Shock To The System

by Shock To The System (lit)

  "Donald," he said mildly, "you could not be more wrong. My overture to you was sincere. I believed my best hope was to have Larry's assailant identified and charged—and Paul's, if there was one. And I believed, based on what Norris had told me, that you were the best man to do the job. The Albany Police Department is not as effective in these matters as it might be. It was as simple as that."

  "Then why did you change your mind?"

  "Well—on the advice of my attorney. He decided that your involvement was—redundant." He was blushing again, of all things.

  I said, "I don't believe you, Vernon. Your suddenly distancing yourself from me had something to do with your night of woolly eroticism."

  He shook his head. "No."

  "Yes."

  "No."

  "What is it? There's more to the sheep story."

  "No, there is not more to the sheep story."

  "Anyway, how did they get up here that Thursday night? Doesn't the building have security?"

  "There's no guard. I buzzed them in. Paul phoned me and feigned a mental breakdown. I was skeptical but let my compas­sion for a former patient whom I thought of as a lost sheep—lost soul—interfere with my better judgment. And I buzzed the door open from my office without knowing precisely who was going to arrive. It was a very great mistake that I will never, ever make again."

  "Not exactly, I suppose. I think there's still a part of this you're not telling me, Vernon. Something you badly did not want me to uncover, and that's why you left a message for me on Saturday telling me to piss off."

  "Absolutely not," he said, bright as a tomato on Timmy's Aunt Moira's kitchen windowsill in August.

  I watched him radiate red heat and light for a quarter of a minute. Then the thing that should have been obvious all along hit me, and I said, "If Paul Haig was not blackmailing you or either of the two others involved in the allegedly unphotographed episode of amour de brebis, then he was blackmailing someone else about whom he had information that that person would consider damaging or even incriminating. Prime candi­dates surely are members of the therapy group. Paul presumably knew many of their most intimate secrets. Is that correct?"

  "I suppose that would be true. Most members of the group,

  however, tended to speak in generalities about their past unfortu­nate lives as sexual degenerates. So it would be hard for a black­mailer to come up with tangible or even specific evidence that could be exchanged for money."

  "Were all the group members that discreet and closemouthed, or just some of them?"

  "Two members of that particular group," Crockwell said, look­ing queasy, "were particularly graphic and loquacious on the subject of their own sexual perversions."

  "Who were they?"

  "You know I can't tell you that. But you can take my word for it, Donald, that for a variety of reasons neither man is a likely target in a blackmail scheme."

  Moody and Stover. I said, "But some members of the group no doubt are likelier targets. And the incriminating dope Haig might have had on one of them could have come from a source other than a therapy session itself. Maybe a member wasn't succeeding in his de-queering nearly as well as he let on here, and he badly did not want that bad news to get back to—wherever. Whether or not any of that happened can be learned only by digging around extensively in the group members' lives, a project I might or might not have the time and resources to take on. I might have to leave it to the cops.

  "The job can be narrowed down considerably, Vernon, if I know who in the therapy group might reasonably be expected to have the wherewithal to come up with sixty thousand dollars on short notice. If anyone knows who in that group has access to big bucks, it's you. You know who had a hard time raising the cash for treatment and who wrote a check without giving it a second thought. Are you going to help me out, or aren't you?"

  He looked thoughtful, but it didn't last. "I can't tell you that, and I'm sure you can understand why, Donald. Patient confiden­tiality is paramount in my profession. The ethics involved here are clear."

  "Yes, I know all about your ethics, Vernon. Look, I'm not asking about anybody's manatee fixation or whatever, only about

  their cash reserves, which is surely a fairly innocuous matter in the therapeutic context."

  "Well, you are quite wrong about that."

  "Oh. I beg your pardon. So you're not going to help me iden­tify the person who killed Paul Haig and may have tried to kill Larry Bierly, two of your former patients?"

  "No, I'm afraid that if it involves medically confidential infor­mation, I'm unable at this point in time to help you, Donald."

