Godchild (21 page)

Chapter 56

Pearl’s office was shaped like a square.

To the right of his desk was a single floor-to-ceiling window-wall that looked out over a small glade. I knew the glade must serve as a sort of peaceful walking area for patients during the warm months of the year. Now the glade was dead, the trees as barren and broken-looking as the patients themselves.

The pain in my kidney had mellowed.

Enough for me to stand up a little straighter.

A brown leather couch had been pushed up against a far Sheetrock wall decorated with custom-framed prints. One print depicted three white Adirondack chairs set on a peaceful-looking plot of overgrown grass surrounded by shrubs. Another showed wild horses in full gallop, racing around a spacious pasture. And another I recognized as a signed Jennes Cortez, with racehorses taking off from the starting gate of the Saratoga racetrack.

I sat down on the couch, still groggy, head throbbing, staring directly ahead at the numerous framed medical diplomas tacked to the wall behind Pearl’s leather swivel chair. Instead of sitting in the chair, Pearl set one leg up on the edge of the desk, crossed his arms.

Casual, unaffected.

Leon, now with a bloodstained handkerchief pressed up against his face, sat on one arm of the leather couch while Short Goatee sat on the other.

“Why do you insist on fighting us, Mr. Marconi?”

“I’m being kept here against my will.”

“Now, if I had a dime for every patient forced to stay here against their will…” He let it hang while rolling his eyes, raising his hands in the air.

“That’s not what I mean,” I said, looking first at Leon, then at Short Goatee.

“Are you suggesting you were somehow framed?”

“I’m suggesting that someone has manipulated a specific series of events to suit their own purposes,” I said. “And I know who the son of a bitch is.”

“That’s a normal schizophrenic reaction to an otherwise undesirable situation, such as being placed inside a psychiatric treatment center when you’d rather not be.”

“I’m not schizophrenic.”

“Schizophrenia is nothing to be ashamed of, Mr. Marconi,” he said, a phony smile plastered on his skull face. “Many schizophrenics lead normal, everyday lives with the help of medication. Now, on the other hand, would I give a schizophrenic permission to carry a firearm? That’s a different story entirely.”

He reached over onto his desk, picked up a piece of paper, and handed it to me. Written at the top of the paper was the number 813.12,
Family Restraining Order and Injunction.
A copy of Val’s original order filed with the county clerk. I crumpled the paper up in my hands, threw it to the floor.

“You know what I think, Pearl?” I said, right index finger aimed at his face. “Someone wants to take me out of circulation, and I believe you’re being paid to help them out.”

“Is that what you think? Then you should knew that about one in one hundred will suffer from schizophrenia at some point in their lives. And the numbers will skyrocket with the coming decades. So you have terrific company. Like yourself, there are plenty of people who suffer from disorders of thinking or delusions, such as the one you suffered not long ago in the Albany Rural Cemetery about seeing the very black Buick that smashed into your car some years back, killing your wife, Fran. Then there is the Rambo-style shooting up of a public watering hole, followed by the faking of your own murder, and finally chasing down an innocent man at an automotive-sales facility. And now we have accusations floating around over the whereabouts of Renata Barnes, the novelist—accusations that could very well point to you, Mr. Marconi.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Of course you don’t,” he said. “But then, that’s a part of it, isn’t it? Denial.”

A buzzer went off outside the office, then a muffled announcement over the house PA. A doctor by the name of Dubin being paged. Probably a crazy bastard like everybody else in this place. Doctors and orderlies included. In the meantime I pictured Renata where I left her, in the room at the Days Inn, the phone line unplugged. Now that I hadn’t come back after I left last evening, I knew it was entirely possible that she had taken off. And if she had taken off with her new manuscript, then my entire plan was shot to hell. Without her, without her story and her eventual testimony about Charlie’s death, I was as good as finished.

“Lots of people suffer from the effects of hallucinations,” Pearl went on, “or perceptual disorders, feelings of being controlled or simply believing that things of a universal nature, such as the weather, carry personal significance.” He paused for a second or two to take a breath. “Tell me, Mr. Marconi, do you get mad at the weather?”

I almost admitted that I did.

“So you see, Keeper—and I can call you Keeper, can’t I?—there’s really nothing to be ashamed of. Capital District Psychiatric Hospital is a wonderful place for getting well again.”

I sat there on the couch, feeling a slow burn.

“Are blow jobs a part of the patient’s treatment?” I asked, turning to the two gorillas.

Pearl’s face went white, while Goatee’s face turned a distinct shade of red.

“I have no idea what you are suggesting,” Pearl said. He slid off his desk, stood up straight, his lanky body as thin and grotesque as one of those dead trees outside his window. “And if you continue to make unfounded accusations, I’d be happy to have your accommodations switched to perhaps something slightly less comfortable.”

“Is that how you warned Mr. Pukas? Threatened to put him in isolation?”

