by Neil Mcmahon
After almost two years of working for the man, Alison knew almost nothing about him personally. He was aloof, distant, a behaviorist with a mechanistic model of therapy that combined drugs with behavior modification.
At least, that was the operative assumption. Since his therapy sessions with the NGIs were conducted privately, no one else really knew what took place.
But a scenario was taking shape in her mind.
Many psychiatrists were reluctant to perform court-ordered evaluations, for good reason. The pay was almost nothing and the time demands great. The work itself was depressing and thankless, with grim prison visits and human beings at their worst. Trials and hearings were likely to bring attacks from attorneys, seeking to belittle professional competence and even verging into the personal.
But Jephson performed dozens of such evaluations per year, usually on cases that received no publicity. These almost never went to trial. They were settled at hearings among overworked, disinterested, state-appointed attorneys and judges. Jephson’s backup evaluations were usually performed by Vikram Ghose, a timid man from India who was on a continuously provisional status, without a license to practice independently in the United States, but whom Jephson had hired at Clevinger.
Suppose that, once in a while, the tumblers lined up to present low-profile cases, offenders with histories that suggested mental illness. These men screened by Jephson in private pre-hearing sessions. He then selecting, not the genuinely mentally ill, but sociopaths who might be keenly intelligent, especially in their own interest. Shading evaluations and obliquely coaching to present them as schizophrenic or bipolar.
Then guiding them through therapy, with information couched, coded, conveyed largely by emphasis, and absorbed by that instant, razor-keen intuition. The rules would be made immediately clear: act out once and you were in jeopardy; twice, and you went back to Atascadero or Vacaville, places that made Clevinger look like a Ramada Inn, to remain for years and maybe life. But stay in control, do twenty-plus months of soft time, and walk out free and clear. Therapy confidential. Negative feedback easily doctored and no central agency to correlate it. Especially if the men moved to other areas of the country, perhaps even changing identities.
“Sorry, dear,” Mrs. R said, hanging up. “They know how to complicate things.”
“Dr. Jephson asked to see me.”
“Yes?” Mrs. R drew the syllable out into a question. Vermillion lips compressed, she picked up the phone again. She said, “Dr. Chapley’s here,” then looked up and nodded.
Jephson’s private office possessed the flavor of a Cambridge don’s, with its supplied grandeur overcoming the cheap, textured drywall and aluminum windows. The desk was his own, a massive structure of antique oak with blotting pad, inkstand, and a silver tray of stationery. A small TV/VCR unit for educational videos sat on a rollered stand in a corner. Several diplomas and awards hung on the wall behind him, flanked by thick volumes on neurology, psychoanalytic theory, and behavior modification, sitting shoulder to shoulder on shelves like haughty authorities.
“Alison,” he said. “Please sit down.”
He swiveled to the side and leaned back in the chair, slender hands clasping each other with a relaxation that seemed imposed.
“From time to time something comes along that makes me realize my shortcomings. Such as the poor follow-up on those NGIs that you brought to my attention. My focus has always been on results. I’ve let other aspects suffer, bureaucratic details and such. Our system is imperfect, our resources limited. One does the best one can.”
He paused.
“It’s a very impressive best, Dr. Jephson,” she said. “No one would argue with that.”
“I’m afraid I’m not much good at delegating responsibility, either.”
This time she waited. Jephson’s fingers steepled.
“I’ve been thinking for some time that JCOG would benefit from an administrative director,” he said. “Someone to take over the day-to-day business, the hands-on operation.”
Her eyebrows arched with comprehension. So: become a team player—and acquire the position of administrative director of JCOG. Stay another year or two, blind to what was going on, then carry the weight ofthat credential to wherever she wanted to go next.
From threat to bribe.
She said, “I think that’s a wonderful idea. It would free you up for more important things.”
He waved a hand modestly. “Just putting other talent to good use.”
“Did you have anyone in particular in mind?”
