Loving Time

Vice President of Medical Affairs of the university, the Chancellor of the university, the trustees of the Psychiatric Centre, the chief psychiatrist of the state of New York, so vital to the Centre’s funding, who reported to the Commissioner of Mental Health. The Vice President of Medical Affairs called the Dean of the medical school, who called the Commissioner of Mental Health, who called her while she was on the phone with the Chancellor. They all knew one another well, worked together on the committees that funded and regulated the academic and medical services the university and Centre provided, both to their students and the patients they served.

There was a great deal of interest in the case because Harold Dickey had been a well-known figure at the Centre for over thirty years. A lot of people had liked him. People’s liking and respecting Harold had been one of the many problems Clara had had with him. People had been foolishly loyal to all of Harold’s outdated views. Clara thought bitterly of Harold’s influence on the Ray Cowles case. Dickey had killed Ray.

And not only had Harold been genuinely liked, he had been the head of the Quality Assurance Committee and had died under suspicious circumstances right here in the Centre. During her many talks with all of her colleagues, Clara hadn’t exactly prepared for big trouble. Never, in her wildest dreams, would it have occurred to her that there would be any. She had talked to everyone and thought she had the Harold’s-death piece of her nasty situation all nailed down. Arch had assured her that the FBI person would take care of the other piece. Boudreau.

All Clara had needed today was the Chinese policewoman, who had bungled the Cowles case, suddenly back in her life to cast suspicions on Harold’s death. It was infuriating, outrageous. Clara could feel the tic jumping in her cheek as she tried to process the information April Woo had given her, make sense of what she’d heard and not have a seizure herself. For a moment she was possessed by the fear that, like Hal’s, her heart might run amok, too.

Ray was a suicide. Did that make sense after what he told her that night? No, it didn’t make sense. Now it seemed Hal was killed by a combination of Elavil and alcohol. But everyone knew Harold didn’t like to take medicines. Clara made a steeple of her index fingers and tapped them together. Ray wasn’t depressed and Hal wasn’t depressed. Ray never talked about suicide in any real way, and Hal was much less interested in his mood than his mental processes. Hal would never have taken anything to jeopardize the way he thought. The chemical uplift was for other people, Hal’s wife, maybe. His daughter. Not for him. He was a purist.

Clara stared through the triangle of her fingers, seeing Hal so clearly even after all these years, even after his ugly death. She saw him sitting in his underwear in the old easy chair in the bedroom of her apartment, the faded quilt thrown over the chair, always the jubilant peacock after sex, a glass of Johnnie Walker in his hand. For the sex he had no apology, but the scotch he had to analyze and explain.

“Every man has his weakness and his poison. Scotch is my poison,” he’d say, holding the amber liquid to the light.

He didn’t admit to his other weakness, which was women—most particularly her. Wouldn’t acknowledge the appetite because he never had any intention of paying the bill. A little knot of bitterness still remained deep inside Clara because of that. It was like a painful lump of otherwise benign tissue that became sensitized only with strenuous exercise. Occasionally the feeling had resurfaced with Hal’s pedantry in meetings when he pretended compliance and helpfulness to some innovation of hers, then stopped the progress cold with a few modest questions that generated endless debate. Now even his death had to raise questions.

Hal was a drinker, plain and simple, an old-fashioned lush. The steeple fell apart as Clara’s fingers stopped tapping. One hand gripped the arm of the chair. The other rose to her mouth and began stroking her lips and her chin.

Someone you love is going to die. If Hal had written that note, he most certainly hadn’t meant himself. For one thing, she didn’t love him anymore, hadn’t loved him for years and years, and he had known that. Not only that, for him the cold fact of the death of her love was old news. Hal had considered her loving someone else a challenge, a hurdle he could get over. He’d been arrogant. He would manipulate her, torment her any way he could. She could see him getting a little crazy and finding ways to scare her. But she didn’t see him hurting himself. And no one else would, either. Hal’s death would simply not be written off as a suicide.

