by Casey Dorman
“Sounds as if you feel competitive with him.”
“He’s the competitive one. And Regina pushed it. She constantly told me that her father was more successful than I was. He let me know, too, without directly telling me, but in other ways.”
“Did he ever remind you of your own father?”
“My father wasn’t a success. I’m more of a success than my father ever was.”
“Do you know what happened to your father after he left you?”
“No, except he died when he was fifty. But he never was a financial success, I know that much.”
Lucas had a different issue with his father than George had with his.
“So there have been some developments in your wife’s case since you last saw me. Is that what’s been on your mind since our last visit?”
“Not really. Sherry has quit, but I’m still worried about her.”
George felt his pulse quickening. Was it because they were now talking about Sherry Bennett? “She’s gone, so what can you do?”
“I can’t just give up. I can’t let something happen to her.”
“Are you still following her?” He knew that Lucas had followed her less than a week ago, because he’d seen it with his own eyes.
“I can’t. I’m at work all day, and I have no idea where she is or who she’s with.”
“What about at night? You can still follow her at night.”
Lucas started to sit up. Then he lay back down. When he spoke, he sounded irritated. “This isn’t about me. It’s about her. You were supposed to tell me how to help her.”
“No, I’m supposed to help you understand yourself, which includes why you’re so concerned with Sherry Bennett and whether you’re spending your free time following her around. Her welfare is not something that concerns me.” He knew that he was lying. He was concerned about the secretary; that’s why he’d followed her earlier. But he was just being safe and trying to make sure his patient didn’t get himself into trouble, wasn’t he?
“I dreamed again,” Lucas said abruptly, interrupting George’s thoughts.
“The same dream as before?”
“A different one.”
“Tell me about it.”
“This time I was near the ocean. It might have been that stretch of beach along the Pacific Coast Highway near where I live: Crystal Cove. I was up on the cliff looking down at the beach below. It was daylight, and I could see this couple down on the beach, near some rocks that stuck out into the ocean. They were fighting with each other, really fighting, like wrestling. The man was on top of her. I wanted to go down and help her, but I couldn’t find a way down the cliff. Every time I got close to the edge I got scared, I froze. My legs became wooden. I was afraid of falling. I just kept looking down, watching them, searching for a way to get to them, but I was completely paralyzed by fear. Then I woke up.”
“And what did you think when you woke up?”
“I wondered if the woman was Sherry.”
“In your dream, did it feel to you as if it was Sherry?”
“I can’t remember. I think it must have been her because that’s who I’ve been worrying about. But honestly, I can’t say.”
“You couldn’t see her clearly?”
“She was under the man much of the time. I saw her bare legs sticking out, kicking. Maybe she had on a bathing suit, or a short skirt, or a dress that had been pulled up.”
“And you’re sure they were fighting?”
There was silence. After a few seconds, Lucas spoke. “At first I thought they were having sex. But the man was fully dressed.”
“Were you frightened when you thought they were having sex?”
Lucas hesitated again. “I guess I was. I don’t know why.”
Another textbook dream, George thought. A child seeing his parents having sex often mistook what was going on as a fight, as violence in which his mother was being hurt. A child traumatized by such a memory often had dreams in which the original act was repeated. Such dreams sometimes persisted into adulthood. Lucas hated his domineering mother, but perhaps such feelings were a reaction formation to his own Oedipal desires for his mother, stirred by that first observation of his parents in bed.
Sometimes a boy’s observation of his mother’s genitals in such a situation, his first realization that his mother was devoid of a penis, was the beginning of his castration anxiety. Such anxiety was certainly present in Lucas’ dream in the form of the paralysis of his legs, his feeling that they were “wooden,” which was reminiscent of his earlier dream when the man was using a saw to cut something, and Lucas again felt his legs become paralyzed.
“I think we can explore this dream further, but we’ll have to do it next session,” George said. He was reluctant to end the session but it was time to stop.
Lucas sat up. “I’m not sure why, but I always feel better after our sessions. I do now.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” George said.
Chapter 22
Madeline had gone out and not told George where she was going. He had celebrated his abandonment by finishing the dinner she’d left for him and then pouring himself a large, fourth, gin and tonic. He was interrupted by his cell phone ringing. He expected that it was Madeline, but the caller ID said it was his after-hours answering service. Most of his clients underwent only minor crises, and he rarely received after-hours calls. Occasionally a client became distressed, even suicidal, and he needed to respond to his or her need with immediacy.
It was Sherry Bennett. The service had her on hold; she was asking to talk to him. George took her call.
