Death in a Funhouse Mirror (10 page)

Suzanne was in the ladies' room, putting in her eyes. She snapped the case shut, put on a dab of pink lip gloss, and gave me a dazzling smile. "How do I look?"

"Like a million dollars," I said. "Who is it today? Brockelman or Braddock?"

"It's Paul." She smiled foolishly, as though Paul were the most magical word in the language, then caught sight of herself in the mirror, and tried to put on a more solemn face. "Just look at me," she wailed, "grinning like a hyena."

"Better that than the alternative. But this is Monday. You know, haul that barge, tote that bale, all that sort of stuff."

She nodded, the unstoppable smile sneaking back onto her face. "We're picking up the rings, he's taking me to lunch, and then we're meeting with the minister."

"Dangerously traditional, if you ask me. And your jitters?"

"Vanished in the light of the day."

"Bravo. See you later. I'm gonna go beat some bushes."

"We're not headed for the poor house, you know."

"I know. It's just how I am. Not happy unless I'm in the middle of a frenzy."

She snapped her purse shut and headed for the door. "Didn't know people could get into the middle of frenzies. Are they anything like funks?"

"Quite different. One gets into frenzies in order to avoid funks."

"I'll store that little gem away for a rainy day," she said, and beat a hasty retreat before I could get her into further conversation. I like conversational ping-pong better than she does, but usually she'll play, unless she's too busy. She wouldn't have been any fun today anyway. Her quickness was tamped down by too much happiness.

Sarah stuck out a hand as I went by. Two more pink slips. My ear ached just looking at them. "And your mother wants to know if she should wear that cobalt blue jacquard to the wedding," she said. "I told her I thought the peach sounded better, but she still wants you to call. I have to go out to get Joanne a new bathing suit. Want me to bring you back a sandwich?"

Because I'm always busy, and my mother refuses to admit that I work for a living, Sarah spends a lot of time talking to her on the phone, answering the questions I'm not there to answer. I'm very happy with the arrangement. I don't know how Mom and Sarah feel about it. "Thanks, but I'm not hungry." I went into the office and shut my door. I called the two people who wanted to set up appointments, made one for Tuesday of next week, and one for this Wednesday. I called my mother and concurred with Sarah on the peach. My mother is a large, handsome, rather fierce woman. The peach would soften that a bit.

Then, my first slate of tasks complete, I looked at the new messages. One from someone named Dom Florio. I didn't recognize the name. The other a second message from Cliff. I couldn't imagine what he wanted, unless it was to tell me when the funeral was, and for that he could have left a message, but I obediently dialed the number. He turned out to be guarded by a bevy of dragons determined to protect Dr. Paris from any intrusions. Patiently I worked my way through the dragonesque hierarchy. It was tiresome but not surprising. In any bureaucracy where a person has even a shred of importance, dragons go with the territory, and Cliff was very important. Right now he was probably also very much in demand by reporters, voyeurs, and other people who didn't have his best interests at heart. Finally, after explaining who I was and that I was returning Dr. Paris's call to the fourth person, a sullen sounding male, I got a slightly more promising, "I'll check for you," and seconds later, Cliff's familiar voice came on the line.

"Thea? I'm so glad you called back. I hope you didn't have too much trouble. We're really being hounded by the press. They're making it very difficult for patients and staff. You'd think they'd have more decency."

I'd done a brief stint as a reporter, back when I was just out of college. The first thing I'd learned, and one reason I'd given it up, was that since all the other reporters were so craven and opportunistic, you couldn't respect people's privacy, or their grief, or their feelings, or you wouldn't get stories. I hadn't covered much crime, but the bit I did, and what I saw other people do, turned my stomach. If reporters have a motto, it has to be "the end justifies the means." It's a philosophy I just don't buy. Graphic photos of tears and anguish may add a bit of drama to the evening news, but that doesn't justify bullying your way into someone's house when they're disabled by grief, asking them upsetting questions, and then recording their responses. So I could imagine what it was like at Bartlett Hill.

"I'm sorry, Cliff. It must be terrible. I know how the press can be. They haven't any decency."

