Loving Time (50 page)

“Get back!” Daveys screamed at the throng behind him. “Get out of here!”

“You get out of here!” Bobbie shouted back. “Don’t even think about coming in here.”

“Freeze, Bob. I’ve got a gun,” Daveys said. But he didn’t look too confident about it, hadn’t seen too many psycho wards.

“I don’t give a shit about the gun. Shoot the place up. Go ahead, you might get a gold star.” Bobbie laughed at the thought.

“That’s it, it’s over, Bob. Put the chair down.” Davey gaped
at the spectacle. “Let’s calm it down in here,” he said reasonably.

“Fuck you.”

Ellen saw her chance and started wrestling Bobbie for the chair. Seamus pulled himself to his knees and grabbed Bobbie’s ankles. Bobbie wrenched the chair out of the nurse’s grasp and slammed it down on Seamus’s head. He collapsed and didn’t move again.

Daveys moved the gun from side to side, trying to get a clear sight. “Stop it! I said,
stop it now
. This has gone far enough.” Daveys lost his reasonable tone. “I mean it. I’ll shoot.”

“Oh, sure you will.” Bobbie grabbed Alberto, the closest patient, who still stood close to his nurse, weeping and holding onto his penis for dear life. Effortlessly, Bobbie picked up the half-naked old man and held him like a shield. He was laughing when he said, “Go ahead, asshole, shoot.”

At 11:56, Mike and April charged down the hall, past a dozen frantic aides and nurses, who had arrived from other floors to reestablish order on Six North. They raced into the opening at the end of the hall just in time to see Daveys’s arms tremble, skewing his aim from Bobbie’s foot to his head. Alberto screamed and wept for help. Daveys missed whatever he’d been trying for when his gun went off. The discharged bullet hit Bobbie and Alberto. Locked in a fatal embrace, they went down together.

W
ednesday morning brought a white sky, punctuated with dark pockets of brewing storm. The temperature had sunk ten degrees below freezing during the night. The snow was gone, but crusty patches of ice had formed in the puddles on the streets and sidewalks.

Clara Treadwell saw the ice on her terraces and some lacy frost crusting the corners of her windows. She decided to take the cold storage tags off her mink coat. She was no longer troubled by winter or anything else. At two
A.M
. she had been awakened from her medicated sleep by Special Agent Daveys. He told her that Robert Boudreau had killed Gunn Tram in her home, then fled to the Centre, where he caused a disturbance among the patients on Six North and killed one of them. When Clara asked about the outcome, Daveys told her Boudreau and another patient had been fatally shot when Boudreau took the patient hostage in an effort to escape. Clara counted the victims of the Centre’s former employee, Robert Boudreau. Because of him, five people associated with her institution were dead.

Clara spent the rest of the night on the phone, telling different versions of the truth to different important people. At six-forty-five she called Jason Frank and told him to meet her at her apartment with the Cowles file at seven-thirty. Jason seemed distracted by other things when she called, but after she told him what had happened, she managed to persuade him to leave the arms of his wife and get over there.

Then Clara took a long, hot shower to warm her bones and thought not of the day ahead but of Florida. Abruptly, she had decided that Florida was not such a bad place if you owned two or three big houses and thousands of acres of orange groves. It was not as bad, say, as her life with husbands one and two had been in California. Those husbands had been difficult and
jealous. Arch Candel was powerful and protective. He’d brought the FBI in to solve all her problems. Arch would see that she came out of this clean. Maybe after a few years, when her contract at the Centre was up and all this was forgotten, he’d arrange a presidential appointment for her. Surgeon General or Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare would be nice.

Full of her bright future, Clara Treadwell dressed in a neat black suit, as was appropriate for a day of gravity and mourning. She was composed and serious as she opened the door of her apartment for Jason Frank at seven twenty-nine.

“Come in, Jason. It’s good to see you. I’ve already made the coffee. You must be freezing.” She went through the door to the kitchen without stopping to take his coat.

“It’s cold,” Jason admitted. “How are you doing?”

“I’m shocked and saddened, of course. Deeply saddened,” she added.

