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Authors: G. H. Ephron

BOOK: Delusion
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As we neared the end of the driveway, I could see neighbors huddled on the street in tight groups. They gave us the once-over.
A Channel 12 News camera team had floodlights set up in
the street. A perfectly coiffed blonde smiled at the camera and read from notes clutched in her hand. The story would be tomorrow's lead. Most people would hear about it and be shocked by the barbarity of the crime. They'd assume the husband did it. That was usually the case.
I opened the door of the Jeep and reached in for the Dunkin' Donuts cup that was sitting on the dash, opened it, and dumped the cold coffee on the ground.
“Hey, you!” someone yelled. When I looked up, a flashbulb popped in my face.
Annie and I quickly ducked into the car.
“Asshole,” Annie muttered. “Jerk. Didn't even ask permission.” She had her key out and was trying to jam it into the starter. “Damn. Stupid. Asshole.”
I put my hand on her arm. “House key,” I said.
“House key?” She stared at me. Then she looked down at the key that was never going to fit into the ignition. “Oh.”
She switched keys. The engine started up with a roar. Quickly Annie eased up on the gas pedal. Clearly she wasn't as inured to violent death as she seemed to be.
Annie turned the car around and we headed home.
As we cruised along the main road, I thought about the Babikian home. Physical evidence isn't my thing. I look at behavior, state of mind, not bloody smears across the floor. But what struck me were the contrasts. The fresh smell of laundry detergent against the slightly sour smell that wafted in from the pool. The restrained monochromatic walls, glass and chrome furnishings in the living room with its menacing masks, against a cozy kitchen with its puppy dog calendar, frolicking cherubim, and gallery of newborns. Tabletops with nothing on them—no unopened mail, no piles of newspapers, no magazines or books. No disarray at all. Everything in complete control, chaos squelched. And against that, an excessive crime: a woman
bashed in the head, butchered, and drowned—any one of which would have killed her.
I knew someone had mentioned it, but at that moment, I couldn't for the life of me remember the young woman's name. Suddenly, that seemed very important.
“LISA.” NICK Babikian could barely say his wife's name.
Nick sat hunched over the battered table in the examining room of the Middlesex County Jail. Hours after I left the Babikian home, he'd been arrested. They'd been holding him now for two days.
In the unforgiving fluorescent light, his skin looked green against the orange of his baggy prison scrubs. Otherwise, he seemed much the same. Still wired, still suspicious, Nick kept his eyes on me from beneath bushy eyebrows and a tangle of black curly hair. The air vibrated with anxiety.
“She was twenty-six when we met,” he said. Six words. This was the richest response he'd given me in the hour since I'd started the evaluation.
For at least the fifth time since he'd come into the bare, windowless cubicle, Nick glanced furtively about. He twisted around and checked the wall and floor behind him. Then he
turned back. As he shifted in his seat, the chains from leg irons dragged on the floor.
I'd started off, as I always did with someone I evaluated, by telling him that I was there to help the team prepare his defense. I was reminded, once again, of the unique relationship between forensic psychologist and prisoner. My time is limited and my goals quite specific: to find exculpatory evidence. Typically, defendants are highly motivated to give me what they
think
I want, which often has its own problems.
But Nick seemed oblivious to that script. I'd begun with a mental status exam, hoping to ease his way into answering with the relatively innocuous questions. But even these encountered resistance. From the way he crossed his arms and avoided eye contact, to his terse responses, the message was clear: He didn't trust. I needed him to lower his defenses enough to get our conversation to flow before I took him back through the crime.
As I'd expected, Nick knew exactly where he was and why. He didn't seem suicidal. He also admitted that he didn't feel safe. Under the circumstances, that could be considered normal. There were no frank hallucinations or delusions.
I began to probe his relationship with his wife. “You had a happy marriage?”
“I loved my wife,” Nick said. He focused on the oatmeal-colored Formica tabletop. “We had our occasional problems.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Like what?”
“You said you were having problems.”
“You know, problems. Everybody has problems.”
“Sure. I know everyone has problems. How bad were yours?” It felt like pulling teeth.
“We saw someone, couple of times,” he said, still evading the question.
“A marriage counselor?” I asked. Nick nodded. “What did you talk to her about?”
