The Mask of Sanity

by Jacob M. Appel

  Balint asked few questions about the imaginary tournament, merely wishing his wife good luck when she departed on Friday morning, and then he dropped the girls off with his parents for a full day of grandparent-granddaughter bonding. By midday, he’d crossed the Verrazano Bridge and was cruising the backstreets of Hempstead and Wantagh. He’d listened to the radio news on the two-hour drive and learned—to his amusement—that the FBI believed the case might be linked to a similar strangling in Duluth several years earlier.

  Balint pulled into the parking lot of the South Coast Nature Center. Only one other vehicle sat in the lot—a dilapidated pickup. Patches of snow dappled the nearby woods, but much of the dirt trail was dry. The contours of the land, and the waist-high stone walls, limited visibility. This patch of urban parkland appeared to be the ideal location to wait for his next victim.

  A fifty-something woman emerged at the head of one of the paths. She walked a Saint Bernard who wore a bright orange parka. After watching the pair for several seconds, Balint registered that the woman was blind. Although it crossed his mind that the service animal might put up a fight, he also entertained the notion of strangling both human and canine—of wrapping a ribbon around the neck of each. That would certainly confound the FBI investigators.

  He stepped from the vehicle, leaving the door ajar so that his victim wouldn’t hear the sound of it closing. Step by step, he cut the distance between them. Thirty yards. Twenty. The woman looked up: “Is someone there?” Balint said nothing. The dog barked, but its owner appeared to relax. “What’s gotten into you today, Excelsior? We can’t have you getting all excited over every last rabbit and chipmunk.” He advanced another few feet. But at that precise moment, a young couple hiked over the ridge. The owners of the pickup! They’d spotted him—so even after their departure, he couldn’t risk murdering this blind woman. Instead, he greeted her and asked for permission to pet her dog.

  Balint’s stop at the nature center had cost him more than an hour. And now that he’d been seen, he didn’t dare commit his crime anywhere near the south shore of Long Island, so he drove all the way across the county to Brockton. The homes there were more upscale than in Upper Chadwick or Cobb’s Crossing, but not so exclusive as to require private security. Unfortunately the gloomy weather had driven nearly everyone off the streets. His best bet, Balint realized, was to enter a home through an open back or side door, as he’d done in Westchester, but he struggled to find a suitable target. It was nearly four o’clock, and darkness was already falling, when he caught sight of a man smoking a cigarette on the concrete walkway alongside a Catholic Church. As the Mercedes approached, Balint recognized that the man was a priest.

  The cardiologist rounded the corner and parked the Mercedes on a residential block. He pulled his sweatshirt hood over his head and strode quickly toward the church. As he approached the building, the clergyman stubbed out his cigarette and disappeared through a large red door. If that entrance were unlocked, Balint realized, he’d have a perfect opportunity to follow the priest into the building. His heart rate had nearly doubled by the time he reached the red door. He looked around—nobody. Then he gripped the door handle with his gloved hand and pulled. It refused to open. He tugged for several seconds—and then accepted the reality of the situation and let go. Only when he turned around again in disappointment did he notice the security camera tucked into the evergreen hedge.

  That ended his day’s efforts. He’d nearly blown it. When he reached Hager Heights to pick up his girls two hours later, he’d perspired through his shirt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The encounter with the hidden security camera convinced Balint that he had to be far more cautious in selecting future targets; it also left him in a disagreeable mood. When Amanda returned home from her “bridge tournament,” he peppered her with questions about the event: How had her partner played? How many “master points” did she earn? Had she run into anybody they knew from Laurendale? Initially, his wife had been in bright spirits, but eventually she soaked up his irritability and snapped, “I don’t see why you care so much about my life all of a sudden.” So he withdrew to his den and spent the evening on the phone with Delilah. Amanda could have listened at the door, he realized, but he doubted that she cared enough to bother. When at breakfast the next day, his wife announced that she’d be attending another overnight tournament—on the weekend between Christmas and New Year’s—he was neither particularly surprised nor particularly upset. Let her have one final hurrah with Sugarman.

