Then they noticed the open window. A very cool breeze was blowing in to disturb the papers on Tony's desk.
"What kind of guy goes to the trouble of having us sketch his missing wife and then walks off with the sketch?" Tony wondered dazedly.
"A nut job," barked Tremaine. "I knew he was a nut job the minute he walked into the place."
"He seemed perfectly normal to me."
Tremaine slammed down the window. "It's gotta be forty out there, and he's walking around in a stupid T-shirt. A nut job. Just like I said. I can spot them coming from three miles off."
"Then why didn't you warn me?"
Troy Tremaine shrugged. "Hey, he had a legitimate beef, and I can be wrong about people. But not nut jobs."
"What do we do?"
"Me, I don't do nothing. You, start sketching. I wanna post that nut job's face on the squad-room wall so the uniforms can see it."
Chapter 8
Dr. Aldace Gerling was nervous. Very nervous.
As chief of psychiatry at Folcroft Sanitarium, he was an expert on neuroses, psychoses and every other form of mental illness known to modern man.
He could not account for what was happening to him.
It was a drumming. Others had heard it before him. Unfortunately those others were all patients in Folcroft's psychiatric wing. An orderly had been the first person not institutionalized in Folcroft to report hearing the drumming noise.
Dr. Gerling had dismissed the orderly's report as a mere auditory hallucination. So many others had reported the sound that the staff had begun listening for it. It was only natural that someone would hear something that made them think of drumming. It was the power of suggestion at work. Nothing more.
And then Dr. Gerling had heard it.
It was a distinct drumbeat, slow, steady. Oddly familiar, too. Gerling had raced to the spot, only to find the drumming noise racing ahead of him. Around every corner just ahead of him. As fast as he could waddle, the measured drumbeat outpaced him, its source annoyingly elusive.
Finally Dr. Gerling had turned the last corner on the psychiatric wing and thought he had the drumming trapped in a utility closet.
He had opened it, but there was nothing there. The drumming had stopped cold. There was nothing inside that could have produced the phenomenon. Not even remotely.
Still, Dr. Gerling had felt it incumbent on him to report this event to Dr. Smith, and did.
As he made his rounds, Dr. Gerling wondered if Dr. Smith had ever gotten his report. He wondered if Dr. Smith would ever receive any report at all, considering the regretful state he was now in. Gerling had looked in on him and went pale at the sight. Smith appeared to be in some form a paralytic state. Utterly unmoving, eyes wide, every muscle rigid as if struggling to escape his useless body.
Dr. Gerling paused in front of the door of one of the more difficult patients at Folcroft, Jeremiah Purcell.
Purcell was a thin, pale young man with long cornsilk hair and almost no mind to speak off. When he had first been brought to Folcroft, he was a complete imbecile. He could not feed himself or dress without help, and had regressed to childhood so completely his toilet training had to be redone.
Thankfully he could now take care of most of those personal chores himself. Nevertheless, he seemed frozen in a state of utter befuddlement, watching cartoons and other such childish programs for hours and hours on end. There was no character disorder on record to explain it, so Dr. Gerling had coined one: adult-onset autistic regression. He would have written a paper on this new frontier in mental illness, but Dr. Smith frowned on any publicity that directed a spotlight upon Folcroft, no matter how positive.
Dr. Gerling observed his remarkable patient through the tiny square window in the steel door. Purcell sat in a big comfortable chair, intense neon blue eyes glued to the TV screen, long canvas sleeves buckled to the back of his straitjacket. From time to time he giggled. He seemed very pleased with his program, so Dr. Gerling made a remark on his clipboard that the patient was in elevated spirits today. On the clipboard, he prescribed only half of the daily forty milligrams of haloperidol.
He passed on.
The next patient was not in good spirits. He had been a resident of Folcroft for a much shorter time. About two years.
