Loving Time

by Leslie Glass

  Dr. Treadwell went on. “But I’m a little uncertain what I’m at liberty to reveal in a matter like this … the ethics of confidentiality … I’ll have to consult a lawyer.”

  That was it. Interview over. April glanced at Mike.

  “The deceased was your patient,” he said.

  Dr. Treadwell shook her head. “Not at the time of his death. As Director of the Centre, I can’t take private patients. Ray Cowles was a patient of mine, years ago. Over a decade ago—more like eighteen years to be exact—”

  Abruptly, the doctor stopped talking. She picked up the tape recorder and turned it around in her hand. “I’m very saddened by Ray’s death, Sergeant. Thank you for telling me.”

  Dr. Treadwell gave the two detectives a small, saddened smile and pushed the button to stop the recording. April was right. At the mention of the lawyer, the interview was over. They were dismissed.

  fifteen

  Mike and April exited the Psychiatric Centre and crossed to the no-parking area where they’d left their unit. The sky had thickened into a dense rain cloud that was just beginning to unburden itself in a very fine drizzle. It was colder, too.

  At the car, Mike smoothed back his hair and held out the keys. “You want to drive?”

  April shook her head. She opened the passenger door and slid in, slamming it harder than she meant to.

  Mike jogged around to the driver’s side. Just as he reached for the door handle, the sky opened up. Sheets of fat raindrops plummeted down. He dove into the car, banging the door and sprinkling water all over the front seats, shaking his hands in April’s face.

  “Hey, watch that.” Cold on April’s cheeks, the rain felt fresh after the hot dance in the executive offices upstairs. She laughed, relieved to be out of there.

  Mike settled in his seat, adding to the musty old car a mix of aromas that included fruity Caribbean aftershave, Old Spice deodorant, and wet wool. He didn’t make a move to start the engine. He was busy with the rain on his face, with his sleek wet hair. The torrent streamed down the windshield, completely blocking the world outside.

  This was how he liked it, stuck with April in a very tight space. This was when he was tempted to tell her the stories of his life and ask to hear hers. This was when he most wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her. All the windows were fogged up. From outside in or inside out no one could see a thing. He glanced at her, but she was studying the rain pummeling the windshield, didn’t say a thing. He knew if he tried to kiss her, she might take her gun out and kill him. April seemed to think love was some kind of curse. He didn’t know why any woman would be as hard and unyielding as that.

  “I’ve decided to move,” he said suddenly.

  “When did you decide that?”

  He laughed. “This morning. In the shower. I was thinking of you, and I decided it was time to get a place.”

  Sitting in the car with the rain hammering at them, April could almost imagine it. The downpour sounded like a shower. She didn’t want to think of Mike without his clothes. “Let’s go. I’ve got a lot to do. I’m hungry. It’s almost two-thirty.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s hard to get a shrink to tell a straight story. Even in homicide cases, they always claim patient confidentiality.” She sighed. “Maybe we’ll never know what happened to Cowles.”

  “Not that.”

  April laughed. “Well, I’m glad you shower, if that’s what you mean. But thinking of me? I don’t know, Mike.… You got a hundred and one girls crazy about you. Why think of me?” She turned to him, her face appropriately blank.

  “You’re the detective. You tell me.”

  “Nope. I’m not in your head.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You are in my head.”

  She shifted uneasily. Uh-uh, she wasn’t going for monkey business in a unit. Why didn’t he give it a rest?

  “Okay, then, what about you?” he said.

  “What about me?”

  “You shower or bathe? This is important.”

  She made a tsking noise with her tongue. She knew of officers who had gotten up to things in their units. Knew the cooping places along the Henry Hudson Parkway. Precinct life was practically living together. There would have to be some monkey business among the uniforms. Some of it consensual, some of it not so consensual. Nobody liked to talk about it, but sexual harassment happened. A lot.

