The Dark

by Andrew Neiderman

  Hartman’s eyes widened. He thought a moment and then nodded at the chair beside his desk.

  “Have a seat, counselor.”

  “Thank you. To get right to the point, Detective, I believe one of Grant’s other patients is responsible not only for the attack on him, but for Jack Landry’s death and for some other crimes recently committed in Los Angeles.”

  “Really? Jack Landry? The private dick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Landry was mugged, robbed down in South-Central. You say your guy did that?”

  “He made it look like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Landry was working for me, following him.”

  Hartman whistled through his teeth, nodded, and took up his pen.

  “Go on.”

  “I hired him after this man began to have a . . . very negative influence on my husband. Grant was very disturbed about him.”

  “That’s your husband’s work, isn’t it? Dealing with disturbing people and making them whole again?” Hartman asked, half in jest.

  “Yes, but this man is different. He’s. . .”

  “What?”

  “Different,” she said.

  Hartman raised his eyebrows.

  “You’ve met him?”

  “No, but my husband talked about him enough for me to understand the problem.” Hartman smirked.

  “You have to give me something more to go on, Mrs. Blaine. You, of all people, should know that.”

  “My husband diagnosed him as a compulsive-obsessive.”

  “So?”

  “He is driven by the compulsion to instigate evil.”

  “Come again?” Hartman said.

  “He has an obsessive need to get other people to do evil or illegal things. It pleases him in a sick way. For example, Grant told me the man claimed to have talked Clarence Dunbar into bashing in his wife’s head. You know that case?”

  “Yeah.” He paused, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Isn’t your firm defending him?”

  “Yes, but it has nothing to do with this. I am not on that case.”

  “Okay,” Hartman said with some obvious skepticism. “Go on.”

  “And then there’s a Mrs. Mosley, an elderly woman who supposedly overdosed on medication. Grant’s patient claimed he talked the woman’s daughter-in-law into killing her. The coroner told me that an overdose of nitroglycerin was the cause of death, only he assumed it was because the woman had memory problems and made an error.”

  “So?” Hartman said with impatience. “That sounds logical.”

  “There are other examples of his psychotic work I’m sure you’ll discover.”

  “And just because he has this obsessive need, as you call it, he’s able to get anyone he wants to do something terrible, like killing his wife or her mother-in-law?”

  “He doesn’t just get anyone. He works on just those who are most vulnerable,” Maggie replied. “I met Clarence Dunbar, questioned him. He’s the sort who is emotionally weak, psychologically disturbed, easily influenced. Grant’s patient preys on people who have these evil ideas anyway, greedy people, ambitious people. You understand?”

  “No. How does he know who these people are?”

  “I don’t know all of it,” Maggie said with some frustration. “It’s his . . . work, his obsession. Maybe he does research. He hunts them like a . . .”

  “Like a what?” Hartman asked.

  “Like an obsessive-compulsive personality would,” Maggie replied. “I believe he gets information from psychiatric files, as well.”

  “You have some concrete evidence of this? Something in writing? On tape?” Hartman asked.

  “No, I don’t. That would be in Grant’s files. You can subpoena them after you investigate and find probable cause.”

  “That’s a tough one, Mrs. Blaine. You know what it’s like getting privileged information. It’s like asking a priest to testify. You guys would tear us up.”

  “Not in this case.”

  “Because it involves your husband?” he followed quickly.

  “Yes,” she confessed.

  “Yeah, fine, but what do you have for us? I mean, what do I do, go up to him and ask him point-blank if he had an obsessive need to get a woman to kill her mother-in-law?”

  “Just start an investigation. You’ll see.”

  The detective gazed at her a moment.

  “According to the patrolman, this is the guy”—he fished through some paperwork—“who found your husband bleeding to death, rushed him to the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bois, Jules Bois,” Hartman read.

  “That’s him. He’s very clever. He did all that to cover up his involvement in the attack.”

  “But you think he’ll just up and confess to us like he confessed to your husband?”

