Emerson was too easily understood. You always knew what he meant, and that can be fatal to a politician. Besides, he advocated a number of—apparently—unpopular ideas. Such as giving every citizen the same generous exemption and taxing all income above that level at the same flat rate for all taxpayers. According to Emerson, a progressive, graduated income tax not only discriminated against the most productive, energetic, and successful members of society—and he was opposed to discrimination against any minority—but it lessened the revenue which a lower and less confiscatory rate would actually produce; besides, the steeply progressive income tax was straight out of the Communist Manifesto. You couldn't say Emerson didn't have some pretty radical ideas, no matter what names they called him.
Horatio M. Humble, on the other hand, was more progressive and up-to-date. He was firmly fixed in the twentieth century. Or maybe it was the twenty-first. It was hard, sometimes, to tell just where he was firmly fixed. But he'd made his position clear in some areas. For example, he was for easing tensions. That was good. And he was for dissolving suspicions. Nobody could argue with that. And he was for trusting the Soviet Union. Well ... Anyway, he was also for removing the threat of the atomic unthinkable, for unilateral disarmament, and for trusting the Soviet Union. He was for a UN troika as Tri-President of the World, and for trusting the Soviet Union.
I figured he didn't advocate suicide or surrender except every time he opened his mouth. But he was so clever that he made it all sound like Statesmanship. Maybe because he used a lot of words like Peace, and Brotherhood, and Compassion, and Understanding, and Intellectual—and Statesmanship. Besides, there was that voice of his. He could have recited “Little Bo-Peep” and it would have sounded like Statesmanship.
Well, I thought, the catastrophe might as well be faced. It was eight to five he'd be elected in three more days. It was possible he'd make a fair President. Anything is possible. It's possible that there's green cheese on the far side of the moon.
I stood looking at Humble's face on the billboard, and he seemed to be looking past me, smiling at the wreckage across the street from him. Suddenly it was all too much. I turned and saw the operator of that truck-crane climbing down from his cab, and when he took off his cap the sun hit his red hair. It was Jackson, all right. After the photos of those characters in Sebastian's office, and now Humble's smiling face, I couldn't think of anything I'd enjoy more than a few words with profane, boozing, hard-boiled, hard-working Jack Jackson, who sweated sweat.
I walked toward him and yelled, “Hey, Jackson!"
He spotted me, waved and grinned, then ambled my way, a heavy-set, red-faced, red-haired guy with hands like hams. We shook hands and he said, “Shell, what brings you down here, you big white-haired bastard?” I told you he was profane.
“Not to see you, Jackson."
“That's good. Say, my boy's doing six houses in Boyle Heights now. Six, how about that? Making more'n the old man."
I grinned. I was glad to hear it. I'd helped send his boy to the county slammer for six months a few years back—for stealing a few automobiles—and Jack had not loved me at the time. But since doing his bit the kid had buckled down and gone into the construction business himself. He was doing very well now—and not by stealing cars.
“He makes more than you because he works harder,” I said. “He doesn't knock off every ten minutes."
“Hell, first time I've knocked off in an hour, Scott. Coffee break. Besides, if I work too fast I get in trouble with the union.” He unhooked a tin canteen from his belt and took a glug. Then he squeezed his eyes shut and ran his tongue in and out.
“Still snorting that hundred-proof coffee, I see."
“Man's got to keep up his strength,” he said. “Makes you feel kind of weak, though, right at first."
“Aren't you afraid one of these days you'll get over-coffeed and swing that skull-cracker back into your lap?"
“Not a chance. Why, after a couple canteens full I could knock a fly off a wall and not touch more than ten, twelve thousand bricks.” He paused. “Now that you mention it,” he said, and took another pull.
After the grimace, he looked at me and said, “This juice is merely to keep me from going nuts on the job. Wham, down goes a wall, down goes a column, down goes—Same thing, over and over. This may look exciting and glamorous to you—"
“I wouldn't exactly—"
“But it's not. No, it's not. It's boring. Always the same thing. Wham, down she goes."
