Эд Макбейн - Snow White and Rose Red

“Yours,” he said. “It’s bad enough I have to work with a lunatic, I don’t have to go looking for other lunatics in the bushes.”

“She’s not a lunatic,” I said.

“you’d better be ready to prove that to Judge Mason,” Frank said. “Who, as I understand it, signed both the commitment papers and the order appointing guardianship.”

“That has not escaped my keen eye,” I said.

Dr. Nathan Helsinger was in with a patient when I arrived at his office.

I should mention immediately that there are not very many psychiatrists in the city of Calusa. I’m sure we have our normal share of psychotics, but we have very many more than our normal share of senior citizens — what my partner, Frank, calls the white tide. This expression won’t make any sense to you unless you’ve heard of the red tide. The red tide is caused by the blooming — or population explosion — of a tiny one-celled plant that lives in the Gulf of Mexico. The plant is called Ptychodiscus brevis ... or something. No one knows what causes a red tide bloom. When it comes, however, it kills the fish and stinks up the beaches. My partner Frank maintains that the white tide serves the same purpose. I myself have nothing against old people except that they cough a lot during performances at the Helen Gottlieb.

My point is that the business of psychiatry, as it has evolved in America, has largely to do with neurotics as opposed to psychotics, and when a person reaches the age of eighty-two, he doesn’t much give a damn whether or not he is infantilely fixed on his mother’s breasts. Have you noticed that a lot of old people smoke? That is because they’re not afraid of cancer; death is on the horizon anyway. Similarly, an octogenarian doesn’t want to spend fifty minutes four days a week on a psychiatrist’s couch when he could be out fishing instead. Two things that are in short supply in Calusa are psychiatrists and orthodontists; old people don’t want either their teeth or their heads straightened out.

It is my partner Frank’s belief that all psychiatrists are nuts.

This is because he once used to play poker with a psychiatrist who was certainly certifiable. At a game one night, when Dr. Mann — for such was his name — failed to fill a diamond flush with a three-card draw, he threw the table into the air, scattering cards, poker chips, and potato chips all over the room. Frank told Dr. Mann he was behaving like a child. Dr. Mann answered, “Fuck you.” Frank thinks all psychiatrists should be sent to Knott’s Retreat.

I was here in Dr. Nathan Helsinger’s office to learn why he had felt Sarah Whittaker should be sent to Knott’s Retreat.

His patient came out of the inner office after I’d been waiting in the reception room for ten minutes.

“Raining out there?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “Nice and sunny.”

“Probably rain later on, though,” he said.

“No, the forecast is for clear skies,” I said.

“It’ll rain,” he said, and went to the coat rack, put on his rubbers, raincoat, and rain hat, and left without another word.

Dr. Helsinger appeared five minutes later.

He was a man of about sixty, I guessed, wearing a seersucker suit with a white shirt and a striped blue tie. Five feet nine inches tall, more or less, with pink cheeks, twinkling blue eyes, and a little round potbelly. He had a full white beard. If he’d been wearing a red hat, he could have been Santa Claus.

“Mr. Hope?” he said. “Sorry to have kept you waiting, I had a call to make. Come in, won’t you?”

We went into his office.

Framed documents on the walls told me he’d done his undergraduate work at Princeton, gone to medical school at Columbia, done his internship at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, served his assistant residency and residency in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York, and been certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and that he was licensed to practice psychiatry in both New York State and Florida. The walls were painted white. Aside from the diplomas and such, there was nothing else on the walls. The room was furnished with a desk, a chair behind it and one in front of it, and a couch. A window was open to a cloistered little garden outside. A bright red cardinal sat chirping on one branch of a lavender jacaranda tree. It took wing as I sat in the chair on the patient’s side of the desk.

“So,” Helsinger said. “When I spoke to you on the phone, you said you were representing Sarah Whittaker.”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“You feel she’s competent, is that it? you’re seeking her release from Knott’s?”

“If the facts seem to warrant it,” I said. “At the moment I’m trying to learn—”

“you’ve talked to Miss Whittaker, I assume?”

“Yes, sir. Several times on the telephone and once—”

“Have you talked to her in person? Have you met her?”

“I was about to say... yes, sir, I went out to Knott’s and we talked for quite a long time.” I hesitated and then said, “She seemed all right to me.

“The man who just left this office seems all right, too,” Helsinger said. “Except that in his head It’s hurricane season all year round.” He sighed deeply. “Sarah Whittaker is not all right, Mr. Hope. She is a very sick young woman.”

“We spent two hours together. She seemed perfectly lucid, and organized, and... sane , Dr. Helsinger. Admittedly, I’m not—”

“No, you’re not,” Helsinger said at once. “Did she mention her father to you?”

“Only to say that she’d inherited a substantial amount of money from him.”

“Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to be exact.”

“Yes. That was the figure.” I hesitated again. “It’s also the figure mentioned in the guardianship papers.”

“Her mother has been appointed guardian of her person and property, yes,” Helsinger said.

“That’s a lot of money,” I said.

“Is it? What do you know about the Whittaker family, Mr. Hope?”

“Virtually nothing.”

“Then let me fill you in. Horace Whittaker came here from Stamford, Connecticut, when he was a young man. In Sarasota, Ringling was putting up villas and hotels for all his circus pals, and the town was beginning to boom. If it could happen in Sarasota, why not Calusa? Horace bought up all the land he could lay his hands on — it could be had for peanuts back then, the place was truly nothing but a small fishing village, bounded on the west by the Gulf of Mexico and on the east by Calusa Bay. He began selling off his real-estate holdings after the war — I refer to World War II, Mr. Hope, the only realistic war we’ve fought in the past forty years. Land Horace had bought for two hundred dollars an acre was then selling for two thousand . Gulf-front property today is worth five thousand dollars a running foot. The Whittaker family still owns choice gulf-front property it doesn’t yet choose to sell. Alice Whittaker inherited all of it when her husband died. The estate was valued at close to a billion dollars.”

“I see.”

“By comparison, Horace left his only daughter a mere six hundred and fifty thousand. Does that still seem like a lot of money to you?”

I said nothing.

“The oversight may have precipitated the elaborate delusional system Sarah had constructed,” Helsinger said. “It’s difficult to say. In any event, delusional perception is only one of the so-called first-rank symptoms of schizophrenia.”

I knew next to nothing about mental disorders. To me, a woman with “delusions” was someone who believed she was Queen Elizabeth or Catherine the Great. Sarah Whittaker believed she was Sarah Whittaker, and she further believed she was sane.