by Mark Schorr
Louis Parker had ten years clean and sober, but still went to an AA meeting a day. The seventy-year-old lived alone in a downtown single-room-occupancy hotel. He had a dignified presence, wanted little social service support, and always seemed to be on the verge of disclosing a big secret. At first Hanson didn’t believe his stories. But the sharp-eyed Parker, who had the battered face of the bantamweight boxer he had once been, was intriguing enough that Hanson had visited the newspaper office and verified several of his tales in their archives.
Parker had been a private investigator, the buddy of a lawyer who became the mayor in the seventies. It had been a heady time of growth and corruption, and Parker had been right in the midst of it. The mayor had been wiretapped by the feds and caught taking money, and had turned on everyone around him, including his buddy. Parker served three years at the minimum-security prison in Sheridan, Oregon. Being a convicted felon with a swiftly growing alcohol problem had kept Parker from ever holding another high-paying job.
Hanson allowed himself a few lower-acuity clients at the clinic, and Parker was one who wasn’t in extremis. Parker set goals and met them, sort of. Not suicidal, homicidal, or indulging in high-risk behaviors. When questioned, he’d get vague and segue into an anecdote about bringing prostitutes into city hall for a council meeting, or tell a story about “tailing some moke.” He often sounded like a character out of a hard-boiled detective novel but seldom took himself seriously. Hanson liked the feisty Parker and let himself be distracted. Their appointments might not be therapy, but they were therapeutic. Enhancing the aging ex-city aide’s self-esteem, he rationalized. And elderly white men did have some of the highest suicide rates.
“Yeah, I remember when this town had a personality. Hey, Doc, you know where the words ‘skid row’ came from?” Parker liked to sprinkle his conversations with factoids, delivered in a self-amused staccato.
“No.” Hanson had told him several times he was neither a Ph.D. nor an M.D., but the older man was more comfortable addressing him as “Doc.”
“They used to let the lumber skid down to the harbor to load on ships. Muddy, sloping, dangerous streets by the waterfront. Who’d wanna be there but bums? Never thought I’d wind up there.”
“That reminds me, did you set an appointment with the housing specialist from Senior and Disabled Services?”
“It’s two months out. I wouldn’t be surprised if they screw with me,” Parker said with a sneer that was more endearing than menacing. Parker repeated a story Hanson had heard a couple times before, about when the bantamweight had gone toe-to-toe with a corrupt bar owner. “You know, Doc, I got enemies in this town.”
His words reminded Hanson of LaFleur. The counselor wondered what excuse she would use when she called in. Would he allow her back sooner if she admitted a relapse and agreed to treatment? He made a mental note to call her parole officer.
Hanson turned his attention back to Parker and nodded along. Funny that his mind was drifting—usually he stayed focused in session. Even if a story was repeated, there was a detail or nuance that would make listening worthwhile. People repeated themselves until they felt heard.
Tammy LaFleur lurked in his thoughts. Was it because she was seductive and his marriage was stalled? Or that his desire to rescue was overcoming his common sense? He should talk with Pearlman about it. “Yeah, I oughta do a book. I ain’t told you even half the stories.” “We’ve talked about your journaling.”
“Yeah, the stuff I could tell you. Maybe you could write it down.”
“It’s more therapeutic for you to do it.”
“Ah, I never liked writing. Fieldwork was my thing. Still keep my police scanner going. Hey, Doc, that reminds me, I heard bad news about one of your clients.”
“You know I can’t confirm if someone is my client or not.”
“You don’t have to be coy with me, Doc. She and me spent some time in the waiting room together. Plus we were in that symptom-management group together. Her name was Tammy, a flashy blonde.”
“Tammy?”
“They found her yesterday. Shot in the face. Saying it was suicide, which don’t sound kosher to me. A pretty babe like that, she’d put on a fancy dress, do it up with pills, lay herself out in the bed like a movie star. ’Cause it’s always possible she might’ve just blown her head off. We’re all nuts here, right?”
