Mind Games (31 page)

I’ll start with you, Dr. Epstein, in an effort to unravel my confusion. A change has come over you, a softness in your eyes, where before was the steely intensity of the analyst. You’re not working me as hard. Today, you were unusually quiet, in your consulting room and at the Pondicherry. What’s with this
constant distant smile? Maybe you’re just pleased with yourself: the patient is on his feet. They said he’d never walk again.

I am going to assume (against contrary, troubling evidence) that you’re merely displaying the sweet sadness of the therapist whose work is almost done. I’ve felt it many times – a closeness develops, a kind of love, but it must end: the patient must leave, must hope his new coping skills will help him tough it out alone.

Nataraja approved of you, though typically he mistook the nature of our relationship. (“You been horizontal with her yet?”) He has an avid interest in sex, and fondly recalls those halcyon days when many women of his New Age tribe sought enlightenment in his bed.

After you dropped me off, I carried your gentle kiss to bed with me, and you featured in a dream …

I’m going off track. Okay, I’ll start with Monday evening – that was when Dotty Chung summoned me to the Sapphire Lounge, when I met the gracious Lolita L’Amour, when the web tightened on Grundy and Lyall.

I was on a training run, racing over the Second Narrows bridge, when Dotty lit up my cellphone. She’d been prospecting the gay bars recommended by James’s search, and had just struck gold. Lolita L’Amour, a bartender, recognized José Pierrera from a photograph, remembered serving him – and “two lovely young things he was with” – several weeks ago.

I sped to the Sapphire Lounge, which is in a small hotel on Hastings Street, in Burnaby, not more than half an hour’s walk from Pierrera’s home. The decor is vaguely Levantine, with faded murals of ocean and olive groves, and many of its clientele could be described as working-class transvestite. Thirty people would pack it, but on this night there were only a dozen present.

Dotty had also summoned Churko, and he was already there, on a bar stool looking massively uncomfortable. Dotty was beside him, chatting to the person I took to be Lolita. The several customers in drag looked dowdy in comparison to
Madame L’Amour: striking in a slinky green gown and hot lip-stick. Her given name is Lawrence Green; one can’t easily tell her age – maybe early forties.

Churko greeted me with a grunt, glancing past me at a table where a couple was holding hands. He then watched with open distaste as Lolita offered her hand, and I kissed it.

“My dear, you have to be utterly the
last
gentleman standing,” she said.

“Let me go back over this,” Churko said. “You remember this José Pierrera guy?”

“I never knew the poor thing’s name. She spoke about two words of English. I think she’d been here a few times, but one really doesn’t
notice
José. The word
nondescript
comes to mind.”

“How come you never called in? We ran his picture on the fucking
TV
.”

“I don’t do
TV
, darling.”

“You don’t do newspapers either?”

“Too depressing. This is all so maudlin. I hope I’m not going to be dragged into some horrendous courtroom situation.”

“If we find you’ve been withholding …”

I gently interrupted, my hand on his elbow. “Hey, Jack, this party came forward, let’s … let’s have a beer.” Dotty, who was also dismayed at his brusqueness, had been nursing a lager, and I ordered a couple more. Churko declined a glass, wiped the mouth of his bottle with his sleeve before taking a pull from it.

Lolita excused herself to attend to other customers, and I grabbed the opportunity to urge Churko to change tack. What I really wanted him to do was relax. He is more than slightly homophobic, and his lack of judgment was showing.

“I want to ask you, Doc, how is this party, as you put it, going to look in the witness box? She … he better be able to give us faces.” Churko was clutching a photo album, shots of two dozen young men, Grundy and Lyall among them.

“Hey, Jack, get into the spirit,” Dotty said. “You may get lucky. That brunette over there has eyes for you.”

“I got three daughters. This is the world they’re growing up in.”

When Lolita rejoined us, Churko pressed on resignedly. “I’d like you to describe the scene – José came in with those guys, or met them here, or what?”

Lolita explained she’d been working alone that night. She remembered Pierrera wandering in, taking a back booth, ordering a beer. She was struck by how lonely he looked.

At about ten p.m., two young men came in, strangers to her. “Brutes, if you know what I mean. A muscle shirt, for goodness’ sake, and the muscles to go with it. The other one wasn’t as hefty. Utterly adorable in their quiet, strained way.”

She thought they were straight at first, until they started chatting up Pierrera, flirting with him, the slighter man talking in a falsetto. “I mean, really,” Lolita said, “she was coming on like a little tramp.” Soon they joined Pierrera in his booth.

“You didn’t figure that was strange?” Churko asked. “These two studs coming on to this lonely … this nondescript who could hardly talk English?”

“I don’t ask, darling. That isn’t part of my job description. One is
discreet.”

However, she thought they were hustlers, or maybe drug dealers. They seemed high on speed or cocaine. They had another round of drinks during the next half-hour, and since the bar was becoming busier, Lolita lost track of them. The booth was deserted when she next looked, a fifty-dollar bill tucked under a shot glass. She had no idea if they left together.

“Okay, I want you to look at some pictures here. You’ll see they got numbers, and I want you to tell me if you recognize anyone from that night.”

She didn’t study them for long. “Number eight,” she said. “Number twenty.” Grundy and Lyall.

Churko told Lolita to keep her silence, thanked her, and motioned for Dotty and me to join him outside.

“That joint gave me the creeps,” he said, pulling deeply on
a cigarette. “Looks like we got our guys, but they’ll hire a ten-thousand-a-day lawyer who’s gonna rant about how it’s highly circumstantial. I got to talk to some higher-ups. Be close to a phone.”

