Loving Time

by Leslie Glass

  Jason understood his ambivalence and conflicts about connection, but after all his training and two wives, at almost forty he still wasn’t sure what made love sometimes conquer all. Was it a sensory thing that could be regenerated over and over by sight or touch or smell, or was love driven by fantasy, the secret things that happened in a person’s head?

  “Well, what do you think?” Emma said.

  “About what?”

  “Never mind.” She pointed at the Cowles file he’d been lugging from one room to another all day. “What’s the case?”

  Jason was still on Intake’s descriptive assessment of Raymond Cowles’s analyzability. He’d noted in the part on family history that Ray’s mother’s father had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for most of his life and had died under suspicious circumstances when Ray was two. Out of a lot of routine information, in the middle of his annoyance with his wife, that piece jumped out at him. It was important because it meant there was a possible history of suicide in Cowles’s family. It also meant that his mother might well have experienced a profound depression herself when her father died. The grandfather’s cause of death was unclear and was stated in the most perfunctory way in the assessment. No further questions about that seemed to have been asked because there was no elaboration.

  The chart read:

  Diagnosis deferred in 20-year-old man with what appears to be a character neurosis and identity confusion. In addition, the patient has repetitive and recurrent ego dystonic homosexual fantasies that he has never acted on. Masturbation fantasies have been homosexual. Patient is likable, highly intelligent, responsible, and intends to stay in the area since he has a job waiting for him, and his fiancée is getting a doctoral degree at the same university. He has limited financial resources.

  “Jason?”

  “Huh?” Jason looked up. He realized Emma was waiting for an answer to something or other. He dropped the report guiltily.

  “Plus ça change.” She laughed.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing, darling. I know. I know. If I want you, I have to take you the way you are.”

  “And it appears I have to do the same. Is that fair?”

  She nodded. “You have your life. I have to have mine.”

  Is that fair? he wanted to whine. Was that the deal? Damn, she was gorgeous. “What’d you ask?” he muttered.

  “Nothing. I just asked about the case. I can’t know, right?”

  “Wrong. I can tell you about this case. A former patient of Clara Treadwell committed suicide last week, and Clara asked me to review the file.”

  “Oh, my. The Clara Treadwell?” Emma pulled off the cropped shirt and the bicycle shorts, rolled them up in the towel for the laundry.

  Her nudity was a conversation-stopper in more ways than one. The body was lovely, but around Emma’s navel were the broken images of the tattoo started by her abductor. They were just bits of black now, more than half removed by the laser surgery she was having in California. It was no longer possible to decipher what the tattooed picture had been, but Jason had already seen it. The thing that really startled him was how his formerly modest and reserved wife—who used to hang back never wanting to annoy him with too much of herself—was now a bold temptress. He wanted to maintain his equilibrium and not be bowled over by it, but the balance was gone. A renewed surge of enthusiasm for the woman driving him crazy jolted through Jason.

  “Very nice,” he muttered. “Show off.” He cleared his throat, wondering if she wanted more love—just at this moment. And if he was up to it. Yep, his body indicated he was up to it.

  But Emma was just kidding. She grabbed a shirt, tugged it over her head, and perched on her side of the bed. No panties. She crossed her legs. Now he was sweating.

  “Is this the Clara Treadwell, the one who once leaped upon you in Seattle—”

  “Ah, it was L.A.,” Jason said modestly.

  “Wants you to review her case? After all the trouble she’s made for you at the Centre? Why?”

  Jason beamed. “You know. You remember. Darling, you’re still jealous.”

  “And you’re still mine,” Emma said loftily. “Even with the beard.”

  He scratched the beard, pleased she was taking it seriously. “Hey, nobody owns anybody, you know that.”

  “So why did she come to you?”

  “Clara? I have asked myself that question.” He did not think it wise to say Clara wanted to be his mentor and improve the quality of his life. He smiled at the thought of anyone but Emma succeeding at that.

