Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle

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1© Alma Halbert Bond 2008 225 pages 57,263 words

THE DEADLY JIGSAW PUZZLE By Alma Halbert Bond, Ph.D.

Alma H. Bond, Ph.D. 720 West End Avenue (#619) New York, NY 10025 212-222—9211 [email protected]

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Http://alma_bond.trpod.com

To my dear son Zane, who has achieved the wisdom of the ages The hard way

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my appreciation to Detective Joe Gallaugher for patiently and lucidly guiding me through the procedure of the New York City Police Department in the solving of a murder case. He was helpful beyond the call of duty. I would also like to thank the policemen of the nineteenth precinct for taking me on a tour of the station house. I am particularly grateful to the charming young officer who spent a great deal of time guiding me through the various rooms of the precinct, and who, for reasons of his own, preferred to remain anonymous. My thanks, too, to Cynthia Lent, Technical Information Specialist of the National Center For The Analysis of Violent Crime, The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ms. Lent was kind enough to advise me on appropriate literature and to send me Criminal Investigative Analysis, Sexual Homicide, the book on criminal profiling issued by the FBI. I found it particularly helpful in developing the character of the murderer in this book. Another book I found extremely useful was Homicide, a Year on the Killing Streets, a study on the functioning of the Homicide Unit of a large city. I learned a great deal about the working habits and lives of detectives from Mr. Simon, and borrowed heavily from his knowhow. I want to thank Dr. Elizabeth Saenger for her phenomenal editing suggestions, and to friends and colleagues who kindly read early drafts of this book, Janet Bond Brill, Dr. Mary Hanford Bruce, Martha Van Noppen, Dr. Gladys Nussenbaum, Dr. Margaret Ray, and Julie MacDonald and her class at the Iowa State Summer Festival. If I have forgotten anyone, please accept my apologies. I owe a special debt to my son, Zane Phillip Bond, for his continuous encouragement and for arranging one of the interviews that gave me insight into an important segment of this book. Mr. Jim Buff deserves my sincere thanks for his generosity in sharing his life story with me and for permitting me to integrate it into the portrait of one of the characters. Particular thanks go to Barrowcliff Design Associates for their advice on and assistance with the diagram of the (fictitious) apartment of 8C, 1043 Park Avenue. My appreciation also belongs to Marilyn Sollar, my young realtor friend, who generously shared with me her knowledge of similar apartments in the Park Avenue area. My thanks also go to the Key West Writers' Group, who enthusiastically listened to chapter after chapter each week as they rolled hot off the computer and eagerly awaited each subsequent episode as if it were the next installment of The Perils of Pauline. Alma H. Bond

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Chapter Page CONTENTS Layout Apartment 8C 1043 Park Ave. 4 1.

Case History

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The Absent Husband

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The Stepdaughter's Revenge? 43

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The Cardboard Box

57 5.

The Meeting With

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John 63 6.

The "Boss"

75 7.

Carlos

84 8.

The Elusive Stranger 92

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The Tall Woman

99 10.

The Memorial 107

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The Shopping Expedition 119

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12.

The Voice from the Grave 123

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John's Apartment 128

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The Lucky Break 133

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The Lineup 141

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John Begins the Interrogation 145

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The Life of George Plumm er

159

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18.

Mary's Dilemma

172 19.

The Wind-up 179

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Conclusion 184

Chapter One CASE HISTORY

Veronica Vail had been in analysis with me for a total of eight years. She finally decided to try life on her own and bid me goodbye. "I'll miss you," she confessed as she sashayed out the door. Several months later I received a phone call from Lieutenant John Franklin, who was attached to the Nineteenth Precinct, not far from my office and home.

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"Your former patient, Veronica Vail, was murdered in her Park Avenue apartment late last night, Sunday evening, May 22," he said in a deep, sonorous voice." My gasp sounded more like a scream. "I'm sorry to bring such terrible news to you," he said. "May I see you to find out if you know anything about her that might have contributed to her death?" The telephone felt like a foreign object, cold and hard against my face. In a trance, I thrust it away. A million years passed before I could speak. "Veronica dead? " I finally said in a choked voice. "I don't believe it! She tried to get me on the phone only two days ago! "Dr. Wells," her message had said, "I need to talk to you. Please call me back." Her voice sounded urgent. I returned the call, but only got her answering machine. Oh, why oh why hadn't I tried again? I should have called and called until I got her. Veronica wasn't the type of patient who phones her analyst easily. My eyes filled with tears. I shook my head violently, trying to get rid of the grisly images he had invoked in me. He was talking about some other Veronica Vail, I told myself. My head swam, I felt faint, and if I were not seated I would have fallen to the ground. Agonizing for a few moments, I tried to convince myself that the call was part of some ghastly nightmare. But sadly, imperceptibly, my head cleared and the heartbreaking reality sank in. She was dead, the gorgeous Veronica Vail was dead, murdered in cold blood, severed from this earth forever by a sword slashed through the fabric of time. I still couldn't believe it. Then into this quagmire of horror slid an uninvited thought. Dear God, something in me was not surprised. Before she left, I had sensed that a tragedy was bound to befall this impulsive, enigmatic woman.

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"Why didn't I keep her from leaving?" I asked myself irrationally. "I should have tied her here with ropes. Perhaps I would have been able to keep her alive." The Lieutenant waited patiently for me to speak. "What happened?" I asked in a voice even more strangulated than before. "I'll tell you about it, Dr. Wells, if you will see me for half an hour. I'm hoping you can give me some information about Mrs. Vail. Perhaps help me find the murderer. You knew her very well." "How did you find out I was Veronica's analyst?" "I spoke with her husband in Japan. He is on a plane flying home now. He spoke very highly of you and told me you know more about Veronica than anyone else in the world." "Why a psychoanalyst, Lieutenant?" I asked. "Sometimes we need to understand the thought patterns of both murderers and victims before we can make sense of crime scene evidence. Was it a random act, or was there something about the victim that contributed to the crime? Why this particular victim among the many millions who live in New York? I thought that your expertise together with your knowledge of Mrs. Vail might help us find the answer." I felt stunned at the suggestion that I help him solve the crime. Then I wondered what it would entail. I am a psychoanalyst. The ethics of breaking the confidential relationship between analyst and patient, even a dead one, run deep. Most psychoanalysts would prefer jail to betraying one word confided by a patient during the analytic hour. I also thought ruefully of my crowded schedule, the books I wanted to read and write, the time I wouldn't be spending with my daughter and grandchildren.

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"How about seven o'clock tonight?" he urged. "I know you are busy with patients but maybe you can squeeze me in at that time." His voice sounded as though he were begging me to see him. "How about tomorrow night at seven instead?" I asked, hoping to use the time to make sense of the horrifying news, and to stop the chaotic images swirling frantically inside my head. To my surprise my head cleared as soon as I committed myself, for I realized that the last thing I could do for Veronica was to help apprehend her murderer. She needed me as much as she had before. I could not desert her now any more than I could when she was alive. The detective muttered an agreement, although his hesitancy told me he would have preferred tonight. "I'll be here," I said. "My office is on the first floor just after you walk in the door. To the right." "Thank you very much," he said, his deep voice mellowing in gratitude. "I'll look forward to meeting you." "You know I can't reveal anything personal that Mrs. Vail told me in analysis," I warned him. "All I want is your help in sensing who might have murdered her," he said, his uncompromising tone leaving no doubt that here was a man who meant what he said. "See you at seven tomorrow."

I sat there interminably, clenching the phone as if I were turned to stone, listening to the yingying-ying of the shrill dial tone. My office is on the first floor of a building on East 87th Street in Manhattan. I live on the

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tenth floor, which to me is an oasis in the midst of the hustle-bustle, grime, and noise of New York City. I never tire of looking down at the comparatively quiet, tree-lined New York street. To my right I enjoy the magnificence of Central Park as she modifies her raiment with the changing seasons. Madison Avenue is to the left, where I often muse on the events of the days while watching glamorous, well-dressed New Yorkers parading by. Once I even saw Jackie Onassis pass beneath my window. The patient walks into my lobby, turns right, and enters the waiting room where I keep flowers and magazines. When a patient leaves, I greet the one who is waiting, who then walks into the larger room that is my office. I love this office. Not a day goes by that some event doesn't take place in it which makes a patient (and me) feel good. But I suddenly felt the office had been violated, what had been a harbor of safety and solace was now imbued with terror. The walls of the office are covered with deep walnut panels which came from a great ship brought up from the bottom. After years of looking for carved panels, I finally found them at a Sotheby`s auction. The beautiful mahogany desk was purchased from the Salvation Army in the early years of my marriage. It cost thirty-five dollars to buy, two hundred to refinish. Highly polished, thick walnut bookshelves bought twenty years before from a retiring Park Avenue bibliophile graced the back wall. They were laden with yearly editions of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, the neatly boxed sea green volumes of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and overflowing stacks of psychoanalytic journals. Lower shelves burst with my primary addiction, mystery novels. I especially love my stained glass window, taken frame and all from an old country

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church long vanished from the earth. Birds singing forever on flower-entwined branches have illuminated the office for more than twenty years. The deep wine-reds, lime-greens and brilliant blues are reminiscent of the great stained glass windows of Chartres. But on this sad Monday, even the colors of the stained glass window seemed dreary and grey. A Haitian portrait of a weeping woman in deep blues and vital reds hangs over the couch, given to me by a dear friend, now dead. Veronica had loved this painting. She understood well the deep sorrow of the woman. On this sad day I looked at the Haitian picture and I wept, too.

I thought about Veronica a great deal after the detective hung up the phone. By the time she had ended therapy six months ago she had learned much about her secret self. "I want to be able to marry like everyone else," she told me as she entered analysis. "I want to have a child and there isn't much time left." During the analysis she started to understand a great deal about her fear of intimacy. "No wonder I can never be close to anyone," she said with insight. "My parents were either remote or slobbering all over me. You have to learn to be intimate. Nobody ever taught me how." I pictured her as she was when the analysis began, as she met a man she was attracted to. I imagined her turning on all her sexual charm. She was good at that. She would slide one leg forward, thrust her shapely breasts out, and give the man her most seductive smile. She might even go out with him for a time or two. But sooner or later, usually sooner, she would complain to her friends that he was too short, too quiet, too talkative, too anything, just to get him off her back. This had gone on all during her twenties, until she could no longer fool herself that it was the fault of the men.

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After two years of working with me, she met a man at her job where she was an assistant to a wall paper designer, who fell in love with her. She decided to marry him. Then soon after her marriage she had a baby, and felt ready to leave treatment. "That's why I came here," she said. "Why should I come anymore?" If Veronica was happy about the termination, I was not. Despite her success in being able to marry and bear a child, I felt she could have profited by learning more about herself and the way she kept people at a distance. But when patients make up their minds to leave analysis, I never to try to stop them. Then if they wish to return, they will feel it their need not mine. I developed this tactic years ago after a child's mother made him come to me for treatment. He announced, "I'll come to analysis, but I won't get any better!"

Sure enough, after Veronica became pregnant she phoned me and said in a wry voice, "I guess you were right, Dr. Wells. I need a refresher course of treatment. I am bored and dissatisfied with everything, including my stodgy husband, his daughter Beryl with her interminable hockey games at Barnard, and even my own sweet child who never lets me alone." She returned, much the same as when she had left, for three years of weekly therapy. Marriage and motherhood had not worked miracles in her life any more than in anyone else's. When she entered my waiting room again, I smiled. Veronica moved like a sensuous panther. Once you saw her walk you never forgot her. Before she became my analytic patient I had noticed her gliding around the reservoir in nearby Central Park where I jog every morning before going to work. I remembered her well.

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Six feet tall, Veronica had shoulder length red hair that danced in the breeze like a pillow case hung out to dry. She was slim and thirty-one when I met her. She had stark, impenetrable granite eyes which added a mysterious look to her face, and a seductive, contralto voice. She was not beautiful in the early Hollywood sense of having perfect features, but she was uniquely attractive. She radiated a kind of magnetic pull that made everyone stop talking when she entered a room. Somehow, she always made you aware she was there. There also was a faint aroma about her, earthy as well as sensual. The scent of a freshly bathed, red-headed woman blended with that of Chloe perfume to subtly imply sexual availability. She dressed in a most unusual but elegant way. She didn't go for fashion, the trendy stuff. Rather she set her own trends. I recall her telling me of a gown she had designed for herself. It was a brilliant emerald green and made of a soft drapey material, perhaps jersey. The gown had an empire waist and hung below it in folds about her body. I pictured her looking like a Greek goddess in it. One day she complained, "My husband Roland is always sexually aroused but has a real problem with sex. He feels guilty about it and is ashamed of himself for daring to indulge." Then she added with disgust, "He always speaks of sex as 'fucking.' Which makes me think he finds it degrading, even though he's preoccupied with it. It makes me feel cheap." "And he's constantly accusing me of having affairs with other men," she added. "When I talk on the phone, he hovers around, listening to every word. The other night he heard me making an appointment with a man on the phone. Roland attacked me because he thought I was setting up a rendezvous to have sex. I was making an appointment with the plumber to fix a leaking toilet.

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Roland will never believe it, but the affairs are all in his imagination! "I lo-o-ve sex, Dr. Wells," Veronica confessed in her deep sensuous voice. "Roland and I have it all the time, always trying new positions. The other night I put my leg up on the kitchen table." She demonstrated by lasciviously pointing one long limb diagonally in the air. "That was very exciting and we had a great time. But his sexual problem makes him feel like a bad boy and often throws a wet blanket on my pleasure." Despite her avowed love of sex, Veronica had a problem with it, too. She could give herself sexually but not emotionally to her husband. After a few years of analysis, she was able to admit, "I like to lead him on and then reject and abandon him. It's fun to tease him that way. Like I'll say, 'Come on up to the bedroom, dear.' And when he jumps in bed all excited, I pretend to be asleep. I drive him crazy with my in-and-out-of-the-shell games. But it does make sex terrific, when we have it," she said with excitement. "You have a gift for showing just enough of your secret garden to tease Roland into wanting more." I told her. "You have fun letting him peek at the treasures you hoard inside, and then slamming the door on him. What you are unaware of is that you need to keep your inner self hidden. You are afraid of what you will find if you open up." Roland did and said all the right things in his marriage, even in these days of female liberation, like opening doors for Veronica and paying the restaurant bills. But a false note in his voice, an exaggerated courtesy toward his wife, made me question whether he was just acting the part of a happily married man. I also wondered about the wife who had divorced him but allowed him to keep their ten year-old daughter. The woman had then married a man who lived in Los Angeles and produced television films. Why had she divorced Roland? Had she, too, been

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sexually dissatisfied? Veronica once brought her husband to my office to meet me. I found him a neat-looking man in a dark suit with a navy blue sweater under it. He was of medium height and build, wearing horn-rimmed glasses. I noticed that he kept nervously slicking his hands through his straight brown hair. He wore it long in the back, as some men who unconsciously wish to be women often do. According to Veronica, he always counted the grams of fat he consumed at every meal and never went to bed at night without totaling the number of calories he had eaten that day. She told me he stayed in shape by exercising in a gym precisely three times a week for exactly one hour at a time, never one minute more, never one minute less. "He acts like the world would come to an end if he exercised fifty-nine or sixty-one minutes once in a while," she said. "He drives me crazy with his counting. I can't stand to listen to another word of it." I also learned from her that Roland was so preoccupied with satisfying himself sexually that he frequently left her high and dry. One climax for him was never enough, like a greedy child who devours the whole cookie jar. I doubted if he could give any woman complete satisfaction, because he was more interested in gratifying his own needs than hers. I believe that ultimately each person is responsible for making sure that he or she is sexually fulfilled. But human beings do need cooperation! Otherwise why have a sexual partner at all? Veronica had studied at the Art Students League in Manhattan. According to her instructors she was very talented. Once she brought me a painting she had done of two visibly excited men making love to a partially disrobed woman. The vivid orange of the woman's disheveled clothing and the Van Gogh-like riot of the greens and yellows of the forest gave life and depth to air that otherwise would have remained a vapor. Two graceful eagles swooped

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down eternally on the unsuspecting trio. I remember thinking that Veronica could have been a great artist. But before her analysis she had been no more capable of settling down in a career than with a husband. Despite her talent, Roland received more privileges at work than his wife. He often was sent to exotic foreign countries on business while she was kept at home tracing the boss's designs. "I don't dare ask to go, too," she said ruefully. "Or, God forbid, instead! I'm afraid I'd be fired." According to Veronica, their boss, Carlos de la Cuesta, was a fascinating man. "His wall paper designs were on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art," she told me. "They're in demand all over the world. He's gifted, tall, handsome and debonair. He is also gay and a well-known drag queen. Roland admires him and never stops talking about him. She hesitated and then said, "Sometimes I think Carlos is in love with my husband, and that's why he favors him over me. I watch them together as Carlos looks at Roland with his soulful brown eyes that seem to be....well, pleading.. for love. Imagine, this famous designer longing for love from my little husband! But then, maybe it's just my imagination." She paused again. "Conceivably Carlos feels he would be more likely to win Roland's affections if I were out of the picture." Despite some sexual dissatisfaction with Roland, I do not believe Veronica had any other lovers. I think she would have told me if she had. The success of an analysis depends on the patient following one of Freud's greatest discoveries, free association, in which he or she must disclose all thoughts and feelings, including erotic ones for members of either sex, to the doctor.

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This is called "the fundamental rule" of analysis. If it is not complied with, repressed material underlying the illness stays hidden. Freud likened the unconscious to a market place. If a thief could be apprehended anywhere but in the market place, he asked, where do you think all the thieves would hide out? Similarly, the psychological root of an illness is likely to be buried in the material the patient is most reluctant to speak of. Veronica tried hard on a conscious level, and did her best to follow the fundamental rule. Most of the time she succeeded. I trust she would have told me, if she were having an affair. But after she had been in treatment for six years, she started to speak increasingly of her weariness with Roland and his compulsivity. Her despair about the incompleteness of their sex life had deepened. When she said, "Dr. Wells, I don't know how much more of him I can stand," I sensed she was on the verge of seeking an affair. I was well aware that Veronica possessed a self-destructive streak and at times openly sought trouble. Once she and her friend Minnie Brown, a plain quiet woman who gave no competition to Veronica, were walking down Broadway. They saw two strange men grappling together in a fight. One held a knife in his hand. Veronica swiftly ran over to the men. Completely ignoring her own safety, she tried to break up the fight by forcing herself between them. She craved adventure and excitement so much that she lost all track of any danger to herself. In this case, she could easily have been cut or even killed by the knife. But she was lucky. The men were so startled by her intrusion that they stopped fighting. I found myself wondering, Was she less lucky this time? Veronica and her step-daughter Beryl, a tall, husky young woman of eighteen, were rivals for Roland's attention and constantly fought. "Beryl seems to think I give her and her father a

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hard time," Veronica said in one of her last sessions. "We don't really like each other very much. But I think the trouble is that we compete for his attention. She was the only one in her father's life before he married me and she makes it very hard to like her. The other night he and I were sitting talking side by side on the sofa, and wouldn't you know, the big twerp plopped herself right down between us! And when you are a woman her size, that's not easy to do. I still have a bruise on my leg where she sat on it!" Veronica's sensuous walk and demeanor often excited men to the point of accosting her on the street. She told me she thought that one man waited for her on a nearby corner every day and shouted sexual obscenities. According to her, she always ignored him or answered something like, "Get lost, jerk!" She was not an openly aggressive woman; in fact most of the time her actions were highly controlled. But there was the occasional evening when she smoked pot or drank heavily. She would break loose, tell off-color jokes, and sing and dance erotically, as she told me the day after, lying on the couch and groaning that she had too painful a headache to free associate. She acknowledged that she enjoyed the sophisticated parties where she was the belle of the ball. I could easily picture her languorously gyrating her stomach in time to sexy music, for she was an accomplished belly dancer who exulted in showing off her body. "The rest of the time I'm restrained," she said. "But every once in a while I have to let out my hidden feelings." "Make sure you do so in a way that won't hurt you," I warned. Veronica had entered analysis shortly after her mother died, although it seemed to me she did not mourn her very deeply.

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"I really don't miss her very much," she said in answer to my question. "Most of the time she wasn't there for me, even when she was alive. 'Mo-ther,' I remember pleading with her when I was a child, 'I need a new gym suit for school.' I never got it until I stole money from her purse and bought it myself. When I needed something she was always so busy with her job and her clothes she didn't even hear me. So after a while, I stopped wanting anything from her." In a subtle way Veronica and her mother were sexually competitive, but this was obvious only in their manner of dressing. "Mother was too heavily made-up, dressed in too youthful a style, wore colors too bright for her age and looked cheap," Veronica complained. She felt that her own gracious style of dressing was far superior. Veronica didn't care much for the way I dressed either and wouldn't accept anything I had to say about clothes. She said, "To be kind, your taste is ordinary." "Mother was a egotistical woman who had a number of lovers till the day she died," Veronica continued. "It was her style, not mine. I never wanted a lot of lovers. I wanted only one man who would love me the rest of my life. "She was a very selfish woman who cared only for herself. What she wanted was total control. She had to supervise everyone and everything. She kept me her prisoner. The way I dressed, what I ate, how I ate it - everything had to pass muster. I couldn't do anything the way I liked, even the simplest act. When I prepared a tomato for a salad I had to cut it in slices. Heaven help me if I did it in quarters. So that's how I always cut my tomatoes now, in quarters. And the top sheet had to be folded exactly one third of the way down the bed, even if I liked it tucked cozily around my neck." If Veronica was not allowed to have things her way physically, she made up for it

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psychologically. Very early she found a way to keep her mother locked out of her inner world. "Yes, Mother," she would say as her mother spoke, but her impenetrable grey eyes shut out her mother, who sensed Veronica wasn't there. This technique must have frustrated her mother as much as it did Roland. I wondered how long it would take Veronica to break through the weighty cover-up of her real feelings. "I think I'm afraid to feel," she said, as she approached the end of her analysis. "When I shut everyone out I go inside where it's nice and warm and comfortable, and then I'm scared to come out. Like if I felt too much I'd scream and scream. So I just stay there inside... If I went deep down inside myself, so deep I couldn't get out, would you throw me out when another patient rang?" Veronica's mother always had to work because her father was usually too drunk to support the family. She made Veronica clean house, cook and shop. "I'll never forgive my mother for robbing me of my childhood," Veronica said indignantly. "But Mother had some nice traits, too," she added, after missing a beat. "As a child I used to sit and watch her set the table. She would place a lovely blue bowl in the center and then arrange flowering pink almonds so they drooped over the sides of the bowl. It looked like a stilllife painting." Veronica allowed she had felt far more loved by her father than by her mother. She told me, "Unlike my mother, my father could express his affection for me. When I was a little girl he would hug me close to his chest, gently stroking my hair away from my forehead until I contentedly fell asleep. It was so sweet I miss it still." It was one of the few times in the eight

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years I knew her that Veronica cried. Other times she would get all dressed up and he would take her to a saloon where he always got drunk. "He would lift me up on the bar and show me off to his drinking buddies. This memory made me feel both proud and sad, proud that he loved me enough to show me off and sad that he had to be drunk to do it. "But when I was a teenager I turned against him for being drunk all the time," she added, tilting her chin rebelliously. Veronica saw her father as a romantic figure who broke his daughter's heart as he left home when she was twelve. She spoke of him in the tone one would speak of a rejecting lover. "Did you ever want anything so badly that when you finally got it, all you could do was cry for the times it wasn't there? That's how it was with me and my father. When he finally came around I didn't want him anymore. He returned after two years, but he was hospitalized so many times for alcoholism that mother threw him out of the house. Just as I was about to forgive him for abandoning me, out he would go again," she lamented. "My mother says when I was little I used to jump on anyone's lap who came in. At least those men were around." Her parents never divorced, but "mother had a strange lover in her bedroom every once in a while. I never got used to what that did to Dad," Veronica told me. I wondered if she would end up the same way, finally identifying with her mother's sexual habits, as many women have a way of doing. Who else but her mother was there to copy as she grew up? "Once when I was six my father promised to take me to the circus," she said. "He probably meant well but he got so drunk he forget all about it. I was so devastated I crawled into the bottom of my closet and wept for hours. I never believed him when he promised me

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anything after that. It hurt less to shut him out altogether than to risk being disappointed again." Did Veronica unconsciously copy him when she led men on and then rejected them? I wondered. "He finally became drunk so often he was unable to hold a job and support his family, she continued. "I remember once he staggered into the apartment filthy, unshaven and stinking of beer. He lurched over to me for a hug. His overpowering smell made me sick, but I still needed his hug. When he wrapped his arms around me I wanted to vomit, but I let him hold me because it felt good. I hated myself because I needed him so badly. He was nothing but... a loving bum." I always had the feeling there was a hidden incestuous relationship between the two that Veronica kept deeply repressed. I had no proof; it was just a strong sensation. "Sometimes after his death," she told me, "I roamed the streets searching for men with a chin, a nose, a build like my father's; anything that could make me feel for a moment that he had returned. He was never very far from my thoughts." I think she loved him till the day she died. When she was thirteen he joined Alcoholics Anonymous for a while, which taught him to make reparations to the people he had harmed. He came to her, put his arms around her, and said, "Forgive me, sweetheart, I'm sorry I hurt you." To her everlasting sorrow, she pulled away from him and ran to her room. "How could I trust that he wouldn't hurt me all over again?" she said. He died of cirrhosis of the liver when she was almost sixteen, possibly never knowing of her secret love. This is early for a girl to lose her father, particularly when the relationship has been so complex. She was to mourn him the rest of her life. In many ways she had married a man like her father. Both were pretentious, both were

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Anglophiles. Both felt superior to and looked down on people who were not well educated. But at least Roland could earn a good living and support his family. Her father had tormented Veronica. She got even by tormenting her husband as she teased him psychologically and taunted him about his sexual inadequacies. Her recurrent boredom and bouts of ennui played a role in my frustration, too. She often left me with my stomach twisted in knots, as I struggled against her efforts to keep me from helping her. Unlike my other patients, I would keep her over the analytic hour and give her extra sessions for free, so intent was I on breaking down the barriers she had set up between us. Despite her attempts to free associate, she also was difficult to work with because she could not or would not daydream or remember her dreams in detail. "It's not my fault if I can't remember. It's not fair for you to blame me," she said with some justification. She was subject to vague nightmare states, mostly atmosphere dreams, weird, unsavory and scary. I sensed the feeling of a dark, murky landscape where she was trying to run away from a stranger. "My legs felt heavy, as if they were glued to the ground," Veronica said, "and I could barely move. I always woke up terrified, just as he was about to catch me." She was unable to associate to the nightmares. Perhaps they were a premonition of her fate. Was I right in thinking that she was running away from incestuous memories of her father, memories that would never free her pain until she could consciously face them? During the last part of her analysis, Veronica seemed irritated at being both wife and mother. Roland told me during his one visit to my office that their five-year-old daughter Emily had become too dependent on her mother and clutched at her night and day. "I do not always

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love my daughter, she is a selfish and demanding child," Veronica said. "Sometimes I don't even like her," she added petulantly. She was even less enamored of her stepdaughter, Beryl, whose interests left Veronica cold. "It makes me sad to feel that way about the children," she said. "I never imagined that bringing them up was so tedious." Many healthy women with young children feel the same way, mourning their lost freedom. But they usually are able to overcome their frustration enough to function as satisfactory mothers. Veronica couldn't. She hadn't gotten enough from her own mother to teach her how to do it. She often sat in the same room with Emily, looking as if she were sailing high in the clouds. Her way of closing off behind her eyes must have been even more frustrating to the child than it was to Roland. Veronica tried to make up for this in other ways. She gave Emily an expensive tape recorder on her fifth birthday, the last one they were to celebrate together. It was an imaginative gift for a child and made Emily squeal with delight. But most of the time Veronica seemed unaware her daughter was alive and seldom spoke of her during the analysis. "I often seem to fade away into another world," she confessed. "A world in which I float into outer space. A world where there are no difficulties. I fix my eyes on some remote spot and keep them fastened there. It feels so good, I never want to tear them away." She sought excitement, something she hoped would make her feel "more alive," break up the dullness of her days. "Is this all there is to life?" she would ask mournfully, crossing and uncrossing her long, elegant legs on the couch. I wondered, Did she impulsively look for a thrill in a dangerous situation, as when she tried to break up the strangers' fight?

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I ponder this sometimes at night, when thoughts of Veronica keep me awake. To this day I feel I never really knew her. She was a mystery to me even before the ultimate mystery of her death. I learned much about her life from what she chose to tell me, but there was always something deep inside her that remained locked off. I never really got through to the essence of her. She kept me at arm's length as she did everyone else. She needed me but I never felt she loved me, as many patients do. She was not hostile but solidly bent on protecting herself by wrapping herself in space. When I talked to her sometimes, I could feel her eyes glazing over, and although she answered, at those moments it was rarely from her heart. I remember one time she sat up on the couch with her back to me and was silent. I asked her why she was finding it difficult to speak. She answered with a perfunctory, "I don't know." When I asked her what she was thinking, her reply was a flat "nothing." She made me feel like a puppy begging for love. Once when she was eerily distant, I said, "It's as if you wear a sign saying 'Keep out! Don't touch me! Go away!'" To my surprise, she burst into tears. It hurt badly to be brushed off like a fly on her shoulder, as Roland, Emily, Beryl, and, I'm sure, Veronica's mother knew well. She was lodged in my mind like an insect in amber, and I found myself brooding far more than is acceptable in the mind of an analyst treating a patient. Sometimes in a weak moment, I wondered whether she kept me at a distance because of some defect of mine, some unknown imperfection, inadequacy, or blind spot, or even the limited knowledge of the field itself. Perhaps she was contemptuous because she felt I lacked style, did not dress "classy" enough for her. Once she said, "I went to another woman therapist for a while. She really did have style. You are too pedestrian, you don't look smashing enough."

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"Then what made you come back to me?" I asked. "Because you are bright, knowledgeable and very skilled," she answered. Her response moved me so much that I had to work very hard to keep my voice from breaking. That night I had a dream, "To love is to teach." I woke up thinking of Veronica. Veronica never spoke of her feelings for me, but she obviously was very attached. She turned to me when upset, kept her appointments religiously and remained in treatment for a very long time. Her analysis helped her marry, give birth to a child, find her metier. Many of her friends were amazed at how remarkably she had changed. One of them said, "You used to look like Jackie Kennedy. Now you look more like Madonna." Nevertheless, she remained unhappy and depressed much of the time. She had not been able to dig deeply enough into the shrouded layers of the past to cause the most consequential inner changes of all. The analyst cannot "make" a patient do this; It happens only if and when he or she is ready. Veronica did not know what she wanted out of life, she only thought it should be exciting. As her analyst I had no inkling she was about to be murdered. In the dark of the night I writhed in my rumpled sheets and wondered if I should have sensed the tragedy life had in store for her. Might I have protected her from it if I had guessed? As I review my notes, I see that I once cautioned her not to seek excitement in a way that would hurt her. I fear now that my warning was too little and too late. Although she was often bored, restless and self-destructive, so far as I knew she was not unfaithful to Roland. But on the last day of her life she might have become exasperated enough to embark on some deadly action. She was a woman accustomed to being loyal to her husband.

