The Hidden Law (4 page)

All of this was consistent with its motto, “A tough place for tough people,” and reflected the personality of its founder. Chuck Sweeny was manipulative, inflexible, egotistical and extremely effective.

A high brick wall surrounded the front of the house. I parked on the street and walked up the driveway. The house was a three-story circus of a building, all gables, dormers, chimneys, conical roofed towers, bay windows, and a wraparound veranda supported by Corinthian columns; one expected to catch a glimpse of Morticia Addams at an upstairs window. A young man was mowing the lawn, his thin arms streaked with track marks. The sign on the door said, “You are home.”

Inside, in the foyer, a young black woman sat at a desk reading the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. She peered up at me and said, in practiced cadences, “Welcome to SafeHouse, sir. May I help you?”

“I’d like to see Edith Rosen,” I replied.

She glanced down at a log. “Ms. Rosen’s not in yet. Would you care to wait?” She smiled haplessly, clearly a resident practicing at being an ordinary human being. I knew the feeling.

“Is Chuck around?”

“Yes, sir, Chuck’s here, but you need an appointment.”

I handed her a business card. “Maybe he’ll see me for a minute if you tell him who I am.”

She read the card and picked up the phone, dialing an extension. “There’s a Mr. Henry Rios here who would like to see you.” She smiled at me, nervously. “Oh, OK, I’ll send him in.” She hung up. “Just go straight back down the hall, past the dining room and you’ll see his office.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Thank
you
,” she replied cheerily.

Straight down the hall proved to be a considerable distance. The house’s rococo facade was belied by the shabbiness of its furnishings. The walls were all painted the same yellowing shade of cream and posted on them were long hand-written lists of the house’s rules, along with inspirational messages along the lines of “One Day At A Time,” and “Don’t Leave Five Minutes Before the Miracle,” in Gothic script on parchment paper. The place reeked of stale cigarette smoke. Its many rooms all seemed to be occupied by people urgently, if mysteriously, engaged. In the dining room a middle-aged man looked up from the table he was polishing and gazed at me blankly. A girl sat in a phone booth whispering and giggling into the phone. From behind a closed door came shouting and then weeping.

I pushed open a door marked “Administration” and stepped into a big room where several people sat at desks, hovered around file cabinets or fielded calls. Past them was an open door through which I saw Chuck Sweeny sitting at a beat-up desk, reading.

“Hi, Chuck,” I said.

He looked up from his reading, and peered at me over the top of his glasses. A shock of gray hair swept over a red, drinker’s face. Long thin arms stained with age poked out of rolled-up shirt sleeves. His shirt was unbuttoned and a thatch of white chest hair spilled over a yellowed T-shirt. Chuck looked the part of someone who had once slept in the streets of every skid row from Seattle to San Diego.

“Henry R.,” he said, quickly demoting me from lawyer to fellow drunk. “Come in, come in, come in.”

I sat down. “This is quite a place you’ve got here.”

“This your first time?” he asked incredulously. I thought guiltily of my promise to have visited sooner.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Never as a resident?” he asked, his eyes twinkling.

“Not yet.”

“Well let’s hope you never are,” he said. “So, do you want the tour?”

“Actually, I’m here on business. One of my clients was supposed to check in on Monday, but he’s not going to make it. He overdosed last night.”

“Too bad,” he said briskly. “Too bad.”

“He was carrying a letter from Edith Rosen.”

“Oh, Edie. Did you talk to her already?”

“I was told she wasn’t in. She’s a professional isn’t she, an M.F.C.C?”

“Marriage, Family and Child Counselor,” he replied sardonically. “Don’t that cover all the bases.”

“I didn’t think you used professionals here.”

“Times change, we change with ’em.”

“Well, anyway, my client’s name was James Dee.”

He jotted a note. “Listen Henry, as long as you’re here, I wonder if I could run a little something by you, law-wise.”

“Sure,” I said. “Is the house having a legal problem?”

“Close the door, would you?”

I reached back and pulled the door shut.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe. That’s what I’m hoping you could tell me. This is the situation. You see, one of our residents, hotheaded little guy, well he’s a patient of Edie’s, and it seems he told her that he was going to kill another resident, ex-resident now; he checked out last week.” He jerked his head toward me. “You following?”

“Perfectly.”