“You seem pretty blasé about it,” Hanson said, stunned and trying to sound composed.
“What do you expect me to do, break down bawling?” Parker shrugged. “It’s a pity. She was a nice girl. Well put together, in a high-maintenance kinda way. But she was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, if you know what I mean. Started asking if I wanted to do bodyguard work for her. Coming on flirty. Like if she needed a bodyguard, I’d really be able to do much. And if she didn’t, well, then she was nuts. Twenty years ago, I would’ve probably fallen for it.” Parker switched to a high-pitched voice, “‘I bet a big strong man like you could keep me safe.’ You wanna know a benefit of getting old? You’re not led around by your schlong so easily. Hey, you look pale.”
“I’m okay. A bit of a surprise.”
“It’s nice seeing you get upset,” Parker said with a grin. “Tammy and me, we’re numbers in the system. You think John Q. Citizen would give a flying fuck if we turned up dead? Less of a drain on the taxpayers. Nice to see you give a damn.”
Hanson was silent, still absorbing the news.
“Don’t feel so bad. She was a big girl, she made choices. Like, I’ve got a niece and a nephew. Both of them were sweet kids and visited me when I was in prison. My nephew wound up a biker in San Francisco, got killed a couple years back. My niece is a hotshot FBI agent. Sometimes it’s bad luck, sometimes bad choices. Mainly a mix of both.” Parker looked at his watch. “Well, as you usually say now, ‘Our time is about up.’ See you in two weeks, at this time?”
“Sure.”
Hanson had ten minutes before his next appointment, with phone calls to return to a couple of welfare workers, a Child Protective Services worker, a parole officer, and a Social Security hearing officer. Plus a few from clients.
But he sat and focused on his breathing. The small room was stuffy, a couple of cheap, brightly colored lithographs on the wall, the well-worn furniture looking like hand-me-downs from a seedy motel lobby. He could hear the ineffective ventilation wheezing stale air. The smells of body odor, cigarette smoke clinging to clothing, beery breath in the morning. Too many people with too many problems in too small a space.
Tammy LaFleur was dead. He had lost clients before, of course. Working with Portland’s most troubled, it was inevitable. How much of his concern was caring about her, how much of it was a feeling of failure? The catcher in the rye, missing the kids as they went over the cliff.
If she had been an open client he would be responsible for notifying the state so it could investigate. Deaths of mental health clients that might be related to their symptoms were supposed to be investigated, to make sure there was no abuse or neglect. Did her death occur when her chart was still open?
He checked the “In/Out” board. Pearlman was attending a meeting at one of the other sites. The mental health agency had eight clinics around the county. Hanson was stationed at the largest, in the downtown area, with the most intense clients. He could have used his seniority to be transferred to a quieter site. His wife urged him to, so he would have more energy for a private practice or to go back to school and earn a Ph.D. By staying downtown, he got to work with the hardcore, those who had been kicked hardest by Lady Luck, those who had made the worst decisions, those whom society wanted least.
There wasn’t any staffer around he felt he could talk to. He provided clinical supervision for half the counselors and liked his role as the “wise old man,” the person that others went to. Half of them were just out of grad school—who else would take such a low-paying, high-stress job dealing with society’s unwanted?
After a few minutes of relaxation breathing, he was c
omposed enough for his next appointment, Brittany, a teenage girl who had cut on her arms and thighs. Small neat slices which had alarmed her parents.
“People cut on themselves for lots of different reasons,” he began his session with the slender girl with long red hair and dark makeup.
Brittany regarded him with adolescent distrust. “Like what?”
“Some people do it because they dissociate, zone out, and the cutting helps them stay grounded. Others cut because it helps them zone out. Some like to see the blood, to make internal pain visible. Some feel it is a good way to punish themselves, others are seeking attention. A few hope to scar their bodies in certain ways. Peer pressure when a bunch of girls are doing it. Maybe something you read about. And some want to kill themselves. I leave anything out?”
