Your Eyelids Are Growing Heavy (22 page)

“We did?” Her voice was higher than he remembered it.

The elevator arrived; Algren gestured for her to enter. Riding down he kept up an easy line of chatter. For some reason Dr. Snooks seemed nervous, answering only in high monosyllables. When they stepped off in the lobby, she walked along with him, her head swiveling back and forth.

“Are you looking for someone?” he asked.

“What?” she squeaked. “No, no, I'm not looking for anyone.”

What
was
the matter with the woman? “Well, it was nice running into you, Dr. Snooks,” he said smoothly, preparatory to leaving.

He could see her make the effort to get a grip on herself. “Dr. Algren,” she said firmly in her natural voice. “I'd like you to have a drink with me, if you will.”

He hesitated. But he'd been planning to stop for a drink anyway—maybe a little company would be good for him right now. He agreed, and they set out to find a bar.

Oakland bars were always crowded on Friday nights. They passed two that blasted music at them through closed doors, and ended up in a minuscule booth in a place that called itself Out in Left Field. The bar was packed, and Algren found the place appalling.

The decor consisted mostly of baseball bats and gloves and catchers' masks hanging on the wall, spaced among photographs of what looked like every man who'd ever worn a Pirate uniform. Both of the bartenders were dressed in referees' outfits. Algren ordered scotch and water for himself; Dr. Snooks wanted beer. When his drink came, Algren sighed when he saw the swizzle stick was a little plastic baseball bat.

“This is the first time I've seen you to talk to since the Hypnosis Institute,” Algren said to his companion. “I remember you were chairperson of one of the committees—the Ethics Committee, wasn't it?”

“I was chair
woman
,” Dr. Snooks said mildly.

“Oh? I thought ‘chairperson' was the correct term.”

“Only when the person you're referring to can be either male or female. Like, ‘The Speech Therapy Department is looking for a new chairperson.' But once that person is hired, he becomes the chair
man
or she becomes the chair
woman
.” Dr. Snooks sniffed. “There's altogether too much fuss made over that word ‘person.' As if there were some enormous difficulty about using it correctly. Sorry—it's a pet peeve of mine.”

Algren smiled easily. “I stand corrected.” A burst of rowdy laughter rang from across the room. “Do you come here often?”

“Once in a while. Not a whole lot.”

Algren averted his head to hide his surprise. He'd asked the question sarcastically; it hadn't occurred to him that anyone he knew would come
back
to a place like this. He took a swallow of his watery scotch and heard his stomach growl. “Excuse me.”

“Hungry?” Dr. Snooks asked. “They have a good kolbassi here.”

He looked around. When they'd come in there'd been waiters everywhere, coyly dressed as stadium vendors. Not a one in sight now.

“He'll be back,” Dr. Snooks said dismissively. “Dr. Algren, I'm glad I ran into you tonight. I have an intriguing new case—something more in your field than mine. Have you ever had a patient who claimed he'd been hypnotized without knowing when it happened?”

Algren's glass paused halfway to his mouth. “Without knowing it?”

“That's what he claims. He—”

“He?”

“A youngster, a fifteen-year-old boy. At first I made the mistake we're never supposed to make. I assumed the kid was just looking for attention and had found a novel way of getting it,” she ad-libbed happily, getting the hang of it. “But now I don't think so. Trouble is, I've had no other case like it for comparison. Have you run into anything like that?”

Algren slowly took a drink, not allowing himself to relax. “No. Never.”

“Well, this boy claims he was programmed to steal his father's keys and have duplicates made—the father owns a jewelry store.”

“Then the impulse to steal was already in the boy.”

“Is that always the case?”

“The subject must cooperate with the hypnotist, you know that.”

“But a subject can be lied to under hypnosis. He can be made to think that what he's doing is not wrong in the context of his personal value system. I think that's what happened to this kid. And I believe him when he says he was hypnotized without his knowing it. It wasn't until later that he figured out what must have happened.”

“Why? What makes you believe him?”

