The Analyst (32 page)

For the first time in nearly two weeks he found that the sensation of being followed and watched had slipped away. He was sure that he was alone. He did not expect this state to last.

It did not take him long to spot the bench, and within moments he was seated, the file and envelope provided by the clerk in the records office on his lap. To a passerby, he would have appeared to be simply another physician or relative taking a moment outside the hospital to consider some issue, or steal a bite of lunch. Ricky paused, a little uncertain what he might be opening by removing the documents, then reached into the folder.

The name of the woman patient he’d seen twenty years ago was Claire Tyson.

He stared at the letters of her name. It meant nothing to him.

No face sprang into his recollection. No voice echoed in his ear, recalled from twenty years before. No gestures, no expressions, no tones crossed the barrier of years. The chord of memory went silent, unplayed. It was simply one name out of dozens from that time period.

His inability to recall a single detail filled him with ice.

Ricky read quickly through the intake form. The woman had come to the clinic in a state of near acute depression coupled with paniclike anxiety. She had been referred to the clinic by the emergency room, where she’d gone for treatment of contusions and lacerations. There was evidence of an abusive relationship with a man, who was not the father of her three young children. Their ages were given as ten, eight, and five, but no names were included. She was only twenty-nine years old, and had given an apartment address not far from the hospital, which Ricky knew instantly was in a very nasty part of the city. She’d had no health insurance and had been working as a part-time clerk in a grocery store. She was not a native New Yorker, but had family listed in the next of kin space from a small town in northern Florida. Her Social Security number and telephone listing were the only other completed items on the intake form.

He turned to the second sheet, a diagnosis form, and saw his own handwriting. The words filled him with dread. They were clipped, curt, to the point. They lacked any passion and sympathy.

Then he’d signed the bottom of the page. He wondered, staring at his signature, whether he had signed his own death warrant.

There was another entry, on a second sheet, showing that Claire Tyson had come back to see him in the clinic four times, and had failed to appear for her fifth and last authorized session. So, Ricky thought, at least his old mentor, Dr. Lewis, had been wrong about that. But then another thought occurred to him and he flipped open the copy of the death certificate complete with the city coroner’s seal and compared that date to the initial treatment date on his own clinic form.

Fifteen days.

He sat back hard on the bench. The woman had come into the hospital, been directed to him, and half a month later she was dead.

The death certificate seemed to glow in his hand, and Ricky quickly scanned the form. Claire Tyson had hung herself in the bathroom of her apartment using a man’s leather belt, looped over an exposed plumbing pipe. The autopsy revealed she had been beaten shortly before her death and that she was three months pregnant. A police report clipped to the death certificate said that a man named Rafael Johnson had been questioned about the beating, but not arrested. The three children had been handed over to the Department of Youth Services for processing.

And there it was, Ricky thought.

None of the words printed on the forms in front of him came close to conveying the lasting horror of Claire Tyson’s life and death, he thought. The word
poverty
doesn’t come close to capturing the world of rats, dirt, and despair. The word
depression
barely suggests the crippling black weight that must have rested on her shoulders. In the whirlpool of life that trapped young Claire Tyson there had been only one thing that gave her meaning: the three children.

The oldest, Ricky thought. She must have told the oldest that she was going to the hospital to see him and get help. Had she told him that I was her only chance? That I held out some promise of something different? What did I say that gave her some hope, which she passed on to the three children?

Whatever it was, it was inadequate, because the woman killed herself.

Claire Tyson’s suicide had to have been the pivotal moment in the lives of those three children and in particular the oldest, Ricky thought. And it didn’t even register on his own life in the slightest. When the woman failed to show for her final appointment, Ricky had done nothing. He couldn’t remember even making a single phone call out of concern. Instead, he’d filed all the papers in a folder and forgotten about the woman. And the children.

And now, one of them was out to get him.

Find that child and you find Rumplestiltskin, he thought.

He rose from the bench, thinking he had much to do, pleased, in an odd way, that the pressures of time and deadlines were so pressing, because otherwise he would have been forced to actually consider what he had done-or not done-twenty years earlier.

Ricky spent the remainder of the day in New York City bureaucratic Hell.

Armed only with a twenty-year-old name and address, he was shunted between offices and clerks throughout the state Department of Youth Services offices in downtown Manhattan, trying to determine what happened to the three children of Claire Tyson. The frustrating thing about his assault on the world of clerkdom was that he, and all the people at all the offices he dealt with, knew there was some record somewhere of the children. Finding it, amid the inadequate computer records and rooms filled with files, proved to be impossible, at least initially. It was clearly going to take some persistent digging and hours of time. Ricky wished he were an investigative reporter or a private detective, the type of personality that had the patience for endless hours with musty records. He did not. Nor did he have the time.

Three people exist in this world who are connected to me by this fragile thread and it might cost me my life, he told himself, as he butted up against another clerk in another office. The thought gave him a shrill urgency.