She pouted, then smiled. “You’ve worked with people who cut? I’m not nuts?”
“Not nuts. More than a few people, mainly girls, do try it. A very small percentage actually kill themselves. I had one girl, an artist, damaged her tendons and weakened her hands, very sad.” He paused. “But most recognize cutting isn’t a good idea.”
“Tell me about it,” Brittany said, bobbing her head. “I took a shower and they stung like a son of a bitch.” She smiled, curled up into the chair, and played with her brightly colored sneaker laces.
As they talked, he saw her as a young Tammy I.aFleur, and he was aware of his own countertransference, thoughts about the dead woman. He forced himself to refocus on Brittany, and the session went well. Afterward he hurried to where the charts to be closed were stacked. Perennially understaffed in clerical as well as clinical areas, there was often a week backlog before paperwork was done.
What was hard about accepting her death? Client death was an occupational hazard for community mental health. Suicide, getting killed by an ex-partner, police, angry drug dealer, hepatitis, HIV, car accident, overdose. Not what would be boasted about on the chamber of commerce’s posters for “the Largest Small Town in America.”
“Is everything okay?” Michelle Benjamin asked. She was a dark-brown-eyed social worker, fresh out of grad school and full of enthusiasm. Hanson had the feeling she would take most of the clients home, like a little girl taking in errant puppies. He had known counselors who actually had taken clients home, and usually found everything they owned, and the client, gone. He’d seen dewy-eyed do-gooders become cynics and change careers.
“Yeah, sure.”
She stared at him as he rooted through the “Terminated” charts in a big blue Rubbermaid bin.
“Really?”
His urgent movements made his words a transparent lie, but he didn’t want to tell her his true concerns. He was the wise old man, after all. “I had a client suicide,” he admitted. “I had discharged her recently.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Thanks.”
She nodded respectfully. “I appreciate you sharing that. It’s good for me to know that even someone as experienced as you can have that happen.”
He gazed into her concerned, idealistic face.
“Do you want help looking?” she asked.
“I bet you’ve got a client scheduled.”
She nodded.
“I can handle it.”
She squeezed his shoulder supportively before hurrying away. He dug into the stack of charts, finding LaFleur’s after a few moments. He took it to his office and shut the door. Most clinicians shared a large, open bullpen, walls plastered with crisis alert sheets and notices of concerts for worthwhile causes. As a supervisor he had his own office, with a window. By corporate standards it was a couple notches up from a janitor’s closet; by community mental health standards, it was the corner office with a private executive bathroom. About eight by twelve feet, it looked out on a busy street where he could watch the police bust an occasional drug transaction or roust a drunk from the dingy doorway of the Somewhat Honest Bob’s Pawn Shoppe. The sleazy businesses—tattoo parlors, pawnshops, shabby hotels, and raunchy bars—had been crammed into a few-block area downtown, and that included the main social service agency offices.
What was he looking for? Closure or proof he had done right? Paperwork oversights or justification? Was the answer to his distress somewhere in the chart?
He skimmed the demographic and financial-eligibility information, as well as her signature on the informed-consent forms that laid out treatment expectations. He jumped to recent progress notes, where she had sounded more upbeat. He knew that suicidal clients sometimes appeared happier once they had made up their minds that death was the best way to solve their problems. But there was none of that feeling with Tammy. Despite her evident paranoia, she seemed to look forward to her future. No disconcerting giving away of belongings or declining to make plans.
She spoke of her father as “neglectful or bullying” and her mother as “passive” and “more concerned about appearances than anything else.” She had refused to identify her parents, but vague references to vacations and living in West Slope made it clear that they were upper-middle-class. She graduated high school, took a year of community college toward becoming a veterinary assistant, then was licensed as a cosmetologist. She became an “exotic dancer,” and had her first arrest for prostitution at age eighteen.
