The Best Revenge Page 19

  “Complicated? You bet it’s complicated. Tom Clone is not an innocent man, Kelda. His conviction was thrown out. Thrown out, that’s all. He wasn’t suddenly found not guilty. He certainly wasn’t exonerated. There’s no evidence that he didn’t kill that girl. You know the book in that murder case in Park County better than anyone but the detective who ran Clone down. One little break for the local cops and Clone could be rearrested at any time. You’re putting a lot at risk personally and professionally by even being seen with the guy, let alone getting involved with him. And now, now look what’s happened—the SAC knows that you’re up to something and . . . it appears that somebody’s following you . . . and you’re Clone’s alibi for—”

  She stepped back from him. She told herself not to get defensive. The admonition didn’t work. “Have you forgotten about the knife we found? You know, the one with somebody else’s blood on it? Have you forgotten about that?”

  “No,” he replied. “I think about it every day.”

  The chill in his words slapped at her. “I know what I’m doing, Bill. I’m not sure why, but I have this need to understand him, to know how people could think him capable of what they think he did to—”

  “It’s not our job to understand them, Kelda. It’s our job to catch them and convict them.”

  “I don’t think I agree. Anyway, it’s none of your business whom I’m seeing socially.”

  He turned his head away from her toward the Sixteenth Street Mall. “That little girl can’t protect you from everything, Kelda. One of these times you’re going to go to make a withdrawal from that account and you’re going to find out that it’s busted. Totally empty.”

  “What are you implying?” But she knew exactly what he was implying. He was reminding Kelda that her public heroics in rescuing Rosa Alija wouldn’t insulate her forever.

  “You know exactly what I mean,” he said.

  “Screw you, Graves. I do not need Rosa Alija to keep me out of trouble with the SAC.”

  “You don’t? Tell me that after you get your ass reassigned to Billings. But please don’t drag me up there with you. Denver’s as cold as I ever want to get.”

  He stared at her for about ten seconds, pivoted, and started walking. His long strides were taking him away from the Sixteenth Street Mall, back in the direction of the Federal Building.

  “Wait,” Kelda called after him.

  Bill Graves didn’t slow. He broke into a jog and cut into a cloud of diesel exhaust hanging behind an RTD bus that was holding up traffic on Seventeenth.

  CHAPTER 25

  I woke feeling guilty about how I’d handled the phone call with Tom Clone the previous evening. Doubt about my own clinical judgment had once been a rare emotional state for me, but over the past year I’d begun to question my therapeutic decisions with increasing frequency and, unfortunately, I could argue, with increasing justification. The previous year my clinical missteps had cost some people their lives, and I was already beginning to suspect that the cavalier method with which I’d handled the emergency the night before might end up having similarly grave consequences.

  While I was showering I tried to convince myself that my self-flagellation was nothing more than mindless catastrophizing. My behavior the night before might not have been an ideal clinical intervention, but it was hardly lethal. But my rationalization wasn’t sufficient; the guilt and regret that I was feeling didn’t wash right off and disappear down the drain.

  Lauren didn’t know I was treating Tom Clone. That wasn’t surprising—typically she didn’t know any of my patients’ names. It was therefore coincidence that she initiated a discussion over breakfast regarding the story in theDaily Camera about the assault on his grandfather. I made small talk in reply and succeeded in nudging our conversation away from Tom Clone and on to the ongoing dilemma of juggling our workdays and Grace’s care, and negotiating which of us was going to be home first to rescue Viv, our daytime nanny.

  The answer that day was Lauren.

  She asked if my telephone emergency had turned out okay the night before. I told her it had.

  And that was it.

  I didn’t tell her that the emergency patient was Tom Clone and that he had probably slept on a couch in the ICU waiting room at Community Hospital, but that he would have been much happier in our guest room. Nor did I mention that Sam Purdy was acting as though he suspected Tom of involvement in the assault on his grandfather. I didn’t tell her that the heroic FBI agent who had rescued Rosa Alija was one of my patients and that she was apparently now dating the controversial man who had once been convicted of almost beheading his ex-girlfriend in Park County, and who was now—miraculously, it seemed—out of prison.

  I didn’t tell her that I was full of doubts about whether I was still capable of doing work that left people trusting me for insight into their lives.

  What I told her was that I wished that the cast was off my arm and that I yearned to take her and Grace and both dogs and drive the Mini the whole length of the Peak to Peak Highway and maybe take it over Trail Ridge Road into Rocky Mountain National Park.

  She told me that I was a good father and that she loved me, and I left for work with just enough warmth coursing through my veins to suspect that I would make it through another day as a psychologist.

  Tom Clone’s emergency appointment was that afternoon at three. He showed up right on time.

  He and I were alone in the waiting room, so I greeted him by saying, “How’s your grandfather doing, Tom?”

  “A little better, they think. He’s resting better anyway. But I’m worried. His EEG is showing some anomalies, he lost more blood than anybody his age can really afford to lose, and his kidney functions are screwy. I’m afraid his kidneys are going to shut down. That would kill him, for sure.”

