Bad Blood

by E. O. Chirovici

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gregory, I’m not capable of doing that, at least not yet. But I’m pretty sure that Mr. Fleischer wasn’t involved in your husband’s death. If he’d committed a felony murder in cold blood back then, he wouldn’t have been eaten alive by his dilemma about one particular night in Paris. Maybe he did a few bad things in his youth, but nothing of that sort. But I can’t say the same thing about Mr. Hale. Unfortunately, I’m not sure he could tell fantasy from reality and right from wrong.”

  “But I’m sure, Dr. Cobb, because I knew him well, with all due respect. Will you stay for lunch?” she asked politely. There was no trace of warmth in her voice.

  “No, thank you, I have to get back to New York. I’m sorry for having taken up so much of your time.”

  “Then goodbye, Dr. Cobb,” she said, extending a hand that was firm and cold. “Thanks for visiting me and take good care of yourself. You give me the impression of a man groping through a crypt.”

  I shook her hand and got in the car. She remained standing by the bench, clutching her coat around her shoulders. Before I drove away, she called out to me and I cracked the window. “Dr. Cobb, you probably know the answer to a question that torments me: Why do people lie?”

  “Out of fear, mostly,” I answered. “More often than not, a lie is a means of defense, Mrs. Gregory. Or sometimes they do it in hope of a reward.”

  “You’re right, Dr. Cobb. Never forget the answer you just gave me.”

  I started the engine and reversed to turn around. She was still standing in the same spot, her white hair fluttering.

  eighteen

  THAT AFTERNOON, I struggled to finish writing an article I’d promised to send to a magazine in Chicago. My mind was occupied with that story and my thoughts about Julie’s farewell note which Josh had sent me, so it was difficult to concentrate on anything else.

  I did a search through my computer and looked through some old files. I nailed together all the information I’d gathered about Julie during our sessions. I listened to a couple of audio files and I read some notes I’d written back then. There was something that made me uneasy while I listened to one of the audio files, but I couldn’t quite place it. I listened to the recording one more time, with the same result, and so I gave it up for the moment.

  While searching through those files, I came across the name and address of a friend of Julie’s. Every patient has to give a contact person in case of emergency. Julie had chosen to give me Susan Dressman’s name rather than her parents’. I sat for a long time at my desk, trying to pluck up the courage to call her, both hoping and fearing that her cellphone number was still the same.

  She answered straightaway and seemed surprised by my call, but immediately remembered who I was and agreed to meet me in the city, at a café named Gino’s on East 38th Street.

  When I got there, two hours later, only two tables were taken: one by Susan, who had already ordered herself a salad, and the other one by an elderly couple. I recognized her immediately, though I’d only ever seen her once, when I’d accompanied her and Julie to the opera. She’d lost weight and changed her hairstyle, but she had the same ironic, self-confident eyes, and the set of her mouth seemed to suggest that life is just a long series of insipid occurrences. She recognized me too, and waved as soon as I entered.

  I wasn’t hungry, so I just ordered an espresso. As the coffee machine was beginning its loud monotonous buzz behind the counter, she said, “When I saw you in the doorway, I told myself that you haven’t aged at all. But now I can see you’ve got some white hairs, and I’d bet good money you didn’t have them when we met—how many years ago was it?”

  “Three,” I answered. “The year when Julie …”

  “I still can’t believe she’s gone,” she confessed. She spoke quickly and avoided eye contact. “Sometimes I find myself wondering what she’s up to and why she hasn’t called. For me she was always so full of life ... I was never able to think of Julie as a person … with problems.”

  The waiter brought my coffee. I poured in some sugar and stirred. Susan had finished her salad and pushed the plate aside.

  “What do you want from me, James?” she asked, looking for something in her purse, which was on the chair next to her. “I assume you didn’t call me just to catch up.”

  “These last few days I’ve been going through the notes in Julie’s file and—”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” she warned. She zipped up her purse and looked me in the eye for the first time. “Julie’s file, I mean. Julie wasn’t a file. She was one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met, and also one of my best friends.”

  “I didn’t mean it to sound like that,” I apologized. “She meant a lot to me too. She wasn’t just another patient.”

  Two red blotches appeared high on her cheekbones. She said slowly, “I was wondering whether you’d bring that up. Julie told me what was going on between you. I thought it was strange, but after all you were both single and it was your business what you were doing. But a shrink is supposed to be ethical and keep a professional distance, not get it on with his patients between sessions. I wondered what kind of man would take advantage of the power he inevitably held over such a vulnerable person to make her take her underwear off.”

  I was taken aback by her language and the hostility I could read in her gaze.

  “And my answer,” she went on, “was that such a man must be an utter scumbag. And that he should be prevented from doing the same thing to other female patients. Cliff, her father, called me that night. He showed me her suicide note and asked me if I knew the man the letter was addressed to, because she hadn’t mentioned a name. I knew about you, so I told him who you are and urged him to take legal action against you. That was my idea, you know.”

  I wanted to be anywhere in the world except there with her.

