Modern Masters of Noir

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  First published in 1960.

  Jackie, to my annoyance, made his first appearance in my office at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.

  For the past year I had kept that particular time open for meditation since it was the hour that my wife Helen met her death in the automobile accident. Not even my receptionist knew that these weekly periods were memorial in nature; I let her believe I was taking a mental coffee break.

  Nor was this a deception, for a psychiatrist can only absorb so much of other people’s problems before he feels the need to clear his mind. And in the year since Helen died, I had been working very hard—burying my sorrow in my practice so to speak.

  Consequently, I was disturbed to see a new patient usurping the hour that I considered my own private affair. Though I had no choice but to make the best of it, I intended to reprimand Linda, my receptionist, for her thoughtlessness with the appointment book. As it turned out, I became so caught up in the abnormality of the case that I never did correct her.

  My new patient, a virile young man, acted as if he realized his presence was unwelcome. He slouched in the big leather chair opposite me, fixed his eyes on the wall above my head, and read aloud my credentials in a mocking voice. ” ‘Know all men by these presents that John Kermit Conover, having completed the studies prescribed by law . . .’ Oh, surely that must give you godlike powers, Dr. Conover.”

  “Not at all.” No need to take offense; many frayed personalities react defensively to the analyst at first. “The diplomas merely demonstrate that I’ve had some seven years of certain special training. I’m only another man, like yourself.”

  “No,” he said quickly. He was strangely anxious. “No, we can’t be anything alike.” In appearance, at least, he was right. He had the smooth athletic grace of youth, the good looks of health and eagerness, and he seemed expensively well-dressed, while I . . . well, I am now fifty-three, as conservative and quiet and gray as my office walls.

  “Suppose we begin with your name,” I suggested.

  He relaxed into his former arrogance. “Jackie Newman?” he asked with a smile. I had no doubt that it was fictitious, not that this would be especially unusual. “You call me Jackie. I’m afraid we’re going to see a lot of each other.”

  “All right, Jackie. I hope I may be able to help you. However—”

  “Look, you’ve got it framed there on the wall that you’re a psychiatrist. You solve people’s problems, don’t you?”

  “Not exactly. Everyone must solve his own problems. My job is to help you uncover and understand what your problem really is. Then you supply the therapy.”

  “Oh, nice setup,” Jackie snorted. “You get the fee while I do the work.”

  “It’s significant that you look at it that way. Do you often have feelings of being cheated?” He stared at me angrily but didn’t answer. “You see, as a detached observer, I’m frequently able to detect what the patient is too emotionally bound up in to see for himself. Then I’m able to help.”

  Jackie dropped his head. “You can’t help me,” he muttered. “Nobody can. I already know what is wrong with me.”

  “Then let’s talk about it.”

  “I’m afraid,” he said simply. His face, free of the taut lines of arrogance, turned soft and childlike. “Unless something stops me. I know I’m going to do something bad.”

  “How do you mean—bad?”

  “You know,” His right hand twitched in a small clawing gesture. “Something violent—hurt somebody.”

  I reassured him that the urge to violence is imbedded in us all. It is better that the patient not think himself wholly unnatural. “Now, have you ever done anything violent, Jackie?”

  “No. Not yet. But lately—well, I’ve been taking things, stealing . . .”

  “What sort of things?”

  He folded his arms, as if hugging something tightly against his chest. “Oh, things.” He kept his eyes on the upright desk pen in front of me. “Nothing I actually need. But I wanted to—I get this wanting feeling inside that makes me keep taking them, more all the time.”

  I tried to probe deeper but with no results. What were his emotions at the time of the act? How did he feel about it afterward? I knew that the nature of the stolen objects would provide a key to his compulsion, but Jackie kept sliding away from the subject. “I’m not worried about the stealing!” he finally burst out petulantly. “It’s the other thing—what I told you before.”

  “You believe that theft is the stepping stone to something worse, is that it?”

