Mirror Image (15 page)
Phil Camden’s house was on a quiet street off Walnut. Many Pitt faculty lived in the area, a hushed conclave sheltered by trees and stone fences. Close enough for a short commute to campus, far enough away in style and ambience as to be of another world entirely. Where the houses all had libraries and velvet-toned wall clocks, and drinks were served before dinner.
I stood at Phil’s front door, framed by the porch light, and leaned on the bell.
In a minute, I heard a heavy shuffling from the other side of the door, then the sound of bolts being unlocked.
Phil Camden opened the door and peered out through sleep-clouded eyes, his glasses at an angle on his nose.
“Who the hell—? At this hour?”
That voice, so sharp, so threaded with authority, still had the size and weight I remembered.
But the man did not. Though it had been only five years since I’d last seen him, he had aged much more. And gotten smaller, shrunk into himself, burdened at last by time and labor. And grief.
“Phil…” I began, though half the anger I’d carried up to his porch had already faded. “Look—”
He adjusted his glasses and drew himself up. The cold fire in his eyes leapt up, as if on command, and steadied.
“
You
?…What in God’s name?…How dare you…?”
“We have to talk,” I said quickly. “I know you’re working for Wingfield. I know what you’re trying to do.”
“Go to hell!”
He started to close the door, but I blocked it with my foot. He glared at me in disbelief.
“I should call the police,” he said hoarsely.
“But you won’t. You
want
to talk to me. That’s why you called me earlier. On my cell phone.”
“That was a courtesy. To notify you that I’d been retained in legal action against you by Miles Wingfield. I thought it the proper thing to do.”
“Maybe. But right now, the proper thing is to let me in your house so we can talk about this like men.”
He considered this. I guess propriety won out, because he stepped back and let the door swing open.
I let out a long breath as I watched him turn and pad down the carpeted hall toward his study. I closed the door behind me and followed.
The house was just as I remembered it. Formal, tasteful. Antique furniture. Venerable bookshelves laden with classic texts. Dim, hushed. A house born before the era of civil rights, feminism, and pop culture. A house shaped and contained by one man’s proud intellect and iron will.
Phillip Camden turned on the lamp over his study desk, then sat heavily in the stuffed leather chair. Sighing, he motioned impatiently for me to take the one just beyond the pool of light.
We’d said not one word since I’d entered the house.
He found a small notebook and consulted it.
“I’ll be brief,” he said. “Regarding Kevin Merrick, nee Wingfield. I’ll assume you’re familiar with his case history prior to coming into treatment with you.”
“Yes. I got his files from County psych after his confinement there.”
“Following a robbery and assault he’d suffered—”
“That’s right. It happened six months prior to entering therapy with me. Kevin had surprised a burglar in his apartment. There was a struggle. Kevin managed to escape.”
Camden studied a document paper-clipped to a file.
“I further assume you noted Kevin’s diagnosis at his three previous psychiatric institutions. As well as the results of the tests administered periodically during the last seven or eight years of his life.”
I shrugged. “He pretty much got the whole buffet. TAT. MMPI. Bender-Gestalt. Plus about two dozen mental status exams, over the years. Clumsily administered, I’m sure, by some trainee trying to impress his or her supervisor.”
“Is that mere cynicism, or are you trying—fairly clumsily yourself—to make a point?”
I leaned forward in my chair. “People like Kevin get tagged with labels pretty early on, and spend the rest of their lives trying to wriggle out of them. You know what it’s like in the mental health system.”
“So we should just throw away diagnosis altogether?”
“Of course not. But calling the categories of mental illness objective is total bullshit. Hell, they change every time there’s a new edition of the damn manual.”
Camden threw down the folder in disgust. “This discussion is over. You are as infuriating now as when I had the misfortune to select you as my graduate assistant.”
He was visibly agitated, and took a few deep breaths to calm himself. Beyond the bubble of light cast by the desk lamp, the room faded into a thick darkness.
“I will now return to the facts of the Wingfield case, as they’ve been presented to me in these documents. I will do so with alacrity, and then I will return to my bed.”
“I’ll bet you will. And you’ll sleep like a baby. I mean, how can you work for a man like Miles Wingfield? Why would you help him?”
His voice was cool and placid as a deep lake. “I should think that obvious. Because his complaint against you affords me the opportunity to injure you, to bring you pain. As you did me.”
