None of this Ever Really Happened

by Peter Ferry

  The next day was Saturday, so I packed up the dogs and my bike and headed back into the city in time to catch Tanya Kim at Outfitters. "I want to see if you know someone." I handed her the photograph.

  "Are you kidding?" she said. "Is this some kind of joke?"

  "Not your parents. Him. That guy."

  "Oh," she said. "No, I don't think so."

  "I thought he might be a friend or maybe a colleague of your parents."

  "I don't know him," she said.

  10

  . . .

  THE SUMMER OF LISA KIM

  AS I LOOK BACK NOW, it seems to me that the summers of my boyhood often had themes, although I don't know quite how they got them nor which one went with which year. It was all fantasy stuff, all self-invention. One summer a bunch of us spent weeks blazing trails through the Michigan woods. We trampled them, mapped them, and marked them by painting tin-can lids and nailing these to trees. Another summer a friend and I started a lawn-mowing business with an emphasis on the business part; we spent all the money we made on business cards, triplicate-receipt books, and clip-on ties. Another time a bunch of us formed a band, although no one could really play an instrument. We sat around someone's basement wearing yellow-, pink-, and blue-tinted sunglasses, pounding, beating, strumming and wailing really bad songs. We spoke of record contracts. A couple summers we played softball every morning from ten to noon and kept meticulous personal records; in the end we had almost as many at-bats as the big leaguers we were imagining ourselves to be. When I was a little older, I saved up my money and bought a secondhand drafting table, and one summer I was an architect wearing white short-sleeved shirts and designing a toolshed my father later built. The next summer, a friend and I wrote a daily comic strip about turtles because turtles were about all we could draw.

  That summer I lived at Carolyn O'Connor's—the summer of Lisa Kim—I indulged myself as if I were a kid again. This time, of course, I was a detective. It wasn't all that hard to do, either, with ten weeks free and no one there to shake her head or roll her eyes. It involved imagination, prevarication, and a lot of telephone calls. The first of these I made to the hospital where the Kims were on staff, and the second to Miriam Prescott, the woman who was the head of the hospital's special-events committee. She invited me to meet her at her club.

  In the Fitzgerald/Hemingway debate, I side with Hemingway and then some. It seems to me that money often insulates people and makes them silly, like the Kronberg-Muellers and their circle in Mexico. I thought Miriam Prescott would be like one of them or else a long-faced patrician woman in tweed, despite the heat. Instead she had buck teeth and freckles, and I felt bad about taking advantage of her almost before I knew that I was doing it.

  I was surprised to be led to a café table on a terrace beside the tennis courts. "I took the liberty," she said as we shook hands.

  A waitress was already delivering fancy tuna-salad sandwiches with elegant little homemade potato chips, cornichons, big stuffed green olives, and glasses of iced tea.

  "A working lunch," she said, pleased with herself. "I can always justify it when the cause is good."

  "Well," I said, "this is . . . thank you."

  She waved me off. "Just like Henry to make all that fuss and be so cross and then send someone right over. Anyway, where shall we begin?" On the phone I'd told her that I work for the Tribune, and I do sort of and sometimes, but she must have thought I was on assignment. I decided to play along.

  "Well, let's begin with your dinner dance," I said.

  "Of course, it's just one of our three big annual fundraisers." She told me about the other two in considerable detail, and then about the dinner dance itself, the silent auction, the raffles, how the theme is chosen, the committee, how much money was raised for the hospital. I took notes and was happy that I'd thought to bring a notebook and pen.

  "Well," I said finally, "you've given me a lot to work with."

  "I hope so. You can never get too much publicity. Any idea when your article might run?"

  "I'm sorry. I just write them. The editors fit them in. Since this is about your whole program, not just the one event, I suppose they might even hold it until . . . what's coming up? Your fall outing?"

  "That might be nice. That wouldn't be bad at all," she said.

  "May I ask you a question?" I unfolded the photograph of Lisa Kim's parents taken at the last dinner dance which I'd torn from the newspaper, and smoothed it out in front of her.

  "I picked this out of the files, and I just wondered . . ."