  As I processed the technical sophistication of his remarks, I reminded myself that Tom Clone had been only months away from completing medical school when he was incarcerated for almost decapitating his girlfriend in Park County.

  I consciously reminded myself that he hadn’t done it. He hadn’t killed that girl. The DNA said so.

  “Come on back to the office,” I said.

  After we settled on our chairs, I waited for him to choose a place to start.

  He scanned the perimeter of the office once before he said, “I was with that FBI agent last night. The one I told you about who picked me up from prison. The one who found the knife.”

  That FBI agent. Kelda.

  I said, “When your grandfather was assaulted? That’s who you were with? The FBI agent?”

  “Yeah. She called out of the blue and asked me out, bought me dinner. We were down on the Mall most of the evening. We were having a great time—I thought we were, anyway—but once we got back to my place she was, I don’t know, gone. Cold. You know, distant.”

  I waited.

  “She said she was tired. That her leg was sore. Why would she drive to town, take me to dinner, and then suddenly go cold on me? The night just . . . ended. I don’t get it. Maybe I’m just out of practice, but I think it’s bullshit.”

  I thought a little reality testing might be in order. “Maybe, Tom, she was tired and her leg was sore.”

  He scowled at me. “No, you weren’t there. It wasn’t like that. Everything was great, perfect, and then suddenly, everything wasn’t. She just said she was leaving, got in her car, and left. I don’t know why I bothered.”

  His voice had sharpened and I realized that the events of the previous evening with Kelda had become overdetermined for Tom—they’d taken on meaning beyond the simple progression of events. Along with that awareness, a thought one-hopped through my consciousness like a hard shot across the infield: If I hadn’t mentioned Tom’s grandfather in the waiting room, would Tom have brought up the old man’s condition on his own? There was no way to answer that question and I kicked myself for putting my compassion in front of my clinical obligations.

  I said, “And that left you feeling
. . . how?”

  At first blush his response was pure non sequitur. He said, “I’m starting work tomorrow at Kaiser. In the pharmacy? The lady in their personnel department knew my story, feels I’ve been screwed, and says I’m perfect for the job. To tell you the truth, I think I got lucky that I ran into somebody who feels that way. She’s in the minority, believe me.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, their insurance won’t pay for me to come here to see you. If I want to see somebody, I have to see somebody on the Kaiser staff. I don’t know if my attorney will continue to pay for therapy if I can see somebody on my insurance plan for free. So I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  I could have gone into a harangue about how long the waiting list was going to be to see a psychotherapist at Kaiser, or how restrictive the mental health treatment options were going to be. It would have made me feel better, but I didn’t. I said, “You don’t know what’s going to happen about what?”

  “What’s the point?” His words were perilously close to a whine. “Why should I get something started with you when I’ll just have to stop? What good is that going to do?”

  Lightbulb time.

  Duh. Remember a concept called transference, Dr. Gregory?

  I said, “Tom?” and waited until he was focused on my words. “What you’re describing right now? It’s similar to what you’re feeling with that FBI agent, isn’t it?” I almost said “with Kelda,” but I caught myself just as the back of my tongue was curling toward the roof of my mouth to form theK . I didn’t think Tom Clone had ever used her name with me.

  He replied, “What do you mean?”

  If I dissected his reply, I thought I would find about an equal blend of “I don’t understand” and “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  In the face of an interpretation similar to the one I’d just made to Tom, the response of “What do you mean?” wasn’t an uncommon one, especially in the early stages of psychotherapy. A major goal of insight-oriented psychotherapy is to increase self-awareness so that similarities between emotional reactions to prior events and emotional reactions to current ones, like the circumstance I was pointing out to Tom, become self-evident to the patient.

  Responding to his innocuous-sounding “What do you mean?” meant that I had a clinical judgment to make: How far should I stretch the interpretation that I was making? I decided to go for broke. The worst that would happen is that he would consider the connections I was suggesting to be totally inane. The best that would happen is that he would begin to see himself as vulnerable to the gravity of emotional and historical forces that he hadn’t previously recognized.

  In other words, as human.

  “Tom, you haven’t been out of prison long. And you haven’t been coming to see me for long. Yet in the brief time that you’ve been here, you’ve focused most of our time together on events where people become very meaningful to you and then seem to turn their backs on you.”

  He made a perplexed face. It wasn’t just confusion, though. A healthy dose of skepticism was mixed with something I was interpreting as aggravation. He said, “I don’t know . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I caught enough hesitation in his voice that I thought he was at least curious about the point I was making.

  “Your mother?” I continued. “When you were young and she’d get manic, she’d take you on these terrific E-ticket rides, on these grand adventures she concocted, and then suddenly her mania would crash into depression and she’d leave you stranded and alone.”

  He was staring at me.

  I asked, “Still with me?”

  “So far.”

  The two words carried a surprising modicum of warning.