"That's true, isn't it?" he said. He sounded surprised, as though he'd assumed they were just forgetting their manners and would soon come to their senses. "Well, I didn't call you to cry on your shoulder, though I must say you did a pretty good job of taking care of us on Saturday. I called because... I hope this won't seem too odd, coming at a time like this... but I was sitting this morning in one of our Monday breakfast meetings where we were agonizing, as usual, about the bottom line and I had an idea. Hospitals these days are getting as competitive as car dealers, and believe me, it does take some of the satisfaction out of being in what was once termed a 'helping profession.' Excuse me."

He cleared his throat and came back on the line. "Sorry. On top of everything else, I'm getting a cold. Despite the chicken soup. It was delicious, by the way. I'm afraid I'm rambling a bit here. As I was saying, I was sitting in the meeting, listening to our financial brothers telling us that we have to find ways to attract more patients, to make our outpatient services more attractive— can you imagine it, Thea, wanting more people to need psychiatric services? It hardly sounds compatible with the oaths we took. And I thought about what you were saying on Saturday about the work you do. I wondered why it should be limited to independent schools, and whether we could do something like that here. Maybe it would help to get a clearer understanding of our image and figure out how to market ourselves."

There was a clattering in the background, like he was playing with the pens and pencils on his desk, or one of those little magnetic sculpture things. I didn't know whether psychiatrists went in for desk toys.

"Well, what do you think?" he said. "Can we get together and talk about it? It's just an idea, but I'd like you to talk it over with your partner and then the two of us could sit down and discuss it. What about Wednesday?"

I was completely bowled over. By his suggestion. By how much he remembered of my babbling on Saturday. By all the questions his suggestion raised—could we do it, did we know enough, were our skills so readily transferable?

And by how functional he was just two days after Helene's death. It was sort of scary, even from a man whose whole professional life involved control. It was unreasonable to compare him to myself, but that was what I was doing. After David was killed, I tried to go to work, but everything I saw was David. Everything I did reminded me of him. I finally gave up and went home and stayed in bed. But Cliff was at work and apparently functioning.

"I can't do Wednesday morning, but how about Wednesday afternoon? Any time after two."

"Three-thirty?"

"That would be fine." I wrote it on my calendar. "How do I find you?" He gave me directions, which I wrote in the memo section on the corner of the page.

I thought we were at the end of our conversation, but he coughed and cleared his throat again, and then said, "Have you talked to Eve?"

He sounded like he felt guilty asking the question, though there was nothing odd about it. Maybe he felt uncomfortable telling people about the funeral. It was a difficult thing to do. "Yes. Yesterday. She asked me to pick her up and drive her tomorrow."

"That's good," he said. "How did she seem?"

"Weary but calm. Not like Saturday."

"That's a relief. I'll see you on Wednesday, then." He hung up before I could respond.

Odd that he hadn't realized he'd also see me tomorrow, but maybe he didn't think it was appropriate to speak of seeing someone at a funeral. I could understand that. I looked at the other message, trying to remember who Florio was. I hate making cold calls. It always helps to know the identity of the person. "Florio," I muttered. "Dom Florio." Sure didn't sound like a headmaster, though it might be a trustee. I tried again. "Florio. Mr. Florio." It finally clicked when Mr. Florio didn't sound right. Florio was a cop. A nice cop, but still a cop. I stuck the message under the corner of my blotter. He could try and catch up with me and I'd talk with him if he did, but I wasn't going to call him. He'd want to talk about things I didn't want to talk about. Besides, I had a living to make.

I dictated a few letters and spent some time going over a draft questionnaire Valeria, our newest employee, had prepared for a telephone survey we were planning. Most of the basic material was there but it was awfully primitive considering how many of these we'd done. For phone work, the questions need to be simple and clear. Hers would have baffled even our very competent phone team. Her resume and references had been impressive, and she'd been great in the interview, but she was insecure and an awkward writer. The things she produced were useless. It made me wonder why her other employers had found her work so good.

