“I just told her that I was thinking of us all going over to the big house tonight and tying you up and letting her use her manicure set on you. Snip, snip. Make us a little drinkie there, would you?”
“No,” said Marlene equably. “And I think I’ll pass on mine too.”
“Oh, I hurt your feelings! I’m always doing that, I don’t know why. And we should be friends, you know. We’re very much alike.”
“You think so.”
“I do. I’ve been looking into your career. Both of us make our own rules, both of us do just as we please, the only difference being that you’re a hypocrite, and feel obliged to justify your actions-how many people have you killed? — as being in service of some notional higher good, whereas I do what I like merely because it pleases me. The will is all.”
“The Marquis de Sade,” said Marlene.
“Exactly! If you let yourself go, I think you could be one of his more complete and proficient devotees.”
“But he ended up in jail, didn’t he? As will you.”
“Oh, really? And who is going to put me there? Your big jewboy?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact. One thing I’ve learned, Doctor, in my years of dealing with scumbags, is that they are all au fond, whatever their pretensions, mere assholes. They all make mistakes, they all get caught, if not for one thing, then for the next, and so will you. You’ll love Attica, by the way, especially once the word about your racial attitudes hits the cell blocks.”
Robinson gave her his boy-pulling-wings-off-flies grin. “Why, I think you really believe that! What a quaint idea: crime does not pay. But nothing pays better. Haven’t you heard that every great fortune was founded on a crime? A case in point is young Rohbling. Do you really imagine that he’ll spend a single day in jail? Of course, to be fair, I’m not nearly as well fixed as the Rohblings, but I intend to change that quite soon.”
“Really? How?”
He laughed and said in a fake whisper, “No, that’s a secret. Ginnie knows. Why don’t you ask her? You’re such a favorite of hers.”
Suddenly, Marlene was overcome by a boredom so oppressive that it seemed to darken the sun. She had met more than her share of bad guys, and they were universally bores. The violent criminal, almost by definition, is grotesquely self-involved, but Robinson seemed to her to occupy a class of his own. Talking to him was like watching a bad movie as a goof, fascinating in its awfulness for a while, until you realized that there were more rewarding things you could be doing.
She stood up abruptly, stripped her towel off the lounger, and thrust it into her straw bag.
“Going somewhere?” Robinson asked, standing as well.
“Yes, away from you.”
“But why? I thought we were having such a nice conversation.”
“No, you didn’t. You were annoying me and annoying your girlfriend by talking to me, and loving it because you’re a sadistic little shithead.”
Robinson’s smile grew tighter. He reached out and grabbed Marlene’s left wrist. He said, in what was meant to be a commanding voice, “Sit down, you stupid bitch!”
Marlene sighed and instead of pulling away from him, as he had expected, went toward him, jamming his calves up against the lounger frame. Then she pulled the.45 out of the straw bag and jammed it hard into his belly.
“How crude,” he said disdainfully, releasing her. She took the gun away from his belly and then, almost without willing it, and not pausing to justify it through the Principle of Double Effect, she flicked her wrist and snapped the muzzle of the weapon into his groin, and when he flinched, she dropped her shoulder and shoved him backward over the lounger. His head knocked against the fieldstone terrace with a satisfying coconut sound. She saw the look on his face. Pain, rage, but also triumph. As she walked away, she felt sick at heart.
“Dr. Perlsteiner,” said Karp, facing his first and only rebuttal witness, “could you tell us something of your background and qualifications?” This was why he had declined the stipulation of expert qualifications; he loved this part.
Perlsteiner said, “I received my medical education at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and then did postgraduate work at various hospitals in Berlin, and then I went to Vienna to be certified as a psychoanalyst.”
“And who was your teacher in Vienna?”
“Sigmund Freud.”
As always, a stir went through the courtroom. Even the most benighted recognized the magic name. In the pissing contest among shrinks that made up an insanity defense trial, this was the unmatchable squirt.
Karp took him through the rest of his resume: private practice in Berlin, escape from the Nazis, capture in France, the concentration camp, the new life in America, long service as a forensic psychiatrist at Bellevue. Then:
“Have you examined the defendant, and the record of his behavior preceding and after the murder in question?”
“I have.”
“As a result of this examination, did you reach any conclusions as to whether Jonathan Rohbling, at the time of the murder of Jane Hughes, lacked substantial capacity to comport his behavior to the requirements of the law, by reason of mental disease or defect.”
“Yes, I did.”
“And what were they?”
“I concluded that he did not lack that capacity. He knew what he was doing and that it was wrong.”
This was the formal rebuttal, what the People had to show beyond a reasonable doubt. Karp paused for a moment to let it sink in.
“Doctor, tell us, on what do you base this conclusion?” asked Karp, and off they went. Perlsteiner had a good courtroom voice, carrying but not harsh, and with a slight accent that recalled, for the older jurors, Albert Einstein and the actors hired to play distinguished scientists in the movies. Rohbling, he concluded, although by no means playing with a full deck, was not suffering from schizophrenia, paranoid or otherwise. How could he tell?
“By his competence,” answered Perlsteiner. “I will explain. Schizophrenia exhibits in many forms. It is a labile disease, and in fact, we often now speak of ‘the schizophrenias/ plural, do you see? But it is a true disease of the mind, just like polio is a disease of the motor nerves. If you suffer from schizophrenia, you can’t use your mind properly, just like polio, for example, you can’t use your legs. So, when I hear of a person who dresses himself up, who prepares his clothes, his wig, his makeup, just so, who travels on the subway, to what is an alien culture, for him, and passes himself off successfully as a member of that culture, who befriends a respectable elderly woman, who makes his escape after committing a crime, who eludes the police for some time, who recalls a psychiatric appointment and attends it, and presents a facade of normality strong enough to deceive a psychiatrist, then I say to you, whatever this man is suffering from, it is not schizophrenia. Schizophrenics are, typically, nearly helpless people.”
“And what in your opinion is Mr. Rohbling suffering from?”
“Well, he is compulsive-obsessive-compulsive syndrome, to be technical. Infantile, narcissistic. He feels bad about himself, and why not? He’s a young man, he has no discipline, he doesn’t work, he doesn’t go to school. His father has contempt for him, ignores him.” Perlsteiner shrugged. “It makes him feel better, disguising himself. Now he is in control.”
“And why, in your opinion, did he kill Jane Hughes?”
“Oh, impossible to say. I would not even guess at the psychology.”
Karp accepted this as a welcome departure from Dr. Bannock’s encyclopedic understanding of Rohbling’s motivation, and moved on to a point-by-point refutation of the defense’s psychiatric testimony, from which it emerged that Dr. Perlsteiner (and by extension, Dr. Freud) did not think much of modern American psychiatry. The business about the disease switching on just when it was convenient-nonsense! The disease was variable, true, but once florescent, it did not wane back to normality for short periods in the way proposed. Never. He deplored especially the tendency to medicalize every nasty character trait, and to attribute antisocial acts to dark compulsions, traceable, of course, to childhood trauma. Thank you, no further questions.