Delusion

by G. H. Ephron

  I crawled back out the window, trying not to snag my clothes on the sill. I walked slowly back, trying to figure out what to do next. I leaned up against the Volvo. That’s when I realized it was running. I tried the door. It was locked. I peered inside. Empty.

  Odd, how close to the house it was parked. I went around to the other side. “Shit,” I said, as dread gathered in my chest. There was a hose, one end stuck to the tailpipe, the rest of it snaking its way through a basement window.

  I yanked the hose off the tailpipe and raced back into the kitchen. There I found the door to the basement. I pulled it open, groped for a light switch, and flipped it on. Dirt had been tracked on the off-white carpeted steps. I hurried down.

  I found myself in an exercise room, the floor covered in padded black rubber, free weights against the wall, a bench and a treadmill. Now I could smell it, the faint odor of automobile exhaust. The wall on the side bordering the driveway was paneled in cedar stripping. It had a door with a window in it. Looked like a sauna.

  I peered in. I could just make out Teitlebaum collapsed on the lower bench, pressed against the wall. I had to get him out of there, and right away.

  I took a huge gulp of air, pulled the door open, and propped it with a chair. Then I dragged Teitlebaum down off the bench. I grabbed him under the arms and had him all the way to the basement stairs before I inhaled again. I yanked and pulled him, trying not to think about the damage I might be doing to his head and back as I bumped him on the steps. His face was bluish-gray, not the cherry-red that I remembered reading was a sign of carbon monoxide poisoning. We both needed to get out of the basement. In a closed space, carbon monoxide could quickly reach toxic levels. Within minutes after that, it starts killing brain cells.

  I pulled Teitlebaum into the kitchen, slammed the basement door shut, and opened the outside door. I leaned on the counter, trying to catch my breath. Then I picked up the phone. No dial tone. Chills went down my back—had someone cut the phone lines? Then I remembered. When I’d peered into his office, the phone had been off the hook.

  I didn’t want to leave him alone, so I got out my cell phone and called 911 and told them to send an ambulance right away. The dispatcher asked if he had a pulse. I pressed my fingers to his neck. There might have been a faint one. Did I know CPR? She said she’d wait on the line while I started.

  I’d learned CPR years ago but never actually had to use it. I laid him out on his back. Today his sweater was yellow, and the shirt under it pale blue and still crisp from the laundry. I knelt over him, placed the heel of one hand in the center of his chest and the other hand on top of that one. I pressed down, then released. Press. Release. Press.

  I put my fingers in his mouth to be sure the airway was clear. I pinched his nose, opened his mouth, and started mouth-to-mouth. I exhaled, watching his chest rise, then fall. I did it again, and again. “Breathe, goddamnit,” I whispered.

  I didn’t hear the ambulance until the siren’s wail was dying and someone was banging at the front door. I jumped to my feet and let them in. I waited as the team of paramedics worked over Teitlebaum. I asked one of them about his coloring. Why wasn’t he red? That was a myth, the paramedic explained. Only a small percentage of carbon monoxide poisoning victims turned cherry-red. Most were cyanotic, like Teitlebaum.

  While I was giving him what information I knew about Teitlebaum, the other one said, “He’s breathing.”

  Teitlebaum was still unconscious when they lifted him onto a gurney, an oxygen mask strapped over his face. I hoped I’d gotten to him soon enough. Carbon monoxide poisoning had a particularly devastating effect on the frontal lobes and limbic system. A psychiatrist who couldn’t control his emotions, who swung back and forth from euphoria to apathy, would be as hard up for clients as one accused of murder.

  I watched the ambulance pull away and heard the siren start up again. The woman next door was standing halfway out of her back door, transfixed by the drama.

  I went back inside. The dispatcher was still on the phone. I thanked her and hung up.

  The quiet house was still full of Richard Teitlebaum’s presence. There were large photographs of sailing yachts on the walls, bookcases filled with modern fiction and nonfiction. The smell of coffee wafted in from the kitchen.

  I walked into the kitchen and turned off the coffee. I was wiped, like I’d just run a mile in knee-deep mud. I poured what was left in the pot into a cup.

