The Mask of Sanity

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The Mask of Sanity Page 13

by Jacob M. Appel


  THE CLAW marks on his cheek were too severe to pass off as a shaving injury. He’d managed to stanch the blood flow on the drive home, but the bandages that covered the wound also hid half of his face. At first he considered blaming the marks on one of Bonnie Kluger’s numerous outdoor cats—of actually scooping one of these noxious beasts off her lawn and knocking on the peculiar woman’s door to complain. Yet that required interacting with his wife’s former friend, an owl-like creature whose piercing gray eyes and lack of an appropriate filter always gave him the willies. Instead he attributed the scratches to a feral raccoon that had assaulted him as he carried trash bags to the curbside. When he picked up the girls that evening and his mother grilled him on his injury, he described in vivid detail how he’d surprised the animal during its midday meal and how it had escaped down a sewer grate. Later, in narrating the episode for Amanda, he added that he’d received a full round of prophylactic rabies shots in the Laurendale emergency room.

  Nobody questioned his story. This confirmed what he’d already suspected: small lies usually unravel quickly, but big lies often survive without scrutiny. He repeated the tale of the rabies shots again at the hospital: Who could second-guess him? If anyone dared look in his medical chart, their snooping would trigger the instant investigation that occurred when an employee accessed the health records of a colleague.

  The one person who raised any doubts was Delilah. He’d taken her out for dinner that Sunday night, foisting the girls on Amanda. Since his wife had been away all weekend at her tournament, she couldn’t reasonably object when he claimed that he needed to check up on a few patients at the hospital. But the closest he got to Laurendale-Methodist was a Turkish kabob house in Pontefract Beach.

  “Did you really get scratched by a raccoon?” asked his mistress. “I’ll understand if it was something else . . .”

  Balint wondered if his story truly seemed that transparent.

  “Of course it was a raccoon. What else could it have been?”

  Delilah reached her hand across the table and wrapped her fingers around his. “I thought you might have gotten into a fight with a person . . . maybe another woman . . .”

  Balint wondered how much his mistress already knew—if she knew anything at all. He suspected that she was merely fishing. “What would I want with another woman when I’m in love with the most beautiful woman in the world?”

  “Some men like variety.”

  “You’re the only variety I need,” pledged Balint.

  He paid the bill and they strolled along the moonlit avenue toward his car. The evening was warm for January, yet the air carried a hint of impending snow. He savored the feeling of Delilah’s hands in the pocket of his overcoat.

  “Can we discuss something serious?” she asked.

  Balint let his breath out slowly. “Sure.”

  “I don’t mean to pressure you, but you haven’t said anything about my father in weeks. Is he going to get a heart? I want the truth.”

  So that was all.

  “Of course, he’s going to get a heart,” Balint reassured her. “There were a number of obstacles to overcome before we could list him—but now that he’s on the list, all we need is a heart . . . and a suitable organ could come along any day now.” He had just boxed himself in, time-wise, he realized—but he was glad that he had. “I promised you that I was going to get your father a heart and I am going to get your father a heart. It’s not a matter of if, only of when . . .”

  “You sound so certain,” said Delilah.

  “Because I am certain. As far as I’m concerned, your father might live another thirty years.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Norman Navare would die two days later. The call from Delilah came during Balint’s monthly meeting with the chairman—and he excused himself early by telling Dr. Sanditz that he’d suffered a death in the family. Then he raced down to the emergency room, anticipating the worst. He even feared that his mistress might cause a scene, although he sensed that the nursing student wasn’t the disturbance-provoking type. But it turned out that the “medical emergency” Delilah had described proved far less alarming than he’d expected. At least, for him. Navare was indeed critically ill—but his condition had nothing to do with his heart. The housepainter had fallen off a stepladder.

  “I found him when I came home from my shift,” explained Delilah. She’d managed to remain surprisingly calm. “He’d been trying to change one of the light bulbs in the foyer, and he must have lost his footing.”

