Travel Writing

by Peter Ferry

  One week minus one hour later, I put my backpack with its precious cargo on the floor and settled into the now-familiar chair. Albert Decarre sat across the coffee table. I told him I thought it was time to talk about the thing I had seen and the thing I knew. He asked me what I had seen.

  “I saw someone die.”

  “Um,” he said, “I’m sorry. That can be very hard. Did you know the person who died?”

  “Not beforehand, but I got to know her afterward.”

  “After her death?”

  “Yes. In fact I quite fell in love with her.”

  “After she was dead?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Actually the only time I ever saw her was on the occasion of her death.”

  “May I ask you how she died?”

  “It was an accident. At least it seemed so at the time.”

  “And you saw it happen?”

  “I saw the whole thing.”

  “I want to ask you something else. Did you cause the accident?”

  “No.”

  “Did you have anything to do with her death?”

  “No, except I think—or I thought for a long time—that I could have prevented it.”

  “You no longer think that?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not very often.”

  “So you have some doubt?”

  “A little.”

  He took some notes and I watched him. He had an unusually expressive mouth. He had long white fingers. He crossed his legs in that way that thin people can so that the one fairly dangled from the other. “A while ago, you said that something happened that your relationship with Lydia wouldn’t be able to survive. Is this what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you fell in love with the woman who died?”

  “Yes, I fell in love with her. The other shoe dropped.”

  “Interesting phrase. Do you often feel that the other shoe’s about to drop?”

  “No, I don’t think so, but I did in that relationship.”

  “Do you feel that now?”

  “Now? I guess I do, in a way, but in a very different way. More as in ‘resolution,’ and I guess that’s why I’ve come to see you.”

  He turned back a page. “Resolution of what’s been haunting you?”

  “In a way.”

  “Tell me this,” he said. “Do you think you could ever have the kind of relationship with a woman that your parents had?”

  “Well, I hope so. I think that’s what we’re all looking for, don’t you?”

  The doctor ignored my question. He said that he dealt with a lot of people who’ve had inadequate models in their lives, or bad models, but sometimes having a good model—a model that’s too good—is the hardest thing of all. He called it the famous-parent syndrome. If a parent has been extremely successful, it’s a hard thing for a child to live up to. He can never make as much money, build as big a house, write as good a book, hit as many home runs as his father, and even if he does then he knows people will say, “Well, it was just because of his dad. His father made it possible.”

  “You think my parents’ marriage was too ideal, and I can never live up to it?” I asked

  “It’s possible. One thing that interests me is that you chose to fall in love with someone who was unattainable.”

  “I didn’t exactly choose her,” I said.

  “You fell in love with someone unattainable. There is no one less attainable than a dead person, and you may be surprised to know that lots of people fall in love with dead people.” He smiled. “It’s another syndrome.” He called it the widow’s syndrome. A man dies after a difficult or troubled marriage, and his wife turns him into a saint, forgets the dirty socks on the floor, the drinking, or the womanizing, and romanticizes him, turns him into the husband she’d always wanted, and ends up loving him more in death than she ever did in life.

  “And you think that’s what I’m doing?” I asked.

  “It’s possible,” said the doctor. “You see, loving someone who isn’t there is safer than loving someone who is, which is why ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ There’s no more profound absence than death, and when someone’s dead, you can make her anyone you want her to be.”

  “I don’t know. It seems a little pat.”

  “Okay, tell me more. Why do you think you fell in love with this dead woman?”

  I told him that guilt was a factor, that she was beautiful and interesting and vulnerable.

  “Vulnerable after her death?” he asked.

  “In an odd way. I told you I saw something and I know something. That has to do with what I know.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I know that her death wasn’t really an accident, or at least it was an intentional accident.”

  “An accident she intended? Did she commit suicide?”

  “No. She was killed.”

  “Oh. Murdered?” he asked.

  “Yes, she was murdered, and I know who did it.”

  “How do you know this?” he asked.

  “I saw the man who did it.”

  “You saw him do it? You saw him kill her?”

  “No, but I saw him, and I know he did it. I put two and two together, and I know.”

  “Pete, may I ask you what your purpose is with regard to this man?”

  “I would like to see him brought to justice, of course.”

  “May I ask then why you don’t just go to the police?”

  “I did. That’s one of the first things I did.” I waited and watched him.

  “And were they able to help you?”

  I told him that they helped me see that I knew nothing about police work, that my “case” against the man was intuitive, my evidence was either missing or circumstantial, that the man was a highly respected citizen with no criminal record, and that I appeared to be on either a wild-goose chase or a crusade. Here are the things I did not tell him: “They” was Steve Lotts, who now believed the man to be involved in the woman’s death, Lieutenant Grassi may have suspected foul play early on, and I now had a lot more evidence that I hadn’t taken to the police because I wanted to be able to act if they did not. “They said that no prosecutor would dare to touch the thing, and if one did, he’d get laughed out of the DA’s office. They suggested I seek counseling.”

