Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  “Did you learn anything?”

  It was late in Colorado-almost eleven at night-and I was exhausted. Although it was an hour earlier in Nevada, Raoul’s voice told me that his long day and long story had left him every bit as tired as I was. Maybe more. But something about his day had at least temporarily softened the edge of his despair.

  “He wouldn’t talk to me about this Rachel woman. I could tell from his little act that he knew who she was, but he wouldn’t answer any of my questions, wouldn’t even admit that she hung out at his chapel. When I showed him Diane’s photograph he wouldn’t admit that he’d ever seen her before. I knew he was lying; wasn’t sure exactly about what, or why, but I knew he was lying. I was beginning to think I was going to have to just stake out the damn wedding chapel and wait for Rachel to show up again and lead me to Diane.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. That’s when it hit me. I lowered my voice to a whisper, pulled a little pile of thousand-dollar chips from the Venetian out of my pocket, stacked them up in front of me, and asked Howie exactly how much he was being paid.”

  “Paid for what?” I said.

  “That’s just what he said to me. All offended and everything. Reverend Howie’s a smart guy. He’s on the edge, but he has some pride. I don’t think he’s too dishonest. At the chapel he makes a living providing a service, as screwy as the service is. He supplements his income by taking people’s money, or whatever else they might want to bet, in high-stakes poker games. But he plays those games fair. His MO? He sets people up by being a better actor than they give him credit for, and then he takes their money by being a better poker player than they give him credit for. This time? I already know he’s a good enough actor, and I wouldn’t think about sitting down to a hand of Texas Hold ’Em with the guy.”

  “Yeah?” I had one ear focused on Raoul’s Las Vegas story, the other tuned to Grace’s room. She was making the kinds of nighttime noises that often precede one of those restless nights that end up with one of her parents dozing nearby on the rocker in her room until dawn. I said a silent prayer that my little daughter was merely enduring a troublesome dream.

  Raoul said, “Eventually, he told me. I had to make it clear I wasn’t going away, but he finally said, ‘Fifty.’ ”

  “I’m sorry, Raoul. I’m too tired. I don’t get it.”

  “I didn’t get it at first, either. See, my brainstorm was that I thought that Rachel Miller must be paying him. That that was why he let her attend all the weddings. I figured she might be slipping him five bucks, maybe ten, per ceremony. But he was trying to convince me that she was paying him fifty bucks a pop-fifty-to sit in this tacky chapel while Reverend Howie did his pretentious I-now-declare-you-husband-and-wife song and dance.” Raoul paused. “Do you know how many people get married in Las Vegas on an average day? One hundred and fifty-three. That’s what Reverend Howie told me.”

  “If it’s people, wouldn’t it have to be a hundred and fifty-two or a hundred and fifty-four?” I asked. “Maybe you mean couples; the number can’t really be odd.”

  Raoul sighed. “Alain, your point?”

  I did the math. Five weddings a week: two hundred and fifty dollars. Ten weddings a week: five hundred dollars. Five weddings a day, with one day off each week: fifteen hundred dollars. That meant that for Rachel Miller to attend weddings to her heart’s content would cost somewhere between two thousand and six thousand dollars a month, or between twenty-four and seventy-plus thousand dollars a year.

  Plus gifts. Holy moly. Where the hell would a schizophrenic woman living on the streets of Las Vegas get that kind of money?

  I asked Raoul, “Do you believe him?”

  “At first, I thought he might be inflating the numbers to see how the negotiations would go with me, that I might be sitting in that saloon watching him drink scotch so that I could try to outbid Rachel for some crazy reason. You know, offer him more than fifty to turn her away.”

  “He’s making pretty good money by allowing her to stick around for weddings.”

  “That part seems clear. Tell me, how sick is Rachel? No details-I’m not asking for anything confidential-just rate it for me. Do it in a way I can understand.”