  They stood on either side of her father’s stretcher in the “resuscitation” unit of the emergency department, waiting for a bed in the ICU. Assorted tubes and wires protruded from every corner of the housepainter’s body. Balint had skimmed the electronic chart. Navare’s CT scan showed considerable cerebral hemorrhage, but his lab values looked stable. It was one of those cases that might go either way. However, from Balint’s vantage point, the best possible outcome was death. That would spare the debilitated old man months of recovery and possible brain damage. At a personal level, it would also relieve him of any responsibility for securing the man a heart.

  Delilah appeared to be thinking along the same lines—or at least along parallel lines. “Will this keep Papa from staying listed for a heart?” she asked.

  “Let’s focus on one thing at a time. Once he recovers, we’ll have to see where we stand . . .”

  Delilah placed her hand on her father’s forehead. “I warned him not to climb up on that stepladder. I must have warned him a thousand times . . . The college kid next door was always willing to change the bulbs for us, but Papa was too ashamed to ask.”

  Balint remembered how it had felt when his own father had died—the torment of being yanked out of his high school chemistry class by the assistant principal, then driven to the hospital by his Aunt Clara. He remembered seeing his father spread out on a gurney with a ghostly sheet tucked up around his neck. Breathless. Like a wax display in a museum. Before that day, he’d believed—without ever thinking about it too deeply—that life was inherently fair. If you worked hard and took care of yourself and looked after your family, then God smiled upon you and let you win the cosmic chess game. And Balint had believed in God back then—a benevolent, handsoff God who periodically tipped the scales of justice in favor of the universal good. After that day, he’d accepted that God only helped those who helped themselves. In college, he’d even worn a T-shirt that read: “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” And at some point, the Lord dropped out of the equation entirely, and it was all about ammunition. He’d never shared these thoughts with anybody—not with Delilah, certainly not with Amanda, not even with the know-it-all therapist they’d sent him to see when his father died. This was the sort of secret that, if divulged, could unravel a person forever.

  “You’re crying,” said Delilah. “Oh, Jeremy.”

  His lover stepped around her father’s body and wrapped her arms around him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  How absurd that she’d thought he was crying for her father, when he was actually crying for his own loss. Absurd—but convenient.

  “We’ll get through this,” said Delilah. “Together. One way or another.”

  At the recommendation of the ER attending, who predicted at least another hour before an ICU bed became available, they stepped upstairs to the cafeteria to grab a quick lunch. When it came to space in the intensive care unit, even the chief of cardiology had little pull. After all, you couldn’t simply dump one of the current ICU occupants out of a bed, so you had to wait for one of them to recover—or expire.

  Balint canceled all of his patient appointments for the afternoon. He was aware that his colleagues might witness him strolling through the hospital with Delilah, but what was so wrong about comforting a patient’s daughter? As it turned out, the few familiar faces he encountered in the cafeteria—Myron Salt, Sid Crandall from rheumatology—greeted him at a distance, b
ut chose to stay clear.

  Over lunch, Delilah talked about her father’s boyhood in Venezuela and her paternal grandfather’s involvement in the coup d’état of 1945. When they returned to the emergency room, the same ER attending informed them that Navare’s EEG had flatlined and asked if they’d like for him to summon a priest.

  “He’s brain dead,” Balint explained to Delilah. “I’m sorry.”

  “But his heart’s still beating . . .”

  “On the machine. When the machine stops, his heart and lungs will also stop.”

  Delilah nodded and sat mute for ten minutes. Then she rose suddenly and had a brief, pointed conversation with the ER physician.

  At 2:14 P.M., the nurses turned off all the machines.

  THE FUNERAL was scheduled for Thursday afternoon. On his way out of the office, Balint ran into Warren Sugarman opposite the hemodialysis suite. Although he had no way of proving it, gut instinct told him that this encounter hadn’t been a coincidence, that his rival had been lying in wait. Sugarman lacked his usual entourage of obsequious surgical residents sporting immaculate scrubs.

