I leaned in toward
her,
energy jangling through me. “Maybe if he was already suicidal, she could’ve gotten him to do it when she
wasn’t
there.”
“And,”
I added, “gotten Lance Phillips to do it inside a locked cell.”
M
errill and I found Baldwin and Alvarez together in his office.
They stopped talking abruptly when
we
walked in, and
didn’t
offer us a seat.
“I was just leaving,” Baldwin said. “I’ll let you all
talk.”
Merrill moved in front of the
door.
“We
came to see
you
,”
I said, “but
we’d
like to talk to both of
you.”
She glared at Merrill, then looked at Alvarez for support, but found none.
Finally,
she sat down again.
“What’s
this about?”
“Hypnosis, Confinement visits,
murder.”
“
Murder
? I thought he committed suicide.”
“Who?”
“Don’t
play games with me, Chaplain.
We
all know you mean Danny
Jacobs.”
“What has that got to do with us?” Alvarez said.
They were the first words he had spoken, and they came out in a heavily accented rhythm uncommon to English.
“That what we want to
know,”
Merrill said. “What?” Baldwin said in outrage, but it lacked conviction.
“We’re
talking to everyone who was in the
dorm
the night Jacobs was killed and in Confinement the night the attempt was made on Lance Phillips.
You
two
were in both
places.”
“One cannot practice medicine from a desk,” Alvarez said. “I—how do you say it?—make the house call. I am very dedicated to
my
medicine. I make the rounds
constantly.”
Juan Alvarez was a middle-aged Hispanic man with a light complexion and coarse, black hair going
gray.
He
wasn’t
fat
exactly,
but overweight, soft,
fleshy.
His eyes protruded out of his head, as if too much was stuffed into his skull, and when he widened them, which was often, they seemed to pop out.
“You
do
,”
Bailey said to him. Then to
us,
“He
does.”
“
But what were you doing in those particular places at those particular times?”
“Checking on patients I had discharged from the infirmary,” he said. “My care of them does not end when they walk out of this
building.”
“Same thing with
me,”
Baldwin said. “I keep telling Hahn if you want to be effective,
you’ve
got to
go
where the patients are. Meet them on their turf, in their
world.
It’s
amazing what that can teach you about their
needs.
Know what I mean?”
“You
know what she mean?” Merrill asked. I
shrugged.
“So
y’all’s
just down there
checkin’
on
patients,”
he added. “Doing no harm, shit like that?”
“Yes.”
“Eleven-thirty at night?” Merrill said. “Get the fuck outta
here.”
“It is true,” Alvarez said.
“We
are very dedicated.
Our patients are our
lives.
We
practice giving help because we want to help others, we want to make a difference in the
world.”
“Do you
have
any other patients?”
“What?”
“Do either of you practice medicine or psychiatry anywhere else?” I asked.
Bailey looked at Alvarez.
“No,”
Alvarez said. “I am a physician for the state of Florida
only.
That is all. Florida has been very good to me. I
love
America. I own many things. Rental
property.
Clinic. Restaurant. But the only patients I
have
are here. In here I am doctor. Out there I am businessman.”
“Do either of you
have
any idea who might
have
tried to kill Lance?” I asked.
They both shook their
heads.
Baldwin said,
“I’d
look at those Suicide
Kings.”
“
You
know about them?”
“Well
. . . yeah. And
they’re
bonkers.”
“
Bonkers
?”
Merrill said, “Can you put that in terms we can understand? Just speak English.” He looked at Alvarez. “No
offense.”
Alvarez
didn’t
get it, just shook his head in confusion and gave a small smile.
“Sorry
we could not help
more,”
Alvarez said. “But we really must return to
work
now.
If we think of anything other we call
you.”
Ignoring him, I looked at Baldwin. “Whatta you use hypnotherapy for?”
She winced and shuttered
slightly,
but recovered
quickly.
“Ah,
well, all sorts of things—treatment of pain, depression,
anxiety,
phobias, stress, habit disorders, gastro-intestinal disorders, skin conditions, post—all sorts of things. Why?”
“Ever use it on Lance or Danny?”
“Not as I recall, but I may
have.
I use it on all my
patients.”
“They were your patients,
weren’t
they?”
“Lance still
is.”
“So
you’ve
used it on them.”
“Oh, well,
yes.
I thought you meant . . .
Yes,
I guess I
have.”
P
assing through the waiting room for Medical, Classification, and Psychology on my
way
to
Hahn’s
office, the desk sergeant held up the phone.
“For
you.”
“Thanks,”
I said as I took it from him.
“I’m not supposed to be talking to you about
this.”
It took me a minute, but I recognized the voice as that of Hank Sproul, the forensic pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Danny
Jacobs.
“I realize that,” I said.
“And
I really appreciate
it.”
“
I’m doing it for your dad.
He’s
good people. I
owe
him. Just keep it between
us.”
