Denial (4 page)

"I know.  I know.  I need the work.  Believe me.  And I want them to trust me, Paulson.  I really do.  I can't tell you how much I want that."  I paused.  "But it's even more important that my patients be able to trust me.  Even a patient accused of murder."

He frowned and nodded.  "Emma Hancock may not appreciate that," he said.  "But I do."

*            *            *

It was getting dark when I left Levitsky's lab.  I phoned the lockup from the Rover with instructions that Westmoreland be given his dose of Thorazine, even though I knew it wouldn't do much more than sedate him.  He'd end up slurring his confession instead of stating it clearly.  Like it or not, though, letting him down easy for the night was all I could do for him before seeing him again in the morning.

I was out of energy and money, which are very closely linked when you're chasing coke.  I inhaled the last of my supply and started over to my mother's apartment at Heritage Park.  We had made dinner plans before, and I'd left her a message that I was strapped for cash.

Heritage Park is actually a cluster of five-story glass-and-steel buildings on Lynn's pier that was supposed to spark gentrification and save the city.  Instead, the development was itself consumed by urban blight and spit back out as subsidized housing for the elderly, disabled and poor.  My mother qualified on the first count:  She was seventy.  As to her health, despite the ravages of fifteen years of diabetes, she insisted she had been sick not a day in her life.  And she was far from poor; my father's life insurance policy had netted her about half a million dollars.

I leaned to kiss her at the front door.  Her thin, cool lips brushed my cheek.  She retreated a few steps and squinted up at me.  "You look sick."

I have always looked weak or ill to my mother.  As a boy, I trusted her impressions of me, which ultimately made me feel disabled.  No doubt she had the same corrosive effect on my father.  "I feel great," I said.  I walked past her into the living room.  "Eyes bothering you again?"

She stayed at the door and inspected me as I sat down on the couch.  Her eyes narrowed to slits.  Deep crow's feet fanned across her temples.  At five feet two and about a hundred pounds she reminded me of a deeply rooted weed.

"Dr. Fine told me he suggested laser treatment for your retinas."

"He'd like to make a little money, that friend of yours."  She readjusted a strand of pearls that had drifted to one side and captured her little breast, then limped into the kitchen.  The diabetes had destroyed most of the nerves in her left foot.  "Nothing's wrong with my eyes.  I see everything I want to."

I smiled at that truth, remembering her habit of locking herself in the bedroom and blaring television whenever my father flew into one of his rages.  "You got my message?" I yelled to the kitchen.

"No..."

"I left a message on your answering machine."

"Oh?"

I picked up a piece of blown glass twisted to look like candy.  It was just one of the fake things in the room.  The décor — including oversized, never-opened coffee-table books, antique spectacles perched on the side table, a silk flower arrangement on the mantel of the false fireplace — only resembled that of a home.  I felt like I was in a Levitz showroom.  "The message was about my mortgage," I yelled again.

"That?  Oh, yes, I got it."  She brought our plates to the dining room table.  "I hope you still like tuna.  I found a beautiful piece at Star Market."

I have always disliked fish, and I was certain that my mother, if only unconsciously, remembered this.  "Tuna sounds perfect," I said.

"Come.  Sit down."

I sat at the dining room table with her, tried to ignore the odor of fish mixed with her perfume and picked around the tomatoes in my salad (which cause me an allergic skin reaction).

"How's your Kathy?" my mother asked, slicing her fish into a checkerboard.

"Wonderful."

"I never got a thank-you note for the bracelet I sent her for her birthday.  It's been a month."  She stared at me as she chewed one of her fish squares.  "So I wondered maybe something was wrong."

"She's been busy at the hospital."

"Everybody's having babies.  Probably you would have been happier as an obstetrician yourself.  You wouldn’t have to think so much."  She added two heaping sugars to her tea and took a sip.

"If you don't watch your sugar, your foot will get worse."

"My sugar's fine."

I swallowed a forkful of tuna without chewing or breathing.  "Excellent fish," I nodded.  "So what do you think about the mortgage?"

"What mortgage is that?"

"The message I left..."

"Oh, of course.  The loan."

