Believe Me

by JP Delaney

  “What’s the story about?” someone asks.

  “I don’t know. That’s the point. Nobody knows. The story’s there already. All we have to do is let it out.”

  The exercises have been getting harder lately. Paul’s had us spend whole days calling things by the wrong name, just to see how it feels. He’s had us improvise ever-crazier characters—a salesman with a suitcase full of sweaters knitted from giraffe wool, a soldier armed with an invisible machine gun—then sent us out, in character, to accost passersby on the street. To my surprise, the passersby have usually been happy to listen. Either I’m getting better at this, or New York’s getting nuttier as the heat kicks in.

  And with every exercise, he reminds us of the one and only rule. Acting isn’t pretending. The clue is in the word. Acting is doing. Being. Becoming.

  “Let’s go,” he says now, slapping his palms on the floor. A slow, loping rhythm. Gradually we all pick it up.

  “Once,” he says.

  A fraction off the beat, the student to his left says, “Upon.”

  “A”

  “Time”

  “There”

  “Was”

  “A”

  Suddenly, it’s my turn. Don’t think, act. Though in truth there’s no time to do either, the driving rhythm forcing me to say the very first thing that comes into my head. “Princess.”

  And the story passes on, gathering momentum as it goes around and around. A fairy tale, something about a prince who falls in love with a statue in his garden.

  The next time, Paul makes it harder. If you hesitate, you drop out. And the rhythm will get faster each time it goes around. It’s all about learning to react instinctively in the moment, he explains.

  This time he doesn’t start with anything so obvious as “Once.”

  It’s a strange, glittering story that emerges, a dark fantasy about a little girl who lives in a graveyard among ravens and crows.

  One by one the students falter, get to their feet.

  All except me.

  And in the end it’s just the two of us, me and Paul, lying at right angles on the floor like two hands of a clock, our hands slapping the boards in triple time, the words flowing so thick and fast it’s as if we’ve memorized them.

  I feel possessed, exhilarated, captured. As if I’m just the mouthpiece of another personality. A host to some voodoo spirit. The real me obliterated, annihilated, by a force stronger than any orgasm.

  I get it now. Don’t think.

  At last he stops, and I lie there for a few seconds, coming back to my senses, savoring the moment.

  The group stands silently, watching. Usually at the end of a good exercise they applaud. I raise my head and look.

  That cop is standing with them. Detective Durban.

  “Ms. Wright,” he says. “Claire. Can we talk?”

  * * *

  —

  I take him to the cafeteria. Around us, students sit in groups of two or three, chatting or working on their laptops.

  It’s too hot for coffee. He gets us Diet Cokes from the machine.

  “America,” I murmur in a funny Yankee voice as he hands me mine. “Land of the calorie-free.”

  He doesn’t smile. I notice how tired he looks.

  “I’d like you to do something to help us, Claire,” he says brusquely.

  “Of course. Anything. If I can. What?”

  “We’re backtracking over some old ground on the Fogler murder. Rechecking statements, seeing if there’s anything we missed first time around.”

  “You haven’t made an arrest, have you? I’ve been checking online.”

  Durban frowns. “We’ve eliminated a great many people from our investigation. Including all one hundred and twenty-six guests who were staying at the Lexington Hotel that night. We haven’t been sitting on our hands.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Though most of our work has centered on one individual,” he adds.

  “The husband,” I say. “Patrick.”

  He doesn’t respond to that. “Can you still recall the details of your conversation with Mr. Fogler?”

  “Of course.”

  “We have someone new looking at the case for us. A psychological profiler. I’d like you to meet with her.”

  “Sure, if you think it’ll be useful…When?”

  “Now would be good.”

  I glance in the direction of the rehearsal room. “I’m in the middle of class.”

  “This is important, Claire.” His tone has hardened.

  “It’s just—I don’t see how I can be of much help. Patrick Fogler and I only spoke for a few minutes. He wasn’t interested in me.”

  Durban nods. “Maybe. But why did he leave?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fogler. When you tried to pick him up, you said he seemed eager to get away. That’s what I keep wondering about. Since he was only going home, and he believed his wife was out of town, why the rush? Why break off a conversation with a friendly young woman who’s prepared to discuss French poetry like she actually gives a shit?”

  “Perhaps I bored him.”

  “That’s one possibility.”

  “Is there another?”

  He doesn’t answer me directly. The flow of information is always one-way with this man, I realize. “Either way, I’d like you to speak to this profiler.” He leans across the table. “Look, I never did get around to reporting you to my friends in Immigration. But it’s not too late.”

  “Seems I don’t have much choice, then,” I say with a tight smile.

  “No,” he agrees. “You really don’t.”

  * * *

  —

  We take a yellow cab. Durban gives an address in Union City. The driver’s turned the air-conditioning off, to save fuel. It’s the first really hot day of May and we sweat on the vinyl seats. My skirt rides up my bare legs and once or twice I see Detective Durban glancing at them before he turns his head and looks out the window instead.

