The Oedipus Murders

by Casey Dorman

  “She was buried on my property. I don’t understand that either. I found her because that was where you dreamt that she was buried and I decided to look.” George gazed steadily at his patient, closely watching his reaction.

  “I didn’t dream that she was buried on your property.” Lucas’ tone was flat, as if he were stating a fact.

  “Not my property specifically, but on one of the lots at Banning Ranch. You described it to a tee.”

  “It could have been anyplace. I’ve passed Banning Ranch many times, driving along PCH. It never occurred to me that that was the place in my dream.”

  George could feel his anxiety rising. The assumption that the location in Lucas’ dream was Banning Ranch was his. Was his conclusion just a projection based upon his owning property there? But Lucas’ wife’s body had been buried there. “It seemed clear to me. Which raises the question of why you dreamed accurately of the location of your wife’s body.”

  “What question does it raise?” The suspicion was evident in Lucas’ voice.

  “Whether you are really reporting your dreams to me or making them up. Whether you’re telling me things you want me to hear.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. I understand you own a copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.”

  “Do I? It must be my wife’s then. I don’t recall it.”

  “Some of your dreams are remarkably similar to those described in Freud’s book.”

  “A coincidence I guess. How did you know that I owned a copy of that book?” He stared at George.

  “The police told me.”

  “Really? The police haven’t been to my house since the day I reported Regina missing.”

  “So perhaps they noticed it then.”

  “I don’t recall them entering my den.”

  “So you do know where the book is located.”

  “All the books are in the den.”

  “Well, we’re getting nowhere with this. I don’t know how the police knew about the book but they told me and I was familiar with the dreams that Freud mentioned in his book.”

  “You talked to that psychologist, Doctor Lin. Wasn’t she the one you talked to after Sherry was killed?”

  George felt himself getting uncomfortable again. He didn’t want to implicate Susan Lin. “I talked to Detective Reynolds, too.”

  “Which one told you about the book?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Really?” Lucas smiled at him. “By the way, doctor, you haven’t commented on my leg. You didn’t even act surprised when I walked in your office with a cane.”

  “The police told me that you’d suffered another paralysis after viewing your wife’s body in the morgue.”

  “You seem to be pretty cozy with the police. I would have thought that they’d be treating you as a suspect since you found my wife’s body… and Sherry Bennett’s, too.” George could have sworn that Lucas was gloating.

  “I am a suspect or, as they say to the press, a person of interest. Being present when two dead bodies are found by the police makes them wonder about me. I understand their point of view.”

  “So we’re both suspects. That’s an interesting development.” Lucas reached down and took his right leg in both hands and hoisted it onto the couch, leaning back and putting his other leg up next to his right leg. “Shall we start our session doctor? I had another dream.”

  George didn’t know what to think. He felt as if he were being manipulated, but perhaps he was being paranoid. He was not used to being this confused with a patient. “I’d like to hear about your leg, first,” he said.

  “What about my leg?”

  “As you pointed out, your paralysis is back. Tell me how that happened.” Even as he asked, he felt a sharp twinge of anxiety. He remembered his own feeling of being paralyzed when he saw the mound of earth under which Regina Bonaventure was buried. Then he’d blanked out. One of his fugue states had disrupted his consciousness, just as it had when he had found Sherry Bennett’s body. George knew that it meant something, but he could feel his resistance to finding out what it was. Was he more involved in the women’s deaths than he was aware?

  “I had a flashback to my brother’s death, to the time when I had to identify his body in the morgue,” Lucas said. “Everything seemed similar. After I saw Regina’s face, I got mad because they hadn’t cleaned her up. It was just like my brother after his heart attack when he had the traffic accident. I started to yell at the pathologist, then this white light exploded in my face. I couldn’t see anything. I was dizzy. It was just like when I identified my brother’s body. As soon as they sat me down, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to move my leg. It was just like before.”

  “Just like when you viewed your brother’s body?’

  “Exactly like it. Or it felt that way to me.”

  George was sure the man’s paralysis was real. Everything he’d said fit psychologically. “What were you thinking when you were sitting there?”

  “I imagined myself on one of the tables. My body with a tag on my toe.”

  “On your toe?”

  “I thought about being dead.”

  “And how did that feel?”

  “I don’t know. It was just a momentary thought. Then I tried to get up and I couldn’t. My leg wouldn’t work.”

  Was Lucas suffering from castration anxiety or was he afraid of dying? Ernest Becker had said that Freud manufactured his theory of sexuality, and particularly the castration complex, in order to divert his own thinking away from the topic of death. Freud himself was terrified of dying, according to Becker. George had regarded Becker’s suggestions as brilliant speculation, but they had never shaken his belief in the sexual basis of neurosis as put forward by Freud. But Lucas Bonaventure presented exactly the kind of case that put the two theories in competition.

  “What did you think when you found yourself paralyzed?”

