Sugarman tried to rise from the carpet, but Balint slugged him with the ashtray once again. This time, the thud of stone against flesh resounded across the den. The wide-eyed, unconscious face of Balint’s rival stared up at him. He clasped Sugarman by the throat and squeezed the life from his body until the man’s tongue dangled from his lips. He looked just as Balint had envisioned he would: face mottled and bloated, ears bloodshot at the tips. As he eased the surgeon’s lifeless body to the floor, Balint sensed the heavy burden of death in the weight of the corpse. It all felt surreal.
He spread out his rival’s corpse alongside the sofa and tied each of the six green ribbons around the dead man’s neck. Never again, he realized, would he hear the oafish welcome of “Balint!” rising from his rival’s throat; never again would he have to endure imagining those coarse hands fondling Amanda’s breasts. This was checkmate. He had challenged God to a game of chess—and he had trounced Him.
Balint felt only one emotion: relief. Less than a minute later, he was cruising along Hamilton Boulevard with hardly a care in the world.
ACT III
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Balint arrived early for the monthly heart-transplant summit the following Monday. He’d spent the previous afternoon glued to the radio in his study, but if the police had found Warren Sugarman’s corpse, they weren’t yet publicizing the discovery. Amanda hadn’t intruded upon him—but she’d clearly suspected something amiss, because each time he’d visited the kitchen to replenish his coffee, she’d had her cell phone pressed to her ear. Presumably she’d been dialing her lover—now her former lover—and, needless to say, Sugarman hadn’t answered her calls. By breakfast that morning, Balint’s wife had appeared blatantly anxious, but he pretended not to notice. Similarly he feigned surprise when Sugarman didn’t appear to chair the transplant meeting.
The summit would serve no purpose without a surgeon present who could agree to list the prospective organ recipients under his name. Balint nibbled on his croissant and skimmed his New York Times, waiting for a man he knew would never arrive. In fact, this would be the last early morning conference he’d have to attend for quite some time, he expected, because he’d recently learned that Chester Pastarnack—Sugarman’s only potential short-term replacement—had accepted a position as a paid consultant to a venture capital firm and relocated to Arizona.
“I got a ride home from Warren on Friday,” reported one of the anesthesiologists. “I even said to him, see you bright and early on Monday. He didn’t mention a word about not being here.”
The senior nursing coordinator gathered together her files. It was already 7:20. “Let’s hope he’s all right.” When she stood up, that somehow granted permission for the other attendees to disperse.
Balint accompanied the German consult-liaison psychiatrist into the corridor. “I have served on this committee twenty-six years,” said the headshrinker. “Under Chester Pastarnack and before that under Allan Drevitz and before Drevitz under Rachel Glendening. Not once did any of them stand us up.”
“Something must have happened,” said Balint—trying to sound just as he might have on any other occasion. “This is so unlike Warren.”
The psychiatrist snorted. “Dr. Glendening chaired this meeting once when she was nine months pregnant. The woman was practically in labor. You don’t surmise Dr. Sugarman is giving birth to a child, do you?”
Balint wasn’t sure whether the question was rhetorical.
“I doubt it,” he said.
“In that case,” answered the shrink, “I am highly disappointed.”
The word ‘disappointed’ from her lips suggested something closer to outrage.
LAURENDALE COUNTY’S Sheriff Ralph Spitford, announced the murder in a hastily arranged press conference shortly after noon. The sheriff was a broad-shouldered African American officer who wore his sunglasses perched on his forehead. His cousin was Reverend Spotty Spitford, the perennial left-wing presidential candidate. Unlike Chief Putnam or Detective Mazzotta, Spitford looked like a cop. He answered reporters’ questions in short, declarative sentences, as though pained to part with each syllable. Balint caught the tail end of the announcement during a quick foray into the cafeteria for a sandwich. In pairs and small groups, physicians and nurses stood transfixed around the television screens. Intermittently Balint heard Sugarman’s name and that of the Emerald Choker rising above the murmurs of alarm. A female surgery resident hurried past him toward the women’s restroom, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Balint strolled back to his office suite, his hands in his pockets. He resisted the overwhelming urge to whistle a cheerful tune.
