The Last Place

CHAPTER 35

“You went too far back there.”

Carl had beaten Tess to her own accusation.

“I went too far? Pretending to be a cop is stupid. It’s something you can get arrested for.”

“I was a cop.”

“Was being the operative word. I noticed you didn’t say you were a Toll Facilities cop.”

“A cop is a cop.”

“If you are a cop. But you’re not, not anymore. We agreed to pretend to be social workers from the hospital. Which would have allowed us to be warm and friendly, gain her confidence. The moment you said police she was on alert, looking for traps. She may not know everything her son has done, but she knows something.”

“She knows a lot more than she did, thanks to you. Billy Windsor’s going to run now, because of you. He’s out of here, we’ll never find him. When you’re in an investigation, you play your cards close to your vest.”

“From what movie did you pluck that cliché?”

Carl ignored the taunt. “All we had to do was wait, and he would have come back.”

“Do you seriously believe the two of us were going to pull off surveillance in a gated retirement village with a private security force? They would have thrown us out in the first fifteen minutes. True, Billy Windsor won’t be able to go near his mother, may not even dare to call her at home. That will make him more desperate to accelerate his plan, whatever it is. And speeding up might make Billy sloppy.”

Carl was driving for the first time since Mickey Pechter took batting practice on his knee four days earlier. He suddenly wrenched the steering wheel to the right and pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned restaurant.

“Let me ask you something. When did we decide you were the boss? I thought we were partners on this, but you’re always calling the shots, the one who’s always right. Is it because I didn’t tell you about what happened to me, or because I didn’t tell the cops about Mary Ann Melcher? Well, I’ll remind you that I was right-he isn’t dead. I’ll also remind you that I saved your life.”

“Saved my life?”

“When that creep broke into your house.”

“You saved me from the hellish inconvenience of killing him, but he wasn’t going to hurt me.”

“Still, I was there for you. I had your back. And yet you talk to me in that-that mommy voice, as if I’m your little boy and I have to do what you say. Well, I’m not your little boyfriend, okay? I’m not pussy-whipped like that dust-mopping, dog-walking sissy you keep around to service you. I’m a real man. A real man!”

Tess felt the conversation getting out of control, saw it heading toward a place where horrible things would be said, things that could not be forgiven or forgotten. She wanted to fling herself out of the car and run away. She wanted to hit Carl in the stomach or hurl insults at him that would cut even deeper than his rude comments about Crow. She wanted to plug her ears and chant so she could no longer hear his voice.

Count, Dr. Armistead had told her once. It really works. She counted to ten. Then twenty. Then thirty. Halfway to forty, it was as if the needle on a blood-pressure gauge had started to fall, and she said, “I’m sorry.”

Carl, with the look of a man who has been dangling on a cliff ‘s edge, beat his own hasty retreat. “I’m sorry too. It’s just that I want you-I want everyone-to listen to me, to realize I have something to say, something to contribute.”

“I know. I want the same thing. I want people to-” What did she want, anyway? What button had Carl just pushed? Mickey Pechter and Major Shields had found it too, almost without trying, provoking the same odd mix of rage and shame. Now Billy Windsor was playing her, taunting her. He wanted to be found. He wanted to escape.

“I’m tired of people underestimating me,” she told Carl, who nodded. “And condescending to me. When I get stuff wrong, I’m stupid. When I get it right, I’m just lucky. If we find this guy, people are going to say it was all luck, that we wouldn’t have stumbled on his name if it weren’t for your gimpy leg and your knowledge of the disability system. If we screw up, we’ll be the fall guys.”

Carl looked out his window, so she couldn’t see his face. “Do you want to go to the state police, tell them what we’ve found?”

“No. Because they’ll take it away from us.”

“Take it away from me, you mean. I’m the one with no standing here.”

“We’re a team on this. If they don’t want to work with you, I don’t want to work with them.”

He turned back, his smile so broad that his eyes almost disappeared in his freckled face.

“They say it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart,” Carl said. “Frankly, I’ve never been accused of being either.”

