Head Case

by Michael Wiley

  ‘I have better days and worse.’

  ‘Looks like this might be one of the bad ones.’

  The receptionist let out a little laugh, though she didn’t seem sure she knew what she was laughing at.

  ‘What about Scott?’ Kelson said.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I talked to Venus Johnson again this morning. I heard some stories about him and your mom. D’you know if he also went to Suzanne Madani’s office on the night she died?’

  Rick slid off the desk. ‘Out.’

  ‘That’s what Venus Johnson said this morning. Then we sat down for a long talk. You used a master key to get into Madani’s office, right? Did you ever lend it to Scott?’

  Rick grabbed Kelson and steered him out of the office. ‘C’mon.’ He took him past the cafeteria and imaging lab toward the elevator bank.

  ‘I hear Dr Madani ate dinner down here on the night she died,’ Kelson said. ‘Does Scott spend time with you in your office? Maybe he ran into her and decided she needed a kill-shot of fentanyl.’

  ‘Shut your damn mouth.’ Rick steered him around a bend.

  ‘But what would Scott have against her? I know why he might hurt Patricia Ruddig – with the whole witnessing thing. I don’t know about Josh Templeton or Daryl Vaughn. Or Josh’s mom or Suzanne Madani. What’s your theory?’

  Rick’s fist seemed to come from nowhere. His knuckles cracked against Kelson’s jaw, and Kelson fell to the floor. He sat on the tile, stunned. Rick looked like he was thinking of kicking him. ‘Stay the fuck away,’ he said, and went back down the hall toward the security office.

  Two nurses, coming from the cafeteria, gazed at Kelson as if they might offer help. Instead they scurried toward the elevators.

  Kelson went up to his car and cranked the heat high. As warm air spilled from the vents, he inspected his chin in the mirror. It was red and painful to the touch, but the skin was unbroken. ‘Joke’s on me,’ he told the man in the mirror, ‘after all.’

  So he pulled out his phone and dialed.

  The number rang twice, and Sue Ellen’s voicemail picked up. Her recorded voice – which always made Kelson think of bells – said, ‘Mom says I can’t tell you my name because you might be a scumbag, but if you aren’t, please leave a message.’ The please dripping with twelve-year-old irony. She added, ‘If this is Dad, two words. Potbellied pig.’ The message signal beeped.

  ‘Is potbellied one or two words?’ Kelson asked. Then he said, ‘It’s about four o’clock. I just called to say hello. Love you.’

  He hung up and cocked his head so he could see his chin in the mirror. ‘Going to be nasty,’ he said.

  He started to dial another number – but the phone rang in his hand. Caller ID said it was Sue Ellen.

  ‘Hey, kiddo.’

  ‘Oink,’ she said.

  ‘Ha. Why weren’t you answering your phone?’

  ‘I’m meeting with my math tutor.’

  ‘Since when do you have a math tutor?’

  ‘Since Mom saw what I got on my algebraic expressions test.’

  ‘What are you doing calling back while you’re in a tutoring session?’

  ‘It’s boring.’ As if the r in boring went on forever.

  ‘Is he at least cute?’ Kelson said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your math tutor.’

  Sue Ellen held the phone away, and Kelson heard her ask, ‘Mrs Christensen, my dad wants to know if you’re cute.’ She came back to the phone. ‘Mrs Christensen is glaring at you.’

  ‘She can’t even see me.’

  ‘A math tutor can see everything.’ Then, ‘Now she’s smiling at you.’

  ‘It’s good to hear your voice, honey,’ he said.

  ‘Potbellied is one word. A compound. Now, Mrs Christensen is smiling at me. Kind of creepy.’

  ‘Love you, kiddo,’ Kelson said.

  ‘Love you too.’ She hung up.

  He looked at the mirror. ‘See?’

  Then he dialed a second number.

  Frida picked up. ‘Hi there.’

  ‘Hi there,’ he said. ‘Sorry I didn’t call earlier. Can we get together after work?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Pick me up when Richelieu closes?’

  He glanced at the mirror. ‘What do you think of bruises?’

  ‘Spanking’s my limit. Maybe candle wax on the nipples.’

