Johnithan Kellerman – Bad Love

“What kind is that?”

“An optimist. Idealistic. Most of us start out that way, don’t we?”

I nodded. “Did Hewitt have a history of violence?”

“None that was listed in our files. He’d been arrested just a few weeks before for theft and was due to stand trial-maybe she was counseling him about that. There was nothing on paper that would have warned us. And even if he was violent, there’s a good chance the information would never have gotten to us, with all the red tape.”

She put down her pen and looked at me. Flipped her hair. “The truth is, he was exactly like so many others who come in and out of here there’s still no way to know.”

She picked up one of the folders.

“This is his file. The police confiscated it and returned it, so I guess it’s not confidential anymore.”

Inside were only two sheets, one clipped to each of the covers. The first was an intake form listing Dorsey Hewitt’s age as thirtyone and his address as “none.” Under REASON FOR REFERRAL someone had written “multiple social problems.”

Under DIAGNOSIS: “prob. chron. schiz.” The rest of the categorieS-PROGNOSIS, FAMILY SUPPORT, MEDICAL HISTORY, OTHER PSYCH.

TREATMENT-had been left blank. Nothing about “bad love.”

At the bottom of the form were notations of referral for food stamps.

The signature read, “R. Basille, SWA.”

The facing page was white and smooth, marked only with the notation, “Will follow as needed, R.B SWA.” The date was eight weeks prior to the murder. I handed the folder back.

“Not much,” I said.

She gave a sad smile. “Paperwork wasn’t Becky’s forte.”

“So you have no idea how many times she actually saw him?”

“Guess that doesn’t say much for my administrative skills, does it?

But I’m not one of those people who believes in riding the staff, checking out every little picayune detail. I try to find the best people I can, motivate them, and give them room to move. Generally it works out. With Becky. ..”

She threw up her hands. “She was a doll, a really sweet person. Not much for rules and regulations, but so what?”

She shook her head. “We’d talked about it-helping her get her paperwork in on time. She promised to try, but to tell the truth, I didn’t harbor much hope. And I didn’t care. Because she was productive where it counted-getting on the phone all day with agencies and arguing for every last penny for her cases. She stayed late, did whatever it took to help them. Who knows? Maybe she was going that extra mile for Hewitt.”

She picked up the phone. “Mary? Coffee, please. … No, just one.”

Putting it down, she said, “The real horror is that it could happen again.

We have a steel corral now, to direct them out onto the street after they get their meds. The county finally sent us a guard and the detector, but you tell me how to predict which of them is going to blow.”

“We’re not very good prophets under the best of circumstances.”

“No, we’re not. Hundreds of people file in here each week, for meds and vouchers. We’ve got to let them in. We’re the court of last resort. Any of them could be another Hewitt. Even if we wanted to lock them up, we couldn’t.

The state hospitals that haven’t been shut down are filled to capacity-I don’t know what your theory is about psychosis, but mine is that most psychotics are born with it-it’s biological, like any other illness. But instead of treating them, we demonize them or idealize them, and they get IJAU LUVE 11515 caught in the squeeze between the do-gooders who think they should be allowed to run free and the skinflints who think all they need is to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.”

“I know,” I said. “When I was in grad school the whole community psych thing was in full bloom-schizophrenia as an alternative lifestyle, liberating patients from the back wards and empowering them to take over their own treatment.”

“Empowering.” She laughed without opening her mouth.

“I had a professor who was a fanatic on the subject,” I said. “Studied the mental health system in Belgium or somewhere and wrote a book on it. He had us do a paper on deinstitutionalization. The more I researched it, the less feasible it seemed. I started to wonder what would happen to psychotics who needed medication and couldn’t be counted upon to take it. He handed the paper back with one comment, Medication is mind control,’ and gave me a Cminus.”

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