Shutter Island Page 6

  She nodded, though Teddy could tell she wasn’t too fond of the concept.

  “We were discussing anger management. We’ve had a few instances of inappropriate volatility recently.”

  “What kind?”

  “Patients screaming at other patients, fighting, that sort of thing. Nothing out of the norm, just a small upsurge in recent weeks that probably had to do with the heat wave more than anything. So last night we discussed appropriate and inappropriate ways to display anxiety or displeasure.”

  “Has Miss Solando had any anger issues of late?”

  “Rachel? No. Rachel only became agitated when it rained. That was her contribution to group last night. ’I hear rain. I hear rain. It’s not here, but it’s coming. What can we do about the food?’”

  “The food?”

  Marino stubbed out her cigarette and nodded. “Rachel hated the food here. She complained constantly.”

  “For good reason?” Teddy said.

  Marino caught herself before a half smile went full. She dropped her eyes. “One could argue the reason was understandable possibly. We don’t color reasons or motives in terms of good or bad moral suppositions.”

  Teddy nodded. “And there was a Dr. Sheehan here last night. He ran group. Is he here?”

  No one spoke. Several men stubbed out their cigarettes in the standing ashtrays between chairs.

  Eventually, Cawley said, “Dr. Sheehan left on the morning ferry. The one you took on the return trip.”

  “Why?”

  “He’d been scheduled for a vacation for some time.”

  “But we need to talk to him.”

  Cawley said, “I have his summation documents in regard to the group session. I have all his notes. He departed the main facility at ten last night, retired to his quarters. In the morning, he left. His vacation had been long overdue and long planned as well. We saw no reason to keep him here.”

  Teddy looked to McPherson.

  “You approved this?”

  McPherson nodded.

  “It’s a state of lockdown,” Teddy said. “A patient has escaped. How do you allow anyone to leave during lockdown?”

  McPherson said, “We ascertained his whereabouts during the night. We thought it through, couldn’t think of any reason to keep him.”

  “He’s a doctor,” Cawley said.

  “Jesus,” Teddy said softly. Biggest breach in standard operating procedure he’d ever encountered at any penal institution and everyone was acting like it was no big deal.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “On vacation,” Teddy said. “Where did he go?”

  Cawley looked up at the ceiling, trying to recall. “New York, I believe. The city. It’s where his family is from. Park Avenue.”

  “I’ll need a phone number,” Teddy said.

  “I don’t see why—”

  “Doctor,” Teddy said. “I’ll need a phone number.”

  “We’ll get that to you, Marshal.” Cawley kept his eyes on the ceiling. “Anything else?”

  “You bet,” Teddy said.

  Cawley’s chin came down and he looked across at Teddy.

  “I need a phone,” Teddy said.

  THE PHONE IN the nurses’ station gave off nothing but a white hiss of air. There were four more in the ward, locked behind glass, and once the glass was opened, the phones produced the same result.

  Teddy and Dr. Cawley walked over to the central switchboard on the first floor of the main hospital building. The operator looked up as they came through the door, a set of black headphones looped around his neck.

  “Sir,” he said, “we’re down. Even radio communication.”

  Cawley said, “It’s not all that bad out.”

  The operator shrugged. “I’ll keep trying. It’s not so much what it’s doing here, though. It’s what kinda weather they’re having back on the other side.”

  “Keep trying,” Cawley said. “You get it up and running, you get word to me. This man needs to make a pretty important call.”

  The operator nodded and turned his back to them, put the headphones back on.

  Outside, the air felt like trapped breath.

  “What do they do if you don’t check in?” Cawley asked.

  “The field office?” Teddy said. “They mark it in their nightly reports. Usually twenty-four hours before they start to worry.”

  Cawley nodded. “Maybe this’ll blow over by then.”

  “Over?” Teddy said. “It hasn’t even started yet.”

  Cawley shrugged and began walking toward the gate. “I’ll be having drinks and maybe a cigar or two at my house. Nine o’clock, if you and your partner feel like dropping by.”

  “Oh,” Teddy said. “Can we talk then?”

