Blunt Darts jfc-1 Page 4

  I did so, with my hands outstretched on the wall, and Giant spread my legs a little wider. He looked one foot inside my right one and gave me a rough upper-body patdown.

  When I was in army officer training, a military-police major always said to be sure to check a man's crotch for a weapon. When I was actually in the field, a military-police sergeant showed me how to bring the frisking hand up just right to ring the friskee's chimes without any abrupt motion being apparent to an onlooker. I looked down as Giant started his hand up the inside of my right calf, saw the telltale turning of his wrist, and shifted my weight to the left just in time to catch most of his goose on my inner right thigh. Nevertheless, I heard a gentle tinkle of bells.

  Giant snickered and moved back from me as I straightened up.

  "He's clean, Your Honor," he said-"and smart."

  "Please be seated, Mr. Cuddy."

  No surprise there. Giant had probably read my plates when I pulled out of the judge's driveway yesterday. One call to the Registry of Motor Vehicles, one call to the Boston police, and one call by them to the Copley Square rent-a-car would have produced the information. Still, I had a feeling that Mrs. Kinnington would be disappointed in me. I also didn't like being roughhoused, even a little, by Giant. But I liked the judge's style sufficiently less that I maintained my composure and dignity. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I sat.

  "Why were you visiting my mother yesterday?"

  "Does Baby Huey have to hear all this?" I asked. I heard Giant suck in his breath behind me, as though he'd been waiting thirty years for somebody to call him that.

  "Officer Blakey will stay." Well, one question answered. I must have missed the nameplate on the blue pup tent with sleeves that Blakey wore.

  The judge continued, "By the way, I am sorry about the search, but no security system, even ours, is foolproof. I'm sure you understand." He smiled and gestured to a box on his desk. "Would you care for a cigar?"

  "No."

  The smile evaporated and was replaced by the case-dismissed look. "Why were you visiting my mother?"

  "If you must know, we had a date for racquetball."

  The judge's eyes glanced up and then down. The ham applied itself to my shoulder again and, this time, started to squeeze. The initial pain was welcomely replaced by a spreading numbness.

  "By the way," I said through reasonably unclenched teeth, "did you hear the one about the Long Island judge who couldn't stand lousy coffee?" I was referring to a judge in New York who some years earlier had had his bailiffs handcuff a guy selling coffee outside his courthouse and drag him in to explain why the coffee was, in the opinion of the judge, so rotten. I couldn't remember what had happened to that judge, but apparently Kinnington did, because he waved Blakey off. My happy blood sang on its way back to my shoulder.

  "Mr. Cuddy, I do not wish to see you around my property or my family again. Ever. Do I make myself clear?"

  "I've understood every word you've said, Judge," I said as I stood and, not having been knocked down, turned and walked to the door. Blakey backed up, keeping two paces away from me, and opened the door for me.

  "See ya around the quad, Cuddly Bear," I said softly to Blakey as I exited past him.

  "Remember," said Blakey, just as softly. In the court lobby I stopped at an enclosed pay phone. I called information, got the number I wanted, and dialed it.

  "Sturney and Perkins, good morning."

  "Good morning. This is John Francis calling from Judge Kinnington's court." I never like to tell a lie. "The judge and I were just speaking about a confidential matter that one of your people is handling, but frankly, the investigator's name has slipped my mind."

  "Just a moment, please." There was a click, then dead space, then another click.

  "That would be Ms. DeMarco, but I'm afraid she won't be in until two. Can I give her a message?"

  "Gee," I said in my best Andy Hardy voice, "that's inconvenient for telephoning. The judge is in the next room. Hold on." I drummed my fingers through one verse of "Eleanor Rigby" so the no-doubt harried receptionist, when I got her back on, would not want to talk very long. I resumed. "Okay, I can be there at two-thirty. Just leave a message that I'll see her then."

  "Fine. Thank you," said the receptionist crisply, and hung up.

