The Syndrome (17 page)

“D.C. Criminal Code. You’re ‘practicing a health occupation without a license.’ Not good.”

Duran turned to Sideburns, and focused on him for the first time. He looked as if he was made of bone and gristle, one of those wiry guys who got into a lot of fights as a kid—and kept on going. “Not to make too much of a point of it,” Duran said, “but who the fuck are you?”

The man smiled, delighted to have gotten Duran’s attention. Reaching into his coat, he came up with a business card and handed it to his adversary.

There were a lot of numbers for such a small card: telephone, fax, mobile, and pager. In the upper right-hand corner, in what Duran guessed was an attempt at humor, was the detective’s logo—a corny fingerprint under a corny magnifying glass.

“Mr. Bonilla is a private investigator,” Adrienne explained. “And I’m a lawyer and … well, you can see where this is going. We’re going to put you away.”

Duran shook his head in disbelief.
Put me away!?
“Look,” he said. “I understand how you feel about … what happened … but, you’re wrong about me, and you’re wrong about my not being licensed. It’s in my office—on the wall, next to my diplomas.”

Bonilla scoffed. “Lemme show you something,” he said, waggling a leather portfolio. “You mind if we sit down for a minute?”

Duran shook his head, and gestured toward the couch in the living room. Once seated, Bonilla made a production of opening his portfolio, then laying it down on the coffee table. “The first thing I did,” he said, extracting several sheets of paper, “was check with the District’s Medical Board.” He donned a pair of reading glasses and peered at the documents in his hand. “And when I ask them about you, what they want to know is, are you a psychotherapist or a psychologist? Because there’s a big difference! Turns out, any wacko can hang out a shingle as a ‘therapist.’ But a clinical
psychologist
, which is what you’re supposed to be—that’s another story. Because, one: you got to have a doctoral degree. And two: you gotta complete an internship. After that, you have to do supervised, post-doctoral work. And, finally, you gotta pass a licensing exam. And you, Doc—you ain’t done any of this stuff.”

Duran was silent for a moment. Then he leaned forward in his chair. “You must not be very good at what you do,” he suggested.

“No?”

“No. Because, if you were, you’d know I was magna cum laude—”

“You were magna cum bullshit!” Bonilla interjected. “When the board said it never heard of you, I figured, what the hell—it’s probably an oversight. Maybe you’re registered somewhere else—Virginia, Maryland—Alaska, for all I know. Or you forgot to renew. So I check with the A.P.A. And guess what? They never heard of you, either. So that’s when I thought,
Hmmmnn.
Better check out the diplomas, the ones our friend here saw. Brown, right? And Wisconsin.”

“That’s right.”

“No, Jim—that
ain’t
right. For openers, you didn’t graduate from Brown. In fact, you never even went there.” Bonilla removed a page from his portfolio, and pushed it across the coffee table.

Duran picked it up, and began to read. The letter seemed to be authentic, but … it couldn’t be. According to the registrar, no one named Jeffrey Duran had attended Brown between 1979 and 1993. A check with academic advisers for the class of 1990 produced not a single transcript, nor did the office of residential life have any records associated with a student by that name. The letter thanked Mr. Bonilla for bringing to the university’s attention the inaccurate inclusion of Mr. Duran’s name on its “base list” of 1990 graduates.

Duran couldn’t believe it. “They think—”

“You hacked your way in,” Adrienne told him.

“But … they’re wrong. It’s a mistake.”

Bonilla’s grin revealed small yellow teeth. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s gotta be a mistake. You went to Brown, only you never took out a library book, registered for a class, or signed up for a food plan. Like I said, ‘magna cum bullshit.’” The detective
raised his eyebrows, withdrew a second sheet of paper from the portfolio, and slapped it down on the table.

“Wisconsin never heard of you either,” he said.

Duran picked up the paper, which bore the school’s letterhead with its familiar logo: an eye, surrounded by the words,
Numen Lumen.

“This is impossible,” Duran insisted, wagging his head, as if it were a pendulum. “What
is
this? I mean—” he held up the papers. “Did you write these yourself? Why would you
do
that?”

Bonilla made a little clicking noise with his mouth and shook his head, beaming at Duran with an expression of faked admiration. “You gotta hand it to him, Adrienne. This guy’s good. I mean, you don’t know better, you’d have to say he’s
affronted
!”

“I think you ought to leave,” Duran told them, getting wearily to his feet.

“Hear me out,” Bonilla insisted, “because I saved the best for last.” There was nothing amused in the man’s face now and he looked at Duran with the sharp, malevolent focus of a bird of prey. “All these institutions that never heard of you got me worrying (well, I’m the anxious type, as Miz Cope here will tell you). I had a feeling, y’know? So, knowing your
alleged
name and your
actual
address, I ran a credit check with Experian. Cost me thirty-five bucks. All I was lookin’ for was
a header—just the top line.” He placed another document on the table, and watched as Duran picked it up. “Name, address, and D-O-B. Where you were born. And your Social.”

Duran frowned. “My what?”

“Your social security number,” Adrienne explained.

“Like I said: it’s the top line.” Bonilla grinned in a bright, unfriendly way. “And the next thing I do, I get on the Web, and—bim bam boom—I’m at the site for the Social Security Death Index. Takes about thirty seconds. And guess what?”

Duran didn’t want to play anymore. “I think you ought to go,” he said.