  I leaned against the refrigerator and took a sip. How long had he been down there? Would it have made a difference if I’d gone to the basement first instead of farting around, upstairs and down, chatting up the neighbor, climbing in and out of the garage?

  I wandered into his office and sank down in a chair. I’d sat there when I first met him. I could picture him pitched forward, kneading his hands together. He’d been upset. Stunned, grieving as if he’d lost a friend. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to know that husbands kill wives. Had it all been an act?

  I thought about Teitlebaum. A Newton Hill yuppie with callused hands. A calm professional who crackled with anxiety. I tried to envision Teitlebaum creeping into the Babikian home in the dead of night when he knew Nick would be working in the basement, knowing that the only witness to worry about wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what she saw. He finds Lisa …

  That’s where I hit a wall. Teitlebaum may have crossed a few boundaries in his relationship with his patient. But in my heart of hearts, I couldn’t picture him as a murderer. And though he knew that it would incriminate Nick to have Lisa found with a mask on, I couldn’t imagine him inflicting that final, dehumanizing indignity on a young woman he’d treated and for whom he seemed to care deeply.

  Teitlebaum’s desk was bare. No neatly folded suicide note providing the explanation we all crave when someone takes his own life. Only two mugs—one full of pens, the other full of pencils all sharpened and pointing up—lined up alongside the receiverless phone.

  I picked up the handset from the floor, put it back in place. Who would grieve for Richard Teitlebaum? Did he have relatives in Rhode Island? On the shelf behind the desk were some framed photographs—looked like a family reunion, maybe Teitlebaum with parents, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. At least I could call and let someone know.

  I scanned the room for an address book. I tried the top center desk drawer. It had a neat stack of stationery, envelopes, extra pens and pencils, and in the corner a small container of stamps. I tried the top side drawer. I remembered Teitlebaum opening this drawer when we’d talked here. Sitting on top of a checkbook and a calculator was a small brown leather notebook. I lifted it out and shoved the drawer closed with my knee. The book had a calendar in the front, addresses and phone numbers in the back.

  I went to the T’s and found several Teitlebaums listed. I called the first one. Michael Teitlebaum turned out to be his brother. Michael’s wife Karen was home. I told her what I could, as gently as I could. She seemed stunned, barely able to talk. Finally, she thanked me and said she’d let the rest of the family know. I gave her my phone number.

  Then I called Chip to let him and Annie know what was going on. Annie got on the phone and launched into a barrage of questions. She made me take her through my every movement. Finally, she asked how I was feeling.

  I gave a tired laugh. “Feeling?” As usual, I’d been trying not to feel anything. “Just beating myself up for not getting here earlier.”

  “He may make it,” Annie said.

  “And he may be sorry that he did,” I said. “Carbon monoxide can cause permanent brain damage.”

  “Maybe you should go over to the hospital. After he regains consciousness. You might get some closure.” She was beginning to talk like me. “Let me know if you want company.”

  I hung up and opened the drawer again to put the datebook back where I’d found it. I remembered Lisa Babikian’s calendar, her biweekly appointments. If she’d been alive, she’d have had an appointment with Richard Teitlebaum today,
Friday, at four o’clock, right around the time Teitlebaum had been sitting in the sauna losing consciousness.

  I opened the datebook to today’s page. Lisa Babikian’s name had been crossed out. All of the other appointments today were scratched out too. Being suspected of murder hadn’t just damaged Teitlebaum’s practice. It had destroyed it.

  19

  THE HEADLINES Saturday morning: “Suspect in Brutal Killing Clings to Life.” There was a picture of a professorial-looking Richard Teitlebaum. I scanned the article. When the paper had gone to press, Teitlebaum had been alive and in intensive care. There were no details about what the police had dug up from Teitlebaum’s garden, just that they’d brought back several boxes of evidence.

  There was an interview with his next-door neighbor, Barbara Small. She described him as “weird” and “spooky.” “You’d say hello, and he’d just have this distant look on his face. And he had all these strange people going in and out of his house at all hours.” With neighbors like her, who needed enemies?

