Brain Trust

by A W Hartoin

  They flashed me their badges and I asked, “Here to arrest me or molest me?”

  “I’d be more worried about that guy molesting you than us,” said the one on the right, Gordon.

  “She’s a girl, dirtbag.”

  The one on the left, Gansa, almost had an expression and then said, “I don’t think so.”

  That’s when I smelled hotdogs with an after smell of tacos and turned around. Aaron was standing right behind me, staring off to the left and holding two fat paper bags.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Huh?’

  “Go back to the truck and stay with…Mary Elizabeth.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You need me.”

  The FBI guys chuckled. “You need him like you need eczema,” said Gansa.

  Bastards.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. I need him.” I grabbed Aaron’s arm. “Don’t I?”

  “Huh?” Aaron couldn’t have looked more weird if he tried. He had on one of his beloved pink hairnets and an ancient Star Trek tee. Of course, there were the stained shorts and when I say stained, I mean it.

  “Never mind,” I said. “So what’s the FBI doing at a looney bin like this?”

  “Surprised to see us?”

  “Thrilled beyond compare.”

  They just looked at me. If their bosses thought looks were everything, they were incredibly wrong.

  I crossed my arms. “What do you want?”

  “The same as you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  Gordon said, “Your family is under attack. We all want to know who is behind it?”

  “Where is my father?”

  “We are locating him,” said Gansa. He whipped off his sunglasses in what I assumed was an attempt to show sincerity. Yeah, right.

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s been well over twelve hours. You’re telling me that you can’t find my father? He’s working for you.”

  No answer.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “What reason would we have for keeping your father out of the picture?” Gordon took off his sunglasses and smiled. I have to admit he was pretty good at it. Claire would fall for him hard, if we could find her.

  “What are you looking at?” asked Gordon, his smile turning downward.

  “Nothing.” I pushed the question of Claire out of my mind. I had enough to worry about already. “I don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing and I doubt you two are high up enough in the chain to know either.” I started to walk by them and Gordon grabbed my arm.

  “Miss Watts, you will cooperate or we won’t let you see Blankenship. Understand?” He screeched and danced away.

  “What the…”

  Aaron stood there with a lit lighter. No expression. Naturally.

  “You burned him? Are you crazy?” I asked, but I was impressed. Aaron wasn’t exactly a weirdo of action.

  “I could arrest you!” yelled Gordon.

  A car door slammed hard. Fats was out of the truck.

  “Oh, shit,” said Gansa under his breath.

  “Oh, shit is right,” said Fats.

  “I have a gun.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, walking toward us in a way that made me pee a little and she wasn’t even looking at me.

  “Aaron, enough with the lighter,” I said.

  He extinguished the flame and pocketed the lighter before heading for the door.

  “Where is he going?” asked Gansa.

  “What’s she going to do?” asked Gordon as Fats continued to advance.

  I held up my hand. “We’re fine…er…Mary Elizabeth.”

  She stopped walking and just stared at the agents through her dark glasses. Sweat beaded up on their smooth brows and I detected a nervousness that Hatchet nose and Toupee would never have had.

  “You’re rookies, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “No,” said Gordon a little slowly.

  “Well, everyone has to start somewhere. It’s your bad luck that you had to start with me.” I walked past them and through the door Aaron held open for me.

  “Miss Watts!” Wilson Cleves said through the heavy bullet-proof glass partition next to the heavy metal door that led to the patient rooms or cells, depending on their condition. “I didn’t think I’d see you here.” He flicked a glance at the agents who were glowering beside me.

  “Really? You usually come to work this early?” I asked.

  “Um…well…I assume you’re here to see Blankenship.”

  “And Greta.”

  He frowned. “You have time?”

  “Mom says you always have time for kindness.” Mom did say that. I only wished I’d thought to bring Greta something. She was technically a murderer that my dad had put away for killing her kids with cough syrup, but she had postpartum psychosis and Dad felt it wasn’t her fault. He visited her and now I did, too.

  A brief alarm sounded and the metal door opened. Shelley, the guard who usually handled me, waved me back. I walked through with Aaron trotting along behind me.

  “Who are you?” Shelley asked him. “I thought you’d be alone, Mercy.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “He’s my partner.”

  She had Aaron sign paperwork saying he wouldn’t sue if someone accidentally bit his eyeball and we went through the body scanner. The agents fell behind as their guard was in no hurry. He gave me a wink and fussed about their paperwork as we hoofed it down the corridor that looked like any office building on a budget until we got to the door that nobody in their right mind would want to go through. It was heavy barred metal, obviously designed to keep something terrible in. I felt a familiar panic as it made a clang and swung open.

  It’s fine. You’re not really crazy. They’ll let you out.

  To distract myself, I asked, “So what’s with that new alarm on the other door?”

  “We had an escape attempt. Thwarted, but it was close,” said Shelley.

  I threw up in my mouth a little. “Not Blankenship?”

  She smiled at me. “No. That little weasel is locked down so tight, he can’t even scratch his balls.”

  Ew.

