Man With a Squirrel (29 page)

The art education major stammered.

“This woman here,” Fred said, jerking his thumb toward Cover-Hoover, “is going to hit you up, or him, your parents—someone in your family—for a big donation. Not to her. She's too pure, doing great missionary work. To her foundation. Wait. The expression in your eyes tells me your people already started forking over. Right?”

“Not that much,” the student said. “Dad believes what my uncle did, but Mom … Anyway, fuck them. After what they maybe did…”

“This is a precious confidence you are betraying,” Cover-Hoover said to her patient, administering mild reproof.

“Shut up,” Fred told her. To the student he said, “You live at home or at the safe house?”

“Safe house? I have an apartment.”

“OK. Because the safe house is going to be off-limits. And Cover-Hoover is going to be busy. If you have problems—most people do—go to the clinic at your college. Meanwhile, since you have a class scheduled, go to it. Take the T. You don't need Boardman. You'll be fine on the subway. I guarantee it.”

The student got up and left. Fred closed the office door. “People believe what they were already going to believe,” he said. He cracked his knuckles and rubbed his hands. “Now. I assume your office is soundproofed? What's the story on this safe house?”

A timid tap came at the office door. Fred opened it. “The bathroom door is locked,” the student said.

“It's hard to find a toilet in Harvard Square. There's one in the Harvard Coop. Second floor. The Coop's gonna take care of you,” Fred told her.

“Thanks,” the student said, closing the door again.

“Where was I?” Fred went on. “Oh yes, Manny's in your crapper.” Cover-Hoover licked her lips and stared. “Let's go to your safe house,” Fred said. “We'll take my car.”

“Ann Clarke is not to be trusted,” Cover-Hoover warned. “She suffers from delusions.” Fred moved behind her and pulled her chair back. She rose slowly. “You are impeding an important work,” the doctor said.

“I hope so.”

*   *   *

Before they left Fred carried Manny into Cover-Hoover's office and laid him, snoring, on the couch. The doctor of loving-caring looked sick, seeing his arms flop backward at the elbow joints. Fred pulled the shirt and sweatshirt down. “Euro Disney stock was Boardman's idea?” Fred asked. “Yeah. Right. He likes Mickey.”

“Boardman was horribly abused as a child,” Cover-Hoover said. “He came to me, one of my early—but this is no business of yours. It is a wonder he survived. The mouse, its happy innocence, is part of a therapeutic … What you have done to the boy will add years to his therapy. Our work together … his capacity for trust…”

“After Molly Riley joins us we'll arrange for someone to scoop the little fellow up,” Fred assured her. They walked down Brattle Street, across the brick no-man's-land filled with pitfalls and traps for the unwary that some designer had inflicted on an honest corner. Fred kept to Cover-Hoover's elbow. Anyone who recognized her would see she had switched bodyguards. She said, “I cannot be held responsible for the actions of my patients. Nor can I be required by law to break the doctor-patient bond of confidentiality. What they do is their business. What they say is mine.”

*   *   *

She looked at Fred's car with dismay before she got in. As he drove to the tollbooth to buy their way out she said, “I am under duress, because I understand my former patient, now my colleague, is being held by you and is in danger. I am under duress. You are forcing my hand.”

“That's fair,” Fred said.

Cover-Hoover had not put on her coat, and it was a cold evening. She did not shiver. She crossed her arms and said, “Can you find Walden Street?” Jesus, Fred thought. The place was nearby. He should have found it. “I have been concerned about Boardman Templeton,” his passenger said, looking beautiful. “The dark forces buried within him are powerful. He may yet not escape them.”

Fred cut along to Garden, turned right up Chauncy next to the old Commodore Hotel, now Harvard housing, intending to turn left on Mass. Ave. toward Porter. “You may be placing my patient, Molly Riley, in grave danger,” Cover-Hoover said.

“What are you, talking into a microphone?” Fred asked. “Making evidence? Or is this a threat?”

Cover-Hoover looked out her window at the dull, cold, darkness of the night.

