The Syndrome

by John Case

  Adrienne nodded. “I felt sorry for him,” she muttered, and it was true. For a moment, it seemed as if he was coming apart at the seams. Then he got it together. Somehow.

  “Well, don’t get carried away,” Bonilla told her. “Just because he’s fucked up, that don’t make him a good guy.”

  She nodded a second time. “I know,” she replied, and picked up phone to check the messages at her office. Behind the door, she could hear Duran and the polygrapher talking, but she couldn’t tell what was being said.

  “Are you sitting in a chair? Wait to answer.”

  Duran counted to three, and said, “Yes.”

  “Is today November 8th?”

  Again, he waited as he’d been told to do, and then replied, “Yes.”

  The polygrapher watched the graph being drawn on his monitor. “Am I sitting across from you? Answer ‘No.’”

  Duran did as he was told. And then they got down to business.

  “Is your real name Jeffrey Duran?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a licensed clinical psychologist?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Just answer the question, yes or no,” Sutton scolded. “Are you a licensed clinical psychologist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was your treatment of Nico Sullivan meant to be in her best interest?”

  “Yes.”

  After Duran had left in a taxi, Adrienne and Bonilla went into the testing room, where Sutton was printing out a copy of the results.

  “So?” Bonilla asked, rubbing his hands together. “Whatta we got?”

  The polygrapher looked at Adrienne, and shrugged. “What we’ve ‘got’… is George Washington.”

  Bonilla frowned. “Paul… don’t do this to me. What are you talkin’ about?”

  “He’s Jeffrey Duran.”

  “No, he’s not,” Bonilla told him.

  “Well, he thinks he is,” Sutton replied. “And when he says he’s a clinical psychologist, he thinks he’s telling the truth.”

  “Get outa here,” Bonilla exclaimed. “We know he’s lying. He’s in the Death Index!”

  The polygrapher shook his head, sat back in his chair, and turned the palms of his hands upward, as if to say, What can I tell you?

  Adrienne spoke up. “Just before the test, you suggested the results might not be reliable.”

  “That’s true,” Sutton admitted. “But that was because he was so overwrought, so stressed I was afraid everything he said would look like a lie. But that’s not what I got. Look,” he said and beckoned them around to his side of the table.

  On the computer screen were four graphs, arranged in tiers, one on top of the other. Using the mouse, Sutton put the cursor on the line marked PNEUMO 1, and clicked. Instantly, the other lines disappeared, and PNEUMO 1 filled the screen. “See this?” he asked, moving the cursor to a sharp peak that spiked above the line’s median wave. “That’s a lie.”

  “How do you know?” Adrienne asked.

  “Question number 4: ‘Is my shirt yellow? Answer yes.’“ Sutton pinched the fabric of his white shirt, and shook it to illustrate the point. Then he flipped the monitor from one screen to another—PNEUMO 2, CARDIO, and GSR. Similar spikes could be seen in about the same place on each graph.

  “So?” Bonilla asked.

  “So we know what a lie looks like when Mr. Duran is telling one. Now, look at this,” he told them, moving the cursor to a wobble in the GSR line. “That’s the truth. You can see: there’s no stress at all.”

  “What was the question?” Adrienne wondered.

  “Another test question: ‘Are you sitting in a chair?’ Answer: ‘yes.’ He was sitting right across from me.”

  “And when you asked him if he was Jeffrey Duran?”

  Sutton consulted his notes, and moved the cursor to a part of the graph that was nearly flat. “You see what I mean?” Then he flipped the screens, one after another. “CARDIO. ABDOMINAL PNEUMOGRAPH. THORACIC PNEUMOGRAPH. There’s nothing. He’s practically flat lining.”

  Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Finally, Bonilla chuckled. “The son of a bitch beat the polygraph!”

  Sutton tried to object “You can’t beat—”

  “He beat it, Paul! We know he’s not Duran.”

  “He thinks he is.”

  “Bullshit.”

