Delusion

by G. H. Ephron

  “Comes with the territory?” Annie asked.

  Boley flinched.

  “You took the hard drive because you were afraid it might show that you and Lisa had a thing going,” I said. “You even planted the hard drive in Teitlebaum’s desk. Didn’t it bother you, what you were doing?”

  “I thought he was the one,” Boley said.

  “What now?” Annie asked.

  Boley looked at her. “Case closed.”

  “And you get the credit for putting away another killer?” Annie said.

  “It’s my job,” Boley said, managing a weak smile.

  “Yeah, that’s your job, all right,” Annie retorted. “Find the shortest distance between two points, never mind who gets run over. And the world is full of Lisa Babikians, isn’t it? Young, unhappy women just begging for what you have to offer.”

  “Give it a rest,” Boley said.

  “Sooner or later, you’re going to make a mistake,” I said.

  “Take your sanctimonious—” Boley started.

  “You almost did this time,” I said, cutting him off.

  “Better be more careful who you hit on. Everyone knows,” Annie said. Boley looked back and forth from Annie to me. “They do. Your buddies are covering for you. Sooner or later, you’re going to do something even they can’t look past. And I can’t wait.”

  Boley dismissed Annie with a shrug. “You got nothing on me.”

  He turned and trudged up the stairs. Annie and I followed. We watched as he wandered through the kitchen. He stopped in front of the refrigerator. He stared at the photograph of Nick and Lisa, all dressed up, her looking at him, him looking away. It was the way they’d approached life.

  Boley went over to the window. He picked up a little ceramic angel from the ledge. It looked so incongruous in his beefy hand. He slipped it into his pocket.

  After Boley left, Annie rested her hand on my shoulder. “See? You’re definitely not paunchy.”

  “Guess the neighbor was describing Boley,” I said. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  27

  A WEEK later, Mrs. Babikian had settled in again at Westbrook Farms. I’d hired a geriatric care manager to keep tabs on her. The police had found Jeff Gratzenberg’s body, stuffed into a plastic barrel in a storage room behind Cyclops Productions. The autopsy results weren’t back, but speculation was that death was due to strangulation. Richard Teitlebaum was at home recuperating. And there was a profile of homicide detective Al Boley in the morning paper—he’d set some kind of record in murder cases solved.

  It was noon and I’d sneaked away from work. Annie had agreed to go rowing with me, and I didn’t want to give her time to change her mind. She was helping me lower a double scull from an overhead rack at the BU Boathouse.

  “I want to see Nick Babikian locked up until he’s an old, old man,” she said. “I hope to hell his attorneys don’t think they’re going to have a chance with NGI or dim cap.”

  We set the boat on our shoulders and headed out through the double doors onto the deck.

  “Delusional disorder,” I said. “Believing you’re Mary, mother of God, is one flavor. Another is believing that the world is out to get you. I don’t think there’s any question that Nick suffers from paranoid delusions. Will the jury swallow that he had no control over his actions? That the paranoia compelled him to kill? That seems like a long shot to me. Especially in Massachusetts.” We carried the shell upside down on our shoulders. “I’m just glad it won’t be up to me to convince them.” After he was arrested, Nick had been furious when Chip told him he was resigning as his attorney.

  “You got pretty paranoid yourself there. For a while, anyway.” Annie was right. I’d watched The Conversation a few nights earlier, the movie recommended by Mr. Kuppel. What had surprised me was how I found myself identifying with the paranoid surveillance expert, Harry Caul. Like him, I never knew if I was working for the good guys who were trying to defend themselves against evil forces, or whether I’d been hired by the bad guys who were using my skills to entrap and endanger innocent people. Good and evil were more or less indistinguishable, had the same rights and privileges in the criminal justice system. And like Harry Caul, I’d come to know the insidious pull of paranoia. By fomenting my own anxiety and paranoia, Nick weakened me as a potential adversary, one less person who might see through his carefully constructed defense. I could easily relate to the uncertainty that drove Harry to tear apart his home to the floorboards, looking for planted surveillance devices.