  ‘Huh – I mean, not you. Me.’

  ‘What’re you into? Paddles? Riding crops?’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ he said. ‘But bruises happen sometimes – to me. As in twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘Visible?’

  ‘On the face.’

  ‘If I don’t like them, we’ll turn out the lights.’

  ‘That works for me.’

  Kelson drove home. In the early evening, he lay on his bed with an icepack on his chin. Payday jumped on to the mattress, and then Painter’s Lane joined them. The cats kneaded Kelson’s chest. After a while, he dozed. He woke at nine p.m., then slept again. When he woke at midnight, the cats were gone, and he got up and stumbled to the kitchen. The cats were waiting at the refrigerator. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’m nothing but a meal ticket.’ He asked Painter’s Lane, ‘And if I don’t feed you?’

  She meowed.

  ‘Right – you’ll eat me.’

  He fed them, topping each of their bowls with sliced ham.

  Then he went into the bathroom, looked at the mirror, and ran his finger down his jawline. ‘Not so bad,’ he said.

  He shaved, dragging the razor gently over the spot where Rick Jacobson had hit him.

  At 1:30 in the morning, he sat at the Golden Apple Grill and told his regular waitress about taking a punch in the face.

  She poured him a refill. ‘Next time, keep your mouth shut, Rocky, and maybe the man won’t stick his fist in it.’

  ‘Next time, I’ll take you along to remind me,’ he said.

  At three o’clock, Kelson picked up Frida at Club Richelieu. She didn’t mind his bruises. At 3:45, back at his apartment, they kept the lights on.

  THIRTY-NINE

  As the sun rose the next morning, Kelson drove to Lower Wacker and walked the streets, looking for the professor. A woman with a sore on her lip said she saw him the previous evening on Lower Randolph. A man smoking a cigarette on a milk crate on Lower Randolph said he saw him in the middle of the night sitting in a cloud of vent steam by a lower-level garage entrance on North Columbus. ‘Like a wizard,’ the man said, and spat.

  A half-hour later, Kelson found the professor on South Water Street, standing by his shopping cart, staring at a shaft of daylight that fell from between the upper-level roads. His red hair was filthy, but the lenses on his wire-rimmed glasses shone clean. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost his waifish companion. ‘Like the gleam in God’s eyes,’ he said, as Kelson approached, ‘if God had eyes to see.’

  ‘It’ll blind you if you keep staring,’ Kelson said.

  The professor kept staring. ‘Do you know what Derrida said about death? It’s “the possibility of the impossible.” He died nastily – pancreatic cancer – and he never accepted his mortality. He said he was “uneducable about the wisdom of learning to die.” For Heidegger, on the other hand, death, or what he called “being-toward-death,” was liberating. On this point, I think Derrida had it right and Heidegger was full of shit.’

  ‘Where’s the girlfriend?’

  The professor lowered his eyes to him. ‘You haven’t listened to a word I said. Mycobacterium tuberculosis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My assistant has TB. Drug resistant. The clinic put her in a house where they can monitor her. She’ll die. They always do.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘The people I love.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes.’ He stared at the beam of sunlight.

  Kelson tried looking at it. He managed three seconds before he felt a searing. ‘I need to know more about Daryl Vaughn.’

  �
��Dead too.’

  ‘The thing is, I’m confused by his death.’

  ‘We all suffer from the “non-access to death,”’ the professor said. ‘Unless we’re Heidegger.’

  ‘You were with Daryl when the kids beat him with the baseball bats?’

  The professor was still staring at the sunbeam. ‘It was a moment of cowardice on my part – mitigated only by the fact that I was protecting my assistant, lest the boys attack her too. But my protection was unnecessary. The boys were interested only in beating Daryl.’

  ‘Did they say anything?’

  The professor turned his eyes back to Kelson. ‘They made it clear they meant to thrash him to death.’

  ‘Did they say why?’

  ‘I refer you to Foucault’s reinterpretation of Galtung’s conception of structural violence.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘The boys used all the usual epithets for an African American. They insinuated that Daryl engaged in non-normative sexual activities. In short, they seemed interested in demonstrating domination. They beat him with wooden sticks. It’s an ancient ritual.’

