Laura Lippman - The Last Place

“Ah. So is he contented, Pygmalion, with his perfect woman?”

“What man wouldn’t be?”

“I mean, is that where the story ends?”

“Yes. They live”-he knows enough to take on the protective coloration of irony-“happily ever after.”

“Yet you haven’t had much luck with women.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“You seek an… extreme cure.”

“I know my limitations. All I ask is that I be allowed to live happily. Ever after.” His tone is arch, yet he has never been more sincere.

“It is up to me to decide if you should have what you want.”

“I understand the rules. I didn’t expect you to let me… plunge right in.”

“No? Well, we are used to even more extreme things in my field. There are people who want to remove their limbs. Did you know of this? Some see it as a natural continuation of what we call gender reassignment. To me, it lays bare the problem. We can alter our bodies only so much. But our real selves will reclaim us. We see that every day, with boys who were born with incomplete genitalia. They cannot be made into little girls. That’s a hard lesson, especially here. Johns Hopkins was once at the forefront of gender reassignment.”

“I’m not asking to become a girl.”

“No, but you’re asking to become something almost as odd-a eunuch. You want to thwart your own masculinity, but you need a chemical crutch to do it. It would be irresponsible of me to authorize this treatment without intensive counseling. Why are you adamant about this? You show no signs of being a sexual predator or of being sexually dysfunctional. A couple of failed relationships are not reason enough to give up. Everyone has failed relationships, you know. One needs to be right only once. Then you realize everything else was part of the journey.”

He had reached into his pocket, found his lanyard key chain, squeezed it. “Have you gotten it right, Doctor?”

He blushed. “I don’t talk about my personal life. Surely you know that.”

“But you’ve gotten it right, or so you think. For how long?”

“Well, it’s been two years-”

“My parents were married for twenty years. It would be forty now, if my father had lived.”

“Most admirable. That should bode well for you, assuming it was a loving marriage.”

Sharply, instantly. “It was.”

“So why are you here?”

“I know what I need.”

“That is still to be determined.”

In the end, they had to agree to disagree. Dr. Michael Shaw, who had heard so much but listened to so little, had become another loose end to be tied. As Billy waited in the rain that day, he imagined his mother, narrowing her eyes at a piece of thread, snipping it and licking it until she could force it through the needle. The Bible said it was easier for a camel to pass through such a hole than it was for a rich man to go to heaven. But Dr. Michael Shaw, in his brief ride on the hood of that borrowed car, had passed through this life without a whimper. He couldn’t guarantee that Dr. Shaw went to heaven, but wherever he went, he went easily, without a sound. There was only the rain and the quiet beneath it. No one heard a thing.

“Michael Shaw was part of a program that treated rapists.”

Tess had begun babbling as soon as she found Carl, perched on the edge of one of the Adirondack chairs that were scattered about the grounds. He listened intently, managing to make sense of the jumbled details about Depo-Provera and chemical castration.

“That’s why he had a dormancy period,” she said. “He stopped.”

“Or tried to,” Carl said. “He must have understood enough about his own behavior to know there was a sexual component to what he was doing. He assumed the treatment would kill his sex drive and he would stop killing.”

“But the original program had been disbanded, so it’s possible he never received Depo-Provera at all, just traditional therapy.”

“You told me earlier that a psychiatrist has to tell authorities if he thinks his patient has committed a crime or is a genuine threat to someone. Why would Billy Windsor kill Shaw if Shaw didn’t know anything?”

Tess, who had been pacing back and forth, sank into the chair opposite Carl, leaning back in its broad arms until she was staring through the trees and the smoky blue sky overhead. It was a Code Red day, unseasonably warm, a harbinger of how horrible Baltimore’s summer might be. The air was thick, almost chunky.

“I have a theory,” she said.

“Shoot.”

“But I don’t want to have theories, I want facts. Theories are for shit.”

Carl shrugged. “What else do we have at this point? A name, a mother.”

“No one really gets close to this man. His mother, the women he professes to love-they see only one side of him. But in order to get the treatment he wanted from Dr. Shaw, Billy Windsor would have had to reveal some part of himself he normally conceals. He wouldn’t have confessed to murder, but he might have told the doctor other things, made revelations that he came to regret. He let Mary Ann live because they didn’t reach that point of no return, for whatever reason. He gave up on her.”

Carl nodded. “I’ve been sitting here thinking about Hazel Ligetti. Why kill her unless she’s an accomplice, unless she’s started making noise about blackmail? But a woman who meant to blackmail someone wouldn’t list him as a beneficiary.”

“She’d write a letter,” Tess said, remembering how she once did the same when she feared Luisa O’Neal and her husband might harm her. “Put it somewhere safe.”

“He got rid of her because she knew him. Really got rid of her- burned her place to the ground, wiped her off the face of the planet.”

“Which also took care of any incriminating paperwork she might have taken home with her from work,” Tess pointed out. “Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“The first time I went to Sharpsburg, I looked for Hazel’s grave. She was Jewish, which isn’t something a casual friend would have known. The name is a classic Ellis Island screw-up, Italian by way of Hungary. But someone had been to her grave, left a small stone.”

“A stone?”

“Jewish custom. At the time, I thought it was just a passerby, someone who felt sorry for one of the few Jewish headstones in the cemetery.”

Carl understood. “He was marking the trail for you. He wanted a day to come when you would make that connection.”

“But why does he want me, Carl? I don’t look like the other girls. I’m not working in a convenience store, waiting for Prince Charming to sweep me off my feet and set my life right. My life is fine.”

They both looked north, to where bulldozers had begun ripping up a huge portion of the parklike campus. As Dr. Armistead had told Tess at their first meeting, Sheppard Pratt could survive only by selling off its one asset, its land. The mentally ill no longer spent their lifetimes here; the hospital no longer needed all this acreage. But the trees that were being uprooted had long screened the hospital from the world. Now the world was looking back, if one could call this exposed fringe of suburbia a world.

“Did you see anything in the cemetery that day?” Carl asked. “Another person, a car? It would sure help if we knew what he drove. Even a partial description-”

“He doesn’t have a vehicle. His last car was titled to his last girlfriend. Remember? Mary Ann Melcher bawled just thinking about him putting that van in her name. The state police ran all his identities through the computer. Nothing came up.”

“Still, he’s gotta have a car. And it would be risky, titling and retitling a vehicle to himself. Creates a paper trail of links, which he’s managed to avoid. He’s never put two of his names in the same place. You had to make that leap, when we were looking at the rental car records in Spartina.”