"Critical Conditions" - читать интересную книгу автора (White Stephen)

Fifteen

Serendipity prevailed to allow me to meet Merritt’s friend Madison before Madison knew that Merritt was under investigation for murdering Dr. Edward Robilio. I rushed from my office after my ten-thirty patient to get up Broadway for my lunchtime rendezvous with Madison Monroe. Parking was sure to be a bitch on the Hill, so I grabbed a ride on the Hop.

Madison was almost a foot shorter than her friend Merritt. The color of her hair was the exact hue of coffee ice cream, but what was most striking about it was its texture, which was as fine as corn silk. It seemed to blow away from her face, moved only by the air I displaced as I approached.

On first blush, Madison seemed every bit as wary of me as her friend had been. She apparently guessed who I was by the way I hesitated and scanned the room. I kept my distance and sized her up.

She was already round and feminine in all the places where Merritt was still transforming from girl-child to woman. Madison’s hips were mature, and her breasts swelled against a short sweater that exposed an inch or two of her trim abdomen. She wore a jean skirt and tall black clogs with clunky Vibram soles that caused her butt to thrust out and up.

From at least five feet away, I said my first line, which had come to me as I was riding the bus. “Hi, you must be Madison. It’s a pleasure to meet a hero. I’m Alan Gregory, Dr. Gregory.”

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t a great line, but I thought it warranted more of a reply than “yeah.”

“Can I get you something, some coffee?”

“You buying?”

“Yes, of course. You’re doing me a favor. I appreciate it.”

“A, uh, frappucino. Grandé.” She pronounced it correctly-grand-ay-but without much confidence. “With whipped cream. And a chocolate chip scone, too.” Madison’s apparent vanity didn’t include any worries about an avalanche of calories finding their way to her hips.

I waited in line and picked up her order along with an espresso for myself and joined her across the room at a high table about the size of a large pizza. We sat on metal stools.

Although I’d asked her to come to my office, she had declined. Meeting at the Starbucks at the corner of University and Broadway, close to both Boulder High School and the University of Colorado, had been her idea, but since I had expected her to refuse to see me at all, it seemed like a reasonable compromise.

I handed her the coffee and pastry.

She said, “You didn’t have to call my mom, you know? To set this up. She doesn’t know what I do.” Her tone was at once swollen with dismissiveness and disgust.

“I’m sorry. I…you’re not eighteen, and I felt I needed your parents’ permission-”

“I don’t need my mother’s permission to talk to people. So you sure as hell don’t need my mother’s permission.”

This, I suspected, was an argument I wasn’t going to win. I shifted gears and hoped she would tag along. “You did something wonderful, you know that? You saved Merritt’s life by what you did.”

She sucked on her straw and swallowed before she replied. “Yeah, well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m glad she’s alive and all, but…”

“But what?”

“How does it go? Every coin has two sides.”

I waited. When it became apparent that she wasn’t planning on flipping the coin over so I could see the other side, I said, “Meaning what?”

“Meaning that Merritt’s not especially thrilled about my heroics.”

“She’s angry?”

Madison had just bitten off a mouthful of scone. After she swallowed and chased it with a draw of frozen coffee long enough in duration to induce brain freeze in lesser beings, her voice turned sour and she said, “You tell me. You’re the shrink, right? She hasn’t said a damn word to me since she woke up. She won’t take my calls. I even went to see her once in the hospital and all she did was glare at me. Yeah, she’s grateful. No doubt about that.”

I wondered about the sudden animosity but decided to be reassuring. “People sometimes feel that way initially after a suicide attempt. They believe they still want to die. So at first they treat you like you’re a bad guy for saving them. That will change, believe me. I’ve been there before.”

“With her? She did this before?” She was incredulous, I suspected, not so much that it might be true, but that it might be true and that she didn’t know about it.

“No. With others. I’ve been doing this, being a psychologist, for a while. Unfortunately, I’ve been with a lot of suicidal people.”