“Not.
yet
, Jeff, I’m just getting to the punch line.” Bonilla stood up, crouched like a batter and raised his hands to shoulder height. “You didn’t attend Brown.” His arms came round in an arc, as if he were swinging a bat—and missing.
“Whoosh!
Turns out, you ain’t no Badger!” Another swing, and: “
Whoof!
And last, but definitely not least,
you
ain’t even Jeffrey Duran.” The detective reached into his portfolio, and extracted a piece of paper. “Check it out,” he said, and handed it to Duran.

Who saw, at a glance, that it was his own death certificate. A somewhat blurry photocopy, but nonetheless, a Certificate of Death for

The cause of death was listed as “Massive trauma (auto).” The physician of record: Willis Straight, M.D. There was more, but Duran stopped reading.

“In case you’re wondering,” Bonilla taunted, “you’re
buried in Rock Creek Cemetery. ‘Sometimes Heaven Calls To Its Breast Those Loved Best.’”

Duran was stunned. The only explanation for the documents he’d been shown was that they were a hoax, and yet—who would go to such lengths? Was Adrienne Cope so disturbed that she was trying to kill him off
symbolically?
Maybe, but—what about Bonilla?

“The man you’re impersonating never grew up,” Adrienne told him. “He died as a baby. But you know that, of course.”

“I know you’re distraught about your sister’s death,” Duran said calmly, “and I can make a lot of allowances for that. But this … the effort that went into this …” He tossed the death certificate onto the coffee table. “You’re a very disturbed person. I hope you get some help.” Then he turned to Bonilla with a ferocious look. “And
you
—” he began.

‘Get some help?!’
“Adrienne sputtered. “‘The effort that went into it’—the effort that went into it involved about five hours of Mr. Bonilla’s time. And the diplomas took even less. And that’s a crime, by the way—having those diplomas on your wall. It’s criminal possession of a forged instrument. And for hacking into the universities’ computers—that’s another crime.”

“This is ridiculous,” Duran told them. “This goes way beyond providing closure—”

“
‘Closure’?!”
Adrienne growled.

Duran took a step back as Adrienne lunged at him, only to be intercepted by Bonilla, who seized her by the arms and murmured, “It’s okay …”

“Talk about sick!” Adrienne muttered, her voice rising in volume. “You’re the one who needs a shrink! The people you see are desperate—they’re dying inside—and they come to you for help, and what do they get? Some phony-baloney therapy—”

“Take it easy,” Bonilla murmured. “We’ll see him in court—and you can write to him in jail. He’ll have lots of time to read.”

Duran was dumbfounded by her anger. “I feel like I’ve
stepped through the looking glass,” he said, to no one in particular.

Bonilla chuckled as he steered Adrienne toward the door. “Is he good or what?” the detective asked. “I mean, you deal with a con man, a little acting talent shouldn’t surprise you. But this guy! You gotta hand it to him.” He shook his head in a rueful way, stepped into the hallway with his client, and pulled the door closed behind him.

Duran remained where he was, standing in the foyer, staring at the door. In irons.

It was insane.

Sitting at the computer, unnerved by his confrontation with Nico’s sister and her doberman, Duran read over the last few entries in Nico’s file:

Paging down to the bottom of the file, Duran made a new entry:

It was crazy. If the documents had been genuine, it might have made sense to confront him with them. But they weren’t. So what had Nico’s sister hoped to accomplish?

It made you wonder about lawyers and private eyes.

Getting up from the computer, Duran crossed the room to an antique wooden cabinet that held a selection of single malt whiskies and a rack of Waterford tumblers. Pouring two fingers of Laphroaig in one of the glasses, he swirled it for a moment, and sipped. You could create any kind of document you wanted with desktop publishing, he thought. Birth certificate. Death certificate. Whatever. But that wasn’t the point—that wasn’t what was bothering him. What was bothering him was the fact that Bonilla and Cope had nothing to gain by confronting him with phony documents.

Duran took a second sip of Laphroaig, and wandered over to the window. Looking out toward the cathedral, he thought,
Maybe this guy Bonilla, fabricated it all, and sold the package as a bill of goods to Nico’s sister. Maybe he figured he’d make a few bucks, jack up his hours …

It was possible, of course, but … how hard up would a guy like that have to be?

He shook his head, uncertain what to think. It was irritating, on the one hand—disconcerting on the other. To have
someone get in your face and deny something as fundamental as your own identity—and to do it in your own living room was … Well, it put you off-balance.

What was the phrase she’d used?
the man you’re impersonating.
A ridiculous accusation but, even so, it made him feel as if she’d shone a flashlight into his soul—and found a structural flaw that ran from his forehead to his feet. She was wrong, obviously, but her accusation went to the heart of what had been bothering him so much of late: the alienation that he felt, and the feeling that … how to put it?

In his heart of hearts, there
was
no heart of hearts.

Finishing his scotch, Duran turned from the window and wandered into the hall. There, he picked up the photo of his mother, sitting on the porch swing, head thrown back in laughter. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember her as she really was. And what he remembered was …
the photograph. Mom in the swing …

Which was the trouble with memory—or
his
memories, at least. There was nothing “eidetic” about them. He’d been reading up about it, and that was the word Ernst Young used to describe memories of a “Proustian” character, referring to the scene in which the bedridden Proust is suddenly immersed in a fully textured past by a single bite of tea-soaked, madeleine.

Not so Duran, whose own long-term memories were almost entirely visual and matter-of-fact. There was no sense of color or smell, no taste or sound. There was just the image, and only the image. Or to put it another way: he remembered his mother in the same way that he remembered … Eleanor Roosevelt. (Or Marilyn Monroe—or Pocahontas).