Wallflower j-3

by William Bayer

  Aaron had looked into former boyfriends, too. Except for Gale they all seemed to be jocks.

  "Maybe not the brightest guys, but most of them fairly decent. She didn't like pretentious or overstudious types."

  Simionov, the fencing coach, had told Janek pretty much the same thing:

  "She talked straight and she fenced straight and she liked straight-talking people. If she'd lived, who knows how far she might have gone? Bronze medal, maybe even silver." The coach had shaken his head with grief. "She had everything: talent, will, strength and speed, and as fierce a fighting spirit as I ever encountered in a woman. Who knows? With a little luck she might have gone all the way."

  Fran Dunning phoned Janek two days after their walk.

  "You said I should call you if I remembered anything.

  Good girl! "What do you remember?"

  "Something Jess said at the Chinese restaurant. It's probably not important, but I thought I should tell you anyway. She said she might have to stop seeing her shrink."

  Interesting. "Did she say why?"

  "No. But I'm sure the reason wasn't financial because she once told me her stepfather was paying the fees. I wouldn't remember her mentioning it except the week before she'd been very positive about her therapist."

  "Try and recall her exact words, Fran? Did she say she might have to stop or that she wanted to quit?" "I don't remember exactly. But I had the feeling that she was disgusted about something, that whatever it was, it was gnawing at her, and that if she stopped seeing her therapist, it would be at her initiative." Fran paused. "I could be wrong, Lieutenant, but that's what I thought at the time."

  Janek thanked Fran and reminded her to call him again if she remembered anything more. When he put down the phone, he thought about what she'd said. Jess's comment could have been a casual remark, but still he was glad he knew about it. He'd been looking,for an excuse to see Dr. Archer again. This time, he resolved, he would limit the discussion to her former patient.

  The therapist had set their appointment for 5:00 P.m. As before, she appeared at the door of her waiting room precisely on the hour.

  "Nice to see you again, Lieutenant. You have fifty minutes," she announced with a sympathetic smile.

  As Janek followed her into the consulting room, he noticed that her curly red hair was dyed.

  "Now, how may I help you?" Dr. Archer began smiling again after they were seated in opposing chairs. "Jess tried to get in touch with me two days before she was killed. Any idea why?"

  Archer shook her head. "I have no idea, and I can't imagine why you'd ask me that."

  "Her father and I were partners once. Laura Dorance thinks Jess might have wanted to ask me about him. Did she talk about him much in here?"

  The psychologist looked pained. "As I told you before, Lieutenant, even though Jessica has passed away, I don't feel I can properly discuss her therapy."

  "Look, Dr. Archer, I'm conducting a criminal investigation. Right now I need your help. If you refuse to give it to me, then I'm faced with a problem. I can write you off as an unhelpful witness or I can seek a court order to compel you to respond." The therapist was staring at him. Janek smiled to soften his threat. "I certainly hope that won't be necessary."

  Dr. Archer sat very still. The office was silent except for the muted sound of classical music issuing from the waiting-room radio.

  After waiting futilely for her to speak, Janek decided to take her silence as acquiescence.

  "Laura tells me Jess began asking questions about her dad about the time she started seeing you. Laura assumed his name came up in therapy."

  "His name did come up," Dr. Archer affirmed.

  "Just his name? Or his character?"

  The therapist tightened her lips. "I am truly mystified," she said.

  "Why are you asking me about this?"

  "Please, Dr. Archer, I'm not your patient. I'm here to ask questions, not answer them."

  She turned away, irritated. "And you expect me to respond without the right to ask questions of my own-is that how it goes, Lieutenant?"

  Janek turned conciliatory. "Can't we try and work this out?"

  Archer turned back to him, then folded her hands neatly on her lap. "I shall try to help you as best I can," she whispered, then clamped her mouth shut.

  He found the next half hour trying. Archer kept her word, answered all his questions clearly, sometimes even exhaustively. But she made no effort to be pleasant. Rather, she replied to him in terse sentences while gazing at him as though she regarded him as a torturer.

