Flamethrower (5 page)

“They were psychiatrists,” Jody answered as if it were a natural question.

“Both?”

Jody nodded.

“Oh,” said Ruby. No wonder the woman chewed her fingernails. “So you’re planning on coming up with the money?”

“That’s why I’m here. I have seventy-two hours to get it, but I don’t have many resources. There was a substantial offer made some weeks ago for one of Tobias’s horses, and I’m here to see if Violet can sell the horse and collect the money in such a short time. Violet doesn’t know why I need the money so quickly, and I’d like to keep it that way.” Jody was staring at Ruby but she didn’t really seem to see her. Her blue eyes were bloodshot.

Ruby struggled for something to say. Then was saved by Violet coming through the office door.

“Oh!” Violet said, “Ruby!”

Violet looked drawn. This was hardly a shock. Jody’s husband’s
colt, Fearless Jones, was hands down the most exciting horse Violet and Henry had trained in years. Ruby knew it had to be a heartbreak. She wished she could tell Violet that Jody had an extraordinarily valid reason for doing something this rash.

Ruby stood up to hug Violet.

“You might not want to do that.” Violet pulled back. “Our shower is broken. I’m afraid I’m quite ripe.”

“You smell fine to me,” Ruby said, realizing this sounded peculiar. No one seemed to notice though.

“Violet, you’re very kind to help me,” Jody said, rising from the couch and smoothing her dress down over her thighs.

Violet nodded. She looked as if she was about to cry.

“Could I have a word with you, Ruby?” Jody asked.

“Oh,” Ruby said, surprised, “sure.” She looked at Violet.

“I have an awful lot to do, Ruby,” Violet said weakly. “We’d better have coffee another time.”

“Okay.” Ruby felt overwhelmingly useless for not being able to console her friend.

On her way out, Ruby touched Violet’s shoulder. Violet tried to smile.

Ruby followed Jody Ray over to the dirt road behind the barn, where Jody stopped walking and turned to Ruby.

“I’m sorry for this,” she said, looking past Ruby.

“For what?”

“For what you’ve seen in the last twenty-four hours. For what it must be putting you through.”

“It’s not putting me through anything. Though it is frustrating. And horrible for poor Violet.”

“Yes,” Jody said, “poor Violet.”

Suddenly, Jody’s face folded in on itself, and she started crying. “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes.

Her mascara had streaked a little.

“You have streaks,” Ruby said, touching under her own eyes.

“Thank you.” Jody dabbed at her eyes, gulped air in, then started crying again.

To her own amazement, Ruby draped an arm around her psychiatrist’s shoulders. She felt Jody stiffen. She considered removing her arm but didn’t. Instead, she started talking. Reiterating that Jody should call the cops. Jody didn’t move or say anything. After a while, Ruby removed her arm. She felt like an idiot.

“I know what I’m about to ask is probably wrong,” Jody said, “but I desperately need help.” She pushed a long strand of hair off her forehead.

“Okay,” Ruby said tentatively.

“Would you consider coming with me to Tobias’s apartment to look through his things? I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.”

Ruby frowned, confused.

Jody clarified: “We’ve been separated for a while. He has a studio apartment in the East Fifties.”

“Oh,” Ruby said. It was getting really weird. But of course Ruby liked that. “I guess so,” she said.

Jody was still staring right through Ruby and didn’t seem to have heard her.

“So do you want to go now?” Ruby asked.

“Oh,” Jody snapped out of it, “yes.”

“How long will it take?”

“Take? I don’t know.”

“An hour? Two?”

“I don’t know.” Jody seemed frustrated. “I guess this is a bad idea.”

“No,” Ruby protested, “I was just wondering how long it would take. I have to go tend to my horse.”

“Oh, the horse, right,” Jody said. “Yes. Well, two hours tops.”

Ruby had never heard Jody say anything as colloquial as
tops
.

“All right, that’s fine,” Ruby said.

Jody was staring off into the distance. At what, Ruby didn’t know.

“Should we go then?” Ruby prodded her.

“Oh,” Jody’s eyes focused, “yes, let’s.”

She turned and started walking very quickly toward the parking lot. Ruby, who was a few inches shorter, had to trot to keep up with her.

