Loving Time (32 page)

All Clara had needed today was the Chinese policewoman, who had bungled the Cowles case, suddenly back in her life to cast suspicions on
Harold’s
death. It was infuriating, outrageous. Clara could feel the tic jumping in her cheek as she tried to process the information April Woo had given her, make sense of what she’d heard and not have a seizure herself. For a moment she was possessed by the fear that, like Hal’s, her heart might run amok, too.

Ray was a suicide. Did that make sense after what he told her that night? No, it didn’t make sense. Now it seemed Hal was killed by a combination of Elavil and alcohol. But everyone knew Harold didn’t like to take medicines. Clara made a steeple of her index fingers and tapped them together. Ray wasn’t depressed and Hal wasn’t depressed. Ray never talked about suicide in any real way, and Hal was much less interested in his mood than his mental processes. Hal would never have taken anything to jeopardize the way he thought. The chemical uplift was for other people, Hal’s wife, maybe. His daughter. Not for him. He was a purist.

Clara stared through the triangle of her fingers, seeing Hal so clearly even after all these years, even after his ugly death. She saw him sitting in his underwear in the old easy chair in the bedroom of her apartment, the faded quilt thrown over the chair, always the jubilant peacock after sex, a glass of
Johnnie Walker in his hand. For the sex he had no apology, but the scotch he had to analyze and explain.

“Every man has his weakness and his poison. Scotch is my poison,” he’d say, holding the amber liquid to the light.

He didn’t admit to his other weakness, which was women—most particularly her. Wouldn’t acknowledge the appetite because he never had any intention of paying the bill. A little knot of bitterness still remained deep inside Clara because of that. It was like a painful lump of otherwise benign tissue that became sensitized only with strenuous exercise. Occasionally the feeling had resurfaced with Hal’s pedantry in meetings when he pretended compliance and helpfulness to some innovation of hers, then stopped the progress cold with a few modest questions that generated endless debate. Now even his death had to raise questions.

Hal was a drinker, plain and simple, an old-fashioned lush. The steeple fell apart as Clara’s fingers stopped tapping. One hand gripped the arm of the chair. The other rose to her mouth and began stroking her lips and her chin.

Someone you love is going to die
. If Hal had written that note, he most certainly hadn’t meant himself. For one thing, she didn’t love him anymore, hadn’t loved him for years and years, and he had known that. Not only that, for him the cold fact of the death of her love was old news. Hal had considered her loving someone else a challenge, a hurdle he could get over. He’d been arrogant. He would manipulate her, torment her any way he could. She could see him getting a little crazy and finding ways to scare her. But she didn’t see him hurting
himself
. And no one else would, either. Hal’s death would simply not be written off as a suicide.

Her agitated fingers moved back and forth across her lips, rubbing the soft skin as if it were a rough surface that needed abrasion. She hadn’t loved Ray Cowles, either. And now he was dead, too. What did the story tell? Suicide and suicide? Ray because he couldn’t face coming out of the closet and Hal not because she wouldn’t love him but because he couldn’t accept
her accusation of harassment, the threat of being thrown off the Centre staff.

What about accident and accident? That sounded better in both cases. Neither had left a note. Maybe neither had meant to die. It didn’t sound good enough, though. Hal had been very busy when he died. He had wanted to clear himself, keep his job. He wouldn’t have taken Amitriptyline. If he hadn’t taken the medication on purpose, could he have taken it by accident? Clara thought of Bobbie Boudreau leaning against a tree, smoking, as she returned to the Centre after Hal’s death. Boudreau knew the building well. Boudreau was a mischief-maker, a poisoner. Boudreau had killed that way before. He’d been fired under extremely unpleasant circumstances. The pieces fit. Boudreau had killed Hal because Hal had found out Boudreau was the one who was harassing her.

Clara decided it was time to take the used condom out of her freezer, where she’d put it last Friday before leaving for her meeting in Washington. She was going to nail Boudreau with his own nasty little gift. Clara leaned back and checked her watch. She had ten minutes to relax before Special Agent Daveys arrived.