“You can hardly expect the junk to stay up after you whack—"
“No, but sometimes in the midst of all the havoc I've wrought I get feeling kind of wild. It builds up in me. It's a strain. I feel like tearing off down the street."
For a moment I had an appalling vision of Jack at the wheel of his truck, chugging down Sunset, waving his canteen, swinging his ball from side to side—wham, bang, crunch, down she goes!
“So then I take me a little nip,” Jack said. “Does the job."
“Man, I hope so.” I changed the subject. Waving a hand around us, I said, “What's going on here? Some millionaires building new banks and hotels?"
“Urban renewal."
“Ah. Billionaires."
So that's what this was. Another urban-renewal project. One of the free “improvements” to be paid for out of federal funds. Federal funds. To me that's a sneaky euphemism for “my money."
I looked around again. “Boy,” I said. “Just what I wanted."
“What are you talking about?” Jack asked me. I shrugged. It takes a long time to explain. He went on, “Three whole blocks here going to go. This one, and”—he pointed—“them two."
He was pointing in the direction of Sebastian's office. “You mean the Sebastian Building, too?"
“Yeah. It goes next week. That whole block goes. Then the one past it. Got my work cut out for me. Some of them buildings won't go down easy."
“I'll bet not."
“The old ones aren't so tough. It's the new ones that give me trouble."
“Must make it rough on you guys who have to tear them down."
“It's a living."
“Jack, don't you ever have any doubts...” I didn't finish it. Maybe he did; maybe that's why he drank. I glanced across the street at Horatio Humble's smiling face. His warm smile oozed right at us, here in the urban-renewal project.
He didn't have any doubts. He knew. He was all for urban renewal. And rural renewal. And for urban-rural-renewal renewal. And for Medicare, denticare, and menticare; for mommacare, poppacare, and kiddiecare. He was for the Peace Corps, the war corps, the coexistence corps, and the corps corps; for foreign aid, domestic aid, and for north, south, east and west aid; for moon shots, space shots, Salk shots, and flu shots ... The hell with it.
“Well, Jack,” I said. “I've an appointment coming up. Keep swinging."
“You bet. Time I got back at it.” He hauled the canteen out for the last time. “Soon as I have a little snort. How about you?"
He held out the canteen. I took it, looked around at the bricks, chunks of cement, part of a bank counter. “Thanks, Jackson,” I said. “Don't mind if I do."
* * * *
To get to Mordecai Withers’ establishment you head up into the Santa Monica Mountains on Benedict Canyon Drive, then turn off on a narrow two-laner called Hill Road. Half a mile up Hill there's a private drive that rises to a five-acre site from which there's a lovely view of nearby Beverly Hills, and Hollywood, and on a clear day even the Pacific Ocean. We get a clear day about every two, three months.
But it was a lovely location. I'd been by the place two or three times, but never inside. Nor had I previously met Dr. Withers. As I drove up Benedict Canyon I ran over in my mind what I knew about him. Just about what most of the public knew, I guess.
He was the man who, single-headed, had developed the theory of mental treatment which in the last few years had replaced Freudian psychoanalysis. For more than two years now he had reigned supreme in the f
ield of head-shrinking, or as it was sometimes half-facetiously called, “Brain Withering.” Instead of saying, “I'm undergoing analysis,” the phrase was, “I'm being Withered.” It was almost as “in” now as psychoanalysis once had been.
Even in the forties and fifties the inevitable reaction against Freud's sex-snarled theories had been in the making. Hardly anybody except those who had undergone the long, intensive, repetitive, hypnotic conditioning of the analytic process—which, of course, included all the analysts themselves—really believed the ludicrous tenets of psychoanalysis. That, to choose mild but typical examples, a man's neurosis could often be traced back to the “fact” that he was poisoned by repressed hatred for his father because as an infant he had desired sex with his mother and thus hated and even wanted to kill the man, his father, who was having sex with his mother—the soberly discussed “Oedipus complex.” That little girls, even only children, so admired and desired their brothers’ male organs that they became filled with warps and wild frustration because they didn't have one—the soberly discussed “penis envy.” That males suffered from a hidden and unconscious fear that somebody would chop off their you-know—the soberly discussed “castration complex.” And other cerebral excursions into even more pronounced lunacy.
