Authors: Jeremiah Healy
Marek nearly smiled. “Yes, but if I had a placebo ready for that night’s session already, and if I were worried about how much flurazepam a postsession blood test would detect, I simply would have given William the placebo that night, as well.”
“That’s right.”
Now Marek did smile, in his patronizing way. “And therefore, I—”
“—never did use a placebo. In those earlier sessions, I mean.”
Marek stopped smiling. “But you said either …”
“No, I said you had choices, palming or placebo. But in fact you had a third choice at the earlier group sessions, the choice you actually made.”
“Really. What?”
“Give William another shot of flurazepam.”
“Why on earth would I do that?”
“At first, when you began your private sessions with William, you must have used a greater than normal dose of flurazepam anyway to ‘relax’ him. According to Professor Kirby, flurazepam really isn’t an anxiolytic, a tranquilizer. It’s more of a true hypnotic, meaning a sleeping potion. Even very diluted, it would still be stronger than most true tranquilizers. Kirby says that while it would take some time to build up a tolerance to flurazepam, increased usage would do it. I’m betting that over the months you had to give William an increasing amount of flurazepam before your times with him, in order to hypnotize him into doing, and letting you do, certain things. So, at the earlier group sessions, it was probably safer just to give him another shot of the stuff, to make sure he was still under.”
“Not acceptable, Cuddy. I begin every group session by asking the subject where he or she has been during the preceding hour. Clearly, if I’d been sodomizing William he would have revealed that.”
I shook my head. “Not necessarily. You could have blocked that memory from surfacing at the group sessions by sufficient flurazepam earlier and a posthypnotic suggestion implanted in William before you turned him loose.”
“And what, pray tell, are your credentials in pharmacology and hypnosis?”
“Slim to none. But Kirby’s are impeccable, and I have a feeling he’ll back me on that possibility.”
“Still rubbish. Why, then, would I not just inject William in group that night too?”
“With more flurazepam, you mean?”
“Yes,” he said, testily.
“That closes the circle. Like I said, you realized at some point after you killed Jennifer that the police would examine William both chemically and visibly. For what it’s worth, they did. But when they looked at his arm, you wanted them to see only one fresh track mark. And you also were probably afraid that another shot, at the group session now, of flurazepam would show up as off the scale in any blood test. That would be difficult for you to explain. Homer Linden, and I expect Donald Ramelli too, would say William seemed lethargic at group many nights. How could you get the police to buy that a group member like William who appeared lethargic to start with had somehow been built up over the course of your care to tolerating enough flurazepam to cool a killer whale? No, you faced a real predicament, Doctor. Shoot William again with flurazepam and run those risks, or ask Lainie to move so you could fake it.”
“Sheer conjecture.”
“But Lainie fooled you, didn’t she? She wouldn’t move. Tell me, Marek, did you realize then that you’d be having more trouble with her?”
He sat impassive now, a Buddha statue in a handsome Caucasian body. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Sure you do. Jennifer confided in Lainie, thought Lainie had the world—probably meaning men and sex—all figured out. I saw Lainie in action at a bar. She seemed a good listener for people in trouble. Maybe Jennifer confided that she was going to see you earlier that Thursday, maybe Lainie was just being coy to attract you herself. Whichever, Lainie didn’t move, and you had to try to cover yourself anyway. You remembered to dim and up the lights but not to turn on the video equipment.
“I told you. I told the police. I was rattled by William’s—”
“No sale, Doc. You’re a trained professional, used to dealing with agitated people. If anything, William’s state should have triggered your videotaping him, not squelched it. No, you failed to start the camera so no record would exist of your palming the needle. Then you botched your act, and Lainie spotted it. Is that why she was the one who went down to the basement with you to check on William’s story? Did Lainie confront you there? Or was it later? Was Lainie still interested in you romantically?”
“You are crazy,” a slight rise in Marek’s voice, clipping off his words again.