  Cawley stopped, looked back at him. The dark trees on the other side of the wall had begun to sway and whisper.

  “We’ve been talking, Marshal.”

  CHUCK AND TEDDY walked the dark grounds, feeling the storm in the air swelling hot around them, as if the world were pregnant, distended.

  “This is bullshit,” Teddy said.

  “Yup.”

  “Rotten to the fucking core.”

  “I was Baptist, I’d give you an ’Amen, brother.’”

  “Brother?”

  “How they talk down there. I did a year in Mississippi.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Amen, brother.”

  Teddy bummed another cigarette off Chuck and lit it.

  Chuck said, “You call the field office?”

  Teddy shook his head. “Cawley said the switchboard’s down.” He raised his hand. “The storm, you know.”

  Chuck spit tobacco off his tongue. “Storm? Where?”

  Teddy said, “But you can feel it coming.” He looked at the dark sky. “Though, not to where it’s taking out their central com’.”

  “Central com’,” Chuck said. “You leave the army yet or you still waiting for your D papers?”

  “Switchboard,” Teddy said, waving his cigarette at it. “Whatever we’re calling it. And their radio too.”

  “Their fucking radio?” Chuck’s eyes bloomed wide. “The radio, boss?”

  Teddy nodded. “Pretty bleak, yeah. They got us locked down on an island looking for a woman who escaped from a locked room…”

  “Past four manned checkpoints.”

  “And a room full of attendants playing poker.”

  “Scaled a ten-foot brick wall.”

  “With electric wire up top.”

  “Swam eleven miles—”

  “—against an irate current—”

  “—to shore. Irate. I like that. Cold too. What’s it, maybe fifty-five degrees in that water?”

  “Sixty, tops. Night, though?”

  “Back to fifty-five.” Chuck nodded. “Teddy, this whole thing, you know?”

  Teddy said, “And the missing Dr. Sheehan.”

  Chuck said, “Struck you as odd too, huh? I wasn’t sure. Didn’t seem you tore Cawley’s asshole quite wide enough, boss.”

  Teddy laughed, heard the sound of it carry off on the sweep of night air and dissolve in the distant surf, as if it had never been, as if the island and the sea and the salt took what you thought you had and…

  “…if we’re the cover story?” Chuck was saying.

  “What?”

  “What if we’re the cover story?” Chuck said. “What if we were brought here to help them cross ts and dot is?”

  “Clarity, Watson.”

  Another smile. “All right, boss, try and keep up.”

  “I will, I will.”

  “Let’s say a certain doctor has an infatuation with a certain patient.”

  “Miss Solando.”

  “You saw the picture.”

  “She is attractive.”

  “Attractive. Teddy, she’s a pinup in a GI’s locker. So she works our boy, Sheehan…You seeing it now?”

  Teddy flicked his cigarette into the wind, watchi
ng the coals splatter and ignite in the breeze, then streak back past him and Chuck. “And Sheehan gets hooked, decides he can’t live without her.”

  “The operating word being live. As a free couple in the real world.”

  “So they amscray. Off the island.”

  “Could be at a Fats Domino show as we speak.”

  Teddy stopped at the far end of the staff dormitories, faced the orange wall. “But why not call in the dogs?”

  “Well, they did,” Chuck said. “Protocol. They had to bring in someone, and in the case of an escape from a place like this, they call in us. But if they’re covering up staff involvement, then we’re just here to substantiate their story—that they did everything by the book.”

  “Okay,” Teddy said. “But why cover for Sheehan?”

  Chuck propped the sole of his shoe against the wall, flexing his knee as he lit a cigarette. “I don’t know. Haven’t thought that through yet.”

  “If Sheehan did take her out of here, he greased some palms.”

  “Had to.”

  “A lot of them.”

  “A few attendants, anyway. A guard or two.”

  “Someone on the ferry. Maybe more than one.”

  “Unless he didn’t leave on the ferry. Could have had his own boat.”

  Teddy gave it some thought. “Comes from money. Park Avenue, according to Cawley.”

