Shutter Island(74)

“Chuck?” Cawley said slowly.

“My partner,” Teddy said. “Chuck.”

Cawley came off the wall, the cigarette dangling from his fingers. “You don’t have a partner, Marshal. You came here alone.”





19


TEDDY SAID, “Wait a minute…”

Found Cawley, closer now, peering up at him.

Teddy closed his mouth, felt the summer night find his eyelids.

Cawley said, “Tell me again. About your partner.”

Cawley’s curious gaze was the coldest thing Teddy had ever seen. Probing and intelligent and fiercely bland. It was the gaze of a straight man in a vaudeville revue, pretending not to know where the punch line would come from.

And Teddy was Ollie to his Stan. A buffoon with loose suspenders and a wooden barrel for pants. The last one in on the joke.

“Marshal?” Cawley taking another small step forward, a man stalking a butterfly.

If Teddy protested, if he demanded to know where Chuck was, if he even argued that there was a Chuck, he played into their hands.

Teddy met Cawley’s eyes and he saw the laughter in them.

“Insane men deny they’re insane,” Teddy said.

Another step. “Excuse me?”

“Bob denies he’s insane.”

Cawley crossed his arms over his chest.

“Ergo,” Teddy said, “Bob is insane.”

Cawley leaned back on his heels, and now the smile found his face.

Teddy met it with one of his own.

They stood there like that for some time, the night breeze moving through the trees above the wall with a soft flutter.

“You know,” Cawley said, toeing the grass at his feet, head down, “I’ve built something valuable here. But valuable things also have a way of being misunderstood in their own time. Everyone wants a quick fix. We’re tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old days back, and we don’t even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress. This is not news. Not news at all. It’s always been so.” Cawley raised his head. “So as many powerful friends as I have, I have just as many powerful enemies. People who would wrest what I’ve built from my control. I can’t allow that without a fight. You understand?”

Teddy said, “Oh, I understand, Doctor.”

“Good.” Cawley unfolded his arms. “And this partner of yours?”

Teddy said, “What partner?”



TREY WASHINGTON WAS in the room when Teddy got back, lying on the bed reading an old issue of Life.

Teddy looked at Chuck’s bunk. The bed had been remade and the sheet and blanket were tucked tight and you’d never know someone had slept there two nights before.

Teddy’s suit jacket, shirt, tie, and pants had been returned from the laundry and hung in the closet under plastic wrap and he changed out of his orderly clothes and put them on as Trey flipped the glossy pages of the magazine.

“How you doing tonight, Marshal?”

“Doing okay.”

“That’s good, that’s good.”

He noticed that Trey wouldn’t look at him, kept his eyes on that magazine, turning the same pages over and over.

Teddy transferred the contents of his pockets, placing Laeddis’s intake form in his inside coat pocket along with his notebook. He sat on Chuck’s bunk across from Trey and tied his tie, tied his shoes, and then sat there quietly.

Trey turned another page of the magazine. “Going to be hot tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Hot as a motherfucker. Patients don’t like the heat.”

“No?”

He shook his head, turned another page. “No, sir. Make ’em all itchy and whatnot. Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need.”

“Why is that?”

“What’s that, Marshal?”

“The full moon. You think it makes people crazy?”

“I know it does.” Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and used his index finger to smooth it out.

“How come?”

“Well, you think about it—the moon affects the tide, right?”

“Sure.”

“Has some sort of magnet effect or something on water.”

“I’ll buy that.”

“Human brain,” Trey said, “is over fifty percent water.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. You figure ol’ Mr. Moon can jerk the ocean around, think what it can do to the head.”

“How long you been here, Mr. Washington?”

He finished smoothing out the wrinkle, turned the page. “Oh, long time now. Since I got out of the army in ’forty-six.”

“You were in the army?”

“Yes, I was. Came there for a gun, they gave me a pot. Fought the Germans with bad cooking, sir.”

“That was bullshit,” Teddy said.

“That was some bullshit, yes, Marshal. They let us into the war, it would have been over by ’forty-four.”

“You’ll get no argument from me.”