Dreams in the Key of Blue (27 page)

“The man deserved to die,” I growled.

“You reading a mystery?” the waitress asked.

“It’s no mystery anymore,” I said.

You ripped him apart, then dropped his heart on the table.

I tucked the notebook under my arm and walked to the phone, a black-and-silver box decorated with coin slots and fine print. When I got to the part about calling cards, I had no idea what they were talking about. I popped in a quarter, punched numbers, then listened to beeps and hums followed by a digitized voice lecturing me about placing calls outside my local dialing area.

“Phone company needs more humans,” I muttered, as I made a second attempt.

This time I listened to a crackling noise, then another virtual voice informing me that the number I had dialed was no longer in service. “I’m calling a damn police department,” I shouted into the phone.

“Need help?” the waitress asked.

“Stay out of this,” I grumbled. “It’s between me and this machine.”

I reread the instructions. Calling collect seemed the easiest of the options, so I did.

“A fucking miracle,” I muttered when I heard Jaworski’s voice.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Nothing. You get anywhere with Squires?” I asked.

“Motor Vehicles has nothing on her. If she has a phone anywhere in the state, it’s unlisted. We may have to get a subpoena for that.”

“She talked to Jasper this morning.”

“Jasper ain’t been around. If Squires told you that, she’s pulling your chain.”

“There’s a connection between Martin and Squires. Ben Loudermilk sold Martin the scrimshaw letter opener two years ago. She arrived in a limo. Loudermilk’s description of her sounds like the woman in the painting. He also told me the story of the
Lily D.
That’s what’s depicted on the scrimshaw.”

“I ain’t following all this, but that’s nothing new,” Jaworski said. “Did you see Katrina Martin?”

“It’s worse than I thought.”

“She the one you knew?”

“For a couple of weeks one summer, thirty years ago,” I said. “Herb, Dorman abused his daughter. Lily told her mother that she didn’t want him for a father, that she wanted someone different. Katrina told her that I was her father. Lily grew up believing that I would come for her. She thinks that I should have rescued her and cured her mother.”

“Jesus. That’s more than enough reason to hate you. I’ve run into craziness over the years, but nothing like this.”

“I don’t understand why she’s playing games. She could have killed me. She’s had plenty of opportunity.”

“You said there’s a logic to murders like these,” Jaworski said. “Killing Dorman makes sense. What about the others?”

“I had time for Jaycie Waylon. I didn’t have time for Lily. I don’t know. All the connections are tenuous. I feel like I need a playbill.”

“Lucas, when are you coming back?”

“Feds all over the place?”

“They are, but it ain’t that. I had a call from a detective in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They found Stanley Markham.”

“That’s the first good news I’ve heard in days,” I said, feeling relief wash through me. “Maybe they’ll keep him locked up this time.”

“No need,” Jaworski said, breathing heavily into the phone. “He’s dead. One shot through the forehead from the twenty-two I’ve got sitting here on my desk.”

“What the hell?”

Seven dead from the same gun, and one of them the killer, Stanley Markham.

“Jasper and her friends from Washington want you to get your ass back up here.”

“No,” I said, as I struggled to understand what Jaworski was saying.

Lily Dorman went after Markham, found him, and blew him away.

“Herb, come to Portland tonight. Stay at the Holiday Inn by the highway. I’ll get there when I can.”

“Lucas, that limb we’re on is cracking. Jasper had her talk with Saymes. The board is meeting tomorrow night.”

“What the hell is she thinking?”

“You pegged Markham the last time. You could have sent invitations to his arrest. Jasper figures you found him again. You had the gun. She knows you don’t play by the rules.”

“I found him and capped him. Sure, I could have. I didn’t. We don’t have time to waste on this shit, Herb. You got a phone book there that covers Maine Central Mental Hospital?”

“You planning a vacation?”

I laughed. “Yeah. I need the number to make my reservation.”

As soon as I hung up, I called the hospital and asked for Dr. Westlake. After a pause, the receptionist said, “We don’t have a Dr. Westlake.”

“She or he was a psychiatrist or psychologist there seventeen or eighteen years ago.”

“God. I was five then. Hang on.”

While I waited, too many violins ruined Beatles tunes.

“The woman who runs the gift shop remembered,” she said. “She’s been here forever. Dr. Julia Westlake is the one you want. She has an office in Portland.”

I thanked her and checked the Yellow Pages. Julia Westlake, M.D., maintained an office in the heart of the business district. I called, explained to Westlake’s secretary that I was a psychiatrist who needed to consult with the doctor about one of her former patients. I assured her that it was an urgent matter, and she penciled me in for five-thirty that afternoon, when Westlake would have finished seeing patients for the day.

