So Like Sleep

by Jeremiah Healy

  At eight-thirty, I called the Goreham College general number and got no answer. I fetched my Times from downstairs, read for a while, and tried again. After two transfers, I got the student directory operator, who gave me McCatty’s dorm address and room telephone. Six rings, no answer.

  I next tried Mariah Lopez at U Mass. Somebody’s secretary said she would be in by 11:00 A.M. The secretary took my and William’s names and gave me brief directions.

  I got dressed and first drove down to Boston Garden. I easily found a parking space and walked the three blocks back up to 100 Cambridge Street, one of the state office buildings. The lobby directory listed room 1507 for the Board of Registration in Medicine. Despite Homer’s and Lainie’s endorsements, Marek’s experimental hypnosis therapy still smacked of quackery, and I wanted to check on his background. I took the elevator to the fifteenth floor.

  Around two corners I found a powder-blue wall with a reception window cut into it and the board’s designation on a silver and black sign. I looked through the window into a multidesked office area. A well-dressed young woman with short dark hair noticed me and smiled brightly. She said, “Can I help you?” as she walked toward me.

  “Yes. I’d like to see the file on a doctor.”

  The smile never wavered. “I’m sorry, but the only information we can give out over the counter is the doctor’s current address, alma mater, and graduation and licensing dates.”

  “How can I get permission to see the rest of the file?”

  She half-turned and called to another young woman, with shoulder-length blond hair. The colleague came over, echoed the first one’s version, and politely suggested that I telephone after 3:00 P.M. to speak with the board’s general counsel.

  I had a better idea. I thanked them and went back downstairs to the lobby and a pay phone.

  I reached Murphy at his office. He said he would see what he could do about getting me a copy of Marek’s file. Murphy’s voice didn’t telegraph any hard feelings from our talk the night before.

  I tried McCatty’s number at Goreham again. His roommate said McCatty was at an exam and would be back about two. Without identifying myself, I said I’d call back then.

  It was only ten-fifteen. Plenty of time to catch Dr. Lopez, then drive to Goreham.

  I went back to the car, circled downtown Boston, and picked up Morrissey Boulevard. I passed the sprawling, red-brick Boston Globe building on the right and the equally red-bricked but more academic B.C. (for Boston College) High School on the left. Shortly thereafter, the U Mass access road squiggled off toward the water.

  The University of Massachusetts is spread over a number of sites. Its main Boston campus is at Columbia Point, a peninsula jutting out into the harbor. The school shares grounds with the John F. Kennedy Library and a huge but abandoned sewage pumping station. From a distance, the U Mass buildings are a monolithic brown, rather foreboding and depressing. Up close, you see that the walls are made of an impossible number of individual, chocolaty bricks, with dark-green windows like polarized sun lenses peeking out well above rock-throwing height.

  I parked my car in the indoor garage and climbed to the second floor of the harborside wing. Following my directions further, I found Mariah Lopez’s office and knocked. A woman opened the door and smiled at me.

  “Dr. Lopez?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m John Cuddy. I appreciate your seeing me on such short notice.”

  “Please come in.”

  We sat down. Dr. Lopez was fiftyish and slim, with gray, curly hair and gold-framed glasses. “I’m told that you’re here about William Daniels?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Could I see your identification, please?”

  I showed her.

  “And you’re working for William?”

  “Working for his mother to help William.”

  “Last week, I spoke with a Mr. Rothenberg on the telephone,” Lopez said.

  “That’s William’s attorney.”

  “Yes. He didn’t mention you.”

  “I started only two days ago.”

  “I see.”

  When she didn’t continue, I said, “May I ask you some questions about William?”

  Lopez fussed with the collar of her blouse. “We’re under a great deal of scrutiny here. At the university, I mean. Are you familiar with us?”

  “I know that you try to provide higher education to people of lower means.”

  Her expression remained neutral. “Nicely put. Our mission is to advance students who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to obtain college degrees. Many of them take more than the classic four years. Many eventually finish, most do not.”

  I said, “And therefore?”

  “And therefore our ability, our financial ability to pursue this mission is terribly threatened by … by …”

  “By the legislature seeing one of your best and brightest up on a murder charge?”

  Lopez flinched. “Yes.”

  “That’s already happened.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “William’s already been charged. That damage has been done. Getting him off may not reverse the damage, but his being convicted can only make matters worse.”

  She paused. “I was under the impression, from the news and Mr. Rothenberg, that there isn’t much doubt—any doubt, really—that William shot the girl.”

  “If that’s the case, then your indulging me in a few questions probably can’t hurt either the university or William.”

  The hint of a smile. “I have the feeling, Mr. Cuddy, that you are a very good investigator.”

  “Not measured by what I know so far. When did you first meet William?”

  “When he enrolled here, something over two years ago. Do you need specific dates?”

  “No. How did you come to know him?”

  “Well, when the students register, they’re given information about the variety of services provided here. We call me ‘Personal Counseling’ to try to take the sting out of seeing a ‘headshrinker.’ William came to me shortly after he started classes.”