  Tim Foy: Yes, he was discussed; in therapy a patient's parents always are. Jessica had described watching her father get into his car and then seeing it explode. Her father's death had been the traumatic event of her early years, yet her long-term response to it had been surprisingly positive. Seeing him die had hardened her will. She was determined never to become a victim. She developed all aggressive personality that she channeled healthily into sports. All of that was entirely to her credit.

  Bad dreams: Yes, Jessica had been having them lately. Nothing unusual about that. A patient often feels a requirement to bring dream material to her analyst, especially in the early stages of therapy. The content of her dreams varied, but they were typical college-age stress fantasies: facing an exam while blacking out all knowledge of the subject; finding herself naked in a room in which everyone else is dressed; letting her tewnmates down by stumbling during a fencing match and thus losing a tournament to a rival school.

  Sex: Jessica had the normal longings of a woman her age with no indications of lesbianism beyond normal parameters. Again much to her credit, her initial exhilaration at the anonymous sex to which Greg Gale had introduced her gave way fairly quickly to feelings of inner emptiness and ennui.

  The topless fencing episode: That could be viewed in a sexual context, although Dr. Archer saw it somewhat differently. Jessica had brought it up at their first session. It was her "presenting symptom."

  She was disturbed about it. She felt that by staging the scene with the other girl, a British fencer she had befriended at the Ruspoli School in Italy, she had done something forbidden, possibly even evil.

  "The imagery of the Bayard painting embedded itself in Jessica's mind,"

  Archer explained. "She was fascinated by the seminudity of it, the notion of women exposing their bared flesh to a steel sword. She equated it with the stripped-down costuming of male boxers. to fight bare meant to duel seriously, even to the death. We spent several sessions working through her troubled feelings about it, especially her guilt over having talked the English girl into trying it.

  In my analysis I tried to focus on the underlying meaning of the scene.

  What we came up with (and I emphasize we did this together) was that Jessica's strong attraction to fencing and to martial arts was based on her romantic notion of heroism. I called it the gladiator's syndrome, the idea that the highest, most noble way of life is the way of the warrior who regularly offers his body to injury or death for the delectation of the public. The gladiator's sacrifice is for the benefit of those who watch him. By engaging in dangerous fights, he fulfills the innermost needs of his audience, channeling its bloodlust into sport, stylizing its collective aggression into art. At the same time he, or she, in the case of Jessica, surrounds herself with an aura of glamour. It's close to the Japanese samurai ideal, but with the added component of exhibitionism. It's a hard, short life of intense experience-perilous, painful, and, ultimately, self-sacrificial."

  It was a brilliant analysis, and Janek was dazzled by it. He was also impressed at the way Archer seemed to come alive. But the change in her demeanor made him uneasy. The voice she used to explain the fencing episode was different from her voice when answering his other queries. It was more vital, authoritative, indicative of an inner power and confidence that didn't fit with her earlier pettiness. Now he felt he was listening to another person altogether, a strong, dynamic temperament hiding behind a bland, nondes
cript fagade. But even before, he realized, Archer's eyes had betrayed her. Her relentless gaze should have warned him he was dealing with an extraordinary individual, far more passionate, forceful, and intelligent than her insipid professional manner and constricted body language would suggest.

  But then another transformation, which Janek found equally surprising, took place. When he mentioned the Polaroids he'd found in Jess's closet, he saw an immediate pinching up of the eyes, followed by a grimace of anger. The reaction was fleeting, covered up almost instantly by a patient nodding of the head. But Janek was certain about what he'd seen: Jess had not told Archer about the pictures, and for that the therapist now felt betrayed.

  "I take it you didn't know about them," he asked.

  Archer shrugged the omission off. "A patient will almost always hold something back." Her tone connoted superior wisdom. "A little shield against the therapist, a small corner of privacy to be preserved.":,Do the photographs surprise you?" 'Not the photographs so much as the way Jessica hid them. I have to admit that surprises me a bit."

