The Man Who Understood Cats

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  “It sometimes helps our investigations to let people jump to their own conclusions.”

  “I see. I hope my amateur efforts haven’t muddled things too badly.”

  Thinnes gave a noncommittal shrug. “Where did you get Miss Baynes’s address?” He’d checked; she wasn’t in the book.

  “She was one of Allan’s few friends, the only one I had an address for.”

  “Was Finley right- or left-handed?”

  “Left-handed.”

  Thinnes nodded; he’d expected as much.

  Caleb said, “Was there anything else?”

  “Not unless Miss Baynes told you something incriminating.”

  “She said she’d had a date with Allan the night he died, and she thought he’d stood her up.”

  Thinnes nodded again. “Well, thanks for coming in, Doctor.”

  “My pleasure. I’ve always wanted to see the inside of a police station—voluntarily, of course.” He stood up to go.

  Thinnes stood too. “Maybe you’d like to spend a day with us sometime—see how it’s done.”

  “I’d like that very much. When?”

  “You doing anything tonight? We’re just coming on. You’re welcome to join us.” Thinnes pointed to his tailored suit. “You got any, ah, more casual clothes?”

  Caleb smiled wryly. “It’ll take me a while to go home and change.”

  “How ’bout we pick you up at your place in an hour?”

  “Fine.”

  After Thinnes watched Caleb disappear, he turned to find Crowne seething.

  “What was that, Thinnes?”

  “We’ve got nothing so far, and he’s the closest thing we have to a suspect. If we can get him off guard, he may let something slip.”

  “You can’t even prove you’ve got a homicide. Personally, I think Bendix has you pegged: you finally flipped out! You oughta go have a nice long talk with Karsch.” He got up and stalked out of the squad room.

  Twenty-One

  Thinnes pulled the unmarked police car over in front of the Gold Coast skyscraper, and Caleb emerged, dressed casually. He got in the back seat and nodded to Crowne, who’d cooled off. As Thinnes pulled into traffic, Crowne handed Caleb a release form to sign.

  Thinnes filled him in. “You missed roll call. That’s where if we don’t have a case of our own pending, we get our assignments—lists of people to question, suspects or prospective witnesses for whatever cases are still open.”

  “Tonight, we got a good twenty,” Crowne added, “mostly people who’re unavailable during the day or weren’t home when the detectives stopped by earlier. It can be tough sometimes.”

  “People are under no legal obligation to tell us the truth unless they’re under oath.” Thinnes looked back at Caleb. “Moral obligations don’t have any weight. It makes working up a case more of a challenge.”

  “Yeah,” Crowne said, “but it’s a bad idea to lie to us. When we get lied to, we get really nosy.” He looked sharply at Caleb to see if he was listening and had understood. “And we usually know when somebody’s lying.”

  Mutt and Jeff. All dicks played the game. Crowne wasn’t as good at it as Frank Flynn, Thinnes’s former partner, but he was okay for the less than subtle stuff. Thinnes watched Caleb carefully in the rearview as Crowne said, “Thinnes, you can’t make a case for murder. Finley’s fingerprints were on the gun, and he had gunshot residue in the right places. Somebody pointed a gun at him and said, ‘Shoot yourself or I’ll do it for you.’”

  Caleb’s expression told Thinnes only that the doctor was good at disguising his feelings. Thinnes kept his eyes on Caleb as he told Crowne, “The killer used a bullet to kill him and a blank to dust his hand afterwards.”

  Caleb seemed interested, nothing more.

  “The gun was only fired once,” Crowne said.

  “Maybe. But who said there was only one gun?”

  Still Caleb gave nothing away. But then the murderer was likely to be a cool SOB.

  “Gimme a break. A killer that carries two guns so he can make it look like suicide?”

  “But Allan wasn’t killed in the heat of passion,” Caleb interrupted. “If you plan to get away with murder, you plan.”