“Mr. Pukas is a sick man, Mr. Marconi,” he said, now walking around his desk, plopping himself down in the leather swivel chair, his eyes peeled out the window onto a suddenly overcast sky.

“Pukas is a victim,” I said, “just like me.”

“You don’t know how right you are, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “In my estimation, your separate schizophrenias are the result of post-traumatic stress syndrome. You have both suffered and withstood terrible assaults on your body. An experience that, in turn, has resulted in serious psychological consequences that far outweigh the physical scarring. The only significant difference between you and Pukas is that he suffered abuse at the hands of his parents, while you were abused by rebel inmates in 1971 during the Attica riots.”

“I’m over that,” I said, putting a fake, ear-to-ear smile on my face. “See, I’m one happy-go-lucky son of a bitch now.”

“You got the son of a bitch part right, anyway,” said Leon.

For a time the four of us just sat there, once again silent, Pearl staring out the big window onto the barren trees. Until he turned back to me suddenly, his blue eyes staring into mine. “There are two types of trauma suffered by nearly all law-enforcement in this country,” Pearl went on, “from the lowliest prison guard to the highest police official.” He tapped his chin with the index finger on his right hand, then turned back to the window like an old friend.

“Get to the point, Pearl,” I said.

“Show some fucking respect,” Leon said, taking the rag away from his mouth, examining the bloodstains, then reapplying it.

“The first is a kind of episodic stress,” Pearl went on, “in which a traumatic incident, like a sudden fist to the teeth, occurs to a lawman or his partner. That kind of stress, Keeper, has little lasting effect, as opposed to chronic stress, which is brought about by the daily routine, by those nagging inner voices that continually ask you where you went wrong with your life.” Pearl tapped his two front teeth with the back of his pen. “Now, take your wife, Fran, for instance — ”

I shot up.

Leon and Short Goatee each grabbed a shoulder, pressed me back down onto the couch.

“You blame yourself for her death. And the fact that she was decapitated is particularly disturbing and gruesome. All that blood, all that mess. Tell me, Mr. Marconi, did you know that victims who suffer clean and instantaneous decapitations retain consciousness for nearly twenty seconds before the oxygen and blood run out of their skull? Witnesses at public executions in France reported cheeks that were still rosy with life and wide-open eyes, pupils moderately dilated, the mouth closed so firmly it could not be opened by manual force when the executioner tried to pry the upper and lower jaw apart. So imagine the horror your wife experienced when she realized her own head had been sliced off?”

Pearl pretended to shiver.

I wanted to kill him.

“For you, the memory of Fran’s death has become a chronic torture. Maybe you don’t show physical evidence of the torture, such as rectal bleeding, dyslexia, and any other of the dozen or so assorted maladies normally associated with getting the living daylights beat out of you. But you do show the neurological and schizophrenic symptoms associated with psychological torture.”

Stomach turning over, head buzzing.

“For instance, I bet you drink far too much. And let me guess: You greet all forms of commitment and love not with a normal dose of apprehension but with an almost violent distaste. In some cases, your reaction may be interpreted as almost psychotic. Does the death of those two women in Monterrey, Mexico, or perhaps the kidnapping and attempted murder of Renata Barnes ring a bell?”

I felt like the Linoleum was being pulled out from under me, the hole opening up onto some kind of bottomless cavern, black and so very cold. I had to wonder if the session was being filmed or recorded. I knew the cameras and microphones had to be hidden.

“Keeper,” Pearl said, “sources close to me have obtained a statement from the owner of a certain ranch in Monterrey where the murders took place—an owner, I might add, who himself was shot twice in the shoulder and left alone to die in the desert by you. Now, I’m not accusing you of having carried out the actual murders. I’m just saying it is possible for a man in your condition to perform such a heinous act and not even realize it. But, if you were to produce Ms. Barnes unharmed, that would be an entirely different story. You do know where she is, don’t you, Mr. Marconi? Can you provide me with an exact, detailed location?”

That was it, then. They still hadn’t located Renata. She had stayed put after all. That’s what they wanted from me. A location. If not, they were going to make me out as a killer.

“I’ve never laid eyes on Renata in my life,” I said.

“Now, now, Keeper,” Pearl said. “I’m certain that once the conditions are right, you’ll be willing to reach deep down into your soul of souls to try and find the strength to cooperate with us.”

I folded my hands on my lap. “And just what do I use for an incentive?”

Pearl lit up like a spotlight. “Pain, of course,” he said.

I lunged over his desk, grabbed him by the shirt collar. I got in two quick blows to the mouth before Leon and Short Goatee jumped me, pulled my hands around my back, dragged me off the desk and onto the floor, slapping a plastic shackling device around my wrists, cutting the skin when they yanked it tight.

From on my chest on the carpeted floor, I saw Pearl slide himself back into his chair.

His mouth was bloody.