“It’s one of my favorite sayings. But, truthfully, here’s the real luck, the only luck. You get born to two nice people who can provide a comfortable life for you, who don’t abuse you-” She broke off, embarrassed.

“That’s okay. Keep talking.”

“Who are kind to you and to each other. Your DNA doesn’t carry any time bombs. You do all the dumb shit that teenagers do, and you come out unscathed. Then you’re a grown-up and you make your own luck. You know what word I really hate?”

“What?”

“Overachiever.”

Carl looked puzzled. “I thought that was a good thing.”

“It’s the most subtle insult in the English language, because it implies predestined boundaries and limits. You’re supposed to stay in this little box, only you’re too stupid to realize it. When people tell you you’re an overachiever, they’re really saying they could do so much better than you if they ever lowered themselves to giving a shit.”

She felt her anger rising again, at some nameless faceless enemy, and she wondered what Dr. Armistead would think about this diatribe. Dr. Armistead-she glanced at the dashboard clock. “Shit. I have thirty minutes to make it to therapy, or I lose a hundred and fifty bucks.”

“Physical therapy?”

Funny how Carl, who knew both kinds, who knew she was in anger management, still assumed a doctor’s visit had to be for a physical ailment.

“No, you know, it’s the guy the judge ordered me to see at Sheppard Pratt. Because of what I did to that guy who broke into my house.”

“You told me you had been accused of assaulting him, but I never got the particulars.”

She gave him those, even as they raced across the narrow two-lane roads that would take them to the highway and back to Baltimore. It was gratifying to see Carl laugh at certain points in the story, to be reminded that it really was a prank-except for the part where Mickey Pechter had ended up in the emergency room with that severe allergic reaction. She began to laugh too, thinking about how he looked in the parking lot, like one of those hairless cats. Really, the whole story did have a certain comic element.

But it was probably better not to share that insight with Dr. Armistead, who thought she was making so much progress.

There were twenty minutes left on the faces of the multiple clocks staring at her when Tess ran out of things to say to Dr. Armistead. Until she had sat down in the frayed wing chair, she had not realized how much she wanted to withhold from him, at least for now. She could not speak of Carl’s reentry into her life, for that would take her to the subject of Mickey Pechter, which should be avoided at all costs. But if she told him she believed Billy Windsor had laid this elaborate trap for her-using a powerful foundation, passing a list of his victims to her, even killing a woman-Dr. Armistead would probably ring for an orderly and lock her up in one of the dormitories.

“What are you thinking?” he prompted, after she had stared into her lap for several seconds.

“I thought my face was supposed to be so readable,” she said, trying for a light tone.

“Not always.”

Now other professionals who charged by the hour-a lawyer, for example, or a plumber, even a private detective like herself-would be satisfied to end the hour early. But Dr. Armistead clearly didn’t bill by the part-hour. He just continued staring at her, his bushy brows drawn down as low as they could go. Tess met his gaze with what she hoped was a blank face and guileless eyes.

“What are you thinking, Tess?” he asked again.

“Nothing, really.”

“Which is, as you know, impossible.”

“Well, I’m thinking about how I have nothing to say.” Which was absolutely true.

Funny, she wouldn’t have minded speaking about the quarrel with Carl, which had surprised her in its heat and fury. Carl struck her as someone whose strengths and weaknesses were inextricable. He was dogged, but dogged quickly became obsessive. He was blunt, yet hypersensitive when it came to his own feelings, collecting slights the way some little boys collect rocks and rubber bands. Where had all that stuff about Crow come from? If a woman had made such a speech, she would be called catty. An unfair characterization-to women and cats.

But even if she could speak of Carl, how could she really explain him to Dr. Armistead? He would need to know Carl’s history: the town of North East, his violent father, the mother he had saved. He would have to be able to see Carl, with his squinty eyes and bowlegged walk. How did therapists work without all the day-to-day context of real life?

“Are you sure you have nothing to say? Or is there something you very much want to talk about but don’t know how to begin?”