“I’m frightened. I didn’t know who else to call.” Her tone was apologetic, but she sounded as if she were holding back a sob. “I think Mr. Bonaventure is stalking me again. I got a call about a job interview and I was supposed to meet someone in Irvine at this office building, but everything is closed, and when I came back to my car the tire had been cut.” Her voice was rising in anxiety. “I know that Mr. Bonaventure is behind this, and I’m afraid he’s going to show up.” She started to cry.
George needed her to regain control of herself. “Who called you about the interview?” he asked, his voice as calm as he could muster.
She inhaled deeply. “A woman. She said she was with the employment agency that Mr. Bonaventure’s company provided to ex-employees and that a prospective employer wanted to interview me. I was supposed to come to the office at eight o’clock tonight. I questioned her to make sure it was eight at night and not eight in the morning because that didn’t sound right, but she said she was sure that eight at night was what the employer had said. The building’s locked but there’s no such employer even listed on the sign in front.” Her voice was rising again, the hysteria just below the surface.
He tried to clear his mind. The gin was making it difficult to think. The story about the interview sounded suspicious, although Bonaventure had told him that his company sometimes referred former employees to an employment agency. “Do you have Triple-A or some other emergency car service?” He wanted someone else involved.
“I’ve got Triple-A.”
“Call them to come and change your tire.” He took a long sip from his gin and tonic. “And give me the address. I’ll come and wait with you, so you won’t have to worry about Bonaventure.” Why had he offered? She wasn’t his patient, he hardly knew her.
“Would you? I know it’s ridiculous of me. But if it’s him, you’ll be able to talk to him instead of me.”
What would happen if Lucas showed up and found him with Sherry Bennett? Was he hoping that would happen? Was he now competing with his own client for a woman? The gin must
be getting to him. He’d told the woman that he would come, and now he had to go there.
— — —
The building was about a fifteen minutes drive, on the edge of Irvine, near the Santa Ana border, in a cluster of office buildings, some of which were still lit, but most were dark. The parking garage where Sherry had said her car was stranded was dimly lit. He saw her car, with its rear tire flat, sitting near the entrance to the building’s basement. He could see Sherry sitting in the driver’s seat. He drove toward her car.
— — —
He was leaning over her, one of his knees on the seat next to her leg, the other foot on the floor of the garage. He had no recollection of how he had gotten there. The last thing he remembered was driving across the floor of the garage in the direction of Sherry’s car. He stared at her face, only inches in front of him. Her eyes were wide open, bulging. Around her neck was a nylon rope, one end of it looped around the headrest. George began to feverishly undo the rope, tearing at it until his fingers were raw.
The parking garage was suddenly illuminated by flashing red and blue lights. An Irvine police cruiser pulled up next to the car. Two uniformed police officers stepped from the car with their hands resting on their holstered guns. “Step away from the car!” one of them shouted.
George was confused. “She’s been murdered, help me get the rope off her neck!”
“Step away from the car!” the officer repeated, both of them advancing toward him.
He stepped back.
“Turn around and put your hands on the roof of the car.”
He obeyed. “She’s dead. I found her and I was trying to take the rope off her neck. I’m a doctor.”
One of the officers was bending over Sherry’s body. He was feeling her pulse. He put on a pair of rubber gloves and then began loosening the rope.
“She called me and said she was frightened. She wanted me to wait with her until Triple-A arrived,” George said. “She was dead when I got here.” He felt as if he had to explain himself.
The officer who had stood him against the car looked at him suspiciously. “You’re her doctor?”
What was he going to say? “I’m not her doctor. I’m a doctor, a psychiatrist. I interviewed her recently because a patient of mine is stalking her. She called me tonight on my answering service to tell me that she was stranded here and she was afraid he was going to show up to harass her.”
The policeman turned him back around. “What is this patient’s name?”
Sherry Bennett wasn’t his patient so nothing she’d told him was confidential. He could divulge Bonaventure’s name as the person she was afraid of. “Lucas Bonaventure.”
The police officer didn’t recognize the name. He wrote it down using a stylus and an iPad he’d fetched from his car. “When did you get here?”
He had no idea how long he’d been there or how long his fugue state had lasted. “I got here about thirty seconds before you did. What brought you here, anyway?”
“She made a 911 call, saying that she was here with a flat tire. She thought it had been cut. She thought someone was going to harm her.”
“She didn’t say who it was?”
“She got cut off before she finished talking. We located her from her cell phone.”
A tow truck with the Triple-A logo on the side pulled up. “Somebody need a tire changed?” the driver asked.
“Stay in your truck and don’t leave. We want to talk to you,” the officer told the man.
“I’ve called the paramedics,” the other cop said, straightening up after having worked over Sherry’s body for about five minutes. “There’s nothing they can do except take her to the hospital and have her declared dead.” He walked over to his partner. “Let’s let the detectives question this one. They’ll get pissed off if we do anything more than secure the crime scene. Put him in the cruiser.”