  “He could. It’s part of his sickness.”

  “What if he doesn’t confess?”

  “He must have had something to do with Landry’s death,” Maggie insisted, struggling to impress him. “He surely had something to do with Doctor Flemming’s death.”

  “Doctor Flemming?” Hartman sat back. “Wasn’t he that psychiatrist in Brentwood whose wife shot him?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So, what, is this guy all over the city talking people into killing their wives, their husbands, their mothers-in-law . . . I mean, how’s he come to this psychiatrist in Brentwood?”

  “He was seeing him before he came to see my husband,” Maggie said.

  “And you think he talked the psychiatrist’s wife into shooting him?”

  “Drove her to it, maybe. I don’t know all the answers, but you’ve got to start a serious investigation of him,” Maggie insisted. “Look into his background. See who he really is and what he really does. That’s what Jack Landry was trying to find out for me when he was murdered. Maybe Bois saw Jack follow him that day and realized I had hired him. Don’t you see the possibilities?” Maggie asked.

  “Okay,” Hartman said, standing. “Don’t bust a blood vessel. We’ll go question the guy, see where he was the night of Landry’s death and what he knows about today’s exciting events.”

  “My husband’s secretary . . .” Maggie said, and paused to look away a moment. She couldn’t help feeling like an informer, ratting on people who once trusted her.

  “What about her?”

  “I think she’s been seeing this patient, this Jules Bois, socially. I think she might have given him some information about some of Grant’s other patients, one of them being the man accused of stabbing Grant.”

  “Ormand?”

  “Yes. Have you spoken to him? I’m sure he’ll be able to tie Jules Bois to this, now that you know what to ask.”

  “You don’t know?” Hartman responded.

  Maggie held her breath.

  “Know what?”

  “I thought that was part of why you came here to blame this other guy. When they went to pick up Ormand, they found him in his closet, wearing a necktie, only the necktie was tied to a hook just high enough above him to keep his feet from reaching the floor. Suicide.”

  Maggie shook her head.

  “That can’t be. It was definitely a murder,” she said.

  “Oh. And why is that, Sherlock?”

  “Because I just learned Jerome Ormand was an agoraphobic. He was terrified of being closed in, trapped. That’s why he was seeing Grant. Don’t you understand? The man would never put himself into a closet.”

  Hartman shrugged.

  “Or maybe it was his way of getting the courage or the inclination to commit suicide. I’m sure there’s a psychiatrist out there who would testify for another defendant at the drop of a retainer—aren’t you, Mrs. Blaine?” he asked sharply.

  Maybe Grant wasn’t just babbling last night, Maggie thought sadly. Maybe he was right. Maybe lawyers, psychiatrists, even policemen had killed Satan. There was no guilt anymore. Even Bois, even Bois would go unpunished.


  “I’ve told you a great deal more than I should have,” she said slowly, her voice tired and depressed enough to impress Hartman, “in the hope that you would initiate an investigation.”

  “I’ll check on this,” Hartman promised.

  “Thank you.”

  “How’s your husband?”

  “He’s . . . getting better,” she said.

  “At least someone is,” Hartman quipped.

  When they brought Lydia Flemming into the visitors’ lounge, Maggie was surprised to see how well put together she was. She looked as though she had been brought directly from her home and not from some room on a mental ward. Her hair was brushed and neat. She wore makeup and a pretty light blue dress with sapphire earrings. The moment she saw Maggie, she smiled, but then, just as suddenly, the smile evaporated.

  “It’s Grant, isn’t it?” she said just before she sat in the wide-armed, heavy-cushioned chair across from Maggie. Spiders with legs of ice ran down her spine.

  “How did you know that?”

  “I can see it in your face. You look like I looked when I gazed at myself in the mirror just before . . . just before I lost Henry,” she said, and took a deep breath. She gazed around the lounge. “It’s really very comfortable here. Everyone’s been quite considerate and I have a nice room with a window that looks out on the gardens and the fountain. I feel . . . safe.