  As for the detectives, they were so together there were bunk beds down the hall from the squad room for people who didn’t want to go home on night shift-day shift turnarounds. With the exception of Sergeant Joyce, April was the only woman in the detective squad. Sergeant Joyce went home to her kids. April went home to her parents even if it turned out to be for only two or three hours. She went home, thought about Mike, then came back, saw him, and wanted to get away again. It was weird.

  “I’ll tell you what,” April said. “If I’m so much in your head, I’ll think it and you tell me.”

  “Fine.”

  Although April showered every morning, she thought of all the bath beads and bubble baths lined up on the shelf above her bathtub. She bathed at night and on weekends.

  “You do both,” he told her. “Bath and shower. How’s that?”

  “Adding the third option gave you only a thirty-three-percent chance of being right.”

  “Well?”

  Well, she could lie and say he was wrong, but she wasn’t much of a liar. “You’re right,” she admitted.

  “Good. You should trust me more.” The rain had slowed to a trickle. With a grin, Mike wiped the fog off the inside of the windshield, then started the car. “So what do you think about my moving out on my own?”

  That wasn’t a good question to ask April, who had moved out only as far as the second floor herself. “I don’t know. You ever live alone?”

  “Entirely all by myself alone? No.”

  “Me neither.”

  He swung around in a wide U-turn. “You ever live with that guy—what was his name?—Jimmy?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What for?”

  “You were honest. I asked you a question, you didn’t slide around on it, saying it wasn’t my business. You answered the question.”

  “Well, I didn’t live with him,” April said, indignant now. “Why would I want you to think I did?”

  “Doesn’t mean you weren’t sleeping with him.”

  “I’m not a nun.”

  “Querida! I’m relieved.” Mike laughed, then hit the hammer and ran a red light.

  sixteen

  “I didn’t do it, you fucker. I didn’t do nothing. God gonna come down and she gonna rip your heart out. She gonna give your babies boils and plagues. That’s what she gonna do.” The invective from the woman in the holding cell came out in a long, bitter tirade. When it was over she began again. The woman was wearing three or four layers of clothes, all torn and reeking. She wouldn’t sit down on the bench against the wall. Occasionally she kicked at it.

  “There’s roaches in here,” she screamed.

  No one denied it.

  “Hey, get me out of here. I didn’t do nothing. You put me in jail for nothing.” She hung on the bars of the holding cell, trying to get her fat head through. Her face was puffy and blotched. Her stringy hair was tied in a few loose knots that hung down on either side of her face.

  The four people in the squad room were on the phone, ignoring her.

  “Hey! You. Fucker. God’s gonna rip your heart out.”

  Detective Aspirante, at the desk closest to Ginesha, the civilian secretary who answered the phones and took messages, crossed his legs. “Pipe down, can’t you see we’re working here?”

  “I can see it. I can see you fuckers working.” The woman started her own private spitting contest. How far out from the bars could she land one?

  For a few seconds it was almost peaceful—Ginesha, Aspirante, Mike, April, all talking on the phone, look
ing out the windows at the rain pounding Eighty-second Street.

  “Aw, shit, don’t do that. Come on.” Aspirante was on his feet. “That’s disgusting. Jesus.” He looked around for help. “She’s spitting on the fucking floor.”

  Sergeant Joyce came out of her office with a file in her hand. “What’s the matter, Aspirante?”

  The woman in the holding cell screamed at Joyce. “He hit me. That fucker hit me.”

  Joyce made a disgusted face at Aspirante. He shook his head.

  “Oh, no. I didn’t even bring her in. Healy brought her in.”

  “He knocked me down and raped me, too. That’s the one.” The woman pointed at Aspirante. “He’s a cop. I knew he was a cop. God’s gonna rip his head off. She is.”

  “What’s her story?” Joyce demanded.

  “Some old guy crossing Broadway stumbled into her grocery cart. She was napping on a bench. Heard the cans rattle in the cart, got up, and knocked him flat with a broom handle. Broke his arm with it.”

  “Get her out of here.” Joyce turned back to her office. “We got a raper coming in.” She went into her office, kicking the door closed behind her.

  “Hey, Woo …” Aspirante began.

  April listened to the voice on the phone, ignoring Aspirante’s approach. “Well, when is he coming in? Uh-uh, I see.”

