Regrets Only

by Nancy Geary

  “Fifteen years, if you can believe it, and for Dr. Reese for nearly a decade perhaps. I can’t recall precisely when she joined this office suite. Ms. Moore was the most recent addition, but even that’s been a while.”

  “What do you do for them?”

  “Filing, billing, scheduling, negotiating rates with health insurers, a little bit of everything. Increasingly, Dr. Reese took over her own paperwork, but Dr. Ellery couldn’t function without me. I’m not sure he could find a paper clip, not that all my years of service are getting me any thanks.” She pushed the fragrant bouquet of lilacs—apparently a fresh delivery—slightly to the right to get a better view of both detectives. Her long fingernails had been painted a bright magenta.

  “Will you be going with him to the Wilder Center?” Lucy asked.

  “No. The announcement had hardly been made and he snatched up some young thing from the Behavioral Therapy Unit. She can barely type and doesn’t understand the concept of filing, let alone the practice, but I’m sure you’ve heard that before.”

  “Can you tell us what kind of relationship Dr. Ellery had with Dr. Reese?”

  “How much time have you got?” She snorted. “Let’s just say that what started out as friendly deteriorated fairly rapidly once they were both nominated for the directorship.”

  “Could you be any more specific than that, ma’am?” Jack asked.

  “I believe they knew each other professionally before Dr. Reese agreed to join this office suite. When she first started here, they seemed pretty friendly. I recall that they left together after work on occasion. I assumed they were going out for drinks or dinner.”

  “Were they ever involved romantically?”

  Betty shook her head. “I would doubt it. Dr. Ellery fancies himself a bit of a ladies’ man, but Dr. Reese was too professional for that—and, frankly, too cold. I wouldn’t be surprised if you found . . . Let’s just say she seemed to be perfectly satisfied without any male companionship. Anyway, for years they had lunch once a week. It was primarily to discuss office matters—I know that because they came back with more than a few new tasks for me—but it seemed that they were friends, too. My guess is they shared some personal information on occasion, maybe sought advice from one another. They seemed jovial enough together.”

  “What changed?”

  “Dr. Ellery became Mr. Hyde once the list of nominees was announced. He wanted that position, and it seemed to me he’d do anything to get it. The man became a monster—giving orders, canceling patients so he could dine with the powers that be, more concerned with his physical appearance and social calendar than his work. I thought it was very unprofessional.”

  “Why did he want it so badly?” Jack asked. “Looks like he’s got a fairly good operation going here.”

  “Power. Money. Prestige. You’re the Y chromosome here. You tell me. The man loves the limelight, and becoming the director of the Wilder Center offered plenty of that. But then—just about the time we all thought a decision would be made—he had a little problem.”

  “What was that?”

  “The Herbert boy’s suicide.”

  “The what?” Jack and Lucy exclaimed in unison.

  Betty was taken aback. “Foster Herbert, a young boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen. He’d been a patient of Dr. Ellery’s for a while. A sweet boy he was, very polite, attractive, but extremely troubled. I did the insurance forms. I’m not the doctor and even I knew his diagnosis was dismal: 296.3x, sometimes with catatonic, sometimes with melancholic, and oftentimes with atypical features.”

  “Can you tell us what that code means?” Jack asked.

  “It is major depressive disorder, recurrent,” Betty recited. “The ‘x’ designates that other features are present.”

  Lucy neither wanted nor needed further explanation. After Aidan’s death, she’d combed the DSM searching for answers. This devastating illness was ingrained in her mind. “Recurrent” meant it didn’t go away.

  “In any event, this past winter—January, I think it was—he shot himself right out behind the family barn while his mother and father were out to dinner,” Betty continued, seemingly pleased to have a captive audience. “The parents blamed Dr. Ellery. I don’t know the particulars, but there was even some stuff in the paper that was critical of the psychiatric care the boy had received.”

  “Do you happen to recall the name of Foster’s father?”

  “Sure. Bill. William Herbert. The wife’s name is Faith.”

  “Do they live in Gladwyne?”