B
obbie’s day off was on Wednesday. On the Wednesday after the death of Harold Dickey, he walked back and forth through the underground corridors in the Medical Center complex—from building to building and back—looking as if he had important business to do. As always, he seemed to belong there. As far as he was concerned, he did belong there.

He had become attached like a plant in a garden and didn’t intend ever to leave. Before last year the wards in the Psychiatric Centre had been the garden where Bobbie thought he’d stay forever. Some years he’d worked the day shift, some years the night shift. Always he’d been available to fill in whenever needed, to help the damaged people in the wards. He didn’t like regular people. He lived for his work.

Bobbie saw his patients as sacred victims of the vicious world that systematically destroyed them—made them sick, incarcerated them, made them sicker, then spewed the lost souls out onto the street again where they couldn’t possibly survive. He believed it was the same kind of destruction done to him in the Army. He took comfort in the crazy. He felt God sent him there to the crazies, to be the one in control of them. He told the patients what to do. He gave them what was good for them. They got it when he said so and not before. If they had to go into restraints, he was the one to put them there. He was the one to release them. Every cigarette, every privilege they had and couldn’t have was up to him. It was his job to protect the crazies from their doctors and from the world. Bobbie gave them their medicine with love. He mourned their loss when they were tossed back into the unspeakable life outside.

After that patient jumped off the terrace last year and Bobbie was blamed for it, he’d felt even worse than when he had been transferred out of his first MASH unit and over the
next years was systematically demoted from one nursing job after another until he was no longer doing any procedures at all, was forbidden to touch the patients—even to bathe them or change their dressings. Demoted and demoted again
for no reason but pure mean spite
until all he could do was carry the bedpans and mop up the blood. Bag the corpses of all those medical fuck-ups. He’d bagged a lot of corpses before he left the Army.

But now he felt good again. One vicious bastard who didn’t deserve to be a doctor, much less breathe the air of the living, was gone from this earth. Bobbie felt real good seeing Dickey as a dead man, rushed down the street on a gurney with all those asshole paramedics trying so hard to keep a dead man alive. God surely had a hand in putting Bobbie out on the street at that exact moment to serve as witness to the punishment of true evil

God was surely good to give him a death he could see again and again. He played it over and over in his mind, particularly the part with the bitch Treadwell hurrying back to the Centre alone, probably going back for the bottle. Bobbie had been interested to see that Clara Treadwell’s face had not been white with shock. Nor had it been gray with grief. Treadwell had completely forgotten the man who’d died just minutes before. She was preoccupied, busy with what she had to do next. Bobbie laughed at the panic the bitch Treadwell must have felt when she saw that Dickey’s scotch bottle was missing from his office. Now the bitch would know she wasn’t safe. Bobbie had been there: He knew what she had done.

Monday Bobbie felt good. Tuesday he felt good. Wednesday he felt good enough to travel up to the third floor and pay a visit to the old bag. He wanted to see Gunn’s fat face get all red, wanted to hear her protest and complain, get all scared about what would happen, what would happen.
And what the hell happened since the good doctor was just fine when I saw him and gave him the files on Friday?
He wanted to hear her whine about all the trouble they’d get in. And ask again and again
what had he done, what had he done, what had he done? Blah, blah, blah. Gunn didn’t know he was in control of this. For once he knew what was going on and Gunn didn’t. It made him feel good to think about it.

Bobbie arrived at Gunn’s office soon after five. She was sitting at her desk, still as a stone. He was disappointed that her face didn’t get red with embarrassment and fear when she saw him. She sat there staring straight ahead of her as if she’d been turned to stone. She looked beaten, looked old. He wondered how he’d gotten involved with such an old woman.

“Hi.” He pulled on the brim of his baseball cap.

She shook her head.

Malika, her dim-witted associate, walked by and didn’t even say hi. “I’m goin’ now” was all she said. Then she left.

“What’s up?” Bobbie asked Gunn. “You look funny.”

“Something’s wrong. Some guy from the FBI was here.”

“Huh?” Bobbie was startled. “What’d he want?”

“Take a guess, Bobbie.”

“Don’t fuck with me, woman. What’d the asshole want?”

“He wanted to know why friends of Dr. Treadwell’s were suddenly dying here.”

