If I Should Die Before I Die (4 page)

He hadn't. He claimed that he didn't take part in the rough stuff. Maybe so. But he also told about one of the schools he'd been expelled from years before. A faculty daughter had claimed that Carter McCloy had beaten her up. According to Carter McCloy, the faculty daughter had made him do it. The scandal had been hushed up; McCloy had been sent home.

If he hadn't taken part, then he'd certainly watched. He described it in detail, and it took me a while to realize that the detail was for the Counselor's Wife's benefit. Because, to hear him tell it, he didn't feel a thing.

“Why don't
you
ever say anything?” he said at one point, and you could hear the irritation in his otherwise flat voice. “I mean, you're always asking me stuff like: ‘How did you feel about that? Did that give you pleasure?'” Pause. “The great Dr. Saroff. Why don't you tell me what
she
feels?”

Pause.

“I wasn't there,” came the Counselor's Wife's answer.

“But I'm telling you about it, you know?”

Pause.

“How do you think I should feel about it?” the Counselor's Wife asked.

“There you go. Very clever. Answering questions with questions, turning it back on me, you know? But seriously—I mean it!—how do I know what you think? Maybe you'd like to get spread-eagled yourself, how do I know? Would you like your wrists tied down? I want to hear that. Maybe you'd like to be a sandwich, you know?” Laughter, then another pause. “All right, I know what you're thinking, go ahead and say it. ‘Is that what I think most women want?'…”

“Well?” the Counselor's Wife said on the tape.

“Sure they do, lots of them. They want to be scared. Most women are excited by being scared. It turns them on, you know? But I want to hear that from you. What turns you on, you know?”

Pause.

“Why is it so important for you to know what turns me on?” asked the Counselor's Wife's cool voice.

No answer.

Silence.

End of tape.

Increasingly, in the chronology of the tapes, he got more pointed, personal, more graphic too. And angrier, when seemingly nothing he said got to her. I could hear that clearly, and I kept thinking meanwhile that if the bridge-and-tunnel fathers and brothers hadn't done it yet, somebody sure ought to.

Still, that didn't make him a killer.

I said something of the sort to the Counselor's Wife.

“Wait a minute,” she said, head bowed and fiddling with the machine. “There are a couple of more things I want you to hear.”

McCloy was very quiet in the next selection, at least at the beginning. He'd start to say something, then he'd fall silent. You could hear him cough. Even though I knew it was part of the technique to wait for him to talk, I didn't see how she could just sit there, listening to him cough.

Suddenly, on the tape, she was the one who spoke:

“You once said you thought women like to be scared, that being scared made them sexy. I wonder why you think that's so?”

“What makes you ask that now?” Tone of irritation.

“Curiosity, that's all. I also happen to think it's not true, so I wonder why you think so.”

“It's been … well, it's been my experience, you know?”

A conversation-stopper, but only for a minute.

“What frightens men?” the Counselor's Wife asked. “I've only heard you talk about scaring women, about what scares women. But what scares men?”

Pause.

“I don't know. I'm never scared.”

“Never? Not even when you were little?”

Pause.

“I don't remember ever …” Pause. “Not really, you know?” Silence again. Then he started, slowly at first, then his voice picking up speed. “I've got this friend … Hal, you know? I've told you about him before … You want to hear something really weird? He says that when he was little … real little … do you know what he was scared of? I mean like
really
scared? Of falling asleep, you know? He says he was scared to death of falling asleep! And do you know why? Guess. Go on, guess.”

No answer from the Counselor's Wife but it didn't matter, the voice rushed on:

“It was the kid's prayer. His mother made him say it every night. You know the one I mean: ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,' you know? ‘Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep/If I should die before I die/I pray the Lord my soul to take.'

“It made him an insomniac, you know? He was convinced that if he let himself fall asleep, he was going to die, you know? Can you imagine that? He did everything he could think of to keep from falling asleep! To this day, he won't sleep with anything on him, not a blanket, not even a sheet. He won't even use a pillow, you know? In the middle of winter he'll turn the heat up but he won't put anything over his body. Oh yeah, and he sleeps with the lights on!”

Toward the end he started to laugh, and then you could hear his snorting sounds on the tape.

Then silence.

“Why did you say it wrong?” the Counselor's Wife said.

“What do you mean, ‘say it wrong'?”

“Don't you realize you said ‘If I should die before I die' instead of ‘If I should die before I wake'?”

“That's not what I said.”

She recited it then, the lines from the kid's prayer, the way he'd said it.

It agitated him all right.

“What're you trying to do, twist my head?” he accused.

By way of answer, she told me, referring to some notes on her desk, she'd rewound the tape and played the passage back for him.

“… deal, you know?” he was saying when the tape picked up again. “Big Freudian slip, you know? So what?”

“Why
did
you say it?” the Counselor's Wife asked.

“How should I know? It was a mistake, that's all. You're supposed to be the expert on Freudian slips, why don't you tell me what it means?”

“If I knew,” her voice said mildly, “I'd tell you.”

Her tone, though, had no effect on his rage. You could hear it gargling up in him, how she was no different from all the others, how all they wanted to do was play mind trips on him and twist his head and then, when the going got rough, they dropped him like a hot potato. He had the language to go with it too. He threatened her. His voice trembled with it. She was so smug, he said. That was what stuck in his craw, he said: that she was so
smug
.

Finally, a lull. Then you could hear a rustling sound on the tape, and she said:

“I think that's all we'll have time for today.”

“That's what
you
think!” he retorted. But if anything more had happened, the tape didn't have it, because that's where it ended.

She played me parts of one more, from the next session and, she said, the last one. She dated it at the beginning of July.

