Mental State Read online

  Claire was standing at the nurses station talking to another doctor and rubbing her eyes the way people do when things aren’t going well. Making eye contact, he raised a hand up to his shoulders, fingers spread, as if to say a gentle “hello.” Claire nodded toward a plastic seat in the waiting area where some kids were coloring on a low table. Finding Nemo played on a flat-panel television, hung on the wall like a picture. Royce sat awkwardly and saw that one of the children, a girl about seven years old, was bald. A pink ribbon clung to a few stands of her hair. She smiled at him, and he swallowed hard, managing a half smile and a nod. The children made his pain easier to handle. They gave him perspective.

  On the other hand, he heard how Claire always played cancer as a trump card in her fights with Alex, and now he understood why his brother resented her so.

  Half an hour later when Claire tapped him on the shoulder, he jumped.

  “Follow me,” she said coldly.

  Picking up his bag, he trailed after Claire, who had already used her ID to open a set of security doors leading back to the ward. The door was closing behind her, but he hustled and got his hand on it before it shut. Down the hall, the back of her leg vanished into a procedure room. She had the calves of a woman with a three-times-a-week personal trainer and a budget for fancy things. He slid in as the door shut behind them.

  “What do you want? I told you not to come here.” She stared at her pager while she talked.

  “Why are you being like this?” He was genuinely puzzled.

  “I’m at work. What do you want?” Her curtness made his blood tingle.

  She looked up from her pager and met his eyes. He stared for a long minute, and she stared back. He didn’t know her well enough to interpret this behavior. Was she always this cold or just in shock? Was this a game? The staring contest could have gone on for a while—neither of them liked losing, at anything.

  Finally, he’d had enough. “You were married nearly twenty years. Four kids. You loved him once.”

  “I moved out a long time ago. My kids will carry this the rest of their lives. They’re the ones I care about. Fuck him!”

  “Claire—”

  “If you need my help with the funeral or whatever, I’ll obviously try to find some time.” She could sense his shock at her impatience and vulgarity.

  “Jesus, Claire. The investigation just got started. Nothing’s for sure.”

  Her pager beeped. “Are we done here?”

  “No.” His tone was straight from Quantico, a voice to seize control of a situation. “No, we are not. Sit down.”

  Claire didn’t appreciate anyone telling her what to do. She stood firm.

  He reached out and grabbed her arm, leading her to examination table. He pulled a swivel chair away from the desk in the room and took a seat.

  “Alex was murdered.”

  “What?” Claire’s arms fell to her sides, and for the first time in this conversation she wasn’t looking at her pager or phone. “The police said suicide. A gun was next to his head. All the telltale signs, they told me.” She used her fingers to make air quotes around “telltale.”

  “I know what they think.”

  “I even talked to his dean, and she said Alex was acting strangely in the past few weeks.” She sounded panicked.

  Royce was surprised. Alex’s boss was on Claire’s list of things to do when she first heard her ex-husband was dead? Or had the dean called her?

  “I don’t think it’s suicide, Claire. I’m here to find out what really happened.”

  “The FBI is involved?” Claire whispered, even though they were alone.

  “No. This is between you and me. I’m not sure how I’m going to swing this work wise, but I owe it to my baby brother. There’s a killer out there, I’m sure of it.”

  “Do you really think the Chicago Police, the University Police, the dean, everyone is lying?”

  “I didn’t say that. Or suggest it. I just think they don’t want to know any different.”

  He stood up and walked toward the window. Hardball wasn’t working. He had to find a way past the armor, so he slumped his shoulders in defeat.

  “Look, maybe I’m wrong. I just need to fill in some missing pieces of this puzzle. I need it to add up for me. Does that make sense?”

  Claire slid off the exam table, walked over, and patted him on the shoulder. “Are you sure you aren’t just, well, you know, playing the hero? He’s gone, Roy. Maybe we don’t need a hero. Maybe we all need to just say goodbye.”

  If a nurse walked in at that instant, they might have thought it was a genuine moment of sharing and empathy, but the actors were too practiced for this to be the right conclusion. Royce knew how to play a witness or suspect, and Claire how to feign compassion. It was cop and doctor 101.

  “I appreciate how you feel but I think you’re wasting your time. And I’m worried you’re going to be making a lot of pain for a lot of people.” She walked toward the door and turned the handle. “Give my love to Jenny and the girls.”

  She needed to believe the easy story everyone was selling—that her husband was a prick and he let his demons get the best of him—and get back to her patients and her life. A real killer would play it differently, pretend to be helpful. A real killer would hide this much hostility.

  “I need your help.” This time he didn’t hide his desperation.

  She snapped back toward him, still holding the door handle.

  “Look, in room four-oh-six I’ve got a six-year-old girl surrounded by her family. She has acute, nonheritable retinoblastoma. Do you know what that means?”

  “No.” He gulped.

  “It means she’s going to die, and I’ve got to go in and tell them all that. Do you know what that feels like? Do you know how much energy that takes? I don’t have time for a wild goose chase. Alex killed himself. It’s too bad, but I’ve got to go.” She stepped out into the hallway.