  I left the courthouse, retrieved my. 38 from the trunk, and got into the Mercury. It was only 10:10. The cat being out of the bag, I decided to rattle some more local cages before driving in to see Ms. DeMarco. I crisscrossed the downtown area of Meade until I spotted the police station. I parked (no meters) and went inside.

  SIXTH

  – ¦ The desk sergeant blinked twice at me. "What did you say, buddy'?" he asked.

  I decided against raising my voice. "I said, could I please see whoever's in charge of Judge Kinnington's son's case."

  "Sit down over there." I sat down on a bench seat across the small anteroom. The desk sergeant made an internal call while I gave him one of my best Gaelic smiles.

  The desk sergeant clamped his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. I hoped he wasn't going to yell anything confidential to me, since you have to cover both ends of the receiver to be sure the other party on the line can't hear what you're saying.

  "What's your name?"

  "John Francis Cuddy, Sergeant."

  He repeated the words into the phone. The sergeant said, "Right" and hung up. "The Chief will be back to me in a few minutes."

  "Thank you, Sergeant," I said, and waited. Sergeants in every hierarchy love it when you call them by their title.

  Five minutes later, the sergeant's phone rang. He picked it up and said, "Yes, Chief." Just then a young, short, and squat uniformed officer came through the front door. The sergeant hung up.

  "Hey, Dexter, show Mr. Cuddy here to the chief's 0ffice."

  The short, squat one stopped, nearly came to attention, and motioned to me. "Follow me, sir."

  "Thank you, Sergeant," I repeated as I moved into the corridor.

  "This is it, sir," said my guide as he gestured to a newly painted door.

  "Thank you, Dexter."

  "Yes, sir," he beamed, pushing out his chest. I was certain that he was somebody's nephew.

  I knocked and heard a near-human growl from behind the door. I entered the office.

  There was a nameplate on the desk that said SMOLLETT. No rank or title, just Smollett. The plate was old and worn-looking. I got the impression the chief had bought it when he first came on the force, because he was old and worn-looking too. He had a voice that sounded like a '47 Nash without the mufflers.

  "What do you want?" he said. I decided to sit down anyway.

  "I want to speak with whoever's looking into Stephen Kinnington's disappearance."

  "It's a missing-person case," he said, folding his hands, gnarled by arthritis, in front of him on the desk. "It's been looked into."

  "Then can I look at the reports and talk to the investigating officer?"

  "Why?" he asked, quite reasonably.

  "Because I've been retained to find him," I replied.

  "I wanna know who retained you."

  "Why?" I asked, quite reasonably.

  "Get out," he said, his eyes bulging a bit.

  "Look, Chief," I said with some heat, "I've talked with the boy's grandmother, father, and now the chief of police of the town he skipped from. And so far all I'm getting told is to butt out. Now, if this were a criminal case, I could see it. The too-many-cooks theory. But with a missing person, the more knowledgeable people looking, the more likely it is somebody'll find something?

  "Get out," he said again, his folded hands trembling a little.

  I complied.

  SEVENTH

  – ¦ After I left the police station, I drove around Meade for an hour, just taking streets to see where they went and to get an idea of how many ways there might be for a fourteen-year-old boy to leave town. Even Meade's finest must have checked with bus drivers and the few cabs that plied the town
. My guess was a cross-country hike until he was out of Meade and then maybe hitchhiking northwest to Worcester, northeast to Boston, or even southeast to Providence, Rhode Island. From any city, his transportation opportunities were limitless. Even with publicity, the chances that someone would come forward to say, "Yeah, I picked up the kid," were astronomically small. Without publicity, there was no chance at all to trace his route. I was going to have to be very lucky and hope that I could deduce what city he'd chosen as his jumping-off point.

  I cut short my wanderings and drove to the outskirts of Brookline, a beautiful bedroom suburb of Boston, but really a small city in its own right. I stopped at a telephone booth in a gas station. The telephone book showed two Dr. D. Steins in Brookline but one was eliminated by his D.D.S. degree. Dr. Stein the psychiatrist was in a large, old stone medical building on Beacon Street across from the 1200 Beacon Motel. I eased the rent-a-car into one of the slanted center divider parking spaces, crossed the street, and entered the foyer.

