“I’ll call 911.” She reached for the bedside phone.
“No, don’t. Not a heart attack.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Just give me a minute or two.”
“Do you want a glass of water?”
He nodded. At least it would get her out of the room, if only for a moment. He found himself with a sudden desperate need to be alone. He wished he had a desert island to escape to.
She bolted from the bedroom, returning with a glass of water and dampened washcloth. As he drank, she placed the washcloth across his forehead. The room was becoming stationary again; the walls no longer oscillated. When he finished drinking, she sat next to him on the bed, as his breathing returned to normal and his pulse slowed. The dread passed, leaving in its wake a leaden awkwardness and embarrassment.
He forced himself to turn towards her, to look her in the eye. “I’m sorry.”
“Makes two of us.”
“Nothing like this has ever happened to me. It’s the worst feeling imaginable.”
Her tongue made a clucking sound against the roof of her mouth. “Well, it’s a first for me too. At times I’ve had a strange effect on men, but I’ve never caused anything like that before.”
“You didn’t cause it. The truth is, it had nothing to do with you.”
Her eyes bore into him, her pupils narrowed. “That’s funny, I thought it might have, since it happened in my bed, right before we were about to make love for the first time.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said helplessly.
“What did you mean? No, wait, I don’t think I want to know the answer.” She turned away from him and looked dispassion-ately out the window. “I think you should get dressed now. Go home—go home to your wife. Hmm. I wonder if anything like this happened to her, when she was having her affair.”
He sat up in bed sharply and put a hand to his face as though she’d punched him. “That was cruel.”
“I guess it was.” Her tone conveyed no trace of an apology.
⸎
Gottlieb dressed quickly, as they maintained a total silence. He couldn’t wait to be outside, to feel the late summer breeze against his cheek, to flee the confines of this apartment, to flee the presence of this woman. At the same time, it occurred to him that once he did leave, he might not see her again. An intolerable thought.
Finally, he was ready to make his exit. He glanced at his
watch. It was not quite ten o’clock. He’d been there for less than
ninety minutes. It felt like half an eternity.
His hand on the door, he turned back towards her, as she stood in the middle of the living room, her arms akimbo. “May I call you?” he asked, as tentatively as he’d ever asked anyone for anything.
She maintained a stony silence before answering. “I suppose,” she said at last. “But let’s give it a while, okay?”
CHAPTER XIX
R ARELY DID GOTTLIEB HAVE SIGNIFICANT BLOCKS of free time during the day. He was therefore at loose ends when he left Cassandra’s apartment, lacking goal or purpose, still smarting from humiliation and failure.
To the extent that he felt like doing anything, he felt like driving. Almost automatically he headed for Lake Shore Drive. He couldn’t estimate how often he’d traversed it through the years. Five hundred times? A thousand? It didn’t matter; he never tired of the sleek soaring architecture on one side, the blue-green glory of Lake Michigan on the other.
But even Lake Shore Drive gave no solace. Once on it, he found himself indifferent to it. For all he cared, it might have been the ugliest stretch of highway in the world, a collection of low-life bars and cheap motels and pawn shops.
Demoralized and distracted, he considered his options. He could always go to GCFI. Tell them he’d made a miraculous recovery, and he’d decided to come in after all. Too late for that, though. GCFI was far away—by the time he arrived, it would almost be time to leave again. Besides, and more to the point, he didn’t want to go there. GCFI was, in fact, the last place he wanted to be just now, with the exception of Cassandra’s apartment.
Half tapping, half pounding the steering wheel, Gottlieb weighed his other options. He could do what she said: go home to his wife. Except that Sharon wouldn’t be at home. She’d be at work. Sarah would be at day care. Only Peter would be there, probably just emerging from his den. Miserable, profoundly shaken, Gottlieb realized that he simply lacked the heart to see his son just then.
