by Leslie Glass
The hall was empty when she came out. Sergeant Joyce must have taken Lorna Cowles to the precinct to answer some questions of her own. April headed back into the apartment.
No one from the M.E.’s office had arrived to pronounce the corpse dead yet, so Raymond Cowles was still in his bedroom lying on his back on the bed with the plastic bag neatly taped around his neck. The photographing was finished, but someone April didn’t know was sketching the room, measuring everything and labeling distances and angles. He was shorter than she and weighed twice as much; he was working intently and ignored her.
She moved closer to the bed to get a better look. The beige covers of the bed were pulled back in an untidy mound. The body lay on a rumpled sheet that had some stains on it. Whatever body hairs had been there earlier were gone now. If Raymond Cowles had struggled at the end, there was no sign of it. His arms were by his sides. Under the plastic, his unseeing eyes were just slightly open. April reached out to touch his hand. It was cool, rigid. She crouched down to look at the long, slender fingers with their short nails buffed to a low luster. His left ring finger had the indentation of a ring, but there was no ring on it now. The only visible bruise was on his neck—a hickey, round and red and put there before his death. There was no guessing what kind of marks might be hidden under the shirt and trousers.
“April,” Mike called from the living room.
April straightened up. The sketcher continued to ignore her. She opened the drawer of the bedside table with the crook of her finger, even though she knew Mike would already have looked there. Inside was a large jar of K-Y jelly and about a year’s supply of latex condoms in packets of three.
The man had been interested in eating and sex. She closed the drawer and left the room. Mike had arranged some items on the dining-room table, which was still gritty with gray fingerprint powder. The items were in clear plastic bags, already neatly labeled. Among them was a pill container with twenty-five Kaminex remaining from a prescription of seventy-five, a notepad with the name Harold Dickey and a phone number written in blue ink on it, and a copy of Final Exit.
eleven
“Halloween.” Sergeant Joyce spat out the word with disgust. “Worst night of the year as far as I’m concerned.” She threw herself into a chair in the detective squad’s interview room, where the TV was on, set to a surgical procedure. The removal of what appeared to be an eyeball was in progress.
April leaned against the wall behind the monitor so that she wouldn’t have to watch it. Mike sat in the chair opposite her and stroked his mustache.
“One of my kids ate two pounds of candy and threw up half the night. The other one dressed like a washing machine—covered his head with a box from the supermarket and had his sister staple up the bottom. She forgot to put any holes for his arms, so the poor kid couldn’t collect anything.” Sergeant Joyce shook her head fondly. “Can you beat that?”
April and Mike exchanged glances.
Joyce sighed gustily. “Well, what do you think?” She directed the question at Mike.
He winked. “Kids are great,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind having a few myself.”
“No kidding.” Joyce shot him a mean look. “Why don’t I believe that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, I wasn’t talking about kids. I was talking about the case—Raymond what’s-his-name.”
“Okay.” Whatever you say.
The words “ovarian cancer” jumped out of the TV speaker.
Sergeant Joyce’s head jerked around as if she hadn’t realized the show was on. “What the fuck is that?”
April’s stomach rumbled. She jiggled her foot impatiently. It was lunchtime. The minutes were ticking away, and there was a lot to do.
“Looks like the TV. You want it off?”
“Yes, I want it off. I want it always off. Who turns that thing on, anyway?”
Mike leaned over and hit the power button. He shrugged again. If the squad supervisor didn’t know that Healy turned on the surgery channel every chance he got, it wasn’t his problem.
“I hope it’s suicide,” she said suddenly, pulling at her hair. “Our record is really getting to stink.”
April smiled. Yeah, here they were in what was called a quality-of-life precinct: the West Side north of Fifty-ninth Street, Central Park West to the Hudson River. The area included a number of high-profile churches and synagogues, the New York Historical Society, the Museum of Natural History, Columbus Avenue, where the TV networks were, Lincoln Center, several colleges and a university, a huge hospital complex. The list went on and on. This was where robberies, muggings, panhandling, car thefts, drugs, and rapes of the homeless were the major contenders for their time. Homicide was not exactly a daily occurrence around there. People didn’t like it. It made them nervous.