  "Then you get no mercy from me," I said, and got up and went out.

  22

  My partially sleepless night and early-morning romp with T. Callahan had left me jet-lagged by late afternoon— sleeping until one hadn't helped—so I'd been pouring down extra-strength Jamaican Blue Mountain for over an hour when Timmy arrived home just after six. I didn't know then that my extra coffee consumption would turn out to be the key to an early resolution to the question of Paul Haig's murder. I just meant for it to get me through the evening without dozing off and toppling face-foreward in a public place.

  I told Timmy about my meeting with Crockwell and the news of the therapist's onetime course in aversion therapy. Timmy stared at me in horror.

  "Why, that's savage!"

  "It is."

  "You're making it up."

  "No."

  "But it's beastly!"

  "Well, yes."

  "But how could they do such a thing? Even to a man like Crockwell?"

  "Two of them were enraged at him, they were under the influ­ence of powerful drugs that break down inhibitions, and I guess they saw it as a kind of poetic justice."

  "Oh, it's poetic, all right."

  "Yes. Not Emily Dickinson, though. Robinson Jeffers maybe. Or Edgar Guest."

  "It's poetic, but is it justice? I certainly don't think so. Crockwell's patients all went to him voluntarily, misguided as they were. But what those three did to Crockwell is assault, pure and simple. And he's not pressing charges?"

  "No." I told Timmy the story of the Texan running for sheriff who wanted to accuse his opponent of fucking pigs.

  Pouring himself a cup of the potent coffee, Timmy said, "That's a good joke about Texas politics, but it also illustrates why people who are victims of sex crimes often won't come forward and testify against the people who assaulted them."

  "That's true, Timothy. But you also have to admit that (a) the joke is funny, and (b) it's a bit droll, too, when a man who cons people into administering electric jolts to themselves to combat their sexual natures gets a dose of his own medicine. Admit it. The image is priceless."

  He poured one-percent low-fat milk into his coffee and stirred it. "But it's still assault."

  "But the image is still priceless."

  "But it's still assault."

  "But the image is still priceless."

  He conceded nothing. Though after a moment he did say, "Are there pictures?"

  "No. Anyway, Crockwell maintains he never got it up for the sheep pictures. Or even for the Playboy bunny slides, would be my guess, given the circumstances."

  "Well, there's that."

  "Yes, think of the Polaroids showing up in the supermarket tabs. The horror."

  Timmy shuddered, but I could see the images flipping along inside his head, and I suspected that they were not without enter­tainment value. He said, "So now you don't think Haig's black­mail scheme had anything to do with Crockwell and the sheep?"

  "I'm pretty sure it didn't."

  "But it's such a classic setup for blackmail."

  "Not if there are no pictures or other evidence—which St. James and Crockwell both insist there couldn't have been—and

  the blackmail target is ready to tell the blackmailer to go jump in the lake."

  "I'm sorry, Don. I guess you're back to square one then."

  "Not at all." I expla
ined that with the Haig-Bierly-St. James (You-Don't-Want-to-Know)—Crockwell sheep incident now eliminated as the nexus of the blackmail situation, it was sud­denly clear that the most likely blackmail target for Paul Haig would have been a member of the Crockwell psychotherapy group who was secretly involved in sexual escapades that would have been considered impermissible by both Crockwell and oth­ers in the man's life, and who moreover was in a position to come up with the sixty thousand dollars Haig needed to hang onto Beautiful Thingies. I said Crockwell wouldn't tell me who in the group was well-heeled and that I would have to find out inde­pendently. Meanwhile, I'd keep my appointment at eight that evening in Ballston Spa with Dr. Glen Snyder, who treated Paul Haig during the six weeks prior to Haig's death, and who I be­lieved might have information or insights about Haig that would shed light on the blackmail or at least the circumstances sur­rounding it.

  Timmy said, "If Snyder is a well-off shrink, maybe Haig was blackmailing him and he killed Haig. He would have known about the Elavil because he prescribed it."

