Blameless (31 page)

Diana didn’t need to read her notes to remember that he had shown up for that first session wearing a wide orange tie with skeletons dancing all over it—and flying high on cocaine. Ethan had squirmed in his seat, played with the ring on his finger, and sniffled and swallowed a lot. His pupils were dilated, and he excused himself twice to use the bathroom—presumably to take a few snorts. Had she known him better she might have challenged him or brought it up to the group, asking them what it felt like to have their cohesion upset; but she hadn’t been sure he didn’t suffer from allergies—and she had known the group wasn’t ready. Her notes did remind her that, despite the cocaine, he had been “attentive and sweet,” listening to Sandy’s struggles with her father and even offering a few, quite sensible, solutions.

But within a month Ethan’s flimsy veneer of charm had worn through. He was edgy and irritable, snapping at Sandy to grow up and for Bruce to get a life. By Christmas he was swaggering around the room, taunting James and Terri for being “wimpy-assed teetotalers” and bragging that he could drink an entire bottle of Jack Daniels and not feel a thing. And then there had been the fistfight over James’s bomber jacket. She had asked him to leave and he had—for almost two months.

When he returned, all contrite and apologetic, full of resolve to change and willingness to meet all her demands for his reentry into the group, she had allowed him back in. It had been a mistake, but terminating a patient was a ticklish and formidable task, one that Diana had always found extremely difficult. Gail claimed it was because Diana’s heart was too soft—that her patients had survived before they had started seeing her, and that they would survive long after her as well. Diana grimaced, thinking of how long James had survived after she had terminated with him: less than three months.

With James there had just been no choice. He had gotten completely out of hand. Although he had been on a downward slide the entire last year of his life, this past summer had been a disaster—a disaster for which Diana held herself responsible. “I need you to think of me as much as I think of you,” James had begged one July morning after Diana caught him following her to the library. “Otherwise there’s no purpose to my life.” When she told him that his purpose for living had to come from within himself, he had blamed her for his inability to get his life together, declaring that if she were a better doctor he would be better too. Diana had known his words held more than a grain of truth.

So she had tried to be a better doctor: talking to her peer supervisory group, consulting an expert on borderline disorders at Harvard, working out her feelings in her journal. But the damage had been done, and James only got worse. “I’m going to kill myself and it’s up to you to see that I don’t,” he warned, trying to use her feelings for him against her. Where before he had pretended to accidentally bump into her at the store or the library, he now blatantly followed her to class, to the parking lot, to the dry cleaner’s. He hid in her car and harassed Craig’s secretary with phony appointments. He also began stealing her things: the hairbrush she left on a shelf in the office, the coral paperweight her parents had brought her from Greece. When she confronted him about his inappropriate behavior, he crossed his arms and said, “If I’m going nowhere, you’ve only yourself to blame.”

Gail and Craig and her entire peer group argued for termination. “You’re not doing either one of you any good,” Gail told her. “If you really care about him, refer him elsewhere.” Craig was even more adamant—especially after they discovered Diana was pregnant. “I don’t want him around you,” he said. “We don’t know what he’s capable of.”

With much ambivalence and trepidation, Diana told James she couldn’t be his therapist anymore. Rather than the anger she had expected, James’s face crumpled and tears streamed down his cheeks.

“Please,” he had begged. “Don’t turn me away. I’ve nowhere to go without you.”

Although she wanted to take him in her arms and tell him he could stay, Diana remained resolute, explaining what a good doctor Alan Martinson was and how much better off James would be with him. She set up a series of termination sessions, but James never returned. Within the week, he was at Mass General having Seconal pumped from his stomach. Less than three months later, he was dead.

Diana closed her eyes against the pain and forced herself to return to her search for Ethan’s shotgun reference. After about an hour of fruitless reading, she finally found the reference in the notes from a group the following spring: Ethan had talked about how his mother’s boyfriend had taken him duck hunting and taught him to shoot—before the boyfriend killed the mother, that was. Diana shook her head. Nothing that would impress Levine. Anyone could have been taught to use a shotgun. And the truth was, a person didn’t need lessons to know how to blow someone’s head off.