  When I’d brought the tape back to Mom, she had a package for me. I must have blanched when I saw the brown paper wrapping. “Don’t worry. It’s just your father’s harmonicas.”

  “You saved them?”

  “Of course,” she’d said, like it had been a no-brainer. “Your Uncle Louie’s postcards?” She shrugged. “Well, I didn’t care so much about them.”

  Annie and I stopped at the edge of the dock. We rolled the boat off our shoulders and set it into the water. The sky was a brilliant blue, and there was barely a breeze.

  “Promise I won’t fall in?” Annie said, looking out over the water.

  There wasn’t much traffic on the river. Only a few teams practicing in eights. If you’re going to learn to row, noon is the time to do it. Early morning or late afternoon, we’d have wreaked chaos in the river crowded with varsity rowers.

  “I can only promise that if you fall in, I’ll fall in with you.”

  “Why don’t I find that reassuring?” Annie distastefully eyed the brown, opaque liquid we call river water.

  Annie held the boat while I went back for the oars.

  I took off my sneakers. “Hold onto it now,” I said. I put one foot in.

  She watched in silence as I fastened the oars in place.

  I stepped back on the dock. “Lesson one: getting into the boat,” I said. Annie winced. “Take off your shoes and crouch.”

  Annie took off her shoes and squatted by the boat. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  I grinned. “Now grab both oar handles, step in, and sit.”

  I held the boat steady. Annie stepped in easily, as if she’d been doing this all her life. But once she was seated, she gripped the edges as the boat shimmied in the water, then steadied.

  “Okay, now slip your feet into the shoes and fasten them.”

  “How come I get the front?” Annie asked as she worked on the shoes that were fastened to the cross stretchers.

  “You don’t. You’re in the stern. Facing backward.”

  “Figures,” she muttered. “Just like dancing.”

  “When you get used to this, Ginger, I’ll let you lead,” I said. “Promise.”

  I crouched, grabbed my oars, steadied myself. “Hold onto the dock,” I said. “I’m getting in.” I stepped into the boat.

  “Holy shit,” Annie said, exhaling as the boat sank lower, the edge now only three inches above the waterline.

  I tied in, fastening the Velcro, then pushed away and took a few strokes so we’d be clear.

  Just then, three racing eights came zooming down on us. Annie gave a yelp and I froze. The eights managed to maneuver around us, the last one brushing the tip of our oars.

  “Sorry about that,” the coxswain called out. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” I hollered back.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Annie said as we bobbled on their wake. “You can let me out here. I’ll walk.”

  “You can’t wimp out on me now. Besides, it was his fault. We had the right of way.”

  “Said the sports car to the ten-wheeler,” Annie muttered.

  I ignored it. “Lesson two: taking a stroke.”

  I started her on the same drill she’d done in the tank. Annie steadied herself, evened her hands, pulled her knees to her chest, and took a smooth, clean stroke. Then another. I kept my oars flat on the water to provide a stable platform, training wheels.

  I’d never seen anyone pick it up so fast. As the b
oat began to move, I joined in. We were gliding along more quickly now. I swiveled my head around after every stroke or two, keeping an eye over my shoulder to make sure we were going straight.

  “Are we having fun yet?” Annie asked. “This feels like I’m doing all the work and you’re giving all the orders.”

  “And I have the best view,” I said as I watched Annie’s back curve and straighten, her muscles rippling, her shoulders shining with sweat. Her stroke was equal to mine in duration, almost in strength. This was something I’d known would be true, without knowing I knew.

  “It wasn’t as awful as I thought it would be,” Annie admitted when we got back to my place an hour later. Neither of us had eaten lunch.

  We were in the kitchen, unpacking the bread and cheese and salad we’d picked up at Bread and Circus. Annie’s hair was damp, and she smelled soapy from the shower. I uncorked a bottle of everyday red. Annie poured while I got out plates.