  “Who was it then?”

  “Harvey the head case. IQ in the mid-160s and always thinking.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Attacked women and tried to eat their feet.” She said it like eating feet was a common enough occurrence.

  “What the hell? When did that happen?”

  “In New Jersey before you were born. We got him after his third escape out there.”

  “Congratulations, I guess.”

  “Thanks,” she said with all seriousness. “We are good. So, Greta?”

  “Yes, please.”

  We got to Greta’s door, a pretty normal one.

  “You moved her?” I asked.

  “She’s been more cooperative since you started coming. Hasn’t been hurting herself or screaming. Doctors decided to give her a more comfortable room. Your dad’s been lobbying for it.”

  “Good.”

  Shelley opened the door and said, “Greta, Mercy’s here and she’s been having a crap couple of days. Try to be perky.”

  I went in and saw Greta sitting up at a metal desk bolted to the floor. She had a set of watercolors like the ones they give kids in front of her. I guess they didn’t trust her with brushes yet because she was using her fingertips to paint.

  Greta brushed a greying lock of blonde hair out of her eyes, leaving a smear of blue across her forehead. She looked the best I’d ever seen her, not so painfully thin and there weren’t any new scabs on her arms.

  “Mercy,” she said softly. “I knew you’d come.”

  “Are you going in?” asked Shelley.

  I turned and Aaron thrust one of the paper bags at me. I took it and looked at Shelley, who shrugged. She’d x-rayed Aaron’s bags and didn’t fin
d anything objectionable in them.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “For Greta,” said Aaron and he stepped back for Shelley to close the door.

  There was a heavy clang and a grind as she locked me in, an ominous sound if there ever was one.

  “I don’t know what it is, but if Aaron made it, you’re in for a treat.” I gave her the bag and she actually smiled as she pulled out wax paper-wrapped chocolate chip cookies and little Italian butter cookies that smelled of orange.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “How’d you know I’d come?” I asked.

  “First, tell me what has happened to you.”

  So I told her about Sturgis and Mom. I managed not to cry and I was pretty proud of that. She stood up off her metal stool and hugged me, her painfully thin body trying to soothe my curvy one. I ended up wanting to soothe her. My mother was alive. Her children were dead.

  “I know there is nothing I can do. I wish there was.”

  “You listened. That’s enough.”

  “Not really,” she said, going back to her stool. The effort of moving seemed to exhaust her. “You will go see Blankenship now to get information?”

  “And it’s useless to me. The FBI will hear it and take over. Dad would hate that.”

  Greta smiled wanly. “Yes, Tommy is all about control. But there’s no reason they have to hear everything.”

  “We’ll be in the fishbowl,” I said.

  She slid a blank piece of paper over to the side of the table and gave me her watercolors. “Warn Blankenship.”

  I grinned at her. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.” I stuck my finger in the flimsy water cup on the table and wrote in red, “Whisper. FBI is listening.”

  “It will only take a few minutes to dry,” said Greta.

  I ripped the paper into a manageable size and waved it in the air. “Now it’s your turn.”

  Greta turned solemn. “You know that I have bad days.”

  “Sure.”

  That’s what I said, but I didn’t know that Greta had a problem with catatonia. It happened infrequently, usually on her children’s birthdays. It was her middle son’s birthday last week and she’d been catatonic for three days.

  “When it happens, the doctors like to put me in the sun room,” said Greta.

  I had no idea where she was going with this, but she was pretty intense about it. “Yeah. Did something happen in the sunroom?”

  Please don’t say that someone assaulted you.

  “Yes. When I’m like that, I’m completely immobile and mute.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But I can hear perfectly.”

  I got all tingly. “What did you hear?”

  Greta told me in great detail how an orderly came in, checked the room, and since it was only Greta, he answered a call. A call about Blankenship. This was after Blankenship’s visitor, a man who got nothing out of him and that’s what the orderly said. He was trying to get access to Blankenship to ‘persuade him,’ but only high-level personnel got near him. The person on the other end of the line talked for a long time and the orderly sounded nervous to Greta when he said that he didn’t think he could do that. ‘That’ was never specified. But the orderly was worried about getting caught. That was the end of the conversation and the orderly left, but not before calling Greta a smelly vegetable.

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  “I’ve never heard his voice before, so he’s not on my team, but when he answered, he said, ‘Jones’.”

  “I can’t believe catatonia came in handy,” I said.

  “Me either,” said Greta. “I hope this helps you. I think that orderly was told to kill Blankenship.”

  “I agree.” I wasn’t against Blankenship dying, but if someone wanted him dead, we definitely needed him alive. I thanked Greta and rapped on the door.

  Shelley unlocked the door and let me out. I waved to Greta before the door slammed again. She was smiling and it warmed my heart.

  I turned to the guard and asked, “Do you have anyone working here by the name of Jones?”

  “Jones? Why do you ask?”

  “Just something Greta mentioned.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know any Jones. By the way, your partner is quite a storyteller,” said Shelley while we walked down through a warren of corridors.

