by John L. Monk
“That’s me,” I said.
What a horrible, horrible, mistake coming here. I actually felt bad, like I’d cheated on Tara. Which I had, in a way, because my ride was her husband. If this got back to Tara, after all the apologizing Scott must have done when he’d gotten caught…
How’d he get caught to begin with?
And then I remembered: Tara said if Melody called the house again she’d call the police. Maybe Melody had spilled the beans, hoping to nudge the relationship to where she thought it should be.
“What did you say to Tara?” I said.
“Huh?”
“When you called the house.”
“Which time?” she said.
“Each time.”
Melody’s face grew pinched, like she was about to cry.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“You’re still mad at me…”
“Nope,” I said. “Totally not mad. So what did you tell her?”
“Fuck you!” she shouted, and moved to push past me.
“Hey,” I said, grabbing her hand. “I’m sorry, okay? I just wanted to—”
“What about me?” she said, wiping her eyes.
“You’re right, I’m sorry. We’ll talk about it later.”
Sniffling and hiccupping, Melody buried her head in my shoulder and hugged me around the middle. I stroked her hair and closed my eyes and pretended she was someone else.
“We’re good now, right?” I said to her after she pulled away.
Melody nodded halfheartedly, which was all the heartedly I needed to get dressed, give her a chaste kiss on the cheek, and then get the heck out of there.
It was raining when I left. On the way to the clinic, Tara called me. I pulled over to talk to her.
“Hello?” I said.
“Where have you been?”
“With George,” I said. “Jungian Pentangle therapy, remember?”
“Cut the shit,” she said. “I looked it up as soon as I got upstairs. There’s no such thing.”
Tall, pretty, and tech-savvy.
“It’s still very new. Cutting edge.”
“Don’t bother coming home,” she said. “Just stay with … Go to hell!”
I pulled back onto the road, seeming to hit every rain-filled pothole and feeling dirtier than the Toledo gutters.
It wasn’t my place to speak for the Great Whomever, but whatever Scott had been trying to do, he didn’t need my help. If I hadn’t shown up, they would have gone to dinner that night. What had Tara said, something about him wanting to talk? Maybe Scott had wanted to fix things up, and I needed to call her back now and apologize. Or maybe he’d wanted a divorce and had planned to spring it on her over lobster. If that was the case, no amount of fence mending would help once I was gone. Scott would show up and the train would resume its normal course—except he’d be missing three weeks and freaked out of his mind.
This just wasn’t fair.
I tried calling Tara back, but she didn’t answer.
“Shit,” I said.
When I entered the clinic, I saw Melody had arrived first. She blew me little kisses all the way from the front doors to my office, while Pam frowned at her in disbelief.
I tossed Melody a small wave, then entered my office and shut the door.
Scott’s office was warm and muggy. I checked the thermostat, but it was set to seventy-three degrees. When I put my hand over the vent, it was blowing cold dry air. The landlord obviously skimped on the AC over the weekends.
Sexually satisfied and guilty about Tara, I relaxed on the big puffy couch and waited. I wondered what to do about Melody. I’d basically used her, and I was guilty about that, too.
I couldn’t go back to her house or make kissy faces at her or whatever she expected. But if I didn’t, she had that crazy brother she could sic on me again. Maybe next time he’d have a better wingman than George.
Eventually it got cooler and drier, and around nine thirty there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, I was so happy to see someone other than Pam or Melody or anyone sexy that I almost hugged the balding middle-aged man standing on the other side.
Noting my weird grin, he smiled uncertainly and stepped inside.
I moved toward the comfy chairs and stopped when I saw him heading to Scott’s desk.
“Where’s the sheet?” he said, looking around.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Come on, Doc, quit clowning.”
He started ruffling through papers and opening desk drawers.
Though I was tempted to shout, “How dare you, my good man!” or other appropriate words of outrage, I held back. He seemed like he knew what he was doing.
In retrospect, I should have searched harder for Scott’s appointment book. Then at least I’d know who to expect.
“So how you been?” I said.
Whoever-he-was laughed. “You gonna pscho-anal-ize me?”
I smiled and spread my hands wide. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
“Good on you,” he said, still rummaging.
A moment later, he found a clipboard in one of the drawers. He flipped a few pages and wrote something using one of Scott’s pens. Then he gazed pointedly at me.
“You gonna sign this or what?” he said.
I went over to see what it was and he handed it to me. It was an attendance sheet with a bunch of signatures on it—a different person’s and Scott’s, each time, with time-in/time-out boxes next to them. The man had conveniently filled in his boxes: 9:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., respectively.
“Well?” he said.
“Sure,” I said, and signed Scott’s name next to his. I moved to hand it back and he just laughed at me.
“See you in two weeks, Doc,” he said, and then left.
Chapter Thirty-One
The sheet we’d signed was an official-looking form titled, “PROOF OF ATTENDANCE.” At the bottom, in small writing, was the address to a Social Security office on Monroe Street.
