The Dark

by Andrew Neiderman

  She tightened her grasp on his hand and pulled him toward her.

  “I’ve got to learn to think of other things, distract myself,” she said. “Isn’t that what you said? Doctor, show me how. I’ll meditate as you show me, just the way you instructed, but you’ve got to help me calm down,” she said. “You’ve got to help me cap this flow of raw desire, and then I’ll do what you instruct,” she promised.

  She placed his hand on her breast and then zipped down the halter quickly to shove his palm under the material. He felt the coolness and then her erect nipple. She had turned her face to him, her lips inviting, the halter falling to the side to expose her bosom.

  “Please, Doctor,” she said. “Help me. It won’t take long and we’ll be able to concentrate. All the distraction will be gone. That’s just sensible therapeutic treatment, isn’t it?”

  She tugged on his wrist, urging him to get off the chair and come to her.

  He heard his notepad fall to the floor. He felt himself rising. When he glanced to his right, he envisioned Bois again, sitting behind the desk, nodding, smiling, coaxing.

  He gazed at Deirdre Leyland and her exposed breasts, her beautiful skin, her lustful eyes. All resistance was melting away under the heat of rationalization. She was right: there was a therapy, a line of thinking, that could justify this. It called for putting the patient at ease. And that’s exactly what he would be doing, right?

  That’s right, he thought he heard the imaginary Jules Bois say as if he could hear Grant’s thoughts. You’re putting the patient at ease. Nothing more. It’s good therapy, Doctor. Force yourself to help her.

  He was on his knees and she was taking his head in her hands and guiding him toward those short shorts that she had undone.

  When he gazed toward his desk again, he imagined Bois standing in front of it, leaning against it, his arms folded across his chest, scrutinizing like an objective observer.

  The scent of Deirdre Leyland’s sex hooked him and, like a poor, dumb fish he swallowed and felt himself jolted out of the security of his own identity.

  “Relax,” he heard himself saying, “just try to relax, Mrs. Leyland. This won’t take long and then you’ll be relieved and we’ll be able to concentrate.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” she moaned. “Yes, that’s right.”

  Afterward, after she had left the office, he stood by the window and gazed down at the street. He saw her emerge from the building and cross the street to a waiting black automobile. He couldn’t see the driver’s face, but the shape of the head was familiar. Before he could think any more about it, he heard the door open and turned to see Fay, all flushed, her hand at the base of her throat, her eyes wide.

  “Doctor.”

  “What is it, Fay?”

  “It’s . . . Mr. Gordon,” she said. “He deliberately came a half hour early to sit in the waiting room.”

  Grant stared, anticipating. Peter Gordon was a forty-five-year-old man who had been arrested and convicted for obscene exhibitionism. The last time was his third arrest. Part of his punishment was a commitment to psychotherapy. This was only the second time Grant had met with the man and there was still a wall of distrust, anxiety, and resentment to scale.

  “What?”

  “He’s sitting there on the sofa facing me . . . with his penis out!”

  Grant rushed past her and stopped.

  “There’s no one here, Fay.”

  “What?” She turned. “He was sitting right there, Doctor,” she said, pointing to the sofa.

  “I guess he left,” Grant said, but the door opened and Peter Gordon entered. He froze at the way they were both staring at him.

  “What?” he said. “I’m late?”

  Grant turned to Fay. She shook her head.

  “It’s all right, Fay,” he said softly. “Go on back to your desk. Right this way, Mr. Gordon,” Grant said, stepping back.

  Peter Gordon’s forehead crinkled. He considered and then he walked through the waiting room, not glancing at Fay, who was looking down. She looked up the moment Gordon was inside the inner office.

  “You all right?” Grant asked her.

  “Yes. I guess I have to get used to this sort of thing if I’m going to work for a psychiatrist.”

  Grant smiled.

  “No one ever really gets used to this sort of thing, Fay.”

  He closed the door and turned to Peter Gordon, who was sitting on the lounge. He didn’t like lying back on it.

