The Mask of Sanity

by Jacob M. Appel

  Balint sensed that the conversation was not headed where he’d hoped. “I’ll bear that in mind. If I’m ever up for luring . . .”

  “What I wanted to speak to you about is something much more pressing,” continued Steinhoff, glancing at his watch again. “My data people have been crunching numbers, and it seems we’re not giving away enough free care.”

  “Maybe people aren’t sick enough.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” said Steinhoff. “What I think—”

  “Because we could make them sicker,” interjected Balint. “And then we could make them better again. That would vastly improve your numbers, I’m sure.”

  “What I think,” repeated Steinhoff, “is that we have a visibility problem. To put it bluntly, not enough people in the community know about our services. And if you don’t know about them, you can’t possibly access them.”

  “You have a point there,” agreed Balint.

  “I’m glad we see eye to eye. Because what I’d like to do, God willing, is to start advertising directly to the population we’re trying to serve. I’m thinking a series of sixty-second radio spots. Maybe television too—during the local news—if we can raise the funds. What do you think?”

  “I guess it can’t hurt trying.”

  “Great. So when would be a good time to set up the taping? Ideally I’d like to have you record the first handful of segments sometime within the next week.”

  “You want me to tape the ads?”

  “Who else? I already took the liberty of jotting down a few loose ideas for the text.” He reached into his canvas bag and handed Balint a manila folder. “But nothing is carved in stone, so feel free to add ideas of your own . . .”

  Balint opened the folder. Steinhoff’s “loose ideas” were, in reality, polished scripts. The first of these began: “I’m Dr. Jeremy Balint and saving lives is my job. It’s also my passion . . .”

  The rabbi stood up. “I can’t thank you enough for your involvement in this effort,” he said. “Volunteers like you make Project Cain possible. But I don’t want to take up any more of your time. Why don’t I call you tomorrow and we can hammer out the scheduling details?”

  He didn’t give Balint an opportunity to disagree.

  “And send my love to that charming wife of yours, Dr. Balint,” said Steinhoff. “You’ll forgive me for saying that you’re a very lucky man.”

  Balint slid the folder onto his desk. “If I had any more luck,” he griped, “I wouldn’t have enough time in the day to thank God for my good fortune.”

  “I couldn’t have said the words better myself,” agreed the clueless rabbi, clasping Balint’s hand and then retreating to the door. “If you ever give up medicine, you’d make a fine rabbi, Dr. Balint. And I don’t say that to many people.”

  THE IMAGE of the security camera had been emblazoned indelibly upon Balint’s consciousness. In hindsight he realized that trawling the streets for a suitable target had been the height of madness. He’d gotten lucky three times—first in Cobb’s Crossing, then with Kenny McCord, and finally outside the church—but only a fool would rely on luck with the stakes so high. Now he determined to be far more prudent. Rather than choosing his victims on the spot, he decided to scout for them in advance—to identify promising individuals long before he actually approached them. His initial idea had been to use the hospital’s brand new electronic medical record system to look up promising patients at Laurendale-Methodist’s affiliates in Nassau County. He’d intended to check the records from somebody else’s account—accessing a public computer after a nurse or social worker forgot to log out of the network—in order to identify vulnerable candidates who lived alone. Then he realized the flaw in his scheme: once he’d killed these people, their bodies would likely be transported to the same affiliate hospitals, where internal security might later screen for unauthorized access to their charts. The IT probe would be looking for inappropriate access by curiosity seekers, bored technicians, and medical students seeking the inside scoop on an Emerald Choker victim, not for suspects. Yet the computer folks might inadvertently notice his own hospital’s electronic fingerprints and launch an inquiry. The odds of that happening were exceedingly low—but exceedingly low was not the same as zero.

