David addressed me in his soft, professional tone. “Did Jed sleep with her, Alex? Did they have an affair?”
“For what it’s worth, he denied they ever did. Of course, I wouldn’t trust him from here to the kitchen now, but the first night I met him, when he told me the story, he had no reason to lie to me.
“In fact, he made quite a point of telling me that it played a big role in his divorce. The stalker actually called and spoke to Jed’s wife. Tried to convince her that they had been having an affair—which didn’t take much for his wife to believe. I’m so confused by him now I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“Do you know any more about this than you’ve just told me?”
“No, David. I don’t. It’s sort of like what happens to doctors. Every time you go to a cocktail party, people complain to you about their aches and pains and hope for a free diagnosis. Well, for me, it’s the high crimes and misdemeanors they all unload on me. I listened to Jed’s story, but he thought the situation had ended when he moved to New York and neither one of us dwelt on it. I guess it had a certain resonance for Isabella.”
“Alex”—David was in his most sincere mode now—“Alex, would you mind if I talked to Jed about this a bit more? Perhaps something Isabella confided in him, because of his history with a similar problem, perhaps that will shed some light on these strange letters.”
Of course I minded. Mike leaped in over me. “Hey, that’s a great idea. His lawyer won’t let him talk to us, but if you call him, as Coop’s friend, I bet he’ll be hungry to talk to you. He’s screaming to get her back, Doc. That’s a great angle to work with him.”
“How do you feel about it, Alex?”
“What difference does that make?” I could feel a good pout coming on for myself.
Maureen came to my defense. She could see I was flagging and knew that I didn’t want Jed to get his toe back in the door. “Do what you gotta do, guys, but don’t put Alex in the middle of it, okay? Cut her a break, will you? Where do you think this exercise in futility will get you?”
“I’m not proposing that there’s any direct connection between Isabella’s killer and Jed’s problem, but it would certainly be interesting if they discussed the phenomenon with each other. He can tell us that, of course. Very interesting.”
Riveting. Ask him if they ever bothered to talk about me, while you’re at it.
David tried to draw me back into the conversation. “Alex, I’m sure you’ve come across this in some of your stalking cases. Obsessional love, delusional disorders—it’s in all the forensic psych literature. Quite fascinating material. Do you detectives ever work with the DSM?”
“I’ve seen the book in Alex’s office. Can’t say I’ve ever used it,” Maureen replied. Chapman just shook his head.
“It’s the forensic psych bible,” I explained. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, weighty scientific tomes that detailed and outlined the elements and criteria for a mind-boggling array of psychiatric disorders, which guided doctors and lawyers through all the odd routes of affirmative defenses and excuses for criminal conduct.
“Yeah, I know it. ‘I killed my mother because I was born with very short earlobes and webbed feet and wasn’t allowed to eat Cheerios for dinner; I skinned the cat because Uncle Harry never let me kiss Aunt Mary’s ass after church on Sundays; I put the baby in the microwave because Jupiter didn’t align with Mars and no one ever lets me do what I want to do anyway.’ Yep, for every violent crime there’s a shrink with an excuse. I didn’t know it all came out of one big book.” Mike’s disdain for the psychiatric community was beginning to rear its head. “What are we looking for here, Doc?”
“I’ll have to do some more reading tomorrow. There’s one category called obsessional love. Those are the cases where there was some kind of relationship between the subject and the victim—a love affair, a one-night stand, a ‘fatal attraction,’ if you will. The harasser begins a campaign to regain that relationship, or to seek revenge.
“The more unusual category is quite different. It’s called erotomania and—”
“Erotomania? That sounds like something I’d like to catch.” Mike was clowning again, trying to get me to cheer up.
“In cases of erotomania,” David continued, “there was never an affair or a romance between the parties—exactly like Jed told you, Alex. The stalker suffers from a delusion, the delusion that the man she fixates on actually loves her, even if she’s had only the briefest contact with him. It’s extremely bizarre.”