  “I found out about the letter she left for me by chance a little while ago,” I said. “I thought that perhaps you could answer a couple of questions … That’s why I looked you up.”

  She signaled to the waiter, “A cappuccino, please. Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not even sure she really was in love with you. But what I do know is that you behaved like a jerk.”

  She sipped her coffee and gazed at me over the rim of the cup.

  “I don’t want to be here with you, speaking about Julie. I agreed to meet with you because I was very curious about what you wanted from me. Now I know that meeting you was a mistake. I still feel a distinct need to do you harm. Perhaps you, in your wisdom, have a term for what I’m feeling, but I’m not interested. Goodbye. I think it’s a terrible thing that you’re still practicing and playing with people’s minds. But shit happens every day, doesn’t it?”

  She was so angry she could barely get the words out.

  “I was doing my job, Susan. Which is just that, raking through my patients’ minds, regardless of how dreadful, dirty, or tragic what I find there might be, regardless of how hidden away things are in the basement closet. I’m trying to help.”

  “But seducing your patients isn’t part of your job, damn you!” she said, raising her voice.

  The spoon of the man at the other table froze halfway between his mouth and his bowl of soup.

  “I know that and I’ll regret what happened my entire life. But about that letter, there’s something that …”

  She glared at me. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Are you interrogating me now? Do you think I’m one of your patients? Do you want me to lift my skirt up for you too, is that it?”

  I placed a twenty on the table and got up. “Goodbye, Susan. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Don’t ever dare to call me again.”

  “I won’t.”

  When I called Claudette Morel back, she answered with a much calmer and friendlier tone of voice and asked me to let her know as soon as I arrived in France. She told me that she was retired and had all the time in the world, abandoning her previous lie about having to consul
t her busy diary.

  I booked a flight for the following week and checked to see whether the Hotel Le Meridien still existed. It was still in business and had recently been renovated. I made an online reservation for three nights. The thought that I was going to be sleeping there gave me a strange feeling, as if I were planning to spend the night in a haunted mansion.

  That evening, I took a pen and a pad and sat down at the desk in my apartment, as darkness descended on the city in an icy wave.

  This is what I knew. Simone had been murdered that night, and immediately after that, Josh renounced the entire fortune his parents had left him and went to Mexico for a couple of years. Abraham dropped out of sight for a while, and returned to the States under an assumed name. He too renounced everything, including his identity. In Fleischer senior’s will there was a clause stipulating that if Josh was involved in any violent act against a woman, he’d have to forfeit his entire inheritance. It was logical to assume that he might have donated his money to the White Rose because he felt guilty, and wanted to respect his father’s final wish.

  I wrote out ABRAHAM HALE in capital letters, underlined it, and focused on the name.

  He began a relationship with Simone Duchamp immediately after he moved to Paris. Most likely, his psychosis was already festering at the time. Josh’s arrival in France brought about a major problem in the relationship. Josh’s version: he and Simone fell in love with each other. The version suggested by Abraham in his diary and vaguely confirmed by Elisabeth Gregory: Abraham and Simone were deeply in love with each other and Josh tried to destroy their relationship out of pure spite. He never really loved Simone, but he was jealous of their happiness.

  But why did he tell me a different story? Why did Abraham change his name and completely abandon his previous life? Neither Josh nor Abraham had been considered suspects by the French authorities, so they had no reason to be afraid of consequences for what had happened in Paris.

  On the other hand, it seemed bizarre to me that Simone’s parents had never suggested to the French police that Josh and Abraham might have been involved in their daughter’s disappearance. Had they informed the police, the boys would have been treated as persons of interest or suspects, so they’d have been questioned or even taken into custody for a couple of days at least. But it looked like the parents had done next to nothing when it came to Josh and Abraham. Or maybe they had, but the police—God knows why—hadn’t followed up on the lead.

  While I was rolling all the questions around in my mind, I once again had the distinct feeling that I was ransacking an old manor full of ghosts, the walls of which were ready to come crashing down on me at any moment.

  When I was a child, somewhere on the outskirts of my hometown, right by the cemetery, there was a deserted two-story house. It was overrun with weeds, reaching almost as high as the broken roof, which rain and heat had turned black. The front yard was a miniature jungle behind the rotten planks of a ramshackle fence.

  Teenagers used the derelict house as a den, holing up there to do pot, to make out, or just to drink beer and get away from the grownups. Tom, a red-haired boy who was two years older than me, claimed that he’d made out with May LaSalle in there and that They Went All The Way; but no one believed the biggest liar in the county, because nobody had been inside the Hogarth house since 1974.

  Local legend had it that the three-bedroom house had been the setting for some horrifying and strange events, not long after the family that built it left town. In the late sixties, Caleb Hogarth, his wife, and their three kids left abruptly one night, leaving a note for the sheriff. The note said that they were headed out to California and asked him to keep an eye on the property. No one ever heard from them again after that, and so legally the house and the land couldn’t be sold.