  Their first stop was The Wise Fools Pub. They were looking for a blues player who may or may not have seen the fatal beating of a possible witness to a probable drug buy. “One of those real solid leads,” as Crowne put it. It was early; there were few patrons. Crowne and Caleb waited while Thinnes questioned the bartender, who shook his head a lot and told him not to bother the musicians. The musicians, as it turned out, were delighted to be bothered—when Caleb offered to buy them a round—but none of them had ever heard of the blues player.

  They had to question the driver of a hackney cab who’d witnessed a violent assault earlier in the evening. They tracked her down at the cab stand north of the Water Tower information center. The driver told her story with gestures and much pointing; the horse waited patiently, looking bored. Thinnes asked the questions as Crowne took notes.

  Why, Caleb wondered, as he watched Thinnes work, do I want to get close to a cop? It’s a danger—cops have their own agendas, their own rules.

  It came to him like a déjà vu, like the feeling his grandmother had described as “someone walking on your grave”: Thinnes had that something Chris’d had, the same sort of attitude toward the truth—that it must be known.

  They flagged an old Buick down on Division Street and followed it into an alley, letting it pull several car-lengths ahead. Thinnes and Caleb stayed in the car. Thinnes filled Caleb in on the case, while Crowne got out and walked up to lean against the Buick and talk to the driver, a former gang member in his twenties, who sometimes gave them useful information. As they watched, Thinnes asked Caleb, “What does a psychiatrist actually do?”

  “If he’s successful,” Caleb said, “he helps people solve their personal problems.”

  A Karsch kind of answer, if ever there was one, Thinnes thought. “Yeah, but how? What exactly do you do?”

  “There’s nothing exact about it. When a client asks me to help, I have him describe the problem. I listen to what he says. I study his body language for discrepancies. I try to notice what he doesn’t say.”

  He paused as they watched Crowne take out a cigarette and then hand the pack to his informant. Crowne lit up with a green plastic lighter, which he also handed over. The informant took a cigarette, lit it, and put both pack and lighter in his pocket.

  Thinnes could read neither approval nor disapproval on Caleb’s face as he continued. “If there’s any suggestion of organic impairment, I send him to his physician for a thorough physical, and I test him myself for drugs and anything I think his doctor may have missed.”

  Down the alley, Crowne walked around the informant’s car and got in the front seat. His gestures became mildly threatening, and he leaned toward the informant as the man spoke.

  Caleb waited, perhaps for Thinnes to comment, then went on. “If I don’t find drugs or any physical cause for the problem, I dig into his family history and try to determine what purpose the problem serves, either for the client or for significant others in his life.”

  In the informant’s car, Crowne shook his head vigorously, almost as if disagreeing with Caleb. He listened to the informant for a moment, then shrugged.

  “Motive, opportunity, and method,” Thinnes said. “Basic detective work, huh?”

  “That, and a bit more. A detective’s finished when he’s discovered who did it and presented his evidence. At that point in the investigation, a therapist still has to determine if his subject really wants to change, and if he’s serious, how to help him do it.”

  “Sort of a one-man criminal justice system.”

  “That’s one way to put it, although it’s more frequently described by critics as playing God.”

  Crown got out of the Buick and started back toward them, poker-faced, but Thinnes could tell he’d struck out. Thinnes kept his eyes on Caleb a
nd said, “What do you think, Doctor. Did he score?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Then Crowne opened the door and threw himself into the passenger seat with a resounding “Damn!”

  A little while later, Thinnes cruised slowly down Rush Street on autopilot, watching the activity as he kept up his end of the conversation. The subject was baseball, and he found he had the Cubs in common with Caleb; Crowne was a South Sider. As the car passed one of the half dozen bars on the strip, Thinnes spotted something suspicious in the alley next to it. He stopped, backed up fast, and pulled down the alley. He and Crowne were out of the car almost before it quit moving.

  Two large bouncers were holding a drunk up against the building wall. The drunk was a male cauc, mid twenties, a yuppie type, too far gone to stand without help. Thinnes showed the bouncers his star.

  “What’s the story?”

  “Guy came in D and D. We were just trying to sober him up enough to pour him into a cab.”

