Sweetheart (10 page)

Only none of it was Gretchen’s. She had rented the house under a false name from a psychologist who was spending the season in Italy. It had been the last place the police could trace Archie to. But by then, Gretchen had already taken him to another house. The psychologist, Dr. Sarah Rosenberg, and her family came back; the carpet, onto which Archie had spilled his drugged coffee, had been replaced.

“I want to talk about Gretchen Lowell today,” Rosenberg said.

It was their fourth session. It was the first time she had mentioned Gretchen. Archie had admired her restraint. He took a slow sip of the paper cup of coffee he held on the arm of the chair. “Okay,” he said. He felt warm and pleasant, just high enough that he could relax, and not high enough that Rosenberg would notice.

Rosenberg smiled. She was lean with dark curly hair she wore back in a low ponytail, maybe a little older than Archie, though he probably looked older to anyone guessing. He liked her. She was better than the department shrink he’d seen for six months. But then, for some reason, Archie was always more comfortable talking to women.

“I want to talk about the six weeks you knew her before she revealed who she was,” she said.

It was something the department didn’t like to talk about, the fact that Gretchen had infiltrated the investigation for that long before she revealed herself. It didn’t make them look exactly sharp. Archie sighed and looked behind Rosenberg, out the window. “She just showed up one day,” he said. “She said she was a psychiatrist. She ran a couple of group counseling sessions. I also conferred with her about the profile.” He rubbed the back of his neck and smiled. The smell of coffee wafted up from the cup. He brought the coffee because when he didn’t he thought sometimes he could still smell the lilacs. “She seemed to have some insights,” he said.

Rosenberg sat in the other striped chair, where Gretchen used to sit. She crossed her legs and leaned forward. “Like what?” she asked.

A squirrel bolted up one of the cherry trees, sending the leaves rippling. Archie took another sip of coffee and then rested it back on the arm of the chair. “She was the first person who suggested that the killer might be a woman,” he said.

Rosenberg kept a yellow legal pad on her lap and she wrote something down on it. She was wearing black slacks and a green turtleneck and yellow socks the same color as the notebook. “What was your reaction to that?” she asked.

Archie noticed that his left leg had developed a restless bounce. He pushed his heel into the floor. “We had exhausted pretty much everything else,” he said.

“Did she offer individual counseling?” Rosenberg asked.

“Yes,” Archie said.

“Did she counsel you?” she asked.

He inched the pillbox out of his pocket and held it in his fist on his lap. “Yes.”

“Just you?”

“Yes.” If Rosenberg noticed the box, she didn’t say anything.

“What did you two talk about?” she asked.

“The same stuff you and I do,” Archie said. “My work.” In fact he’d been more up front with Gretchen. He had shared everything. The stress of the investigation. The pressure it put on his relationship with Debbie. “My marriage.”

Rosenberg raised an eyebrow. “It must have been quite upsetting to realize that you had shared all of those personal thoughts with a killer.”

Quite upsetting. That was one way of putting it. The funny thing was, at the time, it had been nice to have someone to talk to. Too bad she carved people up for fun. “She was a good listener,” Archie said.

“So you spent more time with her than the others did,” Rosenberg said, her pen poised over the notebook.

“Yes,” Archie said. “I guess so.”

“Where did you have your counseling sessions?” she asked.

Archie lifted a hand. “Right here.”

Rosenberg sat up and looked around her home office. “I understand why she would consult with you about a case here, but that’s unusual. That she would actually treat you in her home.”

“Why?” Archie asked. “You do.”

“I’m a psychologist,” Rosenberg said. “She said she was a psy-chiatrist.” She wrote something on the legal pad, shaking her head.

“She wasn’t really a psychiatrist,” Archie reminded her.

Rosenberg looked up from the legal pad. “Did you ever suspect her?” she asked.

There went the leg again. Archie didn’t bother to stop it. It felt good, somewhere for the nervous energy to go. He lifted his cup of coffee, but didn’t take a drink. “About the time the paralytic drug she slipped in my coffee kicked in,” he said. He set the paper coffee cup on the floor, opened the pillbox on his lap, removed a pill, and swallowed it.

“What was that?” Rosenberg asked.

“An Altoid,” Archie said.

Rosenberg smiled. “I’m not sure you’re supposed to swallow those.”

Archie smiled back. “I was hungry.”

Rosenberg leaned forward and then uncrossed and crossed her legs again. “I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me,” she said.

Archie looked down at his hands. Sometimes he thought he could still see the faint tan line where his wedding ring had been. “I think about her sometimes,” he said softly.

“About Gretchen Lowell,” Rosenberg said.

Archie looked up. “I fantasize about fucking her,” he said.

Rosenberg laid the pen down on the pad. “She held you captive for ten days,” she said. “You were powerless. Perhaps your fantasies are a way of having power over her.”

“So it’s perfectly healthy,” Archie said.

“It’s understandable,” Rosenberg said. “I didn’t say it was healthy.” She reached across and put a hand on Archie’s forearm. She wore rings on all her fingers. “Do you want to get past this? To give up the pills? To get over what happened to you? To be happy with your family?”

“Yes,” Archie said.

“That’s the first step.”

Archie rubbed the back of his neck. “How many are there?”

Rosenberg smiled. “One less.”

There were five Vicodin lined up like little piano keys on Archie’s office desk. Archie swept them into his hand and washed them down with the dregs of the cold coffee he had left from his session with Rosenberg.