  They fell quiet again, and the noise of the traffic on Old Keene Mill Road was suddenly apparent, a low hum. Finally, Sutton said, “You can’t really ‘beat’ the polygraph—” As Bonilla started to object, Sutton held up his hand, as if he were answering a question in class. “Hear me out,” he told them. “What you can do—if you’re really good—is muddy the results.”

  “What about drugs?” Bonilla demanded. “A couple of Valium—”

  “Even with drugs, the most you could do is create some ambiguities.

  But that’s not what I’m seeing on this test. There aren’t any ambiguities. Every indicator’s crystal clear.”

  “So where does that leave us?” Adrienne asked.

  “Well, if it looks like the truth, but you know it’s a lie, I suppose it’s possible…”

  “What’s possible?” Bonilla insisted.

  “That he’s a psychopath—”

  “Bingo!” Bonilla exclaimed.

  “It’s very rare,” the polygrapher remarked, “but it may be that Mr. Duran—whoever he is—it may be that he’s not wired the way you and I are.”

  “How do you mean?” Adrienne asked.

  “A psychopath is someone who’s devoid of empathy, someone who lacks all moral dimension. So we’re talking about a person who doesn’t really distinguish between good and bad in an ethical sense. It’s just a question of what feels good—for them. So lying doesn’t generate any stress at all. And these machines… well, that’s what they measure. So…”

  “But when you asked him to lie, it did cause stress. You showed us. ‘Is my shirt yellow?’”

  Sutton smiled. “Right. Well, the truth is that when I said you couldn’t beat a polygraph machine, what I meant was that you couldn’t fake the truth. But you can fake a lie.”

  “How?”

  “By generating stress. Some criminals know this and use various techniques to produce polygraph results that are ‘inconclusive.’ Because if every response reads as a lie—even clearly truthful ones such as verifying one’s name… “ He shrugged. “The results are useless.”

  “What techniques?”

  Sutton shrugged again. “Long division works well. The operator poses a question. The subject does a little math as he responds to the question, the stress caused by the calculation makes the response look like a lie. Or you could bite the inside of your mouth, pinch yourself. Pain shows up as stress, too.”

  “So,” Adrienne said, “you’re telling us Duran knew that he had to make the responses that were clearly lies look like lies.”

  Sutton pressed his hands together. “Well, Eddie did say the both of you were surprised when this guy agreed to the test. So maybe he’s been around the block a few times.”

  “What he’s saying, Scout, is that your boy is a cold son of a bitch—is that about right, Paulie?”

  Sutton nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he said. “If you’re right about who he is… it’s a wonder he’s got any arms and legs.”

  “What do you mean?” Adrienne asked, looking puzzled.

  Bonilla chuckled. “He means—”

  Sutton nodded. “The guy’s a snake.”

  Chapter 16

  Leaning back against the seat of the taxi, Duran watched the windows run with steam, and listened to the tires’ sloshing in the rain. He should have felt better. He should be happy. It was obvious from the polygrapher’s body language that he’d passed the test with flying colors. Which ought to have left him feeling… validated, or something. But all he really felt was a vague unease—as if “the other shoe” had yet to drop.

  Up front, the windshield wipers were working overtime, but not
to much purpose. The rain was falling in microbursts, puffs of fine spray followed by sheets of water that slowed the cab to a crawl.

  “This is some bad shit,” the driver remarked.

  Duran nodded and, noticing the tiny flag on the dash, replied without thinking, “Lavalas.”

  The driver did a double take, and glanced at his passenger in the rearview mirror. “Pale Creole, zanmi?”

  Duran looked at him. “What?”

  “I said, pale Creole—no?”

  Duran shook his head, uncertain what he meant. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  The driver chuckled and shrugged. “Just a few words, then. Lavalas—big rain.”

  Duran nodded, uncertain how he’d known the word. From television, maybe, but… zanmi meant ‘friend.’ Somehow, he knew that one, too. Christ, he thought, and looked out the window at a smear of glowing, red taillights.

  “Looka that!” the driver exclaimed. “Standing watuh!”