“It’s Healy. I know it’s Healy. He must have been rejected from medical school or something.” The Sergeant smirked at them, wanting them to know that even when she said she didn’t know things, she really did.
“High school,” Mike shot out.
“All right, all right. What about the stuff in this guy Raymond’s apartment?”
“You mean the book and the Kaminex?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a precise description of the plastic-bag suicide in the book, complete with some discussion about alcohol and tranquilizers. If you drink too much and take too many, you fall asleep before the bag’s attached. He had that section highlighted,” Mike said.
Or someone had. April thought of the neat job and wondered how a man might have a lover in for dinner, have sex, get dressed, comb his hair. Then what? Did they have a fight and break up? Was he so despondent he headed for the bathroom, popped a few pills, wandered back into the bedroom to call his shrink?
Then what?
He took the pills, put a plastic bag over his head, lay down on the soiled sheets with his shoes on, and went to sleep? Wouldn’t he want to write a note telling the shrink what had happened? Desperate people usually wanted to tell, to explain themselves.
“The book could be a plant,” April said. Could be there were no tranqs in his body.
“Halloween,” Joyce muttered. She was back on Halloween. “What’s the significance of that, huh?”
“Maybe it was just a coincidence,” April suggested.
“Lots of movement, lots of noise in the area last night,” the Sergeant was lamenting. “You know in these buildings, not all the kids trick-or-treating live there. Sometimes they bring their friends over and do it together. People open their doors without looking.”
April shifted her weight and started jiggling her other foot. Why was Sergeant Joyce fixated with Halloween? Halloween probably had nothing to do with it. The guy was unhappy. He offed himself. After a bottle of wine and dinner and sex all over the sheets? Love bite on his neck.
“Maybe it’s not a coincidence,” Mike said. “If you kill somebody on Halloween it could be a trick. The joke’s on the victim. If you kill yourself, the trick’s on the people left behind. You think Cowles had a sense of humor?”
April shook her head. Sometimes killers did, but suicides usually didn’t. Raymond’s wife had said he was seeing a psychiatrist. The same Dr. Treadwell had prescribed a tranquilizer. Maybe Ray had had trouble sleeping, but maybe he had had a mental problem. April had already dialed the number on the pad found on the table beside Ray’s body. Harold Dickey was also a shrink. According to Ray’s appointment book he’d seen Treadwell, the other psychiatrist, on Friday.
The two psychiatrists seemed to be the key. April checked her watch. It was after one. The person who had answered Dickey’s phone said the doctor was usually in his office between one-thirty and two. If they hurried they might be able to catch him.
“Let’s go talk to the shrink,” April said.
Sergeant Joyce pushed her chair away from the table, scraping new scuff marks on the dingy green linoleum floor. She scowled at Mike. “Be nice,” she warned.
&n
bsp; twelve
The old fire room on level B3 where Bobbie Boudreau spent his breaks had been too small to rehabilitate during the many improvements and additions to the Stone Pavilion since its original construction in 1910-13. The room, a space of about eight feet by ten feet down a rarely traveled jog off a main passage, had been passed over again and again. Its door was green like all the others, but without a label to designate its purpose. Without a label, the room was ignored. It hadn’t been of use to anyone for many years until the day six months ago Bobbie found it in one of his janitorial ramblings.