  “Well, I keep getting urges, like I was foaming inside. Like just taking things isn’t enough. Like there’s something even better I could do.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  All he gave me was a knowing smile. Nor would he admit to any dreaming, when I took that tack. Psychiatry is the only branch of medicine where the patient will conceal his symptoms, hide them even from himself. But the outstanding fact that Jackie had come to me at all was encouraging, so I said, “Let’s go about it another way. Tell me about yourself.”

  He related his history with some pride. It was a rambling discourse and the more I heard, the more dead certain I became that he was making it up as he went along. Although totally alone in the world now, he claimed to have come from a wealthy family upstate, to have served with distinction in the army—“I got the Purple Heart twice”—and, following this, to have pursued several vocations, among them automobile racing and uranium prospecting. In view of his youth, his story sounded somewhat incredible.

  He must have sensed my disbelief because he broke off abruptly. “How do you like it so far?” he demanded. “Are you jealous?”

  “Let’s say that you’ve raised certain questions in my mind.”

  “Well, they’ll have to wait,” he said bruskly, and rose. “Either I’ll see you next week or I won’t. I’m like that.”

  Not until after Jackie was gone did it occur to me that I’d failed to tell him that this particular appointment hour was inconvenient. Then, examining my own reactions, I decided that my omission was intentional: I wanted Jackie to return. He displayed, bad manners and all, possibilities that gripped my interest beyond the cloudy merits of his case.

  My receptionist came in. “Doctor, Mrs. Greer has canceled out on her four o’clock. Some unexpected company. She hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

  “It suits me fine,” I told her. “That last patient gave me a splitting headache.”

  “I’ll get you some aspirin,” she said, instantly solicitous. I often wondered what prompted Linda to choose to work for a psychiatrist; she is such a completely uncomplicated personality. A pretty brunette, her buxom femininity and animal vitality sometimes struck me as incongruous amid the neuroses and psychoses of my practice, as if she were moving cheerily among the dead. Yet she was efficient enough and though not a graduate nurse, she fulfilled many of a nurse’s functions. “By the way, Doctor, I was wondering—since we don’t have anybody else coming in today—if I could get away a little early. It’s our anniversary and Ed and I were planning to have dinner in town and maybe go to a show.”

  “Anniversary? Has it been a year already?”

  “No, just six months.” Linda giggled. “It probably sounds silly to you—but we’re still so darn thrilled about being married . . .”

  “Don’t apologize for being happy,” I said. “So few people are.”

  I thought about Jackie quite a bit during the next week, though I was by no means sure I would ever see him again. However, he appeared on schedule the following Thursday. This time he was sullen and less communicative, except to admit that he was still stealing “things.”

  In his depressed state he had either forgotten or discarded his previous account of his life; what little he would tell of his background varied greatly from before but sounded to me more probable. The one solid nugget of information I uncovered was that Jackie had briefly attended the same university as I, but I was unable to exploit t
his common experience to establish the rapport I desired.

  He had quit school out of boredom, and he mumbled something about the girls there that I didn’t catch and he wouldn’t repeat. It included the phrase “sweaters and bare legs,” and I surmised privately that his trouble was sex-centered but he wouldn’t respond to that line of questioning either. Nor would he speak at all of the seven-year period following college, muttering, “Why talk about it? It’s all over.” Or—his favorite form of dismissal—“It isn’t important.”

  The consultation left me somewhat despondent, partly the gloomy contagion of his own mood but mostly because I felt I was getting nowhere.

  Yet the following week Jackie surprised me by bringing with him in a shopping bag the articles he had stolen. They bore out my first theory as to the center of his trouble. The “things” turned out to be brassieres—most of them fancy with lace or bright in color—and he was compulsively explicit as to when and where he had taken each one. Some had come from clotheslines in various parts of the city, but many of them were new with price tags still attached.

