NYPD Red

Chapter 48

Doris was back at the front desk.

“Thanks for your help,” I said. “Dr. Ben-David said she wouldn’t mind if we took a quick look around.”

“Then you may want to look for the man in the Freud T-shirt,” she said, barely making eye contact with us. “The dayroom is over there.” She cocked her head to the right.

Doris was obviously in the loop.

Nothing says “I’m glad I’m not locked up in here” like a large communal room in a mental institution.

There were a few dozen men and women scattered about, both alone and in groups, some watching TV, some staring into space, some talking to one another, some sitting off to the side quietly tapping away at a laptop or a video game.

It’s the same kind of tableau you might see in an airport lounge. Except it was obvious that these people had no place to go. You could see it in their eyes.

“Sigmund Freud T-shirt at eleven o’clock,” Kylie said.

The man was my age, with a long, lean body, thinning blond hair, and round wire glasses. He was looking out a window, holding two unlit cigarettes in his left hand.

“Don’t forget what the doc said,” I reminded Kylie.

“He’s nosy and likes to talk.”

“I mean the part about him being fragile. Be gentle.”

“You know me, Six. I’m as gentle as a kitten.”

She didn’t mean it to be any kind of a sexual reference, but the male brain doesn’t need innuendo to get it thinking about sex. My mind flashed to our first month in the police academy. Before Spence came back into the picture. Kylie MacDonald was more tigress than kitten.

“You probably have a problem preying on the mentally ill,” she said. “I don’t. Follow my lead.”

She eased toward Freud, then stopped a few feet away, within earshot.

“I thought Gabriel would be here,” she said to me.

“Gabriel who?” I said.

“The film director,” she said. “Are you new here? I thought everyone knew him.”

Freud turned away from the window. “Excuse me,” he said. “You looking for Gabriel?”

Kylie smiled, perky and happy to find a helpful soul.

“Yeah. Hi. I’m Kylie.”

“I’m J.J.,” he said. “What are you looking for Gabriel for?”

“I’m an actress. He’s a director. Duh.”

J.J. laughed. Crazy or not, he was as susceptible to Kylie’s charm as the rest of hetero mankind. “I know him,” J.J. said. “Are you in one of his movies?”

“I wish,” Kylie said. “I’m auditioning. Is there anything you can tell me that would help me nail the part?”

“Let’s sit on the porch,” he said. “We can smoke out there.”

The two of them stepped through a pair of French doors onto a narrow porch with outdoor furniture as run-down as the indoor stuff.

J.J. sat on a wicker rocker and Kylie sat on a bench across from him. I hovered in the background.

J.J. shifted the two cigarettes to his right hand, but made no move to light them. “Gabriel is a difficult director,” he said. “When you audition, never ad-lib. I’m serious. Always do the script as writ. He hates it when somebody tries to rewrite him. Like one night at dinner, we were supposed to have meat loaf, but they gave us fried chicken. He went ballistic, screaming, ‘Who rewrote this scene?’”

“He sounds dedicated.”

“No, Kylie. Scorsese is dedicated. Gabriel is just crazy.”

“I still want to audition,” Kylie said. “Where is he?”

“Gone. Vanished. Poof-just disappeared into thin air. One night he walks into the dayroom-some of us were watching that show with the Japanese robots-do you watch that?”

“No. Is it good?”

“If you like robots, yeah. Anyway, Gabriel, he just walks in and announces that he’s finished shooting all the wacko-people shit in his script. He says we’re all stars, but he can’t promise who’s going to be in the final cut until he edits it. The next morning he was out of here.”

“Did you ever see the script?”

“No. The only ones who were ever allowed to see it were Gabriel and Lexi.”

“Who’s Lexi?”

“His girlfriend.”

“Do you know her last name?”

J.J. shook his head. “No. It’s just the one name, like she’s so famous that she doesn’t need a last name. Like Oprah. Except most people know it’s Winfrey.”

“Is Lexi still here?”

“No. She never lived here. But I bet he’s with her. They go everywhere together. You know what I think?” he said, gesturing with the cigarette hand.

“Tell me.”

“I think Gabriel doesn’t have to be locked up in a place like this. I think he only came here to shoot scenes for his movie.”

“I’m surprised they let him bring a camera in here,” Kylie said.

J.J. looked at her like she was nuts. “There’s no camera,” he said. “It’s all in here.” He tapped his forehead.

“The movie…” Kylie took a second to reprocess the information. “The movie is in his head?”

J.J. shrugged. “Hey, I told you-the guy is crazy.”