Dry Ice Page 21

“Is she still there? Has that woman been discharged?”

  “Nicole was discharged in January of this year. We wanted to watch her through the holidays. You know how that goes.” I did. I nodded. “Her friend had been discharged a while before. Four months? Five? I’d have to go back and check.”

  “But this woman—Nicole’s friend—had also been a confidante of Michael McClelland’s? You’re sure?”

  “The security requirements of their respective units prohibited a lot of contact. But their relationship—even at a distance—created some clinical and community issues. The two of them were complementary colors. Yin and yang.”

  “What issues?”

  “Nicole’s friend is a psychologist. Made things complicated clinically in the institute. And in the community at large.”

  “I can only imagine.”

  “Unless you’ve treated a colleague, especially a violent colleague, in an inpatient environment, I really doubt that you can imagine how complex it is.”

  “What was her diagnosis? Why was she in the forensic institute?” I asked.

  He thought about my question for a moment. “Sorry,” he said. “I really shouldn’t.”

  My meeting with Tharon made many things clear for me, one of which was why he had called me.

  After I discovered Nicole’s body in Peter’s barn, the authorities had obviously quickly tracked her identity—even if she didn’t have ID on her person, her fingerprints were on file all over the Colorado criminal justice system—and had quickly been able to confirm her recent prolonged stay at the state hospital. Someone from Boulder’s law enforcement community, probably one of the sheriff’s investigators, had then called Dr. Thibodeaux to ask some questions about his ex-patient. The name of her current therapist—me—had come up during the conversation, and Thibodeaux had tracked down my home number and called me as an act of rather dubious, but much-appreciated, professional courtesy.

  When Tharon said that it was time for him to leave to meet his friends for the basketball game, I asked him if he would answer one more question.

  “Depends on the question,” he said, glancing at his watch.

  “That’s fair. Earlier, you said you’d been in my shoes during your residency, that you didn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone else. What did happen during your residency?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “I had a borderline guy I’d been treating for a while. The transference was…let’s say, labile. Constant splitting. He was a cutter, among other things. Very manipulative. Multiple suicidal gestures.” He forced a small smile. “It wasn’t my best clinical work.”

  He reached for his jacket.

  “Borderlines can do that,” I said. “I’m not good with them. Never have been. I think it takes a certain type of therapist.”

  “Yeah, well.” He shook his head, shooing away some memory. “You want to know what happened?”

  “Yes.” And I thought he wanted to tell me.

  He folded the coat across his lap. “Okay. We were having a department Christmas party. Second year of my residency. The party was at an attending’s new apartment in a building near the Quarter. Somehow my patient found out where the party was being held. One of the other residents was on call that night. She was at the party, too.”

  “The on-call resident was an optimist?” I said.

  “Marlene was an optimist. My borderline guy calls the psychiatric clinic, says it’s an emergency, and gets his call returned by Marlene. She just went into one of the bedrooms of the apartment and called him. My guy is no virgin at badgering on-call residents—he immediately says he’s in treatment with me and in his own overwrought diva way conveys that he’s in crisis. Marlene begins to do her intervention. He stops her and says he wants to talk with me, no one but me. She begins to dig deeper into her clinical bag of tricks—Marlene was good—but he stops her again. He demands to talk to me. She begins to explain the call system and tries to get him to understand why that’s not possible. He stops her again. He’s getting more agitated. When she persists, he tells her he’s on top of a building, and he is going to jump if I won’t talk to him right then.”

  “Wow. On a manipulative scale, that’s a ten,” I said.

  Tharon made a what-are-you-going-to-do face. “Marlene goes into one final song-and-dance about how the emergency call system works and tries to convince him that I’m unavailable and tells him he will need to talk with her. She’s sure she can help. I’m sure you know the script. My patient says he knows all about the call system and that he also knows I’m standing close enough to her at that moment that she could hand me the phone.”