  Betty flipped through a Rolodex, apparently one she hadn’t bothered to keep current. “Yes,” she said, surprised. “The monthly statements were sent to Greaves Lane, although I know the father requested that the final bill be sent to his law office at Leedes, Collin, and Wilkes. How did you know?”

  “I remember something in the newspaper,” Lucy lied. Foster was dead; his sister stood to inherit five million from Morgan Reese. How they were all connected, though—and how Archer might fit into the picture—remained a mystery. She scribbled the name of Bill Herbert’s law firm.

  “Do you know what kind of law he practices?”

  She shook her head. “Anyway, as I was saying, I wouldn’t be surprised if the suicide knocked Dr. Ellery out of the running. Not exactly what a psychiatric hospital wants to advertise, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sure. I can see that,” Jack remarked.

  But then something changed dramatically, Lucy thought. Apparently the nominating committee was willing to overlook Foster’s death once Dr. Reese became unavailable. She glanced at her watch. The scheduled press conference was a little more than three hours away.

  “Then last Sunday,” Betty continued. “When I saw the look on Dr. Ellery’s face—absolute delight—well, it made me sick. Dr. Reese’s body was barely cold. No better than an ambulance chaser, he was more than happy to benefit from this tragedy. He actually had the gall to walk over and kiss me. I’ve a good mind to bring a lawsuit. People pay real money to settle sexual harassment claims.”

  “Do you often work on a Sunday?” Lucy asked, ignoring her diatribe.

  “Try never. But he called me early that morning and told me he needed me in the office. It wasn’t even seven o’clock. But he was emphatic. He said he had lots to do since he’d be ‘moving on,’ as he put it. He offered time and a half, but his threat was what got me in on a weekend. Little did I know I was wasting my time.”

  “What was his threat?”

  “That I would be fired if I didn’t show up. Not that it mattered. I’m out of a job anyway. Dr. Reese is dead, Nancy Moore’s vacating the office space, and Dr. Ellery isn’t taking me with him where he’s going.”

  That may be a blessing, Lucy thought. Once they were finished with the esteemed psychiatrist, he might not make it to the Wilder Center. And an orange prison suit made even a dirndl look good.

  Out on the street, Jack could barely contain himself. “Bill Herbert’s a partner of Carson Leedes!”

  Lucy held up her hand to shield her eyes from the strong sunlight. “Is that a name I should know?”

  “He calls himself a family lawyer. Nothing about family in his line of work, except that there needs to be something to destroy. Leedes is the most famous divorce attorney between Washington and New York.”

  “You’re the happily married man. How do you know about him?”

  “He had a client about eight years ago, a guy named Michael Lucas Abernathy the third. Good-looking in a flashy, stripper kind of way—he’d grown up in Jersey. His father—a guy named Abramowitz—made a fortune in bucket manufacturing. Mike came here, changed his name because he didn’t want the ethnic taint, and bought a big old house in Haverford. Then he decided to divorce his high school sweetheart after fifteen years of marriage, and he hired Leedes to represent him. The legal proceedings weren’t going so well—the judge ordered him to pay alimony that was seriously cramping his style—so he took matters into his own hands. Murdered his wife
and her sister, who had been living with her since he’d moved out. The evidence was overwhelming. The guy was an idiot—prints everywhere. But before we could find him, Mike took his kid—a little girl—and fled. We tracked him to Puerto Rico, but then he literally vanished. No trace. Anyway, I must have questioned Leedes a dozen times. He claimed to know nothing.”

  “You didn’t believe him?”

  “No. But there was nothing left to do. His partners were no help. It’s a prominent firm—leather chairs in the conference room, plenty of fancy art, that kind of deal. I got the distinct impression that the other lawyers leave him to his own devices—or vices, I should say. The work’s unsavory but he’s a major profit center, so they look the other way. Leedes struck me as the type who’d do anything for a buck.”

  “Abernathy has never been found?”

  “Nope. And we had nothing on Leedes. Couldn’t even charge him with obstruction. He’s kept right on practicing. The guy is worth a fortune. I suspect his partner Bill Herbert is, too.”