  Duran saw that, up ahead, a Lexus was stalled in a pool of water. The water covered most of two lanes, and all the traffic had to squeeze around it.

  “You mind a little music, chief?”

  Duran shook his head. “No. Music would be fine.”

  The driver shoved a cassette into the console. “I wish I had some konpa for you, but my other customers, they don’t like the horns. So, I carry Marley… “ The tape began to play.

  “No, wo-man, no cry…”

  The cab inched forward and stopped, inched forward and stopped, strangely in tempo with the music. Duran sat back and closed his eyes, thinking, Konpa… But whose konpa? Eklips’?… Sweet Micky… Tabou. Where did he get this? How did he know this music? From television? He didn’t think so. It was more like—déjà vu, or that reincarnation business he’d been thinking about.

  And it made him shiver.

  Because something was going on in his head, and whatever it was, it was totally beyond his control. It was as if his identity, his sense of self, was peeling away like paint from an old house.

  There were moments when he seemed to remember—actually remember—another life. The cabbie’s voice—Pale Creole, zanmi?—and his round, black face… They were Haiti in the flesh. He could smell the place—a montage of jasmine, rum, and sewage. It was a place he’d been to, a place he really knew. He was sure of that. But when? And why? He couldn’t say. All he knew was that his memory of Haiti was three-dimensional and eidetic, unlike so many other memories (unlike, for instance, the memory of his mother). It was real, and not a pastiche of television shows and articles.

  Nor was that all. There were other memories he couldn’t explain, or fragments of them.

  He seemed, for instance, to know a lot about mycology. This expertise had surfaced in the supermarket, when he’d been picking out shiitakes. Suddenly, he’d realized that the terminology of mushrooms was as familiar to him as the names of presidents—a litany of boluses, gills, and mycelia. Where did that come from?

  I remember when we used to sit…

  And sailing. He’d owned a sailboat once, he was almost sure of it. Somewhere with a lot of fog. Portland, maybe, or Vancouver. But, no. Those were just names he’d picked out of the air. He didn’t see them, really. But the sailing—he could feel the water sliding under the hull, taste the spray, see the light dancing on the waves, feel the salt grit on his skin.

  But it was all so ephemeral. No sooner would the memories begin to surface than they’d disappear. And no matter how hard he tried to hold on to them, no matter how hard he tried to explore them, they dissolved in his mind as completely as cubes of sugar in a cup of tea. And then he was left, not with a memory, but with the memory of a memory.

  In the government’s yard in Trenchtown…

  The driver was on Connecticut now, driving past the National Zoo. A bloodred pool of neon light lay in the darkness outside the Monkey Bar, blinking on and off. Duran shifted uncomfortably in his seat, looking away from the street.

  There was one memory that he didn’t want to surface, that he tried desperately not to recall. It was an image that made his stomach turn, a tableau of ochre walls in a suburban abattoir. Gore congealing against the stenciled border where the wall met the ceiling. It was everywhere, the blood. Thick and clotted, it pooled on the floor and stuck to his shoes.

  “You okay?”

  He must have moaned because the driver was looking at him in the rearview mirror, his face furrowed with concern.

  Duran nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I—I’ve got a bad tooth.”

  The driver grinned as the cab pulled up to the portico in front of Duran’s apartment building. “For a moment,” he said, “I’m thinking a loa has you.” Then he laughed.

  Duran smiled and shook his head. Handing the driver a twenty-dollar bill, he reached to open the door and step out. Above his head, the rain was pounding on the roof, a sudden deluge.

  “You can wait, my friend,” the driver told him in a solicitous voice. “Sit tight. Or you’ll be soaked before you get inside.”

  Duran thanked him, but got out anyway, and just as the driver had promised, he was instantly soaked to the skin. Not that he minded. The rain and the cold took his mind off the ochre room. And that was a blessing.

  After a long moment of standing in the rain, he entered the building’s antiseptic lobby, which was silent and deserted. Home again, home again, jiggedy jig, he thought, the words larded with sarcasm. The truth was, he felt no connection whatsoever to this place. It was like an all suite hotel, or the apartment of a friend who’d gone out of town for the weekend. Comfortable, certainly, but nothing to do with him.