  She also claimed that a large, paunchy person had been skulking around the car, kicking at the dirt in the driveway. She said it might have been before Teitlebaum got taken off, might have been after. Paunchy? I looked down at my stomach. I most certainly was not paunchy, though I wasn’t being as religious about rowing every morning as I’d once been.

  I made up my mind to visit Teitlebaum at the hospital. I called Annie to take her up on her offer to go with me. We agreed to meet in the hospital lobby later that morning. I was hoping the visit would reassure me that I hadn’t been too late.

  It was just after eight o’clock and the day was already heating up. It promised to be a scorcher—almost ninety in May. It sometimes happened in New England, and when it did, it was not a pretty sight. Unseasonable heat cooked magnolia blossoms right off the trees.

  I threw on shorts and sneakers, grabbed my water bottle and Walkman, put in a Jess Klein CD, and went out for a run on the river. I did a circuit, up and over the Longfellow Bridge, then down along the Boston side and back over the Mass Ave Bridge. Then home. As out of shape as I was, I still resisted the temptation to rest along the way. Running gives the mind a break while the body takes over.

  I got back dripping with sweat, as if I’d taken a dive into the river. I smelled almost as sweet.

  When I got out of the shower, the phone was ringing. It was Detective Boley. “Just a formality at this point,” he said, but could I go over to the police station and give a statement about finding Teitlebaum?

  I told him I’d be over around noon. “What did you find at Teitlebaum’s?” I asked.

  There was a pause. “I’ll be holding a press conference in a half hour. Tune in and find out,” he said and hung up. The arrogant bastard. He’d be enjoying center stage.

  I drove to the hospital with the heater on high so my engine wouldn’t overheat, the windows down, and news radio blaring. At least the roads were empty. I was rolling into the hospital parking lot when the breaking news bulletin came on. The police had found bloody gardening gloves and human tissue buried in Dr. Richard Teitlebaum’s garden. Maybe Lisa Babikian’s unborn baby.

  I bashed the radio into silence and peeled myself off the seat. Annie was waiting for me under a potted palm in the blessedly cool lobby. She had on jeans and a black scoop-neck T-shirt under an unbuttoned white cotton shirt. “Did you hear the news?” she asked.

  I nodded. Annie had her hair up, and tendrils curled down the back of her neck. That’s where I kissed her. Her skin felt cool and damp.

  “Chip’s preparing a motion to get Nick released,” she said. If this were any other case, I’d have been pleased. Getting our defendant off without a trial was a win-win all aro und. Good for the defenda nt, go od for the state, and Chip got paid. But I’d have felt a whole lot better if I thought Teitlebaum was going to get a fair shake from the criminal justice system. For once, I appreciated the way Chip usually shielded me from information I didn’t need to know. Now I craved the tunnel vision I didn’t have.

  We took the stairs to the second floor. Then down a long corridor, following the signs to the ICU.

  “I just heard what else they found when they searched Teitlebaum’s house,” Annie said. “A miniature surveillance camera.”

  “Yeah, I saw it there,” I said. “It was in Richard’s desk. He said Nick planted it in his office so he could spy on his wife’s sessions.”

  Annie started to say something else but stopped. We’d reached the closed double doors to the ICU. A uniformed police officer was seated just outside. He harrumphed to his feet and asked who we were there to see.

  “Richard Teitlebaum,” I said. “We’re friends. Dr. Peter Zak. Annie Squires.”

  “Hey, Annie,” the officer said, turning a warm smile on Annie. “How you been keeping yourself?” Half the police officers in the Western world seemed to know Annie.

  “Hey yourself, Eddie. I’m good. Peter’s the one who found Dr. Teitlebaum and called the ambulance. Okay if we go in?”

  “They only let one person in at a time.”

  “That’s cool. You go ahead,” she told me.

  The officer glanced through the window in the door. “He’s unconscious.”

  I pushed the intercom next to the door. The nurse, a middle-aged woman with graying hair who looked like she’d seen it all, came over. She asked who I was there to see and buzzed me in.

  The beds in the ICU radiated out from a central nurses’ station in separate, glass-walled cubicles. The nurse indicated Teitlebaum. She gave her head an infinitesimal shake. “A shame,” she said, “young man like that.”

