One We Love, The (15 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

T
he whole
encounter with Beth, particularly her parting shot, had left me unsettled. As
4:00 neared, I tried to pull myself together. The meeting with Bettina Reyes
was going to be tricky, and I needed my wits about me.

For a woman in an illicit affair, Bettina was rather dumpy.
And crabby, too. Couldn’t really blame her for the latter attribute since she
hadn’t wanted to meet with me in the first place, and she most certainly didn’t
want to hear what I had to tell her. Still, I had to give it a try. At the very
least, I needed to find out who her amorous counselor was. Since Regina hadn’t
included his name in the file, I wouldn’t be able to pursue the ethics review
without more information. Not to mention, I didn’t want to lose sight of the fact
that Regina’s knowledge could have been very threatening to one of our
colleagues.

Enough to kill her?   

After greeting Bettina in the clinic lobby, I led the way to
my office. She walked uncomfortably close behind, so much so that I could smell
her breath mints over my shoulder. Motioning her to a chair, I tried to
discreetly uncrinkle the leather of my shoe heel where she’d trod on it. Twice.
She hadn’t apologized.

“Thank you for coming in,” I started. “I’m sure this is
diffi—”

“I just want to get this over with.”

“I underst—”

“No. You don’t. None of you seem to understand that this
isn’t any of your business. I’m a grown woman. I’m
not
being abused. I’m
not being mistreated. For the first time in my life I’m very happy. I thought
that’s what you the
-rapists
want for us.”

It took me a moment to realize she’d bifurcated the word:
therapist. Freud would have had a heyday with her word choice, given
“the-rapist” lover. Client or not, the temptation to respond sarcastically was
hard to resist.

As I struggled, I was hit by an uncomfortable realization.
Either Bettina Reyes was my client—in the same way she was The-Rapist’s
client—or she wasn’t. I couldn’t have it both ways. No matter how badly I
wanted to know who the therapist was and whether he’d had anything to do with
Regina’s death, that didn’t override my responsibility to Bettina. Not even if
murder was involved.
Bettina
had to be my priority. Otherwise I was just
using my role to manipulate her into a position she didn’t want to be in.
The-rapist, indeed.

So for the second time that day I had to resort to the
telling the truth. I truly hoped it didn’t get to be a habit.

“I don’t know the name of the other therapist. Regina never
recorded it. I have no way, without your cooperation, of following through with
an ethics complaint.”

She blinked. “Then why did you have me come in?”

“Because I needed to give you the chance to talk about what
it might mean to you when you heard that Regina died. Especially since you two
were in disagreement over your, um, lover. I wanted to make sure that you know
the door is always open if you need to talk about the situation. I won’t lie
...” Well, not under these circumstances. “I totally agree with Regina that he
should be reported. I do believe that his actions are unethical and that you
are being mistreated. But unless you tell me his name, I can’t do anything
about it.

 “Which is kind of freeing, I hope. For you, I mean. Instead
of resenting me for going against your wishes, you can just talk about how you
feel. Or if you’d prefer to see another therapist, that’s fine, too. Either
way, you’re in the driver’s seat. But keep in mind: I’m under the same ethical
strictures as Regina. If I learn his name, I will report him. No question about
it. So, what do you think?” I relaxed back in my chair, waiting for her answer.

She started crying. Therapy began.  

S
ince Regina had
been killed at the shelter, detouring into the Reyes affair was a long shot and
I feared getting too distracted. However, I also couldn’t ignore it. Plus Regina
had made a habit of roping her colleagues in the community to volunteer hours
at the shelter. Theoretically the killer might be someone only tenuously
connected to the shelter. Unfortunately, that meant I had to go to the only person
I could think of who might know the background on the Reyes case. If he was
still in town, that is.

Later, as Hannah and I were preparing the big room for the
grief group, I dithered back and forth about asking her if she knew Marshall’s
whereabouts. I’d come to terms with the fact that Bettina might never feel
comfortable revealing her lover’s identity, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going
to try other means to see if it tied in to Regina’s death.

I finally blurted out my question. After asking, I couldn’t
figure out what to do with my hands, so I pretended to fuss with the stack of
paper cups next to the water pitcher. There is only so much arranging you can
do with a stack of Styrofoam cups—one really tall stack or two short ones. I
went with two.

Hannah watched my machinations, then gently asked, “Do you
want me to find out?”

Abandoning my cup maneuvers, I flopped down on one of the
folding chairs. At first glance, it seemed a remarkably straightforward
question.
Did I want Hannah to find out if Marshall was in town?

