by Leslie Glass
“He never missed a session, was never late. Why are you asking me these things?” John looked at her with undisguised curiosity.
“Dr. Dickey had taken some medication that contributed to his death. We’re trying to establish how that happened, Dr. Flower.”
“Oh, please, call me John.” John cocked his head, staring at her in a boyish way. She noticed that he had green eyes. “May I ask you what?”
“What medication?”
“Yes, it might help.”
“I really can’t say.”
Flower made a harrumphing noise. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter, except there are things you can take by accident and things you can’t, if you see what I mean.”
April smiled. “It was, apparently, something he didn’t take as a general rule.”
“The rumors say he was drunk.”
“Was he a drinker?” April asked evenly.
Flower raised an eyebrow, continuing to stare at her speculatively. “From time to time I have had the suspicion. Not enough to incapacitate him, though. He never looked or acted drunk.”
April nodded. She wondered what was wrong with the young doctor that he had to be in therapy. He seemed attractive and not unintelligent. “Do you think he was suicidal?”
Flower shook his head. “Once he got hung up at an airport somewhere and didn’t think he was going to be able to make my session. He called me from the airport and left a message on my machine.”
He fell silent, breathing in the scented steam of his coffee. Then he said, “I had a nine-o’clock on Monday.”
“Uh-huh,” April said.
“We were going to terminate soon.”
“Terminate? Does that mean the end of treatment?”
“Yes, and I knew him very well. He wouldn’t have done this to himself without making sure I was okay. And that goes for everybody else he treated.”
“I understand.” April glanced at her watch. She was going to be late for the FBI. “Look, I have to go. Thanks for your help.”
Flower seemed disappointed. “Listen, I’d like to help. Can we talk again? I could nose around, ask a few questions, and get back to you.”
“Thanks,” April said, holding in a smile. Everybody there was so helpful. “I’ll let you know.”
“He was a great guy. I wouldn’t like to think …” John Flower got up and followed her to the door. “You’ll find out, won’t you? You’ll find out what really happened to him, won’t you?”
“Yeah,” April murmured. “We usually do.”
forty-nine
The three chairs in Sergeant Joyce’s office were already occupied when April arrived six minutes after the hour, panting a little from her sprint up the stairs.
“Thanks for joining us, Detective,” her supervisor said sourly. She nodded at the narrow-faced man in the gray suit sitting next to Sanchez. “This is Special Agent Daveys from the New York Branch. Detective Woo.”
Sanchez still retained his smiling Buddha countenance from the morning. He winked at April April bobbed her head at Daveys.
“Detective.” Daveys held out his hand so that April had to advance and take it. “Nice to meet you.” The guy was thin and didn’t look particularly strong, but he had a muscular grip that didn’t let go when April did. Her expression remained blank as her bones crunched. She cracked a few knuckles when her hand was returned to her.
Sergeant Joyce raised an eyebrow at her. Problem? April’s shoulders moved about half an inch. The agent looked vaguely familiar. She had a feeling she’d seen him before.
“So, Daveys, you were about to tell us the reason we’re joined together this lovely afternoon,” Joyce said.
Daveys smiled beatifically. “Sergeant Sanchez, Sergeant Joyce, Detective—Woo? Looks like the U.N. around here.”
Joyce’s eyes narrowed. “Yep, we can help in any language. You have a problem, Daveys?” She looked ready for a juicy sneeze, pressed a finger to the base of her nose to contain it.
“From what I understand, Sergeant, you’re the one with the problem. I’m here to assist with the solution.”
“Well, that’s just great. Why don’t you fill us in on the case and your reasons for involvement?” Joyce was the supervisor, so she was the speaker. She looked feverish, though, germy and damp.
“Why don’t I start with the questions?” Daveys replied.
“Well, this is just a little unusual. Generally, when our department thinks we need help, we get people from our own bureau,” Joyce said.
“Uh-huh,” Daveys replied. “So?”