“Not her. Him.” Nick swallowed and stared off into space. “Do I have to talk about it? Why don't you ask him?”
“May I? I'd like very much to do that,” I said.
I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd balked when I took him up on the offer, but he didn't. He said, “Dr. Richard Teitlebaum. He's in Newton.” The name sounded vaguely familiar. I wondered if this was the DR. T on their kitchen calendar.
I turned to a fresh sheet of paper and quickly wrote a paragraph that would release Dr. Teitlebaum to talk to me, and vice versa. I pivoted it and handed Nick the pen.
“What's this?”
“He'll need to see that you've given him your permission to talk to me.”
He read what I'd written, turned the page over and inspected the back. Then he gave me a guarded look and drew a diagonal line across the blank side—ensuring, I suppose, that I couldn't add anything. He turned it back over and signed.
“You ever see anyone else to talk to?” I asked. “On your own?”
“A shrink?” Nick shook his head. “I only went to Teitlebaum because it was important to Lisa.”
“And you tried to do the things that your wife wanted you to?”
Nick picked at a curling corner of the Formica top until a little piece broke off. “I loved my wife.”
The room had turned stuffy. I took off my jacket and hung it over the back of my chair. Nick's glance fell to my belt. He leaped up, the chair crashing over behind him. “What the hell is that? You're taping this!” He was staring bug-eyed at the pager the guard had given me.
“Whoa, time-out,” I said, unhooking the gadget. “It's a panic button, that's all. They give it to visitors whenever they go one-on-one
with violent offenders.” I held it out to him.
At first Nick reared back as if the thing might be about to explode. Gingerly, he took it and examined it, turning it over. Apparently satisfied, he handed it back to me. Then he righted his chair and eased back in it. “They make security cameras that look a lot like that. Tiny little things with pinhole lenses. I've got them all over my house.” It was the longest, unbroken thought I'd gotten out of him. “What I don't get is why the hell the police haven't looked at the security video and arrested the murderer.”
I remembered the stark interior of his home. Where could you hide surveillance cameras?
He seemed to read my thoughts. “You didn't see the cameras, did you?” Nick smiled. “What the hell good would that do? They're in the masks.”
Now I understood why someone who was paranoid would choose to hang masks on his walls. With video cameras hidden in empty eyeholes, he'd feel like the watcher, not the one being watched. His own vigilance could be extended through an arsenal of pinhole lenses.
“Maybe the police don't realize …”
“They know,” he said coldly. “Boley does. I had a break-in at my business six months ago. He got the guy because I caught him on camera.”
“Boley?”
“That detective. Something about him …” Nick shook his head.
“Something what?”
“I don't know. The way he was looking at me. Felt like he knew something that he wasn't letting on.”
Nick would probably have attributed dark motives to any cop investigating the case, but there had been something odd about Boley. For one thing, here was a homicide detective who dealt
with violent death every week. I wouldn't have expected him to have been so shaken by the crime.
“Why didn't you mention the video cameras when you were arrested?”
For a moment, Nick seemed baffled, as if he were trying to remember: Had he been arrested?
“Did you tell Chip?”
“I …” he started. “Honestly, I don't remember.”
“I'll pass the information along,” I said. I made a note. It wasn't all that surprising. In a crisis, people have lapses about all kinds of basic things. When we'd rushed my father to the hospital after his final heart attack, my mother couldn't remember their home phone number or the name of their insurance company. But she could rattle off the list of the half dozen medications Dad was allergic to.
I said, “Whenever I evaluate someone, I try to get as complete a picture as I can. Maybe you can tell me about yourself. What was it like growing up?” Most people like the opportunity to talk about themselves, and open-ended questions like this one usually get them going. I never knew exactly where it would lead.
Nick did a slow blink, as if he were trying to read between my words and find the hidden intent.
“Sometimes the past helps us to understand the present,” I said, trying to reassure him and reaching for an offhand tone. “So what were you like as a kid?”
He stared down at the table, his gaze sliding from there to the floor.
“Look,” I said, leaning forward, “if you want me to help you, you're going to have to do what I ask you to do, even though you may not see the point.”