Fred pulled over in front of a health-food store and, looking to any interested observer like an impulsive first date, gave his passenger a quick search and found the device between breasts well-designed to give it shelter. He tossed it into the backseat, where it slid down the wrapped package of stretched cloth representing dogs or kangaroos. Cover-Hoover did not make a move to stop him or look back. She did her wide white buttons up.

“You'll be more comfortable now,” Fred told her.

“Your argument is force.”

Fred started driving again after a bus opened a place in the stream of traffic. “Your argument is force also,” Fred answered. “Poison is force. What danger is Molly in?”

“She fears you. She fears all men.”

“Fraud and murder. That's what you should be afraid of. Being indicted for those things.”

“I am a healer. What a patient of mine, outside my knowledge or control…”

“We'll find out soon enough,” Fred said. He turned left on Walden. “Oona Imry was killed here,” he mentioned as they crossed the bridge. She showed no flicker of interest. “Little Boardman has a thing about bridges. Apparently, according to Ann Clarke, she and Manny forced gin into her until she lost control. Then Manny held her under the bridge until he could get her in front of a train. Say anything you want…”

“I am not responsible. I know nothing about this. I am not responsible. Turn right here.” Fred turned on Richdale. “It's too late. It is out of my hands.” She spoke like someone standing on a mountain and looking down at a rushing sea of mud below her, engulfing everything that lived. Unfortunate as it was, at least it was happening down there. Fred looked ahead of them down the S curve of Richdale Avenue. He passed the office-furniture warehouse and showroom backing this side of the tracks.

“Ann Clarke is the victim of recurrent guilt fantasies,” the zombie's therapist confided. “I don't know what she may have said to you…”

“Which house?”

Fred had driven along Richdale last week, prospecting generally. It was as mixed-use as a street in Cambridge could be. Cover-Hoover gestured toward a large lot, vacant except for dismantled brick factory buildings. The lot was fenced, but kids had cut openings so they could get in and hurt themselves. At the far edge was a one-story brick building, boarded up, running the whole length of the lot. Fred saw no residential units in the vicinity. It was isolated and looked abandoned.

Cover-Hoover said, “A kidnapped witness will say anything. Ann Clarke will say she is Marie Antoinette looking for her lost head. Templeton knows nothing, except the loyalty of the low IQ. I have given these people something to live for, something to die for.”

Fred studied the brick building. They could have it booby trapped and wired. All they'd need was one convert from MIT.

“Let's go in.” Fred opened his car door. Rain began activating the dark air. Lights were sparse on this street.

“I cannot take responsibility for the consequences.” Cover-Hoover spoke with grave simplicity and understatement. Fred, listening to her mild, sad voice, was invited to imagine ghastly possibilities behind the patchwork facade of the building. A mob of fanatic former victims of Satan stared out from behind the boarded apertures, brandishing weapons.

“We'll see what's going on,” Fred said. “According to Sandy Blake you sleep with Manny?” Cover-Hoover glanced at him, her tongue flickering moisture onto her full lower lip. Her eyebrows rose. She asked herself—Fred could see her doing it—if this was a way in, an invitation anted up by Fred's subconscious unselective lust.

“Contemporary therapeutic practice allows broad latitude, if exercised with discretion, and with due respect to the patient's needs and progress. Supposing you, for instance, found yourself to be a patient of mine…”

“Thanks for sharing these feelings with me,” Fred said. He walked around the car, opened the door, and took her arm. “Let's say hi to the dervishes.”

34

They walked in the light rain beside the low building at the edge of the vacant lot. It was an old cement sidewalk underfoot, cracked and soft with weeds. Fred kept slightly behind Cover-Hoover, and on her right; the building was on her left. She was right-handed. She'd provide instant cover if anyone inside had the notion to use firearms. The building paced at forty yards. Fred watched for movement in the boarded windows.

The power of his own experiential memory and fear was growing. Cover-Hoover would rely on that. That was how she worked. She was good enough to smell some of his past. He'd held men while they died screaming. He'd done his own screaming in his day. She'd gotten out of the car with such palpable recognition he wondered, What's her bluff? What does she have waiting?

She had hardly turned a hair when she saw Manny, her demon lover, out cold with his powerful arms gone flaccid. She'd looked him over, seen he was finished, and started planning her next move.