  “So,” Grant began, “were you just in my office, Peter?”

  Peter Gordon looked up.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, were you sitting out there and did you do something you weren’t supposed to do?”

  “I just came in,” he claimed. “I just came into the building! I wasn’t sitting out there.”

  Grant stared at him.

  “You don’t believe me?” Peter Gordon shoved his hand into his pants pocket and produced the parking ticket. “Check it out,” he said.

  Grant narrowed his eyes and took the ticket from Peter Gordon. It was stamped literally two minutes earlier. How could he have been in the office a half hour early? Unless he had parked someplace else, committed the act, and then left and parked in the garage. This was maddening.

  “You gotta give me that back,” Peter Gordon said, “or they’ll charge me for the whole day.”

  “What? Oh, sure. Sorry,” Grant said, and handed the ticket to Gordon, who stuffed it in his pocket and stared at the floor sullenly.

  “Everyone blames me for doing things I don’t do,” he mumbled.

  After the session, Grant followed Peter Gordon out to Fay’s desk and watched her paste on the validation stickers to cover his parking fee in the building. Peter Gordon took the ticket without saying thank you and left, still in a quite sullen demeanor. Grant hadn’t had a very productive session with him. The man barely uttered more than two polysyllabic words.

  “Did you notice the time stamped on Mr. Gordon’s parking ticket, Fay?” he asked.

  “No, why?”

  “According to the ticket, he pulled into the building only about two minutes before he walked in.”

  “He’s never been very early, Doctor.”

  “But . . . no, I was referring to what you said had happened before,” Grant explained.

  “He was here, Doctor. It happened. I wouldn’t lie about it, would I?” She smiled at him with an all-knowing, sophisticated look quite uncharacteristic of her.

  He stared a moment. Should he continue this? He decided to retreat into the office and closed the door.

  He was sweating and he was feeling very confused. His head was actually spinning. He went to his desk and sat a moment, thinking and then looking at his desk to find anything that would prove Jules Bois had indeed been sitting there, watching.

  What, am I going mad, too? he wondered.

  Physician, heal thyself, he heard, and went for a Valium.

  7

  Maggie was more upset than she had revealed after her visit with Dunbar. She was twisted with contradictions. First, she told herself she had no right to go there. As she had told Carl, just living with a psychiatrist gave her no ability to evaluate anyone. She was sure that Carl Thornton and even Grant could easily explain away Dunbar’s confusion about Henry Flemming.

  And yet, she had the instinctive feeling there was more to this. Maybe years of practicing criminal law had made her somewhat paranoid, but she found the coincidence of Grant’s patient Bois claiming responsibility for the criminal activities of one of her firm’s clients a bit too much. Grant was having an unusual reaction to this patient anyway. He as much as admitted that to her. She had to look into all this for Grant’s sake, and for her own.

  She decided she would do one more thing before she did anything else in her office. Grant had said Bois claimed another victim, someone named Mosley. A simple phone call to the coroner’s office revealed that a sixty-eight-year-old woman named Lillian Mosley with a San
ta Monica address had arrived at St. John’s Hospital DOA. She had been brought in by ambulance when her son found her in the apartment, collapsed on the kitchen floor. So that part proved true, she concluded. Of course, Bois could be, as Grant had said, simply scanning newspapers for delusions.

  Maggie knew that a person brought to a hospital emergency room dead on arrival was automatically reported as a coroner’s or medical examiner’s case. The coroner would investigate for possible foul play and determine if a complete postmortem examination was needed. Not all cases would require an autopsy, however. Only those truly suspected of foul play would even have blood drawn for toxicology tests, especially with the workload the coroner’s office had these days.

  Maggie spoke with a coroner’s secretary, who, annoyed with her questions, nevertheless agreed to read her the coroner’s conclusion.

