Читать книгу Madhouse Fog - Sean Carswell - Страница 10

4

The next day, I sat in my wooden office chair, gazing at the fog outside my office window. I had a three-ring binder on my lap. It was full of papers I had printed off the internet, punched three holes in, and stuck in the binder. I had ordered the pages logically, highlighted them appropriately, made notes in the margins. On the computer behind me, I had computer files that held the drafts of various proposals. The phone on my desk could show a list of my last ten outgoing calls; all to people whose names were in my three-ring binder. Surrounded thus by all the signifiers of the consummate professional, I watched a bluebird.

The bluebird perched on the high branch of a fir sapling on the hill across from me. The young branch sagged under the bluebird’s weight, swaying in the gentle breeze. I wondered if bluebirds were indigenous to this part of California and if it was odd to see a bluebird in January. Or, perhaps, was this the south where the bluebirds flew in the winter? Are bluebirds migratory? If so, where was the rest of its flock?

Letting go even further, I indulged in more thoughts, wondering if a group of bluebirds was called a flock, or, perhaps like crows, a group of them could be called a murder. A murder of bluebirds? It didn’t have the right ring to it. And while I was on the subject—or nowhere near it, if you don’t follow my random loose associations—where were all the palm trees on the grounds of this Southern California psych hospital? Wasn’t it state law that palm trees had to be visible in every glance here in Southern California?

Dr. Benengeli snapped me out of my ruminations. I heard her voice in the hallway outside my office. “Are you supposed to be here?” she asked.

A male voice responded. He did not answer her question. He just said her name in that warm and jovial way that sets off alarm bells. He said, “Dr. Benengeli.”

“Walters,” Dr. Benengeli said. She paused. I set my feet on the floor and perked up my ears. “Are you supposed to be here?”

“I just wanted to say hello.”

“To whom? To me?”

“Well, who else?”

“You know where my office is. You know it’s not in this building.” Dr. Benengeli had a lilt to her voice that I’d never heard. I thought of her exceptionally short stature and the lack of psych techs in this building and of the castor oil coating the barbs of this strange man’s voice. I rushed into the hallway. The fluorescent light above my office door flickered. Dr. Benengeli and the strange man both stopped talking and turned to face me.

“Do you need a hand, Doctor?” I asked.

Castor Oil Walters gave me a smile. “You must be the new grant writer,” he said.

I looked to Dr. Benengeli. Her eyes were like polished stone. I couldn’t read anything in them. She didn’t wait for subtleties to play out. “Okay,” she said. “I see how it is. Come on, Walters. It’s easy to get lost in this building. Let me show you to your car.”

Walters walked toward me. He wore smoky dark glasses, even in the dark hallway, and he waved a white cane in front of himself. The cane didn’t touch anything. The tip just floated a few inches off the ground and away from the wall. Walters didn’t exactly look in my direction. I gathered that sight wasn’t the sense he was relying on, anyway. He pulled a silver case from the inside pocket of his blazer and opened it. I looked to see what the silver case held. Business cards. He slid a card out like it was the end of a magic trick. Ta-da. The card was in my hand before I could think to refuse it. Dr. Benengeli spun Walters and led him down the hallway away from me.

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.