by Linda Barnes
“How’d you guess?”
“Intuition.” I could have said, “And you haven’t asked me out yet,” which he usually does right after “hello,” but I didn’t want to start anything.
“It’s a lady,” he said. “Somebody who’s getting to be a very close friend.”
I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth, but I felt a sharp stab of something that felt uncomfortably like jealousy. “You gonna arrest her?”
“Haven’t decided yet. What can I do for you?”
“Run a plate?”
Mooney and I keep an ongoing balance sheet in our heads. Anytime I can help him out, I do my best. Private cops need official pals to break bureaucratic logjams.
I said, “I’m looking for a late-model Firebird, light blue, maybe gray.”
“Just give me the plate.”
“Yeah, look, I’m sorry to bother you at the office. The last two numbers are four, eight.”
There was a moment’s silence. “Nah,” he said, “you gotta have more than that.”
“I don’t.”
“Give the client the money back.”
“I would if I could.”
“Spent it?”
“It’s a personal thing, Mooney. Try it with the Registry, okay?”
“Those clerks hate me already.”
“They respect you, Mooney.”
“Carlotta, don’t even try to butter me up.”
“Why not?”
“Might work.”
I smiled. “One more thing.”
“Where have I heard that before?”
“What does Cee Co mean to you?”
“Huh?”
“Just free-associate, Mooney.”
“This a test?”
“Moon, try.”
“Short for Coca-Cola?”
I hung up. While I waited for Patsy to call back, I made a list. Seiko. Seeko. See Ko. Ceeko. C. Ko. Somebody Ko. I tried the White Pages and learned that Ko is quite a popular name in the Chinese community. The entries numbered twenty-six and ran from Chi-Fen Ko to Zyuan Ko, with a pedestrian Thomas Ko thrown into the mix.
Patsy didn’t call back.
After staring interminably at both the shiny side and the dull side, I carefully placed the foil square back into Emily Woodrow’s envelope. Under my magnifying lens, it seemed dotted with a faint crescent-shaped pattern. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before.
I sighed. Maybe Roz would have a different take on it. She usually does.
When the doorbell rang, I was relieved.
Waiting is hard.
6
Keith Donovan, hands buried deep in his trouser pockets, was rocking back and forth on my front stoop. Alone. He’d exchanged his jacket and tie for a blue crewneck sweater.
“May I come in?” he asked with a quick on-and-off grin.
“Okay.”
He headed to the living room, aiming for the easy chair again. I followed. Last time, he’d kept his feet on the floor, his hands in his lap. This time he leaned back and crossed his legs, relaxed. If he’d been a prospective client, I’d have quoted him top dollar. I go by the shoes.
Give him a break, I scolded myself. He might have a pile of grubby sneakers in the closet. And it’s not his fault he looks too young to practice anything more complicated than tying the laces.
His wheat-colored hair would look great when it grew out. He was about my height. Decent build—narrow shoulders, but even narrower hips. He sat high in his chair, evidence of a long torso. Most of my length is in my legs.
“I wanted to thank you for listening to Mrs. Woodrow,” he said. “It’s quite a painful story.”
“Thanks for rustling me up a client. You want a commission?”
The corners of his eyes crinkled, making him look a shade older. “No, really, you were fine. You helped her. Just having somebody listen the way you listen helps.”
“Anytime,” I said, wondering why we couldn’t have exchanged such pleasantries over the phone.
“Look,” he said, “this isn’t something I usually do. I hope you don’t feel like I’m passing the buck.”
I recalled the gratifying size of Emily Woodrow’s check, and her desire for secrecy, even from her therapist.
“Any bucks I can collect, I’ll take,” I said lightly.
“No. Really, this step, um, my visit was fairly unorthodox. Psychiatrists aren’t exactly known for their activism.”
There. He’d said it again. Psychiatrist. How old was he?
“Even in the People’s Republic of Cambridge?” I asked.
