In the other half of the room was the bed, a TV, a TV chair. And the wall of windows. Conrad stood by those windows, looking out. He didn’t notice anymore what was happening in the building across the court. He was thinking of his own words, replaying them in his head.
How can they live with something so bad, how can they face it? How can anything ever mean anything to them again?
Christ, he sounded just like a fucking forty-year-old, like he was having a midlife crisis. The next thing he knew they’d find him in some New Jersey motel, dancing with a sixteen-year-old and wearing a lampshade on his head. Why did she have to start him talking like this in the first place? There was nothing he hated worse than hearing himself complain about …
Something caught his eye. A light in one of the windows across the court. In one of those darkened windows just opposite him. It was not an electric light; more like a burst of flame, a match flaring. Just for a second. An orange flash. And then gone quickly, as if someone had put his hand in front of it or blown it out.
The bathroom door opened behind him. Conrad glanced over his shoulder. Aggie had come out wrapped in his white terry-cloth bathrobe. It was too big for her and came up around her ears like a high collar. Her blue eyes blinked out from it gaily.
“Sweetheart?” he said. “Isn’t that the apartment where that old lady got killed?”
“Which?” Aggie, who loved gossip of all kinds, was immediately attentive. She approached him as he gestured toward the dark window. “Yeah, that’s it. Lucia Sinclair’s place. Or”Park Avenue House of Death,” as we faithful readers of the Post call it. Why?”
“Has anyone moved in there?”
“Not that I’ve heard. And I would’ve heard.”
“Huh,” Conrad said. “I thought I just saw someone light a match in the window.”
Aggie shook her head with grave authority. “The murder didn’t even happen three weeks ago. I can’t believe the police would let anyone rent it yet.” She wrinkled her nose. “I can’t believe anyone would want to rent it yet, after what they did to that poor woman. Remember the papers said they kept her alive while they … ?”
Conrad laughed and turned to her, holding up his hand. “I’m sorry I asked.” He touched his right temple. “My eye was bothering me today. It was probably just a scintillation.”
“Okay,” Agatha said. “If you don’t want to hear the local news …” With a single graceful motion, she shrugged off the bathrobe. It slipped down to her feet. Conrad’s eyes ran slowly over her body. “Just forget the whole thing,” she said softly. “And close those curtains.” She stepped out of the tangle of terry cloth around her ankles. She came toward him. She whispered, “You never know who might be watching.”
The Woman in the Chair
The Impellitteri Municipal Psychiatric Facility was set a few blocks off Queens Boulevard, not far from the county jail. Lit by small spotlights, it seemed an enormous gray cube floating in the dark. The rain ran down the lights, and shadows of the rain played over the building’s stone surface. To Conrad, as he drove into the parking lot, the building seemed to drift and waver under the downpour.
He had told Jerry Sachs he would be there at seven-thirty that Friday evening. It was seven-thirty on the dot as he parked his Corsica—a jaunty silver-blue sedan—in one of the RESERVED-MD spaces by the front door. When he shut the engine off, the rain sounded loud and hard on the rooftop.
He wished he were home. He wished he were playing Chutes and Ladders.
He took his briefcase off the floor, brought it to his lap, and snapped it open. He lifted out his little Sony cassette recorder. Pressing the red button, he held the recorder up with the built-in microphone near his mouth.
“Friday, October twelfth,” he said. “First session with Elizabeth Burrows.”
He rewound it, played it back. His own voice came up to him clearly: “ … session with Elizabeth Burrows.” He slipped the recorder into his inside jacket pocket. He glanced out the window, through the streaking rain, at the hospital’s vaporous facade.
She killed a man, Nathan. She cut his throat. Christ Almighty, she cut the poor bastard to pieces.
Conrad let out a long breath. “Uh boy,” he said aloud.
He took his briefcase by the handle, pushed the door open, and ran through the rain to the hospital steps.