It was mid-morning and they were still waiting on the crime lab report on the new bodies. Archie glanced down at Susan Ward’s story in the
Herald
in his lap.
MYSTERY KID LEADS COPS TO NEW BODIES.
It didn’t even make the front page. It was in the Metro section, dwarfed by ongoing coverage of the senator’s death. Maybe the mystery kid’s parents would see the story and piece it together. Archie wanted to at least prove to Henry that he wasn’t going crazy. In the meantime they had the standard poodle in custody. On the off chance he passed any clues.

Archie touched his right side, where his persistent cramp had returned. The Vicodin didn’t seem to help.

He opened his desk drawer, and there was Gretchen. He’d gone back to the log the night before for the book. He’d told himself he didn’t want to litter, didn’t want one of the crime techs to find it, that he wanted the closure of lighting the thing on fire, et cetera. Then why had he brought it to his office, brushed the mud off, and put it in his desk drawer?

Raul Sanchez poked his head in Archie’s office door, and Archie slammed the drawer shut. Sanchez had foregone his FBI cap and windbreaker for a brown suit and tie. You almost couldn’t tell it was a clip-on. “Meeting with the mayor,” he explained. “They’re already planning a public funeral for Castle down at the Waterfront. Speakers. Tents. The whole enchilada.” He smiled at the enchilada line. “Traffic downtown is gonna be fucked.”

“I’ll make a note to be out of town,” Archie said. Watching people weep over Castle was a little more than Archie could bear right now.

“You going to Parker’s service?” Sanchez asked.

“Yeah,” Archie said. Parker’s funeral was that afternoon. No tents for that one. No crowd control. His family must have moved mountains to make arrangements that fast. Archie thought he knew why.

Sanchez hesitated, then rubbed the back of his neck. “His blood alcohol was .24.” He looked up meaningfully at Archie, then scratched his bearded chin. “Thought you’d want to know.”

Archie closed his eyes. “Fuck.” They were getting him in the ground just in time.

“We’ll wait until after his funeral,” Sanchez said. “Make it public tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” Archie said.

Sanchez turned to go.

“You got my message about why Parker was meeting with Castle?” Archie asked. “Susan Ward’s story?”

“Crazy shit,” Sanchez said, turning back. He shrugged. “Doesn’t change the blood test, though.”

Archie sighed and leaned back in his chair, hands folded across his chest. The brass pillbox pressed against his thigh. Gretchen Lowell smiled in his desk drawer. “No,” he said.

Susan fiddled with the white piping of her brown dress. She had decided against black. It was too funereal. The brown dress was vintage, A-line, cap-sleeved, with white piping and two big white buttons on the chest. She had clipped her turquoise hair at the back of her neck. It seemed too colorful somehow, disrespectful of the occasion.

There were a fair amount of people in the church, probably a couple hundred. Susan recognized many faces from the paper. The wooden pews were full, and it was standing room only in the back. The rain had passed and sun streamed in through the stained-glass windows, throwing colored trapezoids of light on the wooden floor.

Parker was at the front of the church, in a glazed ceramic urn.

Susan was sitting in the third row. She’d arrived early. Susan was almost never early. But she’d arrived an hour before the funeral, and after twenty minutes crying in her car in the parking lot she came inside and got a place up front.

She saw Derek, sitting in the back with some other city beat reporters. He tried to catch her eye, but she avoided him.

Then she saw Archie Sheridan come in with his family and sit a few rows behind her across the aisle. He was wearing a black suit and shiny black shoes and sat with his arm around his ex-wife, who was wearing a black sleeveless dress that showed off her lean, tan arms. His son was wearing a gray suit and the little girl was wearing a gray eyelet dress. They looked like a photo spread of what to wear to a funeral.

Susan looked down at her own ensemble. She looked like she worked at Mr. Steak.

The
Herald’s
publisher, Howard Jenkins, gave the eulogy. A few of the older reporters at the paper spoke. There weren’t many left. Most
Herald
employees over fifty were offered buyout options to retire so the paper could save on pensions.

Parker was an institution. Parker was a reporter’s reporter. Parker was a muckraker, a local hero, a warrior for the afflicted, a champ, a gem, employee of the fucking year.

God, it was all such bullshit. Susan got up, squeezed past forty knees, feet, and purses, and walked as fast as she could out the door, into the hallway, down the carpeted stairs, and out of the church.

The old stone church had a courtyard that overlooked the park blocks. A few tables, fluttering with pink paper tablecloths, had been set up for the postfuneral reception. There was a large silver urn of coffee and a glass bowl of fruit punch. Several plates of deviled eggs sat spoiling in the sun. And bottles of Wild Turkey were lined up five deep. Susan smiled.

On the other side of the street, in the park, people streamed by, walking. Lunchtime traffic clogged the street. Susan’s hands were shaking.

Archie Sheridan appeared at the door she’d just fled through. “You okay?” he asked quietly.

Susan turned her head, embarrassed, and dug through her purse. “I just needed a cigarette,” she said, coming up with the yellow pack.

Archie walked down the stone steps and leaned against the church wall next to her while she found her lighter.

“Parker was legally drunk when he drove off the bridge,” he said. “They’re making it public tomorrow.”

Susan held the lighter to the end of her cigarette. The flame licked and jumped, then flattened as she inhaled. It was bound to come up, but she was still sorry that it had. “Parker was
always
legally drunk,” she said. “You know that.” She dropped the lighter back into her purse. “He was an alcoholic.”