Disappointed, Diana put the file back in the cabinet. She called Mitch and briefly summarized her afternoon; he was very interested in Ethan’s girlfriend’s death, and they made an appointment for the next day. She called Craig and asked him to pick up Chinese food on his way home. Then she pulled out her notes and began reviewing for the next day’s lecture.

When Craig got home they ate in front of the evening news, pressed close together on the couch, open boxes of moo shu chicken and Hunan-spiced shrimp spread on the coffee table in front of them. Diana told him about her visits with Marcel and Ethan’s landlady—omitting her fears of being followed. Craig told her his client in Nashville was concerned about a slip in the construction schedule and that he had to go down there on Wednesday.

“I worry about you here by yourself for three days,” he said, putting down his chopsticks and looking at her seriously.

“I’ll be fine.” Diana loaded more moo shu chicken into the empty pancake on her plate and carefully rolled it into the shape of a fat cigar. “Gail stays home alone all the time when Shep travels.” Diana wasn’t nearly as confident as she sounded, but Craig was having enough trouble at work because of her; if he refused to go to Tennessee—which she knew he would if she seemed the least bit afraid—it could make things extremely difficult for him. “It’s not a big deal,” she added, smiling and taking a bite of the sloppy pancake.

“I’ll be right back,” Craig said, standing up and walking into the hallway. He returned with a large white bag. Slowly he removed the contents: a box of bullets, a Ziploc bag containing some oddly shaped tools, and a black rectangular box that Diana knew contained the gun. “I know you don’t want this in the house,” he said before she could speak, “but it’ll make me feel a lot better if you just let me leave it in my night table drawer.”

Diana put down her moo shu chicken and pressed herself into the couch. “I don’t like this.”

“And you think I do?” Craig asked as he snapped open the box and showed her the gun lying on ridges of foam rubber: It was shiny and small and looked more like a toy than a deadly weapon.

Despite her aversion, Diana reached out and touched it. “I thought it would be a bluish color,” she said.

“I got a license so it’s all legal and official. I signed up for lessons at a firing range somewhere out in Weston. You should take a few too. This thing doesn’t have a safety—once it’s loaded it’s ready to go.”

Diana pulled her hand back as if it had been burned. “I’m not learning how to shoot a gun.”

“Okay, okay,” Craig said, snapping the case shut. “I’ll load it later and put it away—you can forget it’s even here.”

But Diana knew she wouldn’t forget.

The next day Diana decided to walk to her appointment with Mitch. Although it would be dark by the time the meeting was over, her path home from his office crossed some of the brightest and busiest segments of Boston—especially now, as the city was festooned with millions of Christmas lights and what seemed to be almost as many shoppers. She hoped the gaiety would be contagious.

The late afternoon sky was an unforgiving steel-gray as Diana stood in front of Symphony Hall waiting for the light to change. A cold wind was kicking up off the water, and she wrapped her scarf an extra time around her neck. Across the street, the Christian Science Plaza was blazing with lights and bustling with people, as if defying both the weather and the calendar. But neither the lights nor the people could fool Diana. It was cold, it was bleak, and today was the first day of December.

As she walked across the plaza, ignoring the Salvation Army Santas and the street merchants hawking Christmas baubles beneath the columns, she reviewed all she had to tell Mitch, and worried about all he had to tell her. She had detected both an edge of excitement and a tinge of despair in his voice when she had called to set up their meeting. “We’ll go over everything tomorrow,” he had promised. “Tomorrow we’ll sort the germane from the irrelevant.” For some reason, Diana found the idea of sorting the germane from the irrelevant quite ominous.

She was so distracted that she almost tripped over a child turning circles along the side of the reflecting pool. A little boy in a bright purple parka bumped into her, lost his balance, and sat down hard on the concrete. Surprised, he leaned his head backward until his eyes met hers, then began to giggle. His mother ran over to them and scooped the child up in her arms. “Sorry,” she said to Diana, smiling as she nuzzled his neck. “He never watches where he’s going. Do you? Do you?” she demanded in mock seriousness. The little boy continued to giggle. As his mother turned around, he raised a red mittened hand to Diana and waved good-bye.