  “What’s the story? Is she responsible for this patient’s death?”

  “This is the question his wife and insurance company might ask a jury to consider.”

  “Malpractice.” She shivered and was silent for a moment, then asked, “Why?”

  Jason shrugged. “Money.”

  “What do you think?” Emma lay back against the pillows and considered the ceiling.

  Jason shrugged again. “I have no idea. When Clara asked me to look at the file Wednesday, there was some doubt as to the cause of death—they thought it might be a homicide—and because of my ties to the police—”

  “Ah. April Woo.”

  Jason nodded. “April Woo. But now they seem sure it’s a suicide.”

  “So what now?”

  The first of many clocks started chiming eleven.

  “I missed the clocks,” Emma murmured. “I didn’t think I would. But it was so quiet at night. Sometimes I thought of getting a grandfather clock.” She raised her hands in a helpless gesture. “But you know how they all have to be wound every five minutes …”

  “I’m glad you came, Em. I missed you, too.”

  The phone joined in with the ding-dongs. Emma frowned. “Your girlfriend?”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend.” He reached for the phone. “Dr. Frank.”

  “Oh, Jason, I’m so glad you’re there. I hope I’m not disturbing you. This is Clara Treadwell.”

  “Oh, hello, Clara.”

  “Oh, my,” Emma murmured.

  “I’m sorry to call so late. But I have some bad news,” Clara said.

  “Oh?” Jason glanced at his wife. Emma raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes. Harold Dickey died this afternoon.”

  “What?” Jason was stunned. He’d seen Dickey only two days ago at the meeting in Clara’s conference room. He’d looked more than healthy then.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Jason said. “He looked so well. It’s a shock.”

  “Yes, well, a man over sixty … I thought you should know.”

  “Thank you for calling. Can you tell me what happened?”

  “It was very sudden, very sad.” Another long pause. “It happened in his office at the Centre. Massive MI. Now we’ll have to look for someone to take over his position.”

  There it was, the offer of a staff position, coming less than a week after Clara had raised the subject as a vague possibility.

  “Thank you for calling me,” Jason said again. He wondered what Harold had been doing in his office on a Sunday afternoon. Harold had never worked on Sunday, even in Jason’s day. He played tennis on the weekends, was known for it. Everybody knew he liked his booze and his tennis on the weekends. Jason thought about that.

  “Of course, you had to know.… Jason—?”

  “Yes?”

  “Um, did you hear from the police about Ray Cowles?”

  Jason was surprised. “Yes, late Friday. Didn’t they call you?”

  “I’ve been out of town. Well—?”

  “They’ve closed the case as a suicide.”

  There was a pause. “That’s a real disappointment. Well, good night, Jason. We’ll be in touch.”

  Clara hung up before he could say anything else. He put the receiver down thoughtfully.

  “What’s going on?” Emma asked.

  “Harold Dickey died of a heart attack this afternoon.”

  “That’s too bad. I’m sorry
.” Emma got up, heading for the bathroom, then stopped.

  “Ah, are we heading toward a hospital appointment, or have you two”—she wrinkled her perfect nose—“just suddenly gotten very chummy for some reason?”

  “God, you women are competitive. Clara’s sixteen years older than you.”

  “And you rejected her once, Jason. Women don’t forget things like that. Maybe she hasn’t heard your wife is back.” Emma disappeared into the bathroom and slammed the door.

  Distracted by the memory of something April had once said, Jason scratched his beard. April once told him that in police work it helped always to think dirty because very little in life is really clean. Suddenly, the back of his neck prickled at the recollection of an old rumor about Dickey and Treadwell. Not to mention the possible job materializing almost instantly. He heard the shower come on and Emma begin to vocalize in the steam. Without meaning to, he was beginning to think dirty.

  thirty-six

  “What kind of car is it, Mr …” April’s eyes dropped to the complaint on her desk, but her mind was on the two young women grabbed off the street and raped in empty classrooms at the university on Monday at six P.M. and that morning at ten-thirty.

