Loving Time

forty-eight

The bean burrito and guacamole sat heavy in April’s stomach as she headed out into the field after lunch. Lunch with Sanchez when it was his turn to choose—and he chose Mexican always—made her want to get into bed and sleep it off. Aside from the earthy spices and thickness of food in her mouth, she had to be on her guard with him all the time. He was as hot as the small red chilies on the plate you weren’t supposed to eat, and there was always another meaning to everything he said. April had no background for this kind of banter.

Playfulness was against everything Chinese. Severe punishment as a spur to improvement was the hallmark of her culture. There was no such thing as positive reinforcement. Compassion was something she’d learned on the streets of New York. And sex—well, as her Italian supervisor in Chinatown used to say, “Get outta here. Forget about it.”

Out of sight, out of mind was the Chinese philosophy on sex. Better if you didn’t have it, but if you had to have it, you didn’t talk about it. April had never heard her father refer to the physical aspect of married life. On the rare occasions Ja Fo Woo chose to say anything about anything, his remarks were limited to what children owed their parents, what wives owed their husbands, and what courses should be served for dinner. Occasionally, he had some things to say about his digestion. He had no sense of humor in two languages. Likewise her mother.

As for her former boyfriend, Jimmy Wong, forget about it. Jimmy used to tell April she didn’t love him enough (and didn’t do enough for him) to make her insecure about her ability to please him and motivate her, like Avis, to try harder.

At lunch Mike had reminded her of the Latinas in high school, with their pushed-up breasts and glued-on pants, the can of hairspray whipped out in the girls’ room. Always talking, laughing, teasing, spraying their hair, getting ready to hit on boys.

“You see Carlos over there? He es sooo cool. The way he look in those tight jeans—so good. You see hes bike, so low. Esta noche I take heem. Véalo usted mismo.”

Mike kept telling her that kind of thing was normal, that she should lighten up and enjoy it. It seemed an impossible assignment What if she lightened up about him and he decided he didn’t like her after all? What if he opened the wrong door and some bad guy’s Glock blew him away? It didn’t seem worth the trouble.

“Querida. Hey—wait a minute.” Mike hurried after her.

She ignored him. There wasn’t an unmarked unit available, so she was debating taking her own car over to the Psychiatric Centre, where she had three interviews lined up. The trouble with taking her own car was the Centre’s parking garage was nearly two blocks away from the Centre and the wind was fierce over by the river. But if she left her car on the street, someone might try to steal her radio.

Mike caught up with her and took her arm. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

“You know.”

“Oh, come on, can’t you take a joke?”

“Don’t play with me, Mike.”

“Oy, querida, playing is life. What else is there? Dios, I pity the guy who gets you. Can’t do this. Can’t do that.”

She punched him lightly on the arm. “Knock it off.”

“Some life he’ll have. With your sulks all the time, and never any play, I bet his cojones will shrivel up and die.”

April laughed in spite of herself. “Eat your heart out, Mike.”

“I am,” he admitted, then, “What’s the matter? I thought we had a good time at lunch.”

“Maybe you were having a good time. I don’t like the secrecy and games. If you know something, tell me.”

“If you don’t like secrecy and games, then you’re in the wrong business, baby. Go into hairdressing.”

“You know what I mean.”

He shrugged, smiling. “The whole thing is a puzzle, querida. These cases are the least of it.”

“So something’s coming down.”

He nodded solemnly. “You guessed it, something’s coming down.”

“Am I being reassigned?”

He shrugged again.

“Come on, what’s coming down? Are you telling or not?”

“How about not.” Mike looked over as more uniforms joined the first two on the sidewalk outside the fence. The uniforms were talking and laughing.

“Thanks, pal.” April watched them, too.

“Oh, all right, if you really want to know, give me a kiss and I’ll tell you.”

She shook her head. Not a chance.

“Okay, so sue me for sexual harassment.”

“Maybe later, when things slow down,” she muttered.

“Bueno, I’ll look forward to it. See you at four,” Mike said, and walked away.