  “ ‘It is my opinion that Lillian Mosley, a sixty-eight-year-old female, died as a result of cardiac arrest. She had a history of heart disease,’” she recited in a monotone.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. Okay?” she whined with impatience. She was about to cut her off.

  “No,” Maggie said quickly. She explained who she was and asked to speak with Doctor Benson, the medical examiner who had handled Lillian Mosley. After putting her on hold for nearly ten minutes, the secretary managed to transfer the call to Benson. Once again, Maggie explained who she was and then asked if there was any possibility the Mosley woman overdosed on her nitroglycerin.

  Doctor Benson had trouble recalling the corpse. Maggie could hear him sifting through paperwork before he finally responded.

  “Oh. Yes. Well, that was a possibility because she had some evidence of Alzheimer’s and was living alone. So what’s new, huh?” Benson said dryly. It always amazed Maggie how everyone from one end of the social structure to the other accepted the plight of the elderly in America as inevitable.

  “Well, if that’s a possibility, shouldn’t you have done a toxicology?”

  “No, not necessarily. I had no reason to believe there was criminal activity involved. Do you know something? Because this was four days ago. I’m sure the body’s either been buried or cremated.”

  “Can you give me the son’s name and address?” Maggie asked. Doctor Benson did so and then Maggie considered her next step. If she somehow convinced Grant to go to the police with the information Bois gave him and it turned out Bois was delusional, they would have wasted their time and caused innocent people some deep emotional trauma. Grant would be furious with her for getting him to do it.

  On the other hand, what if Bois was telling the truth? A woman was murdered. The police would want to interview Bois. Yet Grant had said he couldn’t tell the police about Bois anyway. He had insisted that would be a breach of the patient-doctor confidence. What’s more, she was sure he would be furious about the investigating she had already done.

  To her way of thinking, Grant was trapped by the principles of his profession; but she wasn’t. She buzzed her secretary.

  “Get Jack Landry on the phone for me, Marsha,” she snapped.

  Jack Landry was a private investigator often hired by the firm. She had had two previous experiences with him on cases and was very satisfied with his work and professionalism.

  Landry was an ex-New Orleans police detective who had opted to leave the department when he was, as he put it, disgusted with the corruption, corruption he called insidious and infectious. He told Maggie he had eventually felt like Serpico and feared for his own life. It was best to effect an early retirement.

  At forty-four, he wasn’t really retired. He enjoyed private investigatory work, enjoyed being his own boss, and had developed a very good reputation, not only with attorneys, but among the well-to-do, who hired him to spy on their own children, as well as on spouses and business partners. For the most part, he said he found the work clean and easy. And he was well paid.

  Maggie arranged for them to meet for lunch at a coffee shop not far from her office. Landry was a six-foot-one-inch lanky man, Lincolnesque, with deep facial lines that gave him a habitual look of sadness and worry. Even his smile was melancholy. Maggie attributed the sculpturing of the man’s face and personality to the ugly exposures he had endured as a police detective in New Orleans.

  “Good to see you again, counselor,” Landry said in his Cajun rhythms after they shook hands. They ordered coffee. Landry ordered a bagel and cream cheese and Maggie ordered a cob salad.

  “Why is it you women eat healthier than us men?” Landry complained. “Do women really have stronger willpower?”

  “You’re the detective, Detective,” she said, smiling. “You tell me.”

  Landry laughed.

  “Maybe it’s just because I’m too busy to think about myself these days. Everyone wants information; no one trusts anyone. Your husband would probably say paranoia has become an epidemic in America.”

  “I might be another victim of it,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I hope you’ll have time for one more assignment,” Maggie said, and explained what she wanted Landry to do: investigate the Mosleys.

  Landry sipped his coffee and chewed his bagel, listening. Then he sat back and after a moment shook his head.

  “You have a witness who claims he knows Mrs. Mosley’s daughter-in-law killed her. Why don’t you just get him to go to the police?”

  “He doesn’t just know she did it, Jack. Grant says the patient claims he encouraged her to do it.”

  “Why?”