The waiting room was overflowing with hostile inmates seeking relief from the state workers behind the
two
locked doors on either side of the room. Many of them suffered from paranoia and narcissism and a sense of victimhood that their daily interactions with the mammoth immovable machine of the DOC only served to confirm.
“I found nothing to contradict it was anything but self-strangulation.”
I thought about it.
“However,
since there was no note and this method is very rarely used in suicide . .
.”
“It could be murder?”
“I
can’t
say that. I
checked
everything very
carefully.
When your dad called, I checked everything again.”
“Can you say it
wasn’t
murder?”
“Not
definitively.”
“Anything
you
can’t
account for?” I said.
“Anything
at all?”
He hesitated and there was nothing but static on the line for a long moment.
“Only one thing,” he said
slowly.
“There’s
usually
way
more than that. This was a very clean death and
autopsy.
There were some small pinpricks on the
decedent’s
left hand fingertips.”
I waited to see if more was coming.
“They were very small. Probably nothing at all, but I
can’t
account for them.”
“Like from a needle?
Was
he
drugged?”
“Tox
tests
didn’t
reveal any drugs in his system.”
“But
that’s
the kind of punctures
we’re
talking about.
Like from a needle or—”
“Yeah.
They
would’ve
been easy to
miss.
I’m surprised I discovered them.”
“Could they be where drops of blood were drawn, like for a slide?”
“Possibly.”
“What about from checking his blood sugar levels?”
“Sure. Something like that,” he said. “Except he
wasn’t
a diabetic.”
“Y
ou got a book on hypnotherapy?”
“Several,” Hahn said.
“I need a textbook-type definition of what hypnotherapy is used
for.”
“Why?”
“Something Baldwin said—well, stopped herself from
saying.”
“You
don’t
need a book,
you’ve
got me.
Hypnotherapy is used to treat pain, depression,
anxiety,
stress, phobias, hemophilia, skin conditions, post-surgical
recovery,
relief of—”
“That’s
it.”
“That’s
what?”
“What she stopped herself from
saying.”
“
What?”
“Post-surgical
recovery.”
“
Really?
That’s
interesting.”
“You
mind walking me through exactly how hypnotherapy works?”
“I can do better than that,” she said. “I can
give
you
a demonstration.”
“I
want you to be comfortable,” Hahn said in a
slow,
soft, monotonous
voice.
“Adjust
your clothes, your shoes, the
way
you’re
sitting, so you can be free and comfortable.”
The inmate in the seat in front of
her,
a small, pale boy with fine blond hair, began to
move
his limbs and wiggle into his chair just a little more in an attempt to be comfortable and free.
“Now,
as we begin,
you’re
going to be aware that
we’re
in a professional environment and that
we’re
being watched, but as you relax, there is no need for the things surrounding us to
have
any impact on this
process.”
He nodded, his head and eyelids already seeming relaxed and
heavy.
“I’m going to ask you to look
up,
fixing your gaze on a particular spot that you are comfortable with, okay?”
He nodded and began to stare at a picture of Freud on the wall behind Hahn.
“Found
one?” He nodded.
“Once you’ve fixed your eyes on it,
don’t
turn
away
from it. Keep your head in that position so that your ears’ll remain still and you’ll be able to hear the various inflections and intonations of my
voice.
That’ll enable you to better focus on what
we’re
doing.”
Hahn paused, but he
didn’t
respond in any
way
I could observe.
“Don’t
worry about your
thoughts,”
she continued. “There will be many racing through your head.
You
might
wonder,
‘Am
I doing this right?’ or ‘What does she mean?’ Nothing is
wrong.
Everything is right. Everything. Okay?
Don’t
waste time trying to play a role you think
you’re
supposed to or doing what
you’ve
done before. Just relax, be comfortable, and be
yourself.”
Hahn’s
office was warmer than usual, and I wondered if that had anything to do with the hypnotic
process.
It might not
have,
but the heat and the continual monotonous sound of her voice were making
me
sleepy.
“Now,
you’ll notice that your eyes will blink from time to
time,”
she continued, her voice droning on like a recording.
“It’s
a very natural
thing.
It’s
a protective mechanism because the eyes
weren’t
designed to maintain a fixed stare. When it happens, feel comfortable about it.
Your
eyes will also
tear.
It’s
a normal reaction to your eyes’ fixed state.
It’s okay.
Everything is
okay.
The object
you’re
staring at may distort
occasionally.
That’s
natural
too,
so expect that to happen. Let it happen.
It’s okay.
Everything is
okay.
And
finally,
your eyes will grow heavy and want to close.
It’s
the same thing that happens when you read or watch
TV.
When it happens, let it. Let them naturally close, and then feel how you can seem to funnel back into the privacy of
yourself.”
His eyes were beginning to blink more frequently and then close, only opening
occasionally.
“That’s it,”
she said.
“You’re
doing great. I notice that you are already relaxing.
That’s
fine.
You’re
doing fine.
You’ll
notice that
you’re
beginning to feel
much
more comfortable.
Your
eyes are more comfortable closed than open. Just relax and be comfortable.
You’re
doing great.”