  “Why?”

  Lopez considered that one for ten or fifteen seconds. “I’m not sure I can tell you.”

  “Patient-psychotherapist privilege?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doctor, given the case against William, my finding out all I can about him is pretty vital. I’m sensitive, even sympathetic, to your position. I wish there were a client-investigator privilege. But frankly, I don’t have a lot to go on, and you might tell me something that would help him.”

  Lopez played with the blouse again. She made up her mind but talked without looking at me. “William was concerned. He knew he was much brighter than most of the other students here, but he was afraid to show it. Apparently, he’d had some problems with excelling in high school, problems with his classmates there, I mean. So he wanted to be tested by me, to see if he was really good enough to make ‘showing off’—that was his expression for it—worthwhile.”

  “William wanted to see if he was smart enough to make appearing to be smart worthwhile?”

  “Yes. I see you find that surprising. You must remember that many minority children do not enjoy the same family and peer support for educational achievement that majority children receive. For a minority child to excel in schoolwork suggests an alignment of that child with the authority figures in the school. While William’s mother appeared supportive, his father was gone, his friends disapproved, and his uncle, a serviceman who probably represented the epitome of aligning with authority, had been killed in Vietnam. Therefore, William was both externally and internally discouraged from displaying his own capabilities.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, in response to his request, I gave him all kinds of tests, from … Do you care about the names?”

  “No, just what you found out.”

  “What I found out was that William was one of the most gifted students I have ever read a
bout, much less met. His scores on all sorts of cognitive exercises were virtually off the scale. Though I will deny ever having said this, William’s going through that high school must have been the equivalent of you or me masquerading at an institution for the severely retarded.”

  “Did the test results convince him?”

  “Convince him? Oh, yes, he seemed somehow relieved, in fact, as though he’d been told that some extraordinary aspect of him was normal, if not average. Even with the test scores, however, William’s poor high-school grade performance required his, well, ‘prepping’ here before another, more prestigious college would consider him. His evaluations were superb, and through the help of several of our professors who believed in him, Goreham accepted him as a transfer student.”

  “Why Goreham?”

  “Because it’s a fine school.”

  “Granted, but why not Harvard or one of the other Ivies? If William was so extraordinary, I mean.”

  Lopez frowned and sighed. “An Hispanic friend of his went to Harvard, academic scholarship. A black football player to Dartmouth, supposedly academic also but really athletic reasons. Both flunked out their freshman year. One committed … well, that’s another story. Suffice it to say that William, and I as well, viewed Goreham as both worthy and achievable.”

  “Did you stay in touch with him after he transferred there?”

  “Not exactly. William seemed to be caught up very quickly in a different world. He … perhaps he tried to change too much too soon. Dormitory life, a new girlfriend, the girl William … the dead girl, and, well, he had difficulties there.”

  “What kind of difficulties?”

  “Academic ones. He came here once, midway through his first semester. William showed me some papers he’d written for courses there. C and D grades. The papers had some spelling and grammatical errors, but the professors’ written comments focused more on content. William’s work, while imaginative, wasn’t to the point. He couldn’t seem to concentrate his exceptional qualities on the subject assigned. Rather, he took flights, expanding on tangential themes to the exclusion of central ones. It was as though William felt he had to justify their decision in admitting him by blazing new trails in whatever subjects he took.”

  “That sounds like a pretty easy difficulty to correct.”

  “Yes, but others weren’t.”

  “Others?”

  “Non-academic ones. Apparently, William suffered some … ‘hazing’ would be the polite word … from the boy who used to date the dead girl. Those attitudes drove him out of the dormitory. William had to maintain minimum grades to retain his scholarship, and the commuting from his home to Goreham by public transportation took three hours a day, what with bus and train transfers. Then the social pressures of continuing to see the girl while she …”

  “Go on.”

  Lopez looked squarely at me for the first time since she’d begun talking about William. “I think I have to stop there.”

  “Why?”

  Lopez just looked at me.

  “Doctor, I need to know anything that might help William.”

  “This,” she said softly, “can only hurt him.”

  “Worse than he’s hurt already? The authorities have him cold now.”

  Lopez’s eyes left me, flitted around the desk, then closed. “William was certain that the girl was seeing someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “He didn’t know. It was devastating him. He said …”

  “Yes?”

  She opened her eyes. “He said it made him want to kill her.”

  We both stopped. I took a deep breath and tried a related topic.

  “Dr. Lopez, you knew that the dead girl and William were in a therapy group?”

  “Yes, he mentioned it.”

  “The psychiatrist involved uses hypnosis and a tranquilizer drug called flurazepam to treat—”

  “Flurazepam?”

  “Yes.”

  Lopez shook her head. “Mr. Cuddy, I’m fairly certain that flurazepam is a hypnotic, not an anxiolytic.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The drug flurazepam. It’s more a sleeping potion than a tranquilizer. Using it with hypnosis would be … oh, overkill, I would think.”

  I thought back to Clifford Marek and the lab report on William. “How sure of that are you?”