  17

  We pull up outside an ugly, nondescript office, in a block full of ugly offices and empty parking lots. The windows haven’t been cleaned in decades and the paintwork is peeling.

  The security guard at the reception desk makes me sign in. After that, I don’t see a single other person as we go down a long, airless corridor. At last Detective Durban knocks on a door. The nameplate says SUITE #508. DR. KATHRYN LATHAM ABFP, FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST.

  “Enter,” a female voice answers.

  Inside, a woman is sitting behind a cheap wooden desk, working on a laptop. I put her age at sixty, maybe more. Her hair is so gray it’s almost blond, cut short, and she’s dressed more stylishly than I was expecting from the surroundings.

  Her eyes, when she looks up, are blue and shrewd. “Claire Wright, yes?”

  “Claire, Dr. Latham,” Durban says, introducing us.

  “Call me Kathryn. And take a seat. You don’t mind being recorded, I hope?”

  She nods at one of the walls, which I now see is made of dark reflective glass. Some kind of two-way mirror. Behind it I can just make out the red dot of a camera in filming mode. Automatically I pull my shoulders back, as if I’m at a casting, before realizing how stupid that is.

  “Now then,” Dr. Latham says. “Tell me about your encounter with Patrick Fogler.”

  I tell her everything I can remember, emphasizing that Patrick behaved properly throughout. It doesn’t take long. Dr. Latham listens, her head tilted, blue eyes on me, saying nothing. When I’m done, she nods. “Thank you, Claire. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “That’s it?” I say, surprised.

  “Sure. You can go now.”

  “Kathryn…” Detective Durban protests, as if that wasn’t what he was hoping to hear. />
  “She isn’t right for it, Frank,” Kathryn Latham says firmly.

  I frown. “Right for what?”

  “Claire, could you give us a moment?” Durban says. “Just wait out in the corridor.”

  I step out and he closes the door behind me. I can hear the rumble of their voices but even when I press my ear to the wood I can’t make out what they’re saying.

  The next door along must lead to the room behind the two-way mirror. I open it carefully, in case there’s someone in there, ready to say I was just looking for the bathroom, but it’s empty except for a monitor and a small camera on a tripod. The sound is turned on and I can hear them perfectly.

  DETECTIVE DURBAN’S VOICE

  …her class. She’s good. She can act.

  KATHRYN LATHAM’S VOICE

  They all act, Frank. MAWs, they’re called. Model, Actress, Whatever. It doesn’t mean she could do something like this.

  DETECTIVE DURBAN’S VOICE

  This is at Pace—the Actors Studio course. I’m told they’re pretty selective. And she’s…attractive.

  KATHRYN LATHAM’S VOICE

  (pointedly)

  Is she, Frank?

  DETECTIVE DURBAN’S VOICE

  Sure, we have female cops who’d do it. No disrespect to my colleagues, but have you seen them? I think Claire would stand a better chance of getting under his defenses.

  KATHRYN LATHAM’S VOICE

  Didn’t work last time.

  DETECTIVE DURBAN’S VOICE

  He gave her the book. You said yourself—for him, that’s intimacy.

  There’s a pause while Kathryn Latham thinks about this. Next time she speaks, she sounds fractionally less emphatic.

  KATHRYN LATHAM’S VOICE

  Even so, you can’t get around the fact she’s a civilian. It’s a safeguarding issue.

  DETECTIVE DURBAN’S VOICE

  We’d be right there if anything happened. And the great thing about her is, she has no records. No bank account, no Social Security number for him to check out. She can be whoever we need her to be.

  I’ve heard enough. I go back into the corridor and walk straight into Dr. Latham’s office without knocking.

  “I’ll do it,” I say. “Whatever it is. But you need to pay me.”

  It’s quite the entrance, but Kathryn Latham looks unperturbed. “Do you have any idea what we’re talking about?”

  I shrug. “I caught some of it.”

  “It can’t do any harm to tell her, at least,” Detective Durban says quietly.

  Dr. Latham studies me for a moment, unblinking. “Very well. We have a suspect in the murder of Stella Fogler—”

  “Her husband.”

  “Please, don’t interrupt. We have a suspect. This individual is highly intelligent, highly disciplined. He can’t be provoked or tricked into revealing himself. There’s been a suggestion that an undercover operation might succeed where other methods have failed.”

  “You mean—entrap him?”

  “Not your sort of entrapment.” Dr. Latham says it witheringly. “This would be a highly sophisticated, psychologically based operation. The suspect would be encouraged to reveal various aspects of his personality, which could then be compared with my profile of Stella Fogler’s killer. If the two match…Well, it would strongly indicate that suspect and killer are one and the same.”

  “Would it be dangerous?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’d be wearing a wire,” Durban says reassuringly. “We’d have people standing by, ready to pull you out.”

  “If I did it, how much would I get paid?”

  “Whoever acts as decoy will have the satisfaction of knowing she’s doing her civic duty,” Dr. Latham says frostily. “A woman died, Claire.”

  “We could probably pay something as well,” Durban adds.