At three April was sitting in the academic office of Dr. Lionel Hambug gathering her thoughts. Sally Ann Dickey had given her permission to check out her husband’s private office in the Medical Office Building, so she had gone there first. She found a room furnished with leather chairs and a leather couch. It had an artificial bamboo tree in the corner that needed dusting. Books and periodicals lined the bookshelves, and in the cupboards below, the deceased had kept files and reprints of his articles. April looked through the reprints quickly. Genetics seemed to have been Dickey’s area of interest. His files were full of graphs and charts.

In his middle desk drawer she’d found an appointment book held shut with a rubber band. She opened it to check out the coming weeks. Dickey’s time had been fully booked for the whole month of November. According to his book, he planned to speak at an association meeting in Miami in mid-December. He’d made a note to himself to inform (his letters were a scrawl) about the subject of his talk. He had blocked out the following week as a vacation and written “Aruba” across the days. His wife had not mentioned any trip to the Caribbean. Nor had Sally Ann known that in the last year Harold had added two modest life-insurance policies to those he already had and named psychoanalytic associations as beneficiaries of both of them. April had not yet been able to reach his lawyer to find out the contents of his will. No medications were kept in this office, but there was a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the bottom drawer. Johnnie Walker happened to be the favorite brand of the Chinese. It was expensive, but even her father drank it—showed what a big man he was. This particular bottle of Johnnie Walker was full and had not been opened. April closed the drawer, leaving it there.

“How can I help you?”

Dr. Hambug regarded her with expressionless eyes. He had granted her six minutes of his time and by the look of his face and surroundings, it seemed clear he would not allow a second more. He was a small, curly-haired man, clean-shaven, thin as a rice cracker, and clearly a tense and aggressive person even in repose. He wore a brown glen-plaid suit with a pale green shirt and brown tie and sat in a wooden rock-and-rolling chair similar to April’s in the squad room. It was like the old railroad stationmaster’s chair, hard and unforgiving to the back and bottom, not the shrink-industry-standard padded-leather job.

The chair creaked as he rocked back and forth waiting for her answer.

“I’m investigating the death of Dr. Dickey.”

“Yes, you told me that on the phone. What exactly are you looking for?” Now there was a slight gleam of curiosity in the doctor’s eyes.

“Dr. Dickey was working in his office the day he died and it’s not entirely clear to us what happened. We’re trying to establish his state of mind so we can—”

“You think Harold Dickey might have committed suicide?” Dr. Hambug seemed surprised. “Harold?”

“It’s a possibility. That or an accident.” Or a homicide.

“Gee.” Hambug stared at the reproduction of some frenzied sunflowers on his wall.

April knew it was a famous painting but not why. She didn’t know anything about art. “Does that sound plausible to you, Doctor?”

Hambug tore his eyes away from the sunflowers and smiled at her. “Plausible?”

“Your office is next door to his. You must have known him pretty well.”

“We had lunch together two or three times a week for about twenty years. I guess you could say I knew him well.” Hambug glanced at the corner of his desk, where a small clock presented its back to April.

She guessed she had about three minutes left. “What was his state of mind, Dr. Hambug? Would you say he was a happy, contented man, or a disappointed, angry man? Was he happy, was he depressed? Was he tidying up for suicide?”

Hambug swung about while the chair complained noisily for a few seconds. His narrow mouth considered the question while his brow furrowed. “I know what state of mind means,” he said coldly.

April waited. She didn’t like being patronized by people who had dozens more years of higher education than she did and thought she was stupid because of it. “So?”

He shrugged. “Dickey didn’t like the way things were going. His position had eroded at the hospital. Things were changing. Hal found that distressing.”

“He was in conflict with Dr. Treadwell.”

Hambug ignored that. “Things were changing, but Hal had a devoted following, his students liked him, the staff liked him.”

“What about Dr. Treadwell?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“They had a relationship at one time, apparently he wanted to renew it. What about that?”