Jason unbuttoned his coat, then opened his briefcase and pulled out the thick Cowles file. He put it down on the table. It was clear he was troubled and not as sanguine about the whole thing as she.

Clara didn’t give a shit. “Milk?”

“No, thanks.”

“Is that the complete file, everything I gave you?” she asked as she carefully opened a fresh carton of orange juice.

Jason nodded at the file. “Yes. It’s all here.”

“You didn’t make a copy?”

“No, Clara, I didn’t make a copy.”

Clara’s briefcase was open on the kitchen table. Her tape recorder lay on top of a pile of papers. Realizing the button for voice-activation was off, she put the juice container down and rearranged the papers in the briefcase as a camouflage to pressing the button on the recorder.

“This has been a terrible ordeal. I want to thank you for your counsel, Jason, and for your time. I’m glad it’s over. You’ll be free of the unpleasantness of all this soon.”

Jason considered his mug of inky coffee. “I didn’t realize
the case was closed. I thought lawsuits took forever. Did the hospital settle so quickly?”

“No, no. It’s all still up in the air. But I know it will all go smoothly now.” Clara poured herself a half-glass of orange juice and drank it, savoring the freshness of the taste. Then she poured some more. “Doesn’t the FBI renew your faith in the system?”

“The FBI?”

“Yes, they came in after the police failed to solve Harold’s murder. Can you imagine what a disaster this could have been for me without the FBI? Those stupid cops actually suspected me of some involvement with Ray’s death, Hal’s death.… It was the FBI agent who followed Boudreau to Six North. Boudreau had started a riot among the patients.” Clara poured herself some coffee before going on.

“The police incompetence in all this is absolutely shocking. If I were you, Jason, I’d cut back my involvement with them before you get in serious trouble.” The nerve in Clara’s cheek jumped.

Jason studied her, frowning. “You think the police were incompetent? In what way?”

“Jason, they thought I was responsible for a patient’s suicide. They came to my office and harassed me, practically accused me of murder. And then when poor Hal died— Well, they were sure I killed
him
, too. Me, a murderer. Can you imagine people going around saying that? It was slanderous, damaging to the Centre and all of us—absolutely intolerable.”

Jason glanced at the briefcase, then studied Clara’s face. “Clara, may I be absolutely frank with you?”

“Of course. More coffee?”

He shook his head. “Did you know, Clara, that the police don’t feel that truth is a relative thing? They think if you lie about one tiny thing, you’re likely to be lying about everything. It makes them really suspicious.”

Clara laughed. “What are you talking about? I never lie.”

“You spoke to Raymond Cowles the night he died. You talked to him for six minutes, a very short time before he killed himself. The police have the phone records to prove it.”

“So what?” Clara demanded, suddenly angry. “It’s none of your business and none of their business.”

“Clara, this is a very compelling piece of evidence that was important to the police and believe me, it will certainly be used against you in a civil suit.”

“I don’t
ever
want to hear you say any such thing, Jason. That conversation was sacred, inviolable. It’s confidential. The police are absolute bunglers; they don’t know anything about it.”

“Well, they’re paid to find out all the confidential things people don’t want them to know, and in this case they did.”

“They didn’t find out anything. Don’t make me angry.”

“Then don’t say the police are incompetent when they make a connection between you and a suicide, and you and a homicide. You were involved in both.”

“They weren’t connected.”

“Maybe not to each other, but they were both connected with
you
. And you talked to Cowles before he suicided. You can’t hide your head in the sand, Clara. You were practically there in the room with him.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Clara said coldly.

“You can’t hide your head in the sand,” Jason repeated.

“Nothing Ray and I talked about had anything to do with his suicide.”

Jason didn’t comment.

“All right, if you really have to know, Jason, I’ll tell you. Ray wanted to go into treatment again so he could get my blessing for choosing to be a faggot, after all.” She took a sip of coffee and swallowed it with a sneer. “Can you imagine what that meant to me, after all I’d been through with him?”

“What did you tell him?”

“What did I tell him?” Clara’s face hardened with the memory of Ray’s plaintive voice. Even now it made her shudder with revulsion.