  "Oh, that's Dr. Kim and Dr. Kim, our Korean couple. We're so pleased with them. He's a radiologist and she's a pediatrician. Very, very competent."

  "And this gentleman?" I asked. "He looks so familiar to me."

  "Let's see. Oh, that's Dr. Decarre. Albert Decarre."

  "And is he a radiologist or . . . ?"

  "No, no. He's a psychiatrist," she said.

  That morning I sat on Carolyn's deck a long time looking at his phone number in the phone book. Up until now, everything could be rewound and erased. After this I wasn't quite so sure. I took the dogs down to the dog beach at Belmont Harbor and threw sticks for them; I went through the dialogue— especially my half—in my mind. I went home and wrote it down. In the afternoon I bought a prepaid cell phone with cash; I filled out the forms using a fictitious name and address. I bought some Diet Dr Pepper and put three cans on ice. Just before I called, I opened one.

  "Dr. Decarre?" I asked.

  "Speaking."

  "My name is David Lester. I'm a freelance writer and I'm working on an article for the Chicago Tribune about the death of the actress Lisa Kim. Our article is going to state that an eyewitness saw you with Ms. Kim a few minutes before the accident occurred. Do you have any reaction to that claim?"

  "What? No. No, no."

  "We are also going to print that you had a personal relationship with Ms. Kim. Can you confirm or deny this?"

  "Lisa Kim was a family friend. I've been friends of her parents for many years. I'd known Lisa since she was a child. That's all."

  "Paul? What is it, dear?" a voice asked in the background.

  "Nothing. Just the hospital." I jerked my head up. He had just lied. Why had he just lied?

  "We're ready to serve," the voice said.

  "I'll be right there," Decarre said.

  "Dr. Decarre, how long was Lisa Kim a patient of yours?" I asked.

  "I can neither confirm nor deny that anyone is or was a patient of mine. It is a violation of the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Confidentiality Code to do so."

  "Would you like at this time to make any statement, clarify or add information to the article?" I asked. "We would be happy to represent your point of view."

  There was a long pause. "No."

  "Thank you for your time," I said and hung up. The son of a bitch had lied, and he hadn't denied that Lisa had been his patient. And if he was a longtime family friend, why didn't Tanya Kim recognize him in the photograph? That didn't make sense.

  My phone rang, and it was Lydia. Charlie Duke had called her out of the blue. "He's in Kansas seeing his family. He wants to visit us."

  "What? Didn't you tell him?"

  "Of course I told him. I said, 'Charlie, you need to know that Pete and I aren't living together right now.'" I don't think either of us had really said it before. I wondered if it had been hard, and if she had rehearsed saying the words, as I probably would have.

  "Do you know what he said?" she asked.

  "What?"

  "He said, 'Oh you poor kids. That seals it. I'll be right there.' " I laughed. I heard her laugh.

  "So when's he coming?" I asked.

  "Tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow? Oh Jesus, Lydia, I'm not sure I can do this."

  "Well, he's coming. I'll handle this if you can't." Lydia's answers sometimes reminded me of wines. They had tiny hints of martyrdom with the suggestion of moral superiority and guilt infliction.
<
br />   I went to see Rosalie Belcher Svigos again on my way to pick Charlie up at the bus station. First I called her cell phone, gambling that she wouldn't pick up, and she didn't. I left a cryptic little message. Would be in the hospital at 10:00 tomorrow morning. Know the name of the guy in Lisa's car. Rosalie called me three times and I didn't pick up. The third time she left a message to meet her at a certain nurses' station on the eleventh floor. Good. I wanted to see her face when I said his name.

  I was on time and so was she. "Who is he?" she said immediately.

  "Albert Decarre. I think he was Lisa's psychiatrist and her lover."

  "Fuck!" she said. "Son of a bitch. I was afraid something like this was going on." She took me into a family-counseling room and sat down hard in a chair. She wanted to know my evidence, and I laid it out for her. I told her about the photograph and phone call. I told her about his lie and his nondenial. I did not tell her about the hypnosis. She shook her head. "What makes you think they were lovers?" she asked.