Tess almost started at the sound of Dr. Armistead’s voice. She knew he couldn’t read her mind, but he did seem to divine how much was popping and jumping inside her head. There was so much to do. Not that she had a clue as to what it was. All she and Carl had achieved today was their successful tyranny of a sad, isolated woman. It was June 6. How much time did they have? Where should they go? Carl was waiting for her outside, coiled in one of the Adirondack chairs that dotted the broad parklike lawns of Sheppard Pratt. She needed to have some plan of action when the hour ended.

“I guess I’m distracted. I’ve actually been working very hard.”

“Really? I thought you had finished your work on that case. We spoke of it last time. You told me that the man you were looking for turned out to be dead, and your partner had proved to be unreliable.”

“Right. Right, right, right. This is something new.”

“What are you working on now?”

“Oh, nothing interesting. This is a deskbound project, lots of computer time. Securities fraud.”

“I didn’t know you did that kind of work.”

Neither did I. “The boring cases pay the bills, actually.” She yawned, largely for show, but it was a mistake. Even a yawn was fraught with meaning in Dr. Armistead’s lair.

“Are you not sleeping well?”

“I’m a little restless. It’s gotten so hot, but I hate to turn on the AC before summer truly starts. It feels like such a defeat.”

“Insomnia.”

“I’d call it… wakefulness.

“I fall asleep.” Once Crow came home. “I just don’t stay asleep.”

“Are you having the nightmare you spoke of in a previous session? The one in which you see your friend die?”

How did he remember so much? It’s not as if he had notes in front of him. Was he taping her secretly? Did he write things down after she left and then read them later? But there were always appointments on either side of their hour together, so he didn’t have time to make notes while his memory was fresh. Although the day and hour of their appointments changed weekly, she always saw the same sad, older woman in the hall, the one with the yellowish skin and bluish hair.

“No, not that nightmare.”

“Another, then? A new one?”

“I meant, no nightmares at all.”

But, despite her best efforts, tears welled in her eyes. His question had taken her back to the alley, to the morning that Jonathan had died. They had made love the night before. Well, they had sex. He was excited, certain of the glorious future that awaited him when he broke his big story. She had been a little depressed, as if Jonathan’s upward progress ensured her downward path.

The lights of the cab had come out of nowhere. They should have heard the engine when they left her apartment, should have noticed the sound of the chugging motor. But they didn’t have time to notice anything. Jonathan did take a moment, however, to push her to the side of the alley, so she was not in the taxi’s path. The driver probably didn’t care if he killed her too, but she was not important enough to come back for.

The inevitable question: “What are these tears about?”

“Nothing. It’s a bad memory, okay? I should cry when I think about it. A man died.”

“Surviving,” Dr. Armistead intoned with a self-impressed solemnity, “exacts a price. In dreams begin responsibilities.”

“We always come back to poetry,” Tess muttered. And not particularly apt poetry, she yearned to add.

“Poetry? It’s the title of a prose work by Delmore Schwartz.”

“Schwartz took it from some French poem. Villon, I think.”

Another awkward silence. Tess studied the degrees on the wall. It seemed a little show-off, to her, all those degrees, a half dozen in all. There was George Washington, Wisconsin, two from Johns Hopkins. Of course. Johns Hopkins, the ultimate Baltimore pedigree. If you could claim any link to Hopkins-if you just had your appendix out there-the detail would probably appear in your obituary.

Obituaries. Johns Hopkins. Maybe she could get something out of this hour after all.

“Did you know a psychiatrist named Michael Shaw?”

For once, Dr. Armistead was caught off guard. “By reputation. I’m sure we met at some point, but I have no distinct memory of him. Why do you ask?”

“He’s connected to a case I’m working on.”

“The one on security fraud?”

“Sure. Yes. He may be one of the investors who was swindled in this derivative scam.” Derivative scam? She wasn’t even sure what a derivative was. “My client is another victim, but he would like to file a class-action suit, so I’m trying to find others, so he can sue the brokerage.”

“What brokerage?”

“An out-of-state one.” Her eyes were still focused on the diplomas looming over Dr. Armistead’s shoulder. “Washington Securities.”

