So Like Sleep (22 page)

It was a long ride, nearly five hours. But I needed the time to think. To rethink, actually. We clacked along the Connecticut coast, past the clubbiness of Stamford and the grubbiness of Bridgeport, the last sailboats of the evening slipping gracefully into Old Saybrook harbor. I took apart and reworked everything I knew, this time with William, not Jennifer, as Marek’s centerpiece. What must have happened. And what I was going to be able to do about it.

A
NIGHT OF SLEEPING
in my own bed did me a world of good. Looking back on the events of the next twenty-four hours, however, I made three bad mistakes. One was calling Steve Rothenberg, finding out that he would be on trial in another matter all day, and deciding that I didn’t need to speak with him. The second mistake was calling Lieutenant Murphy, finding out he was unavailable too, and deciding that I didn’t really need him, either. The third will become pretty obvious.

The phone call I did complete appeared successful at the time. O’Boy set up the meeting I wanted in Calem, and the young assistant prosecutor there seemed cooperative. He also seemed pretty chummy with Chief Wooten, but I just assumed they had worked together before.

I was in front of Marek’s office building before 5:00 P.M. I took the stairs and entered his reception area just as Mrs. Porter was gathering her things and closing up shop. She looked up, recognized me this time, and scowled.

“Is he in?” I said.

“Dr. Marek is very busy. He’s preparing a paper and cannot—”

I started walking toward his inner door.

She said, “Wait, you can’t just … Dr. Marek, Dr. Marek!”

I got to the door and opened it as Marek was rising behind his desk. He was in shirtsleeves, with a portable computer humming in front of him.

“What do you want?” he said, clipping off each word.

The receptionist behind me said, “He just pushed his way in, Doctor. I …”

Marek said, “It’s all right, Mrs. Porter. I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.” Then, to me: “Mr. Cuddy, we’ve concluded our business together. I would appreciate your leaving. Now.”

“I think you ought to hear me out on this one, Doc.”

“Now.”

“I really do.”

“Mrs. Porter, please call the police, and tell—”

“You see, it’s about Agnes Zerle, and Jerome Gemelman, and …”

I stopped, because Marek’s face had gone from ruddy to ashen. He said, “Mrs. Porter, I’m sorry. I do have to speak with Mr. Cuddy. You may leave for the day.”

“But, Dr. Marek …”

“No, no,” he said, his soothing voice back on track. “It’s all right. I know what Mr. Cuddy wants to talk about, and the police won’t be necessary. Thank you, though.”

She looked apprehensively at Marek, then combatively at me before she left the room, closing the door behind her.

“Take a seat,” he said as he punched some buttons on the computer and then turned some dials on his other console. As the computer drone died, Marek frowned and adjusted the dials some more before he sat back down.

He said, “It’s rather warm in here, which is how I like it when I’m writing. Would you care to take your jacket off?”

Marek was right about the temperature, but I said, “No, thanks.”

He rested his elbows on the desk surface and tented his fingers in front of his chin. “Now, why do you want to talk with me about dear Ms. Zerle?”

“I think you already know.”

“Why assume that?”

“Because of what she could have told me.”

“Ah, Mr. Cuddy, am I now to make some sort of slip that you’ll use to nab me under whatever absurd theory you’re pursuing?”

“Nab you for what?”

“Sir, you keep dangling the worm, and I keep ignoring the bait. Why don’t you simply tell me what you want so that both of us can progress to more productive endeavors?”

“Fine, Doctor. You killed Jennifer Creasey. You also killed Lainie Bishop to cover it.”

Marek laughed and rocked back into his chair. “This sounds like quite a thorough delusion on your part, Mr. Cuddy. Perhaps I should take the time to hear you out. For professional curiosity, I mean.”

“I have to give you credit, Doctor. At least for Jennifer. The way I see it, you must have had to act quickly and under considerable pressure.”

“Please go on.”

“You’re comfortably established in a fine community like Calem. You channel an underside to your personality to keep that community from discovering the truth. You do competent, maybe even brilliant work …”

“Why, thank you.”