  "Lisa wrote—but for some reason didn't send—a letter addressed to P, 'P' period." I took the letter from my hip pocket and gave it to her. She slowly and carefully read it twice.

  "Wow," she said. "How'd you get this."

  "Maud gave it to me thinking I was P. I gave it to an old boyfriend of Lisa's named Peter Carey, thinking he was P; he said it wasn't for him. Then who was it meant for? When I was talking to Decarre on the phone, his wife came in and called him 'Paul'; he goes by 'Paul.' Maybe it's far-fetched, but I started playing around with it, and it's not too hard to get from 'Paul Decarre' to 'P. Decarre' to 'de Carre' if you frenchify it to 'Peter Carey'?"

  "Not so far-fetched," said Rosalie. Apparently Lisa gave everyone she knew a nickname or called them by their initials. Rosalie said I would have been "P" or "Mr. P" or "PF Flyer" or "Old Shoe" or who knows. She also said that she had always felt something wasn't right about Lisa's death, had always known it, but couldn't find even a shred of evidence, so when I called, she'd agreed to see me out of desperation; I was the first person to share her suspicion. It was the timing of the whole thing that bothered her. Lisa had called her a few weeks earlier to say that she was very, very in love, but she wouldn't say with whom. Both those things were unlike her; she usually let other people fall in love with her, and she always told Rosalie everything. And there was the movie she'd been cast in. She was very excited about it. She was working hard on the role and making plans to go to New York. She was running every day and taking megavitamin shots. She'd never felt happier or better. It was, said Rosalie, an anti-coincidence, and she didn't believe in coincidences of any kind. Then there was the whole heroin thing. "It just didn't fit," Rosalie said. "It wasn't Lisa. It wasn't right. Let's look this guy up." She went out into the hall and came back pulling a computer on a cart. I looked over her shoulder. He'd gone to a good med school, been in a top-notch residency program. His clinical interests were depression, drug abuse, eating disorders, marital problems, phobias, sexual dysfunctions, sex therapy.

  "Maybe they all say that," I said.

  We looked at two other psychiatrists on the staff. They had entirely different areas of specialization. "Let me look at something else," said Rosalie. "Listen to this. According to the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation, Dr. Albert Decarre has been reprimanded for professional misconduct."

  "What does that mean?" I asked.

  "Don't know," Rosalie said, "but it could include having a relationship with a patient."

  "So he may have done this before?"

  "Possibly. He's done something. What you really need to know is whether Lisa was his patient." She said that she couldn't help me with that because that information would be in the doctor's records, not the hospital's. When I told her Decarre had a stiff back and asked if she could find out about it, she said only if he'd had surgery, and then depending on where the surgery had been performed. She said she'd try. Her eyes swept by me like spotlights at a grand opening. "If this guy," she said, "if this guy. . . ." Then she focused on me. "What else are you trying to find out?"

  I told her I needed to know Lisa's mother's maiden name and Lisa's Social Security number.

  "Dr. Kim's maiden name is Sam. The Social Security number I don't know, but I might be able to find out. Lisa stayed with us for two weeks when she was between apartments and left a lot of stuff. Let me look at it; I might find a check stub or something."

  I told her I didn't understand the line, "You can say that our little friend helped . . ." I was afraid it might be a reference to drugs. "What else could it be?"

  "Maybe the megavitamins, and those are prescription. I bet you this guy was writing scripts for her."

  There was a time when Charlie Duke could have stepped off that bus as if it were a Learjet, but this day he looked about like everyone else who had come from Topeka by Greyhound, and that wasn't very good. His linen slacks were badly wrinkled, his guayabera shirt could not hide that he'd grown thicker and softer in the middle, his gray hair had a yellowish cast to it, and there was a road map of fine red capillaries on his nose. Then, when he smiled, I saw that the long white roots of his teeth were exposed. "Periodontal disease," he would say. "Awful stuff. Going to lose them all. Oh well." But that was later.