  “The children,” she continued, “haven’t been here. They make their duty calls, but I hear the strain in the voices. They think of me now as the woman who killed their father.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No,” Lydia said, shaking her head. “Someone else killed him long before I did, but”—she sighed—“no one’s ever going to believe that, I’m afraid. No one but you, perhaps,” she added, glancing up at Maggie.

  “We didn’t talk very much at the police station, Lydia. I was too upset. I’m sorry. I had to turn you over to Phil Martin.”

  “I understand. I don’t mind. I feel safe,” she reemphasized. “What’s happened?” she asked, her face turning serious.

  She seems so sane, Maggie thought, so much the Lydia Flemming I remember.

  “One of Grant’s patients attacked him this morning and nearly killed him, stabbed him in the neck with a sharp fork.”

  “Oh, dear. Henry grappled with a patient once. The man struck him on the temple with one of Henry’s trophies, but Henry was a strong man, a football player, college wrestler. He took him down quickly and restrained him, and then blamed himself for it.”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, nodding. “Grant will, too.”

  Lydia smiled and nodded.

  “Lydia, tell me about Henry. Why did you think he was no longer Henry?”

  Tears came to her eyes. She sat quietly a long moment and then took a deep breath.

  “I don’t mean to upset you,” Maggie said.

  “It’s all right. It’s not easy for me to tell anyone these things. The doctors here try to get me to talk about it, but I can’t talk to them.” She leaned forward and whispered. “I don’t trust them.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure who they’re working for,” she said. Maggie nodded. This was the paranoia, she thought, and wondered now if Carl Thornton was right: she had put herself into the madness and would get nothing substantial from Lydia Flemming.

  Lydia looked at the attendant in the doorway and then at Maggie. She smiled.

  “But somehow . . . maybe because of our friendship . . . I feel I can tell you. I feel I should tell you. You have Grant to worry about or you wouldn’t have come.”

  “I appreciate that, Lydia. Whatever it is, I know it’s difficult for you.”

  “You don’t know how difficult.” She took another deep breath, looked away and then back at Maggie. “Henry began taking on some of the characteristics of some of his patients,” she began.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I’m not even an amateur psychiatrist, Maggie, even though I spent a good deal of my adult life living with a psychiatrist, but I could recognize symptoms of paranoia, for one. It got so he locked the doors and closed curtains as soon as he arrived home. I would find him staring out the windows sometimes, watching the street. When I asked him what he was looking for, he would snap at me, ‘Nothing!’ Often at night I would wake and find him missing from the bed. When I looked for him, I usually found him downstairs peering out the window or in his office just pacing.”

  “He never told you why?”

  “No. In fact, he got more and more belligerent about my inquiring. It was as if he wanted to drive me away from him, as if he thought . . .”

  “What?”

  “That whatever or whoever was after him would harm me if I was too close to him.” She sat back. “It went that way for a while and then he began to undergo an even more dramatic personality change. It was never like Henry to forget to call me if he wasn’t coming home or if he would be home very late. Henry was never selfish, never self-centered. He always thought about me first. Suddenly he stopped being interested in anything but himself. He never even asked about the children or cared to see our grand-children.

  “When he returned home from work, he would go right to that den and light up his computer. He told me he was working on some new book, some new theory about guilt.”

  “Guilt?”

  “Guilt being the cause of all our psychological problems and it being the fault of religion. Henry usually kept his current works on the long table in the den, the pages spread out for his editing. Often he would ask me to proofread for him, but not this time. This time he didn’t want me anywhere near what he was doing.”

  “So he was writing a book about it, too,” Maggie mused, her thoughts returning to Grant at the hospital.

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Lydia said quickly, as if she were afraid Maggie would lose interest or miss the point. She swallowed. “He began . . .”

  “What?”

  She shook her head and began to cry. Maggie rose from the chair and went to her, putting her arm around Lydia’s shoulders and holding her. She felt her shaking. The attendant at the door widened his eyes. After a moment Lydia took a deep breath and nodded.