Diana stopped and watched the small red mitten disappear into the crowd. She continued to wave, somehow uplifted by the encounter, although the child was no longer aware of her. She strode more purposefully toward Mitch’s, focusing on the encouraging things she had to tell him: that Ethan and James had been heard arguing at Ken’s right before James’s murder; that Ethan had most likely been to his apartment within the last couple of weeks; that she had the feeling the bartender knew more than he was telling. And she already knew Mitch considered her discovery about Ethan’s girlfriend’s “suicide” germane.

Not bad for an amateur, she thought, riding the escalator down toward Boylston Street. And as she walked past the towering Prudential Center Christmas tree, she was reminded that the coming of December also brought her that much closer to the birth of her child.

By the time she stepped into Mitch’s office, she was feeling much better, almost optimistic. “So, let’s sort the germane from the irrelevant,” she said cheerfully as she sank into the chair he pulled out for her.

Mitch raised his eyebrows in mild surprise and went around to the other side of his desk. He nodded and pulled a folder from the drawer. “You first.” As before, he took notes and listened carefully, stopping to ask her a question now and then. She told him everything she had discovered and everything she thought about each piece of information. When she finished, he seemed very pleased and declared all of her information germane.

“Kruse never said anything to you about the girlfriend’s suicide?” Mitch asked.

She shook her head. “Patients only tell you what they want—and there’s no way for a therapist to find anything out unless you’re told.”

“But wouldn’t the police call you?” Mitch asked, obviously surprised.

“About what?”

“I don’t know—like if something strange happened involving one of your patients? Or if a patient got arrested?”

Diana smiled; the outlandish assumptions people had about therapists always amused her. “How would the police know that he was one of my patients?”

Mitch nodded. “I’ll have Norman run a check on the girlfriend’s suicide—we just might have something here. And,” he added, pulling a small packet of computer printouts from the file, “I’ve got a few interesting tidbits for you too. Many of them based on the information you got in Norwich.” He smiled at her. “Maybe you’re in the wrong occupation?”

Flushed with optimism and Mitch’s compliments, Diana grinned. “It’s nice to know I have a fall-back career if this one blows up in my face.” Her grin disappeared as she listened to her own words.

“Here’s my good news,” he said quickly. “Jill Hutchins may have an alibi, but she’s looking more and more suspicious with every additional piece of information we discover about her.”

“She is?”

He flipped through the printouts. “According to this preliminary credit check, the woman is deeply in debt, and her credit rating is abysmal.” He tapped the desk with his pen. “But there’s something else here …”

“Something else?”

He locked his fingers behind his head and looked at the ceiling. “It’s subtle, but her pattern of debt seems to indicate a kind of desperation,” he said. “At various times, on a single day, she’s pulled cash from every credit card. All the cash she could get.” He turned and looked at Diana. “That and her criminal record.”

“Jill has a criminal record?” Diana leaned closer to Mitch. “Something we can use?”

He held up his hands. “Don’t get too excited. We don’t know if it’s germane or irrelevant yet.” He smiled at her, then continued, “But it appears that Ms. Hutchins was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon out in Des Moines a few years back. And she also had a run-in with the police in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early eighties. Grand theft auto.”

“Molly Arell’s perfect little angel …”

“The aunt probably never knew anything about it. The Nebraska thing happened a long time ago—and a long way from home.” He checked his pages once more. “And the Des Moines charge was dropped rather abruptly.”

“Whom did she assault?” Diana asked, beginning to enjoy herself. “With what deadly weapon?”

“Her husband, with a knife, in the kitchen,” he said, his voice serious, but his eyes laughing.

Diana flashed on Jill holding a poker to her stomach the afternoon she had gone in search of her journal. She saw herself on her knees, looking into Jill’s feverish eyes. Perhaps this wasn’t so much fun after all.

“This isn’t a parlor game,” Mitch said, as if reading her mind. “We’ve got to watch this woman. I think we should follow up on why the Des Moines charges got dropped.”