“My guess is she was more than interested in you. My guess is Lainie had fallen for you, truly, and didn’t know quite how to show that, the real thing. Or maybe it was just business as usual for her. She tried to hit me up to tell her about any divorce cases I was working on. Lainie worked the angles, and she wanted a little advance notice if a couple might be needing to put their house on the market, maybe with an aggressive, effective sales broker like her to push it. I’ve given it a lot of thought, Marek, and I’m betting either she was really in love with you or she tried to blackmail you, maybe for straight money, maybe for names of patients who were in the kind of trouble where their homes might have to be sold.”
“Lainie Bishop was a slut, Mr. Cuddy. Pure and simple. When her ex-husband realized it, he bailed out. I think you’re giving the dear departed Ms. Bishop too much credit for brains.”
“But you didn’t, did you? You knew just how gullible she might be with the right kind of encouragement. You made it sound to her like you might enjoy supplying her with more than money or names. You arranged a little rendezvous with her at her house. Then you killed her and made it look like the town burglar had panicked. Exit the Cheshire cat from another potentially embarrassing professional snafu.”
“You’re mad, Cuddy. Clinically and literally. Mad.”
“I don’t think so. I think the way I described it is about what happened.”
Marek made a noise deep in his chest, like a mountain about to slough off in avalanche a couple hundred tons of ice and snow. He leaned forward again. “You ever kill anyone, Cuddy?”
I thought for a second. “Not that we can talk about.”
He started to laugh, then choked a little. “After what you’ve just put me through, ‘Not that we can …’ Well, let me tell you, my friend, you have no idea what hell is until … How do you think I felt about Lester Briles, that boy at New York Central? How do you think it feels to be pushed to do something that every part of you but one says will be wonderful, and the one part says is despicable?”
“If the one part’s your conscience, I’d say it ought to feel pretty human.”
“Don’t patronize me!” he snapped, slamming his hand flat on the desktop. “I’ve had enough of your ‘homo’ innuendos. You despise me, don’t you? You despise me because I go down on black boys and bugger them.”
“No, Marek. I despise you, all right, but not for being gay. I despise you because of the way you traded on a relationship. You took advantage of people, of patients, who were coming to you professionally for treatment.”
“Mr. High and Might—”
“A professional’s supposed to be like the keeper in a game preserve. Only you fed the animals out of your hand one day and gunned them down the next. You killed two innocent, at least relatively innocent, people and did your best to ruin a third, all of them in your care. That’s what I despise.”
Marek snorted. “So what do you do now, detective? Do you kill me?”
“I thought about it. After I figured out what you did, I thought about it.”
Marek’s eyes opened wider. He started to speak, then stopped.
I said, “But then I decided it wouldn’t do any good.”
Marek recovered. “Why not? People with delusions like yours often believe that revenge is its own reward.”
“Maybe. But only when it also solves the problem. Killing you might square your crimes, but I’d go to jail, and William wouldn’t necessarily get out.”
“I see,” said Marek ponderously. “So you want me to turn myself in. To make the grand gesture of self-confession to free what you see as my wrongly accused patient.”
“No, just the opposite. I want you to run.”
Marek stared at me. He finally said, “You want me to what?”
“Run. Soon, like tomorrow, maybe. And far, as far as you can.”
“Why in God’s name would I do that?”
“Because either way, you’re finished here. And as a psychiatrist, anywhere.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Okay, I’ll go slowly. Let’s say you stonewall it and try to stay in Calem. You and I both know what actually happened. I go to the cops, they investigate a little deeper. They look at the records in New York and other places. They bring in Zerle, maybe Gemelman too. They go back to Lainie’s, find some piece of physical evidence like threads from a coat to tie you there. They have a superstar hypnotist deprogram William, unravel those mistaken recollections you planted in his head.”
“None of this would begin to stand up in court.”
“It wouldn’t have to. I’d just have to smear you enough that your professional life in this area would be a memory. A bad memory that would stick in people’s minds.”
“Then why should I run, if you’ll ruin me anyway?”
