The Last Place

by Laura Lippman

  Tess was excused, and the next case was called. Dazed, she left the courtroom with Tyner.

  “Can he do that? Drop the community-service provision and make me go to therapy?”

  “He just did. I guess he assumes it’s no different from ordering a drunk driver to go to AA meetings. It’s funny, though. He never once mentioned anything about counseling in all our meetings. I bet it occurred to him just now. I suppose I could have objected, but it will actually take up less of your time than volunteering. That was going to be three hours a week for a year.”

  “But why would the judge change the terms of our agreement at the last minute?”

  Tyner, usually happy to criticize or rebuke her, was slow to answer.

  “There was something in your face, Tess, when you looked at Mickey Pechter. Something dark. I hate to say it, but Judge Halsey may have a point.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “You drink how much?”

  The court-ordered psychiatrist, Dr. Marshall Armistead, had been droning efficiently through a laundry list of medical history when an inattentive Tess tripped herself up by telling the truth. Tess was so bored, so detached, she couldn’t remember what she had said to provoke this reaction. Two drinks, three drinks. Was that really so much? Should she claim she was French on her mother’s side or backpedal?

  Backpedal.

  “I mean, not every night. But it’s not unusual for me to have wine with dinner, maybe two glasses. And I like to go out with friends at least once a week, have a cocktail.”

  “Do you drink alone?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you drink to relax or to reward yourself?”

  “I wouldn’t describe it that way.”

  “Do you often feel hung over in the mornings?”

  “Never.” She tried not to sound too hostile, too defensive. “Look, I know this drill. I don’t have a drinking problem.”

  “Okay, we’ll move on. Drugs?”

  “Only pot now.”

  One eyebrow seemed to twitch at “only.” They were notable eyebrows, with an old man’s wildness, although Dr. Armistead appeared to be relatively young, no more than forty. He was bald, but in the nonchalant manner of a man who had lost his hair young and never mourned it. He had a full mouth and a prominent nose. The eyes beneath the animated brows were deep-set, a changeable hazel not unlike her own. But beady, Tess decided.

  “Only marijuana now,” he echoed, picking apart her words. “So you’ve used other drugs?”

  “I tried cocaine once. It made me speak very, very, very fast, and even I could tell I was inane. I don’t need to speed up. I was too old for the rave-and-ecstasy fad by the time it got to Baltimore or I might have tried that, just out of curiosity. But really I’m essentially drug-free. One nice thing about being self-employed, though, is no one can make me pee into a cup.”

  “Essentially drug-free.” He checked his notes. “You do drink quite a bit of coffee.”

  Tess sighed and rolled her eyes. “I know I don’t have a caffeine problem, because if I go a day without coffee, I don’t get headaches. And, really, I hardly smoke pot at all anymore. It’s a hassle to get it, and I have to worry about the consequences.”

  “Consequences?”

  “There’s a risk, given what I do, in breaking the law. As I get more successful, the risk is less worth taking.”

  “And yet… you committed a felony.”

  “I was charged with a felony. I pleaded to a misdemeanor.”

  He frowned at the piece of paper in front of him. “But the original charge was a felony.”

  “Charges don’t mean a thing in our system. Innocent until proven guilty, remember?”

  He went back to the standard questions, and Tess’s attention wandered again, taking in her surroundings. She had expected grander surroundings at the famed Sheppard Pratt Hospital. After all, Zelda Fitzgerald had been treated here once. But the Jazz Age was over and the era of psychotropic drugs and HMOs was a bad fit for the once-elegant hospital. A certain genteel shabbiness was rampant inside the buildings, although the grounds were still lush. Here, for example, Dr. Armistead’s window was propped open with a small piece of plywood, so the outside breezes could combat the dry overheated air pumped out by the old radiator. Tess was especially struck by the dowdy wing chair in which she sat. The arms were so worn they were nothing but silken strings.