News of Sugarman’s murder ricocheted swiftly through the hospital. Shortly before four o’clock, the vice president for external affairs sent out an e-mail message confirming the death and recapping the victim’s “illustrious” career. Balint wrote back on a whim, suggesting the creation of a memorial fund for Sugarman’s son. By the end of the workday, to his considerable amusement, he found himself in charge of a drive to raise college tuition for Davey Sugarman. Waiting at the elevator bay, Balint kept thinking to himself: I’m not going to run into Warren Sugarman. Never again. Although he’d been looking forward to this moment for many months, even he found himself genuinely surprised at how much pleasure he derived from knowing that he’d never again share another elevator car or endure another promenade across the parking garage in the company of his wife’s lover. On his way out of the building, Balint noticed that the hospital’s national and state flags had been lowered to half-mast.
Myron Salt caught up with him at the snack stand in the lobby, where Balint was buying a chocolate cruller for the drive home.
“You heard about Sugarman?” asked Salt.
“It’s awful. I’m practically shaking.”
He paid for his donut and waited while the neurologist ordered a latte.
“The Emerald Choker,” said Salt. “You read about these things. You don’t really believe they could happen to someone you know.”
“It’s uncanny.”
“I played squash with him on Saturday morning,” said Salt. “Or rather, I played squash against him. You know how Warren was about winning . . .”
“Losing certainly wasn’t his style.”
He registered that Salt was speaking of Sugarman in the past tense—and he dug his teeth into his lower lip to fight off an involuntary smile.
“And now I’m thinking, we were playing squash and he had only hours to live. And then I’m thinking, what if that lunatic had followed me home instead of Warren? What if I’d been the one who got wrapped up in ribbon?”
“You think you were followed?”
“I don’t have a clue. I’m just saying . . .”
The squash game came as a surprise to Balint. It meant Sugarman must have returned from his racquet club only a short time before Balint rang his doorbell—that he had lucked out to find his rival at home. For all he knew, the entire Institutional Review Board proposal of the previous weekend might have been an outright lie to conceal plans with Amanda, plans foiled when Balint insisted upon leaving the girls in her care. Gloria might merely have been a last-minute stand-in. What a relief, he reflected, that this weekend Sugarman had substituted a sporting match for a stymied tryst rather than another romance.
“It still hasn’t sunk in,” said Balint—striving to strike the right chord. “Warren—of all people! It goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished.”
“How so?” asked Salt.
Balint hadn’t anticipated having to explain himself. “All I’m saying is that Warren was one of the kindest, most generous, upstanding human beings I’ve ever met—and it’s hard to see how, in a fair world, he’d be the one to get murdered.”
Myron Salt laughed, but with a glance around them, as though Balint had told an off-color joke. “Warren? Upstanding? Now that’s some radical historical revisionism if ever I heard it. Warren was a philandering prick and a selfish bastard. A
nd he was also my best friend since second grade, so I should know.”
“You certainly don’t mince words,” said Balint.
“I cared about him too much when he was alive to lie about him now that he’s dead.”
Their conversation paused while they passed through the revolving doors into a wintry mix of snow and slush. Myron Salt opened his umbrella.
“How are you doing?” he asked Balint. “I figured if there were any residual effects from your boxing match, I’d have heard from you by now.”
“I’m back to baseline—at least as far as I can tell. I suppose I could have major deficits without realizing it.”
“You might not realize it,” answered Salt. “But your wife would. Half the calls I get these days are from concerned spouses. Only last week, a woman whose husband I’d treated phoned me and said, ‘He’s more or less back to normal—except he’s been going to work wearing only one shoe and sock.’ ” The neurologist laughed again. “Isn’t that classic? Only one shoe and sock. I guess it’s all a matter of your perspective on normal.
