A Shock to the System - Stevenson Richard (чтение книг TXT) 📗

"There's no guard. I buzzed them in. Paul phoned me and feigned a mental breakdown. I was skeptical but let my compassion for a former patient whom I thought of as a lost sheep—lost soul—interfere with my better judgment. And I buzzed the door open from my office without knowing precisely who was going to arrive. It was a very great mistake that I will never, ever make again."

"Not exactly, I suppose. I think there's still a part of this you're not telling me, Vernon. Something you badly did not want me to uncover, and that's why you left a message for me on Saturday telling me to piss off."

"Absolutely not," he said, bright as a tomato on Timmy's Aunt Moira's kitchen windowsill in August.

I watched him radiate red heat and light for a quarter of a minute. Then the thing that should have been obvious all along hit me, and I said, "If Paul Haig was not blackmailing you or either of the two others involved in the allegedly unphotographed episode of amour de brebis, then he was blackmailing someone else about whom he had information that that person would consider damaging or even incriminating. Prime candidates surely are members of the therapy group. Paul presumably knew many of their most intimate secrets. Is that correct?"

"I suppose that would be true. Most members of the group,

however, tended to speak in generalities about their past unfortunate lives as sexual degenerates. So it would be hard for a blackmailer to come up with tangible or even specific evidence that could be exchanged for money."

"Were all the group members that discreet and closemouthed, or just some of them?"

"Two members of that particular group," Crockwell said, looking queasy, "were particularly graphic and loquacious on the subject of their own sexual perversions."

"Who were they?"

"You know I can't tell you that. But you can take my word for it, Donald, that for a variety of reasons neither man is a likely target in a blackmail scheme."

Moody and Stover. I said, "But some members of the group no doubt are likelier targets. And the incriminating dope Haig might have had on one of them could have come from a source other than a therapy session itself. Maybe a member wasn't succeeding in his de-queering nearly as well as he let on here, and he badly did not want that bad news to get back to—wherever. Whether or not any of that happened can be learned only by digging around extensively in the group members' lives, a project I might or might not have the time and resources to take on. I might have to leave it to the cops.

"The job can be narrowed down considerably, Vernon, if I know who in the therapy group might reasonably be expected to have the wherewithal to come up with sixty thousand dollars on short notice. If anyone knows who in that group has access to big bucks, it's you. You know who had a hard time raising the cash for treatment and who wrote a check without giving it a second thought. Are you going to help me out, or aren't you?"

He looked thoughtful, but it didn't last. "I can't tell you that, and I'm sure you can understand why, Donald. Patient confidentiality is paramount in my profession. The ethics involved here are clear."

"Yes, I know all about your ethics, Vernon. Look, I'm not asking about anybody's manatee fixation or whatever, only about

their cash reserves, which is surely a fairly innocuous matter in the therapeutic context."

"Well, you are quite wrong about that."

"Oh. I beg your pardon. So you're not going to help me identify the person who killed Paul Haig and may have tried to kill Larry Bierly, two of your former patients?"

"No, I'm afraid that if it involves medically confidential information, I'm unable at this point in time to help you, Donald."

"Then you get no mercy from me," I said, and got up and went out.

22

My partially sleepless night and early-morning romp with T. Callahan had left me jet-lagged by late afternoon— sleeping until one hadn't helped—so I'd been pouring down extra-strength Jamaican Blue Mountain for over an hour when Timmy arrived home just after six. I didn't know then that my extra coffee consumption would turn out to be the key to an early resolution to the question of Paul Haig's murder. I just meant for it to get me through the evening without dozing off and toppling face-foreward in a public place.

I told Timmy about my meeting with Crockwell and the news of the therapist's onetime course in aversion therapy. Timmy stared at me in horror.

"Why, that's savage!"

"It is."

"You're making it up."

"No."

"But it's beastly!"

"Well, yes."

"But how could they do such a thing? Even to a man like Crockwell?"

"Two of them were enraged at him, they were under the influence of powerful drugs that break down inhibitions, and I guess they saw it as a kind of poetic justice."

"Oh, it's poetic, all right."

"Yes. Not Emily Dickinson, though. Robinson Jeffers maybe. Or Edgar Guest."

"It's poetic, but is it justice? I certainly don't think so. Crockwell's patients all went to him voluntarily, misguided as they were. But what those three did to Crockwell is assault, pure and simple. And he's not pressing charges?"

"No." I told Timmy the story of the Texan running for sheriff who wanted to accuse his opponent of fucking pigs.

Pouring himself a cup of the potent coffee, Timmy said, "That's a good joke about Texas politics, but it also illustrates why people who are victims of sex crimes often won't come forward and testify against the people who assaulted them."

"That's true, Timothy. But you also have to admit that (a) the joke is funny, and (b) it's a bit droll, too, when a man who cons people into administering electric jolts to themselves to combat their sexual natures gets a dose of his own medicine. Admit it. The image is priceless."

He poured one-percent low-fat milk into his coffee and stirred it. "But it's still assault."

"But the image is still priceless."

"But it's still assault."

"But the image is still priceless."

He conceded nothing. Though after a moment he did say, "Are there pictures?"

"No. Anyway, Crockwell maintains he never got it up for the sheep pictures. Or even for the Playboy bunny slides, would be my guess, given the circumstances."

"Well, there's that."

"Yes, think of the Polaroids showing up in the supermarket tabs. The horror."

Timmy shuddered, but I could see the images flipping along inside his head, and I suspected that they were not without entertainment value. He said, "So now you don't think Haig's blackmail scheme had anything to do with Crockwell and the sheep?"

"I'm pretty sure it didn't."

"But it's such a classic setup for blackmail."

"Not if there are no pictures or other evidence—which St. James and Crockwell both insist there couldn't have been—and

the blackmail target is ready to tell the blackmailer to go jump in the lake."

"I'm sorry, Don. I guess you're back to square one then."

"Not at all." I explained that with the Haig-Bierly-St. James (You-Don't-Want-to-Know)—Crockwell sheep incident now eliminated as the nexus of the blackmail situation, it was suddenly clear that the most likely blackmail target for Paul Haig would have been a member of the Crockwell psychotherapy group who was secretly involved in sexual escapades that would have been considered impermissible by both Crockwell and others in the man's life, and who moreover was in a position to come up with the sixty thousand dollars Haig needed to hang onto Beautiful Thingies. I said Crockwell wouldn't tell me who in the group was well-heeled and that I would have to find out independently. Meanwhile, I'd keep my appointment at eight that evening in Ballston Spa with Dr. Glen Snyder, who treated Paul Haig during the six weeks prior to Haig's death, and who I believed might have information or insights about Haig that would shed light on the blackmail or at least the circumstances surrounding it.