Book of the Dead

  “She’s saying you don’t look dead. That’s a relief. And how’s Kay?”

  “She likes Charleston, but I’m not sure it likes her. I like it okay…. Well, I’m always motivated by places that are a bad fit.”

  “Which is most places.”

  “I know. Lucy the freako. I trust we’re still undercover. Seems like it, since I gave my alias to that same what’s-his-name at the desk and he didn’t question it. Democratic majority notwithstanding, privacy’s a joke.”

  “Don’t get me started.” He peruses her lab report. “You know how many patients I have who would self-pay if they could afford it just to keep their information out of databases?”

  “Good thing. If I wanted to hack into your database, I could probably do it in five minutes. The Feds might take an hour, but they’ve probably already been in your database. And I haven’t. Because I don’t believe in violating a person’s civil rights unless it’s for a good cause.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “They lie and are stupid. Especially the FBI.”

  “Still topping your Most Wanted List, I see.”

  “They fired me for no good cause.”

  “And to think you could be abusing the Patriot Act and getting paid for it. Well, not much. What computer stuff are you selling for multimillions these days?”

  “Data modeling. Neural networks that take input data and basically perform intelligent tasks the way our brains do. And I’m fooling around with a DNA project that could prove interesting.”

  “TSH excellent,” he says. “Free T-four fine, so your metabolism’s working. I can tell that without a lab report. You’ve lost a little weight since I saw you last.”

  “Maybe five pounds.”

  “Looks like you’ve gained muscle mass. So you’ve probably lost a good ten pounds of fat and water weight from bloating.”

  “Eloquently put.”

  “How much are you working out?”

  “The same.”

  “I’ll note that as obligatory, although it’s probably obsessive. Liver panel’s fine. And your prolactin level’s great, down to two-point-four. What about your periods?”

  “Normal.”

  “No white, clear, or milky discharge from your nipples? Not that I expect lactation with a prolactin level this low.”

  “Nope. And don’t get your hopes up. I’m not letting you check.”

  He smiles, makes more notes in her record.

  “Sad part is, my breasts aren’t as big.”

  “There are women who’d pay a lot of money for what you’ve got. And do,” he says matter-of-factly.

  “They’re not for sale. In fact, I can’t even give them away these days.”

  “That I know isn’t true.”

  Lucy is no longer embarrassed, can talk about anything with him. In the beginning, it was a different story, a horror and humiliation that a benign pituitary macroadenoma—a brain tumor—was causing an overproduction of the hormone prolactin that fooled her body into thinking she was pregnant. Her periods stopped. She gained weight. She didn’t have galactorrhea, or begin to produce milk, but had she not discovered what was wrong when she did, that would have been next.

  “Sounds like you’re not seeing anyone.” He slides her MR films out of their envelopes, reaches up, and attaches them to light boxes.

  “Nope.”

  “How’s your libido?” He dims the lights in the office and flips on the light boxes, illuminating films of Lucy’s brain. “Dostinex is sometimes called the sex drug, you know. Well, if you can get it.”

  She moves close to him and looks at her films. “I’m not having surgery, Nate.”

  She stares dismally at the somewhat rectangular-shaped region of hypointensity at the base of the hypothalamus. Every time she looks at one of her scans, she feels there must be a mistake. That can’t be her brain. A young brain, as Nate calls it. Anatomically, a great brain, he says, except for one little glitch, a tumor about half the size of a penny.

  “I don’t care what the journal articles say. No one’s cutting on me. How do I look? Please tell me okay,” she says.

  Nate compares the earlier film to the new one, studies them side by side. “Not dramatically different. Still seven to eight millimeters. Nothing in the suprasellar cistern. A little shift left to right from the infundibulum of the pituitary stalk.” He points with a pen. “Optic chiasm is clear.” Points again. “Which is great.” He puts down the pen and holds up two fingers, starts with them together, then moves them apart to check her peripheral vision. “Great,” he says again. “So almost identical. The lesion isn’t growing.”