  Balint ultimately decided to cull his victims from the obituaries. He’d once caught the tail end of a radio call-in show where a female participant “of a certain age” explained that she found her boyfriends by combing the death notices for recent widowers. So why not use the same info to help select murder victims? The process entailed a small risk: he had to look up the various Nassau County newspapers online at the Pontefract Library, so it was theoretically possible that his trail might be traced. But in this case, the danger truly did approach zero. The only real risk was being seen by Bonnie Kluger once again—but what could she possibly do? Lots of people visited libraries every day, and few of them were cold-blooded killers.

  He proceeded with caution. His optimal target, he decided, was a widow over sixty whose husband’s obit didn’t list any other survivors. It was also essential that she live in a freestanding dwelling, either a private home or a duplex, because apartment buildings contained meddlesome neighbors and superintendents and hidden security monitors. To his surprise, and frustration, very few notices met these criteria. Eventually, he recognized why: an actual human being had to place a death notice—and to pay for it. If you died with survivors, particularly adult children, this increased the pool of persons who might arrange for such an announcement. Solitary widows apparently preferred to save the money and the effort.

  So days elapsed with no optimal candidate, while life in Laurendale continued all around him.

  Amanda attended her “bridge tournament” in Philadelphia—and had the audacity to telephone him to announce that she’d be staying over an extra day because she’d qualified for the final round. On New Year’s Day, he took the girls ice-skating at the rink in Musselburgh, affording his wife yet another afternoon alone with Sugarman. But he refused to let her philandering get under his skin. He kept his eyes focused on his prize. Finally, during the first week of January, he spotted a notice in the Queensferry Sentinel that passed muster.

  The death announcement was for Stavros Constantinou, eighty-one, a retired sanitation worker and Korean War veteran who’d died of lung cancer. He left behind a wife of fifty-eight years, Sofia—and nobody else. Balint looked up their home address on the Internet, then used an online mapping program to find a visual of Mrs. Constantinou’s house. He’d hit the jackpot: the elderly woman lived in a stand-alone bungalow situated near the end of a winding backstreet. On paper, Balint could not have asked for a more perfect target: it was as though Sofia Constantinou had been born for the sole purpose of helping him revenge himself upon Warren Sugarman.

  WHILE BALINT was scouting for Nassau County widows, the police announced that they’d identified a “person of interest” in the previous slayings. For weeks, pressure had been mounting on the authorities to crack the case. At a personal level, Chief Putnam was extremely popular. His plainspoken candor and seemingly perpetual five-o’clock shadow instilled confidence that his officers were leaving no stone unturned. The pundits even predicted that after the chief made an arrest, he’d become a leading candidate for the open congressional seat in his district—although nobody even knew for certain to which political party he belonged. But as much as the public liked Chief Putnam, popular frustration had been growing with the lack of progress on the case. So as soon as it appeared that the authorities had identified a suspect, the killings once again became national headlines.

  The police themselves revealed no additional information about their investigation. At first Balint feared he might be their “person of interest.” But then word leaked to the media that this “person of interest” had been interrogated by police in New York City. Two days later, the New York Post identified him as a twenty-five-year-old handyman from Brooklyn who’d been detained at a routi
ne DUI checkpoint. The cops had reportedly found a spool of green ribbon in his glove compartment. When they searched his apartment, they also uncovered newspaper clippings describing both the Rockingham and McCord killings, as well as a collection of fake military outfits, a counterfeit NYPD badge, and an arsenal of semiautomatic firearms. In addition, someone had recently used the suspect’s computer to search for information on the victims and on strangulation methods. The handyman, whose name the Post did not release, was the sort of angry white loner who matched perfectly the predictions of the pundits. Two days after his interrogation, the district attorney filed felony weapons-possession charges against the suspect and officially detained him as a “material witness” in the Rockingham killings.