Maureen questioned him, “Are you serious, that this is a real disorder? The woman believes the man’s in love with her—or vice versa, even though there has never been any kind of social or sexual interaction?’”
“Exactly. It’s a delusion that they are loved by another person. And other than that delusion, the patient’s behavior is completely normal. In fact, these people are usually extremely intelligent. No other signs of mental illness or dysfunction.”
“Would you call Segal for us tomorrow, Doc? I bet he’d jump at the chance to crawl on your couch and talk to somebody about this, really.”
“Certainly, Mike, I’ll call him. I don’t think we can ignore that history of his in view of these references that Cordelia Jeffers makes, whoever she is. I’ll leave a message for Jed at his office. Alex, you can jot down his number for me. And I’ll pull some of the literature so we can find out more about the disorder. I have to take the shuttle to Washington first thing tomorrow—meeting with the Drug Czar about funding treatment programs. But I can see Segal in my office at the end of the day, and if that works with his schedule, we should know a lot more about whatever Isabella may have discussed with him by the same time tomorrow.”
“Great. I’ll call the LAPD. They’ve actually got a special bureau called the Threat Management Unit—only one I know of in the country. Maybe they can pull up Segal’s file and see if there’s anything we should know about in it.”
I wrote down the CommPlex number and handed it to David as he left. Chapman answered the intercom and told the doorman to send the kid with the pizza upstairs. I sat and chatted with Maureen and Mike as they devoured their dinner, then sent them on their way home just before midnight.
I undressed, brushed my teeth, and started to get into bed, and remembered that I had a dog-eared copy of the DSM on the shelf with my reference books in the second bedroom, which I used as a home office. It was my habit to bring the old editions of penal codes and trial manuals here whenever the new ones arrived in my office, so I had a version to work with instead of carrying the oversized books back and forth each night.
The Diagnostic Statistical Manual was hardly bedtime reading, but I had put myself to sleep so many times with autopsy photographs and Emergency Room medical records that this would be relatively light fare. I carried the volume I needed back to my bed and climbed in, looking in the index for Delusional Disorders.
The DSM noted a clear distinction in the two categories of behavior that David Mitchell had discussed. The more common was the one he referred to as “obsessional love.” It was fascinating to read, because it seemed to have been written about Isabella Lascar and her kind of problem. The manual described the prototypical obsessional love victim as a “sexy actress or bombshell”—that was our girl. In these cases, the women who became victims had prior knowledge of their harassers, usually intimate, and most of the stalking activity began following a “love gone sour” relationship. The majority of the subjects—the stalkers—were male, who harassed with letter and telephone contact. Garelli and Burrell certainly fit the bill as soured lovers, and if she had told Jed he was just a one-week stand, he’d be in exactly the same category. I couldn’t wait to show this stuff to Mike tomorrow afternoon.
It was impossible to plow through it all, with clinical examples and scads of footnotes, but it was Thursday morning already—exactly a week since I received the news of Isabella’s death—and I had all weekend to research this materia
l to see if it had any relevance to our work.
I skimmed down the pages to get to the related section on erotomania. If Jed had been truthful about his stalking experience, it appeared as though he and Isabella had been plagued by opposite aspects of a similar delusion. In cases of erotomania—unlike obsessional love—most of the victims were men, and most of the harassers were women. Like the situation Jed had described to me, the person stalked has had no relationship with the stalker, who is fervently convinced that the victim would return the affection—if not for some outside influence. Of course, I thought to myself, Jed’s wife would have been the obstacle. The harasser kept calling his wife to tell her that Jed was unfaithful. Once she could get the wife out of the way, she was deluded enough to think the path to Jed’s affection would be cleared.
No wonder Isabella and Jed had so much to talk about. It was really weird.