Before I finished my sentence I knew I’d lost her; Madison wasn’t paying attention anymore. As I waited for a reaction to what I said, she offered a reluctant wave and a wan smile to someone across the room. She lowered her head, rolled her eyes, and under her breath said, “Dweeb.”

“Excuse me?”

“That guy. He’s so lame. I can’t stand it when he smiles at me like that.”

“Oh.” Madison had just reminded me that I was sitting with someone whose age was on the shy side of seventeen.

As fascinating as a detailed probe of Madison’s social life might have been in other circumstances, I felt a need to try to keep her talking about Merritt. “As I told you on the phone, Madison, I’m hoping to try to learn some things that will better help me understand why Merritt tried to kill herself. Everyone says you were closer to her than anyone else. I hope you can help.”

“Who says that? Who’s everyone?”

She had caught me exaggerating. With an adolescent, I should have known better. “Uh, well, her mother said that, I guess, mostly.”

She looked up at me, smiled, and winked. With definite joy in her tone, she asked, “Merritt’s not talking to you either, is she?”

“I can’t really tell you what she’s saying or not saying. I’m just not allowed to.”

She intertwined her fingers around her sweating frappucino. “I knew it. She’s not talking to anybody, is she? Nobody. This is rich, so rich. What about her stepdad? Is she talking to him?”

“I can’t say.”

“I bet she isn’t. This is sooo cool.”

“What is?”

“Nothing. You don’t know anything, do you?” She scrunched up her nose and smiled, disbelieving, like I had just told her I was giving her free backstage passes for Smashing Pumpkins.

“What do you mean, Madison?”

“Nothing.” The smile endured. “So, what did you want? Why did you want to talk to me?”

“Why did you mention her stepdad in particular? Why him, and not, well, her mom?”

Small head shake. “He’s normal. She’s a star. What did you want?”

Suddenly I was much more interested in what she thought I wanted than in sharing what I really wanted. “Well, what do you think I want?”

“She’s really not talking?”

I shrugged. This adolescent was getting the best of me and I didn’t like it.

“Cool.”

“I’m trying to find out why Merritt might have wanted to kill herself.”

With the straw of her iced coffee already touching her lips, she said, “I guess she was real upset about her sister. I guess that was it.”

She said it without conviction, as if she was guessing at an answer in class, and hoping for some good fortune from the high school gods. “You may be right. It may be that she’s worried about her sister. As a psychologist, though, I find sometimes that it’s too easy to look at some awful event in someone’s life and say that because of X a person has a good reason to kill herself. The hard question to answer, usually, is, ‘Why now?’ See, I don’t know why Merritt did it the day she did it. Why then and not the day before? Or why then, and not two weeks from now? If she was so upset about Chaney, what was different the day she took the pills?”

Her eyes more wary than confused, Madison asked, “What’s X mean? What did you mean when you said X gives somebody a reason to kill herself?”

“It’s just a shorthand way of saying ‘something that might be upsetting her.’ You know, like moving, or changing schools, or Chaney’s illness. That kind of X.”

“It’s like math?”

“I guess.”

Madison shrugged. Mollified by my response-or my apparent ignorance about something else, I wasn’t sure-she again seemed remarkably uninterested in doing anything other than checking out the latest customers who were walking in the door of the coffeehouse.

“She have a boyfriend?”

Madison tried on a facial expression that I interpreted as a mixture of serious disgust and total amusement and said, “Noo. She isn’t there.”

“Trouble with friends?”

“I’m her friend. We’re cool. Were cool before this, anyway.”

“Anyone else she might have had trouble with?”

“Nope.”

“School going okay for her? Problems with teachers or classes?”

“Merritt slides. The teachers like her. And everyone cuts her extra slack now because of Chaney. It’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card for her.”

I thought that Madison sounded almost envious that Merritt had a terminally ill sibling and she didn’t. Before I could figure out a way to respond, someone apparently walked in the door behind me who rated a smile from Madison that was warm enough to reheat my tepid coffee. I was tempted to turn and check to see who had come in, but I didn’t. I guessed it was a male person.