  It was two P.M. on Wednesday, November 10. At three, she had an appointment with Jason Frank, but for the third time this week she didn’t think she’d make it. Today she’d just spent two and a half hours in the emergency room with the second rape victim, an exquisite, espresso-colored, nineteen-year-old student from France. Nicole Amendonde had been raped, sodomized, beaten on the head, and bitten on the breasts and inner thighs.

  A professor found the young woman naked and bleeding profusely and called for help. In the hospital, however, the girl refused to talk about what happened. She didn’t want the police involved, didn’t want her parents to know. She was terrified she’d be blamed for the attack and her parents would be angry at her. The hospital called the precinct for a female detective to come to the emergency room to talk to her.

  April had encountered this kind of resistance before in Chinatown. She knew how to get Nicole to tell her what happened, and she knew how to persuade the girl to agree to let the ER doctor use the rape kit. Then, as soon as she’d gotten back to the precinct, before she’d even had time to grab a cup of coffee, Sergeant Joyce had sent her this clown.

  “Dr. Lobrinsky.” The plump, deeply tanned little man sitting by April’s desk in a single-breasted camel hair coat buttoned all the way up was convulsed with rage. His yellow toupee, no longer straight on his head, had realigned his part so that now it seemed to originate from the top of one ear. Two tightly compressed fat lips busily worked their tension from one cheek to the other.

  Absolutely furious at the perfunctory way he was being treated, the fat man thundered out his name in the crowded squad room as if it had the power to bring his case the deep respect he felt it deserved. No one, however, had ever heard the name, and no one turned a head in his direction.

  The week had started badly and was getting worse. Sergeant Joyce had heard the rumor that she was about to be promoted to lieutenant after having made the short list nearly a year ago. That was the (maybe) good news. The bad news was the rumormonger either didn’t know or wasn’t telling where the assignment would take her. So the good Sergeant was in a state of partially preoccupied hysteria over her future. One just never knew until it happened what a promotion meant. It could just as easily signal the end of a career as the advancement of one. So far the Sergeant had nibbled away all the skin around both thumbnails and begun chewing on the nails themselves.

  It didn’t help that the neighborhood seemed to be having a rash of car thefts and two young women had been viciously raped with the same MO in a three-day period. Sergeant Joyce had once been in Sex Crimes and demanded a game plan on this even before the second case. The second case occurring that morning in a different building put the perp’s cycle of recidivism at three days. Three days for gearing up to this kind of assault was a bad sign. It meant the guy was way out of control and would keep at it until he was stopped. Never mind that the sites he chose were well-peopled or that subconsciously he might want to be caught, the odds of his eluding them were still in his favor. And, of course, at any moment he could always get on a bus or a train and leave town.

  In addition, the two victims were black college students and the rapist was white. This added a politically sensitive and potentially explosive element to the case. The Department didn’t want another girl hurt. Already powers in the Department had sent word down from above that there would be no time or expense spared on this one.

  No time spared on anything else with the exception of the time April had to waste on this Dr. Marcus Lobrinsky, who happened to be some kind of bigwig doctor from the hospital. It was unfortunate for him that his 1992 Mercedes 500SEL, double-parked in front of Zabar’s at Eightieth and Broadway, was stolen when he went into the gourmet-food store for his weekly supply of smoked fish and caviar. And it had to happen just when the whole precinct was galvanized on a more pressing matter.

  So when he bellowed his name, only April was available to nod respectfully. “Dr. Lobrinsky.” As he jabbed a surprisingly slender finger at her, she wondered what kind of doctor he was.

  “I want my car back immediately. The car cost me over eighty-five thousand dollars. And that was in ’92,” he said contentiously.