  I found Stein's door on the fourth floor and opened it. The foyer below and the hallway above were nondescript, but the psychiatrist's waiting room was elaborately furnished with a comfortable-looking sofa and four easy chairs arranged around a midsize oriental rug. The walls were a soft beige, with nonstrident landscapes and seascapes. If Dr. Stein intended his patients' surroundings to be soothing, his intention was successfully realized.

  As I closed the door, I heard a low-toned bong. There was no receptionist, and indeed no desk or interior window for a receptionist. I was halfway to the inner office door when it opened.

  "Yes?" said a tallish, slim man about forty. His initial smile of greeting faded as he failed to place me. He had a beard that was redder than the moplike sand-colored hair on his head.

  "Dr. Stein?" I said.

  "Yes."

  "I'm John Cuddy. I believe Mrs. Kinnington called you?"

  "Kinnington? She may have. I've been in group most of the morning. Kinnington?"

  "I have a letter from her." I lifted it from my jacket pocket and handed it to him. He looked down at it.

  "Yes,. well…" He seemed only to skim the letter, but he nevertheless kept it in his hand when he looked back up. "I'll have to check my service. I never take calls when I'm in group. I'll be another fifteen minutes or so and then I can see you. Please sit down and I'll be back to you."

  He withdrew into the inner office and closed the door. I sat down and scanned his eclectic magazine collection. I flipped through two old New Yorker magazines (which I read only for the cartoons) and was halfway through my third Field and Stream article (in their largemouth bass annual issue) when the inner door reopened and a string of two men and three women of varying ages tiled out. From the distrustful looks they gave me as they passed, I think the waiting room's soothing qualities were pretty well wasted on them.

  Stein was last out. He smiled at me and beckoned. I followed him in. Seating himself in a highback chair behind his desk, he bade me sit as well, so I dragged a visitor's lowback up to the front of the desk.

  "I am sorry about disturbing you before," I said. He waved me off as he sank, somewhat relieved, into his desk chair. "Not at all, not at all. In fact, despite what they say in clinic, I think an occasional interruption may be good for a group." He shot me a mischievous smile. "It's certainly good for me." I smiled back. He reached for the telephone and hit one button.

  "Checking my service," he said to me as an aside.

  He spoke with the service for a while, taking down several quick notes on a pad. He said, "She did?" several times, then said thank you and hung up.

  "Well," he said to me, "it seems your Mrs. Kinnington was quite insistent on reaching me. Virtually threatened my service with legal action if she were not put through."

  "She's a very determined woman. And quite concerned about Stephen."

  "Stephen, Stephen, yes, yes," he said as he looked at Mrs. Kinnington's letter again, and then rose and crossed to one of six file cabinets in the room. He pulled back a drawer, retrieved a file, and, opening it, returned to his seat.

  As he turned the pages of the file, he spoke to me.

  "Mrs. Kinnington says in her note only that Stephen is missing. According to the file here and my recollection as well, Stephen's father was the family member most involved with Stephen's… ah, stay at Willow Wood."

  I chose my words carefully. "Mrs. Kinnington was out of the country at the time. Both she and the judge are doing everything possible to locate him. You are just one link, but perhaps an important one, in that chain."

  "Yes, yes, of course." Whatever momentary reticence he had had now seemed to dissolve. "Well then, how can I help you?"

  I breathed an inner sigh of relief and plunged on.

  "We don't know why Stephen has disappeared. We thought you might be able to give us some idea."

  Stein pursed his lips and flipped back to the front of the file. "According to my records, I last saw Stephen over three years ago. Aside from my file entries, I really have little recollection of him."

