by C I Dennis
There was one other thing on my list; I wanted to see Barbara again. I wanted to know exactly what she knew about the family finances. She also had my house key. So I had two excellent reasons why I needed to go see her, neither of which was the real reason—I wanted to see her again, even though she’d dumped me.
Dr. Doug Leyburn freed up space in his schedule, so I drove to his office. His receptionist gave me a clipboard with a form to fill out. I explained that I was not there for treatment and handed it back, and she eyed me suspiciously. She had a point; most of us are teetering on the edge of some form of insanity. A periodic consultation was probably a smart idea, like changing the oil every five thousand miles. They could have you in and out in fifteen minutes—a Jiffy Lube for neurotics.
Carole Velutto came into the waiting room and saw me. I’d forgotten how attractive she was. She gave a little gasp of surprise and then we both grinned sheepishly. Meeting someone you know in the waiting room of a psychiatrist’s office is a little like getting caught with a Playboy when you’re fourteen.
“Are you OK, Vince? You look...”
“Slipped in the bathtub,” I said. “I saw Frank the other day. He doesn’t look so good either.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. She brushed her black bangs off her forehead, revealing her beautiful dark eyes and an unfriendly expression. “Everyone has their demons. Even you, right?”
“Me?” I didn’t get her drift.
“Vince. I’m not stupid,” she said, “And I’m glad you’re getting treatment.”
“I’m just here on a case,” I said. “As far as I know I’m not crazy.”
The moment I said that I wished I hadn’t. After all, she was there, dealing with something. I began to apologize, but she ignored me and sat down and opened a magazine. Dr. Doug opened the door just in time. I removed the foot from my mouth and beat a hasty retreat to his office.
*
The doctor’s quarters were furnished with a desk, a leather-and-wood Eames recliner, which he sat on, several upholstered wing chairs and a loveseat with a blanket draped over it. It all looked cozy and worn—the kind of furniture you’d find in an old hotel that was due for a renovation. But it was comfortable, which was the desired effect: people needed to feel at ease if they were going to spill their innermost secrets. I took one of the wing chairs by the solitary window.
I gave him the details on C.J. and D.B., as much as I knew. I said although it was possible that it was two different men, I had sidelined that notion when Le had said “my husband is two people.” To me that was her way of saying he was two different people in one body.
“That’s where I wondered if PTSD would come in,” I said. “It sounds like he went through a lot in Vietnam, especially if he deserted, as the wife number two told the wife number one. I’m wondering if that’s what started it.”
Dr. Leyburn was leaning all the way back in the Eames recliner, completely motionless, with his eyes closed. I was starting to think he’d nodded off—or perhaps he was communicating with the spirit world. Finally, he spoke, with his eyes still shut. “Have you met both of the men?” he asked, “That is to say, both the personalities?”
“I played two holes of golf with D.B.,” I said. “He’s the gregarious, hard-drinking, hustler-type. I’ve only met C.J. once, though I’ve observed him more times than that. He’s a very serious guy. I can’t imagine him acting like D.B.; it must be a hell of an effort.”
“Have you heard either of them talk about the other?”
“Yes,” I said. I told him about talking with D.B. in the parking lot after his golf hustle and how he’d referred to his brother as a hard-ass. He was right about that, I said—C.J. was as unemotional a person as I’d ever seen.
I thought I’d lost him again—his eyes were closed and I could barely hear his breathing. “That fits,” he said, finally.
“You mean the PTSD?”
“No,” he said. “The correct acronym would be “DID.” Dissociative Identity Disorder. It’s quite different from PTSD and somewhat more severe. Both originate from traumatic experiences, but DID is usually caused by events that take place at a younger age than someone would be during military service.”
“C.J. was probably around twenty when he was in Vietnam,” I said.
“That’s old for DID,” he said. “Someone with multiple personalities as distinct as your friend’s is a severe case. It probably began in his youth. Parental abuse is a common trigger. The victim develops one or more separate identities to escape from the reality of the bad things that are happening. Sexual abuse can do it, or severe beatings. The patient becomes another person, outside of the person who is being abused, so they don’t have to experience it. It’s a survival mechanism.”
“Understood,” I said. I’d been beaten a few times, and remember wishing I was somewhere, anywhere else.
“I’ve treated patients with DID, and the stories can come out during hypnosis. One of them told me she remembered peeking around a door when she was a young girl, watching her sister being raped by her father, when in fact there was no sister, just her. It was the only way she could escape.”
“Whoa,” I said.
“People do awful things to each other, as you well know.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”
“His Vietnam experience may have exacerbated it,” he said. “And then going back and finding wife number two as you described her, was likely the beginning of actually being two people, with two lives and two spouses, even a son.”
“So the disorder came first, and the two-wives thing followed?”
“Probably,” he said. “Two different households and identities would be a perfect environment for DID.”
“Do you think this guy is dangerous?”
“He could be. Some are, and they’re especially dangerous to themselves. There are cases where one of the personalities actually hates the other, and there are even suicides because of the inner conflict. As if one personality had to kill the other one off. How old is he?”
