Mad Dogs (12 page)

25

Outside, the sky bled. Taxis jammed the streets. Armies of the evening tramped the sidewalks. As far as we could tell, none of those marchers were on-our-trail hunters.

As far as we could tell.

And as far as we could tell from our Recon Stage One, no surveillance teams were watching the upper West Side apartment building we'd detoured from Maine to hit now in Stage Two. The building was 20 floors of units whose windows glowed out to the coming night. Our target was a sixth floor apartment. We rode the elevator summoned for us by the doorman who'd bought Hailey's bold con that we were there for ‘the' dinner party.

Once we decided that the building was free of surveillance, we'd hoped the apartment would be empty, a burglary waiting our arrival, but when we stepped out of the elevator, at our open target door stood an old man who looked like a mustache-less Albert Einstein in a black suit. He beckoned: “You're just in time.”

Eric rushed to obey the old man's summons.

The old man lunged for him.

Russell surged to rescue our guy. Zane's right hand swept under his coat. Hailey pivoted to watch our rear. I crouched with all the closed apartment doors in my vision.

The old man threw himself around Eric in a hug, so Eric hugged him back.

“I'm so glad you came!” The old man leaned away from Eric and beckoned us closer. “I'm Leon's father, Jules Friedman. Thanks for being here.”

“Wouldn't have missed it.” I peered into the apartment linked to our dead shrink. Bookshelves lined the foyer. People mingled in the dining room.

“I'm sorry, but you'll have to tell me your names,” said our psychiatrist's father.

Eric blurted: “Hailey, Russell, Zane, Victor. I'm Eric.”

Too late for my lie, I thought.

Jules Friedman said: “And you knew my son… How?”

“From work,” Russell said, putting himself between obedient Eric and the father's questions. Hailey diverted Eric into the apartment.

“Ahh,” said Jules.

“Yes,” said Russell.

“Your two people who showed up at my high school to… to tell me about Leon, they never met him.” Jules turned his misted bloodshot eyes to me. “Can you imagine having to tell some stranger that his child is dead? How terrible that must be.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

Like a falling child, he wrapped me into a hug. Collected himself and leaned away. “After they left, I didn't think anyone from… from his work would show up.”

Zane said: “He was special to us.”

“He was special to everybody,” said the mourning father. “Come in.”

He led Russell into the apartment logged in his son's laptop under HOME and I realized this was not where Dr. F ‘lived' but where he felt safe. Where he'd come from and no doubt where he told himself he could always return.

Zane and I stood in the hall. He'd walked here holding his coat open to fresh air.

“You sure you're OK?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Zane. “Or no. Now it's all… different. I feel… light.”

“All we have to do is stay calm. Low profile. Keep cover. Be cool.”

He smiled. “I'm not
exactly
worried about temperature anymore.”

“Should we abort? Is this Recon smart? Is it safe?”

“Beats me.” He went into the apartment.

Where Russell yelled: “What a fuckload of food!”

I stepped into the apartment and closed the door.

Found my comrades in a crowded dining room. An abstract print from a museum shop dominated one wall. Opposite it, someone had tacked a white bed sheet above the mantle where a silver-haired woman in a navy Armani suit now positioned a cylindrical glass vase of red roses. Sandwiches, cold broccoli and carrot sticks covered the dining table. Warm smells rose from a beef brisket and a butchered turkey.

Our murdered shrink's mourning father gave me a grateful smile.

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Friedman—”

“Please:
Jules
.”

“Jules. Did… What did our people tell you about Leon's death?”

“A dark highway. Like always, him working too hard. Tired. Driving back from seeing patients at that Army base by the border. Black ice. Lost control. A one car wreck. Fast—they said, promised it was fast, that he had to… to be dead before… before the fire.”

That haunting lie made him look away. Whisper: “What else is there to say?”

“Nothing,” I lied. “Except that he was a good man.”

Russell swooped over to us, a plastic glass of red wine in one hand while his other waved a turkey drumstick. “Great food!”

“Thank you,” said Jules. “The corner deli, they knew Leon since he was a boy. And the sandwiches: the industrial cooking class at the high school where I teach…”

Jules curled into a twisted man in a shiny black suit in a room where he'd eaten 10,000 happy meals, curled in on himself and trembled, not daring to shut his eyes.

The silver-haired woman in dark Armani now stood near Zane. She took a white envelope out of her purse and put it with others in a basket on the sideboard.

Russell aimed the turkey leg at the sheet tacked above the mantle: “What's that?”

“I covered all the mirrors,” answered Jules.

“Wild.” Russell left us for the wine table.

The silver-haired woman flowed into the space made by Russell's departure. She woman embraced Jules: “I'm so sorry!”

“Thanks.” Jules gestured towards me. “Victor, right? Forty years teaching high school history, you learn to learn names quick. This is Dr. Clark, she was Leon's mentor at Harvard—don't deny it! And I saw that envelope go in the basket.”

“Whatever I can do to help.” Her voice purred like a cat.

“Right now, you can help by excusing me.” He left the room.

Her bright blue eyes zeroed in on me. “You were a friend of Leon's?”

“Not as much as I would have liked. You teach at Harvard, Dr. Clark?”

“Please, it's Yarrow. After two decades, sentimentality brought me back to this city. I just opened a practice here, though I still lecture and keep my eye on research.”