  "Why?" Archer raised an eyebrow. "You found them, didn't ou?" Janek squinted. "You're not suggesting she expected me to search her room?"

  "Of course not, Lieutenant. But she didn't hide them all that well.

  A good hiding place is an irrevocable hiding place, one that stays secret even after the hider's death."

  "So what does that tell you?"

  When Archer began to speak, Janek recognized the same authoritative voice she'd used while analyzing the fencing incident.

  "It tells me Jessica wasn't all that ashamed about partaking in the scene. I know from what she told me how difficult it was for her to set it up. I know she proposed the idea to a teammate here in New York and, to her embarrassment, was rebuffed. Still, she needed a confederate, in this case the English girl, and so she took a chance. By merely broaching such a bizarre idea, she risked exposing herself to the other girl's ridicule."

  But this time the other girl went along." 'She did. And I think that that, ultimately, is what got Jessica so upset. Not that the English girl went along, but the way she went along, as if she took it as a seduction on Jessica's part and regarded it as a forbidden act."

  "But there's still something I don't understand, Doctor. You say Jess was troubled by the incident. If she was, why didn't she destroy the photographs?"

  Archer paused to reflect. "Difficult to say. Perhaps for the same reason people often hesitate to destroy documentation even when it contains material that's painful for them to see or read. Jessica staged the duel. She had a large emotional investment in it. to destroy the photographs of the scene she'd worked so hard to set up would be to deny herself any chance to contemplate it in the future and perhaps even to revel in what she'd done."

  Janek smiled. "You're a fascinating woman, Doctor. It's very interesting to talk to you."

  The therapist smiled demurely, then glanced at her watch. "Which brings us," she said, "to the end of the session. Your fifty minutes are nearly up."

  A final question." Archer motioned for Janek to ask it. "I have it from one of Jess's closest friends, who spoke to her just days before she died, that she was thinking about quitting therapy."

  "And you want to know what I think about that?" Archer looked past him toward the opposite wall. "In this business we're used to sudden changes in a patient's feelings. In the therapeutic relationship the therapist often comes to represent important figures in the patient's life-parent, sibling, lover-toward whom the patient then acts out. So, you see, when a patient contemplates leaving her therapist, it's only a natural by-product of the process."

  "So I shouldn't make too much of it?"

  "You may make of it whatever you like," the psychologist replied, rising. On their way to the door she turned to him again. "Have you given any thought to what I said last time?" Janek nodded. "I thought about it.'-' "And dismissed it out of hand?"

  "Not at all. But after I thought about it awhile, I decided you were wrong."

  Archer grinned. "You work in a most dangerous and stressful field, Lieutenant. There's bound to be some distortion in your view of things."

  Janek smiled. "Think I could use some therapy, Doctor?"

  Her grin widened. "We can all use therapy, Lieutenant. In your case I'd say it certainly wouldn't hurt." they both chuckled over that. Then at the door Janek thanked her for her time. "I hope we can talk again."

  The therapist nodded. "Anytime, Lieutenant. Just give me a call. I shall always try to fit you in."

  That evening Janek took a long walk. Leaving his apartment at six o'clock, when the rush-hour traffic was just at its crest, he headed up Broadway to merge with the throngs still surging out of the subways. On his route he passed stores offering high- and low-fashion gar ments; markets offering sturgeon and pastrami; Chinese, Turkish, Lebanese, and Ethiopian restaurants; bars catering to gays and transvestites; panhandlers; dope dealers; homeless people living in cardboard boxes; old people sitting on benches; and aggressive young people on the make.

  By the time he reached the Columbia University campus, he felt he had confronted a cross section of the human condition.

  At 114th Street he turned into Riverside Park. Although it was a chilly November night, the joggers were out in force. He didn't see many lone runners; press and TV coverage about Jess was still in the public mind. But as he walked farther uptown, the number dwindled off, until, north of the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, there were none at all.