Jephson swiveled back to her and smiled, a gift he bestowed rarely. “I shouldn’t think I’d need to look too far from home.”
“When would you be implementing this?”
“Oh, it will take a few months. We need a formal job description, funding, all that.”
Or else it was a stall. Nothing definite promised—but a way to keep her quiet until he could come up with something damaging to her.
She said, “I wouldn’t call that poor follow-up a detail, Dr. Jephson. Those are dangerous men. No one knows where they are.”
His smile remained, but his pale eyes went glacial. “I am looking into it, Alison.”
She bit off the words, So am I, and stood.
“Keep me posted,” she said.
Mrs. R was busy over a stack of papers. She waved beringed fingers as Alison walked by.
Alison paused at the outer door. “Paula, is John Garlick’s release still on schedule?”
Mrs. R looked up, surprised. “As far as I know. Why?”
“I just wondered if any hitches had developed.”
“You’d have to ask Dr. Jephson.” Mrs. R’s gaze returned to the papers.
Alison’s gaze turned hard, anger flaring at being caught in this smug charade.
“Suppose Garlick stops reporting for meds?”
“The outpatient clinic would notify us,” Mrs. R said.
“But that’s that, right? Nobody else would know. Nobody’d go looking for him.”
“Social workers would try to contact him.”
“Meaning what? A phone call or two? What if he just disappeared?”
Mrs. R placed both hands flat on the desk and leaned forward.
“You wouldn’t go looking for those men either, Alison. It’s not like on the wards. You can’t just scream for help.”
Back on Three-Psych, Alison imagined a subtle shift among the staff she passed: gazes of curiosity or wariness. The patients looked different, too: sly and secretive instead of confused. She realized she was assessing them all in terms of: Who might be in on this?
The answer kept coming back: Anyone.
A few minutes before five P.M., Alison let the heavy door of Three-Psych swing closed behind her and walked out into the damp twilight air. The afternoon had included a Dual Diagnosis Group meeting, for patients with both mental illness and drug problems from fortified wine to inhaling propane.
Garlick, a one-time heavy drinker and meth user, had put in a mandatory appearance. Today, there was no baiting of other patients. He had been quiet, polite, his gaze rarely meeting hers, as if he had known he was under her scrutiny.
Soon to be released.
She opened the Mercedes’ door and was swinging herself in when her mind registered what the car’s interior light showed:
A small white box, lying on the driver’s seat.
Her breath stopped. But a second later, she exhaled and managed a smile.
A return gift from Monks.
She left the door open for the light, and opened the box with her thumbnails. Under a layer of tissue paper lay a five-by-seven photograph. The setting was a forest clearing, with a thick growth of redwoods at its edges. The corner of a shed was visible, with a rusty corrugated iron roof.
In the foreground was the face of a man. He was looking over his left shoulder, his gaze fixed on the camera, his mouth slightly open. The sense was that he had been taken by surprise and was just realizing that the
photographer was there. His eyes were shadowed beneath the bill of a baseball cap, but an ugly, unmistakable sense of menace emanated from them.
Recognition came to her with sick shock. He was Caymas Schulte, one of the phony NGIs, released a few months after she had started working at Clevinger; the only one she had personally known.
Her fingers felt rough edges on the photo’s back. She turned it over.
Another picture was glued on that looked like it had been cut out of a book: a small pretty bird, with a red head and yellow and black markings. A cartoon-style balloon was drawn in ink, issuing from its mouth. It contained musical notes, as if the bird were singing.
Heart hammering, she swiveled to look around, as if the message-bearer might still be standing there. As if it might be the phantom lover from her childhood, whom she knew had touched her once, but she had no memory of.
Her twelfth summer, at the family’s country home. An older cousin, Gerald, a gentle boy who teased her in a way she was beginning to understand.
Another boy who lived nearby: Earl Lipscomb, quiet, polite, but with something frightening in his eyes. She would see him in the distance what she was alone: feel him around her edges.