  “How does someone get to be so paranoid that it colors his every experience?” Annie asked as she unscrewed the corkscrew from the cork.

  “When one family member experiences a life-threatening blow, as Nick’s grandmother did during the Armenian holocaust, it can result in a kind of psychiatric contagion. It gets passed from parent to offspring. Empathy serves as the vector for the disorder.”

  “Indeed, Herr Doc-tor,” Annie intoned. “Meaning?”

  We carried the plates and glasses out into the living room. Annie took the morris chair and I took the couch.

  “Meaning that, in a sense, he may well have caught it from his grandmother. Certainly his mother, who never actually experienced the horrors, behaved as if she did.

  “We had a patient a few weeks ago. A couple of weeks of sixty-milligrams of Prednisone made her delusional. For Nick, it was that steady diet of irrational fear that his grandmother and mother fed him.” In turn, I’d almost caught a terminal dose of it from Nick.

  “If he hated the Turks, then why did he act like one, killing his wife and then cutting her that way?” Annie asked.

  “Identification with the aggressor,” I said, putting the technical name to it. “His family had barely survived extermination. Nick was beaten up all the time growing up. Identifying with your aggressor is one way to maintain a sense of self when you’re constantly being assaulted both physically and psychologically. As you experience more stress, you take on the characteristics of your aggressor, and in so doing borrow some of his perceived ego strength as a way of bolstering your own failing defenses.

  “The stressor for Nick was his mother’s illness. He was so enmeshed with her, and then her Alzheimer’s pushed the paranoia that was already there into the semipsychotic realm. Psychotic defenses distort reality. He projected his own fears into the environment and then saw them come back on him.

  “Then Nick discovers Lisa is leaving him. It’s an assault on his ego that is incredibly damaging. To him, it means he’s not a man. So who’s the most powerful person he knows? The Turk. His response is to identify with what has been his lifelong aggressor.”

  “So he becomes his own worst enemy,” Annie said.

  “Literally.”

  Annie leaned back in the chair. She sat forward and adjusted the seat back. Then she settled again. I watched with my mouth open.

  “You adjusted my chair!” I said.

  Annie looked at me, surprised. “Now you are acting paranoid. See?” She pointed to the notches. “You’re supposed to adjust it.”

  “Have you ever done that before?”

  “I … I …” she sputtered, laughing. Then she saw I was serious. “I think so. Maybe.”

  I remembered. Annie had come over after my first special-delivery package. We’d opened a bottle of wine. Had she sat in the chair? I couldn’t remember for sure. That was how it worked. Something bad happened, leaving you feeling vulnerable. Then you found yourself interpreting small, unexpected changes in your everyday environment as menacing.

  I charged into the kitchen. The cork was on the kitchen counter, but the corkscrew wasn’t. Annie came up behind me. “The corkscrew?” I said.

  “I put it away,” Annie said.

  I reached for the drawer where I usually kept it. It wasn’t there. Annie opened the silverware drawer. There it was.

  “And I thought …” I said.

  “What did you think?”

  “After the break-in, my chair was adjusted too far back. And my corkscrew was in the wrong drawer.”

  “And you thought you had an intruder?” Annie asked. I nodded. “When all you had was me.” Annie sauntered back into the living room. She settled back into the chair, adjusting it once more.

  “Well, I guess in a sense you do. Have an intruder, that is,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s about time you got used to it?”

  ALSO BY G. H. EPHRON

  Addiction

  Amnesia

  DELUSION. Copyright © 2002 by G. H. Ephron. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  eISBN 9781429973564

  First eBook Edition : March 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ephron, G. H.

  Delusion / G. H. Ephron.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-30500-1

  1. Zak, Peter (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Forensic psychiatrists—Fiction. 3. Paranoia—Patients—Fiction. 4. Trials (Murder)—Fiction. 5. Boston (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3555.P49 D45 2002

  813’.6—dc21

  2002068351

  First Edition: October 2002