Her agitated fingers moved back and forth across her lips, rubbing the soft skin as if it were a rough surface that needed abrasion. She hadn’t loved Ray Cowles, either. And now he was dead, too. What did the story tell? Suicide and suicide? Ray because he couldn’t face coming out of the closet and Hal not because she wouldn’t love him but because he couldn’t accept her accusation of harassment, the threat of being thrown off the Centre staff.

What about accident and accident? That sounded better in both cases. Neither had left a note. Maybe neither had meant to die. It didn’t sound good enough, though. Hal had been very busy when he died. He had wanted to clear himself, keep his job. He wouldn’t have taken Amitriptyline. If he hadn’t taken the medication on purpose, could he have taken it by accident? Clara thought of Bobbie Boudreau leaning against a tree, smoking, as she returned to the Centre after Hal’s death. Boudreau knew the building well. Boudreau was a mischief-maker, a poisoner. Boudreau had killed that way before. He’d been fired under extremely unpleasant circumstances. The pieces fit. Boudreau had killed Hal because Hal had found out Boudreau was the one who was harassing her.

Clara decided it was time to take the used condom out of her freezer, where she’d put it last Friday before leaving for her meeting in Washington. She was going to nail Boudreau with his own nasty little gift. Clara leaned back and checked her watch. She had ten minutes to relax before Special Agent Daveys arrived.

bobbie

forty-four

Bobbie’s day off was on Wednesday. On the Wednesday after the death of Harold Dickey, he walked back and forth through the underground corridors in the Medical Center complex—from building to building and back—looking as if he had important business to do. As always, he seemed to belong there. As far as he was concerned, he did belong there.

He had become attached like a plant in a garden and didn’t intend ever to leave. Before last year the wards in the Psychiatric Centre had been the garden where Bobbie thought he’d stay forever. Some years he’d worked the day shift, some years the night shift. Always he’d been available to fill in whenever needed, to help the damaged people in the wards. He didn’t like regular people. He lived for his work.

Bobbie saw his patients as sacred victims of the vicious world that systematically destroyed them—made them sick, incarcerated them, made them sicker, then spewed the lost souls out onto the street again where they couldn’t possibly survive. He believed it was the same kind of destruction done to him in the Army. He took comfort in the crazy. He felt God sent him there to the crazies, to be the one in control of them. He told the patients what to do. He gave them what was good for them. They got it when he said so and not before. If they had to go into restraints, he was the one to put them there. He was the one to release them. Every cigarette, every privilege they had and couldn’t have was up to him. It was his job to protect the crazies from their doctors and from the world. Bobbie gave them their medicine with love. He mourned their loss when they were tossed back into the unspeakable life outside.

After that patient jumped off the terrace last year and Bobbie was blamed for it, he’d felt even worse than when he had been transferred out of his first MASH unit and over the next years was systematically demoted from one nursing job after another until he was no longer doing any procedures at all, was forbidden to touch the patients—even to bathe them or change their dressings. Demoted and demoted again for no reason but pure mean spite until all he could do was carry the bedpans and mop up the blood. Bag the corpses of all those medical fuck-ups. He’d bagged a lot of corpses before he left the Army.

But now he felt good again. One vicious bastard who didn’t deserve to be a doctor, much less breathe the air of the living, was gone from this earth. Bobbie felt real good seeing Dickey as a dead man, rushed down the street on a gurney with all those asshole paramedics trying so hard to keep a dead man alive. God surely had a hand in putting Bobbie out on the street at that exact moment to serve as witness to the punishment of true evil

God was surely good to give him a death he could see again and again. He played it over and over in his mind, particularly the part with the bitch Treadwell hurrying back to the Centre alone, probably going back for the bottle. Bobbie had been interested to see that Clara Treadwell’s face had not been white with shock. Nor had it