I wondered why I had never heard the term erotomania before, so I read on. “Erotomania is the delusional belief that one is passionately loved by another.” But as recently as the third edition of the DSM, just a few years ago, there was no specific mention of the condition. It was only with the later publication of DSM-III-R—the one I was reading—that it was included as a specific category, as physicians began to document more and more cases of patients exhibiting this unusual conduct.
I was getting sleepy, so I decided to stop after the next few paragraphs, which described the history of the initial diagnosis of the condition. It was originally documented in 1921 by a French psychiatrist named G. G. de Clèrambault and therefore, named for him: de Clèrambault’s Syndrome, and referred to in the literature of the time as psychose passionelle. As I lay in my bed each of these last few nights, suffering from a serious bout of post-breakup depression, I longed for a malady with a fancy French name like this, and hoped some obscure footnote would drop a hint that would dignify my pathetic condition with a Gallic accent.
The early case descriptions were all quite interesting, as they typified the illness. The patients were usually women from modest backgrounds, while the male victims were generally from a higher social and financial status—executives, physicians, media figures. These otherwise sane women insisted they could provide evidence for their beliefs, in the form of signs from their love objects like “meaningful glances, messages passed through newspapers, or telepathic communications.”
I had to admit my amusement at de Clérambault’s first case analysis, comparing in my mind that victim—King George V of England—and the one I knew, Jed Segal.
The French psychiatrist wrote that one of his most dramatic cases involved a fifty-year-old compatriot who became completely convinced that King George was in love with her—although, of course, they had never met. She believed that British tourists and sailors were emissaries of His Majesty, sent abroad to declare his love for her. The deluded woman made several trips to London, and on one of them, in 1918, she stood for hours outside Buckingham Palace, waiting for a glimpse of her beloved. When at last she saw a curtain moving in a window, she interpreted this as a signal from the King. As she told all those who tried to bring her to her senses, “The King might hate me, but he can never forget me.”
It was a merrier point at which to close the book for the night and go to sleep.
I reached for the light switch and took note of the still unblinking red light on my answering machine. It seemed to me that David Mitchell said he had left a message shortly before I got home from Rao’s this evening, but then I remembered that Maureen had been in here using the phone to call her husband, and probably hit the rewind button by mistake. Tomorrow I would call my parents just to say hello, but for now I would give myself to dreams of some kind of psychose passionelle. Everything—even mental illness—sounded better in French.
Chapter
22
THE RAIN HAD STOPPED BY THE TIME MY ALARM WENT OFF AT seven o’clock, and I opened the curtains to reveal a glorious October morning. It was Thursday, and I tried to remember what the day’s line-up looked like in my red desk calendar as I showered and thought ahead to the weekend. I had planned to spend it with Jed, so I daydreamed instead about a whirlwind shopping binge, a haircut that would announce a new “me,” and assembling a few of my girlfriends for a ladies’ night out at an elegant restaurant.
I didn’t feel like dealing with a Yellow Cab, so I called a car service to deliver me to the office. I read my Times most of the way downtown while Imus kept me diverted on the radio, and I was pleased to note when I entered the building through the revolving door that Battaglia’s car had not yet pulled into its reserved space directly in front of the office.
Laura was drinking her coffee down the hall with Rod’s secretary and the phones were quiet. I turned on my computer and brought up the screen for E-mail to send some messages before starting on my response to the motions I had to file in the Reynolds case.
“Mind if I come in?” I looked up to see my old friend, Mike Diamond, the veteran court reporter for the Post, standing outside my door. He had worked the courthouse beat for almost thirty years and was the revered dean of the school of the tabloid crime story. Diamond was tall and lean, with silvery hair and an irresistible grin, even when he was at his most offensive. We never ended a press conference on a rape case without his asking what the woman looked like, and even when Battaglia refused to give an answer, Mike would invent a description of his own. If he assumed the victim had been African-American because the crime had happened in a housing project in Harlem, she would appear in print as a “raven-haired beauty,” and if the rape had occurred in a townhouse on the Upper East Side, the woman was invariably a blonde.
