Loving Time

forty-six

In spite of his fatigue and the wine at dinner, Jason did not go to sleep when Emma did. There were a number of things he wanted to take up with Clara. He decided to finish the Cowles file before his meeting with her the next morning. He gathered up the papers and took them into the living room, where he sat in his favorite chair, reading, as Emma slept. At one he heard each of his clocks chime once. And then on the half-hour he heard them chime once again. He found it a little eerie to be sitting in the dark, with only one light shining on his page, married again with all the attendant complications of ambivalence and longing. Nothing about their relationship was the same as it had been before Emma left, least of all the old sense of security. Still, the need for love was a powerful motivating force. Jason had found he could endure life without it, but only just.

A sense of sadness touched him as he turned the pages to find his place in the file. Doctors don’t like to lose patients at any time in their lives, but this patient of Clara’s and Harold’s was by no means silenced. Ray Cowles was still crying out to them, demanding their care and attention even now. Jason did not have to see his body, or the death report, or the confusion and sorrow of his widow to be touched by the tragedy of his death. Cowles had been a year younger than he. Jason thought of him as a very young man, hardly at the halfway point of his life.

What had changed his mind after all these years? What had made him leave his wife, then feel he could not endure the freedom to be himself? Jason searched through the ancient history of Ray’s analysis, trying to find the seeds of his final self-destructive act. He was looking for a thread of depression and suicidal feelings that should have been noted and followed more closely at the time of his original treatment. And he was deeply aware as he read Ray’s story that the only other witness to the dead man’s treatment with Clara Treadwell was now also dead.

Six months into the analysis, Jason stopped at an entry and shook his head. It was clear to him that something more than the supervision of a therapy was going on between Dickey and Treadwell. There was no question that her supervisor’s mind was on the seduction of his resident—not the needs of the patient—and the supervisor was using the patient’s remarks as a kind of direct foreplay with Clara.

Jason sighed and stopped again on a love issue that occurred over two years later. The patient RC was infatuated with a professor at the university. RC’s description of his feelings included being overwhelmed by the way the man looked and by his smell. Dickey had told his student Clara that those were not true feelings of love. Dickey had insisted the patient was really in love with Clara. He remarked that RC never acted on his feelings for Professor S. and that proved he was not gay and not in love with him. In her following sessions Clara led the patient to believe Dickey’s interpretation of his feelings was the correct one.

It was obvious to Jason that indeed the patient’s description of his feelings for Professor S. had the clear ring of truth. And that by year two and a half of RC’s therapy, his therapist and her supervisor were involved in a sexual relationship and were more interested in each other than they were in him. Jason didn’t sleep very well that night. Neither did Emma. Both of them rolled around for hours, periodically coming together to hold and stroke each other in the dark.

It was unseasonably balmy at six-fifty-five when Jason walked up Riverside Drive to meet Clara Treadwell. He was a little hung over from too much white wine and not enough sleep. As he approached her building, the night doorman stood outside by the curb polishing the brass on the canopy supports.

“No one goes in there,” the doorman said coldly when Jason tried to enter the building.

“Dr. Frank to see Dr. Treadwell. She’s expecting me.”

“I’ll have to call up.”

Jason nodded. So call up.

The guy jerked his head toward a man sitting in a car at the curb, then called up, spoke on the intercom, and said to Jason, “You’re okay. Penthouse.”

Clara opened the door even before Jason rang the bell, then, without greeting him, passed through the foyer to the kitchen. “Come in here. I’ll make coffee” was the first thing she said.

She didn’t look as if she’d slept much either. Jason followed her into a kitchen not unlike his and Emma’s. It was large enough to sit in, modern but not trendy. She did have a microwave oven on the counter, which they did not. Jason wasn’t sure what microwaves were good for, but only the night before Emma had said she wanted one.

He watched Clara grind some coffee beans from a Zabar’s bag and dump them into a filter without measuring. Then she found milk in the refrigerator, poured some into a pitcher, put the pitcher in the microwave. Hit a button.

“Sit down,” she said.

Mystified by the milk in the microwave, Jason sat in one of the two chairs at the kitchen table. After a few seconds the machine beeped. Clara took the pitcher of steaming milk out of the machine and set it on the table. “Café au lait,” she said.

“I don’t speak Italian,” he murmured.

“It’s French.”

“Ah. I knew that.”

She smiled. Sure he did. She set two mugs on the table with a sugar bowl. The microwave beeped when the milk was ready. The coffee machine beeped when the coffee was ready. It was a beeping kitchen. Clara poured the coffee and the milk in the proportions she felt were correct for the item she was making. Jason ladled in four heaping teaspoons of sugar, then put down the spoon.

“Ben Hartley called me here last night. Raymond’s insurance company’s lawyer called him yesterday. It looks like the insurance company has to pay the widow. I thought suicide wasn’t covered, but apparently if the policy has been in place for more than a year the company has to pay no matter what the cause of death. They’re going to sue us for the money.”

“Who’s us?” Jason asked.

“Oh, me, the hospital, and anybody else they can think of.”

“What’s the basis of their case?”