  “Why are you telling me this today when you wouldn’t before?” I asked.

  “Because I’m finished.” Jackie was jubilant, pacing back and forth excitedly, refusing to settle in the patient’s chair. “I’m not going to steal any more of them. It’s just a matter of deciding to exercise self-control.”

  “Have you ever considered—despite this theft aberration, which is minor—that you might be under too complete control? That you might be hiding from yourself something of real importance?”

  He turned to me with a hurt expression. “You don’t think I am cured.”

  “You may be. But it’s seldom that easy, Jackie.”

  “You’ll see,” he promised, earnest as a five-year-old. “I brought this stuff up here so you could give it back to the people I took it from.”

  I agreed, though I knew it was an impossible task. To return all that stolen lingerie to its rightful owners would provoke questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer. So I simply pressed the shopping bag into the bottom drawer of one of the filing cabinets that stood in the anteroom to my office, intending to dispose of its contents at a more convenient time.

  Linda discovered Jackie’s loot before I remembered to do so, however. When I entered my office one morning, she was standing in the anteroom, peering astonished into the shopping bag. “Doctor, what on earth are these things?”

  I explained, telling her a little about the patient but without mentioning his name of course. She laughed. “Isn’t that ridiculous? Stealing stuff like this!”

  “To you, perhaps,” I said, a trifle annoyed. “But I can assure you it’s deadly serious to him. Somewhere there is a deep and terrible rift in his personality.”

  Jackie never mentioned the brassieres again and as far as I could tell his thefts had stopped. He proudly gave the credit to his new-found “self-control” but it seemed to me that his interests had merely passed on to other, and possibly more sinister, areas. Whereas he still refused to fill in the seven-year gap in his life, he suddenly began talking at great length about women he knew, or had known. All of them, according to him, fell over themselves with eagerness to win his favors.

  Finally, as both his loquacity and the affairs became repetitious, I suggested that he might be indulging in fantasy.

  Jackie laughed heartily. “I told you that you were jealous of me, didn’t I? Just because I’ve got what it takes. Here you’re supposed to treat me and you don’t even see how stodgy you yourself are.”

  I said gently, “You may not believe it, but I was young once myself.”

  “Not really, I’ll bet. I’ll bet you always had your nose buried in some book. I’m different. Why, before I quit college . . .” And he was off again, describing with relish an erotic and possibly fictitious escapade. On the other hand, it was also conceivable that he was telling the truth; he was both handsome and aggressive enough. There was always that nagging doubt in my mind as I tried to pin down which was the real Jackie.

  Interspersed with his amorous reminiscences was an infrequent moment of insight into Jackie’s present activities. I learned that he had bought a pair of binoculars and was spending much of his time in the big park near my office. He was watching people—he called it “studying” them.

  “Nothing wrong with that,” he said when I questioned him about it. “I’m expanding myself. Have to share the world with my fellow human beings, so I might as well get acquainted with them.” He gave me a quick crooked grin. “The other day I watched your Linda, sitting on the grass, eating lunch out of a paper sack. I guess she was tanning her legs. Pretty jazzy for you, having something built like that around the office all day.”

  It was poor clinical practice but I had to become stern with him at that point. “Linda’s an extremely nice girl and happily married. You’d better forget about Linda.”

  Jackie only smirked. In his exhilarated moods he enjoyed trying to put me on the defensive, to reverse momentarily our relationship. But he was indignant when I suggested he give me the binoculars. He flatly refused. Yet, although I didn’t press the point, at the conclusion of the session I discovered that he had left them behind on my desk. I stored them away with the stolen lingerie in the filing cabinet.

  During the next few weeks the collection grew steadily. Detailed drawings and floor plans of buildings, maps and written schemes for various adventures upon which he had decided to embark. Most of these were juvenile fancies but I was concerned with the recurring motif of aggression. And no matter how fanciful, all these plans represented sex substitutes—as did his actions at this time—and I was faced with the increasingly difficult job of separating what Jackie actually did from what he claimed he had done.