“Practice? You're a…”

“Psychiatrist.” She laid a paw on my arm. Her claws circled my bones.

“Tell me,” she whispered. “How's he doing?”

“Jules?” I licked my lips. “Doing better than a lot of people—I mean, than a lot of people would. If they were, you know,
doing
. Whatever. Not than anybody is doing—”

“Yes, I know. One never knows what to do at times like this.”

Make her talk! Don't you talk!
“You met Leon at Harvard?”

“I knew the family. We went to school together. Well, Jules and I did. I admit I thought it was absurd—graduating Harvard to teach public high school in Harlem! But that's who he is. If he believes, he does. I never knew how much I admired that until, well, until after he'd met Marisse when I was doing my residence at the psychotic ward in Bellevue. There's no eye opener like time in a mental hospital!”

“Really.”

“Seems like yesterday.” Yarrow clung to me. “That asylum brought me to Leon.”

Nearby, Eric stood behind two men so deep in their conversation they didn't notice him even when one of them turned to the mantle, slid aside a hammer, a packet of tacks and a wire loop to set his glass of red wine beside a vase of red roses.

As Yarrow told me: “I remember when Jules first had me over to this apartment. For dinner. To meet Marisse. Two old college friends… And I saw her. Saw her pregnant with Leon. All of a sudden I realized… what a great man Jules is—was—is, I mean. Better watch it. Think I'd know better. Those tricky Freudian slips.”

“Tricky.”

“Marisse was the most honest, magic person. You simply had to love her. Two years she's been gone. Now poor Jules is truly all alone. Myself, I've been divorced for a year, a nice man but… Enough of me. What was it you said you do?”

“What?”

“What you do,” purred Doc Yarrow. She squeezed my arm. “Who you are.”

Martial arts schooled me on how to break a grip on my arm. Hit her with my free hand: a palm strike to her temple, a knuckle jab to her windpipe, smash her forearm with my hammer fist. Jerk away through her grip's weak spot, the thumb-finger contact. Grab/peel her little finger and snap it back. Pull to unbalance her, then
T'ai Chi
push/pop her away. Pin her gripping hand to my arm with my other palm, drop the elbow of the arm she held to point my “trapped” fingers up, then saw the sword edge of that hand against her trapped forearm and slam her to her knees with
Qinna
's Small Silk Tie-Up.

“Excuse me,” I told Yarrow, “my friends… need help.”

I wriggled between strangers in the crowded room and made it to Zane.

Jules called out: “Please, everyone! Could we all start into the living room?”

“We've got to get out of this place!” I whispered to Zane as the crowd surged.

“We haven't gotten anything here but food,” he said, brisket sandwich in hand.

“Speak for yourself. And watch what you say: that old lady is a psychiatrist!”

“And you're crazy. You've got a lot in common.”

“If she spots us for who we are…”

“You worry too much. What's the worst that could happen? Besides,” he said, nodding to the subject of his concern, “it's not her or you we should be worried about.”

Russell stood at the dining room door downing another Merlot.

Jules called from the other room: “Everyone! Please! In here.”

Russell headed towards that voice. I hurried after him to the living room.

Night filled the windows of that room where couches, chairs and tables had been pushed aside to create an empty space of rug ringed by a circle of metal folding chairs.

Standing between the memorial table and the ring of chairs, Russell listened to Jules say: “… should technically pull the drapes, but he loved this view. The vastness of the city. The sense of the whole universe just beyond a thin pane.”

Russell stared at the circle of chairs. “Hey! I know how this works!”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah, I do this all the time.”

I said: “
Russell!”

Jules frowned: “All the time?”

“Two, three times a week,” said Russell. “Depending on how things are going.”

“My God!” said Jules. “Two or three…
A week!
You poor man!”

Russell led the way into the circle of chairs as Jules told him: “All that… death, and you so young.”

“Oh man,” said Russell: “Don't get me started. All I see behind me are bodies.”

Night turned the wall of windows into a translucent mirror that reflected the circle of metal folding chairs. The silver-haired woman chose a chair, her therapist's license snug in her purse as she zeroed me with her gaze and patted the seat beside her.

Somehow I summoned the strength to hold up my pleading hand:
Wait
.

I pulled Russell close: “That old woman is a shrink!”

He shook off my feeble grasp. “Of course she is.”

Gravity pulled me into the seat beside Dr. Yarrow Clark.

“So much easier not to sit alone,” she purred. “Or beside a total stranger.”

“Who's not a stranger.” SHUT UP! DON'T TALK TO HER!

She blinked. “What… an interesting perspective.”

Two teachers sat beside Zane. Two chairs away sat Eric. Jules politely waited in the center of the circle. Beside Jules stood his new buddy Russell.

“Perspective is key,” said Yarrow as Jules's colleagues and friends filled the chairs. “I'm observing a clinic that treats immigrants who can't be related to from an American medical perspective. It's com-mon for Hispanics to have
ataque de nervios
that makes them fall on the floor, scream and cry and beat their chest. Malaysians—”

“Won't talk about that.”

“I beg your pardon?”

My lips pressed shut. My head shook
no
.

She shrugged. “Anyway, Malaysians have a psychosis called
Latah
that compels them to mimic other people. Chinese patients often fear the wind. They call that
pa-fay.
”

“
Pa-feng
,” shot the correction from my lips.

Dr. Yarrow Clark blinked. “Do you speak Chinese?”