I read the card:
FRANK WALTERS
CONSUMER LIAISON
DICKINSON AND ASSOCIATES
The address was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. He had an office phone number there and a cell number with a 212 area code. I thought, 212? Manhattan?
I looked back down the hall. Dr. Benengeli and Frank Walters were gone. I scratched my chin with the card. Something seemed off. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I returned to my seat and faced the window. The bluebird still sat on a high branch of a fir sapling. The sun burned away at the gray of the morning. Mist from the Pacific that had settled on the rocky hills around me started to fall away like a silk slip falling off the back of a chair. I tried to make sense of things.
Could Walters be a patient? Patients weren’t allowed into the Williams Building. That would explain Dr. Benengeli shooing him away. But what was she doing up here? How did she know there was an errant patient? And why would she go after him herself? Wrangling wandering patients was the jurisdiction of psych techs. And what about that business card? Why would a patient be carrying a business card? While I was no authority on clothes, I had spent some time in a discount department store lately. That jacket Frank Walters wore had not come off a bargain rack. There was money behind the purchase of a blazer like that. His sunglasses alone must have cost more than my whole wardrobe. And it’s not that people who own these items don’t show up in a psych hospital; it’s just that they don’t wear their big money clothes here. Most patients show up wearing the clothes they’d wear if they were changing the oil in their car. Also, Dr. Benengeli had offered to walk him to his car, not to his room. Which would make a certain amount of sense if she knew he didn’t have a room in the hospital, but why would she assume that a blind man had a car? Something was fishy.
Before I could figure out what was going on, my phone rang. It was someone from the Beatty Foundation for Mental Health. A grant possibility. I got back to work.
Ten minutes later, my phone call was done and Dr. Benengeli poked her head into my office. She didn’t offer a greeting or loiter with any small talk. She got right to the point. “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job or where to look for funding,” she said, “but be careful around that guy.”
“What?” I closed my three-ring binder and leveled my eyes at hers.
“Why?”
Dr. Benengeli looked at her watch. “Crap. I have a ten o’clock group. I’ve got to run. Just be careful.” She vanished down the hallway.
My phone rang. The caller ID told me the call was coming from the 212 area code. I answered. “This is Frank Walters of Dickinson and Associates,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you about donating money to your institution. Can I take you to lunch on Thursday, say, one o’clock?”
“Sure,” I said. I opened my nearly empty appointment book. Under the page listed for Thursday and the time listed for 1:00 PM, I wrote: Frank Walters. Lunch. I also wrote the name of the restaurant where he wanted to meet. And then added Be careful.
5
Of course there was a catch. Dr. Bishop gave me the puppy, sure, but she asked for a favor in return. She promised it would be a small favor but now I had a Roads and Grounds guy hooking up a timer and a surveillance camera in the front entranceway of my apartment. I wasn’t sure what to make of this either.
The Roads and Grounds guy’s name was Eric. He was a white guy with one of those autobiographical faces: hard and rocky, full of crevices and ravines and the lingering effects of time. It was a face that told the story of a man who’d had his feather earring and his Trans Am with an eagle painted on the hood, who’d smoked his Camels and drank his CC and Ginger, who’d learned the after-hours secrets of women who spent their evenings in dive bars, who’d surfaced on the other side worn and scarred but without regret. Or at least without any regret he’d admit to. It was the kind of face that I would hire if I were hiring because you don’t get a face like that if you don’t find a way to show up for work every Monday morning after spending a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday blowing the lion’s share of what you’d earned the previous week. Perhaps it was this face that led Dr. Bishop to trust Eric. Regardless, he looked very trustworthy as he capped wires and double-checked connections.
The surveillance camera fit in the drawer of the small side table positioned by the front door. Eric had brought the table with him. It was the kind of furniture purchased from a big box store; the kind you take home and assemble with a Phillips-head screwdriver and a hammer for the tiny nails. The newspaper rack/table actually matched the rest of the cheap furniture in my apartment perfectly. I wondered how Eric or Dr. Bishop had known this would be the case. Then I remembered that I was a man in my mid-30s who lived in an apartment, wore discount department store clothes, and waited patiently for his wife to leave Fresno, though signs were pointing more and more to the notion that she was not going to leave. Of course I’d have assemble-it-yourself, pressed-wood furniture.
Eric took the knob off the drawer. He asked me to hold one edge of his tape measure flush against the drawer, where the knob had been. He pulled his end of the tape to the middle of the tile foyer adjacent to my front door. He sized up the angle of the tape. He told me I could let go. He then positioned a drill to enter the table at roughly the angle that the tape had shown him. He drilled a hole there. The lens of the camera fit in Eric’s new hole. Using door shims, Eric supported the camera in the drawer. He filled the rest of the drawer with styrofoam peanuts. When all seemed sturdy, he shut the drawer, saying, “You won’t even notice this.”
“And the whole idea is to film my floor?” I asked.
“To film what happens on that floor in the fifteen minutes prior to you coming home.”
“What do you think is gonna happen?”
“It’s not what I think. It’s what Dr. Bishop thinks that matters.”
“And what does she think is gonna happen?”
“She thinks your pup here is gonna sit in that spot and stare at the door.”
“That’s it?”
“Maybe wag his tale.”
“That’ll be one exciting movie,” I said.
Eric smiled. His teeth were shockingly white, the kind of bleached bones you can get from over-the-counter teeth whiteners. His eyes backed up the smile. “It actually could make for an interesting movie, if you give it enough time.”
I raised an eyebrow. Clearly there was something more going on here that I didn’t understand.
Eric kneeled in front of his toolbox. He carefully arranged his tools, in order. With a four-inch paintbrush, he swept the shavings that his drill had left on my foyer tile onto a sheet of paper. He folded the shavings into the paper, careful not to let any slip out. He stuffed the paper and paintbrush into his toolbox. He stood up. “That’ll do ’er,” he said.
My new pup came over at this point. Perhaps he sensed that Eric was about to leave and it was time to go for a walk. He trotted over with his little legs and big paws. In another year, he’d be a decent-sized dog. He’d grow to maybe forty or forty-five pounds. I’d have to get a place with a little yard so there’d be enough room for the two of us. For the time being, he was still small enough for me to scoop up and hold on my forearm, if I wanted to. I didn’t at the moment. The pup nuzzled against my leg. Eric bent to pet him. He said to the dog, “You must be the little gift from Dr. Bishop.”
I