“So, what do you think? What was it that got her to take those pills? You know her better than anyone. You must have a theory.”

“Like I said: Chaney. She hated what was happening to Chaney. The hospitals, the publicity, the hassles, her parents’ being so…”

“So?”

“Whatever.”

I waited. She browsed the room. I wished we were in my nice, boring, nondistracting office. “Had she talked about suicide?”

“No…”

“Were you going to say something else?”

“She…she had thought about going to live with her dad. Thought she could travel with him, help him out, be like his assistant or something. Oh, God, I shouldn’t have told you that. Now she’ll really be ticked.”

“Why? Why will she be ticked?” When I ask “why” questions in situations like this, I know I’m lost.

She appraised me as though she couldn’t believe what a dullard I was. She said, “Work on it.”

“Nothing else?”

“That’s all I know.”

With what I hoped was a deft move, I changed direction. “The day you found her after she took the drugs, she was upstairs in her bathroom, right?”

Madison nodded as she fished around in the frappucino foam with her straw, hoping to discover a pool of untouched slush. She knew something I didn’t know, and she knew that in this match she had me on points.

“See anything else, anything unusual, when you were in the house that day?”

The straw stopped in mid-swipe.

“Like what?”

It was my turn to shrug and act indifferent. I’d been paying attention to the technique, and I thought I did a pretty good job. “Like anything.”

“What do you mean, ‘Like anything’?”

I leaned forward, closing the space between us. “Merritt’s in a lot of trouble right now, Madison. I’m wondering whether you saw anything when you were there that might explain any of it.”

“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

“What did you see?”

“Why is she in trouble?”

I sat back on my chair and drained my coffee. “She screwed up.”

Her voice betrayed some anxiety. “Screwed up how? I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I can tell you is that it was all too weird. Finding her like that. I don’t remember anything but how dead she seemed. I thought she was dead.” She shivered.

I thought the shiver might be an act, but I wasn’t really sure. Madison was pretty good. I asked, “You didn’t wait for the ambulance to come? Is that what I heard? Do I have that right?”

“I freaked. Totally freaked.”

“You freaked?”

“You see someone you think is dead, you freak, you panic, you do stuff you shouldn’t do. Ever done that, just walked in on somebody and thought they were history?”

“Yes, I have. Earlier this week, as a matter of fact.”

She wasn’t really interested in my experience with dead people. Her question had been rhetorical, and my answer, to her, irrelevant.

“Maybe I should have stayed. I don’t know what difference it would have made. Tell you what, next time it happens, next time I walk in and find a dead person, I’ll try and do better. How’s that?”

Few things in life are more unpleasant than an irritated adolescent. Maybe aggravated cobras and perturbed grizzly bears would offer a good approximation.

I used my confrontation voice from the office, firm but burrowing. “But you thought she was already dead when you got there?”

She was staring at the dregs of foam in her cup. She said, “Yes, I think I said that. I thought she was already dead. She was laying there all unnatural, like one of those rubber dolls you can bend any way you want. And I didn’t think she was breathing. I thought I was way too late.”

“But you called the ambulance anyway?”

“I called 911. The ambulance was their idea.”

“Why did you call 911?”

“It’s what you do when something messy happens. Don’t you watch TV?” The sarcasm was inflated.

“Why did you go to the house that day? Did you and Merritt have plans to do something? Or maybe, had she told you she was going to take the pills and you went over to talk her out of it? Was that it?”

“What?”

“Why did you go to Merritt’s house? Why that day? Why that time? Why did you go inside and walk upstairs and go into her bathroom even though no one answered the door?”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

I tried silence. It didn’t faze her; she seemed to regroup before my eyes and I feared that my recent advantage was slipping away. I said, “Why did you decide to visit Merritt that afternoon?”

“We’re friends. Okay?”

“Do you have a key to the house?”