  I couldn’t tell him anything specific about Rachel’s mental health mostly because I really didn’t know anything specific about Rachel’s current mental health. “With the kind of disease that someone like Rachel has, with the kind of chronicity she’s endured-she could have very visible symptoms. If you were to measure the disease of a person like that on the figurative ten-scale, say, on a bad day-a day when she’s not taking appropriate medicine-she could be approaching double digits.”

  “On that ten-scale?” Raoul asked.

  “Yes.”

  He emitted a high-pitched whistle. “See, that’s what I thought. That kind of sick is scary to people like me. Which means that Rachel is ill enough to be a serious liability at a place like the Love In Las Vegas. What bride wants somebody that disturbed camped out in the front row of her wedding?

  “Reverend Howie’s fee is insurance: He makes Rachel pay to attend the weddings. Who knows, he may even limit the weddings he lets her attend. Maybe he picks them himself. Makes a judgment about which ones are safe for her to be at, which ones she might create a distraction, cost him some business.”

  “Raoul, if Rachel were attending all the weddings she wanted and if she were paying that much, it would cost a fortune. Where would she get that kind of money?”

  Before the words were out of my mouth, I heard a prolonged whimper from Grace’s room. Damn.

  “This town?” he said. “Too many bad ways to answer that question. Way too many.”

  I shuddered at the thought of what perverse advantage some people might gain over someone as ill as Rachel Miller. “What did Howie finally admit to you?”

  “Just that she gives him money so he’ll allow her to attend the ceremonies. And this is the funny part-she doesn’t pay him herself-the money comes from someone else, someone who makes Reverend Howie very nervous. He wouldn’t give me the person’s name. He said, ‘You can buy me scotch all day and all night and I’m not going to give you a name.’ I even pushed one of the thousand-dollar chips from the Venetian across the table and left it right in front of him. I said, ‘Name and phone number, Howard, and it’s yours.’ He picked it up, flipped it, ran his fingers over the surface, and pushed it back onto my side of the table.

  “I added two more and made it a nice little pile. He pushed them all right back to me. I added two more. He did the same thing.”

  Howie had turned down five grand. I was thinking, Wow. “So what are you going to do, Raoul?” I asked.

  “I took four chips off the pile and slid the one that remained back across the table. I said, ‘Different question. Man or woman?’

  “ ‘Yeah?’ Howie asked me. ‘For a grand? That’s all you want to know?’ I said that was the deal and he actually had to think about it. He is so wary of this person that gives him money so Rachel can attend weddings that he actually considered turning down a thousand dollars rather than reveal to me the person’s gender. Eventually, he picked up the chip and slipped it into his shirt pocket like it was a pack of matches. He said, ‘It’s a man. Not a man you want to fuck with.’ ”

  “That was it?” I said. “That’s all you got for a thousand dollars?”

  “In business you don’t always get value at the front end of a relationship. At the start you form a bond, establish platforms, ensure access. What I got for my thousand dollars is I got Howie on my payroll. And I reduced the possible suspects by half.”

  “How do you find the man you’re looking for?”

  Raoul sighed. “You remember a guy in Denver named Norm Clarke? Use to write for the Rocky.”

  I remembered him. “The gossip columnist with the patch on his eye?”

  “Sí. Well, I know him-he did a story on me back in the tech boom times. He lives in Vegas now, knows everybody. I’m meeting
him downstairs a little later for a drink. I’m hoping he can help me find the man Howie was talking about.”

  Grace’s unsettled whimper suddenly blossomed into a wail that was so powerful I could have sworn her lungs had been temporarily replaced by air compressors.

  Raoul didn’t need to be told our conversation was over. I sprinted in Grace’s direction, praying that I could quiet her before Lauren’s sleep was shattered.

  39

  After getting all of four hours’ sleep I got all of four hours’ warning before the next shoe dropped. I spent most of those four hours wondering whether having any warning at all was a good thing or a bad thing.

  I never quite decided.