“About sixty.”
“That’s remarkable in itself. They don’t tend to live long lives.”
“This is a big help,” I said. I groaned as I rose from the chair.
“Are you in pain?” he said, leaning forward and opening his eyes.
“Yeah. I crashed my car, the night before last.”
“Do you need a prescription?”
“No thanks,” I said, “I’m all set.”
*
The next item on my agenda was to figure out what to do about Barbara. I was at a loss as to how to go about it. I didn’t want to knock on her door; C.J. might be there and it would definitely look like I was interfering. I could call her, but I didn’t know exactly what I was going to say. I could follow her around until we met up, but I’d already done that two days before, and it would look like I was stalking her. Roberto would have texted her; texting walked the line between casual and intimate conversation, it was non-committal. I could text back and forth with Roberto no problem, but somehow the thought of texting Barbara made me feel old.
I drove back to my house and made a salad out of some remnants in the fridge. I couldn’t believe all the crap I had bought during my shopping binge at the Publix; I’d probably toss half of it out. I washed the salad down with a cold Pellegrino and retreated to my recliner, closed my eyes and leaned back, Dr. Leyburn-style, in an attempt to clear out my mind and wait for inspiration. None came. Clearing my mind was futile—the moment I hauled everything away it just accumulated all over again, like an enchanted recycling bucket. They used to offer a meditation class at the Sheriff’s, but whenever the instructor encouraged us to “be in the moment,” I’d be trying to remember what it was that Glory wanted me to pick up on the way home.
My cell phone buzzed, yanking me out of my reverie. It was Barbara, solving my dilemma by calling me—I recognized the Tracfone on the caller ID.
“Hey,” I said.
&nbs
p; “Hey yourself,” she said. There was a long silence. “Is this the party to whom I’m speaking?”
I laughed. “No, he can’t come to the phone right now.”
“Well, please tell him to call me,” she said. “I want to take him to the beach. I miss him.”
I missed her too, but I was starting to feel like a ping pong ball, and she was holding both of the paddles.
“What beach would you be taking him to?”
“I’m partial to the Tracking Station. It’s quiet, and we’ll have it to ourselves because the kids are back in school and there aren’t any tourists in August.”
“Good,” I said. “I can’t stand autograph seekers.”
“Half an hour?”
“I’ll be there,” I said. “Barbara...”
“Yes?”
“I got a little banged up. I’m probably not good for the whole afternoon.”
“Are you talking about our night in the hotel?”
“That was the good kind of banged up,” I said. “This is the bad kind. I don’t look so great.”
“What happened? Do you want me to come get you?”
“No, I’ll just see you there,” I said, and we hung up. I collected a beach hat and a folding chair, and changed into my trunks. It was as nice as it gets outside; mid-eighties with a slight breeze that would be more noticeable on the beach. Maybe some time in the sun would help me heal.
*
Tracking Station Beach is the site of an old NASA installation from the earliest days of the space program. Cape Canaveral is seventy miles north of Vero and when there is a launch you get a perfect view from the shore. A few concrete foundations are still scattered among the palms and sea grape—leftovers from the big radar dishes that followed the astronauts’ progress into space.
I parked in the lot and carried my gear across a wood-planked walkway and down a few steps to the sand. There was no one on the beach except for Barbara, already settled in a low, brightly-striped beach chair with a big straw hat and a cooler by her side. I looked back at the lifeguard station, which was shuttered, with a “Swim At Your Own Risk” sign hung across the front. Glory and I used to go to the beach a couple times a month to sit and read. We were partial to South Beach, currently Vero’s widest as in recent years it was the beneficiary of the constantly shifting sand. Tracking Station was much narrower, but the warm, blue Atlantic was the same. I dropped my chair next to Barbara’s and unfolded it.
“Oh my god, Vince, what happened?”
“Do I look that bad?” I had a loose Hawaiian shirt on, and I’d thought that the shirt and my sunglasses would cover the worst of the damage.
“What did you do to yourself?”
“I bought a new car,” I said. “But it’s gone now.”
“You crashed it?”
“Unfortunately.”
“You can hardly move,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I sort of told you,” I said.
“Take your shirt off,” she said.
“I can’t,” I said. She unbuttoned it and peeled it back. My bruises were starting to color in nicely, and the ones across my chest looked like an archipelago of volcanic islands, seen from a satellite.
“How did this happen?” she said.
“I was going too fast, and it was raining.”
“You’re not telling me everything.”
“No.”
She opened the top of her cooler. “You want a beer?”
“I’d better not,” I said. “A friend already fixed me up. I’m full of painkillers.”
“Vince,” she said, “Are you still looking into, you know...”
“Yes. I don’t expect you to pay me. I just want to know.”
“So do I. That’s kind of why I called.”
“You mean I’m hired again?” I said.
“If you want to be.”
“Why?”
She took a beer out of the cooler and opened it. “Here’s to all the women in the world whose husbands keep them in the dark,” she said, and took a swig.
“What happened?” I said.