  He stiff-armed the door so it wouldn’t swing closed. “Has Alex been out of the country lately? Has he been to the Middle East? I need to know right now.”

  Claire froze. She muttered flatly, “He was in Lahore in June.” She jerked herself away, but not before a tear sparkled in her eye.

  CHAPTER 4

  March 2014

  Chicago, Illinois

  At a marble side table in an expansive office on the sixth floor of the Hutchins Law Library, Professor Alex Johnson held his head in his hands. Stacks of exams were to his right and left, suggesting he was about half way through. Grades were due tomorrow. It was the worst part of the best job in the world. Taking a sip of stale coffee, he groaned. It was at about this point every term that he dreamed of doing a “stairway special”—throwing the exams down the stairwell and giving A’s to the ones that went the furthest, B’s to the next furthest pile, and so forth. When he was a law student, his professors joked that this was how they’d graded exams. Now, Alex sort of believed them.

  The sound of glass shattering heralded an incoming email. During exam-grading season, he set his email alarm to an annoying sound, so he had as many distractions as possible. He got up and headed over to the standing desk that held his laptop.

  Opening his mail, he saw a message from a professor at the University of South Asia, in Lahore, Pakistan. Alex received lots of invitations to speak at conferences, to present academic papers to various law faculties, and to teach mini-courses at various law schools in Europe and Asia. He agreed to go to more than he should have. He loved getting away and feeling important, and he always felt more important when speaking abroad. A second-rate professor at an American law school was treated as a rock star at the best law school in any other part of the world.

  Plus, Alex, despite his Anglo name and appearance, was half Lebanese and deeply intrigued by the Muslim world. He’d spent countless hours bouncing on his great grandmother’s knee as she sang to him in Arabic and let him sip from her arak. Every time he went to the Middle East,
he remembered the smells and sounds of his great grandmother’s house in East Palestine, Ohio, and felt at home.

  He didn’t recognize the professor or the law school, and the topic of the conference seemed a bit odd. But he’d never been to Pakistan. Thinking about the trip would get him through the next few weeks of tedium at school and increasing fights with his wife.

  He didn’t bother to check his schedule, consult his wife, or think about the potential hazards of traveling to Pakistan before typing back:

  I’d be delighted to attend your conference on “Rethinking Banking Regulation: What South Asian Regulators Can Learn from American Failures.” Please send me details regarding my presentation panel and logistics.

  Yours sincerely, Prof. A. Johnson

  Returning to the stack of exams on the marble table, he picked up an anonymous answer—from Student 1189—and turned to the first page. The first thirty questions were multiple-choice. Student 1189 got three correct. The average student in the first half of the exams got sixteen. Alex recorded a three in his Excel file of student scores but immediately went back to double check his work. Going through the answers again and confirming the score, he almost doubted the answer key and the first fifty or so exams he graded. At elite law schools, there was often quite a variance between the performance of the best and the worst students—standardized tests and grades in college were roughly predictive of law school performance, but the difference between a four-point-oh from Arizona State and a four-point-oh from Harvard could be enormous, even if both students scored the same on the LSAT. There were also people who got in for reasons having nothing to do with merit—alumni kids, rich kids, minority kids. But Alex had never seen a performance this bad. He wondered whether the student might have fallen ill or had a panic attack.

  He moved to question two, an essay question in the more traditional law school style. The question was a detailed, three-page hypothetical involving multiple issuances and sales of stocks and bonds during the formation of a business enterprise. Professors called these “issue spotters,” because they deliberately buried many, sometimes dozens, of tough legal questions. The elaborate facts, often zany and convoluted, were constructed to distract and mislead. A prized skill of a good lawyer is seeing through the messy stories and getting to the nub. To see the issues, then wrestle them to submission.

  In this question, Professor Johnson’s answer key identified six major issues for students to find and analyze, as well as four difficult bonus issues that top students were expected to find. Student 1189 spotted only two, both easier ones, and offered what Alex viewed as unacceptably weak legal analysis.

  Up to this point, Alex was curious. Now, he was sad and a little bit afraid. Sad because Student 1189 shouldn’t be paying fifty thousand dollars a year for law school, or at least this law school, and because in a few weeks he or she would be hurting, big time. Alex was afraid not just for the student, but also for himself: extreme events, like failing a student, could create risks, headaches, and work even for tenured professors. As he approached question three, Alex was cheering for a home run—perhaps Student 1189 allocated his or her time badly, and the score on the final question would make up for the other two. “Yes, that must be it,” Alex said aloud to the empty room. He hoped.

  Question three was a policy question, meaning an open-ended statement about legal doctrine that gave students an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to do high-level brain work, and argue for big-picture changes in policy. The average student over the years wrote about ten double-spaced pages of analysis for policy questions like this. Student 1189’s answer for question three was blank. Nothing.

  Alex doubled checked the email file and confirmed with the registrar that he had all the pages that were turned in. The file was complete and not corrupted. Student 1189 ran out of time or maybe didn’t remember or ever understand the Modigliani-Miller theorem or modern portfolio theory. Maybe he never even came to class. Alex was supposed to take attendance to ensure students complied with the American Bar Association rules, but he hated all cartels, especially the ABA, so he chose to flout that rule.

