Death at Charity's Point

by William G. Tapply

  I never did. By then I was beyond caring.

  And now I found my sliding glass doors locked. I let the beer slide frigidly down my throat. The same moon that had shone on the ocean from Charity’s Point only a few hours ago now hovered high over my city apartment building, illuminating the same ocean I had swum in, which now lay like a silvery blanket far below me. I felt depressed, uneasy, lonely. All that wine, probably. Postcoital ennui. I was tired.

  How the hell could I have locked my doors?

  I finished the beer, dragged myself to my feet, and wandered bedward. If I had locked my doors sometime before I departed for my rendezvous with Rina, I must have been more nervous than I realized. Damn! I was slipping.

  CHAPTER 10

  LEONARD WERTZ’S SECRETARY, A solidly built, dark-haired girl with a pouting mouth and large astonished eyes, insisted that I fill out a questionnaire while I waited for the doctor to see me.

  “I don’t intend to see him regularly or anything,” I protested. “I just need to talk with him.”

  She smiled, showing me the pink tip of her tongue. “A lot of people feel that way at first. You’ll see. He’s really very good.”

  “You misunderstand me, miss. I’m not here for treatment.”

  “That’s perfectly normal, Mr. Coyne. Please fill out the form for us. There’s no commitment.”

  I shrugged. It was easier to fill out the form.

  The waiting room was furnished with two director’s chairs separated by a magazine-strewn, glass-topped table on plastic legs, and the secretary’s Danish modern desk. From where I sat her legs came into full display under her desk as her narrow skirt rode up her thighs—dimpled knees, pleasingly tapered calves, slim ankles. Part of the treatment, I supposed.

  I took a copy of Cosmopolitan from the table and filled out the form on it, crouching awkwardly in one of the director’s chairs. Those canvas contraptions are not designed for people over five foot six. Film directors tended to be short, I guessed. I got a backache after about thirty seconds of sitting in that one.

  The items on the questionnaire were innocuous enough—occupation, marital status, health insurance. On the back page I found a statement for me to sign indicating that I understood that Dr. Wertz guaranteed no cure for whatever ailed me. I smiled. That might dissuade the average lay person from bringing suit, but I knew that a medical patient’s signature on such a disclaimer had absolutely no standing in court.

  An inner door opened, and through it stepped a man who appeared to be several years younger than I—a man constructed, it struck me, entirely of spheres and circles. The top of his head was bald and shiny. A reddish-brown fringe circled from behind up over his ears and continued down his cheeks in a neatly trimmed beard. He wore no mustache. His thick, rimless glasses magnified his eyes. The effect was that his head looked as if it had been placed upside down on his neck.

  He wore prefaded designer jeans with hearts stitched on the rear pockets over his high, round, girlish ass and soft hips. A yellow jersey stretched taut across his pear-shaped torso. A little penguin was embroidered over his left breast. The square-toed, high-heeled cowboy boots that peeped out from under the boot-cut bottoms of his jeans had fancy stitching up the sides. He teetered uncertainly in them.

  He moved, in fact, much like a penguin. Leonard Wertz was a chic shrink.

  His fingers, as I shook his hand, felt like soft, uncooked sausages. In his voice I detected the hint of what I thought was probably a carefully cultivated British affectation.

  “Mr. Coyne. Won’t you come in.” He stood at the door, holding it for me. As I brushed by him to enter his office, the scent of English Leather assaulted me.

  His office looked like a small living room. At the far end, a large picture window overlooked a small lawn bordered all around by a high stockade fence against which rambler roses were tied, leafing out and preparing to bloom. The inside of the office was conspicuous primarily by the absence of the usual accoutrements of an office—no desk, no telephone, no professional journals or books, no equipment, no diplomas on the wall. There were two easy chairs, a sofa, a rocking chair, and a coffee table. An undistinguished landscape done meticulously in oils was displayed over the sofa. On the opposite wall over the chairs hung a pair of matched prints—clown faces, one laughing and one crying.