“Anyway,” said Salt, “I’m glad to see you’re wearing shoes on both feet.”
He wished Balint a safe trip home and set out into the darkness.
BALINT HAD expected to find Amanda on the verge of a breakdown. To his surprise, his wife greeted him as though nothing were amiss. She was camped out at the kitchen table, surrounded by balls of crumpled paper, navigating Jessie through her math homework. “Dinner’s running late,” she apologized. “Phoebe left her backpack at school and I had to drive her there to pick it up.” How well she’s taking this, thought Balint—or, more accurately, what a great show she’s putting on. But then it struck him that she didn’t know. Why should she? What was devastating news bound to spread rapidly through the hospital might not seem nearly as significant at the public library, where most likely nobody other than Amanda had ever heard of Warren Sugarman. Before today, at least. As he listened to his wife explain how to convert fractions into decimals, he grew increasingly convinced that she wasn’t faking.
After a twelve-hour workday, Balint’s stomach gnawed with hunger. He realized that his wife wasn’t to blame for their late dinner, but the delay irritated him nonetheless. When he failed to find a satisfactory snack in the refrigerator that might tide him over until the meal, a cruel impulse got the best of him. “What a crazy day at the hospital,” he said. “I imagine you heard the news about Sugarman.”
Amanda looked up, concerned. “What news?”
Balint sorted though the day’s mail—forcing himself to appear indifferent.
“What news?” she demanded again. “Did something happen to Warren?”
“You really don’t know?”
“Oh my God. Is he hurt?”
He looked up from the mail—wearing an expression of polite concern.
“Not hurt . . . Dead,” he said. “Murdered.”
A subtle change swept across Amanda’s face: her eyebrows slanted closer together and the muscles around her mouth tightened. To Balint, attuned to these subtle nuances, it was as though he were watching as the final vestiges of youthful beauty drained from his wife’s features. She set down her calculator. Jessie recognized her mother’s distress and dropped her pencil.
“I don’t believe you,” said Amanda.
Balint continued to sort through the mail. “Why would I make that up?”
“You know exactly why . . . To torment me. To throw things in my face. If this is your idea of a joke, Jeremy, it’s not the slightest bit amusing. It’s sick.”
“Do I sound like I’m joking?”
Amanda’s eyes were fixed on him. “Jessie, please go watch TV.”
“Are you mad, Mommy?”
“No, darling, I’m not mad. But Daddy and I need to talk. About adult things.”
Their daughter didn’t protest further. A moment later, they were alone. Amanda held her arms to chest as though to protect herself from attack.
“Did you do something to Warren?” she demanded.
“Me? Nothing. It was the Emerald Choker.”
A puzzled look sparked in his wife’s eyes, and color surged into her cheeks. “You are fucking with me. You bastard!”
Balint feared she might throw something at him—something more lethal than a high-heeled shoe. “If you don’t believe me, turn on the news . . .”
Amanda rose in silence and crossed the room to the vintage black-and-white television that perched on the countertop. They’d inherited it from her father when he passed away—rabbit ears and all. She turned on the device and flipped through the channels to the six o’clock news. On the screen, a grizzled crime reporter in a trench coat broadcast from Meadow Court; while he spoke, the camera cut to footage of a body bag being removed from Sugarman’s home.
“It can’t be . . .” gasped Amanda.
“Satisfied?” asked Balint. “I don’t blame you for not believing me. When you get right down to it, what are the odds that someone we know would be murdered by a serial killer? It’s going to be a challenge for the transplant program . . .”
Amanda switched off the television.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
His wife shook her head. Her face had turned a ghastly shade of ash. She didn’t cry. She didn’t move. She merely stood with her back leaning against the counter, paralyzed with grief, staring blankly out at the room. If she’d exploded with rage or collapsed into tears, Balint might have savored his payback. But his mind didn’t know how to process Amanda’s catatonic agony, an emotion utterly alien to him, and the longer she remained mute and motionless, the less pleasure he could find in his success. That brief interval—before his wife regained control of her senses and inquired after Sugarman’s funeral—was the only time when Balint entertained the notion that he’d actually done something wrong.
