Crack-Up by Eric Christopherson Read Free Book Online Page B

night at Sally Anne Bilchik’s former place of employment, Treviso ’s Italian restaurant in Georgetown .   I arrived to find Keisha Fallon waiting for me in a secluded booth near the back wall.   She was nibbling at a plate of antipasto and drinking from a carafe of rosé.   The alcohol meant that Keisha had completed her interviews with Sally Anne’s co-workers.
    The interviews were standard procedure.   I studied the disturbed individuals who threatened my clients.   Over the years, I’d collected thousands of their written letters, the contents of their mailed packages, photographs and videos of their various crimes and obsessions, and records of the bizarre things they’d said or done.   It was all shipped to a warehouse in Rockville , Maryland , sorted in file cabinets, put on display shelves, hung on the walls, and analyzed.   I’d taken Sarah there one day.   She’d suggested I rent the space out for Halloween parties.
    I ordered the meat lasagna, as I recall.   After Keisha ordered and the waiter left, I summarized my search for Jeremy Crane, finishing with the medicine cabinet’s contents.
    “The drug I found is used to treat a range of psychotic mental disorders, so we can’t be sure that Jeremy is schizophrenic, but most people who take Olanzapine are.”
    Keisha nibbled on a breadstick.   “Strange coincidence, huh?   First Sally, now Jeremy.”   She didn’t know about me, of course, or the possibility a man with a feverish mind had beheld nothing more in Jeremy Crane’s medicine cabinet than a bottle of aspirin.
    “It’s nothing, Keisha.   One in every hundred people is schizophrenic.   That’s a lot, if you think about it.   If you live in a city, you pass by them every day, on the street, though you probably don’t know it.   If you work for a large company, you’ll have co-workers who are schizophrenic.   Take a crowded commercial jetliner, there will be schizophrenics aboard.   Take a train, or a subway, and every second or third time, at least, you’re sharing the compartment with a schizophrenic.”
    “Guess you’re right,” she said, toothpicking an olive.
    “Of course I am.   But it doesn’t matter.   Anytime some coincidence twists my intestines into balloon animals, I’ve got to check into it.   Tomorrow, I’m going to see Sally Anne Bilchik.   Now tell me what you’ve just learned about her.”
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 7
     
     
     
     
    That evening, on my drive home, I obsessed over my new habit of confronting fellow schizophrenics.   Again, I tried telling myself it was all merely coincidence.   But I couldn’t help considering whether I’d slipped free of my sanity altogether, whether in fact I’d been committed to some mental institution some time ago, my plight, my world, nothing but unbroken delirium, a waking dream.   It wasn’t until I arrived home and kissed Sarah and swept Ellie up into my arms and felt Duke’s jealous paw scratching my crotch that I was cured of such morbid thinking.
    The next morning, I phoned a staff physician at the District of Columbia ’s Maximum-Security Psychiatric Unit, who informed me that Sally Anne Bilchik was in no condition to receive visitors, and wouldn’t be for another day or two.
    By early afternoon I was in Charlottesville , my hometown.   Normally, I would fly out there twice a month to visit my mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.   The city is also where my psychiatrist back then was located.   An out-of-town shrink was an added—yes, paranoid—precaution for keeping my illness a secret.
    “Got a little broth in my beard,” Doctor Shields said to me faster than most people could think it.   The man’s words always went off like a string of Chinese firecrackers.   “Just had soup at my desk for lunch, Campbell’s chicken vegetable, have a seat, I’ll be right back, you look good, have a mint.”
    I knew that nerdism wasn’t a clinical term for the doctor’s own