If I Should Die Before I Die (3 page)

“What does Fincher say?” he asked, glowering at me.

“I haven't had a chance to talk to him yet.”

“You haven't?”

I caught the accusatory tone all right.

“No.”

“Well, and what have they got on the rest of the family?”

“I asked the same question,” I answered.

“And …?”

“Nothing. They haven't even looked.”

“Assholes,” he said, pulling the pipe from between his teeth. I didn't know for sure if he was referring to the Magister children or the Firm or both, but I knew enough not to ask.

We sat there, eyeing each other. I could feel it mounting in him, call it tension, anger, whatever, but it was par for the course and I was used to it to the extent that I would ever get used to it.

“We'd better get off our butts, Phil,” he said finally. “What else are you working on?”

I mentioned one or two matters of no great consequence. Nothing, in fact, that couldn't wait.

“Drop them,” the Counselor said. “I want you full time on Magister. And not just the widow. I want them all. Now.”

“But the Firm …,” I started to say.

“I don't give a damn what McClintock wants or says he wants.
We
want to know who's going to win.”

I sat there a moment, waiting, but his head had already turned away, and then he rang for Ms. Shapiro.

I stood up and crossed her in the doorway.

A foul mood all right, but I put it to his gearing up. At the beginning of any case the Counselor feels at a disadvantage, and the feeling communicates itself to the rest of us. Usually, when the Firm calls us in, the feeling is double because nothing irritates the Counselor more than, as he puts it, the Firm's incompetence at handling its own matters. Even though, needless to say, their incompetence helps pay our bills.

Anyway, I was used to it like I said, and the foul mood, I expected, would dissipate once we began to get a handle on the case.

Only this time it didn't, and I was only partly right in the cause I gave it.

There was an envelope waiting for me when I got back downstairs. It was marked “By Hand,” and I thought I recognized the writing, but all Roger LeClerc said was that a messenger service had delivered it.

Strange. The more so since the handwriting was the one I'd thought it was.

“Phil,” the note inside said, “I need to talk to you in private, to ask your advice, maybe your help. I'd prefer not to do it at home. Could you come over to my office any time between five and seven today? I've got to do my show after that, but I'll be here until seven-thirty. Please try to make it. It's important.”

And the signature read: “Nora.”

I looked at my watch. It was 5:20. I put in a call to Bud Fincher's office, not to talk to him but to find out where I could reach him later. Then I left the office and walked up Park to the apartment house where the Counselor's Wife, a.k.a. Nora Saroff, does her shrinking in one of the ground-floor suites.

As it turned out, I didn't get Bud Fincher till the next day. And if I thought I found out why the Counselor's Wife had been crying that morning and why she'd canceled her appointments, well, I turned out only to be partly right there too.

In other words: you win some, you lose some.

CHAPTER

3

“I find myself in a strange position,” she began. “Strange to me at least. I've never had anything like it happen before.”

I sat across her desk from her in a padded armchair where, I supposed, her patients confessed their secrets when they weren't lying on the couch behind me. I'd been in the outer area once or twice before, where the receptionist and waiting patients sat, and I knew that the Counselor's Wife shared the setup with another shrink, but I'd never been in her private office.

The effect of the room and its furnishings was quiet, neutral, maybe a touch feminine. The Counselor's Wife used a long white parson's table for a desk, and there was a large white vase at one end filled with fresh flowers in water, also a tape recorder, a white jar for pencils and pens, a telephone (also white), and very little else. Behind her, framed by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, hung a large oil painting, lit from above, which depicted ballet dancers at rest. A couple of them were holding on to those practice bars, another group was talking in a cluster, and a single girl leaned forward on a bench, head down, like she was trying to relax her neck. The painting was signed, but I couldn't read the artist's name. I assumed it was a good one, probably valuable.