  I felt the caution—it was milder than my reaction to a dog baring its teeth, though not much—and I pressed on. “Then there’s this FBI agent who shows up in your life. First she finds the evidence that gets you out of jail, then she picks you up to take you home from prison, and she takes you out for a wonderful meal in a romantic hotel. The next time you try to reach her, she acts as though you’re nothing but a bother. Then . . . she calls out of the blue and takes you out to dinner. The evening is terrific. But when you try to extend your time together, she just disappears like the night had meant nothing to her.” I thought I’d explained enough. I waited for Tom to reply.

  He didn’t oblige.

  I asked, “Do you see a pattern?”

  He snorted at me through his nose. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  I nodded once, slowly. I’d swung for the fences and failed to make contact. It wasn’t the first time I’d gone down swinging, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. At least, I consoled myself, I didn’t get called out on strikes.

  I said, “Okay.”

  As I figuratively made the stroll back to the dugout, I was recalling what Tom had said to me the previous night when he’d called and requested the extra appointment. He’d told me that he was feeling vulnerable, both in terms of his physical safety and in terms of his legal status. I wondered if he would get around to talking about either concern during this session.

  He said, “You done with that other thing?”

  I said, “Yes.” I thought,You bet.

  “Here’s something weird for you. The last couple of times I slept in my grandfather’s house, I heard doors clanging shut. It sounded just like when I was inside when the cell doors slammed.”

  “You were awake or asleep?”

  “The first night I was asleep. The sound woke me up. I thought it was just a bad dream. The next night I was asleep the first time I heard it, but the next time was maybe an hour later and I was still awake. It made me jump. It sounded just like a cell door slamming. Exactly.”

  “What do you think it was?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m jumpy. I have a lot on my mind. Maybe I’m just hearing things. But that never happened to me before, even when I was on death row.” He sat forward on the edge of his chair with his elbows on his knees. “I was also wondering about post-traumatic stress. Wondered if you thought that was possible.”

  I’d been watching for signs of post-traumatic stress disorder since Tom Clone had stepped into my office for the first time. Like combat veterans, or abused spouses, or the tens of thousands of people trapped in lower Manhattan on September 11, or hundreds of other categories of traumatized people, Tom’s experiences in prison had left him vulnerable for symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

  “It’s certainly possible, Tom. PTSD could certainly cause flashbacks like the ones you’re describing. And your experiences in the criminal justice system were certainly severe enough stressors to place you at risk. Did you have any other . . . sensations associated with hearing the doors slam?”

  “Like what? You mean anxiety symptoms, like that? What else would I look for—rapid breathing, heart palps, sweaty palms? That sort of thing?”

  I nodded, although I was reluctant to provide a shopping list of symptoms. The list was longer than the one Tom had asked about, of course, but I didn’t enumerate any of the alternatives. I generally wasn’t eager to suggest to Tom, or to any patient, that there were symptomatic targets at which to take aim.

  “No. Nothing like that. Just the damn doors slamming.” He shivered. “Once you’ve heard it a few times for real—and, believe me, it’s real when you’re the one that they’re locking up—you’ll never, ever forget it. You don’t know what it’s like, that sound.”

  I watched, eerily fascinated, as his eyes told me he’d gone someplace else.

  No,I thought,I don’t know what it’s like.

  I asked, “Are you having any other experiences that remind you of the time that you spent in prison?”

  “Like what?”

  “Flashbacks.”

  “What would they be like?”

  “I wasn’t there, Tom. I can only imagine what you went through. You haven’t told me much about what
life was like for you inside, so I don’t know specifically what to ask.”

  “I don’t like to think about it. I don’t think I’m ever going to want to think about it.”

  I waited thirty seconds or so for Tom to exit my office before I made the stroll to the waiting room for my next patient. As I greeted her, I could see through the front window that Tom was climbing on a bright red Vespa parked at a bike rack in front of my office.

  I followed my new patient back down the hall to my office wondering how a man just released from the penitentiary could afford to have a motor scooter that looked brand-new.

  CHAPTER 26

  Kelda didn’t comment about my cast at the beginning of her rescheduled session the following week. And she didn’t ask about the condition of my arm.

  She was almost fifteen minutes late and seemed intent on using the remaining minutes of her allotted time efficiently. She sat on her chair, released her hair from confinement behind her head, and said, “That trip to Hawaii I told you about? I didn’t go on my own. Jones’s family was going over to get some closure after her death. I went with them. They wanted to collect some of her things that someone had found at the gallery where she’d worked and meet the people who knew her at the end. They invited me to go along. So when I went, I went over with her mother and her brother.”

  I didn’t know what parable I had just heard the preamble to. So I waited patiently to hear the fable.

  “She’d hadn’t been in Maui long, you know, when she died. Jones hadn’t. Yet she’d already done about a dozen paintings—acrylics—and twice that many watercolors. That was a remarkable output for her. Three dozen pieces would have been a year’s work for her in Denver, maybe more. To me that meant that something was stimulating her there, driving her.

  “I didn’t get it at first—I told you I didn’t understand why she’d gone to Hawaii at all. But when I walked into that co-op, that gallery where they’d found some of her old things, I think I finally began to understand what was going on with her.