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But perhaps on this fateful day, fed up with Roland and her sex life, she gave in to an impulsive urge with a stranger she had picked up in a bar. Did a man she picked up murder her, silencing her forever? After ending the phone call with Lieutenant Franklin I sat lost in time, grieving in silence for this lovely, troubled young woman. I missed her sultry presence, her valiant striving to understand her sorrows, her brave wish to forge a better life for herself. Now that I would never see her again, I would miss her even more. I determined to do all I could to answer Lieutenant Franklin's questions, to try to help him catch the killer without revealing Veronica's innermost secrets. I asked myself what made me so deeply invested in finding the murderer. I answered that I needed to understand her gruesome fate. All analysis is the untangling of mysteries. Veronica was a very mysterious woman, whose inner reserve tantalized everyone she knew. Her death simply added to the mystery of her life. She had hired me to delve into the enigma of her life. As her analyst, I believed I owed it to her to help unravel the mystery of her death. And perhaps, if I were lucky, the search would also lead me to the essence of Veronica -the elusive core that had haunted me throughout her analysis, the core she had managed to conceal even from herself. That would be my personal reward, if I could finally penetrate the unfathomable fortress within this strange, seemingly unknowable woman. Although I tried to listen to patients the rest of the sorrowful day, thoughts of Veronica crowded my head. I still could not believe I never would see her again, that she would not return for further help if she needed it, that she no longer was gliding about in her incomparable manner through the overrun streets of New York. I rejected the idea of a world unoccupied by this

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beautiful red-headed woman. Such a place seemed senseless and cruel, and for the moment, I didn't want to live in it. I was obsessed by the thought, Who in the life of Veronica Vail hated her so deeply that he or she was driven to murder? Was it Roland, who was plagued by thoughts that she had other lovers? Was it Beryl, her jealous step-daughter? Was it her husband's would-be lover, Carlos de la Cuesta? Was it an unknown robber? Or was it a man she had picked up for a sexual encounter? Was I to blame for her death? These are the thoughts that robbed my patients of my attention and kept me tossing in my bed all night. But I vowed that no matter who it was or how long it took, how far afield or how costly the search, I would uncover her murderer. I owed it to Veronica. I owed it to my profession. I owed it to myself.

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Chapter Two

The Absent Husband

Early the next morning, right before my first patient arrived, Lieutenant Franklin called.

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"I wanted to catch you before you went to work," he said. "Roland Vail just flew in from Japan. I saw him briefly a few minutes ago but I'd like to interrogate him again with you. You know, of course, that the surviving spouse of a murdered person is always a prime suspect until it can be proven otherwise. I'd like the psychological point of view on him. Can you make it any time before seven P.M.? His apartment is at 1042 Park Avenue, just around the corner from you. We can meet there and talk briefly before we see him." I checked my much-thumbed black leather appointment book. A lunch date with Dr. Wilhelm Marks, an old friend and colleague with whom I was working on a paper called The Psychopathic Personality in Private Practice, was pencilled in. C’est la vie, I thought. Veronica, dead or alive, means more to me than a paper. And I can see Wilhelm any time. I'm sure he'll understand. "I have lunch at one o'clock. I can come then. Is that all right with you?" I asked. "Perfect," he answered, sounding pleased. "See you then," I added, just as my first patient rang the doorbell. I was impressed again with Lieutenant Franklin's forthright and intelligent manner, and stored away the thought that he sounded like an interesting, attractive man. It would be the first time I'd ever worked with a policeman. At five minutes past one, I timidly approached the double sculpted doors under the canopy of the old brick building on upper Park Avenue. I asked the pot-bellied Irish doorman for the Vail apartment. "My name is Dr. Wells. I am looking for Lieutenant Franklin. He is expecting me," I added, in response to his frosty look at my peacock green suit from the eighties.

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He steered me through the overstuffed lobby paneled in highly polished brown walnut to the wrought iron elevator. After several jerks and stops I arrived at the Vail apartment on the eighth floor. Two police officers guarded the entrance. A yellow tape across the carved oak door announced "Police." Lieutenant Franklin, who had bounded up the steps, appeared just as I did. He was a tall, well built man of perhaps forty, with a solemn face, jet-black hair and electric blue eyes that sparkled. I thought he looked almost handsome in his freshly pressed grey tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a starched white shirt and neat red and grey striped tie. He proudly wore his gold detective's shield in full view on his pocket. Recognizing me immediately, he extended a firm handshake and greeted me warmly, although his face retained its serious expression even as he welcomed me. Since the murder had been verified, the Lieutenant informed me, the yellow tape indicated that the apartment was now officially known as a crime scene. As we stood outside the door of the apartment, Lieutenant Franklin explained how the police force operates when a murder occurs. He said that upper Park Avenue is covered by the nineteenth precinct, the district between 59th and 96th Streets from Central Park West to the East River. "Detectives from the precinct have been working the scene all night, looking for and interrogating witnesses. Crime Scene Officers have photographed Veronica's body from every conceivable angle, and dusted the furniture and other articles for fingerprints. They have made detailed sketches, searched for blood stains, hair and shreds of clothing, They have taken measurements of the exact position of her body in relation to other objects in the room."

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He suddenly stopped and asked, "Do you mind hearing all of this?" "Mind? I appreciate it." I replied emphatically. "I want to hear every detail connected to Veronica's murder." His eyes were shining as he continued. "The officers by now have examined the clothing on the body to determine whether and how it is torn and if buttons are missing. The position of her hands has been inspected to establish the presence or absence of defense wounds. The general character of her injuries, their location on her body, how deeply the knife thrusts penetrated, the extent of bleeding, the condition of her blood, all have been carefully noted. "An autopsy has been performed, where photos were taken of Veronica's unclothed body which clearly show the character of her wounds. Vaginal washings and combings and loose hairs that might be those of a suspect have been preserved to establish whether a rape has occurred. The medical examiners are trying to determine which particular wound or wounds caused her death." I shuddered and thought, "No! This is a story about some stranger. It has nothing to do with the vibrant, exquisite Veronica." He caught my tremor and looked to check again whether I wanted him to go on. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat and smiled. He continued with his account. "The officers have also observed and measured the layout of the building and the apartment, and have explored the surrounding areas for any possible suspects. They are now knocking on all the doors in the building and interviewing the neighbors to ask, 'Do you know Veronica Vail? Why do you think anyone would have wanted to kill her? When was the last time you saw her?'" The lump in my throat grew massive, as I realized again that indeed Veronica had been

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murdered. Then I marveled that all this police work had been accomplished while the city slept, in the short time that had elapsed since the murder. "You should know that the scientific interrogation of suspects and witnesses is just as important as the examinations of weapons, bloodstains, and fingerprints," Lieutenant Franklin said, looking at me with a searching gaze. "The fundamental questions - 'what?' 'when?' 'how?' and 'why?' have to be answered before scientific evidence can be useful. This is where you can help me to understand the case." I was stirred by the trust Lieutenant Franklin had so swiftly placed in me, and the importance of the work he had asked me to share. I didn't know why he believed in me so soon, but I knew I trusted him. I liked the way his blue eyes danced in his earnest face, the clean air he exuded, his forceful take-charge manner, his no-nonsense bearing, and his compassionate, sensitive demeanor. I believe in trusting one's instincts. They existed long before our intellect, and are far more reliable. This is a man I intuitively felt I could have faith in, who would do well by Veronica. I determined once more to do all I could to help find the murderer for Veronica's sake. But now I possessed an additional, important motive. I wanted to do well for Lieutenant John Franklin. We bypassed the flank of officers and entered the lavish apartment where Veronica had lived. Under ten foot, hand-painted coffered ceilings, a neat brown Samsonite suitcase sized to fit under the seat of an airplane rested against the antique paneling. The Lieutenant led me down a long, elegant gallery adorned with wrought-iron sconces and hung with large modern paintings. The hall led to a spacious living room, where windows grandly rose from the floor to twice the height of a man. Between them was a large marble

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fireplace. The room was decorated entirely in white, white walls, white carpet, white drapes and white furniture. There was even a white Steinway baby grand piano. Veronica had explained to me that they had decorated purely in white in order to provide the most effective background for their art collection, mostly large brilliantly colored abstract paintings by young up and coming artists. I stood there for a moment, stunned at the visual feast laid out before me. Roland sat waiting in front of the fireplace, his head in his hands. As we approached, he looked up at us beseechingly, his near-sighted brown eyes encircled in black. Magnified through thick horn rimmed lenses, his eyes looked raw and huge. In addition to the grief he must be feeling, I realized he had been up all night on the plane. He stood up and awkwardly tugged at his beige camel hair jacket, realigned his brown trousers, straightened his brown hand knitted tie. Then he shook the lieutenant's hand and greeted me with an expression of relief. "Oh, Dr. Vail," he said, breaking into tears. "I can't believe she's gone. She was sitting right here when I left the apartment only a few days ago. It doesn't seem possible that I will never see her again." He ran over to me and I held him in my arms like a sobbing child. When he recovered a few moments later, the Lieutenant asked us to sit on the clawfooted white silk couch as he sat in a nearby matching chair. I understood that he was not put off by Roland's distraught appearance, for John had warned me over the phone that a nervous murderer may appear as agitated as an innocent viewer. He said to Roland, "Tell us about the last time you saw your wife." Roland ran his hands through his hair. I noticed they were trembling. He said in a cracked voice, "It was late Tuesday evening. My plane for Japan left at 10 P.M. and I wanted to say good-bye. As I said, she was sitting right here on this couch and I walked over to kiss her. But

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she turned away, wouldn't say good-bye. "It was the last time I would ever see her again and we didn't even say good-bye!" he said tearfully. "She just sat there like she was made of stone. I felt angry and picked myself up and left. If only I had known, I would have insisted we make up before I left. I'll never forgive myself." The tears rolled down his face again. "Why wouldn't she say good-bye?" Lieutenant Franklin asked. "She was angry that I was leaving. She and Beryl didn't get along and Emily was no company for her. Veronica didn't have any really close friends. She wasn't the kind of person who could call someone up and say, 'Hey, I'm lonely, come on over.' I thought, Yes, I knew that aspect of her well. She would prefer to sit alone for hours staring off into space. Roland turned to me and said, "After she left you, Dr. Wells, I was the only one she really talked to. So it was important to her that I stick around. And also, if the truth be known, she didn't want me to have the pleasure of traveling abroad because she was jealous that Carlos always sent me and never her." "One of your neighbors said they heard loud angry voices that night," Lieutenant Franklin said tonelessly. Roland tightened the knot of his slender brown tie. Then he loosened it. "I guess you can say we had a tiff," he admitted. "But it wasn't very important. She didn't want me to leave. She said, 'You don't have to go away again. Carlos would send someone else if you asked. He'd do anything for you. I'll bet he'd even let me come with you if you insisted.' "I was annoyed and snapped, 'Maybe he would, but I'm the one he asked and I'm the one

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who is going!'...I must admit I enjoyed being one up on her." He fell silent. The Lieutenant and I waited. Roland soon said sadly, "If only I had asked Carlos to let her go with me! Then she'd be alive today. It's all my fault! I'll never forgive myself," he repeated. The Lieutenant and I were quiet. The silence felt brutal. Roland looked jarred, as if he just realized what he had said. Then he blurted out, "You don't really think I had anything to do with her murder, do you? Just because a couple has a little spat doesn't mean a man would kill his wife!" He looked imploringly at the Lieutenant and then turned to me for corroboration. Both of us remained silent. "Anyway," he asked, "how could I have done it? I was in Japan." "You could have hired someone to kill her before you left," said Lieutenant Franklin casually. Roland looked stunned and shook his head in disbelief. "You are mistaken, Lieutenant. I've loved Veronica since I first saw her leaning over her desk at work, with her bright red hair drooping over one eye. I stood there staring at her. I thought she looked ..well, sultry...like a movie star. I've always loved movie stars and used to daydream about marrying one," he murmured, as if to himself. "I never cared as much about any woman as I do --did -- her. I don't know what I'll do without her." He pulled out a large white handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose vociferously, as tears continued to roll down his face onto his dapper mustache. I looked at Lieutenant Franklin, wondering if we had heard enough from what appeared to be a loving husband. He returned my look and asked, "Have you any questions for Roland, Dr. Wells?"

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"Yes, thank you for asking, Lieutenant," I said, and then turned to Roland. "I'm sorry Veronica is dead, and that we have to put you through all this, Roland. Right now your pain is beyond the help of any human being and there is nothing I can say or do that could make much difference. But should you ever feel the need I will always be there for you." Roland seemed moved at my expression of sympathy and his deep brown eyes signaled their gratitude through his thick glasses. I continued, "But we don't really know who killed Veronica and have to explore every possibility. It would help us if you would describe your life together." "Certainly, Dr. Wells. What should I tell you?" "She told me what she thought your family life was like. But I don't know how you feel about it. What kind of wife do you think she was? Were you satisfied with your marriage? " "She was the ideal wife for me," he answered hastily. "We made a good couple. We had the same interests, designing, decorating, parties, art. I guess you know we renovated this apartment together a few years ago and that it is occasionally shown to visitors on guided tours in this section of New York. But most important to me was.....she loved sex," he said, turning his head away in embarrassment. He tautly ran his fingers through his lank brown hair. I couldn't resist a look at the Lieutenant's face. It was expressionless. "And you had no complaints at all about the marriage?" I probed further, remembering Veronica's sexual grievances. Roland's upper lip began to twitch. "Well, I guess you could say she was a little, uh, reclusive. She had kind of, uh, a steel curtain between herself and the rest of the world. Sometimes when I wanted to be, uh, close, she would climb behind the curtain and close herself

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off inside. That bothered me a lot. It bothered the girls, too. The three of us really felt shut out sometimes. Sometimes it made Emily cry. It got me upset .....but, I assure you, Officer," he added in an urgent tone, "not enough to kill her!" "I'm sorry to have to ask you this, Roland, but it is important to know. Do you think she ever had an affair with another man?" I asked. "Positively not," he replied immediately, his upper lip twitching away. "She was much too decent for that!" "Did she have any enemies?" the Lieutenant asked. "None that I know of. Everybody liked and admired her, even if they weren't close friends." "Who do you think killed her?" "I think a robber broke into the apartment Sunday evening when we are usually out, was surprised to find Veronica home alone and killed her to avoid recognition." He sounded very certain. "What gives you that idea?" Lieutenant Franklin asked. "Because one of our most valuable pictures is missing." Roland pointed to the empty spot over the marble fireplace. "I didn't know that," the lieutenant said, writing briskly in his black looseleaf notebook. "She was wearing an emerald ring and a wedding band of yellow metal when we found her. Her purse seems intact. It had her credit cards, twenty dollars and some change in it. But of course we don't know how much money she was carrying or if she was wearing any other jewelry before the murder. Was anything else missing?"

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"Not that I know of, but then I haven't been home very long. We don't keep much cash around. I'll let you know if I find anything else gone." "What's your opinion of how your wife died?" the Lieutenant asked. "I think the robber left in a panic after he killed Veronica and grabbed the painting as he left," Roland said. "He could have seen it over the fireplace from the gallery as he came in. It is large and colorful and very hard to miss. He must have known he could get a lot of money for it. It is - was - our most valuable painting." "How do you think he got in? Two locks on the door including the Medico were secured when the police arrived." "I don't know. He could have gotten in on a ruse, like a messenger from Western Union, although I understand the doorman on duty that night doesn't remember any such person. But then knowing the doorman, that doesn't say very much. Or the intruder may have forced the lock with a credit card, the way some burglars do." "By the way, who painted the picture?" the Lieutenant asked. "It was an original oil painting by my boss, Carlos de la Cuesta," Roland answered gravely.

After saying good-bye to a shaking Roland, Lieutenant Franklin and I were ready to leave. I had only ten minutes before my next patient was due. "Mary, I know you don't have much time now, but I'd like to fill you in quickly on a phone call I had this morning with Mrs. Joanne DeLuca, Roland's former wife," John said as we walked to the elevator.

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I was torn. I wanted to hear about the Lieutenant's conversation with Mrs. DeLuca very much, but I also like to be on time with my patients. I decided I would listen to his replay of the phone conversation and then run the two blocks back to my office. "Certainly, John," I said. "Please go ahead." I only realized later that I had called him John. "She lives in California," he said. "I wanted to get a feeling for how angry or even violent he got with her. I told her about Veronica's murder and she was genuinely shocked. In fact she gave a little scream and started to sob. "Then she said, 'You're not suggesting that Roland killed her, are you, Lieutenant?' "I answered, 'We don't really know yet who killed her. We are just investigating every possibility to find out everything we can about how Mrs. Vail lived. That's how the homicide division works. It would be helpful if you would answer a few questions about your former husband.' "All right', she answered, only a bit reluctantly. 'If you think it would help. What can I tell you?' "'What kind of a husband was Roland?' I asked. "She said, 'He was usually rather kind and a nice sort of guy, if a bit of a weirdo.' "I asked how he was a weirdo. "'Well, you know,' she said, 'with his twitches and his habits and all, like he was always running his hands through his hair. He got on my nerves.' "I asked, 'Is that why you separated?' "'Not really,' she answered. 'We weren't getting along very well anymore.'

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"I asked, 'Were there any instances you remember where he was rough with you or showed any tendencies to violence?" "She thought before answering, then said, 'Well, he did have a bit of a temper.' "'What do you mean?' I asked. "She hesitated again, and said, 'Once he got so mad at me he almost choked me. But he stopped before he hurt me so I guess it wasn't very serious.' "'What did he get so mad about?'" "She sounded embarrassed and then said, 'Well, he kind of caught me at an indiscretion.' "I asked, 'Was your 'indiscretion' the reason Roland was awarded custody of Beryl at your divorce?' "She faltered and reluctantly answered 'Yes, I'm afraid it was.' "'Thank you, Mrs. DeLuca,' I said. 'If you remember anything more you think could be of help to us, please call me, no matter how unimportant it may seem.' "'I will,' she said, and we hung up." He fell silent. I was quiet, too. Finally he asked, "Well, Mary, what do you think?" "About what?" I said. "About Roland almost choking her." "I think jealousy is his weakness and she certainly provoked him." "Do you think it is possible that Roland killed Veronica out of the same kind of violence that made him choke Joanne?" John asked, leaning back against the elevator button. "Of course it is possible. He lied about the marriage. But I suspect he lied only because he was afraid it would make him a prime suspect if he told the truth."

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"Was he honest about their sex life? Was he really satisfied?" I hesitated. "Yes, he was more satisfied than she was," I said, deciding that I would divulge one of Veronica's secrets, as it was vital for the case that he know the truth. "I think her tantalizing him kept him in a state of sexual bondage that excited him. I doubt whether a man as compulsive as Roland could enjoy sex with a woman who was all there for him." Lieutenant Franklin looked at me intently with his shimmering blue eyes and nodded in appreciation. Then he asked, "Do you think he had her murdered, Mary?" "No, John, I don't." "What makes you think he didn't?" "He didn't hate her that much. He had his mean little ways of getting even with her, like making her jealous about Carlos. He could get very angry, as his former wife testified and he told us himself. But even if he was unpleasant sometimes, I don't believe he is evil enough to kill." I thought for a moment and then added, "Besides, he really needs Veronica, sexually as well as emotionally. He meant it when he said he didn't know what he would do without her. A person at his stage of development preserves the one he loves, even from his own anger. He is like a child who pulls the eyes out of his teddy bear, but can't go to sleep without it. He really seems broken up about her murder. He couldn't possibly have faked his anguish that well. "And John," I added as an afterthought, "with his raw conscience he'd be in a straightjacket by now if he'd murdered his wife. And let us not forget, he has his compulsions to help tone down his rage. "Do you think he is innocent, John?" I asked.

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He looked at me and laughed as he pushed the elevator button. "I don't know yet for sure. But maybe he's just too kooky to be lying. Nobody would act that way by choice." "Same time, same place tomorrow?" John asked eagerly, as I stepped onto the elevator and girded myself to race all the way back to the office. "We'll interview Beryl then." When I nodded, his boyish face lit up with a grin. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile. It began with his blue eyes crinkling with pleasure, and erased the lines around his nose as the smile heightened the sensuality of his lips. In all my life I had never seen anyone so transformed by a smile. Suddenly, eerily, his face was cast with a translucent look under the dim light of the foyer. At that instant he looked exquisitely handsome, almost beautiful. I wanted to reach out and stroke his cheek, to make some wild gesture, I didn't know what, that would communicate my feeling. This man is capable of pure joy, I exulted. It confirmed what I had only suspected before, that the somber look of the police detective concealed a very different kind of man. I didn't know why, but the vision left me rather tearful.

He waved as the elevator door

closed. I waved back. It seemed a long time 'till tomorrow.

Usually I am an excellent sleeper. Edward used to envy me because he said I always fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow. But that night lying in bed, I was unable to sleep. I couldn't even get comfortable. What a strange life I've been thrown into, I thought, pulling the covers over my head as if to shut out the horror of the slaughter, and then kicking them off again. Horrible as her murder was, I found searching for her killer an exciting change from my usual stodgy existence. I love to learn and working with Lt. Franklin gave me the opportunity to

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understand something new every moment. Then I smiled at myself and said, Who are you kidding, Mary Wells? It is John that inspires you as much as anything you are learning! I had always liked Veronica and thought she was an interesting woman, even though she was a difficult patient to deal with. I stressed to myself again that justice demanded we would find her murderer. From deep inside a little voice piped up, "Yes, God, help us find him. But please, God, must it be right away?"

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Chapter Three

The Stepdaughter’s Revenge?

It was a windy, rainy day as I approached the old Park Avenue apartment house at precisely 1:05 the next afternoon. Lieutenant Franklin stood huddled under the canopy in his dripping wet yellow slicker, as water poured down from the skies. His wrinkled brow made him look anxious. "I'm sorry, Mary, but something vital has come up that can't be put off," he said apologetically. "There's been another murder in the precinct that I have to look in on right away. I know this is highly irregular, but you are a licensed practitioner, and I have every confidence in you. Do you think you can interrogate Beryl yourself? Two officers are outside the apartment, if

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you need help." He really looked upset. I laughed as I shook off rivulets of rain. The weather had not dampened my pleasure at seeing him. "I'm a psychoanalyst, John. Interviewing people is what I do for a living." "Thank you, Mary." He looked relieved. "I'll drop back as soon as I can get away and we'll talk about what you have learned," he said, ducking his head as he plunged into the sleeting rain. I rode the dilapidated elevator only slightly more apprehensive about the coming hour than the day before. I would miss John's presence, but, in a way, I was delighted to interview Beryl alone. Two people are more likely to relate intimately than when part of a group. I find that a confidence is usually watered down in direct proportion to the number of people party to it. Then when I thought about it, I wondered if John had prearranged the whole situation, perhaps feeling that a mother figure alone could get further with a young woman in a state of shock than a male detective. The officers recognized me by this time and quickly escorted me through the yellowtaped door. Shivering from the dampness, I tugged off my tasseled rubber boots, plaid raincoat, and purple hat and laid them on a wooden Shaker bench by the door. The detectives must have finished gathering their physical evidence, for none of them were in sight. I walked through the lengthy gallery to the elegant living room where only yesterday we had interrogated Roland. The dismal weather had fogged up the windows and the overcast skies obscured all light from the room and seemed to echo the sense of loss that pervaded the apartment. It felt desolate and oppressive, heavy with the stillness of death. I stepped down a hall that looked like it led to the bedrooms, seeking Beryl. The

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passageway was lined with family photographs. I stopped before the photograph of a bikini-clad Veronica, her head joyously uplifted. She looked like a beautiful Amazon worshiping the god of the sun. It must have been taken in Bermuda, where they went for their honeymoon, I thought with a thump in my heart. I shall never see Veronica again, hear her low, sensual voice, look into those granite eyes filled with unshed tears. "Hi," said a husky voice that could have belonged to either a man or woman. "You must be the Dr. Wells my stepmother was always rapping about." Startled, I turned around and saw a tall, robust young woman with imposing features and yellow hair parted in the middle and cut in a straight line around her neck. This could only be Beryl, Roland's daughter by a previous marriage. My God, I thought, with that bulk she could easily have stabbed her stepmother to death! She wore large denim overalls, heavy white athletic socks and high top mens' sneakers. She could have been attractive had she not possessed the physique of a football player. Come to think of it, I remember being told by Veronica that her stepdaughter played hockey. Veronica had also said that Beryl was eighteen, but I thought she could easily have passed for twenty-five. I peered into her wide green eyes and recognized in them the pleading expression of an overgrown little girl who yearned to be held. The mother in me rose to the fore. For the moment, I stopped thinking of Beryl as a possible murderess and realized how difficult it must be for her to be the stepdaughter of the lovely Veronica. Veronica would be a hard number for any young girl to follow. I felt sorry for this poor, awkward child who had to trail in the footsteps of so elegant a stepmother. Beryl was almost as tall as Veronica but lacked her grace and superb animal quality, to say nothing of her exquisite

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figure. Beryl's height might help her play hockey but with her bulk it only made her looked clumsy. She interrupted my thoughts. "Well, I guess you're here to grill me. Shall we go to my room and, like, get it over with?" she said, not waiting for an answer. I followed her back through the gallery to a spacious room where a large double window overlooked Park Avenue. The walls were bedecked with athletic pennants, posters of Wayne Gretsky, and a number of snapshots of Beryl herself in various hockey poses. The ruffled white curtains and sweet smelling bottles of perfume that one might expect to find in the bedroom of a female teenager were conspicuously absent. A simple cherrywood desk was cluttered with papers and a pile of textbooks, and a grey warm-up jersey had been tossed over the matching wooden chair. A row of athletic shoes peeked out from under the narrow blue-quilted bed. Copies of "Hockey World" and "Sports Illustrated" lay on a small bedside table. Numerous hockey sticks and a system of weights were lined up against the walls. Boxes of pucks, knee guards, and helmets completed the decor. Looking around Beryl's room, it was evident that she and Veronica were truly a mismatched pair. She sat down on her bed. I removed the warm-up jersey and sat on the chair. She glared at me and said, "I don't know why they sent Veronica's shrink to see me. I'm doing okay, if you know what I mean. What's your deal? Am I supposed to spag out or something?" "You sound very strong, Beryl," I answered, getting right to the point. "But somehow I doubt that is how you feel inside. You must be very shaken up by Veronica's murder. Particularly since the Lieutenant tells me you were the one who found the body. Finding a corpse is always a horrendous experience. Wouldn't you like to talk about it? It must be very hard to

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keep your feelings all bottled up inside." Beryl's face softened and her flimsy adolescent shell cracked, as a lone tear rolled down her stolid cheek. How like an adolescent, I thought, so tough one moment and falling apart the next. I came over and sat beside her on the bed. "Like, what do you want me to tell you?" she asked in a muffled tone. "The whole story, starting from when you last saw Veronica alive." As if on cue, the words poured out of her, her clear eyes wide as an innocent child's. "I saw her on Sunday morning, you know, when Emily, Veronica, and I had breakfast. There were bad vibes between us as usual. Veronica was tweaked out because Roland had gone away without her and went off on me for no reason. Every time I turned around she started dissing on me. What a cold fish she could be! She said she had little enough of him anyway, without my hogging the scene every time he was around." "Did you?" "I'll say, although I don't think anybody but Veronica would think so. After all, he was my father before he married her! "Anyway, at ten o'clock Sunday evening I came home from Jennifer's house where we had been hitting the books for a vocab test in French class at Barnard. She is someone I hang out with. I had told Veronica I was going to pull an all-nighter at Jenny's so we could study together. But we finished the vocab and I decided to bail out so I could study some more and maybe catch some sleep because I was trashed. She hesitated for a moment and then went on. "I went straight to my room because I still had a lot of homework to do, and, leave us not tell stories, I didn't feel like talking to Veronica

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because she was always in my face. It was quiet in Emily's room, which is right next to mine, so I was sure she was asleep. I thought Veronica must be in her bedroom as she often is, doing some work for Carlos, reading, or just spacing out. She really was a flake, you know. But now I'm sorry I didn't drop in to say hello. We never even said good-bye." I thought, How sad that none of those closest to Veronica had bid her a decent farewell. If only we knew when a person was going to die, we all would behave quite different. Beryl reached for a box of Kleenex and wadded the disintegrating tissue in her hand. "My father's and Veronica's bedroom is beside the living room," she continued. "The library, the hallway and their bathroom and closets are between their bedroom and mine. This is an old building with thick walls and I came right here into my own room and shut the door. I worked for a long time on my vocab without giving Veronica a thought. "Suddenly -- I don't know how much later -- I heard shouting and screaming enough to set my ears on edge. For a few seconds I thought she was blasting the stereo and I tried to block out the sounds and continue studying. Let's face it, she was always spacing out and forgetting she had pumped up the CD. But soon her screams pierced my ears and I couldn't deny any more that something terrible was going on. I threw my book on the floor and rushed to Veronica's room." Beryl paused again and shuddered. "What I saw there will plague me as long as I live," she said with a quiver in her voice. "It was horrible! Horrible!" I noticed immediately that she had dropped the teen slang, as she was taken over by her memories. Whatever the horror of Veronica's murder, it was helping Beryl to grow up. She put two fists up to her cheeks and pressed them together. "Veronica was lying on the floor with her eyes staring into space. Her hands turned up as if she was trying to push the

