Praying for Sleep (21 page)

The assistant came a half breath away from saying, Not unless you call rape a successful relationship. He wondered if Adler would have fired him or laughed.

"A history like his" — Adler riffled pages — "and still Kohler puts him in therapy. One way you could view it is that Kohler was more than negligent in this whole matter. Let's just take that tack for a minute, shall we? Is that door open? My door there. Close it, why don't you?"

Grimes did, while Adler flipped through one doctor's assessment of Hrubek, in which was recorded the patient's plans to remove this therapist's internal organs with a single hand — a process that Hrubek described articulately all things considered, with an impressive knowledge of human anatomy.

When Grimes dropped again into his chair, Adler had closed the file and was gazing at the ceiling. His hand dipped into his crotch, where he adjusted something. He said, "You realize what Herr Dr. Kohler has done?"

"He —"

"Do you know the case of Burton Scott Webley? Burton Scott Webley the Third. Or Fourth. I don't recall. Do you know about him? Do they teach you such arcane things in... Where did you go to school?"

"Columbia, sir. I'm not familiar with the case, no."

"Co-lum-bi-a," Adler stretched the four syllables out with elastic disdain. "Webley the Third or Fourth. He was a patient in New York. I don't know. Creedmoor perhaps. Or Pilgrim State. Don't let's quibble. No, wait. It was private. Top doctors, like our friend, Sigmund Kohler. Cumlaude sort of doctors. Co-lum-bi-a sort of doctors."

"Got it."

"You see, Kohler has this idea that our mental hospitals are chockablock with van Goghs. Poets and artists. Misunderstood geniuses, vision and madness locked together, — the beast with two backs." When he noticed Grimes staring at him blankly, Adler continued, "Webley was a paranoid schizophrenic. Delusional. Monosymptomatic. Twenty-eight years of age. Sound familiar, Grimes? Delusions centered around his family. They were trying to get him, blah, blah, blah. Felt his father and aunt were having an incestuous relationship. Including bouts of televised sodomy. On network TV, if I'm not mistaken. He had a bad episode and threatened the aunt with a pitchfork. Well, he's involuntarily committed. Insulin-shock therapy is all in vogue and his doctors put him into a hundred seventy comas."

"Jesus."

"Then the ECS department third-rails him for six months after his blood sugar becomes an embarrassment. With that much amperage, well, he came out of it rather tattered, as you'd suspect."

"This was when?"

"Hardly matters. A little while after they unplugged him, he sees the senior psychiatrist, who does a new diagnostic, Webley is neat and clean and coherent. And very sharp, Astonishing indeed, considering the SmithKline cocktails he's on. He's polite, he's responsive, he's eager to undergo therapy. The doctor schedules the full battery of tests.

Webley takes, and passes, all twenty-five of them. A miracle cure. He'll be written up in the
APA Journal
."

"I can guess what's coming."

"Oh, can you, Grimes?" Adler fixed him with an amused gaze. "Can you guess that after he was released, he took a taxi to his aunt's house then raped and dismembered her, looking for the hidden microphone that'd recorded the evidence used to commit him? Can you guess that her fifteen-year-old daughter walked into the house as his little search was in progress and that he did the same to her? Any inkling that the only thing that saved the eight-year-old son was that Webley fell asleep amid the girl's viscera? You look sufficiently pale, Grimes.

"But I have to tell you the end of the story. The shocking part: it was all calculated. Webley had an IQ of 146. After he took himself off his brain candy, he snuck into the library and memorized the correct answers to each of those twenty-five tests and, I submit, honed his delivery pretty fucking well."

"You think Hrubek did the same thing to Kohler? What this Webley did?"

"Yes! Of course that's what I mean! Kohler bought a bill of goods. Lock, stock and barrel. Callaghan's death, any other deaths tonight — they're ultimately Kohler's fault. His fault, Peter."

"Sure. Of course."

"Tell me, what do you think of him? Of Kohler?"

"Pompous little shit."

Adler was pleased to have someone second this sentiment though it reminded him how much he detested Grimes for being such a toady. "I think there's more to it. Why is he being so blind? Kohler's not stupid. Whatever else, he's not stupid. Why?"

"I don't really —"

"Peter, I'd like you to do something for me."

