Loving Time

“This is his academic office.”

“Yeah?” April deadpanned. She didn’t even have her own desk, not even a drawer of her own. Academic office, patient office. What’d these doctors need two offices for, her face said clearly.

“Yeah.” Jason smiled. She was cute.

“You got two offices, too, Doc?”

“Uh-uh, only the one.” He scratched his face.

“So what’d Dickey do in this office?”

“This was where he did the administration side of his job. Harold was on hospital committees, taught classes, supervised residents. He wrote articles for journals, spoke at conferences. Maybe he was working on some kind of patient follow-up project with those files.”

“Like what kind?”

“Like I don’t know what kind, April. Like to make statistics, see how patients were doing five years later, ten years later. Something like that.” He checked his watch, was certain that was not what Dickey had been doing with the files.

They’d arrived at the elevator bank. Miraculously, no one else was around. “A patient like Raymond Cowles committing suicide fourteen years after treatment ended?” April asked. “Are you suggesting Dickey was working on that?”

“Huh? No … Look, April, a certain percentage of the borderlines commit suicide no matter what you do to help them. It’s a fact of life. If they want to die, they find a way.”

“Oh, I didn’t know Cowles was a borderline personality,” April murmured.

Jason tsked. “You know what I mean. I’m just saying don’t jump to conclusions. There may be no connection between the two deaths.”

“Maybe not. This one might not be a suicide. I don’t see a note. I don’t see a container of pills. I smell liquor, I see a glass, but I don’t see a liquor bottle or a flask. Where did it come from? Where did it go?… Anyway, Jason, the files Dickey was working on are employee files. Very few are patient files.”

Jason’s brow furrowed. He had to talk to Clara. Maybe Hal had been working on the condom thing and the person he’d been looking for somehow … “Look, April, I’ve got to go. I have a patient waiting for me.”

“Yeah, well, what did you come here for, anyway?” April’s face stayed blank.

“It’ll have to wait. Will you keep me posted on this?”

She smiled suddenly, as if he’d told her something important. “Well, thanks for the input.”

“So keep me posted,” he said again.

“Hey, I’ll level with you as long as you level with me.”

“Oh, come on, April. When have I ever not leveled with you?” He’d punched the button twice for the elevator. It didn’t light up. He punched it again.

“Oh, Jason, this is something different This is your turf. I’m not feeding you information so you can house- clean before we get the facts.”

Would he do that? He opened his mouth to protest. The elevator doors slid open. The elevator was full of people.

“Hey, Jason. Good to see you. I heard you’re—”

Jason pushed in. “Is this a down? Oh, sorry, getting out.”

Too late. The doors slid shut.

forty

“Anything?” Sergeant Joyce stormed into the empty squad room as Mike Sanchez was on his way out. There was no question she was pissed. A case from when she was in Sex Crimes three years ago had finally come to trial, and the A.D.A. had promised her she’d be up and could testify first thing.

“What took so long?” Mike asked. It was already after one.

“Some damn thing with the judge. The opening of the trial kept getting delayed and delayed. Bailiff wouldn’t let me go, and I wasn’t called until eleven-forty-five. What’s new?”

“Your unnatural at the Psychiatric Centre left a mess in his office.”

“What kind of mess?” Sergeant Joyce was something of a mess herself. First thing in the morning, in her black suit with the wraparound skirt that just grazed the top of her chubby knees and apple-green blouse, she must have looked pretty put-together for her court appearance. Now the four-leaf clover pin with a tiny green stone in the center, which may or may not have been an emerald, was the only thing about her still on straight. Everything else looked like yesterday’s well-thumbed newspaper. Almost the whole of her blouse had worked its way out of the wrinkled skirt. Her hair was wild, her eyes were watery, and her upturned Irish nose was red and raw. Balled up in her fist was a green handkerchief, which she clapped to her face suddenly but too late to stop the explosion.

“Achoo!”

“?Valgame Dios!” Mike said.

“Thanks. Both my kids are sick,” she muttered, snuffling angrily as if illness, too, were a purposeful act intended to further complicate her life. “Can you believe that? Both of them at home with flus and fever, and I don’t feel so hot myself.”

“Too bad,” Mike said. “Have you taken anything?”

“Nah.” She shrugged it off. “Where are you going?”

“I’m on my way over to see what’s up with Woo. Seems this guy Dickey took a lot of files over the weekend when they were supposed to be secured, and the hospital wants them back.”

“Uh-huh. What’s the problem?”

“April says there’s something wrong.”

“Yeah, so what’s wrong?”

“Lot of mess in there, but the doc was known for never working on the weekends. Something was up with him. Also there were no medications of any kind on the scene.”

“So he swallowed the pills somewhere else. Anybody check on what medications he took? Guy was in his sixties, wasn’t he? Maybe he took his medication, forgot he’d taken it, and took it again.” She edged the side of her thumb into her mouth and started nibbling at it, her red nose leaking. She didn’t want a homicide here.

Mike looked away. “We’re checking on it.”

“Aw, shit. Let’s take a look.” She sneezed again. “Anything new on the rapes?”

“No. Squirrel must be new in the area. No one knows him.”

“What about the street people?” Joyce sloped reluctantly out into the hall.

Mike followed her at a distance. Suddenly his throat felt a little scratchy. “Yeah, well, we got a few of the street people say they saw someone who looked kind of like the guy in the sketch hanging around earlier this week. But we have no leads on who he is.”

“I don’t want any uniforms out there. We have to let him think he got away with it.”

“No uniforms,” Mike confirmed. A lot of people, but no uniforms. He put his hand over his mouth and coughed, testing. Now he had to get in the car with her. All he needed was a bad cold. The temperature had gone up again. Maybe that was the problem. Hot, cold. Everybody wore the wrong thing, got sick, passed it along.

In the lot Sergeant Joyce headed for the navy unit she’d used that morning to go to court With her there was never any argument about who drove. She always sat on the passenger side and told whoever was at the wheel how to drive. Mike got in and opened his window all the way. It was only a few blocks to the Psychiatric Centre. Today Joyce clearly didn’t feel well enough to tell him how to get there.

Instead she sneezed and complained all the way, didn’t like being pressured into a big investigation at the Centre when young girls were getting brutally raped a few blocks away on their college campus, didn’t like the way she felt, didn’t appreciate spending the morning in a closed witness room waiting for a case three years old to come to trial. Then she started all over again. Without exactly saying it, mostly Sergeant Joyce seemed uncomfortable about going into the Psychiatric Centre, where cops had to hand over the bullets in their guns and walk around with the anxious feeling they were buck naked.

The hospital parking lot was down the hill nearly two blocks away from the Centre. In the interest of time, Mike parked inside the white diagonal lines a few feet from the entrance. And still it was twenty minutes before they found April and Serge on the nineteenth floor. The ritual of finding the head nurse on the third floor, emptying