I sat back, at a loss. It wasn’t that anything he said surprised me. It was the purity of intent. As always, Phil Camden’s clarity of purpose was breathtaking.
I looked at him. “You’re wrong, Phil. I loved Barbara with all my heart, as you did. And this is wrong.”
He held my eyes for a long moment, then referred once again to his notebook.
“The facts are plain: you mishandled Kevin Wingfield’s case from the start. The patient was found wandering in a convenience store, with no memory of the preceding three hours. A dissociative state triggered by a violent encounter with a burglar. Given these symptoms, his history of voluntary
and
involuntary commitment, and obvious borderline features—”
Here he stopped, fixing me with a stare. “Given these conditions, a course of drug therapy, behavioral protocols and rigid out-patient monitoring is the conventional, prescribed treatment. As I will testify.”
“Hell, you just outlined the kind of treatment Kevin had been receiving for years, with little real effect.”
He shrugged this off, but I pressed on.
“Look, I honestly think our work together after the robbery attempt was the first genuine incursion into Kevin’s inner world. The sexual and physical abuse he’d suffered as a child denied him the healthy development he needed, the affective attunement he yearned for.”
“Which
you
provided, by virtue of your superior wisdom and compassion?”
“Which I
hoped
to provide, by giving him a model to emulate. From which he’d hopefully emerge, with enough inner resources to become whole again.”
I took a breath. “It was a risk, yes, but a calculated one. Based on our level of trust and intimacy. On Kevin’s courage. It was our work together, and I believe in it.”
Camden just shook his head. “I always felt you took your cases too personally.”
“How should I take them—
im
personally?” My voice hardened. “Christ, you can’t even
work
with patients.”
“No need. You know my methodology.
Who
Kevin was, as a person, is irrelevant.”
“Not to me.”
We just stared at each other. Two entrenched, unmoving antagonists. Using professional differences to mask what really lay between us. And always would.
Finally, I stood up. “To hell with this. I’m not going to defend my work with a patient. Not to you.”
“Perhaps not. But soon you will have to. In court.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“This is pointless,” he said wearily. “You’ve stormed the barricades, confronted your foe. Now let’s both return to our lives and await the inevitable legal conflict.”
He shut off the lamp and the room was plunged into darkness, except for a dim light thrown from the hall.
Camden slowly got to his feet.
“I trust you can see your way out?”
The uniformed cop stationed outside my office was apparently expecting me, since he gave me a nod as I neared the door. What he wasn’t expecting was the cup of coffee I handed him, from the all-night diner around the corner.
He was heavy and florid-faced, and climbed up out of the metal folding chair with some effort. He took the steaming Styrofoam cup in both hands.
“Thanks, Doc. Lt. Villanova told me you was comin’.”
Flat Pittsburgh vowels. A working-man’s stance, weight shifted to one foot. Pure blue-collar cop. Like my old man.
“Sorry for the late visit,” I said. “Couple things I want to check in the office.”
“No problem. Besides, it’s nice to have company. CSU’s been here and gone. Quiet as a tomb since yesterday.”
The cop, whose name tag read Johnson, lifted the yellow crime scene tape from across the office door.
“By the way,” he said, as he ushered me in, “we put your mail in a pile on the floor. After goin’ through it. Ya know, for threats an’ stuff.”
“Thanks, officer.” I crossed the darkened waiting room and unlocked the connecting door to my office.
“Take as long as ya want,” he said. “Touch anything ya want. Tech boys have dusted the hell outta the place.”
I waited till he went back out into the hall, then I entered my office and flipped on the overhead.
Strange feeling. The last time I was in here, Casey and I had been backing away from the knife that killed Kevin Wingfield.
I glanced at my desk top. The blotter had been taken down to forensics. Everything else remained, but had obviously been moved, examined.
I opened the desk drawer and checked the organizer tray. The little compartments holding paper-clips, pens, stamps. In one, I found what I was looking for. Or, rather,
didn’t
find it. Which was what I’d expected.
This compartment was where I kept the spare keys. One to the public rest rooms, down the hall. The other a spare office key that opened both the outer door and the inner, connecting door.
This key, as I’d guessed, was gone.
It was the only thing that made sense. Kevin had often taken various things from my office when I wasn’t looking. My pen. A letter-opener. What if one time, when I’d stepped out of the room for some reason, he’d opened the desk drawer to see what he could find?
My office key. Labeled with my suite number. It would have been irresistible. So easy to slip in his pocket, carry it around with him during the day.
