Denial, avoidance, whatever.
That night I slept fitfully. Friday morning at eight I phoned North Carolina and got an address for the French Bulldog Club of America, in Rahway, New Jersey. A post office box. No phone number was available.
At eight-ten, I called the Rodriguez house. A phone company recording said that line had been disconnected. I pictured Evelyn and the girls barreling over a dirt road in Baja, Rodriguez following in his truck.
Or maybe the four of them, wandering through Waikiki with glazed tourists’ eyes. If only they knew how much we had in common now. .
.
I began unpacking books. At eight thirty-five, the doorbell rang and Milo appeared on one of the TV monitors, tapping a foot and carrying a white bag.
choked shopping carts in front, it could have been a private sanitarium.
A generous lot next door was two-thirds empty and marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. NO PATIENT PARKING. I decided a consultant qualified as someone’s employee, and parked there.
I made my way back to the front of the building, passing the section of wall that had been obsessed upon by the TV camera. A cement cornerstone etched with names of forgotten politicos stated that the building had been dedicated as a veterans clinic in 1919. The door Hewitt had come out of was just to the right, unmarked and locked-two locks, each almost as large as the one sealing Roddy Rodriguez’s brickyard.
The main entrance was dead center, through a squat arch leading to a courtyard with an empty fountain. A loggia to the right of the fountain-the path Hewitt would have taken to get to the unmarked door-was sectioned off by thick steel mesh that looked brand-new. An open hallway on the opposite side led me around the fountain to glass-paned doors.
A blue-uniformed guard stood behind the doors, tall, old, black, chewing gum. He looked me over and unlatched one of the doors, then pointed to a metal detector to his left-one of those walk-through airport things. I set it off and had to give the guard my keys before passing silently.
“Go head,” he said, handing them back.
I walked up to a reception desk. A young black woman sat behind more mesh. “Can I help you?”
“Dr. Delaware for Ms. Jeffers.”
“One minute.” She got on the phone. Behind her were three other women at desks, typing and talking into receivers. The windows behind them were barred.
Through the bars, I saw trucks, cars, and shadows-the gray, graffitied walls of an alley.
I was standing in a small, unfurnished area painted light green and broken only by a single door to the right. Claustrophobic. It reminded me of the sally port at the county jail and I wondered how a paranoid schizophrenic or someone in crisis would handle it. How easy it would be for someone with a muddled psyche to make it from the no-parking lot, through the metal detector, to this holding cell.
The receptionist said, “Okay, she’s all the way down at the end,” and pressed a button. The door buzzed-not quite as loudly as the one at the pawnshop, but just as obnoxiously-and I opened it and stepped into a very long, cream-colored hall marked by lots of doors. Thick, gray carpeting covered the floor. The light was very bright.
Most of the doors were blank, a few were labeled THERAPY, and even fewer bore slide-in signs with people’s names on them. The cream paint smelled fresh, how many coats had it taken to cover up the blood?
The corridor was silent except for my footsteps-the kind of womblike damping that comes only from real soundproofing. As I made my way to the end, a door on the left opened, spilling out people but no noise.
Three people, two women and a man, poorly dressed and shuffling. Not a group, each walked alone. The man was lanternjawed and stooped, the women heavy and red-faced, with cracked swollen legs and stringy hair.
All of them looked down at the carpet as they passed me. They grasped small white pieces of paper, “Rx” stamped at the top.
The room they’d exited was classroom-sized and crowded with another thirty or so people queued up before a metal desk. A young man sat at the desk, talked briefly to each person who stood before him, then filled out a prescription blank and handed it over with a smile. The people in line scuffed forward as automatically as cans on a conveyor belt. Some of them held out their hands in anticipation before they got to the doctor. None of them left without paper, none seemed cheered.