The officer who’d questioned him led George to the police car and put him in the back seat. The two officers began stringing tape in a wide perimeter around the car.
After about five minutes, an unmarked police car pulled up. Behind them was a black and white SUV marked “Crime Scene Investigation” on the side. Two plain-clothed officers stepped out of the first car and walked over to the body, each sticking his head inside the car for at least a minute, then conferring with the two uniformed cops. George couldn’t hear what they were saying. The uniformed cops and the detectives were joined by two more officers, a male and a female, who were in the process of donning head-to-toe protective outfits, each of them carrying a bag of some kind of equipment. The detectives and the CSI people talked briefly, then one of the detectives headed toward the two uniformed cops, who had moved off to the side. The other came over to the cruiser where George was sitting and opened the back door.
“Name, please,” the detective said. He was in his thirties, clean-shaven with blonde, straight hair, and freckles on his face. He might have been a surfer dressed in a suit for work.
George gave him his name and address.
Unlike the uniformed officer who’d recorded his notes on an iPad, the detective wrote down George’s name in a worn, leather-bound notebook, using a ballpoint pen. “So tell me what you were doing here.”
George tried to control his panic. He reminded himself that he hadn’t done anything, at least as far as he knew. He explained how Sherry Bennett had called him to say that she had come to what had turned out to be a bogus job interview, had her tire slashed and had grown fearful that his patient was stalking her. He had told her to call Triple-A and he would come and keep her company while she waited.”
“You told the officer that she’s not your patient. Is that right?”
“I only met her once.”
“Yet you volunteered to come here and keep her company while she waited for a tow truck?”
He knew how strange his story sounded. “I felt bad. It was my client she was scared of.”
The detective, who hadn’t given his name, stared at him long and hard. “This patient, his name is Lucas Bonaventure?” The uniformed cop must have given the detective Lucas’ name.
“Yes.”
“You’re a psychiatrist, right?”
“Correct.”
“Lucas Bonaventure is the name of the man from Newport Beach whose wife is missing. Are you aware of that?”
“I am.”
“It’s the same guy?”
“Yes.”
They were interrupted by the sound of a dying siren as an ambulance, its emergency lights flashing, pulled up and parked next to the detectives’ car. Two paramedics were met by one of the uniformed cops who escorted them to Sherry Bennett’s car.
The detective turned his attention back to George. “Officer Dramond said that you had your hands on the rope around her neck when he and Officer Wilshire drove up.”
The roof of his mouth was dry. George ran his tongue over it. He cleared his throat. His anxiety was almost overwhelming. He was afraid of losing his voice. “I thought maybe I could revive her if I could get the rope off of her neck, but the two officers told me to step away from the car. I presumed that the police officer knew first aid. It wouldn’t take a doctor to try to resuscitate her.” He was aware that his voice sounded strained.
The detective stared at him for a few seconds. “He seemed to think she was beyond resuscitation.”
George couldn’t hold the man’s gaze. “He was probably right,” he said, looking over the detective’s shoulder at the ambulance. “I was just panicked and wanting to try everything I could think of.”
The detective looked over at the crime scene. The two uniformed officers w
ere standing next to the open door of the car. After a quick examination of the body, the paramedics had stepped back and were waiting before doing anything more. The detective squinted his eyes as if he were thinking. “What’s the number for your answering service?”
“It’s on my cell phone. I can speed dial it for you.”
“What’s the number?”
George told him the number.
The detective dialed the service on his own cell phone and identified himself as a police officer, then asked if a call had come in for Doctor Farquhar that evening. The operator gave him the time that Sherry had called and told him the caller’s name. The service had recorded her call up to the point when they’d transferred it to George. “Your story fits,” the detective said, looking at George. “She called about thirty minutes before our guys arrived. How long did it take you to get here?”
“I live in Newport Beach.” He knew that it had only taken him fifteen minutes to get from his house to the parking garage. But even granting five minutes to get himself out of his house, that left at least ten minutes unaccounted for before the police arrived. He had no idea what he had been doing for those ten minutes. “It took me a while to find the address.”
“How do we know you weren’t already here when she called you? Your answering service reached you on your cell, even though you say you were at home.”
“They always call my cell. That’s the first number they call because I always have it with me. Does it make sense that I was already here, lurking around somewhere, and she just happened to call me to tell me to come here? If you check her cell phone I’m sure you can verify that she called Triple-A after she got off the phone with me. I told her to call them.”
The detective scowled. “You can get out of the car, but don’t go anywhere. My partner and I will want to ask you some more questions.” It appeared to irritate the detective that George’s story made sense. George knew that it wasn’t the whole truth, but he didn’t know what the whole truth was. He had no memory for the first ten minutes after he’d driven up next to Sherry Bennett’s car.