The doctor pointed at a file.
“Get it,” Eichord said, and he immediately produced a thick folder bearing a number and Schumway's name.
“Are there tapes?” He acted like he'd gone numb and Eichord repeated it as he skimmed through the file. “Recordings?'
“No.'
“Don't you automatically tape your sessions with your patients?'
“I've been Alan's doctor for a long time,” he said, as if that explained it.
Eichord read silently. Then he hit the last two pages, which were on a form marked SUMMARY. It began with a brief description of the patient, his vital statistics, Intelligence Quotient, other salient facts known about the individual called Schumway, Alan. Then came the good doctor's assessments.
OFFENSE RECORD: No offense recorded.
AGGRESSIVENESS: Uniformly belligerent and arrogant.
FREE ANXIETY AWARENESS: Uneasy. Fearful apprehensive. Paranoid.
FLIGHT IMPULSES: Escapist. Lives in make-believe world of contrived values. Artificially bolstered by indulgences. Alleges inability to use legs. Refuses to accept fact there is no medical reason for him to be confined to wheelchair.
CONVERSION TENDENCIES: Incapacitating conversion hysteria.
EMOTIONAL VOLATILITY: Manic.
OBSESSIVE/COMPULSIVE TENDENCIES: Obsession with visual stimuli (art-deco-style graphics), aural stimuli (dance band music of the 1930s—see Mother Fixation).
SCHIZOID CHARACTERISTICS: No friends. Calculated arrogance to counter sense of inability to achieve a heterosexual relationship under what he perceives to be “normal” conditions. (Hallucinated?)
PARANOID CHARACTERISTICS: Suspicious.
SEX VARIANCE: Reliance on oral sex, and insistence on sexual intercourse only with females exhibiting emphasized degree of what he perceives to be “vulnerability.” (Possible history of child molestation? Preoccupation with sex with the dead. Mother Fixation.) Strong latent homosexuality. Predisposition to sexual objects he perceives as “inferior” (transvestites, fetishists). Reliance on masturbatory fantasies and voyeurism.
ANTISOCIAL TENDENCIES: Violently critical. Openly supercilious.
EPILEPTOID CHARACTERISTICS: Rigidity. Explosive temperament.
MANIC TENDENCIES: Loathing. Destructive desires. Punishment fantasies.
SCHIZOPHRENIC TENDENCIES: Paranoia.
PHYSICAL DIAGNOSIS: Old spinal injury long-since healed and paralysis of legs psychosomatic (see
PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS: Undifferentiated psychosis.
ACTION POTENTIAL:
Aggressive, antisocial, with alarmingly high violence capability. Should seek institutionalization.
Eichord's hands were shaking.
“You fucking idiot. Why didn't you come forward with this?” The man just looked at him. “Don't you realize you're playing with a killer? You could be an accessory to multiple homicides? What the hell is the
“But I—I
“You WHAT?'
“Yes. Look at the damn dates.” He drew himself back up, regaining some of his bluster. “I cured him. I was finally able to bring him around. Make him realize that he could WALK. With time, he'll be out of that wheelchair and he'll have regained full use of his legs. Then, with continued therapy, I can restore his mental and emotional balance. Make him a full person again. He's a wonderful success story, don't you see?” The doctor rubbed his chest. “This man hurt me,” he said accusingly, but in a softer tone.
“Jeezus.” Eichord was fumbling with the calculator on the doctor's desk. Suddenly he realized the significance of the man's words, of what he was reading what he was HEARING.
“My God! 292 days. You fucking IDIOT. Don't you see what you did? All you did was help a killer get back up and walk again. He hadn't killed for over twenty years. You cured him all right. Maybe you can figure a way to bring Hitler back to life. I can't believe it. You've put a homicidal maniac back on the streets. Given him legs and the will to kill again. Nice going, asshole.” He detuned on the doctor's response saying, “Where's a DSM-II?” He turned pages. Asked questions. Began reading. Forgot to sit down. Forgot to breathe. Forgot Dana and Monroe were standing there. Forgot Dr. Lishness.
The words came in alien phrases. So many questions. So much information to digest so quickly. Trying to sift through the conversion symptoms of Schumway's disorder. The words like “pseudoneurological” and “hypochondriasis” accessible to a word buff like Eichord, but the clinical jargon insulating the facts under a thick coating of astasia-abasia and akinesia-dyskinesia, pathophysiological and psychogenic conceptualization. Even the academic usage of such words as “temporal” or “etiological” pushed him further away from a clear understanding.
With a final round of warnings to the psychotherapist, the men returned to the car and headed back to the station house.
“Shit. Wasn't nothing to that, was there?” Monroe said. “That white boy sure didn't take much leanin', did he?” He laughed softly.
“I think what did it was that hair,” Dana said, “all those little patches of baaaaad, black Rastafarian hair clumps stickin outta Monroe's cheeks. Very scary to your basic white person. We don't HAVE that shit.'
“Yo gonna have a bad, black Rastafarian FOOT stickin’ outta the cheeks of yo fat ASS in a goddamn minute, blubber tub.'
“Mon-roe,” fat Dana said. “Can I AX you som'-pin?” But the big detective ignored him.
“Smart ass car dealer lookin’ pretty good, eh?” he said to Eichord.
“Yep.'
“Need to knock his fuckin’ dick inna dirt.'
Eichord said nothing. His mind was ice-cold, like a meat locker, and he drove silently, framing the proper response inside his head.
Around 1400 he confirmed that he was going to be late and made certain Donna had arranged to take the boy to a girlfriend's house, where she planned to have their evening meal. By 1430 he was in the Buckhead Public Library making a nuisance of himself on the third floor, then vanishing into the bowels of the reference room on the second floor, where he reached over behind a spine-worn Psycopathia Sexualis feeling in between the solid rows of old books on the top shelf. The library books he'd dropped were still there. He pulled them out.
These were the books that had been used as cross references in the report he'd had Doc Tulare lash together for him, but it was the sort of report a layman could research if he wanted to spend three or four hours in the dusty bookshelves. All the titles were appropriately dog-eared and he had a nice checkable bibliography. Unlike prints, which generally paid off only in the movies, the first step was still Alibi Ike. It helped if in backtracking your trail the other guy found you were otherwise occupied at the time of a crime, especially if you could arrange it so he thought it was HIS idea.
The beautiful thing about the multilayered library was all the nooks, crannies, spiraling stairs, alcoves, hidden recesses where you could sit quietly at an out-of-the-way desk. Eichord still loved the library just as he had as a kid. But he needed it another way this one time, and he had the books in his jacket and was out through the basement without being seen and on his way to Schumway's house.
By 1500 a rather ordinary-looking middle-aged man in dark, thrift-shop coveralls and workman's cap, carrying something, was climbing the hill in back of Alan Schumway's. He looked like a repairman of some kind with his