When he found it, the dust in the little room was so old it was no longer furry. It had hardened into a gritty crust that refused to come off even with soap and water. Stacks of red fire buckets with clumps of ancient sand still clinging to their sides and bottoms lined one wall. A large axe and a smaller one, both badly rusted, hung on the wall above three folding stretchers made of wood and canvas piled one on top of the other. Rolls of rotting fire hoses almost prevented Bobbie from opening the door. That first day when he pushed inside and breathed the hot stale air of the forgotten room from the hospital’s distant past, he’d felt as if he had discovered another country for himself—almost like the cardboard box he’d jerry-built into his own space in a corner of the ramshackle structure the Boudreau family called home when he was a kid.
He’d stumbled on the place only a few days after his mother died in a room not so very different from this in a brownstone a dozen blocks downtown. And it was there, camped on the only cot still strong enough to support his weight, that he brooded on the bitter humiliations and injustices he had suffered in his life, culminating in the final ultimate castration by the bitch Clara Treadwell, who ruined his life and killed his mother.
It made Bobbie’s jaws hurt—set his throat afire, his whole head and brain, in fact—to think how evil that bitch Clara Treadwell was, how much he wanted her dead. After all his years of faithful service at the hospital, caring for the craziest of the crazy, people so vicious and dangerous the other nurses were scared to handle them. He’d cleaned up their shit, their vomit, dressed their wounds when they stabbed or burned themselves, stopped them when they pulled out their hair. He’d sedated them, calmed them with his touch. They’d loved and depended on him, and she’d swatted him down like a fly for a death he had had nothing to do with. Nothing to do with. He’d been scapegoated, humiliated, drummed out of his whole life when all he’d done was his job as he was told to do it, nothing more, not a thing more.
And it wasn’t the first time in his life this had happened, not by any means the first. How could life be so unfair? The answer was that people like Clara Treadwell always abused their power. They always hurt little people. They hurt anybody they felt like hurting. And good people had no way to protect themselves.
It was actually a photograph of Clara Treadwell in the Medical Center’s newspaper that gave Bobbie the idea of cutting out letters, pasting them into messages, and delivering them to the bitch herself. Her picture appeared with some regularity. He’d seen it in the Post when she was appointed to the President’s commission. The same picture appeared in the Medical Center newspaper. A month later there was an article about her condom lectures and her proposal to put condom machines in the adolescent clinic and inpatient departments of the Psychiatric Centre to prevent AIDS. The article talked about the furor her proposal caused.
That photo had also featured Dr. Harold Dickey, Chairman of the Quality Assurance Committee—the other fuck who deserved to die. Years ago Bobbie had walked into an empty patient room on a locked geriatric-depressive ward and found Dickey and the young Clara Treadwell groping each other behind the door. Lots of things just didn’t change. In the recent newspaper photo they stood beside a condom presentation on a blackboard. Dickey’s hand cupped Treadwell’s shoulder. Both were smiling.
For a few weeks after that photo appeared in the newspaper Bobbie put condoms in Treadwell’s files, left them on her chair in the boardroom, in her desk, in the toes of the running shoes in her closet. The locks were changed in the executive suite, but that never kept him out.
He sat on the cot, staring at his collection of bitch photos taped to the wall. The one that galled him the most was the one with the smiling arrogant foolish hypocritical Dr. Dickey. Those two thought they could get away with anything, thought no one knew what their relationship really was, what they were up to. Bobbie felt powerful, knowing about them and knowing they didn’t know he knew.
Like the colonel years ago who never knew how close he’d come that day to dying, Clara Treadwell didn’t believe she was in mortal danger. She didn’t believe in Bobbie’s power. He could see it in the way she walked, in the smile in her publicity photos. Foolish woman was going to lose her old lover. He stuck the photo back on the wall. Since the bum had had his accident and fallen off the bridge, Bobbie had felt very calm. The pieces of his shattered life were coming together again. He didn’t like messes, knew exactly how to kill so no one suspected a thing. Accidents were his speciality. He’d gotten a bonus he hadn’t expected with the bum, and the next two were scheduled. He checked his watch. One-twenty-five. Time to go to work.
thirteen
At one-thirty P.M., in gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt with no slogan on it, Jason Frank jogged down the five flights of open stairways from his office and apartment to the main floor. The stairs, like those in an old first-class European hotel, had been a major attraction for him when he moved there eight years ago. The twenties-era building was unique. It had two ways of getting up and down: the large, old-fashioned, see-into cage elevator and the open stairs. Wide landings went all the way around the building, forming an elegant square from the marbled lobby to the fifteenth floor. The wrought-iron railings were painted black, decorated with insets of brass leaves and elaborate vines.
