Projection (20 page)

The officer directed me to a door at the end of the counter.  He let me in.  "Anderson," he said, extending his hand.

I took it.  "Frank Clevenger."  His handshake was one of the most powerful I had ever felt.

We began walking down the flight of stairs leading to the holding cells.  I was behind Anderson and noticed that he limped badly, favoring his right leg.  His weakness surprised me, making me more conscious that the rest of him — a barrel chest, thick neck and rippling forearms — was built as if to withstand assault.

"I have a titanium knee and pins in my tibia," he said, reading my mind the way people with physical defects sometimes can.  He answered my next question, too.  "Attempted robbery of a U.S. Trust branch on Orleans Street.  I got hit twice.  The bottom of my femur shattered."

I wanted to reassure him I didn't see him as handicapped.  "Looks like you’ve got most of your strength back."

Anderson stopped on the stairs and looked up at me.  "My leg is coming back," he said.  "That's not my problem."  He paused, pointed at his shaved head.  "I have things wrong nobody but me can see.  Nightmares.  Flashbacks.  I might be at the counter out front and, all of a sudden, no warning at all, start bawling like a baby."

My skin turned to gooseflesh.  I was standing in front of a stairwell in the middle of the night, hundreds of miles from home, while a man I had known just minutes revealed himself.  If exposed ten thousand times I do not believe I will ever become immune to the raw, awful beauty of the human psyche in distress.  Dermatology would have been a desert for me; I have a vampire's thirst for the suffering of others.  My other addictions pale in comparison.  "Crying over a bullet ripping into you isn't anything like being a baby," I said softly.

He pursed his lips, nodded.

"Have you seen anyone about the memories?"

"They wanted me to.  They might make me."

"Why would you need to be forced?"

He shrugged.  "I don't know."  Just as suddenly as he had turned toward me, he turned away and continued down the stairs.

I caught up to him and walked with him.  I tried to summon the panic of being struck by a bullet — the shock, the pain, the helplessness of the inevitable collapse, of life and death spinning like a roulette wheel.  I had to concentrate in order to avoid imitating his gait, a knee-jerk and futile way of trying to edge into his experience.  How many of us have not closed our eyes and attempted to navigate a room to appreciate the lot of the blind man?  And how petty is that effort knowing we can open our eyes the next moment and see?

One or two of the prisoners in lockup seemed truly dangerous, but the rest looked like hapless thugs and drunks who might have been nabbed for disturbing the peace, simple B & Es or, like Harry, driving under the influence.  We stopped at a two-man cell.  "Harry's the big one," Anderson said.

Harry was snoring loudly, lying on his side on the lower bunk.  He was wearing a long brown leather coat, but I could tell it covered at least two hundred fifty pounds.  He had grown his crown of hair shoulder-length on one side to comb over his bald spot, and the tress hung limply down his face.  He looked like a bizarre cross between a skid row bum, a rock drummer and the Buddha.  A black man about twenty was perched on the edge of the bunk above him, watching Anderson and me.

"What's the other guy in here for?" I asked.

"Possession of cocaine.  Intent to distribute."

"How much?"

"Half a gram."

"Oh."  I had more than that in my boot, not to mention the heroin.

"It doesn't sound like anything," he went on, unlocking the door as he spoke, "but he was near a school."  He could go away for five years.  Maybe more.  And it's federal time."

"That should cure him."  I worried I might have shaken our alliance, but Anderson surprised me again.

"The ‘War on Drugs’ is a joke," he said.  "This guy needs a halfway house, not the big house."  He leaned closer and dropped his voice.  "Half the cops in this building smoke dope or do a line of tootie now and then.  One thing I can't stomach is holier than thou, Scarlet Letter bullshit."

"You're a hundred percent right, and you'll never make chief," I said.

"I'm barely making it as an Indian."  He pulled open the door to the cell.  "Like I told you, good luck getting anything out of Harry.  I couldn't make head nor tails of what he was saying."

I walked in.  Anderson waited at the door.  I nodded at the black man in a way that asked for reassurance he wouldn't jump me.  I was entering his space, even if it was borrowed from the penal system.  He nodded back.  I knelt by the side of Harry's bunk.  "Harry?"  Nothing.  Louder, "Harry."  I grabbed his shoulders and shook him.  "Harry!"

