Delusion

by G. H. Ephron

  “Maybe they’ll even run a picture of you with your car,” Annie said.

  I groaned. I hated it. But it could work. It had to work. And it felt a whole lot better than cringing behind a barricade.

  Monday morning I scanned the paper for news about Gratzenberg’s disappearance. There was nothing. After rounds, I went up to my office and found the scrap where I’d scribbled Kelly from the Globe’s phone number. I called and told her I’d changed my mind.

  She said the article was already written, ready to go in the Science section this week.

  I knew I sounded certifiable as I explained to her that I could talk about obsessions and compulsive behaviors as a therapist, and also as someone who’d seen the positive aspects of it. I told her about my car. “It’s extremely rare. A 2000 TC. There were only about nine hundred made, and mine is one of about two hundred imported into the country. Maybe the only one in New England,” I added, laying it on thick. “A pile of scrap metal when I first got it. You could even run a picture of me and my car,” I said, putting the cherry on top.

  “Oh, God, that would have been so great,” she said. “If only you’d changed your mind a few days ago.”

  “It’s really too late?” I asked.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “Hang on.” There was a moment of dead air before a Muzak version of “New York, New York” came on.

  She came back on the line, breathless. “They’ll hold it until tomorrow. Can I interview you this afternoon?”

  “This afternoon?” I said, swallowing any second thoughts. “No problem.” We agreed to meet after I’d finished work.

  Now all I needed to do was get the garage wired to trap an intruder. I remembered Nick’s advice: Install infrared cameras that could see in the dark; hook up the alarm to my beeper. I called Argus Security. I told Bill approximately what I wanted, and he said he could have it installed in a couple of days, easy.

  That left me only one detail to take care of. I called my mother and asked if she had any lunch plans. There was silence on her end of the phone. Then, “Lunch?”

  “Why? You’ve eaten already?”

  “It’s ten-thirty in the morning. I’m still digesting my oatmeal.”

  “So you’ll be hungry by twelve or one?”

  “And why exactly is it that you want to take me to lunch?” my mother asked. “It’s not my birthday. It’s not your birthday.”

  “We can go to Carberry’s.” No response. “Or the S&S?” I could just barely hear her breathing. “Why can’t I just take you to lunch? Does there have to be a reason?”

  My mother sighed. “Just come here, why don’t you? I’ll make you a nice lunch, and you tell me whatever it is that you don’t think you can tell me on the phone.”

  Later, I sat in my mother’s kitchen and drank coffee while she cooked cheese blintzes. Alongside the stove, she had a plate of a half dozen yellowish pancakes. Her metal bowl held a mixture that looked like creamy cottage cheese and smelled like vanilla. She sliced a hefty chunk off the end of a stick of butter. It sizzled when it hit the pan.

  One by one, she lay each pancake in the skillet and warmed it on both sides, ladled on the cheese filling, folded it, and set it on a plate warming in the oven. There are no cheese blintzes between here and Brooklyn that can hold a candle to my mother’s.

  When she’d finished cooking, we sat together at the table. She put three blintzes, now browned at the edges, on my plate. Then another. I started to protest but didn’t, promising myself instead that I’d row an extra Head piece, from the boathouse past the Cambridge Boat Club, to pay for this lunch.

  I spooned a few dollops of sour cream over the blintzes and dug in. I closed my eyes and savored the thin, resilient pancakes tasting of egg yolk, the sweet filling, and the tang of sour cream. My father would have had them with a glass of hot tea with a teaspoonful of marmalade stirred in.

  “So,” my mother said when I pushed back from the table feeling uncomfortably full. “You wanted to tell me?”

  I plunged in. “You know the break-in I had? The packages we’ve gotten?”

  “So?”

  “Well”—I hadn’t quite figured out how I was going to say this so it wouldn’t sound as if I’d be setting out the welcome mat for a career criminal—“I’m having them wire the garage too. In case someone breaks in there.”

  “And why on earth would anyone want a car that’s thirty years old and falling apart?”

  I laughed. “It’s not falling apart! It’s probably working better now than when it was brand-new. And it’s worth twenty times what it cost brand-new.”

  Her look, the way she had her lips pursed together and raised her eyebrows, said I’d be trying to sell her a bridge next.

  I went on, “And also because there’s going to be an article in the paper about how I’ve been working on it.”

  My mother’s look turned incredulous. “My son, the mechanic?” Minnie Sadowsky would not have been impressed.

  “Actually, it’s an article about obsessions, and the compulsive behaviors people use to deal with them. The car’s just a sidelight.”

  “But why in the paper?”

  “They asked me to do it.”

  She didn’t say it, but I could hear her thinking: And if they asked you to jump out a window?

  “Anyway. I wanted to warn you. About the article. About the garage. Just in case you decided to go looking for those boxes in the back …”

  “The ones with Uncle Louie’s postcards from Florida? And your father’s harmonica collection?”

  “Because if you go in there, an alarm will go off. You won’t hear anything, but the police will be coming …”

  “Before I could play ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ on the harmonica.”

