Valley of Bones

Six

The consulting room is large and bright, the walls covered with dun rice paper, relieved by several marine-themed paintings and prints, ships under sail, tropic shores with boats, the framed diplomas and accolades. A model of a yacht in a glass case. Dominating the room a mahogany desk, also the canonical leather couch, leather side chairs, a long credenza in rosewood, on which sit examples of Haitian and Cuban folk art, statues of saints and demons.

Mickey Lopez, with a genuine smile, comes from around his desk and hugs Lorna, plants kisses on both cheeks. She has to bend slightly to receive the kisses and a pong of his Acqua di Parma, for he is short and blocky. He beams at her, and she smiles back. He tells her she looks marvelous. Hardly any accent, just enough to be distinguished, although it is, of course, a Spanish one rather than the prized mittel-European model. But good enough for Miami. She tells him he hasn’t changed a bit, and he hasn’t, the same beautifully cut gray sharkskin suit, white silk shirt, maroon tie, very Manhattan. Mickey Lopez resembles to a startling degree the late Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion?the blunt-featured determined face, the famous untamed aureole of white hair around the high shiny pate. He says it’s because all psychoanalysts summon forth their inner Jew, and this is his. She was in analysis with him for twenty months, terminated at her request last year.

Howard Kasdan is standing too, and now he leans into her with a handshake and a kiss on the cheek, an all-friends-together kind of kiss that lasts a sadistic forty milliseconds too long. The pheromones hit her like a blow to the base of the skull. No suit for Howard; Howard, M.D., is not that kind of shrink. He has on the silk/linen Hugo Boss cream jacket he always wears, and today it is worn over a black silk turtleneck, black slacks, shiny Italian woven loafers. A scientist exploring the mind is Dr. Kasdan. She doesn’t have to bend for him, no, he’s six two and buffed, dark eyes under thick brows and lashes, deep eyes, she always called them penetrating to herself, and they were, so much that she has to look away at the palm tops waving outside the silvered glass of the window.

After they have all taken seats, Mickey begins chatting about sailing, the expense, he is going to sell the damn boat, and Howard, whose boat is five feet longer than Mickey’s, tells him that’s bullshit, that everyone in town knows Mickey Lopez is rich as God. Lorna does not care for sailing very much. That is, she rather likes the thing itself, but not the endless talk about it, the mystique. I mean, it’s avehicle, for God’s sake, not a person, she has told Sheryl, also no sailor. The talk runs down after a few minutes and Lopez says, “Speaking of money, unlike you public sector parasites, I have to see a patient in twenty minutes, so could we get this going, please? I think this is your party, Lorna.”

She opens her briefcase and pulls out three photocopied packets and a notebook, and hands each of the men a packet. Clears her throat, breathes in, out, in, and begins, the professional screen falls, the emotions still roil in the pit of her belly, but nothing shows. In psych testing she is The Man, and everyone knows it.

“The subject here is a native-born white female, age thirty-three, in good general health. No sign of recent trauma, but we observe old scars on the backs of the thighs, and somewhat more recent scarring on the ventral surfaces. Heavy keratinized scarring on the soles of the feet. X-ray shows cartilage damage in the region of the proximal humerus and the glenoid process, both sides, suggesting recent dislocations, with treatment. She has trouble with arm elevation?”

“Excuse me, Lorna,” says Lopez. “Does she give a history for these injuries?”

“She says she was tortured. By the man she killed. Allegedly.” There is a meaningful pause here, but no one comments, and so Lorna continues. “Subject presents a somewhat flattened affect, or maybe an unnatural calm would be a better way of putting it. I mean unnatural in someone accused of committing a capital crime. We expect a little anxiety, but nothing shows. She understands her situation rationally, but there doesn’t seem to be any emotional component. I think that’s indicative, considering her test results. To which we now turn. Page one of your handouts. We administered the Wechsler, and she’s not intellectually impaired; on the contrary, she scored above normal on almost all the segments, but especially high on the nonverbals. Her picture completion score is off the scale, actually the highest I’ve ever seen.”

Kasdan says, “Remind me, please…?”

“Picture completion measures visual perception, long-term visual memory, and the ability to differentiate essential from nonessential details.”

“Thank you. Please go on.”

She does, taking them through the psychometrics, comforted and calmed by the precise figures. Emmylou Dideroff was not lying or trying to manipulate, was unusually self-critical, was not easily influenced by social standards or customs but socially extroverted, not a psychopath, a rejector of normal female roles.

Kasdan asked, “A lesbian?”