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murderer away. Some of her fingernails were broken from trying to defend herself from the killer and her hands were all red. The police told us she had defense wounds on them, lots of little cuts between her wrists and little fingers caused by grasping the knife and then having it wrenched away. First I thought she had blood-red nail polish smeared all over them," Beryl said, her voice cracking. "Then I saw that her fingernails, which she always kept polished, were red with blood of the same color. You couldn't tell where the polish ended and the blood began." She took a deep breath, then went on, "She had a thing about her nails, if you know what I mean. It's ironic, isn't it, that they ended up broken and covered with blood. I never paid much attention to mine. Like she would say, 'Beryl, you'll be the death of me, you never care how you look.' I wish I had listened to her. Now she is dead and she never even saw me with pretty nails." She added poignantly, "Do you think she would know if I polished them for her funeral?" Suddenly she stood up straight and jerked her shoulders back as she forced herself to go on. "A knife from our kitchen lay at her feet. The handle and blade were caked with blood. My father had brought it back from the Orient a few years ago. It was a beautiful knife. He was proud of it and kept it hanging on the kitchen wall. It has a carved ivory handle with unusual figures on it, two Chinese women kneeling in a flower garden, so I am sure it is ours. It also has a thin, pointed blade that we use all the time because it is so sharp." She moved a fist to her mouth and bit down on it. "I guess we'll never use it again." "Strange," she mused, "the killer used my father's knife to kill his wife. If only he had known, he never would have bought the knife!" At this point Beryl began to shake. Her teeth chattered so violently she could hardly

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speak. I sat her down on the bed again and brought her a glass of water from the bathroom. Snot was dripping from her nose, but she was too preoccupied to notice. I brought her a tissue, and said, "We can finish another time if you like." "Isn't it better to talk now?" "If you are able to, yes, it will be helpful," I said, feeling guilty about pushing her. "Well then, let's go on. I'll tell you all I know," she said in a mournful tone. "All right, if you'd rather. But stop any time you want," I said, admiring her pluck and knowing how difficult it is to speak of the grisly details of murder. "I knew Veronica was dead the minute I saw her," she said, forcing out the words. "Everything was red, obscenely red, it was all sopping with blood. The sight of all that red stunned me for a moment, so that I couldn't make out the details of the scene. I stood there shaking my head like a wet puppy until the sight grew clearer in my mind. I saw that most of her clothes had been ripped off. Her blouse and silk bra and underpants, all that was left of them, were hanging in shreds. I couldn't connect Veronica's beautiful body with that lump lying under all the gore. "The killer had sliced Veronica's face from her forehead to her chin from left to right and right to left, like a cross dripping with blood." she said, trying to maintain control. I could see in her fortitude the woman she was going to be. "He had covered one of her breasts with little slashes up and down and side to side so that it looked like raw hamburger meat. You could hardly tell it was a breast. The other one was ---" She stopped for a moment and blew her nose. "-- was hanging by a thread off to the side of her body. Here her valiant attempts to contain her horror broke down, and Beryl rushed over to the

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box of Kleenex again and began to retch. I wanted badly to help her, but couldn't think of what to do, so I did and said nothing. There are moments in life when we are totally helpless. There is little I find more difficult to bear. When she finished she pulled herself together again and said, "I could see that the killer had stabbed her body many times. The Medical Examiner said it was hard to tell exactly how many, because lots of times the knife had entered and reentered the same wound. But he guessed that maybe there were nineteen gashes in all. He thought that any one of four of them could have killed her in a few minutes, but that she probably died from the cut across her throat. That was the worst of all... It was slit straight across her neck, from ear to ear. The space between her head and her neck was spread wide open and blood was spurting out of the gap. For one awful moment, it looked like a huge laughing mouth." She stopped again and wiped the sweat off her face. Although the room was cool for autumn, Beryl was drenched in perspiration. She repeated with disbelief, "Blood was spurting out of the gap! It was squirting all over the room. The entire room was soaked through with blood. Blood on the sheets, blood on the carpet, blood splattered on all the walls. I've never seen so much blood. Do you remember the line from Macbeth, 'Who ever would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?' Would you believe, that's what I thought of. Gruesome bits of gristle and slivers of skin and bone were all over the place, sometimes stuck to fragments of silk. I didn't know what they were until I asked the detective. Some of them reached as far as the hall." Beryl gulped, shoved the Kleenex into her mouth with both hands, and hurriedly ran to the bathroom off her bedroom where I heard her vomiting. I followed her. She was down on her

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knees retching over the toilet bowl. I walked over and held her head. "The worst part of it all," she sobbed as she lifted her head from the toilet, "was something else the Medical Examiner said." She hesitated again to try to get control of herself. "He said....that the depth and number of her stab wounds reached a level of violence that the police call overkill....and that no motive but sex produces that kind of overkill. I don't know why, but that's the hardest thing to take." She stood up, staggering a bit as she arose. I gently washed her face with a washcloth. "You are a brave young woman," I said, "and are doing well by Veronica." Beryl buried her head in my shoulder and we wept together. We returned to Beryl's bedroom and she reverted to her teenspeak. "Veronica and I didn't get along," she said. "We fought like two cats spitting at each other. She was always bagging on me. Half the time I was clueless why she was teed off at me. I think she resented me because I wasn't her own child. I got freaked out because she took my father away from me but I must admit that at times I loved her and wanted her to love me. I needed a mother because my own mother never really cared about me. I mean, she lives clear across the country now." I said I understood how difficult it is for a girl to grow up without a loving mother. "Oh, Veronica tried all right," Beryl said, after wiping her nose. "She encouraged me to invite friends here, and listened to me rave about the hockey games, even though she hated hockey. But I don't think her heart was in it when it came to loving me. I just wasn't her type. Maybe if I had been a funky teenager who 'had style', as she put it, she might have been more interested. I guess I wear this getup mostly to get her goat." She sighed and said, "Now I wish I had at least worked at looking better, even if she said

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I don't have any natural 'style'. Maybe I could have learned from her and then she would have been the mother I wanted. But let's get real, it's too late. She can never teach me now. At least she was always there. Now I won't have any mother at all." My next patient was due to arrive in a half hour. I asked Beryl, "Before I leave would you show me the bedroom where the murder took place?" Beryl took my hand and led me back through the gallery and down the two short halls to the Vail's bedroom. As I had expected, the room was very pretty and feminine. The walls were a soft shade of green, with darker green drapes gracefully decorating the windows. The king size four-poster bed, which obviously had been changed, was covered with embroidered white sheets and ruffled pillow shams. A matching pair of white bureaus and a vanity, still covered with grey dust from the fingerprint detectors, stood against the far wall. A cardboard box marked "Veronica" in bold black letters sat on the ruffled chair in front of it. I walked over to her vanity, next to the window that faced 88th Street. A large box of assorted eye shadows stood on top of it. I wondered why Veronica had needed so many colors: She had always worn green eye shadow. A fleeting thought crossed my mind that perhaps they belonged to Roland. A number of jars of French face creams and moisturizers and an antique set of silver brushes, mirror and comb were placed next to the eye shadow. I found myself feeling vaguely uncomfortable, as if I were a voyeur in Veronica's bedroom. Surely the woman deserved some privacy, even if she were dead, even from her analyst. "What's in the cardboard box?" I asked. Beryl answered, "Cool question! When Roland and I were looking through her closet to

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see if we could find some clue to the murderer we came across the box. It's filled with old papers and junk, maybe from as far back as high school. We were going to look through it to see if it might give some hint of a person in her background who could have killed her." "Very good, Beryl," I said. "Would you mind if I take it home with me and look through it?" "Not at all," she answered. "I was saving it to give to Lieutenant Franklin, but you can give it to him when you are finished." "Thanks, Beryl," I said. "I appreciate it," and turned my attention to the vanity. Lined up in front of the central section of the three-paneled mirror were a number of expensive perfume bottles. I picked one up, opened the glass top, and held it to my nose. The aroma of Chloe assaulted my nostrils. It was as if Veronica were physically present in the room. I thought I was going to faint. Not very helpful, I thought, in the presence of a young woman who was going through a trauma herself! Quickly containing myself, I looked about the rest of the room. Over the bed hung a large sensual painting of a couple making love. I was sure Veronica had painted it. I walked over to look at it more carefully, and decided it was even lovelier than that of the erotic trio she had brought to my office. Painted in bright blues and greens with vivid brush strokes, it subtly hinted at the Vails' intriguing sexual practices. The narrow frame was colored in a dark shade of green, I noted, looking everywhere but at the most ominous spot in the room. I said to Beryl, "On first glance there seems very little evidence that a vicious murder took place here less than two days ago." Beryl gave me a strange look. "Look back there," she replied, pointing to the floor behind

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the spot where I was standing. Veronica's body was starkly outlined in white chalk on the stained green carpet, in the position in which she had died. The artist had a way with line drawing, I thought. Veronica was turned crookedly on her side. I could see what Beryl meant when she described how Veronica's head had been almost severed from her body. The head was awkwardly twisted and an open triangle between head and neck was clearly delineated. The drawing showed her arms resting on the floor, with palms pulled up, as if to ward off the attacker. Even her dangling breast was depicted by the chalk line. Sooner or later someone would wash away the chalk lines and the bloodstains but for now the effect was gruesome, as if we were in the presence of an actual body. Once again I was flooded with feeling. I thought, You deserved far better than this, my dear Veronica. I admired you, wanted you to be happier, to enjoy your new life with your husband and children. You worked hard to get there and by all rights should have made it. It is so damn unfair! In your most terrifying dreams you never imagined so horrible an ending. On my life, I give you my vow, Veronica, we will catch the killer no matter what sacrifices are required. As she walked me to the door, my arm around her shoulder, I said, "Believe me, Beryl, I hate to ask you this. I even hate to think it, but I must. You are a muscular, athletic young woman, probably much stronger physically than Veronica was. You were jealous because you thought your father loved her more than you. And you were hurt that she wasn't the mother you wanted her to be. All of this adds up to a pretty angry young woman. Have you told me a madeup story? Did you kill Veronica yourself?"

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Beryl didn't seem surprised at the question. Nor did she seem to mind. She answered, "No way, Jose! Not. Take it from ne, I didn't kill her. It's true I was pissed off at her sometimes and fully jealous. And yes, she disappointed me. But I could never kill anyone, man, woman or child. It's all I can do to hit a hockey puck!" As I put on the tasseled boots, plaid raincoat and purple hat I had left on the Shaker bench, I said, "Beryl, you told me you ran by the living room immediately after you heard the screaming. Did you see anyone as you passed by?" "Yes," she answered, after hesitating a moment. "I saw somebody but not inside the living room. I haven't told anyone about it because I don't want to get anyone in trouble who might be innocent." Then she added guiltily, "I know I'm supposed to tell about such things, but I have a personal reason to keep quiet." "Beryl, you know how important it is for the detective to get every possible lead in order to find the killer," I said. "If you hold anything back, you may be keeping to yourself the one bit of information that could help the police to find him. Rest assured, if the person you are thinking of isn't guilty, the police will find that out, too." "All right, if I have to," Beryl answered unwillingly. "As I passed the entrance to the living room on my way to the master bedroom, I thought I heard a slight sound. I looked down the gallery and saw the back of a man. He must have hidden in the shadows when he heard me open the door of my room. The gallery lights were off, except for the one in the foyer near the elevator, which was shining through, you know, the glass up there over the top of the door. The light was dim and I could hardly see him. But I thought I saw him turn and run out the front door, right here where we are standing now." She drew a breath.

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"What did he look like?" "He was a tall, thin man, with dark hair, at least it looked dark to me. I thought he was a white man. But as I told you, the light was very poor. I could see that he was carrying a large painting. It must have been the one that was over the fireplace." "Did he resemble anyone you know?" She paused again and then said, "Look, I don't want to get him in trouble, and the lights were off so I'm not sure." "Tell me anyway, Beryl. If he didn't do it, nothing will happen to him." "Well, I thought he looked like.... Dad's and Veronica's boss, Carlos de la Cuesta. He had that tall, thin dark look. But remember, I'm not sure!" "I'll remember, Beryl. Whatever comes of it, I think you are a wonderful, courageous girl. Veronica would be proud of you. And thank you for your confidence in me." She threw her arms around me and we hugged for several moments. We each seemed to trust the other in this moment of unbelievable crisis.

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Chapter Four

The Cardboard Box

As soon as I finished working, I grabbed the cardboard box and dashed upstairs to my apartment. I yanked off the brown tape that Veronica had sealed it with and dumped the contents on my mahogany dining room table. Little bits of yellowed paper scattered onto the floor. A whiff of old papers and pressed flowers drifted up into my nostrils and made me sneeze. I quickly scrutinized the contents of the box, handling them as gently as possible so as not to destroy them. My first thought was to check out only what I thought might be useful in our search for the killer. Then I got so excited about this new source of information about Veronica that I forgot the murder and concentrated on each new item in the box. On top of everything else lay a limp stuffed animal, a brown bear called "Brown Bear" which Veronica had spoken of many times. It had one eye hanging out of its socket and smelled faintly of dried milk and moth balls. She had loved it dearly as a child and lugged it around for years, until finally she was ashamed to be seen with it. The bear was so worn its fur was practically rubbed off and great patches of naked white cotton showed through. Poor "Brown Bear." Poor Veronica. Too bad you weren't buried together. You could have comforted each other.

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I was amused to find an old poem, fragmented around the edges, which Veronica apparently had cut out from the newspaper. The seeds of the grown-up Veronica were already blossoming in the teenager. The poem was called FASHION NOTES, and was written by someone I never heard of called Anne Mary Lawler. It read, When I am garbed in shabby clothes, With run-down shoes and laddered hose-It always seems so odd to me The sun springs up in majesty, And as my future way I wend I meet acquaintance, foe and friend. But when I sally, bravely dressed In all my gayest Sunday best-My sense of humor feels the strain Because it never fails to rainAnd I could trot from Pole to Pole And never, never meet a soul. There were also a group of Veronica's high school blue books. I eagerly opened the first one which was marked A on the cover, and saw it was an essay entitled, My First Date, written in a large, round childlike hand. It read, "Last night I went out on my first date. It was to a high school dance. I went with Willie Smith, a wimpy guy in my class, although he was nice enough to bring me a yellow rose that matched my dress. The worst part of it is that I am six feet tall. My mother calls me a stringbean and says I am a long drink of water. I sure (here the teacher had marked 'surely' in red ink) felt that way at the dance. Willie only came up to my ears. I was so embarrassed when we went to dance that I wanted to fall through the floor. I was sure everybody was looking at us and laughing. "I am not very popular with guys. Maybe it's because I am so tall. I only got asked to the

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dance by Willie because my mother is a friend of his mother's and she made him ask me. "I hope and pray that some day a tall boy who is not a wimp will ask me out on a date." How accurately Veronica had captured the anguish of being a teenager, I thought. I smiled when I found a pressed yellow rose tucked inside the dance program. I next picked up a clipping with crumbled edges from her high school newspaper. The headline said, "French Club Presents Cultural Olympics Play." The article read: "Students of The High School of Music and Art represented the French language at the Cultural Olympics this year when they performed a play entitled La Surprise d’Isadore. The play was presented at the Interscholastic French Club and was received with much praise. The play was directed by Miss Crawford, head of the French department. Heading the cast were Veronica Larsson and Willie Smith." I grinned at another yellowing clipping entitled "Family Life Problems Winners." It read, "First prize of $10 for the best answer to family Life Problem No. 168, 'For her own good, how would you handle the situation if your daughter threatened to run away?' goes to Veronica Larsson of New York City." In the box were also some crumbling football score cards and an old playbill from the seventies of Chorus Line. There were yellowing report cards from grammar school, all of which had excellent grades on them, bound with a rubber band which snapped in my hands, and a transcript of Veronica's college record. She had received a B.A. with honors in Fine Arts. Her grades were primarily A's, with a small array of B's in math. Included were a number of sketches on art paper, mainly line drawings. One of them

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labeled "Mother" showed an unsmiling and stern woman leaning on the kitchen sink slicing tomatoes. Her grim expression made clear why she and Veronica had never been very close. Another sketch marked "Father" was a study of a tall thin man who somewhat resembled Veronica, except for his scruffy appearance. Despite the unkempt, unshaven look, he had a sweet smile and a jaunty quality about him that was quite attractive. I was quite impressed with the quality of the drawings and realized again what a talented artist Veronica had been. There were a few letters in the box, too. Although I felt even more like a voyeur than I had in her bedroom, I thought I had better read them. They were mainly from a friend named Maggie who had moved to Nebraska. The letters contained such commentary as "My new school is grisly, and I am lonely as all get out for Music and Art." Any feelings she had about Veronica were conspicuously absent. Apparently she had been as close-mouthed as an adolescent as she was as an adult. There were no love letters included. I thought sadly that one would expect a woman as lovely as Veronica to have received at least one of them to preserve among her treasures. The only new mementoes in the carton were the Vails' wedding certificate and the notice of Emily's birth. Again I felt gratified that at least I had helped her find a mate before she died. In a jumble at the bottom of the box were a lipstick without a top and other loose cosmetics which had left smears of red on the cardboard. Dog-eared copies of Vogue and Seventeen, some broken sticks of charcoal, a paint-smudged box of water colors, several single drop style earrings, and a few sewing patterns completed the collection. So few objects to commemorate a truncated life! It was one o'clock in the morning when I finished, and I had to get up for an eight o'clock

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patient. I was not happy. Although the contents of the box had given me a portrait of Veronica as an adolescent I had never seen before, I found nothing that would help the investigation. As I knelt to pick up the fragmented bits of newspaper from the floor, I noticed a few papers clipped together that had fallen off the table. They contained an advertisement from the personal columns of New York Magazine and a letter of response from a man named Jeremy Hall. The ad read, "Beautiful, free-spirited, tall red-head in her twenties would like to meet good-looking tall man for fun and games. Write Red, NYM Box 3059." The response read, "Dear Red: I am a tall, handsome man of thirty, who would like very much to meet a 'freespirited tall red-head' for fun and games. Call me soon, I am waiting impatiently. Jeremy Hall" If there had been any other replies to her ad, Veronica obviously had not been interested enough to save them. Since there were no other suspects revealed by the contents of the box, unless the wimpy Willie Smith wanted his revenge, I decided to contact Mr. Hall first thing in the morning to find out if Veronica had followed through on his letter. I also wanted to know what he thought she meant by "fun and games." Did it allude to S and M? I knew of no predilection of hers for sadomasochism, at least in the physical sense. Then I planned to call John and ask if he wanted us to interrogate Jeremy Hall. I was carried away by my discovery and couldn't wait to tell John about it, but I wanted to have results before contacting him. 5 o'clock the next morning found me up and eager to pursue my sleuthing. But I forced myself to wait until 7:45, when with trembling hands I dialed the number Mr. Hall had given

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Veronica in his letter. A middle-aged woman answered the phone in a dejected tone. "My name is Dr. Mary Wells," I began, in high spirits. "Yes?" she responded lethargically. "I would like to speak to Mr. Jeremy Hall." There was an abrupt inhalation at the other end of the line and then silence. I repeated my request. "Mr. Hall died five years ago," the woman said. "I'm so sorry, I said. "Forgive me, I didn't know." My head sank and I closed my eyes, feeling as despondent as the woman on the phone. Finding the ad and the letter had filled me with hope, but now I felt like a punctured balloon. So far the score was absolutely zero and box or not I would get no points at all from John Franklin for my detective work.

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Bond/DJP

Chapter Five

The Meeting With John

That evening John called me at home to ask if I could see him the next afternoon at 3 o'clock to talk for half an hour. He sounded very eager for us to meet. "Will you have time for a cup of coffee so I can hear about your experience with Beryl?" "As a matter of fact I do," I answered, delighted that he had asked. "I just had a cancellation for that hour and a cup of coffee will be exactly what I need. I know a little French patisserie on Madison Avenue not far from your precinct and my office which has great espresso."

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I gave him the address. "Looking forward to seeing you," he said, and hung up. John and I arrived at the patisserie at the same time. He took both my hands in his and looked directly into my eyes as he said, "I'm so happy you could make it, Mary." "I am, too, John," I said, as his candid gaze locked into mine. The patisserie is small, with perhaps twelve garden-type tables and chairs. It looks like a restaurant in southern France. A well-stocked pastry counter off to the side of the room and the smell of freshly baked croissants made me realize I was ravenous, as I eyed the rich gooey chocolate cake slathered with icing smelling of butter and cream, seven-layer "dobage" with slabs of snowy layers smothered in dripping chocolate, tiny little petty-fours pretty as a painting in their paper underwear, and dark chocolate eclairs jammed tight with lush whipped cream. Fortunately, the lunch crowd had thinned out and we were immediately ushered to a small, round glass-topped table. I chose espresso and a rich, creamy chocolate eclair, and John immediately seconded my order. We obviously possessed the same tastes when it came to dessert. "Well, Mary, did the kid do it?" John asked, after the French waitress had left the table. I smiled. "No, John, I'm happy to say I am certain she did not. Whoever killed Veronica was mad with rage or inhuman. But it wasn't Beryl. I've written it all out for you," I said, handing him my notes. "She may look like an angry football player, but underneath those powerful shoulders, she's just a little kid who needs to be loved. "But I'm worried about her, John. She's had a terrible shock and I'm afraid she is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We live with the illusion that we are invulnerable to death. Other people die, we think, but not us or our dear ones. Like living through a war, discovering the

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body of a victim shatters our illusions. A young person like Beryl has the veils 'untimely ripped' from her eyes. All of a sudden she becomes aware that death is arbitrary, that survival is not always dependant on age, that good does not always prevail over evil. Our belief that our government and loved ones will protect us from disaster is demolished. I think it is more than Beryl can handle alone. She should be in therapy." "Yes," John answered, with an respectful look permeating his cobalt blue eyes. "I understand what you mean. I've seen many people who discover the bodies of victims suffer from PTSD for years afterward. We don't want the poor kid to have any more troubles than she already has. I'll recommend that her father put her in therapy. In the Vail family that shouldn't be too difficult to bring about." He looked at me to get my reaction. I smiled. Then I asked, "Did you learn anything from the fingerprinting, John?" "Not much, I'm afraid. There are lots of prints of Veronica, Roland, and the maid all over the bedroom," he said. "But as far as unexpected prints are concerned, nothing yet. People think it is a simple matter to get fingerprints that are useful. They are wrong. Less than one third of all intercity crimes scenes yield identifiable prints, which are always hard to get off any surface, even a mirror. The chances of getting useful prints from this knife with its intricate, carved ivory handle are absolute zero."

"What about the doorman?" I asked. "Was the elderly Irish man on

duty Sunday night? He seemed very with it when I came up yesterday." "No. I wish he had been. Things might have been very different. He is a tough old character who knows everything that goes on in his building. If there was anyone suspicious around he would certainly have noticed. We don't get Irish career doormen like him anymore. Unfortunately for New York City - and for Veronica - he is a dying breed."

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"How about the man on duty? Did he see anyone who looked questionable?" "I'm afraid not. He is a young kid and not the brightest I've ever met. He was in a daze when I questioned him and said he hadn't seen a soul Sunday evening he didn't recognize. I'll bet he was stoned on grass. Apparently this building like many others these days is having trouble hiring a reliable staff. When the men have to relieve themselves they put up a little black sign that says in white letters, "The doorman will return in five minutes". Unfortunately, this kid said he went to the john sometime between 10:30 and 10:45, he's not sure exactly when. I'll bet he was out at least the entire fifteen minutes. A stranger could easily have slipped in behind another tenant." "How do you think the killer got out?" John answered, "Either the doorman wasn't back yet or he was asleep on the job. Or stoned on grass. I wouldn't put it past him at all." "There is no other entrance?" "No. There was one, but when the crime wave accentuated twenty years ago or so, the board voted to block it up. There is a service entrance on the left side of the building, but it is locked by the super after 6 P.M. every night. We interrogated him and he insisted that he locked the entrance as always. I see no reason not to believe him. No one can come through there after that time until 8 A.M. the next morning." "This is a tough case, isn't it, John?" I asked, as I slowly sipped the aromatic coffee. "Yes, Mary, it is," he said, picking up his cup too. "But then one out of eight cases that we are assigned are tough to solve. This one is a pip. Because of the vicious knifing, it looks like an impulsive, spur-of-the-moment job. The hardest crimes to bring down are not the premeditated

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ones in which every detail is worked out in advance, but the unwitnessed, spur-of-the-moment cases of rape and robbery perpetrated by a stranger." "Are you hopeful about solving this case?" "Maybe one of these days we'll get an informant or a coincidental crime that will break the case wide open," he said, savoring his eclair. "Or we might just get lucky. Whether a case is solved or not could depend on something as unscientific as how much bragging the killer does. "They say that a detective is only as good as his informants, he said, looking up from my notes. "I sure have great informants." I waited for his special grin. Sure enough, it flashed across his face and once again transformed him into a being different from anyone I had ever known. Then in the aftermath of his fleeting smile, he resumed his solemn look. The change in his expression was bewildering. "Where did it go?" I asked myself. "Was it really there or have I been imagining that luminescent smile?" Across the room a hefty policeman was sitting with his back to us. A thick, sturdy man, bald on top, he sat with one mighty leg spread onto each side of the spindly, cast-iron chair. His shoulders bulged beneath a tight white polyester shirt which looked strained to the breaking point. His gargantuan frame dwarfed the small furniture. He looked grossly out of his element in the patisserie, a restaurant frequented mostly by lady lunchers of the upper East Side. At first glance I thought he was wearing a double holster with a gun on each side, but on looking closer I saw that one of the "guns" was a walkie-talkie. There was an empty plate in front of him, with a knife leaning against one side of it and a spoon bottom side up on the other. "Hey, there's my friend Pete!" John said with surprise. "What's he doing in a place like

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this? "Hiya, Pete," he shouted across the tiny room. "How ya doin'? Whatcha doin' here in this elegant joint?" "Spyin' on you, John. How's it goin'? "Could be worse, could be worse. Tank up now, there may not be time later. See you, Pete." To me he said, "Pete is a cop on the beat we are covering. He is a good man for the job. If there is anything to find, he's the man to unearth it." At the moment I wasn't terribly interested in Pete, because I had something else on my mind. "Are you married, John?" I asked, trying to casually sip my espresso. "No, Mary. I'm divorced." "I'm sorry, John." "I had a hard time after Brenda and I separated," he continued, "but that was over three years ago. I'm just about getting over it now. I used to go to sleep at night not caring whether I woke up in the morning. Then I decided I had to go on living for the sake of my kids." "Oh, you have children?" "Yes. Two boys, age seven and nine." "I'm glad. They are lucky children to have you for a father. You are so kind and dedicated I think you must be wonderful with them." The expression in John's eyes betrayed his appreciation. I may be wrong but they may even have moistened a bit. "This man is starved for human compassion," I thought, and continued with our conversation. "Do they look like you, John?"

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"As a matter of fact they do," he said proudly, reaching for his wallet. "I'll show you a picture of them." They were at the beach. He was supporting the boys so that one was standing upright on each of his outstretched arms. The three beaming faces looked almost exactly alike. As I handed the photo back I said, "Hmmm, John, I see we have the Chief of Police and Chief Detective of the twenty-first century here." He grinned his inspired grin again. This time, delighted to see that it lasted a moment, I smiled in return. "What happened to the marriage? That is, if you want to talk about it." Again he looked me directly in the eye and said, "I think I could tell you anything, Mary dear. Brenda and I just weren't right for each other. She is a decent human being who is still my friend. But she is a simple soul who doesn't share my intellectual interests. We married because we were attracted to each other and wanted children, but I never was really crazy about her. In fact I don't mind telling you that I've never really been in love with anyone." I looked at him in surprise. I had crushes on many men before I married. Each "love" faded away eventually, sometimes gently, sometimes tempestuously, sometimes not for years, as the man or I discovered we were not right for each other. Was it possible that a person could reach John's age without ever having been in love? "When I got involved in detective work," John continued, "Brenda wasn't interested in it at all and resented the long hours I put in. Cops are always putting in lengthy hours and coming home late at night, if they come home at all. Finally she gave me an ultimatum: the police department or her. I chose the police department. I was surprised that I took the separation so

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hard. I thought the worst part would be losing the children. But I missed Brenda more than I had expected. I'm a lonely guy, Mary. The family was company for me." "Has there never been anyone else, not even after you separated?" "Not yet," he answered, with a gleam in his eye. "How come you've never been in love, John?" I asked. "That's very unusual for a man your age." "Well, Mary, if you don't start with the psychoanalytic interpretations, I'll give you my thoughts on the subject. Don't laugh, though, I think it's because of my mother. But not for the usual alibis that my mother did this or my mother did that to me. Dr. Eda Franklin would be a hard number for any young woman to follow. She was good, kind, loving, intelligent, and thought there was nobody like me on earth. We shared the same interests to a remarkable degree. She was the only woman I've ever known who would go scuba diving with me or help me put a computer together. I could talk to her about anything. She always knew the right thing to say to make me feel better. She kept up on my cases and never failed to ask how they were coming. She listened to me talk about them all night, if I needed to. And sometimes she would have great suggestions that helped me apprehend a criminal. Besides that, she gave me complete freedom to see her or not, whatever and whenever I wanted. Compared to her any woman has got to be the loser. And believe me, I do compare every woman I meet with her. Any normal woman has got to lose out." He was silent for a few moments and then added, "My mother was my best friend." "And is this paragon of womanhood still alive?" I asked, biting my lip. "I'm afraid not," John answered, looking devastated. "She died right after my divorce from a sudden heart attack. She was only seventy-two."

