Wanting Sheila Dead(50)

EIGHT



1


Things moved faster these days than they used to. There were cell phones, and computers, but Gregor thought the real reason was that there were so many more people. When Gregor had first started working, businesses had put up HELP WANTED signs in their windows and taken in almost anybody who walked in off the street. There was a lot of work and too few people to do it. Or maybe it had only seemed that way, because women had stayed home and done their own laundry and housework, and that had left the field of paid employment look more open.

Actually, Gregor had no idea what his mind was nattering on about. It was the kind of thing he thought about these days. Maybe that was getting older. Maybe that was getting married again. What it probably actually was was the fuss with the court-appointed attorney. In Gregor’s day, most court-appointed attorneys half slept through their cases. Now there were kids fresh out of law school who took being a court-appointed attorney as a crusade.

He got out of the cab in front of the Wilson Deere Memorial Hospital and looked around. The woman on the phone had sounded very young, almost too young to have graduated from anything. There was nobody waiting for him at the door, so he went inside. Here was something that had not changed. The interior landscape of public mental hospitals was as grim and terrifying as it had always been.

The big ground-floor foyer had linoleum on the floors and walls the color of pale pea soup. There was a male attendant at the front desk. The desk was behind a cage of barbed wire. Weren’t the inmates all upstairs and restrained by orderlies? Maybe people came in off the street and threatened the staff, for whatever reason.

The young woman he was waiting for was standing near the elevators, looking through her briefcase. There were no chairs to sit down in. There were no magazines to read while you waited. Gregor thought of Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit, and then he thought that this young lawyer wouldn’t have the faintest idea who Olivia de Havilland was.

Gregor went up to the elevator. “Excuse me,” he said. “My name is Gregor Demarkian. I’m looking for LeeAnn Testenaro.”

“Oh,” the young woman said. She dropped the briefcase, looked at it for a moment, and then picked it up. “Oh,” she said again. “Excuse me. Yes. Mr. Demarkian. I’m LeeAnn Testenaro.”

Gregor held out his hand. In his youth, men did not offer their hands to women. They waited for women to offer their hands instead. It all seemed unnecessarily complicated for this time and place.

LeeAnn took Gregor’s hand and shook it. Then she dropped it and looked at her briefcase again.

“I don’t mean to look this disorganized,” she said. “It’s just that I’m not used to this kind of thing. I mean, our usual case, in Legal Aid, is of some kid who robbed a liquor store or got so incredibly stoned on something that he wandered into a police station and puked all over the desk sergeant.”

“Did that really happen?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, yes,” LeeAnn said. “And you wouldn’t believe how hard it is defending people who do things like that. It’s as if they wanted to go to jail. You can’t get them to shut up. We’re up on the fourth floor. They’re expecting us.”

“Good,” Gregor said. He punched the elevator button and the doors opened directly. The elevator was gray and ugly and metal. There was no carpet on the floor.

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” LeeAnn said. “We don’t do anything to make life easier for these people. Do you know who ends up in here, most of the time? Homeless people. A lot of them are genuinely mentally ill. A lot of them are just addicts, but they can get very out of it and seem mentally ill. I spent all last winter getting dozens of them committed for four-day observations.”

“You did?” They had gotten into the elevator together. It was heading upward. It creaked. “Why?”

“Because it keeps them out of the cold,” LeeAnn said. “I know this isn’t the kind of thing I’m supposed to think, and I know why the courts did it, but I don’t think I’ve ever found anything so stupid as that bit where you can’t involuntarily commit somebody who isn’t a danger to themselves or others, and then you define being a danger as not actively going after people with an ax. Aren’t they a danger to themselves when they’re too paranoid to go to a homeless shelter when it’s minus six outside?”

“You really don’t want to make it too easy for people to be socked away against their will,” Gregor said. “We make that hard even when they have gone after people with an ax.”