Death at Charity's Point (16 page)

“My pleasure,” I said. We exchanged smiles.

“Guess I better get going, then,” she said.

“Can you make it okay?”

She snorted. “Hey, I’m liberated, remember? No, I’m fine. Thank you.”

“Well, then…”

“Yes. See you. Good night.”

“Night.”

She slammed the door to my car. I waited for her to climb into her Pinto. When I heard her engine start up and saw her headlights flash on, I started back to Boston.

At one o’clock on a Monday morning the highways seem like scenes from nuclear holocaust films. They’re brightly lit and otherwise empty of human life. A few trucks passed by, northbound in the other lanes. I imagined them moving of their own volition, without men steering them. I drove in silence. Rina’s hillbilly station had faded completely away. I listened to the static for a while, then snapped off the radio. It seemed as if Rina had faded away, too.

I parked in the garage under my apartment building and rode up the elevator to the sixth floor. Piped-in Muzak still filled the casket on cables. When the little bell dinged and the elevator eased to its cushioned stop, I twitched. I had actually dozed during the vertical trip.

I lurched down the corridor, unlocked my door, and flipped the light switch. My apartment looked as if it had been burglarized. It took me a moment to remember that it always looked that way. It was
supposed
to look that way. I still was surprised occasionally not to find Gloria’s orderly influence on the place where I lived, where everything had its assigned place and God help the husband or son who put it in backwards, or upside down, or, most venal sin, neglected to put it back at all.

I loved the comfort of mess, disorder, untidiness, disarray. It helped define my place, identify it as Mine. Nothing had a special spot in my home, now. I gave everything the run of the house. If my books liked it under the kitchen table, I believed they had a right to rest there for a while. If spoons found their way onto the top of the television, and if shoes liked it in the bathroom, maybe just to get away from their mates for a while, it was all right with me.

Charlie had dropped by my place once to pick me up for a golf date. He had expressed envy at the mess I had achieved in my apartment. I told him that I hadn’t been like that when I’d lived in my parents’ house or when I had lived with Gloria. Charlie looked around, poking at a balled-up sweatshirt on the kitchen table, and said, “This is how you give the finger to Gloria.”

So when I walked into my apartment in the early morning hours after my evening with Rina Prescott, I said, “Hello, Coyne’s Place. This is why you’ll never marry again.”

I kicked my shoes toward the bedroom, let my jacket slide onto the sofa, found a can of Rolling Rock behind an almost-empty jar of pickled hot peppers, and made for my little balcony. One beer before bed.

I fumbled with the lock on the sliding glass doors that opened onto the balcony. I had taken my seat and lifted my legs tiredly up onto the railing before it hit me: The sliders had been locked! The sliding glass doors should have been unlocked. I never locked them. It was another way I had of flipping my middle digit at my ex-helpmeet, whose compulsion for security rivaled the one she had for tidiness. Gloria required me to tour the house every evening before I was allowed to retire. The cars had to be safely garaged
and
locked. I had to check each window and door. Bolts had to be thrown, chains secured, keys turned. She always said, “You can’t expect me to make love to you unless I feel safe and secure. I just couldn’t relax.” There were moments toward the end of our marriage when I was tempted to unlock everything on one of my nightly rounds, go upstairs and screw her until she yelled “Uncle!” and then gleefully tell her the house was wide open.

I never did. By then I was beyond caring.

And now I found my sliding glass doors locked. I let the beer slide frigidly down my throat. The same moon that had shone on the ocean from Charity’s Point only a few hours ago now hovered high over my city apartment building, illuminating the same ocean I had swum in, which now lay like a silvery blanket far below me. I felt depressed, uneasy, lonely. All that wine, probably. Postcoital ennui. I was tired.

How the hell could I have locked my doors?

I finished the beer, dragged myself to my feet, and wandered bedward. If I had locked my doors sometime before I departed for my rendezvous with Rina, I must have been more nervous than I realized. Damn! I was slipping.

LEONARD WERTZ’S SECRETARY, A
solidly built, dark-haired girl with a pouting mouth and large astonished eyes, insisted that I fill out a questionnaire while I waited for the doctor to see me.

“I don’t intend to see him regularly or anything,” I protested. “I just need to talk with him.”