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"I'm sorry, John. I can see it must have been awful for you to lose her, particularly at such a difficult time. But perhaps her death will free you to find a woman of your own." His face light up as he said, "Maybe I've found her, Mary. Maybe at long last I've found her." Embarrassed, we both looked down at our espressos. He spent a few moments rapidly stirring his coffee and then asked, "And you, Mary. Are you married?" "No, I'm a widow. Edward died five years ago," I answered and then was silent. "Do you have any children?" "Yes." "How many?" I never know what to answer to that question. I decided I trusted John enough to take a stab at it. "I had two children, John. But now I have only one, a lovely daughter named Barbara who is studying to be a biologist." "What happened to your other child?" he asked, his concern showing as if carved into his face. "Alan was a wonderful, brilliant young man of twenty when he suddenly developed spinal meningitis. He fought it valiantly but was allergic to penicillin and for some unknown reason antibiotics didn't work for him. He passed away three weeks later. I think his death killed Edward, my husband. He never recovered from it. I've never really gotten over it, either. I miss Alan every day of my life," I said, my eyes fogging over. "I'm so sorry, Mary," John said, taking my hand. "Were you close to each other?" "Yes, John, we were very close. In some ways it reminds me of the relationship you had

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with your mother. Since Edward was so busy, Alan and I spent a lot of time together. We went to movies, concerts, art museums and galleries together. Alan was a poet. He was also very interested in my work. He was my friend and favorite companion. His death has been the greatest loss of my life." We both were silent. Then he said, "Has there been anyone else for you, Mary, either before or after your husband died?" "No, John," I answered. "There never has been. You and I are a lot alike in that respect, too. I guess we're just two old fashioned people." He nodded, his face serious as usual. Then he said, "I'm glad. That's the way I want it to be. I decided years ago that I wasn't interested in hopping into bed with any bimbo who came along. When I do have sex again, it won't be just sex, it will be making love." I stared at him in awe. "I feel exactly the same way," I said. "There is no experience on earth that compares with having sex with the person you love. Once you've had that, casual sex doesn't seem very inviting. My husband ruined sex without love for me forever. You have a wonderful experience in store for you, John." John grinned his radiant grin and said nothing. Then he deliberately changed the subject. "Tell me more about Barbara," he said. "She is married to Jerry and they have two adorable little boys, one of whom is named Alan." He smiled and said, "How nice that your son has a namesake. It must help a little to bear his loss." "Yes, John, it does, a little, anyhow, " I said, secretly knowing that nothing in this world

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could make up for Alan's death. "Barbara is almost as old as you, John," I said suddenly. "Too bad I'm so much older than you. We'd make a great couple." "Nothing is purr-fect," he said, and we both burst out laughing. "What was your marriage like, Mary?" "Edward was also a psychoanalyst and everyone thought we made a great professional pair. We got our post-doctoral training together in Vienna at a time when very few psychoanalysts were doing that. We had the advantage over other analysts of being able to discuss our cases together in bed in the middle of the night. Later we referred patients back and forth and became unusually successful quite early in our careers. An analytic couple, somehow, is much more powerful than the mere sum of its parts. People seem impressed by the twosome, and we were paid more and asked to give more papers than either one of us would have been separately. "It was a good marriage, as marriages go. We married young and were real helpmates to each other in developing careers and raising our children. The problem for me came later. Edward worked all the time, even though we really didn't have to anymore. A good weekend off for him was one in which he polished off an analytic paper and reviewed two psychoanalytic books on the side. "After the children left home I found myself lonely much of the time. I didn't want to be a drain on my children, but I missed them very much, especially Alan. When I complained to Edward, he told me to use my own resources to fill my time. I was tired of using my own resources; I wanted live human companionship. We didn't have fun, the way you and I laugh together sometimes even when we are seriously working on solving Veronica's murder case."

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John looked at me with a joyous expression, as if I had given him a great gift. "Would you have left him if he had lived?" he asked. I thought about my answer for a while and then said, "I don't think so, John. I didn't realize until the last few days there could be anything better in my life." Our eyes smiled at each other. As we got up to leave, I reached for the check. John slammed his hand down on mine. Women's lib or not, my heart sang...

"Mary," the Lieutenant phoned early the next morning. "How would you like to go to the Garden Bar with me tonight and see Carlos in drag? He appears there at times as a female impersonator and we can get a good look at him without him being aware of it, before we interrogate him tomorrow." A little thrill shot through me. John was accepting me, at least for a while, as his partner in detecting Veronica's killer. I had a fantasy he soon would accept me as more. I pushed away the thought and reverted to my professional demeanor. "What a great idea, John," I said. "It will be useful to us." Then I decided I was being ridiculous and added, "and it should be lots of fun." "Good. I'll pick you up at your office at 11:30 tonight." "11:30? Why so late?" My patients arrived early in the morning. "The club doesn't open till midnight. Okay?" "Okay," I said, thinking I'll sleep when I am old. "See you at 11:30, John. I'll look forward to it all day." "Me, too, Mary. 'Bye, ...." He muttered a word I couldn't make out and then hung up.

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Was I imagining it, or was that a soft-spoken "hon" at the end of his sentence?

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Chapter Six

The "Boss”

We went through a small theater entrance marked "The Gardens" to a good size ballroom packed mostly with gay men twisting and reaching skyward in rhythm to the booming sounds. Each person seemed to be dancing alone, and I sighed for the romantic days when couples danced cheek to cheek and you could tell who was dancing with whom. Red and blue strobe lights blinked on and off, alternating with occasional flashes that lit up the room like lightening. Caught in their sudden exposure, the dancers seemed frozen in time and a weird quality was cast over the entire scene. My ears ached immediately from what felt like blaring noise. John looked at me and took my hand. A little trill went through my stomach. On stage a gyrating man was singing in a falsetto voice, his hand clutching his genitalia. I hoped he was not an example of what was to follow in Carlos' act. Wooden bars lined with men and an occasional woman stood in the front and the sides of the room. Large carpeted benches padded with huge pillows beckoned us. John and I, still holding hands, sat down to wait for Carlos, billed as Rolanda, to start his act on stage. I suddenly realized

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the connection between Roland and Rolanda, and thought the similarity made it obvious that Veronica had been correct in her assessment of Carlos' love for Roland. A pretty, graceful, nicely built blond woman of medium height suddenly walked out on the stage. She wore a stylized pink gown which looked like something the queen might have worn in "Alice in Wonderland." Slender legs in sheer black hose and dainty shoes with four inch heels clicked out from under her dress. She began to sing in a sweet feminine voice, then pranced around the stage. It wasn't until the audience began to whistle, hoot and holler that I realized the pretty young woman was Carlos de la Cuesta, alias Rolanda. I gasped. John and I looked at each other in amazement. When Rolanda dropped the pink gown to expose a black tutu adorned with yellow flowers, the lines of her womanly torso and shapely legs appeared even lovelier. I had seen female impersonators before, even some famous ones. They had always seemed to be made up caricatures of women. I remember watching a man powder his face in the subway. The exaggerated angle he held the compact and the affected tilt of his wrist as he applied powder seemed a mockery of a woman's gestures. I was surprised and pleased to see Carlos looking and behaving so naturally. I found Rolanda's last number, Bette Midler's song, "From a Distance", quite poignant, and saw that the man next to us was in tears. When she sang, "You used to be my friend and now you're my enemy, God is watching us but he's watching from a distance", I wondered if she was thinking of Roland and Veronica. Although Rolanda's songs moved me very much, it seemed to me that her art lay not so much in singing and dancing as in her unique skill at projecting the uncanny illusion that she was a woman, indeed a woman who is a lady.

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This impression was accentuated after the show, when John flashed his golden shield at the cashier in the box office and asked to see Carlos. He came out front right away. He had changed into a spectacular white sequined gown, and if anything, even higher heels. I was shocked to find that he was extremely tall, perhaps six feet, three inches, not counting the heels. I am five feet six inches tall, not a particularly small woman, but I had to contort my head sharply upward to talk to him. To tell the truth, I felt rather intimidated by his dynamic presence. He seemed to fill the entire small space behind the box office. In addition, up close it was apparent Carlos had large features and the facial bone structure of a man. On stage, from the position we had taken, the illusion that we were looking at a pretty young woman was truly miraculous. "Whatever else comes out of the interrogations," I said to John, "whatever evil Carlos may be capable of, in at least one of his selves the gentleman is a lady." I told him he appeared natural and real on stage. Carlos looked deeply into my eyes, and his expression told me that he believed me. His obvious pleasure made me feel good, too. Just before John and I left, he confirmed the appointment for us to interrogate Carlos during my usual lunch hour the following day. How different Carlos looked the next afternoon! I never would have recognized him as the "woman" we had seen the night before. He appeared at the Vail apartment promptly at one, wearing well-cut grey slacks, a white-on-white shirt, and a soft jacket of teal blue tailored to fit his body. When I expressed admiration for his subtle, multi-hued tie, he told me it was made of Ancient Madder Silk. I had never heard of it before, of course, but I've always admired people who can do what I can't, and was impressed. A tall, slender, handsome man with styled long black hair and an engaging demeanor, Carlos didn't seem nearly as imposing as Rolanda.

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John took the lead as we sat in the now familiar living room. "I understand you are a famous wall paper designer, Mr. de la Cuesta," he said. "Yes," Carlos answered in a deep voice, displaying no embarrassment. "The Vails both worked for you?" "Yes. I first heard about the murder when you called me Monday morning, and was horrified. I still can't believe it." "What did you think of Veronica?" "She was a good worker and also my friend. But Roland is very special to me, so I gave him the more interesting work in the shop. I knew she was angry with me about that, and also because I sent him abroad without her, but we continued to be friends. I often had dinner at their apartment or took them to Lutece and other 'in' restaurants they loved." "When did you last see her alive?" "Late Friday afternoon at the office. She was finishing up a pattern for me when I left. Roland was still away, and we had no parties planned for the weekend." "Did you speak to her at the time?" "Yes. I said goodnight and told her I appreciated that she was staying to finish the job and doing such good work to boot." "Did you notice anything unusual about her?" "No, nothing. I did think she looked rather dejected, but supposed it was because Roland was away without her and she had no plans for the weekend. I'm sorry now I didn't ask her if anything was wrong. I also wish I had thought to ask her out to dinner." "Do you feel she was usually a contented person?"

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Carlos hesitated. "That's a hard question to answer. I would say she was sometimes... well, gloomy. I knew she was dissatisfied because Roland was getting better jobs than she. Sometimes she seemed upset over it, although she never talked directly about it. But one can pick up those kinds of vibes. Sometimes in the office when she seemed a bit glum, I thought it was probably about the work situation. But mostly she seemed to enjoy life, especially at our parties." "Did she have other friends in the office?" John asked. "A few of the employees and I often attended parties with the Vails, usually at their home or mine, but so far as I know, she wasn't close to any of them." I thought how well Carlos' picture of Veronica fit the isolated picture of herself she had painted in her analysis. "Is there anyone in the office you think might have reason to want her dead?" John asked. "No, no one at all. My secretary will give you the names of the rest of my staff in case you want to check them out. Trite as it may sound, we are all like one big, happy family. I wouldn't keep anyone in the office who couldn't get along with the others." "I'll be frank with you, Mr. de la Cuesta," John said. "You are a gay man, are you not?" Carlos nodded his head. John went on, "I've been told you are in love with Roland Vail. Even your stage name, Rolanda, suggests the attachment. Are you?" Carlos' deep brown eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. "Yes," he answered. "I've been in love with him as long as I've know him. Is that a crime?" "No, of course not," John answered. "Does he love you in return?" "No. I always hoped against hope he would but although he admires me, it was his wife he loved. He wasn't open to sex with any other person, man or woman. But I never stopped hoping."

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"Is Roland gay, too?" "He may have had a few homosexual affairs before he married but once he met Veronica he wouldn't stray for anybody, man or woman." "Do you know any man he had an affair with?" "No. I'm not even sure it was true. It may be only hearsay." "I'm going to put it straight to you, Mr. de la Cuesta. You are a suspect in Veronica's murder. Several indications point to you as the murderer." Carlos turned white. "Me? Why would anyone think I killed her? She was my friend." "It has been suggested that if Veronica were out of the picture, Roland would be free to have an affair with you." Carlos turned whiter. "Well, I must admit I've thought of that since she died. But I never would have killed her, whatever the situation with Roland. I liked her and am devastated by her death. She was my friend and valued employee, and I will miss her very much. I am not a killer, Lieutenant Franklin, and resent that you think I am. He bristled slightly, then added, "I've never known a drag queen who was a murderer. Have you?" John shook his head. "Not that I can recall." "I'm not surprised," Carlos said. "Most of us are really very gentle people under our barbed repartee. I've known some drag queens who committed suicide, but never murder." Then he visibly relaxed. "But I've seen some queens commit murder on stage, they were so bad. Actually I've butchered a song or two, myself. And I've flayed them in the aisles," he laughed. "I've tickled a couple of people to death. And my face has stopped a few clocks. And then there was one ballad where I got them right in the heart.

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Then he added with a snort, "And these heels I wear are plain murder. But as for actually killing anyone, no!" I burst out laughing and said, "You're very funny, Carlos."

"That's my professional

wit, designed especially for you," he said with a smile. John was not amused. "Murder is very unfunny," he said to both Carlos and me. I felt reprimanded like a naughty child and wished I had contained my laughter. But I had found Carlos so amusing in a straight-faced sort of way that I couldn't help myself. Also we had all been very uptight, and as I frequently tell my patients, there is nothing like a good laugh to break the tension. But I regretted that we had offended John. "Where were you Sunday night at 11 o'clock, Mr. de la Cuesta?" he continued. Carlos blanched again. "I was out, shall we say...cruising? I met a man I didn't know and brought him to my apartment." "What is his name?" This time Carlos turned a shade of bilious green. "I never asked. He said to call him Andy." "Was there a doorman or anyone else you know who saw you together?" "I don't have a doorman. And we didn't meet anyone on the way to my home." "Did you stop any place on the way?" "No." "You realize, of course, that we have only your word for your whereabouts at the time Veronica was killed." Carlos nodded and said, "I know. But I believe my innocence will prevail."

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"Let's hope so," John answered. "But in the meantime, what do you know about this man?" "Not much. I never met him before Sunday night. I was walking along the East River Drive and he stopped to talk to me. We liked each other right away, so I took him to my apartment and we had sex. Then he left." "What did he look like? "He was blond, cute, kind of short, about thirty years old and very sexy looking. He was also sensational in bed. I wanted to see him again but he said he wasn't interested in a relationship. He would only tell me that his name was Andy and he worked in a bank." "Which bank?" "I don't know. I think he said it was on Wall Street." "Can you find him for us?" "That's difficult, Lieutenant. I have no idea where to look." "Try, Mr. de la Cuesta," John said, in a tone that would be hard to ignore. "I'll see what I can do," Carlos answered. "Try, Mr. de la Cuesta," John repeated, looking him straight in the eye. "I suggest you try very hard," Then he arose and put out his hand. "Thank you for your time, Mr. de la Cuesta. You have been very cooperative. We will call you again if we need you." After Carlos left, John and I discussed Carlos. John thought that of all the people we had interviewed, Carlos was the most suspicious. He could not provide any proof of where he was at the time of Veronica's slaying. I kept remembering Beryl's description of the back of the man running out the door. According to her, he was a tall, slender man with long, dark hair. That

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description fit Carlos perfectly. I found it intriguing that his painting, "The Hurricane," was the only thing stolen from the apartment. Roland had told us that it was Carlos' masterpiece. Perhaps he regretted having given it to the Vails and wanted it back. If he were to get away with Veronica's murder, he couldn't have found a better time to steal back his painting. Reluctantly, I told John I believed it conceivable that Carlos was Veronica's slayer, and suggested that I interview him again. John said he would arrange for an interrogation the next day.

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Chapter Seven

Carlos

Carlos showed up at my office promptly at one o'clock. He wore another elegant outfit. This time a jacket of a subtle yellow plaid and grey gabardine trousers. We shook hands amicably. I was impressed again with this personable man. He took my hand warmly in both of his and said, "Veronica used to talk about you, Dr. Wells. She loved you very much. She believed you were a very wise woman." I was moved that she had told him she loved me, as she never had said so to me. It was as

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though Veronica's voice was coming to me from her grave. "Thank you, Carlos," I said. "I appreciate what you are saying and am sorry you have to be put through this ordeal. I thought perhaps if you could tell us more about yourself we could settle any suspicions about you once and for all." "There couldn't be a nicer person to do it with," Carlos said in an ingratiating tone. "What do you want to know?" "Have you ever been in therapy?" "Yes. Once I went for a year or two after the ending of a painful love affair." "Then you know what therapy is like. Let's pretend you have just become my patient and are telling me all about yourself for the first time." "All right, I'm game," he said, leaning back on the brown leather chair used by those patients who did not lie down on the couch. I sat in my regular chair. "Female impersonation isn't new to me," he began. "My mother tells me I used to take my bathrobe, step into her high heels and go clumping down the street to have dinner with the neighbors when I was a little boy. I remember putting on Judy Garland records, picking up a hairbrush and pretending it was a microphone. It was always the female stars I emulated. Whenever I went to the movies - you know how you go to the movies and take home one of the characters to copy - I was always a female. I remember being Mary Poppins; I saw it six times in a row. Those days the kids went to the movies and stayed there all day. I just knew I was Mary Poppins. I climbed to the top of the garage, stood there with an umbrella and jumped off. I hit the ground and broke my collar bone. But even the broken bone didn't convince me I wasn't Mary Poppins. I told everyone it was because I didn't have a parrot on the end of my umbrella that I

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couldn't fly. He added insightfully, "A lot of the inner me comes out when I'm in drag. It is my moment to release everything. That's why I never needed much therapy. Being in drag is my therapy. I silently agreed, thinking that there are genetic, biophysical, and environmental aspects to homosexuality, and that Carlos needed the outlet he found as Rolanda in order to feel a whole person. "Are you anything like your mother?" I asked. "Only in the way she gives everything away. She said, excuse the language, that she would give away her asshole and shit through her ribs, if she had to. "She would give you anything in life. I've seen her do it time and time again and I'm the same way. I wonder, Why can't I be a little more protective of myself? "Maybe I am like my mother," he said with surprise. "She walks with a limp so when I was a little boy, I limped, too. She took me to the doctor to see what was the matter. They examined me, x-rayed me, and medicated me. They even put a cast on my leg for a while. But nothing helped: they couldn't find a thing wrong. Then, after all this money was spent, one smart doctor asked me why I limped. I said, I limp because my mother limps. "I loved her a lot, and wanted to be like her. I still look for role models, especially women. I'm always looking for role models to impersonate. "My father was an alcoholic, a sweet man, but his sickness means that at times he is 'good' and at times he is not. He also raised pigeons on our roof, and was with them whenever he was sober. He would put a metal ring around their legs and take them to Atlantic city in a cage. Then he would let them loose. Sometimes he took us with him, and it was fun to see them circle high in

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the sky and then find their way home. We used to eat the squabs and their eggs. My father has lots of good qualities and my mother put up with his drinking for that reason. Also, along with her age - she is seventy-four - she had polio as a child and really can't be by herself and get around alone much any more. She's the strong one in the family. I'm strong like her but also weak like him, I'm gullible like he is. My father would buy the Brooklyn Bridge if you said you were selling it. "My father was in the navy, so he was gone a lot of my youth. He was away for at least six months out of every year until I was about six and when he was at home he was drunk or playing with his pigeons. I really didn't have much fathering." Carlos' eyes watered. "He took me fishing sometimes but he would get so flossed I had to help him back to the car. His intentions were good, but I would think, Oh, there he goes with the promises again! It hurt less to give up on him altogether." I thought how similar Carlos' upbringing was to that of many other gay men I had treated, in that the father was absent both physically and emotionally from the little boy's life, giving him only female figures to emulate. "Roland is very different from my father," Carlos continued. "He doesn't promise much, but what he promises he delivers. When he says a certain job will be finished on, say, Tuesday, I'd stake my life that it will be on my desk by Tuesday. He is my most reliable worker. You can see why that's so important to me." I mused further on how similar Carlos' relationship with his father was to Veronica's, both men alcoholics, both occasionally loving, both totally unreliable. Roland's inherent decency and dependability may well have been the magnet that drew Veronica, as well as Carlos, to Roland. "You are a successful wallpaper designer, Carlos, as well as a famous artist," I said. "It's

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unusual that you also have a career as a female impersonator. How did you get into it?" "On a fluke. I went into a bar one night in 1977, a gay bar. It was the first time I ever saw a drag show. I looked at a friend of mine and said, 'What's the big deal? Anybody could get up with a dress on and lipstick and lip sync to a song.' He said, 'Yeah, sure!' The next week there was a drag talent show and I thought, I'm going to do it! I am a designer and can make all my own clothes, so that part was easy. "Oh, yeah, except for the shoes. I have to have them specially engineered and, believe me, it gets to be plenty expensive! A guy of six foot three who weighs two hundred pounds and wants to wear six inch heels had better make pretty sure his shoes have enough support in them. Women’s shoes just don't do it. They aren't solid enough to keep me from breaking my as! "Anyway, I dressed up as Carmen Miranda, with a big headpiece and fruit all over it, grape earrings and a big taffeta dress. It was tropical pink and all the rest of those hot colors. I had a lot of fun and I won the contest. Then the bar asked me to do a guest spot every once in a while. Now I do it as much as I can. It's a wonderful change from wallpaper designing and even my painting. I have a great time doing it. "Also it's a little vacation from being Carlos de la Cuesta, renowned designer and artist. That gets to be a little tiresome, and people are always wanting something from me. I am the person I impersonate when I am up there on stage, instead of just spoofing the artist as some drag queens do. I have too much respect for the one I'm impersonating to poke fun at them. Some drag queens don't feel that way and can get downright nasty. I don't like doing that. I think that to profit from something you have to insinuate things without coming right out and saying it. I like to be subtle.

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"I like to think of myself as an actor who is playing a role. When I'm finished, the scene is over. I don't like to go out eating in drag. I'm not comfortable in those clothes. I can't wait to take them off. For a while I might camp and carry on at a bar, but then I think it is time to put on the blue jeans and tee shirt and relax. When the lights go up, the magic is over. I don't try to force it to continue." I said, "Tell me about you and Roland, Carlos. What else do you find so lovable about him?" He smiled. "Just about everything. He's so cute and looks kind of tiny when he stands next to me. I always seem to go for the small guys. I want to cuddle him and rub my hand through his hair, the way he's always doing himself. He seems kind of nervous and scared all the time. I want to hold him in my arms and say, 'There, there, little one, everything will be all right.' He is like a frightened little boy and I guess I want to be a father to him. Yes, that's it. He's my little boy and I want to be his father. But I would be a good father, the kind I always wanted and never had." At that moment the pain in Carlos' eyes was profound and I felt for him. "It's excruciating never to be able to hold and comfort the person you love," I said, remembering unrequited love affairs of my own. His mournful eyes overflowed again. "I yearn for Roland all the time. I can't go to sleep at night unless I hug my pillow and pretend it is him. When I'm upset it makes me feel better just to know he exists. Nobody has ever understood that before about Roland and me," he said gratefully, looking at me with his huge tear-filled eyes. "Tell me, Carlos, didn't having Veronica around make it even harder for you? Weren't you terribly jealous of her?" I asked.

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"Of course. It was a terrible situation. Every time I saw them together I felt stabbed in the heart." Then he said, "Yes, I'm aware I said 'stabbed', Dr. Wells. But believe me, in this case the stab wound was mine and not Veronica's." "Why did you keep her around, if it was so painful for you?" "She worked for me before Roland did, and I guess I felt a certain loyalty to her. Then, too, she was a good worker and useful to me at the shop. We had a good working relationship, at least on my part, anyway. She could be very alluring and seductive, the way I am, and we had fun playing up to each other. "But it was just a game. Roland was the one I really wanted. To tell you the truth, Dr. Wells, when they invited me out with them, I had to take the two of them to get the one I wanted. I don't think Roland would have seen me very much alone outside of office hours. He wanted to hang around his wife all the time. He confessed to me once that he really didn't trust Veronica and was afraid she had other lovers." "What did you say to that?" "I said I had never seen her with any other man. But I remember hoping Roland was right, because then maybe he would have had time for me." "What kind of wife was Veronica, Carlos?" His eyes darkened as he said with indignation, "Not good! She didn't appreciate what she had." "You would be a better choice for him?" "I'll say! She wasn't really nice to him at times. She was moody and always picking on him about something. Nothing he did or said satisfied her. That's one of the things I wanted to comfort

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him about." "How did you feel when she criticized him?" "It made me furious. Sometimes I even hated her. I thought he deserved much better." "And did you ever think you wanted to get even with her, maybe 'stab' her in the heart, the way she did to you?" "No, Dr. Wells, I never thought of wanting to hurt her in any way." His voice sounded sincere. "But I don't hesitate to tell you, if no one else, that in some secret part of me I am delighted she is dead. She deserved it because of the way she treated my dear Roland." He thought for a moment and then added, "Maybe now there will be a chance for me." Carlos left shortly after, giving me time to think about what he had said. I felt I had never met a more honest man in my life. He was not afraid to say he was glad Veronica was dead. It takes years to get a patient to admit he or she might once in a while have an intimation of such a thought. And that only on the safety of the analytic couch. But Carlos was able to come right out in the light of day and say he was glad that Veronica had died. But the big question was, Was he glad enough to kill her himself? He still wasn't off the hook. After all, Beryl had identified Carlos at the scene of the crime. The thought occurred to me that perhaps he had hired someone else to kill Veronica. This would be more in keeping with his fastidious personality. Then he would be able to keep his elegant hands unsoiled with blood and still be able to honestly say he hadn't killed her. I made a mental note to speak to John about it.

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Chapter Eight

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The Elusive Stranger

Over coffee at the patisserie, the cozy French restaurant on Madison Avenue that was now a familiar meeting place for us, John and I intensely discussed the possibility that Carlos was Veronica's murderer. It was a difficult situation, as we both liked and admired Carlos very much. Since his interview with me, we felt even more certain he should be considered a prospect. But as there still was no evidence that would positively identify him, we decided to continue the search for the killer. In the meantime detectives were looking for Carlos' alleged sexual partner the night of the crime. They investigated all the banks on Wall Street, as well as the gay bars in Greenwich Village and the East River area where Carlos said he had met Andy while "cruising." So far they had come up with nothing, which made it even more imperative that the inquiry of Carlos continue. "The Vails are well-known collectors of modern art," John said. "It is possible that a burglar broke into the Vail apartment to steal some of the expensive paintings on the wall. A straight break and entry job. When he was surprised by Veronica he killed her, became nervous and left, staying only long enough to grab the one painting of Carlos that was in full view. "We are checking out all the identifiable art collectors in the city," he added. "I've also asked Roland how many paintings he had so we could do a count and circulate descriptions of any others that may be missing." "It is possible the thief was a sophisticated collector," I agreed. "Or perhaps he was interested only in Carlos' art. He did steal his most famous painting, 'The Hurricane.'" I marveled to myself what a multi-talented person Carlos was. Indeed, he was a

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Renaissance Man. Most people would be thrilled to possess one of his talents and here he was a phenomenal success in three careers. It bore out a pet theory of mine that talent is a general attribute and that most people who are gifted in one area could do just as well in others. I thought, What a pity, what a waste, should Carlos turn out to be the killer! "Good idea that the murderer may be a collector of Carlos' paintings," John agreed. "We'll get a list from his office right away of people who own his paintings." I added that I thought it feasible that an unknown man had broken into the apartment to rape her. Since Veronica was a striking beauty whose sensuous walk and demeanor often excited strangers to the point of accosting her, I considered the "Elusive Stranger" an important suspect. I reminded John that once you had seen Veronica, she was not easy to forget. "Could be," John answered without too much enthusiasm. "The laboratory reports of the autopsy indicate no vaginal fluids were present. But then many rapists are unable to ejaculate into their victim. So we'll continue to check out your 'Elusive Stranger' theory." He sighed and continued, "The detectives and my friend Pete are combing the area for a man who looks like Beryl's description of the murderer. I asked them to bring in anyone who resembles the drawing printed out by the computer as soon as they find him. If he skips out I told them to send out a general alarm and have him arrested." Then in his low, earnest voice John asked, "Am I missing something, Mary? Did Veronica ever tell you anything that would cast suspicion on any particular stranger?" I thought for a moment and then recalled, "She said many men tried to pick her up. She thought that one man even waited for her on the corner of her building every evening when she came home from work."

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"Did she describe him or tell you anything else about him?" "I'm afraid not, except that he hurled sexual obscenities at her and she replied, 'Get lost!' Apparently it didn't do any good, because he continued to wait for her. I warned her to be careful." "I'll alert Pete to watch that particular corner," John said. "How can we be sure we have the right guy?" "I can only give you an educated guess, John," I replied. "I would expect that someone who stands around on street corners waiting to verbally harass a woman is a loner and a drifter. A person who does not work and is unable to form normal human relationships. Such people are unable to experience warm tender feelings for anyone and are immune to praise, reproaches or the feelings of others. They are capable of any action no matter how unthinkable or vile because they are unable to identify with other human beings and can't imagine the horror and terror the victim is experiencing. John nodded his head and said, "Yes, I believe that is what keeps us civilized, the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others. It is what is lacking in the type of criminal who mugs into the camera of newspaper reporters and gets off on his victims' pain." "Part of the problem is that these people are so isolated they lose touch with reality. When they become obsessed with a person, there is no one there to say, 'Hey, wait a minute, that's crazy!' If you and I are a bit out of touch, one of our friends or colleagues or a family member will look askance or say, 'Cool it, fella'. But there is no one close enough to bring this kind of person back to earth. Nobody said to Hinkley or Chapman, 'Put down that gun, son. It is preposterous to shoot a president or a rock star.' "And John, men with this problem rarely date or marry. They aren't put together well

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enough for that. They have hazy goals, are indecisive, and often appear to be in a daze. Many of the people living on 'skid row' suffer from this affliction." "What do you think he looks like?" John asked. I hesitated and then went on, "I would guess he is a white man in his late twenties or early thirties, of normal height and perhaps thin and undernourished looking. He probably comes from a dysfunctional family, maybe one of the younger children of many, who was treated by other family members as if he did not exist. He would be an inept man, probably not too bright, who is socially inadequate and sexually ineffectual." I added my last thoughts on the subject, "He possibly lives alone in a slovenly and unkempt furnished room, if he has a home at all. He is presumably a person who daydreams a lot, often about rape, torture, and murder. Usually the fantasies stay in his head and he is a harmless enough creature. But occasionally he may lose the distinction between fantasy and reality and act out his fantasies. That's when he becomes dangerous. His victims are frequently strangers. The attack is often spontaneous and comes as a violent surprise to the target. This type of murderer characteristically is preoccupied with obsessional thoughts and is in an anxious state of mind when the assault occurs. "But remember, John," I admonished him, "this is only a guideline, an educated guess." He looked at me with bright blue eyes shining with appreciation and said, ""Thanks, Mary, that's wonderful. How do you know all that?" "I had to do a lot of research in that area for my last paper with Wilhelm, New Visions: The Sociopathic Personality Today. "We may well be able to use it. We are investigating many areas now and you never can

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tell when, where or what will pay off. But sometimes we just have to wait for something to break. You have been very helpful, Mary, but for the moment there is nothing else you can do. Go home and get some rest." Appearing more dejected than usual, he picked up the check, kissed me on the cheek and left me at the table staring at my cold coffee. My heart slumped to the bottom of my leather cowgirl boots. I felt I had failed my first and only murder investigation, as well as my new friend and colleague, Lieutenant John Franklin. That night, as I was preparing for my evening meal a luscious lasagna, an old favorite of my children, John called. He sounded even more dejected than before as he said, "I have some news for you. We found Andy, the man Carlos said was with him the night of Veronica's murder. He is an executive at Citibank on Wall Street. He is blond, young and short, just as Carlos said. Andy confirmed that he was with Carlos Sunday evening at eleven and was shocked to think we were investigating him as a possible killer. He found Carlos kind, considerate and loving, and doesn't believe for a minute he was capable of murder." I heard John's familiar sigh as he added, "So now we have nothing at all on Carlos. I'm dropping him as a suspect." To my surprise, I was overcome with a flood of mixed feelings. I liked Carlos immensely and had sensed all along that he was telling the truth. I was happy he apparently was innocent of this heinous crime. In addition, I knew the Vail family was suffering all the tragedy it could stand right now and was relieved that they would be spared further grief. But inasmuch as we had lost our prime suspect, I, like John, felt even more despondent than before. We were no closer to solving the mystery of who killed Veronica Vail than we were the day we started. Then, as now,

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we were exactly nowhere. I was the one who now sighed as I said, "Thanks, John. Keep in touch." "See you around," he answered. I was devastated. Did his remark mean he didn't intend to seek me out any longer, that we weren't going to continue working together on the case? I continued to brood about it. As much work as there was for me to do, I couldn't concentrate on anything else. I only knew that now I had another reason to solve Veronica's murder. I realized John had become very important to me and I didn't want to lose his respect. Or the possibility of anything more. Following this thoroughly dispiriting day, I felt I needed some pampering. So I lethargically stuck the half-cooked Lasagna into the refrigerator and took myself to Victor's Restaurant, a favorite of my husband's and mine for many years. Over a dish of Shrimp Creole and a pitcher of Sangria, my spirits improved. As I ate, I considered where John and I might go from here to solve this puzzling case. My mind drifted onto a killer I'd read about in the newspapers, who selected only lame women as his victims. Another weirdo killed only women with long, blond hair. Was there anything unusual about Veronica, I wondered, that would make her stand out from other women? Of course, I thought with excitement. Her height! Maybe the killer has it in for tall women and picks them as his victims. I wondered if any other women Veronica's size had been murdered recently. When I got home I called John at the squad room, where I thought he might be hanging out. "Lieutenant Franklin here," he answered in his melodious voice. I told him of my latest thoughts about Veronica's murderer. He said thoughtfully, "I'll come to your office the first thing

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tomorrow morning."