“Not in that range of scores, typically,” Lorna replied. “You know those stories about people who have lifelong successful careers as coal miners or cavalry officers, and then when they die it turns out they’ve really been women? That’s this.”

“So was she a cavalry officer?” Lopez, smiling.

“Not that we know of, but it could tie in with the gun fantasy, which I’ll get to in a minute. She’s a perfectionist, and scores unusually high on scale eight, the schizophrenia scale.”

“You must have messed up, dear,” said Kasdan confidently. “This woman is not a schizophrenic, or not one like any I’ve ever seen.”

“Actually, Doctor,” says Lorna, exercising considerable self-control as she recalls yet another of the reasons she is no longer with this man, “scores over ninety-one are associated with subjects under acute, severe situational stress. People in combat, for example, or in the grip of an identity crisis. It’s not diagnostic for schizophrenia. The subscale is Sc3, which is associated with lack of ego mastery. We would expect to see strange thought processes, feelings of unreality, defects in memory, false memory. As we in fact do observe in interview. So: did either of you get the gun fantasy?”

Lopez looks at Kasdan. “Gun fantasy?”

“Not with me either,” says Kasdan. “What’s the gun fantasy?”

“An elaborate…I don’t know what to call it…script? She recalls shooting a cannon. She supplies considerable fabulation detail about this gun, its sound, its effects, and so on, and reports she still hears it in what appear to be hypnagogic states.”

“A cannon, huh?” says Kasdan, grinning. “That sounds like your department, Mickey.”

“Yes, but sometimes a cigar is only a cigar”?Lopez laughs?”as the master tells us. Go on, Lorna.”

Lorna turns to the last page of her sheaf. “Taken together, the scores don’t conform to the typical abnormal, if that’s not an oxy-moron. In fact, I don’t believe I have ever seen a pattern quite like hers, and I’ve done a zillion of these.”

Lopez says, “So what’s the bottom line here? Is she or is she not competent under the rules for section 12(f)?”

“She is not,” says Lorna. The certainty in her voice even surprises her. “These results, combined with my observations of fabulation, delusional voices, and extreme resistance to talking about negative aspects of her past, are indicative of a defendant who cannot cope with reality, and cannot aid in her own defense. I recommend that she be remanded to treatment.”

“Howie?” Lopez, with an inquiring look.

“I disagree. She knows where she is,” he says, counting off on his fingers. “She knows what she’s accused of, she can answer questions rationally; my position is that she’s ready for trial.”

They both look at Mickey Lopez, who leans back in his leather chair and bridges his hands judiciously under his nose. “Well,” he says after half a minute of breathing silence, “I am inclined to agree with Lorna. Test scores are clearly abnormal, but the delusional voices are the clincher for me. I had a truly fascinating conversation myself with Ms. Dideroff on the subject of angelic and demonic voices and how to distinguish one from the other. What I don’t want to see is a trial, with the pressure mounting, and all of a sudden she’s standing up in the courtroom, saying, ‘Yes, Jesus, what is it?’ I do not wish to have to explain to Judge Pakingham how such a thing happened. Let’s get her into Jackson, look at her for a while, see how she acts. There’s no rush, is there?”

“Oh, hell, Mickey,” says Kasdan brusquely. He checks his watch and rises. “Go for it! And you can include me too. I don’t feel strongly enough about it either way to be the odd man on this. Meanwhile, I’m out of here. Got a lab meeting.” He waves blithely to both of them and is gone.

Lopez too checks his watch. “I must go too, my dear. I’m sorry to have to throw you out into the street.”

“Yes, the freezing cold,” says Lorna, standing and putting away her papers.

Lopez also rises. “It’s good to see you again. I miss you.”

“Really. I didn’t know analysts were supposed to miss their analysands.”

He shrugs. “It is the case that some people are dull and some not, and it is inherently more interesting to talk to the interesting ones. If you don’t tell the board, I won’t either. How have you been getting on?”

“Okay. Living life. Doing my work. You know.”

“Attacks? Dreams?”

“I’m fine, Mickey,” says Lorna in a tone that closes this line of conversation. “But I’d like to ask a favor?”

“Which is…?”

“I want to continue with this patient.”

“With this Dideroff? What do you mean, continue? In what capacity?”

“I want to be on the treatment team. In fact, I want to be the primary. Under you, of course.”

A judicious pause. “You’re not qualified as a therapist. Technically.”

“People a lot less qualified than me see patients every day over there. Student social workers? Interns? It’s called supervised clinical experience.”

She makes herself meet his gaze and relaxes the muscles of her face, to let the persona sag somewhat, trying to show him that this is not some neurotic tic but an honest and reasonable professional proposal, that she is not manipulating or trying to presume on their past relationship.