She smiled, showing me the pink tip of her tongue. “A lot of people feel that way at first. You’ll see. He’s really
very
good.”

“You misunderstand me, miss. I’m not here for treatment.”

“That’s perfectly normal, Mr. Coyne. Please fill out the form for us. There’s no commitment.”

I shrugged. It was easier to fill out the form.

The waiting room was furnished with two director’s chairs separated by a magazine-strewn, glass-topped table on plastic legs, and the secretary’s Danish modern desk. From where I sat her legs came into full display under her desk as her narrow skirt rode up her thighs—dimpled knees, pleasingly tapered calves, slim ankles. Part of the treatment, I supposed.

I took a copy of
Cosmopolitan
from the table and filled out the form on it, crouching awkwardly in one of the director’s chairs. Those canvas contraptions are not designed for people over five foot six. Film directors tended to be short, I guessed. I got a backache after about thirty seconds of sitting in that one.

The items on the questionnaire were innocuous enough—occupation, marital status, health insurance. On the back page I found a statement for me to sign indicating that I understood that Dr. Wertz guaranteed no cure for whatever ailed me. I smiled. That might dissuade the average lay person from bringing suit, but I knew that a medical patient’s signature on such a disclaimer had absolutely no standing in court.

An inner door opened, and through it stepped a man who appeared to be several years younger than I—a man constructed, it struck me, entirely of spheres and circles. The top of his head was bald and shiny. A reddish-brown fringe circled from behind up over his ears and continued down his cheeks in a neatly trimmed beard. He wore no mustache. His thick, rimless glasses magnified his eyes. The effect was that his head looked as if it had been placed upside down on his neck.

He wore prefaded designer jeans with hearts stitched on the rear pockets over his high, round, girlish ass and soft hips. A yellow jersey stretched taut across his pear-shaped torso. A little penguin was embroidered over his left breast. The square-toed, high-heeled cowboy boots that peeped out from under the boot-cut bottoms of his jeans had fancy stitching up the sides. He teetered uncertainly in them.

He moved, in fact, much like a penguin. Leonard Wertz was a
chic
shrink.

His fingers, as I shook his hand, felt like soft, uncooked sausages. In his voice I detected the hint of what I thought was probably a carefully cultivated British affectation.

“Mr. Coyne. Won’t you come in.” He stood at the door, holding it for me. As I brushed by him to enter his office, the scent of English Leather assaulted me.

His office looked like a small living room. At the far end, a large picture window overlooked a small lawn bordered all around by a high stockade fence against which rambler roses were tied, leafing out and preparing to bloom. The inside of the office was conspicuous primarily by the absence of the usual accoutrements of an office—no desk, no telephone, no professional journals or books, no equipment, no diplomas on the wall. There were two easy chairs, a sofa, a rocking chair, and a coffee table. An undistinguished landscape done meticulously in oils was displayed over the sofa. On the opposite wall over the chairs hung a pair of matched prints—clown faces, one laughing and one crying.

“So, Mr. Coyne,” began Wertz. He held the form I had filled out. “You’re an attorney, I see. Divorced, eh?” He abruptly put the questionnaire onto the coffee table and fixed me with a magnified stare. “Why don’t you just tell me about it.”

“I’m not here for treatment,” I said. “I thought you understood that. I’m here professionally. In regard to one of your patients. Former patients. George Gresham.”

He nodded. “Mr. Gresham terminated with me some time ago, you know.”

“He terminated, period,” I said. “He’s dead.”

Leonard Wertz slowly removed his glasses. His eyes behind them were small, pink, porcine. He held his glasses in his upraised hand. “Oh, dear,” he said.

“Suicide,” I added quickly. “It appears to have been suicide.”

“Oh,
dear,
” he repeated emphatically.

“Yes. Mr. Gresham’s mother—his next of kin—is understandably upset. She has asked me to try to sort out the details of his death. His frame of mind, that sort of thing. I thought you could help.”

“Well, now, Mr. Coyne, you must understand that what passes between me and my patients is confidential. Strictly confidential. You, as an attorney, surely understand that. Without the assurance of confidentiality…”

“He’s dead.”