“Enter,” I said, trying my best to be cheerful, knowing that this visit was uncharacteristically overdue, given my tangential involvement in the death of a movie star.
“Anything new?”
“All quiet, Mickey. Nothing to report.”
“No, I mean, off the record.” Right. There was no such animal as “off the record” for Mickey Diamond.
“I’m not kidding. I’ve got nothing for you, really.”
“Did you see ‘Page Six’ today?” he asked, referring to the Post’s gossip column.
“Nope.” I hated to admit it, but I usually bought the tabloid because so many of the office stories were covered in it. The last few years, the Metro section of the Times, which used to be too classy to report on all the city’s sex and violence, now read like the tabs on any given day.
“Johnny Garelli’s in town for the Lascar investigation. Says he was at Rao’s with an unidentified blonde last night. Probably a starlet or hooker. Thought maybe you’d know who she is, give me a scoop. Chapman and Peterson must keep you on top of things.”
Could he tell I was blushing? “I’m out of the loop on this one, Mickey. Just a witness.”
He smiled that impish grin that usually worked on me. “C’mon, it’s really slow. Haven’t you got anything for me?”
Unfortunately, the subject matter of my cases was prime fodder for Diamond’s stories, and every available space in the tiny courthouse press office was literally papered with headline stories that he proudly called his “Wall of Shame.” I had been a cover girl in more of those tales than I cared to count.
“Get out of here before Battaglia sees you with me and thinks I leaked something to you. Scoot.”
“Just give me a quote on the murder case, something I can use as an exclusive, please?”
“Are you out of your mind? I want to keep my job, I honestly do, Mickey.”
“Can I make up something, like how bad you feel about Isabella? I promise it’ll be tasteful.”
I picked up my box of Kleenex and threw it across the room at him, laughing at that prospect. Frequently throughout the last three or four years, before I could even ask Battaglia for permission to talk to any of the reporters about a case or an issue—a firm office rule—Diamond would have some pearls of wisdom, in quotation marks, attributed to me. Even the Distr
ict Attorney had stopped berating me and come to realize I was not guilty but that Mickey had simply fabricated the statement, trying to keep it consistent with what he thought my views would be on a given subject.
“Hey, you owe me. My editor wanted me to do a story about you and Jed Segal. Even had a headline: THE LEGAL MISS WHO MISSES KISSES, but I refused—”
I was out of my chair and making my way toward the door in a flash. “I’ll break your fucking neck if you even think about a story like that.”
“Easy, easy,” he said, putting his hands on top of his head, as if to shield himself from a strike by me. “Don’t be so sensitive, I was only joking.” He backed out past Laura’s desk. “City desk’s working on an anonymous tip. D’ya hear that Garelli killed a guy once, when he was in the Marines? Not the enemy, I mean one of his buddies. Beat him into a coma over nothing—an insult the other guy threw at him. Guy died four months later in a military hospital. We’re trying to check it out before anybody goes with it in print. Hear anything like that?”
“No, I haven’t heard a word about it,” I responded, shaking my head in amazement. Not one of the things Johnny had chosen to confide in me, but that was hardly surprising.
Mickey left me with a last effort at a story line: “Call me if you get anything decent. My imagination isn’t as sharp as it used to be. I’m not so good at creative writing anymore.”
I called Mark Acciano to see how late the judge had kept the jury working last night. “They deliberated till almost midnight, then he sent them to the hotel. Started again at nine-thirty this morning.”
“Could you get any sense of the split?”
“Nah. They all just looked tired and grumpy by the time he dismissed them. Impossible to tell what the problems were.”
“Any guessing from the court officers?”
Although it wasn’t cricket, if the court officers liked the lawyers, they often reported back what they could hear of the arguments from their stations outside the door of the locked jury rooms. If the twelve were fighting like cats and dogs it was one thing, and quite another if eleven were ganged up against one.
Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy Page 26