"Look, sir —"

"Some detective work." When the otherwise thin Adler dropped his head to look over the top of his glasses he developed an alarming double chin.

Because it was very late in the evening and he was tired of treading lightly through hospital politics, Peter Grimes chose not to be coy. "I don't think I'd like to do that."

"'Like to do that'?" Adler snapped. "Don't give me any of your bluster. I want to see fear in your face, young man. You're not union. If I wanted your fucking balls, I'd' have them in an instant and a hell of a lot easier than I could castrate those orderlies. Don't you forget that. Now are you listening? Some detective work. Write it down if you can't remember it. Are you ready?" he inquired sarcastically, forgetting for the moment that he was speaking not to an incompetent secretary but to a doctor of medicine.

As man and dog returned to the sports car, Heck grew convinced that Hrubek had hitched a ride or snuck into the back of a repair vehicle that had answered the distress call.

Hiding in trucks for real this time, is he? Heck wondered. He leaned against the car and shivered slightly as a breeze came up.

Oh, man, here I give up almost a year's salary, sounding all grandiose and righteous and look what happens? I lose the trail completely. What would you've done, Jill? Tell me you'd've told him to stuff it too.

But no, Heck knew. Jill would've skedaddled home and tucked Kohler's check in her jewelry box. By now she'd be fast asleep.

In her pink nightgown.

Oh, baby...

Then, suddenly, Emil's nose shot into the air and the dog stiffened. He turned north, toward Route 236, and began to trot forward. Heck followed, feeling the line go taut and Emil pick up the pace.

What's going on here?

The breeze blew over them again and Emil began to run.

Glancing down at the asphalt, Heck closed his eyes in disgust. "Goddamn! What was I thinking of? Bicycle!"

Heck commanded Emil to stop then examined the asphalt and found a tread mark leading unsteadily from the car toward the highway. The tread was very wide; the rider could easily weigh three hundred pounds.

The surest clue though was Emil, whose nose was in the air. When a dog raises his nose and switches from trailing ground scent to trailing airborne, it's a good sign that the quarry's on a bike or motorcycle. They'd probably been upwind of the scent until the breeze a moment ago blew a bit of it back in their direction. Emil's ears twitched and he doled his weight from the left paw to the right and back again, ready to run.

Heck was too. Airborne scent is the hardest to track and even a moderate wind will disrupt it. A storm of the sort that was expected would surely obliterate it altogether.

Strapping the thong over his pistol, he wrapped Emil's red lead around his left hand.

"Find, Emil. Find!"

The hound broke from the starting gate and surged down the road. They were on the trail once again.

What's different?

Standing on the edge of the lake not far from the patio, Lis was momentarily disoriented. This place seemed both familiar and foreign. Then she understood why. The lake had risen so high that the shape of the shoreline had changed. What had been a voluptuous outcropping of lawn and reeds was now concave, and a cluster of small rock islands roughly in the shape of the constellation Orion had vanished-completely covered with water.

She turned back to her labors.

The two women hadn't returned to the dam but chose to build the new levee closer to the house, filling and piling sandbags where the culvert met the lawn. Even if the lake were to overflow the dam a line of bags here would, if it held, stop the water from reaching the house. Besides, she decided, they hardly had the time or strength to cart several tons of sand a hundred yards through a rocky culvert slowly filling with water.

Portia filled the bags and Lis dragged or carried them to their impromptu line of defense. As they worked, Lis glanced occasionally at her sister. The rings and crystal necklace were gone and her delicate hands and short, perfect nails — fiery red — were covered by canvas gloves. In place of the black lace headband was a Boston Red Sox cap.

Portia lunged energetically with the shovel, absorbed in the task, scooping huge wads of sand and pitching them into bags. Lis, with years of gardening and landscaping behind her, had always assumed herself the stronger of the two. But she saw now that they were, in strength at least, on par. Thanks, she supposed, to the hours Portia spent on health-club treadmills and racquetball courts. Occasionally the young woman would stop, pull off a glove to see what sort of honorable callus she might be developing, then return to the job. Once, as she gazed out into the forest, Portia twined a strand of hair around her finger and slipped an end into her mouth. Lis had seen her do this earlier in the evening — a nervous habit that she'd perhaps developed recently.