  Patients, when they call my office number, are given a voice-mail instruction to call my pager directly in the case of an emergency. How often do my patients take advantage of the opportunity to reach me on my beeper? Once or twice in a bad month, infrequently enough that the mere sight of an unfamiliar phone number on my pager makes me anxious. So, on Thursday morning, while I was idling at the intersection of Broadway and Baseline on the way to work and my beeper vibrated and displayed an unfamiliar (303) 443- number, I was wary.

  The 443 prefix meant the call came from a Boulder address. That’s all I knew.

  I returned the page as soon as I stepped into my office.

  “This is Alan Gregory,” I said. “I’m returning a page to this number.” I don’t use the “Doctor” appellation in those circumstances because I don’t know if the person who called me will answer the phone or if someone else will. If it’s someone else, discretion might dictate that my profession remain secret.

  “Thanks for calling back so soon,” the man on the line said. “This is Bill Miller.” And then, as if I might not know, he added, “I’m Mallory’s dad.”

  What a sad thing, I mused, that he could use his daughter’s unfortunate notoriety as a quick social identifier. And an even sadder thing that he would.

  “Mr. Miller,” I said, buying some time while I hurriedly chewed and swallowed the ramifications of the simple fact that he had called me. “What can I do for you?”

  “Can you squeeze me in for an appointment? It’s… important.”

  “Umm,” I managed. My eloquence, given the circumstances, was profound.

  “Today, if possible,” Bill Miller said.

  I wondered whether he was asking me to get my tongue untied sometime “today,” or whether he was asking for an appointment with me sometime “today.”

  If you asked me to write an ethics problem for a psychologists’ licensing exam, or to dream up a delicious ethical conundrum for clinical psychology graduate students’ comprehensive exams, I don’t think I could have come up with something as devious as the dilemma I was facing at that moment.

  “Do you have some time available?” he said, kindly pretending not to notice how flummoxed I was. “I’ll be as flexible as I need to be.”

  The problem freezing my communication skills wasn’t my schedule. My practice calendar that day was no more or less constricted than usual. On most days, if I was willing to give up a meal or stay late at the office, I could squeeze in an emergency.

  The problem I was struggling with was that I didn’t know if I could see Bill Miller professionally at all. The issue that was complicating what should have been a simple matter of logistics was a problem of professional ethics.

  My initial impulse about the ethical maze? I didn’t think that I could see Bill Miller as a clinician. But I wasn’t at all sure I was correct in that snap assessment. The circumstances were complex. I quickly decided that I’d never confronted another set of facts quite as complex in my entire career.

  The arguments for agreeing to see Bill Miller for therapy? They were easy. He had once, albeit briefly, been my patient. His present circumstances-or at least the ones I knew about-were so public and so tragic that they might cause someone to seek professional help. Empathy and compassion both argued for me to make myself available to him.

  The arguments for refusing to see Bill Miller for therapy? This is where things got messy. Psychologists are under an ethical obligation to avoid what the profession calls “dual relationships.” At its heart, this is a conflict-of-interest clause, intended to ensure that a clinician is free to act in the best interest of his or her patient, uncomplicated by competing forces. In practice, the dictum requires that a clinician not wear two different hats in a patient’s life.

  In simple English, it means I shouldn’t do psychotherapy with the woman who cuts my hair. I shouldn’t join a book group run by one of my therapy patients.

  Simple, right?

  Usually, yes. But try to apply those simple guidelines to my relationship with Bill Miller. That’s what I had been trying to do for the hours between his morning phone call and the midday appointment time I’d eventually offered him.

  I hadn’t gotten very far.

  Did the fact that I was a good friend of a Boulder cop who was involved with the investigation of Bill Miller’s daughter’s Christmas Day disappearance qualify as a dual relationship?

  I wasn’t sure, but the degrees of separation seemed to be sufficient insulation.

  Did the fact that my practice partner was covering the clinical work of a therapist who had died, and possibly been murdered, weeks after seeing Bill Miller’s daughter for a single therapy session qualify as a dual relationship?

  Once again, blank spaces seemed to separate Bill Miller’s place on the board from the space that I was occupying.

