on, as if mocking her distress. “Come on, Bobbie, pick up.”

He wasn’t picking up, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. Gunn Tram trudged up and down the three flights of creaking stairs between their apartments all Friday evening looking for him.

“Just because I have a phone doesn’t mean I have to use it,” he had told her on the other occasions when she complained about having to come down the stairs to find him. “Maybe I don’t want to be found.”

That night he didn’t want to be found. Even if Dr. Dickey hadn’t come down to her office asking a lot of questions about “people who had grudges against the Centre,” Gunn would have been worried. Bobbie had the look in his eye that something was bothering him. When something was bothering Bobbie, Gunn knew, he usually did something about it that bothered other people.

Gunn was scared for him. Bobbie didn’t mean to get in trouble. But like today, when Dr. Dickey asked if Bobbie could possibly still be hanging around the Centre—well, trouble just seemed to come to him. It hurt Gunn that Bobbie made people mad when he hadn’t done a thing. He was like a magnet for bad luck. She didn’t understand why the doctors cared so much about crazy people they couldn’t even help, and didn’t try to help Bobbie who’d been such a good nurse to them.

Around eleven Gunn walked over to the French Quarter bar on Broadway looking for him. Brian said he hadn’t been
in. She sat drinking beer at the bar until midnight. At midnight she walked home slowly.

Bobbie’s apartment was in the space that used to be the kitchen when the brownstone was a private home. It was just below ground level at the back of the building. Steps up to the back door led to a long-unused garden. His two windows were not visible from the street.

Gunn knew, from the long list of grievances about him, that Bobbie often came in and out the back way, frightening the neighbors at odd hours. And she had to agree with them that the way Bobbie did things was a little peculiar. Often when he came to see her, he climbed the fire escape and entered through an open window. Gunn saw him as eccentric and attributed his strangeness to his unusual childhood in Louisiana and the terrible things he had witnessed in Vietnam.

All her life, Gunn had been interested in people. The sameness of the population in Sweden had been the real reason she left home at sixteen, all alone, to come to America. She had wanted a different kind of life from her parents’ dull repetition of their parents. Even then, she had liked all kinds of people. Their stories fascinated her, especially the sad ones. She felt she could be any one of them and her heart was filled with a powerful desire to help. Gunn worked at the Psychiatric Centre because she craved the tragedy and disappointed dreams she found there. So many sad stories made her own uneventful life seem almost joyful. At the Centre, there were very few happy stories, many damaged people. Gunn had loved Bobbie from the first conversation she’d had with him over fifteen years ago. He had come to work at the Centre with the same wish to help she had. He was good to those poor mad creatures on the locked wards, people Gunn was afraid of being too close to even though the shrinks taught tolerance, and Gunn had tried hard to learn their lessons. Bobbie cared about the little people, and so did she.

All the thirty years Gunn had worked at the Centre the docs had joked about how everybody was crazy, how it was all right
to be crazy. Over the years, Gunn had watched the degree of craziness escalate. Now it was spilling out all over the place, and it was still all right. The docs, the patients, the residents—nobody complained about anybody. Even Gunn could tell that some of the young women residents coming in were very strange, very strange indeed.

In the old days, all the iffy things like attitude and sexual preference were watched very carefully. In those days, a person couldn’t be too strange and still qualify as a doc Supervisors were informed about every little thing every resident did. It was hard to get into the Centre, and even after they were in, residents were carefully screened during all the years of their training. Gunn had loved working in Personnel in those days. Little notes about any peculiarity were added to everyone’s files. But not anymore. PCness decreed that everybody had a right to keep whatever baggage they came in with and never mind how it affected the patients or the system. It was scary what people got away with now. Gunn knew for a fact that many of the doctors took a wide range of painkillers; even the great Harold Dickey himself had a weakness for Johnnie Walker that he indulged in in his office throughout the afternoon following lunch. There were a lot of things going wrong that Gunn had to worry about.

The light was on under Bobbie’s door when Gunn returned to the brownstone. She stood in the dim, cramped hallway outside his apartment and knocked timidly.

“Bobbie?”

Inside, she could hear movement, but he didn’t answer. “Bobbie, you in there? I got to talk to you.”

Sounds of the toilet flushing upstairs, then a slammed door. Gunn put her face so close to Bobbie’s door her lips almost touched the faded paint. She whispered urgently, “Bobbie, you remember Dr. Dickey, don’t you?… Dr. Dickey came to see me today. He asked about people with grudges against the Centre, people who hated Dr. Treadwell.… Bobbie, you don’t hate Dr. Treadwell, do you?”

No answer from inside. Gunn felt dizzy in the gloomy silence, but she had something to say, and she was going to finish no matter what. “Of course, I didn’t tell him anything—I didn’t know anything—Bobbie, Dr. Dickey took the files, lots of files. He said he wanted to check out all the disciplinary actions taken against staff for patient errors. He took some patient files, too.…

“Bobbie, he took the files, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop him. You know he’s the head of the Committee. He wanted them, and everybody from upstairs was already gone. There wasn’t even anybody to ask if it was all right.”

Gunn could hear Bobbie breathing on the other side of the door, but he didn’t open up. She said, “Something’s going on, Bobbie. Dr. Dickey told me somebody wants to hurt Dr. Treadwell. I feel so bad about it I didn’t know what to say.” There was a pause while Bobbie, unseen behind his door, breathed in and out.

“Oh, Bobbie, I’m afraid. Please … Tell me you don’t hate Dr. Treadwell. You wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, would you?”

Gunn did not like the dark, the tight space, the dense stillness in the decaying building, the slight wheeze at the end of Bobbie’s exhalations. She knew him, knew he sat on her fire escape sometimes in the middle of the night, not doing anything at all except breathing in and out just like this. She remembered Dr. Dickey’s own words so many times over the years: “We’re all a little crazy, Gunn. Don’t let it worry you one little bit. Most crazy people never hurt anyone but themselves.” Gunn had tried not to let the crazy things worry her.

Suddenly the light went off under Bobbie’s door, and his voice came out of the dark. “Go away, old woman. The bastard is looking for someone else, not me.”