He could go to a restaurant, get something to eat. Not a bad idea, except that he wasn’t hungry. He could kill an hour or two in one of the nearby museums, the Field Museum or the Museum of Science and Industry. Another reasonable option, but he had no interest in them. Or he could go early to his office, rearrange the piles of papers on his desk, and pretend to read some journals. If all else failed, he could play solitaire on his computer.
Beset by colossal indifference, he pulled off Lake Shore Drive and headed to his office. He couldn’t recall a time when the day passed so slowly, so oppressively. The thought came to him, as undeniable as it was unwelcome—I need help. I need to talk to someone. The realization made him blush and clench his teeth. Gottlieb had grown used to a caretaking role. He was the strong one, the one whom others turned to. He hated few things as much as admitting that he needed help himself. The illogic of this made it no easier to stomach. He sought help only when he had no choice.
As soon as he got to his office, Gottlieb took the Yellow Pages from a drawer. With a sigh he turned to the listings for physicians, searching for Warren Pasternak, the psychiatrist he’d seen a quarter of a century ago.
There was no such listing, as he’d expected. The man had almost certainly retired, off to Florida or California. Or else he’d died. He’d been in his midfifties when Gottlieb had consulted him. That would make him close to eighty now.
On a hunch, Gottlieb picked up another phone book, the White Pages. Pasternak would likely have had an unlisted home number while he still practiced. Once retired, though, he wouldn’t need one. A long shot, but Gottlieb was desperate enough to try anything. He turned to the P’s. Pace . . . Paget . . . Parker . . . Pasternak, Dr. Warren V. The listing gave a Sheridan Road address.
He dialed the number right away, lest he give himself an opportunity to back down. The phone rang half a dozen times
before a man answered—Hello? The voice was clearly Warren Pasternak’s: older now, but with the same tone, mildly questioning. The same cadence; the same hint of a subtle, not displeasing accent. Gottlieb recalled that he’d immigrated to America as boy, arriving here with no English. His parents, Austrian Jews, had seen the writing on the wall. Like Cassandra’s parents.
It occurred to Gottlieb that he didn’t know what he’d say. He hadn’t thought it through that far. “Dr. Pasternak?”
“Speaking.”
“Dr. Pasternak, I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Harold Gottlieb. I was your patient many years ago.”
“Gottlieb. Harold Gottlieb . . .” The old man pondered this awhile. “Why, yes, I do remember you. I saw you when I did some work for Student Health Services. You were in medical school, yes?”
“That’s right. I saw you for—oh, four or five months, I think it was. You helped me very much.”
“Well, this is always nice to hear.” He sounded pleased. “We don’t get those quick dramatic outcomes, like the surgeons.”
“So I’ve noticed. I became a psychiatrist myself.”
“Really! Where do you work?”
“Here, in Chicago.” Gottlieb was starting to feel less tentative, less needy. “I do a fair bit of forensic psychiatry. I’m on the staff of the Greater Chicago Forensic Institute. I also do some teaching, and I have a small private practice.”
“I hear from everyone how hard it is these days to practice,” he said. “Myself, I was very fortunate. I quit ten years ago, before this foolishness with managed care became too bad. Before the bean counters and fai
led nurses began to watch over us like birds of prey.”
“Have you retired completely?”
“Just about. I do a little work for Jewish Family Services, six hours a week tops.” He paused. “So, Dr. Gottlieb—”
“Hal. Please call me Hal.”
“So, Hal, what leads you to call me after all these years?”
A truthful answer might have gone along these lines: Because I have a case I don’t know how to deal with, a life-or-death case which is taking me into dark uncharted waters. Because I need to talk about my son, my one-time greatest joy in life, who throws me completely for a loop right now. Whenever I come home, I half expect to find that he hanged himself. Because I had my very first panic attack this morning, in the bed of a woman not my wife. Because my life no longer makes much sense to me. There hasn’t been a great disaster, at least not yet, and God knows it could be infinitely worse, but it simply doesn’t make much sense to me at all.