“And you think Shaw-”

“May have treated the man who ended up ripping him off. Is there a way to find out?”

“Of course not.” Dr. Armistead looked offended. “Confidentiality would not be breached in such a matter.”

“But he’s dead, and a crime may have been committed-”

“Michael Shaw is dead, not your quarry. And being a suspect in a securities fraud does not mean one suspends the usual doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“Oh.” She slumped back in her chair, running her fingers through the unraveling fringe on the arms. She had thought she was on to something.

“If it’s any comfort, I doubt Shaw treated the man you’re investigating.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Before he went into private practice, Shaw worked under a mutual friend at Hopkins. He treated rapists, the hard-core cases-repeat offenders, pedophiles.”

“Really?” As Carl had told her, over and over again, serial killings had a sexual component.

“He started with the program as a young resident, back in the 1980s. You may have heard of the study. About a hundred and fifty offenders were given Depo-Provera.”

“I thought that was a contraceptive.”

“It’s derived from the female hormone progestin and is used as a contraceptive, yes. But it also was employed for what is known as chemical castration. The program was somewhat misrepresented in the press, I’m afraid. Depo-Provera was only one component, along with traditional therapy and behavior modification. But the media focused on one patient, the so-called ski-mask rapist, who volunteered for treatment. Unfortunately, he stopped taking the drugs and was arrested a few years ago for raping a three-year-old girl. Very sad.”

“But this program was up and running twenty years ago?” She did the math in her head. Billy Windsor had “died” at age seventeen, but that had been fifteen years ago. Could he have disappeared in order to enter the program, or a subsequent version? Had Becca Harrison’s murder been a sex crime? No, they were boyfriend and girlfriend, suitably puppylike in their devotion, according to the old woman on Notting Island. Yet Michael Shaw was on Billy Windsor’s list. No coincidences, Luisa O’Neal had said. No, that was Freud. Luisa had said nothing was random.

What if Billy Windsor had sought treatment from Michael Shaw in order to control his impulses? Could he have been that self-aware, that analytical? It seemed impossible, yet that would explain why the deaths had stopped, why there was the long gap between Hazel Ligetti’s murder and Dr. Shaw’s hit-and-run.

And it would explain why they had started again. Billy Windsor had given up on modern psychiatry.

“Why are you smiling that rueful little smile, Tess?”

“Am I?” A half-dozen minute hands snapped to twelve, signaling her freedom. “I’m just thinking about what I want for lunch, now that we’re done.”

“Do you see yourself as a godlike figure?”

The question comes back to him, unbidden. Why is he thinking about that now, when he has so much that he must fix, so many unanticipated problems, so much that has gone wrong?

But he doesn’t even have time to track that thought as he normally would. He’s vigilant about his own mind, knows it as well as he knew the marshy inlets back home and navigates it with the same delicacy. Only two people have ever known him as well as he knows himself, and one is lost to him forever.

As for the other-he cannot believe they went to his mother, frightening her so that she walked three miles, crossing two highways, until she found a pay phone where she felt safe. “What was she talking about, Billy? Are they DNR? Do they know what you’re doing?”

He was at once relieved and horrified. At least they had not revealed all his secrets to his mother; at least she was still safe, still innocent. He told her that the visit meant nothing: The girl was a little crazy, maybe even a pathological liar. He would take care of it. In the meantime, his mother was not to open the door to anyone without asking for a badge or ID, and she was not to talk to anyone without a lawyer present.

She began to cry, telling him she couldn’t do this again, couldn’t go without seeing him. He reminded her that they had managed in the early years, when she was still on the island, and they would manage now. No one could keep them from seeing each other.

But beneath his soothing voice and calm assurances, he was furious.

