The Double Bind Read Online Free PDF Page A

CIA—or Rambo, the pope, and the CIA—are after them. Not Bobbie. He dreamed of castles. Gotta love it.”
    “Well, he did see the devil,” Laurel said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “He only mentioned it to me once. But he told Emily, too. One time he saw the devil.”
    “Did he say what the devil looked like?”
    “He looked like a person, I think.”
    “Anyone in particular?” asked Katherine.
    “Someone he knew, I’m sure. But that would be a question for Emily.”
    “How serious were the drugs he was taking when he saw him?”
    “Maybe the devil was a woman.”
    “Or her?” Katherine said, correcting herself.
    “I’d say very serious. You don’t see the devil on Thunderbird.”
    Katherine smiled ruefully, tilting her head back toward the screen in the one tiny window in Laurel’s office, hoping to catch a wisp of the wind. She was, it seemed to Laurel, summoning a memory of the man herself. Bobbie—and he was always Bobbie to the social workers and the residents of the Hotel New England—was a human skeleton when he arrived at the shelter, but he recovered quickly: One of the side effects of his antipsychotic was weight gain. He never became truly rotund, but within three or four months he had regained the paunch of the poor who live on fast food and the carb-laden breads and pastas that were heaped onto plates at the emergency day station and the Salvation Army. Food heavy enough to help the hungry feel full and keep warm. Lots of peanut butter. He’d shrunk with old age, but he still had presence and bulk. His face was hidden up to his eyes with a white beaver beard that retained a few small patches of black, but those eyes were what everyone noticed because they were deep and dark and smiling, and his eyelashes were almost girlishly long.
    “He was quite a character,” Katherine purred after a moment. “Did you know he was a photographer?”
    “I know he said he was,” Laurel answered, “but I don’t think there was much to it. I assume it was a hobby or something. Maybe a part-time job he had before his mind went completely. Shooting class pictures at elementary schools. Or babies at Sears.”
    “There might be more to it than that. Bobbie didn’t have any cameras or photo stuff in his room, but he had these. Look in the box,” Katherine said, waving languidly down at the carton at her feet.
    “These being…?”
    “Pictures. Photos. Negatives. There’s a ton in there. All very retro.”
    Laurel peered around the side of the desk. Katherine pushed the box toward her with her foot, so she could reach it and pull apart the top flaps. The first image Laurel spied was an eleven-by-fourteen black and white of easily two hundred teenage girls in identical white button-down shirts and black skirts on a football field playing with Hula-Hoops. It looked like it was some sort of halftime extravaganza: Synchronized Hula-Hooping, maybe. The next one, based on the modest two-piece bathing suit the subject was wearing, was from that same era: A surfer girl was posing atop her surfboard on the beach, pretending to ride an actual wave. Laurel picked it up and saw scrawled legibly on the back in pencil, “Real Gidget, not Sandra Dee. Malibu.” She thumbed through a few more, all black and white, all from the late 1950s or early 1960s, until she came upon one she thought might have been a very young Paul Newman. She held it up for her boss and raised her eyebrows.
    “Yup,” Katherine said, “I think it’s him, too. Unfortunately, there’s nothing on the back. No annotation or clue.”
    She put Paul Newman back in the box and pawed briefly through the prints. Toward the bottom, she discovered long strips of negatives, none of which had been placed in sleeves. Like the photos, they had been dumped unceremoniously into the carton.
    “And you think Bobbie Crocker took these?” she asked Katherine, sitting back in her chair.
    “I do.”
    “Why?”
    “They were in his apartment,” Katherine said. “And