Hundred Dollar Baby

59

It was pretty good spring weather, so when I left Patricia Utley I walked back to the West Side. I needed the exercise. I had done nothing but sit and stare and listen and nod for days. I felt like a rusty crankshaft. There were a lot of dogs in the park, which made me feel better. When I got to Lionel's building, Hawk wasn't there. Which meant April wasn't there. I thought about bracing Lionel, but I knew I'd have trouble with the doorman, who already knew me for a phony and a Bostonian. It was late. I walked back across the park to my hotel.

In the room, my message light was flashing. I had voice mail. It was Hawk.

"Called your cell," he said. "But no answer. Figured you don't know how to retrieve messages on it. So I didn't leave one. April come out, got her car, and headed north, me behind her. At the moment I'm behind her, south of Hartford. I think we going home."

I called Hawk's cell.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Stay with her," I said. "I got a couple bases to touch here and then I'll drive your car home and bring your stuff."

"Careful of the car," Hawk said.

"I'll be in touch," I said.

After I hung up I made myself a strong scotch and soda and took a pull and looked out the window and let out a long, though tough and manly, exhale and rubbed the back of my neck. Below me the traffic, mostly cabs, raced uptown as if it was important to get there. I watched them for a while and drank my scotch. It seemed a perfect time to review what I was doing. Which didn't take long, since I didn't know. The crime under consideration was who killed Ollie DeMars. I was supposed to be interested in that. It was what I did. But my real goal seemed to be the salvation, again, of April Kyle. Which, I supposed, was also what I did. What I knew was that I wasn't getting anywhere with either.

I went back to the minibar for a refill, then I sat on the bed with my drink and called Susan.

"I'm alone in my hotel room," I said, "drinking scotch and heaving long sighs."

"Would phone sex help?" she said.

"Probably."

"Okay," she said. "Glad to accommodate-who is this, please?"

"Oh, good," I said. "Toy with me, in my despair."

"You have never despaired in your life," Susan said.

"Until now," I said.

"Tell me about it," Susan said.

I did. Susan listened quietly, offering only an occasional encouraging "uh-huh."

"So," I said, "my question to you, doctor, is, What's up with April?"

"I'll spare you the perfunctory preface about not having examined April and thus not being in a position to make a solid diagnosis."

"Thanks," I said, "for sparing me that."

"I can, however," Susan said, "make an informed guess."

"Please," I said.

"I'll probably need to use the phrase deeply ambivalent," Susan said. "Can you handle it."

"You're a shrink," I said. "You have to talk that way."

"Okay," Susan said. "I would guess, and what I know of her history would certainly suggest it, that she is deeply ambivalent about men."

"There it is," I said.

"Yes," Susan said, "I warned you. Everything that she has ever gotten she has gotten by seducing men, you included."

"Seduced in a broad sense," I said.

"Yes. Seduction needn't be sexual. And everything bad that has ever happened to her has been caused by men.

"In fact?" I said.

"In her fact," Susan said. "The way people experience things is not necessarily consonant with empirical fact."

"Consonant."

"Remember the Harvard Ph.D.," she said. "This Dreamgirl scheme seems a perfect expression of her situation."

"She sees it as a way out of dependence on men," I said. "But to do it she has to depend on men."

"She has moved from Lionel, to Ollie, to you, to Lionel again. My guess is that you, or maybe even Hawk, are waiting in the wings, when the buffeting of circumstance, and her own ambivalence, overwhelms her again with Lionel."

"Which it will?" I said.

"Predictions are hard," Susan said. "Explaining afterwards is what shrinks do better."

"Informed guess?"

"She'll be overwhelmed," Susan said.

"Any tips on saving her?" I said.

"Maybe she can't be saved," Susan said.

"I know," I said.

"She's had these furrows grooved into her soul by her whole existence."

"Shrinks don't say 'soul.' "

"Never tell," Susan said. "When are you coming home?"

"Tomorrow or the next day," I said. "How about that phone sex?"

"Better than nothing," Susan said.