  “What?” I asked. “How did—”

  “Marlene’s quick. She asks what building roof he is on. He says, ‘The one where your party is. The one you’re in this very minute. The one that Dr. Thibodeaux is in this very minute. In fact, when I jump, I should pass right by the living room window on my way down.’ The building was six stories tall.”

  “Holy…” I said.

  “The party was on the fourth floor.”

  “Crap,” I said.

  “After a couple more minutes trying to get any connection with the guy, Marlene hands me a note explaining what’s going on. My first reaction is I think he’s bluffing—he’s manipulative and self-destructive, but I never saw him as suicidal. Not intentionally, anyway. But just to be safe I borrow a phone and call 911 to report a possible jumper. Marlene scribbles me another note telling me she’s sure she can handle him.

  “The rescue truck shows up a few minutes later with siren and lights. Couple of cop cars, too. By then, the whole psychiatry department—all the attendings, all the other residents, everybody’s dates and significant others—knows exactly what’s coming down on the roof. Half the party is at the window watching, wondering what’s going to happen. One of the other residents is actually joking about where my patient will land.”

  “Hostile,” I said. “Your patient, and your colleague.”

  Tharon shrugged. “Actually, ‘hostile’ was just beginning. Hostile was a few minutes later when he did exactly what he was threatening to do. He jumped. True to his word, he did indeed pass right in front of the living room window. For me, it was a blur. He was there; he was gone. He landed on top of a car. He died on impact ten feet from the rescue truck.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can’t imagine.”

  “Old wound, old story,” he said. “Before we had coffee today I thought that what Nicole did to you was something similar. Killing herself so close to your house. Suicide as weapon. Hostility. Humiliation. Anyway, I thought I might be able to cushion the blow a little bit by giving you some of her history.”

  “Do you still think that? That Nicole’s death is the same kind of thing your guy did to you?”

  He shook his head. “Maybe not.”

  “It’s not the same, is it?” I said. “I’m not convinced that what Nicole did was part of a crazy transference. I don’t think it was even a medication failure. I may have made some diagnostic mistakes, but she wasn’t a character disorder out of control. And she wasn’t that depressed.”

  Tharon shrugged. “From a distance that’s what I thought it was. But if Michael M.’s involved—and especially if his friend is—you may have a whole different problem on your hands.”

  I thanked him. We shook hands. We exchanged business cards. He left.

  THIRTY-SIX

  KIRSTEN SAT back and retrieved her wine from the hibachi.

  I could taste her on my lips.

  “God,” she exclaimed. “What a relief that was. I didn’t realize how badly I needed to say that.” She looked at my bewildered face. “Oh…I didn’t say it to put you on the spot. I said it for me.” She spread both hands on her chest. Her face broke into a wide smile. “Now maybe I can let it go. We can both let it go. Pretend I didn’t say it.”

  It had been a secret.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. I
had felt transferential breezes of affection blowing from her during the brief interval she was my patient. That wasn’t unusual. But the admission she’d just made did not feel like an unresolved transference from Kirsten’s therapy.

  It did not.

  “Men are dense.” She laughed. The trill was a lovely note that hung in the air. “Dear God, I feel better,” she said. “Oh…but I bet you don’t. I’m sorry.”

  “You bet right.”

  “Will you tell me about it?” she asked. It was her turn to change the subject. “What happened back then?”

  She was inviting me to spill my secret as she had spilled hers. I recited the familiar relationship equation in my head: disclosure plus vulnerability equals intimacy.

  Did I want that? Could I handle that? I wouldn’t go near the first question, but knew the answer to the second. I could not handle it. I shook my head. My therapist rationalization machinery kicked in—It’s unresolved transference she’s feeling. That’s all it is. She didn’t really love me. Doesn’t. She loved what I represented.

  “I’d be honored,” she said. “If you would tell me.”

  “I don’t think I can, Kirsten.”

  Maybe she loved me. Maybe she still does. God.