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Chapter Nine

The Tall Woman

As John sat at my office in the chair new patients took when they faced me for the first time, I handed him a cup of coffee and said, "John, you know Veronica was a very tall woman. As a matter of fact, she was almost six feet." "That is tall for a woman," said this six-foot tall police officer, as he stirred three lumps of sugar into his coffee. I continued, "Perhaps her height set off some kind of crackpot who's got it in for women her size. Do you know whether there have been any other murders of tall women in or around New York City?" "Hmmmm, good point, Mary." For the first time in days I saw the flash of a smile on his pleasant face. John went on, "I'll check the computer files of murder victims for height. Do you know of anything anyone ever said to Veronica about her size that we should investigate?" "No, but it was a source of difficulty for her, particularly when she was younger," I

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recalled. "In later years she learned to wear her height with pride. I remember once she spent practically the whole session talking about it. I learned very much that hour about what it is like to be a woman who towers above everyone else, and remember practically everything she said. Which, I am sorry to confess, doesn't happen very often." "What did she say?" John sounded very curious as he enjoyed his coffee. "Well, she mentioned that she was taller than any other woman she knew. I am a good height for a woman, five feet six, but because my father was so huge and my mother was my size, I never felt particularly tall. So I asked Veronica, 'What is it like, being tall?'" "'It's not always great,' she answered. "'Worst of all is going to the movies. You try to sit in the back row because some little old lady usually comes behind you and treats you as if you could remove your height like it was a hat. So you slither down on your spine and watch the movie all crunched up. When people sit in back of you they sigh and say, 'Oh, isn't she tall! Just my luck to get behind her! I wonder how big she is when she stands up?' "'I want to answer, This isn't my hat, lady, it's me. Have a little personal respect. But you don't do that. Instead either you move or they move. When you're young you're insulted but now, I just think, that's their ignorance.'" I had to smile, and I've never gone to the movies since that I don't think of what she said. John smiled too and drained his coffee cup. Then she went on, "'And then there's the business with clothes. If you have an inseam that's longer than thirty-one inches, you buy men's dungarees, wear them on your hip, cut 'em off and call them Capri style. But then you're cool around the ankles. So you buy long slacks and steam out the hem with white vinegar and find some kind of stupid little facing and hope nobody gets the

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chance to check out the bottom of your pants. It's a good thing I can sew, or I'd never have anything decent to wear.'" Then I recall her saying, "'You try to ignore ritzy stores with salesladies and go to KMart's where nobody is going to bother you. At the department stores, if the sleeves are four inches above your wrist, the salesladies tell you to push them up and say they are three quarter length. I hate the salesladies in the expensive lingerie shops worst of all. They look you over and won't give you the size you ask for. I know I need a size seven, but they will only sell me a five. 'Come over here, dearie,' they say, 'you are in the wrong section. Oh honey, you can't wear that size, it's much too big for you.' I ought to know my own underwear size. "'I wear a size fourteen tall, but sometimes I don't know where they get the women they make fourteens for. The crotch is too low. It hangs down and isn't nice. Makes you feel like you are wearing diapers." John laughed out loud, as I poured him another cup of coffee. '"I'm delighted that we can wear skirts of any length these days,' Veronica continued, 'because now I can wear short people's long skirts and they just about reach my knees.'" I could hear Veronica's satiny voice coming from the couch as she went on, "'And bathing suits are a headache. You either have to buy a two-piece suit or a really expensive one like a Jansen, always long, which will stretch.'" I understood Veronica's tribulations about clothing very well. I don't have the same problem she had, but dressing has always been a nuisance to me that I would just as soon do without. As Veronica said, I don't "have style," and nothing I do can change that. '"Nobody can ever tell your weight," she complained. "You can win with the weight guesser at a carnival every time. Emily has more little Kewpie dolls than she can play with. You'd

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think the guessers would catch on to the weight of tall women, but they always underestimate by at least twenty pounds.'" I looked at John. He was wearing the fabulous grin that lit up his face. "Don't stop now," he begged. "Please go on." I obliged. "Veronica then asked me, 'Do you know what I regretted most when I was little? Having legs that reached the ground. Emily's reach the ground. I hope she grows up to be littler than I. No matter where I sat I could never dangle my legs. I always envied the little girls in first grade who sat there swinging their legs. Now I know they are uncomfortable, cutting off the circulation at their feet. Mine always dragged on the ground.' "'I didn't know how to get in and out of a car when I was a teenager without looking like a preying mantis. When your hormones are in an uproar and you are five feet ten inches tall and weigh ninety eight pounds, something should be done about it. Once the school nurse rounded out my weight to one hundred pounds and I wanted to kiss her feet! "'My mother sent me to modeling class on Saturday mornings. Well, it didn't teach me to be a lady, but it taught me to look like one. I learned to sit down with my knees pressed together. That eliminated the praying mantis look. "'I never told my mother how much I appreciated her sending me there. I think of that whenever I see a woman sitting with her legs so far apart you can measure the distance with a yardstick. That's when I stopped feeling like a popsicle, when I went to modeling school. "'Motels are all made for leprechauns. The shower hits you about here,'" she said, pointing to her middle. "I had to sit in the tub to wash my hair. The bathroom must have been made for dwarfs. When I looked in the mirror all I could see was my belly button," she said laughingly.

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"'And the dances! When you're at a dance all the little old bald-headed men want to slow dance with you. Guess where their heads hit? Ha ha! I think dancing with a tall woman gives them some kind of reflected stature. "'One time I was sitting on a chair at a dance. It was a very low chair, and my butt was just about on my heels. This small guy, a cute compact little fellow, came my way. He looked over the line of girls waiting and asked me to dance. When I saw him coming I turned my face the other way, hoping he wouldn't ask me, knowing all the while he was going to. And when he did, I didn't look at him when I stood up because I thought for sure his face was going to be on his feet. It wasn't. He just lit up, like he was delighted with the prize he had won. I was shocked. "'There's something about catching a tall woman, I don't know what those little dudes get out of it. I was young then and felt embarrassed. Now I think, You're just on a trip! I work hard not to be seductive with them, but I do have my moments!'" "How does Roland feel about being shorter than you?" I remember asking. Veronica answered with a smile in her voice, "'I think he's one of those dudes I was talking about that gets a kick out of catching a tall woman! Maybe that's one reason I'm much better about my height these days, because Roland likes it. Most of the time now I enjoy being tall. It first happened at a party where we danced all night. People were drinking a lot and running in and out of the bathroom. This little lady wobbled out of the stall, looked up at me and said,' My God, you're tall.' I looked her straight in the eye and said, 'No, Ma'am, I'm not tall. I'm Veronica.' It was on my thirtieth birthday. That's when I got over being tall.'" I stopped to relax a few moments, after noticing that John had drained his coffee cup again and was still listening with fascination. Then I continued with more that Veronica had said.

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"'A nice thing about my size happens on airplanes; I can reach the overhead baggage space. It's always these little old ladies that bother me. Of course they've brought everything with them. They stand there looking like camels. I wonder, Should I jump up out of this seat and help them? Of course I always do. But nobody ever says to me, 'Honey, you look too tiny to do that yourself. Here, let me do it for you.' They treat me like a pack horse, 'Oh look, she is human! they giggle. 'Of course if some guy wants to pick me up he might hoist my luggage. Nobody but Roland ever thinks I just might enjoy being helped.'" John was still listening intently, taking a note or two once in a while. So I continued. "Veronica said, 'Ever since I was a little girl people always expected more of me than of other kids my age. Just because I was big didn't mean I was ahead in other ways, too. Yet they always require me to perform like a child two or three years older. I had to be efficient in self defense. "'Even now, if I'm with a group outside, I'm the one people will pick out to ask directions. Being tall seems to mean you know everything. Just because I'm taller than others doesn't mean I know more. Tall people are not allowed to be insecure about anything." Then she said, "'I guess everybody is always looking for a parent, and because they all look up to me, literally, I mean, they think I'm their mother. As you know, I'm not especially the motherly type. But people who look at me don't realize that. "'Maybe that's one reason I close off to people. They always want me to mother them, and I'm not about to do it. Nobody ever mothered me, so why should I mother anyone else? I'm always the grown-up, never the child. Sometimes I want to be a child, too, but no one will ever let me.'" She's right, I remember thinking. Inside of that six foot body a little child is imprisoned. I'm the only person in the world who doesn't permit her to act strong, secure and in command at all

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times. I now recalled one of the last things she said, as she shifted to another vein. "'But I must admit there are compensations to being tall. It's great to be able to look over people's heads at a parade, and I can always see at the movies and in the theater. I hardly ever need a ladder. I can reach stuff on a high shelf that even Roland can't.'" She fell silent for a few moments. I wondered what she was thinking. I hazarded a guess. "'Is there any other reason you like being tall?'" "'Yes," she confessed sheepishly. "'People can't help but notice me. They gawk at me when I walk down the street. Mostly it makes me feel important. When I do get clothes that fit, they look better on me than on short women. I like that a lot. And I must admit it makes me feel good to look down on practically every woman I meet.'" John suddenly stood up and said with reverence, "You've told me a lot about Veronica. Thank you, dear Mary." He called me "dear," I exulted silently. "That means I'm dear to him. How about that?" He continued, "I'm going to keep on asking you for even more recollections. I think that's the only way to solve this particular murder." "You know I'll be delighted, John. Any time." "You gave me an idea about tall women and I want to find out if it works. I'm going to the squad room and check out the computer files on recent murder victims. I'll phone you when I get home." "I can hardly wait," I said as I led him to the door. "Good luck." "Don't forget, eight o'clock." He looked back and waved as he walked through the foyer.

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That evening at four minutes past eight by my watch, John called. With uncustomary excitement, he said, "Guess what, Mary! Two other women around six feet tall were murdered this year in New York City! We've got some men investigating to see if there were any other similarities. I'm waiting for further news. I'll call you in an hour or so." I had been intending to write up some case reports for the insurance companies, but I was so stimulated by John's phone call that all I could do was putter around the kitchen and wait for his next call. It seemed to take forever. He phoned again in two hours sounding a bit more dejected. "Mary," he said, "the news is not so good. We checked out on the computer the tall ladies murdered in the last few years. Only six were five feet eleven inches or over. All the killers were found. Four of the victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, one by a neighbor, and one by a gay lover." It's a good record for the homicide department, but not much help to us." "Oh, I'm so sorry my idea didn't work out," I said. "Don't feel bad, Mary. It was a great idea. Keep trying. That's how murders get solved. I'll be in touch tomorrow." Far from feeling bad, I felt highly pleased at the compliment. I walked around my apartment humming the old Cole Porter tune, "Night and Day." Night and day You are the one Only you 'neath the moon And under the sun. When I realized what I was doing I asked myself, "What's the matter with you, Mary Wells, singing a love song about a man almost young enough to be your son!" Then I laughed aloud and announced to my superego what John had said to me at the

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patisserie when I first told him I was older than he, "Well, nothing is purr-fect!" As I am always telling my patients, people can't help how they feel -- we are responsible only for our actions. But what a strange mixture of emotions had overcome me, on the one hand the horror of murder and on the other a deep longing for the detective who was trying to track down the killer.

Chapter Ten

The Memorial

The Vails had planned a memorial for Veronica on Monday at the Unitarian- Universalist Church on Central Park West and 76th Street at eleven o'clock. It was one of the rare occasions I considered important enough to cancel my patient hours to attend. As we had planned, John picked me up at ten o'clock sharp. Since it was a beautiful fall New York day we walked across the park and then down Central Park West to the church.

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Usually I don't care much about clothes. But out of respect for Veronica, I wore a black Chanel suit I had bought years ago when my husband and I gave a paper on Repressed Criminality in Psychoanalytic Patients at the American Psychoanalytic Association. With the suit I wore a white silk blouse with a carved black brooch I had brought back from Russia and low heeled black pumps. John's admiring glance confirmed that I looked as good as I thought. Even though I relished being with John, it was difficult to enjoy the lovely weather. Veronica's death had brought back the other terrible losses of my life. I looked at John's solemn face and realized he was feeling the same way. "Such a beautiful day for so sad an occasion," we both started to say at exactly the same moment. Then we looked at each other and laughed. As we approached the white stone building that reached skyward with spires that looked like God had been making sand castles, John squeezed my hand and said, "I have some pleasant memories about this place. My mother and I used to come here for the Unitarian services every Sunday when I was growing up." I squeezed his hand in return, thinking, How nice that John and his mother went to services together. And how lovely that we are doing the very same thing at the very same church! We walked inside the old building and immediately entered the brown paneled chapel that Roland had selected for Veronica's elegy. What eons of heartache the dark brown wooden pews padded with soft burgundy cushions must have supported! We sank into one near the back of the hall so we could observe the people who had come to the ceremony. I was surprised to find the auditorium was crammed with nearly 600 mourners, as I had been led to believe that Veronica had a small family and very few intimate friends. But she had been a very social person, and whether they were close to her or not, many people who knew her were interested enough to attend her

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eulogy. In addition, the memorial had been announced in the newspapers, and probably many curiosity seekers were present. On the first row of pews we could see Roland, Beryl and Emily, huddled together in a little cluster. Roland was dressed in a neat black suit with matching tie and handkerchief. Beryl in Veronica's honor was wearing a simple, well-cut silk dress of deep dark green and matching suede pumps. Her hair had been styled and I noticed she was wearing nail polish. She looked lovely. I thought Veronica would have been proud. I had never seen Emily before. She was a small, thin, sallow child in a navy blue sailor coat and hat, who looked younger than her five years. She didn't seem to have inherited Veronica's beauty, but then one never knows what changes the years will bring. Emily was leaning heavily into Roland's side, so that with his black suit and her navy blue coat, she seemed to have all but melted into him. Behind them Carlos sat with military bearing, impeccably dressed as always. Beside him was a short, handsome, blond man I presumed to be Andy. I was glad they seemed to be working it out together. As I looked further, a bevy of smartly dressed young men and women approached Carlos, threw their arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. All of them were crying, some noisily, some silently with tears running down their faces. I assumed they were Veronica's coworkers and fellow students from the Art Students' League. I saw John make a notation in his little black book and presumed he would check on the members of the group later. Several rows in front of us, an elderly grey haired woman of indiscriminate appearance sat stiffly next to an elegant, sophisticated looking couple. They seemed an unusual combination and I

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wondered who they were. I was to find out later in the week. The Irish doorman was a few rows behind us. I hardly recognized him in his neat brown suit. Some photographers were scattered throughout the auditorium. I recognized no one else in the room but Pete the policeman, whose belly was almost disguised by his conservative dark suit, and a row of policemen who were standing with him in the back of the auditorium. John saw me looking around at them and whispered in my ear, "They are watching for any suspicious stranger. Sometimes killers can't resist coming to the funeral of their victim." I studied the room as well as I could but no suspicious looking individual caught my eye. I said I would watch out for such a person during the rest of the ceremony. A guest book for mourners rested on a spindly table of battered brown wood at the back of the auditorium. John said the police were watching for any guest who did not sign. It was a long time since a man had accompanied me to a memorial, or indeed, to any public event. I was proud to be seen with a man, especially such a handsome one. The sorrowful occasion did not keep me from enjoying John's rich baritone voice. It rang out over everyone else's during the singing of Veronica's favorite hymn, "We Gather Together to Sing Out for Freedom", which opened the service. As the congregation sang, I looked about the auditorium to see if I could recognize anyone else. My eyes lit upon a man I hadn't noticed before. He was tall, dark, and thin, and there was a strange quality about him, perhaps a wild glint that one sees in the eyes of psychotics, that made me look at him more closely. In height, weight, and coloring, he resembled Carlos somewhat, but lacked his elegance. As I looked at him, the words of Beryl as she was describing Veronica's killer came to mind, "...a tall, thin man, with dark hair, at least it looked dark to me." I decided to point

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him out to John when the singing was over, but when I turned to do so a few moments later, the man was gone. Did he leave because he had seen me looking at him? I hoped the police had noticed him, and determined who he was. The Reverend Henry Bateson officiated at the service. He was a short, bulky middle-aged man with a baby face and prematurely white hair, a lock of which had tumbled down onto his forehead. A hush came over the room as he walked to the podium which was carved from brown wood, raised his silver-rimmed glasses and began to speak. "It is with anguish that we stand before the mystery of life and death today," he said. "We are sad for Veronica Vail, sad for ourselves, and sad for her grieving family. But we are here not only to mourn her untimely demise, but to celebrate a unique and distinguished life. As her minister and friend, I have known Veronica Vail for many years, and have long admired her beauty, her integrity, and her talent. Both sets of her grandparents were farmers in Sweden, and her parents came to the United States as teenagers. Leaving one's country is always fraught with difficulties, especially when one is no longer a child. As a result, they were never able to feel altogether at ease in their adopted land. Perhaps they communicated their discomfort to Veronica, and that is why, despite her poise and grace, she, too, never managed to feel completely at home in this great country. Nevertheless, she managed to overcome this obstacle, as she did many others in her all too brief life. She was born Veronika Larsson in Arkansas on January 5, 1954. Her family relocated to New York when she was a small child, and the move was just one more in a series of arduous adjustments she had to make. Veronica had a hard time finding herself, as the expression goes, and it took her longer than many of us to carve out her life's path. But she came through her trials

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magnificently. She was just starting to make her way as a young wife and mother, as well as in her chosen field as an artist when the fiend, an abomination of a human being, cut short the flowering of this lovely spirit. She was only beginning her life as a fulfilled adult. As a result of this insane attack we will never know the heights to which she might have risen. The killer has caused great anguish to all who care for her. He has cheated her and us of the fruits of her labor, as well as her gracious presence. "Veronica was driven by a pervasive sense of justice and an unswerving compassion for the downtrodden. She viewed herself as an American, a Humanist and a woman of culture. She was passionately involved in civil rights of all kinds. To her, equality and humanitarianism were one. Although she was an atheist, she defended the right of all to pray. She even supported the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, while favoring a counter-march of Jews and Christians, Blacks and Whites. Although Sweden took no part in World War Two, she insisted that we all regard ourselves as children of Holocaust victims. She pledged herself not to a self-interested defense of a particular people but a commitment to the right of everyone to be free and safe. "She never backed away from a fight, but it had to be a fight where there was a chance of winning. This last battle was too much even for this brave young woman. She faced death as she faced life, with courage and integrity. "Veronica was a good woman, a good wife, and a good mother. Now Emily and Beryl will have to grow up without her loving support, Roland will be lonely for the presence of his beautiful, gracious wife, and the rest of us must mourn a devoted and loyal friend. Let us vow to keep the memory of this lovely woman fresh in our hearts, so that in us, her family, her friends, and her colleagues, she will continue to live on forever."

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Reverend Bateson paused for a moment of silence. Then he solemnly asked if anyone present wished to speak of his or her memories or feelings for Veronica. I waited impatiently to find out who, if anyone, would speak, partly to learn more about Veronica and partly in the hope that the killer might be among the speakers and would give himself away. Carlos rose and briskly walked up the marble stairs to the podium. I noted again what an attractive man he was and the dignity with which he carried himself. He was wearing a grey silk Italian suit, a pearl grey tie, and simple silver cuff links. Surely Veronica must have approved without reservation of Carlos' sense of style. He looked briefly at a few notes he had made, then put them aside and began to speak so quietly I could barely make out what he said. "I loved Veronica Vail. She was my friend as well as my employee. I loved her high spirits, her fun-loving personality, her beauty, her loyalty, her conscientiousness, her reliability. Many a weekend after the rest of the staff had left, Veronica alone remained in the office. If she promised to do a piece of work, she would always keep her word, no matter how long it took her to finish. I wish I knew more people like her, both in and out of the office. As Carlos spoke, his voice grew louder and more self assured. "She was one of the most honest people I ever met," he continued. "If I wanted a genuine critique of a wall paper design, Veronica was the person I would ask. Others might tell the boss his work was wonderful, whether they meant it or not. But I could always depend on Veronica to give an honest evaluation. "She didn't talk much about herself, but when she did, you could be confident she was telling the truth. The rest of us human beings might embroider the facts once in a while to make a

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good impression on the listener. But not Veronica. I've always loved and respected her, but it is only as I speak about her today that I realize the depth of her magnanimity. Veronica Vail was a person truly larger than life. "There was a lot I admired about Veronica. But most of all I loved her wish to grow. She was never satisfied with herself as a person and as an artist, and worked hard to improve in both capacities as long as she lived. "It seems to me that she was always in....a state of becoming. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of her death is that she was not allowed to develop all she had it in her to be. As an artist I know how urgent it is for creative people to be able to finish our life's work. I would have liked to see her mature into a happier, more fulfilled person. But that is not to be. She was cut down much too soon. This unspeakably cruel assassin has taken away from us the joy of seeing Veronica Vail in full bloom. For that alone we will never forgive him. His voice grew soft again as he concluded speaking. "We will miss you terribly, Veronica. You were a delightful person. We will miss you as a friend, as a fellow worker, and as a person who was a joy to know." Carlos stopped speaking, wiped his eyes, and without looking to the right or the left, swiftly returned to his seat. If I had had any lingering doubts as to Carlos' innocence, his speech dispelled them forever. The next person to address the congregation was Minnie Brown. I had never seen Minnie before and thought I would look her over carefully to consider the possibility that she was the killer. John had already interrogated her and found that she had a convincing alibi; her cousin said she had been with him a the time of the murder. But he could have been lying. In a murder case one never knows. Minnie was far less attractive than Veronica had been, and I felt it was possible

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that pathological jealousy was the motive for her murder. Minnie had been the one person Veronica sometimes met outside the office and the parties given by the staff. They went together to art exhibits, the movies and lectures on art. The two friends were an unlikely combination, and acquaintances considered Minnie an odd choice of companion for Veronica. Minnie was a plain woman with a humble quality about her. The name of Brown aptly described her nondescript appearance. She looked many years older than Veronica, who had never spoken of Minnie to me except in her capacity as companion. I was surprised to hear her speak so eloquently of her friend. She began by saying, "What comes to me first when I think of Veronica Vail is that she was a courageous woman. I remember a number of instances when she put the welfare of others first and gave no thought to her own personal safety. One Saturday afternoon we were walking down the street together on our way to the movies when a little child darted in front of a car. Veronica dashed out into the street, snatched the child from the jaws of death, and brought him safely back to his mother. She did this while a crowd on the street, including me, just stood there paralyzed. When she handed the boy to his mother, everybody on the street clapped. "As Reverend Bateson has told us, Veronica had a passion for civil rights. Whether for gays, lesbians, blacks or whites, she had a compassion for equal rights for all people. Many of us here today feel the same way, but what was different about Veronica was that when she felt some right was being threatened, she would speak out, no matter where or with whom she was. I remember once we went to hear a famous senator talk on why he should be reelected. During his speech, he made a remark that 'those people' deserved consideration. Veronica stood up in front of the huge crowd. 'Excuse me, sir!' she said in a bold voice. 'Excuse me! There are no 'those people', there are only 'us people' in this country. A senator should know that. I will not vote for you again.'

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The senator was not reelected. I often wonder if Veronica's courage had anything to do with his losing."

Then Minnie looked directly at the family and said, "That was your wife, Roland.

That was your mother, children. You should all be proud of her." For some reason, Minnie's contact with the family moved me to tears. Minnie continued, "More personally, Veronica was my friend, perhaps my only friend. I am a lonely, single woman, and don't make friends very easily. Veronica understood this, perhaps because she was the same way. When I was shy about calling her, which I often was, she always called me. She made sure I had plans for Thanksgiving dinner, for my birthday and for Christmas Day. She gave me of her time and company and asked nothing in return." Minnie's voice caught in her throat as she continued, "I don't know what I will do without her. "She was also a fun person. We laughed together at the silliest things. Once she was angry with her analyst for going on vacation, and said she was going to picket the office with a sign saying, 'We won't take this lying down!' "You know the song, 'You Light Up My life?' Well, I can honestly say that Veronica lit up mine. The world will be a far emptier place without her."

Downcast and weary, Minnie slowly

walked down the marble steps and returned to her seat where she sat alone. I was touched by what Minnie had said and more admiring of Veronica's character than ever before. She had never told me of the incident when she rescued the child in the street nor the one where she spoke up to the senator. I understood as I never had before that the analyst doesn't always get the whole story from a patient. I also knew that I had been unkind to suspect that Veronica had selected Minnie as a friend only because she was no competition. The relationship had much more depth than I had given Veronica credit for.

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I checked the auditorium for the dark stranger again. He still was not to be seen. Beryl strode to the platform next. She looked directly at the audience as she said, "Veronica was my stepmother. We didn't always get along as well as we should. But now that she is gone, I wish I had tried to know her better. I think it is my loss that I didn't. I will regret it as long as I live. If I had known she was going to be killed, I would have behaved very differently. "She was a beautiful, elegant woman, who possessed a style of her own that no other woman I've ever seen could compare to. She tried to teach me, but I wouldn't learn from her. Maybe now that she is gone, I will remember her lessons, and if I'm lucky some day I may even get to be a little like her.... "In her own way she was a very generous woman. She didn't care much about sports, but she knew I loved hockey. She came to some of my games and tried her best to discuss them with me, even though I know they bored her to tears. "She had bursts of generosity with other people, too. One time our maid Millie had a fire in her apartment and lost all her wardrobe. Veronica gave Millie some of her own clothes and enough money to buy some more." She looked through the audience, found Millie who was weeping in her seat, said, 'Hi, Millie!' and waved to her. Then she continued, "Carlos spoke of Veronica's honesty. I would like to say something about that, too. Her sincerity extended to more than her words. She never pretended to feelings she didn't have. For instance, once I made a special dinner, a chicken casserole. I asked her, 'Did you like the dinner, Veronica?' She answered, 'No, Beryl, actually it was terrible.' It made me feel bad at the time, but then when she did say she liked something, I could always trust her to tell the truth.

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I pray that I will grow up to be as honest and truthful as my stepmother." She paused for a moment to swallow. "Goodbye, Veronica," Beryl continued with a break in her voice, and then said softly, "I will always miss you. I really loved you, you know, even though I never told you about it." Then she started to sob. Roland ran up to the dais two steps at a time, held Beryl and kissed her, and then helped her to her seat. After that he returned to the platform. He stood there speechlessly for a few moments, his cheek twitching. He took off his glasses, cleaned them with the pocket handkerchief that matched his striped tie and then put them back on again. Then he cleared his throat and began to speak. "What can a man say when he loses the person dearest to him in the whole world? There are no words to describe the greatest loss a man can know. Veronica was my wife, my love, my friend, my companion in fun and sorrow. She is irreplaceable in my life and the life of my children. We will miss her dearly." Somehow Roland possessed a dignity I had never seen in him before. His grief seemed all the more noble for the constraint with which he controlled it. He smiled sadly and said, "I could bear her loss better if she were here to see me through it." A ripple of laughter spread through the audience. It was a relief to have this mild note of humor interjected into so sorrowful an occasion. Then Roland looked out into the audience and formally concluded, "I thank all of our friends and associates who have come here today to share our sorrow. Veronica didn't always feel people liked her. I know she would be happy that so many of you cared enough about her to come and say good-bye."

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There were no mannerisms, no compulsions, no distractions, as Roland pulled himself up to his full height and solemnly began to return to his seat. As he walked, Emily sharply cried out, "Mommy, Mommy, I want my Mommy! What happened to my mommy?" A great gasp rose up from the audience and seemed to fill the auditorium until it ascended all the way to the cathedral ceiling. It was as if the combined sadness of all the mourners was infinitely greater than the loss suffered by each person alone, as if our sorrow was so enormous that even the large auditorium was not great enough to contain it. Unlike most memorials I have attended, the grievers filed out of the assembly hall lost in their own private worlds. John and I joined them, talking to no one. What we had experienced was too overwhelming to alleviate our sorrow by comforting each other. Despite my grief, as we walked up the aisle I searched again for the tall, dark man I had noticed during the service. He was nowhere to be seen.