  “I didn’t know you could play the harmonica.”

  “I can’t.”

  She tilted her head and gazed at me. It was like watching a Pachinko game, when all the silvery balls rain down and find their way into the slots. “You want him to break in,” she said.

  “No. I don’t. I just don’t want you to set off the alarm. Or get frightened. Or be upset when you see the article.”

  She folded her arms over her chest. “This is an excellent plan. I approve. Then maybe when we’re rid of him, we can get rid of these foolish alarms and cameras and keypads. And I can stop worrying about forgetting where I put the little piece of paper I keep in case I can’t remember the pass code.”

  As I was leaving, she handed me a videotape. “Mr. Kuppel recommends,” she said. It was The Conversation, a Gene Hackman movie I’d seen when I was in high school. I vaguely remembered the dark story of a guy who’s hired to tape a conversation between a young couple in a park.

  “I already saw it,” I told her and began to hand it back. Then I remembered more. Like the Gene Hackman character in the movie, Nick Babikian was an expert on surveillance. And like Nick, the character had become paranoid about his own life. “On second thought,” I said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.”

  Kelly Quinlan turned out to be a tiny brunette who weighed about as much as a large housecat. She had glasses that slid down her nose when she got excited. She got excited when I showed her the car. She ran her hand over the fender. When I opened the door and she sat in it, she sighed and sank back into the leather seat and closed her eyes. Then the photographer who’d come with her took a picture of me with a chamois cloth in my hand, polishing the chrome.

  We went in the house. She sat at my kitchen table, switched on a tape recorder and set it on the table between us. We talked for a while about the differences between healthy and unhealthy habits, when normal behavior shades over into obsessive behavior, and how to tell when habits become compulsions. I talked about my car and how working on it was a habit that helped me when I needed to be distracted.

  “How long ago was it that your wife was murdered?” she asked.

  I felt as if I’d been sucker-punched. The answer was three years, two months, and a coupl
e of weeks. I gritted my teeth and reminded myself: I’d asked for this. There was a greater good. “Three years. I’d rather not talk about my personal life,” I said.

  She looked genuinely pained. She turned off the tape recorder. “I’m sorry. I just thought your working on the car might have been a way of working through your grief.”

  “It was very painful,” I said, not wanting to get into it more deeply than that. “I don’t think there are words that can do it justice.”

  “I know,” Kelly said. “My fiance was killed in an airplane crash. Do you ever get over it?”

  She closed her notebook and looked at me. Had the sadness been there in her eyes all along and I just hadn’t noticed? I smiled at her. So many of us wounded souls were walking around looking whole.

  “Not really,” I told her. “When you lose someone you love, it creates a hole. Grief shrinks the size of the hole. The loss never stops being there. But after a while, you can keep yourself from falling into it. Eventually, you get to where you can get on with your life without thinking about it every godamned minute” —I heard my voice rising but I couldn’t help it—“of every stinking day.”

  The interview only took forty minutes, but it felt like two hours. Kelly gave me a hug when she left.

  Bill from Argus Security arrived as Kelly was leaving. He took his measurements and gave me an estimate.

  After he left, I closed the garage and stood inside in the dark. It was just a car, I told myself. If there was one thing I knew, it was that cars could be fixed.

  The article ran on the front page of the Health and Science section of the paper. I couldn’t read it. I barely glanced at the picture of me polishing my car and looking like I’d rather be giving blood.

  Annie called me that morning. She’d told me it was fine. It could do the trick.

  The phone started ringing before I’d left for work. I let the answering machine accumulate the messages from well-meaning friends who’d seen the piece.

  I drove to work in a rented Toyota, hoping the BMW left in the garage all day would make an irresistible target. Even though I didn’t think he’d take the bait right away, whenever my beeper went off it was an electric shock that didn’t subside until I checked the readout to see that it wasn’t the security company. Gloria noticed. She suggested a couple of Valium.

  As the end of the week neared and work at the Pearce wound down, no alarms had been tripped.

  23

  NICK WAS supposed to come to my office to finish up the tests. At the last minute he called to say his mother’s caretaker had called in sick and asked if I could come over to his house instead. I wasn’t happy about doing it there. Though there was no time pressure from Chip, the last thing I wanted was for the testing to be seriously interrupted, giving Nick the opportunity to fortify his psychological defenses. In my office, I could control interruptions.

  The security gates were closed when I pulled into Nick’s driveway. I opened the car window and pressed the button on the intercom mounted on a post. I waited. His neighbor’s yard was abloom with newly planted pansies, and the air was fragrant with lilacs that reached out into the driveway on either side. It was the last place you’d have expected to find a gruesome murder.

  The gate clicked and swung open, and I drove through. In the daylight, the low-slung house with its harsh angles seemed like a scar on the landscape. The bushes that flanked the door had been pruned as they were into cubes and spheres.

  As I pulled up, the garage door swung up to reveal Nick, standing in the shadowy interior. I got out and walked up to meet him. It was one of those garages that look as if no one had ever parked a car in them for fear of soiling the concrete floor.

