He inspected paintings, examined books on the coffee
table, fingered upholstery fabric, and checked his reflection in a Victorian bevelled mirror.
'Great room,' he pronounced. 'Did you use a decorator?'
'No.'
'Just kinda did it yourself?'
'Over the years.'
'Has a good feel to it,' he said. 'Coherent.' He smiled. I thought I detected a mocking edge to his words, but I couldn't be sure: the tinted lenses did a good job of masking his emotions.
'All right, sir,' said Whitehead, 'let's go over that phone call again. From start to finish.'
It was busywork. I considered protesting but knew it would only make things more difficult. Feeling like a kid kept after school, I complied. Whitehead removed a plum-sized lump of dead gum from his mouth, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and stowed the mess in his pocket. After filling his mouth with a fresh wad, he resumed the interrogation.
It was a stultifying process. He repeated old questions and tossed in a batch of new ones. All ranged from pointless to irrelevant. As we trudged farther along the road to nowhere, Cash continued to check out the room, interrupting several times to comment on my good taste. Whitehead acted as if he weren't there.
I decided this was no good cop-bad cop routine. This was no routine at all.
They hated each other.
By a quarter to six the interrogation was dead. At ten to, Robin came home. When I introduced her to them as my fiancee, their eyes widened in amazement.
Suddenly I understood it all: Whitehead's antipathy and pointed comments about deviates; Cash's preoccupation with my interior decoration.
They'd assumed I was gay.
When you stopped to think, it make a kind of narrow-minded sense: I was friends with a homosexual cop; I'd treated - and had shown human concern for - a homosexual teenager. I had a well-decorated home. Utilising a mindless formula that approached life as simple arithmetic, they'd done their calculations and had come up with a neat little answer:
One plus one equalled queer.
As they fumbled and prepared to leave, I filled with anger. Not at being mistaken for a homosexual but at being categorised and dehumanised. I thought of Jamey. His whole life had been one categorisation after another. Orphan. Genius. Misfit. Pervert. Now they said he was a monster, and I didn't know enough to dispute it. But I realised, at that moment, that I couldn't walk away from learning more.
Souza had foisted a tough choice upon me. The two policeman had helped me make my decision.
I CALLED the attorney the next morning and, after reminding him of my terms, agreed to work with him.
'Good, Doctor,' he said, as if I'd made the only rational decision under the circumstances. 'Just tell me what you need.'
'First I want to see Jamey. After that I'll take a complete family history. Who'd be the best person to start with?'
'I'm the most knowledgeable historian of the Cadmuses you could find,' he said. 'I'll give you an overview, and then you can talk with Dwight and anyone else you choose. When would you like to see the boy?'
'As soon as possible.'
'Fine. I'll arrange it for this morning. Have you ever visited the jail?'
'No.'
'Then I'll have someone meet you and orient you. Bring ID that states you're a doctor.'
He gave me directions and offered to messenger over the ten-thousand-dollar retainer. I told him to keep the money
until my evaluation was complete. It was a symbolic gesture, bordering on pettiness, but it made me feel less encumbered.
The County Jail was on Bauchet Street, near Union Station, in a neighbourhood east of downtown that was half industrial, half slum. Truck yards, warehouses, and machine shops shared the area with twenty-four hour bail bondsmen, crumbling fleabags, and dusty stretches of vacant lot.
Entry to the facility was through a subterranean parking structure. I found a space in the dimness next to a decrepit white Chrysler Imperial blotched with rust spots. Two kerchiefed and haltered young black women got out of the big car, solemn-faced.
I followed them up a flight of iron stairs and into a small, silent courtyard created by the U-shaped intersection of the parking structure with the jail. On the left arm of the U was a door stencilled OWN RECOGNISANCE COURT. Running through the yard was a short strip of grimy sidewalk bordered by parched, yellowing lawn. A large spruce tree grew on one side of the lawn; from the other sprouted a spruce seedling - stunted, tilted, and stingily branched -that resembled nothing so much as the big tree's neglected child. The walkway ended at double doors of mirrored glass set into the high, windowless front wall of the jail.
The building was a study in cement slab - massive, sprawling, the colour of smog. The expanse of raw, flat concrete was crosshatched overhead by concrete beams at the seam of the union with the parking garage. The junction yielded a maze of right angles as cruelly stark as monochrome Mondrian that cast cruciform shadows across the courtyard. The sold concession to ornament was the scoring of the concrete into parallel grooves, as if an enormous rake had been dragged through the cement before it had dried.
The women reached the double doors. One of them pulled a handle and the mirror parted. They preceded me into an incongruously tiny room with glossy pale yellow walls. The floors were worn linoleum. Adorning the right
wall was a patch of tarnished hand lockers. Blue letters over the lockers instructed anyone carrying a firearm to deposit it within.
Straight ahead was more one-way mirror, shielding a booth similar to that of a movie house ticket taker. In the ' centre of the silvered glass was a grilled speaker. Below the speaker was a stainless steel trough. To the right of the booth was a gate of iron bars painted blue. Over the gate were painted the words SALLY PORT. Beyond the blue bars was empty space backed by an opaque metal door.
The women stepped up to the booth. A voice barked through the speaker. At the end of the bark was a question mark. One of the women said, 'Hawkins. Rainier P.' Another bark elicited the deposit of two driver's licences through the trough. Several moments later the bars slid open. The women trudged through, and the blue gate clanged shut behind them with earsplitting finality. They waited silently in the sally port, shifting their weight from hip to hip, looking too tired for their ages. In response to a third bark they passed their purses to the left, answered more questions, and waited some more. When the rear metal door opened suddenly, a beefy tan- uniformed sheriff's deputy stood in the opening. He nodded perfunctorily, and the women followed him through the door. When they'd disappeared, it slammed shut, loud enough to echo. The entire procedure had taken ten minutes.
'Sir,' barked the speaker.
I stepped up and announced myself. Up close I could make out movement on the other side of the glass, shadowy reflections of young, sharp-eyed faces.
The speaker asked for identification, and I dropped my hospital badge from Western Paediatric into the Trough.
A minute of scrutiny.
'Okay, Doctor. Step into the sally port.'
The holding area was the size of a walk-in closet. On one wall was a key-operated elevator. To the left were tinted glass sliding windows set over a steel barrier. Behind the glass sat four deputies - three moustached men, one woman. All were fair and under thirty. The men looked up
at me briefly before resuming their examination of a copy of Hustler. The woman sat in a swivel chair and peered at a hangnail. The booth was papered with county memoranda and outfitted with a panel of electronic equipment.
I waited restlessly, suspended between freedom and what waited on the other side of the metal door. I was no prisoner, but for the time being I was trapped, at the mercy of whoever pushed the buttons. I started to feel antsy, the anticipatory anxiety of a kid being strapped into a roller coaster seat, unsure of his fortitude and just