“Good, good. So this little guy makes this threat and I find out about it.”

“From the therapist?”

“I hear about it,” he continued, “and, of course, I’m concerned, a mite concerned, anyway. I mean, shit, Henry, people are always threatening to kill each other around here, but this guy, well, he don’t seem to want what we have to offer.”

“What exactly do you want to do? Expel the kid?”

“Well, now that’s where you come in, Henry. See, I want to throw him out, but you know, there’s paperwork,” he shuffled through a stack of files on his desk. “Seems I have to document my reasons,” he said caustically. “For the state, because they give us money now. But Edie says she can’t say anything about what the kid told her because there’s some privilege these days between patients and counselors, like the kind you have with priests or,” he twinkled at me, “lawyers. But that can’t be right, can it? I mean, he threatened to kill this guy.”

“There is a psychotherapist-patient privilege,” I said, “but it’s not absolute. In some cases a therapist does have a duty to warn a third party if one of the therapist’s clients has made a threat against that person. Otherwise, the therapist could be sued if anything actually happened.”

“Exactly,” Chuck said, shedding his vague, folksy manner. “That’s
exactly
what I told her, and I told her that that means the house could be on the line. But damned if she refuses to cooperate. Maybe if she heard it from you.”

“Chuck, the privilege also doesn’t apply if someone other than the patient and the therapist know about the threat. You know. Why don’t you expel the kid?”

“I need Edie to back me up,” he said grimly. “Let’s go find her. It’ll just take a minute of your time.”

We found her in a large closet beneath the stairwell that evidently served as her office. A small metal desk was shoved across the space and against the wall, leaving enough room behind the desk for her chair and a file cabinet. Her phone was connected to a jack outside the room by a long, tangled cord. An uncovered light bulb hung down from the ceiling providing the room’s only light. The trod of footsteps on the stairs was audible above us. The only other furniture was another chair wedged between the back wall and her desk. Anyone sitting on it would have to have sat spread-legged. On the corner of her desk was a vase that held a white rose.

“Edie,” Chuck said, “there’s someone I’d like you to meet, an old friend of mine, Henry Rios, the lawyer. You probably heard of him.”

Edith Rosen was a short, stocky woman in her early fifties, it looked like. Her plain face was comfortably lived-in but her gray eyes were wary and when she spoke there was an edge to her voice.

“I’m sorry, I haven’t heard of Mr. Rios. Is there a problem?”

I decided it would be a good idea to disassociate myself from Chuck whom apparently she disliked. “I stopped by to let you know that Jimmy Dee overdosed last night.”

I handed her the letter she had written for Deeds. She looked at it and then at me, “Deeds?”

“I found it in his room. He didn’t show up in court yesterday, so I went out looking for him.”

“Ah,” she said, blinking. “Poor Deeds. He was your client?”

“Yes.”

“I’m so sorry.” She turned the envelope over and said, softly, “Deeds.”

“I appreciate the letter,” I said.

She gave me a tired smile. “He told me, ‘God must have put you in my life.’”

“Yes, he was fond of invoking God,” I replied.

“Maybe God answered,” Chuck said.

She put the envelope on her desk. “Maybe your God, Chuck,” she replied, then said to me, “Chuck is one of those AA fundamentalists who thinks you’re better off dead than still drinking or using.”

I said, “I can’t imagine any circumstances where anyone is better off dead.”

My answer pleased her.

Chuck cleared his throat and said, “Henry wants to talk to you about something else, too, Edie. That situation we discussed yesterday.”

I quickly said, “Well, actually Chuck, you asked me about it.”

“I know, I know, and thank you for taking it on. You two talk, all right? I’ll be in my office.” He scurried out of the room, leaving me to face a clearly irritated Rosen.

“May I sit down?” I asked.

“Sit.”

I arranged myself uncomfortably in the chair and said, “This wasn’t my idea, Edith.”

“What did he tell you?” she demanded.

“He told me that one of your patients threatened the life of another patient, and that he wanted to expel him, but he needed you to back him up, and you refused.”

“Did he tell you why?” she asked in the same, unyielding tone.

“The psychotherapist privilege.”

“No,” she said, “I mean, did he tell you why he needs me to back him up?”

“No.”

“Because he found out about it by rummaging through my files when I wasn’t here.”