  A likely story.

  “We’ll take him. You want to press?”

  “Hell no. We just want him gone.”

  Crowne glared at Thinnes but didn’t complain in front of the civilians about the extra paperwork they’d have to do. He hitched his thumb toward the car. The bouncers pulled the drunk away from the wall, and he almost collapsed. They backed him up to the car, where he sagged onto the hood like a water balloon.

  Thinnes curbed the car in front of an old red brick building, six stories, wrapped like a U around a trashy, weed-filled central courtyard. He fished his notebook from his inside pocket and flipped it open. “Mrs. Emilio Campos. Says she speaks English.”

  “These people never speak English,” Crowne said, “even when they do. We ought to save this one for Viernes.”

  Thinnes shook his head. “We’ll try. If we strike out, we’ll give it to Viernes.”

  “I speak Spanish,” Caleb said, “if that’s any help.”

  Thinnes turned to Crowne. “See there? You gotta think horse. You’ll get grass.”

  “Yeah. Then you’ll get busted.”

  They got out of the car and went in. There was no security door, no elevator. Mrs. Campos lived on the third floor and answered the door with, “No hablo inglés,” to which Caleb responded, “Hablo español.” A rapid conversation followed, completely in Spanish, during which Mrs. Campos did most of the talking, and Caleb interrupted, occasionally, with “¿Quién?” or “¿cómo?” Finally she shook her head and went back into her apartment. Caleb stared after her with a troubled expression.

  “Well?” Crowne demanded.

  “She’s afraid if she says who shot him, they’ll kill her or her family.”

  It was about what Thinnes expected, but Crowne got angry. “These damn people—”

  “She’s afraid to be the first,” Caleb interrupted, scarcely concealing his annoyance. “If we can get someone else to identify him, she’ll corroborate. She said at least a dozen other people saw the shooting.”

  Crowne shook his head.

  Thinnes nodded. “Then if the doctor doesn’t object…” He looked at Caleb, who shook his head. “Let’s start knocking on doors.”

  They canvassed the entire building, questioning anyone who would open the door, with Crowne and Thinnes asking in English, Caleb translating. If the sighs and shrugs and heads shaking were anything to judge by, no one ever saw anything. Caleb spoke as much with his hands and shoulders and face as with words. Thinnes’s hunch was confirmed—the doctor had depths to him not hinted at by his life-style or profession.

  Their last interview was with a family on the fifth floor. Caleb spoke with the man of the household as Crowne, Thinnes, the man’s family, and neighbors looked on. There was much gesturing on both sides, and a good deal of commentary from the onlookers. Suddenly the general debate was too much for the man.

  “¡Ya basta! ¡Silencio!” he demanded. The spectators fell silent. The man turned to Caleb and said, “Lo siento, no puedo ayudarles.” Caleb shrugged and nodded with apparent sympathy.

  “Nadie vió nada,” another man said.

  “Váyanse, por favor,” a woman added. “Vimos nada.”

  Three or four people nodded in agreement and stared at the detectives. Caleb turned to Thinnes. “They know, but they’re afraid to speak out. They’re pretty adamant.”

  “Okay. Let’s get out of here.”

  A modest crowd had gathered by the time they reached the street. Neighbors called back and forth in Spanish as the three of them got in the car. “Well Ray,” Thinnes was forced to concede, “looks like you’re going to get your wish. We’re definitely going to have to call in Viernes.”

  Twenty-Two

  Clark and Ontario. McDonald’s. Thinnes sat with Crowne and Caleb in the car with the motor running as Crowne dispensed “dinner” from a paper bag. He watched Caleb remove the bun from his Quarter Pounder as they talked and roll the meat up like a taco.

  Crowne asked Caleb, “You still think Thinnes is right? Somebody killed Finley?”

  Caleb swallowed and said, “Yes.”

  “You never been wrong?”

  “Certainly. But in Finley’s case, I doubt it.”

  “But he was crazy, wasn’t he? Else why was he seeing you? A crazy’s just as likely to kill himself as any other damn thing.”