“… but then you get a little careless. You have this group that you’d like to expand. You were happy to have Jennifer come to you. Her family connections could lead to more rich new clients. She was obviously attracted to you, but you must have learned how to deal with flirtatious female patients a long time ago. You just kept your professional demeanor with her, a fiduciary who wouldn’t think of trading on a relationship for sexual satisfaction. However, you still wanted a more diverse group for your experiment, and lo and behold, Jennifer brings you a dilemma. William Daniels. Ghetto to greatness. Young, bright, and good-looking to boot. Slim, taut-muscled, features like a male model.”

“Perhaps,” said Marek, clearing his throat, “if you could get to the point.”

“I’d love to, Doctor, but it’s a complicated story, and I don’t want you to feel I’ve missed any of it. Anyway, Jennifer offers William to you—for the group, that is—and you can’t even make an argument against him. He’s exactly the right person to round out the experiment. So you accept him, probably figuring you can control it. Keep the patient from becoming a target, I mean.”

Marek just looked at me.

“I’m guessing the first time you really didn’t try to arrange it. Probably William came to you, maybe just early on one of the group’s Thursdays. He poured out his soul to you, all the problems he’d been having, with Jennifer, grades, the shits who were harassing him at school. Was there something about him, his body language, maybe? Whatever, something broke the camel’s back. First you told him you were going to relax him with an injection of flurazepam. Then you hypnotized him, told him he should ignore any discomfort he might feel afterwards. And then you did him.”

Marek’s eyes were ablaze, his lips tight. “Nonsense.”

“And he was good, maybe great. The anxiety, the torment, all the energy that builds up from those emotions, it all came rushing out, and you knew this was too good to pass up in the future. So you handled the transition from the trance in a way that ensured he consciously remembered nothing. And the next time, William just shows up a little early again. To start, probably only on his Thursdays, the ones when he’s going to be the subject of the group session. I bet you got a bit of a jolt the first time you found the gun on him, but I’m sure that you could understand his explanation for it, that the other kids back home in Roxbury might need strong persuading to leave their upwardly mobile neighbor alone. Maybe the revolver even heightened things a bit for you. The street kid on the rise, Goreham with a dash of gun oil? Great thrill, precious little risk, and even that minimized. After all, you’re his psychiatrist, right? The person he’d come to if anything started to surface. You know what I mean?”

“Of course not.”

“Oh, come on now, Doctor. Surely William told you about the nightmares.”

No response.

“You remember. The visions of what you made him do. The visions that you blocked off from his conscious mind by the hypnosis. They’d have to surface somewhere, sometime. Professor Kirby—he’s at BU—we had a nice chat about all this—”

Marek came forward as if someone had kicked the back of his chair. “How dare you …”

“Oh, all in the hypothetical, of course. He and I just talked about how a suppressed memory like that would come up when the suppression state—here, wakefulness—was supplanted by sleep. That was really good of you, Doc, you know? Taking away from the kid the peace of sleep, the one time that he could forget about the things that were driving him crazy.”

“This is all rubbish. You have no proof whatever for any of this.”

“Bear with me, Doctor, bear with me. You covered your trail pretty well, but you couldn’t know about William’s tapes unless—”

Marek said, “What t—” then caught himself.

“His audiotapes. William recorded his nightmares. Interesting stuff on those tapes. But there was other evidence of what you were doing to William. Jennifer confided in some people. She let on that William the Stud was declining somewhat in his performance. Not surprising, what with you tuckering him out on Thursdays early evening, when Thursdays after group were probably their most likely times to get together. My guess is she wondered why, though. Do you suppose she noticed that William was always here before everybody else on Thursdays? Or did she just figure that if she came to you well before group and told you about William’s problem, the sexual-function talk might just turn you on? Jennifer was a girl who liked to experiment herself, a girl who was used to getting whatever, or whomever, she went after. Jennifer came up here early that Thursday night, didn’t she, Doctor?”