How dare she go to his mother? How had they found his name, the one thing he had kept for himself? Who had betrayed him? Luisa O’Neal would not dare speak his name, even if she had known it. But they knew whom they sought when they visited Notting the second time. Fuck June Petty, with her big yapping mouth, her love of gossip, and her never-ending rivalry with all the women on the island. She had dined out on this story-the expression had never been more apt-for years, smacking her lips and shaking her head in mock sympathy for a woman she had never liked. He supposed June Petty would say it was ironic, if she knew what irony was: Drey Windsor helped her son’s girlfriend escape her terrible father, only to see that son kill himself in despair over her disappearance.

But it had been his mother’s idea-he appeals to some invisible jury-a brilliant idea, at that. After all, she had not needed to be a particularly good actress to portray the grief of a mourning mother. He was dead to her all those years-the “good” years, as he thinks of them now, the years of going to school and building his business and finding release with the occasional prostitute. Strange, it was just before his mother joined him on the mainland that the pull began. Not because of her, but because things were finally settled. Anchored at last, he was free to search for the love he craved, to create the love he needed.

But when he persuaded his mother to leave Harkness, it was as if he took her away from the source of her strength and power. On the mainland, she is weak. She is dying. Not physically but emotionally. His father’s accelerated death had shown him how a parent can disappear before one’s eyes, and he knew he would someday have to face this with his mother. But he had expected that her mind would be unchanged, that she would always be sharp and shrewd, capable in a crisis.

After all, she was the one who knew what they must do when he came home sobbing, overwhelmed by what had happened. It had been her idea to weigh Becca down, let his boat drift on the tide, and then take him across the bay dressed in women’s clothes. If anyone had noticed the boat that arrived at Saint Mary’s that night, they would have seen two women on the dock. She had put him ashore with all the cash she could manage to find, hugged him, and headed home to wait for the knock at the door and the announcement that her son’s skiff had been found with a note, indicating he had killed himself because Becca Harrison had told him she was running away to be an opera singer. Which was all true, after a fashion. Becca was gone, and he couldn’t live without her.

The thing is, she’s right, his new girl, his oh-so-clever girl, she’s gotten to him. Whatever happens, he cannot risk seeing his mother for the time being. So she has taken something from him, punished him. He who has given her so much. Doesn’t she know her debt to him? The others didn’t understand, but then the others were not capable of accepting his gifts. He knows that now. He chose poorly, time and time again, and finally despaired of ever getting it right.

He had tried to explain this once, not in so many words, but the doctor had proved to be even dumber than the women he had tried to help.

The doctor. That’s why the stupid question is ringing in his ears, after all this time. “Do you see yourself as a godlike figure?”

“Of course not.”

The doctor had persisted. “Do you think of yourself as superior to others, better?”

“No,” he had said. “Not at all. Are you listening to me? I identify with Pygmalion. He’s a mortal.”

“It’s a Shaw play. I’ve always been partial to Shaw.” The doctor gave a self-conscious, meant-to-be-deprecating smile. “For the most superficial reasons, I admit.”

“Yes, I know all about his Pygmalion. The basis for My Fair Lady, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately?”

“I don’t like musicals.”

His voice had been too vehement and the doctor pounced. He pounced on everything, without discrimination.

“You like plays but not musicals? Why?”

“Actually, I don’t like plays either. They’re phony: all that emoting, all those big gestures and voices. I like film. Once sound was developed, the idea of people standing on a stage, reciting lines, became ridiculous.”

“Sound was developed quite some time ago.”

“Theater has been ridiculous for quite some time.”

An uneasy silence fell. He knew he had punctured the doctor’s professional shell. The doctor probably liked theater. And opera too, of course, which he loathed to this day. Poor dumb bastard. How could this man ever help him, stupid as he was? He had done his research so carefully, looking for someone with the experience he needed. He wasn’t used to making mistakes.

“The theater has its moments, I suppose,” he said, trying to make amends. “I prefer film, however.”

“What kind of films? Are there certain genres or directors to your liking?”

“Bertolucci,” he said, and instantly regretted it, for the doctor seemed to sit at attention. Oh, everyone knew Last Tango, with its silly, obsessive sex. Nothing could have interested him less. He was thinking about 1900 and The Last Emperor. The latter was his all-time favorite, because it was about a boy born to greatness-and the world he lost. “I like all the Italians, for some reason. Fellini. Sergio Leone.”