Then, the night of his murder, he’s stabbed on the way to his car in the garage. During the assault, the key falls from his pocket. The killer apparently hadn’t gone through his victim’s pockets after the murder, since the cops had Kevin’s personal effects. In fact, that same night Polk had shown me my monogrammed pen recovered from the body.
So the key
must
have fallen out, with my pen and the other things Polk showed me. The killer spots it. By now, he knows he’s killed the wrong man. But he scoops up the key, sees the label. It’s the key to my suite.
Maybe he decides right then to come back later, leave the knife as a warning to me. Maybe he’s not thought ahead that far. But he pockets the key anyway, and takes off…
Yes.
Had
to be how the killer got in and planted the knife. Which meant it
hadn’t
been with the key I’d given Noah. Which also meant there was no reason to mention that key to the cops, and getting Noah mixed up in all this.
I picked up the pile of mail the cops had left—some journals, invitations to conferences, and the like—and went back out into the hall. Officer Johnson had finished his coffee and was leaning back heavily in his chair.
“Got what you needed, Doc?”
“Thanks, yeah.”
I left him there, a tired beat cop on the late shift, rocking back slightly on his heels, guarding an empty room.
***
I was tossing the stack of mail onto the passenger seat of the Mustang when my cell rang. I sat behind the wheel, glanced at the dashboard clock. Two a.m.
It was Casey. “Hey, you’re up.”
“More or less. I just left my office. I think I got something the cops’ll want.”
“Great. I wanted to talk to you, too.”
I settled back in the seat. “Shoot.”
“Not on the phone. Why don’t you come over?”
“Now?”
A long pause.
“Danny. Don’t make me ask twice.”
I chewed on that. But not for too long.
“Okay, give me your address.”
She did, and hung up. I looked at the phone in my hand. Then at my own eyes in the rear view mirror.
Did I know what I was doing? Did I care?
***
Casey’s condo was near Edgewood, her building part of a new, upscale complex set against its sloping hills.
I followed a series of lights atop identical brass poles to the residents’ parking lot, and then searched for the visitor spaces she’d told me about.
The night air had dropped another ten degrees. I pulled my coat up around my throat and hurried to the front of her building. I buzzed her number. She buzzed back, and I was in.
I found her door and knocked. Nothing. Knocked again.
“Come in,” she called from the other side of the door.
I did. Her place was spacious, yet simply furnished. Almost perfunctory. As though her sense of herself, her measure, lay elsewhere. In paneled offices, hammering out deals with defense lawyers. In courtrooms, examining witnesses and confounding suspects. Alone in a bar at some ungodly hour, going over briefs. No, Casey didn’t live
here.
She lived only in those places.
For
those places.
Music played from two Bose speakers set in the ceiling corners at the recommended angle apart. Something a little too high-tech for my tastes. Oh well.
“Casey?” I took a few more steps into the living room.
“In here.” I tried to track her voice.
“Where?” This was ludicrous.
Her voice had an edge. “Where do you think?”
I took a breath. Tried to have a coherent thought. Make some kind of argument within myself about what I was doing. What
we
were doing.
Then I went into the bedroom. She wasn’t there.
“Hey,” she called out from another room. “You gonna give me a hand or what?”
I turned, now better able to gauge the direction of her voice. I crossed the hallway, made a left, and went into the kitchen.
Casey was leaning against a large cooking island that dominated the small kitchen. It had a tiled top, and, for half its width, a thick wooden chopping block.
She was propped against the wood, blowing a wisp of hair out of her eyes, as she struggled to open a bottle of Merlot. She was dressed simply in jeans and an oversized Land’s End shirt. Her feet were bare.
Her eyes cut over at mine. “Yo. Feel free to jump right in, Sir Galahad.”
I took the bottle from her. The corkscrew was buried up to the hilt. I braced the bottle against my upraised knee, got some leverage, and twisted. In half a minute, I got the cork out.
Only then did I look up, to see Casey smiling at what was probably a look of intense concentration on my face.
“Good man.” She scooped up two wine glasses from near the sink and placed them on the tiled counter. I poured us each a glass. She raised hers in a toast.
“To peace in our time,” she said.
I laughed, and we drank our wine in silence. Then she put down her glass, took mine from my hand, and began unbuttoning her shirt.
“Okay, so much for the formalities,” she said, resting her hand on the chopping block. “Now come over here and fuck me.”