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Chapter Eleven

The Shopping Expedition

We were walking back up Central Park West on the park side of Fifth Avenue enjoying the changing colors of the leaves when John casually asked me, "Mary, where do you get your clothes?" I looked up at him in surprise and asked, "Why?" "No particular reason. I was just curious," he responded in the non-committal tones of a good cop. "Do you know the story about the Boston ladies' hats?" I asked. "Unh unh," he replied. "When they were asked where they got their hats they answered, 'We don't get our hats, we have our hats!' I'm afraid I'm like them in that I don't get my clothes, I have my clothes." John laughed. I wasn't sure it was funny. "I get the feeling you are trying to tell me something, John. Am I right?" He laughed some more, a bit uncomfortably this time. I was getting a little peeved. "Come on, John. Don't hold out on me. Are you trying to say

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that my taste in clothes could be improved upon? He looked self-conscious and hedged a bit. "You look very nice today." "Meaning, of course, that the way I look on other days leaves much to be desired," I said, more than a bit defensively. John pulled himself together and went for the jugular. "You said it, I didn't," he replied firmly. "So answer my question. Where do you get your clothes? Or at least where did you get them before you were a Bostonian lady?" "I pick them up wherever I happen to be whenever I happen to need something," I admitted. John whirled around, grabbed my arm hard, and signaled a taxi. "Where are we going?" I asked. "To Bergdorf's," he answered. "Why Bergdorf's?" "That's where I used to go shopping with my mother." I was too embarrassed to admit that I had never been there before. The reputation of the store intimidates me. The salesladies in the finer department stores always make me feel I have forgotten to take a bath. When forced to go into one for reasons of expediency, I want to announce, "I am a doctor and make ten times the salary you do, so you needn't be so supercilious!" That would put them in their places! But of course I never do. Like Veronica, for very different reasons, rather than put up with their condescension I prefer to grab something off the rack when nobody is looking. When we got to Bergdorf's John steered me to the fourth floor and quickly went through a

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rack of sophisticated suits hanging on the wall. Before I could check them out, he had picked out two, a pale yellow and a turquoise. "You have such a good figure," he said, as he thrust them at me. "You shouldn't hide it in those dark colors and matronly clothes you wear. And Mary," he added, "trust me. Those cowboy boots are out!" Then he sailed through a dress rack across the room and before I knew it had selected a beautiful rose colored wool and a stunning low cut white cocktail gown. He came over and shoved them in my arms, too. "Here, go try these on," he ordered. "Why do I need a cocktail dress?" I grumbled. "Because I'm going to take you dancing," he said. Secretly pleased, I protested further that I didn't need all that stuff. John persisted. So what could I do but try them all on? I got the shock of my life in the fitting room. One after another I tried on the dresses and suits and was amazed to find that each one fit me perfectly and looked exquisite. Somehow John knew my body well enough to chose an impeccable quartet of clothing for me, ideal in size, fit, color and style. None of them required the slightest degree of alteration. I stared at myself in the triple mirrors and hardly recognized myself. I looked like a woman out of the society pages rather than a dowdy academic. Even I could see that I had never looked so good in my life. I thought, Veronica should see me now! When I modeled the clothing for him, John literally glowed. I was thrilled to see his eyes light up with adoration and delight. But it was more than mere pleasure, I soon realized. Open desire was written all over his face. "That's how I want you to dress," he said.

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First I thought, You have your nerve, John! How I dress is my business! Do I tell you what to wear? But soon I crumbled inside and mused, Thank you, dear John, for caring what I wear. Nobody ever has before. Not my mother, not my father, not my husband. I see what Veronica meant when she said I didn't have 'style'. You do, John, and you have shown me what it is like. Won't my patients and colleagues be surprised when they see me! They'll wonder what happened to me. And John.....I think I'm falling in love with you.... I said, "Thank you, John, for your help. I'm going to make a bonfire and burn all my old stuff. But where did you learn to chose perfect clothing for another human being, to say nothing of a person of the opposite sex?" "Remember we were talking about empathy?" he answered. "The main quality that sadistic murderers don't have? I guess I'm the opposite of a killer, because I think I know what it feels like to be you." How lovely, I marveled, that he can pick far nicer clothing for me than I can select myself! It's as if I've found a part of me in him that has always been missing. I didn't want to admit it to John, but I had heard many times from many people about my lack of taste. Or am I being too kind to myself? I guess it would be nearer correct to say, not that I have no taste, but that I have bad taste! But nobody had ever tried to help me develop it. John is right, empathy is the measure of a person. And John is the most sensitive, compassionate, feeling human being I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. I'm sorry you had to die, Veronica dear. But for me John is the silver lining of the terrible cloud of your death.

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Chapter Twelve

A Voice from the Grave

Sometimes when clouds look their blackest, a silver lining is about to peek through. Thus it was when I received a phone call from Roland early the next morning before I started work. "You'll never guess what happened, Dr. Vail," he said, his voice cracking at the top with excitement. "I was going through Veronica's clothing to see what I could give to the Salvation Army. In the back of her lingerie drawer - you know, she loved beautiful French lingerie- -" He stopped to choke back the tears and then went on. "In the very back of the drawer behind a hill of bikini underpants I found a dream she had written down. It is dated 9 A.M., Sunday, May 22, the day she was killed.. May I bring it over to you right away?" "Please do, Roland," I said. A feeling of exhilaration rushed from my skull to my toes. "It

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may tell us what was going on in her mind before she was killed. But I'm expecting my first patient soon and won't be able to read it until later." "That's okay," he said. "I just want to get it to you before I go to work." Shortly before my patient arrived Roland stopped by, clutching the dream neatly encased in a manilla envelope marked "Dr. Mary Wells." We hugged and held each other close for a few moments. Then, remembering the last time he appeared in my office when he had accompanied Veronica, we shed a few tears. I don't know if I was now seeing him through Carlos' eyes but he did indeed seem sweet and rather endearing. "It's lucky for the Vails that we have you," he said. His distorted smile broke my heart. "I wish I could look at the dream right away," I said. "But I'll read it as soon as I can, Roland, and will give you a call then." Gratitude moistened his eyes. "Thanks, Dr. Vail," he said, just as the doorbell rang. It was 8 o'clock when I received Veronica's dream. From then on I had a solid block of patient hours straight through the morning until lunch hour at one. As on the day I had received the news of Veronica's death, I felt sorry for the patients I was seeing. Most of my attention was centered on Veronica's dream, wondering what it could be about and whether it would contain any clues to her death. But I worked as best I could, and no patient complained (no more than usual, anyway). The hours dragged by. Freud spoke of Analysis Terminable and Interminable. Well, it wasn't what Freud had in mind when he wrote that article but the morning was the most "interminable" of my extensive analytic career. Eventually, as always, the clock reached one. Immediately after the last patient left, I raced

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to my brown leather chair and with shaking fingers opened Roland's envelope. I pulled out a piece of pale blue letter paper with a delicate lacy border and the words "A Note from Veronica" embossed at the top. The notepaper was lovely and feminine and a faint odor of Chloe perfume escaped as I unfolded it. I smiled through my sadness. How like Veronica, I thought. Everything about her was stamped with her own unique style. The paper seemed a bit the worse for wear, as if she had creased and uncreased it many times before deciding to store it in her drawer. It read: 9 A.M., Sunday, May 22 The Dream of the Loving Bum I was running through the mist in a dank, murky landscape. My feet felt heavy and it was hard to lift them, as if they were encased in cement. The scene was shrouded in darkness and I could barely see. It had the weird, scary atmosphere of my nightmares. But in this dream, unlike the others, I was not running away from danger. I was running towards something or somebody rather than trying to escape. I ran and ran, but couldn't get any closer to where I was trying to go. It seems I ran forever. Suddenly I saw who it was I was trying to reach. It was the man who waits for me on the street corner everyday. Now my feet felt like they had wings. I flew over to him with outstretched arms. He held his out to me, too, and tenderly pulled me to his chest. He held me close and gently stroked my hair away from my forehead. It felt wonderful and I was happier than I have ever been in my whole life. Suddenly I looked up at him in shock. The man had my father's face. I woke up terrified. ----------------

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At the bottom of the paper Veronica had scrawled, "I must tell this to Dr. Wells." "Oh Veronica, Veronica, what have you done?" I cried out in a burst of anguish. "All the years of your analysis I waited for this dream. And now it comes too late to save you. If only you had brought the dream to me before you acted it out! You might still be alive today!" I threw myself on the patients' couch and cried as I hadn't since the death of my husband. When I was able to speak without sobbing, I called John at the squad room. His low, resonant voice answered, "Hello. Nineteenth precinct, Detective Franklin speaking." "John, this is Mary. I'm in my office. I may have some important information for you. Roland found a dream of Veronica's this morning which she wrote the day she was murdered. He brought it here before he went to work. It may well tell us who the killer is." John replied in an urgent voice, "Stay right there, Mary. I'll be right over." He arrived within ten minutes. I handed him the dream in silence. He read it carefully. Then he turned to me and solemnly said, "Yes, Mary, Veronica from the grave may have given us the all-important clue to her murderer. He might well be the man on the street corner who waited for her every day and shouted obscene remarks. The man in the dream who resembled her father." My eyes widened and I looked up at him in surprise. "John," I said, "I didn't know you understand dreams so well. Where did you learn to do that?" "Oh, didn't I tell you?" he casually responded. "My mother was a psychoanalyst." Then he smiled, not his usual incandescent smile, but an impish grin. "You devil," I said. "You know very well you never told me!" He paused for a moment until I could absorb the shock and then continued. "Veronica ran

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toward the man in the dream. Since every dream is a wish, I think it indicated what she wanted to do in real life. In this case, her dream was a prediction." But I had stopped listening to him. "No, John Franklin, you didn't tell me your mother was a psychoanalyst!" I declared with more than a trace of sarcasm in my voice." Then I forgave him and said, "John, you are wonderful. Is there anything you don't know? Veronica's father was the love of her life and she missed him hopelessly. If the man on the street corner unconsciously reminded her of her father, it makes sense that she wanted to run toward him. It was the only way for her to get her father back. Instead it put her in the grave. "We know she was a self-destructive person at times. Perhaps that was her unconscious wish, to join her father in the grave. We'll never know for sure. If only she had lived long enough to discuss it with me first. She might still be alive today!" John gave me a compassionate look and paused for a few moments. Then understanding my anguish he tried to comfort me. "Don't worry, Mary. I promise you we'll catch the killer. I'll call Pete right away and put out a citywide search for the man." I responded in a dismal tone. ""Oh, John, in a city of eight million people how can we possibly find a man we have never seen and know nothing about? We don't even know what he looks like." He stared at me in surprise and asked, "You, Mary? Giving up the fight? Now, when we've come so far? I don't believe it!" It was as though John looked deep inside me. A smile of understanding that hit me where I lived passed between us and warmed me from the inside out. It was only a look, but sometimes a look can transform the world. I knew that something between us had changed and would never be

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the same again. "Would you like a quick cup of coffee, John?" I said. "I have ten minutes before my next patient arrives." He said, "Sure. I want to check out what kind of coffee-brewer you are. It may turn out to be a very significant skill in my life." I laughed and said, "I'm not so sure I make good coffee." His radiant smile told me all I needed to know.

Chapter Thirteen

John's Apartment

John called a few hours before the lineup was scheduled and said, "It's Saturday morning, Mary. How about if I pick you up and we have lunch at the patisserie before we go to headquarters?" "Oh, John, that would be lovely," I answered. "I can't think of anything I'd like better than a whole morning together." "Great," he said enthusiastically. "I'll be walking up from the station house. Would you mind stopping off at my apartment with me for a moment? It's on the way between headquarters

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and the patisserie. I have to stop home to pick up a report on our progress with Veronica's case that I filled out last night for the Chief of Detectives." "I don't mind at all," I answered. "I didn't know we lived so close together. I'd like to see where you live." John choked up a bit as he answered, "There really isn't much to see. I don't think you'll like it very much." Truer words were never spoken. John lived in a railroad flat close to the river on East 87th Street. After huffing and puffing my way up the five flights of stairs, I blinked when we passed through the warped, scratched door. I am not a snob about living quarters but I do like them to be sunny and cheerful. This apartment felt like I was entering a closet. Four tiny rooms were joined together like the cars of a train and weren't much wider. Before you had time to turn around you were out the back door. Paint drooped from the walls like the ears of a spaniel. His bathtub fought for space with the kitchen set, and the toilet out in the hall presumably was shared with several other tenants. I could truly say the furniture was worthy of the apartment. The few essential pieces like his wobbly-looking bed and battered bureau looked like vintage Salvation Army. Despite its dreary appearance, I could see that the apartment was spotless. Even the worn checkerboard linoleum had recently been scrubbed and the typical casement windows of the slums were free of the ubiquitous New York soot. He looked for my reaction, wearing the expression of a child caught with his fingers in the cookie jar. "Well, Mary, what do you think? I'm sure you find it very different from your own home." I felt he deserved an honest answer. "John," I said after I finished huffing and puffing. "It's

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none of my business, but you asked me and I have to tell you the truth." He looked at me with a curious expression on his face, and motioned for me to sit down on one of the two scarred wooden chairs at the Formica topped table. "You asked me what I think," I forged ahead. "Well, I think this place is dreadful! You are always nicely dressed and you love what euphemistically are called the finer things of life. Why doesn't your taste doesn't show up in your home? How can you live in such dreary surroundings?" He swallowed. "I know the apartment is not the greatest, but I didn't think about that when I asked you to come here with me. I work long hours and haven't much time to socialize. Also I haven't the energy or the inclination to try to make friends. You are the first person I've ever trusted enough to invite up here. Although maybe I unconsciously knew what I was doing. I guess I want you to accept me at my worst, as a depressed son of a gun who drowns his sorrows in work day and night and has no time for the niceties of living." "Oh John," I answered, "That's not fair! It's simply not true that I don't accept you. I welcome who you are and admire you with all my heart. It's just that I want you to have the best of everything in life. This apartment, if you can call it that, isn't worthy of a man of your sensibilities." "Thank you, Mary. I know you mean that," he answered, looking somewhat mollified. "When my divorce was granted, a policeman in my precinct was getting married and he turned this place over to me, furniture and all. I was so despondent at the time that it seemed easier to take the apartment than to look for another. I'm not a rich man, Mary. Detective work is not the best paid profession in the world and much of what I make goes to the children. The rent is so low and I'm home so little now that I hate to give it up."

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I hadn't known that detectives were paid so little. "That's awful, John," I said, with indignation, "and it's terribly unfair. You people are genuine heroes and deserve to earn as much as the highest paid professionals." After thinking about it a moment I added, "Your mother was a famous psychoanalyst, at least as well known as I. She should have been able to leave you some money." "As a matter of fact she did, although New York living is so expensive it wasn't as much as one would think. You know what it costs to live in a decent apartment in New York, Mary. The rent is probably the highest in the world." I nodded. "Yes, I have the same problem your mother did. Despite the high fees most of my patients pay it takes almost all the money I earn to live the way I like to in this city. Fortunately, for many years there were two of us with an income, so I'm not badly off at all. "Don't answer this if you don't want to, John," I continued, "but I'm curious about what you did with the money your mother left you. From what I earn I imagine you inherited enough to buy a decent coop." "No, Mary, I don't mind your question at all. I told you there isn't anything about me I wouldn't tell you. There would have been enough money for a hefty down payment on a coop, but I gave it all to Brenda to keep in trust for the children's education." I was appalled at myself for having reprimanded this honorable man who was doing the best he could to carry out his responsibilities as father and policeman, even as he was recovering from his double-pronged mourning period. I looked intently at John. There was something faintly familiar about the lines of his face, as if we had known each other in some distant past. Suddenly I was flooded with sorrow. There

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was a quality about him that reminded me of my dead son, Alan. Why not? I thought. John is only a few years older than Alan would have been if he were alive. Both were young, vital, strong and handsome. Both were sensitive, compassionate, and caring. And I love them both, I hesitantly admitted to myself for the first time. Then I worried whether, in criticizing his choice of apartment, I was treating John like a son. "I'm afraid doctors don't live in the real world," I said by way of apology. "I've been spoiled by having an analyst's income for so many years. I believe yours should be equal. Your work requires as much skill as mine, and perhaps is even more important. Without your professional expertise none of the rest of us could function at all. You deserve much better treatment from the largest police force in the nation. "John, I'm saying this because I care about you. You need somebody to work with you, somebody to care about you, somebody to help you make a better life for yourself. It's not good for you to lead such a lonely and deprived existence. I guess I'm saying that what you need is a good wife!" John's enchanting smile lit up his face from ear to ear as he said, "Good idea, Mary. I couldn't agree with you more. Are there any volunteers?" I smiled and didn't answer, because I was struggling with myself about whether to continue. How would he react if I told him what I was thinking? Would he be through with me forever? Would I be so hurt I wouldn't be able to function? Might I impetuously be leaping into something I would live to rue? Then the thought whirled through my mind that if I were to die today, it is not what I did that I would regret, but those things I wanted to do and didn't, an unuttered word, an unwritten letter, an unconsummated love affair. I knew I had to tell him my

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thoughts now or I would never forgive myself. I held my breath and lunged in. "John, I had an interesting dream last night. I think it was partly triggered by Veronica's last nightmare." He looked puzzled. "What do you mean? What was the dream?" "I dreamed I was snuggling up to a man in bed. We didn't have any clothes on. I didn't know who he was at first, only that it felt nice and warm and cozy. It also felt familiar, as if I'd been there many times before. I thought in my sleep, 'It must be Edward come back to earth.' Then I looked closely at the man's face and John -- I saw it was you." I looked to see his reaction. Would he say, "My, this woman is forward. I'm all for Women's Lib but she is carrying things a bit too far? Or might he say, "What is this old biddie doing having a sexual dream about a young guy like me?" "What a lovely dream, Mary," he said, getting up and taking my hand. There were tears in his eyes. Then he added, "Let's make your dream come true."

Chapter Fourteen

The Lucky Break

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Like a stone rolling down a hill, once things start moving they pick up speed as they whirl. The next morning before eight o'clock John called. "I hope I didn't wake you." A note of pleasure in his voice broke through his customary restraint. "But I thought better early than interrupting a patient." "My friends are always concerned about when to call me," I said. "That's the life of an analyst. But I'm always up by seven. And I would welcome hearing from you at any hour." "Thanks, Mary." His voice was fairly bursting with delight. I wondered what possibly could have caused so drastic a change in his mood. Was he that happy about our relationship? Somehow, it did not seem very likely. Maybe he has found the killer, I thought with joy. "I really appreciate your availability for me, Mary." Then he paused dramatically and said, "We may be getting somewhere. I have a lead as to who the 'loving bum' in Veronica's dream might be." "How wonderful, John!" I felt an excitement churning in the pit of my stomach that must have matched John's. "Tell me more." "Last night after I left you, I stopped by the squad room to see if anything new had come up. It was a stroke of luck, because a woman named Lotty Lobell had just dropped in with some information about a person she thought might be the killer." He paused, trying to contain his exhilaration. I held my breath. "Lotty told me she lives next door to the Vails. She said she saw a man run away from Veronica's apartment building on the night of the murder." John apparently sensed my enthusiasm and felt it necessary to warn me, "But don't get too thrilled about this, Mary dear. The woman may

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be a crackpot." "Did she say what he looked like?" "Yes," John went on slowly. "She said he was a tall man with black hair, who was carrying a rather large painting." "I hope it wasn't Carlos," I said, suddenly worried. "I don't think so," John replied thoughtfully. "Lotty said she has seen the man before, that he often hung around the street corner." I realized John was more enthusiastic than he wished to let on. "I'll bet that's the man in her dream, the one who waited for Veronica every night until she came home and hurled obscenities at her!" I suddenly cried out. "Maybe yes, maybe no," John was showing remarkable self control. "That's what we have to find out. Lotty lives directly next door to the Vails at 1038 Park. She's the housekeeper there to a family named Barnes. Can you interview her with me today at one o'clock?" "Of course. There is nothing I want to do more. I'll meet you in front of 1038 Park Avenue at 1:05." Again John and I arrived at practically the same moment. I thought, How lovely that he is always there when he says he'll be! I, too, am always on time. My patients frequently repeat the old cliché that they set the clock by me. I am not one of those doctors who keep people waiting until I get around to seeing them; I think that is rude and inconsiderate. I consider the patient's time as valuable as my own. The fact that very few of the younger generation share my prompt habits endeared this gentle policeman to me even further. John flashed his gold shield at the Puerto Rican doorman and we entered the stately

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building, which was far more imposing with its intricately carved paneling, Louis XIV furnishings, and fine English paintings than the one that housed the Vails. We took the elevator to the third floor. Lotty was waiting for us at the door to the apartment. She appeared in her late sixties. She was still a rather pretty woman although a bit wrinkled, with hair styled in corrugated waves of steel-grey. Dressed in a neat button-down cotton dress and sensible black low heeled shoes which supported her swollen ankles, she seemed a nice enough lady of Scottish descent, who was no more a crackpot than the rest of us. She led us through the apartment to her nine by twelve foot maid's room. She offered me a straight oak chair, the only one in the room, as she and John sat on the narrow bed. She began to talk immediately without any prompting from him. "When I am tidying up the parlor, I like to look out the windows and down at the street," she said, her voice rising several pitches as she spoke. "It makes me feel good to see the lovely flowers and big buildings. I never thought I'd be living on Park Avenue," she confessed with a giggle. "Anyways," she continued, "I seen this man hanging around the corner and wonder what he's doing there. This part of the city don't like bums to beg here. But the man leans up against the telephone pole smoking a cigarette, and watching the crowd go by. I thought, Don't he get bored standing there so long?" "When did you generally see him, Lotty?" John asked. "In the late afternoon. I know because I don't get to the dust and vacuum the parlor until I'm finished everywhere else. I wait until last because Missus likes it to be spruced up with flowers and

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all when Mr. Barnes comes home for dinner. "Once I was late getting the flowers and I seen the man standing there when the murdered lady was coming the other way. I remembered her because she was so beautiful and tall. I never seen anybody walk like that in my life, like she was the Queen of England or something. I didn't know her name until I seen her picture in the paper. It scared the living daylights out of me. You don't expect that kind of thing to happen to anyone that close." "Did you hear him say anything to her?" John asked. "Yes, sir, as a matter of fact I did. He made a filthy remark. It would make a lady heave to say it." She stopped speaking and blushed to the roots of her grey marcelled hair. "You can tell us, Lotty," I said. "We know it was his comment, not yours. It is important that we know exactly what he said." She hesitated and her clenched face reflected the struggle going on inside her. We waited silently until, eyes averted, she stammered, "He yelled, 'You're a nice lady. You don't fuck.'" She shook her head vehemently and grimaced. "And did Veronica answer?" John asked. "Yes, sir, she did." "What did she say?" "She said, 'Get lost!'" "Can you tell us what he looked like?" John asked. "Yes, sir. He was a tall, thin, white man, maybe in his thirties. He had black hair that was long and sort of grungy. His eyes crumpled up when he yelled at her. I remember thinking he had nice features and would be handsome if he were cleaned up a bit. He scared the bejeesus out of me,

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but he didn't seem to bother her. I wouldn't have had the gall to answer him back the way she did." "Tell us about the man you saw running out of the Vail's building the night of the murder," John said. "I was sprucing up the living room. The Barnes had a few people in for dinner and I always want to put everything in order before I go to sleep. Like I told you, I sometimes look out the living room windows. When I'm bushed it helps me loosen up before going to bed. I like to look at the windows up and down the street and watch the classy cars speeding by. And," she said, with reddened face, "I guess I like to keep an eye on what is going on around here. That night I happened to stick my head out the window and look down below. I saw the man running out of the Vail's building next door. He was carrying a large painting under his arm. I thought it was a barmy thing for a looney like him to be carting." John promptly rose and walked into the living room. I followed closely behind. He opened one of the majestic windows, stuck his head out and looked down at the street below. He nodded his head. Sure enough, he was able to make out people entering and exiting from the building. "Are you sure it was the same man? It can get pretty dark at eleven o'clock," John said, on returning to Lotty's room. "Yes, sir. He was the man from the street corner. The street light was shining right down on him. I could tell because of his dark hair and skinny bones, and something about the way he held himself -- kind of scrunched up like a...a homeless bairn." "Do you remember what he wore any of the times you saw him?" "No, but I would say he was always scruffy looking, like he needed a bath and clean

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clothes. He looked like he could have used a good scrubbing from head to toe." "Why didn't you come to the police right away?" John asked. Lotty thought for a moment and then bit her lips. "I guess I should have. But like I said, you just don't think the folks around you are killers. I thought I seen too many TV shows. I told myself he mustn't be the murderer because they don't hang around street corners. And I was scared stiff to report him if he wasn't the one who done it. I'd hate to do that to some boy who turned out to be innocent of any crime but being poor." John looked at me and asked, "Is there anything you'd like to ask Lotty, Dr. Vail?" "No, thank you, John," I replied, getting up. "I think you've covered everything important." John turned to her and said, "Thank you, Lotty. You've been very helpful." As he stood up, he added, "If we find the man, would you be willing to identify him in a line-up?" "Must I, sir?" Lotty asked, her nose quivering as she talked. No doubt she had in mind the line-ups in detective shows she had seen on TV. "Yes," John answered. "Line-ups are very important in identifying a criminal. In my opinion they are worth a thousand photos. It is a means of achieving justice and fairness for which there is no real substitute. It is also useful in determining whether the state is prosecuting the wrong person. "As you know from television, the suspect will be placed in a group of similar people and you will be asked to select the one you saw. If you think he is not the right person, we will drop the charges immediately. But if you do pick him out, we will take the suspect to trial." She hesitated and began to chew her nails. "I don't know, sir. That's a real responsibility." Her flickering eyes told us that she continued to vacillate between yes and no. She looked up and

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saw John and me leaning forward on the edge of our seats as we waited for her answer. "All right," she said suddenly. "I'll do it, if you think it matters so much." Then she added, "I hope I can do it right." "I'm sure you can," I reassured her as we shook hands good-bye.

"Do you think Lotty will really mind being the witness in a lineup, John?" I asked on our way out. "Nah, no way," he answered. "Most people love being interviewed. It breaks up the monotony of the day." That night John called to inform me that his colleague, Pete, had brought in a suspect who fit Lotty's description, as well as Beryl's, of the man they had seen leaving the Vail apartment house the night of Veronica's murder. The suspect's name was George Plummer. According to John, he was a relatively young man, tall and thin, with dark hair. He had not been difficult to find. Apparently the old adage that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime was true in this case. For the man was apprehended on the street corner he habitually occupied. Objecting all the way, Plummer was practically dragged to the squad room by Pete and shoved into the plastic chair by John's green metal desk. He kept muttering, "I din't do nuttin'," as the detective interrogated him. He was unemployed, homeless, and had no next of kin, he conceded with a growl, and continued noisily to protest his innocence of whatever the charge was supposed to be. "I was jes walkin' around Sunday night," he maintained. "I never heard of the dame." Since

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he had no alibi, a lineup was scheduled for the next morning. The following day was Saturday and since I do not see patients on the weekend, I planned to attend the lineup. I spent Friday evening pacing up and down my apartment like a race walker in a competition. Had the suspicious-looking man I saw at the Memorial been picked up by the police? Would he be one of the men in the line-up? I hoped so. For me the establishment of his guilt would be a satisfactory conclusion to the investigation. But I prayed that whatever took place at the line-up would reveal the killer of Veronica Vail.

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Chapter Fifteen

The Lineup

On Saturday morning John came by to escort me to the police station. I wore my new turquoise suit, and was amply repaid for the time and trouble I'd taken in dressing by the adoring look in his eyes. John wore a soft black jacket and trousers with a small, almost unnoticeable hounds tooth check. We walked down Park Avenue hand in hand, enjoying the admiring glances cast our way. I enjoyed it especially because it had been many a year since I had observed such approving glances in my direction. The nineteenth precinct lies in an unmarked granite building with doors and trimming painted an enamel blue, giving it a more cheerful appearance than one would expect. We walked through cement grey double doors to the entry room, brightened by two large white globes hanging from the ceiling. Two marble benches under the front windows also were painted in the cheerful blue of the doors. Someone in the precinct obviously was trying to make the police station seem less depressing.

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An ugly young man with a pockmarked skin waiting to report an accident sat fidgeting on one bench, and two anxious grey haired women on the second bench also seemed to be waiting for something, perhaps a son or grandson being interrogated. We walked past two metal desks, one manned by a retired cop wearing a white tee shirt with NYPD printed on it, and the other by a young, uniformed Hispanic woman. A swinging door separated the squad room from a small reception waiting room, where Lotty Lobell sat nervously twisting a handkerchief. John greeted her with a businesslike handshake. Wearing his characteristic solemn look, he led us to a small three- by-seven foot room lined with cinder blocks. Besides John, Lotty, and me stood Pete, the hefty police officer who had apprehended the suspect. In addition, the youthful lawyer appointed for the defense crowded into the tiny space. "He is permitted to observe the proceedings but not allowed any say in the recognition," John said. With so many good sized people packed into the three-by-seven foot span, I found it hard to take a deep breath without poking my elbow into Pete's big belly. It reminded me of the craze of my youth, when as many college students as possible stuffed themselves into a telephone booth. John said to Lotty, "I am going to show you five people. You will see them through a one-way glass window. They cannot see you. Look at them carefully and then I will ask you two questions. Do you recognize anyone inside? Where do you recognize them from? That is all I will say. Do you understand?" Lotty nodded, her rapidly shifting eyes making her seem even more jittery than the day

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before. The lights were dimmed, the door shut. A policeman then pulled a screen up over a small window about one yard by a foot. The window revealed five men who appeared in their early-tolate thirties in an interview room on the other side of the glass. My spirits sank when I saw that none of the "suspects" were the man I had observed at the Memorial. "Oh dear, now Carlos is back in the picture. Or else we will never find Veronica's murderer," I thought gloomily, as I turned my attention to the men. They were sitting on a scuffed brown bench with metal legs. On the right end was a man with dark, wavy hair and a goatee. He had a pleasant expression on his face, and seemed interested in the proceedings. Next to him sat a thinner man with a droopy mustache and a scowl. In the center was a tall, black haired man with a slender physique, who looked like he had slept in his clothing for a week. To his left sat an even taller man with large muscles and a flattened nose. I didn't like his looks, and thought he must have been a prize fighter. And on the far left a man with short legs and wild looking hair seemed to be puffing for breath. Most of the men stared straight ahead and paid no attention to each other. "That's 'im! That's 'im! The one in the middle," Lotty shrieked, not waiting for the Lieutenant to question her. "I know 'im! I know 'im! The one in the dirty clothes! That's the man who hangs around the street corner. I saw him flirting with Veronica that afternoon, and running out of her building the night of the murder. I'd know 'im anywhere. See? He has black hair and is tall and skinny and stooped over." Lotty's normally impassive features were animated with pleasure at her achievement. "Very good, Lotty," John said. "Now the policeman is going to pull down the window shade again and the men will take different positions. See if you recognize anyone again."

