The Prodigy Part 8

"You going to tell me?"

"Where to start? I almost don't want to tell you about this first thing, so I'll go with that." She chuckled, "Somewhere deep down I have a soft spot for Freud."

"You've lost me."

"Resistance, there's something that doesn't want to come out, so that's probably the first thing that needs to ... and it makes no sense. My boss-Anton-gave me Jimmy's case, and it felt like he was doing me a favor."

"Some favor."

"No, it really is. This is off-the-clock work, and Jimmy is paying big bucks for door-to-door shrink delivery."

"And?"

"Well, Jimmy said that he asked for me specifically."

"Why you?" Ed leaned forward, the banter gone, his expression worried.

"I interviewed him a single time when he was at Croton. I was still a resident and I was working on some research on stalking. I guess he must have liked me. Although his sister sure didn't." Barrett looked at Ed, "She threatened to sue the medical school, me, and anyone else her lawyers could think of if I didn't leave her brother alone."

"Why would she care?"

"You know she took me out to dinner last night?"

"Because?" letting his voice trail.

"She's his conservator. Arranged for his release. So I asked her, and she said she was trying to protect him."

"Did she tell you why he wanted to meet with you?"

"No, and that feels jagged, too. Why wouldn't she?"

"So what are your options?" he asked.

"About which piece?"

"Why he wants you?"

"I don't know. I don't think I'm so wonderful that after a single visit someone is going to pick me out from all available psychiatrists."

Ed traced a finger around the rim of his cup. "There's an obvious reason."

"Which is?"

"Look in the mirror, Barrett. Maybe the boy has a crush."

She shuddered, "Don't even go there."

"Hey, you want to make the jagged pieces smooth, you got to roll them through the possibilities. And common things are common. Look at it this way, here you've got an inmate living what? Eight, nine years in a maximum security hospital."

"Longer-by the time I saw him, it would have been fourteen or so."

"You think he's straight?"

"He's something. Do I think he likes girls? In some fashion and based on what happened to Nicole Foster, I'm not certain that breathing is a prerequisite."

"Nice. So you've got a perp who's spent eighteen years in the nut house and in comes this hot, twenty-something psychiatrist who's all concerned about his welfare. I bet he can remember everything you wore that day. He probably spent nights ..."

"Stop right there."

"Tears on his pillow," Ed chortled.

"Are all men pigs?" Barrett asked.

"It's the hormones."

"I thought that was the PMS defense."

"Same idea, different s.e.x."

"What if he picked me because I was the only name he could think of?"

Ed's head c.o.c.ked slightly as he mulled her suggestion, "Second choice at best."

"Why?"

"How many shrinks would he have seen at Croton over the years?"

"Good point. There would have been dozens. But if your answer is the right one, and he's got some sort of crush, why didn't he ask for me at the time of his release?"

"Don't know. Maybe he did. Maybe something changed between then and now. You said his sister didn't want you to see him at Croton, and now she's taking you out to dinner, maybe she had something to do with it."

"All of which leads me back to the beginning. Who the h.e.l.l is he and what makes him go? You know that music we heard outside his place?"

"Yes."

"It was him."

"He's good," Ed admitted.

"Really good. Like concert-stage good."

"Seriously?"

"I think so. In another life that was where I was heading."

"Music?"

"Yeah, I've played piano ever since I was little." As she spoke, she pictured Sophie, and the back room of the used bookstore where she'd have her daily lessons, and would then spend hours practicing.

"No kidding. Why'd you switch? Leave that and become a shrink?"

"It's funny, but when I was applying for medical school that was the question I always got asked. Not, 'Why do you want to be a doctor?' or 'How do you feel about working with sick people?' It was always something about music."

"So what's the answer?"

"You know, I had a lot of pat answers. And looking back, it's the hardest thing I've ever done. I had this amazing piano teacher." She looked up at Hobbs, "This is boring, isn't it?"

"h.e.l.l, no," he said. "Let me hear this. Who's this teacher?"

"She was incredible, both of them ... Sophie and Max. They're both gone now. They kind of adopted us, my mother, sister, and me. We landed on their doorstep and they just happened to have an empty apartment over their bookstore; my mom still lives there. ... I don't want to go into the details, but when I was real little we had to get out of Georgia in a hurry and these two Polish refugees we'd never met let us stay with them. I don't think they even charged rent for the first year, and every day when mom was out working they'd look after us in the store, and somehow I started fooling around with this big old piano in the back, and Sophie decided that I had some talent. She was a concert pianist in Poland, both she and Max were Jewish; their families killed by the n.a.z.is, but they survived and came to New York. Some of the stories they'd tell ... just amazing." Her eyes misted.

"They sound like good people."