Leonard Wertz replaced his glasses slowly. “Yes,” he said. He stared beyond me through the window into the back yard for a long moment. Then he focused his stare on me. “Well, I suppose if he’s dead…”

I smiled and leaned back in the easy chair. “Good,” I said. “I guess what I’d like to know from you is simply this: In your professional judgment, was George Gresham a candidate for suicide?”

“Suicide,” Wertz repeated, pronouncing the word slowly, as if he were trying it out for the first time. Then he said, “George.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have believed it.” He looked appealingly at me.

“Then you don’t think…?”

“No, Mr. Coyne, it’s not that I don’t think George was
capable
of suicide. Not at all. There are depths to the human mind that none of us can fathom. It’s not that. I’m just trying to reconcile what I know of George with this fact you’ve given me.”

I waited. Finally he continued. “I’m not an ordinary psychiatrist, you see. This sofa here is for my patients to sit on. I do very little retrospective analysis. No dreams, no stream of consciousness, no hypnosis. No psychotherapy, in the traditional Freudian sense. My specialty is A.C.R.”

“A.C.R.?”

“Yes. Assertiveness Conditioning and Reinforcement. A.C.R. It’s based on sound scientific principles—the culmination, really, of the works of Pavlov, Skinner, Krasner, and the others. Oh, there have been the popularizers, the
I’m OK, You’re OK
crowd. Quack psychiatry. How to overcome depression and become rich and famous in five easy lessons. Mail-order sanity. But
we
are engaged in a legitimate branch of therapy.” He looked at me, eyebrows lifted. I nodded to him. “We utilize the well-established principles of behavioral psychology,” he continued. “We try to shape the individual’s behavior—his personality, really, his entire repertoire of behaviors—in order to make him more assertive, more aggressive, a more successful person.”

“Okay,” I said. “I understand. So George Gresham wanted to become more assertive, then.”

Dr. Wertz’s eyes slipped past me to linger again on the garden outside the window. “He committed suicide, you say,” he said softly.

“That’s what people seem to think,” I answered. I shrugged. “I hoped you could help me—help his mother, actually—to understand it.”

“I told George—I used every trick of persuasion at my disposal, really—I told him that every gain he had made could be lost. You see, the first phase is the conditioning phase. We substitute a new galaxy of responses for the old. The second phase requires establishing that galaxy, firming it up, making those new responses part of the basic personality. That requires reinforcement—the second phase. George had completed the conditioning phase, and he had just begun some excellent reinforcing exercises when he left me. Quite suddenly. I was very surprised and very disappointed. He had made excellent progress. I told him he should finish. It’s really quite dangerous to terminate in the middle of an A.C.R. program. The personality is in a change pattern, you see. Tends to be very unstable. If George had finished with me, I daresay he would be alive today.”

Dr. Wertz spread his hands. “It’s a tragedy.”

“I agree,” I said. “So are you saying that leaving in the middle of treatment—in an unstable situation, as you put it—could result in a greater likelihood of the patient’s committing suicide?”

“No,” he said firmly. “Not by itself. But when an old pattern of coping—or compensating—has been conditioned away, and new ones aren’t in place, the patient is left vulnerable to dramatic and sudden mood shifts. You can understand that, Mr. Coyne.”

“Yes,” I said. “Manic-depressive behavior.”

He smiled. “You might say that,” he said, as if
he
might never have said that. “The point is, it’s the problems, the crises in one’s life that are to blame, not the interrupted therapy. I don’t honestly think George was any
more
suicidal when he left me than when he first came.”

“I wasn’t trying to blame you,” I said. “Are you saying he was suicidal when you first began with him?”

“Everyone is suicidal, Mr. Coyne.”

“Oh, come off it,” I said. “You’re not answering my question.”

“Yes, I am. I’m just trying not to oversimplify things for you. Being suicidal isn’t like having the measles or a broken leg. It’s not a matter of being that way or not. It’s a question of degree. You’ve heard of the death instinct, I’m sure. It’s in us all. You, for example, smoke cigarettes. It’s part of the human condition. George Gresham and Attorney Coyne alike.”

“Okay, then. A matter of degree. Fine, to
what
degree would you say he was suicidal when he came to you? I really don’t want to spar with you, Doctor.”