Close to four o’clock, the doctor entered, accompanied by an assistant. The doctor was tall and slender, and didn’t seem to want to make eye contact with him. He was a middle-aged man, possibly in his early fifties, and he spoke very slowly, in a monotone. His assistant was a woman approximately thirty-five years of age, who seemed to take notes while the doctor spoke with Bernstein, and who made no attempt at conversation, but who seemed to make some type of sound occasionally off to the side.
“Dr. Comeaux, what on earth is taking so long? I came in for a simple appointment, and you’ve had me here half the day.”
The doctor had been standing next to him, checking his pulse rate and heartbeat. Those functions had already been done at least three times during his visit. The doctor, who already looked uncomfortable, now looked even more uncomfortable at his question. He glanced awkwardly at his assistant, who glanced awkwardly back at him. For a moment, neither seemed to know what to do. “Well, we have a certain routineWe’ll have you out of here in no time.”
“I thought it would be an hour at most. It’s been sixHave you cleared all these tests with my insurance company?”
The doctor shifted nervously again, and for a moment was at a complete loss of words. He glanced at his assistant again, and she looked down at her paperwork. The silence became even more awkward, and after a few more seconds, the assistant said that the office’s insurance manager took care of that, and that Bernstein would need to check with her.
Alice Garcia relaxed in her downtown office on the eighteenth floor and looked out the window at Titans Stadium. She liked it when the weather cleared and her late afternoon view of the city was a nice one. During the cold months, she didn’t really have time to admire the view. On a cloudy day, darkness seemed set in on Nashville shortly before four o’clock, and it wasn’t until close to when daylight savings time kicked back in that she was able to relax for a moment after five o’clock and look out the window. She was an intense worker, and rarely took time during the work day to study what was going on around her, separate from her work.
Alice was one of the managers of a large call center that had located to Nashville two years before. She was born in Miami to what she had always assumed were white parents, but she had been placed for adoption immediately after birth. The couple that adopted her was mixed. The man was a radiologist whose family roots were in Peru; he had been born within a year after his family arrived in the United States, decades earlier. The woman was born to Japanese parents in Ecuador; her father had lived in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay as well, and her mother had lived in Venezuela and Colombia.
Alice was tall, slender, with short dark hair and an athletic, slightly muscular build. She often ran in her neighborhood off of West End Avenue, and did strength training at a gym as well. She had never married, never even come close, and wherever she had worked, she had attracted male and female admirers, a number of whom were often curious as to her own preference.
Although she had never had trouble getting dates, she had recently placed a profile on an online dating service, and had quickly gotten several offers. She had made arrangements for one of them to call her on her cell phone that evening around five forty-five. Now, staring out the window at the peaceful landscape of the city, with a clear blue sky overhead, she wondered whether to go ahead and leave, or to take the call there.
She felt tired, almost exhausted. She had awakened a couple of hours earlier than normal that morning, and had gone on into work, knowing she had a backlog on her desk. She had worked straight through lunch, ordering a small sandwich to her desk, and now that she had a moment to relax, it all caught up with her suddenly. That happened often with her work schedule and ethic, and sometimes after work she had to force herself to keep moving in order to avoid falling asleep in her chair. She could overcome it, but she had to make the effort.
Her cell phone rang. She realized instantly that she had fallen asleep, and it didn’t alarm or surprise her. Her staff was used to seeing her do that after working hours, and they knew to leave her alone. She blinked a few times, trying to come back to reality.
She took her phone from her purse and answered. A relatively deep voice on the other end responded hello, and waited for her to say something. She struggled for a moment, trying to remember the man’s name.
“Martin?”
“That’s my name.”
She had an instant negative reaction, which she tried to fight. She didn’t like people who were too flip too suddenly; she liked them to be deferential, polite, and work through the basics in a respectful manner. She knew her radar was now up, but she determined to give him a fair shot. That had sometimes worked well in the past.
Alice tried to remember what Martin looked like. She obviously must have had some type of attraction, or she wouldn’t have made an overture, and he wouldn’t be calling. But since she had signed onto the dating site, her first experience in that type of forum, she had looked at at least one hundred profiles, probably more. Many were outside of her age range, some she just was not attracted to, and others had certain interests or habits that she disdained.
“Are we on this evening?”
“That’s why I’m calling.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I’m staying at the Westin downtown.”
“You’re staying in the city?”
Now she recalled him more clearly. Martin lived near the city, but a little ways out in the country. He had been a little murky about what he did for a living, calling himself a “consultant.” She hadn’t pressed him, deciding she would do that when they met.
He was a nice looking man, or at least the photograph he posted on his profile indicated that. He was slender and athletic looking, like her, and he had dark brown hair cut at regular length. He was supposedly six feet tall, two inches taller than she, but she hadn’t actually seen a photograph of him standing up.