The lighting was indirect and on the dim side. Beige drapes completely masked the two windows which, I figured, gave out onto the Park Avenue sidewalk. The carpeting was of a reddish brown tone and the upholstered furniture, including my chair, was covered in a nubby beige fabric. I had the weird feeling that I'd been there even though I knew I hadn't, and it wasn't till later, when I went along with her to the television studio, that I realized why.

“The professional ethics are muddy,” the Counselor's Wife was saying. “Of course there's the confidentiality of the therapeutic situation … that's what you're taught in school. Whatever a patient says inside this room is held to be secret and sacrosanct, the same as in a priest's confessional. Or, if you like, a lawyer's office. But only up to a point. After that, you're on your own. Only there's no one to tell you where that point is, or when you've reached it, or what you should do once you have.”

As though amused by something she'd just said, she smiled, showing her white teeth.

“God knows it's not like me to beat around the bush this way,” she said. “It's also not like me to be the one doing the talking. Here, I mean. In this room. Maybe we ought to switch sides.” She eyed me, crinkles in the corners of her eyes. “I bet that's what you're thinking too, isn't it?”

I shook my head. Actually I'd been wondering what it was that had choked her up that morning. Whatever it had been, though, I saw no sign of it now. Maybe she felt self-conscious inside, or was beating around the bush, but outwardly she seemed perfectly composed, cool.

“Here's the point, Phil,” she said. “I think one of my patients may have committed a crime. Or crimes. A terrible crime, or crimes. And I don't know what to do about it.”

She stopped there, eyes on me, head slightly tilted.

“Do you
think
it?” I asked. “Or do you know it?”

“Both,” she answered. “Both think it and know it. And neither. Sometimes I think I'm crazy even to think it; other times I'm dead certain.”

“Certain enough to tell the police?”

She shook her head.

“Hardly,” she said. “You'd have to understand the dynamic of the … damn, excuse the jargon. You'd have to have sat here where I sit to believe it, heard what I've heard, felt what was behind the words. Even then. Just hearing myself say it out loud makes me think I'm all wrong, that I might be doing him … someone … a terrible injustice.”

She paused again, leaving a gap.

“What does Mr. Camelot think?” I asked.

“I haven't told him,” she answered coolly.

I felt something in her then. Call it a stiffening.

“Then why me?”

“I felt the need to talk to someone outside the profession.”

Another silence. It unnerved me a little, along with the cool, blue-eyed stare that invariably makes me feel like I'm being measured.

“Look, Nora,” I said, “if you don't think you should tell me about it, don't. Not to worry, I'll forget you ever mentioned it. As far as I'm concerned, I never …”

“Not to
worry?
” she repeated harshly, turning it into a question, her eyes now large and fixed on me. “For God's sake, Phil, I think I may know the one who's killing those women!”

“You mean the Killer?”

“The Pillow Killer,” she said. Then, tossing her head angrily, she repeated it: “The Pillow Killer. That's typical, isn't it? Men on the loose, anonymous, so sick and twisted and frightened that they'll commit horrible crimes, and we don't know who they are so we give them funny names. We invent their names for them. The Zodiac Killer, the Boston Strangler, the Mad Bomber. Son of Sam. The Pillow Killer. We don't know who they are, so we make them into celebrities with funny names. Did you ever stop to think why we do it?”

“I guess we all need our heroes,” I said.

She laughed quickly.

“Funny,” she said. “That is, unless you're a woman. Then it's not so funny. But that's the point, isn't it? After all, isn't it men who give the funny names to men who prey on women? You ought to try it sometime. I mean: try being us. Try walking in the street, or waiting in the subway, an elevator, at a supermarket checkout, and not knowing whether the man standing behind you is thinking about suffocating you with a pillow. We're supposed to be hysterical, paranoid, and everybody jokes about the blonde wigs and the scarves. You ought to try it sometime.”

It would have been hard to be male in the last decade or two and not have heard similar suggestions. Hard too not to have learned that it's pointless to answer.

“I'm sorry, Phil,” she said. “I didn't mean to subject you to Feminism 101. It's just that I've had a tough day as far as the sexes are concerned.”