  “Not rich enough to save his own son.”

  22

  10:15 a.m.

  This is extraordinarily difficult for all of us,” Dr. John Bradley said. He ran his slender fingers through his thinning hair. His face was drawn and dark circles ringed his green eyes, making him appear older than Lucy guessed he was. His blue shirt and white coat were wrinkled. He didn’t need to tell them that he’d been awake all night. “We’re as shocked as I’m sure you were by what transpired. I’m very sorry you had to suffer through that experience,” he said, directing the comment at Lucy. “One of the most difficult things about treating persons with certain kinds of mental illness is accurately predicting the level of violence. Apparently we misjudged on Calvin. Seriously.”

  Jack, Lucy, and Dr. Bradley sat at a round table in the basement cafeteria of Friends Hospital. The odor of scrambled eggs and greasy bacon, well past their prime, filled the institutional space. Aside from a few nurses and technicians taking a midmorning break, and a doctor doing some paperwork at a table by the far wall, the place was empty. Lucy drank directly from a bottle of water. The lukewarm temperature was undesirable, but she didn’t want to miss a moment of the conversation to get a glass with ice. Jack and Dr. Bradley sipped weak coffee.

  “As I told your partner yesterday, despite what happened at your headquarters, in my opinion there was simply no way that Calvin could have murdered anyone only hours after he was discharged from his latest round of ECT.”

  “He’d been discharged. Didn’t that mean he was all right in your view?”

  “Yes. But that’s my point. The effect of ECT is to bring about almost immediate calm. Calvin was on a course of six treatments given roughly one month apart. This was his fifth. He was very subdued.”

  Not that subdued. He’d managed to pin Lucy in a corner, pull her own gun, and then unload its bullet into himself. Next time she wanted to relax, she’d try another antidote. “When we asked him what he’d done Saturday night, he had no recall.”

  “I can believe that. The general anesthesia given to administer ECT produces short-term memory loss, but it’s usually recovered in one to two hours. Certainly by the time Calvin was released from our facility that memory had come back. The other kind of memory loss we see tends to occur after a patient has received numerous courses of treatment—usually four to six. The memories can often be retrieved later on, but at least for the time being are gone. Calvin had experienced some of that, but relatively little compared to most patients.” He paused, and stared at his hands. “Look, most sharks are harmless, but ever since Jaws, they’ve gotten terrible press. It’s the same for ECT. There’s a lot of stigma. I’ve been at this a long time, and I’ve seen some of the most hopeless cases anywhere. In my view nothing is as effective in the immediate treatment of severe depression and mania. In Calvin’s case, his response to the therapy was terrific.”

  “But the point is, he couldn’t remember what happened to him Saturday and there’s nobody here to account for his whereabouts,” Jack said. He voice was firm. Lucy surmised that after everything Calvin had put her through, Jack wanted to be able to pin Dr. Reese’s murder on him, too. At least she wouldn’t have suffered for nothing.

  “That’s all true.” Dr. Bradley looked beleaguered, and took another sip of his coffee. “But I’d been intimately involved with Calvin’s care. Neither Dr. Reese nor I thought that he was a danger either to himself or others. He is—or rather was—a frightened child, truly stunted in his emotional development. He was very dependent on Morgan. I just can’t imagine that he would harm her.”

  “Did you know she had a restraining order against him?”

  Dr. Bradley set his jaw, but said nothing.

  “She considered him a threat—at least to her.”

  This time he stared down at the floor. No doubt the conversation was extremely painful for him. Lucy wondered whether he blamed himself for what had happened. He’d been too confident in the shock treatments and had explained away Calvin’s propensity to violence.

  “What can you tell us about the relationship between Calvin and Dr. Reese?”

  He shrugged. “She’d been his therapist for a number of years. She brought me in because she wanted someone to administer the ECT. We hadn’t met, but she knew me by reputation, as I did her, and I was happy to offer our facility here at Friends.”

  “Did you and she discuss any aspects of Calvin’s therapy?”

  “Not much. She was very respectful of his privacy.”

