Marlene patted his arm. “Yeah, I know. Meanwhile, you saved my life. I wanted to thank you.”
He looked her in the eye, and Marlene was surprised by what she saw in his: pain, confusion, some unbearable longing. She wondered briefly if he had a thing for her personally, or for what she represented. Then, in what appeared a conscious effort, he gathered up this potent mixture and stuffed it away behind his bland and phlegmatic daily mask.
“Well, you know, you’re a nice person,” he said with as much of a shrug as a prone person could manage. “You were decent to Dane just now. He’s kind of boring about guns and all, and you kind of made it all right for him. Not many bosses give enough of a shit to do that.”
They must have given him some dope, Marlene thought as she heard this uncharacteristically sensitive remark. There was clearly more depth in the man than she had imagined.
“And if I were a bitch, you would’ve let Stolz chop me up?”
“He wasn’t after you. He was after the client,” Wolfe said, and then, after a moment, “What do you think makes a guy like that tick? I mean, travel all that distance, twist his whole life into a knot, just to kill some tennis-playing girl.”
“Oh, it’s love, without a doubt,” answered Marlene confidently. “In the wrong channel, needless to say, but still love. It’s the only thing powerful enough to make people do stuff that crazy.”
“Love? But he wanted to kill her.”
“Oh, yeah, but what’s weird about that? It’s classic stranger stalking. Look, put yourself in Manfred’s shoes. He’s a simple guy, not much going for him, no talent, no outlet for what’s got to be a passionate nature. One day he sees her, in a photograph or on TV. He’s smitten. Now there’s a channel for his love. Maybe it starts small-he’s a regular fan, like ten thousand others. He collects pictures, souvenirs of Trude Speyr. But that’s not enough. The channel gets deeper, starts to wear away at the banks of his regular life. He starts going to her tournaments. He gives up his job, his friends, assuming he had any, his family. His fantasy life gets richer. He’s only really alive when he’s thinking about her, looking at her. In his mind they’re together. But of course, in real life she doesn’t know he’s alive. After a while this becomes intolerable. He begins writing to her, trying to get close to her physically. Maybe he invades her space, steals little things, makes demands. She’s terrified, naturally, but he reads this as rejection. In his mind, she was always nice as pie. Now the river is raging. It washes away the rest of his life. He’s got nothing left but her, and she rejects him, worse, ignores him. He’s got to make her notice him, or die. So he attacks. When he’s killing her, then maybe she’ll notice him.”
She was watching Wolfe while she spun this out. He was following it all with more intelligence than she had seen in him before, or maybe she hadn’t looked in the right places.
“It sounds like the Music Lover,” he said in a quiet voice.
“No,” said Marlene with absolute confidence. “The Music Lover’s completely different. The Music Lover is a sadist named Vincent Robinson. What he wants is to control and torment his victim. No love involved. He’s got some crazy sado-mas thing going with the target’s sister too, which I’m not even going to try to figure out. Basically, he’s aping a stranger stalker to scare the vic and get his rocks off. He feeds off her terror. The psychology is completely different, and my feeling is, if I catch this guy in the act and dance on his head for a while, he’ll back off and find someone else to play with. That type of guy is relatively easy to chase away from a particular individual. True obsessives are nearly impossible to discourage.”
“Can’t be cured, huh?”
“Oh, I said discouraged, not cured,” said Marlene. “I’m a firm believer that if you want to change your life, you can. Most people don’t. Obsessives rarely do, sadists never do. In my experience anyway. You know, how many shrinks does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb-”
“Has to want to change,” supplied Wolfe.
They smiled at each other.
“You have a nice smile, Wolfe,” said Marlene. “You ought to crank it up more.”
He blushed, much to her surprise, and then she checked her watch and stood up. “I got to go out to Edie’s. You’re sure you want to come to work tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Really.”
“Can I send you anything tonight? Your motivational tape?”