Jody’s car was an exquisite cream-colored Mercedes sedan from the 1980s. Ruby got in the passenger side, settling into the red leather seat. Jody slammed her door shut and kicked off her shoes.

“I like to feel the pedals,” she said.

This struck Ruby as an overly intimate revelation—that Jody’s liking to feel the car’s acceleration shooting up through her feet somehow meant she was sexually voracious, which
wasn’t something Ruby really wanted to think about. Speculating about other people’s sex lives was sometimes entertaining, but when that person was your psychiatrist, the whole thing took on unpleasant overtones.

“Oh” was all Ruby said.

Jody focused on driving, and Ruby was left to her own thoughts. She felt particularly alive at the prospect of helping her psychiatrist look through her husband’s things. She had actively decided to do something unusual and that was making her tingle. Ruby had always been slightly purposeless. She liked life, but she’d let it shove her wherever it wanted and she never pushed back.

“Are you okay?” Jody asked after a ten-minute silence.

Ruby was startled.

“I’m feeling mediocre,” she heard herself say. Yet another thing popping out uncensored. She glanced over at Jody. The Psychiatrist was frowning.

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know. How I do so many things but don’t excel at any of them.” The woman was her shrink, after all.

“What brought this on?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I was under the impression you excelled at many things.”

“At what?” Ruby asked, “I don’t have a stressful but stimulating job the way most New Yorkers do. I don’t train racehorses or even do something noble like teach yoga to mental defectives the way my best friend does.”

“You’re not supposed to say ‘mental defectives.’”

“Half the crazy people I know would refer to themselves that way.”

“What about the other half?”

“I wouldn’t use the phrase in front of them.”

Jody arched an eyebrow.

“My husband is a mental defective.”

“What?”

“He was my patient. Initially a suicide attempt.”

“The husband whose leg was …?”

“Only one I’ve got.”

Ruby stared at The Psychiatrist.

“You’re going to need years of therapy just to get over having been a patient of mine,” Jody said then. She let out a small laugh. Ruby didn’t laugh back.

“Does your husband’s condition have anything to do with his having been kidnapped?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“You have to call the authorities, Jody.”

“Don’t start with that again. I have a plan.”

“This is crazy.”

“I’ll grant you that. And I’d like to reiterate that you don’t have to do this, Ruby. I never intended to involve you in anyway.”

“It’s fine.”

“You’re a kind and lovely woman.”

“That and two bucks will get me on the subway. But thank you. I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Don’t be flip.”

“I’m not.”

They fell silent.

The traffic wasn’t too bad, and Jody had to circle Tobias’s block only three times to find a parking spot.

Tobias’s street was a pleasant, mostly residential block. There were nice brownstones. A dry cleaner. People walking designer dogs.

The building was a three-story brownstone that had been sectioned off into small apartments. The husband’s apartment was on the second floor in the back. As Jody fumbled with the keys, Ruby stared at her psychiatrist’s chewed-down fingernails. She understood their provenance now: psychiatrist parents and a mental defective husband.

After getting the door open, Jody hesitated. Ruby stood behind her, waiting. She was on the verge of saying something when Jody walked forward.

The apartment was a large, L-shaped studio with two floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over a dense green garden. A massive sleigh bed was pushed against one wall, a desk and computer against another. A TV roosted on a stand near the bed. There was no sofa.

Jody walked over to the desk, sat down, and touched the computer keyboard. The screen woke up, and Ruby saw that the desktop pattern was a win photo of a racehorse.

Ruby came closer and stood looking over The Psychiatrist’s shoulder as Jody opened the husband’s e-mail program. Ruby and Ed shared a computer, but Ruby didn’t think she’d ever be able to breach his privacy and read his e-mail. Even if Ed’s leg had been cut off.

Jody suddenly got up and walked away from the computer. “I can’t go through his mail like this. Would you do it?” Her face was pinched.

“What should I look for?”

“I don’t know,” Jody shrugged, “anything suspicious.”

