The Analyst (48 page)

“That’s right. Says he’s got no memory of the fight at all. Says he woke up all covered in blood when the policeman shoved him with their sticks and with that knife by his side. I guess having no recollection isn’t much of a defense.”

Ricky turned the page, but the scrapbook was blank.

“Got to save a page, I guess,” the woman said. “For one last story. I hope I pass before that day arrives, for I do not want to see it come.”

She shook her head. “You know something, father?”

“What’s that?”

“It always made me angry. You know, when he scored that touchdown against South Side High, in the city championship, why, they put his picture right on the front page. But all these stories, over there in Tampa where nobody much knew about my boy at all, why, they were little stories, stuck way inside the paper, where hardly anyone ever saw them. It seems to me that if you’re going to go about taking some man’s life away from him in a court of law, why you ought to make a big deal of it. It ought to be special and right up there on the front page. But it isn’t. It’s just another little story that gets stuck back next to the broken sewer main and the gardening column. It’s like life isn’t all that important anymore.”

She rose and Ricky rose with her.

“Talking about this makes my heart feel filled with sickness, father. And there ain’t no comfort in any words, not even the Good Book, to take the hurt away.”

“I think, my child, that you should open your heart to the goodness that you remember, and that way you will be comforted.” Ricky thought trying to sound like a priest made his words trite and ineffectual, which was more or less how he wanted them. The old woman had raised a boy who was to all outward appearances a proper son of a bitch, he thought, who started out his sorry excuse for life by seducing a classmate, dragging her alongside of him for a few years, then abandoning her and her children when they became inconvenient; and he ended up by killing another man over probably no reason at all, other than one created by too much liquor. If there was anything redeeming about Daniel Collins’s silly, useless existence, he had yet to see it. This cynicism, boiling around inside of him, was more or less confirmed by the words the old woman spoke next.

“The goodness stopped with that girl. When she got pregnant that first time, why, any chance my boy had, just went right away then. She lured him in, used all that woman cunning, trapped him, and then used him to get out of here and away. All the trouble he had, becoming someone, making his way in the world, why, I blame it all on her.”

The woman’s voice left no room for any compromise. It was cold, clipped, and utterly committed to the idea that her darling boy had nothing to do with creating any of the trouble that befell him. And Ricky, the onetime psychoanalyst, knew there was little chance that she would see her own complicity. We create, he thought, and then, when that creation goes so wrong, we want to blame others, when it is usually ourselves to blame.

“But you think he’s innocent?” Ricky asked. He knew the answer. And he did not say
of the crime
, because the old woman believed her son was innocent of everything he’d done wrong.

“Why, of course. If he said it, I believe it.” She reached into the scrapbook and found an attorney’s card, which she handed to Ricky. A public defender in Tampa. He noted the name and number and let her show him out the door.

“Do you know what happened to the three children? Your grandchildren?” Ricky asked, gesturing with the phony medical letter.

The woman shook her head. “They was give up, I heard. Danny signed some paper when he was in jail in Texas. He got caught doing a burglary, but I didn’t believe it none. Did a couple of years in prison. We never heard from them no time again. I guess they’s all grown up now, but I never seen any of ’em, not one time, so it’s not like I think of them. Danny, he did the right thing by giving them up after that woman passed, because he couldn’t raise three children he didn’t know all by hisself. And I couldn’t help him none, either, all alone here and being sick and all. So they became someone else’s problem and someone else’s children. Like I said, we never heard from them.”

Ricky knew this last statement was untrue.

“Did you even know their names?” he asked.

The woman shook her head. The cruelty in that gesture almost struck him like a fist, and he understood where the young Daniel Collins had found his own selfishness.

When the last of the day’s heat and sunshine hit his head, he stood dizzily on the sidewalk for just a moment, wondering whether Rumplestiltskin’s reach was so far, that it had put Daniel Collins on death row. He guessed that it was. He just wasn’t precisely certain how.

Ricky returned to New Hampshire and back to life as Richard Lively. Everything that he’d learned on his trip to Florida troubled him.

