The Dead Student (9 page)

He stopped at the corner of 71
^st
Street and West End Avenue and waited for the light to change. A taxi jammed on its brakes to avoid a man in a shiny new Cadillac. There was a quick squeal of tires accompanied by an exchange of horns and probably some obscenities in several languages that couldn’t penetrate closed windows.
City music
. A bus jammed with commuters wheezed out pungent exhaust. He could hear a distant subterranean subway rattle. Beside him a young woman pushing a baby in a stroller coughed. He grinned at the child and waved his hand. The child smiled back.

Five people ruined my life. They were cavalier. Thoughtless. Selfish. Fixated on themselves, like so many preening egotists.

Now only one is left.

He was sure of one thing: He could not face his own death, could not even face the years leading up to it, without acquiring each measure of revenge.

Justice,
he thought,
is my only addiction.

They were the robbers. The killers.

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. One last verdict to go.

The light changed and he crossed the street, along with several other pedestrians, including the woman with the child in the stroller, who maneuvered the curbs expertly. One of the things he liked the most about New York City was the automatic anonymity it provided. He was adrift in a sea of people: millions of lives that amounted to nothing on the sidewalks. Was the person next to him someone important? Someone accomplished? Someone special? They could be anything—doctor, lawyer, businessperson, or teacher. They could even be the same as him: executioner.

But no one would know. The sidewalks stripped away all signs and identities.

In the course of his studies on murder—as he’d come to this philosoph
ical conclusion—he’d spent time admiring Nemesis
,
the Greek goddess of retribution. He believed he had wings, like she did. And he certainly had her patience.

And so, to launch himself on his path, he’d taken precautions.

He’d become an expert with a handgun and more than proficient with a high-powered hunting rifle and a crossbow. He’d learned hand-to-hand combat techniques and had sculpted his body so that the years flowing past would have minimal impact. He’d finished Ironman Triathlons and taken many speed-driving courses at an auto racing school. He dutifully went to his internist for annual checkups, became a health club and Central Park jogging path addict, watched his diet, emphasized fresh vegetables, lean proteins, and seafood, and didn’t drink. He even got a flu shot every fall. He studied in libraries and had became a self-taught computer expert. His bookcases were crammed with crime fiction and nonfiction, which he used to harvest ideas and techniques. He thought he should have been a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

I have become a doctor of death.

He continued to walk north. He wore a tailored dark blue pinstriped three-piece suit and expensive Italian leather shoes. A dashing white silk scarf was looped around his neck against the possibility of a chill breeze. The late afternoon sun reflected off his mirrored aviator sunglasses. It was a fine time of day, with fading sunlight slicing through cement and brick apartment canyons, as if picking up momentum as it made its final foray across the dark waters of the Hudson. To any passerby, he must have looked like a wealthy professional heading home from the office after a successful day. That there was no office, and that he’d merely spent the prior two hours happily walking Manhattan streets, did nothing to undermine the image he projected to the world.

Student #5 had three different names, three different identities, three different homes, phony jobs, passports, driver’s licenses, and Social Security numbers, and fake acquaintances, haunts, hobbies, and lifestyles. He ricocheted between these. He’d been born into substantial inherited wealth; medicine had been his family’s profession, and he could trace the physi
cians in his ancestry back to battlefields at Gettysburg and Shiloh. His own late father had been a cardiac surgeon of considerable note, with offices in midtown, privileges at some of the city’s most prominent hospitals, and a mild disapproval of his son’s interest in psychiatry, arguing unsuccessfully that real medicine was practiced with sterile gowns, scalpels, and blood.
“Seeing a heart beat strongly—that’s saving a life,”
his father used to say. His father had been wrong.
Or, if not wrong,
he thought,
limited.

He considered the name he’d been born with to be a sort of
slave
name, so he’d left it behind, discarding it along with his past as he’d shifted trust funds and stock portfolios into anonymous overseas accounts. It was the name of his youth, his ambition, his legacy, and then what he thought of as his abject failure. It was the name that he’d had when he’d first plunged helplessly into bipolar psychosis, been ousted from medical college, and found himself in a straitjacket on the way to a private mental hospital. It was the name that his doctors had used when they treated him, and the name that he’d had when he’d finally emerged—allegedly stabilized—only to survey the wasteland that his life had become.

Stabilized
was a word he held in contempt.

Exiting the clinic where he’d spent almost a year, even as a young man he had known he had to become someone new.
I died once. I lived again.

So, from the day of his release, through each year that passed, he was careful to always take the proper, daily psychotropic medications. He scheduled regular six-month, fifteen-minute appointments with a psychopharmacologist to make certain that unexpected hallucinations, unwanted mania, and unnecessary stress were constantly kept at bay. He was devoted to exercising his body and was just as rigorous in training his sanity.

And this he’d accomplished. No recurrent swings of madness. Levelheaded. Solid emotionally. New identities. Constructed carefully. Taking his time. Building each character into something real.

On 121 West 87
^th
Street, Apartment 7B, he was Bruce Phillips.

In Charlemont, Massachusetts, in the weather-beaten double-wide
trailer on Zoar Road with the rusted satellite dish and cracked windowpanes that overlooked the catch-and-release trout fishing segment of the Deerfield River, he was known as Blair Munroe. This was a literary homage that only he could appreciate. He liked Saki’s haunting short stories, which gave him the
Munroe
—he’d reluctantly added the
e
to the author’s real last name—and
Blair
was George Orwell’s actual last name.