“Boardman is impulsive and excitable,” Cover-Hoover said—one professional to another, as if she were responding to Fred's thought and distancing herself rapidly from these wayward patients. They rounded the narrow building. The back entrance would not be visible from the street. Surrounding buildings were too far away, or were warehouses without windows. Cover-Hoover pushed a buzzer next to a heavy iron door and spoke into an intercom grill. “The Stalker is with me. He is holding your sister somewhere.”

The door buzzed open. Fred went in behind her, stepping into darkness. He kept his hand under Cover-Hoover's elbow. She turned a light on. Someone had done a half-decent job making a bad place habitable. It was lit by hanging fluorescent work lights, and furnished with camp stove, folding chairs and tables, and four metal single beds. Fred saw a big sink with dishes in it. The room was as wide as the building, maybe fourteen feet. It smelled like tuna fish.

No crowds of victims greeted them. Cover-Hoover looked around the empty space. “They must be in the meeting room,” she said. “We'll go and see, shall we?”

“Where's the door-lock buzzer?” Fred asked.

“One here. One in the meeting room.” Cover-Hoover opened a door at the room's far end, giving access to a passage that was dark until she turned lights on with a switch. They were going back the length of the building, in the direction they had come from outside, along the walkway, in the rain. The smell of tuna was stronger. On either side of them the passage offered stall doorways. One led to a bathroom. Some were vacant and tumbled down; others had beds, and a couple of these had stout doors with hasps and padlocks ready.

“You kept the old man in one of these,” Fred remarked. “Martin Clarke. According to Ann.”

“Sometimes he wandered and required restraint,” she said matter-of-factly. “He'd get loose sometimes, deluded his daughter had been replaced by a changeling. He deteriorated rapidly.”

“But he could still sign checks? Or did he surrender his power of attorney?”

Cover-Hoover raised her eyebrows. “One night he simply disappeared,” she said. “We feel he went to stay with friends in San Antonio. We never heard. He was a free agent. Anything might have happened.”

The woman's aplomb was so impermeable he could not get past the soothing professional veneer. Fred checked each stall for signs of either Molly or Sandy Clarke.

At the far end of the passage was another door. “I'll do what I can to help you,” Cover-Hoover promised, easing open the door into a black cavern with small sounds in it. The smell was gasoline, not tuna fish.

“Fred? Don't turn on lights,” Molly pleaded from the darkness. Fred was jerking Cover-Hoover's arm down and back. “You'll make a spark. Then the place goes up,” Molly explained, her voice shaking with tension. “Fred?”

“Right,” Fred said. “I'm here with Cover-Hoover.”

“I'm soaked with gasoline. She's next to me. Sandy. Sandy Clarke. Blake. She has a lighter. She's soaked too. I don't know what she wants. I can't figure her out.”

“This is Eunice,” Cover-Hoover said. Fred watched the light from the hall they had come through stretch slowly into the large room as his eyes adjusted. It was forty feet long or so. Molly was at the far end, kneeling on the floor in front of one of the posts that held the ceiling up, her hands back of her. Molly still was wearing Sam's red down jacket, with the hood up now. She was drenched with gas; the fire, unless it was an immediate explosion, would take her head right away. Her feet were joined on the wrong side of the post. The area was storage space, burned sometime in the past. It smelled charred, once you got past the smell of the gasoline fumes.

Sandy Blake squatted next to Molly, a dark hump of limbs with a pale face that turned toward Fred and Cover-Hoover where they stood in the room's doorway. She held a fist clenched next to Molly's face. Fred could not distinguish the object in the gloom, but Molly would not make a rash misjudgment on so crucial a point. If that's what Molly said, it was a lighter.

“I feel your pain,” Eunice Cover-Hoover called into the room, striving to push backward into the hallway. Fred stood their ground. “And I respect your patienthood. Both of you.”

It was Templeton's method, to tie Molly's feet and hands around the post. Molly was not one to accept a malignant fate without gesticulating protest. Manny had done the job on Marek, then met Cover-Hoover in Cambridge and taken Molly into safekeeping, and then gotten back to Cover-Hoover's in time to greet Fred.