  The doctor caught her combing those strings with her fingers and made a quick note on his Palm Pilot. Was it considered hostile to fiddle with string? Angry? Anal? Like many people who wandered into a psychiatrist’s office for the first time, Tess was worried she wouldn’t be allowed to leave.

  “Is there mental illness in your family?”

  “No, not really.” Her reply was automatic, and she immediately doubted its veracity. Really, insanity was the only explanation for some of them. But there was no diagnosed mental illness in her family, so she was telling the truth. Besides, the doctor was barreling ahead. There was no chance to revise or revisit her answers.

  How did she sleep? Fine, most nights. Most nights? Well, everyone had a bad night now and then, right? Did her bad nights usually follow drinking?

  “I told you I drink almost every night,” she pointed out.

  After heavy nights of drinking, then? That wasn’t the pattern.

  “So, there is a pattern?”

  “No, that’s not what I meant. It’s just—I have bad dreams, sometimes. They come with the territory, the kind of work I do. I’ve seen more than my share of… disturbing things. But it’s not as if I’m a police officer, or a paramedic—”

  “Or a doctor,” he said, gently making the case for his own profession. “Doctors see a lot of death too.”

  “Not the kind of death I’ve seen, not unless they’re in the emergency room. And it’s not just death, anyway. The death is the least of it. I’ve seen what people will do to one another to get what they want, rationalizing all the while that it’s fair—or even moral.”

  “Which is what you did, is it not?”

  His voice remained gentle, nonjudgmental. She knew he was testing her, asking her to evaluate her behavior in the context of what she had just said, to hold it up to the light of her own logic and see if there were any holes in it.

  Still, the question pissed her off.

  “I tried to stop a pedophile from picking up little girls on the Internet.”

  “Not a pedophile, as I understand it, not by clinical definition. He may have been stalking underage girls, but he wasn’t interested in little-girl girls, was he? Otherwise he wouldn’t have sought to meet you in a bar.”

  “Okay, underage girls. Whom he apparently plied with roofies, which have no purpose except for date rape.”

  “Yes, I saw the reference to that in the file the judge sent me. But do we know if he’s ever used those drugs?”

  “He had them. It was only a matter of time.”

  “So you took the law into your own hands.”

  “I had heard about him from an underage girl I knew. She was safe, but I had to protect other girls who might run into him. To do that, I needed to figure out who he was.”

  “Do you feel that way a lot? That you have to protect others?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Have you ever used violence to protect—your word—anyone?”

  Tess shook her head. She was proud of the fact that she relied on her wits more than her Smith & Wesson. She seldom fired her gun outside a range.

  “Really? Judge Halsey sent me a note that I should ask you about the time you tried to beat a boy, down in Pigtown. It apparently came up in the prosecutor’s presentencing investigation.”

  “I beat a boy in Pigtown—?” It was hard not to finish with the lyric “just to watch him die,” but she didn’t figure Dr. Armistead, with his wallful of degrees, for a Johnny Cash fan. The memory kicked in a beat later. The doctor’s bland encapsulation had taken the incident so far from its context that she hadn�
�t recognized her own past. “It wasn’t quite the way you make it sound. The ”boy‘ was a killer, barely human. He had used a young girl without any thought to the consequences. I snapped.“

  “So you do have trouble controlling your emotions?”

  “No, no, not at all. It was a most unusual circumstance.”

  “But there was this boy and now there’s Mr. Pechter. And in both cases the trigger seemed to be the man’s manipulation of a younger, more inexperienced girl.”

  “Twice isn’t a pattern.”

  “Is twice all there is?”

  Tess glanced at one of the several clocks in the room. They were all small and subtle, placed throughout the study as if they were nothing more than part of the decor. But wherever one looked, there was a clock, and they were all ruthlessly synchronized. She thought there should be a huge digital readout, showing the seconds counting down and the dollars going up, like that national debt clock that used to tour the nation. An hour with Dr. Armistead cost $150, of which her insurance would pay $100. That was a good deal, according to Tyner, who had used his contacts to find the doctor after almost every other therapist in town had claimed to be too busy or not a part of her insurance plan.