  “I want a green card,” I say slowly. “Full pay, and a green card.”

  He shakes his head. “Not possible.”

  “You said yourself, you have friends at Immigration—”

  “There’s not going to be any green card,” Dr. Latham interrupts. “Because there’s not going to be any operation. You’re not doing this.”

  We both stare at her.

  “At least, not unless I decide you are,” she adds.

  18

  I sign some forms, then Dr. Latham runs a battery of psychological tests on me. The Wechsler. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. The Hare Psychopathy Checklist. She makes me hold electrodes in each hand while she flashes images onto a screen. Dogs, babies, clouds, and then, abruptly, a knife, pornography, more clouds.

  But mostly, we talk.

  “Why New York City, Claire?”

  I shrug. “Why not?”

  Dr. Latham looks at me shrewdly. “You were a foster child, I understand?”

  “Correct,” I say, wondering how the hell she knows that.

  “And you got on well with your foster family?”

  “Foster families. Plural. They didn’t like us to get too settled. And no. Not really.”

  She waits for me to continue.

  “Take the one I spent longest with,” I say at last. “Julie and Gary. Julie was a manager in the Health Service. Gary worked in marketing. From the outside, it was Happy Families…at least, when the social workers were around. I suppose I was about eleven when I realized the two of them didn’t actually like each other very much. But they were stuck. If they got divorced, they’d lose the side business they had going—which was being foster parents. Ten thousand pounds per kid per year, tax free. So they struggled on, trying to pretend everything was fine.”

  I pause. “Go on,” Dr. Latham says quietly.

  “It was a year or so later when I first noticed Gary starting to look at me a different way. If I bumped into him coming out of the bathroom, he’d smile like we shared some kind of secret. One time I cut my leg, and I remember he ran his hands up and down it to see how bad it was. And then sometimes he’d rub my back…I liked it at first. I mean, it was better than being ignored, right? I finally had something that made him pay attention to me—something his wife didn’t. It was a while before I realized what that something was.

  “He never actually did anything. Nothing serious, anyway. Just groped me a few times when I made the mistake of being alone with him. It didn’t surprise me when Julie eventually kicked him out and he ran off with some woman he worked with.”

  Dr. Latham nods. “And the decoy work you were doing for that law firm?”

  “What about it?”

  “How did it make you feel?” she asks, and I sense this is an important question for her.

  I shrug. “It was a shitty job that paid the rent.”

  “Was that all it was, Claire?”

  “Look,” I say, annoyed by her persistence, “those women thought that if their husbands let someone like me pick them up, they weren’t worth being married to. But the truth is, almost any man will try it on in that situation. That’s just the way men are.”

  “That’s taking a pretty cynical view. Maybe those women wanted to be able to trust their partners.”

  “Then they should try trusting them. Not testing the relationship to destruction.” I shake my head. “Men think with their dicks. Get over it.”

  “All men, Claire?” Dr. Latham asks quietly. “Or just men like your foster father?”

  I stare at her. I’ve finally realized where she’s going with this.

  ME

  The decoy work…I’m acting out the story of my childhood, aren’t I?

  I feel the tears spring to my eyes.

  ME

  Breaking up other people’s families, just like my family was broken. Punishing those men because no one w
as there for me when I was a kid. No father to love me. Just some slimy pervert looking for a feel.

  A tear spills onto my cheek. I swipe it away.

  Kathryn Latham lifts her hands and, to my surprise, applauds, slowly and sardonically.

  “Very good, Claire. It’s Freudian bullshit, of course. But I am impressed with the way you took my suggestion and ran with it. And the tears are a nice touch.”

  She tosses me a box of tissues and ticks something on her pad.

  “Right. Let’s move on to your sex life. This may take some time, I imagine.”

  * * *

  —

  And then at last we’re back in a room with Detective Durban and he’s looking at her expectantly.

  “Well,” Dr. Latham says matter-of-factly, “she’s insecure, impulsive, fragile, emotionally incontinent, can’t handle rejection, and although she tries extremely hard to hide it, she craves approval like a junkie craving a fix. What can I say, Frank? She’s an actress. On the other hand, she’s also quick, observant, talented, and brave. Somewhat against my better judgment, I think this might actually be worth a try.”

  19

  She takes me to a conference room in the same building, still littered with disconnected cables from some previous occupant.

  “Twelve years ago, Patrick Fogler was questioned in connection with the disappearance of Constance Jones, a prostitute.” Dr. Latham brings up a photograph of a young black woman on an audiovisual screen. The woman stares at the camera defiantly. It’s a police mugshot, I realize. “She’d been seen getting into a car similar to Fogler’s. But the witness didn’t get the license plate and there was no forensic evidence. Constance was never found. Patrick protested his innocence and no charges were ever pressed.”

  She changes the picture. Another mugshot.

  “Four years later, the body of another prostitute was found in an empty property not far from the university in Massachusetts where Fogler was then teaching. She’d been decapitated. The head and the body had been posed separately from each other. Again, there was nothing specific to link him to the crime.”