"Right.  The loan.  A few thousand would tide me over.  I'd have it back to you in a month."

"You're not eating.  You don't have an appetite?"

I swallowed another forkful of tuna."

She glanced at the tomatoes pushed to one side of my salad.  "Why it was so important for you to live in Marblehead escapes me.  I have to tell you:  Two thousand a month sounds like you're paying for an address.  Who needs the aggravation?  Extra stress."  She patted her mouth with her napkin.

My mortgage was close to five thousand a month.  "No way out of it now," I said.

"Thank God, Kathy helps out.  You couldn’t live the way you do on what you make."

My mother had never worked.  I smirked, thinking again about the insurance money she'd inherited from my father.  "Those days are gone, huh?"

She stopped chewing.  "Meaning?"

"Meaning you're exactly right.  Kathy and I both have to pitch in."

"So, anyhow, since I hadn't heard from her, I called her today."

"You called Kathy?"

She nodded.  "She told me you're using that cocaine again."

"She's lying."

"Why would she lie?"

"I don't know.  Ask her."

"So I put two and two together:  the loan and the drugs."

Without really intending to, I raked the teeth of my fork against the mahogany beside my plate.

My mother's eyelids fluttered a bit as she watched the fork scratch the high-gloss finish.

"If you don't want to give me the money, just tell me," I said quietly.  "I'll have to find is somewhere else."  Fast.

"Your father and I worked hard for our money."

"It's his life insurance money.  He didn't work for it at all.  He just died."

She reached over and took the fork out of my hand, the dipped her white cloth napkin in water and tried to polish away the scratches I had made.  Her fingers moved very quickly.  Her cheeks flushed.  "He did the best he could while he was alive."  She stopped, laid my fork on my plate and used a dry corner of her napkin to buff the table to a shine.  The scratches were barely visible.  She took a deep breath and ate another fish square.  "I can give you a few hundred dollars, if that would help."

I had the desire to drive my fork deep into the mahogany, but I needed all the money I could get.  "Every little bit helps," I smiled.

"You'll stay for desert, then?"

"Of course."

"I know you love rice pudding."

I detest rice pudding.  "Sounds great," I said.

She seemed to relax.  "Maybe I could manage three hundred."

*            *            *

Later that night, standing on my deck with a tumbler of scotch, the ocean crashing against the sea wall, I felt more and more uneasy.  Kathy had threatened to leave at least a dozen times during the ten months we'd been living together — over my drugs or my women or my gambling — but it was eleven o'clock, and my gut told me she might stay away this time.

I had to admit, if she finally called it quits, it would be partly my fault.  You can't expect a woman to stand by you when she doesn't know you.  I'd tried to tell Kathy how different Lynn had been when I was a boy, when the beach was clean, and the leather factories boomed, and people drove ten miles north from Boston to spend the day shopping on Union Street.  But I hadn't told her how watching the city fade into a gray, hobbled shadow of itself had darkened something in me.  I hadn't told her about seeing my father, who wholesaled leather for the J. L. Hanbury Tanning Company, working more and more, making less and less.  I hadn't told her that the most attention the man had ever paid me were clumsy, drunken beatings that twisted pain and pleasure forever in my mind.

Not that she would have listened for very long.  She had always been quick to dismiss my pain as a lousy excuse for my lifestyle.

I carried my scotch inside and wandered through the hallways, staring into rooms filled with overstuffed couches, worn leather wing chairs, antique wooden chests, oil paintings of the ocean, vases of cut flowers — all of it selected and arranged by Kathy.  She seemed to be gone from the house and everywhere in the house at the same time, which reminded me of something painful I couldn't quite put my finger on.  My throat tightened, but I held back the tears and reminded myself that withdrawing from a woman is no different than kicking a drug; you feel shaky and you want it, but eventually the need passes, and you feel restored.

Mine was run-of-the-mill loneliness anyhow.  A man like Westmoreland was truly cut off, hearing voices no other soul could hear and seeing visions no one else could see.  Some unspeakable horror had driven him into a fortress of terrifying private thoughts, and only an extraordinary therapist would stand a chance of helping him find the door.  Luckily, my only job was to say whether he knew what it meant to confess to murder.