“So, what’s the story here? What interests you about a local unnatural?”
“We want to help you out with your case. On our end there may be some question of conspiracy.”
“Oh, yeah, what kind?”
“Corruption,” Daveys answered.
“That’s very interesting,” Joyce said, not appearing very interested. “Corruption covers a lot of territory, Agent Daveys. It could mean something. It could mean nothing. You want to share with us what your connection is?”
“Well, that remains to be seen. What we’re looking for at this time is some cooperation. You let us see what you have, we’ll work closely with you on the thing, help you with your case, give you the use of our people, our facilities, our labs. Whatever you need.”
Sergeant Joyce sneezed suddenly. The sound resembled the explosive blowout of a tire. No one blessed her. When she recovered she murmured, “That’s very decent, very generous of you, Daveys.”
“We try to please.”
“We try to please also, don’t we, Sergeant?”
Sanchez stopped licking the ends of his mustache and said they did.
“So …” Daveys spread out his hands. “What’ve we got here?”
Joyce glanced at April. April had a finger in one of the ivy pots on the windowsill, testing the soil for wetness. The plant didn’t look so good. Maybe it had caught the Sergeant’s cold.
“You want to brief us on the investigation, April?”
Now April knew where she’d seen Daveys. The dark blue sedan. He’d been cruising the street in Westchester while they were interviewing Dickey’s widow.
She said, “Dr. Harold Dickey died of a massive heart attack on Sunday afternoon, November 7, as the result of ingesting a large amount of alcohol mixed with Amitriptyline. He was with Dr. Clara Treadwell at the time of his seizure and death. Dr. Treadwell’s story is that she returned from out of town and met Dickey at his office at the Centre. From his appearance she immediately deduced he’d been drinking for some time. Within minutes of her arrival, he collapsed. She tried to resuscitate him, called for the paramedics. They took him to the emergency room, where he was pronounced dead after all measures to save him had failed.”
April glanced at Joyce. The Sergeant’s head was buried in her hands. She looked bad. “Rotten kids,” she muttered. “They’re back at school, and I’m sick as a dog. I can’t afford to be sick. Go on.”
“As I said, the M.E.’s report showed that the victim was poisoned by the aforementioned substance. Our first line of questioning was to determine whether the victim might have ingested the drug by accident. We ruled that out this morning when the lab results showed drug residue in the glass he’d been drinking from. So far, there has been no indication that the victim was depressed at the time of his death and might have taken the substance voluntarily.
“Dickey was a drinker, but not a fan of medications of any kind. He has been described by his wife and colleagues as strictly conscientious. He had a full schedule for the coming weeks—classes, an academic conference, a vacation trip to Aruba in December. He had no family history of suicide. The six people I spoke to about him, including his wife, all said he was not the type to commit suicide. In addition, his behavior in the days before his death indicated that he was concerned about something and working on something. And although he left his office a mess, there was no sign of a liquor bottle or a container for the drug.”
/>
Daveys scratched his neck. “So you think someone poured him the lethal mixture. Like Socrates, the victim drank it, then the aforementioned murderer took away the evidence, hoping the death would look like a heart attack.”
Joyce flashed him a dirty look.
Daveys didn’t seem to mind. “Well, kids, that’s pretty quick work. How many people had a reason to kill him?”
“At this moment the prime suspect seems to be Clara Treadwell, the person with him at the time of his death,” Sergeant Joyce said flatly.
“And what’s her motive?”
“She’s named in a multimillion-dollar malpractice case involving the suicide of a patient about a week before. Apparently Dr. Dickey supervised her in the case years ago. He was also her lover.”
“Anyone else?” Daveys asked.
Joyce turned to April. “Anyone else?”
“Dr. Treadwell suspects a former male nurse name of Boudreau. A year ago Boudreau gave an inpatient an overdose of Amitriptyline. The patient jumped off a terrace.”
Daveys grimaced. “Messy. Have you talked with Boudreau?”