Bobbie almost laughed. A bubble of air rose from his gut. He belched loudly, tasted the meatball from his meatball-hero lunch. “What friends?” he asked innocently. “I didn’t know the bitch had any friends.”

“Oh, come on, Bobbie. You know what I mean. Two people died. Not only poor Dr. Dickey—but a
patient
, too. Another patient died.”

“
Another
one since last week?”

“No, the same one from last week. Isn’t one enough?”

Bobbie shrugged. “Is the FBI here to nail the bitch for her crimes?”

Gunn shook her head. “Bobbie, you worry me to death. You really do.”

“Why should I worry you to death?” He almost laughed in her fat face.

“Because you don’t always think about the consequences of doing things … of people
dying
.”

“The shit I don’t.” Now he was getting angry. He didn’t have anything to do with anybody’s dying. Gunn had no idea what was going on. She was pissing in the wind again, going off on some crazy suspicions that were as far from the truth as falseness could get.

“I don’t even work here,” he protested. “I don’t even know the guy. You told me it was a private patient I don’t even know the guy’s name. How could I have anything to do with it?”

“Well, you know Dr. Dickey’s name, Bobbie,” she said haughtily. “And the police were here, too. The police
and
the FBI. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“Right, the fucking FBI. Let me tell you something—when the fucking FBI investigate things, they don’t tell you they’re fucking FBI. So you’re imagining things. You’re in cuckoo-land. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She nodded. “Oh, yes, they do. I told this guy to go away if he didn’t have proper authority to ask me questions, so he showed me this FBI
thing
.” So there.

“So what do you want me to do about it? I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Dickey had a heart attack and croaked. I don’t know about the other guy. I never even heard of him.”

Now she got agitated. She started crying. “Poor Dr. Dickey. And now they won’t release my files. I’m just so upset, Bobbie.”

“Don’t worry. I didn’t have nothing to do with it. I didn’t even know the guy.”

Gunn blew her nose. “That’s what you
say
. But you’re not supposed to be here. What are you doing here? You knew the police were here, didn’t you?”

She was crazy. He made a noise with his mouth. Who said he couldn’t be there? No one said he couldn’t be there. Only
she
said he couldn’t be there. It pissed him off. He had to be
smart about this, couldn’t fly off the handle at her. He shook his head.

“No, I didn’t know nothing. I just stopped by to see you. Don’t try to make something of it.”

“Let’s go, Bobbie.” Gunn’s face was mad. “After everything I’ve done for you,” she muttered. “I don’t know why I put up with this. I don’t want you ever coming over here again, you hear me?”

“What do you want me to do, leave town?”

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea. Then you’d be safe.” She waved her short, fat arms at him, shooing him away. “You go first. I don’t want us seen together.”

She was nuts. Bobbie made another noise and walked out.

“
H
ow’s it going with us, Jason?”

Emma leaned against the back of her green and black bistro wicker chair and tapped the end of her fork on the white tablecloth soundlessly. In the soft light, her smile was wistful. Wistful and sad always made Jason feel guilty. Guilty made him defensive. He didn’t want to be defensive.

They were dining in a restaurant Emma thought was engaging enough to unite them against their private, ever-absorbing preoccupations. Emma was still waiting for word about her play and Jason had been sucked into the black hole of hospital politics and was never off the phone. The restaurant Emma had chosen to divert him to her own interests, however, was opposite the museum, around the corner from the Twentieth Precinct. From their table at the window, Jason was able to watch the street and wonder if April Woo was on duty. And if so, what she was doing.

“How’s it going with us, Jason?” Emma repeated.

At the question, he hastily focused on Emma. In the old days Emma would never have asked such a thing. How was it going with them? What kind of question was that? How did he feel? Did he love her, miss her? Before six months ago she would never have demanded that he talk to her about these things. She used to know better than to try to swim in such tricky currents. But that was then. Now she felt she had the upper hand. The tables had turned. Suddenly she was a person of substance, an earner. She wore expensive clothes, had her hair colored, and dropped names of Hollywood people he was pretty sure he didn’t ever want to know. So now Emma figured she had the right to ask any question she wanted.