  For Balint, the news could not have come at a worse time. If the police had apprehended this suspect after he’d killed Sugarman, that would have provided an excuse to halt his murder spree and permanently retire his strangling gloves with little worry. But being in custody afforded the suspect an unshakeable alibi for when Balint killed the surgeon. Of course Balint still hadn’t thought through what he’d do if the state charged the wrong man after Sugarman was dead. Would he really let an innocent stranger serve life in prison—or face possible execution—in order to secure his own peace of mind? The answer, he realized, was probably yes. That might be crueler, in some ways, than merely killing strangers, but it was another necessary evil. The alternative would be to contact the authorities anonymously in order to exonerate the accused—maybe supplying a detail that only the legitimate killer might know. But at the end of the day, it would be difficult to justify such an unnecessary—and even arrogant—risk.

  This time around, Balint didn’t have to confront such ethical dilemmas: the case against the Brooklyn handyman soon fell apart. It turned out that he’d been hospitalized on the psychiatric unit at Bellevue for the entire month of December, providing an airtight alibi for the time of the Kenny McCord slaying. At first, the pundits predicted that he’d been plotting a copycat offense—but even that proved to be so much hot air. According to the Post, the suspect had informed police that he’d actually been planning to reenact the Emerald Choker killings in an effort to solve them. Further evidence for this claim emerged when the authorities discovered a list of potential “suspects” among his belongings. The list reportedly included the “real Zodiac killer” and “Satan.”

  BALINT BIDED his time before paying a visit to Sofia Constantinou. He figured that the woman might have friends or neighbors who’d look after her during the first days of her widowhood, before returning to their own busy lives, so he allowed a window for these well-intentioned folks to offer their compassion. Fortunately, Amanda—obviously emboldened by his indifference—revealed plans to attend yet another “bridge tournament” in the middle of January.

  “Maybe I’ll come with you to an event one of these days,” he suggested, seeking to rankle her a bit.

  “That would be great,” Amanda replied as smooth as ever. “Not this time, of course—because we’d have to make arrangements for the girls. But maybe over the summer, when they’re at camp.”

  “If you’re still into bridge by the summer,” said Balint.

  A glint of hostility flickered across his wife’s face. “Do you really think I’d give up bridge that easily?”

  It crossed Balint’s mind that his wife understood exactly what he was talking about—that they were both speaking in the same code—but that as long as neither acknowledged it, their marriage remained on safe ground. “I have no idea,” he replied. “I gave up figuring out what games you’re into a long time ago.”

  That concluded their discussion. Two weeks later, Balint deposited his daughters with their grandparents, kissed them each on the head, promised to make them hot chocolate before bedtime, and drove the two hours and twenty minutes to the working-class hamlet of Queensferry, New York. He paused on the outskirts of the town and wrapped burlap over the license plates of the Mercedes.

  The nineteenth-century coastal village had once been a whaling port, the final stop for harpoon vessels bound from Nantucket and New Bedford to their hunting grounds in the southern Pacific. Following the Second World War, the hamlet had remade itself as a bedroom community for teachers and firefighters from New York City. Low-slung, one-story dwellings sprung up on the farmland that ringed the original town, including the tidy bungalow on Crescent Court where Sofia Constantinou lived under the shade of two towering Norway spruces. When Balint pulled up at the curbside, shortly after one o’clock, the trees already cast long shadows over the shingled roof.

  Balint glanced up and down the block. Not another human being in sight. In fact, the nearest house was hardly visible around the bend. He pulled on his leather gloves—which would have to suffice, as latex was bound to draw the widow’s attention. Then he strode rapidly up the brick path and rang the front bell.

  Half a minute elapsed. Then a minute. Balint thought he saw movement at the drapes in the bay windows. Finally, the door opened a crack and a throaty voice addressed him from behind the chain. “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Sofia Constantinou, the wife of the late Stavros Constantinou,” said Balint—striving to sound calm. “I’m Dr. Balint with the New York City Municipal Workers’ Benefits Fund.”

  “Do you have identification?”

  Balint removed his hospital ID card from his wallet and slipped it between the door and the frame. That appeared to satisfy her. A moment later, the door shut and he heard her slide open the latch.