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This time the fellow with the wavy hair and the goatee was in the center, surrounded by the man with the droopy mustache on one side and the tall prize fighter type on the other. Bordering them on the extreme right sat the heavy man who was having trouble breathing, and on the far left the tall, thin man with the stooped over posture. "That's 'im again, the one on the left end," Lotty screeched. She stood up straight and seemed to have grown several inches taller. "Are you sure?" John asked. "I'm positive!" She answered in an authoritative voice, looking even prouder than before. I thought, John is right, Lotty has no objection at all to participating in this procedure. She is a lonely old woman who lives in a nine by twelve maid's room. She has nobody to love or to whom she really matters. She's never felt so important before and probably never will again. She'll remember this day as long as she lives. I looked at John. His eyes sparkled in his jauntily tilted head. He, too, seemed pleased with himself, as pleased as anyone can look wearing his usual sober detective expression. I was pleased, too. Pleased for Veronica, pleased for John, pleased for the part my professional skill had played in the arraignment. And if the truth be known, I was also pleased that John would be pleased with me.

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Chapter Sixteen

John Begins the Interrogation

When Pete brought the suspect out of the interview room, John went to him and in a not unkindly voice said, "You've just been identified in a lineup. Do you want to tell me what happened?" "Nuttin' happened. Ya tryin' to frame me or sumpthin'? What's a matter?" George kept reiterating. Standing in front of the suspect, John ordered, "Put him under arrest, Pete. We've got our man." Pete took Plummer away in handcuffs, still muttering that he was innocent.

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This comment, John later told me, was the beginning of a crucial plan to lure the suspect into confessing the crime. First John intended to say to him, "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be used against you in court. You have the right to a lawyer. If you can't afford one, the state will furnish one." Then John said, "I determined to do everything in my power to convince Plummer that the police know he is guilty of killing Veronica, and that I will continue with the interrogations as long as necessary to get a confession out of him. I want him to think it is just a matter of time until the expertise of the laboratory technicians and the evidence collected at the crime scene will wear him down. "The entire situation, even the interrogation room itself, is designed to help detectives in the breaking down process," John explained. "Every thing about it demonstrates to the suspect that he is no longer in charge of himself. Every detail of his life, whether he would eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, smoke, or relieve himself is solely in the hands of the interrogating detective. Even the light switch was constructed in such a way that it could only be turned on or off with a key. "I must persuade Plummer," John continued, "that his total comfort, the satisfaction of his most basic body needs, his future, perhaps even his life itself depends upon pleasing me. He must be convinced there is no other way, that until the moment he yields to my will, he will remain an enslaved, totally wretched human being." John added, "I am determined to break Plummer down right away because all cops know from experience that if a case is not solved in the fleeting, priceless days after the murder, it

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probably will never be solved at all." He went on speaking with the most solemn expression I'd seen yet on his face. "It won't be easy. I think he is a violent sex offender, and they are among the most difficult suspects to break. The consequences of failure for me would be tremendous. "No matter how many detectives are in the department there are never enough. If I don't unravel the murder by the end of the month, the chief will probably decide the trail is cold and there are more pressing matters to occupy my time. I'll be returned to my district a defeated man, with Veronica's file stuffed back in the government-issued metal cabinet forever, just one more unsolved murder in the annals of the NYPD." "I know you'll be successful, John," I said, trying to make him feel better. "I have to be," he acknowledged. "A piece of myself goes into every case I handle. If Veronica's killer goes undetected, I'll never be the same again." What dedicated man he is, I thought. How many policemen or indeed members of any profession throw themselves heart and soul into their work as fully as John does? He not only has a brilliant mind but a caring, sensitive soul. We could use a city full of people like him. It was clear to me that John, a dedicated cop for many years, was a man of great integrity. His every thought, even his mood often depended on the state of success of the case on which he currently was working. "When a case 'comes down,' as the police call it, I'm in high spirits for days," John said. "But when I have difficulty in solving a crime, beware! Because I tend to be dejected and melancholy. "Worst of all, I begin to doubt myself and my choice of career. I fret that all my efforts have been in vain, and that all the perpetrators I have apprehended are back on the streets as if I

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never existed. Or even worse, replaced by a thousand more. I am afraid the police department and I can never keep up with the avalanche of crime today. I worry that I have wasted my life and that it is too late for me to change directions. "But what always happens, Mary, is that sooner or later a new case will come down and make my spirits rise to the skies." "I know it, John. And you are a healthy man because you know it, too." Much as John felt it imperative to solve any case on which he was working, he was particularly intent on resolving this one. The homicide was a sensation because Veronica Vail had been an inhabitant of the upper East Side, the most elite area in New York City. She also was young, beautiful, successful, part of an influential "yuppie" crowd, and wealthy enough to live on Park Avenue. Because of her personality and the nature of the crime, her murder was the type of story the media lusted after. There was a tremendous outcry in the newspapers demanding that the killer be apprehended and expressing outrage at the murder. The hoopla culminated in a headline in the Daily News, "Park Avenue Woman Stabbed in Cold Blood," with a full page insert featuring photographs of Veronica at every stage of her life. John's superior officers all the way up to the mayor were clamoring for the murderer to be caught. It was turning out to be the case of the year. In a sense, regardless of past successes, John felt his future in the department would rise or fall on this case. In addition his professional pride and reputation was at stake. His boss had already given him a warning that he had better come through with the killer soon, and his coworkers, usually respectful, were jokingly calling him "Mr. Promotion." "Anybody can fail occasionally, whatever their line of work," John said wryly. "But very

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few people have their failures headlined in the newspapers for all the world to see." Were he to be sent back to auto theft or vice and prostitution as a result, it would be a tragedy for Lieutenant John Franklin, who had wanted to be a homicide cop since he was a little boy. The homicide unit is the star of the New York City police department, the natural element of the intelligent cop. John's work was his life and his life was his work; two or three hours daily at the crime scene, four interrogating suspects, perhaps three more doing paper work, and then four for the autopsy. He thought, dreamed and ate the detective scene. He never seemed to tire of it. That's where he belonged and that's where he wanted to be. Nothing else could possibly mean as much to him. In addition, he was incensed by the young, beautiful, sensual portrait of Veronica painted by her family and friends. He vowed to capture the murderer so that justice could be done. I might be mistaken but I sensed that he was personally infatuated with the image of Veronica as she was. I liked Roland and wished him well, but I had never felt he was man enough for Veronica. She would have done much better, I thought, with a strong man like John. "But I want him!" I thought ferociously. "And I have every intention of winning him, or at least go down trying. "But he is too young for you," I told myself sternly, and returned to the fantasy of how well the two of them would have looked together. Stupid as it is to be envious of a dead woman, I felt jealous of Veronica's beauty and blatant sex appeal. I've always been considered an attractive woman. Some people even consider me pretty. At five feet six with a well preserved figure, curly wheat colored hair, and straight Yankee features, I guess if compared with most female psychoanalysts I look like a beauty queen. But when it comes to a woman like Veronica, I'm

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simply out of her league. If only I looked more like her, I sighed. Then I could win John for sure. "Another issue is at stake that is terribly important to me," John continued. "I am a loner, unlike any of the other men in my squad. In the NYPD the Irish have run the show since it was formed in the late nineteenth century. It is only recently that a black man became Commissioner of Police. Many of the officers in my squad are Afro-Americans, Hispanics, or sons of the immigrant Irish fathers and grandfathers who had been on the police force before them. I come from entirely different ethnic stock. I carry the blood of a mixture of Scotch, Irish, English and German ancestors who had been Americans for many generations. I am not a prejudiced man, and certainly don't discriminate against anyone because of race or religion," John went on, "But I think the men resent my privileged background. Not that they don't respect me or are ever unfriendly. But I'm sure they feel I'm a different sort of fellow and there's always some restraint in how they handle me." He then told me he was the son of a brilliant psychoanalyst and an anthropologist who had left his family when John was a baby to study the Aborigines of Australia. Apparently his father preferred the Aborigines to his family in New York, for he never returned home again. Since John was the scion of two intelligent people, one would expect him to have followed in their professional footsteps. He might have, John said, had he not developed a reading block early in his school career. He was sent to Stevenson, a special school for children with learning disabilities, where he managed to overcome his handicap enough to get through high school. He never managed to enjoy school itself, however. Nor did he ever learn to read for pleasure. Despite his cultured upbringing, he became streetwise at an early age, learning which

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children on the block he could trust and which ones to avoid. In New York City, such knowledge is necessary for survival. John had always been entranced by policemen, possibly because Joe, a friendly cop on the beat, had taken an interest in the fatherless boy. John would walk the beat with his friend and listen hour after hour to tales of how, with no thought of life or limb, he had single handedly captured one desperado after another. John was never quite sure whether the stories were true or simply a figment of Joe's imagination. But he didn't really care; he enjoyed hearing them anyway. On the day he was graduated from high school, John decided to skip college and become a policeman himself. I loved the story John told me about how his insistence on justice showed up early in his life. At twelve years of age, he was held up on the street by three boys and robbed of thirty cents. He recognized the youthful offenders as students at his school. He reported the incident to the principal, who promptly took John around to the various classrooms to identify the guilty parties. The principal then asked him if he wished to press charges and warned him of possible consequences. John said he didn't care what the consequences were, he wanted to press charges. At the trial he testified against the delinquents. They were found guilty. As the boys were first offenders, they were let off with a warning and required to report for counseling. Before they were dismissed, however, John asked the judge if he could speak privately with him. When the judge called him up to the bench, John whispered in his ear, "I want my thirty cents back." The judge ordered the culprits to return ten cents apiece to their victim. The boys approached him single file and one by one handed him back a dime. They never bothered him again. "I hope my action cured the boys of their delinquent behavior," John said. "I never heard

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otherwise." John said he began his police career proper as a patrolman and spent years checking out street corner brawls and chasing down drug dealers until the underworld life of the city became second nature. Subsequent years as a plainclothesman in the metro crime unit helped him develop an intuitive sense of guilt and innocence that no school could ever teach. In addition, his ability to mime the streets for information set him head and shoulders above the other cops. "I question everyone," John said, "even the babies in carriages." Solidly trained in forensic science, criminology, pathology, fingerprinting, DNA coding, blood-typing and the study of weapons, he was a natural in conducting interrogations, far surpassing most of the other detectives in skill. He rose quickly in the ranks of the police corps where he spent fifteen years and gained a reputation as a brilliant detective in his five years in Homicide. Even when his personal life was a shambles, his work continued to be flawless. John Franklin became a homicide detective par excellence. For him, any other job was unthinkable. Despite his lack of a college degree, it was obvious he had inherited his parents' intelligence, if not their aspirations. Even though he did not enjoy reading, he shared many of their other intellectual interests. His mother had taught him to love music, opera, ballet, and art and he was extremely well-informed on current events. He was also a scuba diver and a selftaught computer expert. Perhaps for these reasons the differences between John and his coworkers seemed so vast that he felt a perpetual outsider in the squad room. He was an unusual detective and an unusual man--unusually perceptive, unusually bright, unusually honest, and unusually decent. "Most of the detectives in my squad enjoy each other's company and relish working

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together," John continued. "Some of them are even afraid to ride without a fellow officer beside them. Here again I am different. I prefer to work alone. While homicidal cases customarily use the services of a primary and a secondary detective, I like to take on the complete responsibility for a murder myself. I learned early in my career that even the most cooperative witnesses are more likely to talk openly to one detective than to two." I remembered that I had interviewed Beryl alone, and realized my suspicions that it had all been arranged by John were correct. "What a manipulator you are, John," I thought with a smile. But then it had been so tastefully done I hadn't really minded at all. Because he was one of the best detectives in the squad and brought down more cases than any of his colleagues, John was frequently permitted to conduct his cases his own way. But he was afraid that if he failed to resolve this murder, his freedom to work alone would be challenged. On the way to the interrogation, John told me he planned to show George Plummer the data collected by the technicians, to attempt to get him to break down even before he reached the interrogation room. John intended to exhibit to the suspect Veronica's bloody and shredded lingerie and blouse, the blood-caked knife and the sketches of the crime scene. In particular, he wanted to present Plummer with the impersonal black-and-white photos of the victim on the floor of her bedroom and the gruesome triangle in her neck, along with the eighteen other wounds depicted in grotesque detail. John would also show the suspect his own face, an ID photo, attached to a bulletin board alongside the pictures of Veronica, hoping it would shock him into an admission. John intended to do everything he could to convince Plummer the police already possessed physical evidence to prove his guilt, that John was the person with superior power and

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information and that it was just a matter of time until Plummer was exposed as a killer and his deserved punishment executed. If that didn't work, John told me he planned to go at the suspect in the interrogation room. First he would softly restate, "You've been identified in the lineup as the killer. Why not save a lot of time and unpleasantness and tell me the truth about what happened?" John also told me that if that tactic failed he would talk loudly, now angrily, then friendly, then mumble so the suspect would have to lean close to hear him. Then John said he planned to drone on interminably, shouting, then whispering, then asking questions, repeating the same ones over and over, trying to provoke Plummer to any action other than his repetitive denials, to break down his defenses, to strike the one note that would pry a confession out of his sealed lips. As if reading my mind, John said that if it seemed manipulative he was sorry, but considered it necessary in his mission for justice to apprehend the criminal with any technique that would work. He added, "In this instance, the end justifies the means. I genuinely believe George Plummer was Veronica Vail's killer and must be brought to justice, whatever the techniques necessary to bring about a confession." But, John admitted, whatever his method George remained unmoved. He was a stone who met every accusation with a monotonous denial. "I din't know 'er, never heard of 'er, and did nuttin' wrong. If I hung out on her street corner, that ain't no crime." John then asked open-ended questions, trying to evoke some emotion that would produce more than the stereotype responses he was receiving. He spoke of Veronica's youth, her beauty, her sexuality. He tried to provoke pity for her little girl, her husband, her stepdaughter. He talked of her wasted talents, her unlived dreams. But all to no avail. George's answers remained

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noncommittal and his face immobile. Certain as John was that he had the killer in his hands, he possessed only the rudiments of a circumstantial case. What he did not have was evidence--concrete evidence, solid evidence to back up Lotty's claim. He knew that in the absence of a fingerprint match he was treading on shaky ground, that without physical confirmation a good defense lawyer could find an escape hatch that would rip Lotty's identification of Plummer to shreds. In all probability the lawyer for the defense would question her age, her eyesight and her ability to recognize at a distance a man she didn't know, in the attempt to plant in the minds of the jurors the idea that Lotty Lobell was a foolish, senile old woman. John had hoped Plummer would be so intimidated by the expertise of the police, their knowledge and authority, that he

would feel forced to confess the crime. Now John wondered if Plummer was "with it" enough to experience that fear at all. Since John was interrogating George alone, I finally had a lunch hour free. So I called my forgiving old friend and coauthor, Dr. Wilhelm Marks to see if he could lunch with me. Wilhelm, his wife Blanche, Edward and I had made a foursome for many years, often spending New Year's Eve and vacations together at the summer house Edward and I had at Ogunquit. When my son Alan died, I don't know what I would have done without Wilhelm's sympathy and gentle support. Then when Edward and Blanche died about the same time, Wilhelm and I spent a lot of time together comforting each other. He took Edward's place for me in that when I needed a consultation about difficulties with a patient, Wilhelm was always available.

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Needless to say, I did the same for him. We work well together and the two of us have written many articles together. But, unfortunately, he fell in love with me and wanted to get married. We were together so much that people began to think of us as a couple. Much as I liked him, I objected to it. The combination never felt right to me. Perhaps it was because he wasn't Edward. Or maybe he just didn't have the right chemistry. Or could be that he reminded me too much of my father. And, superficial thinking or not, I don't like the way Wilhelm has aged. Like many men of our generation, he has a flabby body, a pot belly, and smokes smelly cigars. He has never learned to take care of himself physically. When I think of how gorgeous John is, with his youthful, beautifully-toned physique, I become even more revolted by Wilhelm's appearance. But I don't think about that when we are together. He is a dear friend and an important person in my life. "Mary!" he said with delight when he heard my voice. "It's been too long since we've seen each other." I felt warmed by his affection and a little guilty for having neglected him. "Too long, Wilhelm! Can you meet me for lunch today?" "I'm really sorry, Mary," he answered, his voice filled with dismay. "You know there's no one I'd rather see. But I have a conference at one o'clock that has been scheduled for months. It is with an analyst who is coming in from Montauk to see me. I can't possibly cancel it this late. Can we make it another day?" "Certainly, Wilhelm. I'm booked up for a while but I'll call you as soon as I can," I said, preparing to hang up the phone. "Wait a minute, Mary. Can't we at least talk for a while? How are you doing and how is The Sociopathic Personality in Private Practice coming along?"

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"I'm just fine, Wilhelm. But I'm afraid the Sociopathic Personality isn't. I've been too busy searching out a real one." "What do you mean?" "A patient of mine was murdered and the detective in charge asked me to help him apprehend the killer. So I've been spending a lot of time interrogating suspects with him." I expected to be commended by Wilhelm for my courage and concern for my late patient. But to my surprise he had quite a different reaction. "What? Are you crazy?" he shouted. "Why are you doing such a senseless thing at this stage of your career? Besides, you are not trained for criminal investigation. In our field we don't know much about actual murders. I can't remember one article about a killer in all the books and journals I've ever read." I thought Wilhelm had a point. When the investigation started, I had gone through my extensive psychoanalytic library and had only been able to come up with one article about a murderer, in an early copy of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Apparently analysts have not analyzed many murderers, at least for publication. The life circumstances of a convicted murderer are not conducive to five times a week psychoanalysis. Wilhelm continued berating me. "Forget it, Mary. Leave it to the cops! You've spent over thirty years developing your expertise in psychoanalysis. You can serve humanity better by sticking to the job you're qualified to do and leaving the detective work to the professionals." I knew that although he didn't say so, my good friend Wilhelm was worried for my life. And sure enough, he soon calmed down and said, "I'm sorry for yelling at you, Mary. But grilling suspects is very dangerous work. You may be dealing with a killer. I wouldn't want to lose you,

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Mary. You mean too much to me." "Thanks, dear friend. I know it is because you care. But as an analyst yourself, can't you understand that I have to do this final thing for my patient?" "She must be that murdered woman from Park Avenue that all the papers are full of, the one the Daily News carried a full insert on," he said. I didn't answer. Even after her death it was ethical for me to keep Veronica's analysis with me confidential, even with a trusted colleague like Wilhelm. Nevertheless he understood and said, "I didn't know she was your patient, Mary. I'm so sorry. I've never had a patient who was killed but I'm sure it is terribly difficult for you and must be a real crisis in your life. But I want you to take care of yourself, and talking to criminals is not the best way to do it." I was quiet. He finished with, "Let me know what happens, Mary. Don't listen to my grumbling. You know I'm always behind you. And remember, if there's anything I can do I'm always here for you." "Thanks, dear, I know you are," I acknowledged. "And Wilhelm, don't worry. I will be careful." After we hung up I carefully thought over what he had said. I didn't agree that I was untrained for investigative work, at least in the way I chose to do it. It seems to me that the suspects I had interviewed were not so different from my own patients. All people, guilty of a crime or not, need to talk about themselves to an understanding, non-judgmental person. Perhaps Wilhelm was right in that what I was doing could be dangerous. But I knew that risky or not, I could not stop until we had apprehended the killer. And certainly I had no intentions of stopping

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my work with John. Right after I hung up the phone rang again. It was John. He sounded disheartened and defeated. He had continued his barrage of George over a period of several days now, but had gotten nowhere. Something in his voice signaled emergency. "Mary," he said quietly, "I'm at the squad room. I can't get to first base with this guy. How about you interrogating him? Maybe your softer manner can get through where I can't." Oh, we're playing 'good cop, bad cop', I thought with pleasure, and then swiftly felt flooded with remorse for my flippancy. I had heard the discouragement in his voice and felt deeply concerned for this brave, skilled man whose expertise so far had been of no avail in this case that mattered so deeply to us all. I wondered if I would ever see his shining smile again. I said, "I don't know if I can do any better, John, but I'll be happy to try. l've just finished with my last patient. I'll be right over."

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Chapter Seventeen

The Life of George Plummer

A suspect deemed dangerous is detained in a nine-by-twelve foot cell off the reception room with three cinder block walls and a cage front. It stands apart from the clamor of clacking typewriters, ringing telephones and loud-voiced cops that compose the cacophony of the squad room. A suspect can be interrogated in the detention cage with minimal fear of harm to the interviewer. The interview with George would take place there, John decided, so that he could sit outside "the cage" and come to my assistance if necessary. After I arrived, John unlocked the cage door and called for Pete to bring George inside. Terror knotted my stomach and swept through my body as I waited for the suspect to be brought in. It was my first look at a possible killer. John took one glance at my pale face, put his arm around me and gave me a reassuring hug. Then he said, "Here is the suspect." I hate the use of the word "suspect" in a case like this, where it seems so clear that the person is guilty of the crime with which he is charged. It always irritates me when I read in the newspapers something like, "Joe Jones was seen to shoot the cashier and rob the grocery store by the owner and six customers, one of whom captured the 'suspect' and sat on him until the police

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arrived." But using my better judgment, I know the word must be used because in our constitution a person is presumed innocent until he is found guilty and it has often happened that a suspect who looks guilty as sin was later found to be innocent. Pete brought Plummer into the cage, protesting all the way, "I din't do nuttin', I din't do nuttin', I know my rights." With a tremor in my fingers that was only partially irrational, I stepped inside the cage. Then John shut the slip bolt to lock the cell door. My skin grew prickly and my face felt hot. I sank down on the skimpy wooden bench soldered to the wall. The suspect looked me over intently, drew back and then, to my surprise, quieted down. It was an odd experience to be locked inside a cage. It felt degrading and humiliating, lacking even the dignity afforded prisoners in cells. How dreadful to be treated like an animal gawked at by anyone who wandered by! It was anxiety-provoking even for me, who knew I could leave at any time. With a newly-discovered compassion, I found myself pitying even the animals in the zoo. I took a good look at George Plummer for the first time. He was a tall, thin fellow who appeared badly nourished and somewhat shorter than he was because of a pronounced stoop. His face was tinged with the grey of fatigue and terror, on top of the weariness born of years on the streets. Two of his front teeth were broken, and the others were discolored. He still wore the dirty, wrinkled shirt he had worn at the line-up. Lotty was right: It looked as though he had slept in it. Despite his derelict appearance, George had handsome features and large green eyes rimmed with long, thick lashes. His eyes were extremely appealing until he characteristically narrowed them into a scowl. Up close I saw he was younger than I thought, perhaps not more than thirty years old. His black hair was unkempt, but had a slight wave in it which I thought would be

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attractive if washed and combed. I understood what Lotty meant when she said he would be handsome if he cleaned himself up. I had a fleeting fantasy that I took him home, gave him a bath, had his teeth repaired, and helped him begin a new life. I was struck by his posture, in which his chest caved into the line of his back. His physique seemed to belong to a person who didn't want to be seen. Marginal people try to take up as little space as possible; life for them has proven many times it is safer to stay invisible. He continued to stare at me. Suddenly he scrunched up his green eyes and blurted out, "Who're you? A lady cop or sumpthin'?" "I am Dr. Mary Wells, a psychologist," I explained. "Lieutenant Franklin thought you might like to talk to me." For the first time he seemed mildly amused and said, "A shrink, eh? What makes 'em think I need one?" "Anybody in your position would need to talk to someone," I said. "I know I would. It must be shocking to find yourself dragged off to a police station, called a murderer and locked up in a cage like an animal. Especially for someone like you who, I'm told, was never in jail before." He stared at me with cats' eyes, and faltered, as if he didn't quite know what to do with a compassionate response. Then an almost imperceptible flicker in his eyes told me that my proposal interested him. "What do ya want me ta talk about?" he finally asked. "Anything you like," I answered. "Just tell me about yourself." George seated himself at the other end of the wooden bench. I was only slightly jarred.

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"Ain't nuttin' ta tell," he said. "I got no job, no home, no friends." "Did you ever have a job?" "Yeah," he answered. "I used ta drive a cab. Then I got sent to a funny farm and the bastards wouldn't renew my license. But I'm not a nut case," he emphasized. "They sent me up fer loitering. Would you believe, loitering? Big deal! Fer that I got stuck in the nut house! "Did you ever work anywhere else?" "Yeah. I worked a while in a leather factory, but the fumes stank so bad I quit." "Are you married, George?" "Nah. The dames don' even wanna date me. Me ma always said I was handsome, but it never done me much good with the girls." "Where is your mother now?" "She lives some place in Ioway, if she's still livin'. I used ta wanna go see 'er but I kinda drifted away. Seein' how I don' have no job or nuttin', I kin never git the money together." "How about your father?" "Ha!" he laughed, in a single harsh note that sprang from his throat like a bird cry. "Me pa was a no-good drunk. He skipped town when I was a li'l kid, maybe four or five. We never saw him no more. Ma shacked up with a different guy, but he din't like me. Used ta beat me up alla time. So I run away when I was fifteen and ain't been home since." "That's a long time, George. Do you miss them?" He paused and then answered, "Maybe me ma once in a while, but I try not ta think about it." "What kind of boy were you?"

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I was surprised again when he answered, "Lonesome. I was the las' kid in line. Me brudders and sisters left home soon as they could. Me mudder musta got tired or sumpthin', cause I growed up by myself." "We had a cat once," he suddenly remembered. "It was me pal fer a while. But then I started swingin' it 'round by the tail an' it run away." He thought for a moment and then to my further amazement added, "I was a kid with a terrible temper. I'd be good fer a while and then some little thing'd set me off. I remember once when I was a kid me ma said ta wash me feet. I said, 'Why should I wash me feet? Nobody kin see 'em. They're covered up with me socks.'" I had to suppress a smile. "Would you believe the ole' lady smacked me in the face?" George continued, "I got so mad I threw down everythin' in the bathroom. Soap, towels, glasses, toothbrushes, whatever I saw I chucked on the floor. I kin still see the mess on the linoleum, soap, water, rags, broken glass. It made me laugh when she slipped all over the place, but she din't hit me no more after that! I couldn't do nuttin' about me ole' man but I sure took care a her!"

Then, as if worried about what

I would think of him, he added, "There was nuttin' wrong with me, Doc. When I get mad I go nuts, that's all. Lose me temper like me step-dad." "What else did she do that made you mad, George?" I asked. "She was a mean ole' broad. She never gave me nuttin'. Specially anythin' I asked fer. Once I said, 'Ma, I'm hungry. Can I have some more of that macaroni?' She said, 'No, you can't.' I said, 'Aw Ma, why not? You got plenny left.' Would you believe, she answered, 'Jes' because you want it you can't have it!'" How terrible it must be to have everything you ask for denied, for no better reason than

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that you wanted it! Small cuts and denials every day of one's life add up to intolerable frustration. I thought that even if nothing else had gone wrong in George's life, this trait of his mother's would have made him sick. It is similar to the disappointments inflicted daily on impoverished children who are continually teased by the toys and luxuries they see on TV. But because George's deprivation was imposed on him by the woman who supposedly loved him, it must have been a thousand times harder to bear. Frustration provokes aggression. George had experienced enough frustration to build up a storehouse of rage waiting to explode. No wonder he had experienced outbursts of temper all his life. It was a miracle he hadn't killed anyone before now. And yet, bad as it was psychologically to be raised by a mean, unfeeling mother, it must have been far worse with his stepfather. "Tell me about the beatings your stepfather gave you, George," I said. I have heard many tales of child abuse by parents in my long career as a psychoanalyst, but I have never heard of crueler treatment than George was subjected to by his stepfather. For the young George Plummer, escape from home was the one possible solution to his predicament, short of murder itself. According to him, there was not a bone in his body that his stepfather had not broken at some time or other, over the years of abuse. His mother said she was helpless to stop her husband. She told George that his stepfather often continued indefinitely to punch him, even after he was knocked unconscious. George added that sometimes his stepfather beat him over the head with a baseball bat, though he didn't remember much about that because "it knocked me out real quick." Apparently George's black eyes were so commonplace that the family nicknamed him

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"Blacky." His stepfather had also broken both of George's front teeth, as well as two on the side which were not so obvious. George's story sounded highly improbable to me, the child of an upper middle class family. I wondered if it was possible that he was pulling my leg, or at least that he was a bit of a show-off and grossly exaggerated the sheer brutality of the beatings. He saw me looking at him, and like a crafty animal seemed to sense I was doubting him. "He hit me jes' about every day," George added in a matter-of-fact tone. "An' sometimes when I wet me bed he'd lock me up fer days with nuttin' ta eat or drink. I used ta try an' run away an' hide but he always found me an' beat me up worse. Once me mouth was so swollen I couldn't eat fer five days." Our eyes connected and remained locked together for what seemed like an eternity. I could see straight down into his soul, and show-off or not, there was no mistaking the look of truth there. I realized that George had grown up before the days when child abuse was front page news, and that what is unthinkable now happened then more often than we would like to believe. If I still doubted George's word, I had only to look at his two front teeth. I had the impulse to comfort him by patting his hand, but I thought I'd better refrain. Who knew what his reaction would be? I wasn't about to find out. "You have brothers and sisters, you said?" I asked. "Yeah, lots. Four girls and three boys." "Couldn't they do anything about the beatings?" "Nah. They was jes' glad it wasn't them. They got outta the house as soon as they could. I don' blame 'em. If they'd stayed he woulda got after them, too. Don' see 'em now neither. They

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din't pay much attention ta me even when they was home. They thought I was jes' a dumb kid who took the food outta their mouths. I bet they don' even know I skipped town." "Did your mother take you to see a doctor when you were hurt, George?" "Once she took me ta the hospital when me arm din't get better. She tol' 'em I fell down the steps. I still can't hold it out straight." He extended his arm with bravado and demonstrated that it stayed bent at the elbow. A tatoo of a nude woman slipped out of his rolled up sleeve. "It must have been terrible for you, George," I said, wondering how he had survived so much physical and mental abuse. "I've never spoken to anyone before who was treated so badly," I added, with compassion in my voice. He looked surprised again, as if beating up your children was only to be expected. What we grow up with seems normal to us, I thought. If our parents are kind and loving, we accept that as the way of the world. If they treat us badly, then that is what we anticipate from life. As deprivation and beatings were an every day affair to George Plummer, he never expected to be treated otherwise. I wondered if, in turn, he resorted to attacking anyone who made him feel worthless, as Veronica might have done in a moment of disdain. Had she said or done anything to make him feel inadequate that fateful Sunday night? Much as I wanted to ask, I refrained. We were getting along too well. The professional within me began to wonder what diagnosis I would give George Plummer. I played with the idea that he was schizophrenic and then decided against it. I don't know why I came to that conclusion; much of our profession is an art not a science. Perhaps it was the light in his eyes at times when he felt understood, or the flash of warmth that occasionally

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came through. Or even the bit of humor he allowed himself to display, like when he said he didn't need a "shrink." Although some psychologists and psychiatrists might disagree, to me the diagnosis of schizophrenia just didn't feel right. I didn't even think he could be labeled psychotic. After careful consideration, I concluded that George Plummer suffered from a disorder of impulse control. I believed that the murder of Veronica was the demonstration of a severe temper tantrum in an immature, inadequate personality. I suspected he was often lost in a fantasy world where all his dreams came true, and sometimes could not tell where his daydreams ended and reality began. And why not, given his cruel, deprived childhood? I am not one of those "bleeding heart" professionals who excuse criminals because of their abominable childhoods. After all, I believe he killed my Veronica and that no matter what the cause of his hideous act I would be inflamed with rage at him later. But I had learned over the course of many years to put my personal sentiments aside in order to enter the world of the patient. Thus for the moment I felt only sympathy. George's crime was understandable, if not excusable, in the light of the extreme violence and emotional deprivation he had suffered as a child. Looking for confirmation of my conclusions I asked, "Do you have any dreams, George?" "Yah," he answered, leaning forward to tell me. "I have scary dreams alla time. Las' night I dreamt about killin' people." "Who killed whom?" "Don' know. I was too scared ta find out. I woke up." I decided my diagnosis was correct. Frightened as he was, I was surprised to find that George, like most of my private

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patients, was really involved in the interview. I'm sure he didn't have much opportunity to talk about himself elsewhere to an interested person. I also suspected that George was a bit of an actor, and enjoyed dramatizing his story. I became so engrossed in what he was saying that I forgot John was outside the cage, listening to every word. Pleased as I was that George was now openly talking, it also saddened me. Here was a despairing person whom a competent clinician probably could have helped, if George had seen one before he got into trouble. Even a few sessions a week ago might have averted the tragedy. From some of his reactions to what I had said, George seemed a man capable of gaining insight into himself. All he needed was a sympathetic person genuinely interested in listening to him talk. Now, though, it was probably too late. I doubted if anyone could help him any more. I thought carefully before the next question, "Do you think your mother loved you, George?" He paused and considered the question. "Yeah, I guess she did. She said I was handsome." His chest seemed to swell as he spoke. "And she used to let me sleep in bed with 'er when the ole' man got drunk." I was not surprised that the 'ole man' didn't like George. I asked, "Where did you sleep when your stepfather wasn't drunk?" "When I was li'l I slept in a cot at the foot a their bed." It figures, I thought. Even on a "good night" in the household when his stepfather wasn't drunk, George must have seen plenty of goings on in that bedroom. When children witness parental intercourse, it causes them to experience strong feelings they are emotionally and

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physically unequipped to deal with. Seeing his parents engaged in intercourse must have added to the already fragile boy's overloaded storehouse of rage, confusion and jealousy. Sometimes children think a man with an erect penis is stabbing the woman with whom he is having sex. It is conceivable George was emulating what he thought was his stepfather's act when he ostensibly stabbed Veronica. I decided to change the subject. "Did you like school, George?" "Nah, I couldn't concentrate," he answered. "When I went I jes' sat there and looked out the window." I thought, Of course he couldn't concentrate, he must have been in terrible pain from his broken bones much of the time. To say nothing of the teeming rage at all the physical and mental abuse he endured. And the fantasy world I imagine he dwelt in as the only way out of his misery. For years he had lived a life of suffering and humiliation. Nobody noticed, not even his teachers. Everyone thought he was failing because he was stupid. But how could he possibly have done well at school, with all that was on his mind? I estimated his present level of functioning to be in the dull normal range of the population, with an I.Q. of perhaps ninety. Because of his speech, I suspected he was practically illiterate. But every once in a while there appeared a glimmer in his eyes that made me question what his intelligence could have been, given a clear mind and an educated heart. "I din't go ta school half the time," he continued, as if reading my mind. "After a year or two they stopped tryin' ta find me an' jes' lemme be." How sad, I mused, that there was no one to take enough interest in this child to get him out of his home while there was still time to save him.