  “I can’t talk right now,” said Balint as he hurried toward the elevators. “I’m on my way to a funeral.”

  Sugarman followed him. “I’m headed downstairs.”

  “It was that patient you wouldn’t give the heart to.”

  Balint felt no need to inform him that Navare had fallen on his head.

  “I’m sorry. Truly, I am.”

  They boarded the bustling elevator. When they reached the lobby, Sugarman resumed the conversation. “I didn’t realize you were going to patients’ funerals these days,” he said. “That’s mighty generous of you.”

  Balint couldn’t discern whether he was being mocked. Then it struck him that Sugarman had no memory of refusing to list Delilah’s father for an organ—that the surgeon didn’t even recall their conversation about Navare being a family friend. He obviously hadn’t connected the patient with Balint’s mistress.

  “I need to be at the cemetery in twenty minutes,” lied Balint, picking up his pace as he crossed the plaza en route to the parking garage. A light snow was falling, coating the statues of medical luminaries in glistening flakes. “Is there something specific you wanted to talk about?”

  “I ran into your wife,” said Sugarman.

  Balint kept walking. He shielded his eyes from the snow with his hand.

  “Gloria’s father had back surgery, so I was picking up Davey from school.”

  They’d arrived at Balint’s car. He didn’t give a damn for Sugarman’s explanations—as long as he didn’t have to hear them. “So you ran into Amanda . . .”

  “Your wife tells me that your daughters are into ice-skating. It planted the idea in my head that we could all go skating together—give my boy, Davey, an opportunity to spend some time with your kids.” Sugarman lowered his voice. “He’s hit a rough patch since Gloria and I split up. Frankly it would do him some good.”

  The last thing on earth that Balint wanted was to spend a day ice-skating with Warren Sugarman and his idiot son. It suddenly crossed his mind that this might be the final occasion he ever saw the surgeon alive—or the final occasion, minus one. Even if he agreed to the skating date, he could always kill the prick beforehand.

  “Why don’t you and Amanda work something out?” suggested Balint.

  “Sure. If that’s okay with you.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be okay?”

  He faced his rival over the trunk of the Mercedes. Sugarman sported a broad, oafish grin, but looked to be at a loss for words. In the distance, someone’s car alarm raged for help. Balint didn’t understand how he’d once considered this ignorant slab of meat to be his friend.

  “Okay, then I’ll call Amanda,” said Sugarman. “And I’m very sorry about your patient. We should all really make a habit of going to patients’ funerals, when we can . . . You are a genuinely good soul, Balint. I’ve got to hand it to you.”

  If only you knew, thought Balint. If only you knew . . .

  THE FUNERAL itself was a modest affair. A mass at Saint Rahab’s Church in Hollowell was followed by a brief graveside service. Afterward, they’d retired to a mom-and-pop diner for a light afternoon meal.

  Among the mourners were several of the dead man’s cousins, his partners in the painting business, and a band of nursing students from his daughter’s graduate program. Delilah held Balint’s arm through both events and introduced him around as her boyfriend. Mercifully, none of the nursing students looked familiar. The only awkward moment occurred during the Mass, when his mistress nudged him forward to accept communion. Balint shook his head and let her slide past. While he had no scruples against enjoying a free cracker and a sip of wine, he realized that Delilah might at some point discover the truth—at least, about his religion—and that taking communion was the sort of offense for which she might struggle to pardon him. He prided himself on his foresight in this regard.

  Balint paid no attention to the service. His thoughts were consumed with the fate of Mrs. Constantinou, whose body apparently still had not been discovered. That was the downside of selecting a victim with limited social connections. In theory, weeks might elapse before anybody noticed the woman missing. The impulse even entered his head that he might try to speed up the process—for instance, by calling 911 from a pay phone and summoning the police to her address—but that, Balint realized, was sheer insanity. His only realistic option was to wait.

