“What do you mean?” Ricky asked.
But the old physician didn’t reply. Instead, in a single sweeping gesture, he lifted the revolver up to his temple, grinned maniacally, and then fired a single shot.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Ricky half shouted, half screamed, in surprise and shock. His voice seemed to blend with the echo of the revolver’s report.
He rocked back hard in the chair, almost as if the bullet that exploded into the old psychoanalyst’s head had actually been diverted and struck him in the chest. By the time the reverberation from the gunshot had faded into the night air, Ricky was on his feet, standing at the edge of the desk, staring down at the man who once he’d trusted so implicitly. Dr. Lewis had slammed backward, twisted slightly by the force of death delivered to his temple. His eyes had remained open, and now they stared out with macabre intensity. A scarlet mist of blood and brain matter had painted the bookcase, and deep, maroon blood was seeping from the gaping wound down across the physician’s face and chin, staining his shirt. The revolver that had delivered the fatal shot slipped from his fingers to the floor, its weight muffled by the fine Persian carpet beneath their feet. Ricky gasped out loud, as the old man’s body twitched once with muscles coming into tune with death.
He breathed in harshly. It wasn’t, he realized, the first time he’d seen death. When he’d been an intern, doing rotations in internal medicine and the emergency room, more than one person had died in his presence. But that was always surrounded by equipment, and teams of people trying to save life and fight off dying. Even when his wife had finally succumbed to cancer, that had still been part of a process that he was familiar with, and provided a context, even if awful, for what took place.
This was different. It was savage. It was murder, specialized. He felt his own hands shake with an old man’s palsy. He fought hard against the overwhelming instinct to panic and run.
Ricky tried to organize his thoughts. The room was silent, and he could hear his own labored breathing, like a man at the top of a high mountain, sucking in cold air without significant relief. It seemed that every sinew inside of him had tightened, knotted, and that only fleeing would loosen the tension. He gripped the edge of the desk, trying to steady himself.
“What have you done to me, old man?” he said out loud. His voice seemed out of place, like a cough in the midst of a solemn church service.
Then he realized the answer to his own question: He’s tried to kill me. One bullet that can kill two people, because the old physician’s death was likely to be taken hard by three people on this earth who had no restrictions on how they would respond. And they would blame Ricky, regardless of what evidence of suicide stared them in the face.
Only it was even more complicated than that. Dr. Lewis wanted to do more than simply murder him. He’d had the gun leveled at Ricky’s face, and he could easily have pulled the trigger, even knowing that Ricky might return fire before dying. What the old man wanted was to endow all the people playing out the murderous game with a moral depravity that equaled his own. That was far more important than simply killing Ricky and himself. Ricky tried to breathe past the thoughts which flooded him. All along, he thought, this hasn’t only been about death. It’s been about the process. It’s been about how death was reached.
An appropriate game for a psychoanalyst to invent.
Again he sucked at the thin air of the study. Rumplestiltskin may have been the agent of revenge and the instigator, as well, Ricky thought. But the design of the game came from the man dead before him. Of that he was certain.
Which meant that when he spoke of knowledge, he was likely telling the truth. Or at least some perverted, twisted version of the same.
It took Ricky a second or two to realize that he still clutched the envelope that his onetime mentor had handed him. It was difficult for him to strip his eyes away from the body of the old man. It was as if the suicide was hypnotic. But he finally did, tearing open the flap and pulling a single sheet of paper from the envelope. He read rapidly:
Ricky: The wages of evil are death. Think of this last moment as a tax I have paid on all I have done wrong. The information you seek is in front of you, but can you find it? Is not that what we do? Probe the mystery that is obvious? Find the clues that stare at us directly and shout out to us?
I wonder if you have enough time and are clever enough to see what you need to see. I doubt it. I think it is far more likely that you will die tonight in more or less the same fashion that I have. Only your death is likely to be far more painful, because your guilt is far less than my own.
The letter wasn’t signed.
Ricky sucked in a new and seemingly unique panic with every breath.
He lifted his eyes and began to search around the office. A wall clock clicked quietly with each passing second, the sound suddenly penetrating Ricky’s consciousness. He tried to do the travel math: When did the old man call and tell Merlin and Virgil and perhaps Rumplestiltskin that Ricky was on his way? From the city to the country home was two hours. Maybe a little less. Did he have seconds? Minutes? A quarter hour? He knew he had to get away, to distance himself from the death sitting in the seat before him, if only to gather his thoughts and try to determine what move he had left, if any. It was like being in a chess game with a grand master, he thought suddenly, moving pieces around a board haphazardly, all the time knowing that the opponent can see two, three, four, or more moves ahead.
His throat was dry and he felt flushed.
Right in front, he thought.
Sliding gingerly around the desk, trying to avoid even brushing up against the dead analyst’s body, he started to reach for the top drawer, then stopped. What am I leaving behind, he thought? Hair fibers? Fingerprints? DNA? Have I even committed a crime?
Then he thought: There are two kinds of crimes. The first brings out the police and prosecutors and the weight of the state demanding justice. The second strikes at the hearts of individuals. Sometimes the two blend together, he knew. But so much of what had happened was predominantly the second, and it was the judge, jury, and executioner who were heading his way that truly concerned him.
There was no way around these questions. He told himself to have confidence in the single fact that the man whose prints and other substances were being left in the dead man’s room was dead, too, and that might afford him some protection, if only from the police who would likely be there at some point that night. He put his hand on the drawer and pulled it open.
It was empty.
He moved swiftly to all the other drawers. They, too, were barren. Dr. Lewis had clearly taken the time to clean out anything that had been accumulated there. Ricky ran his fingers under the desk surface, thinking perhaps something was concealed there. He bent down and searched, but saw nothing. Then he turned his attention to the dead man. Breathing in sharply, he let his fingers travel inside the man’s pockets. They, too, were clear. Nothing on the body. Nothing in the desk. It was as if the old analyst had taken pains to wipe his world clean. Ricky nodded in agreement. A psychoanalyst, better than anyone, he thought, knows what speaks about who one is. And it follows that seeking to wipe that identity slate clear, he would know better than most how to eradicate the telltale signs of personality.