What he said instead was this: “I’m dealing with a very unusual case right now, a criminal case, and I’d appreciate your input. I’m also dealing with some, uhm, difficult personal issues. Talking with you has helped me clarify things before, and I thought it might again.”
Pasternak seemed to deliberate before replying. “Well, Dr. Gottlieb—Hal—as I told you, I closed my office long ago. But I’d be happy to meet with you here, in my home. Informally.”
Gottlieb felt a tidal wave of gratitude pass though him. “I can’t tell you how much I’d appreciate that.”
“When would you like to come?”
“As soon as possible, whenever it’s convenient.”
“Come tomorrow morning if you’d like. Ten thirty?”
“Perfect.”
Gottlieb thanked him again, said good-bye and heaved a huge sigh of relief. For the first time in weeks he felt something akin to calmness.
⸎
Warren Pasternak lived on the eleventh floor of a high-rise at the southern end of Sheridan Road, a short distance past the terminus of Lake Shore Drive. His apartment included a small patio off the living room, facing the lake. He and Gottlieb sat there, on opposite sides of a serving table that held their glasses of iced coffee and a plate of macaroons. It also held Pasternak’s smoking accouterments. A pouch of tobacco, a pipe tool, and a lighter. He smoked an elaborately carved meerschaum. A light breeze from the lake failed to dissipate an aromatic haze that lingered above the patio.
“This is my favorite place on earth,” began Pasternak, after an exchange of pleasantries. “I sit here by the hour. I read, I watch the colors of the lake change, I observe its moods. I watch the boats and planes.” He pointed towards the sky. “This is one of the approaches to O’Hare.”
“It’s very pleasant.”
“I think we moved here because of the patio. I wasn’t much older than you are now. Our children were grown, and we wanted someplace smaller than the house we had in Evanston. We looked at different condos, but none of them had a view like this one.”
He still wore a wedding band, Gottlieb noticed, but the condo showed no sign of a woman’s presence. “Is your wife living?”
“Barely. She’s in a nursing home. Advanced Alzheimer’s. Once in a while she knows who I am, but not usually. She spends the day wandering up and down the corridors. You know how Alzheimer’s patients tend to pace. Sometimes she’ll watch a video of tropical fish swimming in a tank. No plot, no dialogue, just the fish. It was made for cats. Now this was a lawyer, someone who graduated from the University of Chicago cum laude. They made her an editor of the Law Review.”
“I’m sorry. It must have been awful for you.”
He acknowledged the condolence with a nod. “The first stage was the worst. She was still intact enough to know what was happening. She’d cry for hours, sometimes for days. None of the antidepressants made a whit of difference. All they did was give her side effects. Blurred vision, lightheadedness, upset
stomach, dry mouth. You name them, she had them.”
He drew on the pipe. “Well, Hal, it’s what that woman said—Hannah Greene, her name was? No one promises us a rose garden.”
They fell silent as a trio of sailboats swept across the horizon, their sails gleaming in the bright sunlight. Pasternak put down the pipe and tapped the edge of it against the ashtray.
“Tell me about this case you’re so concerned with.”
“Have you followed the Christina Shannon murder?”
“Not closely. When you reach my age, you grow tired of the atrocity of the moment.”
Gottlieb paused to organize his thoughts. “I told you, I do a lot of forensic work. James Shannon, her father, is our patient.” He gave a quick review of the key facts of the case, including results of the workup to date. “It’s a matter of life or death, literally,” he concluded. “Our evaluation may play a role in whether or not he’s executed.”
“I see. And you say you’ve found no evidence of a major psychiatric illness?”
“None. That isn’t just my own opinion. Everyone at GCFI who spends time with him feels that way. It’s also been corroborated by friends and family members.”
“Hmm. Very interesting.” Pasternak refilled his pipe and lit it, expelling a spiral swirl of smoke. He asked many of the questions which Gottlieb had asked himself. Did Shannon have an undiagnosed physical problem? Did he have a rare reaction to some prescription medication? Did losing his wife set in motion a psychotic depression? Was Gottlieb convinced he didn’t drink to excess or use drugs?