  “Did you do something…terrible?” she asked.

  Yes. “I don’t think I’m capable of making that judgment.”

  “Was it so bad the last time you talked about it?”

  Bad? Adrienne held me in her arms for about a minute after I told her. Then she said, “Pretty good secret, meshuggah. Top ten. Better than Peter’s fire story. And definitely better than him shagging the nanny.”

  Telling Adrienne had been fine. In life she was the exception. Not the rule.

  “I think you might have to tell me,” Kirsten said.

  Was that the lawyer talking? Or the woman who had loved me?

  “How old were you?” she asked.

  “Young.”

  “How young?”

  “How old is Amy?” I asked.

  “Dear Jesus,” she said.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ALTHOUGH I’D intended to tell Kirsten about my meeting with Tharon Thibodeaux, she and I never got around to talking about it in detail. That afternoon visit at her West Boulder cottage proved to be about other things.

  All she heard about Kaladi were the headlines.

  I returned home from my visit to her house just before dusk. Lauren had spent most of the day working while Grace had been off with friends. When I walked in the door Lauren asked me where I’d been. I told her I’d been meeting with my lawyers about Nicole Cruz.

  “Go well?” she asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  That ended the conversation.

  As Lauren was getting ready for bed I asked, “You still thinking Bimini is a good idea?”

  “I am,” she said. “I think we’ll go. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to Grace.”

  Her back was turned when she spoke. I was grateful she couldn’t see me attempt to process her words. I continued to feel paralyzed by her plans. That my vote on the matter had been rendered superfluous no longer surprised me.

  Lauren climbed onto the bed and flicked off the lights.

  I said, “Good night.”

  In the dark she said, “Are you seeing someone? Another woman?”

  I moved toward the bed. “Lauren, what are—”

  “No,” she said. “Just answer me. I don’t want a speech. I don’t want a thousand questions. Just tell me, dammit. You’re so different lately, the last few months. So distant. So…just tell me. Are you having an affair?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then good night,” she said.

  “Can we talk about this?” I asked.

  “I’m too tired,” she said. “Please.”

  I stood in the dark for a few seconds before I accepted the reality that she didn’t want me there. Emily followed me out to the living room. I finished what was left of the vodka. I knew before I started drinking it that the couple of slogs in the bottle weren’t going to be sufficient.

  The dog snoozed. I remembered seeing a big bank of parking lot lights near the Foothills Parkway south of Arapahoe flick off right on schedule at two-fifteen. I had been thinking about Michael McClelland conducting an orchestra that was playing my requiem march. Sometime after that, I found sleep.

  The next morning came quickly. I was up and out of the house to see an early patient before Lauren and Grace were out of bed.

  “I’d like to think I can leave you alone for a weekend without the world falling apart,” Cozy said to me a few minutes before noon. From Cozy, that constituted a greeting.

  He was back from San Diego.

  I had seen only two patients that morning. One other had canceled. Another was a no-show. The inevitable attrition to my caseload as a result of my public connection to a patient’s suicide had begun. I expected that my patient roster would be diminished by half in another week. If the controversy didn’t resolve soon, and my name continued to be plastered ignominiously on the inside pages of the local paper, the remaining half would be diminished by half within the next fortnight.

  I’d used the extra time from the last cancellation of the morning to stroll east on Pearl to get something to eat before my meeting with Cozy. I stopped at Allison for a pick-me-up shot of espresso while I weighed my options. Sal’s or Snarf’s? Snarf’s or Sal’s? Snarf’s won. As I absorbed Cozy’s quasi-insulting overture I still felt the warm buzz from my sandwich. I suspected it would be the most enduring pleasure of my day.

  The tone of Cozy’s comments wasn’t only an awkward jab at humor, it was also that of a father expressing his disappointment to a teenager who had demolished the trust his parents had placed in him while they were out of town. Most days I would have parried with some move in the same key. Or I would have allowed Cozy his interpersonal imperialism, knowing that in the near future he would be using the honed skill not at my expense, but in my defense.