But then, Lis thought, how would I know if she'd picked it up recently or not? She reflected how little she knew of her sister's life. The girl had for all practical purposes left home at eighteen and rarely returned for any length of time. When she had, it was usually for a single night — a Saturday or Sunday dinner — with her current flame in tow. She even spent the majority of holidays elsewhere — usually with boyfriends, sometimes workmates. A Christmas for two in a far-off inn, however romantic, didn't appeal much to Lis. During summer breaks from college Portia would travel with girlfriends, or work at internships in the city. When she'd dropped out of school her junior year, the girl had abandoned her Bronxville apartment and moved to Manhattan. Lis was then working at Ridgeton High School and living in a small rental house in Redding. She'd been hoping that after her sister left Sarah Lawrence, the young woman might come back to the area. But no, Portia smilingly deflected the suggestion, as if it were pure craziness. She added that she had to move to New York. It was time for her to "do the city."

Lis remembered wondering what exactly this meant, and why her sister seemed to treat it as an inevitable rite of passage.

What, Lis wondered, was life like when you "did" the city? Did Portia's daytime hours pass quickly or slow? Did she flirt with her boss? Did she gossip? What did she eat for dinner? Where did she buy her laundry soap? Did she snort cocaine at ad-agency parties? Did she have a favorite movie theater? What did she laugh at,
Monty Python
or
Roseanne
? Which newspaper did she read in the morning? Did she sleep only with men?

Lis tried to recall any time in recent years when she and Portia had spoken frequently. During the prelude to their mother's death, she supposed.

Yet even then "frequently" was hardly the word to use.

Seventy-four-year-old Ruth L'Auberget had learned the hopeless diagnosis a year ago August and had immediately taken up the role of Patient-one that, it was no surprise to Lis, her mother seemed born to play. Her monied, Boston sous-Society upbringing had taught her to be stoic, her generation to be fatalistic, her husband to expect the worst. The role was, in fact, simply a variation on one that the statuesque, still-eyed woman had been acting for years. A formidable disease had simply replaced a formidable husband (Andrew having by then made his unglamorous exit in the British Air loo).

Until she got sick, the widow L'Auberget had been foundering. A woman in search of a burden. Now, once again, she was in her element.

Buying clothes for a shrinking figure, she chose not the shades she'd always worn — colors that made good backgrounds, beige and taupe and sand — but picked instead the hues of the flowers she grew, reds and yellows and emerald.

She wore loud-patterned turbans, not scarves or wigs, and once — to Lis's astonishment — burst into the Chemo Ward I announcing to the young nurses, "Hello, dahlings, it's Auntie Mame!"

Only near the very end did she grow sullen and timid — mostly at the thought, it seemed, of an ungainly and therefore embarrassing death. It was during this time that, on morphine, she'd described recent conversations with her husband in such detail that Lis's skin would sting from the goosebumps. Mother only imagined it, Lis recalled thinking — as she'd protested to Owen tonight on the patio.

She'd just imagined it. Of course.

The chills, however, never failed to appear.

Lis had thought that perhaps their mother's illness might bring the sisters closer together. It didn't. Portia spent only slightly more time in Ridgeton during the months of Mrs. L'Auberget's decline than she had before.

Lis was furious at this neglect, and once — when she and her mother had driven into the city for an appointment at Sloan-Kettering — she resolved to confront her sister. Yet Portia pre-empted her. She'd fixed up one of the bedrooms in the co-op as a homey sickroom and insisted that Lis and Ruth stay with her for several days. She broke dates, took a leave of absence from work and even bought a cookbook of cancer-fighting recipes. Lis still had a vivid, comic memory of the young woman, feet apart, hair in anxious streamers, standing dead center in the tiny kitchen as she slung flour into bowls and vegetables into pans, searching desperately for lost utensils.

So the confrontation was avoided. Yet when Ruth returned home, Portia resumed her distance and in the end the burden of the dying fell on Lis. By now, much had intervened between the sisters, and she'd forgiven Portia for this lapse. Lis was even grateful that only she had been present in the last minutes; it was a time she would rather not have shared. Lis would always remember the curiously muscular touch of her mother's hand on Lis's palm as she finally slipped away. A triplet of squeezes, like a letter in Morse code.