“I don’t know what—”

“She rode the elevator up, walked through the front door, and came to your inner-office door to knock. But maybe she listened at the door first. And heard funny sounds she recognized. She came in on you. She started laughing, calling you names; maybe both. Your past flashed through your mind—New York, Philly, Chicago—but those were just brushes with the authorities. Getting away with punching street kids was one thing. William, now, he was the lover of a headstrong girl from a powerful family, a girl who knew how to dish it out to lovers, especially older lovers, who rejected her. She knew how to get you. My guess is that you remembered William’s gun, that she was laughing at you even while you tried to pull up your pants and rummage for wherever you kept it when William was here. Then Jennifer saw the gun and probably the look on your face. She bolted out the door, instinctively down the stairs instead of risking a wait for the elevator. A little late for the dentists and all, and a little early for the group’s other members to be drifting in. You chased her down the stairs. That must have been quite a sight, huh, Doc?”

Marek ground his teeth.

“Anyway, she’s used to taking the elevator, not the stairs, so as she’s flying down she misses the lobby level and realizes too late that she’s hit the bottom, the basement. She panics and heads through the only door that opens, the one to the boiler room. You corner her in there. She turns on you, tries to tough it out with threats. Or does she start making fun of you again, of what you are?”

Marek closed his eyes.

“Maybe you didn’t mean to kill her. Maybe you didn’t even realize the gun was going off. But suddenly you did, maybe after the second shot, maybe after the third. But in any case, there she was. Fortunately, you hadn’t emptied the gun into her. But what to do? And not much time to do it in. Then you remembered William. Tell me, Marek, when you got back upstairs, was William still in the same position? Was he still waiting for you? As though you had just gotten up to change a phonograph record instead of having killed the girl he clearly if stupidly loved?”

“What would you know about it?”

His eyes were still closed, but it was a crack in the facade. I hoped there’d be more. “So you get back to William, and tell him to get dressed. You take him down to the boiler room, hand him the gun you’ve already wiped off. You tell him to fire at the wall, or maybe you tell him some bad guys, like the kids in the neighborhood, are armed and coming at him, tell him to kill them before they kill him. Either way, William fires, then you tell him to put the gun in his pocket, then you tell him he’s just shot Jennifer. You ask him how he could have done such a thing. He gets agitated, terribly upset. You tell him there’s only one way for him ever to feel better again, and that’s to tell the group about shooting her, that once he does that he’ll be able to forget everything else that happened. All the pain, all the horror, all gone once he tells the group and shows them the gun. You tell him to wait down there, maybe for a while, maybe ’til a certain time. Then you leave him there, in the basement, staring at Jennifer’s body and breaking apart inside.”

“I think,” said Marek in a tired voice, “that this has gone far enough, even for a delusion.”

“Unfortunately for William, it hasn’t. That night you came back up here and waited for the other members of the group. As they arrived, you welcomed them as though nothing had happened, as though the only annoyance in the world was the thoughtless tardiness of Jennifer and William. Then, however, you realized something. You’d had William shoot at the wall so that when his hands were tested by the cops they’d find evidence that he had recently fired a gun. But they’d also test him for drugs, and that would mean both chemically and visibly, like looking at his arms for needle marks. That presented a problem, didn’t it? You’d already injected him once, before playtime. If you gave him another shot, during the session, there’d be two needle marks on his arm and too much drug in his system. So you asked Lainie to move, to change her chair, so that you could palm or fake the session injection of William.”

Marek suddenly looked almost relieved. “Cuddy, this is ridiculous. If I had done even remotely as you suggest, then over the weeks that I was ‘preying’ on poor William I would have to have been ‘palming’ his session dosage. And that just doesn’t hold up. The late Lainie would have seen me from her chair, and I never asked anyone, Lainie or anyone else, to move any other night.”

“So Homer told me. And that bothered me a lot. I could understand your slipping up that night under the pressure of Jennifer’s murder, but what about all the other sessions?”

“Precisely.”

“But then I figured out what must have happened the previous Thursdays. If I’m right, you had a choice those other nights. First, give no drug at all in the session, palming the syringe every night. As you said, the problem with that is that you would have been seen, by a member or by the videotape. A second choice would be to give William a placebo, like a harmless injection of sugar water. That would leave two fresh needle marks instead of one, but as long as William wasn’t going to be examined those other nights, no problem. Also, with the placebo approach you wouldn’t have to palm the needle, for Lainie and all to spot.”