  Mrs. Constantinou was a tall, big-boned woman with distinctly masculine features, whose face appeared to be frozen in an expression of mild displeasure. She wore a threadbare terrycloth robe.

  “What can I do for you, Dr. Balint?” she asked.

  The widow stood in the doorway, arms akimbo. She did not invite Balint inside.

  “As I said, I’m from the New York City Municipal Workers’ Benefits Fund. Your husband had an insurance plan with us—and I’ve come to settle the policy. Would it be all right if I stepped inside for a moment?”

  Mrs. Constantinou raked her eyes up and down his body, then seemed to decide that he posed no immediate threat, and beckoned him into the house. He followed her through a dimly lit foyer into an equally dim parlor. Balint felt his heartbeat accelerating, but at the same time, he enjoyed the thrill of pretending to be something that he was not.

  As he trailed the widow along the narrow passageway, he might easily have wrapped his hands around her throat. That’s what a novice would have done—at his own peril. But Balint held back because he wasn’t yet certain that the woman was alone in the house.

  At his host’s urging, he seated himself on a sofa shrouded in a plastic cover. The widow sunk into the armchair opposite him. The room was too warm and smelled oppressively of lavender and potpourri.

  “You’ll have to forgive me,” said Mrs. Constantinou, “I don’t have anything to offer you. I’ve been meaning to go shopping all week . . . but I just haven’t . . .”

  “I fully understand. You don’t have anybody to help you?”

  The widow stiffened. “I’m well looked after,” she said defensively. “Now what’s this about an insurance policy?” Balint removed his handheld computer from his jacket pocket and punched in a few random numbers as though pulling up Constantinou’s account.

  “New York City salaried employees have an option to buy into a life insurance program,” he explained, spinning his carefully premeditated tale. “I am delighted to say that your husband bought into our plan when it was first offered . . . and that you’re the beneficiary. The amount should come out to $88,471.15.”

  “What’s the catch?” demanded Mrs. Constantinou.

  “No catch. All I need is to verify the death certificate and I’ll have them send you a check within thirty days.”

  His host’s expression softened. “Sammy was a wonderful man, Dr. Balint. He promised to take care of me forever and he did—even now . . .
”

  Balint assured himself that Sofia Constantinou’s death, if not as unequivocally a public service as Kenny McCord’s, was nonetheless a net positive. The widow had apparently led a good life. By promising her the insurance payout, he was enabling her to die happy—rather than alone and demented someday in a nursing home.

  “If you could just show me the death certificate,” prompted Balint.

  The widow stood up. “It should be with the other papers.”

  Mrs. Constantinou crossed the room to the television and removed a shoe box from the shelf below. She began to sort through the contents. “I’ve got Sammy’s naturalization papers, his Medicare card, his hospital bills . . .” Balint now felt confident that they were alone in the house. He eased himself off the couch and took three rapid steps across the carpet. “I know they gave it to me. It’s just that I was so overwhelmed and—”

  He had his gloves around her throat. She reached her hands up, and at first he thought she was going to grab his fingers, but then he noticed a medallion hanging just above her sternum. It was one of those medical panic buttons. He managed to block her hands at the last second, but that meant releasing half of his grasp on her neck.

  She screamed and dug her nails into his cheek. Instinctively he used the full force of his body to ram her head face-first into the front of the mantelpiece. The blow proved strong enough to knock the fight from her.

  Blood trickled down Balint’s right cheek—warm and unpleasant. He finished the job quickly, squeezing until his victim yielded her carotid pulse. Then he dragged her cadaver into the kitchen and scrubbed her right hand for twenty minutes, hoping that the scalding water would wash any traces of his DNA from under her fingernails.

  As a final touch, he retrieved the ribbon from his pocket and cut off five identical strands, wrapping each one around her neck. Only his fourth killing, but five ribbons. That, he mused, should keep the authorities scratching their heads.