Crack-Up (15 page)

“But Sarah,” I said, “don’t you see what this means?”

“Only too clearly.”

“We know it’s not the case that my pills stopped working, like Doctor Shields says might happen one day.
 
Because there wasn’t a trace of Risperdal in my system when they brought me in here.
 
Either I stopped taking my pills voluntarily—which flatly contradicts my own memory, and my own history—Flatly!—or I’ve been taking dummy pills!
 
Placebos!
 
Whatever you call them!”

“Dummy pills?” Sarah said.
 
“That looked just like your real pills, I suppose?”

“Yes!” I said.
 
“I think I’ve been set up!”

“But Argus, who on Earth—”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, but I do know we have a state-of-the-art security system protecting our home, which means the new housekeeper is our prime suspect.
 
She’d have the easiest opportunity of anyone to switch my real pills for the dummies.”

“What about Ellie?” Sarah said, smirking.
 
“Or Duke?
 
You know, you really can’t trust those Irish setters.”

“This is no laughing matter!”

“Relax, Argus,” Sarah said.
 
“You’re going to be okay.
 
Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Listen to me, Sarah!
 
Please!
 
You’ve got to listen to me!”

“I’m listening.”

“But you’re convinced I’m still paranoid!”

She nodded, smiling sweetly.

“Stupid little shit stain."
 
It was Darth whispering in my ear suddenly.
 
“Tell her just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“What?” Sarah said.

“N-n-nothing, never mind.”
 
At least Darth’s voice was growing weak and infrequent.

“How’s he doing?”
 
The question for my wife came from Keisha Fallon as she sat down at our table.
 
“I won’t bother to ask the man himself.”
 
Her sneering glance stabbed at my heart.

“Oh, Keisha!” I burst up out of my seat to hug her, but she put a traffic cop-type hand in my face, freezing me in a hunched, mid tackle position.

“No more touchy-feely from you, mister.”

“I’m sorry.
 
So sorry.
 
I—”

“Oh, Keisha!” Sarah said, rising, wrapping her arms around the other woman without meeting resistance.
 
“They told me what he did.
 
I’m so sorry.
 
So, so sorry.”
 
For a moment, the two women sneered at me together.
 
I dropped back down in my seat.

“He’s better now,” Sarah said, patting Keisha’s shoulder.

“He better be,” Keisha said, throwing me her coldest stare.

Sarah complimented Keisha on her outfit—embroidered blue jeans with a hot pink top that Sarah was correct in saying did go well with Keisha’s beautiful bronze skin.

“Why weren’t you at the funeral?” I asked my employee.

“Rebecca Helms fired us yesterday.”
 
Oops.
 
Ex-employee.

“Oh, Keisha!” Sarah said.
 
More hugging and patting and squeezing ensued, myself once more excluded.
 
“You poor thing!”

“Poor is right!” Keisha said.
 
“No job now, but I’ve still got all my bills.
 
House payment, car payment, food and gas, water and electricity.
 
And no man to help out.”

She turned teary-eyed.
 
Sarah too, in sympathy.
 
My wife turned to me.
 
“Argus you have to do something.”

“Oh!” Keisha said, sniffles mixing now with more sneers in my direction.
 
“Wish I’d never left the Service.
 
‘Big future,’ the man said.
 
‘Big money.’ Oh!”

“Argus,” Sarah said, “you have to find a place for Keisha.
 
Of all people.”

“If we have any accounts left,” I told her and turned to Keisha.
 
“What about Helms Technology?”

With a haughty head tilt and downcast eyes, Keisha said, “We still have the account.
 
For now.”

“Let me make some calls, and I’ll see if I can find you a place out there.
 
For now.”

“Thank you.”
 
Big sniffle.
 
“And by the way, we found their missing man for them, that Jeremy Crane . . .”

Keisha’s anger at me dissipated as she related her story.
 
Two nights before, the
North Carolina
state police had discovered Jeremy Crane’s black Ferrari Maranello, abandoned in a restaurant parking lot in
Kitty Hawk
.
 
They’d located him shortly after dawn the next morning, about five miles away, wandering an otherwise deserted beach on a slender peninsula no wider than a freeway.

“He was dehydrated,” Keisha continued, “disoriented, and wearing nothing but his pale ass birthday suit.
 
Not only that, but—get this—he'd shaven his head bald, he’d shaven off all his body hair, and he'd applied a shiny coat of silver metallic paint to his skin.
 
Every pore, head to toe.
 
Doctor says he might’ve asphyxiated himself if the beach sand hadn’t ground away the paint on the soles of his feet.”

Keisha produced a small photograph and held it up for my inspection.
 