“I don’t know about that,” Hambug repeated. “He certainly liked women, always had a woman friend. As far as I know, he hasn’t had anyone special for several years. His relations with his wife, of course, were strained. His children are estranged, I gather. However, Hal was an optimist. He was enormously respected in his field. His time was filled, and he was a fighter. He didn’t have the profile of a suicide.… I’ll miss him.”

Jason had said similar things. But Dr. Treadwell had hinted that Dickey had been depressed. “Was something bothering him lately?” April asked.

Hambug glanced at his little clock again. “Well, there was always something bothering him. Hal was something of a tilter at windmills, but I don’t know of anything in particular. I can’t even hypothesize.”

April bet he could hypothesize pretty accurately if he wanted to. Now that the specified time was up, he could look her over appraisingly. He was doing that when she stood up suddenly. She wanted to leave before she was asked to, reached in her bag for a card. “Thank you for your cooperation, Doctor. You’ve been very helpful. If you think of anything else, you can reach me at this number.”

Surprised, Hambug lurched out of the creaking chair to take the card and open the door for her. It occurred to April that he hadn’t expected her to leave quite so easily. Well, sometimes you got a strike on the first try and sometimes it was necessary to work the fish a different way, come back two, three, even four times until you got all a person had to tell The heels on her ankle-high boots pounded the uncarpeted floor of the hall as she headed to her next interview.

Gunn Tram was sobbing at her desk in the personnel office when April found her ten minutes later. The woman who had made such a fuss about getting her files back was not as large as her name implied. Gunn Tram was no Viking, just a small, plump hen of a woman with a number of chins, yellow hair, and neon-pink lipstick. She had to take her glasses off to blot her eyes. As she bent her head, the gray of her roots made her scalp look dirty. April figured she had to be somewhere between fifty and sixty.

“Well, what do you want to know?” Gunn Tram reached for a tissue, looking distinctly hostile, focused on the gun in the holster at April’s waist that showed when she opened her jacket, then abruptly changed the subject. “Did you hand in the bullets for that gun to the head nurse?” she demanded in a way that made April think she could be difficult to work with.

April nodded.

“You’re not allowed to have a gun in the hospital.”

“I’m acquainted with the regulations,” April assured her.

“If an unstable person got a hold of that”—Gunn rolled her eyes—“anybody could get killed. We don’t have a police guard like they do at Bellevue.” She started to cry again. “You don’t know the things that can happen in a place like this.”

April could smell the remains of coffee in the Styrofoam cup on her desk. It was one of those gourmet blends. The aroma was strongly perfumed vanilla or hazelnut. Next to the cup, near the computer, two doughnuts wrapped in plastic wrap waited to be consumed.

“Do you mind if I sit down?” April didn’t wait for an answer. She sat in the chair by the desk and took out her notebook, wrote down the day, the date, the time, who was with her, and what Gunn Tram had said so far. Then she wrote: DISKS???

The woman’s chins trembled. “How long will this take?”

April shrugged. “Depends.”

Gunn took a deep breath and tore apart one of the doughnuts.

“How well did you know Dr. Dickey?” April tried some subtle backtracking. It wasn’t easy now. She was tired and didn’t like the people there. They were like Chinese puzzle boxes, complicated and deceptive.

“I’ve been working here as long as he has,” Gunn said stiffly.

“How long is that?”

“More than thirty years.” She studied the pieces of doughnut, then took a bite of the smallest, chewed daintily.

“So you knew him pretty well.”

“Very well.” Of that fact she was proud. “We have to be careful about the people who work here. Accidents are”—her eyes teared up again—“costly for everyone.”

“What kind of accidents?”

“Oh, in a hospital anything can happen. If a patient who shouldn’t be out gets a weekend pass, then goes home and hurts somebody or hurts himself. Or somebody gets the wrong medication and …” She left the rest hanging in the air. “Or someone elopes.”

April sighed. Elopements, wrong medication. Wrongful death in a mental hospital. “What’s the procedure when something goes wrong?”

Gunn rolled her eyes again. “Oh, God, there’s an internal investigation for everything—reports, meetings, disciplinary actions. No accident goes unpunished,” she said softly, “except maybe the ones that do.”

“Did Dr. Dickey often work on Sundays?”

