“—dows. Tall like a professional basketball nigger."
“JEEZUS! He's fucking TELLING you the killer is a tall nigger That's your own goddamn interrogation and you missed it."
Eichord wanted a drink. No. First what he wanted to do was reach over and grab this moron by the shirt collar and tie, grab evening and just twist until the idiot was right there in his face and then put his lights out for him. No. Grab the lapels of the cheap suit in a cross-X grab and put a reverse chicken choke on the ignorant son of a bitch. Put him in a ball right here on the floor. THEN go out and get the drink. But what he did was take a very deep breath and begin slowly tap-dancing, fine-tooth comb in hand, patience ebbing but under control, as he took the two shoe flies step by step, fact by fact, through the long parade of deaths that were currently attributable to the Grave-digger perp or perps unknown, dancing all the while not unlike Gene Kelly in the rain-filled gutter, dancing through the modus operandi, the opportunity patterns, the random factoring, the lack of commonality, the day danced away, Eichord shuffle-kicking through a shit clog of red tape trying to convince these characters that “tall like a basketball nigger” was just a nigger of speech.
The tap dance was fairly effective but they weren't buying it without music so Eichord ended up having to get on the horn and have the ballet orchestrated by McTuff, and finally he got them pulled out of his thinning hair, if not clean back to Austin, and by midafternoon, when he had an appointment with a psychiatrist named Sue Mandel, they'd left. He figured Sue to be a tough old gal in her fifties, hair pulled back into a bun, about five feet tall, Dr. Ruth only more severe-looking.
He was tired and muttering under his breath about the “scum-wad bureaucrats” and the time-wasters and the fumblers and bumblers and depradations and degradations and the furriers and scurriers, and the rest of them nasty folks, when he walked in and old Sue slapped him on the back with a hand like a catcher's mitt.
“Jack?” Sue said with a big smile, in a voice an octave deeper than his own. Sue was a guy.
“You're Sue Mandel?"
“One and the same, pally. Pull up a toadstool.” The shrink was six feet tall, went about 210, and had a blue beard. But truthfully Eichord scarcely blinked an eye at it. By now he was used to the constant confusion of this ever-changing and unpredictable murder case. It was a case where he'd met the most beautiful woman he'd ever made fantasized love to and she spelled her first name like a man's, Noel as in Coward, so why not a shrink named Sue?
“You're a big name around here, bub. I've been reading up on your activities since the Lonely Hearts case. Proud to meet you."
“That's good of you,” Jack said. He liked the guy. The guy had taste even if he did have a shitty name.
“I'm sure you want to know about our friend"—he vaguely gestured in the direction of where Ukie was kept under lock and key—"right?"
“Sure do."
“Nobody would love to tell you more than yours truly. Problem is I can't be sure. We've talked a lot. He has deep-seated problems. He has the self-esteem of about the level one might expect in light of his record as a KSP, but the big question—are the intense anxieties and frustrations enough to trigger the mass murders? No way to know. The results of the tests are inconclusive. The polygraphs are too inconclusive to base any judgments on himself is a skizzy kind of character who does a lot of role-playing, but he's a terrorized and subjugated personality the nightmares—let's call them—the thing that shows him the graves—that figure is very real to Ukie. He believes that someone is capable of controlling his mind and whatever it is must be very powerful."
“Just for the sake of argument, Dr. Mandel, could such a thing as a neural pathway exist?"
“Sure it exists.” He smiled. “But let's define what a neural pathway is. It's not a concrete tunnel that a brain railroad runs on, where your thought goes at 2:55 every afternoon to catch the train home. Forget pathway. Call it a thought plateau where certain types of empathic rapport transcend ordinary understanding. You stand there and the back of your neck gets a signal from your brain and the hairs bristle and when you turn around somebody is watching you. Coincidence. Maybe. Or maybe instead of a sixth sense or eyes in the back of your head we say your brain went into a higher thought plateau. A place it normally doesn't function in. And the supernormal thought level allowed you to make a supernormal appraisal of a situation—based on an assessment of probabilities or circumstances or situations that normally would not occur to you."
“Could a subject, say under hypnosis, be placed on that level of understanding by another person's will? That is to say could another individual implant the proper suggestions so that at given times, in response to whatever stimuli had been programmed, that other person could cause you to think on that plateau?"
“It's not likely but it is within the realm of possibility. If two persons were very closely attuned—and I mean to the extent that, they sometimes felt they could ‘read the other one's mind’ as the saying goes-and one of these parties is strongly dominant to the other, there's a very real possibility that someone who was highly susceptible to that sort of thought manipulation would be placed in a position where they would subconsciously allow the subjugation of their own will and the implementation of thought by the other party. I know of few documented examples of it in anything resembling clinical studies, but I wouldn't rule it out."
“What about his description of the tall man who stands in the shadows? Is this a real person?"
“I'd say the person is very real to Ukie. He could be real. And if a closely attuned person was capable of the kind of thought-image projection we're talking about, it might be that he or she could project a shared reality rather than an imagined projection.
“My feeling, however, is that it could be what we could term, an extremely heightened reality. If I was capable of manipulating your thoughts on that sort of level—let's say that I could force you to picture me standing on this desk and flapping my arms like wings and jumping off the desk. Admittedly a ludicrous image. But what would the heightened reality appear to be in the mind of the recipient? Would it be possible for me to coerce you into thinking you visualized me flying from the desk? Truthfully, I'm not sure. But my sense of the thought manipulation thing is one of sharing a mental picture of a heightened reality."
“But I thought—I mean, this is just layman language and I may have it all wrong—but I thought like a person couldn't be hypnotized against their will or made to do something bad that they wouldn't have found morally acceptable. I realize all this is oversimplification but isn't thought manipulation the same thing essentially as hypnosis?"
“No, that's not precisely right. But first off here, I think we're getting a little cumbersome with the plateau as a metaphor. In the broadest sense we're talking about superimposed personalities-where one is extremely dominant and one equally subservient. If the dominant of the two is supremely aggressive, sociopathic, antisocial, angry ... If he has the desire to punish ... If you counterpoint this with an individual who has a desire, suppressed or not, to be punished, you have a formidable scenario potentially. The dominant one can be enormously fearsome and consciously abominated by the passive one, but beneath that layer the passive individual in fact welcomes the aggression, you see."
“Can you point me toward a clinical book to help me understand this phenomenon?"