“You have sophisticated tastes.”

“Sergio Leone? He made spaghetti Westerns.”

“Ah, Westerns. You like those? Classic tales of good and evil, a huge underpopulated landscape. And very few women.”

“Most people like Westerns.” He looked pointedly at the doctor. “I’d be skeptical of the man who didn’t.”

An awkward silence fell. He did this now and then, reminded the doctor that he knew all about him and what he liked. Who was the doctor to say who was a man and who wasn’t?

“Shaw,” the psychiatrist said, “was a vegetarian. And a friend of Harpo Marx.”

He shrugged. The doctor often produced such self-referential non sequiturs when at a loss.

“I’m sorry, we’ve wandered away, haven’t we. We were talking about…”

“Pygmalion. The myth, not the Shaw play.”

“Yes, I don’t know that so well. A man makes a woman-”

“A man sculpts a statue of the perfect woman.”

“And asks some goddess-”

He could not bear to hear the story told in such inept, unknowing words. “He makes the perfect woman, only she’s a statue. He prays to Aphrodite, who makes the statue real.”

“Aphrodite?”

“The only god on Olympus without parents. She rose from the sea, perfectly formed. You may know her better as Venus. But I’ve always been partial to the Greek names. They’re much prettier. Zeus, Poseidon, Hades-they’re a thousand times better than Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto.”

“Ah. So is he contented, Pygmalion, with his perfect woman?”

“What man wouldn’t be?”

“I mean, is that where the story ends?”

“Yes. They live”-he knows enough to take on the protective coloration of irony-“happily ever after.”

“Yet you haven’t had much luck with women.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“You seek an… extreme cure.”

“I know my limitations. All I ask is that I be allowed to live happily. Ever after.” His tone is arch, yet he has never been more sincere.

“It is up to me to decide if you should have what you want.”

“I understand the rules. I didn’t expect you to let me… plunge right in.”

“No? Well, we are used to even more extreme things in my field. There are people who want to remove their limbs. Did you know of this? Some see it as a natural continuation of what we call gender reassignment. To me, it lays bare the problem. We can alter our bodies only so much. But our real selves will reclaim us. We see that every day, with boys who were born with incomplete genitalia. They cannot be made into little girls. That’s a hard lesson, especially here. Johns Hopkins was once at the forefront of gender reassignment.”

“I’m not asking to become a girl.”

“No, but you’re asking to become something almost as odd-a eunuch. You want to thwart your own masculinity, but you need a chemical crutch to do it. It would be irresponsible of me to authorize this treatment without intensive counseling. Why are you adamant about this? You show no signs of being a sexual predator or of being sexually dysfunctional. A couple of failed relationships are not reason enough to give up. Everyone has failed relationships, you know. One needs to be right only once. Then you realize everything else was part of the journey.”

He had reached into his pocket, found his lanyard key chain, squeezed it. “Have you gotten it right, Doctor?”

He blushed. “I don’t talk about my personal life. Surely you know that.”

“But you’ve gotten it right, or so you think. For how long?”

“Well, it’s been two years-”

“My parents were married for twenty years. It would be forty now, if my father had lived.”

“Most admirable. That should bode well for you, assuming it was a loving marriage.”

Sharply, instantly. “It was.”

“So why are you here?”

“I know what I need.”

“That is still to be determined.”

In the end, they had to agree to disagree. Dr. Michael Shaw, who had heard so much but listened to so little, had become another loose end to be tied. As Billy waited in the rain that day, he imagined his mother, narrowing her eyes at a piece of thread, snipping it and licking it until she could force it through the needle. The Bible said it was easier for a camel to pass through such a hole than it was for a rich man to go to heaven. But Dr. Michael Shaw, in his brief ride on the hood of that borrowed car, had passed through this life without a whimper. He couldn’t guarantee that Dr. Shaw went to heaven, but wherever he went, he went easily, without a sound. There was only the rain and the quiet beneath it. No one heard a thing.