It was a digital copy of Jeremy’s booking photo.
 
In it, he was still painted.
 
His bald, shimmery silver cranium was bulldog-like.
 
His rapt eyes glistened.
 
He saw terror.

I snorted at the image.
 
“So that’s Doctor Jeremy Crane.
 
What’s he charged with?”

“Just indecent exposure.”

“What the hell was he doing like that?”

“Don’t know yet,” Keisha said.
 
“He didn’t talk to the cops, they terrified him.
 
He shit in the backseat of their cruiser.”

“Has he been evaluated?”

“There’s a preliminary diagnosis, but it’s confidential.
 
Privacy issue, or something.”

I didn’t really need to hear the diagnosis after hearing of Jeremy Crane’s strange adventures.
 
I was now certain I hadn’t imagined that bottle of anti-psychotic medication in the man’s bathroom cupboard.
 
But I was still too unwell, as well as too obsessed by now with my own enormous personal and professional problems, to care much about yet another paranoid schizophrenic slipping out of orbit around John Helms.
 
It would be some time before I grasped the significance.

Chapter 15

“Diabolically clever,” Detective Mona Strecker said to me as soon as I’d finished telling her my dummy pill theory.
 
“Like something you see in the movies, or read in some shitty novel.”

She was the lead Homicide investigator on the John Helms murder case.
 
She’d come to my seclusion room—along with her partner, Gary Fellows—at my own insistence.
 
She hadn’t bothered to Mirandize me due to my patient status in the psychiatric ward.
 
Anything I had to say could easily be rendered inadmissible at my murder trial.

“Someone deliberately drove me insane,” I said, seated on the end of my bed in my jammies, gazing up at her as she stood by the steel door.
 
“Who, or why, I have no idea.
 
But I suspect this unknown enemy of mine succeeded beyond all expectations.
 
Because there wasn’t any way to predict that I’d become obsessed with John Helms the way I did and . . . and murder him.”

Her eyes widened with true interest for a change.
 
“Now just how did that obsession begin, Mister Ward?”

“I suppose the same way a hard day can inform your dreams later that night, Detective.
 
As my psychosis grew, an attempt was made on John’s life by a psychologically disturbed restaurant caterer.
 
Thoughts of John Helms and assassination attempts got all scrambled up in my own sickening mind, until I’d settled on the notion that John wanted to kill me, and that I might have to do him first, in self-defense.
 
Now, about my dummy pill theory, I want you to investigate.
 
Prove I’m right.”

“Are you sure you’re right, sir?”
 
Her syrupy voice whispered of the deep South.
 
Her blazer shouted,
Big breasts
!

“Don’t believe me then,” I said.
 
“Check the pills for yourself.
 
Run a lab test on them.
 
And run a background check on my prime suspect, the housemaid.
 
I’m not saying it’s definitely her.
 
It could be that someone broke into our townhouse when we were away.
 
We have a summer place near
Annapolis
we go to on weekends this time of year.
 
So check for signs of forced entry.
 
Tool marks around the windows or doors, or—”

“We know what signs to look for,” she said.

The first time that we’d met—according to her later testimony, not my own recollection—had been at the Helms compound, shortly after John’s murder, while I was sitting handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser wearing a bloody white dress shirt and taupe trousers I’d stained with my urine, crotch to knees, after being stun-gunned into submission.

“What’s the maid’s name?”
 
Gary Fellows was the junior partner by as much as a decade—age thirty-two or so.
 
He had fair skin, a reddish crew cut, and so many thick cords in his neck you could almost believe he'd been decapitated once and had taken precautions to prevent it from happening again.

“Dana," I said.
 
"Or Daphne.
 
I’m not sure.
 
Ask my wife.”

Detective Strecker stepped closer, hovering over me with a rigid stare.
 
My hands clasped together instinctively over my fly hole.
 
Her facial complexion was like that of so many women I’d met in law enforcement: weathered, lined, and leathery, long ruined by too much stress, too much decompensating with alcohol and coffee and tobacco, too many sudden jolts of adrenaline, and over-exposure to high levels of male testosterone.

“You sure you have a maid, Mister Ward?”

Our little meeting did not end well.
 
I got somewhat indignant at that point, I guess, and even more indignant when Detective Fellows whipped out another stun gun.

The orderlies burst in just about then and made him put it away.
 
The next day I finally passed one of those psychiatric assessments administered by Doctor Woods.
 
My reward seemed more like a punishment.

“ ‘You have the right to remain silent,’ ” said a uniformed officer from the DC Police, reading me my Miranda rights from a tiny yellow card while another officer cuffed me, hands in front.
 
“ ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
 
You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning.
 
If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.’ ”