  Teitlebaum lay inert in a hospital bed, a tube up his nose and an IV in his arm. Wires snaked from under the covers, others were attached to his head. They connected to the monitors that surrounded him, each one making its own sinusoidal graph.

  “Has he regained consciousness?” I asked.

  She took the chart off the end of the bed. She shook her head.

  I went over to his bed, pulled up a chair, and sat. I was breathing shallowly, through my mouth, trying not to swallow the smell of the place—denatured alcohol and gardenias.

  “Richard?” I said. A monitor alongside the bed was beeping. A machine, breathing for one of the other patients, hissed and clanked. “Richard,” I said a bit louder, putting my hand on his arm. The nurse’s shoes made a squishing sound as she moved from one side of the room to the other. But Teitlebaum didn’t stir.

  I felt a new surge of anger. Why the hell couldn’t he have waited for me to get there? Suicide was the ultimate stupidity. It left so many unanswered questions, so many people blaming themselves and each other. The police would assume they had their killer, and that he’d taken his own life. Case closed. Everyone goes home happy.

  But I knew in my gut that this case wasn’t closed. Sure it was hard to swallow, Teitlebaum treating two patients who were both brutally murdered. But maybe for once, that’s all it was. A coincidence. Nothing in Teitlebaum’s demeanor, in his reaction to Lisa Babikian’s death, suggested that he killed her.

  I thought about the occasional psychopaths I’d met over the years, killers who managed to mask their malevolence. Wasn’t it a shame about that woman he was accused of killing, Ralston Bridges had asked when I evaluated him. Did I know that she had a five-year-old daughter, now left without a mother? It made him so sad to think about it. He had a little girl himself. He’d been there when she was born. It was the most incredible experience of his life. As he said this, as if on command, a single tear appeared at the corner of a dead, emotionless eye. I’d met only two other real psychopaths, and they had the same dead eyes.

  When Teitlebaum’s eyes went dead, it was from despair, not emotional impotence. I was convinced that he genuinely cared about Lisa Babikian.

  I asked the nurse if I could borrow a piece of paper. Then I scribbled a note. In case he came to, I wanted Teitlebaum to know I’d been there and wished him well. I left it folded on the ni
ghtstand.

  I left the ICU and Annie and I started down the hall. A dapper-looking man, skin the color of light coffee, moved toward us with the fluid grace of a dancer. It was Naresh Sharma, another public defender with whom I’d worked over the years.

  “My good friend Peter!” he said. His voice was flat Midwest. Careful word choice—he picked his words as one would pick up shells on a beach—was all that remained of what must have once been an Indian accent. “And is that Annie Squires?”

  He and Annie embraced. Then she stood away from him. “You’re looking swell,” she said.

  As always, the tall, somber-looking fellow was dressed, if anything, more elegantly than my good friend Kwan, in polished wing tips and a dark suit that fit as if it had been made for him.

  Naresh and I shook hands. “How are you? How’s Lakshmi?” I asked. I’d never forget the extraordinary shrimp curry and homemade chutney his wife, also a lawyer, had cooked to celebrate the end of a trial.

  “She’s fine. I’ll tell her you asked after her,” Naresh said. He glanced toward the ICU, then back at me with concern. “Your mother? She’s well?”

  “She’s fine,” I reassured him. “Alive and kicking. I was here to visit Richard Teitlebaum.”

  “You’re acquainted with Dr. Teitlebaum? He’s my client.”

  “He hired you?”

  “A few days ago. You know I’m in private practice now too.”

  The three of us moved to the end of the hall. I lowered my voice. “I didn’t realize he’d hired an attorney. That’s great. I’m the one who found him and called the police. I’ve been working with Annie and Chip, defending Nick Babikian, the man who …” Naresh put up a hand to let me know he didn’t need it explained.

  “I know it sounds bad,” I said. “And after they dug up his garden and found what they did. But there’s something about this that doesn’t feel right.”

  “You don’t think this was suicide?” Naresh asked sharply.

  “Actually, the attempted suicide is the only part that feels right about it. What I can’t figure out is why.”