  He often did things like that. Alex was the guy who confronted line jumpers at the movie theater, even when he was early and would easily make the previews. He was the guy who kept a dangerously close distance to the car in front during merges so as to prevent cars from going around the line and sneaking in at the last minute. He was the guy who wouldn’t get gas at Citgo, even if about to run out, because the Venezuelan government owned it.

  Alex leaned back in his chair and sighed. He’d never given an F in ten years of teaching and didn’t want to start with Student 1189. Alex lamented grade inflation—when he was a student, a B minus was the average grade, and today, it was an A minus. He was always pushing for more honest grading, but an F had serious consequences. The class wouldn’t count. If the student were a 3L, he or she might not graduate. It would be a black mark on any transcript and a red flag to potential employers. Ten years ago this might not have mattered, but with the legal market in a severe downturn, an F might mean Student 1189 would be headed for a job as a barista, not a barrister.

  But this was F-level performance. Alex wrote “F” in a red Sharpie on the top of the first page and made a mental note to talk to the dean of students in the morning. If he was going to give Student 1189 an F, this was going to a life-changing event and that wasn’t something to be taken lightly. But maybe it was the right thing to do—to let the student know what was expected of a lawyer, especially a Rockefeller lawyer.

  Alex often told his students about the former CEO of General Electric who said that firing the bottom ten percent of workers each year was actually a favor to them, because it allowed them a chance to find work that was a better fit. But Alex was a professor precisely because he didn’t have the stomach for the business world. Admiring was one thing, doing quite another. He scratched out the “F” and put a “D” there instead.

  With Student 1189’s fate swirling in his head, Alex tossed a sheaf of exams into a folio, trekked to his car, and headed the mile down Cottage Grove Avenue to his home in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago. To get there, he had to pass through Bronzeville, once known as the Black Metropolis—a hub of African-American cultural renaissance after the Great Migration brought about six million descendants of slaves from the South to Chicago and other northern cities in search of a better life. Like Harlem in New York City, Bronzeville attracted many legendary intellectuals, performers, and entrepreneurs. Ida B. Wells lived there. So did Louis Armstrong, whose house on 44th Street was just a few streets from Alex’s office. Muhammad Ali, Louis Farrakhan, and Jesse Jackson all lived nearby too, although they were on the border between Bronzeville and Kenwood, the lush and more integrated neighborhood directly to the south.

  Wealthy African Americans fled Bronzeville when its vibrant society collapsed in the 1970s after the riots of the civil rights era and white flight took a lot of wealth and human capital to the suburbs. The Bronzeville where Alex worked was no longer attracting talent but repelling it. Rockefeller was still a magnet, but even it faced problems competing for the best students. Rockefeller’s campus occupied a sixteen-block parcel surrounded by poverty on three sides and by twenty percent of the world’s fresh water on the other. Burned out buildings and vacant lots, liquor stores and derelicts loitering out front made the short drive home the worst part of Alex’s day—not because he didn’t care about the people who lived where he worked, but because he did. The solutions routinely offered to help them were, in Alex’s opinion, making things worse. With NPR’s All Things Considered playing in the background, Alex scanned the horizon and shook his head that this was possible in America.

  His mind wandered back to Student 1189. Grading was anonymous to remove any potential biases of professors and to encourage students to compete on substance instead of brown nosing. Of course, Alex had the power to find out who the student was in advance of issuing the final
grade; he did this every quarter when he adjusted his raw scores to account for class participation. But he didn’t ask for the names from the registrar until the grades were nearly finalized. And, he wasn’t yet sure he wanted to know who this was. Better to be safe than sorry in this high-stakes game, he thought. His rendezvous with Student 1189 would have to wait a few more days.

  CHAPTER 5

  April 2015

  Chicago, Illinois

  Leaving the Children’s Hospital, Royce stumbled wretchedly down the street. How had his brother’s life shipwrecked without him knowing? Claire was so deeply hostile; seemingly as cold as any sociopath. Was she keeping her strength up with rage? Maybe behind the façade was a woman who couldn’t afford the luxury of falling apart.

  He tugged the Pirates cap down over his eyes, and as he did he passed a hand over his cheek and found it was wet. Jenny and the girls back home were unaware the world had imploded. But he was in no shape to break the news to them, and it was probable they still didn’t know. University Police had notified both him and Claire, the next-of-kin, but the story hadn’t broken yet. Claire had given no indication that she’d reach out to her former sister-in-law. There was time.

  Immersing Jenny in this right now wasn’t going to solve the case or mitigate damage. This evening was time to deal with it. So he fiddled with his phone and sent a standing order of flowers to a shop back home that kept his credit card information. They would deliver a bouquet of snapdragons to Jenny with a blank card attached. It was their code that he had to disappear without notice on a case. Jenny would stay blissfully ignorant for another few hours, and she’d be okay with his absence. It came with marriage to a special agent. Or, at least with this one.

  He continued along the street outside the hospital, heart still pounding. At the end of the block, the light turned red, leaving him staring into traffic. Across the street was a -lucky coincidence—a bar with two things he needed: whiskey and Wi-Fi.