  Did the fact that I was seeing a patient who parked his car in the garage of the house of the man who lived right next door to the Millers qualify as a dual relationship?

  Maybe, maybe not. In isolation, I would lean in the direction of “not.” My patient had spoken with Bill Miller’s daughter, considered her a friend. That was all I knew about Bob’s relationship to the Millers. It wasn’t much of a tie.

  Did the fact that my partner and good friend had disappeared while on a trip to Las Vegas to try to arrange a meeting with Bill’s estranged wife constitute a dual relationship?

  I knew of absolutely nothing that tied Bill Miller to any of those events.

  Did the fact that my friend and partner’s husband, someone else whom I enthusiastically considered a friend, was busy looking for Bill Miller’s estranged wife qualify as a dual relationship?

  Probably not, for all of the same reasons.

  But I wasn’t totally sure. I didn’t know if I should be contemplating additive effects. If a wasn’t greater than z, and b wasn’t greater than z, and c wasn’t greater than z, did I have to be concerned whether a + b + c was greater than z?

  Ethical algebra hadn’t been covered in graduate school.

  I interrupted my obsessing over the Bill Miller conundrum to address a practical problem: Diane was still missing, and Thursday was the day she was supposed to be back in her office seeing patients. Although Diane and I shared space, our practices were separate businesses: I didn’t know how many patients she was scheduled to see, nor did I know any of their names.

  My problem was that I had to figure out some innocuous yet compassionate way to notify Diane’s patients that their doctor would not be in the office that day. My solution was to post a note on the front door, the patient entrance to our little building. It read:

  To Anyone With An Appointment With Dr. Diane Estevez:

  Dr. Estevez is unexpectedly away from the office to deal with an urgent situation.

  She is unable to cancel her appointments personally, but will not be in today.

  She will contact each of you individually upon her return,

  and she appreciates your understanding, and your patience.

  Dr. Alan Gregory

  At the bottom of the note, I belatedly scrawled a handwritten offer that anyone with a clinical emergency should call me, and I left my pager number.

  When I’d returned Bill Miller’s call, the offer for an appointment that I eventually mad
e to him wasn’t any more straightforward than was the prevaricating note I had left for Diane’s patients. “I’m not sure I can see you, Bill. I may have an ethical conflict.”

  “How?” he said. “We haven’t spoken in, well, years.”

  “It’s complicated,” I said, lamely. “It’s not even clear to me that I actually have a conflict. I’m just concerned that I might.”

  “Well, how about this,” he said. “Let’s schedule a time. In the interval between now and then you can think about your ethical problem. We’ll talk, I’ll run my concerns past you, and you can decide if you’re able to help.”

  He sounded eminently reasonable. I was reminded that even during the session with his wife so many years before, Bill Miller had always seemed levelheaded and reasonable. Almost, I also reminded myself, to a fault.

  “How about eleven forty-five?” I asked.

  Bill Miller was close to ten minutes late for his appointment. Since I was meeting with him over the brief window in my day that would have constituted my lunch hour, I’d greedily used the free time to devour an energy bar from the emergency stash in my desk.

  “Déjà vu, huh?” he said as he settled onto the chair across from me. “It feels odd to be here without Rachel. That was one day that I will never ever forget.”

  My natural human instinct was to offer condolences to Bill, to be sympathetic about whatever had happened with Mallory, to reflect on the sad outcome of the situation with Rachel. But I didn’t. Instead I contemplated the fact that after so many years between visits with me his first association in my presence was to his long-estranged wife, and not to the tragedy of his recently absent daughter.

  Ironically, one of the most difficult things about the psychotherapeutic relationship is the necessity for the therapist to, at times, put brakes on reflexive human kindness. Were I to presuppose to start this interaction with Bill Miller with expressions of compassion, or even overt sorrow, at his plight-or by giving him a big hug, a pat on the back, and a hearty “hey, big guy”-I might unwittingly interfere with whatever motivation he’d had for picking up the phone.