  I leaned forward a bit. "What I am really interested in is why Stephen, after apparently doing so well for so long, suddenly does an about-face. Now, it may have been a new occurrence and it may have been a recurrence of something from his past. If we know what caused him to act, we may have a starting point for tracing him."

  Stein tented his lingers and gave me a superior smile. "That's assuming that he departed of his own accord. Has that been established?"

  "Not conclusively, but all the available evidence points toward his having run away rather than to kidnapping."

  Stein nodded. He looked to his left and again reread Mrs. Kinnington's letter. He seemed to be trying to memorize it. "I assume that time is of the essence, as the lawyers say?"

  "Yes. The longer it takes us to find the key, the lower our chances of finding the boy."

  Stein came to his decision and swung his desk chair and the folder around sideways. "Let's go through the file." I hitched my chair around so that we sat side by side at the narrow end of the desk.

  The file was in reverse chronological order, so that you had to read from the bottom of the lower page to the top of the higher page. That awkwardness mastered, it took relatively little time to review.

  Stephen was signed into Willow Wood by his father within twenty-four hours of his mother's death. He was diagnosed catatonic upon his arrival, and was treated with half a dozen drugs over the first two months. He slowly came out of the trance, showing exceptional manual dexterity and imagination. Group therapy efforts were aborted nearly as soon as they were begun, Stephen preferring individual sessions, though not really coming around to any one analyst or therapist. The entries suggested Stephen most enjoyed outdoor activities and the library, shunning team sports and leadership roles.

  "What kind of place is Willow Wood?" I asked.

  Stein shrugged. "It's a low-security, very prestigious facility. In the old parlance, it would have been a sanatorium. It is set on the grounds of a beautiful estate about eight miles from Tanglewood. A friend of mine from medical school is head of staff there. Quite a plum position, but she was a superior doctor at a time when few women were entertained in medical school. She refers me all her discharging patients who are returning to the Boston area."

  "There doesn't appear to be any indication of who referred the judge to Willow Wood."

  "No, but any knowledgeable psychiatrist would know of Sarah-that's my classmate. Sarah might have a recollection of it, but surely it would be easier for you to just ask the judge."

  "Right," I said, hopefully not too quickly. "Tell me about the course of care at Willow Wood, generally."

  "Well, the course of care varies, of course, with the condition being treated. Willow Wood specializes, so to speak, in difficult, long-term cases of seriously ill, but not dangerous, individuals."

  "Arts, crafts, and canoeing versus straitjackets and shock treatment?"

  Stein snorted. "In a blunt s
ort of way, yes."

  I returned to the file. Stephen seemed to improve month by month, if you compared a given week's entry to one four or five weeks later. The drugs dropped off, and the assessments of his progress steadily rose. About eight months after his initial admission, he was released to his father, with a forwarding referral to Dr. Stein.

  I looked up at him. "Doctor, I don't quite understand something from the records here. What exactly was wrong with Stephen?"

  "Well," said Stein, clearing his throat and shuffling through the file, "it's often difficult to diagnose exactly what was 'wrong' with a patient. One treats the apparent condition, or symptom, if you like, and then varies the treatment if earlier efforts prove unsuccessful. As you can see, Stephen was catatonic upon arrival at Willow Wood. Then slowly, by an evolving alternation of drugs, counseling, and therapeutic activities, he came back to us, so to speak."

  "In layman's terms, you varied your prescriptions until he seemed to come out of it."

  "Yes, but that can pretty generally be said about any patient."

  "Then you can't really be sure of what was wrong with him to start with."

  "Well, not in some microscopically, conclusively proved sense, no. When Stephen arrived at Willow Wood, he was literally in a trance. One can only identify the symptom or condition. One can't, despite magazine and television to the contrary, ever be sure of what's 'wrong with him,' in the sense I think you mean it."

  I let it lay there while I returned to the file. The remaining pages were pale blue. "Are these blue pages yours?"

  "Yes," he said, hopscotching with a pointed finger. "I first saw Stephen there, then a week later, then two weeks later, then one month later."