He says, “This is important to you?”

“Yes. I’ve been in practice for nearly six years and I’ve never seen MMPI test patterns like that. For one thing, she’s showing frank religious mania without any indication on the mania scale. The readings on scale nine are highly unusual in themselves, and combined with the aberrant sexual orientation…I mean it’s practically unique. We could get a paper out of this, the two of us. A new syndrome.”

Lopez listens calmly to this, nodding slightly. When she finishes he says, “And also…?”

She feels a blush starting on her neck. He used to give her that in therapy when she was weaving one of her elaborate gilded verbal curtains to shield the embarrassing lump of true feeling. Nor does she cop now. “Mickey, for crying out loud, it’s professionallyinteresting. Isn’t that enough? You just said it in reference to your practice, and it’s the same for mine. It’s at least a change from deteriorated schizo street people or shitheads trying to fake psychosis, which are the only two flavors I get on a daily basis. C’mon, Mickey.Puh-leeze? “

He grins and lets out a small laugh and throws his arm around her shoulder. “All right, all right! As you know, I’m a sucker for infantile behavior, which is why I’m such a crappy psychiatrist. I’ll call Jackson NP after we get the remand. And I intend to supervise too, so don’t think there’s going to be any funny business! Now, scram! Out of my office!”

“Yes, Doctor.” She bends to kiss him on the cheek and leaves.

In her car, she sits with the door open, the engine roaring, and the air conditioner pumping chilled air at her face, a familiar maneuver of South Florida. She is sweating even more than the heat and humidity require, and she can feel the thump of her heart. She closes the door and lets the car chill down. Her face dries. She slips out of her suit jacket and directs jets of air at her armpits, holding the sleeves of her jersey open for that purpose. She tells herself she should feel great, that she’s just rolled rat bastard Kasdan, faced him down, marshaled her data, won Lopez’s support, successfully lied to him about her psychic state, and rolled him again on the access to Dideroff. A red-letter day then, so why is she sitting here burning gasoline, with her hand on her heart, trying to count the beats, fearing tachycardia, fearing slipping into the kind of anxiety attack that would have her sitting paralyzed in the car for hours. She checks the fuel gauge?good, three-quarters. Once she had run out of gas racing her engine in a Dadeland parking lot, so now she is careful to fill up often. She has a much higher scale seven score than Emmylou Dideroff. A tendency to obsess. Anxiety attacks. No, no, no, she isnot going to have a fucking attack in Mickey Lopez’s parking lot. She shoves the gearshift into reverse, and the car shoots back, jumping the curb that protects a planting island, and performing a neat left-side taillightectomy against the trunk of a maleleuca tree. Cursing wildly, she slams the car into drive and shoots out onto Ponce de Leon.

On Dixie Highway she takes careful deep breaths. Manufacturing calm. When things are spinning out of control the trick is to control what you can, and you can always control your breathing, as her old panic attack coach used to say. Unless you’re crazy, which she is definitely not. Or not very. Ill perhaps. Why does she sweat so much? Incipient Type 2 diabetes? Her grandfather had it. Although she tests her urine sugar almost daily. Some obscure hormonal imbalance? Or sexual deprivation? Oh yes, there was no doubt that Kasdan still turned her on, albeit in a faintly disgusting way.

Still the tension is undeniable, irritating, and she should take care of it herself, like a modern woman, but this she finds difficult to do. Lorna is not depressive (MMPI scale two score = 53), but she can make herself suicidally so by seeking sexual release without another human in attendance, and it has to be a man too. Others of her acquaintance are not so particular, she knows. Betsy Newhouse, her other best friend besides Sheryl Waits, wants often to discuss dildoes and vibrators and is always threatening to buy one for Lorna. She has a shtick in which she enumerates all the ways in which a vibrator is superior to a man. Lorna has heard many variations of this, and she finds it tedious, but she is a good friend, and besides, no one is perfect, and Lorna is no bargain herself.

Lorna arrives at her house, a stuccoed ranch in South Miami, enters it, and cranks up the window air conditioner in the living room, pausing a moment to stand in front of a chill blast. The living room is simply furnished?a Bahama sofa covered in beige Haitian cotton, a glass-topped coffee table, several canvas butterfly chairs in pale lemon, a cotton rug on the hardwood floor. Lorna’s taste in painting runs to witty surrealism, and there are several pictures on the walls, all bought at art fairs in Coconut Grove. She goes into her bedroom and takes off all her clothes. It is cool in the bedroom because she runs the AC continuously from May to November, twenty-four/seven. Into the bathroom then, where she takes a quick, tepid shower and turns her eyes away from the black mildew springing from the tiles and the ceiling. A Guatemalan lady comes once a week, but she does not do mildew and neither does Lorna.