  “By crazy, I assume you mean unpredictable, illogical, deviant from the norm.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He wasn’t crazy.” Caleb looked at Thinnes as he expanded on what he was telling Crowne. “Craziness isn’t the only reason people see psychiatrists.”

  He held Thinnes’s eyes a moment longer than the conversation warranted, and Thinnes felt a shock. The doctor had a disconcerting way of staring that gave you the feeling he knew what you were thinking. It made Thinnes think of cats and gave him the impression that Caleb was making a discreet, roundabout suggestion. To Thinnes.

  “So he wasn’t crazy,” Thinnes said, to steer the subject back to Finley. “How can you be sure he didn’t kill himself for some ‘logical’ reason? Why do people kill themselves?”

  “There’re several theories.”

  Crowne said, “Such as?”

  “Common sense has it that suicide results from despair, an utter absence of hope, if you will.”

  Crowne nodded. Thinnes watched Caleb’s body language.

  “Then there’s the anger-in, anger-out theory. That suicide is the result of deep-seated anger directed at one’s self, homicide being the result of anger directed at others.” He seemed to assess their reactions to this, then continued. “There’s the evil spirits theory—possession by demons.”

  Crowne laughed. “So which theory is right?”

  “I’d say it depends.” They waited. “You have to remember that any theory is a metaphor, at best. A view of the world. To put it metaphorically, what you describe with your theory depends on what you see, and that depends on where you’re standing.”

  “So everything’s relative, and nobody can really explain anything,” Thinnes said. “That’s a cop-out.” It seemed pretty weird to be discussing philosophy with a murder suspect in a McDonald’s parking lot.

  Caleb shook his head and paused, perhaps to get his words right. “If you live in a culture where mental illness is thought to be caused by demon possession, you’re more likely to be cured by a ceremony to exorcise the demons than you are by psychotherapy.” Thinnes nodded. “And if you believe that the proper medication will cure you, even a sugar pill will give you relief, unless you’re a raving manic-depressive or a process schizophrenic.”

  “So you’re saying modern medical science is voodoo?”

  “Not at all. If someone’s behavior improves when you administer a chemical in a double-blind situation, it’s safe to assume the chemical is having a therapeutic effect, and that his brain chemistry has been changed.”

  “Yeah. So the devil didn’t make him do it,” Crowne said.

  Caleb shrugged. “We can’t say that wit
h certainty if we don’t know what caused his impairment.”

  Thinnes said, “Either heredity or environment.”

  Caleb smiled. “You might just as well say karma. Why do some members of a family develop schizophrenia when others don’t?”

  “It seems to me we’ve gotten pretty far from why people kill themselves, Doctor,” Thinnes said. “What do you think?”

  “I think human beings are wonderfully adept at solving problems—even if we have to create problems to solve.” He paused. “I see most suicides as a misplaced attempt to solve a problem, a normal coping mechanism run amok.”

  “Makes sense,” Crowne said. “Okay, say Finley was murdered. What can you tell us about who might have done it?”

  “A successful murderer’s intention is to avoid detection, and the best way to avoid detection is to prevent anyone from knowing a murder’s been committed, either by making the victim completely disappear, or by making it appear that the victim died by natural causes or his own hand. I’d say our murderer is quite intelligent, and particularly subtle or cowardly.”

  “You got any hunches about his motive?” Thinnes asked.

  “Allan wasn’t dishonest or malicious, but he had access to people’s secrets.”

  “You think maybe he was blackmailing somebody?”

  Caleb shook his head. “Someone might have thought he might, or just that he would go to the police about something.”

  “You one of those, ah …liberal types,” Crowne asked Caleb, “who thinks all criminals are either victims of society or had rotten parents?”

  “There’s evidence that a significant number of those we classify as having antisocial personality disorder had a father with the same problem or were abused or head-injured as children.”

  “So you think bad guys are all just sick?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He paused. “Personally, I believe some ‘bad guys’ are just bad. Evil, to use an old-fashioned word.”