Loving Time (28 page)

But privilege gave rich women more than luxury. April had noted the extra piece in their design over and over, wanted it
and knew how hard it would be to achieve. No promotion would give it to her, and no amount of money could buy it. The posture of Clara Treadwell’s body, the arch of her eyebrows, the set of her mouth as she sat at her desk exhausted but undaunted—her hands easy among expensive blotter, appointment book, and pen set—everything about her stated her confidence in herself, her certainty that she was right and could get that lightness across, her ability to intimidate without saying a word. Her lack of fear. April believed you had to be born with that lack of fear, educated to it, and Caucasian to carry it off.

“You’re here to report your conclusions on the Raymond Cowles case,” Dr. Treadwell said imperiously.

“I’m here on another matter, but I’d be glad to fill you in on that investigation if you’d like.”

Clara nodded.

April quickly told her what they had discovered about Raymond Cowles’s last night and what the forensic evidence had indicated about the manner and time of his death. Clara’s face tightened as April described the dinner and sex with his lover. Otherwise she betrayed no emotion.

“Except for his phone call to you, there seems to be no mystery about it,” April concluded.

The weariness and age dropped away from the hospital director’s face as indignation animated it. “What makes you think I had a conversation with Ray that night?”

“We hit the redial button on his phone, Dr. Treadwell. Your number was the last one he called.”

“That doesn’t mean he reached me,” Clara said angrily. “If he called the number, he must have gotten my answering machine and hung up.”

No, that was not possible. The phone company had logged the call in at over six minutes. Clara’s answering machine took messages of only two minutes in length. April knew that because the machine itself had given her the information when she called the number. Cowles and Treadwell had talked,
but April decided to let it go. If Dr. Treadwell bore some responsibility for Cowles’s mental state at the time he took his life, some other court would have to determine it.

“It’s a mystery,” April murmured.

“I’m a doctor. Do you think I would have hung up on him if I had known he was on the edge?” Clara persisted.

“You spoke to him,” April said softly.

“No, of course I didn’t. I’m saying it wouldn’t have happened
if we had s
poken.”

April’s mouth went dry exactly the same way it had when she followed Mike to the door of Raymond’s room and saw by his stance that Cowles was in there and he was dead. Clara had most certainly talked to him. The admission was there in her denial. It didn’t change anything, though. Only that April could no longer believe any statement she made.

“Well.” April backed off on Raymond. “I’m here to ask you a few questions about Dr. Harold Dickey. You were with him when he collapsed, I understand.”

“Yes.” Clara’s eyes flared. “Has this become a police matter, too?”

April was surprised. “Haven’t you been briefed on it yet?”

Clara shook her head, wary now. “What’s going on?”

“The death file isn’t complete yet, but the preliminary findings show no signs of heart disease or natural—”

“Then what killed him?” she demanded impatiently.

“According to the tox reports, he had very high levels of alcohol and Amitrip … ah, Elavil.”

“Jesus.” Clara’s brow furrowed. “Amitriptyline? Are you sure?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But he’d been drinking. He knew better than—” Clara Treadwell froze.

April pulled out her notepad. “Do you know of any reason
he
might have wanted to commit suicide?”

The doctor stared at April, clearly stunned. “Give me a minute, will you. This is …”

Pressed rigidly against the unyielding chair, April’s back began to ache. She wanted to get up and walk around.

Clara pulled herself together. She could do it faster than anyone April had ever seen. In less than sixty seconds the imperiousness was back. “Detective, I’ll have to talk to you some other time. I need to organize my thoughts about this.”

“I won’t take long,” April said evenly. She didn’t want Clara Treadwell organizing her thoughts. She wasn’t getting a cozy feeling about this woman, who was already implicated in one death. This was her second death in little more than a week. April wanted to know what happened to Harold Dickey. It was her job to find out, and find out she would—no matter who the woman was or how intimidating she could be.

“I don’t care how long it will take. I cannot do it now.”

Clara stood up. April did not.

“I’d rather talk to you before you think about it, Doctor. It’s an unnatural, that’s all. We just have to establish whether it was an accident or Dr. Dickey took too much medicine on purpose.”

“How can I know that?” Clara clenched her fists.

“You were there.”

“Yes,” Clara said, calmer now. “Harold asked me to come there. He was already ill when I arrived. At first I thought he was drunk.” She shook her head. “Then I realized it was something more than that.”

“What made you think so?”

“He was agitated, paranoid, raving, hallucinating. He was having a psychotic episode.” She looked puzzled. “But I—”

“Did he ask for help?”

“He didn’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t know. He would have told me.” She shook her head again.

“When did you call for help?”

“He collapsed and had a seizure almost immediately. I was only there for a minute, maybe two minutes, before it happened.
You can ask the guards. They saw me come in and they responded when the code was called.”

“The code?”

“There’s a code for medical emergency.”

“When did you arrange to meet?”

“We didn’t. He just asked me and I—” She froze again.

Another nerve. “When?”

Clara closed her eyes. “I don’t remember. I just know he didn’t take anything while I was there, and he was already very ill. If I’d gotten there five minutes later, he would have died alone.” She fell silent.

“Was he depressed when you talked to him?”