“I walk to Humiston Park and back every morning around seven. It takes me about an hour, and C.J. usually does his workout while I’m gone. It’s a tight schedule in my house, we’re like a couple of stopwatches. So this morning I had the wrong sneakers on, and my feet hurt, and I decide to go back to the house and change. I hear C.J. talking in his study, where his exercise machines are, with the door closed. There’s no phone in there. I wondered if someone was in there with him, but it was just him talking, and there were pauses in the conversation, like he was listening to someone else.”
“You said he doesn’t use a cell, right?”
“Wait,” she said. “I listened outside the door, hoping like hell that I wouldn’t get caught. He was talking about money, accounts, things like that. I heard him say ‘we’re going to move it all, everything’. Those are the exact words. He was talking about getting faxes, something about Fed wires...I don’t know if I have that right, but it was like a whole different person was talking. He doesn’t do business at home, he just does his workouts, reads a lot, his beach walks and so on.”
“Do you know who he was talking to?”
“I heard him tell someone he had to go, and I ran as quietly as I could to the laundry room, which is my domain, he never goes in there. Then I heard him go into our room and start his shower, which is another part of his routine. So I went into his study, and there was a cell phone on the desk—not a fancy one, just the basic kind. I turned it on and looked at the recent calls, and I wrote them down.”
“Good work, Sherlock,” I said.
“Yeah, but here’s where I screwed up. I went back to the laundry room and waited for what seemed like forever for C.J. to leave the house, and he finally did. Then I decided to call a few of the numbers, because I’m stupid and impatient. At least I used the Tracfone you gave me, so they didn’t know who was calling. The first number was a law office and I had an awkward conversation with a secretary and finally said ‘wrong number’. The second call was an 809 area code, which I think is Puerto Rico, and someone answered in Spanish. I just hung up on that one. The last one was a long number with a ‘41’ in it, which the Tracfone wouldn’t connect me to. I Googled it and found out it was the country code for Switzerland. Here’s the worst part; I called the number from our land line. The caller ID said ‘B-A-P’ and a guy picks up and says ‘C.J.?’, and I freak out and say nothing, so he asks if I can hear him, and I still say nothing, and so he says they got the fax and the wire is all set, confirmed on the other side for seventeen million. I say ‘dollars?’ and he says ‘euros,’ and then he freaks out when he realizes it’s not C.J. He starts going crazy, and I hang up.”
“Barbara, do you have any idea how much money you guys have? If you added it all up?”
“No. I manage the household money, but C.J. handles the investments and everything. I guess I just assume there’s plenty of money, which is probably stupid and shows how spoiled I am.”
The tide was coming in and a wave pushed the water to within a few feet of our toes. I would have loved to go in for a swim, but even in the gentle summer surf it would be a bad idea in my condition. Maybe, if I took enough OxyContin, I could be thirty-five again and could take Barbara in my arms and play in the breakers. She looked fantastic in her powder-blue tankini, and I noticed a tattoo at the bottom of her back that I’d missed before. It was a tiny crescent moon next to a full moon. It could have been two moles if you weren’t looking closely.
“There’s thirty million in various accounts on the Tampa side,” I said. “Some of it is linked to D.B., some to Le and some to a business I don’t know a lot about yet, but I assume he controls it. I have no idea how much is in your and C.J.’s name over here, but there must be something.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” I said. “The problem is that it’s so much money it doesn’t make sense. Either C
.J. had a bundle of money to start with, like an inheritance, or he makes a hell of a lot for a citrus dealer. Too much. That kind of money just smells bad.”
Barbara took another swig of the beer. “How did you find this out?”
I didn’t answer.
“Where did you go after I saw you at Cravings?”
“I went to Tampa again. I followed them around some. I ended up having a conversation with Le.”
“What did you think?”
“She worried me a little.”
“She was nice to me.”
“I think she was conning you. Not to scare you, but I don’t think she likes you.”
She drained the rest of the beer.
“Where’d you get the tats?” I said.
“What?”
“The moons, on your back.”
“Oh. Jacksonville,” she said. “It was the name of a bar.”
“Maybe I’ll get one,” I said. “We can play guess-what-the-tattoo-was when we’re in the nursing home.”
She smiled, but her thoughts were elsewhere. Finding out your husband has thirty million dollars that you were unaware of has to be something of a shock. I was having some trouble breathing; I just couldn’t get enough air in, and what I could get in felt like fire.
Barbara gave me a concerned look. “Vince, you sound like a fish that washed up.”
“I’m not doing so great.”
“Come in the water,” she said. “You need to cool off.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I do,” she said. “I promise you’ll feel better.” She took me by the arm and helped me lift myself off the chair and to my feet. We stepped into the surf, and I went sideways through the rollers while she dived into the first one and got her hair wet. The first waves hurt like hell, but once I got out beyond the break there was a sandbar where I could stand comfortably, with the water up to my shoulders. I bent my legs and bobbed up and down in the warm ocean. She was right—it was the first time I’d felt comfortable since the accident, not counting my semi-overdose at the Publix. Barbara swam up to me and put her arms around my neck.