Joyce gave him another dirty look. “Not yet.”
“Well, get him in here so we can talk.”
“All in good time, Daveys.”
“Well, you don’t want grass growing under your feet, now, do you?”
Joyce turned to Sanchez. “Sergeant? Anything you’d like to add?”
“Not at this time.”
“Well, thanks a lot, kids. Our people would like to see everything you have. Get the stuff together, will you.”
“Stuff, what stuff?” Sanchez asked.
“Whatever you have—notes, lab results, death report.” Daveys got up to leave. “Good working with you. I’ll be in touch.”
For a minute or so after Daveys’s departure, no one said anything. Then Joyce checked her watch, shaking her head at how time had flown. The shift had ended half an hour before.
“Well, I’m out of here,” she announced. “And so are you. April, go talk to Treadwell. Mike, go home.”
April raised her eyebrow at Sanchez. He shrugged. Then, as they were filing out, Joyce added, “Good working with you,” as if she’d just thought of it. She neglected to mention their gathering any stuff together to hand over to anybody.
fifty
It was hot and dry in Clara Treadwell’s elegant living room. In fact, the whole apartment had that beginning-of-winter feeling prewar buildings got when the furnaces were turned on full force for the first time after a long humid summer. Clara paced anxiously in front of the windows facing the Hudson River, black as ink against the evening sky. Outside the windows the first snow flurries danced on the decorative black railings and were swept away without sticking. Around her, the room dimmed to deep gray without her noticing.
April Woo sat motionless in a Queen Anne armchair, her face completely empty. This detective was no friendly Connie Chung type, and the emptiness behind her eyes was a little unnerving to Clara, especially after the open approach of the FBI man, Daveys.
Clara considered how best to deal with the situation. Her area of expertise didn’t have cultural sections like the humanities and sociology. Psychiatry still believed that all peoples developed pretty much along the same Freudian model. Lately, Asian psychiatrists had begun advising their colleagues about the Oriental character. Asian patients (even those born and raised in the West) were organized around a concept of the collective good and not around individualism, so patients urged toward a “healthy” Western standard of integration were threatened with becoming selfish, alienated criminals by their culture’s standards. Asian shrinks warned that the incorrect integration of the two cultures could have devastating consequences.
Clara had never treated an Asian patient. She tended to snub Asian psychiatrists in the same way she snubbed the Canadians, the French, and the Italians—as hopelessly backwater and with nothing worthwhile to contribute to the field. The first time the two police detectives came into her office, she’d had them classified. Detective Woo was a definite petty-bureaucrat type, unimaginative, rigid, and unyielding. The Latino she figured was about on the level of the security guards at the door. Macho and clueless. Clara knew how to handle people like that.
Woo’s notebook was open on her lap. Clara noticed that it was the same kind her assistant used, but that the detective’s notes had a few Chinese characters in them. That bit of foreign secretiveness, too, fanned the deep hostility she had toward the police.
Clara believed April Woo had botched the investigation of the Cowles death and set her up for a malpractice suit that threatened the position she’d spent so many years creating for herself. She believed her whole life was on the line because of this young cop’s fuck-up. And now—no doubt because she had allowed Jason Frank to overrule her own best judgment about the condom this morning—Woo was still hanging around, investigating Hal’s death.
Clara suddenly realized it was dark and began to circle the room flipping light switches. Now she could see that the Asian detective’s hands were not completely at rest on her notebook. The cop was getting nervous and impatient. Clara deliberately slowed her pace to let the other woman stew. She’d talk when she was ready.
Clara did not look at the policewoman, did not want to talk to her. It was Friday at five-thirty, now completely black outside. She had made the woman wait downstairs in the lobby for fifteen minutes. Then, up here in her living room, she had delayed several more minutes. Clara didn’t like the police. She had been comforted by the emblems of her own class displayed by Special Agent Daveys, the familiar gray suit and white shirt, the briefcase, and the familiarity with the same English language she spoke. She seemed to recall from somewhere the fact that FBI agents had law degrees, and it was the FBI that set up the techniques of profiling serial killers. Daveys had assured her they would be able to obtain all the evidence in Hal’s murder and do what was necessary to quickly apprehend the man who had killed him.