  Another matter, however, caused him considerable consternation. Although his attorneys assured him that he was highly unlikely to face charges in the death of Abby Goldhammer, and Amanda had confirmed that any civil claim up to $2 million would be covered by their homeowners’ policy, the local press had laid the blame for the episode squarely on his shoulders. An Op-Ed in the Laurendale Leader branded him “Dr. Negligent” and the editorial page of the Hager Heights Beacon demanded criminal prosecution. It would have been a fitting reflection upon the state of the nation’s justice system, he reflected, if he went to prison for an accidental drowning while escaping punishment for a series of calculated killings. But that didn’t mean he had to accept this disparagement without a fight. Balint ordered his lawyers to threaten both newspapers with defamation lawsuits, even though the attorneys assured him that he had no chance of winning.

  The community’s anger over Abby’s death took an even more personal turn. While Balint didn’t lose any of his current patients, approximately one-third of his new consultations canceled over the following several weeks. This figure was far higher than his usual drop-off rate: a man who was reckless in fixing the stones around his pool might be equally negligent when it came to matters of the human heart. Not that he actually needed the additional business. At a practical level, he was grateful for the extra free time. Yet the cancellations bruised his ego. During the first days after the Beacon editorial, he’d also received a handful of angry, anonymous phone calls at home, but these evaporated by the end of the week. Amanda’s coterie of friends rapidly circled their wagons around her—only Bonnie Kluger sided with Sally, and Bonnie had always been an odd duck—so the negative social fallout from the incident was also limited. In fact, rumors circulated that the Goldhammers felt so isolated in Laurendale that they planned to move back to Brooklyn. Nonetheless, the entire episode left a bad taste in Balint’s mouth.

  He had warned his receptionist to keep an eye out for process servers, as it was almost inevitable that Timothy

  Goldhammer would eventually subpoena him—and he didn’t feel the need to make a civil suit any easier for the banker. So he was already on his guard, when on Christmas Eve, an unfamiliar man in a business suit approached him as he sipped a cup of coffee in the hospital atrium. Another prospective patient had “no-showed,” leaving him forty-five free minutes before his noon conference.

  The stranger appeared to be in his forties, but with gray-tinged sideburns and a deep groove between his eyes. He carried himself with his chest out—like a man who’d inhaled a balloon full of anger. “Are you Dr. Jeremy Balint?”

  “Can I help you?” Balint asked noncommittally.

  “I’m looking for Jeremy Balint.”

  “And what’s your business with Dr. Balint?”

  The stranger responded by socking him in the jaw. Balint toppled backward and his head slammed into the tile floor. He could actually hear what sounded like the snapping of bone, but he remained conscious. Above him, his attacker had lifted a chair and was about to bring it down upon his face—Balint raised his hands in an effort to deflect the blow—when someone tackled his assailant from behind. Through the haze of struggle, he heard a voice shouting, “That monster killed my daughter. That monster killed my baby girl.” And then he blacked out.

  BALINT AWOKE six hours later on the VIP unit—in a room adjacent to the one where he’d treated Norman Navare. His head throbbed, but a quick check of his limbs revealed full mobility
down to his fingertips and toes. At the foot of the bed, a physician sporting a bow tie perused his vital signs on a clipboard. It took Balint a moment to recognize Myron Salt, the director of clinical neurology. “Sure took you long enough,” said Salt, when he finally noticed that Balint was awake.

  “How bad do I look?”

  “No worse than before.” Salt set down the clipboard. “Nothing broken either, as hard as that may be to believe. But we did give you some steroids to prevent swelling.”

  “Aren’t they going to make me loopy?”

  “Better loopy than dead. It’ll teach you not to fight outside your weight class. The guy who slugged you was apparently a boxing champion in college.”

  His altercation with Tim Goldhammer slowly came back into focus. “What happened to him?” asked Balint.

