He shook his head and dragged himself into the small kitchen. For breakfast, he made himself a solitary slice of dry wheat toast and some black coffee which tasted bitter no matter how many spoonfuls of sugar he dropped in. He chewed the toast with an indifference that surprised him. He had absolutely no appetite.
He carried his rapidly cooling coffee into his office where he put Rumplestiltskin’s letter on the desk in front of him. Occasionally he would sneak a glance out the window, as if he hoped to catch a glimpse of the naked Virgil lurking on the sidewalk, or occupying a window from an apartment in the building across the narrow street. He knew she was somewhere close, or, at least, believed her to be, based on what she had told him.
Ricky shuddered once, involuntarily. He stared at the words of the clue.
For a moment, he felt a dizziness mingled with a flash of heat.
“What is happening?” he demanded of himself out loud.
Roger Zimmerman seemed to enter the room at that moment, as irritating and demanding in death as he was in life. As always, he wanted answers to all the wrong questions.
He dialed the dead man’s apartment number again, hoping to reach someone. Ricky knew he was obliged to speak with someone about Zimmerman’s death, but precisely who, eluded him. The mother was still inexplicably unaccounted for, and Ricky wished he’d had the sense to ask Detective Riggins where the woman was. He guessed with some neighbor, or in a hospital. Zimmerman had a younger brother who lived in California with whom he’d connected infrequently. The brother worked in the film industry in Los Angeles and had wanted nothing to do with taking care of the difficult and partially invalided mother, a reluctance that had caused Zimmerman to complain constantly about him. Zimmerman had been a man who reveled in the awfulness of his life, preferring to whine and complain than to change. It was this quality that made him such a poor candidate for suicide, Ricky thought. What the police and his coworkers had seen as despair, Ricky had recognized as Zimmerman’s true and only joy. He lived for his hates. Ricky’s task as analyst was to empower him with the ability to change. He had expected the time to eventually arrive when Zimmerman would have realized how crippled he actually was, traveling impotently from anger to anger. That moment when change was possible would have been dangerous, because Zimmerman would likely have fallen into a significant depression at the idea that he didn’t need to lead his life in the way that he did. He would have been vulnerable then when the number of wasted days finally occurred to him. That understanding conceivably might have created a real and possibly lethal despair.
But that moment had been many months, and in greater likelihood, years away.
Zimmerman still had arrived at his session daily, still considering analysis to be nothing more than a fifty-minute venting opportunity, like a steam whistle on the side of an engine waiting for the conductor’s tug. What little insight he’d gained he mostly used to pave new avenues of anger.
Complaining was fun for him. He wasn’t boxed in and encircled by despair.
Ricky shook his head. In twenty-five years, he’d had three patients who killed themselves. Two of those had been referred to him already displaying all the classic warning signs and had been in treatment only briefly before taking their own lives. He had felt helpless on those occasions, but a helplessness that didn’t carry blame. The third death, however, he did not like to think about because the person had been a longtime patient, whose downward spiral Ricky had been unable to arrest, even with prescriptions for mood elevators, a course he rarely took. It had been years since he’d thought of that patient, and he had not liked mentioning him to Detective Riggins, even if he had withheld the details of the case from the rude and only mildly inquisitive detective.
Shuddering briefly, as if the room had suddenly grown cold, Ricky thought: That was a portrait of suicide. Zimmerman wasn’t.
But the idea that Zimmerman was pushed in front of a subway train to send Ricky a message was far more horrifying. It struck at his heart. It was the sort of idea that was like a spark landing in a pool of gasoline.
It was, equally, an impossible idea. He envisioned himself walking back into Detective Riggins’s overbright and modestly filthy office and claiming that some strangers had deliberately murdered a person they didn’t know and didn’t care about in the slightest in order to force Ricky into playing some sort of death game.
He thought: It’s true, but not believable, especially to some underpaid and overworked Transit Authority detective.
And, in the same moment, he realized that they knew that.
The man who called himself Rumplestiltskin and the woman who went by Virgil understood that there was no hard evidence whatsoever that might connect them to this random crime other than Ricky’s bleating protests. Even if Detective Riggins didn’t laugh Ricky out of her office-which she would-what incentive did she have to pursue a wild story from a physician whom she quite accurately believed would far prefer some crazy mystery novel explanation for the man’s death rather than the obvious suicide that reflected so poorly on him?
He could answer that query with a single word: None.
Zimmerman’s death was designed to help kill Ricky. And no one would know it, except Ricky.
The thought made him dizzy.
Sitting back hard in his chair, Ricky realized he was at a critical moment. In the hours since the letter appeared in his waiting room, he’d been caught up in a series of actions that he had absolutely no perspective upon. Analysis is about patience and he’d had none. It is about time, and there was none available. His glance caught the calendar Virgil had provided him. The fourteen days remaining seemed an impossibly brief time. For a second, he thought of a death row prisoner, told that the governor had signed his death warrant, specifying date, time, and place of execution. This was a crushing image, and he turned away from it, telling himself that even in a prison, men fought hard for life. Ricky breathed in fiercely. It is, he thought, the greatest luxury of our existence, no matter how miserable, that we don’t know our allotted span of days. The calendar on his desk seemed to mock him.
“It isn’t a game,” he said to no one. “It’s never been a game.”
He reached out and seized Rumplestiltskin’s letter and examined the small rhyme. It’s a clue, he shouted to himself. A clue from a psychopath. Look at it closely!
“… Mother, father, and young child…”
Well, he thought to himself, it’s interesting that the letter writer uses the word child, because that doesn’t specify gender.
“… When my father sailed away…”
The father left. Sail could be either literal or symbolic, but in either case, the father left the family. Whatever the causes of the abandonment, Rumplestiltskin must have harbored his resentment for years. It had to be further fueled by the mother, who was left behind. He had played some part in the creation of a rage that had taken years to turn murderous. But which part? That’s what he needed to figure out.