  “So, Mr. Coyne,” began Wertz. He held the form I had filled out. “You’re an attorney, I see. Divorced, eh?” He abruptly put the questionnaire onto the coffee table and fixed me with a magnified stare. “Why don’t you just tell me about it.”

  “I’m not here for treatment,” I said. “I thought you understood that. I’m here professionally. In regard to one of your patients. Former patients. George Gresham.”

  He nodded. “Mr. Gresham terminated with me some time ago, you know.”

  “He terminated, period,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  Leonard Wertz slowly removed his glasses. His eyes behind them were small, pink, porcine. He held his glasses in his upraised hand. “Oh, dear,” he said.

  “Suicide,” I added quickly. “It appears to have been suicide.”

  “Oh, dear,” he repeated emphatically.

  “Yes. Mr. Gresham’s mother—his next of kin—is understandably upset. She has asked me to try to sort out the details of his death. His frame of mind, that sort of thing. I thought you could help.”

  “Well, now, Mr. Coyne, you must understand that what passes between me and my patients is confidential. Strictly confidential. You, as an attorney, surely understand that. Without the assurance of confidentiality…”

  “He’s dead.”

  Leonard Wertz replaced his glasses slowly. “Yes,” he said. He stared beyond me through the window into the back yard for a long moment. Then he focused his stare on me. “Well, I suppose if he’s dead…”

  I smiled and leaned back in the easy chair. “Good,” I said. “I guess what I’d like to know from you is simply this: In your professional judgment, was George Gresham a candidate for suicide?”

  “Suicide,” Wertz repeated, pronouncing the word slowly, as if he were trying it out for the first time. Then he said, “George.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have believed it.” He looked appealingly at me.

  “Then you don’t think…?”

  “No, Mr. Coyne, it’s not that I don’t think George was capable of suicide. Not at all. There are depths to the human mind that none of us can fathom. It’s not that. I’m just trying to reconcile what I know of George with this fact you’ve given me.”

  I waited. Finally he continued. “I’m not an ordinary psychiatrist, you see. This sofa here is for my patients to sit on. I do very little retrospective analysis. No dreams, no stream of consciousness, no hypnosis. No psychotherapy, in the traditional Freudian sense. My specialty is A.C.R.”

  “A.C.R.?”

  “Yes. Assertiveness Conditioning and Reinforcement. A.C.R. It’s based on sound scientific principles—the culmination, really, of the works of Pavlov, Skinner, Krasner, and the others. Oh, there have been the popularizers, the I’m OK, You’re OK crowd. Quack psychiatry. How to overcome depression and become rich and famous in five easy lessons. Mail-order sanity. But we are engaged in a legitimate branch of therapy.” He looked at me, eyebrows lifted. I nodded to him. “We utilize the well-established principles of behavioral psychology,” he continued. “We try to shape the individual’s behavior—his personality, really, his entire repertoire of behaviors—in order to make him more assertive, more aggressive, a more successful person.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand. So George Gresham wanted to become more assertive, then.”

  Dr. Wertz’s eyes slipped past me to linger again on the garden outside the window. “He committed suicide, you say,” he said softly.

  “That’s what people seem to think,” I answered. I shrugged. “I hoped you could help me—help his mother, actually—to understand it.”

  “I told George—I used every trick of persuasion at m
y disposal, really—I told him that every gain he had made could be lost. You see, the first phase is the conditioning phase. We substitute a new galaxy of responses for the old. The second phase requires establishing that galaxy, firming it up, making those new responses part of the basic personality. That requires reinforcement—the second phase. George had completed the conditioning phase, and he had just begun some excellent reinforcing exercises when he left me. Quite suddenly. I was very surprised and very disappointed. He had made excellent progress. I told him he should finish. It’s really quite dangerous to terminate in the middle of an A.C.R. program. The personality is in a change pattern, you see. Tends to be very unstable. If George had finished with me, I daresay he would be alive today.”

  Dr. Wertz spread his hands. “It’s a tragedy.”