I was picked up by a squad car Tuesday morning to join the task force in a conclave with a special prosecutor – Foster Cobb, a former Crown counsel now in private practice.

Churko’s office was crowded, so I stayed by the door, exchanging greetings with Cobb. I’ve worked several murder cases with him, found him able and quick of mind, and he seemed on top of this file already. “We are having a debate, Tim. We have two schools of thought. The first school is represented by my old friend Jack Churko.”

The inspector took his cue. “We give them a chance to explain themselves. We offer the normal courtesy of inviting them for a lineup, and if Lolita fingers them again, we got some friendly questions we want to ask them. We go by the book. We got a prominent family here.”

Cobb nodded, contemplative. “You’ll want to give them the standard warning, I suppose, Jack. The one about how they have a right to a lawyer.”

“We cross all our t’s, that’s my attitude.”

Cobb rested a hand on Churko’s shoulder. “Now, Jack has been around the block a few times, I’ve got a lot of respect for him, and he believes we should go into The Tides with warrants, toss their rooms, bring these bad boys downtown, separate them, and grill them till they’re well done on both sides. Some of these other gentlemen feel we need something harder. What do you think, Tim?”

“I don’t like the first scenario. You’ll be lucky to get a squeak out of these guys. If they exercise their rights, what have we got?”

“A few lies. Association. Opportunity. Sick motive. Your copycat theory: interesting, not compelling.”

“How about giving me one last shot at Grundy? If I get lucky, you can go in with handcuffs.” Grundy can’t refuse to talk
to me, I explained, the terms of his release require him to submit to my monitoring, to close cross-examination.

Cobb was interested, and we worked out this plan: my consulting room would be wired for my regular Thursday appointment with Grundy. Police would listen from Dotty’s quarters above.

Afterwards, I sped off to the Broadway Medical Centre. My disciplinary hearing was to reconvene this day, as soon as the results of Vivian’s polygraph test were in. That had been set for ten a.m. – it had been delayed twice at her request, and Brovak felt she was trying to squirm out of it.

When I showed up, the hearing wasn’t yet in session, and an unusually subdued Vivian Lalonde was leaning against the boardroom door. “It’s over, Timothy,” she said in an oddly thick voice. “It’s all over.” She was dressed in the black of penitence, a clinging dress. I was heartened by her words, her slouch, the posture of defeat.

Brovak was closeted in a nearby office with the polygraph examiner, Charles Lougheed, leaning over the graphs. Brovak grinned at me. “Don’t start feeling sorry for her. We should sue her sweet ass off.”

Lougheed nodded. “She did not perform well.”

He showed me several jumps on the graph. The kymograph pens had been active when she claimed I’d made romantic overtures, my alleged declaration of love. Her versions of the stalking incidents (“Mostly, we would just casually bump into each other”) caused a sweaty skin response and a skip of the heart.

As to the alleged romp on my couch, their exchange had gone like this:

“I’m not under oath, am I?”

“No, you’re not.”

“So if I lie, I’m not perjuring myself.”

“This doesn’t work, Ms. Lalonde, if you don’t agree to tell the truth.”

“I don’t know any more … I don’t remember exactly. I don’t want to destroy his career.”

“What is the answer?”

“We didn’t make love on the couch.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Well, we were on his desk.”

“You had intercourse?”

“Of a fashion. I … I didn’t resist. It’s confusing. I know he wanted me. I know it.”

A chilling footnote: I’d proposed that she be questioned about the notes
You are next
and I
know where you live
. Lougheed found these useful as control questions. Her answers were unhesitant and honest: she knew nothing of them.

The sender had to be Grundy.

I was absorbed in the implications of that, and almost walked into Vivian as I entered the hearing room. She staggered, and when I put out a hand to steady her, she started crying and walked unevenly to a chair. I was concerned – her lack of balance seemed unnatural, as if induced chemically as much as emotionally.

For a few moments, the only sound to disturb a tomblike silence was her sobbing. That was proof enough that Vivian’s edifice of lies had collapsed. Neither Schulter, Mundt, nor Rawlings could look me in the eye.

Brovak laid Lougheed’s written report in front of them, along with the graphs, then slouched in his chair. “She flunked, gentlemen.”

As they perused the material, another silence set in, punctuated by the shuffling of paper and clearing of throats and, finally, as Mundt looked up, his lugubrious sigh. Schulter offered me a rigid smile intended to mask clenched teeth. “Thank goodness. Just as I hoped and expected.”

Vivian was weeping audibly. Mundt cast a regretful look at her, disappointed at her show of frailty. “Let’s put this thing to rest.”

Rawlings was staring at Vivian. I don’t know if he’d followed much of this. He came to with a nudge from Schulter, and said, “Yes, of course, not guilty.”

“Very well,” said Schulter, “I am gratified to make it unanimous.”

Vivian was saying something through choking sobs, her words incoherent.

“I’m sorry, Miss Lalonde,” said Schulter, “we didn’t quite catch …”

She was on her feet, steadying herself with a hand against the wall. “I told the truth … about one thing …”

“What’s that?”

She was looking at me, trembling. “That I love you, Timothy. It’s the only truth that matters.”

With that, she pitched forward, over a chair. “Get a doctor,” someone yelled, Schulter, I think.

I was the first to reach her, raising her limp body in my arms, carrying her to the door, Mundt scurrying ahead of me.