  “Did you know that Calvin owned guns, or that Dr. Reese had helped him obtain a permit to carry?”

  “I did.” He pushed his chair back from the table and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Dr. Reese assured me that he never loaded them, didn’t own ammunition. He just liked to carry them around.”

  “For his fragile male ego?” Lucy asked. Psychiatrists apparently could rationalize any behavior. Listening to him speak, she was debating whether he or his patient had been more out of touch with reality.

  “As I said, I wasn’t privy to the details. However—” He stopped, seeming to wonder whether he should volunteer the information he was now contemplating.

  “Please, Dr. Bradley. I apologize for my lapse in sympathy, but we really do need to know anything you can share.” Dr. Lunatic was apparently still sensitive to tone of voice.

  “I’m not sure this is relevant, or that I should be telling you.” He rubbed his eyes. “Calvin told me recently that Morgan had begun to act in a maternal way. That she’d been very nurturing, even physical. Those were his words.”

  “Sexual?” Jack asked.

  “I said ‘maternal.’ More like hand-holding and an occasional embrace. What Calvin repeated to me was that something had happened in her own life. It sounded to me to be some sort of countertransference.”

  “Could you explain that?” Jack asked.

  “Transference is expected in treatment, or at least in the kind of Freudian psychoanalytic therapy that Morgan practiced. The patient comes to view the psychiatrist as something beyond a doctor. The psychiatrist takes on a more personal role in the patient’s mind—as parent or boss or lover. It can actually be a very important part of the therapeutic process because it allows the patient to explore issues with respect to those relationships in a more immediate way. Anger, jealousy, betrayal, disappointment all come much closer to the surface. The problem arises when it works the other way, when the therapist starts to see the patient in another role—perhaps as child. Sometimes a sexual attraction develops. Professional distance serves an important goal. Countertransference obviously interferes with the necessary boundaries.”

  “Can you give us any particulars?”

  “According to Calvin, Dr. Reese had made several great mistakes in her life. Because of her therapy with him, she had come to understand at least one of those mistakes better. Her hope was that it wasn’t too late.”

  “For what?”

  “You have
to understand. My information was coming from Calvin. I didn’t need to explore the veracity of her comments. My concern when he and I spoke was the effect her disclosures had on him. Oddly enough, whether she in fact had said any of this, or whether he simply believed that she had, made little difference in the impact he experienced.”

  Lucy felt confused. The disparate pieces didn’t seem to lead logically to any conclusion. “Does a patient have to be picked up by somebody after his hospitalization?” she asked, deciding to give psychiatric mumbo jumbo a rest for the moment and focus on concrete details.

  “Yes. Absolutely. The required stay is relatively brief—less than twenty-four hours after the shock is administered. We want to make sure each patient is brought home safely.”

  “Who picked up Calvin?”

  Dr. Bradley paused. His eyes searched their faces. When he spoke, his voice was so soft that both Lucy and Jack had to lean toward him to hear. “Morgan. Morgan Reese. Another woman was with her, but I wasn’t introduced.”

  “Isn’t that unusual? I mean, for a doctor to take a patient home.”

  He nodded. “Part of what I was mentioning before. I suppose I should have said something. It’s just, well . . . so much of this process is about trust, and Calvin didn’t have a lot of it. From what I could discern, he felt very grateful to Morgan. But I see now that I made a huge mistake.”

  That was one way to classify it, although not the one Lucy would choose.

  “Do you remember anything about this other woman?”

  “She was young—a teenager or maybe in her early twenties. I didn’t pay much attention. Calvin never mentioned a girlfriend. I got the impression she was with Morgan.”

  They were outside on the street when Lucy’s cell phone rang. “O’Malley,” she answered before she’d even looked at the caller identification.

  “I beg your pardon. I must have the wrong number,” the woman at the other end said. “I was looking for Mrs. Haverill.”

  “Ah . . . yes,” Lucy stammered, realizing immediately who it was. “This is Mrs. Haverill.” Out of her peripheral vision, she saw the bewildered expression on Jack’s face.