  “Hey, Woo. The Sergeant wants you to get the Broom Lady out of here.”

  April swung her chair all the way around to face the wall and the window, ignoring him.

  Mike hung up. “What’s your problem, Johnnie?”

  “She spit on the floor.” Aspirante directed his attention to three fat gray lugies on the floor.

  “I got to pee. I got to pee. Get me outta here. I got to pee. I mean it. I really got to.”

  “Hey, Woo. The lady’s got to pee. Take care of it, will you?”

  “Yes, you have my number. Give me a call if you think of anything else.” April rang off. She turned to Aspirante and spoke in a quiet, hard voice.

  “Don’t do that again.” She enunciated clearly. “Didn’t you see I was on the phone?” She looked up at him. It was a long way to the sneer. Aspirante was about six feet two, weighed about two hundred and thirty, maybe forty, pounds. Of that maybe an ounce or two was intelligence.

  “You were on the phone?”

  April stood up. Now it was five five to six two. “I’m off the phone now,” she said evenly.

  Aspirante thrust one hip out as if to stop her from getting away if that was her intention and looked way down at her, truculent. “Well, while you were on the phone we got ourselves a crisis. The lady here has to ur-in-ate. Then the Sergeant wants her out of here.”

  “It’s not my call.”

  “When a lady has to pee, Woo, you’re the only one here to take the call.”

  April didn’t say any of the things that came to mind. She had a fleeting thought that Aspirante would not be a friend if they met one night in a dark alley. But that was nothing new. In dark places, she didn’t think anybody would be a friend. Behind Aspirante, Mike got to his feet. Shit. Now the cavalry was on the way.

  “Mike, I want to talk to you,” April said. “I’ll take care of it, John. You can go back to your cage now.”

  Aspirante’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we’ve all got work to do.” Mike came around the side of the desk. “She said she’d take care of it. Now you go ‘Thanks.’ ”

  But Aspirante couldn’t say thanks. It was a lot to ask for him to get himself centered in his big body and figure out where he was. He took a moment to do that, tried to figure out if he’d won or lost the battle, couldn’t tell. He stood there watching April call downstairs for a uniform to deal with the Broom Lady, get her to the bathroom and the papers sorted for the next step in the process. Healy was in the interview room talking to the injured man’s son. If the son wanted to file an assault complaint, it would be hours before the woman was back in her spot on the street. By then the rain might have slacked off. Aspirante went back to his desk. Goldie, a uniform with a long history of dealing with the homeless and crazy, came to take the Broom Lady away.

  “You get yourself in trouble again, Mamie?” she asked the Broom Lady. “What are we going to do with you?”

  Mike leaned against April’s desk. “What’s up?”

  “The doorman on duty last night in Cowles’s building was a temp. It was the first time he’d worked there. He didn’t know anybody, so he had no idea who came to see whom last night, what time they came, or what time they left. No idea at all. He said he wasn’t feeling well, anyway. Had a bug and almost didn’t go to work.”

  “So we’ll have to check with the other doormen. Maybe they know who Cowles was seeing. Or the shrink. She probably knows.”

  “Mike, both shrinks said he wasn’t their patient.”

  Mike nodded. “True, but Cowles’s appointment book showed he had an appointment with Treadwell two days before he died. She’s an attractive woman. Maybe they didn’t meet as doctor-patient.”

  April chewed her lip, thinking about it. Could be they were lovers. “Maybe. Mike, did anything bother you about all those condoms?”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Like what? The guy was into sex.”

  “The semen stains on the sheet,” she muttered.

  “How do you know they’re semen?” He kept his face straight.

  “Supposing they turn out to be semen stains. Then what?”

  “Okay. I get it. Why was it on the sheet? Why wasn’t it in the condom, if he was such a believer? Or in the partner, if he was just too hot to bother with one?” Mike scratched his scarred ear. “Maybe he didn’t get anywhere with the dinner date and jacked off into the air after she left.”