I thumbed through the last few filled-out pages on the clipboard and saw entries going back to the beginning of the month. There were about thirty different names, each showing up on the half-hour, Monday through Friday, starting at 9:30 a.m. and lasting an hour each. Signing in could have been a state requirement, for all I knew. I’d only had that movie theater job back in college and the world was a complicated place, especially anything to do with medicine.
It would have been nice to look in Scott’s computer at his calendar to see everyone’s appointments, but the attendance sheet solved that problem. Mostly. Looking at all the names and times, I noticed there were gaps here and there on various days, and I didn’t see my first patient’s name anywhere. In fact, his session last Friday had fallen on one of those gaps.
My next patient was either someone named Stephanie Ellis, based on last week’s attendance, or Andrew Cope, who’d come at ten thirty two weeks ago. I quickly scanned Andrew’s file and learned he suffered from extreme depression with a number of debilitating symptoms: loss of interest in activities, loss of appetite, sleep problems, lack of energy, and thoughts of suicide. Stephanie’s was almost exactly the same. Maybe Scott specialized in certain types of patients?
At ten thirty there was a knock on the door.
I opened it to find a tall skinny white guy wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and jeans.
“Andrew?” I said.
“Hi, Dr. Schaefer,” he said cheerily, and glided past me on his way to the desk while I stared at him, mystified.
He picked up the clipboard, which I’d left sitting out, signed it, then strolled past me and out the door.
“See ya,” he said.
He made his chipper way through the lobby—whistling, even throwing a jolly wave at Pam and Melody on his way out. Awfully upbeat for someone diagnosed with extreme depression.
An hour later, when the next person showed up, I was ready for her.
Monique was a heavyset black woman wearing a skin-tight halter
and neon yellow pants. When she tried to skate by, I blocked the way.
“How you doing, Monique?” I said, staring at her and smiling.
“Uh, hi,” she said, looking at me like I was the odd one here and not her.
According to her file, Monique also had sleep problems, loss of interest in activities, loss of appetite, lack of energy, and thoughts of suicide. Maybe it was a Toledo thing.
She moved to scoot past me but I followed along, herding her toward the sofa chairs.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Just guiding you to your seat.”
“I ain’t got no seat,” she said, stepping back, making to go around me.
As I moved to block her again, Monique did a double fake and slipped past before I could stop her. She ran over to the desk and began searching frantically. She looked hither. She looked thither. She opened all the drawers like my first patient had, but she didn’t find what she wanted.
“Looking for something?” I said.
“Where the hell’s the sign-in sheet?”
“Sign-in sheet?” I said as if pondering some deep philosophical question that had plagued humanity for ages.
Monique glared at me. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Please have a seat, Monique.”
To my surprise, she walked over to one of the sofa chairs and sat down. She didn’t lean back. She sat on the edge of the chair, staring at me anxiously.
“Why you doing this?” she said.
“Doing what?”
“You know, this. Thought we had it all settled.”
“All what settled?”
“You know…”
Monique sat glaring at me and fidgeting. She glanced from me to the desk to the door and back again. She seemed perfectly normal, just agitated. Not listless or depressed.
I remembered that other patient, last Friday, when I’d first arrived. Will Dingle. He’d seemed genuinely in need of help. But these others? It was almost as if…
“You’re gonna piss me off, you don’t hurry up,” she growled. “I got things to do today.”
“Things to do?” I said, pursing my lips and scratching my chin in my best Sigmund Freud. “How does that make you feel?”
Monique stared at me like I’d insulted her. Then she got up and walked to the desk, yelling, “Where the hell is it?” and “I don’t know what game you’re playing!” and “Talking to me like I’m crazy!”
I’d hidden the clipboard behind the curtains, propped against the window.
“Aren’t you here for therapy?” I said helpfully, a study in sincerity.
Monique laughed. “Therapy? Me?”
She laughed again. Oh, the absurdity.
“Then why are you here?” I said.
Monique stared at me for half a minute, not saying anything. Then her eyes widened and a look of fear swept over her.
“I’m not feeling good right now!” she shouted. Not so much to me but to the entire room. “That’s why I’m going home!”
Then, peering around at every little thing like something was hiding from her, Monique walked briskly to the door, opened it, and left.
I spun around, giggling and hugging myself. I wasn’t here to fix anyone’s love life. Scott’s crime was now obvious. The Great Whomever had put the right guy on the job, and that guy was me, and this was the job. Monique and Andrew, and probably every name on those sheets, were scamming the system. Either a disability program or something for people with debilitating mental disorders. They had to show up or lose their assistance, and that’s where Scott came in—he got a full roster of patients every day and all that government money, and he didn’t even have to work.
I went over to the desk and examined his computer—sleek and modern. I wished I could log in to see what was on it. Probably state of the art video games, or maybe he was working on a zillion-dollar novel. Definitely something other than work, otherwise he’d get bored sitting here for hours every day with nothing to do.
As if on cue, there came a soft knock on the door.
“Come in,” I said.
