Lowboy (11 page)

“You okay, Mrs. Heller?”

For some reason his civility shocked her. She remembered him now: he’d once given Will a toffee that he’d spit onto the floor.

“Yes, Stavros,” she said. “Thank you. I’m all right.”

“Who is this gentleman?”

“Police,” said Lateef. She waited for him to flash his badge but he did nothing. He knows what I’ll do if he lets go of me, she thought.

“It’s fine, Stavros,” she said finally. “I promise.” But the doorman had already disappeared.

“There’s a man who still has respect for the law,” said Lateef. He grinned at her and let go of her arm.

For some reason she decided to behave. “You see what Kopeck’s like,” she whispered. “You saw for yourself what a son of a—”

“I don’t see that at all, Miss Heller. I see a doctor who treated your son for more than a year, apparently with some success, and who’s taken time out of his busy day to help us.” He shook his head tiredly. “I don’t know what happened between the two of you—”

“Nothing happened,” she said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He promised to cure my son and nothing happened.”

“I doubt he said any such thing.” Lateef was standing between her and Kopeck’s door, both his hands slightly raised, as if to keep her from storming back in. “Therapists don’t make those kinds of promises.”

“That’s all they
ever
do,” she said, bracing herself against the wall. Her anger had made her lightheaded. “That’s all they ever do. Then nothing happens.”

“What I can’t figure out is why he’s so angry at you,” Lateef said thoughtfully. “What did you do to him, Miss Heller?”

“He was in love with Will,” she heard herself answer. Her head was still spinning. “Everyone was. But I broke up their little love affair.”

“You sound like a jealous husband.”

“Fuck you, Detective.”

He shook his head at her in plainfaced incredulity. “Miss Heller, you might just be the most foulmouthed complainant I’ve ever let into my Nissan. Does everybody talk like you in Denmark?”

She blinked at him. “In Austria, you mean.”

“Get your story straight, Miss Heller.”

By the time she could think of an appropriate reply he’d darted back into the office like a spider, pulling the door shut behind him with a wink. Make a note of that, Yda, she said to herself. One of his better tricks. She took a small step forward and rested her head against Kopeck’s door, not at all embarrassed by what she’d done. At the moment she felt nothing but relief. She tested the doorhandle with her left hand, turning it to see if it was locked, but she made no attempt to open it. “I’m fine out here,” she murmured, nodding to
herself the way certain people do in public: the lonely and the aged and the mentally ill. The doorman was back in his prescribed position, running a comb carefully through his immaculate hair, looking everywhere in the lobby but at her. The Rothko glimmered sorrowfully in its warped Plexiglas frame. Kopeck will talk, she thought, bobbing her head. He’ll have to. He’ll talk just to prove me wrong.

The stillness of the lobby made her thoughts incline toward Will. Nothing about the place had changed: everything was rapt, expectant, suspended in the sepiacolored air. It seemed preposterous without Will’s presence, stripped of its only context, an empty filmset with the cameras running. The relief she’d felt was already subsiding. She tried to steer her mind clear of Will but it refused. For a moment she stood at a remove from herself, saw the barrenness of a life lived to one end alone, the bitterness and futility of such a life; but the feeling soon passed. You don’t live only for him, she thought. Not anymore. And he doesn’t live for you at all.

A sentence from Will’s letter came to her unbidden, in Will’s dull deliberate voice:
Anything else you could help me with, Violet, but
not with this
.

Then all at once she knew where he was going.

Kopeck’s door opened in that same instant, while she was still in the first flush of her discovery, as though the force of her idea had thrown it open. Lateef stepped out and shut the door behind him. Apparently the conference was at an end.

“He’ll go to her,” she said. “He’ll go to Emily.”

Lateef walked right past her. “To be honest with you, Miss Heller, I’d been hoping not to get the girl involved.”

“Why the hell not? If he’s going—”

“It’s policy.” He said the word with a complacency that chilled her. “We try not to cause alarm if we don’t have to.”

She put out a hand and caught him by the sleeve. “Please listen to me, Detective. I’m trying to tell you that I’m absolutely sure—”

“We’ll find the girl, Miss Heller,” he said evenly. He was making
a great show of patience. “You and our friend Ulysses happen to agree.”

