Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“I’m not worried,” Susan said. “If you can make jokes, I’m not worried.”

She changed the subject, asking after Diane. She knew the cover story of my sabbatical from the clinic, not the truth. I told her everything. She wasn’t pleased. “What do you want? Someone to punish you?”

“Are you my friend, Susan?”

“Of course. I love you.”

“Then don’t be clever with me. You trained me. I want you to review the case and give me an opinion.”

For the first time she looked at the bulky envelope. “You’d better take me to the Wiz.” She nodded at the discount electronics store facing the west side of the park. Red signs pasted inside its windows proclaimed a sale. Susan shrugged. “My tape player is broken.”

We walked to the Wiz and were forced to pick out a boom box; they had nothing smaller. She gave the salesman her Visa card. He went off to get the purchase approved. She asked me what Gene wrote in his suicide note. I told her the gist of it. She said, “Are you going to do something about his boy?”

“Not right away.”

“No?” Her skeptical tone implied disapproval.

“I’m not treating anyone until you review his case.”

“All done,” the Wiz salesman interrupted, returning with her credit card. He also handed her a yellow receipt. “You give this at the front and they’ll give you the boom box.” He offered her a pink copy. “This is your receipt.”

“To the front?” Susan was confused. “Who’s at the front?”

The salesman leaned over to show her. Beside the scanners at the door to discourage shoplifters was a huge black man in an Oakland Raiders cap. “That man. You give him this,” the clerk touched the yellow slip, “and he’ll give you the radio.” He tapped the pink slip. “You keep this.”

Susan pointed to the radio out on the counter. “Why can’t you just give me this one?”

“This is a display model. He’s got to—” the salesman gave up, exasperated. “Just go! Give him the yellow. He’ll give you a radio same as this, but brand-new. In the wrapping and everything. It’ll be perfect.”

“Why don’t you have the brand-new ones out here?”

“These are only for display. We keep the stock in the basement. It comes up there and he gives it to you.”

Susan turned to me. “Do you understand this system?”

“Perfectly,” I said. “Its part of the inventory control. More shelf space, fewer goods to shoplift and it’s tougher for the employees to steal. My uncle claimed he invented it when he owned Home World.”

I had piqued the salesman’s curiosity. “Your uncle ran Home World?”

“Yes.”

He leaned on the counter, gestured to me to come closer, and asked in a low voice, “What happened to them?”

“His son-in-law sold it and then, I don’t know, they expanded and suddenly went bankrupt, right?”

The salesman shook his head and looked troubled. “It’s a jungle, I tell you. Cut-throat business. They were big,” he said, leaning back, his eyes scanning the Wiz’s formidable space.

“Let me ask you something,” Susan said to the salesman.

“Don’t start.” He put up a warning hand. “Give him the yellow. They bring it up from the basement and you got your radio. In the wrapping. Brand-new.”

“No, no,” Susan said. “That’s not my question.”

“What? What’s your question?”

She pointed to the distant pickup counter and the man in the Raiders cap. “What’s his name?”

“His name? You want to know his name?”

“Yes, what’s his name?”

“Anthony. His name is Anthony.”

“Okay,” Susan said pleasantly, wandering off. “Come on, Rafe. Let’s see if Anthony does what he says.”

He did. Susan insisted I walk her back to her office, unpack the boom box, plug it in, load tape number one and test that it worked. When I heard Gene’s voice say, “Are we being recorded?” I shut my eyes.

At least, that immediately intrigued Susan. She listened to me evade Gene’s question, and asked, “You didn’t tell him?”

I hit the Stop button. I gave her a list of the key sessions. Brief notes explained their subject matter. The heart of those sessions the reader already knows. I told Susan it would probably be sufficient for her to listen to just those tapes.

She squinted at my list. “Ten,” she said and pouted. “Even that’s ten hours. I don’t know when I have the time. Could take me a week.”

“Take two weeks. Take twenty. I’m doing nothing until I have your opinion.”

“And this nothing you’ll be doing, where will you be doing it?” I told her I planned to return to the Prager Institute and wait. She invited me to stay at their loft. “You could help me here at the clinic. You’ll be doing me a big favor. I’m short-handed. Billy’s got the flu. You could fill in for him. He’s family therapy. Mostly kids. So you’re perfect.”

“Nice try,” I said. I went downtown to Don Kenny’s show in SoHo, saw the photograph of Gene and his mother with the lion, and returned to Baltimore.

I didn’t do nothing. Since I had listened to nearly twenty hours of the tapes before taking them to New York, I prepared additional notes for my case review with Susan. And I tracked the movements of Pete Kenny and Mrs. Shoen, Cathy’s mother. After three days in New York, she took him to her home in Phoenix.

I made a series of calls. By a stroke of luck, I found a child psychologist in Phoenix, David Cox, who consulted in the local public school system. I knew Cox from a conference in Boston years ago and felt confident enough to phone him and explain my situation. I told him I assumed Mrs. Shoen would put Pete in school in the fall and wondered if he could check on the boy.

Cox went me one better. He called back on Friday, having spoken with Mrs. Shoen. Cox phoned her out of the blue, saying he had heard gossip about the tragedy and offered a sympathetic ear. Mrs. Shoen was relieved to discuss her situation. Pete still didn’t know the truth; he was told his parents died in an accident. Perhaps that is the truth, I thought. Mrs. Shoen made an appointment to come in next week and Cox assumed he would eventually get to see Pete.

“Let me know if I can be of any use,” I said.

“I could use some background on the father.”

“Sure. But for now, you should just deal with Pete, don’t you think?” Cox tried again to find out more than the sketchy details I had already surrendered, but I stalled him. “As far as I know, the boy didn’t have emotional problems.”

Cox was silent for a moment. When he spoke, his tone was polite. Too polite. “Well, besides the murder-suicide, there was the divorce.”

“I mean, of course, prior to those events. Gene wasn’t seeing me during the divorce or after it.”

“Of course there was some history to the divorce,” he commented, again with excessive politeness.

“Call me after you see Pete and we’ll talk,” I said.

Susan phoned Saturday afternoon. She had only taken four days. “Well,” she said, “I’m almost done. Why don’t you come here tomorrow?

“When?”

“Twelve? For brunch. We’ll let Harry sleep late and have Nova and bagels.”

I knew better than to ask for a preliminary judgment. I fancied I heard in her tired voice the sadness she would feel at having to tell me I had failed. The confirmation seemed inevitable. Five days of a queasy stomach and five nights of restless and abbreviated sleep had already convicted me. Sunday, although I hadn’t managed to doze off until after midnight, I woke up at four-thirty exhausted, a typical symptom of depression. I decided to drive to New York immediately.

After parking the car, I walked the quiet Sabbath streets for two hours to get some exercise, found a coffee shop one block from Susan’s, pushed down my irrational feelings, and reviewed my notes with a cold, if bleary, eye. I felt ready by the time I buzzed the intercom to her loft.