She didn't elaborate. She put her hands on the parson's table, palms flat, and gazed at me.

“I want to play you some tapes,” she said. “It won't take long. I won't do all of it for you unless you want to hear more, and I didn't tape every session, far from it. I wish I had now. Or hadn't taped any of them. You'll see what I mean.”

While she fiddled with the machine, she filled me in on the case history, or at least the parts she wanted me to know. She never called the patient by name, only he or him. He was young, twenty-five when he first came to her, which had been about a year before. He came from money, a lot of money, she said. New York money, what she called “your basic poor-little-rich-boy background.” His father and mother had separated when he was a baby; then his father died when he was three. He had no recollection of him. Then his mother—he and his mother—had lived with another man for several years. The man had moved in with them. Then, when the boy was nine, his mother remarried, not to the lover but to another man. The boy had gotten into a lot of trouble. He'd been shipped off to boarding school at twelve and had been kicked out of a number of places through the years—for cheating, stealing, at least once for possession of drugs. He'd never finished college. When he'd first come to the Counselor's Wife, he'd been between jobs, though after she'd started seeing him, he'd gone to work for a bank. His stepfather had got him the job. It hadn't lasted. He no longer lived with his parents. He had a trust fund, enough apparently to pay for an Upper East Side apartment where he had a succession of roommates, male and female—“a kind of free-floating living arrangement” she called it—and enough, for that matter, to pay for the Counselor's Wife.

She wasn't the first shrink he'd been to. He'd been in and out of treatment a number of times. But she was the first one he'd picked out himself. Actually he'd watched her on television, and he'd come of his own volition.

“He has a sex problem,” the Counselor's Wife said. “He announced that right off the bat, the first session. Almost before he sat down. He said he could do sex in the sense of getting an erection, doing intercourse, but it didn't go anywhere for him. That was what he called it: doing sex, doing intercourse. He said he didn't get aroused, didn't feel anything particularly. Nothing happened. He didn't come. Finally the erection would just go away, either because he got tired or else bored.

“You should know that it's not uncommon at all, although I've never met a male patient who didn't think it was unique to him. There's a whole body of case literature on the subject. But that's not the point. He wanted to deal with it, for me to deal with it, like … like it was an abstraction. I mean, I was a sex therapist, wasn't I? Well, if all he wanted was to have pleasure in sex like anybody else, he didn't see why I was interested in what he'd dreamt as a child. The usual stuff.

“Anyway, it turned out not to be so simple. It never is, otherwise …”

She got the recorder going then.

To listen to all she'd taped would have taken a lot longer than the time we had, but even the playbacks she'd selected had a kind of mind-numbing effect. Maybe shrinks are used to it, maybe they can listen to a disembodied voice and fill in the blanks, but I didn't know what he looked like, couldn't see the body language that went with his flat, nasal, preppy-sounding accent, and I couldn't help focusing on his verbal tics, like the way he had of tacking “you know?” on to the back of his sentences, turning every other sentence into a question. There were the pauses too, long ones sometimes, when you imagined him sitting in the chair I was sitting in or just lying on the couch and the Counselor's Wife waiting, just waiting, and even though I knew that part of being a shrink is getting the patient to bounce words off the blank wall of the shrink, I didn't see how she could stand it.

To hear him tell it, he and his peers spent most of their nights hanging out in a bunch of East Side bars, waiting for the “bridge-and-tunnel bunnies” to show up. They called it “trolling.” The saloons were the kind that cater to the under-age crowd. The bunnies were girls from Brooklyn, Queens, the Island, out for high times and kicks and sometimes getting more than they'd bargained for. The Counselor's Wife may have called it group sex; to me it sounded like gang bangs, sometimes uglier than that, and the wonder of it was that this Carter McCloy—for that turned out to be his name—hadn't long since had the shit kicked out of him by vengeful bridge-and-tunnel fathers and brothers.