When they reached the lobby doors he held them open for her. “What else did Kopeck tell you?” she said as offhandedly as she could. “Plenty about me, I bet.”

“I didn’t ask him about you, Miss Heller. Should I have?”

“He thinks I’m bad for my son. That I should keep away from him.”

Lateef shrugged his shoulders as if that were a given. He offered no more than that, and she lacked the courage or the recklessness to press him. “What happens next?” she said, if only to say something.

“What school does Emily go to?”

“Crowley Academy.” She thought for a moment. “But she’s a senior now.”

“Junior, senior, what difference does it make? If he shows up there—”

“It makes a difference, Detective. The seniors get to leave the school for lunch.”

They were outside The Phaeton now, back in the breathable air, strolling almost blithely to the curb. Lateef kept half a step ahead of her.

“You agree with me, don’t you?” she said, drawing even with him. “You see why he’ll go to Crowley?”

“I don’t see anything, Miss Heller.” He was patting down his pockets for the keys. “But since Kopeck seems to think—”

“Good old Kopeck.” She could afford to be magnanimous again, knowing what she knew. “I figured you’d get him to spill.”

Lateef raised his eyebrows at her. “Spill?” he said vaguely.

“I’ve got cable, Detective. I know how you people talk.”

“Get in the car, Miss Heller.”

Neither of them spoke until they’d crossed Fourteenth Street and were coming up on Crowley. Things were happening so quickly. She sat slumped in her seat with her eyes not quite closed, counting the streets as they passed, trying to brace herself for seeing Will. It was impossible to imagine him on some arbitrary corner: she couldn’t
conceive of what he might be doing. Emily might be with him, she reminded herself, and that somehow made it easier to picture. To her surprise it even reassured her. Emily was a clearheaded girl, able to look after herself, and she’d always had the upper hand with Will. She’d underestimated his illness, of course, but the accident and the trial had ended that. No more romanticizing. If Will did find her she’d most likely call the police, or at the very least report him to Crowley. She would handle it quite well unless she panicked. Will was off his meds now, which couldn’t help but give her the advantage, knowing everything she knew. Why hadn’t they gone to her at once?

Emily will mind him, Violet said to herself. She’ll take his hand and talk to him and keep him calm.

Lateef glanced at her from time to time in that odd way he had, studying her as if to confirm some theory, but she had too much on her mind to pay attention. Part of her was still in The Phaeton’s dark expectant lobby and the rest of her was on the street with Will. It was a good thing to know what was going to happen next. It made you feel that randomness was not the universal law: as if a thing you’d been taught to think of as hollow were suddenly shown to have substance. There was comfort in that belief, if you were willing to put reasonable doubt aside. She wondered whether Will took comfort there.

“Kopeck did tell me some things about you,” Lateef said after a while.

The mention of Kopeck annoyed her, coming when it did, but she gave him a cordial smile. “What sort of things did the good doctor say? Am I needy, yet distant? Is my affect inconsistent? Did I keep my son from masturbating freely?”

“Nothing like that.”

He was keeping his eyes on the road in a way that immediately made her think the worst. “It’s true, Detective,” she said brightly, keeping her expression fixed. “A joint now and then. But never when I was pregnant with him, I swear.”

His awkward laugh put her further on her guard. When he spoke again his voice was oddly smooth. “Why did you take your son out of Kopeck’s care?”

“I told you why. He’s a fat, self-satisfied, condescending—”

“Violet.”

The sound of that name from his mouth brought her up short, but it was the look on his face that disconcerted her: an expression of almost fatherly concern. It was not a look she’d have imagined him capable of.

“I took Will away from Kopeck because he wasn’t getting better. Kopeck admitted that much himself.” She stared down at her loose mannish jeans, running her eyes along the wrinkles and the seams. “What I hadn’t considered, of course, was that he might get worse.”

“Worse in what way?”

“Violent,” she said. A motorcycle roared past as she said it.

“What’s that?”

“That he’d become violent.”

“I see.”

“He’d never attacked anyone before Emily. Not once. It’s true that he was scared by things, more frightened every day, and I don’t need a psychiatrist to know what that can lead to. But Will hadn’t been in a single fight in fourteen years. He’d never lost his temper, never raised his voice, never kicked or cursed or threw a punch. Not even—” A second motorcycle passed, closer and louder than the first, and she was glad of the reprieve.