“He never did that I remember.”

“What was he working on last Sunday?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are your personnel files on disks?”

“What?” Gunn brushed sugar from her fingers.

April pointed to the computer. “Have you got the personnel files in the computer?”

“Only the business data. The personal stuff—evaluations, promotion information, histories, disciplinary-action reports—are kept separately in the files. There’s never been the manpower to enter it all in.”

“What about Robert Boudreau’s file?”

“Who?”

“Dr. Dickey asked you for files. Was Boudreau’s file one of them?”

The hostile look was back. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Dr. Dickey took files of certain people. Did he tell you why he wanted them?”

Gunn took another bite of the doughnut. “I think he was doing some kind of survey.”

Uh-huh. “And what about Boudreau?”

Gunn frowned, then shook her head. “Dr. Dickey never mentioned the name.”

“Gunn, I heard that you know a great deal about what’s going on here. Have you ever heard anything about Dr. Dickey being depressed or drinking in his office?”

Gunn looked horrified. “Dr. Dickey? Never. He was a wonderful man.”

That was as far as April got with Gunn. She gave the woman her card. Then she had to wait ten minutes to get her bullets back from the head nurse. She wasn’t out of the hospital yet, so she put them in her pocket.

Her next interview was in the cafeteria. She was meeting with John Flower, a resident who had been in therapy with Dickey. The untidy young man came in several minutes after she did. He was wearing a maroon knit tie and a wrinkled blue work shirt under his baggy sports jacket. They got coffee from the carafes on the beverage table and took a table. Wistfully, Flower told April that Dickey was the most compulsive person he’d ever met.

“Two years ago he had surgery on his knees. He put his whole life in order in case something happened and he didn’t survive. Got someone to cover his seminars and everything.”

The young man played with his cup of coffee. It had come from the carafe marked GOURMET BLEND. The flavor of the week was titled vanilla-hazelnut. April had passed it up for the carafe labeled REGULAR. Hers was not a good choice. The murky liquid tasted like mold.

“He never missed a session, was never late. Why are you asking me these things?” John looked at her with undisguised curiosity.

“Dr. Dickey had taken some medication that contributed to his death. We’re trying to establish how that happened, Dr. Flower.”

“Oh, please, call me John.” John cocked his head, staring at her in a boyish way. She noticed that he had green eyes. “May I ask you what?”

“What medication?”

“Yes, it might help.”

“I really can’t say.”

Flower made a harrumphing noise. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter, except there are things you can take by accident and things you can’t, if you see what I mean.”

April smiled. “It was, apparently, something he didn’t take as a general rule.”

“The rumors say he was drunk.”

“Was he a drinker?” April asked evenly.

Flower raised an eyebrow, continuing to stare at her speculatively. “From time to time I have had the suspicion. Not enough to incapacitate him, though. He never looked or acted drunk.”

April nodded. She wondered what was wrong with the young doctor that he had to be in therapy. He seemed attractive and not unintelligent. “Do you think he was suicidal?”

Flower shook his head. “Once he got hung up at an airport somewhere and didn’t think he was going to be able to make my session. He called me from the airport and left a message on my machine.”

He fell silent, breathing in the scented steam of his coffee. Then he said, “I had a nine-o’clock on Monday.”

“Uh-huh,” April said.

“We were going to terminate soon.”

“Terminate? Does that mean the end of treatment?”

“Yes, and I knew him very well. He wouldn’t have done this to himself without making sure I was okay. And that goes for everybody else he treated.”

“I understand.” April glanced at her watch. She was going to be late for the FBI. “Look, I have to go. Thanks for your help.”

Flower seemed disappointed. “Listen, I’d like to help. Can we talk again? I could nose around, ask a few questions, and get back to you.”

“Thanks,” April said, holding in a smile. Everybody there was so helpful. “I’ll let you know.”

“He was a great guy. I wouldn’t like to think …” John Flower got up and followed her to the door. “You’ll find out, won’t you? You’ll find out what really happened to him, won’t you?”

“Yeah,” April murmured. “We usually do.”