Wireman

CHAPTER 18

SIDNEY RUBENS reached for the unlit stub of a cheap cigar lying in the ashtray. If the cigar was cheap, the ashtray was cheaper. It was a golden tin he had swiped from McDonald’s. It was so small it hardly held all the ashes from one cigar. Which was all right with Rubens because when the tray overflowed it gave him something to do: he had to cross the room to dump the tray. That was all the exercise the overweight Rubens usually got.

Blue smoke unfurled from the cigar. Rubens rolled the smoke around the inside of his mouth and contemplated reaching for the bottle of bourbon in the bottom drawer of his desk.

“Vulgar habits,” he remarked aloud, eying the cigar and the desk drawer.

He knew people talked behind his back. His cigars were vulgar, his taste questionable, his drinking sometimes made his social position shaky, but bless God, he was a good psychiatrist when he wanted to be and the V.A. hospital needed him desperately. They needed all the shrinks they could get since Vietnam.

Rubens opened a manila folder that lay in front of him on the scarred desk. Nick Ringer, the tab read.

Saklow, resident medical doctor, would not prescribe any more tranquilizers for Ringer unless he was willing to see a shrink. Sid squinted, adjusted his gold-framed glasses, and read the note from Saklow.

“Nervous disorder unrelated to physical problem. Insomnia. Faulty memory. Tacoma diagnosed patient as sociopathic; released to brother’s care after seven months rest and chemotherapy.”

The cigar smoke hung over the desk. Rubens adjusted his glasses and glanced over the medical report.

Healthy specimen. One hundred ninety-five pounds, six foot one, no previous illnesses or operations.

Lucky kid, Rubens thought. At least he didn’t come back in a body bag.

Rubens sighed and closed the folder. Ringer was due in five minutes. Plenty of time for a drink, but since this was Ringer’s first visit, he would abstain.

At exactly eleven o’clock the door opened, and Miss Boyd, his young black secretary, ushered Nick Ringer into the office. The girl fluttered her long feathery lashes, helpfully pulled out the vinyl chair for Nick, waved her polished nails at Sid, and left without a word.

“She’s not bad,” Nick commented, lounging back in the chair with an air of confidence and control.

Sidney Rubens nodded around the stub of his smoldering cigar and squirted one eye against the stinging smoke. It was his habit to speak as little as possible. He sized up the man opposite him. No nervousness there, he concluded. Nick was calm and unruffled. Sleeplessness? Where were the fatigued eyes, the tired slumping shoulders?

Nick Ringer looked young to him, but then lately anyone under forty looked young. The young man projected largeness, or was it strength? A pall of stale smoke hung over Nick, but to his credit, he did not cough or make a face at the cigar’s stink. Perhaps, Rubens thought, it did not bother him. On the other hand, perhaps he was very good at camouflaging his emotions. An interesting puzzle.

“So what do I have to do to get the nerve pills?” Nick asked, sitting perfectly poised.

“Saklow doesn’t think you need them,” Sid Rubens said casually.

“Saklow is an asshole.”

Rubens permitted himself a smile and was surprised when the patient did not return it. A waiting game, was it? Rubens deliberately tapped ash onto his unpressed brown sports jacket and let it roll to the floor. The ashtray was full and Nick was watching. Neither man blinked an eyelash.

“Your brother. He brought you home from the V.A. in Tacoma?”

“Yes, Daley brought me home,” Nick answered in a well-modulated voice. “I’m okay now if that’s what you’re asking. Just have trouble getting to sleep, no big deal. I have a shit job and life’s not roses. So what else is new?”

“You work for a local alarm insta1ler?”

“Yes.”

“Your brother?”

“What about my brother?” Nick still held Ruben’s gaze.

Still no anxiety. A strange bird, Rubens thought. But aren’t they all?

“What about my brother?” Nick repeated.

“Where does he work?”

“Hey, why don’t you call him in and ask him? Then you could give him Valium and he could give them to me and everything would be dandy.”

Rubens waited, sucking his cigar, squinting one brown eye. Nick relented under the stare.

“So what do you want? He goes to the university. He fixes up old junk furniture and turns a buck on it. Satisfied?”

Rubens closed the eye and opened the other. He thought casually, I’m satisfied I’m scratching your glossy surface.

“You’ve always been together? Childhood, Nam, and here?” he asked.

“Yeah, always together. Even in Nam.”

“But Daley—is that his name?—Daley didn’t crack, did he?”

For the first time the patient’s veneer seemed to split.

“How do you feel about that.” Rubens prodded.

“Cracking up? I don’t think it was a picnic. I thought I could handle the fight over there in that glory hole and I couldn’t. It was a surprise.” Nick seemed fascinated by something on the floor.

“Special recon—that’s tough business,” Rubens ventured, tapping more ashes onto himself.

“We were a good unit. We just got busted up there at the last and it was a bitch.” Nick eyed the psychiatrist suspiciously. “You know about the Cong I killed?”

Rubens nodded and looked wise although he did not know anything about it. Not all the records from the V.A. hospital in Tacoma had arrived.

“Fucking gooks.” Nick was getting angry.

“It was a lousy war.” Best to offer him something, Rubens thought. He must tread carefu1ly. They were getting somewhere close to what kept the man awake nights.