“You do get a more radical branch of therapy here,” he admitted, “but nonetheless, I feel somewhat uneasy about involving you in what will probably turn out to be a waste of your time and Mrs. Woodrow’s money.”
He seemed to speak in two different voices. One, his shrink voice, used words like nonetheless and somewhat. The other voice, the easy one, went with the smile. When he used his shrink voice, his forehead wrinkled. I wondered if he practiced in front of a mirror.
“I’m a grown-up,” I responded. “I could have said no. Therefore, it’s no longer your responsibility, Doctor.”
“Keith,” he said in the easy voice.
“Keith,” I repeated. He had nice brown eyes, a firm but expressive way of moving his hands.
“Mrs. Woodrow’s version of reality,” he continued in full therapist cry, “may not be entirely responsible.”
“Oh?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “What are you trying to tell me, exactly? That she didn’t see some guy enter her daughter’s hospital room? That she imagined the business with the mask?”
He straightened up and planted his feet on the ground. “You see, when something goes so horribly wrong in a person’s life, that person may automatically seek for a reason, a fault, a devil if the individual is of a religious bent, as a way of obtaining some comfort against the horrible randomness of death and disease.”
He sounded like he was quoting a textbook, but his gaze was direct and sincere. Too direct and sincere.
“You think she’s lying about that last day? Dramatizing?” I admit I was enjoying his academically roundabout way of talking, his frank open gaze. I got the feeling he’d taken a med school course in how to hedge everything he said. If I listened to him long enough, maybe I’d learn.
He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Hospitals can be enormously confusing places. People come and go; it’s all hurry up and rush. And Emily Woodrow clocked a lot of hours at JHHI. She may think she’s telling us exactly what she saw, but she may have the time factor off.”
“It happened on another day?”
“Possibly.”
“I’d think the day her daughter died would be pretty well fixed in her mind.”
“She’s gone over that day, uh, Carlotta. Over and over it. Rewriting it. Sanitizing it. Making it bearable.”
“Fictionalizing it?”
“It’s possible that Emily’s version is very close to the truth. Whoever was administering the chemo probably saw the child’s vital signs failing and called a code.”
“A code?”
“Every hospital has a code system. So visitors aren’t unduly alarmed by loudspeakers booming ‘heart failure in room nineteen.’”
“What would have happened if somebody called a code?”
“All hell would break loose. The place would be flooded with strangers. Someone—a doctor on duty—would grab an emergency cart and rush into Rebecca’s room, try to revive her.”
“Emily didn’t say anything about a crowd or a cart.”
“Exactly.” He paused, leaned back, and crossed his legs. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “And she didn’t tell you that one of her major childhood memories concerns a tonsillectomy that occurred when she was approximately four years old. She doesn’t remember much about it. Mainly the mask coming down and covering her face. The smell. The fear.”
I didn’t like his solved-it-all expression. “Y
ou think she’s confusing the two episodes in her mind,” I said slowly.
His smugness evaporated, and he was all earnest understanding again. “I know the doctor who treated her daughter,” he said, “and believe me, if anything irregular went on in that room, Jerome Muir would have been on it like a hawk. He has an international reputation, an impeccable one. He’s extremely personable and respectable, and he won’t be very pleased to talk to you about this.”
“Better me than an attorney,” I said. “I don’t take depositions.”
He sighed deeply, uncrossed and crossed his legs again.
I said, “So what do you do with Mrs. Woodrow? Talk about her childhood, huh? Age four and on?”
“Mainly she talks.”
“And you listen.”
He took the reading glasses out of his pocket and tapped them thoughtfully on one knee. I wondered if they taught that maneuver at shrink school. “I don’t think it would be helpful for this to go on too long,” he said slowly. “The therapeutic goal is to get Mrs. Woodrow to pick up the thread of her life. A prolonged investigation would hardly help.”
“Quick and dirty?” I inquired.
“Quick, anyway.”
