A Knife Edge

TWENTY-FIVE

Judith Churcher, psychologist, had her office in a place called The Sunshine Clinic, which turned out to be a rambling old house surrounded by a garden that was part manicured, part jungle. Artfully hidden throughout the garden sat painted fairies and frogs cast from concrete. The front door was daubed in the colors of the rainbow. My nostrils detected incense on the air currents. If you weren't depressed when you arrived, The Sunshine Clinic would fix that.

I pushed the rainbow aside on its squeaky hinges and walked into the reception area. It was unattended and no customers were waiting, patiently or otherwise. Judith Churcher shared the house with a kinesiologist, an expert in Reiki, and another psychologist, like herself, who specialized in anxieties. There was a rack of printed materials on one wall. Among an array of titles instructing on how to detect and repair your aura and how to release your inner life-force energy was a book titled Have a Nice Flight.

“Is there anything I can help you with, sir?” said a voice behind me.

The guy who it belonged to was a painfully thin hippie type with stringy arms, wild, wiry gray hair, and a cracked and weathered face that called to mind old window putty. He wore a loose purple cheesecloth shirt, pants of a similar material tied around his scrawny waist, and sandals. A wave of patchouli enveloped me, causing me to fight for oxygen. “I'm here to see Dr. Churcher,” I said. As with Dr. Mooney, Churcher had every reason to believe she had an appointment with a new patient. In this way, I was reasonably sure that the people I drove fifty miles to interview would be in.

“The doctor should be here any moment. Take a seat.”

I nodded and took up his suggestion, one beside an open window.

Almost immediately, a woman in her late forties bounced in the front door. She was wearing a beige linen skirt and matching jacket. Her hair was cut in a short bob and dyed strawberry blonde. The PTA mom type. She walked into one of the rooms and closed the door. Thirty seconds later, she opened it again, sans coat, ready to counsel. “Mr. Cooper?” she inquired.

I stood and walked into her office. She closed the door behind me. “Sit, sit,” she insisted. “Obviously we don't know each other. So, why don't you tell me a little about yourself. Start wherever you like.” She knitted her eyebrows together in concentration, like she was determined to memorize Each And Every Word.

“I'm an investigator with the OSI — an Air Force cop,” I said.

She blinked a couple of times and tilted her head, a combination that communicated her deepest understanding and sympathy for this situation I found myself in. I wondered what was really going through her mind. White noise, most likely. “I'm looking into the death of someone you were counseling. His name was Ruben Wright.” She blinked again, this time with confusion.

“But I thought… Do you mind if we start again?”

“Sure, I'm Special Agent Vin Cooper.” I pulled my badge and gave her a good look so there was no mistaking what variety of Vin Cooper I was. “Sergeant Ruben Wright died a little over a week ago when his parachute failed. I'm looking into his death.”

“Ruben's dead?” She frowned and took a breath, her red lip-sticked lips thin and pursed so that they looked like a cut. From the way she took the news, I gathered it wasn't the first time she'd heard one of her paying customers would no longer be making contributions to her beach house. “I called him only last week,” she said.

“I know,” I replied.

“He missed an appointment.”

“Yes.”

“He was in the Air Force? I thought he was a personal trainer.” I sensed real disappointment, almost hurt. Judith Churcher believed she'd had a deep and honest rapport with Wright.

“He didn't let anyone know the truth, Dr. Churcher,” I said, giving her a break, letting her off her personal hook. “He couldn't, otherwise he'd have been bounced out of the Air Force. We don't let people with MS jump out of planes. He came to see you precisely so that we wouldn't know.”

She nodded and allowed herself to relax a little.

“I want to ask you about his mental state.”

“You're thinking he might have killed himself?”

“We're just closing down options,” I said ambiguously. “I've already spoken to the referring doctor—”

“Dr. Mooney.”

“Yeah, so I know he was on medication for depression. You were helping Ruben come to grips with his new reality, easing him through the grieving process of losing the life he'd lived.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“In your opinion, do you think he was capable of suicide?”

This was a difficult one for Churcher to answer, and I could see by the lines in her forehead that she was wrestling with it. If she believed it was a possibility, why hadn't she done something about it, even if it was only to warn Mooney? And if she hadn't seen Wright's suicide coming, what did that say about her ability to do the job? In the end, Churcher came down on the side of her own professional defense. “Suicide? No. I didn't think he was at risk of that. He was unhappy about the MS, which is only healthy — and natural. But the Effexor seemed to be getting on top of the depression, and the other prescribed drugs were helping him manage his symptoms. Most days, he said, he was actually feeling pretty good.” She glanced up at the ceiling, hunting for a summary. “No, I'd say his state of mind was positive — realistic, but positive. Did you know Ruben?”

I said that I did, that we'd worked together some years back.

“Then you know the kind of person Ruben was — a tower of strength. He was coping well — better than well, in fact. He knew what he was in for, that there were speed bumps ahead, but he appeared to be prepared for them.”

That all sounded like the Ruben Wright I knew, but I also knew that the bigger folks were, the harder they fell. And Ruben had fallen hard. I'd seen the photos. “Were you aware that he was throwing money around like water these past couple of months, pretty much from the time he was diagnosed with the MS?”

Churcher appeared disappointed with the news. She looked at the floor. “No, no, I wasn't.”

“Now that you know, what do you think?”

“I know what you think,” she said.

Amazing, I thought. A shrink who makes statements rather than asks questions. “So tell me.”

“You think he was spending all his money because he intended to kill himself.”

I shrugged. “You can't take it with you.”

“Look, it's possible. I just…”

“Just what?” I pressed.

“I just don't… he wasn't the type. He wasn't suicidal.”

“But it fits.”

“Yes, it does. I have a few MS patients. It's an expensive disease. You need a lot of drugs to control the symptoms, and when the disease advances, earning an income gets difficult. There aren't many jobs around for people with memory loss, right?”

There was always politics, I thought.

Churcher continued. “The point is, securing your financial situation should be one of your first priorities — there's a long and bumpy road ahead. Instead, he began frittering it away, wasting it. That's a pretty big signpost.”

That was the way I figured it, too.

We sat around for another forty minutes, going well past the booked hour. I rehashed the interview with her — asked the same questions different ways, in case anything I'd missed popped out, but I seemed to have picked everything up on the first sweep. At the end, Churcher asked, “Do I have to worry about any repercussions because of this, Officer?”

“If you're worried about the Air Force — no. Hiding a medical condition from the military is not unheard of. You're not responsible for Ruben's actions — he was.”

She nodded, but I knew she wasn't totally satisfied. Like every shrink I'd ever met, Churcher believed she could look into a patient's soul, locate the hidden truth, and help the patient find it, too. It was a big blow to her ego to realize that — at least in the case of Ruben Wright — she'd looked into his soul and failed to spot the lies. I handed her my card and told her she could call me if anything we hadn't covered came to mind, which was pretty much the way I concluded every interview. I took a few steps into the reception area. Two men in business suits and a woman in a hoodie and sweatpants grazed among the medical paperbacks and pamphlets. The woman picked up something about the inner child and flicked through it. That reminded me. I went to the rack and lifted out the Have a Nice Flight booklet. Maybe a little self-help wouldn't hurt. I turned to Churcher and said, “How much do I owe you for this?”

“Have trouble flying?” Churcher checked the title, her smile turning vaguely knowing, in the everyone-has-issues way you get from people who make their living convincing the rest of us that healthy self-doubt is a sickness.

“I think it's more a problem with crashing.”

“Nineteen ninety-five,” she said.

I gave her the money and took a receipt. I had at least one more stop to make, and I was late.