One early fall day, the two young men gone hunting together. Gerald shot, mistaken by Earl Lipscomb for a deer. The death ruled accidental.
A crowded cemetery on a muggy afternoon. The coffin about to be lowered. Men opening the lid to tuck in a bit of shroud.
Inside the blackness, a glimpse of white: Gerald’s face.
Her gaze rising from there, of itself, to meet the eyes of Earl Lipscomb, far at the fringes of the crowd.
In that instant, the truth seared into her mind: that her cousin had taken her place.
Herself, dropping like stone in a dead faint.
Later she learned that she had been unconscious for several minutes. She remembered only the distant sense of a vast barren landscape, with herself on it. Far away at the horizon stood a sort of beacon, endlessly searching. She remembered it sweeping closer, the electrifying instant before contact, and then nothing more.
But whatever had happened during those lost moments made the next months of her life unreal, a shadowy existence that she had reentered like an amnesia victim. And she knew that whatever had touched her had been looking for her ever since. It had colored everything: career, men, life.
She leaned forward to start the car. Her gaze caught the pale oval of her own face reflected in the rear-view mirror. Her hazel eyes, which a man had once told her caught sunlight and reflected it back in bursts, looked feverishly bright.
From another car, another pair of eyes watched the Mercedes back out and drive away. A band moved to the ignition key, but then stopped.
It was so delicate a matter, one that no texts addressed: the purification of a vessel, laying to rest the one who was there and bringing forth the one who waited.
But clearly, they were already coming together.
Chapter 6
On his way home, Monks stopped to buy groceries and liquor at a small store run by an extended Portuguese family, a quiet place with scarred wooden floors and counters and a fine pall of dust hanging in the air. It was a biweekly ritual, more expensive than the bigger supermarkets, but they kept a fine butcher counter and a wealth of other delicacies: toothsome sausages, pungent cheeses, and jars of tart pickled vegetables.
Moreover, there was the feeling that they had come to depend on his trade, ordered in Finlandia vodka especially for him, and that the family would dwindle in some obscure but significant way beyond money if he failed them. The elderly beret-wearing padrone, or his sturdy black-dressed wife, would thank Monks with a heavy accent, dark eyes seeming to measure his vice as he lifted the vodka bottles into his arms.
From there the journey was on two-lane roads, traffic thinning and pavement narrowing as he drove farther west toward the north Marin coast. The drizzle had thickened to rain. He paused at his mailbox, tugging free the usual accumulation of journals and junk. The house was seventy yards farther up a graveled drive, isolated from the road and neighbors by a thick second growth of redwood, live oak, and twisted snakelike madrones, their slick bark glistening in the wet.
Inside, he went straight to the cat food cupboard. A whirl of rumbling fur erupted across the kitchen, the skirmishing of children inside too long on a rainy day: the little calico his daughter had named Felicity, and Cesare Borgia, a scarred old black-coated felon who had been feral until Monks gradually won his trust. Omar, a blue Persian the size of a beagle, watched from the couch like an emperor for whose entertainment the battle was being staged. By all indications he had lain there since Monks’s departure, without moving or noticing that his human was gone.
The fight ended with Felicity crowhopping across the floor, tail held stiffly down, while Cesare sat on the contested ground licking a paw. Monks noted that everyone had ended up closer to the food bowls. It was sheer extortion; a neighbor had fed them hours earlier. His ex-wife had been able to hold out against them, but he had long since stopped even pretending. He considered the selection and chose the Kultured Kat Kidney Entree, feeling it was appropriate to tomorrow’s ASCLEP business, and divided two cans into three clean bowls, an arbitrary assignment since everyone stole from everyone else’s.
Then he made his first drink. Finlandia vodka steamed as it spilled over ice, with a twist of just enough lemon to bring out the flavor. The taste was somewhere between a sweet kiss and a bite. He took drink and bottle to the shower, and later poured a second while he toweled dry. He dressed in a worn flannel shirt and jeans and refilled his glass.