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"Did you ever tell anyone that your stepfather was beating you?" I asked. "I tol' the teacher once. I guess she thought I was lyin' because she tol' me ma. Ma tol' me step-dad an' he beat me up worst'n before. That's the last time I ever tol' anybody anythin'. After that I jes' stopped goin' ta school altagether." What an appalling betrayal, I thought indignantly. Was it possible that she, like I, had found his story hard to believe? Did she have to deny its truth in order to spare herself the horror such knowledge would bring? After all, it was a long time ago. Nowadays, teachers are more on the alert for such treatment and would be much more likely to take him at his word. Or at least to investigate the story. After that deadly experience no wonder George never trusted anyone again. "Did you try to get even with the teacher who betrayed you, George?" "Yah," he said. "How'dja know that? I wrote 'bullshit' an' 'bitch' all over the school with chalk. The principal caught me an' made me scrub it away with a brush. The fuckin' bastard! It took me a whole day ta git it all off the walls!" "So what did you do all the time when you stopped going to school?" "Same thin' I do now. Hung out on street corners." Then, apparently feeling he had given himself away, he drew back into himself. There was only silence in the cage. "Why do you do that?" I asked. But it was too late. George was gone. I felt terribly sorry for him but knew that the time had come for some straight talk from me. "George, I'll be frank with you," I said abruptly. "You are being held in prison because you are suspected of killing Veronica Vail. Did you?" "No," he said glumly. "Never heard of the dame."

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"That's not true, George. You've been identified as a man who stood on Veronica's street corner and made obscene remarks at her. I'm sure you know who she was." "I stand 'round on corners a lot. I got nuttin' else ta do. Don' know if I stood on her corner or not." His voice was expressionless. "Eighty-seventh Street and Park Avenue, George. You were seen standing there many times. Did you stand on that corner?" "Maybe. I don' take no notice where I stan'." He was speaking in the same monotonous tone I knew he had used in John's interrogation of him. I sighed. It was clear to me why John had given up. Then, difficult as it was for me to admit it, I realized I wasn't getting anywhere with Plummer either. I stood up to leave. "All right, George," I said, rattling the cage door to alert John that I wanted to leave. "If you decide to confide in me I'll be happy to talk to you at any time."

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Chapter Eighteen

Mary’s Dilemma

John, looking despondent, threw back the slip bolt and opened the door of the cage. After I

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stepped out, feeling totally disheartened about my failure to get George to confess his crime, John snapped the slip lock shut. How well I understood his dejection when he failed to crack a case! My former teacher and mentor, Dr. Irvana Tibbs, used to say, when a session with a patient hadn't gone well, "Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Don't be so hard on yourself, Mary." But I have never been able to come to terms with failure when it comes to a client. It always makes me unhappy. This time I was doubly upset because I knew I had let down John too, along with George Plummer, Veronica, and my professional image. I took John aside. I told him I was distressed about the case and asked if I could speak to him privately. He quickly brought us some squad room coffee. Then he took me into a gloomy little interrogation room lined with the customary cinder blocks. As we sat on wooden chairs that looked like they'd been pounded with a hammer, I began to tell John how upset I was that the interrogation had gone so poorly. "There is something I don't understand about you, Mary," John said sternly.

"You

are a strong woman. It seems to me you have a core of steel, and could stand up to everybody and everything in the world. For instance, the way you came into this detective work for the first time as if you'd been doing it all your life!" He stopped, a puzzled look on his face, and then went on. " And yet you are as upset about the interrogation of Plummer as I was. Don't you know we are just beginning, and will go on interrogating him as long as it takes to crack him? Nobody has a one hundred percent record in anything. If the case doesn't work out this time, it can always open up unexpectedly at some future date.

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"I have to laugh at myself," he interjected. "Here I am lecturing you and I am exactly the same way. We are too much alike in that respect, Mary. I don't understand either why I care so much when a case doesn't go down. Can you tell me why it upsets you? Then maybe I'll understand myself, too." "I don't know about you, John, but I think I know about me." I drank a sip of the coffee, shuddered, and when John looked away, spit it back into the cup. Despite my bothering John with my feelings about my interrogation of Plummer, I am not someone who confides easily. I paused to consider whether I wanted to reveal myself further to this man I cared about but hardly knew very well. "You can tell me, Mary. You can tell me anything. How bad could it be?" He flashed his precious smile. Sometimes I think I would do anything for that look. I found it irresistible and spontaneously decided to trust him. "All right, John, I said. "I'll tell you, even though I don't do this very often. Promise me you won't laugh, no matter what I say?" "You know I won't, Mary. It matters a lot to me that you talk about yourself." "I was the only child of a rather elderly couple," I began. "My mother was forty years old and my father over fifty when I was born. He doted on me and I loved him passionately, even though we had our differences. I guess I'm like Veronica in that respect," I reflected. "My father was the whole world to me. I'm an analyst and know well the power of the Oedipus Complex and the sexual drive. But to me even an underground sexual attraction doesn't account for the overpowering nature of the bond between father and daughter. They say the man who takes a woman's virginity writes his name on her in indelible ink. But I think it is the father's touch, his

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smile, his caress, that is permanently engraved on his daughter's heart. I think that for women Freud had it backwards. For us love comes first and then sexuality follows. I know that I loved my father like the sun, the moon and the stars, like the good Lord himself. I've had a husband I adored, friends I would die for, and children who are more important to me than life itself. But I never cared for anyone as I did him. To me there is no love in all the world like that of a little girl for her father." Struggling against tears, I stopped for a moment and took a few deep breaths. John seemed as moved as I, and was silent until I was ready to go on. "My father was Humphrey Wells, the famous experimental psychologist," I said. "Humphrey Wells was your father?" John declared, an incredulous lilt in his voice. "I had to take a course in psychology once at John Jay College to get a promotion and we studied his work the whole semester." I nodded, pleased that John recognized my father's name. Years ago all psychology classes were taught his work, but these days most people had never heard of him. I added with pride, "Then you know that he was one of the great pioneers of academic psychology in America, the world's greatest authority on learning theory in rats." "I can't believe it. I always thought his work was fascinating. What did he look like?" John, ever curious, wanted to know. "Funny you should ask," I said. "I guess you could say he was odd looking. He was a rumpled hulk of a man, perhaps six feet five inches tall who weighed three hundred pounds. He had a red face and thin grey hair that stuck out on the sides, and a slow, ponderous walk that took forever to get across the room. I'm sorry to say he always smelled bad; he was always too busy to

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bathe. Believe me, he was a very imposing man when he got angry, especially to a little girl." "What an interesting man to have for a father!" said John. "Interesting, yes. But strange would be a better word to describe him. He wasn't anything like the handsome young fathers the other kids had. Like, don't laugh, he named me 'Psyche,'" I said with a blush, "but I was always too embarrassed to use it. When I got older, I chose the plain old name of Mary myself." John didn't laugh as the children in elementary school had done. I remembered my first grade teacher calling out, 'Psyche, Psyche Wells!' I hadn't answered, sinking into the wooden bench bolted to my desk and pretending to be someone else. But I didn't fool anyone. All the kids knew who Psyche was: They made fun of my name all through elementary school. But John didn't laugh. In fact he didn't think it was funny at all. He simply looked sympathetic and waited for me to continue. I resumed my story. "My father programmed me to be a psychologist from very early on. During my childhood he trained me as his after-hours assistant in the laboratory in our basement. First he would carefully weigh the white rats who had been fed one sort of food or another and then he would run them through the mazes. Then, standing there with a stop watch, he would announce in his booming voice the speed of each rat's performance. My job was to record the time for each trial. I enjoyed helping him because I loved to be with him. "I got to love the little creatures, too. My favorite was a cute little fellow who learned to press the Skinner Bar more rapidly than the others. I named him Grubby. I never forgave my father when he put Grubby to sleep because he got too fat to run the mazes. He never figured out that Grubby gained weight because I used to come in and give him extra rations while my father

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was teaching his classes. I must have messed up his research but good! Imagine, all those prestigious people all these years have been touting the results of tests that were contaminated by a lonely child! Thank goodness Father never found out. If he had known he never would have forgiven me. "It was one of the great disappointments of his life that I didn't follow him into academic psychology and continue his work. He had nothing but contempt for psychoanalysis and insisted it was in no way a science. We spent many an evening arguing about the relative merits of our two fields, while my mother sat bored in her rocking chair. "He was her whole life. She had no friends, opinions or interests of her own. I was someone she did her duty by, but I always knew her love for me didn't hold a candle to how she felt about him. She died two months after he did. She had no reason to go on living. I guess I was always afraid I'd turn out to be like her, having no self without a man to base it on." "No danger of that, from what I've seen," John asserted, perhaps a bit too forcefully. I smiled and went on, "After I got to be an analyst, my father used to rant, 'Psychoanalysis is no science. I doubt if Freud would be awarded a Ph.D. in psychology at Columbia University today. He certainly couldn't get one in my department! There is no proof whatsoever that his theory is anything more than speculation. He should have been given the Nobel prize in literature for his ingenious fiction!' "I would angrily answer, 'Oh Father, what good does it do to prove how quickly rats run through mazes? Who cares? It only proves that one rat can run faster than another. At least psychoanalysts help people, whether you consider our theory scientifically-grounded or not!' I never convinced him and he never persuaded me, and we went right on arguing until the day he

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died. "I feel bad that I always put down the work that meant so much to him. I was only a little girl when his results were published, and by that time I had completely lost interest in the research. But it is really not very smart that I, a psychoanalyst, ignore the work of my distinguished psychologist father. "I think I'll go up to the Medical Library at 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue and take a look at his conclusions," I mused, almost to myself. "Who knows? I may even learn something useful at this late date. "But he was a good man, my father, despite his idiosyncracies. When I asked him if I could go to graduate school, he said, 'I'll sell my shirt to send you.' He supported me emotionally and financially all the way through school, even though a professor doesn't make much money. I think eventually he was gratified that I was a psychoanalyst, even though he never stopped hoping in his heart that I would become a researcher like him." I stopped and then asked, "And how does all this answer your question, John, about why I get so disheartened when I fail with a patient? When my work goes well, I forget all about my father's ravings. But when an interview fails and I get nowhere with a patient, like today with George, I can't help but think, Perhaps my father was right, psychoanalysis has no value. I should have stuck to experimental psychology. Successful therapist or not, my father's voice still haunts me when I falter. John was silent. His impassive face gave no hint of any reaction to what I had said. It was hard to bear the suspense. I finally asked, "Well, John, what do you think? Have you lost all respect for me? Are you thinking that Mary is supposed to be a mature professional

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and a role model for everybody in the world and here she is at her age still carrying on about her father?" Police station, interrogation room and all, John impetuously stood up, walked over and gave me a bear hug. "I think you are adorable," he said.

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Chapter Nineteen

The Wind-Up

We were walking back to the cage to take a look at Plummer. He was holding onto the bars, apparently waiting for us to return. He suddenly began to shake them frantically, calling out, "Hey, doctor lady, jes' a minute, jes' a minute! Come back in. I wanna tell you sumpthin'" I stopped in my tracks, hoping I would be given a chance to redeem myself. John promptly unlocked the cell door and I reentered the cage. "Yes?" I said in what I hoped was an objective tone. "You're right, lady," he said slowly. "I did hang 'round the 87th Street corner waitin' for Veronica Vail. But I never killed 'er. I never killed nobody." "Why did you wait for her?" I asked, as I settled into the cage. "Did you ever see 'er, lady?" I didn't answer. He went on, "If you did, then you know how she looked." "How did she look, George? How did she look?" "Sexy, real sexy. She kinda slid down the street like a slinky cat in heat. When she passed me she'd always slow down an' look me over like she was sayin', 'Ya wanna fuck me, mister? Well, ya can't.' Then she'd go in the house and leave me standin' there droolin'.

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"I couldn't believe a real lady would fuck a bum like me, but she kept on starin' at me every day like she liked me. That's why I yelled out once, 'You're a nice lady. You don' fuck!" "I tol' ya me ma always said I was handsome, so I thinks maybe this lady thought so, too. I was always hopin' she meant business, so I hung 'round waitin' for 'er to invite me in." "And then one day your dreams came true, didn't they George? She did invite you in," I said with conviction. He looked down at his feet and was silent. "I know she did, George. Her husband found a letter she had written the day she died in which she announced she was going to come to you. Tell me what happened that night, George. We are going to find out, anyway. You might as well tell me now." I looked him steadfastly in the eye and held him captive in my gaze. After a long moment he pulled away. What I saw next was mind-boggling. Something in my demeanor must have told George that I was telling the truth, for he suddenly took on the look people get in their sleep when all their guards are down. For a brief moment he fought for self-control, but his last defense melted as the powerful need to confess thrust its way to the fore. I guess even a desperate killer can only hold out for so long. Then, like a balloon collapsed by a pin, George shriveled up and shrank inside of himself. His jaw slackened and his face fell in. His eyes became glazed and he wobbled on his feet, as if the room were spinning around him. He staggered and leaned against the wall to support himself. Then he looked like he was going to be sick, maybe even throw up. He wasn't handsome anymore. In fact he suddenly appeared to be an old man. I knew we had reached the moment of truth, that George Plummer was weary of carrying around his evil secret and wanted the relief of telling things as they are.

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"Tell me about it, George," I said. "You'll feel better when you do. She invited you in, didn't you? You really didn't want to kill her but you couldn't help yourself. For some reason, she made you mad. Like you told me before, when you get mad you go nuts. She invited you in, George, didn't she, and then she made you mad." "Yeah," George said wearily. "She invited me in all right. The day of the murder she come by the corner an' this time she stopped. "'You, mister, she said. 'Am I readin' you right? You been hangin' 'round here waitin' fer me ta have sex with you fer months, haven't you?' I nodded, too surprised ta open me mouth. She went on, 'Okay, how about it?' "I couldn't believe me luck. That's the best offer I ever got, 'cept for whores. An' a real lady, to boot! I thought, me ma was right, I guess I am handsome. "'Sure, lady,' I tol' 'er. 'Any time.' "She said, 'How 'bout tonight? Come by 'round 11 o'clock an' I'll let you in. Me name is Vail and I live on the eighth floor.' "''Are you kiddin' me?'' I asked 'er,' still not believin' me luck. 'Nah', she said. "I like yer looks. You look jes' like me dad.'" "So I come by like she said at 11 o'clock. The doorman wasn't there so I slipped in after a guy what used his key. The elevator wasn't there neither so I run up the steps two at a time, I can't wait to fuck 'er." He paused and looked grim. "Then what happened, George?" "I go into this apartment like you see in the movies. It was bigger then the Salvation Army shelter where I slept las' night. Must a cost more'n I spend in a lifetime. The lady was nice to me

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at first, asked me to sit down an' gimme a drink an' all. I'm struck dumb an' can't open me mouth. Then she takes me to 'er classy bedroom an' sits down on the bed. I figgers, now's the time ta get ta work. So I comes over an' puts me arm round 'er, an' talks to 'er fer the first time. I says, ''Where ya been all me life, lady?" Well, she takes a good look at me like she never seen me before. Then she shoves me away. You'da thought the whole thing was me idea! She says, 'You don' look like me father at all! You're jes' a dirty, illiterate ole' bum! Sorry, but I have ta ask you ta leave.' "Well, I get so mad I see blood. I start to run down the hall to git away, an' I pass the kitchen. I see this fancy knife hangin' there on the wall. I think, this lady made a fool a me. Nobody makes a fool outta George Plummer! The lady is a bitch! She teased me every day. She said she'd fuck me and then she balked. When she finally asks me into these fancy digs, she changes 'er mind the last minute and gives me the ole' heave-ho. Nobody can treat George Plummer that way! She deserves what she's gonna get! "I grabs the knife and runs back to the bedroom, where she's still sittin' on the bed. She don' even look up when I come into the room, that's how important she thinks I am. I'll git you, you bitch, I think. Then I come down real hard on 'er chest with the knife. She begins screamin' an' screamin' so I cuts er' throat so she'll shut 'er mouth. Then 'er eyes go up to the top of 'er head and still she don' pay me no mind. She makes me so mad I keep stabbing an' stabbing till blood spills all over the floor. Alla time I'm screamin', 'You bitch. You're jes' like me mudder. You made me want you, and jes' because I want you, I can't have you!' I can't think of nuttin' except she's a bitch, she deserves what she's gettin'! Now she can't tease me no more! "Then I think she must be dead, so I gets scared and run outta the place. On the way out I

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pass the parlor and see that beautiful pictcher they got hung up in there. I like it, it looks kinda like the way I feel, all stirred up an' everythin'. But I ain't got no place ta keep it. When you sleep in a shelter there ain't no room for art. I think maybe I could get cash for it from Murray, the fence. So I grabs the pictcher and runs outta the apartment and down the steps. Would you believe, the doorman still ain't back yet? What's a guy like that doin' in a fancy place like this? I'll bet he was stoned outta his fuckin' mind!" We both grew very still. Then Plummer retreated to the back of the cage and slunked down to the floor. He was finished and he knew it. No words of mine possibly could help him anymore. I was too exhausted to even say good-bye. He wouldn't have heard it anyway. I looked out of the bars and John was beaming. His whole face was lit up with the luminescent smile I love so well. He quickly unlocked the cell door, relocked it after I came out, and reached over to me with outstretched arms. I ran into them and burst out in tears.

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Chapter Twenty

Conclusion

"It's really very simple, John," I said to him when we met in my office for coffee late the next afternoon to discuss what we had discovered about the murder. "Veronica was a lovely, generous woman with many wonderful qualities. But the tragedy in her upbringing taught her to hurt the people she loved. She was seductive and a withholder. She flirted with everyone who cared about her and then frustrated them, as her father had done by making her love him and then disappearing. She goaded Roland, she disappointed Beryl, she baited me. She even held back her love from her adored child, Emily. She was a marvel at intuitively sensing the one thing each person needed and then withholding precisely that thing. "Unfortunately, someone like Veronica was the last person in the world George Plummer needed. His mother had refused him whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. From the first

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time he saw her, George found Veronica's walk sexually provocative. She made him desire her and then she rejected him. Her brush-off made him feel he was a nothing, as he did when his mother frustrated him. As I spoke, an old tune ran through my head. I couldn't place it but it refused to leave my thoughts. I decided to ignore it and proceed with the analysis of the murder. "It was understandable that George was infuriated," I continued. "We all feel rage at times, but healthy people learn to control it. We learn out of love. We give up acting on our instincts to please the people we care about. But George didn't get enough from his parents to make it worthwhile for him to master his anger. And the brutality of his stepfather taught George to believe that it is all right for a man to act on his impulses, no matter how uncivilized. Because she had an uncanny knack of devining exactly what each person wanted, Veronica was on to the most monstrous method of tantalizing George. She made his mouth water, psychologically speaking, and then said, 'Sorry, I changed my mind!' Thus she symbolically got revenge on her father. She diabolically set off the powder keg George had been sitting on all his life, and he didn't have the emotional tools to stop the explosion." The tune continued to haunt me, but still I couldn't place it. Once more I shoved it aside, as I realized with surprise that I was still angry with Veronica for teasing me along with the others. She knew intuitively that I needed the love of a mother figure. First she made me aware that she had it in her to give, because deep down she really loved me. And then she made sure I never would get the satisfaction I wanted from her. All of this was on an unconscious level, of course." I continued, "She got away with it with everyone else, but she wasn't able to with George.

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Being seduced and then rejected was the last straw in an empty, impoverished life. He wasn't able to handle it the way a healthier person could. To rescue himself he took the one method he was taught as a child, that of violence. As a result, he killed our Veronica. "To be led on and then frustrated at the very last moment would be excruciating for anyone. As you pointed out, John, I am a very strong woman. Yet when Veronica withheld her love from me, even I, trained as I am to look for what we call 'counter transference', the feelings induced in the analyst by the patient, found it very painful. Imagine what it must be like for a forlorn, inadequate personality like George. With his background he found it intolerable, and he cracked. "It was a classic folie a deux. George had always dreamed his withholding mother would come through for him, and for a short while he believed he had found her in Veronica. On the other hand, Veronica unconsciously felt she had her father back and finally would possess the 'loving bum' sexually, as she had always wanted to but never dared admit. "But when George in his own inimitable language said, 'Where ya been all me life?' the discrepancy between him and her father ripped the blinders from Veronica's eyes. She realized then what a terrible mistake she had made. But by then it was too late. Suddenly I remembered something about the recalcitrant song. It had been on a tape of Bob Dylan's that Alan had loved and constantly played on his CD. I know, I thought with excitement, the name of the song is Rolling Stones. Some of the words abruptly came back to me. How does it feel? How does it feel? To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown

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Like a rolling stone When you ain't got nuthin' You got nothin' to lose You're invisible now You've got no secrets to conceal How does it feel? How does it feel?" Now I knew why the song was haunting me. To me it sang of George's wretched life and why he killed Veronica. He was "on his own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown." Veronica made him feel "invisible now," a nobody. When "you ain't got nuthin', "you got nothin' to lose." And "How did it feel? How did it feel?" It felt horrendous, Mr. Dylan. It felt shocking enough to provoke George to murder Veronica. "Do you believe in Fate, John?" I asked. "Sometimes I do. One city block to the left or right for George, one hour more or less at the office for Veronica, the sudden postponement of Roland's trip, his willingness to ask Carlos if he could take her with him; any one of these instances and the tragedy might have been averted. For one ill-fateful moment in the enormity of time the illnesses of Veronica and George fused and transformed their destinies forever. "Fate had a hand in my response to Veronica, too. My mother was not the most loving parent. Whatever she had she gave to my father, and in an emotional sense she was not interested in me at all. I developed a mother transference to Veronica and wanted her to love me as my own mother couldn't. Veronica knew how to give just enough to awaken the need to want more. Then she said, "Get lost." In a sense we were all her victims. Instead of the love we wanted she gave us hostile silence. I don't want to excuse myself, John. But a great analyst named Kurt Eissler once said that counter transference is the creation of the patient. He meant that a patient can

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unconsciously arouse feelings in the analyst that the patient experienced as a child. Veronica induced that kind of yearning in me, as she did with so many others. She made us feel the emptiness her father brought on when he abandoned her. She left us craving her love, as she had hungered for his. So long as she was the pain dispenser, she didn't have to feel anguish herself. And as long as she didn't let people off the hook, she made sure we would stay emotionally involved with her. At the same time she got sadistic pleasure from 'the game'." I was close to tears as I fervently said, "If only she had stayed in analysis one more year! One more year! Perhaps then I could have saved her." Then suddenly I asked, "Do you blame me, John? Do you believe I didn't analyze her properly because I was over involved with her? Could another analyst have prevented her murder?" I looked at him intently to judge his response. What he would say next was terribly important to me. Perhaps our future together depended on it. "Absolutely not," the analyst's son answered, his voice booming with indignation. "You knew why you were reacting that way. Whatever you might have felt, you weren't acting on unconscious motives. You pointed out many times Veronica's need to frustrate people and why she had to do it. But she insisted on leaving treatment before she was ready. She also knew she should bring her last dream to you, and said so on the bottom of her letter paper. But she 'acted out' on it first. And then it was too late to help her." My eyes teared over as I breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you for your support, John dear," I said, sniffing back the tears. He took a huge used handkerchief out of his back pocket and gently wiped them away. I felt all warm inside.

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"That makes me feel better," I went on. "You may be right. Perhaps there is only so much any analyst can do with some patients. But I think sometimes in the dark of the night a little voice will chide me, 'You should have cured her, Mary Wells! You really should have cured her!'" "There goes Humphrey Wells again!" John said. "You know that little voice really belongs to your father." We looked deep into each other's eyes. Then I said, "Stay with me, John. With you around, I'll never need further analysis." He came back with, "Just try to keep me away!" Then he leaned over and kissed me tenderly on the mouth. It was sweeter than honey, the sweetest, purest kiss I had ever known. "I love you, Mary," he said. "I love you, too, John," I answered. "Then marry me." This was what I had been waiting for since the moment we had met. But something inside of me rebelled, I wasn't exactly sure why. Try as I might, I wasn't able to say yes. "I can't, John," I said finally. "I'm too old for you. You're almost young enough to be my son. I'm almost old enough to be your mother." "Oh, so that's it," he said. "What's so terrible about that? I miss my mother and you miss your son. Perhaps in each other we can find the best we had with them." "It seems so...so incestuous." "What? And you a psychoanalyst! It's not incestuous at all! I shouldn't have to tell you that. You're not really my mother and I'm not really your son. We just have the best qualities of

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each of them," he said with no pretense at humility. "What about the age difference," I asked weakly, as I felt my defenses turning to water. "Age doesn't matter, at least not to me. It's how we fit together that counts. We are soul mates, Mary. I knew it even before we met." I was shocked. "What is that supposed to mean?" He actually blushed. "I have a confession to make to you. When Roland first spoke to me he raved about what a wonderful person you are, how sensitive, how empathic, how loving. I thought, I have to get to know that woman! So I asked you to help me track down Veronica's killer. I knew an analyst couldn't turn me down on that." I shook my head and said, "What a manipulator you are, John! You really didn't need my help at all. And all the time I thought you asked me to work with you because you were impressed with my knowledge and talent!" "That too," he said with a little laugh. "Do you mind?" "Not really. I must say I'm rather flattered. You are a wise man, John, in many ways more discerning than I. You know what you want and go after it. You haven't kept yourself locked up in an ivory tower for most of your life. "It's funny how much life is like a jigsaw puzzle," I mused. "For any two people to connect on a deep level, for better or for worse, all the pieces have to come together. You and me, you and your mother, my son and me, you and Veronica and me. Sometimes the pieces fit together for the good of all concerned, as with you and me. Sometimes they connect only to result in evil, as in the case of Veronica and George, Veronica and her father, George with his mother, George and his stepfather. Then you have a jigsaw puzzle that is deadly. But take away any one

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segment and the puzzle consists only of disjointed parts. I might add, our pieces seem to be coming together very nicely." "So will you marry me?" I answered by throwing myself into his arms and kissing him passionately. He responded with all the hunger that lay just beneath his solemn expression. The kiss was very different than the sweet kiss of a few moments ago. This one felt like two magnets forcibly held apart coming together with a crash. What ecstacy to love someone who loved me! And how much I had missed having a man of my own. Just as I remembered, it was an experience different from any other on earth, a world I had thought I would never enter again. Forget age, good-bye Oedipus, none of it mattered one whit when true love entered the picture. Suddenly I knew beyond all doubt I would never let him go. John disentangled himself from me long enough to quip, "Yeah. Well, there are two pieces of this jigsaw puzzle that belong together that haven't been connected yet." "What pieces do you mean, John?" I asked in all innocence, wishing he would stop talking so we could get on with what we were doing. John didn't answer. But his face glowed like phosphorus as he slowly unbuttoned my blouse. I don't know if a luminescent smile is contagious or not, but I suddenly found myself lighting up like an electric bulb.

The End