  “Okay.”

  “So here I am. Seeking counseling.”

  “All right. How are you feeling about all of this now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I presume since you came ‘seeking resolution,’ that you are not finished with it quite yet.”

  “No, no. They did make me step back and take a closer, more realistic look at myself and my motives and the whole situation. I mean, why was I doing this? What did it really matter to me?” I told him that I no longer saw the woman as a purely innocent victim; she was too complex for that. For that matter, I no longer saw the man as completely evil. I didn’t like what he did, but I began to understand it at least a little; I could at least imagine his desperation. I mentioned for the first time that the man was a doctor, that the woman was his patient, that they were having an affair, and that I was quite certain now that at least on some level—if only the emotional one—she was blackmailing him. She was getting to him somehow, that he was an essentially good man who made one mistake and was in danger of being destroyed by it. He was a modest, intelligent, circumspect man about to become a tabloid headline, a man who had devoted his life to helping others undone by the most human of desires, a man trapped perhaps (who knows?) in a loveless marriage, a cold, difficult wife, a lonely man empty, aging, and then this woman—this young woman—this beautiful, vital, exciting, sexy, daring, tempting, willing, able, very able, very willing, and very vulnerable girl came along, and of course it went sour, and she turned into a viper, and he was faced with utter ruin. I told him that I thought a lot about the despair, desperation, and panic the doctor must have felt, about the scandal, the shame and disgrace tha
t he knew lay ahead of him, about that Noah Cross line in Chinatown: “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, at the right place, they’re capable of anything.” I even told him that I thought of some of the things I’d been capable of and some of the things I’d done that I regret. I told him I’d done things I wished I hadn’t. I looked at him.

  “Do you want to tell me about those things?” he asked.

  “No, not really. Not now, anyway. See, I needed to resolve this thing about the doctor. I came to realize my fallacy was my starting point; he’s not an essentially good man; he just looks like one. Look closer and you see a physician who betrayed his most essential trust, who hurt a patient who came to him for help, who hurt her premeditatedly, repeatedly, perhaps as an act of passion originally, but later dispassionately, and when he feared getting caught, he abandoned her. Abandoned her as a lover, as a human being, as a patient. And when she struck back, he killed her.”

  “Hm.”

  “There’s more. There’s the man in the camel coat and the woman who might have been his wife. See, we met at the wreck. They were driving north as I was driving south. Had the young woman swerved left rather than going straight into the tree, she might have hit them. Of course, the woman who might have been his wife might not have been his wife, and for all I know, he was about to hit her over the head or dump her in the lake or she him, all of which is to say that I’m really not much of a sentimentalist myself, but you’d have to consider who else you might be endangering, wouldn’t you?” I looked at him carefully and closely.

  “So where does that leave you?” he finally asked.

  “You mean in the ‘is the doctor good or is the doctor evil’ thing?”

  “If you wish.” And I thought for an instant that he was genuinely interested in my answer.

  “My guess used to be neither,” I said. “My guess used to be that he was more amoral than immoral, that he was something of a sociopath. That he really had no feelings. That he could probably have sat right here and discussed this thing coolly and objectively without raising his blood pressure or breaking a sweat. He could probably have even passed a polygraph test if it was in his own interest to do so. That’s what I used to feel. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Do you think it would make you feel better if you were able to punish him?” he asked.

  “That’s not it, you see. I don’t want to punish him, I just want to stop him.”

  “Then you feel you have a moral purpose?”

  “I came to feel that he was a man without one.” I looked him in the eyes as I explained that the doctor had crossed a line a doctor just can’t cross, not once or ever. And if he ever did, he’d misunderstood the basic relationship between doctor and patient, that there isn’t any margin for error. This wasn’t an error. This wasn’t a slipup or mistake. It was fundamental betrayal. And if a doctor does it once, he’s probably done it before, and he’ll probably do it again.

  “So you felt you needed to stop him. . . .”