Gottlieb answered the questions as he sipped iced coffee. “Shannon once described himself as the most ordinary man in the world,” he remarked. “And he is, except for having killed his daughter in cold blood, for no apparent reason.”
“Tell me what you know about the girl.”
“She was neat and clean, polite and obedient, and no one
liked her. It goes beyond dislike. She was universally despised by just about everyone who knew her. Hated, even.” He summarized the meetings with Malcolm Kenyon and Anita Pierce, ending with an account of Anita’s blindness.
The story prompted Pasternak to inhale sharply. “You’re suggesting that she blinded this woman—blinded her!— because they asked her to leave the camp?”
“I know, it sounds preposterous. But the more I hear about her, the less preposterous it sounds. One thing’s certain. Someone put something in those eyedrops, and there weren’t any other candidates.”
Gottlieb finished the iced coffee, then resumed. “From early childhood she seems to have enjoyed inflicting pain on others.”
“Well, there are sociopathic children, no doubt about it.” The old man stroked his chin. “Did you ever read The Mask of Sanity? That book must be fifty years old now, but it’s still the best account of antisocial types I’ve come across.”
“But she wasn’t a classic sociopath. For one thing, she was never impulsive. She thought things through, she’d bide her time, she’d plan. She didn’t smoke or drink or use drugs. She didn’t act out sexually, at least not that we know of. I never saw her report cards, but I’d be surprised if there was any mention of poor conduct.” He set down the empty glass. “She was also more sadistic than most of the sociopaths I’ve known.” He recounted the story of the goldfish, and her reaction to her mother’s burns from the spilled coffee, and the drawings they’d found at Green Lake Camp.
They fell silent while a 747 flew directly overhead, effectively drowning out all conversation. “The more I learn about her,” resumed Gottlieb, “the more it sounds as if she might have been a genuinely evil person. Whatever that means.”
“Are you sure she hadn’t been abused?”
“I’m not very sure about anything these days, but her father
is the least likely candidate for child abuse I’ve ever known.”
“What about abuse from others? A grandfather or an uncle? A cousin, a neighbor? Or a priest?”
Gottlieb shook his head. “I can only say that I don�
�t think so. Neither did Dr. Kenyon.”
“Hmm.” Another swirl of pipe smoke rose above them. “Interesting, what you said about evil people, whatever that means. There was a time when I was preoccupied with understanding evil. Obsessed with it. I’d just started medical school. It was towards the end of World War II, following the liberation of the death camps. We were just learning the full extent of the Nazi horrors. To put it simply, I couldn’t fathom how such things were possible. So I read . . . I read everything I could get my hands on. Books on psychology, philosophy, religion. I read about evil until it made me slightly crazy, but the more I read, the more it bewildered me. As they’d say today, I couldn’t get a handle on it. Now this is strictly my own opinion, Hal, but I think there’s something about the nature of evil which always eludes us, no matter how hard we try to understand it. Perhaps it always will.”
“Do you believe there’s some ultimate source of evil? Some embodiment of it?”
He set the meerschaum in the ashtray carefully. “I don’t believe, I don’t disbelieve. Such a belief makes no sense to me, of course. Devils with pitchforks are for children on Halloween. But through the years, I’ve heard things that are hard to understand in rational terms.”
“Such as?”
Pasternak folded his hands placidly on his lap. “Let me tell you about a patient I used to have. We’ll call him John. An ordinary fellow, probably much like your James Shannon. Middle-aged, a strong Catholic background. A tool-and-dye maker who worked for the same company for twenty years. John’s wife left him for another man, and I was treating him for depression. One day we were talking about his family of origin. He had two sisters and a brother. I asked him why he never talked about his brother. John said he hoped he’d never see him again, that he considered him a lost cause. And these were his exact words—I did everything I could for him. I even went to the exorcism.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Model Child_a psychological thriller Page 20