The Man Who Murdered God (13 page)

“Where can we find him?” McGuire asked.

Taber shook his head. “I have no idea. As I said, Bobby didn't return last evening. That's unusual for him . . .”

“How about friends? Family?” McGuire interrupted.

Taber shook his head once more. “In all the years I've known him, Bobby has never discussed anyone outside of Lynwood. His mother used to visit him but—” Taber shrugged.

“What's he like?” Lipson asked.

“Brilliant. In a sane world he'd have been a star athlete for his school, valedictorian prize-winning artist, maybe married his cheerleader girlfriend and run for Congress.”

“What do you mean,
in a sane world
?” McGuire asked.

“Because he's not any of those things, even though he deserves to be. And whatever happened to him, it wasn't his fault. I'm sure of that.”

“He did that painting of the faceless person, the big one hanging in the foyer, didn't he?”

Taber's face brightened. “Yes!” he said. “Isn't that brilliant? We use painting as therapy for our patients. It's an effective method of generating indirect self-expression. We tell them talent isn't important, but expressing yourself is. Bobby, as you can see, has immense talent.”

“What's it mean when somebody with that much talent leaves the face off?”

Taber shrugged. “Loss of identity. Fear of exposing true feelings. It's not that uncommon. You may have noticed that most of the patients avoid showing faces altogether. Not because faces are difficult to draw, but because they reveal identity or interpersonal factors, which are the basic problems of most people here.” He turned to frown at his shoes. “The most fascinating thing about the painting is the use of light. Did you notice how Bobby's painting is the only one with a brilliant, specific light source in it? I found that very significant, although I'm not sure what it means.”

“Why don't you tell us about him?” McGuire urged.

Taber studied McGuire for a moment, as though weighing the advice before replying. “Of course, of course. But you must understand how difficult this is for me. First because I genuinely like Bobby. And second because . . .” The doctor looked back and forth between the two detectives. “Because if Bobby has committed these terrible murders, then we've misread him completely.”

“You mis
read
him?” Lipson asked, looking up from his notebook.

Taber nodded. Folding his hands behind his head he sat back in his chair. “This hospital is not a mental institution as such,” he explained. “For one thing, we try desperately to avoid the use of any psychotherapeutic medications. The last time either Dr. Metcalf or I—”

“Metcalf?” McGuire interrupted. “The receptionist?”

Taber smiled indulgently. “Glennis Metcalf is not only a highly qualified clinical psychiatrist, she is also one of the most physically intimidating people you will ever meet. When she has to be. You shake hands with her?”

McGuire nodded and raised his right hand, flexing the fingers to indicate the firmness of her handshake.

“If she ever asks you to arm wrestle, don't put any money on it.”

“Sorry,” McGuire said. “We thought she was just someone in the vestibule greeting people.”

“That's part of our approach here at Lynwood,” Taber replied. “I spend as little time behind this desk as I can. Dr. Metcalf and I and our staff of therapists intentionally mingle with the residents.” He brought his hands back to the desk and leaned forward again. “Too much mental-health treatment in this country, in my opinion at least, consists of warehousing people. That's obsolete. It has to be. Our idea is to make our residents feel a part of society instead of being isolated from it. That's why we encourage them to go out and blend in with the real world.”

“How about safety?” McGuire asked. “Don't the sane people on the streets deserve protection from the kind of patients you're got here?”

“We don't have dangerous patients here,” Taber answered. He looked down at the file folder in front of him. “At least, we didn't have, until now.” He opened the folder and withdrew a piece of paper from the top. A line of perforations along the left side indicated it had been torn from a notebook and random creases across its surface showed it had been crumpled.

But it was the writing, scrawled on every line on the page from margin to margin, that caught McGuire's attention. Taber slipped the paper from the folder and handed it across the desk. Lipson leaned closer to his partner to study the sheet.

The entire page had been covered, front and back, with repetitions of the same three words, written over and over in a hand familiar to both of the detectives:
The Priest desires
.