I returned to Big Mama’s counter and to my reading.

In my twenty-five years of practice, I encountered one case of multiple personality disorder. Now, sitting at Big Mama’s counter with Lily’s diary, I had trouble breathing, my hands trembled. MPD is rare. It is also difficult to treat, devastating to endure.

Many years ago, a colleague referred Chastity Bancroft to me for assessment. On the half dozen occasions that I saw her, if she became frustrated in her attempt to express herself, she curled into fetal position in her chair and went mute. I considered her histrionic.

When I described Bancroft’s behavior to my mentor, Dr. Herman, he asked if I had considered MPD. “It is rare,” he said, “but certainly possible.”

Using the primitive techniques suggested by the literature then, I began an exploration of Bancroft’s sense of time, her memory for remote and recent events, the ways in which she handled the unpleasantness in her life. When it was apparent to me that Bancroft spontaneously dissociated, I inquired about her treatment sessions with her regular therapist.

“She asks to talk to parts of me,” Bancroft said. “The angry part. The sad part. The part that has the nickname Chas. She says that one’s a boy.”

I concluded that Bancroft suffered from depression, that she was indeed dissociative, and that she adjusted her illness to accommodate her therapist’s expectations. Bancroft’s depression was a disabling illness; her MPD was iatrogenic, or therapist-induced.

When I submitted my report, a gender war engulfed
me. The MPD epidemic was in its early stages, but already boasted an advance guard of vocal and politically connected advocates. The women’s movement embraced this mutation of hysteria as evidence of man’s oppression and abuse. Experts stridently informed the public that sexual diddling and sadism by adult males against female children ran rampant in the land. Any attempt at objective analysis of this pastiche of disease and folk myth was akin to treason.

“The furor will pass,” I told Dr. Herman.

Twenty years later, the debate raged. MPD had spawned post-traumatic stress disorder, repressedmemory syndrome, and claims of satanic ritual abuse. Daytime TV offered victims who switched personality or told tales of subversive alters and sacrificial altars, abreacting in agonizing throes for the audience.

A cottage industry was built on a foundation of anecdotes. No one found evidence to support the true believers’ extravagant claims.

The nineties saw MPD downgraded to dissociative identity disorder (DID) in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic bible. The few real casualties of shattered personality suffered in silence.

I continued to read Lily Dorman’s diary, convinced that what the spiral-bound notebook contained was genuine.

I glanced at the wall clock. It was nearly five
P
.
M
., time to call on Dr. Westlake. I reluctantly closed the notebook, and promised myself that I would continue reading later.

TWO GRANITE BANKS SANDWICHED JULIA WESTLAKE’S
wood-frame building. I climbed to her top-floor office overlooking a small city park that offered the requisite benches, pigeons, and placard-bearing protesters, but no grass.

“A concrete park,” I muttered as I turned away from the commuter hour’s traffic and human congestion.

Westlake’s secretary was gone for the day. I stood in the empty waiting room and flipped through a copy of
The Sun,
a small, polished magazine published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The issue contained an excerpt from
Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row,
by Jarvis Jay Masters, a practicing Buddhist awaiting execution at San Quentin.

“Sad case,” Westlake said, walking from her office and nodding at the magazine. “The street animal got humanized too late. The state will kill Masters. You mind if I smoke?”

She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “When I get rid of that last patient at the end of the day, I have my cigarette. I used to smoke two packs a day. I was one of the
lucky ones—it wasn’t that hard to quit. Except for this one. I’m Julia Westlake.”

“Lucas Frank.”

Westlake wore jeans and a blue wool sweater. Her graying black hair was brush-cut and served as a parking space for her eyeglasses. “The real pisser about the Masters case,” she continued, “is that three inmates were involved in killing a guard. Masters was convicted of sharpening the shank. Another inmate committed the murder. Only Masters got the death penalty. Doesn’t sound much like equal justice.”

“‘Equal justice’ is an oxymoron,” I said. “The quality of your day in court depends on what you can afford.”

Westlake smiled. “So, which of my former patients brings you so urgently to my door?”

“Lily Dorman.”

She hesitated for only a moment. “Maine Central,” she said. “That was years ago.”

“You remember her.”

She took a final drag on her cigarette. “I don’t want to get all formal on you,” she began, “but do you have a release?”

“If I have to get authorization, it would not be a release,” I said gently. “It would be a court order.”

It was a bluff. I doubted that any judge would authorize a fishing expedition into confidential records, but I did not have the time or patience to muck around in the quixotic world of professional ethics.

“Give me some idea of just how urgent this is,” Westlake said.