  Five minutes later he was in the shower, with the steam rising and the water tap dancing on his shoulders. He’d begun to feel better as soon as he entered the apartment, but he didn’t feel good—really good—until he’d toweled off, and was sitting on the couch with the remote in his hand, watching Jane Pauley.

  Chapter 17

  Ace Johnson’s deposition was delayed for hours, as the opposition’s lead counsel cooled her heels at LaGuardia, waiting for the weather to clear so that she could take the Shuttle to D.C. They might have moved the depo to the following week but it wasn’t practical. Slough was going out of town in the morning, and Johnson was set to have a hernia operation on Monday.

  It was agreed, then, that they’d begin deposition as soon as possible—which, in the event, was 4:15 that afternoon. By the time they were done, it was almost nine, and everyone was exhausted.

  Though the give-and-take had gone about as well as could be expected (from the client’s point of view), it would not be accurate to say that Adrienne had covered herself in glory. On the contrary. Her role in the proceeding was essentially one of support, which is to say that she was there to anticipate Curtis Slough’s every need. In this, however, she had more or less failed. She’d misplaced a memo that her boss had hoped to introduce and, soon afterward, had been chided for daydreaming midway through her own witness’s testimony.

  “Daydreaming” was Slough’s word. In point of fact, she’d been thinking about Duran’s panic attack of the day before. It had almost panicked her to see him like that, recoiling from the idea that she might be the cause of so much dread. But maybe Bonilla was right. Maybe Duran had been faking it. Maybe he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a psychopath like…

  Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy had been good-looking, too. And didn’t he have some kind of fake cast for his arm, slipping it on so that he could ask people for help? Wasn’t that how he’d lured them—with his neediness? It put his victims off guard, so that the predator seemed vulnerable rather than dangerous.

  She really wanted to go home, curl up in bed and sleep, but Slough made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. “Let’s get something to eat,” he told her. “It’s been a helluva day.”

  “I thought Johnson did rather well,” Slough enthused, as he washed down a bit of mesclun with a sip of martini.

  Adrienne shrugged. “All he really
had to do was remember that he couldn’t remember. It was literally a no-brainer.”

  Slough chuckled. “Even so… “ Then he sat back, and cocked his head, as if deciding what to do with her. Finally, he leaned forward and, in a confidential tone, suggested that, “You seemed a little stressed this afternoon. Is it still that thing with your sister?”

  Still… ? It had only been about three weeks. And that thing? As if Nikki was something shameful, something you didn’t mention in polite company. “I’m sorry,” Adrienne replied, “I was just… out of it.” She shook her head. “It won’t happen again.”

  His face burst into a little blister of concern. “If you need some time off… I mean, I noticed you were gone yesterday afternoon.”

  “I—”

  He raised his hand. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t mean to pry. But, if you need a little time… ?”

  Adrienne shook her head reflexively.

  “Well, just let me know.” He gave her a pat on the arm.

  ‘A little time’? Uh-oh, Adrienne thought, this is one of those moments. With a soft sigh, she caught her lower lip in her teeth, then let it go and smiled at him. Crinkled eyebrows. Big smile. Sincere smile, much practiced while “in care.” Nikki used to make fun of her earnest, big-eyed smile, trotted out in times of crisis. ‘Oh it’s Orphan Girl,’ she’d say, with her Please Please Please adopt me smile.’ Only this time the smile’s message was: forgive me.

  “I’ve been a little distracted,” she said. “You know, Nikki… “ She looked at her hands, then back up at Curtis Slough. “She was… ummm… the last relative I had.” Then, as if she’d confessed too much, she hurried to add: “Not that we were that close—”

  “You don’t have any other family?!” Slough asked. “No parents!?” His eyes were wide, his tone suggesting that he found her situation as freakish as it was sad.

  She shrugged. “No. I’m it: end of the line.”

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed.

  “Yes, well,” she said in a deadpan voice, “he was the end of his, too.”