"You have no idea. And the way she taught ... every piece of music was a story, every composer laying down his life in the notes and the melodies. I became obsessed with playing, and I got really good. So she started entering me into these compet.i.tions, and we'd go together, and my mom and sister would be in the audience. And you see, I've got this little compet.i.tive streak."

"No kidding."

"I know; it's really bad."

"It's not; it's cute."

It felt like flirting, and Barrett wondered how Ralph would feel if the shoe were on the other foot.

"So how'd you do?" Hobbs asked. "Although I think I know."

"At first, not so good, but it just made me determined. The first time I won, the look on Sophie's face, and seeing how proud my mother was; I was hooked. And as I got better, music became this wonderful world where I'd lose myself for hours."

"I'd like to hear you sometime."

"I don't play much anymore ... at least not in front of people," she said, feeling a familiar pang.

"So why did you switch? It sounds like something you really loved."

"I had to be practical. Although I never told my mother this, or Sophie."

"I don't get it," Hobbs said.

"My mom's spent her entire life taking care of me and Justine, she was a waitress forever, and now she tends bar. She has no benefits, and I had to beg her not to take out a mortgage on her apartment-Sophie and Max left it to her-she wanted the money to help pay for college for us ... Very few make money as concert pianists. It's an incredible risk, and the further I got with the compet.i.tions, I knew there would always be people better than me. Medicine was a sure thing; it meant that at least one of us would have a steady income. So instead of Juilliard, I went premed."

"That must have hurt."

"Yeah ... and that's another odd thing with Jimmy."

"Yes?"

"You know when I said I'd met him only the one time, it's not true. I'd actually seen him and his sister growing up. They were four years older than me, and very much the stars of the compet.i.tion circuit. They were these two ethereal blond twins who would make the most amazing music. I made the connection with Ellen, we kind of recognized each other, but didn't know from where. When I interviewed him at Croton, I would never have put it together."

"Why not?"

"He was huge, grotesque. He told me that he's lost over a hundred pounds since then. There's no way I would have ever connected the beautiful boy I saw playing the cello with the man I met at Croton. And it's not just the weight, but the younger Jimmy was dazzling."

"Poor guy."

"Why do you say that?"

"I've been to Croton," Ed commented. "It's not that different from prison, and pretty boys in prison have real problems."

"I hadn't considered that. Maybe that's why he gained the weight."

"It's been known. Doesn't necessarily make the problem go away, but it might decrease it."

"And here I'd just written it off to the medication. Which, by the way, I don't think he's taking. So all of this could wind up being for nothing. If he's not taking his pills, I have to report that to the board, and chances are they'll lock him up."

"Goodbye, golden goose ... although, everything you're telling me is that the man is not stupid."

"True."

"But if he's really this brilliant cello-playing prodigy, then I don't think he's going down without a fight. That is unless getting shower-raped in prison is how he gets his jollies. And one thing you taught me is that the minute you have a sociopath with an IQ above 120, you've got a serious predator on your hands."

"Also true," she said, remembering the feral and dangerous look in Jimmy's eyes.

"I don't like you being in that room alone with him. Any chance I could talk you into having someone else take his case?"

"No."

"Then you've got to wear a wire."

"You think you can get a warrant for one?"

He leaned across and whispered, "I wasn't going to try."

EIGHT.

Grabbing the banister, Jimmy raced up two flights of stairs and ran into Mother's room. Peering through Brussels lace, he glared down at Barrett Conyors as she conversed with the two cops. They were talking in front of what was obviously an unmarked police car, as if the neighbors didn't have enough to talk about. His pulse raced as he devoured details of the woman who'd just interrogated him. She was more perfect than he'd remembered, from her swan-like throat and pointed chin to the high arch of her brows and the willowy grace of her body that not even her off-the-rack suit could conceal. But it was her eyes that held him, dark and stormy gray. Why, he pouted, did she have to be like that?

"No," he told himself, knowing that she loved him. "She's just doing her job." But Dr. Kravitz had been doing his job, at least the job that Jimmy and Ellen had wanted him to do. Ellen had warned him, not about Barrett, but about all the shrinks who would do whatever they could to see him locked up again. They'd pick at his brain until there was nothing left, and then throw him back into stinking Croton where the others would come for him, wanting to use him like a twenty-dollar wh.o.r.e.

He stared at Barrett as she laughed with the cops. "What are you saying?" he needed to know. She was laughing. What words were coming out of her painted lips? She looked back at the house, but he knew she couldn't see him. He lifted up the lid of the window seat and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He focused on her as she hid her eyes behind rimless sungla.s.ses.

"So pretty," he murmured, wondering what it would feel like to stroke her cheek or to touch her hair. Like a princess, like Sleeping Beauty. He blinked.