  It became a haunted house, a place where drunks and hobos took shelter from time to time. But they would never have lingered inside for very long, even if the sheriff and his deputies hadn’t chased them away. Old alkies, teenage rebels, thieves trying to scavenge old pieces of furniture or brass light fittings—they all came out of that house scared stiff, claiming to have seen ghosts, bloodstains on the walls, bodies hanging from the rotten roof beams. They heard eerie sounds and felt cold hands touching their faces.

  But the most terrifying event was to take place in the fall of seventy-four.

  Mrs. Wilbur, an accountant at Rubin and Associates at the time, used to walk her dog in the area. She lived on Crackly Meadow, not far from the derelict house. She also used to visit the cemetery to chat with the late Mr. Wilbur, who had died five years earlier.

  One day she was walking her dog by the Hogarth house. The poodle—whose name history hasn’t recorded—wriggled out of his collar and jumped through a hole in the fence straight into the yard and disappeared from her sight. She entered the yard and called for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. She thought she heard him whimpering somewhere inside the house, and she went after him.

  She was found about half an hour later by a passerby. She was able to speak about what she’d seen and experienced in the house only after the doctors had stitched up fifteen wounds, which were all over her body, given her half a gallon of blood, put a cast on her right leg, which was broken in three places, and tended to her burst lips and black eyes.

  Mrs. Wilbur swore that the person who had attacked her was none other than her late husband, Sylvester. When she entered the Hogarth house, he was sitting on a chair at the living room table, with his elbows resting against the wooden tabletop. He was wearing the same blue suit he’d been buried in, and for a couple of seconds he didn’t seem to notice the intruder frozen by the door, who was all but having a heart attack.

  Then Mr. Wilbur took note of her presence, grinned at her, stood up, and beat her to a pulp. The woman remembered crawling out into the yard, then into the street, where she fainted.

  The doctors said that the cuts seemed to have been inflicted with a very sharp object, and it was a miracle that no major artery had been severed.

  There had been long debates about post-traumatic shock, about vagrants wandering through our peaceful county, and about the sheriff not doing his job. The local newspaper ran a story on the incident, along with an entire page of messages from readers. Some of them asked that the late Mr. Wilbur should be exhumed to see whether he had become a zombie or whether he’d turned himself into a vampire.

  That’s the place I went to one August evening, when I was fourteen and in love with a girl named Marsha Johnson. She was eager to check out the haunted house, so I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to prove my guts.

  So that evening, at around nine, we were in front of the Hogarth house and, honestly, I almost wet my underwear. I’d always been afraid of the dark, and the ghost stories were giving me goose bumps. Once, after I’d read some short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, I’d had nightmares for weeks. Had Marsha asked me to jump from a three-story building, it would have been easier to do it.

  We sneaked inside through the planks of the ruined fence and tiptoed across the front yard up to the cracked front door, which wasn’t locked. I was covered in sweat and my throat turned dry immediately.

  What happened next still isn’t clear to me. I remember that we walked into an almost completely dark living room and turned on the flashlight I had brought along, and which almost instantaneously went off. I opened it up and wiggled the batteries, unscrewed the casing and wound the bulb. Nothing—it was completely useless. In those few moments we managed to glimpse a few pieces of furniture with coverings on them that seemed like a dead body’s shroud, and the large cracks in the floorboards.

  We groped our way to what turned out to be a door leading to a staircase that looked like the spine of one of those huge dinosaur fossils you see in the natural science museums. The only good part was that Marsha was holding my hand for the first time so we wouldn’t get separated. The floorboards creaked deeply with each step, and the remains of a curtain fluttered over the miss
ing shutters. There was a wooden table in the middle of the living room, its legs sunken halfway into the rotten floor. It smelled like rats and mold, like old clothing and spoiled pickles. I knocked down an empty bottle with my foot and it rolled over into the wall. We were stepping on broken glass, carton waste, splinters of wood, and empty cans.

  We reached the stairs and I was getting ready to climb the first step, wondering whether it was solid enough to carry my weight, when I saw something. Not on the stairs, but somewhere to the left, where there was a hallway leading to the basement.

  I’ve never really been able to recall what I saw in that moment. I couldn’t describe it or, better said, I forgot it the very next second. My mind had probably been unable to process what my eyes had seen.

  People divide time into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, and millennia. But there are minuscule intervals, so small that they practically don’t even exist to us. Such a time “particle” can’t be seen with the eyes, perceived with the mind or placed somewhere in the stamp catalogue of our senses.

  It would have been easy to tell you that I saw a ghost clattering in its chains or a zombie with an axe shoved in his head or a one-eyed hairy giant. But what I saw was a million times worse, more horrific and dreadful than all those things put together—that’s why it has no name and can’t be captured in words. Not even in nightmares.

  I only know that I completely froze. I tried in vain to scream, and then I ran away, not even caring about Marsha anymore. I remember tripping like a ball over a step and falling down on the dirty floor. I tumbled over and the cuffs of my pants got tangled up in the bushes. I only stopped running when I reached the park, in front of the city hall. It took over an hour before I was able to stand up from that wooden bench and go home. I mumbled an excuse to my parents, went up to my room, and slept for weeks with the lights on and a folding knife under my pillow.