“Where'd you get this?” McGuire demanded.

“In Bobby's room about a year ago,” Taber answered. “Shortly after he finished his painting. Which he spent almost an entire year completing, by the way. He seemed to be writing those three words everywhere as a form of automatism—”

“What's that?” Lipson interrupted.

“Automatic actions or behaviour that the patient goes through without being conscious of it. You find it in some amnesiacs or when a patient is in a hysterical trance. For a while Bobby was repeating the same three words in writing everywhere. He filled a notebook with it, he wrote it on the walls of his room, on the margins of books, everywhere.”

“Didn't you ask him what it meant?” McGuire asked.

“Of course. But he wouldn't answer. Worse, he would withdraw more deeply inside himself. Which we didn't want, because he was just beginning to emerge from his illness, and the prognosis was looking good.”

“What was his illness?”

“At first we suspected schizophrenia, because when he was admitted here . . .” Taber studied the front of the file folder “. . . four years ago, he exhibited catatonia, which is often a phase of schizophrenia.”

“He came here in a catatonic fit?” McGuire asked.

Taber frowned, obviously displeased with McGuire's suggestion. “I don't care for that term,” he said. “Let's just say he was unresponsive verbally and emotionally to any stimulus.”

“How long did he stay that way?”

The psychiatrist let his eyes roam down the page, looking for information. “About two and a half years,” he said finally.

“Two and a half
years
?” McGuire almost shouted.

“Jesus,” Lipson muttered.

“There were small signs of progress during that time,” Taber added, his eyes still on the sheet. “Especially when he began painting. He did hundreds of sketches but destroyed them all. Which was acceptable, because it was the
act
not the result that was important to his recovery. But my goodness, they were fine. Brilliant even. Anyway, he certainly wasn't a hopeless case. In fact, his psychosis was fascinating. From a clinical standpoint, I mean.”

“What drives a bright, eighteen-year-old kid to just clam, up for over two years?” McGuire asked.

Taber shrugged. “We don't know,” he said. “We suspected it might be organic, but I'm not so sure of that. So we looked at trauma.” He opened the file folder again and flipped through its contents, stopping at a worn, blue typewritten sheet near the back. “He suffered a mental trauma when his father died. He was aged six at the time. We talked about his father when he began responding to verbal stimuli. His father was a hero to Bobby, made all the more so by the fact that he died when Bobby was such an impressionable age.”

“How did his father die?” Lipson inquired.

“Vietnam. Air force. Shot down, body recovered. Posthumous valour award. Buried in Arlington.”

“A lot of kids lost their old man in Vietnam,” McGuire said dryly. “That wasn't enough to make them catatonic, was it?”

“No, no,” Taber agreed, still studying the blue report sheet. “And neither did this. He underwent a personality change. Became much more withdrawn and intense, according to his mother. . . .”

“Is she still alive?”

Taber glanced up at McGuire and nodded sadly. “Oh, yes. Mrs. Griffin is alive. And well. And living in Lexington.”

“Where can we find her?” Lipson asked.

Taber read him the address and telephone number.

McGuire asked if she ever came to visit her son.

“At the beginning,” Taber replied. He wrinkled his nose as though smelling something unpleasant. “But around the time he ceased acting catatonic, they had a falling out. After that they would talk on the telephone, but she wouldn't come to visit him. Mrs. Griffin is what I would describe as something of a religious fanatic. She believes unhesitatingly in her religion, including the fact that her late husband is preparing a home in heaven for her and her son, on the right hand of God.”

“You say religious,” McGuire said. “Any special faith?”

“Oh, most definitely,” Taber answered. “Roman Catholic.”

“Couldn't she give you any clue about what her son was going through?” McGuire asked. “Wasn't she any help at all?”

“Not really. She claimed he came home one day, went up to his room and wouldn't speak or come out. He just sat in a corner and cried to himself. Her family doctor examined him and referred him to us.”

McGuire again: “Why here? Why not a state mental home or private therapy?”