But it meant more than just a yes-or-no answer. It meant
purposely arranging a meeting with a man who obviously didn’t want to be with
me. Not an ego boost, that. Even if we met for professional reasons, there
would be all sorts of hot and cold undercurrents swirling around the
conversation. Very high school-esque. Very distracting.

Perhaps this wasn’t the best time for distractions.

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

I
tossed and
turned all night obsessively pulling petals off an imaginary daisy.
Should I
call him? Should I not?
Siggy stuck with me until about midnight when he
grew so disgusted with my shifting that he deserted me for the couch pillow. Around
3:00 a.m. another avenue occurred to me.

Lisa, of course.

I got to work early, bringing our office manager her
favorite breakfast: a half-dozen crullers and a bucket-sized cup of coffee. Ever
suspicious, but not one to turn down fresh-baked bribes, Lisa busied herself
with cream and sugar.

“Hey, Lisa, I’ve got a question for you.”

“No shit.” At least I think that’s what she said. By the
looks of it, her words had to navigate past a mouthful of cruller to get to me.

“The file you found the other day? The one pending review?
Can we figure out who Regina referred the client’s husband to?”

“Who referred the client?”

“No. Her husband. Regina gave the client a list of referrals
for the client’s husband, but she didn’t document them in the client’s file.”

Lisa’s eyes sparkled. This was just the kind of data hunt
she loved. Or else it was the caffeine/sugar rush. She spun her chair to the
cart where yesterday’s cases were waiting to be filed. With unerring
efficiency, she slid Bettina Reyes’s out of a teetering stack of manila folder
clones.

Flipping it open, she paged through the documents, mumbling
to herself. I didn’t know what she was looking for, but I knew better than to
ask. After more flipping and mumbling, she slapped the file closed.

“OK, she was referred by Dr. Feldman. He’s on the board at
the shelter.”

“I know. I met him. He’s retired.”

“Only semi-retired. He still takes on an occasional client.
He might have, for Regina. Sometimes she’d send someone over to Kyle Channing
over at Wellness Center. He’s got a waiting list a mile long, so it’s tough to
get anyone into him.”

“Why not refer to anyone here?” I asked.

“She usually would unless the client was specifically
looking for a male therapist. In that case, who do we have? Marshall didn’t see
clients, so that would leave Bob.” She snorted, efficiently expressing her
opinion on that one.

“They were pretty close,” I said. “Maybe she would.”

“They weren’t close. He was her minion, not her colleague.
Except . . .”

“Except what?”

“If there was a chance of doing co-therapy, maybe. I think
there have been maybe three cases over the years where Regina and Bob acted as
co-therapists for a marital couple. I think that way she’d still be in charge.
Bob liked it because all he did was sit there.”

“Anybody else?” I asked.

“Not that I can think of. And I would probably know. If one
of our therapists refers someone, we filled out a form with the contact info to
make it easier on the client.”

“But we don’t keep a copy of that form?”

She frowned. It appeared I’d found a miniscule glitch in her
system. Lisa did not allow imperfection. She reached for a sticky note and jotted
a reminder. “We do now.”

“Ok, so Dr. Feldman, Kyle Channing, and . . . Bob.”

“Yup. So now that I’ve answered your question, you can
answer mine. What gives?” Lisa worked on a strict quid quo pro basis. If I was
getting info, I’d better be ready to give it. Instead, I pointed to the cruller
crumbs littered across her desk. “That was your fee.”

Her Icelandic blue eyes narrowed. “Not good enough,” she
said.

I dangled the bag with the five remaining crullers in it.
She eyed it, but I could see her weighing her choices. She’d already had one cruller
fix, but her curiosity had been let loose, too. It was a battle of the
appetites.

I jiggled the bag gently, letting the pastries rasp
seductively against the white paper bag. I’d always loved fishing.

F
or once, I
didn’t want the donuts anyway. My stomach had been queasy ever since the image
of Bob doing the nasty with Bettina entered my mind. I kept telling myself
there were two other options, but I knew Kyle. He was a good guy, mid-thirties
with a charming wife and three cute kids. We often attended the same trainings
and had one of those quasi-deep relationships that survived despite infrequent
meetings where we had to cram a lot of catching up together over the break
periods and lunch hour provided at the trainings. He was one of the few
colleagues who knew about my alcoholism. Well, to be honest, he knew about it
before I did since, over the years, he’d watched me guzzle wine with far more
desperation than a dry turkey sandwich and a boring conference would seem to
warrant.

I didn’t think it was him.

