The Art of Death by Margarite St. John Page B

therapy he’d visited upon her when she was only thirteen but praise her for her good manners and maturity. Perhaps he would confess that a burden had been lifted from his shoulders and he too felt better.
    “Ah,” she said when Dennis placed a martini in front of her. “Now tell me what’s in it.”
    “Citron vodka, Chambord, and champagne, with a lemon twist and sugar rim. Now tell me what you think.”
    Kimmie sipped the beautiful concoction, then looked up. “Sort of like raspberry lemonade with a kick. I like it. What’s it called?”
    “Madame du Barry.”
    “Really?”
    Dennis chuckled. “I don’t know. I just made that up.”
    Kimmie touched his arm. “May I ask you something?”
    Dennis checked the bar before nodding. He was busy but he wanted to humor her, she looked so forlorn.
    “Say somebody did something very bad to you when you were little and he’s never apologized and you ask him to apologize now because, well, better late than never, right? Would you expect to get an apology?”
    “How bad?” Dennis asked. “I mean, how bad was the something this person did when you were little?”
    “Real, real bad. And he’s a psychiatrist. A very respected man.”
    Dennis kept his face expressionless. As a bartender, he felt some sympathy with psychiatrists -- and priests too -- for everyday he heard more intimate personal details and confessions of misdeeds than most professionals. If the question was how to get a person to open up, then the answer was alcohol. “He gave you bad advice?”
    “Worse than that. What he did to me was a crime in all fifty states.”
    Dennis did his best to keep the disbelief out of his voice. “And you want him to admit . . . admit that he committed a crime in all fifty states? Are you asking for that in writing?”
    “Oh, Dennis, put it that way and I sound completely stupid.”
    “Didn’t mean it that way, Kimmie.” Checking the bar again and seeing two new customers, he squared his shoulders. “Time to get back to my duties. Maybe your friend will have a better answer.”
    But Amber didn’t. She arrived wearing a pink track suit and running shoes, her dark eyes sparkling, her shiny black hair falling like a pony tail out of her pink and black Juicy Couture baseball cap. Amber, who’d been adopted from a Chinese orphanage into an American family already graced with two boys, was a perpetually happy woman. Though she was only a nail tech when Kimmie began giving facials at the same spa six years earlier, Amber had already moved up to supervisor and vowed someday to own that place or an even better one. At thirty-one, popular but unmarried, Amber still lived at home, where as the youngest child and the only girl, the light of her parents’ life, she still led the life of a princess. Kimmie, who was not an orphan but was also not a princess, sometimes wished she could exchange places with her friend.  
    “What are you drinking?” Amber asked.
    “A martini. Lemon and raspberry, a little champagne. Dennis made it up. Taste it. Madame du Barry, he called it.”
    “Umm. Good.” Amber signaled Dennis that she wanted what Kimmie had.
    “I ordered oysters Rockefeller for us. You want anything else?”
    “Maybe. I’m hungry. So why do you keep looking at your phone, Kimmie?”
    When Kimmie told her what she’d texted to Dr. Beltrami, Amber was horrified. “If he admits to having sex with you when you were a minor and giving you cocaine, then he’s admitting to felonies, Kimmie. Why would he do that?”
    “To make me feel better. Isn’t that his job?”
    “If he does that, you get out of psychological prison while he gets sent to a real one, where he doesn’t have any job except to try to stay alive.”
    “Dennis sort of hinted the same thing.”
    Amber closed her eyes in frustration. “Have you ever heard the proverb that if you shoot at the king, make sure you kill him?”
    Kimmie buttered a piece of pretzel bread. “What?”
    “You’ve threatened a