He was standing across from a large, pleasant Hispanic woman in the records division of juvenile court. She had a massive flow of raven-black hair that she pulled back sharply from her face, allowing the silver-rimmed, oddly fashionable eyeglasses that she wore to dominate her appearance. “Doctor,” she said, “this is not much to go on.”

“It is all I have,” he replied.

“If these three children were adopted, the records were likely sealed. They can be opened, but only with a court order. Not impossible to get, but hard, you know what I mean? Mostly what we get are children all growed up, now looking for their birth parents. There’s a procedure we gots to follow in those cases. But this, what you asking, is different.”

“I understand. And I’m under some time pressures…”

“Everybody’s in a hurry. Allatime in a hurry. What so urgent after twenty years?”

“It’s a medical emergency.”

“Well, a judge likely gonna listen to that, you got some papers. Get a court order. Then maybe we could make some search.”

“A court order would take days.”

“That’s right. Things don’t work none too fast in here. Unless you know some judge personal. Go see ’em, get something signed real quick.”

“Time is important.”

“It is to most folks. Sorry. But you know how maybe you do better?”

“How’s that?”

“You get a little bit more information about these people you be looking for, get one of those fancy search programs on your computer. Maybe come up with the info. I knows some orphans looking for their past done that. Works pretty good. You hire a private investigator, that’s the first thing he gonna do after he takes your money and puts it in his pocket.”

“I don’t really use computers much.”

“No? Doctor, this be the modern world. My thirteen-year-old, he can find stuff like you wouldn’t believe. Fact is, he tracked down my cousin Violetta, hadn’t seen nor heard from her in ten years. She was working in a hospital in L.A., but he found her. Didn’t take him more ’n a couple of days, neither. You ought to be trying that approach.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Ricky answered.

“Big help if you got Social Security number or something like that, too,” the clerk said. Her accented voice was melodic, and it was clear that talking to Ricky was an interesting break from her daily routine. It was almost as if, although she was telling what he was searching for was beyond his grasp, she was reluctant to let him go. It was closing in on the evening, and probably, he thought, she could leave after dealing with him, and so wanted to keep him handy for just the right amount of time. He thought he should leave, but was unsure of his next step.

“What kinda doctor you be?” she asked abruptly.

“A psychoanalyst,” Ricky said, watching the answer cause the clerk to roll her eyes.

“You able to read people’s minds, doc?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said.

“No, maybe not. That would make you some kinda witch doctor, huh?” The clerk giggled. “But I’ll bet you’re good at guessing what people gonna do next, right?”

“A little bit. Not as much as you probably think.”

The woman grinned. “Well, in this world, you get a little information, know how to hit the right keys, you can make some good guesses. That’s the way it all works.” She gestured with a thick forearm toward the computer keyboard and screen in front of her.

“I suppose so.” Ricky paused, then he looked down at the sheets of paper he’d received at the hospital records office. He turned to the police report and saw something that might help. The officers who had questioned Rafael Johnson, the dead woman’s abusive boyfriend, had taken down his Social Security number. “Hey,” Ricky said, suddenly, “if I give you a name and a Social Security number, will that computer of yours find someone for me?”

“They still live here? Vote? Get arrested maybe?”

“Probably yes to all three. Or two at least. I don’t know that he votes.”

“It might. What’s the name?”

Ricky showed the woman the name and number from the police report. She looked around quickly, to see if anyone else in the office was watching her. “Not really supposed to do something like this,” she muttered, “but you being a doctor and all, well, we’ll see.”

The clerk clicked red-painted fingernails across a keyboard.

The computer whirred and made electronic beeping noises. Ricky saw an entry come up on the screen, and simultaneously, the woman’s narrowly plucked eyebrows rose in surprise.

“This be some bad boy, doctor. You sure you need him?”

“What is it?”

“Well he got a robbery, another robbery, an assault, a suspect in a car theft ring, did six in Sing Sing for aggravated assault. That be some hard time. Man, some kind of very nasty record.”

The woman read further then said suddenly, “Oh!”

“What?”

“He isn’t going to be no help to you no more, doctor.”

“Why?”

“Somebody must have caught up with him.”

“And?”

“He dead. Just six months ago.”

“Dead?”

“That’s right. Says
deceased
right here, and a date. Six months. Looks like a good riddance, to me. There’s a report with the entry. Got a detective’s name from the 41st Precinct up in the Bronx. Case still open. Seems like somebody beat Rafael Johnson to death. Oh, nasty, real nasty.”

“What’s it say?”

“Seems like after they beat him, somebody strung him up over a pipe, using his own belt. That’s not nice. Not nice at all.” The woman shook her head, but she wore a small grin on her face. No sympathy for Rafael Johnson, a type who’d probably passed through her door once too often.

Ricky reeled back. It wasn’t hard for him to guess who’d found Rafael Johnson. And why.

From the same pay phone in the lobby he was able to track down the detective who’d filed the criminal investigation report on the death of Rafael Johnson. He did not know if the call would yield much, but thought he should make the call, regardless. The detective had a brisk, but energetic manner over the phone line, and after Ricky identified himself, seemed curious as to why he would be calling.