  “I think our hour is up,” she told the doctor.

  “The intake interview usually takes a little longer. As my secretary told you when you made the appointment.”

  “Oh.” She went back to combing the strings on the chair’s arms.

  “How’s your appetite?” He was reading from the form again.

  “Lusty.”

  He smiled. Good, he had a sense of humor at least.

  “Sexual desire?”

  “Um—well, I’m hetero. I told you I had a boyfriend.”

  “I’m asking if you’ve noticed any changes in your sex drive as of late, whether it’s increased or decreased.”

  She had to think about this. Crow was only twenty-five, six years younger than she, and his need for sex was so regular that she seldom pondered her own level of desire. She ate at mealtime, she had sex at bedtime.

  “No change. Actually, my relationship is one of the best things in my life.”

  He looked up as if he had never heard a more startling revelation. Talk of good relationships must be suspect here, or rare. It was probably more common for people sitting in this wing chair to confide they were diaper-wearing shoplifters with a fetish for rutabagas.

  “Good, good for you. Do you exercise regularly?”

  “Almost obsessively.”

  Another verbal minefield. He paused, his pen poised over the sheet clamped to his clipboard. “What makes you say that?”

  “I was joking. I am pretty intense about my exercise regimen—it’s the reason I can afford to eat as much as I do, and I love to eat. I row in the warm-weather months, like now, and also run and lift weights. Rowing is great exercise, but it’s also very meditative. I get a little crazy in the winter, when I can’t get on the water.”

  Crazy, she had just described herself as crazy. The word seemed to hover over her in a balloon, like an exclamation from some comic strip character. But Dr. Armistead didn’t seem to notice. He was double-checking his list, what he had checked off, what he hadn’t, trying to decide if she was naughty or nice.

  “That seems to cover it. Now Theresa—”

  “Tess, please.” Mickey Pechter had called her Theresa too.

  “Tess. It’s clear you don’t want to be here. Even if I didn’t know your counseling was court-ordered, I could tell by your body language, your avoidance of eye contact, that you have no desire to enter therapy. Well, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. No one wants to be here. Many of my patients are here conditionally—because of substance abuse or arrangements they’ve made with their employers. Those who seek me out are unhappier still, almost desperate in their pain. I’m a doctor. No one likes to go to the doctor.”

  “Or the dentist,” Tess said. “The dentist is even worse, for some reason.”

  “All you have to do is show up every week for the next six months, and you’ll have fulfilled the court’s mandate. You can come in every week, on whatever day and time works best for you, and tell me you feel fine, and we can talk about the weather or the Orioles. I’ll make a mark on your card and you can take it to your probation officer, and everyone will be happy. Except you.”

  “I am happy.”

  “At times, perhaps. Certainly you have every reason to be. You’re an attractive woman with what appears to be a successful business. You’re in a relationship that sounds healthy and nurturing in every way. I think you drink more than you should, but you don’t seem to abuse alcohol or any other substances. So how do we reconcile that woman with the woman who decided to remove a man’s body hair and then, just for good measure, kicked him as hard as she could?”

  “How can they know I kicked him?” Tess caught herself, horrified by what she had almost said. She had been about to point out that it could have been Whitney. She had stopped short of perjuring herself, but Judge Halsey would not be pleased if he learned she had withheld information. Less than one hour in therapy, and she was ready to give up a secret she had kept from everyone, even Crow.

  “He had a bruised rib. It’s on the hospital report.” He looked at her keenly. “Is that what you meant? Why are you so surprised?”

  “I just didn’t think a bruised rib showed, you know? But this is confidential, right? You can’t tell anyone what I say here?”

  “Absolutely. Nothing you say here will be repeated to anyone, not even Judge Halsey.” He waited to see if she had anything else to say. She didn’t, but she was relieved to have the ground rules made explicit.