The man was perfectly normal intellectually, but he suffered from a character disorder whose chief symptom manifested itself as delusions of grandeur. The patient thought he was Uncle Sam Beasley, the famous cartoonist and founder of the Sam Beasley entertainment empire, which included a movie studio and a chain of theme parks around the world.
He was dressed as a pirate, right down to the rakish black eye patch and swashbuckler boots. Why a person who imagined he was a twenty-five-years-dead cartoonist would wear pirate clothes was beyond Aldace Gerling's understanding, so in his first interview with the man he probed these matters.
The patient had growled, "Go fuck yourself."
What was interesting was that the voice sounded exactly like that of the long-dead Uncle Sam Beasley-except, of course, the real Beasley would never have descended to such harsh language.
As Dr. Gerling peeked in, the patient-he was listed as Sam Beasley on Gerling's patient roster by order of Dr. Smith-was seated at a card table sketching. The walls of his room were littered with sketches. They depicted the patient climbing down a rope of knotted bed sheets though a broken Folcroft window and making his escape from the sanitarium. It was quite a detailed series of drawings, and included a self-portrait of himself cutting Dr. Gerling's throat with his pirate hook. The hook was real. The patient had been brought in with his right hand a blunt stump, so Dr. Gerling had taken the liberty of having a hook fitted. It was currently under lock and key because Beasley had tried to cut the throats of two different male nurses, after which Dr. Smith had decreed that the hook was too dangerous to remain attached to the patient's wrist stump.
Dr. Gerling had protested. "Removing the hook will only force the man to withdraw into himself, to become uncommunicative."
"The hook goes," said Smith, who placed a written reprimand in Dr. Gerling's file for endangering the staff.
So it went. Dr. Gerling had never agreed with the decision, but it wasn't his to reverse. As director of Folcroft, Dr. Smith ruled with an iron hand.
Still, the patient was doing quite well with his good hand. His drawings were excellent. It was amazing how deeply and thoroughly he had thrown himself into the role of Uncle Sam Beasley. The drawing looked uncannily like the real Beasley's work. Dr. Gerling had asked the patient to draw him a Monongahela Mouse, and the likeness was exquisite, right down to the perfectly matched black lollipop ears.
"You could easily find work in the Beasley animation studios," Gerling had clucked, unthinking.
"I built the Beasley Studio, you quack," the pseudo-Beasley roared back, snatching the drawing from Gerling's hand and tearing it to shreds between his good hand and his teeth. The look of animal ferocity in his one good eye was frightening to the extreme.
As these memories passed through Dr. Gerling's mind, the patient caught sight of him.
"You! Quack! How is Euro Beasley doing? Is the attendance up or down?"
"Down. Sharply."
"Damn those pip-squeaks. Can't they run anything in my absence? Tell them they're all fired. They should have known better than to try to appeal to those snobby French. Damn frogs think Jerry Lewis is some kind of creative genius and they dismiss me as a mere cartoonist."
"I will see you tomorrow," Dr. Gerling said pleasantly.
"And I'll see you hanging by your stethoscope," Beasley ground out, returning to his drawings.
"Remarkable case," Dr. Gerling murmured as he passed on, scribbling a note to the head nurse to increase the patient's dose of Clozaril, along with a reminder that his blood be tested every week in the event his white count bottomed out from the powerful drug.
The remaining patients were unremarkable. As he looked in on them, Dr. Gerling's thoughts drifted to the events of the day.
Folcroft lay under a very dark cloud. There was a problem with the Internal Revenue Service, which had swooped down like buzzards with guns at the crack of dawn.
When Dr. Gerling had arrived for work, he found a dead man lying on the lawn, and the wounded-who had included Dr. Smith, technically speaking-had been placed under the care of Folcrofts finest physicians.
Dr. Gerling had been challenged by representatives of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the IRS. The two agencies had fought over the right of first interrogation-whatever that was. The DEA had won. And so Dr. Gerling had submitted to a grueling three-hour interrogation, which consisted of repeating the same denials over and over again.