mind. Seventy-year-old man kills self while breaking and entering-another headline for Mr. Brickman's collection. Old men enter houses the old-fashioned way-they wait to be asked in. He went back up the front stoop and knocked.
Dr. Morten didn't look particularly surprised. He didn't look particularly happy either. What he looked like was particularly resigned.
'You knew him,' William said. 'When I said his name, you knew him.'
And Dr. Morten said yes. Yes. Oh yes. Yes he had. it it it
Fair was fair. Dr. Morten had a point. They'd both told stories to each other. Now it was time to tell other stories to each other. True ones.
First Dr. Morten asked him if Jean was really dead.
Yeah. Dead all right.
Dr. Morten sighed, the way you sigh at the end of a movie that's moved you to tears. Hard to believe it's over, but it is.
Then Dr. Morten said you go first. You're not here to settle the Goldblum estate, that's for sure.
So he did. He took a deep breath and jumped right in, and after a while he found the water wasn't too uncomfortable after all.
'I used to work with him,' he began, the way he'd begun with Rodriguez and the hooker. 'We were the Three Eyes Detective Agency. We were moderately successful, but Jean was the star. Definitely. When it broke up, we all went our separate ways. It wasn't like we had bowling nights when we did work together. So no one kept up with no one. We got old and I started reading the obituaries. I had death on the brain. One day I saw his obituary. I went to the funeral because I thought it was the least I could do. It would've been. Except I forgot to say rest in peace. I started learning things. Like the fact that he wasn't retired. Ready to join the shuf- fleboard league and he wasn't retired. I think that pissed me off. I was actually mad at him. I found out he'd been selling runaway kids back to their parents. Picture it- fourteen-year-old Minnesota kids stepping off the bus and there's Jean fighting the pimps and Covenant House priests for them. I imagine Jean played the sympathetic grandfatherly type-let me buy you a milk shake and you can tell old Jean all about it. Sure, I understand why you'd leave a home like that. Absolutely. Why don't you just give me your parents' number and I'll make it all right for you. Some of them did give him their parents' numbers. And then he'd get on the phone and play the concerned detective. I've found your daughter. Your son. Yes I have. Now if you just send me a money order to cover expenses I'll send them right back to… what, you don't want to pay expenses? Haven't hired me, you say? Low on cash? Click. Jean would give them the old fongul. Beat it, kid, he'd say. By the next week, they'd be out turning tricks. That was Jean. That was the Jean I knew and loved back in the good old days. So, big deal right? Go back to your apartment and pick up the obits again. Except I learned something else. That Jean had stopped selling kids. Honest. Given it up for a real case. Something, anyway, that was real to him. Real big. Real important. I don't know if I believed it. I didn't believe it. Not at first. I don't know why I bothered to find out if I should. Maybe because I'd retired a long time ago and he hadn't. Maybe because I got spit on on the way to his funeral and it felt like just another day at the office. Maybe I had survivor's guilt. Who knows-you're the psychiatrist. Okay, maybe I'm lying. Maybe it was the case. Unfinished- and cases are meant to be finished. After a while, I think it was that, the case, all these missing people I was turning up. So I thought I'd finish it for him. Why not-do the same for me, wouldn't he? And then somebody threw me down a deep dark hole. Tried to kill me-just like that. Came close to doing it too. So I thought, okay, maybe Jean wouldn't do the same for me. Maybe reading the obits isn't so dull after all. Maybe I'll re-retire. No such luck. Now I had this case on the brain. I found out other things. That Jean had this case on the brain too. That it had relieved him of something. That it had somehow balanced the books. He went and had his Mauthausen tattoo burnt off with acid because he said he'd earned it. Now what does that mean? Eighty years old and he's undergoing cosmetic surgery. Now here's what I start to think. I was following this case and everyone was saying he went that-a-way. Remember the old westerns? When they said that-a-way it always turned out to be the other way. The smart sheriffs knew that. So maybe I finally got smart. This case is about what was. It goes back. I don't think a client came out of the woodwork to give Jean a case. I think Jean was his own client. I think this was his own case. I think Jean was spanking himself for a long time, and that he was suddenly shown a way out. That-a-way. I think he saved his best case for last.'
There. Quite a speech. But he'd told it all, all he knew; he hadn't held a single thing back.
'Your turn,' he said.
'What if I don't want a turn?'
'We had a deal.'
'You can get out of the deal if you want.'
'I don't want.'
'Maybe you do, and you don't know it.'
'Now you're losing me, Doctor. Come on, this was I'll- tell-you-mine-if-you-tell-me-yours.'
'You don't want to hear mine.'
'Why?'
'Because mine's worse. Go home.'
'I can't.'
'Go home, William.'
'I can't. Why did you know him?'
'I can call you a cab.'
'Fifty years later and you knew his name. Why?'
'Because I couldn't forget it. I've tried.'
'It's your turn, Doctor.'
'If I tell, you'll wish I hadn't.'
'I wish I hadn't read the obits. One wish to a customer.'
'Okay,' Dr. Morten said. 'Okay,' his voice trailing off like a muffled prayer. And what was he praying for? For William to listen to him maybe, for William to take the next cab home, and leave what was buried, buried. But William had gone too far; he'd crossed that point where going back was longer than going forward. He was committed to the journey now, no refunds, no cancellation insurance. Like Mr. Leonati on another journey to hell, he was good and stuck.
'Okay,' he repeated. 'But I've got to figure out where to begin. Do I begin with him or with me? We're both important here. Take me. I was a kid, a psychiatric intern, just starting out. He wasn't much older. But he'd been through it. Like the rest of them. Bones-walking skeletons with that dead stare in their eyes. He wasn't different, just more bitter than the rest of them. Help him, they said. Help him. He was my first-you never forget your first, right?'
Clarence the cat was pirouetting crazily on the end table, like a music box ballerina gone haywire. Dr. Morten didn't seem to notice. He was back in time, a fresh- scrubbed intern about to shrink his very first head.
'He's a hero, they told me. Lost his family in the camps. Refused to eat when they liberated him. Wanted to die. Help him, they said. Sure thing, I answered. After all, this is what I wanted, what I'd gone to school for. I was going to make him forget, make him come to terms with his loss.
'At first, he was uncommunicative. Sat in the corner and didn't say a word to me. I let him stew in it too- tried to use the silence as a tool. But it didn't work with him. He was back there sizing me up-even then I knew that. So I started to talk-telling him a little about me to see if he'd bite. Of course, before I knew it, I was doing all the talking and he was doing all the listening. See- he'd turned things on their head-reversed roles with me. He was the doctor and I was the patient. It didn't take him long to come up with a diagnosis either. Terminal tenderness- the fatal desire to help others. He had me right where he wanted me then.
'So he began to talk. And talk. Suddenly he wasn't so dead anymore. Suddenly he wasn't so pathetic and tortured. Because suddenly I was. I thought about getting up and leaving him. Just refusing him as a patient. Wishful thinking. We were stuck with each other. At least till the next session when he decided not to show up again. He didn't have to. He'd said everything he wanted to.'
Dr. Morten leaned forward.
'But to tell you about Jean, I have to tell you about someone else first. Someone you may find it hard to believe was real. Except he was. Afterward, I looked up everything I could about him. There wasn't a lot. But there was enough-even today. In the absolute butchery that was World War II he was just an afterthought. Maybe he