  “No. Not without more evidence. So, you know what I did?” I had run an ad in the Evanston Review, the Wilmette Life, all the little papers on the North Shore headed “Ph.D. Study of Clinical Abuse.” It read: “I am writing my dissertation on clinical psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers who take sexual, psychological, or emotional advantage of their patients. If you would like to be part of the study, please contact me through P.O. box such-and-such, confidentiality guaranteed.” When I told Decarre this, he uncrossed and recrossed his legs. He worked hard not to take his eyes off mine, and succeeded. “Got some very interesting replies,” I said. “Fewer than you’d think, or fewer than a layman might think, I guess. Funny how we are suspicious of head doctors like we are of lawyers. Maybe not. Anyway, I interviewed them all. Most you could dismiss almost immediately: sour grapes, fantasy, delusion. Interesting to listen to; these things are so obvious. But two weren’t, and they both had to do with the doctor. These two had the ring of truth to them, and they were similar to each other in some interesting details—some physical things about the doctor—and similar in substance to the dead woman’s story as I had been able to piece it together. Quite similar. One of these stories interested me particularly. It was told to me by a beautiful, nervous young woman who was having trouble sustaining relationships. She said that she’d had ‘about a thousand of them’—these are her words—and they all ended in about the same way at about the same stage in the development of things. She was getting desperate. She had unresolved issues with a father who had disappeared early in her life, and the doctor offered to help her with this—he, by the way, was just the father’s age and, as she herself said, ‘talk about missing a red flag.’ But anyway, the doctor offered to help her with this in what he called a ‘surrogate, therapeutic relationship.’ He was candid with her. He said that it was experimental, that he’d never tried it before, but that he was willing to try it with her. And in her words, ‘What the heck; what did I have to lose? It was therapy for God’s sake.’ No anxiety, no guilt, no expectations except that she would get healthy, or healthier. No entanglements. The woman threw herself into it. In fact, she couldn’t wait for each session. And she says that for a while it worked; for a while it was—her words—‘quite wonderful.’

  “Even the sexual part was good. The doctor was a very caring, generous lover. Very gentle. He taught her things about sex. He coached her. He would talk to her as they made love; she would ask questions. Afterward they would analyze what they had done. It was quite clinical and that allowed her to confront her father through him. And that, too, was working; she was just about ready to go see her father for the first time in three years and get some of her feelings out into the open when the unexpected happened. Her father died. Dropped dead out of the blue, and just like that, any chance of dealing with anything was gone.

  “She ‘came apart,’ to use her words again. She immediately called the doctor but—here’s the funny part—he didn’t return her calls. For three days she called him, paged him, called his emergency number, left messages. No response. Nothing. Nada. She thought it strange. She came to believe that it was the father thing. Somehow the doctor was undone by it, as if it were a message from God or something. In the meantime, she was in distress, so finally, just before Thanksgiving, she went to his office. It was 8:30 in the evening, and his car was still there, although his last appointment was always at 7:00. She waited and waited, and when he didn’t come out, she figured he was doing paperwork, so she went in. He had one of those double doors in his waiting room. She knocked, she pushed; it was open. And there he was with a woman, in flagrante delicto. They froze. The doctor was sprawled, the woman was kneeling, our woman was gaping. I asked if there was any chance this might be some kind of therapy. She said that the only therapy going on there was oral therapy, and the patient was administrating it. Our woman screamed. She screamed, ‘Paul, you cocksucking, motherfucking sonofabitch!’ and then she ran. She slammed the door and ran. That was a long time ago now, and she’s never seen or heard from the doctor again. Of course she wouldn’t have been easy to find. She disappeared. As she says, she ‘left no forwarding address.’ She was hospitalized for quite a while. She lost her job and gave up her apartment, got a new cell phone, made everyone she knew swear not to reveal her whereabouts. Still, there’s no evidence at all that the doctor ever tried to find her.

  “Now here’s the interesting thing and the pertinent thing, too, as far as that goes. That night in the doctor’s office, our woman not only found out about the other woman, but the other woman found out about her. Our woman has only an impression of the other woman, but I think it is impression enough. She was young, taller than average, thin, had medium-length straight dark hair and dark eyes, and she was Asian.

  “The dead woman was a five-foot-six-inch one-hundred-seventeen-pound twenty-eight-year-old Korean. I thought it must have been she, so I was able to check with her insurance company, and sure enough, they were billed for
an appointment on that very day, which happened to be sixteen days prior to her death. Can you imagine the doctor actually billing her? Of course, maybe it was just a computer thing that went out automatically, or maybe he realized that to not bill her would be some kind of admission or something. Still . . .” Now the doctor and I sat for some time looking at each other. His breathing was regular. Twice he pursed his lips, probably without realizing he was doing so; once he nearly smiled, and I thought that was intentional.

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “neither person was willing or felt able to withstand the rigors or publicity of an investigation or trial. I mean, we started the process, we really did. We went to the state licensing board, and they were very interested, but ultimately you have to come forth, you have to testify. And they couldn’t do it. So . . .” I left off and looked at him again.

  “So . . . ,” he said. “So, you didn’t really have anything at all, did you? If the doctor killed this woman—and that is a very big if—you don’t even know how he did it.”

  “Oh, yes I do. He injected her with morphine. That much I know. And he did it in one of two places, and in one of two ways. That much I also know. He either did it in his office, where she had come drunk and out of control, or he did it in her car. There is an eyewitness who places him in her car on Green Bay Road minutes before her death. How is a little less certain. He may have simply jabbed her with a hypodermic needle; she may have been inebriated enough not to notice. Also, we know that he had been giving her large doses of vitamins by injection, and when she came to him drunk, he may have talked her into one of these for some reason or another (to help her sober up?)—it wouldn’t have been the first time, and we know she liked these—and then given her morphine instead. Or he could even have done this in the car just before he got out.”