Multiple Wounds

by Alan Russell

He shrugged. “Open your mouth around the Man and it’s usually trouble.”

  “So no one from the police interviewed you that night?”

  “Tha’s right.”

  “When did you hear about the murder?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “Did you know the woman who got killed?”

  The doctor shook his head. “Not really.”

  “Not really, what?”

  “Seen her around.”

  “You ever talk with her?”

  “Coupla words maybe. She had parties at her place, and whenever there was extra food she always give it away.”

  “You resent her for tossing you scraps?”

  The doctor was phlegmatic. “Everybody eatin’ off somebody’s plate.”

  “Are you sure the woman you saw in the garden couldn’t have been Bonnie Gill?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How were they different?”

  “The art lady was smaller and rounder. And she had shinier red hair.”

  “How red was this woman’s hair?”

  “Pretty deep red. Like one of them roses.”

  “How long?”

  “To her shoulders.”

  “When did you call the Carnation Fund with your information?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “What time?”

  “In the afternoon.”

  “Who’d you talk to?”

  “Some lady. Then she got some man.”

  “You remember their names?”

  “Mostly. He was Yallow Adam or somethin’ like that.”

  “Rollo Adams?”

  “That’s him. And I made sure he got my name. Before I told him anything, I asked about the money. He said he’d tape my conversation to make it official, then play it back for me if I wanted, seeing’s I don’t have no address.”

  “And did he tape your conversation?”

  “Uh-huh. Played back some to show me.”

  “I’d like to take you to headquarters. Go over what you saw.”

  “Shee-it.”

  “We’ll throw in lunch. We can stop and pick up some burgers and fries along the way.”

  “Not in the mood for burgers and fries, man.”

  “What is it you’re in the mood for?”

  “A plate of ribs, and a baked patatah with everything, and some corn with lots of melted butter on top, and a hunk of pecan pie. I get those and maybe I’ll be in the mood to talk some. Maybe I talk your ears off.”

  The doctor smiled at Cheever. He’d been around long enough to know the score. And to know that house calls didn’t come cheap.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  “I had another nightmare,” said Helen.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I dreamt that I was in a hole, a deep hole. And that no one could hear me. The more I cried, the more frustrated I became. I tried to crawl out, but I couldn’t. And it kept getting darker. I woke up in a sweat.”

  “We’ve discussed,” Dr. Stern said, “how dreams often symbolize real events, and also how the mind disguises the content of dreams, setting up buffers to protect us. The cost of those buffers is often immense. Whenever we keep bad memories bottled up, we tie ourselves down. It is a weight we have to carry. Do you understand that?”

  Helen offered an unconvinced nod.

  “You said there was a hole,” said Dr. Stern. “What does that hole remind you of?”

  She struggled with the idea. “I don’t know...”

  “Think.”

  Her hands clenched and unclenched. Her eyes fluttered and her head dropped. When she opened her eyes she no longer looked tense, even appeared to be enjoying herself. “The hole symbolizes a vagina, Doctor. A love canal. A mantrap. It’s a slash, a gash, a cunt—”

  “I didn’t call for you, Eris.”

  “The other one was afraid.”

  “But you’re not?”

  Disdainfully, Eris replied, “Of you?”

  “I wish to discuss this matter with Helen.”

  “You always want to talk with her. She and the little snot are your favorites.”

  “I won’t play your game of divide and conquer.”

  In a singsong response, “I can answer your question.”

  “The hole in your dream is not a vagina.”

  “I know that.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the place where dreams die. It’s the grav-y, bab-y. It’s childhood’s end. It’s tripping into darkness.”

  “In your dream it was getting darker. What do you think that means?”

  “Death.”

  So serious, so deep was the word that it hung in the air like a last note.

  “Whose?”

  “I’m the one in the hole, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “I suppose. You think I’m down there trying to avoid skin cancer?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Don’t have a clue.”

  “That’s odd. The dream offers nothing but clues.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No one could hear you. That made you frustrated. Your silence stymies you. There are things that need to be said, life and death matters perhaps, and yet you are silent.”

  “Silence is golden—apples,” Eris said, laughing.

  Dr. Stern recognized Eris’s mythological allusion to herself. There had once been a grand wedding that all the gods and goddesses had been invited to, all except for Eris, who was inadvertently forgotten. Eris wasn’t the kind of goddess who could forgive being overlooked. She acted on the slight, making her absence known. Without being seen by anyone, she tossed a beautiful golden apple into the middle of the wedding hall. The inscription on the apple read: For the Fairest.

  Three goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, claimed the golden apple as their rightful prize. Paris was given the unenviable task of judging the most difficult beauty contest of all time. The goddesses all offered him bribes. Hera said he could have power and riches; Athena tried to seduce him with glory and fame in war; Aphrodite promised him the fairest of all women for his wife. It was beauty that won over Paris. There was a problem, though. The most beautiful woman in the world was Helen, who was already betrothed to Menelaus. That didn’t stop Paris from claiming his prize, which resulted in the Trojan War.

  Eris enjoyed nothing more than throwing those golden apples into Helen’s life. She sat there gloating.

