Barking Man (25 page)

“An ill one, I’d say.” Wilson sat down on a ladder-back chair. “Do you remember Sharon Morgan? A Lawrence, she was, before she married.”

“Married that crazy fellow, didn’t she?”

“That’s the one.” Wilson ordered an iced tea from the waitress who’d appeared at his elbow, and turned back to the judge. “They’re letting him out of Central State, at least that’s what it looks like.” He ran down the brief of the morning’s activity while Oldfield grazed on his catfish and nodded.

“It worrying you personally?” the judge said when he was done. “For yourself, I mean?”

“Oh no,” Wilson said. “Not hardly. It wasn’t me he said he’d kill, was it? I doubt he’d remember much about me. I never knew him any too well. Even while the divorce was going on it was just her he was mad at.”

“So it’s the wife—ex-wife, I mean. She’s the one with the worry.”

“She’s the one.” Wilson frowned down at his hands. There was a small watery blister where the cigarette had burned him, surprisingly painful for its size. He turned the cold curve of the iced tea glass against it. “She asked me to get an injunction on him. That’s why I came hunting you.”

Oldfield took off his fragile rimless glasses, rubbed them with a handkerchief and put them back on. “That’s tricky, old son,” he said, “when you don’t know for sure if he’s loose or he’s not.”

“Hard to get good information out of that place, don’t you know?” Wilson said. “Seems like a lot of them are crazy, doctors and patients alike.”

“Must be that’s why they call it a madhouse,” Oldfield said with a faint smile. “Well. She does live in the county now? Full time?”

“She moved here right after the divorce,” Wilson said. “Just to oblige you, now,” Oldfield said, “I could sign you a paper. You draw it up. It happens he
is
out, you let me know and we’ll sign it and serve it right away. It won’t be much of a help to her, though.”

“Don’t I know it,” Wilson said. “But what else do you do?”

“Not a whole lot that you
can
,” said Oldfield. “You really think she’s got call to worry? Not just fretful, is she?”

“Not her,” Wilson said. “I’m the one fretting. I’m wondering, how can I get a deputy to watch over them for a couple of days?”

“You know you can’t set them on her, “Oldfield said. “Not without she asks for it herself.”

“She won’t.”

“She was a pretty thing, as I recall,” Oldfield said irrelevantly. He took off his glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “And knew her own mind, or seemed to.”

“You mean she’s stubborn.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Wilson stood up. “I thank you,” he said.

Oldfield smiled myopically up at him, his eyes a light watery blue. “You ought to stay and try the catfish.”

“Well, I believe not,” Wilson said. “Not much of an appetite today.”

“A young man like you?” The judge shook his head. “Must be this heat.”

“Your wife called,” Mrs. Veech reported. “She’ll call you back. And that man from Central State, he called. Dr. Meagrum.”

“He would have, wouldn’t he?” Wilson said, shrugging out of his jacket. “Wait till I was gone, I mean.”

Mrs. Veech sniffed. “In a tearing-down hurry, too,” she said. “He was right cross to find you not here.”

“He’ll get over it,” Wilson said. “All right, then, would you make sure for me that Pax Morgan still has his house in Brentwood? We might want to serve a paper on him a little later in the day.”

In the inner office it was a little too warm, though not quite oppressive. He put his coat on the hat rack, cracked the single window and paced for a moment at the far side of his desk. It was a shallow room and the high wall of dark bookbindings seemed uncomfortably close. With a sigh he went back to his seat, lit a cigarette, picked up the will, put it down, lifted a list of the other items on his immediate agenda and then let that drop too.

The urge to pick at the blister seemed irresistible. He tore loose an edge of it, reviewing, in spite of himself, what little he really knew about Pax Morgan. They’d gone to the same high school, but two years apart; Wilson was the younger. Pax had played football—he remembered that—indifferently, in the line. Later on he had inherited money and started dabbling in real estate, or insurance, neither making nor losing much at whatever it might have been. Grown, he was a loud bluff fellow with a ruddy face and crinkly, almost yellow hair. At the large parties where Wilson would occasionally run into him, he was known for drinking too much and becoming not just mush-mouthed but crazily incoherent. The drinking was said to be a factor in his later, more serious breakdowns.