It could be Feldman, the shelter board member. In fact,
despite his leather sandals and scraggly, gray braid, I was really rooting for
him. Aging hippie sex was ever so much more appealing than any kind of sweaty
coupling with . . .
Bob
. I gagged.

I dug through my purse looking for the card Feldman had
given me at the board meeting. I found it buried under my wallet and makeup
case. It was covered with a fine dusting of face powder where my compact had
broken. I tossed the powder in the trash, where it landed with a clatter in the
empty basket.

I quickly dialed Feldman’s phone number before I could
chicken out. It only rang twice before I hung up. My bravery had lasted seventeen
seconds. I hadn’t really thought it through, anyway. Feldman wouldn’t be able
to tell me if Frank Reyes was his patient. I didn’t have any kind of authorization
for release of information. It wouldn’t be possible for Feldman to confirm a
relationship with Frank one way or another. And if he was shagging Bettina, it
wasn’t likely he’d admit it.

I could always stake out Bettina’s house and follow her to
whichever guy she was seeing. That was not only unethical on several levels,
but far beyond my capabilities.

So I snuck into the file room and looked for a file on Frank
Reyes. If we had one, it eliminated everyone but Bob. I told myself that as
long as I didn’t look
into
the file, I wasn’t breaking confidentiality.
Besides, someone had to put Bettina’s file away. So I did. Right in between the
two other Reyeses: Amelia and Francis.

Ugh. It
was
Bob.

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

L
uckily, Bob had
chosen to take one of his many long weekends and I didn’t have to deal with
running into him in the hallway. My imagination was abusing me enough. I felt
like a kid who’d been in denial about her parents’ sex lives until I walked in
on them. Except sex between two consenting adults was an entirely different
matter than between client, adult or otherwise, and therapist. Especially when
that The-Rapist was Bob.

At any rate, I had time to consider what I should do. I
really wasn’t sure how or, given the way I’d discovered Bob’s involvement, even
if
I could report him to the licensing board. I was only semi-comfortable
with my “looking
at
a file is not the same as looking
in
a file”
rationale. There was also the slight possibility that Frank had seen Bob,
realized what a knuckle-head he was, and decided to go to someone else. I decided
to shelve the Bob-the-pig dilemma in favor of the name-that-killer one.

Unless those were the same thing.

The whole thing hinged on whether Bob had access to the
shelter or not. If he’d ever been shanghaied by Regina into providing services,
then I supposed he could have figured out how to get hold of a duplicate key or
something. Seemed awfully long-sighted, though. It was also doubtful that
Regina would have asked Bob. As Lisa already pointed out, she didn’t have a
whole lot of respect for his clinical skills.

On the other hand, if Bob ever referred a woman to the
shelter, he might conceivably continue on as her counselor. It would make sense
for him to use the shelter’s therapy office. It was possible.

Unfortunately, I had no way of proving any of it.

I decided to give Blodgett a call. After nearly a week since
his attack, he might be getting restless at his enforced inactivity. Blodgett,
despite his lackadaisical appearance, was not a sit-in-the-recliner kind of
guy. Feeling guilty that I hadn’t checked in on him or Diana for several days,
I dialed their house first, hoping he’d been discharged by now. No answer.

The number I had for his hospital room rang nine times. Just
as I was about to hang up, Diana answered. Before she’d said anything more than
“hello,” my heart sank. Even with just one word, it was all in her voice. One small
word with a universe of fear filling it.

“Diana? Are you okay?” Stupid,
stupid
question. I
wanted to bite my tongue off.

“He’s in surgery, Letty. We were just getting ready to
leave. It happened so suddenly.”

“What? What happened?”

“They think he had a heart attack. We were just getting
ready to leave. They were bringing the wheelchair up, you know? They make you
ride in a wheelchair? Then all of a sudden, Del said, ‘Di. Di.’ Just that, you
know? Just my name. He sounded so strange. Like he was scared, maybe. And he
tried to sit down, but he missed the bed and fell into that stupid table. The
one on wheels, you know? Oh my gosh, you never heard such a noise. But everyone
heard that, and I was yelling, you know. So all of a sudden the room was just
full of people. Which is a good thing, you know?  Because I didn’t know what to
do. I just didn’t know what to do, Letty. He’s in surgery now. They took him in
so fast. Just whisked him right away.”