“Well, I’m afraid she’s not one of your typical Upper West Side matrons,” Sachs said. “She’s been in institutions off and on since she was ten years old. And there have been several violent episodes both in and out. Her records from the Manhattan Children’s Center show she once slashed another child’s face open with a kitchen knife. And the DA told me the police have arrested her twice before on assault and battery charges. You’ll be getting your sweet little fingers dirty on this one, Nate.”
Sachs tilted back in his chair and grinned a wide pink grin. He was a big man, half a foot taller than Conrad at least. His face was broad and fat. His shoulders stretched the limits of his white shirt, his belly stretched it taut above the belt line. When he moved, he breathed hard and he was damp with sweat all over. There were dark sweat-stains under the arms, and his head—large, bald, and pink—gleamed with it. His thick black glasses were perched up above his eyebrows. Conrad kept waiting for them to slip through the sweat down onto his nose.
Sachs laughed, a loud, mirthless laugh. “One time,” he said, “she beat the living shit out of a Dutch sailor. Swear it to God. She was wandering around Times Square apparently and the poor bastard goosed her.” He laughed again, his voice cracking. “She broke both his arms and stomped one of his testicles to pudding. She was sixteen years old at the time. And she’s just a little thing, too, wait’ll you see her. It took three cops to pull her off the guy. And when she came to, she seemed surprised. She said it wasn’t her who did it. It was her friend, her secret friend.”
Conrad leaned forward. His chair’s wooden top rail had been pressing into his back. “Her friend?” he said. “You mean, like, another personality?”
“Nah, more like a voice, command-auditory, telling her to do things, though it seems to have some kind of visual component too. Whatever it is, it sure agitates the hell out of her. She goes wild; she has fantastic strength. Definitely capable of real nasty stuff, savage violence. Which is apparently what happened with this other poor bastard, this token clerk she cut to ribbons. She said her ‘secret friend’ was responsible for that one too.” He chuckled, his big head bouncing up and down. “I tell you, Nate, you’re gonna wish you were back on Park Avenue so bad …”
Conrad smiled. “I already do, Jerry, believe me.” He shifted in his seat—the chair really was killing him. The rest of Sachs’s office looked comfortable enough. A vast space with brown linoleum floors and bright orange walls. There was a brown sofa along the wall to Conrad’s left. A half-size refrigerator in one corner, a graceful coatrack with Conrad’s trench coat dripping in the other. And of course, behind the vast, cluttered expanse of Sachs’s desk, in front of a broad window overlooking the parking lot, there was Sachs’s own enormous leather armchair. Its back was so high the head cushion curled up over the director’s gleaming head like a vulture. That looked plenty comfortable.
But the chair in front of the desk—Conrad’s chair—was wood. Small, round backed, hard. There was a butt-shaped depression in the seat of it. Maybe it was supposed to make the unyielding wood more comfortable. All Conrad knew was that it felt as if he were sitting on an anthill. There was no pleasant spot on it anywhere.
“This token clerk,” he grunted through his pain. “This is the current case.”
“Yeah. Same kind of situation as the sailor. This guy, this …” Sachs leaned in over his desk, floated a big hand over some papers there. “Robert Rostoff. He apparently got Elizabeth to take him up to her apartment. But when he made a pass at her: whammo.” Sachs reached up and pulled three times on his nose to clear it. “She really cut him up but good. Took his eye out, cut his dick off. Bad ne
ws for Bob all around.”
Conrad’s butt searched for some softness in his chair’s butt-shaped depression. He did not think he was going to be able to take a month of this.
“And she wasn’t on drugs?” he asked.
“Not according to the reports.”
“Was she on anything, any medication?”
Sachs waved at his papers again. “Haldol, yeah. But only ten milligrams, five BID. She’d been taking it on an outpatient basis for two years. I’ve got it tripled now.”
Conrad nodded.
“The thing of it is, she really did seem to be in remission,” Sachs said. “She was living independently, seeing her shrink, working a menial job at some counterculture day-care center or some shit like that down in the Village. Everything was tickety-boo, know what I mean? Then suddenly—Bobby goes bye-bye. And here she is.” Sachs coughed—and finally the glasses did slide down his forehead. They landed on his nose with a little splash of sweat. “She was apparently still taking her meds at the time too.”