Wilson had gone to Sharon’s wedding but he couldn’t think if it was before or after it that he’d had the one brush with Pax he remembered with real clarity. Another party, undoubtedly some Christmas gathering, for Pax was wearing an incongruous Santa Claus tie and had managed to get quite drunk on eggnog. Shuffled together by the crowd, they somehow became embroiled in an argument over deer hunting. Wilson shot duck and dove, rabbit and squirrel, and on his father’s farm he might shoot what he had to, to protect the livestock, but he had no taste for shooting deer, which now appeared to be Pax’s ruling passion. Wilson was trying to get off the subject, but Pax wouldn’t let it drop.

“You’ve never been blooded,” he said thickly. “That’s your trouble, you’ve never been
blooded
.” He grasped Wilson’s lapel and twisted it, drawing himself unpleasantly near, and Wilson was a little startled by what he himself did next, a trick someone had showed him in the Army. He took hold of Pax’s thumb and squeezed the joints of it together, so that the sudden sharp pain made Pax flinch and let go. Reflexively, Wilson took a step backward, jostling someone behind him in the crowded room, but Pax’s face went from surprise to a total blank, like a television switched to an empty channel, and so the whole episode was amputated.

Real craziness there, or an early sign of it. Wilson pulled the dead skin back from the blister, creating a small red-rimmed sore. By the time of the divorce, there were many worse examples, enough to fill a dossier. Wilson had never cared for divorce work much, but Sharon was both a colleague and a sort of distant friend, and also it was in the first thin stage of his independent practice. But once it was over he swore off friends’ divorces altogether, no matter how bad he might need the work. It had been an easy case in the sense that the outcome was not in real doubt, but it was angry and ugly on Pax’s side, and there’d been some bitter squabbling over property. Sharon had held out for the house on the lake—impractically, as Wilson thought—surrendering the Nashville residence to Pax, who’d later sold it. Reaching for the phone to call the hospital one more time, he wished again she hadn’t done that.

His game of telephone tag with Central State went on for a couple more hours, unpromisingly. When the phone finally rang back around two-thirty, it was his wife.

“Not interrupting, I hope,” she said. “Is it busy?”

“Not so you’d notice,” he said. “It’s been pretty quiet.”

“Well, we need a gallon of milk,” she said, “and cornmeal. Would you stop on the way home?”

“I’ll do it,” Wilson said, scribbling on the pad. “Lisa driving you crazy today?” Their daughter was four years old, and frantic.

“How should I describe it?” she said, and laughed. “This time next year she’ll be in school … I’ll miss her, though.”

“That’s the spirit,” Wilson said. The light on his phone began to flash and Mrs. Veech called down the hall, “It’s that Dr. Meagrum!”

“I’ve got to take this call,” Wilson said. “I’ll be home on time, I think …” He pushed the button.

Dr. Meagrum seemed to be already
in medias res
.”—there’s an issue of doctor-patient confidentiality here, Mr., uh, Wilson. I don’t know who could have sent you that form but they did so without my authorization.”

“Did they?” Wilson said, catching his breath. “As you may know, I represent Mr. Morgan’s ex-wife, and given the circumstances of the case, it seems to me appropriate that
both
of us should have been informed.”

“I can’t agree with you there,” Dr. Meagrum snapped.

“All due respect to your point of view,” Wilson said, trying to collect himself. The conversation had taken an adversarial turn too soon. “I take it that Mr. Morgan
has
, in fact, been released from your, ah, custodial care.”

“My records show that Mr. Morgan has been responding favorably to a course of medication and was transferred to outpatient status two days ago.”

“I see,” Wilson said. “What medication, may I ask?”

“I’m sorry, but that’s confidential.”

“And what assurance do we have that he will actually
take
this medication?”

“He’s in our outpatient program now, and we’ll be monitoring him on a biweekly basis.”

“Biweekly, you say. That’s
every two weeks
?” Wilson creaked back in his chair, gazing up at the join of his bookcase and the ceiling. “Dr. Meagrum, I would like you to consider”—he paused, thinking over the jargon as if fumbling for a key—“consider returning Mr. Morgan to
inpatient status
. Temporarily, shall we say. In the interests of the safety of his ex-wife and family.”

“Our file shows that any such step would be contraindicated,” the doctor said. “Not in the patient’s best interests.”