Two people had entered Claire Tyson’s life at critical moments. One had left her and her children adrift, and now occupied a cell on death row, claiming innocence in a state notorious for turning a deaf ear on such protests. The other had turned his back on the daughter he’d abused and the grandchildren who’d needed help, and years later he’d been turned out on the street equally cruelly, and now was condemned to wheeze away his final days on a different, but similarly unforgiving death row.

Ricky added to the equation beginning to form in his head: The boyfriend who beat Claire Tyson in New York was then beaten to death in his own turn, with a bloody
R
carved into his chest. The lazy Dr. Starks, who because of his own indecisiveness at one time failed to help the distraught Claire Tyson when she came pleading to him, was subsequently driven to suicide after every avenue where he might find help for himself was systematically destroyed.

There had to be others. This realization chilled his heart.

It seemed that Rumplestiltskin had designed a number of acts of revenge according to a simple principle: to each according to who they were. Crimes of omission were being judged and sentences being dealt out, years later. The boyfriend, who was nothing more than a thug and criminal, had been treated one way. The grandfather who’d denied his offspring’s entreaties had been punished differently. It was, Ricky thought, a unique method of delivering evil. His own game had been designed with Ricky’s personality and education in mind. Others had been dealt with more brutally, because they came from worlds where brutality was more refined. One other thing seemed clear cut: In Rumplestiltskin’s imagination, there was no statute of limitations.

The end results, though, he took note, seemed to be the same. A consistent path of death or ruin. And anyone who might stand in the way, like the unfortunate Mr. Zimmerman or Detective Riggins were seen as impediments that were summarily erased with the same amount of compassion one would reserve for a horsefly that landed on one’s forearm.

Ricky shuddered as he assessed how patient, dedicated, and cold-blooded Rumplestiltskin truly was.

He started to make a modest list of people who also might have failed to help Claire Tyson and her three young children when they were in need: Was there a landlord in New York who demanded rent from the destitute woman? If so, they were probably on the street somewhere, wondering what happened to their building. A social worker who failed to get her into an assistance program? Had they been ruined financially, and now forced to apply for the same program? A priest who had listened to her entreaties and suggested that prayer might fill an empty stomach? They were probably praying for themselves, now. He could only guess how far Rumplestiltskin’s revenge reached: What happened to the city power worker who had turned off the electricity at her house when she failed to pay a bill on time? He didn’t know the answers to these questions, nor did he know precisely where Rumplestiltskin had drawn his dividing line, separating the people he’d judged guilty, from however many others there might be. Still, Ricky knew one thing: A number of people had once upon a time come up far short and were now paying a price.

Or, more likely, had paid their debt. All the people who had neglected to help Claire Tyson, so that her only choice was to take her own life in despair.

It was the most frightening concept of justice that Ricky had ever imagined. Murders of both the body and the soul. It seemed to Ricky that he had often been scared since Rumplestiltskin had entered his life. He had been a man of routine and insight. Now, nothing was solid, everything was unsettled. The fear that ricocheted within him now was something different. Something he had difficulty categorizing, but he knew it left his mouth dry and a bitter taste on his tongue. As an analyst, he had lived in his well-to-do patients’ worlds of convoluted anxieties and debilitating frustrations, but these seemed now to be uniformly petty and pathetically self-indulgent.

The scope of Rumplestiltskin’s fury astounded him. And, at the same time, made perfect sense.

Psychoanalysis teaches one thing, he thought: Nothing ever happens in a vacuum. A single bad act can have all sorts of repercussions. He was reminded of the desktop perpetual motion machines that some of his colleagues had, where a group of ball bearings were hung in a row, and if one was lifted slightly, so that it swung against the others, the force would cause the last in the line to swing out and then bounce back, making a clicking sound and starting an engine of momentum that would only stop when someone injected their hand into the works. Rumplestiltskin’s revenge, of which he’d been only a single part, was like that machine.

There were others dead. Others destroyed. He alone, in all likelihood, saw the entirety of what had taken place. Perpetual motion.

Ricky felt shafts of cold drip through his body.

These were all crimes that existed in a plane defined by immunity. What detective, what police authority, would ever be able to link them all together, because the only thing the victims had in common was a relationship with a woman dead for twenty years.