  ‘Last time we talked, you said Daryl thought he was living out part of someone’s story. He felt like a puppet, a character in a book. Did the kids who beat him say anything connected to that? Did Daryl say anything afterward that made you think of it?’

  ‘The boys broke his jaw. They beat him unconscious. He said nothing.’ The professor jerked his head away and stared at the sunbeam again, as if a strange bird flew through the light. Then he looked back at Kelson. ‘But you know what Foucault says about power.’

  ‘What does Foucault say about insane professors?’

  ‘Foucault and madness? Surely you’re joking.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘He wrote the definitive account.’

  ‘What do you know about Daryl and a family named Jacobson?’

  ‘What don’t I know?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The Jacobsons figured centrally in his stories.’

  Kelson felt the rush he felt at moments like this. ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Did he mention a doctor? Jeremy Jacobson?’

  The professor smiled nervously, as if Kelson was jiggling his sense of reality. ‘Yes, Dr Jacobson was the teller of the story, the author of the book, the spinner of the dream. How do you know this?’

  ‘Two sons?’

  ‘At least two. With Daryl, it was sometimes hard to tell.’

  ‘The boys’ mother?’

  ‘A tragic figure. Like all tragic figures, as Derrida taught us, she had a hole in the middle, an absence – the O in Ophelia.’

  ‘Do you realize how annoying you are?’

  ‘I lost my career because of it.’

  ‘Me too,’ Kelson said.

  The professor gazed at Kelson as if he was a vaguely interesting critical problem. ‘How do you know Daryl’s story?’

  ‘I don’t. Or I only know part of it. Tell me what he told you.’

  The professor eyed him suspiciously. ‘Which version? He told it a hundred different ways. You know the distinction between story and plot, of course?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  The professor frowned. ‘Story is everything that happened, every detail – events, actions, how much water was in the toilet, the design of the tire treads. Plot is how you tell it.’

  ‘Just tell it,’ Kelson said.

  The professor’s suspicion seemed to evaporate. He gave Kelson the look of a very smart man talking to a very stupid student. ‘In most versions, Daryl worked for the Jacobson family and others like them, who hired him to do odd jobs.’

  ‘He worked for them?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you. Daryl claimed to have been a handyman before his troubles. While he was doing one of his jobs for the Jacobsons – retiling a bathroom or scraping wallpaper from a bedroom, depending on the account – Mrs Jacobson accused him of stealing money from her purse. Daryl claimed one of her sons stole it. But she called the police and insisted on pressing charges. After Daryl got out of jail, he never worked again.’

  ‘A simple plot,’ Kelson said.

  ‘A tale of injustice, as Daryl told it. He swore he didn’t take the money. But, as in many retold folktales, the plot took various forms depending on the telling. In some versions, Daryl, distraught over the false accusation, went back and killed Mrs Jacobson. In others, one of her sons killed her. All versions converged at the end. Mrs Jacobson was wrong in believing Daryl was a thief. The injustice of her death echoed the injustice of Daryl’s jailing.’

  ‘Scott,’ Kelson said.

  The man’s thoughtful face seemed to crack, replaced again by nervousness and a kind of crazed suspicion. ‘What?’

  ‘The name of one of the sons in Daryl’s story. The one who killed his mom.’

  For a moment, the professor looked distressed. Then, as if triggered by an invisible switch, he said, ‘What does one understand under “the name of a name”? This is Derrida’s question. “What occurs when one gives a name? One does not offer a thing, one delivers nothing, and still something comes to be.”’

  ‘Right,’ Kelson said. ‘I need you to talk to a couple of homicide cops.’

  Another crack. ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘They’re all right. They don’t know this Derrida guy – or Foucault or the rest – but they’re smarter than I am. You’ll like them OK.’

  ‘Uh-uh …’ His philosophy abandoned him. He grabbed his shopping cart and shoved it into the traffic on South Water Street. A rusted white van swerved to avoid hitting him. The drivers in the cars behind the van slammed on their brakes.

  Kelson started after him – jerked back when a VW cut around another car and accelerated. ‘What did Foucault say about playing in traffic?’ he yelled at the professor.