  To his consternation, the news finally broke while he was driving Delilah home from the restaurant. They’d gotten delayed in traffic on the turnpike, and since Amanda was expecting him for supper, he’d flipped on the traffic report. Instead, a newsflash announced that the Emerald Choker had choked once again. This time, of course, Balint already knew the identity of the victim before the media reported it. Her decomposing body had been discovered, it turned out, by a concerned letter carrier.

  Balint shut off the radio—even though he longed to listen for more. “You can always count on the post office.”

  “I thought you wanted to hear the traffic,” said Delilah.

  “I’ll turn it back on in a few minutes. I don’t like listening to that serial killer business. It makes me sick to my stomach . . .”

  Delilah nodded. “Why do you think a person does something like that?”

  “Kills people? Probably because he’s mad as a hatter.”

  “But why? Do you think it’s because he had an unhappy childhood or do you believe some people are just born that way . . . ?”

  Balint didn’t have a good answer. “Probably some combination of both. You need to be born with the capacity for evil—and then something has to go terribly awry.”

  “I don’t know,” replied Delilah. “Sometimes I think we’re all capable of that. I realize that sounds crazy, but what I mean is, if any of us found ourselves desperate enough, or suffered the right trauma, we could end up going haywire. I’m not saying that’s an excuse—don’t get me wrong. It’s still wicked. But just like the church teaches we’re all capable of great good, I can’t help thinking that we’re all capable of great wrongdoing.”

  “You might be correct,” said Balint. “But I hope not.”

  The traffic cleared a few minutes later and he was able to get Delilah home with time to spare for his commute back to Laurendale. Balint walked her to her front door and embraced her. He wished he could stay over—but, unfortunately, he explained to her, he had night duty at the hospital. Delilah understood. She always did. She didn’t even say a word about communion.

  AMANDA HAD dinner waiting for him when he arrived home. Macaroni for Phoebe, hot dogs for Jessie, and swordfish steak for the adults. Whatever Balint might say about Amanda’s inadequate fidelity, she remained as efficient a household manager as ever—on top of her thirty-six-hour workweek at the library. Over the past several days, he’d watched with some surprise as Delilah struggled to manage the responsibilities related to her fathe
r’s death: locating his will, paying for the casket, arranging the hearse. Balint couldn’t imagine his mistress raising children, let alone caring for children in addition to working a full-time job as a nurse. But, unlike Amanda, the girl was totally devoted to him.

  He had wanted to discuss Warren Sugarman’s proposal over dinner, but he didn’t dare mention the subject of ice-skating in front of his daughters. They’d have reacted to the mention of the “I-word” with the same intensity that other children did to words like “kitten” or “pony.” But after the meal, he received a genuine emergency phone call from the hospital—one of his cardiology fellows had shown up for his shift drunk—and it was nearly eleven o’clock when Balint was finally able to arrange for emergency coverage. By then, his wife was sleeping soundly.

  Balint finally had a moment alone with Amanda the following night. It had been a momentous day: Chief Putnam had taken the bait of the five ribbons, and was reporting that the authorities now had reason to suspect an as yet undiscovered crime in addition to the four known killings. The chief held a joint press conference with Detective Mazzotta, the imposing brunette who headed the Queensberry homicide squad. Mazzotta appeared about forty, good-looking, but with a sharp edge that contrasted with Putnam’s easygoing manner. Together they’d formed something called the “Ad-hoc Task Force on Serial Killings”—or simply “The Task Force”—with the goal of coordinating resources across jurisdictions. During the press conference, Mazzotta even quoted a poem:

  Though the mills of God grind slowly,

  Yet they grind exceeding small;

  Though with patience he stands waiting,

  With exactness grinds he all.

  “It’s by the poet Henry Longfellow. We memorized it in high school,” explained the detective. “At the time, I didn’t really understand what it meant or why it mattered—but today, I finally know. It means that it may take us more time than we’d like to solve these brutal murders. But mark my words, we will solve them. So I ask for the public’s patience and understanding during these difficult days.” All it required was one stanza and Detective Mazzotta became a media darling overnight.

 

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