“I’m coming, Diana. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Since I was coming from the clinic, it was a straight shot
up Clairemont. Finding my way back to Blodgett’s room took longer than the
drive over. It was empty when I got there, so I jogged over to the nurses’
station to ask where I could find Diana. A tired-looking nurse had me wait
while she paged for a “walker” to escort me to the waiting area outside of
surgery. With all the remodeling and the resulting rat maze connecting old
sections to new, they’d apparently found it expedient to use volunteers as
escorts.

Elderly volunteers, as a matter of fact.

As he rounded the corner, I felt a wave of impatience at the
sight of my escort—eighty years old if he was a day—and started worrying that
I’d need to borrow a wheelchair just to get the two of us to our destination.

Byron, my designated sherpa, was reed-thin, with near
translucent skin and a dandelion fluff of grey hair wafting atop his head. I
had visions of blowing on it and making a wish, but he moved off with such a
brisk pace that I quickly realized I’d need to save my breath for the trek. Condescending
forbearance immediately gave way to embarrassment as Byron bulleted forward.
His long, lopey strides propelled him at such a rate that I found it necessary
to shift erratically between speedwalking and jogging in order to keep him in
sight. Neither pace was one that I could sustain for any length of time without
passing out. I found myself grateful that we were heading to an area where I
could be quickly attended to following the coronary I was certain was imminent.

We arrived at the surgical waiting area a brisk thirteen
minutes later. Byron had acquired a slight pinkish hue on his cheeks. I, on the
other hand, had sweat rings the size of dinner plates under my arms and a face that
burned from the inside out with surprisingly copious amounts of sweat streaming
off it. I bent over at the waist, willing oxygen past dry, brittle lips and
praying that the people would think the rasping, wheezing sound was the air
conditioner. Since it was early October, that was doubtful.

There might be something to this you-need-to-quit-smoking
idea, after all.

As soon as the dots in front of my eyes receded, I found
Diana and dropped next to her.

She barely registered my presence. I reached for her hand
and sat quietly. I had tons of questions, but I had the feeling we would be
here a while. There was time.

After several minutes, she sighed, then slowly turned to
look at me. “He was going to call you,” she said.

For some reason, my heart thudded heavily. Maybe it was the
blank expression coating her face. “Was he?” I said softly.

She nodded. “He didn’t remember a lot of what happened.
During the attack, you know? The guys have been asking him and asking him. The
doctor says sometimes after a trauma the brain just cancels stuff out. The
accident, what happened right after, all of that stuff. Just gone, you know?”

I nodded.

“But, of course, all of his cop friends are trying to find
out what happened. Who did this? Why? They’ve been coming in and out, talking
to Del, trying to get him to remember. And Bill Stanwick’s been going through
his papers. I let him go through Del’s desk at home and everything.”

She was still staring at me, trying to read something on my
face. My hands started sweating and I let go of her hand, wiping my palms on my
jeans.

“Diana, what’s going on? What are you asking me?”

She looked uncomfortable, her kind eyes filling with pain. Not
one who enjoyed confrontation, she’d nevertheless mothered too many for too
long to dance around the subject.

“Bill said the only thing they could find that didn’t make
sense was a bunch of notes about that lady you worked with. The one who fell
down the stairs at Devlin House? Del’s been pulling files on a bunch of women
from there. Women who died, Bill says. He came in this morning while I was at
the grocery store to talk to Del. In fact, he was just leaving when I came to
get Del.”

“What does, um, Del think?” I asked, stumbling over
Blodgett’s given name.

“He wouldn’t talk about it. Not with me, anyway. But five
minutes after Bill leaves, Del gets his undies in a bunch saying he’s got to
get home. We were already
going
home. The doctor was going to stop in
and see him before lunch and then we were going to get Del released and go
home. All of a sudden, Del’s got to leave right away. Can’t even see the
doctor. Can’t wait to get checked out.”

She turned her face away then, but I’d been watching her
expressions change as she’d talked. From blank to hurt and bewildered to
accusatory. I reached for her hand again, but she pulled it away.

“Diana,” I said. “Are you saying that Blodgett was attacked
because of something he was doing for me?”

She whipped her eyes back to mine. “Are you saying he
wasn’t?”

“I don’t know, Diana. I really don’t. He was just looking up
records for me. I never thought it was connected with . . .” My voice trailed
off as I realized I was lying. I
had
wondered. Diana heard the
uncertainty, too.

“You’ve known about this ever since Del was hurt and you
never said anything?”

“Diana—”

“I’d like you to leave right now.”

“But I really didn’t—”

“I mean it, Letty. You need to leave.”

I stood, torn between respecting her wishes and wanting,
more than anything, to fix this. “I’m sorry, Diana. I really am.”