She grinned. He reddened again. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
“Okay. Thanks again for saving my life. Now you’re responsible for me forever, lucky you.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, which she found remarkably warm and dry, like a hot roll.
Marlene arranged for her VW to be towed to a garage to have its alternator replaced, and had a quick meal with Harry at a local clam bar. Then he drove her to the Sag Harbor marina and its informal ferry.
She found Edie Wooten and the dog in the grand, nicely shabby, dark-beamed living room of the rose-colored house. Sweety rose from his puddle of drool and came to greet her.
“How did you get along?” Marlene asked Edie.
“Oh, great, super,” said Edie. She was sitting in a bluish chintz Windsor chair by the fireplace, which was filled with a bouquet of dried flowers. On the round coffee table before her were spread piles of music manuscript. “He followed me around all day like a lamb. I tried to feed him little treats from lunch, but he wouldn’t take them.”
“He doesn’t take food from anyone but me, except from his dish at home. It’s part of being a guard dog.”
Edie smiled and patted the dog’s flank. “He doesn’t seem much like a guard dog. He seems like a big lovable lunkhead.”
“And you can’t tell that you’re a world-famous cellist except when you’re playing the cello. You can only tell he’s a guard dog when he’s guarding.”
Marlene sat down in the wing chair opposite and eased off her new sneakers, which pinched. Oddly, she felt entirely at home here; she decided it was the absolute unpretentiousness of the unassailably rich.
Marlene asked, “Anybody come by today?”
“No. They keep pretty much to themselves in Ginnie’s house. I saw Ginnie at the pool today with Vince, though. We didn’t talk.” She seemed sad for a moment as she said this. “The pool is neutral territory. Technically, it belongs to me, but I let them use it as long as they behave themselves when I’m there.”
“How did they seem?”
“Oh, you know-hungover, druggy. Look, I hate to be rude, but I have some arranging to do and some more practice …”
Marlene stood up. Yes, and you don’t want me to pump you about your sister and her boyfriend. “That’s okay, Edie. Can I call my daughter from here?”
Of course it was all right. There was a phone in her room.
Lucy answered, for which Marlene was grateful. She did not particularly want to speak to Karp at this juncture. Lucy had reached the age when speakng on the phone was a treat and not a burden. New York Telephone was considering a new substation for her and her gang of preadolescent girlfriends. She was full of chatter about the end-of-school party (for which her suspension had been mercifully rescinded), about which boys were particularly annoying and how they had been put in their place, the doings of the various little Chins, Woos, Mas, and Lees with whom she consorted, this mixed in with flashes from the front-there was a perpetual mob of newsies at the door, who had lately been joined by black pickets carrying signs about Daddy, and no, Daddy wasn’t a racist, then on to her plans for the summer (she wished to attend Chinese day camp) and finally, “When are you coming home?”
“Soon, kid. When this business is over out here.”
“Daddy said you’re living on an island.”
Marlene agreed that this was the case, and described the many glories of Wooten I.
“Can I come out there? With Daddy?”
“Well, Daddy’s pretty busy now and so am I. I still have a couple of more days of guarding Ms. Spey
r. The tournament isn’t over yet.”
“But after,” Lucy pressed, “after, can I come out?”
“Sure, Luce. I’ll have to ask Ms. Wooten, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“Would you really ask her?”
“Really, really,” said Marlene.
Rohbling now entered the endgame, each side with a single major piece left to play. For Waley this was Dr. Bannock, the psychiatrist who knew the defendant best. For Karp it was Dr. Perlsteiner. The two men could not have been more different in their mien or appearance. Erwin T. Bannock was six feet tall and athletic, in his early fifties, with a full head of dark hair nicely graying at the sides. He was dressed in a beautifully cut tweed suit, a three-piece, with a paisley tie and shiny brown cap-toe shoes, an outfit just casual enough to distinguish him from the lawyers, and suggesting (as he meant it to) a British gentleman who had through some quirk found himself at Johns Hopkins and decided it would be a lark to become a psychiatrist. He had a soft, reassuring voice, and the habit of pausing for three beats before answering a question, as if summoning the information afresh from some vast store kept behind that broad, tanned forehead.