“Yes, why don’t you come over here for drinks and dinner? That seems like the easiest thing to do.”
“That sounds fineI guess there’s no chance of you being late if you’re already there.”
“Ha-ha.”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby in about an hour.”
They exchanged a few details of what each was wearing and hung up. Each had a picture of the other, so it should be easy to recognize each other, she thought. She could have been at the Westin in just a few minutes; it was near her office. But she wanted the hour to think a little bit about everything she knew about Martin, even review his profile on the dating site again. She had realized she tended to mix people up, to combine details from one profile with those of another, and she wanted to make sure that she really knew whom she was meeting.
She thought about his story about living out in the country, and now he was staying in a hotel for the night. She never had met anyone at a hotel before on a first date, but then the Westin was more than a hotel; it had a nice restaurant and bar, and a grand picturesque lobby. Also, she knew the place would be relatively crowded, and there was no way he was going to force her up to his room. So what was the worry?
Bob Corinth, the mayor’s chief aide, shook Senator Max Cohen’s hand and took a seat. It was the first time Corinth had met the senator, even after working for the mayor in one job or another for six years. There had been a meeting or two in the past, but he had been off on other assignments at the time.
Corinth was thirty-seven years old, a graduate of University of Memphis, and had been in Nashville almost a decade. He liked working for the mayor; he respected his independence of thought, and assured way of speaking. And, the mayor trusted him—on almost anything.
Senator Max Cohen was fifty-eight years old, with a full head of distinguished grey hair, a rugged face, and alert green eyes. He was almost more of a business executive than a politician, and therefore was less given to bluster and more to frank analysis of a situation. He was there to meet with the mayor on funding for an urban renewal pro
ject, but the topic had briefly turned to the recent revelations of government surveillance of private citizens.
“I honestly don’t think people care much about this,” Senator Cohen said. “Oh, yes, there’s a big hue and cry when these things are first reported. The civil liberties organizations get their panties in a wad. But the average citizen, especially here in Tennessee, doesn’t really even pay much attention, much less get upset.”
“It upsets me,” the mayor said, glancing at Corinth. “I do take it as a matter of principle.”
“Do you really, Mayor, or will you have forgotten about it after it rolls on a little while longer? If you saw that someone had really been harmed by it, then I could see you continuing to be upset about it. But what will happen is we’ll hear that some people are harmed by it, and then various spokesmen, official and unofficial, for the intelligence communities will assert that the very leaking of the fact that we’re doing that kind of surveillance can cause even greater harm. And the citizens will accept that.”
“Do you really believe it’s that easy?”
“Yes, I do. I think we have a lot of rhetoric about this, perhaps more than on any other single subject, at least as far as rhetoric that ultimately never translates into any kind of action.”
The mayor shook his head and looked at Corinth again. He wondered if he should “challenge this bastard,” and he ran the very basics of the idea through his mind in a pause of five seconds. He had always liked Cohen personally, but had found him a little bit tricky. Cohen was nearing the end of his second term, and had generally been scandal-free except for an episode that occurred before he ran the first time and was discovered after he was elected.
Cohen, a lawyer from Jackson, Tennessee, was by now officially accepted as being Jewish. However, when he had first run for senator a decade earlier, that wasn’t so clear. He had ties to an Episcopalian church in Jackson, and his Jewish connections were murkier. Of course, many residents of the state assumed by his last name that he might be Jewish, or have a Jewish background, and there were some rumblings about that. Most voters seemed to like him, though, and he had won handily in that first election to replace a retiring long-time incumbent.
After the election, over the next several years, it emerged that Cohen was attending a conservative synagogue in Jackson, at least on an irregular basis. Cohen had occasionally spoken openly of his Jewishness during the rest of his first term, and by the end of the first term it had been accepted as fact. Still, there were questions here and there about why it had not been more widely reported during the first election, more out of intellectual curiosity than any type of malice. After a while, it came to be regarded as a bit of a mystery, but the issue had simmered there under the surface.
The mayor smiled at Cohen. “How’s your fundraising going?”
In a neighborhood area off Trousdale Road, Haynie Garson lived with his wife. The two of them, both from southern California, had moved to Nashville twenty years before. He worked as a computer programmer for a healthcare company, and she had worked as a high school teacher off and on. She had worked one stretch for more than ten years, then had taken a break for a year or two, then had gone back to teaching. A year or two before, however, she had decided to quit again, and had busied herself with homemaking and shopping.
To most outsiders, the couple, who were in their late forties, seemed relatively peaceful and content. Occasionally, a neighbor or friend or co-worker might pick up that there were tense moments here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary. None of Rachelle Garson’s associates at school, or in her social life, could ever remember her speaking privately about her husband in a negative way. On the other hand, some of Haynie Garson’s associates could recall him making some grumbling remarks about the amount of money his wife spent on a regular basis, and even how she wasn’t bringing in any income to hold up her end of the relationship.