A white flash of light, something like heat lightning, burst over Wilson’s mental horizon, obscuring his view of the bookcases. He found he was clenching the receiver in a strangle grip and talking much louder than before. “Sir, you are describing a
piece of paper
to me, and I am talking to you about a man who has threatened to kill his wife, not once but many times—”

Dr. Meagrum harrumphed. “Yes, someone with this type of pathology might make such a threat, but I wouldn’t suggest that you take it too seriously …”

“He came to her house with a thirty-ought-six rifle,” Wilson said. “A
loaded
rifle—I’m now referring to the police report. They found him and the gun and they found her barricaded in an upstairs bedroom. With her two children, I should say. The boy is six now, Dr. Meagrum, and the little girl is seven. Your
outpatient
has threatened to kill them too.”

Dr. Meagrum resorted to the imperial “we”: “We have no record that this patient is violent. We see no reason to alter the treatment program at this time.”

With a mighty effort, Wilson established a greater degree of control over his voice. “Very well,” he said frostily. “I do sincerely hope you’ll see no reason to regret the course you’ve taken.”

By dumb luck his next call caught Judge Oldfield in his chambers, between cases, on the fly.

“I’m asking the impossible now,” Wilson said. “Let’s have him picked up. An APB. Lock him up and have a look at him. Just for a day or so.”

“You’re right,” Oldfield said. “That’s impossible. I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. This is Williamson County. We haven’t got a police state here.”

“It’s a free country, isn’t it,” Wilson said. “Well, I had to ask.”

“I wonder if you did, at that,” Oldfield said. “You’re acting mighty worked up about this, old son. Don’t you think you might be making a little much of it all? He’s been out two days already, so you say, and what happened? Nothing. The lady didn’t even know until you called her. Simmer down some, think it over. Go home early. It’s Friday, after all.”

“All right,” Wilson said. “Might give it a try.”

“You get me that injunction and I’ll pass it on to the sheriff direct,” Oldfield said. “I can’t do any more than that.”

“I know,” Wilson said. “Not until something happens. Well, I appreciate it.”

He hung up and dialed Sharon Morgan at the office but she was gone, gone for the weekend, had left half an hour before to pick up the children from school. He plopped down the phone and tried, forcibly, to relax. Try it. Judge Oldfield was no fool, after all. Wilson picked up the pencil with a fleeting idea of listing off what he was thinking, feeling, but that was a ridiculous notion; probably that was how they spent their time at Central State. Possibly nothing would happen anyway. Possibly. He looked up Sharon’s home number and dialed it, but there was no answer, though it rang twenty times.

In ten minutes he had scratched out the requisite injunction and handed it to Mrs. Veech with instructions to type it and walk it over to the courthouse when she was done. After she had gone out, he sat doing nothing but covering the phone, which didn’t ring. The jingle of Mrs. Veech’s return moved him to at least pretend to work. But he’d had it with the will for the day, though it still wasn’t quite finished. He scraped his agenda toward him across the desk and ran his pencil point down item by item. There were two boundary disputes and a zoning complaint. A piece of frivolous litigation to do with somebody’s unleashed dog. There was a murder case where the defendant would plead, draw two-to-ten and count himself lucky. A foregone conclusion, Wilson thought in his present skeptical mood, though matters had not yet reached that stage. At the foot of the list was a patent case that would make him and his client rich if he could win it. This one was the most remote, no court date even set for it yet, but at the same time the most intriguing, as much for its intricacy as its promise. He swiveled and dug in the cabinet for the file.

At four he called Sharon Morgan at the lake and got no answer. For another half hour he studied the patent case, though he was losing interest at an exponential rate. When he next called there was still no answer, and he was out of the chair and snatching his coat down from its peg before he even knew he meant to leave. On the highway bound for Keyhole Lake he began to feel a little foolish. He’d been presuming, counting the time from three o’clock, when school let out. It was not more than an hour from Nashville to the lake house, but he hadn’t considered that she might have stopped to shop on the way, or taken the children to a movie or simply for a drive. Now it appeared to him that his every move that day had been an error. It was unlike him to have lost his temper with that doctor. Patience had always been his strength; he left it to his opponents to make mistakes in anger. Then too, that last call to Judge Oldfield was something he’d have to live down, and on top of all that he had wasted the day, and would need to come back in Saturday morning to recover the lost time.