He opened his eyes, then shut them again.

I shook him harder.  "Your brother sent me to see you."

"I got nothin' to say, Charlotte Anne," he said, his eyes still closed, his words slurred.  "Your mother's a good woman.  Heart of gold."  He shook his head.  "Mary?"  His eyes scanned back and forth under his lids, then opened wide and met mine.  He reached out and took my hand in his.  His skin was clammy.  "Mary, turn off the sprinklers.  I'm getting soaked here."

"Told you," Anderson said from the door.

I concentrated on Harry's odor.  He didn't smell of booze.  His breath, even his clothes, carried the chemical sweet smell of ketones, produced by the liver when diabetics go without insulin too long, and blood sugar skyrockets.  I moved my fingers to his wrist.  His pulse was erratic.  I turned to Anderson.  "He's got bigger problems than being drunk — if he is drunk.  I think his brother was not the money; his diabetes is completely out of control.  He needs to get to a hospital right away."

"Is he gonna die?" the black man asked.

"I don't know," I said, glancing up at him.  He was leaning over me, gripping his mattress to keep from falling.

"He sounded drunk just now," Anderson said.

I looked back at him.  "I know, but that's probably because he's delirious.  His blood chemistry is so far off that his brain can't function.  His heart isn't beating real well, either."

"You know for sure he isn't just smashed?"

"No.  I can't be absolutely sure.  But if I end up being right, he could end up being dead."

"Shit," the black man said.  "I knowed it, too."

"Let's go.  We'll get him over to Hopkins," Anderson said.

I rushed back upstairs with Anderson, whose bum leg didn't keep him from outpacing me.  I sat in front of his desk as he called to arrange for an ambulance.  "The paramedics won't transport a patient alone," he said, hanging up.  "I have to ride over with them.  You want to go, question him once he's making sense?"

It was 1:20
A.M.
  I wondered whether I should head back to the Stouffer and make half the calls to Lucas families from the lobby while Cynthia used the phone in our room.  I couldn’t afford to waste time.  I'd already been away from Lynn State six hours.  But I reminded myself to listen to the city the way I would listen to a patient.  I had asked a question by visiting police headquarters.  I couldn’t know whether the answer was about to unfold.  "Let's go," I said.

*            *            *

I rode the ten or so blocks in the back of the ambulance with Anderson, Harry and Jim Maloney, one of the two paramedics who'd arrived at the police station.  Harry's wrists were shackled to the gurney.  I gave Jim my tentative diagnosis — diabetic ketoacidosis — which he scoffed at until he threaded a catheter into Harry's bladder, yielding a few millimeters of urine that turned the chemical dipstick bright pink from glucose.  When he saw that color, he radioed the Hopkins ER for orders.  A doctor with a Texas accent told him to start an IV of lactated Ringer's wide open for rapid hydration and to inject Harry with 30 units of regular insulin.  I watched the cardiac monitor.  Harry's beat was barely clinging to its rhythm, occasionally sputtering like an engine burning gas tinged with maple syrup.

As we turned on to Broadway, the dome of the hospital's original building rose like a beacon amidst Baltimore's poorest streets.  My skin turned to gooseflesh as I pictured the ten-and-a-half-foot white marble Jesus standing inside it, robes flowing, palms outstretched.  Lights are mounted to shine on His face.  His bare feet border a plaque carved into the base that reads,
COME unto ME all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you REST
.  Though I had already sworn off organized religion by the time I interviewed at Hopkins, I was overwhelmed (in truth, nearly brought to my knees) when I saw that statue.  I imagined how patients confronting cancer and stroke and schizophrenia might find hope, might even begin their cures, standing in its presence.  I thought of the Hebrews fleeing Egypt, some of them swallowed into the earth for worshiping graven images en route to the promised land.  Why, I wondered, would the God of Abraham destroy any of his chosen people in a turf battle against an idol they had fashioned from gold?  And once God had killed and defeated the idol, how could anyone believe it consisted of nothing but metal?  I sat down on one of the armchairs facing the Lord, doubting the miracle of His conception, yet revealing in the humble majesty of men carving ten and a half feet of stone into an object of devotion and sting it so magnificently in a place of healing.  And I saw clearly for the first time that it doesn't matter what you worship, as long as it helps you focus your love for others and for yourself.  A willing and great man will do.  So will a golden calf.  Or a piece of rock.  Or the kind of psychiatry I had once been privileged to practice myself.