“It’s a lousy life,” Nick said softly. “I don’t know why I used that garrote.”

“Sure, you know why.” Go cautiously. Garrote? Where would he get hold of…

“They had it—the garrote. It could have been me or Daley instead of the fucking gooks.”

“You killed them. That’s war.”

“The medics didn’t see it that way. They go for strangling and gut shots and napalm—napalm, man!—but not…” Nick stopped.

“But not what?” Rubens said softly, sympathetically.

Nick suddenly laughed. “Beheading.”

Sidney Rubens froze.

“They didn’t go for the fact I took off their fucking heads.” Nick continued to laugh.

Rubens let the smoke trail out in a slow stream that rolled across the desktop.

“You don’t much like the thought of it either, do you?” Nick asked, alert once again, hunching forward, his hands on his knees. He was very calm, inscrutable. “You think I like what I did? You think I don’t have nightmares? You think I don’t need a few pills?”

Rubens adjusted his glasses warily. He sat forward and crushed the cigar into the tin ashtray. The squeaking sound from the chair seemed very loud. He pulled open the middle drawer and removed a prescription pad.

As he wrote he said, “Be back here next week, same time.”

“You’ll only give me enough for one week?” Nick sounded like a disappointed ten-year-old.

Rubens looked up. “That’s right. Enough for a week. You want them, I’m willing to prescribe for you, but the deal includes your visit every week on Monday at eleven.”

“I have to work,” Nick protested weakly.

“Make it your lunch break.”

Nick took the white slip of paper. “Okay,” he said reluctantly.

Rubens saw hunger in the blue eyes, hunger for peace. He stood up and offered Nick his hand. “Good-bye, Nick. I hope you sleep tonight without nightmares.”

“Eat shit,” Nick said amiably as he walked away, ignoring the psychiatrist’s hand.

Miss Boyd closed the door with another little wave of her hand.

Rubens brushed down his jacket, then opened his bottom desk drawer, took out the bottle of bourbon, and settled into his chair with a sigh. He uncapped the bottle and took four rapid gulps.

An hour later the psychiatrist weighed himself on an old-fashioned penny scale in the entrance way just inside the doors of Woolworth’s in downtown Houston. Two pounds. The spaghetti dinner he had just consumed at the counter had already made him gain two pounds. For a moment he was depressed. But maybe his scale at home would not register the weight gain in the evening. Somewhat cheered by that thought, he walked out into the crowded sidewalks. Rubens unwrapped his after-lunch cigar, chewed off the end, and spit it onto the sidewalk. He spied a newspaper vending machine and made for it. Inserting a quarter, he withdrew one of the papers and opened it with a snap of his wrists. A black headline, front and center, caught his attention. Wireman, was it? What was a wireman? Dreadful abuse of the language. The child’s rhyme came to mind and he changed it around a little. Richman, poorman, beggerman, thief. Wireman, lawyer, merchant, and chief.

Rubens leaned against the side of a store and began to read the article.

At first he was intrigued by the unfolding of the gruesome story. As a psychiatrist he was interested in the speculations being made about the Wireman’s identity and personality. Rubens read on, his cigar chewed to a juicy pulp, his appointments forgotten.

Then the gong began to sound. Far off at first, almost unnoticed, deep in the recesses of his mind. It was the word “garrote” that struck the first quivering note. Rubens’s gaze locked on the word until it blurred. He began making the connection. A man sitting in his office, looking so young.

“I don’t know why I used that garrote,” Nick Ringer had said.

Then had come the sudden laughter and the word “beheading.” What else was it he had said? Oh yes, They didn’t go for the fact I took off their fucking heads.

Was it truly connected? It might he just a big coincidence. Sidney Rubens had never wanted to be wrong so badly.

If his suspicions were true, if Nick Ringer and the Wireman were the same… The thought refused to finish itself. He needed a drink—badly. Right now.

The distraught psychiatrist quickly returned to his office, poured three fingers of bourbon into a glass, and read the story over again. There was a policeman, a detective, the story said, well known but now retired, who was semi-officially involved in the case. He was quoted as saying the department had a lead on the killer, but as yet they had no suspect, and they needed all the help they could get.

Yeah, Rubens thought, you need a regular Noah’s ark of help, friend. But he was sealed by an oath of confidentiality. What would he do if Nick Ringer made further revelations that connected him even more to the murders? How could Rubens finger the suspect for the cops?

Rubens knew there were guidelines for professionals who found themselves in his predicament. Situations where their professional ethics of confidentiality conflicted with the safety of society at large. Possibly conflicted. It was just a word connection. Garrote.

The problem was that the guidelines themselves conflicted with each other. Federal agencies said one thing, state agencies said another. What one national organization advocated as a correct course of action was exactly what another national organization said should not be done.

Rubens emptied the glass and sloshed more bourbon into it. Whatever he decided to do, someone would say he was wrong. He gulped the whiskey. God, he hated making such decisions. Why was he getting all shook up? The whole thing was probably a big mistake. Nothing to worry about. Not really. Just a word connection.

But as he poured more bourbon into the glass, he knew better. Deep down inside Dr. Sidney Rubens agreed with Nick Ringer. It was a lousy life.