Ruby had no idea what might be construed as suspicious, but she sat down anyway and started reading through the man’s saved mail. There was some correspondence between Tobias and a woman named Bess who he seemed to play Scrabble with frequently. There were several notes from Violet detailing billing for the three horses she trained for Tobias. Nothing of consequence.

Ruby started looking through the outgoing mail and found something more interesting. Right there for anyone to see. Or at least anyone who happened to go through his e-mail. Ruby felt her stomach tighten.

T
he note was addressed to [email protected], but there wasn’t any salutation in the e-mail itself: “She will be in her office at that time. You can call her there. It will all go smoothly.”

It could have been a note about almost anything, but Ruby knew this was it. She glanced over at her psychiatrist, who was on her hands and knees, looking through a shoebox in the closet.
It will all go smoothly
. Had Tobias had himself kidnapped? And who would be idiot enough to arrange that kind of thing and then leave evidence of it on his computer? It didn’t make any sense.

“Jody?”

Jody was startled and dropped something. A pair of scissors. Why was she holding a pair of scissors? Ruby had a brief image of her psychiatrist stabbing her with the scissors. Then she thought tangentially of Edward Scissorhands and, for the thousandth time, wished he actually existed. She got like that sometimes. Insanely whimsical. A girl had to get through the day.

The Psychiatrist arched an eyebrow at Ruby.

“You should see this,” Ruby said.

Jody got up, smoothed her dress over her legs, and came to look over Ruby’s shoulder. She was still holding the scissors.

“Oh,” Jody said after reading the note a few times.

“Did he have himself kidnapped?” Ruby asked.

“Evidently, yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes, very possibly,” Jody said in a weak voice.

“And had a leg cut off?”

“It seems rash. But Tobias can be rash. He’s been known to do very sick things.” Jody was completely cavalier, as though loss of limb and kidnapping were commonplace occurrences in her life.

“Why on earth would your husband have himself kidnapped?”

“Because he knew I’d pay. Without asking questions or involving the authorities. And then he would keep the money. He has none.”

“I thought he was well off.” Ruby remembered Violet telling her about Tobias’s small fortune.

“He lost most of it. He gambles, of course. And buys bad stocks. What little is left I control. I had him declared unfit.”

“Oh.” Ruby thought about the Fireball in her front pocket. She knew this wasn’t the time or the place for it. Which made her want it all the more. “Couldn’t he just ask you for some money?”

“He could. But wouldn’t. A fierce and bordering-on-perverse pride,” Jody said, staring out the tall window. “What I don’t understand is his failure to think this through in the slightest,” she added.

Ruby waited. She stared at the greenery outside the windows. She imagined jumping out the window, stripping off all her clothing, running naked through the garden. She thought of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and how she had run naked there on a dare as a teenager. It had felt delicious and raw. Why she was having a sudden urge to run through a garden naked right now, she didn’t know.

“The only valuable thing Tobias has left is the colt. Fearless Jones.” Jody continued, “And he knows I’ll have to sell the horse to get the money.” Jody walked over to the bed and sat down very slowly, as though she suddenly weighed hundreds of pounds. She smoothed her dress across her lap. Ruby wondered if the dress-smoothing was a nervous tic. The way Lance Armstrong pulled at the seams of his bike shorts during particularly taxing moments in a race.

“But this is all just a prank,” Ruby said. “You’re not actually going to sell the horse, are you? You’ll find Tobias and talk him down.”

“Two can play this game,” said Jody. “And anyway, we still don’t know,” she added. “This may not be what it seems.” She motioned at the computer screen. “There is a chance he has genuinely been kidnapped.”

Sun was pouring in through the tall windows, shining right into Ruby’s eyes. She got up from the chair, realized there wasn’t anywhere else to sit, then unceremoniously lay down on the floor and closed her eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting for it all to go away,” Ruby said.

“Which brings me to my point.”

“What point?” Ruby asked, eyes still closed.

“I’ve fucked up again.”

“How so?”

“I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

“Don’t tell me, I should go now?” Ruby asked, keeping her eyes glued shut.

“Right.”

“You’re not serious?”

“Very.”

Ruby had finally had enough. She got up off the floor, walked to the door, and didn’t look back. Ruby half expected Jody to call out after her, but she didn’t.