I smiled. “Well, I’m sure you didn’t mean to come over here and insult me, but you’re getting close. If you brought Mrs. Woodrow by for a dose of warm fuzzies, you made a mistake. I’m not a shrink and, frankly, your therapeutic goal does not interest me. If Mrs. Woodrow’s imagination is running wild, I’ll find that out and close up shop. But she’s my client now and you’re not. Understand?”
“You’re very touchy.”
“Am I?”
“I didn’t mean to impugn your professionalism.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you didn’t.”
“Do I detect a lack of respect for therapy?”
“Possibly,” I admitted.
I went to a therapist once. The cop brass sent me, after I shot and killed a man, right before I left the force. Standard procedure: you off somebody, you see the departmental psychiatrist. I’d hated the departmental psych on sight. A pudgy, balding egomaniac, he’d reminded me of a buzzard circling wounded prey, urging me to tell him all about it, scrounge up every last detail. Please, Detective, when did you first touch the trigger? Please, Carlotta, when was the exact moment you felt you had to fire? Please, tell me, what did you feel when you pressed that trigger? Excitement? Relief? A sense of release? Anything sexual? Oh, please, anything at all sexual? Tell me, and it will be our little secret.
It’s not that I didn’t react to killing another human. It’s not that I don’t cry. But I resent being forced.
And I kept wondering what they’d have done to the goddamn felon if it had gone down the other way. Would the same shrink be asking my killer the same questions? And when did you first feel you absolutely had to pull the trigger and shoot the cop?
“A great many people mistrust therapy,” Keith Donovan said mildly, “but others are helped by it.”
“We all have our ways of dealing with shit,” I said.
“Yeah? What do you do when you’re angry?”
“Yell. Play volleyball. Smack the ball around.”
“Hmmmm,” he said.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just hmmmm. And what do you do when you’re down? Depressed?”
I hesitated on that one. “Play guitar.”
“What were you going to say? Before you settled for guitar.”
Our eyes met and I almost smiled. He grinned, and I thought oh-oh. Whenever I start arguing with a guy for no reason, it’s a sure sign the old chemistry’s kicking in.
“What kind of guitar?” he asked.
“Blues,” I said. “Old-time blues. Mainly Delta, a little city stuff.”
He said, “I play drums. Used to, anyway. Rock. Punk.”
I have no-fail chemistry. A guy turns me on, he’s the wrong one for me.
“Since you’re here,” I said, bringing the conversation back to a professional level, “maybe you can answer a few questions for me.”
“Such as?”
“How does Mrs. Woodrow pay her bills?”
“By check. She’s reimbursed by her insurance company.”
Nice, I thought. I ought to have that arrangement. Investigation insurance. “And you’ve been seeing her for three months now? Weekly?”
“I saw her more often right after Becca died.”
“Who made the connection? Why you?”
“Why not?”
“You seem, uh, young.”
“So do you.”
“Are you with Harvard Health or Bay State Medical or anything like that?”
He shrugged. “Another patient may have mentioned me to her.”
I temporarily accepted the evasion. “Okay. She mentioned drug blackouts.”
“Disorientation,” he corrected.
“Right. What’s she on?”
“Um. I don’t know that I should—”
“I can ask her. You don’t have to tell me if it violates any professional standards.”
“What’s going on here?” he said, his eyes narrowing.
“An investigation.”
“You take your work seriously.”
“Don’t you?”
“I only meant to say that Mrs. Woodrow’s suspicions are not uncommon among those who’ve experienced an unexpected loss.”
“You can bring anybody else who wants an unexpected loss investigated over to visit, if you’d like,” I said.
“Look, I just felt I should warn you there’s a good chance you might be dealing with delusional behavior here. I certainly haven’t ruled that out. I think it’s highly likely.”
“What do you mean by delusional?” I asked. Oh, this was fun. I could sit and ask “what do you mean by that?” questions all day.