Naked but for a yellow towel, she goes into the kitchen and makes herself a gin and tonic, with a whole Key lime from the tree in the backyard, and drinks half of it down. Gasping a little, she returns to the bedroom and dresses in a light cotton shirt and bermudas. Then she goes into her office.

Lorna is a freelancer who works out of her home. The office is the largest room in the house, assembled by knocking out the wall between the second bedroom and what locals call the Florida room, a kind of enclosed stone-floored patio separated from the back garden by glass jalousies. From her desk she can look out through these to the croton bushes and yellow allamanders of the backyard. She sits in her swivel chair and enjoys this view, and the sound of birdsong, sipping her drink.

It is a strong one and she has not had anything for lunch. In a few minutes the buzz comes on. She relaxes and feels her face start to numb up. Doctors now recommend a drink a day as being good for the heart, she recalls (for she is an assiduous reader of medical advice), and drinks some more, enjoying the slosh and knock of the ice cubes against her teeth. She feels now the pleasant sense of accomplishment that eluded her upon leaving Dr. Lopez’s office. Howie has been put in his place, an alliance with Lopez on a case, a professional opportunity to explore what could be a new species of craziness, maybe even a suggestion for a whole new subscale for the MMPI-2. That would really make her name in the world of psych testing.

Musing thus, she casts her eye around her office and finds it good. She has a large modern birch desk, an almost new computer with all the accessories, an expensive desk chair with lumbar adjustments, and lots of books. Except for a swath of wall devoted to diplomas and professional certifications, all the wall space is taken up by bookshelves. Lorna buys her clothes (nor are there many of them) on sale, takes few vacations (and these to the cheaper nearby islands), drives a six-year-old car. Her only luxuries are medical examinations and books. She has over four thousand volumes, and she has read them all, some of them twice. There is a teetering stack on a side table, books she has read but not shelved. She is about to stand up and shelve them, a practice that gives her a keen pleasure, when she notices that the light on her answering machine is blinking. She punches the button. The mechanical man in the device tells her she has three messages.

Betsy Newhouse’s light voice: “Kiddo. Your reminder call?four-thirty at the gym. Be there or be pear.” Beep. “Hi, it’s me. Nice seeing you today. Give me a buzz. I’ll buy you a salad.” Kasdan, the rat bastard. Beep. An unfamiliar but pleasant voice says: “Dr. Wise, this is Detective Paz, Miami PD. I was the arresting officer in the Emmylou Dideroff case, and I’d like to talk to you about her. You can reach me anytime on my cell phone.” He gives a number and hangs up.

Lorna reaches for the phone and starts to dial this number, if only to stop herself from calling the rat bastardinstantly, then stops and hangs up. She has to think about this for a moment first. Paz is the cop Sheryl was talking about, the voodoo one, the potential date. She knew he had the arrest on Emmylou, but what could he possibly want with her?

Then, like a shark fin on a night ocean, a thought breaks the surface of her mind. The story about a new wrinkle in abnormal psych was enough to convince Mickey Lopez, and was a good story to tell herself, and might even turn out to be true. But that is not the reason she very much wants to (and, she just now realizes, is positivelydriven to) continue with Emmylou Dideroff. She now realizes, with a feeling that mixes wonder and dismay, and includes a funny hollow just below the belt line, that she has no idea what this reason is. Suddenly she is terrified, nothing to do with the case, she is convinced that there is someone else in her house. She freezes, listens. Someone breathing, a heavy rasping sound…or is that the air conditioner? Now she is in full panic mode, heart pounding, sweat springing freely. The sense of an alien presence is undeniable, it’s in the room, it’s right behind her. Her heart feels like it’s bursting through her ribs. She lets out a gasp and spins around in her chair. Nothing.

It takes her the better part of an hour and two Valium to feel herself again. A panic attack, maybe a little fallout from the tension of the earlier meeting. So she tells herself, speaking aloud in the empty house. Her hands have stopped shaking now, and she picks up the telephone.

Jimmy Paz felt his cell phone vibrate against his hip but ignored it, allowing the voice mail to pick it up. He was standing in the auditorium of Miami-Dade Community College in a long line of people, all of whom were carrying copies of the same book. They were all waiting to get their copies signed by a pale young woman seated behind a table on the stage. The woman had marvelous corkscrew curls of red gold that glittered like a nest of Slinkys under the stage lighting. Her features were sharp and her eyes small and a little too bright, but she had a broad sensuous mouth. A few minutes ago she had finished reading from her poetry.