  “It isn’t shrinking.”

  “Have a seat.”

  She sits on the edge of the couch. “Bottom line,” she says, “it’s not gone. It hasn’t burned out from the drug and become necrotic, and it never will, right?”

  “But it’s not growing,” he repeats himself. “The medication did shrink it some and is containing it. All right. Options. But what do you want to do? Let me say that just because Dostinex and its generic have been linked to heart valve damage, I’m not sure you need to worry. The studies are dealing with people who take it for Parkinson’s. At your low dose? You’ll probably be fine. The bigger problem? I can write you a dozen prescriptions, but I don’t think you’ll find a single pill in this country.”

  “It’s manufactured in Italy. I can get it over there. Dr. Maroni said he will.”

  “Fine. But I want you to get an echocardiogram every six months.”

  The phone rings. Nate punches in a button, listens briefly, and says to whoever it is, “Thanks. Call security if it seems to get out of hand. Make sure nobody touches it.” He hangs up and says to Lucy, “Apparently, someone drove up in a red Ferrari that’s attracting quite a lot of attention.”

  “Kind of ironic.” She gets up from the couch. “It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it.”

  “I’ll drive it if you don’t want it.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want it. It’s just nothing feels the same anymore. And that’s not entirely bad. Just different.”

  “That’s the thing about what you’ve got. It’s something you don’t want. But it’s something more than what you had, because maybe it’s changed the way you look at things.” He walks her out. “I see it every day around here.”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re doing well.” He stops by the door that leads out to the waiting area and there’s no one to hear them, just the man behind the desk, who smiles a lot and is on the phone again. “I’d put you in the top ten percent of my patients in terms of how well you’re doing.”

  “Top ten percent. I believe that’s a B-plus. I think I started out with an A.”

  “No, you didn’t. You’ve probably had this thing forever and just didn’t know it until it became symptomatic. Are you talking to Rose?”

  “She won’t face it. I’m trying not to resent her for it, but it’s hard. Really, really hard. It’s not fair. Especially to my aunt.”

  “Don’t let Rose run you off, because that’s probably what she’s trying to do for the very reason you just said. She can’t face it.” He slips his hands into his lab coat pockets. “She needs you. She’s certainly not going to talk about it with anyone else.”

  Outside the Cancer Center, a thin woman with a scarf wrapped around her bald head and two little boys are walking around the Ferrari. The valet rushes over to Lucy.

  “They haven’t got too close. I’ve been watching. Nobody has,” he says in a low, urgent voice.

  She looks at the two little boys and their sick mother, and walks over to the car, remotely unlocking it. The boys and their mother step back, and fear shows on their faces. The mother looks old but probably isn’t more than thirty-five.

  “I’m sorry,” she says to Lucy. “But they’re smitten. They haven’t touched it.”

  “How fast can it go?” the older boy asks, a redhead, maybe twelve.

  “
Let’s see, four-ninety horsepower, six speed, a four-point-three-liter V-eight, eighty-five hundred rpm and carbon-fiber rear diffuser panel.

  Zero to sixty in less than four seconds. Around two hundred miles an hour.”

  “No way!”

  “You ever driven one of these things?” Lucy says to the older boy.

  “I’ve never seen one in person.”

  “What about you?” Lucy asks his redheaded brother, who is maybe eight or nine.

  “No, ma’am.” Shyly.

  Lucy opens the driver’s door and the two redheads crane to get a peek and suck in their breath at the same time.

  “What’s your name?” she asks the older boy.

  “Fred.”

  “Sit in the driver’s seat, Fred, and I’m going to show you how to start this thing.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Mom says to her, and she looks as if she’s about to cry. “Honey, don’t you hurt anything.”

  “I’m Johnny,” the other boy says.

  “You’re next,” Lucy says. “Get over here next to me and pay attention.”