Something else we couldn't tell from the interview–she was lazy. In after nine, always out by five, never putting in the effort necessary to put a professional finish on her work. She didn't like spelling or proofreading, believing they were someone else's job. This was the third thing she'd done for me that was unsatisfactory. Suzanne was having the same problem. It was time for a constructive talk, my euphemism for shape up or ship out. I finished reading it, dug a sample out of the files, and asked her to come into the office.

She sat down across from me and immediately shook her head so her face was hidden behind her hair. "You hated it, didn't you?"

"Why should I hate it?" I asked, tossing the ball right back.

"It wasn't really finished. It needed simplifying. But you wanted it right away, so I didn't bother with the rewrite. I see questionnaire writing as rather difficult, really. A technique that's perfected over time. It might have been easier if I'd had a sample to work from."

"The office is full of samples."

"But no one gave me one." There was a faint whine in her voice.

"Did you ask?"

"Oh," she said, tossing her hair back, "I might have tried to say something to Suzanne, but she's got her head in the clouds, thinking about her wedding, so she's useless. And you're so busy I couldn't bother you, so I just struggled along."

"But you think you could have done better work with a sample?"

"Of course. No sense in reinventing the wheel, is there?"

"But you did reinvent the wheel."

"Only because I didn't have any choice. No one would help me."

"Did you ask Bobby?"

She glared at me. "Of course not. I couldn't very well ask him, could I?" She was wearing a cheap, shopgirl's idea of business dress. An ugly mustard rayon oversized jacket and miniskirt, and a lime green tee shirt. The colors went well with her hennaed hair, but the top was too tight and the skirt was too short, and the overall effect was rumpled sleaze. What she meant was that she couldn't ask our other professional employee, Bobby Neville, for help because he was her rival. The idea that we needed to cooperate to achieve a common goal, rather than compete, hadn't occurred to her. I suggested as much.

She stared at me with that "you just don't get it, do you?" look she used too often. A leftover adolescent sneer she should have shed at graduation. "But Bobby's gay," she said.

I almost asked her what that had to do with the price of onions in Spain, an old expression of my mother's, but instead I said, "Maybe I'm being dense, but I don't see what his sexual preference has to do with asking him to help you find materials that would let you create a better product. Can you enlighten me?" The musky scent of her perfume was overpowering in the closed room.

She raised her chin truculently. "In these tight economic times, a person has to look out for herself."

I didn't press the point. So far this apparently charming girl with the glowing resume had told me she was self-centered and homophobic. My next question was going to test her common sense. "Did you look through the files for a sample?"

"Sort of. I couldn't find one."

"Did you ask Sarah to help you?"

"Sarah? But she's just a secretary." Valeria's expression said that this time I'd insulted her dignity.

"Just a secretary?" I was losing my temper. Instead of apologizing for a poor job, she was blaming everyone around her, and seemed to think it was okay not to even make minimal efforts to produce a better product because no one helped her. Besides, Sarah and our other secretary, Magda, are the lifeblood of our organization. Without them, we wouldn't just be paper pushers, we wouldn't even have paper to push. Suzanne and I aren't very tolerant of people who look down on secretaries, who act as though they're just slightly above the earthworm in terms of intelligence and ability. "You're telling me that the woman you rely on to correct your grammar, spelling, and punctuation wouldn't be able to find a sample of the work she files every day in the files she maintains?"

To my astonishment, instead of answering, Valeria got up. "I think we should continue this conversation when you've calmed down, Thea."

That did it. Any vestige of desire to try and shape this girl into a useful employee evaporated. "I don't think we need to prolong it, either, Valeria. I'd meant to have a serious discussion of your project, to give you some guidance, and let you have another chance. But I would just be wasting all of our time. We're a small organization, and to be effective, we need to cooperate. You haven't been a team player, and I don't think you want to be. Your work hasn't been satisfactory, and you aren't willing to take the steps necessary to make it satisfactory. You need to find yourself a more competitive arena. We will pay you for two weeks, but I'd like you to leave now. It shouldn't take you more than fifteen minutes to clear out your desk."