“Chlorpromazine. It regulates dopamine levels and lessens the patient’s delusions.”
“Does it regulate paranoia?”
“Yes, you might say that. And as you surmise, paranoia is one of the disease’s symptoms.” Dr. Elsing was pressing on the desk with his fingertips. “Are you assuming Paul killed those people in a fit of paranoia, Mr. Carver?” His fingertips were white, not green.
“It’s a possibility.”
“Not at all likely. Paul could get paranoid at times, even mildly aggressive. But I don’t believe he’s a killer.” He shook his head slowly and looked glum. “Few of the misconceptions about schizophrenia make life easier for the disease’s victims.”
“A police psychiatrist thinks it’s possible that Paul was extremely paranoid and killed his victims to avenge some slight or imagined wrong done to him.”
“That chain of thought is consistent with Paul’s potential behavior, except for the degree of paranoia and the killing part. Maybe he’d insult or even punch someone for this imagined wrong, but taking human life is a different matter. I doubt he’d react with anything near that intensity.”
Carver persisted. “The police psychiatrist says it’s possible.”
Elsing looked as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. He didn’t want to call the police psychiatrist a fool, but that was what he thought. That’s how it was with inexact sciences. “Possible? Sure, Mr. Carver. But the odds and the illness suggest it isn’t probable. I know. Paul Kave is my patient, not the patient of some. . police employee who’s never even met him.”
“Or grown to like him.”
Elsing smiled again. It was a kind of male Mona Lisa smile, not giving away much. “You’re something of a psychoanalyst yourself, Mr. Carver.”
“That’s what keeps me working. Were some of Paul’s problems caused by his relationship with his father?”
Elsing chewed on the inside of his jaw for a moment, then said, “I don’t think I’ll answer that.”
“How often was Paul receiving medication?”
“Once a day. Capsules.” Elsing anticipated Carver’s next question. “He has enough medication to last another few days.”
“And when he runs out?”
Elsing tugged at a button on his coat sleeve. “I don’t know. Paul’s a brilliant and resourceful boy, but there’s no way for him to obtain the drug without a prescription.”
“Would Paul recognize the effects of his illness setting in once he’s off medication?”
“At first he would. But after a while delusion would seem consistently real to him. It’s something like being an alcoholic, Mr. Carver. After the first few drinks an alcoholic thinks he’s sober and able to thread needles or drive a car or work calculus. Everything is altered, and a private reality takes charge.”
Carver handed out his second business card of the morning. “If Paul contacts you for more capsules, will you phone me?”
“The police have already requested that.”
“I’d like you to call me before the police, Dr. Elsing. For Paul. After all, we both want to help him.”
Elsing nodded ever so slightly. He wasn’t dumb enough to agree concretely, but Carver suspected the doctor would phone. He was obviously fond of Paul Kave. He stood up. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got a patient waiting, Mr. Carver.”
“I noticed her in the outer room. Marie.”
“I specialize in helping young people.”
“It must be difficult to keep your objectivity,” Carver said, “and not feel for them too deeply.”
“Every analyst has to learn to cope with that prospect, Mr. Carver. The way to relieve a patient’s anguish isn’t to become part of the problem.”
Carver decided he liked Dr. Elsing. A practical man doing battle with shadows. Carver knew how that felt. He sank his cane into the carpet, braced on it, and levered himself up out of the deep, comfortable chair. “If Paul took this medication long enough, would it possibly cure him?”
“I thought I’d made it clear,” Elsing said. “There is at this time no cure for schizophrenia.”
“You also made it clear that stress intensifies the symptoms. And Paul Rave’s under plenty of stress.”
“Paul’s got a pisspot full of trouble,” Elsing said, momentarily dropping his air of professionalism and surprising Carver with his profanity. “That doesn’t mean he’s a killer.”
Carver didn’t see it that way. Not in the face of the evidence.
“Can you tell me that, in your expert judgment, Paul couldn’t kill another human being?”
“No,” Elsing said, with a sigh almost too soft to hear. “But that’s an unfair question. I can’t state that about anyone. Including you, Mr. Carver.”
Carver said nothing as he limped through the reception room, past Beverly and Marie and the cool spearmint scent, out into the hall with its bulletin board advertising millionaires’ floating toys. He was sweating when he reached the elevator.
Seated in the heat in his car, he tried to reconcile Dr. Elsing’s apparent affection and belief in Paul Kave with his own unrelenting anger. There were times when that rage for revenge slackened, when Paul Kave was humanized and seemed almost sympathetic. Almost.
Deliberately this time, Carver called up the nightmare, blackened ruin of his son. His namesake. Flesh of his flesh. Burned flesh. Tortured flesh. Black twisted hole of a mouth, tendons drawn tight by blast-furnace heat to curl the limbs into a praying posture. Face like that of a darkened, shrunken head bobbing on a cannibal’s hip. A wizened trophy no longer a person except to those who’d loved him. In this case, Paul Kave’s grotesque trophy. What had the moment been like when Chipper saw the flames? Felt their first paralyzing licks? How long had that instant lasted in human, clockless time?
Carver started the engine and slammed the Olds into Drive. People on the sidewalk stared as the big car roared out of its parking space.
Paul wasn’t as Elsing or his family saw him.
Carver felt like screaming into the hot, booming wind that Paul Kave was a killer.
A monster.
One that breathed fire.
Chapter 15
What to do when confronted with a smooth surface and no handhold? Carver wasn’t sure, but the way things were going, he might have to find out. His visit with Dr. Elsing hadn’t exactly sprung open doors to fresh vistas of knowledge.
He didn’t know how long he’d be in the Fort Lauderdale area. That depended on Paul Kave. But it was here, near where Paul disappeared, that Carver had to seek the beginning of the trail, where he’d find something to grasp and build on and follow to ultimate revenge. Always there had to be at least some thin indication of direction. People changed the world as they moved through it, even as it changed them.
He drove north the short distance to Pompano Beach and registered where Laura had stayed, at the Carib Terrace Motel on Ocean Boulevard. He was given a ground-floor unit, and he sat for a while on the edge of the bed and gazed through the sliding glass doors at the beach.
It was essentially the same view as the one from the unit upstairs, where he’d visited Laura after Chipper’s murder. Probably some of the same sunbathers lounged out there on the pale sand, and some of the same children ran and kicked through the surf. Down where the beach was darkened from high washes of foam, an elderly man with his pants rolled into doughnuts just below his knees was walking slowly with his head down, squatting occasionally on spindly legs to examine seashells, none of which was apparently worthy of his collection. Not far from the glass doors, a potbellied man in violent tropical-print swimming trunks was trying earnestly to fold or unfold a bulky redwood lounge chair, wrestling with it as if it were his conscience.
After a while the glare outside caused Carver’s eyes to ache. He got up and pulled the drapes closed. Light and sound were instantly muted, and he suddenly felt isolated and lonely. Remotely afraid of something he couldn’t identify.
He phoned Adam Kave and told him where he could be reached if there was any news on Paul. Then he walked down the street to a Chinese restaurant and had a lunch of crab Rangoon appetizers, Hunan beef and broccoli, and two Budweisers. East meets West.