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Bleeding Hearts(113)

By:Jane Haddam


“He looked fine to me,” Gregor told her. “He’s out helping Donna do something to our building.”

Linda hurried away, got the coffee, hurried back again. She set them up with a pot and then disappeared on the run one more time, going back to the kitchen.

“So,” Gregor said to Christopher. “You and Paul Hazzard. Why do I feel that’s an unlikely combination?”

“Because it is.” Christopher laughed. “Me and the recovery movement, that’s an unlikely combination too. Do you remember when you first met us, when all that happened at our house, when my father died?”

“Oh, yes,” Gregor said.

“Well”—Christopher poured coffee—“about that time I was in, I think it was seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of debt in gambling losses. Really crazy gambling losses. Cards. Roulette. Nonsense.”

“Illegal gambling?”

“Mostly, yeah. But I didn’t do too badly at places like Vegas and Reno when I had the cash. The problem was what I did when I didn’t have the cash.”

“Meaning run a tab.”

“Precisely. I ran a lot of tabs with a lot of people and always the wrong people. More than once, Bennis bailed me out of trouble. The year my father died, I was more than a little overdue. I was getting phone calls threatening me with bodily harm, if you know what I mean.”

“Death?”

“No, just maiming.” Christopher smiled. “Even at the time I wasn’t crazy enough to wait around until somebody was threatening to kill me. Anyway, Bennis bailed me out of that and then she loaned me the money to go to this place in Vermont for three months, where a friend of mine had gone to quit gambling. That wasn’t her idea, by the way. It was mine. If you say ‘therapy’ to Bennis, she spits.”

“I know.”

“Right. Well. Anyway. I went. And as you can guess, it was a place run by Paul Hazzard’s organization. I’ve been trying to work out the timing. My father died after Jacqueline Isherwood Hazzard did—after by at least a couple of years, I’m sure, which means that I was up in Vermont either while Paul Hazzard was standing trial or after it was over, but not before.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Well. I was there for about a month and I was going crazy, only not crazy about gambling. Do you know anything at all about how these therapy programs work?”

“Maybe,” Gregor said cautiously. “I’ve heard a lot of stories since this thing started.”

“The stories were probably all true,” Christopher told him. “The first day, I was dragged into a room with a psychologist in it and lectured about my ‘addictions.’ There was no such thing as a simple ‘addict.’ All addicts had multiple ‘addictions.’ If I was addicted to gambling, then I had to be addicted to other things as well. The regime at the center was purged of all refined sugar, all alcohol, all tobacco, all drugs, all red meat.”

“Red meat?”

“Yeah, well, according to the theory, red meat has a natural tranquilizer in it, an animal protein that acts as a tranquilizer, I don’t remember, and a tranquilizer is a drug.”

“Oh.”

“You’re getting that look on your face,” Christopher said. “Everybody does when they come in contact with the recovery movement for the first time. You get used to this stuff if you hear it often enough. Anyway, the deal was, we had group therapy at two every afternoon, and what we were supposed to do at Group was testify to the damage our addictions had done to us. To be exact, Mr. Demarkian, we were supposed to tell horror stories. I had some pretty good horror stories about gambling, and I told them, but then they wanted horror stories about my ‘other addictions.’ Which I didn’t think I had. I mean, I smoked marijuana fairly frequently in those days, but I wasn’t compulsive about it. It certainly never interfered with my work or my life. The same thing with wine.”

“So?”

“So,” Christopher said, “they kept pushing me and pushing me. They kept telling me I was lying. They kept telling me I was in denial. I asked them what I was supposed to say if I was telling them the truth—if I wasn’t addicted to marijuana or a closet alcoholic or whatever, how did I express that so that they knew I was telling the truth. And the basic answer was that there was no way I could prove I was telling the truth, because there was no way I could be telling the truth, because if I wasn’t addicted, the question would never have come up. It went beyond guilty until proven innocent. It became guilty with no way to prove yourself innocent. Guilty because you were accused.”