“Dr. Treadwell,” Ray had whined at her, “I don’t want it to end this way. I need to see you again. Haven’t you ever been in love? Don’t you know what it feels like to be happy, to be free to be yourself?”

“If you’re happy in your choice to be a homosexual, Ray, you don’t need me,” she had replied, hardening against him.

“This is not a choice. I am a homosexual. I’ve always been a homosexual.”

“Then what do you want from me? Do you want to punish me by telling me all our work together was for nothing? Do you want to punish me for trying to help you achieve a normal healthy life with a woman who loved you, probably loves you still? You’re regressing, Ray. You’re returning to your self-destructive ways. And if you do that, you’re at risk of dying of AIDS at the very least. But you’re wrong about being able to punish me. You can’t punish me; I’m not your mother.”

“I don’t want to punish you.” Ray’s voice was as soft: as he was. “I would never hurt you. All I want is to have you accept that for me, this is not a choice.”

“You’re regressing,” she’d told him flatly.

“Look, I just want closure, what’s so wrong about that? I just want to be able to go on with my life feeling I’ve gotten over the hurdle.”

“You want my blessing for being a faggot?” Clara remembered her angry indignant voice. “Well, absolution is not my department. You need a gay shrink. I’ll refer you to someone who can help you.”

Remembering every word, Clara gritted her teeth at the perfidious way Ray had ended the call by accepting what she said as final and irrevocable, by politely taking down the telephone number she gave him when he didn’t intend to use it. She would never never forget the quiet docile manner with
which he had thanked her and said good-bye. Ray Cowles had even wished her good luck in her own life. After all the years of their relationship, she could not imagine why he had done such a terrible, terrible thing to her. He’d defied her before. How could she have known that he cared so much about what she thought he’d stupidly kill himself over it? Son of a bitch. She would never never get over it.

She ran her fingers through her hair to clear her head. “Jason, the truth is I told him going back into therapy with me was out of the question. You know I don’t take private patients anymore, and I most certainly don’t give my blessing for self-destructive actions. Frankly, I told him absolution is not my department. I said if he wanted a blessing for being gay, he could always go to a gay shrink—I told him the most competent doctor I knew was Harold Dickey and gave him Hal’s name and number.”

Jason looked shocked. “Clara, Hal wasn’t gay.”

Clara tossed her head defiantly. “So what?”

“There are many highly competent gay psychiatrists. Why didn’t you refer Cowles to one of them?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake. Hal knew the case. He seemed the best man at the time, so I gave him Hal’s name. What’s the difference?”

“Hal bore some responsibility for the outcome of the first treatment, so a renewed involvement wouldn’t have been the best thing for the patient.” Jason spoke with a passion that annoyed Clara.

Her eyes became shrewd. “Don’t get moral on me, Jason, there’s no percentage in it.”

“Percentage is not my department. What did Cowles say then?”

“He said he’d do that, he’d call Hal. He sounded fine. And that was it.” Clara stood up, poured herself some more coffee, then sipped it standing up. “It was extremely inappropriate for him to call me in the first place. We’d talked about boundaries,
we’d talked about termination. There was nothing new here.” Except that he’d tried to ruin her life, and she was not going to let him.

She glanced at the clock on the wall. Seven-forty-five. She had to go. She put her cup in the sink and cleared the table of the orange juice carton and the file. She didn’t bother to look at Jason. She didn’t care what he thought. She could destroy him if he didn’t do what she wanted. He had to know that. She released the chain on the back door and went out into the back hall.

She opened the garbage chute and stuffed the file in. It took a minute to position the bundle to fit the slide, but finally she heard the satisfying
thunk
as it dropped twenty stories to the basement. When she returned to the kitchen, Jason had buttoned his coat and was ready to leave.

“Let’s get one thing straight about the Cowles case,” Clara said. “It was a blip in the screen. Ray couldn’t accept his sexual preference. He chose to end his life. These are the facts that have significance for us. The other incidents, the harassment of me that you were witness to, Hal’s death—they brought a kind of hysteria to us all, led us in another direction. Now we’re centered on this unfortunate case of a disturbed young man again. If we stick together with a clean story, we’ll all benefit. If we waver on it, we all stand to lose. Do you understand me, Jason?”