And it wasn’t the first time in his life this had happened, not by any means the first. How could life be so unfair? The answer was that people like Clara Treadwell always abused their power. They always hurt little people. They hurt anybody they felt like hurting. And good people had no way to protect themselves.
It was actually a photograph of Clara Treadwell in the Medical Center’s newspaper that gave Bobbie the idea of cutting out letters, pasting them into messages, and delivering them to the bitch herself. Her picture appeared with some regularity. He’d seen it in the
That photo had also featured Dr. Harold Dickey, Chairman of the Quality Assurance Committee—the other fuck who deserved to die. Years ago Bobbie had walked into an empty patient room on a locked geriatric-depressive ward and found Dickey and the young Clara Treadwell groping each other behind the door. Lots of things just didn’t change. In the recent newspaper photo they stood beside a condom presentation on a blackboard. Dickey’s hand cupped Treadwell’s shoulder. Both were smiling.
For a few weeks after that photo appeared in the newspaper Bobbie put condoms in Treadwell’s files, left them on her chair in the boardroom, in her desk, in the toes of the running shoes in her closet. The locks were changed in the executive suite, but that never kept him out.
He sat on the cot, staring at his collection of bitch photos taped to the wall. The one that galled him the most was the one with the smiling arrogant foolish hypocritical Dr. Dickey. Those two thought they could get away with anything, thought no one knew what their relationship really was, what they were up to. Bobbie felt powerful, knowing about them and knowing they didn’t know he knew.
Like the colonel years ago who never knew how close he’d come that day to dying, Clara Treadwell didn’t believe she was in mortal danger. She didn’t believe in Bobbie’s power. He could see it in the way she walked, in the smile in her publicity photos. Foolish woman was going to lose her old lover. He stuck the photo back on the wall. Since the bum had had his accident and fallen off the bridge, Bobbie had felt very calm. The pieces of his shattered life were coming together again. He didn’t like messes, knew exactly how to kill so no one suspected a thing. Accidents were his speciality. He’d gotten a bonus he hadn’t expected with the bum, and the next two were scheduled. He checked his watch. One-twenty-five. Time to go to work.
thirteen
At one-thirty P.M., in gray sweatpants and a gray sweatshirt with no slogan on it, Jason Frank jogged down the five flights of open stairways from his office and apartment to the main floor. The stairs, like those in an old first-class European hotel, had been a major attraction for him when he moved there eight years ago. The twenties-era building was unique. It had two ways of getting up and down: the large, old-fashioned, see- into cage elevator and the open stairs. Wide landings went all the way around the building, forming an elegant square from the marbled lobby to the fifteenth floor. The wrought-iron railings were painted black, decorated with insets of brass leaves and elaborate vines.
Once grand, it was all getting pretty shabby now. The diamond designs on the bottom half of the walls, formed from black and white half-inch tiles, were no longer perfect. Many of the tiles were chipped or broken. A few were missing altogether. The well-worn marble stairs were cracked and hadn’t been polished to a high shine in decades. The ceilings, decorated with moldings and golden rosettes, were in need of a paint job and some new gilding.
The building was a co-op. Recently the board had taken a poll to see how many owners wanted to spend the hundred-thousand-plus dollars it would take to make the necessary repairs, but the outcome hadn’t been revealed yet. As Jason hit the main floor, the doorman glanced at his watch.
Emilio was twenty-five and watched everybody’s comings and goings with an avidity that was unusual even for the chummy Upper West Side. He had seen the doctor’s last patient come down and was pretty sure the man was gay. It made Emilio worry about the doc. If the doc had gay patients, did that mean he was gay himself? It was the kind of thing you just had to ask yourself. And now, ten minutes later, Dr. Frank was in a sweatsuit heading for the door.
“Going for a run, Doc?” Emilio asked.
Jason smiled. No, he was going to rob a bank. “Morning, Emilio.”
“Not for over an hour and a half. It’s afternoon now.” Emilio opened the heavy glass-and-wrought-iron door.
Dr. Frank walked out. He didn’t look gay. He was about six feet tall, taller than Emilio’s five ten. He was also a lot thinner than Emilio. The doc had a lean runner’s body, medium-brown hair, cut pretty short. He looked kind of like a Kennedy, one of those privileged kind of people. Well-built, good-looking, with a good background and all his shit together. Except he had a beard now. More than three weeks’ worth of beard, and he was still scratching at it. Emilio studied the doc as he went out the door. Was he gay or not?
“Watch out for those raindrops now. It’s going to rain.”
Jason didn’t answer. He was very careful not to say much to Emilio. The young doorman had some problems with his identity. For a while the young man had been telling all the people coming to see Jason that he and Jason were colleagues because Emilio was studying psychology at the community college he attended at night. He said he could tell things about them just by the way they walked.
That kind of thing amused colleagues but made Jason’s patients extremely uneasy. Jason had to tell Emilio to keep his speculations to himself and not do a single thing more than open the door. That was his job and his limit, to open the door. He had considered knocking the young man’s teeth out but decided that was an overly aggressive and unproductive approach to the problem.
Outside, he sniffed the moist chilly air and shivered. He hated the cold, considered it a personal enemy he had to conquer every year. It was November already. Pretty soon he’d have to stop running outside and start traveling across town to work out at the 92nd Street Y. Jason hated that. It took up too much time. Six months of the year, when it was warm, he ran in Riverside Park. He ran in the morning before he saw his first patient or sometime between twelve and two. He had a rationale for everything he did, and in the eight years since he had qualified as a psychoanalyst, he had worked out his days and hours exactly to fit the requirements of his profession, which was unlike any other.
He taught medical students and psychiatric residents. For each hour-and-a-half lecture, it took about forty hours of preparation. He taught at three different levels. Every level had to know certain things by the end of one of his talks. Medical students got the basics. The same subject for residents was much denser and deeper. For colleagues in associations he had to write the papers in advance. Jason got paid nothing for teaching and nothing for supervising residents. The personal cost of becoming an important analyst, a mover and shaker in a rigid and unyielding field, was something no analyst talked about.
No one got paid for the thousands of hours spent writing articles for psychoanalytic journals. Nor for the hundreds of dollars it cost to reprint the articles and send them all over the world to people who wanted them. Jason was paid an honorarium for about half of his speaking engagements, but even those did not begin to cover the cost of the hours and hours it took to prepare. And the days to give them, because a speaker didn’t just fly somewhere and speak, then get on a plane and go home. A speaker had to meet students, had to have lunch with the head of the department, colleagues who wanted to interact. Sometimes it was too far to go home. He had to stay, have dinner and spend the night.
For conferences, topics had to be approved in advance by the program committees. Then presenters had to hand in papers in advance so the discussants could read them and prepare their rebuttals. Of course, one had to stay and listen to other people’s papers. Often Jason was asked to be both a discussant and a presenter. When he got back home, exhausted and drained, he was immediately plunged into a grueling round of twelve-hour days packed with teaching and patients and had stacks of unopened mail waiting for him. That was the career track for someone who wanted to make a difference in the field. Jason was on that career track, an independent attached to an institution that considered teaching an honor that shouldn’t be polluted by any recompense.
He crossed Riverside Drive at Eightieth Street and broke into a comfortable jog. Up at Eighty-fifth Street was the huge hospital complex, one building of which was the Psychiatric Centre where he had trained and where he now supervised and taught.