I walked into the master bedroom and lay down on the tall pine four-poster bed.  Kathy had ordered it from Ethan Allen, then outfitted it with white lace pillowcases and a duvet cover of white-on-white-striped, polished cotton she'd found at Pierre Deux on Newbury Street in Boston.  An undertow of despair pulled at me.  I felt utterly alone.

I got up and paged my dealer, but he didn't call me back, probably down the road to the Surf Lounge, but couldn’t find anybody selling.  Then, lying to myself that I'd turn around before I got there, I drove all the way back to Union Street in Lynn and parked in front of the Emerson Hotel, a forty-five-dollar-a-night fleabag.  Hookers from fifteen to fifty paraded about.  Pimps and scam artists lurked around public phones.  Within a minute, a teenager wearing a purple velour sweatsuit and a half-dozen gold rope chains slunk up to my window.  He peered into the car.  "Serious coin for a rig like this," he nodded.

"Fifty-two grand."  I reached between the front seats for the hunting knife I kept there.  the handle had been made from the foot of a deer, and the blade was six inches long.  I kept it out of sight on my lap.

He shuffled around.  "Them's wheels."

My heart raced.  "I'm not here to talk about cars," I said.  I ran my thumb back and forth along the blade.

"I got me a sister in the hotel.  Thirteen years old.  She be just a tight little girl down there, but she be
stacked
.  Forty bucks for anything you want."

"I don't care about your fucking relatives, either."

"She'll go for thirty bucks."

"
Fucking relatives
, get it?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

"Twenty-five, but that's rock bottom."

"For anything?"

"Right on.  She do what you say, or I beat her ass myself."

My breathing quickened.  I held the knife up so he could see it.  "I want to watch her while she cuts your throat."

He danced back a couple steps and grinned nervously.  "Put that away, man, you scarin’ me."

I lowered the knife.  "Do you have anything to sell me besides little girls?"

He looked right and left as he ran through his other products.  "Joint, three bucks.  Junk, ten-a-bag.  Tootie, hundred-a-gram.  Needle, five bucks."

"One-sixty for two grams."

"I'm talkin’ good shit."

I touched the pedal and shot forward.

"Wait up!" he shouted.  He jogged over, but stayed a few feet back from the window.  He reached into his pocket and showed me two little cellophane packets of white powder.

I took eight twenties from my pocket.  "One-sixty."

"You said one-eighty."

I threw open the door.  "You calling me a
liar?
" I yelled.

He backed further away.  "I ain't callin’ you nothin’, man.  One-sixty, like you said."

I held out the money, and he came just close enough for just long enough to make the exchange.

I drove a hundred yards and pulled over.  My whole body felt energized.  I took slow, deep breaths.  When my heart stopped pounding, I snorted a big blast off the blade of my knife.  It was good stuff and it chased Kathy out of my head.

I got back on the Lynnway and followed it away from Marblehead to Route 1, so I could stop at the Lynx Club strip joint.

When I walked in, Sade's ‘Smooth Operator’ was blaring through four-foot speakers.  The air smelled like a mixture of beer, sweat and smoke.  I took a seat at the runway — perverts row, they call it — folded up a dollar bill in half and stood it up like a tent on the countertop in front of me.  The dancer, a pretty redhead with the kind of lithe body I get lost in, sauntered over and squatted in front of me.  She smiled and brushed the dollar onto the floor with her toe.  Then she turned around and bent over so I could look between her legs.  I nodded, for no particular reason, and smiled involuntarily — a boyish reflex which has sickened me when I've seen it in men at bachelor parties.  I folded a five and propped it up.  "Spank yourself," I told the upside-down face between the legs.  She stood up and slapped herself hard three times, then winked at me and brushed my five off the countertop with her foot.  I watched as she danced to each man in turn, performing for a dollar or two.  When I saw her smile and wink at a three-hundred pound drunk in precisely the same way she had smiled and winked at me, I went to the men's room, did a little blast, then went to the bar and ordered a scotch.

Before I had finished my drink, she was at my side in a skimpy satin robe.  I figured the five-dollar bill had bought me a little special attention after all.