The rain was drifting through the trees in sheets now. He started a fire in the wood stove. Then he flipped through the San Francisco phone directory until he found the number for Tierney’s Pub on Taylor Street.
A voice heavy with brogue answered.
Monks said, “Dennis O’Dwyer, if he’s in.”
The background noise brought him a vivid picture of the long, copper-covered bar lined with men drinking pints of Guinness, reading newspapers, playing darts, arguing politics, conspiring for the IRA. Whatever they did for a living, it was their real business to know what was going on. Dennis’s specialty was the insurance end of medicine. He had been a claims adjuster with ASCLEP for more than thirty years.
“It’s Carroll Monks,” he said when Dennis’s whiskey voice came on.
“How are you, me boy?” It came out sounding like buy. At Tierney’s, Dennis became more Irish with the hours. He was white-haired, thick-bodied, with a purplish nose, cheeks mottled with broken veins, and a vast lexicon of memory for people and events.
“I need to chat a minute,” Monks said. “Is this a good time?”
“None better.”
“Do you remember a big case, maybe twelve years ago? The Vandenard heir, they called him Robby, shot a man.”
“Indeed I do.”
“I’m interested in the psychiatrist who evaluated Robby. His name’s Jephson.”
“A Brit, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
Dennis coughed expressively.
“He got Robby ruled mentally incompetent,” Monks said. “There’s reason to think the proceedings weren’t straight. Did you hear anything like that?”
“It was no secret that Robby got preferential treatment. Like anything else with that kind of money, Carroll. A whiff of trouble, and there’s experts flying in from all over the world, with price tags on them.”
“Like Bernard Capaldi?”
“Like Bernard. He’s retired now. Not in good health, I hear.”
“Was there any suggestion that Jephson was bought too?”
“I’m trying to remember the context I heard his name in. There was a lot of buzz in the insurance game about that incident.”
“There’s a gold mine in your head, Den.”
“More like a peat bog these days. Defense liability exposure, that was it. Fear of a wrongful death suit. But it never material
ized.”
“The Vandenards bought off the victim’s widow.”
“Say what you like, it’s a good way to turn a witness friendly. I can’t recall anything specific about Jephson. I’ll nose around first thing tomorrow.”
“Den, she, the widow, told us Robby was suspected of murdering his sister.”
“There was speculation. People who knew the family. It was kept very quiet, of course. He was only a child.”
“What about the rest of the family?”
“A grim story, lad. Robert Senior, Robby’s father, had a stroke not long after. His wife died in the mid-eighties. It was given out as heart failure, but the rumor was an overdose of drugs and alcohol. She’d been in treatment centers. Heart-break, more likely.
“And that was the end of them, the main-line Vandenards. They were the darlings of the city when those children were young. There’s a branch, cousins I believe, who’ve inherited the interests.”
Monks was silent.
“This Jephson,” Dennis said. “Is he in trouble with ASCLEP?”
“No.”
“Shame. You’ll be at the meeting tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
Monks rang oft, then got out his address book and called Alison Chapley, his fingers seeming to remember her number as he punched the buttons. Her machine answered.
He said, “I have news. Give me a call.”
He refilled his glass, noting that the bottle was approaching a quarter empty: filtering through the microscopic labyrinths of liver and kidneys, alcohol molecules separated out and carried by the bloodstream to the hypothalamus to produce a temporary euphoria, followed by mass cell destruction high and low, a fast-forwarded kaleidoscope of frames to the body’s dissolution. He considered the necessity of a kidney transplant, picturing donor organs like shy mollusks in the sea caves of the peritoneum, hiding from predatory human eyes and the rubber-gloved hands that probed to scoop them out, and wondered again if the malaria was coming on. He refilled his glass and went to check his supply of Plaquenil, a marginal remedy almost as bad as the disease.