  I poured myself another cup of coffee and thought that over. "But what could Haig have had on Snyder?"

  "I don't know. Pill pushing? Fishing out of season? Maybe Sny­der put the moves on Haig, and Haig went along with it and got pictures secretly taken of whatever went on between them. It could be anything."

  "I don't know, Timothy. That's pretty wild. But not totally off-the-wall, and while I'm talking to Snyder I'll keep your scenario in mind. And if I'm not home by midnight, maybe you'd better phone the Ballston Spa cops and have them take a look into Snyder's office. That's where I'm meeting him."

  He said, "At midnight I'll be sound asleep. Do you want me to set the alarm and check to see if you're in bed?"

  "No, I have a feeling I'll be home in plenty of time to tuck you in. Or to get tucked. Though I've drunk so much coffee I may be circling the house at six thousand feet for most of the night."

  He said, "I'll dream of you up there."

  I said I'd try to beam friendly messages down to him.

  By seven-thirty the Northway commuter traffic had thinned out and I cruised unimpeded up through the spring evening. To the commuters in Clifton Park and the other northern suburbs of Albany, I-87 was something of a daily drag. But to Timmy and me, all of its associations were happy: It was the way to summer concerts at Saratoga, camping in the Adirondacks, weekends in Montreal for jazz and blanquette de lapin. I'd have been relaxed and eager driving north that evening if I hadn't been going to see a man about a murder, and if I hadn't drunk too much coffee and needed very badly all of a sudden to urinate.

  I knew there was a Northway rest area above Clifton Park, and when I came to it I pulled in. The I-87 rest areas, in keeping with the intentionally woodsy, nature-friendly character of the high­way, had no restaurants or gas stations, just restrooms, lawns, picnic tables and parking.

  There were plenty of cars angled along the sidewalk leading to the restroom building, and I soon became aware of why some of them were there. My gaydar was rusty, but not so out of whack that I didn't instantly appreciate that this was a busy gay cruising area. After I peed, a number of pairs of eyes followed me outside, and I noted that men were coming and going behind the rest-room building. A hole had been ripped in the wire fence at the rear of the rest-area clearing, and a path led away into the woods. In fact, this rest area had been notorious in fast-lane gay Albany for years, I remembered. And that's when it all came together.

  23

  The meeting with Dr. Glen Snyder was underly help­ful but not a washout. He had no knowledge of any blackmail attempt by Paul Haig, he said, but he did know from his own sources that Paul's father had once been accused of trying to blackmail a state official and had barely escaped prosecution. Snyder knew too of Paul's desperation over his financial situation and his fear that he might lose his business. In fact, Snyder had prescribed the Elavil to alleviate what he called the "severe anxi­ety" brought about by Haig's financial crisis and the fact that his personal life was pretty much of a mess.

  Snyder said the last time he'd seen Haig, Haig had seemed less stressed out. But Haig had made no mention of his money wor­ries being over, and Snyder just thought the Elavil had begun to do its work. Snyder said he was saddened and surprised to learn in March that Haig had killed himself, and Snyder wondered at the time if either Haig hadn't gone off his medication for a reason unknown to Snyder, or some new crisis hadn't come along that sent Haig tumbling over the edge into hopelessness. The likeli­hood of murder came as news to Snyder.

  I asked him whether Haig had ever discussed the other mem­bers of the Crockwell psychotherapy group. He said only in a general way. Haig talked about Larry Bierly, Snyder said, and how wretched Haig had been over losing Bierly, and how he attributed this loss to his alcoholism, which he feared he might never control. Snyder didn't say anything about a Haig family history of untreated alcoholism and I didn't bring it up. Snyder

  said Haig's bitterness over being subjected to Vernon Crockwell's homosexuality-cure regimen was deep, but Haig's bitterness over, and inability to accept, his own unconventional sexuality ran deep too, and Snyder considered Haig a deeply damaged man.