  Not that day. I wasn’t even looking at him when I said, “Stop, Cozy. Save it for somebody else. I’m not in the mood.” I looked at my watch. “I’m going to work all day to make enough money to pay for half of this little chat. I have thirty-five minutes until my next appointment. Let’s get something done before I have to leave.”

  Cozy liked to sit behind his big desk so clients were forced to take him in as part of the grandeur of the scenery. The wall of windows behind him on the top floor of the Colorado Building in downtown Boulder had a billion-dollar bird’s-eye view of historic Boulder, the foothills, the Flatirons, and a wide-angle slice of the Rocky Mountains, including a hundred-mile chunk of the Continental Divide.

  As gorgeous as the view was—and it was world-class—that’s how ugly a stain the building where Cozy worked left on the Boulder downtown landscape. If architects could be shot for malpractice, the one who designed the monstrosity would have long before taken a bullet into his or her soul. The Colorado Building had been erected as though someone with unrefined modernist sensibilities had determined that a late-nineteenth-century Colorado Victorian frontier town needed nothing more than it needed a horrendously out-of-scale, eighty-foot-tall, red brick and reflective glass cereal box to cleave the very soul of downtown into two roughly equal halves. When I got worked up about it, something I did just about every time I was confronted by the thing, I tried to remind myself that the architect shared the responsibility for the travesty with myriad owners, developers, and city planners. Most days the reminder failed to modulate my criticism, or diminish the fact that I wanted the architect’s throat.

  “Don’t you feel…unclean working in this building, Cozy? It’s the architectural equivalent of driving a Hummer.”

  He manufactured a smile. He glanced out the window. He said, “No.”

  From our present perch it was hard to argue with him. Despite its lack of aesthetic virtue—with its most recen
t fenestration the building looked like a gingham glass gate hung between two brick walls—the views to the west from its upper floors were so stunning that it was easy to forget that I was standing inside a monument to architectural pornography.

  “You wanted to move on. Anything else you would like to criticize first?” he asked. I shook my head. “Okay, Alan. The dead…person…hanging in your neighbor’s barn was your patient? I have that right?”

  I thought I was ready to follow him, but I wasn’t. “Ever go to Snarf’s, Cozy? Best thing to happen to that end of Pearl since Don’s.”

  “What,” he asked, “is Snarf’s?”

  Snarf’s wasn’t Cozy’s kind of place. “It’s a dive of a sandwich shop at 21st and Pearl. The old A&W? You really should try it, but promise me you’ll be nice to the girls at the counter.” I was about to add a caution that the girls at the counter might not always be nice to him until I noted that he was staring at me as though he had just realized I was mentally challenged. I pressed on, unfazed. “What about Salvaggio’s, Cozy? You go there, right? Hell, there’s one at the damn corner. The capicolla? Come on. Tell me you do.”

  “Your dead patient, Alan? If I may divert your attention from…cold cuts.”

  I was ready to follow him. “You can call her Nicole. You can call her a woman. You can call me a fuckup. None of it’s germane to what happened on Saturday.”

  He sighed. He’d been hoping for a little less attitude. No longer expecting it, but still, hoping. After muttering, “But Snarf’s is?” under his breath, he said, “You didn’t know she was suicidal?”

  “She wasn’t.”

  “O-kay. We’ll just set aside the”—he spread the fingers of both hands, and palms up, seemed to be trying to capture something as it floated past him—“fact…that the evidence seems to indicate that she hung herself a few yards from the front door of your home. Some might consider that prima facie evidence that she was suicidal, at least…momentarily. But why quibble? My next question: You didn’t know she was depressed?”

  I clenched my jaw tightly enough that I could feel the enamel surface of my teeth grinding and could hear the squeal from the friction. “You’re not asking the right questions, Cozy. If you don’t ask me the right questions, you’re playing into their hands.”