THE NEXT few days were the most critical for Balint’s scheme. Up until now, he’d had no connection to his victims; as long as he wasn’t spotted entering or exiting their homes, and didn’t leave incriminating evidence at the crime scenes, the authorities had no way of tracing their deaths to his doorstep. In contrast, he’d been deeply enmeshed in Sugarman’s life. Even a superficial investigation of his rival’s personal affairs would have uncovered multiple motives for Balint to kill him. Yet for all of his apprehension, the police and the public never considered the slaying as anything other than a random act of violence perpetrated by a lunatic. The media reported every minute detail of the crime, and hailed the glories of Sugarman’s medical career, but no mention was made of his pending divorce or his multiple mistresses or the dead dog he’d discovered seven months earlier in his rose bushes.
In the immediate aftermath of the killing, Sheriff Spitford established a command center inside a mobile trailer opposite Sugarman’s house. His deputies knocked on every door within a square-mile radius in search of witnesses. Meanwhile across the New York City Metropolitan Area, what had previously been a matter of passing concern increasingly gave way to general panic. The networks ran stories about extended families that had temporarily moved in together so elderly parents or unmarried siblings wouldn’t find themselves alone with the Choker. The authorities compounded this anxiety with mass e-mail messages and text alerts offering “safety tips” to protect oneself from attack. Neighborhood patrols, like the one proposed by Henry Serspinsky, sprang up in housing projects and sleepy exurbs. All of these efforts occurred against a background of wild speculation by various self-proclaimed experts on unsolved crimes. Using various algorithms, these experts predicted the precise locations of the next murders—which they claimed would occur in sites as varied as suburban Albany and on the steps of the Chrysler Building. Nobody ever seemed to question that another slaying would ultimately occur, that the culprit might not simply rest on his laurels and retire. One British website even offered pari-mutuel betting on the location of the next killing and the demographics of future victims.
In the absence of clear
progress in apprehending the killer, the media focused on supposed tensions among the various investigators. Days passed before Sheriff Spitford was invited to join Chief Putnam’s task force, fueling further rumors of disagreement over strategy. Putnam and Mazzotta apparently wanted to devote resources to finding the “missing” body of the hypothetical victim who’d been tagged with four ribbons. Spitford doubted the existence of a fifth fatality. He’d been quoted as saying, during a closed-door meeting, “I won’t be dragged on a wild goose chase, when there probably isn’t any goose. That extra ribbon was a twisted joke. You can bet your Sherlock Holmes hats that the perpetrator is laughing his ass off at us right now.” But Putnam and Mazzotta weren’t convinced; they didn’t believe sociopaths were capable of pranks. Isabel Crosby from Trenton Today claimed that Spitford and the founders of the task force were no longer on speaking terms, although all parties vehemently denied this charge. Crosby also broke the news that State Senate Majority Leader Veronica Sanchez-McCord was receiving electroshock therapy for depression at an out-of-state clinic.
In keeping with Jewish tradition, Warren Sugarman’s burial occurred on the first day following the discovery of his body. The previous evening, Balint’s home telephone had rung shortly after eleven o’clock, while Amanda was in the girls’ bedroom, comforting Phoebe over a nightmare. He let the answering machine pick up. Only when he heard Bruce Sanditz’s stentorian voice on the tape did he race into the kitchen for the receiver. Never before, as far as he could recall, had his boss called him at home—certainly not in the middle of the night. “Sorry,” he apologized. “I’m here.”
“Glad I caught you awake,” replied Dr. Sanditz. “You have a minute?”
“For you, an hour,” agreed Balint. “What’s going on?”
Through the plaster, he heard Amanda reading another bedtime story to Phoebe.
“My sense is that you and Warren Sugarman were good friends, right?”
The Mask of Sanity Page 17