  “He told Grant he enjoys getting other people to do harmful things to themselves and to other people.”

  “So, he admits it to Grant, but won’t to the police because he thinks he’s an accessory?”

  “I don’t think that’s what keeps him from telling the police. It’s more complicated.”

  Landry nodded.

  “I don’t know what’s worse,” he said, “the sewer in the streets I investigate or the sewer in the mind your husband investigates. I suppose his is less dangerous.”

  “Supposed to be,” Maggie said. “There’s one other thing for now, Jack.”

  “Oh?”

  “Grant doesn’t know anything about this.”

  “Oh,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “If there’s nothing to it, no harm done,” she said.

  “Except to your pocketbook,” Jack reminded her.

  “Right now I think it’s a worthwhile and necessary expense, Jack.”

  “Well, I’ll do it fast and cut the costs. This doesn’t seem too complicated.” He checked his watch. “If I don’t call you by the end of the day, I’ll call you tonight.”

  “No,” she said quickly. “I’ll call you.”

  “Oh, yes.” He smiled. “Paranoia is very good for my business,” he concluded.

  Maggie returned to her office and dove deeply into her own work to keep from worrying about Grant. She nearly forgot she had to leave a little earlier than usual to get ready for the charity ball at the Hilton. Fortunately, her secretary reminded her about what was on her calendar.

  “Oh, damn,” she cried, and hurried out, hoping Grant had remembered the affair as well. Her mind was put at ease when she turned her vehicle down their street and saw his Mercedes in the driveway. But when she rushed into the house, she was surprised again, this time by finding Grant sitting quietly in a dark corner of their living room, gazing out the window, a healthy glass of scotch on the rocks in hand. He seemed not to have heard her enter.

  “Grant?”

  He turned slowly.

  “Oh, hi, Mag.”

  “How long have you been home?” she asked, moving cautiously toward him.

  “I got home early. My four o’clock canceled. Louise Singer, the procrastinator,” he said, and laughed. It was a cold laugh. “Sometimes I feel like that Dutch kid with his finger in the dike.”

  “You’ve done good work, Grant, and you’ve had some striking success with other patients. D
on’t put yourself down because of one or two failures.”

  “One or two?” He laughed again. Then he sighed deeply and took a good swig of his drink.

  “Something else is wrong, isn’t it?” she asked. She was about to follow with, Does it have anything to do with your new patient? But she hesitated.

  “The strangest thing happened in my office today,” he said. “It’s making me question my own relationship to reality.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  He gazed at her and then shifted his eyes guiltily away.

  “Grant?”

  “I had strange . . . visions today. While I was treating a patient.”

  “Visions of what?”

  He hesitated and then put his glass down.

  “I kept seeing this patient, hearing his voice while I treated another patient and . . . it caused me to make some errors,” he said.

  “What sort of errors?”

  “Just some errors,” he snapped. “Actually, I don’t want to talk about it right now, Mag. I’ve got to work this out myself.”

  “Grant, you’re scaring me.”

  “I’ll be all right. It’s just an occupational hazard,” he said.

  “You should speak to someone else, Grant.”

  “I have. I called Carl today and we had a good discussion.”

  “Carl Thornton?”

  “Yes.”

  She was waiting to see if Carl had said anything about her visiting Dunbar, but apparently he hadn’t.

  “We have the affair tonight, remember? But if you’re not up to it. . .”

  “No, I should go. I should get out,” he said. “I’ll just take a hot shower.”

  He smiled at her.

  “How was your day?” he asked. She hated deceiving him, but now, more than ever, she was convinced she was doing the right thing.

  “Typical,” she said.

  “Any talk about partnerships?”

  “Not today. Maybe that’s just all it is, Grant, talk.”

  He nodded and rose.

  “Okay,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Let’s get ready to pay our respects to the Queen of Beverly Hills: my mother.”

  “Grant!” she warned. “You’d better behave.” She followed him to the bedroom to get herself ready, too.