Waley proposed to stipulate Dr. Bannock’s sterling record in the interest of saving time. Karp refused, got a glare from the judge, ignored it. The jury had to hear about the doctor’s education, his awards, his membership on the appropriate boards.
Bannock was an essential witness for the defense, not only because he knew the defendant best, but because he had been treating Rohbling throughout the period of the murders. He had met with him three days before Mrs. Hughes had been killed, and two days afterward.
Waley took his position before the jury and began slowly to wring from Dr. Bannock his expertise. Karp scribbled notes in the private shorthand he had developed in law school. With the part of his mind not thus engaged, he became conscious once more of his revulsion toward this sort of expert witness. Theoretically, and perhaps at some time actually, an expert witness was supposed to be a servant of the court, explaining complex matters to the jury. This largely remained the case with experts like city engineers and ballistics technicians. But psychiatrists were invariably mere pimps, their substantive knowledge hollow and entirely for sale.
Waley was taking his witness through the psychiatric treatment provided. Bannock said that Jonathan Rohbling was out of his mind, a paranoid schizophrenic family, in fact, with multiple-personality disorder the cherry on top. A schizophrenic family, as the Rohblings: the tyrannical father, the neurasthenic mother, the powerful figure of Clarice Brown, loaded with love-hate ambiguity, combined to produce the psychotic break. Jonathan thought he was a black man named Jared Brown, the true son of Clarice, hence the makeup, hence the trips to Harlem to blend in with his people. Significance of the blue cloth suitcase? Ah, yes: Dr. Bannock had determined that Clarice Brown packed her things in just such a suitcase when the Rohblings had dismissed her.
Bannock also recounted his take on the actual murder. Jonathan wanders Harlem, lost and lonely, driven to find a warm maternal replacement for Clarice. He shows up at a church supper, befriends Jane Hughes. She invites him for coffee; she is lonely too, is attracted in a maternal way to the handsome, religious youth. Once in the apartment, he switches to his “true” self, the son of the beloved, hated, Clarice. He starts treating Mrs. Hughes as his mother, fantasizing, speaking to people who are not there. Mrs. Hughes becomes frightened, asks him to leave. He brandishes the suitcase, opens it, engages in a dialog with the mammy-mistress doll. Mrs. Hughes is terrified, shouts for help. He pushes her to the couch. He is in a panic. Clarice is going to abandon him again! He holds her down with the suitcase; without the suitcase she cannot leave. Symbolically, of course. In actuality, the cloth suitcase smothers her. Now, in his mind, she won’t leave him. So lost in unreality is he that he has no idea that he has killed her. He continues with his pleasant conversation, picks up the famous ashtray, imagines that she gives it to him as a present. He puts it in his suitcase and leaves.
So, because of his suffering from a mental disease, paranoid schizophrenia, he didn’t really understand that he had killed Mrs. Hughes? Waley’s voice was filled with wonder at the power of science. No, came the answer. He had no idea what he was doing? No, he was dominated by his psychotic ideation. Or that what he was doing was wrong? No. In a sense, Jonathan Rohbling was not even there. Thank you, Doctor. Your witness.
“Dr. Bannock,” Karp began, “you’ve testified that the defendant has a mental disease called paranoid schizophrenia, and that you were treating him for that disease. What was that treatment?”
“Well, with schizophrenia the best we can hope for is a reduction in the symptoms through the use of drugs. Halperidol is used, the thiothixenes, and for more refractory cases, chlorpromazine and clozapine.”
“And what was the defendant in fact taking at the time of the murder?”
Bannock pursed his lip, paused for his usual moment. “I can’t say what he was actually taking. I had prescribed sixty milligrams daily dosage of Navane, which is a thiothixene antipsychotic.”
“When you last saw him, before the murder, as you testified, on April seventeenth, had he been taking his medication?”