  “So, there you go—his own boat.”

  Teddy looked up the wall to the thin wire at the top, the air around them protruding like a bubble pressed against glass.

  “Brings up as many questions as it answers,” Teddy said after a bit.

  “How so?”

  “Why those codes in Rachel Solando’s room?”

  “Well, she is crazy.”

  “Why show it to us, though? I mean, if this is a cover-up, why not make it easier for us to sign off on the reports and go home? ’The attendant fell asleep.’ Or ’The lock on the window rusted out and we didn’t notice.’”

  Chuck pressed his hand to the wall. “Maybe they were lonely. All of them. Needed some company from the outside world.”

  “Sure. Made up a story so they could bring us here? Have something new to chat about? I’ll buy that.”

  Chuck turned and looked back at Ashecliffe. “Joking aside…”

  Teddy turned too, and they stood facing it. “Sure…”

  “Starting to get nervous here, Teddy.”

  5

  “THEY CALLED IT a Great Room,” Cawley said as he led them through his parquet foyer to two oak doors with brass knobs the size of pineapples. “I’m serious. My wife found some unsent letters in the attic from the original owner, Colonel Spivey. Going on and on about the Great Room he was building.”

  Cawley yanked back on one of the pineapples and wrenched the door open.

  Chuck let loose a low whistle. Teddy and Dolores had had an apartment on Buttonwood that was the envy of friends because of its size, a central hallway that seemed to go on the length of a football field, and yet that apartment could have folded into this room twice.

  The floor was marble, covered here and there by dark Oriental rugs. The fireplace was taller than most men. The drapes alone—three yards of dark purple velvet per window and there were nine windows—had to cost more than Teddy made in a year. Maybe two. A billiards table took up one corner under oil paintings of a man in Union army formal blue, another of a woman in a frilly white dress, a third painting of the man and woman together, a dog at their feet, that same gargantuan fireplace behind them.

  “The colonel?” Teddy said.

  Cawley followed his gaze, nodded. “Relieved of his command shortly after those paintings were finished. We found them in the basement along with a billiards table, the rugs, most of the chairs. You should see the basement, Marshal. We could fit the Polo Grounds down there.”

  Teddy smelled pipe tobacco, and he and Chuck turned at the same time, realized there was another man in the room. He sat with his back to them in a high-back wing chair facing the fireplace, one foot extending off the opposite knee, the corner of an open book propped there.

  Cawley led them toward the fireplace, gestured at the ring of chairs facing the hearth as he crossed to a liquor cabinet. “Your poison, gentlemen?”

  Chuck said, “Rye, if you got it.”

  “I think I can scare some up. Marshal Daniels?”

  “Soda water and some ice.”

  The stranger looked up at them. “You don’t indulge in alcohol?”

  Teddy looked down at the guy. A small red head perched like a cherry on top of a chunky body. There was something pervasively delicate about him, a sense Teddy got that he spent far too much time in the bathroom every morning pampering himself with talcs and scented oils.

  “And you are?” Teddy said.

  “My colleague,” Cawley said. “Dr. Jeremiah Naehring.”

  The man blinked in acknowledgment but didn’t offer his hand, so neither did Teddy or Chuck.

  “I’m curious,” Naehring said as Teddy and Chuck took the two seats that curved away from Naehring’s left side.

  “That’s swell,” Teddy said.

  “Why you don’t drink alcohol. Isn’t it common for men in your profession to imbibe?”

  Cawley handed him his drink and Teddy stood and crossed to the bookshelves to the right of the hearth. “Common enough,” he said. “And yours?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your profession,” Teddy said. “I’ve always heard it’s overrun with boozers.”

  “Not that I’ve noticed.”

  “Haven’t looked too hard, then, huh?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “That’s, what, cold tea in your glass?”

  Teddy turned from the books, watched Naehring glance at his glass, a silkworm of a smile twitching his soft mouth. “Excellent, Marshal. You possess outstanding defense mechanisms. I assume you’re quite adept at interrogation.”