For the first time, he gave me a long direct look. I could see him weighing the pros and cons. Then he started. “I grew up in Watertown. Lived with my parents, my grandparents. We
owned a bakery on Mt. Auburn Street.” I knew the area. It was known for Middle Eastern grocery stores and bakeries that specialized in
lamejun
pizzas and baklava. “My grandparents worked in the bakery. My parents worked in the bakery. I came home and worked in the bakery. That's all I did—I went to school and worked in the bakery.”
I was encouraged. Nick was loosening up, no longer spending each word like a precious coin. I waited, hoping he'd keep going. But he didn't.
“You mean you didn't hang out with other kids?”
“Huh? I didn't have time for other kids. And my mother—well, my grandmother actually—was paranoid about letting me out of her sight. From the minute school ended until I got to the bakery, she'd be hanging out the door, waiting for me to get there.” He shook his finger, hunched his back, and with a thick accent he muttered, “Terrible things can happen out there!”
“Sounds like she was pretty protective.”
“She earned it,” he said. “You know about the holocaust?”
“Of course …” I started.
“Not ‘of course.' I'm talking about the
Armenian
holocaust.” His look dared me to confess that I was pitifully ignorant, which I was.
“Not as much as I should.”
“At least you admit it. Everyone tiptoes around the Jews, builds memorials. Know what Hitler said before he invaded Poland, as he was telling his high command that it was okay to kill the Jews? ‘Who today remembers the Armenian genocide?' That was in 1939, just fifteen years after the Turks annihilated three million people.” With a bitter laugh, he went on. “But never mind all that. These days, the Turks are our allies. Israel's allies. The world chooses to get selective amnesia. Of course, Americans could care less. They don't know the difference between a Czech and a Slovak, never mind between an Armenian
and an Azeri. Jews, they get.” He glared at me. “But not Armenians.” He stared down at his hands, clasped together on the table, his fingers pulsing. “My grandmother remembered.”
“She was a survivor?” I asked.
“I supposed you could say that,” he said, giving me a sideways look. “She lived through it. But she never got past it. Her memories were as vivid as …” His voice trailed off. “She told me the stories of how she survived.”
“What kind of stories?”
“She'd recite them to me. How they hid. How their neighbors informed on them. How the Turks came to their house.” His eyes had glazed over. “How they took her mother …” There was a burst of static on the prison's loudspeaker system. Nick shook himself. “She lost her father, her mother, her sister, two brothers. Plus aunts, uncles, cousins. But she had memories.”
“You learned about this when you were a kid?”
“My parents never used to talk about it. Not at dinner. Not in church. It was like it never happened. As if all those relatives, all those people never existed. But my grandmother told me, when it was just us. Over and over.”
We sat in the quiet for a few moments. I imagined Nick replaying the tapes his grandmother couldn't help replaying over and over and that she'd now bequeathed to him. It began to explain his own paranoia, his distrust of authority, of people in general. I filed the information and moved on.
“Tell me about high school,” I said.
“BC High,” he said. I must have looked surprised, because he added, “Scholarship. They didn't know quite what to do with me, an Eastern Orthodox kid in the bastion of Catholicism.”
“How was it?”
“That's when I realized my grandmother was right. They
were
out to get me. I'd get beaten up all the time. This one kid …” Nick shook his head at the memory. “Bastard.” He gave me an
appraising look. “Your friend Chip. He was my only friend. He was the only kid who wasn't a Turk. He fought the other kids when they beat on me. I never forgot.”
“And college?”
“Harvard.”
Nick told me his years at Harvard were better. The students ignored him in his quiet separateness. From chess, he got turned on to computer games—first playing them all the time, then creating his own. He'd gotten a part-time job, programming for one of the hot technology companies near MIT. Later, he rented an office and started Cyclops Productions, then more space as his business prospered.
Becoming animated for the first time, Nick told me about
Running Scared
, the first computer game he invented that hit it big time. He took my pad and drew quickly, first strong outlines, then shading with the side of the pencil. He turned the pad and thrust it at me.
The figure looked like an elf, small with well-articulated muscles in his arms and legs. Huge eyes gleamed from under a hood. “Tell me about this guy,” I said as I examined the drawing. The creature reminded me of Nick when I'd first met him, his eyes peering out from under the baseball cap.

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