“I can’t say for certain, obviously. He said he was.”
“In your professional opinion, was he?”
A longer pause. “No.”
“So, on April seventeenth, the defendant, your patient, was an unmedicated psychotic there in your office, was he?”
An impatient wrinkling of the noble brow. “It’s not as cut and dried as that. He may still have had some drug in his system.”
“I see,” said Karp. “But to all appearances he was normal, he was not in blackface, he did not think he was this Jared, he was not having conversations with imaginary people, he showed none of the symptoms you have described, correct?”
“Yes.”
“He presented the aspect of a drug-controlled schizophrenic then, this is what you’re telling us, Doctor?”
“That is correct.”
“You didn’t think on the afternoon of April seventeenth that he could not comport his behavior to the requirements of the law, did you?”
A clever man, Dr. Bannock. He saw the trap closing and thought for a moment on how to avoid it. “It’s not that simple. The underlying schizoid state does not-”
“Just answer the question, Doctor,” said the judge.
“No, not at that time,” said Bannock grumpily.
“Because if he had been manifestly incapable, you, as a good citizen and a doctor, would not have allowed him to roam the streets, isn’t that so?”
“Of course.”
“Thank you,” said Karp. “So that was Wednesday. On Thursday, since, as we have heard, the defendant, in disguise, appeared in Harlem, met Mrs. Hughes at a church affair, befriended her, made a date for Saturday, kept that date, and killed her, are you therefore saying, Doctor, that in three days he somehow lost that substantial capacity to comport his behavior to the requirements of law?”
“Yes, with schizophrenics we often see periods of near-normal-appearing behavior.”
“I see. Now, then, you’ve testified that you also saw the defendant on the Monday after the murder for his regular appointment. The twenty-second of April. How did he seem then?”
“He appeared calm and normal.”
“So are you telling us, then, that he appeared to have no mental disease on the seventeenth, trots out a mental disease on the eighteenth, kills Mrs. Hughes on the twentieth, still in the grip of a mental disease, and then appears normal in your office two days later?”
“No, not exactly. The disease is always present, but it can take different forms, mild or severe, depending on both internal and external factors. Some triggering event often causes the actual psychotic break, and the-and the aberrant behavior.”
Karp heard the little stammer, observed some moisture on the noble brow, and was glad. “What triggering event, Doctor
?”
“Well, the situation, the presence of a black woman of the correct age, middle-aged or older, the blue suitcase, the opportunity …”
“So the presence of all these would trigger this psychotic break?”
“Yes. Would tend to.”
“Doctor, if you look around the courtroom, you will see several women of that description. There is even one on our jury. The blue suitcase is right here. Yet Mr. Rohbling is sitting calmly in his seat. How do you explain that?”
“The situation, I mean here, a courtroom, is not appropriate for the situation in which we would see the psychosis actually evinced.”
“Do you mean that if he rose from his seat, grabbed the blue suitcase, and tried to smother Mrs. Finney there in the jury box, the court officers would stop him?”
“Yes, but what I meant was that a certain situation of intimacy is necessary to trigger the response.”
“Intimacy, I see. You mean, he has to be alone in an apartment, say, with a helpless woman before he becomes incapable of comporting his conduct to the requirements of the law.”
“Well, in effect, that is the case.”
“In simple terms, he only goes crazy and kills when he can get away with it, is that what you’re saying?”
“That is the effect, but in the event he is not thinking in those terms. He-”
“Thank you. How terrifically convenient for Mr. Rohbling! He only becomes an insane killer when he can escape the consequences of his act.”
“Objection! Argumentative. Not a question.”
“Sustained. Jury will disregard.”
“Doctor,” Karp resumed quickly, “your testimony-this business about Jared, and Clarice, and Mr. Rohbling’s mental states-is entirely based on what Mr. Rohbling has told you, isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t been able to look into his head, say, with modern instruments of any kind, or do any definitive blood or tissue tests that would independently establish this diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia?”
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