  “No idea. But Andy Price in hematology recognized him from their time together at Princeton. Says the guy was the state middleweight champion three years running. You owe Andy, by the way. If not for him, we’d be prying chair legs out of your eye sockets.”

  “You neurologists always phrase things so eloquently.”

  “Nothing more eloquent than the truth. Now try to get a good night’s sleep and we’ll see about discharging you in the morning.”

  “You can’t seriously plan on keeping me overnight.”

  “Dead serious. Which is a hell of a lot better than dead.”

  That was when Balint registered that he’d been changed from his street clothes into a hospital gown—that his wallet was no longer in his possession. And his wallet contained more than seven yards of green ribbon! If they’d inventoried his belongings, he was a goner. “Where’s my stuff?” he demanded. “Where’s my wallet?”

  “That’s a question for a nurse,” replied Salt.

  He patted Balint on the arm and departed. Balint rang the call button.

  After a wait of several minutes—during which he pressed the button again multiple times—a portly Filipino matron entered the room. She was not one of the nurses whom he knew well, but he did recognize her from his days as an electrophysiology fellow. “Sorry for the delay, doc,” she said. “I was on break.”

  “Where are my things?” demanded Balint.

  At first, the nurse appeared puzzled.

  “My wallet,” he prompted her. “My keys. My clothing.”

  The nurse smiled. “Oh, I believe your wife took those home with her. She said that if you woke up, to tell you she’d be back in the morning . . . Now do you think you’re ready for some dinner?”

  Balint shook his head. For all he knew, at that moment Amanda was rifling through his belongings—running her tiny fingers over the incriminating ribbon. He wondered if she’d phone the police, but he doubted that she would—at least not until she first confronted him directly. But even if she never went to the authorities, even if he could come up with a plausible justification for owning the ribbon that did not involve homicide, the discovery would still rule out strangling Sugarman. His only hope was that Amanda hadn’t bothered to look inside his wallet at all. That she couldn’t be bothered. If he were lucky, she’d taken advantage of his injuries to spend the night with her lover. What he longed to do was to call her at home—to ask her to bring his wallet to the hospital immediately—but he feared that such a request might prompt her to sort through his things. Far wiser to wait. So he passed the most stressful night of his adult life, anticipating the worst. When Salt dropped by again the next morning, with a team of residents in tow, Balint hadn’t slept a wink.

  “You cured yet?” asked the neurologist.

  “I will be when I get out of here. You haven’t seen my wife, have you?”

  “Nope. But I have seen the inside of your skull. Take it easy for the next few days, okay? And try not to use your face as a punching bag.” Salt turned to his house officers and added, “Dr. Balint is a fine cardiologist, but he’s not the world’s best boxer.”

  “It was a sucker punch,” insisted Balint.

  “That’s what they all say.”

  The house officers took turns listening to Balint’s chest and palpating his cranium. Another two hours elapsed before Amanda arrived. She wore her tennis sweats under her open coat and carried a racket under one arm—her outfit announcing to the world that she wasn’t particularly concerned for her husband’s health. Balint scoured her face for signs that she’d searched his wallet. “I didn’t realize you’d be lucid already,” she said. “The emergency doctors said they might keep you sedated for a day or two.” He detected a twinge of disappointment in her voice.

  “Did you bring my clothes?” he asked.

  “They’re in the car.”

  “Can you get them? I’m ready to go home.”

  “You sure the doctors are okay with that?”

  Balint sat up—too rapidly. As the blood drained from his brain, he felt dizzy, yet his head throbbed much less than it had the previous night. “I don’t give a damn what the doctors think. I am a doctor. Now bring me my pants and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Amanda rolled her eyes, but agreed to retrieve his clothing. She returned ten minutes later toting a brown paper bag. “Here you go,” she said—reaching into the bag—and, for an instant, Balint was certain she was going to pull out a strand of green ribbon, like a magician performing a particularly cruel trick. Instead, she handed him his slacks and shirt. “Satisfied?”