“What did you find out?” she asked suddenly.
“We don’t believe at this time that Dr. Dickey’s death was an accident,” the detective said flatly.
Clara inhaled through clenched teeth. The sound she made was like the hiss of an angry cat. “The reason?”
“There were no containers of substances that killed Dr. Dickey in his office.”
Clara frowned, raking her thoughts back to the day Hal died. There had been a bottle of Johnnie Walker on his desk. She remembered thinking it was almost empty and Hal was drunk. She had concluded that he must have been drinking all afternoon. She had assumed the bottle was still there.
“Why don’t you tell me about that afternoon,” the detective suggested.
Clara opened and closed her hand around the scab that had formed over the cut on her hand. A few more days and the scab would peel off. By then she was certain the man responsible for it would be behind bars. She tried to concentrate on that as she spoke.
“I returned to my apartment around four on Sunday—I had been in Florida for the weekend. There was a message from Hal on my answering machine.” The tic that lived in Clara’s cheek began to dance. She tightened up, resisting it. “He asked me to come to his office right away.”
“Why?”
Clara fixed her gaze on the Chinese cop. “I’m being harassed. Hal was looking into it for me.”
“And that was what Dr. Dickey called you about?”
“Yes. He told me who it was. He wanted to show me—I don’t know—something that would prove it.”
“And …?”
“When I got to the office, I saw that Hal was drunk. Then, almost immediately, I realized he was having some kind of psychotic break. I didn’t have any idea of the cause, of course. And then he collapsed. It was immediately clear to me something was wrong.” Clara clicked her tongue. “Obviously he was poisoned by the man who was threatening me.”
“Was it common knowledge that Dr. Dickey drank in his office?”
&
nbsp; Clara traced the scab with two fingers, testing the skin around it as if for doneness. “I have no idea. I didn’t know myself.”
“Dr. Treadwell, the threats you were getting, the incidents with the scalpel and the condoms that Dr. Frank told us about”—the detective watched Clara play with her hands—“why didn’t you report them to us?”
Clara stilled her fingers. “It was stupid. I realize that now.”
“Dr. Treadwell, you’re the director of a mental hospital. Surely you’d be the first person to understand how dangerous troubled people can be.”
Clara smiled bitterly. “Sick people often get a bad rap, Detective. Sane people can be deadly, too.”
“In any case, you didn’t call the police.”
“No.”
“And a man died.”
“Yes.” Clara looked down at her hands. Now this stupid cop was accusing her of negligence. Her face blazed, but she kept her voice under control. “I said it was a mistake. I had no way of knowing this would happen.”
“What about Raymond Cowles? Did you have no way of knowing that would happen?”
“Detective, the Cowles death has nothing to do with this. If you carry on in this vein, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I think you messed up. I don’t believe Ray committed suicide.”
“Nothing like this has ever happened before?” The detective looked surprised. “No patient connected with your hospital has ever committed suicide? I thought a certain percentage of mental patients commit suicide no matter what you do to help them. Even in the hospital it happens.”
“Look, we work with very sick people. Of course it happens.”
“In fact, it happens fairly frequently.”
“It happens. I said it hasn’t happened to me.”
“But Dr. Dickey was familiar with such incidents. He dealt with them all the tipie. He was the chairman of the Quality Control Committee.”
“Assurance. Quality Assurance Committee. Yes. And that was how we knew the man who jumped off the terrace last year was not a suicide. That man had been poisoned, just as Dr. Dickey was. They’re not all suicides, Detective. Dickey was murdered by Robert Boudreau. We know that, so go arrest him before he kills someone else. That’s what you’re paid for.”