I didn't understand, listening, why she wanted me to hear it. McCloy was all whiny and apologetic. He'd had no right to blow his cork the last time. He'd figured it out, he thought. The real reason he'd blown his cork was because he couldn't stand not seeing her again till September. The Counselor's Wife interrupted the tape to explain to me. The patient, she said, had gone a little bananas when she'd announced that her office would be closed the month of August. Most therapists closed in August, she said, and it was common enough for patients to have trouble with it. There'd even been a novel written about it. In any case, McCloy's “revenge” had been to announce back that he himself wouldn't be coming any more in July. He was going to Alaska. She'd spent a lot of time, she said, trying to convince him that by not coming in July, he was really punishing himself, not her, and suggesting that he postpone his trip till August. But to no avail. His friends were going, the whole gang.

The tape went on. A drone of self-pity was what it sounded like to me, but quiet, flat even. At one point, he'd asked her what would happen if he canceled Alaska. Would she reconsider about August in return? Would she find a way to see him then? No, she'd answered, that would be impossible. Well, he'd said, in that case there wasn't much more to be said.

She let it play through to the end.

“I think that's all we'll have time for today,” her voice said. Apparently she ended every session that way.

Sounds of movement.

“Okay,” his voice answered. “But you know? I think I'd like to shake your hand anyway.”

“Good,” she'd said.

End of tape.

Yes, I thought, and there'd been no more murders during the summer.

The Counselor's Wife looked up at me, shaking her hair back behind her shoulders.

“What did it feel like?” I asked for no particular reason.

“What did what feel like?”

“His handshake.”

She laughed, and her hair tossed.

“Funny you should ask that,” she said. “Sweaty, to tell the truth.”

I watched the smile drift from her face. She was gazing intently at me, waiting for my reaction.

“I don't get it,” I said. “I mean, I guess he sounds sick enough. And all that ‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep' stuff and sleeping with the lights on, I guess he was talking about himself there and not a friend. Is that right?”

“I'm not so sure, but I assumed so too.”

“So maybe he's afraid of pillows. But that doesn't make him a killer, does it?”

“What makes a killer, Phil? Do you know?”

“No,” I said.

“Neither do I.”

I think I've called her face angular before, but not thin, and when she's looking right at you and talking animatedly, which is about the only way she talks, it seems full, broad even. Only now it did look thin, small. Chiseled. She looked distracted, or maybe just tired.

“I spent a lot of time going over it today,” she said. “I'd canceled all my appointments, not because of him but because something else came up. A good thing, though, as it turned out. Or maybe a bad thing, who knows? By the way, I don't tape all my sessions, only with certain patients and they have to agree to it. Anyway, I went over the material today, the tapes and my notes, and I called up a friend at the
Times
for the dates, and there's a correlation. I'm sure of it, Phil.”

“What dates?” I said.

“Look,” she said. “There's no way you could have spotted it, just listening. I hadn't either. But what I call the crazy sessions? The really angry ones? There was a rhythm to them. What you just heard was nothing like having been here. You could feel the electricity in him, Phil. Palpable almost. And building up. It was like … like … well, like when you feel a lightning storm building. I've seen them in the Hamptons. I've seen the ground actually smoke when the lightning bolts hit. It was like that. Once he almost put his fist through the wall. Sheer rage, and always directed at women. At me mostly, the surrogate Mommy according to theory. But then, by the next session, it would be as though exhaustion had set in. Utter exhaustion. I always thought it was because he'd worked it out himself the time before, or worked it out of himself, and that if we did that enough times, working it through …”

I'd heard the rage all right, particularly on the next-to-last tape. And then that kind of relapse on the last one.

“They coincide, Phil,” the Counselor's Wife said quietly. “I've verified the dates. Each one of those murders took place in between.”

But there she lost me, at least for the minute. It was like my Full-Moon Theory. Besides, the last session she'd played for me had taken place in July. We were now in September.

“Did he go to Alaska?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

“But when's the last time you saw him?”

“I haven't,” she said. “Not since then. He was supposed to call the first week of September to make an appointment. He did call. I scheduled him for last Friday.”

“And …?”

“He never showed up. Didn't call, anything.”

“And the Killer killed again last night.”

“That's right.”

“Well,” I said, “if he's the killer, then at least you can't blame this last one on yourself.”

I'd meant it as a joke, but it didn't make her smile. Instead, she reached out and handed me something across her desk.

“When I got here today,” she said, “I found this waiting for me.”

It was a white envelope with the top slit open. I took it, glanced at the front, which simply said “DR. SAROFF” in typed capitals, and pulled out a single sheet of paper folded in three. There was a one sentence message inside:

WHAT MAKES YOU SO SURE YOU COULDN'T BE THE NEXT ONE

and it was signed:

A FRIEND

The Counselor's Wife had put her hand over her mouth while I read it, an involuntary gesture I hadn't seen before. I studied the page again. It looked like it had been typed on one of those cheap memory-writer machines because you could see the little dots that made up the letters. The letters were all in capitals. There was no punctuation.

“How did you get this?” I asked her.

“Alice gave it to me. Our receptionist. It had been slipped under the front door sometime during the morning, before I got here. Actually, one of Bill's patients spotted it on the way out and handed it to her.”

“Who's Bill?”

“Bill Biegler.”

Biegler was the name of the other shrink who shared the suite.

“Could anybody have seen whoever delivered it? One of the doormen?”

“I asked, but you know how they are. Sometimes they're in the lobby, sometimes not. Besides, the whole ground floor is doctors' offices, people come and go all the time.”

“Who else have you told about it?”

“Just Bill. Some of it.”

“Could one of your other patients have written it?”

“I thought of that. I don't see who.”