  “Who?” I asked.

  She jerked a thumb at Aaron. “Him, obviously.”

  “You told her a story?” I asked.

  Aaron shrugged.

  “How come you don’t tell me anything? I asked you how to make Waldorf salad and you wouldn’t say a word.”

  “Maybe because Waldorf salad is gross,” said Shelley.

  “My boyfriend likes it.”

  “Your boyfriend needs help. Here we are. The Fishbowl. Time for fun and games.”

  The agents ran up, tucking in their shirts and missing their jackets, weapons, and badges. Security did a number on them and Shelley couldn’t stop smiling.

  “What did you do?” asked Gordon.

  “Visited a patient,” I said. “You really need to keep up.”

  “Prisoner,” said Gansa.

  “Po-ta-to, Po-tah-to.”

  “This isn’t a private hospital for neurotics,” said Gordon.

  “Everyone in this building understands that better than you,” I said. “Shelley, I’m ready.”

  Gansa grabbed my arm. “We need to discuss strategy.”

  “I’m good,” I said, shaking him off.

  The agent clung to the material of my sleeve. “This has to go right.”

  “What’s your problem, rookie? I’ve been here before.”

  “You have a reputation,” said Gordon.

  I struck a pose, very Bettie Page. “For being awesome?”

  He stammered, “No.”

  “I’m so surprised.”

  They stared at me, making a concentrated effort not to look at my chest and not entirely succeeding.

  “I don’t like you,” I said.

  “Miss Watts, your opinion of us is irrelevant,” said Gansa.

  “We’ll see.”

  I set Aaron’s second paper bag on the metal table in the middle of the Fishbowl. The square, white room was the same as always, but the table situation wasn’t. Where there had been two, one for Blankenship and one for me, there was now one. The table had been positioned so that my chair was at the head of the table and Blankenship sat heavily shackled at the foot. We were now ten feet apart instead of six with the two small tables.

  “Oh, look,” I said. “You made them redecorate.”

  Blankenship looked up, his mask of disinterest fully in place. “I had some tummy trouble.”

  “I heard.”

  Shelley went halfway out the door and said, “Ten minutes, as usual. Don’t attempt to get closer.”

  “I need fifteen,” I said.

  She hesitated and then agreed. “I’m serious about the distance.”

  “No worries there.” I sat down and put my elbows on the table. The paper was itchy in my bra and I longed to pull it out.

  “What’s in the bag?” asked Blankenship. I would’ve thought he was curious if I didn’t know he was a sociopath with psychotic features, making him unable to feel normal emotions. Honestly, I don’t think the diagnosis was complete since he refused to cooperate with any examination. It’d gotten to the point that he only communicated with me. I’d been told that the doctors and researchers were jealous and frustrated, but I’d gladly have traded places with them, just not on that particular day.

  “Could be fish tacos,” I said. “I have no idea.”

  “If it’s fish tacos, you want something,” said Blankenship.

  “Always. We’re not friends.”

  A look of sorrow passed onto his bland face. It was gross in its mimicry of emotion. “You wound me.”

  “You disgust me.”

  “Miss Watts.” Gordon’s voice came through the hidden speaker system
. “Watch yourself.”

  I looked up at the camera over Blankenship’s head. “How about you shut up? If I need help, I won’t be asking you.”

  Silence. I pictured Shelley and the other guards telling him off.

  “Let’s get serious,” I said to Blankenship.

  “With pleasure.”

  I pulled the note out and held it under my tilted chin, pressed against my throat so it might be obscured from the camera.

  Blankenship squinted and then gave me a twitch of a smile. I’d discovered that he could feel pleasure of a sort. He enjoyed hurting others and thwarting the FBI would do.

  “Miss Watts, what do you think you’re doing?” asked the agent.

  I crumbled the note and ate it. “Having a snack.”

  “We will pull you out.”

  Blankenship got tense. “You do and I will give up nothing ever. She belongs to me.”

  Silence.

  I mouthed, “I want to know about the guy that visited you.”

  “Open the bag,” he said.

  “Do you know him personally?” I mouthed.

  “No. Open the bag.”

  I opened the bag and found a tubular object heavily wrapped in foil. I knew what it was and I couldn’t believe Aaron understood men, or whatever you wanted to call Blankenship, that well.

  “Is it…” Blankenship trailed off.

  “A hotdog,” I said with a smile. “It’s no popsicle, but I imagine you want me to eat it.”

  He shifted in his chair and his chains rattled. A shiver went through me, but I concealed it. This was for Mom and Dad. I could do it. I could do anything.

  “Do you want to eat it?” asked Blankenship.

  “Hell, no.”

  “Why not?” He looked a bit suspicious.

  You’re losing him.

  I unwrapped the package and involuntarily horked. Damn that Aaron. Did I say I could do anything? “It’s eight thirty in the morning and this thing is made”—I swallowed hard— “is made of bacon and crab.”

  Blankenship sniffed the air like a feral dog. “And you don’t like crab.”

  “You know I hate it and it’s…lumpy.”