  There was a long pause before Lucas answered. “I’m embarrassed to say this doctor, it sounds so cold, but I was angry at Regina for reminding me of my brother. I knew it wasn’t her fault. My God, she’d been stabbed to death. But that was my reaction.”

  “How did you know she’d been stabbed?” George could feel his anxiety mounting.

  “The coroner told me. I asked him how she died. He thought someone had used a kitchen knife.”

  George went cold. He remembered the missing knife in his own house. He’d been frightened when Detective Reynolds had told him that Regina Bonaventure had been stabbed, but now he was terrified.

  “What was your dream about?” He needed to change the subject.

  “My dream?”

  “You told me that you had a dream you wanted to tell me about.”

  “Yes. It was another weird dream.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It was about a dog. I was being chased by a dog. I was running across this field of tall grass and bushes, and this big dog was chasing me. A Collie or a Spaniel because he had long hair. He was sick or something, maybe rabid, because he was foaming at the mouth. He chased me to the edge of a cliff, above the ocean. There was nowhere to run. Then the scene suddenly switched, the way that it happens in dreams. I was lying in a ditch in the field and the dog was sitting in a tree, the dog that had been chasing me and four or five other dogs just like him, sitting on different branches. I stared at them and I couldn’t move. I wanted to crawl out of the ditch and run away, but I couldn’t move, my legs were paralyzed, just as in the other dreams. Then I woke up.”

  George recognized the dream. The dogs sitting in the tree we
re from Freud’s case of “The Wolfman,” a classic case of castration anxiety, seen by Freud when the patient was an adult, after having had a childhood history of animal phobia and then later manic- depressive illness as an adult. “Where did you read about that dream?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That dream is right out of Freud. It’s one of his most famous cases, called, ‘The Wolfman’ ”

  “It was my dream. I don’t know about Freud’s cases.” Lucas didn’t sound defensive.

  “It’s too much of a coincidence. You don’t just dream one of Freud’s most famous dreams for no reason. You must have read about it.”

  Lucas hesitated. “Perhaps I did. Maybe I glanced at one or two of Regina’s books on psychology. In fact, I do remember seeing a picture of these dogs in a tree in one of the books. I remember it bothered me. I became angry with Regina for having a book like that in the house.”

  “So you saw the picture of the dogs sitting in the tree—they were wolves, incidentally—and it bothered you. What did it make you feel like?”

  “Panicky. It reminded me of that dream of the man with the saw, the one I told you about a couple of weeks ago. Do you think I remembered the picture and that’s why it showed up in my dream? I’m sure what I saw in my dream was that same picture from the book.”

  What Lucas was saying was plausible, although the “Wolfman” dream symbolized castration to Freud’s patient because of specific experiences in the man’s childhood, such as seeing his parents have intercourse, which could well apply to Lucas. But the Wolfman’s dream also was based on experiences which Lucas never could have had, since they were unique to some children’s storybooks in late nineteenth century Russia, the home of Freud’s patient. If Lucas had read anything about the case, not just looked at the picture, he knew that it involved castration anxiety. That, in itself, could have made the description of the dream and the accompanying picture frightening to him because it provoked his own castration fears. It was a tenuous connection, but Freud’s own analyses of dreams thrived on such thin strands of associations. “It’s possible that the picture in the book became connected in your preconscious mind, the part of your mind that manufactures your dreams, to your unconscious fears of castration… or death. How much did you read about Freud’s case?”

  “I don’t remember reading anything, but I suppose I did. I wouldn’t have been just looking at pictures in a book. I’m not a five-year-old child.”

  Five-year-old boys were exactly who developed castration anxiety. “And what about Freud’s other books, The Interpretation of Dreams, for instance? You told me earlier that you hadn’t read it. Perhaps you didn’t remember accurately at the time. How about now? Do you remember reading it?”

  Lucas shook his head. “I’m almost sure that I didn’t. I told you, those books were Regina’s. I may have looked at the one with the picture in it once, but after that, I was afraid to look at any of the others. Afraid that they might make me panicky like that one had.”

  “It’s still a little murky, but your dreams are all related to castration fears. And so is your paralysis. It’s no coincidence that the very symptom that you feel in your dreams is the one you have developed in your waking life. And each time it has been provoked by an experience of the death of someone close to you. Viewing your wife’s body not only aroused your anxiety because of her, but it brought back memories of your brother’s death, bringing on the same symptom you had experienced after viewing his body.”

  “Castration fears?”

  “Young boys often get the idea that their father may be jealous of them. It makes them afraid that their fathers will cut off their penises. All of this is unconscious of course, which is why it comes out in dreams, not in waking thoughts.”

  “That’s awfully hard to believe doc. It all sounds like a theory, not something real.”

  “That’s because your unconscious mind is still erecting defenses against it. Unconsciously, your anxiety is related to a wish, as are your dreams. We haven’t begun to discover what that wish is.” It wasn’t yet time to bring up the Oedipal wish behind Lucas’ castration fear.

  “A wish? But all my dreams are nightmares. They all bring on anxiety. How could I wish for that?”