  First, he mentioned smashing a few windows here and there. Then he recounted entering some empty houses under construction in a new tract. From this he passed on to breaking into occupied dwellings, mostly apartments in the downtown section where women lived alone. These illegal entries were accomplished in the early morning hours and he would, he claimed, creep into the bedroom and watch the sleeping woman for a while and then stealthily depart without awakening her.

  “Aren’t you afraid of being caught?” I asked him.

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” he boasted. Most of the time he was openly scornful of his fellow human beings, particularly those in authority, such as the police—or me, whom he also equated with authority. Yet Jackie occasionally underwent periods when he seemed genuinely ashamed of his behavior and he would draw up solemn “commandments” for virtuous living which he soon broke or evaded.

  I began watching the newspapers to see if any of his presumed exploits were mentioned. They were not, but this didn’t necessarily prove anything one way or the other. Breaking windows—or even knocking down a little girl on a lonely street, as he claimed to have done once—was probably too minor to make the papers.

  Then one day I saw an item that sent a chill through me. A divorcee, returning home late one evening, surprised a prowler in her bedroom. They scuffled, and she was wounded in the shoulder, apparently with an ice pick. Her assailant had fled.

  I felt an icy certainty that Jackie was the attacker. As he had feared from the first, he was progressing steadily from small aberrations to larger horrors. And it troubled me constantly that I could find no way to get inside him and discover the truth about him.

  Sure enough, Jackie described the attack at our next Thursday afternoon consultation. He was pale and frightened of what he had done. His hand shook as he turned over to me the ice pick that he said was the weapon. Then I was faced with a terrible dilemma, undoubtedly the most tortured problem of my career. On one hand, it seemed plain that Jackie Newman was dangerous to society and it was my duty to turn his case over to the police. On the other hand, before me sat a patient in agony whom police methods could neither help nor cure. While over all, like a fog, lay the vast complication that Jackie mi
ght just as easily have read the same news story as I and fitted it neatly into his own life picture. So wherever the truth lay hidden, there also was my duty.

  Linda noticed my extreme depression. “Doctor, you’ve been working much too hard. Why don’t you get away for a while? A vacation would do you good.”

  “I’d like to, Linda, but I’m afraid this is no time for it. I’d be afraid I was running away. There’s a case I have to see through.”

  “Oh, surely it could spare you for a week.”

  “Not this patient. I’m hoping I can pin it down to hysterical fantasy—that the patient’s sustained emotional conflict is causing him to retreat from his real self. But so far I can’t get through to the actual patient, as it were.”

  I had made my decision. Jackie was my responsibility. I was aware that I must avoid the professional trap of becoming too absorbed in my patient, lest I identify with him rather than remaining in detachment. Already, I felt, I was showing an unwarranted fatherly concern.

  I found hints of other dangers too, both to myself and to others. Jackie was evidencing classic symptoms of megalomania of which the ultimate expression, of course, is murder. He now talked about going armed “because my life is in danger”—though, as far as I could tell, he did nothing about this. He finally admitted to nightly dreaming—dreams of himself as the master criminal, of manipulating vast conspiracies, of running rampant in a big black car.

  His periods of contrition were less frequent and he became more openly suspicious of me and my methods, ironically at precisely the time when he needed me more than ever. When I suggested the use of pentothal to aid us in getting at the roots of his psychosis, Jackie flatly refused.

  He scowled when I asked his reasons. “You know why.”

  “Not when it might help. Pentothal merely relaxes the mind’s subconscious defenses. That’s why it’s sometimes called the truth serum.” I explained the value of confession in insight therapy. “Almost all of us practice some form of confession as a natural safety valve. A child uses his mother, a husband his wife or vice versa . . . why, before my wife died, I often made her my confessor to get rid of whatever repressions I might have.”