  “Of late,” Rachel said, “Pandora is the one who has embodied silence as being golden. I would like to talk with her now.”

  There was something of the Cheshire cat in the way that Eris’s grin continued to hang in the air, even as she disappeared. Helen’s eyes closed for a long moment and when she opened them the brazen assuredness was gone. Dr. Stern welcomed the new personality.

  “I’m glad you could join me, Pandora,” she said.

  The personality identified as Pandora said nothing, but her eyes were as open as her mouth was closed.

  “I’m not going to ask you to speak,” she said, “unless you feel so moved, but I would like you to listen to what I have been thinking. Is that all right with you?”

  A tentative nod.

  “I see your silence,” said Rachel, “as a form of resistance. Whether it is a conscious decision or an unconscious one, you don’t want to talk about some things you have seen. You prefer keeping those memories locked away because you don’t want to deal with them. You think it is easier to put this pain away than to face it. But we both know that you won’t get better that way. Keeping secrets from yourself, and secrets from me, will only hurt you more in the long run. Your secret lives in the dark hole of your dream. To see, you will need to let light in. Truth will free you from that hole. Do you understand?”

  Another nod.

  “Would you like to talk? About anything?”

  An adamant shake of the head. Rachel didn’t show her frustration. Therapists try to get their patients to do most of t
he talking, but this session hadn’t gone that way.

  “We could discuss anything you want. We could talk about movies, or your art, or dancing.”

  Still no.

  “That’s all right,” Rachel said. “But please remember this: If you don’t cry out when you hurt, the pain goes somewhere else, somewhere deep. If you try to cover up a limp, it will appear elsewhere, maybe as a stutter or a twitch or the kind of limp only you know about. Even without a voice, your pain is showing itself in different ways. We know it is emerging in your dreams. And I suspect it is displaying itself with your other personalities. Your mouth might be shut, but your wound is open. Do you understand that?”

  An almost imperceptible nod.

  The doctor offered a pen and notepad. “Since you don’t want to talk, Pandora, perhaps you’d prefer to write?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about drawing me a picture then?”

  The ultimate carrot. Most of Helen’s personalities loved to draw, but today even that wasn’t enticement enough. Pandora shook her head again. Rachel backed off, but even while retreating she tried to forge an opening.

  “None of the others have heard from you either, Pandora. That’s bothering them. They know that something’s wrong. I’d like you to talk to the others in the next day or two. Will you try and do that?”

  Sometimes therapy was the ultimate game of chess, minds struggling mightily to get the smallest advantage. Rachel knew that Pandora might be less resistant talking to the other personalities than to her. If she could just get her talking, Rachel knew she might be able to facilitate a dialogue through the third parties. Such negotiations were often as labyrinthian as the Middle East peace process. The time frame Rachel had offered Pandora was elastic but not indefinite. It was presented to try and get a commitment out of Pandora without making her too fearful. If she felt too confined, she would run away without answering. For several seconds Pandora didn’t react to the doctor’s words. Then, hesitantly, she offered the slightest affirmation.

  “Thank you, Pandora. I’d like to talk with Helen now.”

  Rachel had seen the transformation thousands of times, but she was still fascinated by it. There was that moment when Helen’s face went slack, that protean instant of transformation from one personality to another. In a glance, the doctor could see that Helen was back.

  “I discussed your dream with Eris and Pandora,” she said.

  Helen didn’t look pleased. She had come to accept the personalities, but she didn’t know them, or want to know them. There were times when she still bitterly referred to them as “the body snatchers,” but those condemnations were less frequent now.

  “I thought you told me Pandora was doing her mute act,” Helen said.

  “She is. Which speaks volumes in itself.”

  “Then maybe I should just shut up.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “Do you think I know what I want to do?”

  “Yes, Helen, I do.”

  “That makes one of us. Or did you poll the others, and they agreed?”

  “I don’t operate a democracy here.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “You seem tired, Helen.”

  “I was up working all night.”

  “Only working?”

  “They went clubbing again. I didn’t start drawing until very late.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “A painting. Paintings.”

  The sketch had only been a preliminary idea. She had rejected it as being too one-dimensional. It needed more. For some reason she had kept thinking about Van Gogh’s sunflowers, how they had appeared in so many of his paintings and in so many forms. The importance of flowers began to dominate her thoughts. Carnations.

  Helen didn’t discuss the flowers. The doctor was bad enough when it came to probing her dreams, but her art was even more personal. It was hers. She was in control of that world, could make it turn out just as she wanted. Just that morning she had decided to change the perspective on the painting’s solitary figure. Instead of only showing a back, she had decided to offer up a side view. As the painting progressed, Helen knew the face would become more and more defined for her and for the canvas as well.

  She had made one other major change. She had decided to take the knife away from the retreating figure. The weapon diluted what she wanted to say. Instead, the hand was going to be holding a huge carnation, the focal carnation in the painting.

  The giant flower would be red. Blood red. With a trail of its petals behind it. Petals that had dropped. Or been pulled, like little wings.