  “The anxiety is the fear that the wish will become manifested directly in your consciousness, even in your dream consciousness. Your mind is fighting against itself in your dreams.”

  “That’s a lot to swallow.”

  “Of course it is. It’s something that further analysis will reveal to you, but it may take a long time.”

  “I have lots of time, doctor.”

  Unless either you or I go to jail, George thought.

  Chapter 38

  “Some of the soil in Regina Bonaventure’s hair was from the cliff above Crystal Cove,” Abe Reynolds said. “Some of the soil in the knife wounds was from there too.” He looked across his desk at Ben Murphy, trying to decide how much he should tell the private detective. Murphy was a highly experienced investigator, famous for solving difficult cases, but Abe wasn’t sure what his true agenda was. The old man was working for Regina Bonaventure’s father, who seemed to have a thing against his son-in-law. Murphy could just be trying to find evidence against Lucas Bonaventure. It was hard not to have a bias when investigating a murder, but Abe knew that such biases often led one astray.

  “So the body was moved,” Murphy said. “Did the coroner know how long ago?”

  “The condition of the soil where she was found indicated that it wasn’t more than a week or so ago.”

  “About the time that the Collie dog was buried.”

  “Exactly,” Reynolds answered. “So someone might have buried the woman’s body at Crystal Cove, then two weeks later killed the dog and dug the woman up and put the dog in her place. Then he moved the woman’s body to Banning Ranch, to the shrink’s homesite.”

  “That’s a lot of work and a lot of additional risk doing all that digging and carrying around a body. Why would someone do that?” Ben asked.

  “The site at Banning Ranch was a lot safer place to put a body. They were going to dump more topsoil on the spot where her body was buried. If Doctor Farquhar hadn’t been prowling around that night and started digging, and if someone hadn’t alerted the police that there were car lights on the property at night so they went to investigate, then her body would never have been recovered. At Crystal Cove, it was just a matter of time before somebody’s dog or kid dug around and found her.”

  Murphy nodded in agreement. “So who would have done that?”

  “The shrink is the logical suspect. It was his property, and he was digging her up when our patrol car appeared on the scene.”

  Murphy nodded. “Absolutely. But why bury the body on his own homesite? There were several others nearby. And why go back and start digging up the body again, after he’d reburied it? And the dog that was in the grave at Crystal Cove was taken from Bonaventure’s neighborhood. From his neighbor, actually.”

  Reynolds scowled. “You and Doctor Lin both think that Bonaventure killed his wife. But there’s a lot more evidence pointing toward Doctor Farquhar.”

  “There’s some evidence,” Murphy corrected him, “and the doctor had no motive. From what the coroner said, there were almost a dozen knife wounds, all deep. Whoever killed Regina was very angry… angry at her. As far as we know, Doctor Farquhar didn’t know that either Lucas or Regina Bonaventure even existed at the time that she disappeared.”

  Reynolds nodded, his expression glum. “That’s what’s got me stymied. I’m not going to charge someone who didn’t even know the victim, especially, when, as you point out, it looks like a crime of passion.”

  “How abou
t Bonaventure’s and Farquhar’s cars? Someone carried a dead body from Crystal Cove to Banning Ranch.”

  “Bonaventure’s car was clean,” Reynolds said. “We haven’t checked the doctor’s yet.”

  “Then I’ll be going and leave you to your work, detective,” Ben said, standing up. “Good hunting.”

  — — —

  The real estate office at Banning Ranch was open after having been closed for just one day while the Newport Beach police conducted their crime scene investigation on George and Madeline Farquhar’s property. Ben Murphy pulled into the gravel parking lot in front of the building. He was dressed in a blue linen sport coat over a pair of grey, light wool slacks. He wore a pair of loafers with dark socks. His head was bare and his braid was tucked up in a bun. “I’m thinking of moving down here from Santa Barbara,” he told the saleslady in the office. “I’ll be selling my home up there and using my equity to buy something down here. I’ve got an ocean view, and I don’t want to give that up, so this place looks promising. And it would be a while before my house up there sells, so I just want a lot for now. Something I can build on later.”

  “You’ve come to the right place,” Doris Macready, the slightly overweight, middle-aged, blonde saleswoman told him. She stood back, ready to help, being careful not to be intrusive. “None of our lots will be ready for building before another three to six months. As you can see, we haven’t paved any streets or put in utilities yet. Does that fit your timetable?”

  “Perfectly,” Ben answered.

  “Would you like to take a tour of the property or sit down and talk about prices, terms, size requirements, that sort of thing?”

  “How about a tour?”

  “Certainly. I’m afraid we’ll have to take our jeep. The roads are a little rough.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  The picture in Ben’s head had been a serious underestimate of the property’s extent and diversity. The first thing he was shown was a sizeable acreage that was to become a hotel. Then he viewed the park that was the concession to the environmentalists who had objected to the land’s development. Finally, he was driven to the single-family homesites. Yellow crime scene tape surrounded the homesite owned by Doctor George Farquhar and his wife.