Paper Doll

chapter thirty-one

SUSAN AND I had dinner at Michela’s in Cambridge with Dennis and Nancy Upper. Susan knew Dennis from them both being shrinks. Nancy turned out to be an ex-dancer, so I was able to dazzle her with the knowledge of dance I had gained from Paul Giacomin, while Susan and Dennis talked about patients they had known.

I asked if either of them had heard of Dr. Mildred Cockburn. Neither of them had. Still, there was risotto with crab meat and a pistachio pesto. The room was elegant, and the bartender made the best martinis I’d ever drunk.

“I’ve got to find out how he does that,” I said to Susan on the ride home.

“Well, you’re a detective.”

“And how complicated a recipe can it be?” I said.

“Vodka and vermouth?”

“Yeah.”

“Sounds complicated to me,” Susan said.

“Recipes are not the best thing you do,” I said.

We were on Memorial Drive. Across the river the Boston skyline looked like a contrivance. The State House stood on its low hill, the downtown skyscrapers loomed behind it. And strung out along the flatness of the Back Bay, with the insurance towers in the background, the apartment houses were soft with the glow of lighted living rooms. It was Friday night. I was going to stay with Susan.

“Why do you want to know about Mildred Cockburn?” Susan said.

“Saw her name in Loudon Tripp’s checkbook, `Dr. Mildred Cockburn,‘ every month, checks for five hundred dollars. So I looked her up in the phone book. She’s listed as a therapist with an office on Hilliard Street in Cambridge.”

“Odd,” Susan said.

“You’d expect to know her?”

“Yes.”

“When I talk with her, what is it reasonable to expect her to tell me?” I said.

“Ethically?” Susan said.

“Yes.”

“I can’t say in the abstract,” Susan said. “She should be guided by the best interests of her patient.”

On our left, the surface of the river had a quick-silver gloss in the moonlight. A small cabin cruiser with its running lights on moved silently upstream, passing under the barrel-arched bridges, its wake a glassy furrow in the surface. Susan’s street was silent, the buildings dark, the trees, half unleaved, made spectral by the street lamps shining through them.

Susan lived in an ornate Victorian house. On the first floor her office was on one side of the front hall, and her big waiting room was on the other. We went up the curving staircase to the second floor where she lived. When we opened the door, Pearl dashed at us, and jumped up, and tore Susan’s hose, and lapped our faces, and ran to the couch and got a pillow and shook it violently until it was dead, and came back to show us.

“Cute,” Susan said.

We took Pearl down and let her out into the fenced-in backyard. It was shadowy in the moonlight, but not dark, and we could watch her as she hurried about the yard, looking for the proper spot.

Later we lay in bed, the three of us, and talked, looking up at the ceiling in the moonbright darkness. Pearl had little to say, but she compensated by taking up the most room in the bed.

“Is this Olivia Nelson thing making you crazy?” Susan said. We were holding hands under the covers, across Pearl’s back.

“Nothing is turning out to be the way it appeared to be,” I said.

“Things do that,” Susan said.

“Wow,” I said.

“I’m a graduate of Harvard University,” Susan said.