  “I agree,” I said. “So are you saying that leaving in the middle of treatment—in an unstable situation, as you put it—could result in a greater likelihood of the patient’s committing suicide?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Not by itself. But when an old pattern of coping—or compensating—has been conditioned away, and new ones aren’t in place, the patient is left vulnerable to dramatic and sudden mood shifts. You can understand that, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Manic-depressive behavior.”

  He smiled. “You might say that,” he said, as if he might never have said that. “The point is, it’s the problems, the crises in one’s life that are to blame, not the interrupted therapy. I don’t honestly think George was any more suicidal when he left me than when he first came.”

  “I wasn’t trying to blame you,” I said. “Are you saying he was suicidal when you first began with him?”

  “Everyone is suicidal, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Oh, come off it,” I said. “You’re not answering my question.”

  “Yes, I am. I’m just trying not to oversimplify things for you. Being suicidal isn’t like having the measles or a broken leg. It’s not a matter of being that way or not. It’s a question of degree. You’ve heard of the death instinct, I’m sure. It’s in us all. You, for example, smoke cigarettes. It’s part of the human condition. George Gresham and Attorney Coyne alike.”

  “Okay, then. A matter of degree. Fine, to what degree would you say he was suicidal when he came to you? I really don’t want to spar with you, Doctor.”

  “No, I don’t want to spar, either. I’m trying to explain to you that George—like you and me—had an inherent predisposition to take his own life. It’s there, in everyone. As I said, to some degree. You never know to what degree, until, well…”

  “I see,” I said. “But he came to you. To be more assertive, you said.”

  “Okay,” said Wertz, sighing. “George had several conflicts in his life. Again, Mr. Coyne, you have to understand that we’re not talking about an abnormal person here. George Gresham’s conflicts were ones everyone has. His hadn’t worked themselves out as comfortably for him as other people’s do. But he was a good candidate for A.C.R. He could have been helped. He was being helped.”

  “Conflicts, you said.”

  “Yes.” He patted the creases on his jeans. “He exhibited the classical Oedipal conflict, for one thing. There was a woman in his life—or on his mind, anyway—and he had, from all I inferred, a dominant mother—do you understand the Oedipal conflict, Mr. Coyne?”

  “You want to screw your mother, but you know it’s taboo.”

  He smiled. “Exactly. And when you, er, want to screw another woman, it can be a way of displacing that primal instinct, and your unconscious mind induces guilt. Which manifests itself, of course, in a sort of paralysis. Sometimes it’s the inability to perform sexually. Impotence. Premature ejaculation. Sometimes the patient is unable even to approach the object of his feelings. That seemed to be George’s case. He felt the need to become more assertive, to speak to this woman, to approach her.”

  “Did he tell you who this woman was?”

  “No. Of course not. That would have been absolutely irrelevant. Even counterproductive. My treatment focuses on the patient. I would assume the woman had characteristics like his mother. Probably not a young woman. I would imagine she was distant, aloof, strong, aggressive. Certainly in George’s mind she was, anyway.”

  “You said earlier he had several conflicts. Were there others? Besides this sex thing for his mother, I mean?”

  “Nothing extraordinary. I would gather that his younger brother was an important factor in his life—a source of attraction and admiration, but also jealousy. Typical sibling rivalry. Again centering on the mother. And, of course, there was his father.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Dudley. He committed suicide. Isn’t that significant?”

  “Surely. It’s significant.”

  “Meaning, he’d be more likely…”

  “Meaning, Mr. Coyne, that a boy admires and wants to emulate his father, because his father has succeeded in seducing his mother, you see. They’re rivals, but the identity is powerful.”

  “So it’s not simply…”

  “None of this is simple. It’s complicated.”

  I nodded. “What about Win? That was George’s brother. How did he fit into all this? I mean, Win is dead.”

  “Only as I told you. Remember, my therapy does not require extensive dredging up of the past. George seemed quite fixated on his brother—his dead brother. This was somehow mixed up with the woman—and, of course, his mother. George directed considerable rage at his brother.”