“Okay, Mr. Marconi,” he spat, his voice thick and sick, “you’re going to see just what kind of wonderful work we can do at our little hospital.”

He nodded to his boys.

Leon left the room, quickly closed the door behind him.

When he came back in he was carrying a wooden straight-backed chair, which he quickly set in the middle of the floor.

He wasn’t alone.

The man who followed him into the office was someone I recognized right away. A man not much older than me, taller and bulkier, with the sleeves on his T-shirt cut off at the shoulders even in March, and faded Levi’s jeans and worn-in combat boots. He had a hoop earring in his left ear and a thin mustache that barely covered his upper lip and round John Lennon sunglasses that completely hid his eyes. He was smoking a cigarette. As for his head? It was completely bald. Clean shaven. A total egghead. Finally, I’d come face to face with the Bald Man.

Chapter 57

What can I say? That I collapsed in front of the Bald Man? That what should have been fiery rage turned into something completely different? Something passive? A man humbled over meeting his maker?

Leon pushed me down into the chair while Short Goatee applied straps to both my ankles and around my waist. As the Bald Man took his place in the far dark corner of the room, Pearl rolled down the shades and closed the blinds on his windows. He slipped on a pair of black latex gloves.

“Boys,” Pearl said, “please gag Mr. Marconi.”

Leon pulled that bloody rag out of his back pocket, stuffed it into my mouth. I wanted to gag when I felt the warm, wet blood. But I thought of all the things I had been taught at the academy about hostage situations. I remembered how calm I was supposed to be. How I should breathe long steady breaths to avoid the panic, to create an emotional barrier between me and my captors. And I tried like hell to breathe through my nose and I tried like hell to stay as calm as possible. But the effort was useless.

Pearl picked up his phone. “Wendy, I’ll be in therapy for the next hour,” he lied. “So, please, no calls.”

He hung up the phone and used the back of his right hand to wipe the thin film of blood from his mouth. He opened the side drawer to his desk with one of the keys on his key ring. He pulled out a thick, black zip-up rubber bag, set it on his desk. He smiled and ran his fingers over the bag, as if it were alive and purring. “I think it’s about time you began a little soul-searching, Keeper,” he said. “Tell us, where we can find Renata?”

Leon was standing to my left, in full view, arms crossed at his chest. His lip wasn’t bleeding anymore. But there was dried blood caked all around the now purple fat lip. Short Goatee stood to my right. I could see his erection pressed up against his white orderly pants. A giant bulge, as clear as day. He was rubbing the mound with the fingers of his right hand, his eyes wide and psychotic. As for the Bald Man, he stood stiff and silent, smoking one Marlboro after the other.

“Shall we get started?” Pearl said.

“Yeah,” Goatee said, his voice shaking with excitement. “Let’s get started, doc.”

Pearl unzipped the rubber bag, pulled out a small stainless-steel surgical instrument, the kind with two needle sharp hooks at each end that dentists use for scraping plaque off your teeth. “You know the routine, boys,” he said.

Leon reached over, gently untied the ties on my hospital gown, pulled my boxers down to my ankles.

Oh Christ, I wanted to shout. Oh for the love of Christ. But that bloody rag was stuffed in my mouth, the Bald Man standing in the corner…

“As I started saying, Keeper,” Pearl said. “Did you know that I’m a noted expert on both psychological and physical torture?” He made his way around the desk, holding the dentist’s pick in his right hand, a loaded syringe in his left. “I’ve also done extensive research into the resulting post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

My eyes tracked his every movement.

“For instance, I know that to avoid physical evidence, torture is often performed with needlelike devices in order to produce maximum pain with minimal evidence.” He was standing over me now. “Stretching, crushing, asphyxiations are also forms of torture that produce lots of pain with minimal physical stress. But, oh my, the post-traumatic stress is extremely significant. I’d bet the farm that you’ll recall just about anything I want you to recall, just to stop the pain.”

He dropped to his knees, eye level with my sex.

“Here’s how it all works. First we shoot you up with a little speed mixed with a new amazing little drug that stimulates the NMDA receptor in your brain. Your pain should be enhanced to the extent that even the slightest touch will send your neurotransmitters and their receptors screaming. Really, very neat state-of-the-art stuff.”

I felt the prick of the needle in my thigh and then the hot pressure of the medical concoction injected into my system. When it was empty, he pulled the needle out and threw the syringe onto his desk. “Now,” Pearl said a few seconds later, “does this hurt?”

When he tapped my testicles with the point of the weighted dentist’s instrument, I thought my middle would explode in fire and ripping pain. As I thrust my body up against the restraining devices, I thought my eyeballs would pop out, my ribs would snap.

I tried to scream.

But screaming was impossible.

“Oh my,” Pearl said, eyes wide and intense, “do we have a live one or what?”

Leon laughed.

The Bald Man smoked.

Short Goatee rubbed his midsection, let out a groan.

Then Pearl jammed the spike into my left testicle.