  April pretended to study the complaint. The problem she had here was that Dr. whatever-he-did Lobrinsky had absolutely no chance of getting his car back. Not immediately or ever. It just didn’t happen. No one got his car back anymore. Stolen cars weren’t lost sheep that wandered home wagging their tails behind them. Neither were they taken for joy rides and abandoned on some quiet side street in Queens or New Jersey, where they sat waiting for recovery by alert police officers a couple of days later. They weren’t snatched for resale in their present form, either.

  Car theft had become very big business, was an organized-crime thing. Cars were taken for the sum of their parts. Twelve hundred dollars each for the airbags, thousands of dollars more for the radio, the tires, the seats, the bumpers, the wheels, the steel frames, the halogen lights, the muffler, the gas tank—every single part had a value and an outlet. And everybody profited—except maybe the people who lost their rides and the insurance companies who had to shell out for new ones. Dr. Lobrinsky’s Mercedes had been gone for only an hour or so, but April had little doubt that it was already stripped to the ground and no longer a car. She sighed.

  “I’m going to have to hook you up with Auto Theft,” she told the doctor. “I’ll give you the name of someone to contact down there.”

  “Shit,” Lobrinsky exploded. “Down where?”

  “I think the office is located at One Police Plaza.”

  “Downtown? Why the hell can’t you take care of it up here?”

  “Your car is not likely to be in the neighborhood any longer.”

  “You mean you can’t take care of it.” The look beamed at April was hateful and contemptuous in the extreme. It said that while the police in general might be stupid and inept, she, April Woo, personally had to be the most stupid and inept member of the whole Department. She’d seen it before.

  Usually the next question was “Are you a real cop or what?” In this case, April was sitting at her desk in the detective squad room and there could be no doubt as to her status.

  Whatever accusation the angry doctor was going to make next, however, was drowned out by an eruption of noise as two large police officers brought someone in. He was wearing a red baseball hat backward, dirty jeans, and a stained One World sweatshirt with holes in it. The guy was white, medium build, maybe an inch shy of six feet. His greasy brown hair hung below the baseball hat to his shoulders. He was held in an upright position by the two cops, seemed to have some fresh scratches on his pasty face, and his eyes gave the impression that his address was some other planet. Then it got quiet.

  April strained to pick up the vib
es that would tell her what was going on, but Dr. Lobrinsky, sitting in her metal visitor’s chair with his expensive coat still buttoned over his chest and his hair on all wrong, was fully focused on his own problem. Completely unaware of the drop in air pressure, the doctor came to a decision. His fist hit the desk and he began to scream.

  “I don’t have time for this shit! It’s not a hard one. Go out and find the fucking car. That’s what you’re here for. If you can’t even locate a 1992 canary-yellow Mercedes—what the fuck are you good for?” His words hit the crowded room like the roar of an Uzi machine gun.

  Sergeant Joyce popped out of her office with the speed of a Jack sprung from its box. Her yellow hair, only an inch longer than the doctor’s, also seemed attached in the wrong place. The crowd of uniforms and detectives moved aside as she advanced toward April’s desk. At the moment there were fewer than the usual number of coffee stains on her blouse, but she was frazzled and harried nonetheless. Her look said, Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something here? Can’t you see we’re busy and don’t have time to take this kind of shit from anybody?

  Her face also told April that she was deeply rattled by what had happened to those two girls and had changed her mind about wasting time on nasty, arrogant, disgruntled victims of auto theft. She cocked her head at April. Get into my office.

  April excused herself and headed for Joyce’s office. Thirty seconds later Sergeant Joyce stormed in and slammed the door. “I got a call from a path in the M.E.’s office,” she announced, collapsing in her desk chair.

  April leaned against the windowsill. What passed for heat in the precinct hadn’t been turned on yet even though it had been a cold month. The air leaching in around the window frame was truly frigid. Already she could feel her fingers beginning to stiffen. Sergeant Joyce shuffled some papers around on her desk importantly.