  Lucy turns on the battery, makes sure the Ferrari’s in neutral. She takes Fred’s finger and places it on the steering wheel’s red start button. She lets go of his hand. “Hold it in for a few seconds and fire her up.” The Ferrari roars awake.

  Lucy gives each boy a ride around the parking lot while their mother stands all alone in the middle of it and smiles and waves and wipes her eyes.

  Benton records Gladys Self from his office phone inside McLean’s Neuroimaging Lab. As is true of her famous daughter, the name Self suits her.

  “If you’re wondering why that rich daughter of mine doesn’t put me in some nice mansion in Boca,” Mrs. Self says, “well, sir, I don’t want to be in Boca or Palm Beach or anywhere but right here in Hollywood, Florida. In my run-down little oceanfront apartment on the boardwalk.”

  “Why might that be?”

  “To pay her back. Think how that will look when they find me dead in a dump like this someday. Let’s see what that does to her popularity.” She chortles.

  “Sounds like you might have a hard time saying anything nice about her,” Benton says. “And I do need several minutes of your praising her, Mrs. Self. Just as I’m going to need a few minutes of your being neutral and then critical.”

  “Why’s she doing this, anyway?”

  “I explained it at the beginning of our conversation. She volunteered for a scientific research project I’m conducting.”

  “That daughter of mine doesn’t volunteer for shineola unless there’s something she wants out of it. Never known her to do anything for the pure reason of helping others. Hogwash. Ha! A family emergency. She’s lucky I didn’t get on CNN and tell the world she’s lying. Let’s see. Wonder what the truth might be. Let me follow the clues. You’re one of these police psychologists at what’s the name of your hospital? McLean? Oh, that’s right. Where all the rich and famous go. Just the sort of place she’d go to if she had to go somewhere, and I know a good reason why. Would knock you out if you knew. Bingo! She’s a patient, that’s what this is all about!”

  “As I’ve said, she’s part of a project I’m conducting.” Dammit. He warned Dr. Self about this. If he called her mother to make the recording, she might suspect that Dr. Self is a patient. “I’m not allowed to discuss anything about her situation—where she is or what she’s doing or why. I can’t divulge information about any subjects in our studies.”

  “I sure could divulge a thing or two to you. I knew it! She’s worth studying, all right. What normal person would get on TV and do what she does, twisting people’s minds, their lives, like that tennis player who just got murdered. Bet you dollars to donuts Marilyn’s somehow to blame for that, had her on her TV show, getting into all this personal information from her for all the world to see. It was embarrassing, can’t believe that little girl’s family allowed it.”

  Benton’s seen a copy of it. Mrs. Self is right. It was too much exposure and made Drew vulnerable and accessible. Those are the ingredients for being stalked, if she was. It isn’t the purpose of his call, but he can’t resist probing. “I’m wondering how your daughter happened to get Drew Martin on her show. Did they know each other?”

  “Marilyn can get anybody she wants. When she calls me on special occasions, mostly she brags about this celebrity and that. Only the way she says it, they’re all lucky to meet her, not the other way around.”

  “I have a feeling you don’t see her very often.”

  “Do you really think she’d go to the trouble to see her own mother?”

  “Now, she’s not completely devoid of feelings, is she?”

  “As a little girl she could be sweet, I know that’s hard to believe. But something went haywire when she turned sixteen. She ran off with some playboy and had her heart broken, came back home and we had quite a time of it. Did she tell you about that?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “That figures. She’ll go on and on about her father killing himself and how horrible I am and all the rest. But her own failures don’t exist. That includes people. You’d be surprised if you knew the people she’s managed to excommunicate from her life for no good reason except they’re inconvenient. Or maybe someone shows a side of her the world’s not supposed to see. That’s a killable offense.”

  “I assume you don’t mean that literally.”

  “Depends on your definition.”

  “Let’s start with what’s positive about her.”