  “Well, I’m not a doctor, a medical doctor, that is, and if this psychiatrist, Dr… .?”

  “Marek. Clifford Marek.”

  “Well, if he’s prescribing it, then perhaps my information is out-of-date.”

  “Is there anyone you could refer me to who might know?”

  “You mean, like an expert on drugs?”

  “And hypnosis, if that’s possible.”

  “I don’t know of anyone. I could make some inquiries and get back to you. If it’s important.”

  “It might be.” I gave her my card and home phone.

  “Anything else?” she said.

  “Just one more question. Off the record, off-off the record, what do you think happened?”

  Dr. Mariah Lopez’s eyes welled up a bit. “I think a bunch of well-intentioned people pushed William to the point of shooting someone.”

  I turned into the cemetery’s driveway and followed it to her part of the hillside. I got out and took the two slanting footpaths to her.

  “No flowers this time, kid. I need help.”

  What’s the matter?

  “Everybody I’ve talked to says William did it. Even the people who are supposed to be on his side. Except his mother, of course.”

  What does she say?

  “She says he wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. But it was his gun. And the dead girl was his lover. And four eyewitnesses tell the same story.”

  What story?

  “About William’s confession.”

  Does that make it so?

  “How do you mean?” I said, hunching down.

  Well, just because William told them he killed her doesn’t mean he did it.

  “But, Beth, William says he did it. That was about all he said to me, but even he admits it.”

  If you’re so sure William did it, why are you asking me?

  “Because I’m not sure, and that’s what bothers me. The young lover confesses under hypnosis. The psychiatrist who does the hypnotizing remembers to dim and up the lights but forgets to turn on a video camera. A patient who’s a retired investigator, and who reads a lot about hypnosis, doesn’t check a revolver to see if it’s loaded. Another patient is a drunk, whose perceptions are therefore suspect. The drunk’s wife and another patient play at an overaged-singles bar. Add a college student and a cop who are both ex-flames of the dead girl.”

  I don’t see the point you’re making.

  “My point, if it is a point, is that there are loose ends, some of which are probably just coincidence, but all of which, accumulated, seem unlikely.”

  Meaning someone’s lying?

  “Not that I can spot.”

  We were silent for a moment. The harbor below was as empty of activity as I was of ideas. Then an Eastern jetliner came in low and deafening over the hill, angling toward Logan Airport at the other end of the harbor.

  Basically, she said, you’re troubled that maybe someone else killed the girl.

  “Basically.”

  Well, then, if you’re at a dead end with William, maybe you should start working on the someone else. If you can’t prove William didn’t do it, maybe you can prove someone else did.

  “Maybe.”

  Twelve

  I PULLED ONTO THE Goreham campus at 2:15 P.M. I parked in a faculty space and was struck by how empty the grounds were. Then I remembered the roommate’s remark about exam time.

  I found McCatty’s dormitory. A kid wearing an old QUEBEC LIBRE shirt and looking as if he’d just awakened told me McCatty lived on the top floor, “in that corner”—pointing.

  I climbed the stairs. The door in the corner was closed. I knocke
d on it; no answer. I tried the knob, and it turned easily.

  The two guys in the room were stretched out on their respective beds, fully dressed, each with a smoldering toke in his hand. Both wore Walkman headphones, eyes closed, wires running down to a unit on the floor between them. I knocked louder on the open door, but neither acknowledged.

  I walked in, sat in one of the desk chairs, and watched them for a few minutes. The smell of the marijuana was strong and sweet. No apparent activity except for draw, hold, and exhale. One was shorter, chubby, in jeans and a Pat Benatar tank top. The other wore shorts and a Ralph Lauren Polo jersey, shirttails out. Polo had the legs of a soccer player, the look of money. I bet myself that Polo was McCatty and that the octopus music machine was his.

  I was about to step over when the little floor unit clicked. Polo cursed and said loudly, “Joey, flip it over.”

  Chubby sat up and nearly didn’t see me, jumping when he did. “Who are you?” he said, pushing the earphones back and down so they rode like a necklace.

  “John Cuddy. I called earlier. I want to speak with your friend.”

  Polo cursed again and came up on one elbow. He started to say, “Joey, what the fuck …” then saw me. “Who are you?”

  “John Cuddy. I’m investigating a matter that you might be able to help me with.”

  McCatty sank back down into the bed and closed his eyes. “I haven’t got time. I got an exam tomorrow. Come back in September.” He coughed. “Joey, flip the fuckin’ tape, will ya?”

  Joey bent toward the tape machine, but kept his eyes on me. I shook my head very slowly, even melodramatically. Joey stopped, swallowed. I hooked my thumb toward the door and mouthed the word “now.”

  Joey looked to McCatty briefly. I gestured again. Joey took off the headphones, laid them on the floor, and walked out, saying over his shoulder, “Richie, I’ve gotta see Moon for a while.”

  “What the …” said McCatty, up on both elbows now, but Joey was already gone. He looked at me. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  McCatty got up to change the tape. He looked to me again. “I said get out.”