  It was a basic principle of his trade that the first step in any investigation was to go to the crime scene and get a feeling for the place. Since he and Aaron had taken over the case from Boyce, he had been putting such a visit off. Now, approaching the spot where Jess's body had been dragged off the jogging path, he felt his heartheat quicken.

  The streetlamps were on, but in the long, narrow strip of parkland the foliage was dense and the shadows were deep. Despite the darkness, it didn't take him long to find the spot. Orange-tipped police stakes caught the ambient light cast by cars racing above on Riverside Drive. And then he was surprised. There were a good dozen bunches of flowers, mostly dfied up but all the more poignant for being so, arranged along the bottom row of stones of an old retaining wall just behind the site. Stubs of candles were set there, too, in little hardened pools of melted wax. People had heard that a fine young woman had died in this place; they had been moved, had come and left tangible evidence of their caring. So now in the underbrush, amidst the jettisoned Coke cans and discarded sandwich wrappers, a small shrine had been erected at the Scene of Suffering. It would last until the first heavy snow.

  The glue: Janek was obsessed by it. The ice picks were bad enough; they didn't reflect the caring of a knife, the quick dispatch of a bullet, the hatred of a poison. Leaving the picks embedded was bad, too. You didn't bother to use something fine to take your victim's life; you used a throwaway. Like eating your dinner off a paper plate or drinking your wine from a Styrofoam cup, it was a way of showing your contempt.

  But the glue was worse; the glue was truly awful. Janek had investigated many homicides in which victims had been bound. He'd seen handcuffs and rope burns and even barbed wire cutting into flesh. He'd seen his share of mutilations, too: cuts, slices, and, in the Switch Case, actual dismemberment, decapitation. But glue was different. Glue was made of animal wastes, old bones and hooves boiled down to a viscous jelly. Glue was what you used to stick pieces of wood together, not to bind the parts of a human being. Glue said: "I don't desecrate by cutting; I'm not a psychotic acting out my rage." Glue said: "I'm cool, patient. I go about my chosen task the way an undertaker goes about his. I'm neat and careful and whistle a merry tune as I seal up people's body cavities."

  Janek thought he hated this killer more than any killer he had ever sought, not only because the man had taken the life of a person he had loved but also because he had done so with such dehumanizing scorn.

  He was watching the late-evening ne
ws, trying to concentrate on an awful story about a ten-year-old boy set on fire because he refused to buy crack from a school bully, when his telephone rang. It was Monika calling with wonderful news. She would be coming through New York in three weeks' time, en route to a psychiatrists' conference in San Francisco.

  "I hope you're planning to stay awhile," Janek said.

  "Can I take that as an invitation?"

  "You bet you can! How much time can you give me?"

  "Two or three days. Maybe a couple more on my way home."

  That wasn't very much, but it was better than nothing. "How about a couple of years?" he asked. Monika laughed. "Why don't you come out to San Francisco with me?"

  "Sure. And take a little room down the hall so the chambermaids won't get any funny ideas."

  As they talked, he picked up the glass she'd given him, angled it so it caught the light.

  "Maybe I ought to join you in Frisco," he said. "I've been spending so much time with shrinks lately I'm sure I'd feel right at home."

  Monika was intrigued by his account of his meeting with Dr. Chun but was skeptical about something Dr. Archer had said.

  "It's true," she told him, "that a patient who wants to leave therapy can be acting out against an analyst who reminds her of a difficult figure in her life. But your goddaughter wasn't in treatment long enough to develop that kind of strong transference relationship."

  "How long would it take?" Janek asked.

  "Several months at least."

  "Can you think of any other reason why Jess may have wanted to quit?"

  "There could have been a lot of reasons. Anxiety caused by her therapy or a personal dislike for her therapist. I lost a patient once because he saw me unexpectedly in a nightclub."

  "What was so bad about that?"

  "Normally nothing. But this man idealized me. When he saw me dancing with my husband in a sexy environment, he was thrown into such turmoil he couldn't relate to me any longer as his analyst."

  "You say he saw you. Did you see him, too?"