  No doubt he had been, though he needn't have died young. Paul Haig had survived AIDS, and gay bashers in high and low places, and Vernon Crockwell, and to some extent even his fam­ily. But in a moment of terrible weakness—and probably self-destructive revenge against his mother—Haig had reverted to a despicable practice his father apparently had originated in the family. The second time around, the act's consequences were even more dire than they had been the first time. Trying to black­mail a man hadn't just left an ugly cloud over Paul Haig's life; it had ended it.

  Tuesday morning I called my credit-checker friend and said I would pay top dollar if she let me jump the queue in her work day and receive, at the soonest, all the financial dope she could come up with on these people: LeVon Monroe, Walter Tidlow, Eugene Cebulka, Roland Stover, Dean Moody and Grey Oliveira. I said I was most interested in Oliveira. I was told to call back in the early afternoon.

  At ten a.m., I walked into Larry Bierly's room and said, "I know about the assault on Crockwell. Phyllis Haig was right when she told me you were a violent man. Paul must have told his mother some half-truths—a family custom among the Haigs whenever they weren't telling bald-faced lies to each other. It sounds like Paul made a habit of bad-mouthing you around Phyllis because that's what she liked to hear. But when he told her you had assaulted a man, he omitted the fact that he was there at the time and he was involved himself. And of course he left out the part about the electroshocks and the pictures of the Playboy bunnies and the sheep."

  Bierly's little red numbers started going crazy, but he didn't call for the nurse. He looked at me big-eyed and said, "Did you tell the police?"

  "No."

  "Are you going to?"

  "I doubt it. That's up to Crockwell, and he seems disinclined to have word of the episode bruited about the Capital District broadcast-ad market at six and eleven."

  "We should never have done it. It was wrong. I know that."

  "No, Larry, you should never have done it. Why did you?"

  He tugged at the IV tubing leading into his arm and shifted his muscular bulk. "Drugs," he said.

  "Right, the devil made you do it."

  "I'm really not a violent person," Bierly said, almost plaintively. "It was some kind of bad acid or something that Steven and I got hold of. And of course Paul was drunk. He hardly knew what was going on, I have to admit. I was the one who made it all happen."

  "You could serve time for it."

  "I know, I know, I know."

  "And that's why you tried to dump me from the case, isn't it? You suspected Crockwell had killed Paul and tried to kill you in revenge for the late-night aversion-therapy incident, but you couldn't even fill me in on Crockwell's only genuinely plausible motive, because it would have implicated you in a felonious assault. Then when I stumbled
on St. James and started getting close to that unpleasant part of the truth, you wanted me out of the picture—even if it meant Crockwell would get off scot-free."

  He nodded and looked away morosely.

  I said, "Larry, if you thought Crockwell had killed Paul and shot you, weren't you afraid that Crockwell would go after St. James too? You didn't even warn him."

  "But Crockwell didn't know who Steven was."

  "Surely he knew Steven's first name from the night he met him," I said. "And I knew a man named Steven St. James was involved, and you knew I knew it, and you knew I was talking to Crockwell."

  Bierly sulked guiltily. "Who told you about the—incident? Did Steven tell you?"

  "No, he refused. I extracted it from Crockwell."

  "Oh. So now are you going to be able to nail Crockwell?" Bierly asked, brightening a little.

  "He didn't do it," I said. "Crockwell didn't kill Paul, and he didn't shoot you."

  "How do you know?" He looked badly disappointed.

  "Because I believe I know who did do it. I want you to think about something, Larry. After Paul died, did you mention to any­one that you thought he had been murdered and that Vernon Crockwell had done it?"

  He chewed this over. "A couple of people, I guess."

  "Who?"

  "Dody, my assistant manager."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Ed Chartrand, who I have running Beautiful Thingies."

  "Right."

  "Probably a few others."

  "What about my involvement? Did you tell anybody that I was looking into Crockwell's possible involvement? Or that the police were?"

  "Just Dody. I talk to her about a lot of things."

  I said, "What about a member of the Crockwell therapy group you were in? Are you in touch with any of them that you might have mentioned any of this to? Or did you run into one of them?"