  Never in his entire life had the presence of any physical object brought Balint such relief—such joy—as the feel of his cotton trousers. He stepped into the bathroom and locked the door. His wallet remained in the back pocket, precisely as he’d left it. The ribbon appeared untouched. If Amanda had discovered his secret, she’d concealed the evidence of her discovery impeccably. He dressed quickly and then slid the door slightly ajar—just far enough so that he could spy on his wife. Amanda sat cross-legged on the bed, examining her nails, looking jaded with life. Nothing in her expression suggested a woman who’d just discovered that her husband was murdering strangers for a hobby. But nothing in her earlier demeanor had ever suggested she was sleeping with his colleague—so Balint couldn’t be certain. He opened the door fully and cleared his throat.

  “Did they arrest that lunatic?” he asked.

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “About Tim Goldhammer . . .”

  “What about Tim Goldhammer?” demanded Balint, growing impatient.

  “The police felt bad about Abby, so they apparently wrote him a ticket for disorderly conduct and let him go home. But he didn’t go home. He drove up to Asbury Park and jumped off an overpass.”

  “Dead?”

  Amanda paused and gazed out the window. “Not dead. But in pretty lousy shape.”

  “Serves him right.”

  Amanda didn’t respond.

  “Well, it does serve him right,” said Balint. “He could have broken my jaw.”

  “His daughter died. Imagine how we’d feel if something happened to Jessie or Phoebe—if someone let something happen to Jessie or Phoebe.”

  “I’d give that someone more than a punch in the face.”

  Balint buckled his belt and tossed the rumpled hospital gown onto the bed. He examined himself in the mirror, running his fingers along his swollen chin. Secretly he was relieved that Goldhammer had been severely injured—that the banker no longer posed a threat to his own daughters. “Bet there’s going to be hell to pay for the cop who let him go home. Shows there’s no upside to being a patsy.”

  “I feel terrible for Sally,” said Amanda. “I genuinely do.”

  Of course, you do, thought Balint—but I don’t. That’s the difference between us. But all he said was, “I’m sure she’ll be okay in the long run.”

  WHEN BALINT arrived at work the next day—around one o’clock, after taking the morning off to sleep late and recover—he was greeted by another unexpected visitor: Etan Steinhoff. The rabbi stood in Balint’s waiting area, pac
ing and speaking on his cellular phone. From the snippets of dialogue that Balint overheard, he picked up that Steinhoff was trying to set up another Project Cain clinic, this one in Camden. “I was here visiting a congregant,” the rabbi explained, “and I figured I’d take advantage of the opportunity to chat with you. I promise I’ll only take a moment. I know how busy you must be”—he glanced at his watch—“and I have a meeting across town at three.”

  Balint scanned the suite; a handful of patients appeared to be waiting for one of his junior colleagues, but he didn’t recognize any of his own. “No sign of my one thirty?” he asked his receptionist.

  “She’s running late. Traffic. Called to say she’d be here by one forty-five.”

  “There you go,” replied Balint—none too pleased. “We have forty-five minutes.”

  “I won’t take nearly that long.”

  Steinhoff followed him into his office. He thought he knew what was coming: in light of the ongoing negative publicity surrounding Abby Goldhammer’s death, he expected the rabbi to relieve him of his duties as medical director of the free clinic. Little did Steinhoff realize how welcome this dismissal would be.

  “So I wanted to touch base about Project Cain,” said the rabbi. “As you may know, at the beginning of the coming year, we’re hoping to open three more clinics—in Camden, Atlantic City, and South Philadelphia.”

  “And I imagine you’ll want new medical leadership,” offered Balint, trying to make his discharge easier on the rabbi.

  “Maybe at some point, I suppose,” said Steinhoff. “We’ve discussed bringing on board a full-time clinician to oversee our four regional medical directors. But that’s a long way off—and, I might add, you’d be the leading candidate for the job. A shoo-in, quite frankly, if we could lure you away from the hospital.”