  “I’m all right.”

  “If this is too difficult for you, I’ll come back another time, Lydia.”

  “No, no, I’ll be all right. I want you to hear it,” she said. Maggie returned to the chair. The attendant relaxed and leaned against the jamb again.

  Lydia closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and continued. “I did become an amateur psychiatrist. I went to Henry’s reference material and I looked it up.”

  “What?”

  “What psychiatrists call paraphilias, disorders in which unusual or bizarre imagery or acts are necessary for sexual excitement.”

  Maggie stared. She tightened her face with determination.

  “That’s why I say Henry took on the characteristics of some of his patients. It was as if the madness were infectious, especially the bizarre.”

  “What do you mean, exactly?” Maggie asked.

  “It got so he wouldn’t go to bed with me unless he wore some article of women’s clothing. I didn’t know where he got these things or whose they might be. Of course, it was a turnoff for me, but he didn’t seem to care. After a while it was more like a rape anyway,” she said with shame.

  “More like rape?”

  “I want you to see something,” she said, and began to unbutton her blouse. Maggie sat transfixed as Lydia pulled her right arm out of the sleeve and then lowered the brassiere cup over her right breast until Maggie saw the ugly abrasion that had become a scar.

  “My God . . . what?”

  “He bit me while we were having sex and wouldn’t release or ease up. It got so he enjoyed inflicting a little pain on me whenever we were together like that. Finally I shut him out of my bedroom and he slept in the den.”

  She started to cry. The attendant came forward.

  “I’m all
right. Please,” Lydia said.

  “I’d better get her back to her room, ma’am,” he told Maggie.

  “She’s okay. Doctor Thornton said this would be okay,” Maggie insisted. The attendant retreated, reluctantly.

  Lydia reduced her voice to a whisper.

  “I couldn’t tell anyone these things. My husband . . . one of the most respected psychiatrists in Los Angeles; in the country, for that matter . . . of course, I never told the children.”

  “I wish you had told me sooner.”

  “So do I, but he was erratic. Sometimes,” she said, wiping away the tears, “he would come home and seem so normal and apologetic. I would think whatever this was . . . experiment, whatever, it was over, but it never ended. It was as if someone or something had gotten into his brain and poisoned him.”

  Maggie nodded, her eyes brightening with the possibilities.

  “Lydia, Grant has a former patient of Henry’s. He told him his name is Jules Bois.”

  “Does he claim to suffer from a compulsion, an obsession to instigate evil in others?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, her eyes widening with excitement.

  “When he was seeing Henry, he called himself Thomas Forcas. Have you met him?”

  “No. Did you ever meet Forcas?”

  “No.”

  “Grant described him as a tall, distinguished-looking man,” Maggie said.

  “It’s what I was afraid of,” Lydia replied. “You don’t have much more time.”

  “Why not?”

  “By the time he had tracked him to Henry, it was too late for me.”

  “By the time who tracked him to Henry?”

  “Father Dimmesdale,” she said. She leaned closer. “I called him just before . . . before I killed that creature in Henry’s body,” she whispered. “He told me what to do. I never forgot his phone number. It is etched in my brain. 555-6666.”

  She reached out and took Maggie’s hand into hers.

  “Call him, call Father Dimmesdale, and maybe, just maybe you won’t have to kill Grant,” Lydia said.

  16

  Maggie found herself trembling when she returned to her vehicle and got behind the steering wheel. Lydia Flemming was swimming in a pool of madness, just as Carl Thornton had described; but what had put her there? Were they real events or imagined? That scar on her breast was real enough, but the descriptions of Henry were so astounding, how could there be any truth to them? If Henry was so weird, why hadn’t any of his associates seen it? Was he only bizarre around Lydia? And who exactly was this Father Dimmesdale? Why would a priest be calling her and advising her to kill her own husband? Was he real or also something manufactured by madness?