And in Key West, in the small, expensively reconditioned 1920s cigar-maker’s house he owned on Angela Street, he was Stephen Lewis. The
Stephen
was for Stephen King or Stephen Dedalus—he changed his mind from time to time about the literary antecedent—and the
Lewis
was for Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson.

But all these names were as fictional as the characters he’d created for them.
Private investment specialist
in New York;
social worker at the VA hospital
in Massachusetts; and in Key West,
lucky drug dealer who’d pulled off a single big load and retired instead of getting greedy and hauled in by the DEA and imprisoned
.

But curiously, none of these personae really spoke to him. Instead, he thought of himself solely as Student #5. That was who he had been when his life had changed. That was who had systematically repaired the immense wrongs so thoughtlessly and cavalierly done to him as a young man.

Still walking north, he took a quick left to Riverside Drive so that he could steal a look from the park across the Hudson toward New Jersey before the sun finally set. He wondered whether he should stop in a grocery over on Broadway to pick up some prepackaged
sushi
for dinner. He had one death that he had to carefully review, assess, and analyze in depth.
A postmortem conference with myself,
he thought. And he had one more death to consider.
A premortem conference with myself.
He very much wanted this last act to be special, and he wanted the person he was hunting to know it.
This last one—he needs to know what’s coming. No surprises. A dialogue with death. The conversation I wasn’t allowed to have so many years ago.
There was both risk and challenge within this desire—which gave him a sense of delicious anticipation.
And then the scales will finally be balanced.

He smiled.
Murder as talk therapy.

Student #5 hesitated at the corner of the block and stole a glance toward the river. Just as he’d expected, a shimmering slice of gold from the sun’s last effort creased the water surface.

Out loud he said to no one and everyone: “One more.”

As always, as was his custom with all his plans, he intended to be surgically meticulous. But now he was giving in to impatience.
No lengthy delays. We have saved this one for last. Get to it and set your future free.

7

The Doctor’s First Conversation

The saleslady showing Jeremy Hogan through the nursing home was filled with bright and cheery descriptions of the many features available for residents: gourmet meals (he didn’t believe this for a second) served either in one’s apartment or in the well-appointed dining area; modern indoor pool and exercise suite; weekly first-run movies; book discussion groups; lectures by formerly prominent professionals who now made their homes there. She coupled this bubbly enthusiasm with more sobering lists of à la carte medical care available—
did he need a daily injection of insulin?
—a dedicated, well-trained, twenty-four-hour nursing staff, rehabilitation facilities located on site, and quick and easy access to nearby hospitals in the case of a real emergency.

But all he could think of was a simple question, which he did not ask:
Can I hide here from a killer?

In the deeply carpeted corridors, people were relentlessly polite, swooping past him on motorized scooters or moving slowly with walkers or canes.
Many “Hi, how are you?” and “Nice day, isn’t it?” inquiries that no one really expected to be answered with anything other than a fake friendly smile and a vigorous nod.

He wanted to reply:
“How am I? Scared.”
Or:
“Yes. It’s a nice day to possibly get killed.”

“As you can see,” the saleslady said, “we’re a lively crew here.”

Doctor Jeremy Hogan, eighty two years old, widower, long retired, a lanky onetime basketball player, wondered if any of the
lively crew
were armed and knew how to handle a semiautomatic pistol or a short-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun. He imagined he should ask:
“Any ex–Navy SEALS or Recon Marines living here? Combat vets?”
He barely listened to the saleslady’s final pitch, outlining the many financial advantages that accompanied moving into the “deluxe” one-bedroom apartment with the desultory second-floor window view of a distant tangled stand of forest trees. It was only “deluxe,” Jeremy decided, if one considered polished aluminum rails in the shower and a safety intercom system to be riches.

He smiled, shook the saleslady’s hand, told her he’d get back with her within the next few days, wondered about the misshapen fear that possessed him to make the urgent appointment for the tour of the home, and told himself that death couldn’t be worse than some kinds of life—no matter what sort of death came visiting.

He expected his to be painful.

Maybe.

And he believed it was closing in on him rapidly.

Maybe.

The part that concerned him wasn’t only the threat at the end. It was the pillar on which the threat was built:

“Whose fault is it?”

“What do you mean by ‘fault’?”

“Tell me, Doctor, whose fault is it?”

“Who is this, please?”

The curious thing,
he told himself as he drove away slowly from the nursing home,
is that you spent much of your career in and around violent death, and now, very possibly facing it yourself, it seems like you don’t have a clue what to do.

Violence had always been an interesting abstraction for him: something that happened to other people; something that took place somewhere else; something for clinical studies; something that he would write academic papers about; and primarily what he talked about in courtrooms and classrooms.

“I’m sorry, Counselor, but there is no scientific way to predict future dangerousness. I can only tell you what the defendant presents psychiatrically at this moment. How he will respond to treatment and medication or confinement is unknown.”

This was Jeremy Hogan’s standard witness stand response, an answer to a question that was invariably asked in the times he’d been called upon to testify in a court of law as an expert. He could picture dozens—no,
hundreds
—of defendants seated at benches, watching him carefully as he rendered his opinions about what their mental state was when they did what they did that brought them to that courtroom. He remembered seeing: Anger. Rage. Deep-rooted resentment. Or, sometimes: Sadness. Shame. Despair. And the occasional
I’m not here. I will never be here. I will always be somewhere else. You cannot touch me because I will always live in some place within me that is locked away from you and only I have the key.