  Charlie tossed one long arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead; there was a time when he could have pulled that off, too. "You poor kids," he said. "I just can't imagine. You'll have to tell me all about it." I never did, and he never brought it up again.

  I gave him the Cook's tour of the city: Printer's Row, University of Chicago, the Adler Planetarium with skyline view (Charlie took several pictures with an ancient-but-immaculate Instamatic camera), the Loop, the lakefront, and Millennium Park. Charlie made a big deal about having to visit "the legendary Billy Goat Tavern," and I knew what that was about. He needed a drink. He'd been drinking when I picked him up although it was barely noon, and I grimaced at the thought of Charlie on a bus with a pint in a brown bag.

  The Billy Goat is underneath Michigan Avenue and the Tribune Tower surrounded by loading docks. It claims to have once been the hangout of writers and reporters from the city's newspapers, and their autographed photos are all over the walls, but these are old and faded now, and its customers are mostly tourists who know the place from John Belushi's "cheeseborger, cheeseborger" skit. Charlie had a shot and a beer; I was able to negotiate my way down to a beer alone. When I kidded him about "riding the dog," he said it was better than Flecha Roja.

  "Flecha Roja?" I said. "Don't tell me you took buses all the way from Mexico City."

  "From Cuernavaca. Actually from Tepoztlán. Father Dick was at a retreat, and Mr. John Handy (Charlie's name for his twenty-year-old Ford) needs a new clutch at the moment, so I even rode the local into town." Twice during his years in Mexico, Charlie had used hard work and good investment to accumulate some modest wealth, but each time he had awakened one morning to discover that the peso had been devalued while he slept, and his money was worth a fraction of what it had been worth the day before. It is the plight of the Mexican middle class which always seems to pay the price for the greed, corruption, and mismanagement of those in power. The very wealthy aren't much bothered, and the very poor haven't much to lose (staples such as beans, rice, corn, and the diesel fuel that powers the old school buses poor people ride everywhere have traditionally been subsidized), but the always-fledgling middle class takes it on the chin every time.

  Charlie and I met Lydia at our old place. He put his arms around her and held her to him for several moments; she smiled at me beneath his arm. The apartment seemed bare to me, although I couldn't identify a single thing that was missing or changed. It smelled a little different. We had a drink, and Lydia and Charlie talked. I watched Lydia. She had a new haircut that was stylish and looked expensive. She was tan. Odd. I had always owned the sun and Lydia the shade. She had lost a little weight.

  Charlie insisted on treating us to dinner, so we went to La Choza
because it was nearby, inexpensive, Mexican, BYO, and the BYO was just beer and wine. By dinnertime Charlie was half in the bag, and I was confused about how that was happening in front of me; he must have been sneaking drinks when he went to the bathroom. We sat in the garden of the restaurant beneath the El tracks and the twinkling, year-round Christmas lights, drank cold Tecates against the heat, and ate enchiladas and arroz con pollo. Charlie told funny stories about the local men he had hired to dig a small swimming pool in his garden. After three years of frustration, he gave up and converted it into a septic tank. He told a troubling story about how he had discovered a method for converting grain alcohol into vodka, and another about two village boys named Pedro and Pablito who had taken to hanging out at the ranch, doing Charlie's chores and running his errands. He spoke of them several times and quite fondly, so that a suspicion hatched in my mind that they might be doing other things for him, or at least stealing from him. And, of course, he told his usual quotient of improbable tales about unlikely characters doing barely believable things. In one of these an over-the-hill Mexican soap-opera star had lost her luxury villa in a backgammon game but not its detached garage, which had a separate deed. All she had left was her '68 Mercedes convertible, so she married her chauffeur and they were living in the car in the garage. To the chagrin of the municipal government, no one could find anything illegal with the arrangement.

  Then there was "Arturo, the lout, a BMW Bolshevik if there ever was one. Everyone knew his father bought him the position at UNAM to begin with, and of course Sylvia left him years ago, sick to death of his philandering. So, after all those years of ranting and raving about the revolution ad nauseam, guess what? They threw him out of the university, and guess why? Not lefty enough. Now, isn't that just a hoot?"