“Well, it began as a short-term stay. Or at least that's what we expected it to be. Besides, he wouldn't have responded to the assembly-line treatment of a state hospital. His mother wanted something better for him, something private and intense. Apparently veteran's benefits cover most of the costs of his treatment here.”

McGuire was staring at the writing on the notebook paper, the same three words that had been scrawled on the blackboard in Sellinger's classroom. “Did you ever figure out what this means?” he asked, tapping the paper.

“I'm not sure what it means,” Taber replied. “But I'm sure of the source.” He turned to a small credenza behind his desk. “I was looking it up again, waiting for you to arrive,” he said, his back to the two detectives. When he turned to face them again he was holding a small green book. “It's in here. Along with painting, one of the things used to pull Bobby out of his catatonia was encouraging him to read. And he did. He devoured everything we gave him.” He flipped through the book. “Did I tell you he graduated from high school at sixteen, and his I.Q. was measured at 153?”

McGuire shook his head. Lipson wrote down the facts in his note pad.

“Anyway, he started to work his way through our library, reading everything available when he wasn't working on his painting. Novels, politics, mystery-adventures and poetry. Around the time we hung his painting in the foyer, Bobby began responding from his withdrawal. I remember the day I first heard him speak. He was sitting in the reading room, halfway through
A Farewell to Arms.
As I passed him, I asked casually, ‘How's the book, Bobby?' I spoke to him all the time, never expecting a reply, just keeping the door open, so to speak. Usually he would ignore me entirely or smile shyly. This time he said, ‘It's a good book, Dr. Taber.' As normal as could be. I didn't make a big thing about it, but I knew we had achieved a breakthrough. Then he got into poetry . . . ah, here it is.”

Taber passed the book across the desk to McGuire, who followed the doctor's finger down the lines of text.

“It's a poem by Wallace Stevens. See? Here?”

The poem had been marked carefully with red ink in two places. The first section, near the top of the page, was one line. McGuire spoke the words aloud, tonelessly: “The death of one god is the death of all.”

Taber grunted. “The poem's called ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.' Now read the second part, further down.”

McGuire's gaze dropped to four lines framed within a box of red ink.

“The monastic man is an artist,” he read in the same flat voice. “The philosopher appoints a man's place in music, say, today.” Then, his voice rising in urgency. “But the priest desires. The philosopher desires. And not to have is the beginning of desire.” He looked up at Taber. “What's it mean?”

The psychiatrist shrugged. “It's poetry,” he said. “It doesn't have to mean anything.”

McGuire said he wanted to keep the book as evidence, and Taber agreed. “I think Bobby was the only person to ever read it here anyway,” he said. “We won't miss it.”

At McGuire's request Taber allowed the two detectives to make notes from Bobby's file but refused to provide the records unless they obtained a court order. McGuire said that would be fine, they would just copy what appeared to be important.

“How was he behaving in the last week or so?” McGuire asked when he and Lipson had finished.

“A little tense. In retrospect.” Taber picked up a pencil from his desk and toyed with it as he spoke. “I thought it might have to do with his leaving us next month.”

“Why was he leaving?”

“Because he had responded to treatment and appeared normal in virtually every way. After he practically mastered oil painting, he began working in the kitchen, doing basic things at first, peeling vegetables, that sort of thing. Then he started reading all the gourmet cook books he could get his hands on. Soon he was making sauces and soufflés and tackling difficult dishes with ease. He became an excellent cook. So good, in fact, that our regular cook became a little jealous.” Taber smiled at the memory. “The creativity helped him. Helped his identity and his ability to communicate. There was little point in keeping him here. It was time for him to experience independence. His father had left him a fair-sized bequest, to be paid when he turned twenty-one. Which was last fall. Over the years it's built up in value. I'm not sure how much it's worth exactly, but Dr. Metcalf told me it was over a hundred thousand dollars. It's held in trust for him at a bank near here. I believe he can draw a reasonable amount out against the principle each month.”