The ER staff was waiting for us.  Two nurses and a young, female physician I assumed was a medical resident whisked Harry into one of the curtained cubicles.  Above the cloth I saw them hanging more bags of IV fluid.  The cardiac monitor came to life with a green fluorescent tracing that continued to threaten death.

A tall, slim man with perfectly parted jet black hair approached Anderson and me.  He wore a starched white lab coat that hung to his knees, a light blue shirt and a blue-black tie embroidered with silver Texas longhorns.  He reached for Anderson's hand and shook it vigorously.  "You guys better get an in-house doc down there in lockup, or I'm gonna have to put bars on my ER," he drawled.

"You can bunk with us anytime," Anderson said.

"How's the knee?"

"I'll make it."  He smiled at me.  "Dr. Blaisdell, this is Dr. Frank Clevenger from Boston.  He's a criminal psychiatrist."

"Good," he smiled.  "I'm tired of the law-abiding kind."  He bowed slightly in my direction.  "Welcome.  If I get a break in the action, I'll give you the two-penny tour."

Blaisdell went to work on Harry, Anderson left to grab coffee and I went to find a pay phone to call Cynthia.

As soon as I walked into the hospital's main corridor I saw that Hopkins had grown at least as much as the city had.  A labyrinth of old and new buildings had been connected to create a gleaming mall.  Stainless steel ceilings topped corridors thirty feet across.  Lighted etched glass signs affixed to the walls marked the way to medical meccas like the Wilmer Eye Institute, the Halsted Surgical Department and the Oski Pediatric Center.

I used a stall in a men's room to snort half a bag of heroin, then wandered a bit before I found a bank of phones outside a coffee shop called the Corridor Café.  Our hotel room's extension was busy the first few times I tried it, so I used my calling card to dial the Lynn Police Station for an update.  Before I could decide whether I wanted to be, I had been patched through to the State Police trailer on the grounds of Lynn State Hospital.

"Captain Rice," Jack Rice answered.

"It's Frank," I said, unsure whether he would even stay on the line.

"Oh."  A pause.  "Then, coldly: "What do you need to know?"

"I'm just checking in.  Everything holding together?"

"From what we can see down here, which isn't much."  A slightly longer pause.  "That it?"

"What about Calvin?  Any word?"  I pictured Calvin Sanger turning around as he raced toward the hospital, yelling the words I had hooked him with. 
Story of a lifetime!

"No.  No word.  We done?"

I tried to offset his tone by imbuing mine with amiability.  "Listen, Jack—"

"No.  You listen.  You got what you wanted.  Provided nothing changes, we won't take the unit for another sixteen and three-quarter hours.  In exchange, you won't be burying me or my department in the press — ever.  That's the deal.  Don't ask me to hold your hand after you push me into a corner and threaten to fuck me."

I nodded to myself.  He was right.  But I couldn't resist reaching for his hand again.  "I think I'm making a little progress down—"

"Anything we can use here, now?"

"Well, no.  Not yet."

"Then I'll see you when you get back."  He hung up.

"OK," I said to no one.  "See you then."  I slammed the receiver into its cradle.  Two nurses passing by turned to look at me, but looked quickly away and kept walking.  Between my jacket, my hair and the wound on my face, I probably seemed like a bigger problem than they cared to handle on a coffee break.  I stood facing the booth several seconds, then picked up the receiver and dialed the hotel, hungry for a bit of good news about Cynthia's search.

She picked up.  "Where are you?" she asked.

"Hopkins Hospital."

"I thought you were stopping back here."

"I stumbled into someone at the police station who knows a man named Ronnie Lucas.  The trouble is, I couldn’t get anything more from him.  His diabetes had gone out of control, and he was nearly unconscious.  He's being treated in the emergency room right now."  I took a deep breath, thinking how tenuous a lead I had followed.  "Have you found out anything?"

"I might have.  You tell me."

"Shoot."

"I've called twenty-three Lucas families so far."

"OK."

"Nobody answered on nine of the calls.  On twelve others, someone at each address talked to me just long enough to say they have no idea who Trevor Lucas was.  One other woman said she knew him well, that he played tight end for the Ravens and that she was carrying his twins."