  He led me in through a laundry room. It smelled of detergent, the way it had the night of the murder. The dryer hummed, and there was a stack of clean laundry on the top. In the kitchen, the counters were clean and bare.

  “Coffee?” he asked, opening the refrigerator door and pulling out a carton of whole milk. In his pressed pants and white oxford shirt with a button-down collar, Nick reminded me more of an accountant than a computer geek.

  The photographs of babies were gone from the refrigerator. The calendar had been turned to June, and the photo was of a fluffy white kitten peering out from a basket of pink and turquoise yarn balls. Each day’s space had chores carefully written in, like I’d seen on May’s page. Lisa Babikian hadn’t expected May to be her last month.

  “How’s your mother doing?” I asked, pouring a cup.

  “She’s fine. We got back and it was as if she’d never left.”

  I took my coffee and followed Nick through the living room and into the family room. The wood floor gleamed, but I remembered where the blood had been smeared. When I looked up, Nick was staring at the same spot. He looked at me and immediately away.

  Nick sat at the edge of the leather couch. I took a chair and put my briefcase on the glass coffee table. All the masks in here were lacquered, some white-faced, others gilded. They were arranged on the wall in clusters. Did a camera lens peer from any of the eyeholes, beaming my image into Nick’s basement workroom? “I’ve got them turned off,” Nick said, reading my thoughts.

  “Really?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  I shrugged and sipped the coffee. What did it matter if he was recording the session, anyway? I took out the inkblot cards and a blank test protocol. I clicked my pen open.

  Nick looked at the cards with distaste. “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

  “You’ve got the phone turned off?” I asked. “I’d like to get through this without interruption.”

  “No one calls me except telemarketers. If it rings, the answering machine will pick up.”

  The Rorschach is a sensitive test. It has no right or wrong answers. It taps into the basic personality structure of the unconscious. As the test goes on, card after card, the subject’s defenses tend to become more permeable, and the person’s underlying character and issues surface. With someone who’s more fragile, I might administer cognitive tests as bookends around the Rorschach, starting and ending with their more structured, less emotionally charged content. I didn’t do that with Nick. His defenses didn’t need shoring up. If anything, a bulldozer might have helped get past them.

  I started the test the way I always do. “When I was a kid, I used to lie on the beach and look at clouds. Their shapes reminded me of other things. You ever do that?”

  “You want me to look at inkblots and tell you what I see.”

  “Right. Have you ever taken this test before?”

  “No. But everyone knows how it works.”

  “Good, then,” I said, handing him the first card.

  Nick examined it. He turned it over and back. “Looks like a horseshoe crab. There’s bumps on the back. And maybe gills on the sides. Or maybe a vampire mask.” He pointed to two white spots. “Eyes.” Then to jagged outcroppings on the bottom edge. “Teeth.”

  Vampires. Hermit crabs. These were pretty standard—what many people see, in fact. Although Nick had given it a twist, calling it a mask.

  I showed him the second card. His eyes flicked over it. “Two men in red masks, dancing,” he said. The “red masks” part was a bit more unusual. Still, this was close to another popular response. He’d integrated a card with lots of different parts into a single idea—something you see in high achievers.

  Several cards later, Nick was staring at a vividly colored inkblot. “This is fire,” he said, pointing to an orange and green shape at the bottom, “and smoke.” He indicated a gray area above the green. He stopped abruptly when the phone rang. The second ring was broken off by a click.

  “And here,” he pointed to one of the red shapes on either side, “are the bloody bodies of two lions that …”

  There was another click from the kitchen. Then the distant sound of a man’s voice. “Nick, Chip Ferguson calling. We got back the results …”

  Nick leaped to his feet an
d raced into the kitchen. He grabbed the phone. “I’m here,” he said, then lowered his voice so I couldn’t hear what he said next.

  This was what I’d been afraid would happen. Now Nick was pacing the kitchen. For a moment his voice got louder, angry. “That can’t be!” Then quickly he quieted again.

  A minute later, he returned and sat. His face was blank.

  I showed him the card we’d been doing. “Anything you want to add?” I asked. He seemed to be looking at it but didn’t say anything. “You need more time?”

  He peered into my face. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “Knew what?”

  “That Chip was going to call with the DNA results. That’s why you wanted to see me today.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? You’re the one who made me come here.”

  Logic didn’t ruffle him. “We could easily have finished the testing last week. Just like you had to come to the jail to see my reaction to the autopsy. You think I don’t get it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Then I stopped myself. Belatedly I processed what he’d said. “You got a DNA test?”

  “Don’t pull that crap on me. You knew all about it.”

  I wondered why he’d agreed to one, after all his suspicions about the testing labs. Clearly, the results had surprised him. “Is it your child?” I asked.

  “Of course not!” Nick exploded. He started to say something, then stopped. He looked confused. Then a wave of anger crossed his face. He leaned back and collected himself. “Maybe …” He gave his head a shake, dismissing whatever it was. “If it’s not Teitlebaum’s,” he said slowly, “and it’s not mine, then who the hell …”