  Teddy shook his head, noticing that Cawley kept little in the way of medical texts, at least in this room. There were a few, but it was mostly novels, a few slim volumes Teddy assumed were poetry, several shelves of histories and biographies.

  “No?” Naehring said.

  “I’m a federal marshal. We bring them in. That’s it. Most times, others handle the interviewing.”

  “I called it ’interrogation,’ you called it ’interviewing.’ Yes, Marshal, you do have astonishing defense capabilities.” He clicked the bottom of his scotch glass off the table several times as if in applause. “Men of violence fascinate me.”

  “Men of what?” Teddy strolled over to Naehring’s chair, looked down at the little man, and rattled the ice in his glass.

  Naehring tilted his head back, took a sip of scotch. “Violence.”

  “Hell of an assumption to make, Doc.” This from Chuck, looking as openly annoyed as Teddy’d ever seen him.

  “There’s no assumption, no assumption.”

  Teddy gave his glass one more rattle before he drained it, saw something twitch near Naehring’s left eye. “I’d have to agree with my partner,” he said and took his seat.

  “No.” Naehring turned the one syllable into three. “I said you were men of violence. That’s not the same as accusing you of being violent men.”

  Teddy gave him a big smile. “Edify us.”

  Cawley, behind them, placed a record on the phonograph and the scratch of the needle was followed by stray pops and hisses that reminded Teddy of the phones he’d tried to use. Then a balm of strings and piano replaced the hisses. Something classical, Teddy knew that much. Prussian. Reminding him of cafés overseas and a record of collection he’d seen in the office of a subcommandant at Dachau, the man listening to it when he’d shot himself in the mouth. He was still alive when Teddy and four GIs entered the room. Gurgling. Unable to reach the gun for a second shot because it had fallen to the floor. That soft music crawling around the room like spiders. Took him another twenty minutes to die, t
wo of the GIs asking der Kommandant if it hurt as they ransacked the room. Teddy had taken a framed photograph off the guy’s lap, a picture of his wife and two kids, the guy’s eyes going wide and reaching for it as Teddy took it away from him. Teddy stood back and looked from the photo to the guy, back and forth, back and forth, until the guy died. And all the time, that music. Tinkling.

  “Brahms?” Chuck asked.

  “Mahler.” Cawley took the seat beside Naehring.

  “You asked for edification,” Naehring said.

  Teddy rested his elbows on his knees, spread his hands.

  “Since the schoolyard,” Naehring said, “I would bet neither of you has ever walked away from physical conflict. That’s not to suggest you enjoyed it, only that retreat wasn’t something you considered an option. Yes?”

  Teddy looked over at Chuck. Chuck gave him a small smile, slightly abashed.

  Chuck said, “Wasn’t raised to run, Doc.”

  “Ah, yes—raised. And who did raise you?”

  “Bears,” Teddy said.

  Cawley’s eyes brightened and he gave Teddy a small nod.

  Naehring didn’t seem appreciative of humor, though. He adjusted his pants at the knee. “Believe in God?”

  Teddy laughed.

  Naehring leaned forward.

  “Oh, you’re serious?” Teddy said.

  Naehring waited.

  “Ever seen a death camp, Doctor?”

  Naehring shook his head.

  “No?” Teddy hunched forward himself. “Your English is very good, almost flawless. You still hit the consonants a tad hard, though.”

  “Is legal immigration a crime, Marshal?”

  Teddy smiled, shook his head.

  “Back to God, then.”

  “You see a death camp someday, Doctor, then get back to me with your feelings about God.”

  Naehring’s nod was a slow closing and reopening of his eyelids and then he turned his gaze on Chuck.

  “And you?”

  “Never saw the camps, myself.”

  “Believe in God?”

  Chuck shrugged. “Haven’t given him a lot of thought, one way or the other, in a long time.”

  “Since your father died, yes?”

  Chuck leaned forward now too, stared at the fat little man with his glass-cleaner eyes.

  “Your father is dead, yes? And yours as well, Marshal Daniels? In fact, I’ll wager that both of you lost the dominant male figure in your lives before your fifteenth birthdays.”