“She just broke through? Had she been having any reactions? Dystonias? Convulsions? Anything?”
Sachs shook his head. “No. Though I didn’t get a chance to ask her much before she went wild on me.”
“And now she’s catatonic. Has she eaten? Slept? Got up to go to the bathroom?”
“We can feed her orally. She has fallen asleep. She hasn’t gone to the bathroom or defecated. She’s urinated on her chair. We cleaned her up though—don’t wanna make it too hard on you.” He tried to give another of his hearty chuckles, but it died somewhere in his throat. He seemed, Conrad thought, to be running out of steam.
“You’ve still got her medicated,” Conrad said.
“Yeah, by injection.” Sachs spread his hands, dropped them onto his thighs with a loud slap. His smile was still wide but it looked strained now. A line of sweat trickled down his pink cheek into his graying collar. “The thing is, though: she won’t talk. I mean, this was a willing patient, Nate. She’d had a good experience with her last doctor, the state guy who got her out of Manhattan Psych, got her stabilized. She was user friendly, man. Ready to talk. She wanted to talk. Now, suddenly, not a word.” He wiped the sweat from his lips with his palm. “So, uh, what do you think, Nate?”
For a long moment, Conrad could only look at the man. The Humpty-Dumpty head, the shiny pate. The dark eyes blinking somewhat desperately behind the thick glasses. Conrad guessed it wasn’t pleasant to have the Queens borough president breathing down your neck. To have thirty days to make a high-profile case look good when your subject had gone mute on you.
Conrad reached down and took hold of the briefcase on the floor beside him. “Let’s go have a look at her,” he said finally.
Anything to get the hell out of that chair.
An elevator took them to the fourth floor: the Women’s Forensic Ward. A female correction officer was there, sitting at the gunmetal desk outside the ward’s double doors. The obese black woman lifted fierce dark eyes to the ID card clipped to Sachs’s lapel. She nodded and Sachs stepped forward to unlock the doors with a large master key.
Conrad followed Sachs into the ward.
There was a long hallway before them, cavernous and dim. Fluorescents flickered purple in the high ceiling or hung gray and dead. As the two doctors walked together, the shadows obscured the far walls. The corridor seemed to vanish in a sickly dusk.
It was dinnertime now. Passing the cafeteria, Conrad saw the women at their meal. About ten black women sat hunkered over their plastic trays. Shapeless women in the shapeless, shabby street clothes the city issued them. They were shoveling bread and potatoes into their lax mouths, letting the crumbs dribble down their chins.
Out here, in the hall, it was quiet. Only aides passed back and forth and they passed silently. Black women, gray figures, they emerged one by one from the shadows ahead. They nodded at Sachs without speaking, without smiling. They passed into the shadows behind as Conrad glanced over his shoulder to watch them go.
Sachs stopped before a door marked 3: a thick wooden door, its vertical strip of window laced with wire. Sachs glanced at Conrad; chuckled; shook his head. Conrad realized it was supposed to be ingratiating.
Sachs slipped his master key into the lock. The door swung in and Sachs stepped through. When Conrad followed, the larger man was standing in the center of the room.
It was a small room, a cell really. Dim, with a single light burning in the ceiling above. A metal bed was pushed against the wall to Conrad’s left. A small water basin stood on a plastic table against the wall opposite. There was a nook in the far corner—for a toilet, Conrad guessed. To the left of that, in the far wall, there was a large double-hung window with heavy grating over the glass.
In a chair in front of the window, there sat a young woman.
Conrad stopped when he saw her. His lips parted. My God, he thought.
Sachs lifted a hand toward her, like a butler making a formal introduction.
“This is Elizabeth Burrows,” he said gravely.
Nathan stood without speaking.
My God, he thought. Look at her.
Don’t You Want to Touch Me?
She had a face from a painting, an angel’s face. Her strawberry-blond hair hung down, straight and silken, long past her shoulders. It framed her high cheeks and her high brow, both of them alabaster and luminous. Her large, crystalline, green eyes stared out at nothing.