“Because if you don’t run, there’s at least a chance that things will stand up in court, and you’ll be nailed, civilly and criminally. If you stay, you’re ruined and maybe jailed. If you run, you’re ruined but free. Free to be anything you want to be. Except, of course, a psychiatrist or doctor again.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
“The licensing procedure. Every state has one of some kind. I’ll see to it that you never get licensed again anywhere, even if you stay and beat the killings. The reason you’ve been able to hop from state to state like a migrating predator is that each hospital you were leaving had too much to lose in really dealing with you. I don’t have anything to lose. I’ll just hound you. Forever.”
Marek puffed up his lower lip. “But if I run, I get away with it. If you’re right—that is, if I killed Jennifer and Lainie—you’d be letting me get away with murder.”
“Not my job.”
“What?”
“It’s not my job to see you get convicted. My worry is getting William off. If you run, combined with the story I give the cops about you, my guess is the DA either dismisses the indictment or runs a serious risk of losing at trial on the reasonable-doubt question. He wouldn’t want the resultant embarrassing publicity as everyone realizes he’d tried the wrong man and no one knows where you are.”
“Whereas if I stay, I’m still around to deny things.”
“Right, but you’re also around to be nailed yourself.”
A full minute wound by before Marek spoke again. “Why don’t you just get out of here?”
I stood up. “Sure. Just don’t take too long to think it over. And when you make up your mind to run, don’t even call me. Just disappear. And wonder what god you should thank for sparing you again.”
I backed out of the room and closed the door. I crossed the waiting area and was out that door too. I rode the elevator down. Outside, I started my car and drove around the corner. I stopped behind a nondescript panel truck parked near a telephone pole. As I got out of my car, Chief Wooten came through the back doors of the van.
“I think he’ll run,” I said, unbuttoning my shirt and reaching in for the tape holding the transmitter under my right nipple.
“We didn’t get all of it,” said Wooten, crossing his arms so that the Navy tattoo was facing me.
“What?” I said, tearing the transmitter free and drawing it out. I even forgot to rub the burning, tender spot the tape left.
O’Boy stuck his head out the doors, a pair of earphones down around his neck like a high-tech slave collar. “We got bits and pieces, Cuddy. We heard you and the receptionist fine, and Marek telling you to take a seat. But after that, static, bird noises, and maybe every other sentence. Granted I’m no expert on this stuff, but it was like we were being jammed or something.”
I closed my eyes. Marek had a lot of electronic equipment in that office, and he fiddled with the dials on that control panel the last two times I’d talked with him. When he thought I could be coming after him. Dammit.
Wooten said, “Cuddy, with what we did get, it sounded to me like he admitted it. Killing both the girl and the Bishop woman.”
I looked at him. “Yes, but never in so many words.”
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean that he outfoxed me, Chief. He spotted the wire. Electronically. He confirmed it when I passed up taking off my coat in a hot room. He knew all the time I was trying to trap him, and he interfered with the signal back to the truck.”
“So?”
“So he was playing me when I thought I was playing him, Chief. Get it now? He was just using me to find out what I had on him. Now he knows. And by spotting the wire, he knows you suspect him too.”
O’Boy said, “Not necessarily.”
I looked at O’Boy, who continued talking. “Lots of private outfits have this kind of gear now. He might have known you were wired, but still not be sure you’re working with us.”
O’Boy had a point. I said, “Then what do you think we should do?”
O’Boy said, “You went through his alternatives with him, right? I mean, we heard parts of the run/don’t run, and all that shit.”
“Yes.”
“Then I say we wait him out. Two, three days, anyway. Maybe he still sees the sense of it, that both Daniels and him are better off if he runs. Then we grab him on the fly.”
Wooten waved his arm like a semaphore and said, “I say we take the faggot now.”
I started, “Chief—”
“No,” spat Wooten. “You and him talked, Cuddy. Christ, he admitted queering the boy and killing the two females. What more do you think you’re gonna get?”
“Chief,” said O’Boy. “Please wait a minute.”
“No, I’ve waited long enough on this case. The papers, Creasey’s fucking TV station, the whole world’s gonna wonder what the hell took so long to figure out anyway. If we don’t take him now, there’s a dozen ways we could lose him.” A Calem PD cruiser screeched to a halt beside Wooten, and he opened the passenger side to get in.