  “Are you saying George didn’t accept that his brother was dead?”

  “No, I don’t think that was it. It was an unconscious process, part of the old repertoire we had to condition away. That feeling that he was competing with his dead brother for his mother’s love, as personified by this other woman.”

  I tried to understand all of this. I found a neat internal logic to it all, but I couldn’t identify the place where it attached to the world where real people move. Psychology, in its presumption to comprehend the unconscious mind—indeed, even to postulate the dominance of the unconscious—immediately precludes rational criticism. “It’s unconscious,” the shrinks say. “Naturally you don’t understand it. You do want to fuck your mother, of course, and you do want to murder your father, and it does fill you with guilt and self-loathing. So much guilt, in fact, that you have erected defense mechanisms to protect yourself from yourself by hiding it from your unconscious mind. It’s there. We see it. We trained experts. But you can’t expect to. Your defense mechanisms won’t let you.”

  It seemed like a lot of mumbo-jumbo. Except, somehow, it seemed to work.

  “I guess I understand,” I said to Dr. Wertz. “Tell me. Why did he terminate with you?”

  Dr. Wertz thought for a moment. “He missed an appointment,” he began slowly. “Back in January. He had been seeing me every other Tuesday afternoon—after his classes had ended for the day. September through January—the program would have been finished in June. That’s what I had promised him. So he had nine sessions, I believe. Nine out of the twenty. Anyhow, when he missed the January appointment and didn’t call, I called him. To reschedule, you know. All he would tell me was that A.C.R. had become irrelevant for him. He had something else he had to devote himself to. I tried to persuade him to finish. I couldn’t budge him.” Wertz flapped his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “You said he had something else. Meaning, he was no longer interested in the woman? Is that what you inferred?”

  “Oh, it was no inference. He told me. Research. He would be needing all his free time to travel to Boston, he said. An important research project which, he said, couldn’t wait. I suggested we find another time to meet, but he just said he wasn’t interested in the program any more.”

  “Interesting.” I nodded, feeling very much as if I were the psychoanalyst and Leonard Wertz the patient on my couch.

  “Of course,” he continued—free-associating, it struck me—“it’s all perfectly understanda
ble. George was a historian, a cerebral man, a scholar. History was his first love. Before any woman, I’m certain. History was George Gresham’s defense mechanism, you see. He knew it himself. Truth and justice, he always said, came before love and passion. So George’s first passion, his first love, was history. This woman, this intrusion, you might say, into his concept of himself, his world view, had to be reckoned with, reconciled, so to speak. I think that’s what he was telling me when he terminated. That he had reconciled her, found his place for her in his life, and he was then prepared to return to his real love.”

  “A neat theory,” I said. “Makes sense, I guess. Tell me something. What was the date of his last appointment with you?”

  He flipped through an appointment book that was on the coffee table. “Here we are. Tuesday, January 13, at four o’clock. George Gresham. The twenty-seventh was the one he missed. The last time I saw him was the thirteenth.” He looked up at me. “Is that important?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged.

  Dr. Wertz was studying me. “Have I helped you?”

  I spread my hands. “I don’t know,” I repeated. “To tell you the truth, I just don’t know what to make of it all.” I frowned. “Dr. Wertz, were you aware of George’s having any enemies? Anyone who didn’t like him, or was competing with him, or whom he didn’t like?”

  He ran his hand over his bald head. “Enemies,” he repeated. “No, none beyond the usual ones, I think.”

  “What do you mean, ‘the usual ones’?”

  “Only his father. And, of course, his brother.”

  “But they are both dead.”

  “As I tried to explain to you, Mr. Coyne, in his mind—his unconscious mind, that is—they still lived.”

  I pondered this for a moment, then nodded and stood. I thanked Leonard Wertz, M.D., shook his sausage fingers, and walked back out through the waiting room. His stocky little secretary with the dimpled knees smiled brightly at me. I leaned close to her ear and whispered, “Your panties are a very saucy shade of lavender, my dear.”