“His responses under hypnosis are identical to those he makes when he's not in a trance. The textbooks hedge some, but generally they seem agreed that a subject can't be hypnotized without his knowledge.”

“The textbooks are right. Don't take this the wrong way, Dr. Snooks, but some subjects are quite skilled at faking a trance state.”

“Not this boy. What I was wondering was if there was some new drug for inducing relaxation that I didn't know about, something especially fast-acting. Anything new on the market—say, within the past year?”

Algren shook his head, thinking the coincidences were coming at him suspiciously hot and heavy lately. “There must be some other explanation. If your patient—”

He was interrupted by some sort of disturbance at the door. Looked like some kid trying to get in without any I.D.

“What is it?” Dr. Snooks asked, twisting in her seat for a better look. “Oh!”

“You know him?” Algren asked, thinking the kid looked vaguely familiar.

“No, no—I thought at first he was one of my patients, but I was wrong.”

Then Algren remembered. The kid who'd just been tossed out looked very much like the twerp Megan Phillips had sent to his office. He muttered a hasty excuse to Dr. Snooks and made his way to the door. Outside: noise, dirty streets, perambulating people. But no twerp. Algren looked both ways but couldn't spot him. He went back into Out in Left Field and sat down.

“Thought I knew him too, but he's gone. I didn't really get a good look at him. Good lord, will you look at that? That drink is
foaming
. Waiter!” He didn't notice Dr. Snooks glaring at him. A stadium vendor materialized and Algren ordered a fresh drink and kolbassi on a soft roll. His companion said she wasn't hungry—which surprised him.

One of the bar customers had taken a baseball bat from the wall and was demonstrating a grip to his drinking buddies. Dr. Snooks eyed him skeptically. “If he swings that thing, he'll decapitate six people.”

But the customer wasn't that drunk. After he finished making his point, he slipped the bat handle back into the bracket that held it to the wall and called for an Iron City beer. Pronounced Arn City.

A waiter in stadium vendor's outfit plopped Algren's kolbassi sandwich on the table. Smelled good. Algren heard Dr. Snooks make a funny noise. She choked—and then spewed beer all over the table.

“Get a towel,” Algren said to the waiter.

And found himself looking at the twerp.

The kid stared bug-eyed at him for a second—and then took off. Algren slid out of the booth and went after him. The kid burst through the door to the kitchen; Algren wasn't far behind. The short-order cook looked up from his grill at this unexpected intrusion into his domain.

There was only one door out of the kitchen; Algren headed for it. It opened into a storeroom—and a door to the alley was still swinging shut. The light was bad and he didn't see the spare wall decorations stacked in his way. Man and baseball bats went sprawling, making a racket. Algren cursed and got to his feet just as Dr. Snooks came panting into the storeroom.

Algren ignored her and stumbled out through the door. He saw the twerp running down the alley and yelled, “Hey! Hey you! Wait!”

And then the sky exploded. He was conscious of shock, then of falling, then of nothing at all.

“For crying out loud,” Megan said with annoyance, tossing away her baseball bat. “If I had to leave it to you two, we'd be playing Dungeons and Dragons all night. Snooks, get out your happy juice—I'll go get the car.”

CHAPTER 14

Algren was stretched out on the couch in Snooks's office; the psychiatrist was dabbing something on his head and muttering. “Why'd you hit him so hard? He's going to have one hell of a headache tomorrow.”

“How do I know how hard you have to hit a man to knock him out?” Megan said irritably. “I've never done it before.” She turned to Gus, who was still wearing his vendor's uniform. “And take off that ridiculous outfit. Why did you dress up as a waiter anyway?”

“I was trying to find out what was going on,” he said, pulling the tunic over his head. “I couldn't get in the front way—no I.D. And I'm almost twenty-two!”

“Well, it was dumb.”

“Oh, stop grumbling, Megan. He's here, isn't he? And Snooks says he'll be able to talk. That's something—considering the fact that
everything
went wrong.”

“Did you actually take a sandwich to him?” Megan asked.