“I’m sorry, Miss Heller. Could you say that again?”

“Not even when he had a reason to.”

The motorcycles came together in front of the car and the riders leaned casually toward each other. Both of them were women but it took her a moment to see it. They had the bodies of middle-aged men, slump-shouldered and sagging at the middle, the shape all bikers’ bodies tended toward. Like old avocados, she thought. By the time Lateef asked his next question she felt better.

“What kind of reason could your son have had?”

The same one that I had, she thought.

“Miss Heller?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Look at me for a second, Miss Heller.”

She turned and met his look. That was easy enough.

“I asked you what reasons your son might have had—”

“Will was making no progress in Kopeck’s care, so I stopped taking him. There’s no mystery there. But it wasn’t Kopeck’s fault. Not really.”

“Why not?”

“Because Kopeck was only with him for an hour a day.”

Lateef hesitated. “And the rest of the day he was—”

“Most of the time he was with me. Some of the time he was with Emily.” She brought her hands together in her lap. “Some of the time he was down in Richard’s basement.”

They were rolling slowly now, advancing at a creep along a line of cars whose bumpers weren’t quite touching. On the far side of the cars laughing girls promenaded. Some dragged their bookbags on the ground behind them, some balanced them on their heads, some held them to their chests like nursing infants. Half a block west stood the blunt sandstone ramparts of Crowley.

“I’m going to pull over here—are you listening to me, Miss Heller?—and I want you to stop watching the goddamned street and pay attention. If there’s anything significant about your son’s personal history that you haven’t told me, any detail at all, it is absolutely mandatory that you tell me now. You have no choice in this. Do you understand?”

“There he is,” she said calmly, looking past Lateef’s shoulder.

Even as Lateef spun in his seat Will was disappearing around the corner, moving in a way she didn’t recognize, his pale hair sticking out behind his ears. She hadn’t seen his face yet, but that didn’t matter: she’d have known him by the back of his neck alone. He was wearing the navy blue corduroys she’d sent him at Christmas and a shirt that looked meant for a boy of ten. Where the hell did he get
that thing? she thought. She felt pity for him then, as if he were a stranger, and at the same time a sharp spasm of jealousy at the idea of anyone else picking out his clothes. He’s not dressed for this weather, she thought helplessly. He’s dressed for July. She glanced toward Lateef, not sure what to do next, and watched him rifling through the glove compartment. He seems confused, she thought. Maybe he didn’t hear me. But of course he wasn’t confused at all.

“Will doesn’t carry a pistol, Detective. I don’t see why you need yours.”

He looked at her kindly. “I’m getting my badge out, Miss Heller. Just to make this official.” Then she saw that the pistol was already in his coat pocket.

By the time he spoke again they were out of the car and running, pushing past the schoolgirls the way police do on television, ignoring their cries with studied equanimity. She’d seen Will exactly the way she’d imagined seeing him: from the window of a moving car, a stone’s throw from the Crowley steps, Lateef gruff and oblivious beside her. But the correspondence was somehow too complete. It would have calmed her a great deal, helped her to trust in what was happening, if there’d been no trace of Will around the corner: her faith in the world’s indifference would have been reaffirmed. Instead he was less than a block away, holding hands with a girl she didn’t recognize, tipping his head back to look at the sky.

“That’s him?” Lateef said, reaching a hand out to stop her. “That’s your son?”

What’s he trying to hold me back from? Violet wondered.

“Of course it’s my son. Don’t you think that I—”

“Is the girl Emily Wallace?”

“She must be. But she looks different somehow. I’m not completely sure—”

“All right, Miss Heller.” His grip on her forearm tightened. “I want you to stay right here and let me do the rest. If he recognizes you he might start running. Do you understand?”

“We’re wasting time,” she murmured.

“Sit down here on this stoop and wait for me. Can you do that?”

“Just go, Detective,” she said, leaning away from him. “Please go now.” For some reason his hand was still locked tightly around her wrist. They stood there like lovers for a measureless span of time, posed together absurdly, while the children drifted slowly up the street. It made no sense at all. She’d just asked herself whether Lateef might be punishing her when Will leaned slightly farther back and saw them.