There were hints of grandiosity, or maybe her stories had been true. “Dates” with two visiting basketball players, an aging rock star on tour, three nationally known politicos at a convention. Reminded of her Glamour Shot, he thought it might be possible. Young, pretty, wild, available, exploitable.
Over the next four years, two arrests for drugs and another for prostitution, birth of a son, with six men the possible father. Taken away when he was three by Child Protective Services for her involvement with a guy who ran a sleazy bar. Then she seemed to have quieted down. Maybe she had gotten old enough to realize she wasn’t immortal.
The knock at the door jolted him. “C’mon in,” he said, hastily closing the chart.
It was Pearlman. “Michelle said you were upset. Had a client die.”
At times the center felt like a family, with a similar level of support and intrusiveness.
“I’m okay.” How many times had clients told him that, meaning, “I’m miserable”? But was it an opening to probe or a way of saying, “Back off”?
“Which client?” she asked, and he held up the chart.
“Tammy LaFleur,” she said, reading the label. “We talked about her in supervision a few weeks ago, didn’t we? Had been stable, with increasing paranoia?”
He nodded, impressed as usual with her memory.
“She was closed?”
“Maybe. Not sure if she killed herself before I did the paperwork or not. And the closure certainly hasn’t been entered into the computer system.”
“Your call?”
He understood what she was saying. If the client was open, they would have to do a critical-incident review and forward their conclusions to the state. If she was closed for any substantial period, there was a quick in-house review, and a one-sheet follow-up was added to her chart.
“I’d like to do a full critical-incident review.”
She sighed. “I knew you would.”
It meant more paperwork, more staff time away from direct service. But it would help give him closure. A bureaucratic funeral. Which reminded him of a real funeral. He looked at the emergency contact number. Pat Grundig. The name was vaguely familiar. It didn’t specify the relationship, and he presumed the police had notified related parties. He had had to do it enough times, brought in as the mental health professional who should do better at breaking terrible news, even though there was no good way to tell people that they would never be seeing a loved one again.
“You’ll set it up?” Pearlman asked, referring to the review.
He nodded.
“If you want to talk, you know where to find me,” she said.
Hanson rescheduled a couple of clients who could bear canceling and put off two
clinical supervision sessions in the afternoon. He left a voice mail for the agency medical director to arrange a time for the critical-incident review. He also left voice mails for a case manager involved in Tammy’s treatment, as well as the leader of the coping skills group she had been in. Once he set a possible time, he’d notify Pearlman, and they could complete the review in a half hour.
He called the police and tried to get information about the death. “What’s your relationship to her?” the clerk at the other end of the line asked.
The right to confidentiality survived death unless there was strong evidence that disclosure would be to the benefit of the client. Which was hard to argue when the client was dead. Confidentiality could also be broken if it could be shown that it would help catch the killer. But when the victim was the killer …
“I’m her brother.”
“When’s her birthday?” the clerk asked.
“February 25, 1978,” Hanson said, reading from the chart.
“I can release basic information over the phone. Your sister died from an apparent gunshot wound to the face. She died at roughly four o’clock p.m.,” the woman said, stiffly reading from a form. “Official cause of death will be determined by an autopsy which is scheduled for later today. If you wish additional information, you need to go in person to the medical examiner’s office with photo identification. Do you want that address?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry for your sister.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I’ve had my share of tragedies. I know how hard it is.”
“Thank you.”
“God bless,” she said, and hung up.
He allowed himself a few minutes to contemplate the sorrow. Tammy’s, the clerk’s, his own. The thought of numbing out with a drug came sudden and strong. Heroin was best—it had gotten him through Vietnam. Marijuana was a close second, liquor a distant third. No matter how many years had passed, the craving crouched in the darkness like a hungry tiger. He knew he would never relapse, but how many addicts said the same thing as they called their dealers?