Unquestionably, such aspects of the theory—and theory is all it ever was, even though its baseless ugliness was embraced by tens of thousands of otherwise rational individuals—were hardly suitable subjects for convivial discussion in private, much less in public. But as the theory began to be questioned and even condemned in the medical schools, the public at large became ever more enamored of Oedipus, transference, resistance, id, ego, censor, superego. The reason was that the whole package—Freud, Freudianism, psychoanalysis, and all of its private parts—was being increasingly sold to the people by means of the spoken and written word. The cuckooism was glorified on Broadway and off Broadway, in depressing television dramas, in books and magazines and newspapers, in Hollywood films.
But finally the evidence against the Freudian theory became great enough to overcome even illogic. Medical men began questioning, then denouncing. The evidence became overwhelming that psychoanalysis was totally without efficacy in the treatment of neuroses, psychoses, and even hot flashes, and in fact was often of negative value in that it produced the aberrations it was alleged to cure. As a famous psychologist bluntly summed it up: “The more treatment, the less cure."
It was learned that microscopic traces of certain chemicals—LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, and others—when introduced into the human system, in many cases gave rise to reactions apparently identical with schizophrenia, paranoia, and the lesser neuroses; if the body itself when afflicted by illness or stress could produce those or similar chemicals, what then of penis envy and sick old Oedipus? So, slowly, people twitchy because of brain tumors, too much booze or salt, guilt feelings produced by undeniable guilt, and so forth, reluctantly began to abandon the Freudian crutch which had supported the widely trumpeted teaching that the individual was never to blame for his own ills.
Freudianism and psychoanalysis fell into disrepute, disarray, and near disintegration. There was a head-shrinking vacuum. Near-panic ensued, particularly among psychoanalysts, their patients, and couch-makers. Fees dropped from fifty dollars an hour to twenty, ten, five, in some cases less than a nickel.
Then Dr. Mordecai Withers filled the vacuum. Freud had been all wrong; Withers was all right. He introduced Brain Withering. Joy reigned. Fees for Withering went up to fifty dollars an hour. No longer was Freudianism celebrated and glorified on stage and screen, in magazines and books. No, indeed; now it was Withering. Some thoughtful observers of the human scene concluded that mankind at large perhaps should not be at large, since apparently it was but a half step ahead of the ape and losing ground rapidly. But those few fingers in the dike holding back dementia could not possibly fill all the holes in all the heads.
The upshot was that Mr. Mordecai Withers was today the new hero of all who had called Sigmund Freud master. Just as wild African dogs will turn on their wounded brother and start eating him while he's still alive, the brotherhood itself turned on Freud, whom they had so lately beatified, and began chewing hell out of him.
Once the dismembering of his corpse was total, and little Witherers had sprung up over the countryside. Mordecai loomed even more awesomely on the mental horizon as an almost cosmic genius: The Father of Withering. His every pronouncement was listened to with bated intelligence; he wrote books, forewords to books, reviews of books, and critiques of reviews of his forewords to books. He charged a hundred dollars an hour.
This was the man I was soon going to see. I might even get to touch him. I turned off Hill Road and drove up the narrow blacktop drive to the high plateau—sometimes called Withering Heights—on which sprawled, in antiseptic white splendor, the Mordecai Withers Establishment.
It was 3 p.m. on the nose. I sensibly parked near a sign which said “park here,” went up two white cement steps before the office building, and inside.
In the outer office was a couch—make that a divan—a few curved-back chairs, a table with unappetizing magazines on it, and a desk. Behind the desk sat a bony-faced woman typing on little white cards. She was not likely to take patients’ minds off their minds.