“Mrs. Woodrow is certainly suspicious and hostile. Something terrible did happen. Her daughter did die. But I have no way of knowing whether Mrs. Woodrow was already suspicious and hostile before this event set her off. I came in on this case as a fireman. I wasn’t seeing her before the crisis. I just want you to understand that.”
“You toss around words like suspicious and hostile. How about paranoid?” I asked. I once knew a private eye who did regular business with a psychiatrist. Whenever the shrink requested it, the PI would pass his electronic debugging equipment over the dental fillings of extremely paranoid patients. The shrink swore it reassured them tremendously.
Donovan blew out a breath. “Paranoid has definite clinical overtones,” he said slowly.
“Would you use it to describe Emily Woodrow?”
“Not as a one-word label, no.”
“You sound like you regret introducing me to your client,” I said into silence.
“My patient,” he corrected me. “I only want to reinforce that the patient is seeking closure.”
“Or possibly truth.”
“Her daughter died of leukemia. That’s truth.”
“When I was a cop, I got into the habit of treating every death as a suspicious death. Otherwise I found myself tromping all over the evidence before I’d decided to check it out.”
“I didn’t know you’d been, um, with the police.”
“A cop. Would that have kept you away?”
He tried the smile again. “I’d have to think about it. But, no, I don’t think so. I find it extremely interesting.”
“What?”
He shrugged. “A woman. In your line of work. I hope I don’t offend you by mentioning that.”
I shrugged in return. “Anything else you’d like to tell me about Mrs. Woodrow?”
“Just this: If you speak to Dr. Muir, I’d prefer you didn’t use my name.”
“Aha,” I said, arching one eyebrow.
“Is that your first clue?”
“Could be helpful. What can you tell me about this Jerome Muir? Aside from his international reputation?”
He thought about the question
for a while, opening his mouth to speak, then reconsidering, shifting in his chair, frowning.
“Well?” I prompted.
“I never knew him in his prime.”
I wondered what years Donovan considered “prime” ones. Teens? Twenties?
He crossed his arms over his chest and went on. “Muir’s a genius. It’s that simple and that complicated. The amount he’s accomplished, the amount he accomplishes … I don’t know if he never sleeps, or what. He’s the guiding spirit behind Helping Hand, the CEO, the Chief of Staff, and he still manages to see the occasional patient.”
“Does he pick and choose patients?”
“If some oil sheikh’s kid got leukemia, yeah, Muir would probably see him. But he keeps his hand in, takes a few regular cases. He’s part of a practice.”
“What practice?”
“The Muir Group.”
“And modest, too,” I said.
“He is. I mean, if he’d wanted it, they’d probably have named the whole damn hospital after him. He put the deal together that saved the place. You ever hear of MedCare, Inc.? They buy up hospitals—in poor areas, a lot of the time. It’s a for-profit chain, mainly in the South, and they can stay there for all I care. If it weren’t for Muir, MedCare would have eaten the old Hand place. The merger with the Helping Institute kept it alive and vital, and that combo would never have come together without Jerome Muir. He held MedCare at bay almost single-handedly, and did some smooth financial dealing to arrange funding for the merger. Brought people together, bankers, politicians, doctors, neighborhood activists. As far as the Muir Group goes, the other docs probably begged him to let them use his name.”
“So he’s a genius,” I said.
“He’s … I don’t know how to put it … engaging. He has a great manner. He’s a force. He gets behind something and it moves, it happens.”
“Is he a good doctor?”
“There are doctors who go through the motions, and then there are healers. Genuine committed healers. Muir’s a healer.” He stuck out his chin defiantly, as if daring me to say something bad about his idol. Defiance sat on him awkwardly, made him look vulnerable.
“Do I sense a bit of hero worship here?” I asked.
“Chalk it up to my youth,” he said dryly.
“If you happen to be on staff at Helping Hand, you could tell me things about the place. If you want to cooperate.”