He arrived at the table and handed her the slim volume. She looked up, gave him the same nice smile she’d given to the fourteen people ahead of him, and said, “What should I write?”

“Whatever you want,” he answered.

She wrote. He picked up the book and turned to the title page, where she had inscribed: Come up to room 923 at the Grand Bay tonight at about eleven and I will fuck your brains out. Best Wishes, Willa Shaftel.

“Do you write that kind of thing in everyone’s book?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “That’s how you get to be a best seller.”

“Then I better get in line right now,” he said and, waving, took his leave.

Willa Shaftel had been one of Jimmy Paz’s three main squeezes for a year or so, back when she’d worked as a librarian in Coconut Grove. Then she’d left and gone to Iowa on a writing fellowship, and when the first winter hit she’d spent three weeks in Miami, most of it with Paz and most of that in bed. During that time she had inveigled the story of how Paz had caught the Voodoo Killer, as well as details about the various ancillary characters attached to the story, and she had written a fairly successful novel about it, and no longer had to work in libraries. She came during the succeeding winter too, staying for six weeks this time, during which they saw each other nearly every day. Paz had never been deeply into fidelity, but after that he had found himself unwilling to look very hard for alternates. He’d even spent some long weekends at her tiny apartment in Ames, Iowa, a place nearly devoid of Cuban coffee.

Now he thought about her mouth. She really did have a most excellent mouth, and a hot skillful tongue, and she was the most actual fun to fuck of any woman he had ever known. He thought this might be the basis of a relationship more serious and permanent than any he had engaged in before. And she had spent a year in Spain studying Lorca and spoke a peculiar but elegant form of Spanish. No breasts to speak of, but she got along fine with his mother. All in all…

By this time he was out of the building facing the main plaza of the campus, which was tricked out in decorations and awninged booths for the book fair. Avoiding a mime, he found a little coffee bar, ordered a cafe con leche, and took out his cell phone. The voice mail service had a number of messages on it, only one of which was worth replying to just now.

“Dr. Wise? Detective Paz here. Thanks for returning the call.”

“Uh-huh. Why…I mean, excuse me, I mean what can I do for you, Detective?” said the voice. Nice voice, he thought, husky, but a little slurred. And somewhat breathless. A few predinner cocktails maybe?

“This is about Emmylou Dideroff. I was the arresting officer on the case.”

“Yes, you said.”

“Well, she’s writing a confession.”

“That must’ve made your day.”

“Not really,” said Paz, starting to get a little annoyed. “I mean if she’s crazy, the confession doesn’t do anything for us. But it wasn’t, I mean it’s not a regular confession. She asked for a bound notebook, the schoolroom kind, not a spiral. I got her four of them at Staples. She wants to write down all her crimes, she says.”

“She’s delusional,” said Lorna. “As a matter of fact, she mentioned a confession in our interview, but in any writing she does it’s going to be hard to distinguish fantasy from what really happened.”

“Just what I thought,” said Paz brightly. “That’s why I called you.”

“I see. And why me specifically? I mean there are a zillion shrinks in Miami, and a lot of them are on government payrolls already. And I guess you know I’m not a psychiatrist.”

“Yes, Doctor, I know. I’m a detective. The reason is I wanted someone independent, not an employee of the criminal justice system. So I happened to run into Leon Waits because I yanked one of his troopers for the detective squad, and he was giving me heat over it, and I remembered that his wife was some kind of therapist and I asked him could I call her and get a recommendation, and I did and the first name she came up with was you. And then I checked the file and found you were on the case already. It was magic. So the question is, will you do it?”

There was a pause on the line and what sounded like a sigh. “Do what?”

“Just read what she writes. Help me figure out what’s what from a psych perspective. We’ll get you a rate from the department. I cleared it already.”

“Okay, right, but what I don’t understand is why you’re so concerned with Emmylou Dideroff. I mean is this something to do with clearing the case? Getting a conviction? Because if that’s the situation, then I’m not sure I?”

“No, it has nothing to do with the murder we got on board now.”

“Then what does it have to do with?”

“Are you using a cordless phone?”

“Yes, why?”

“And I’m on a cell. I don’t want a guy who ordered some electronics off the Internet listening in on this. We can talk at the party.”

“What party?”

“Tomorrow. At Sheryl and Leon’s. You’re coming, right?”

She laughed for what seemed to him no particular reason, quickly stifled.

“How did you know?”

“I told you, I’m a detective,” he said. “See you there.”