  She loves me, thought Helen, she loves me not.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Cheever watched the monitor. What was on the tube was the Kid talking with Dr. Denton. There were obvious surveillance cameras in both interview rooms, but few people ever noticed them. Unless asked, the detectives never volunteered that taping was going on during the questioning. The doctor hadn’t asked, at least about that. The only thing he had asked for was a second piece of pecan pie. Cheever had talked with Dr. Denton for an hour while the Kid had watched from the monitor room, and then they had reversed positions. Before long Cheever had to decide whether to book the doctor. If he did charge him, it wouldn’t be for homicide, but for vagrancy, or trespassing, or whatever reason was most convenient to hold him. At the moment, Cheever’s inclination was to let him go, even though a CYA mentality would have dictated otherwise. The doctor had a criminal record, one that documented use of a knife. But Cheever doubted he’d had anything to do with Bonnie Gill’s death. He was being helpful, excessively so. Not that he didn’t have his vested reasons. The doctor wasn’t shy about revealing his grandiose fantasies à la the reward money. That, as much as prison bars, would keep him around.

  “Why don’t you tell me again,” the Kid asked, “about how this statue went about turning into a woman?”

  The doctor sighed. He’d been asked the question five, six times already. Cheever only partly listened to his retelling. What he was mostly hearing were the echoes from another conversation. Helen was buzzing in his ear. She had said to him, “Trouble always occurs when statues come to life.” It looked like she was right about that. He remembered how she had stood in front of him, bleeding, emphatically saying, “It would have been better had Galatea just slept and never awakened.”

  Cheever had assumed Helen was talking about a mythical character, but it was hard telling where her fables ended and her reality began. It was the same with her personalities.

  Galatea. He said the name out loud. Curious, he left the monitoring room, walked down the hall, and found an open computer. He typed the word Galatea into a search engine and read the definition: “A statue brought to life by Aphrodite in answer to the pleas of the sculptor, Pygmalion, who had fallen in love with his creation.” Sort of like the Pinocchio story, he thought. But whenever Pinocchio lied, his nose always grew. It wasn’t that way with criminals. Often when they lied only their smiles grew. Cheever went back to the tape room where the Kid was still playing center stage with his grand interrogator act.

  “You sure there was no one else out in the garden?” the Kid asked.

  “No one I could see,” said Dr. Denton.

  “But this woman was seeing someone, or something?”

  The doctor nodded. “Thass what I already told you. Hey, man, I need a drink.”

  “Coca-Cola?”

  “A real drink.”

  “I’ll get you a Coke and a smoke. How’s that?”

  The Kid didn’t give Dr. Denton a chance to answer. He left the interview room. Cheever watched the doctor from his monitor. He sat quietly, expectantly, even appeared a little pleased with himself. Getting cops to jump for him seemed to be to his liking.

  Before bringing Dr. Denton his Coke, the Kid checked in with Cheever.

  “Any place you want me to be taking this?” he asked.

  “Keep him talkin
g about the woman,” Cheever said.

  The Kid nodded and left. A minute later Cheever watched as he reappeared on the monitor carrying a cigarette and soda into the interview room. The doctor accepted the smoke, stuck the cigarette in his mouth, and looked like he expected it to be lit for him. The Kid tossed some matches his way.

  “So did this redhead remind you of anyone?” the Kid asked. “Some actress or somebody you know?”

  The doctor inhaled thoughtfully, held the smoke for a while, then simply said, “No.”

  “You said she had straight hair, shoulder length.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Describe the color.”

  “I told you—red.”

  “Orange red? Flame red? Purple red? Blondish red?”

  “Blood red.” Dr. Denton tossed out the description almost as a challenge.

  “Was the hair natural? Or was it dyed?”

  “I guess only her hairdresser know for sure.”

  Cheever thought of a question he wanted to hear asked. Could she have been wearing a wig? It wasn’t the question the Kid asked.

  “You said she was standing among the statues. Do you think you could draw...”

  The door opened and Mary Beth Carey walked inside. She made the small room that much smaller. Mary Beth was a big woman, weighed around two hundred pounds. She had unruly brown hair and wore the thickest glasses Cheever had ever seen. Her eyesight was never an issue, though. If there was something to be found, Mary Beth was the criminalist who could find it. She was always anxious to help, actually seeking out the detectives to see if they needed her assistance rather than the other way around.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  Cheever shrugged. His thoughts were elsewhere, but he still offered some desultory details. When his words stalled, Mary Beth turned to watch the show. The Kid was trying to get Dr. Denton to choreograph the redheaded woman’s movements. Cheever kept thinking about something else. Like if he had screwed up. Like if he had neglected to do something. Thinking about wigs had him second-guessing himself. He remembered how Helen looked so different when she put on that black wig. What if she had a red one as well?

  “Want to do a background check for a fellow Irishman?” he asked.

  Mary Beth enjoyed playing with computers as much as Cheever disliked doing the same. Everyone on the team thought it was funny that Cheever always tried to get someone else, usually Mary Beth, to do his computer work. He was proficient enough, but preferred spending his time in the field or making calls. Or that rarity of rarities, thinking about a case, really thinking. Cheever had announced more than once that his teammates would rather be playing with computers than playing with themselves.