Melody slipped into the room, closed the door, and locked the doorknob. Then she bounced over and threw me backward into Scott’s desk chair. Straddling my hips, she started making out with me.
That’s right, with me.
* * *
Several shameful minutes passed and then Melody climbed off of me, panting from exertion and adjusting her skirt back around her legs.
I wasn’t panting, having barely exerted. I also wasn’t very happy with myself. Maybe I was having an identity crisis, or my ego had beat up my existential id.
“Pam’s gonna give me so much shit,” she said, giggling, and bounced over to the door to leave.
“Uh, hey, wait a minute. Before you go.”
Melody spun around on the balls of her feet like a ballerina, smiled prettily, and bounced back.
“My computer,” I said, pointing at it. “I can’t get in. Is there something I’m supposed to do?”
Melody made a cute little pouty face and poked me in the belly.
“You forgot your password,” she said.
“I guess I did.”
“I’ll call ArcaTech and tell them to reset it. They should call you pretty quickly.” She leaned in and walked her fingers up my chest. “Bet your ugly wife doesn’t fuck you like I do.”
She gave me a final kiss, then left.
Yeah. She was sort of awful.
Fifteen minutes later someone knocked. When I opened it, Alex Mitchel walked in, smiling and happy to see me. I handed him the form. He signed it and then left, cured of his afflictions, and I hadn’t even graduated college.
Over on my desk, the phone rang.
I went over, picked it up and said, “Hello?”
A man said, “Password reset?”
“I think so.”
“What happens when you try to log in?”
“It says password incorrect.”
There was a brief moment of silence on the other end.
“Okay,” he said. “That means you … Never mind. Your new password is password123. Try that, then change your password.”
I entered it and got a new screen that let me change it.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Sure,” he said, and hung up.
With that settled, I sat down to have a look around Scott’s computer.
Chapter Thirty-Two
At first I was happy to learn about Scott’s little scam, but now I was confused. Put simply, it wasn’t a big deal. He was stealing from the government. Depending on who you asked, that might even have been a good thing. It was still stealing, sure, but the Great Whomever was usually pickier in the whoms he sent me after. Who next, someone driving thirty-five in a school zone? Serial jaywalkers? Kids sneaking into R-rated movies?
Or was this about Melody?
She was something, all right. Pretty, young, athletic, and morally stunted. An adulterer, just like Scott. Bad, I supposed, but way down on the priority list of the things I gave a damn about.
I logged into Scott’s computer. There weren’t any obvious game icons, and I felt a momentary pang of disappointment. I thought about that ride when I’d played World of Warcraft for three weeks. Sheer bliss.
Instead of bliss, there were eight folders on the desktop, all named for various women: Beth, Teresa, Michelle, Alicia, Tammy, Melody, Carol, and Aimee.
I opened Melody’s folder and found about fifty or sixty pictures in it—of her, posing naked in her messy room, and some of the shots were explicitly X-rated. There were video files, too, but I didn’t bother looking at them.
I backed out of that folder and clicked into Teresa’s. No pictures this time, just movie files, each of them named by date.
I clicked one of the files from February of that year and it opened to four angles in Scott’s office, all focused on the couch. One of them was a close-up on one specific location of the couch. About thirty seconds later,
a woman sat down on it and Scott joined her.
“How’s my naughty girl?” he said.
Teresa forced a joyless laugh. “I guess I’m fine.”
“And naughty,” he said.
Strange as it was hearing Scott’s voice on the tape, it got weirder. They began kissing. Then they took off their clothes. One thing led to another, and then I got to see what Scott’s vision of love was from four different angles. At one point, Teresa went off script and scooted over to the left side of the couch, but Scott guided her gently back to the spot in front of the close-up camera. Things got noisy and anatomical at that point, and that’s where I stopped the video.
The other folders were filled with movie files, just like Teresa’s, but I didn’t watch any of them. Not my thing. Scott had graduated from being a cheat to definitely twisted rather quickly. Which meant Melody could go on home wrecking in safety for the rest of her life.
I opened a browser and scrolled through Scott’s bookmarks. Porn sites, and lots of them. So that’s what he did every day instead of writing zillion-dollar novels. I checked his browsing history and saw he had a free email account. When I went there the site got pushy and asked for a password, so I gave up and closed the browser.
I walked over to the couch and looked around. Three of the cameras had to be in those tall bookshelves he had around the room. But that close-up shot of the couch…
Taped underneath the small table between the couch and the sofa chairs, I found a tiny black camera. I left it there and checked out the bookcases and found better cameras aiming down from the top shelves, each one lodged between a couple of heavy books.
A quick check of Scott’s phone showed it was almost one thirty. I’d been here four hours and the walls were closing in on me a little. I was also starving.
When I stepped out of the office, the only person at the front desk was Pam. She ignored me—pointedly.
I walked past the desk over to the other side of the big room. I’d spied some vending machines there on my way in. After inserting a five into the slot, I chose a package of Pop-Tarts. Then I loaded the change back in and got some cookies. Then again and got a package of little orange peanut butter crackers.