She was a tall gal who looked like a spinster in the prim of life—in her middling thirties, say—with a joyless face and a body like a bas relief. I walked up to her and said, “I'm Mr. Scott."
She nodded, said, “You may sit down.” And kept typing. I sat in one of the chairs, which seemed to demand a posture of surrender, but fought it. On a table next to me was a box of little white cards and a sign, “free—take one.” I reached into the box and took out one of the printed cards. It said, “Free—Take One."
Hmm, I thought. I looked at the secretary, typing on little white cards.... But, no, not even here. Could be, though. Maybe. Maybe somewhere around here they had bumper suckers saying “Bumper Sticker” and a dog named “Here-Kitty-Kitty” and —
A buzzer buzzed on the secretary's desk.
She stopped typing. Something big was up.
She looked at me and said, “You may go inside, Mr. Scott...” adding a few words I didn't quite catch. I was on my way. No matter what was in the next room there ahead of me, it had to be one of two things: either an improvement on this, or death.
I had my hand on the doorknob when she cried with sudden animation, “Not yet! I said, in a minute—"
Too late.
I was on my way in.
Boy, you wouldn't believe it. I stopped suddenly and stood so still you'd have thought I was an oak, and I said, “Zah!” Or “Zoo!” Or—it doesn't matter. It was just an exclamation, not a real attempt at communication. But, well, there was this shapely young nude babe trotting across the floor. No kidding. Completely nude, with no clothes on, absolutely naked.
It was just about perfect. The only flaw in the situation was that she was trotting on an angle leading away from me.
Automatically I let out a whoop. It must have sounded to her about like a wild-Indian charge sounded to the old settlers. The gal came to a screeching stop as suddenly as I had, then spun around and gawked at me. After barely a second or two, her startled expression relaxed a bit and she said, “Ooeeoo.” At least that's what it sounded like, though it might have been “Oh, you” or “Holy cats” or even “Eeooee."
“Holy cats,” I said.
“Ooeeoo.” Yeah. that's what it was. I got it that time. Wonder what I got? I thought. Wonder what she's trying to say? Is she trying to tell me something? Is it good? I couldn't decide, but I didn't have much to go on.
She had hair the color of sherry wine—a kind of amber brown with fire in it—and it curled down over one side of her face like heat waves, almost covering one big, beautiful, green eye, I remembered later. She was tall, with superbly jaunty and abundant breasts, flat abdomen slanting in under her rib cage the way it does on some of those mod
els who pose for big pictures which get folded in two places, hips a guy could get very fond of, and the long, lovely, and well-curved legs of a dancer. That's what I'd do. I'd ask her for a dance.
“Oo,” she said. Just part of a sentence, I guess. Then she turned, walked without haste to the door toward which she'd apparently been trotting, and opened it. Beyond her I could see—blurrily, and out of focus—part of a desk, some kind of screen, and an easy chair.
She went into the room, turned again, and shut the door. But she didn't slam it with a bang. In fact, she held it open for a good long second—maybe if wasn't any longer than the usual ones, but it was sure good—then closed it gently. I thought maybe she'd started to smile, but probably I imagined it. I was imagining a lot of other things, and it would have been easy to imagine a big smile.
And that was my introduction to Dr. Mordecai Withers.
No, she wasn't Dr. Withers. He had been sitting in a big overstuffed chair all the time. But at a time like that, what kind of nut would look at Dr. Withers?
He was maybe five-eight or nine, with a pleasant pink face and thinning brown hair, rather pale wide-set eyes behind large horn-rimmed glasses. I estimated his age at near sixty. He had a purple silk scarf around his neck and tucked beneath a pink slipover sweater, and was wearing yellow trousers with their legs stuffed into highly polished black riding boots. I'd put him at about thirty pounds overweight, and he looked just a bit like Santa Claus, shaved and ready for a Hollywood funeral.
A pad of paper was in his lap and he held a wooden pencil in his hand. He picked up the pad, tapped it with the pencil, and said, “Take off your clothes."
The Trojan Hearse (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 4