“I see,” I said. “I wondered why he just didn’t go ahead and expel the guy since it seemed that the privilege had been waived.”

“The privilege is waived by disclosure,” she said, “not by breaking into the therapist’s files.”

“Why would Chuck do something like that?”

“Look around you, Mr. Rios,” she said, her eyes sweeping the tiny room. “It’s no accident that I’m in here. The Board of Directors forced Chuck to hire me because the state required it for SafeHouse to keep its funding, but he has no use for me. As far as Chuck is concerned, all you need to get sober is the big book and a few AA meetings.”

“It’s worked for a lot of people,” I observed.

“It doesn’t work for everyone,” she fired back. “The relapse rate for people coming into AA is ninety percent. Those nine out of ten obviously need something more.”

“How does this explain why Chuck rifled your files?”

“He thinks I’m a subversive,” she said. “He wants to know what I’m telling the residents.”

“Look,” I said, “putting all that aside for a moment, this situation that he described does involve potential liability for you and the house if your patient carried out his threat.”

“I know the law in this area, Mr. Rios, every therapist does. If I seriously thought that Michael was a threat to Gus…” She stopped abruptly, and took a sharp breath. “You didn’t know their names, did you?”

I shook my head.

“Sometimes when I’m angry I blurt things out that I shouldn’t,” she said, smiling wanly. “Freudian slip.”

“As long as the cat’s out of the bag,” I replied, “do you mean Gus Peña?”

“You know him?”

“I was at City Hall yesterday when he gave his little speech,” I said, “and I talked to him afterwards.”

Sternly, she said, “My mentioning their names was completely inadvertent.”

“I’m not going to warn him,” I said. “I do think you should, however.”

“What I was going to say,” she continued, “is that it’s my professional judgment that the threat was not serious. Look, there was tremendous conflict between Michael and Gus while Gus was here. Obviously, I can’t go into the details, but I’m satisfied that Michael was simply expressing some anger. He’s not about to kill Gus Peña.”

“All right,” I said, “but what are you going to do about Chuck?”

“I’ll handle Chuck,” she said.

I untangled myself from the chair. “I appreciate what you tried to do for Deeds.” I gave her a business card. “If you decide you need my help over this situation, call me. Chuck doesn’t have to be involved.”

She took the card. “Thank you, Mr. Rios.”

“Henry,” I said. I stood at the doorway, looking at her. Despite her occasional asperity, Edith Rosen struck me as a very trustworthy person. I was tempted to talk to her about my troubles with Josh. Instead, I asked, “If I were going to see a therapist, and I wanted to see someone like you, who would you recommend?”

“Someone like me?” she asked, smiling. “You mean a specialist in recovery?”

“No, I mean, someone I wouldn’t mind telling my secrets to.”

“What are your secrets, Henry?” she asked kindly.

“I live with a man who has AIDS,” I said, “and I think I need to talk to someone about it.”

She nodded thoughtfully. After a moment, she said, “Why don’t you call Raymond Reynolds. I think he has a lot of experience counseling gay men. Here, I’ll give you his number.” She flipped through a Rolodex, and jotted a name and number on a piece of paper.

“Thanks,” I said.

It was still early when I got to the office, and Emma hadn’t yet arrived. I put on the coffee, checked the mail and went into my office. Josh was sitting on the couch, looking out the window. He looked worn out. There was an ashtray with three butts in it beside him. He hadn’t smoked in a couple of years. I sat down. “Hello,” I said.

He looked at me unsmilingly and said, “Hi.”

“I’m really sorry about what I said this morning.”

“I’m sorry about what you said this morning, too,” he replied. “And I’m…,” he hesitated. “Well, I’m sorry I ran out on you. I should’ve stayed.” He lit a cigarette.

“When did you start that again?”

He exhaled. “Ten minutes after I left the house.”

It was really bad if he was smoking again. “Are you leaving me, Josh?”

“Don’t I get to give my speech?” he asked, smiling briefly. “I’ve been sitting here practicing.”

“I’m listening.”

He stubbed out the cigarette. His long fingers trembled and I hurt for him. “We’ve had a lot of fights, lately, Henry, but you’ve never said anything as vicious as what you said about Steve. Maybe I drove you to it. I mean, I have been lying to you, whether you knew it or not.”