Once grand, it was all getting pretty shabby now. The diamond designs on the bottom half of the walls, formed from black and white half-inch tiles, were no longer perfect. Many of the tiles were chipped or broken. A few were missing altogether. The well-worn marble stairs were cracked and hadn’t been polished to a high shine in decades. The ceilings, decorated with moldings and golden rosettes, were in need of a paint job and some new gilding.
The building was a co-op. Recently the board had taken a poll to see how many owners wanted to spend the hundred-thousand-plus dollars it would take to make the necessary repairs, but the outcome hadn’t been revealed yet. As Jason hit the main floor, the doorman glanced at his watch.
Emilio was twenty-five and watched everybody’s comings and goings with an avidity that was unusual even for the chummy Upper West Side. He had seen the doctor’s last patient come down and was pretty sure the man was gay. It made Emilio worry about the doc. If the doc had gay patients, did that mean he was gay himself? It was the kind of thing you just had to ask yourself. And now, ten minutes later, Dr. Frank was in a sweatsuit heading for the door.
“Going for a run, Doc?” Emilio asked.
Jason smiled. No, he was going to rob a bank. “Morning, Emilio.”
“Not for over an hour and a half. It’s afternoon now.” Emilio opened the heavy glass-and-wrought-iron door.
Dr. Frank walked out. He didn’t look gay. He was about six feet tall, taller than Emilio’s five ten. He was also a lot thinner than Emilio. The doc had a lean runner’s body, medium-brown hair, cut pretty short. He looked kind of like a Kennedy, one of those privileged kind of people. Well-built, good-looking, with a good background and all his shit together. Except he had a beard now. More than three weeks’ worth of beard, and he was still scratching at it. Emilio studied the doc as he went out the door. Was he gay or not?
“Watch out for those raindrops now. It’s going to rain.”
Jason didn’t answer. He was very careful not to say much to Emilio. The young doorman had some problems with his identity. For a while the young man had been telling all the people coming to see Jason that he and Jason were colleagues
because Emilio was studying psychology at the community college he attended at night. He said he could tell things about them just by the way they walked.
That kind of thing amused colleagues but made Jason’s patients extremely uneasy. Jason had to tell Emilio to keep his speculations to himself and not do a single thing more than open the door. That was his job and his limit, to open the door. He had considered knocking the young man’s teeth out but decided that was an overly aggressive and unproductive approach to the problem.
Outside, he sniffed the moist chilly air and shivered. He hated the cold, considered it a personal enemy he had to conquer every year. It was November already. Pretty soon he’d have to stop running outside and start traveling across town to work out at the 92nd Street Y. Jason hated that. It took up too much time. Six months of the year, when it was warm, he ran in Riverside Park. He ran in the morning before he saw his first patient or sometime between twelve and two. He had a rationale for everything he did, and in the eight years since he had qualified as a psychoanalyst, he had worked out his days and hours exactly to fit the requirements of his profession, which was unlike any other.
He taught medical students and psychiatric residents. For each hour-and-a-half lecture, it took about forty hours of preparation. He taught at three different levels. Every level had to know certain things by the end of one of his talks. Medical students got the basics. The same subject for residents was much denser and deeper. For colleagues in associations he had to write the papers in advance. Jason got paid nothing for teaching and nothing for supervising residents. The personal cost of becoming an important analyst, a mover and shaker in a rigid and unyielding field, was something no analyst talked about.