Although his work associates never attributed much importance to his occasional remarks, they did notice something else about him: spring seemed to bring out the absolute worst in him. It was a curious trait, and several of them had noticed it, even discussed it among themselves, but hadn’t known what to make of it. When winter turned to spring, and the days became brighter and warmer, the leaves and blooms began to emerge and grass began to grow, something seemed to happen to Garson’s personality. He became more irritable, seemed to draw away from co-workers, and seemed to have little regard for the basics of courtesy and respect in the office. Had it happened with a person going from fall to winter, they probably wouldn’t even have noticed. And although they noticed this particular aspect, and that it seemed to occur every spring, it only lasted about a month and a half, and was clearly gone by the first of June. They never took it seriously; they just joked about it before, during, and after it happened each year.
This year had been no different. He had become grouchy around the second week of April, and now he was in full flower, so to speak. Workers knew to avoid him as much as possible during that period, and they did so, knowing that if they gave him enough room, enough time, he would revert back to the way he generally was. They couldn’t help but wonder, however, how the mood change affected relations on the home front.
On this particular morning, Garson had awakened slightly later than normal, and his routine was off. He always became a little irritated at such an occurrence in any event, and with his “spring personality” in full bloom, the effect was even worse. Then, after making his early morning coffee, he spilled part of it on himself with the very first sip, resulting in him having to clean himself at the sink.
His wife emerged from her own bedroom shortly thereafter. He never liked that she felt free to awaken whenever she wanted to. He didn’t necessarily expect her to make a full breakfast, but at least she could sit and talk to him as he readied himself for work. He turned to look at her as she approached, knowing this probably wasn’t going to be a good day for him.
She was a petite woman, barely five feet tall. She was thin as a rail, and although she moved energetically, her face was very passive, as was her personality. She never seemed to get excited about much, and always wondered what the fuss was about anything.
“I saw a receipt on the table in the living room, for a massage,” Garson said. “What’s that all about?”
“I had a massage.”
“Haven’t I asked you to check with me before you spend money on a personal luxury?”
“I didn’t see it that way. I just wanted to have a massage, and I had one. It didn’t seem that luxurious to me.”
Garson felt some type of force inside him rising from his stomach toward his head. He was aware of it immediately, and he tried to suppress it, feeling that something bad was happening. He couldn’t, however, and the effect was powerful. The two continued to carry on a conversation for at least a few sentences that he remembered later, but it was like a dark curtain descended from top to bottom across his field of vision. He truly couldn’t see what happened next.
Darleen Ryan unlocked the door of the office and stepped inside, fifteen minutes after eight o’clock in the morning. It had been a rainy night all night long, and the rain had continued during the time she was dressing and driving to work. The rain had caused traffic to move a little more slowly, and she had already determined that she would use that combination of circumstances to justify her tardiness.
She stopped at her desk near the door and placed her purse on the floor by her chair. She spotted a note sitting in the center of her desk, placed where she could see it instantly when she sat down. It was a note from her boss, reminding her that he would be out the entire day, and return the following day.
Her boss, Steve Ross had moved from Atlanta two months before and opened the Nashville office for a business consulting firm specializing in financial management. The office was part of a national firm, but was being opened from scratch, with Ross the only professional staffer present. Darlene was the only other employee, taking c
are of administrative and clerical work.
She remembered right away that he had told her the day before that he would be out of town today, and had even mentioned it the day before that. When she left work in the afternoons, she generally forgot about her work, and everything related to it, until she arrived the next morning. She had worked for the State of Tennessee government, in an obscure division in Parks and Recreation, until Ross had hired her around the first of the year. At the time, he had not yet opened the office, but was looking for an administrative person to assist him in getting it going. After she had accepted the position, there was a two-month delay in actually opening the office before she left her government job and started work for Ross.
Darleen had developed, more than not, a love-hate relationship with Ross from the very beginning, although he didn’t know a thing about it. She liked him, thought he was good looking, and he always treated her with respect. But he seemed distant, and Darleen liked for her boss to engage more with her. Her old boss at the State job had interacted with her even when not giving her tasks to do, or important information related to one thing or another. He had even laughed at her jokes, and told some of his own to her, even some risqué ones.
But Ross was all business, or at least that was the impression he gave her. But then she would hear him on what seemed to be calls with clients or potential clients, or sometimes even on what seemed to be private phone calls, and he would be laughing and cutting up the way she wished he would do with her. She wanted to be part of that, and had tried to make an extra effort to talk casually with him, or joke with him, but he had simply ignored her efforts.
Nashville: The Mood (Part 1) Page 6