“Oh, I treated Ray eighteen years ago. I had an appointment with him two days before he died. They’re going to allege we failed to treat him properly initially and then failed to identify him as a candidate for suicide two months ago when he called and asked to see me again. The insurance company is looking for a million dollars in damages. The widow wants twenty-five million. Ben said that that sum represents a combination of what the widow believes Cowles would have earned in a normal lifetime, plus some kind of compensation for her loss of love and companionship. You know of course he was gay. He’d left her months ago.”

“Isn’t that sort of beside the point?” Jason asked. “Where does Hartley see the liability?”

Clara ignored her coffee and started chewing the lipstick off her lips. “The hospital’s insurance company may take the position that I was treating Cowles, at least this last time, as a private patient and therefore they have no liability. So it’s complicated. Have you read the file?”

Jason nodded. He didn’t ask why she had kept such detailed notes of such a botched job or why she had given them to him.

“The suit is nothing,” she said. “I’m not worried about it. That’s not why I asked you here.”

“Oh?” Jason was worried about it. He sipped the coffee and burned his mouth.

“The police are investigating Dickey’s death. Did you know that?”

“Oh? What are they looking for?”

Now Clara picked up her cup. The liquid on the surface must have been just cool enough. She drank some. “They don’t think Dickey’s death was natural.”

“What do they think?”

“They don’t know.” Clara studied her cup.

“What do you think?” Jason asked.

“I think he was murdered.” Clara let out a sigh and stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “You probably noticed the surveillance downstairs.”

“Surveillance?”

“Yes, I’ve had to call in the FBI.” She brushed her hair back with one hand, indicating her importance.

“Clara, how did the police get involved in the first place?”

She narrowed her eyes, looking back on Hal’s last moments. “Something wasn’t right. In ER, when they finally stopped working on him, I just said it seemed—medically odd. I thought it might be useful to run the toxes.” She shrugged. “I was right. Poor Hal had a lethal mixture of alcohol and Elavil in his blood. If I hadn’t asked, the murderer might have gotten away with it.”

She looked at Jason and shuddered. “Who knows, I might have been next.”

Jason frowned. “How do you know it wasn’t an accident?”

“Jason, you saw me cut my hand. You saw that used condom at the meeting Friday morning. You yourself told me something had to be done about it Well, I’ve done something. I’m having the FBI take over the case.”

“I see.” Surreptitiously, Jason added another teaspoon of sugar to his coffee. He wondered what the police had to say about that. “Well, that about does it,” he said.

“Not quite.”

“Oh?” What now?

“I’d like you to have the specimen tested for me privately, Jason.”

“What specimen?”

“The sperm from the condom.”

“You’re kidding.”

Clara shook her head. She wasn’t kidding.

He was appalled. “Why?”

“Because I know who killed Dickey. I want to make sure he’s caught.”

“Then give the condom to the FBI agent. Or give it to the police.”

Clara shook her head again. “I want to be sure there aren’t two people involved.”

“Two people?”

“Right.”

Jason swallowed the last of his syrupy coffee. He couldn’t get a fix on what game Clara was playing. He was beginning to think that Clara might be disturbed.

“Who are the two possibilities?”

Clara pressed her lips together. “A male nurse from the Centre overdosed a patient with Elavil about a year ago. The young inpatient had a psychotic incident and jumped off a terrace. The nurse’s name was Robert Boudreau. Dickey was the one who investigated the case and had Boudreau fired.”

“You think this man Boudreau was angry enough to murder Harold?”

Clara nodded. “I saw him outside the ER the day Hal died.”

Jason was silent. “What about the condom?”

Clara answered the question by retrieving a package from her freezer. She put it down on the table between them, pushed it to his side with one finger. “I think Boudreau was behind the incidents with the scalpel and the condoms, too.”

“Then why not let the FBI deal with it?” Jason suggested.

“There is a very slight possibility there won’t be a match with his blood type.”

“I see. Who else do you suspect?”

“I’m not entirely sure.” Clara did not look at him.

If Jason hadn’t spent so much time reading Ray Cowles’s file the night before and seen such intimacy between Dickey and Clara, he would never have made the leap. But Clara had given him the file and Jason had studied it. He knew how deeply involved Clara had been with Dickey.

“Someone you don’t want implicated,” he said, “like the victim.”

“Yes.” Clara met his eyes. “You know Hal took advantage of me years ago. He manipulated Ray’s case, and he manipulated me. He was my supervisor. I had no choice but to follow his instruction.”

But Clara had not been acting under Hal’s supervision when she met with Ray two days before his death or when she spoke to him only minutes before he put the plastic bag over his head. Jason could see the strings. Clara didn’t want the FBI to know about her troubled relationship with Dickey. Jason had the Cowles file, which incriminated her in both cases. Now Clara wanted him to take the condom.

“Well,” he said finally. “I’ll have the condom tested if you want me to, but I’ll have to give it to the police. I have no choice about that. This is a criminal investigation. I have to cooperate with them.”

“The police are not competent to deal with this.”

“I would disagree with that view. But it’s up to you. I can’t take evidence in a homicide unless I turn it over to the police.”

Clara hesitated. He could see her weighing the pros and cons of different alliances. For some reason she wanted the protection of the FBI but did not intend to fully cooperate with them. She was playing a dangerous game. After a few minutes, however, she agreed and handed over the plastic package. Jason left with it almost immediately, pulling on the ragged growth of his new beard. He didn’t have long to reach April Woo before both their days got complicated. He wanted the thing out of his possession within the hour.