“I didn't know it was his sandwich. I found the waiter's outfit in the storeroom and put it on. Then when I walked through the kitchen the cook thrust this sandwich at me and said, ‘Booth twelve.' He didn't even look at me—they must use a hell of a lot of temporary help in that place. So I took the sandwich to booth number twelve. I didn't realize it was Algren's until I actually got there.”

“What were you doing there?” Megan asked Snooks. “Why a bar?”

“Thought I could slip him a Mickey,” Snooks mumbled. “Didn't work.”

Gus said, “You scared the hell out of me when you walked out of that office building with him and he was alert and talking and moving right along. Why didn't you inject him while you were in the elevator?”

“How could I stick a needle in his butt when he stood facing me and talking all the time?”

“I thought you weren't going to speak to him.”

“He spoke to
me
.” Snooks looked embarrassed. “It seems we know each other—or at least we've met. All right, all right, so I forgot. It doesn't matter now.”

“How long before that stuff starts to work?” Megan wanted to know.

“It's probably working now. But let's give it another five minutes.”

While they were waiting, Snooks took out a tape recorder and set it up. She spoke into the mike, testing to make sure the machine was recording. “You can talk,” she told Megan and Gus. “But keep your voices flat and unemotional.”

Then she started. Snooks suggested to Algren that he was comfortable and rested and on top of the world. She took a long time with it, concentrating on convincing him that he felt no pain. Then it was time to see if he would respond.

“Can you hear me?” Snooks asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you feel?”

“Very good. Comfortable.”

“Do you feel any pain?”

“No.”

The other three in the room breathed a collective sigh of relief. Algren was under.

Snooks asked him what he had done last Christmas Eve. Algren couldn't recall detail the way Megan did, but he was able to give them a fair account of his alcoholic celebration. Snooks went on to pick dates at random—January 20, February 13, March 8—bringing him up gradually to the April weekend they wanted to know about.

“I want you to remember April twenty-eighth. It is a Friday. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“It's five-thirty in the afternoon. Where are you?”

“On the twenty-first floor of the Sprague Building. In the hallway by the elevators.”

“Why are you there?”

“I'm waiting for a woman named Megan Phillips. I am to get on the elevator with her.”

“When you are on the elevator together, what do you do?”

“I inject her with sodium pentothal.”

“How do you know there won't be someone else on the elevator?”

“Mr. Sperling has another man in the building. He is to make sure one elevator car stays empty.”

Snooks looked a question at Megan, who raised her shoulders and shook her head. “Who is Mr. Sperling?” Snooks asked Algren.

“An executive with Dillon Laboratories.”

Megan's eyes grew wide. “A competitor,” she told the others.

Snooks said, “Did Mr. Sperling pay you to hypnotize Megan Phillips?”

“Yes.”

“How much?” Gus asked quickly.

Algren didn't answer.

Snooks repeated it: “How much?”

“Forty thousand dollars.”

Megan gasped, and Gus muttered, “Told you it wasn't just a hijacking.”

Snooks asked Algren where he'd taken Megan.

“To an apartment building in Sewickley. A man named Ferris drove us there. Mr. Sperling was waiting in the apartment.”

“And in the Sewickley apartment you took Megan Phillips down into a deep hypnotic trance?”

“Yes.”

“Did you give her a posthypnotic suggestion?”

“Yes.”

“Now I want you to tell me what suggestion you planted in Megan Phillips's mind.”

“She was not to remember the weekend. She was to respond to reinforcement. She was to redirect the initial domestic shipments of Lipan to a warehouse complex in Los Angeles.”

“Does that mean anything to you?” Snooks asked Megan, and could tell by her face that it did. “Rest,” she instructed Algren, and went over to sit by Megan. “Lipan again. What about these ‘initial domestic shipments'?”

“He means when the product first went on the national market,” Megan said in a tight voice. “That was in May.”

“And you were to redirect everything to Los Angeles, he says. Like those shipments that mistakenly ended up in Stockton?”

Megan shook her head. “Not quite the same. Those shipments that went to Stockton were just small follow-up orders. The initial shipment was a coast-to-coast saturation release. It was
the
shipment.”