  “Yeah, could be,” April agreed. Could be either of those things. People were coming in. She checked her watch. It was after four, time to go home. Tomorrow they were on the four P.M. to one A.M. shift. The day after that was their turnaround. Start at eight A.M. again. By then they might have an autopsy report.

  Mike stood there, nodding. “It’s something to think about.”

  She could tell he was trying to make up his mind whether to ask her to dinner or something. All that talk of semen and ejaculation must have turned him on. It was too early for dinner, though. They’d just had lunch. Finally he said, “Wanna go out for a beer? We could talk about the case.”

  Now April kept her face straight. “Sure, Sergeant. We could do that.”

  seventeen

  All Monday afternoon Harold Dickey was flooded with memories of his affair with Clara Treadwell, begun nearly eighteen years ago when she was just a green resident. Then his job had been to follow her through her first cases and teach her the process she needed to learn to be a first-rate analyst. Each session she had with a patient had to be discussed, interpreted by him. He corrected her mistakes, watched her every step. It took hours every week. The Ray Cowles case had brought them together. Ray’s treatment had been their common interest, the beginning of their passion and her development as a gifted psychiatrist. With Ray between them as their beating heart, their love had blossomed. Then, only four years later, Ray was cured and successfully terminated. Clara presented a paper on his case. It was published. Her star began to ascend in the psychiatric firmament. And she left Harold far, far behind.

  By six P.M., hours after his visit from the police, Harold Dickey could hardly contain himself. Anxiously, all afternoon he’d been checking his watch again and again, wondering what Clara was up to. How was she taking the terrible news? What was she doing about it? As the hours crawled by, he became more and more upset at her delay in calling him to set up a plan of action. They had a lot to do. She should have gotten in touch with him by now. She had a patient death on her hands. He’d had a visit from the police. She needed him now. Right now.

  Harold’s watch told him it was way past six. In the old days he never had to wait for Clara Treadwell. In fact, it used to
amuse him that he couldn’t get away from Clara. She was always there, flying to him in every free moment she had, teasing him, tempting him with her bright, eager smile. Sexy, sexy girl. Undoubtedly she’d been the brightest student he’d ever had. What a combination of brains and drive and high-voltage sexuality. Clara Treadwell had been like a shot of adrenaline for him every day. She’d pursued him relentlessly, and he had not been able to resist her.

  Harold stroked his mustache, remembering. Before Clara, in all the years of his tenure at the Centre, he’d never been interested in a colleague. Of course he had dabbled with secretaries, psychiatric nurses, and occasionally a social worker, someone sweet and pliant like Sally Ann, the nurse he’d met in his first year of medical school back in Texas and married soon after. They were still married. They had stopped loving each other a long time ago but had never bothered to divorce.

  Theirs was the typical story. Sally Ann had been important as the breadwinner for a number of years, then quit to have children. By then he was a doctor and she was no longer on the same social level as he, was no longer interesting or important. For thirty years now, they had been living in Hastings, sharing the same house. But there had been very little conviction on either side for a long, long time. He didn’t know or care what she did. He’d always had someone else on the side.

  Harold never looked at any of his colleagues, though, never thought of becoming involved with a resident. He’d never even considered it. Those serious, homely women of the fifties and sixties who went into the field never appealed to him. Even in the early seventies when Harold’s star had risen and he was at the top, the very top, and the women began their invasion into the profession—first just a trickle of them, then a few more bright young things with longer hair every year until the number of girls was past the halfway mark—he didn’t think of them. And now there was a real crisis in the field. More women wanted to be psychiatrists than men.

  And Harold had never looked at any of them. Only one had ever gotten his attention. Carmen—Clara. Clara who was Carmen the temptress and destroyer of men, though he didn’t think of her that way then. Clara Treadwell, who had been Carmen, had hung around and seduced him. Without meaning to get too deeply involved, he had helped her out. By the time she left, he was so deeply in love with her, he couldn’t imagine life without her. But Carmen/Clara had moved on to other men, another life, without giving him a second thought. And he’d had to endure living without her. Now she was back, the risen star while he was the falling one.