“Not at that exact moment, no.”

“Had he been depressed recently?”

“Well … yes. There was the Cowles suicide. He was upset about that.”

“Oh? Did he know Raymond Cowles well?” April asked.

“Of course he did, he was the supervisor on Cowles’s analysis. He directed every aspect of the case.” Clara pursed her lips. “But I’m sure he told you that when you spoke with him.”

Uh-uh. Dickey had told her he hadn’t known Cowles.

“Dr. Dickey told me you found his number by Cowles’s body. Maybe Dr. Dickey spoke to him,” Clara speculated.

“Maybe.” April nodded, wondering if the two deaths were connected or not. “Well, thank you for talking to me. I’ll need to see his office. Has anyone been in it since—”

Again the eyes flared. “No. I locked it immediately. No one’s been in that room or touched a thing.”

“Good. I’ll also need a list of his patients, people he worked with—colleagues, nurses—his relatives.” April got up. Her back throbbed, and she had to pee.

“I’ll have my assistant take care of everything.” Clara Treadwell didn’t say good-bye. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the Chinese detective was gone.

D
ead leaves drifted over the paths of Riverside Park and brushed against Jason’s pant legs as he hurried to the Psychiatric Centre to find Hal Dickey’s course syllabus. It was Thursday, November 11, at 9:50
A.M
. Emma had been with him for six days. In that time she’d been called back twice for the Simon Beak play. She was trying out for the part of the wife who finds out her husband had a secret life only after a stroke immobilizes him. The day he returns home from the hospital, a vegetable in a wheelchair, she finds out he cheated on his taxes and stole all their savings to set his girlfriend up in a house nicer than hers. Jason loved the play. Reading it, he almost fell off his chair laughing at the sexually repressed timid woman who revenges herself in a variety of ways. But he was ambivalent about Emma being in it. Anticipating domestic misery, he shuffled grumpily through the leaves.

Out in the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin, a number of sleek sailboats bobbed at their moorings in the sparkling river. Jason didn’t notice the boats or the leaves or the sun glinting on the water. He was too busy juggling his thoughts about work and his wife. The movie role that had made Emma famous featured a smarmy shrink whose sexual interest in his female patient prompted her to act out sexually with a hoodlum. The film had humiliated and devastated him—in no small part because it had come as a complete surprise. Jason had been too busy with his own work at the time to bother reading the script and discussing it with her.

And now she had a vehicle that would allow her to vent her rage at him in a wholly different way. This time her role was funny, complicated, and so satisfying at the end that it demonstrated how perfectly theater could balance story and emotions that were utterly unmanageable in real life. In this part, Emma and all her voices would finally come together.
Jason dreaded the possibility of her getting it. What would happen then?

He put his head down against the glare of the sun. What he did for a living was ease other people’s pain. The way he did it was to work out the structures of people’s minds in his head, using Tinkertoy parts with psychiatric labels. He made a weightless space for each one and created the Star Trek stations that incorporated each person’s mental makeup. He saw each space station of a human being as three-dimensional: the inside, crowded with booby-trapped baggage; the outside, bristling with antennae for picking up ever more hurt and disappointment. He was always working on what was really going on in a person’s mind, not just what appeared to be happening in the room at the moment. His reserve made him seem to be holding back, waiting for the next piece of information, the next session, the next day. His analytic gifts didn’t exactly help him with his own life. Emma wanted a husband with simple thoughts, thoughts that stayed in the room with her, preferably focused on her all the time. It wasn’t going to happen.

Now he’d been drawn into hospital politics. He’d begun to study those first sessions between Clara Treadwell and Raymond Cowles eighteen years earlier and knew already that things about Cowles’s treatment were disturbing. Without noticing, he’d left the path on Riverside Drive and crossed the street. As he approached the entrance to the Centre, he automatically drew his ID from his pocket and clipped it on his jacket pocket.

“Hey, Jason. Too bad about Dickey. I hear you’re taking his spot.” A colleague Jason had known since medical school spotted him waiting for the elevator and shouted over the crush of attendings, outpatients, social workers, secretaries, all craning their necks to catch a useful tidbit of gossip to trade later.

“Just filling in for a week or two, and it is too bad,” he muttered in response.

He checked his watch. Two minutes for the elevator to come and four minutes of stopping and starting to get where he was going. While he waited, he thought of the young and powerfully magnetic Clara Treadwell in her first session with Raymond Cowles.

In his supervisory session Dickey had told his student Clara that her patient Ray had had his first homosexual experience the night following his first session with her because he was resisting his true heterosexuality. Jason shook his head as he got off the elevator.

Resistance to heterosexuality had been the classic diagnosis of homosexuality for almost a hundred years. Many people all over the world still believed a man wanting to have sex with another man, or a woman with a woman, was just being contrary and could change if he or she wanted to. Now a great deal of scientific data pointed to sexual preference being innate, already fixed at birth. Jason wondered what Dickey would say now if he read what he had said and Clara had carefully recorded eighteen years ago when the views he expressed were already out of date.

“Sorry, sir. You can’t go in there.” A stocky officer snaked out an arm the size of a watermain to stop him outside of Dickey’s office.