  As the professor rushed into the farther lanes, a ComEd truck smashed into his shopping cart, ripping it from his fingers, tumbling it down the pavement. For a moment, the professor froze. Then he darted between cars to the other side.

  He turned – outraged, frantic – and yelled at Kelson. ‘Coward!’

  FORTY

  Kelson picked up Rodman forty minutes later at the head of the alley beside the Ebenezer Baptist Church. They drove through the mid-morning traffic, cut into the Loop, and returned to Clement Memorial.

  They rode the elevator to the basement, passed through the cafeteria fumes, and went into the security office.

  As they walked past the front desk, the receptionist said, ‘Hey – you can’t …’ and then fumbled with her desk phone.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Rodman said, ‘call security.’

  He and Kelson went to Rick Jacobson’s office, where the door was open and three men in blue security uniforms sat across the desk from their boss.

  ‘Out,’ Rodman said to them – and they stood like little soldiers.

  ‘Hey,’ Rick Jacobson said, ‘you can’t—’

  ‘Oh, yes, I can. Meeting’s over.’

  The men moved toward the door.

  Rick Jacobson said, ‘Don’t go anywhere.’

  But Rodman cocked his head at them, and they slipped out.

  Kelson smiled at Rick. ‘I brought my big brother again.’

  Rodman settled his narrow eyes on the security director. ‘Did you hit my friend in the face?’ His voice was gentle, terrifying.

  ‘I’m calling the police.’ Rick grabbed his phone.

  Kelson sat on one of the chairs abandoned by the security men. ‘Tell them you want to give them a statement about your family’s old handyman, Daryl Vaughn. Tell them they might want to talk to Scott too.’

  Rick set the phone back on the desk. He looked like he might get sick. ‘What do you want?’

  Kelson said, ‘Wendy Thomas is in jail for stealing drugs from you and using them to kill the mother of one of the patients who died here. She didn’t do it.’

  ‘We have video that says she did,’ Rick said. ‘At least she stole the fentanyl—’


  ‘Two patients who died here in the last six weeks had histories with your family,’ Kelson said. ‘Patricia Ruddig saw your brother run over your mom. Daryl Vaughn worked for you until your family fired him. Josh Templeton – whose mom Wendy Thomas is charged with killing – must have a connection to you too. You want to tell us about it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘And then, there’s Suzanne Madani. What’s that all about?’

  ‘Dr Madani was troubled,’ Rick said.

  ‘You’re grabbing anything that floats, aren’t you?’

  ‘She had an opioid problem. We were investigating her for admitting unauthorized patients. She—’

  ‘The homeless guys she carted in from the streets and shelters.’

  Rick looked unsurprised that Kelson knew. ‘Yes. Eight of them over a period of three years. Do you know what that cost the hospital?’

  ‘You’re going to tell me, aren’t you?’

  ‘Upwards of a million dollars. These were terminal patients, many of them. Men who needed extensive and expensive care.’

  ‘Stupid of her to bring them to a hospital for it.’

  ‘You know it doesn’t work that way.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess that’s my point.’

  ‘The hospital would go bankrupt if everyone did what Dr Madani did.’

  ‘Well, it looks like you took care of that problem.’

  ‘I took care of nothing. I liked Dr Madani as far as I knew her. I think she must have had a good heart. But it didn’t make her honest, and it didn’t make her a victim.’

  ‘What are you going to do about Wendy Thomas?’

  The man was sweating. ‘There’s nothing I can do. We’re cooperating with the—’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Rodman said it softly.

  ‘Scott killed them,’ Kelson said.

  Rick rose from his chair as if he meant to punch him again. ‘That’s a hell of a thing to say.’

  Kelson rose too. ‘I can’t prove it yet, but I will.’

  ‘Get out,’ Rick said.

  ‘Sit down,’ Rodman said.

  But Rick was beyond fear. He came around the desk and said, ‘Out. You don’t come here and accuse – you don’t—’

  Rodman showed his palms, letting the other man know he didn’t want to hurt him but could knock him across the office if he needed to. ‘We’re talking,’ he said, ‘just talking.’