“He’s my husband.”
“Really?” he said. “Smart guy.”
“We’re separated.”
A scoreboard, touting the number of traffic fatalities for the year on one side (seventy-two) and the number of homicides (one hundred thirty-seven) on the other, provided the only break in the long empty wall.
“Men will have their mid-life crises,” he said. “No immunity for you mental health types, I guess.”
I saw myself as he must have seen me. Aging female. The usual lineup of sagging spots—eyelids, jowls, breasts, belly, butt, knees. “You assume it’s his decision,” I said. “Do you make use of intuitive leaps like that in all your investigations?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Just playing the numbers.” He ushered me into a glassed-in office, cleared papers off the visitor’s chair, then asked if I’d like some coffee as if he wanted to make up.
I hesitated.
“It’s not the usual police brew,” he said. “I get here early so I can make it myself.”
He was right. It was decent and in a real mug embossed with Wile E. Coyote chasing Roadrunner. I sipped and took in the scene. Through the internal windows, I saw carrels occupied by other well-dressed men and a few equally decked-out women, all on the phone or hunched over paperwork. I fought down the urge to say something about his name. “I thought you’d be older,” I said instead.
“You don’t much fit my picture of a psychiatrist either, but you all can’t look like Kleinberg. Guess we’re even.” He sat down behind his desk, his demeanor now sober. “But we’re here to talk about the Forsyth case.” He positioned a manila file in front of him and looked at me expectantly. A wave of goose bumps shot up my back. The folder looked new and didn’t seem to have much in it.
“I have a patient scheduled at ten,” I said.
“Got some things to take care of today myself.” He glanced at the piles on his desk and the open cardboard file boxes that lined the walls. “Let’s jump right in.” He tipped his desk chair back and stuck the eraser end of a pencil into his mouth like he wanted a cigarette. “What can you tell me about Allison Forsyth?”
A psychoanalyst knows better than to just start talking. “Could you tell me what happened?” I said. “Her suicide doesn’t make sense.”
Slaughter glanced out toward his colleagues, as if he might be looking for assistance or sympathy. Then he opened the folder, leafed through a few notes, furrowed his pink brow and gave a big sniff.
“We know from her divorce lawyer’s receptionist that Mrs. Forsyth met with him for an hour that morning. The attorney himself has so far been unavailable for questioning. Shortly after their meeting, she gained access to the terrace of the Tower Life Building. Not yet clear how that happened. Twenty-two stories later, she was fairly unrecognizable. We’re hoping you can fill in some of the blank space.”
My brain flickered like a light bulb threatening to burn out. My Allison, who always kept both feet on the ground—literally. I couldn’t fathom her choice. Pills maybe—although I never prescribed enough of her antidepressant at any one time for a lethal dose, even if she added a bottle of Scotch. Carbon monoxide? A hose out the exhaust of her Range Rover? More like it. Even a rope from a ceiling fan. But Allison climbing out on a ledge, balancing for a moment before stepping off into thin air? I made myself imagine her baggy dress forming a futile parachute before inverting over her head. Her blonde hair, for once defying its limpness, lifting straight to heaven. Would she have landed feet first, the metatarsals and those small anklebones shattering in warp-speed domino sequence? Or would she have turned mid-air, assumed the hands-on-chest repose of the analytic couch, landing in one grand splatter?
Did she have time for regret?
Did she even think of me?
“She left a message Sunday canceling her appointment the next day,” I said. “She had been depressed in the past. Seriously depressed. Lately though she was better. More than better. Happy, actually. Moving ahead on her divorce was real psychological progress.”
Slaughter looked at me. “I’ve heard that the time to worry about suicide is when people start to get better,” he said. “They get the energy to do it. It’s called rollback or something.” His eyes narrowed and his pupils dilated slightly.
He was right, and the possibility hadn’t occurred to me. I remembered Allison’s words: Killing myself isn’t an option. Freud said there is no negative in the Unconscious. Killing myself is not an option translates as Killing myself is an option. I knew this. Why didn’t I think of it at the time? Why didn’t I think of it later? Why did I need a detective to remind me of what any competent psychiatrist should know? I saw Freud’s critical face. I thought of what Richard would say when he heard. Shame filled my chest. In trouble. Big trouble. The words floated around in my head. I remembered the day my father caught me peeking into the slaughterhouse. He jerked me up by my arm and threatened to hang my carcass alongside the cows.
What finally came out of my dry mouth was one of Richard’s courtroom lines. “I don’t see that operating here.”
Saying the words sent an electric current though me, gave me a feeling of power, a feeling unwarranted in someone facing the high probability of a malpractice suit.
The skin covering Slaughter’s head turned pinker. “What do you see operating here, Doctor?”
A pleasant tension came over me then, the same feeling I get in a therapy session when things start coming together in my mind, that sense of pressure and possibility, the awareness of the need for something to be said before the something to be said has become exactly clear—the psychic equivalent of the exquisite moment an orgasm becomes inevitable, on the way but not yet arrived.
“I’m concerned,” I said, my words beginning to give substance to suspicions that had been skulking around my mind, “that Allison’s death might be part of something bigger.”
Slaughter didn’t blink, though he elevated his brows a good half-inch, making the same facial gesture I use to encourage a patient to think again.
“Bigger?” he said.
“This is confidential?”
He nodded once, curious or wary, and moved his chair closer to his desk.
“Do you remember the Trinity University professor who died last week?” I asked. “The explosion?”
“I heard about it,” he said. “Arson is in charge of that one.” He put his forearms on the desk as if to show off his scar and began tapping his fingers in military sequence.
“The professor, Dr. Westerman, was also my patient. He was far too compulsive to have made an error in his lab.” My words picked up speed. “And Allison Forsyth wouldn’t have killed herself given where she was psychologically. And even if she’d wanted to kill herself, jumping off a building was the last thing she would have done.” I paused for a breath, then said aloud what I’d until that moment not quite permitted myself to think. “I think they might have been murdered.”
Murdered. The word left my mouth tingling.
Slaughter jerked back slightly like a light had flashed in his face.
“I’m talking about foul play,” I said.
Slaughter picked up a pencil and doodled on a piece of paper, avoiding eye contact. “Let me get this straight. Both of these people were coming to you for psychiatric help.”
“Psychoanalysis actually.”
“Whatever. They were sad or weird enough to pay money to come see you. And you’d seen them how often? Approximately.”
“I do true psychoanalysis which means I saw them five times a week. Professor Westerman was in his fourth year of treatment.