“The house wasn’t locked. She left it open for me.”

“So she was expecting you? You had already talked to her, right?”

“No, I mean, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t know anything about any drugs she was going to take. Nothing, all right?”

“What about a gun? Did you know anything about a gun?”

Her eyes opened wide, and I saw the light reflect off her contact lenses. So that’s where that incredible blue tint came from.

“A gun? What? What gun? What…what do you mean, a gun?”

“Were you afraid the police were going to come when you called 911? Not just an ambulance? Is that why you didn’t stick around after you found her?”

“Why would I be afraid of that?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure. Why would you be afraid of that? Why are you worried that Merritt’s in trouble? Maybe it has something to do with that gun?”

She tugged at one of her earrings and sipped from her straw noisily, as though there were actually still some liquid in her glass.

I felt I was close to something, and I wanted to keep the pressure on. My voice as soft as I could make it, I said, “Madison?”

Incongruously, the warm smile I’d seen earlier again graced her face and she slid off the stool in one graceful motion. A young man in black jeans and a too-tight T-shirt appeared next to her and placed a long arm around her waist.

He was the kind of boy I was envious of in high school and college. He was as comfortable around pretty girls as Wynton Marsalis is around a horn. The fact that I was sitting with Madison didn’t interfere with his advance for a second.

I said, “Hello, I’m Alan Gregory.” I offered my hand.

His was firmly around Madison and he left it there. He said, “Brad.”

Madison said, “Listen, lunch is over and I have a class now. I have to go. Thanks for the coffee. Say hi to Merritt for me. Bye.”

She and Brad made for the door without looking back.

I watched them exit. Her smile dissolved into anger the second they were out the door. I watched her fumble for a cigarette and fail twice to get it lit with a little plastic lighter.

Finally, she got the thing ignited and started walking, inhaling, and scolding Brad simultaneously.

He seemed amused.

I guessed that Brad’s arrival at Starbucks had been choreographed by Madison in advance.

And that he had been late.

I called Sam Purdy at the police department when I returned to my office to see my next patient. He answered, it seemed to me, before the phone even rang.

“I met with Merritt’s friend Madison.”

“Anything?”

“She’s a clever kid, Sam. You know the type. Slippery.”

“Does she know anything?”

“Maybe. She didn’t tell me anything, but I got the feeling that she knows something. But just when I got some pressure going, she had some guy come in and rescue her. Maybe you’ll get more than I did.”

“I should probably keep my distance from witnesses. Officially speaking, anyway. I’ll talk to Luce.” Detective Lucy Tanner was Sam’s partner in criminal investigation, and occasionally in crime.

“After she hears that Merritt’s under investigation, I think she’ll clam up and get real stupid, Sam.”

“Happens all the time. You moved Merritt to Denver all right?”

“Signed, sealed, and delivered. Will she be arrested today?”

“Barring a confession by somebody else, probably. Blood on her clothing types like Dead Ed’s. Gun is definitely Dead Ed’s. Two rounds are missing. Get your arguments ready about why she needs to stay at Children’s and not get moved to the Fort. You’ll need them.”

“Okay.”

I hesitated now. I wanted to cover one additional piece of territory with Sam. And then again, I didn’t. I finally said, “Sam, I think I’ve come up with a motive.”

He was tapping something, the rhythm relentless. “Yes, I know. Me too.”

“Chaney?”

“Chaney.”

“DA has probably figured it out, too.”

“I imagine. Mitchell Crest isn’t stupid.”

“You know, it’s a good motive, but it doesn’t make perfect sense.”

“I know.”

“What about what we talked about last night, Sam? The suicide note? On the little computer? Could Merritt have done that? Right now, they have to be assuming that she wrote that or forced him to write it.”

“That’s a problem. But they’ll manage it, finesse it some way. Watch for something on the five o’clock news. Nobody in the department wants to take the flack they took for the JonBenet case. If they have something good that won’t compromise the investigation, the public’s going to know it.”