  “Look, are we done yet? I know you said this could take longer than usual, but I told a friend I would meet her at the Casino Shop at noon. She wants to take me to lunch to make up for…” Tess’s voice trailed off. It wasn’t that she was, once again, about to implicate Whitney. No, Tess had been on the verge of saying to make up for me having to go through this crap, and she didn’t want to appear that hostile.

  “The Casino Shop?” It was a thrift shop housed in the hospital’s old recreation hall, run by the ladies’ auxiliary. “Does she volunteer there?”

  “She shops there, if you can believe it. She’s decided that she’s really into her heritage, but her heritage happens to be white-bread WASP. So she buys martini shakers, and those old mixing glasses that have drink recipes on the sides. In fact, she’s begun drinking sidecars and Manhattans. If anyone ought to be here, it should be her. She’s clearly nuts.”

  And the Nair had been her idea, after all. Everyone thought Tess was the bad influence. If only they knew.

  “I’ll keep that in mind. But for now, Tess, for the next six months, it’s you and me. Let’s make it worthwhile.”

  “The problem is, I don’t have a problem.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. But why don’t you open yourself to the possibility that our sessions can be beneficial—if not in the way the judge intended, then in some other ways instead. That won’t hurt, will it?”

  She wanted to clutch her middle and stagger around the room, gasping “It hoits, it hoits,” like one of the Jets in West Side Story, taunting Officer Krupke. Instead, she shook Dr. Armistead’s hand and told him she would see him next week.

  “I’ll even try to remember my dreams,” she promised.

  “I would be curious to hear about the bad ones, but it’s not required. We do more than dreams in psychotherapy.”

  “Yeah, but my dreams may be all we have. What can I tell you, Doctor? Despite what the judge thinks, I’m just not that angry.”

  The eyebrows shot up, twin caterpillars caught by a sudden gust of wind. He could not have looked more skeptical.

  CHAPTER 4

  “What do you think about this?” Whitney opened a grocery bag and pulled out a lamp with a crude wooden base and a yellowed parchment shade that showed mallards in flight.

  “It looks like someo
ne’s shop project,” Tess said, grateful for the Corner Stable’s reliable gloom. “And not even a high school shop project, but middle school shop, or from the arts and craft class at a camp for children with no motor skills.”

  “I know it’s kitschy, but I thought it was good kitsch, not bad kitsch.” Whitney never sounded more WASPish than when she attempted a word like kitsch, which wasn’t Yiddish but should be. Still, her mere proximity to the item did give it a certain cachet. With her sharp-featured face and chin-length bob of butter-yellow hair, Whitney had an aristocratic air that was virtually contagious. The Corner Stable looked better because she was sitting in it, and the lamp was almost tolerable as long as she was holding it. Almost.

  The problem was, Whitney couldn’t hold it all the time. Not unless she wanted to become the Statue of Liberty of Greenspring Valley, raising her mallard ducks to the skies, a beacon welcoming the waves of nouveau riche that continued to wash up on her shores.

  “Trust me, it’s bad kitsch. If I look at it much longer, I’ll have nightmares. Which would at least give me something to talk about to Herr Doktor next week.”

  “That’s right, your shrink. Are you cured yet? Or does he think you’re a hopeless case?”

  “Actually, he seems pretty optimistic. But then, he hasn’t known me that long.”

  Their meat arrived—a chopped barbecue sandwich for Tess, a well-done hamburger for Whitney. They had both been feeling particularly carnivorous today, and the Corner Stable was a good place to indulge such urges. Besides, Tess had thought it would be easier to drive north and away from the hospital than to fight the traffic toward downtown. She hadn’t realized that the suburbs were now more congested than the city, their modest streets carrying far more traffic than any planner had ever imagined. It had taken them almost forty minutes to creep five miles to this junky strip of fast food places and liquor stores near the state fairgrounds.