She was sitting very still in a wooden chair. She sat upright, her head erect. Her eyes were fixed directly before her. She wore wrinkled brown corduroy pants and a man’s short-sleeved shirt. But even in the city-issue clothing, her figure seemed slender and graceful: she hadn’t had time to get fat on the starchy hospital food. Her bare arms were very white. Her white hands lay folded in her lap.
Slowly, Conrad let out his breath. Man oh man, he thought. He blinked and straightened. He made himself speak.
“Hello, Elizabeth,” he said, “it’s nice to meet you.”
She said nothing. She didn’t move. She stared straight ahead. Conrad narrowed his eyes as he looked at her.
Three years before, he had been asked to participate in a study at Columbia Presbyterian. They were testing a new approach to withdrawal reactions that involved a style of therapy he and another doctor, Mark Bernstein, had pioneered. The idea was to rely less on medication and more on sparking some form of interaction with a therapist. Using a combination of drugs and active, even radical, engagement techniques, Conrad was rapidly able to lure several patients into a new relationship with reality. In one or two cases, he could even report important remissions.
In the course of the study, Conrad had worked closely with over a dozen withdrawn or catatonic patients. He had seen a forty-two-year-old man stay locked in the fetal position for days and days on end. He had seen a teenage girl posed perfectly still with her arms out and one leg raised, like a ballerina about to be lifted into the air. He had seen patients who shuddered like a plucked string and patients who stared and drooled without moving. There had been one woman, Jane, a childhood rape victim, who wandered around saying “No” very firmly over and over again at intervals of exactly three seconds.
But Conrad had never seen anyone like Elizabeth Burrows.
It wasn’t just her beauty. It was her composure, her seeming serenity. Her hands rested in her lap so peacefully, her bare arms flexible and relaxed. Her gaze was distant but her eyes went down deep. Conrad had the momentary sense that he could see her in there, still alert, still aware.
He turned to Sachs, forced a smile. “Why don’t you leave Elizabeth and me alone together so we can get to know each other,” he said.
Sachs hesitated a second. He had a lot riding on this, Conrad could see it. But he had no choice. He forced a thin smile of his own.
“Just call if you need an aide or …”
He placed his key in Conrad’s hand and went out, closing the door behind him.
Conrad turned back to
Elizabeth, still smiling. “I’m going to turn on a tape recorder,” he said. He lifted the machine out of his pocket. He pressed the button and set it on the table next to the water basin. Then, with two steps, he crossed the room. He lay his briefcase on the bed and opened it. He didn’t look at Elizabeth as he rummaged through it, but he thought he felt her eyes shift toward him. He thought—he sensed—that she was looking at him.
He removed a penlight from the case. When he faced her again, she was sitting still, staring straight ahead.
Conrad stepped up to her. “Excuse me,” he said. He leaned forward and gently, quickly, retracted her eyelid with his thumb. He beamed the flash into her eyes, first the right, then the left. The pupils contracted as the light hit. He felt the normal blink reactions under his fingers.
He slipped the flash into his pocket and took hold of her right wrist. The white skin felt warm. The pulse beneath his thumb was steady and even. He lifted her arm to the height of her shoulder. He watched her face. He let the wrist go.
The girl’s hand dropped a little, then hung in the air uncertainly. Her pale lips tightened. Then her hand floated slowly back to her lap. She clasped it with her other. She sat quietly, staring.
At the other end of the bed, there was another wooden chair. Conrad got it now and set it down in front of her. He turned its back toward her and straddled it. He leaned on the back, smiling at her.
“Actually, it was supposed to stay in the air,” he said. “Your arm, I mean. True catatonics generally have what we call waxy flexibility in their limbs. They’ll stay in whatever position you pose them.”
It was a risk, he knew. He might be wrong. Even if he was right, the challenge might spur a violent reaction. She was a small, almost frail, girl, as Sachs said. But if her “secret friend” came to her, Conrad had no doubt that she could put him in the hospital, if not the morgue.
At first, though, she didn’t react at all. The words hung between them in the silence. He sat watching her. She sat still.
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