Again, the tiny head shake.
“What?” I said.
“I am a Doctor of Human Arts.”
“Of course,” I said. “And the conferring institution?”
“University of the Southern Pacific.”
“In L.A., I bet.”
Nod.
“They give academic credit for life experience.”
“That’s quite enough, Mr. Spenser.”
I nodded and smiled at her.
“Sure it is,” I said. “So tell me about Olivia Nelson.”
She paused for a long time. We both knew she was a fraud. And we both knew that if I were motivated, I could cause her a lot of aggravation with the state licensing board. And we both knew it. She shook her head ponderously.
“Troubled,” she said, “terribly troubled.”
I did a barely visible nod.
“And like a lot of women, terribly victimized,” she said.
Her deep voice was slow. Her manner was ponderous. When she wasn’t speaking, she remained entirely still. She knew I knew, but she wasn’t letting down. She was going to stay in character.
I nodded.
“At the heart of things was the fact that her father rejected her.”
“Original,” I said.
“And so she sought him symbolically over and over in other men.”
“She was promiscuous,” I said.
“That is a masculine word. It is the product of masculine culture, judgmental and pejorative.”
“Of course,” I said.
“When she came to me for help, she had already tried the route of Freudian, which is to say, masculine, psychotherapy. The failure was predictable. I was able to offer her a feminist perspective. And understanding herself, for the first time, in that perspective, she began finally to get in touch with her stifled self, the woman-child within.”
“And she slept around,” I said.
“She gave herself permission to discover her sexuality. And to do so for its own sake, rather than in the service of a thwarted father love.”
“Do you know the names of any other men she gave herself permission to discover her sexuality with?”
“Really, Mr. Spenser. That is privileged communication between patient and therapist.”
“And one of them might have killed her,” I said.
She chewed on that for a little bit.
“I would think it would be in her best interest for you to name them,” I said. “I’ll bet that in your studies at USP you learned that your patients’ best interest was the ethical rule of thumb in difficult circumstances.”
She chewed on that a little bit more.
“I don’t make notes,” she said finally. “I believe it inhibits the life force spontaneity necessary to a successful therapy.”
“Of course,” I said.
She allowed me to watch her think.
“And she never used names. She referred to the men in her life in various ways-the news anchor, for instance, and the judge, the broker, that sort of thing. There was an important clergyman, I know. But I don’t know who he was.”
“Denomination?” I said.
She shook her head. “Not even that,” she said. “She always referred to him as the Holy Man. I think it pleased her to experience a man of the cloth.”
I pressed her a little, but there was no more. I moved on.
“Did she tell you her real name?” I said.
“I was not aware that she had another,” Cockburn said.
“What was her father’s name?”
“I don’t know. I had assumed it was Nelson.”
“She ever mention the name Rankin?”
“No.”
“Cheryl Anne?”
“No.”
We were quiet. Dr. Cockburn maintained her ponderous certitude even in silence. The way she sat bespoke rectitude.
“She did say that she used another identity to get into graduate school, someone else’s records and such,” Cockburn said finally. “She herself had not finished high school. She left home at seventeen and went to Atlanta, and made a living as best she could; she said, including prostitution. At some point she came to Boston, motivated, I think, by some childhood impression of gentility, became a graduate student, made a point of frequenting the Harvard-MIT social events and met her current husband.”
“She didn’t say whose identity she used.”
“No, but if in fact she is not Olivia Nelson, as you imply, then one might assume she used that one.”
“One might,” I said. “How did her father’s rejection manifest itself?” I said.
“He failed entirely to acknowledge her.”
“Tell me about that,” I said. “How does that work? Did he pretend she wasn’t there? Did he refuse to talk to her when she came home?”
Dr. Cockburn gazed ponderously at me. She let the silence linger, as if to underline her seriousness. Finally she spoke.
“He was not married to her mother. The lack of acknowledgement was literal.”
I sat in the heavily draped room feeling like Newton must have when the apple hit him on the head. Dr. Cockburn looked at me with heavy satisfaction.
“Goddamn,” I said.
* * *
“Was that all?” Susan asked later.
“Everything essential,” I said. “I used my full fifty minutes, but the rest of it was just her doing Orson Welles.”
We were having a drink at the Charles Hotel, which was an easy walk from Susan’s home. Susan had developed a passion for warm peppered vodka, olives on the side. In an evening she would often polish off nearly half a glass.
“She did say that Olivia was obsessed with money, and that apparently the family business was slipping.”
“That would support the bounced check and the checkbook with no running balance,” Susan said.
“Yeah. Cockburn said she had some sort of desperate plan, but Olivia wouldn’t tell her what it was.”
“Plan to get money?”
“Apparently. Cockburn doesn’t know, or won’t say.”
“Dr. Cockburn has, in effect, waived her patient-therapist privilege already. I assume she’d have no reason to withhold that.”
“Agreed,” I said. “What do you think.?”
“Dr. Cockburn’s theory about Olivia Nelson is probably accurate. It doesn’t require a great deal of psychological training to notice that many young people attempt to reclaim a parent’s love by sleeping with surrogates. Often the objects of that claim are in some way authority figures.”
“Like a U.S. Senator,” I said.
“Sure,” Susan said. “Sometimes it’s apparent power like that, sometimes it’s more indirect. Money maybe, or size and strength.”
“Does this explain our relationship?” I said.
“No,” Susan said. “Ours is based, I think, on undisguised lust.”
“Only that?” I said.
“Yes,” Susan said and guzzled half a gram of her peppered vodka. “I always wanted to boff a big goy.”
“Anyone would,” I said.
“Why,” Susan said, “if she were sleeping with all these prominent men, would the police not discover it?”
“Partly because they were prominent,” I said. “The affairs were adulterous, and prominent people don’t wish to be implicated in adulterous affairs.”
Susan was nodding her head.
“And because they were prominent,” she said, “they had the wherewithal to keep the event covered up.”
“She wasn’t telling,” I said, “and they weren’t telling, and apparently they were discreet.”
I shrugged, and spread my hands.
“What’s a cop to do?” Susan said.
“Especially when the cop is being told by everyone involved that the victim was Little Mary Sunshine.”
“So they weren’t looking for infidelity,” Susan said.
“Cops are simple people, and overworked. Most times the obvious answer is the right answer. Even, occasionally, when it’s not the right answer, it’s the easy one. Especially in a case like this where a lot of prominent people seem to be pushing you toward the easy answer.”
“Even Martin?” Susan said.
“You can’t push Quirk, but he’s a career cop. It’s his nationality-cop. If the chain of command limits him, he’ll stay inside those limits.”