  “She tell you she makes everybody sign a confidentiality agreement?”

  “Even you?”

  “Do you want to know the real reason I live like this? Because I can’t afford her so-called generosity. I live off Social Security and what retirement I got from working all my life. Marilyn never did a damn thing for me and then had the nerve to tell me I had to sign one of these confidentiality agreements, you see. She said if I didn’t, I was on my own no matter how old and sick I got. I didn’t sign it. And I don’t talk about her anyway. But I could. I sure could.”

  “You’re talking to me.”

  “Well, now, she told me to, didn’t she? She gave you my phone number because it suits whatever little selfish purpose she has this time. And I’m her weakness. She can’t resist. Just itching to hear what I’ll say. Validates her beliefs about herself.”

  “What I need you to try,” Benton says, “is to imagine you’re telling her what you like about her. There must be something. For example, ‘I’ve always admired how bright you are’ or ‘I’m so proud of your success,’ et cetera.”

  “Even if I don’t mean it?”

  “If you can’t say something positive, I’m afraid we can’t do this.” Which would be fine with him.

  “Don’t worry. I can lie as well as she can.”

  “Then the negative. Such as, I wish you were more generous or less arrogant, or whatever comes to mind.”

  “Easy as pie.”

  “Finally, neutral comments. The weather, shopping, what you’ve been doing, things like that.”

  “Don’t trust her. She’ll fake it and ruin your study.”

  “The brain can’t fake it,” Benton says. “Not even hers.”

  An hour later. Dr. Self, in a shimmering red silk pants suit and no shoes, is propped up with pillows on her bed.

  “I understand your feeling this is unnecessary,” Benton says, turning pages in the pale blue Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis 1 Disorders patient edition.

  “Do you need a script, Benton?”

  “To keep things consistent in this study, we SCID with the book. Each time for each subject. I’m not going to ask you things that are obvious and irrelevant, such as your professional status.”

  “Let me help you out,” she says. “I’ve never been a patient in a psychiatric hospital. I don’t take any medications. I don’t drink too much. I usually sleep five hours a night. How many hours does Kay sleep?”

&
nbsp; “Have you lost or gained much weight recently?”

  “I maintain my weight perfectly. What does Kay weigh these days? Does she eat a lot when she’s lonely or depressed? All that fried food down there.”

  Benton flips pages. “What about strange sensations in your body or on your skin?”

  “Depends on who I’m with.”

  “Do you ever smell or taste things other people can’t smell or taste?”

  “I do a lot of things other people can’t.”

  Benton looks up at her. “I don’t think the study is a good idea, Dr. Self. This isn’t constructive.”

  “That’s not for you to judge.”

  “Do you think this is constructive?”

  “You haven’t gotten to the mood chronology. Aren’t you going to ask me about panic attacks?”

  “Have you ever had them?”

  “Sweating, trembling, dizzy, racing heart. Fear I might die?” She gazes thoughtfully at him, as if he’s the patient. “What did my mother say on the tape?”

  “What about when you first got here?” he says. “You seemed rather much in a panic over an e-mail. The one you mentioned to Dr. Maroni when you first got here and haven’t mentioned since.”

  “Imagine your little assistant thinking she was going to SCID me.” She smiles. “I’m a psychiatrist. It would be like a beginner playing Drew Martin in tennis.”

  “How are you feeling about what happened to her?” he asks. “It’s been on the news that you had her on your show. Some people have suggested the killer may have fixed on her because of…”

  “As if my show was the only time she was on TV. I have so many people on my show.”

  “I was going to say because of her visibility. Not her appearance on your show, specifically.”

  “I’ll probably win another Emmy because of that series. Unless what happened…”

  “Unless what happened?”

  “That would be grossly unfair,” Dr. Self says. “If the Academy were prejudiced because of what happened to her. As if that has anything to do with the quality of my work. What did my mother say?”