Serial crimes, Ricky thought, with a thread so invisible that it defied imagination. Like the policeman who had blithely told him about the
R
carved in Rafael Johnson’s chest, there was always someone far more likely to wear guilt than the vaporous Mr. R. The reasons behind his own death were blatantly obvious. Career in tatters, home destroyed, wife dead, finances in ruins, relatively friendless and introspective, why wouldn’t he kill himself?

And one other thing was abundantly clear to him: If Rumplestiltskin learned that he’d escaped, if he even suspected that Ricky still breathed air on this planet, he would be on Ricky’s trail instantly with evil intentions. Ricky doubted that he would have the opportunity to play any game the second time around. It also occurred to him how easy it would be to dispatch his new identity: Richard Lively was a nonentity in the world. His very anonymity made his own quick and brutal death a relative certainty. Richard Lively could be executed in broad daylight, and no policeman anywhere would be able to make the necessary connections leading him back to Ricky Starks and some man called Rumplestiltskin. What they would find out was that Richard Lively wasn’t Richard Lively and he would instantly become a John Doe, planted with little ceremony without a headstone in some potter’s field. Perhaps a detective would wonder idly who he truly once was, but, inundated with other cases, the death of Richard Lively would simply be shunted aside. Forever.

What made Ricky so safe, also made him utterly vulnerable.

So, upon his return to New Hampshire, he greeted taking up the simple routines of his life in Durham with unbridled enthusiasm. It was as if he hoped he could lose himself readily in the steadiness of getting up each morning and going to work with the rest of the janitorial force at the university, of swabbing floors, cleaning bathrooms, polishing hallways, and changing lightbulbs, exchanging a joke or two with coworkers, speculating about the Red Sox’s prospects for the upcoming season. He functioned in a world so insistently normal and mundane that it cried out to be painted in institutional pale blues and light greens. Once, when operating a steam cleaner across the carpet of the faculty lounge, he discovered that the sensation of the machine humming, vibrating in his hands, and the swath of clean rug that it created was almost hypnotically pleasant. It was as if he could disappear from who he once had been in the new simplicity of this world. It was a strangely satisfying situation; alone, a job that shouted out routine and regularity, the occasional night spent manning the telephone bank at the suicide prevention line, where he recalled his skills as a therapist, dispensing advice and throwing lifelines in a modest, controlled fashion. He discovered he didn’t much miss the daily deposit of angst, frustration, and anger that characterized his life as an analyst. He wondered, some, whether the people he’d known, or even his late wife, would recognize him. In a curious way, Ricky thought that Richard Lively was closer to the person that he had wanted to be, closer to the person who’d found himself in summers on the Cape, than Dr. Starks had ever realized treating the rich and powerful and neurotic.

Anonymity, he thought, is seductive.

But elusive. For every second that he forced himself to grow comfortable with who he was, the revenge persona of Federick Lazarus shouted contradictory commands. He renewed his physical fitness training, and spent his free hours perfecting marksmanship skills on the pistol practice range. As the weather continued to improve, bringing warmth and bursting with color, he decided he needed to add outdoor skills to his repertoire, so he signed up for an orienteering class operated by a hiking and camping company under the name of Frederick Lazarus.

In a way, he’d been triangulated, in much the same way one finds his location when lost in the woods. Three pillars: who he was, who he’d become, who he needed to be.

He asked himself, late at night, sitting alone in the near-darkness of his rented room, a single desk lamp barely denting the shadows, whether he could turn his back on everything that had happened. Simply abandon any emotional connection to his past and what had befallen him, and become a man of complete simplicity. Live paycheck to paycheck. Take pleasure in basic routine. Redefine himself. Take up fishing or hunting or even just reading. Connect with as few people as possible. Live life with monklike style and a hermit’s solitude. Turn his back on fifty-three years of life, and say that it all started anew from the day he’d set fire to his home on the Cape and gone forward from there. It was almost Zenlike and tantalizing. Ricky could evaporate from the world like a puddle of water on a hot, sunny day, rising into the atmosphere.