It took me three hours to search the entire house. The only thing of interest was in Chisolm’s office. It was in his rolltop desk, in one of those secret compartments that look like woodwork until you pull it just the right way. Next to a checkbook was a glassine envelope with a couple of grams of coke.
It didn’t prove much, but it tied in with the blow in Alicia’s apartment. So Chisolm was a cokehead. And he’d probably introduced Alicia into its pleasurable byways. Another stop on the highway to perdition. What the hell had Alicia become? A metaphysical, psychological, feminist cokehead. My innocent bride, who wouldn’t even smoke a cigarette, who despised Freud, and who believed that fellatio was wrong.
I flipped through the checkbook. Nothing out of the ordinary. Unless you believe that surviving on your overdrafts was unusual. Considering all the people I knew who were living beyond their means on their lines of credit or home equity loans, I guess it wasn’t anything special.
I put the coke and the checkbook back where I found them and headed home.
Now all I had to do was to check out Mrs. Chisolm’s temperament and find out if she was capable of shortening a person’s life expectancy.
CHAPTER XVIII
“Why didn’t you tell me your little shrink played non-Freudian games?”
“Ha,” Rachel said. “If you only began to know what that squirt was capable of.”
“Then why do you go to him?”
“Because like he amuses me.” She put her hands on her hips. “He’s transparent and he’s also a real sicko. He tries to do every female patient…and I would say his batting average is pretty good.”
“And they go to bed with him?” I kept the distaste out of my voice.
She laughed. “If you call that sofa a bed.” She inclined her head toward me. “You know about transference?”
“Sure.”
“Well, he’s like the master of transference. All his women love him. And he loves them back in every hole. Sometimes he even cures some of them.”
We walked along the path around the lake and came to Bethesda fountain. Central Park was almost empty this early on a Thursday morning. It wasn’t eight yet but the day was going to be the first hot one of the spring. I’d traded in my suit for a navy Lacoste shirt and khaki pants.
I turned to look at her face with its delicate features. Almost perfection, except for the glint in her eye. What the hell was it? Wild, devious, cunning? Damned if I knew.
“Why are you seeing Pasternack?”
A broad grin spread across her face. “You know better than to ask a patient a question like that. A person in analysis should never say why she’s going to a shrink.” She seemed delighted with the question. “But I’ll tell you anyway.”
She locked arms with me. “It was my condition,” she whispered in my ear, even though there was no one within thirty meters of us. “I have like a disorder called vaginismus. Do you know what that is?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a condition that makes intercourse extremely painful.” She screwed up her face in a rough approximation of pain. “He was trying to find out if it was organic or psychosomatic.”
“And what did he find out?”
She looked out over the lake at a young couple rowing a boat. The boy was having trouble maneuvering the boat back into the dock. He finally guided the boat in and the girl stepped over the seat and put her arms around his neck and kissed him. She was wearing a light summer dress that flowed with her movements. Shot in soft-focus, it could have been a thirty-second spot for a douche or a condom.
Rachel turned away from this touching vignette and said, “He wasn’t sure. He said it might have been caused…by Daddy. In like a roundabout way, of course.”
I didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”
She shook her head abruptly. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“All right. Then tell me why Pasternack is such a sicko.”
She clearly didn’t mind talking about that. “He’s very good with his fingers and his tongue. But that’s all he uses, you know. I’ve heard he like only gets off by himself. I think he wants to show power over his female patients.”
“A real Rasputin, this charmer. Tell me something. Do you think he’s capable of murder?”
She chewed on that adorable lower lip. “If you’re a doctor, you think you’re like a god. You’re infallible, you know. You can do no wrong. It’s a given. Do you think a shrink measures himself by human standards? My little sicko has probably done more than most.” She giggled suddenly. “More than me, even.”
I grunted. “You haven’t done half of what you claim.”
“More than half,” she said with another giggle. “Maybe even more than twice.”
I sat in my office that afternoon, shoes off, feet on the desk, drinking black coffee out of a paper cup and thinking about Alicia. The coffee was hot. That was about all I could say for it.
What were her final moments like? Did she think of me in those last measured seconds? That poor sweet bitch.
Jesus. I just wanted to rip the heart out of the bastard that killed her.
I had no shortage of real good possibilities. Stallings, her boss. Why did he fire her? Did she have something on him? Maybe he was banging her. Was I paranoid, or was the girl who was a virgin when she married me turning into the whore of Babylon? Chisolm. Cocaine and the end of a love affair. Mrs. Chisolm, angry beyond belief at her husband’s latest infidelity. Wheelock, because she wouldn’t go out with him or revenge because she dumped him? Pasternack. A twisted shrink. Was he twisted enough to kill? Garbarini, a harmless superannuated love child or a stern Zen master punishing a wayward disciple? Even Rachel. She wasn’t a killer, but there was something about her that didn’t sit right. Something I couldn’t figure out. It was that uncertainty…
Where the hell to begin to begin? I was starting to descend into one of those black butt-kicking moods because there was no shortage of possible murderers and no feel for how to proceed from here. Then the fax rang and rolled out its message.
I eased my feet off the desk and stood watching. I couldn’t believe what I saw. The typeface was Courier 12 point. Could have come from any computer in the free world. The words were not very polite. “Stay out of this you fucking bastard or you’ll be dead”
Short and sweet. Only three more words than he needed to make his point. Maybe he added them for emphasis.
Stay out of what? I was working on half a dozen cases. Which one was he referring to?
I checked the sending number on the header and called it, but all I got was a fax tone on the other end. I sent a fax asking where they were located but all I kept getting was a disconnect message. Five minutes later, the fax got through. The return fax took another couple of minutes.
The fax said the place was on Forty-second between Sixth and Seventh, in what you would not call the fanciest precinct in town. It was four blocks from my office. I grabbed my jacket and got down there as fast as I could. It was one of those public fax-sending storefronts with Xerox machines and post office boxes, squeezed between a smoke shop and a porno hangout. The fat slob behind the counter took a spit-soaked cigar out of his mouth long enough to tell me, “I don’t remember nothing about nobody. We get hundreds of people in here every day.” When I put a twenty on the counter, he just shrugged and looked out the door at a sleazebag who was trying to come in. “Get the fuck out of here,” he yelled, “or I’ll bust your fucking skull.”
I picked up the twenty. That was the way I felt too.
I was in one of the foulest moods I’d ever been in. Black as pitch. For the next couple of hours I wandered around the city trying to sort it out.
Every block was so familiar. I walked around the East side until it became too sterile. Then I took the Seventy-ninth street transverse through the park and walked around the West side, sensing rather than seeing the menace. This was a third-world city next to the opulence of the East side, separated by the green wilderness. A jumbled whorehouse of all nations next to the ordered world on the other side of the park.