The Dark Page 4

  “In your profession that’s close to blasphemy,” Phil said. Grant nodded.

  “I stand accused.”

  “Does this new patient of yours claim he suggested Dunbar use an ordinary household hammer?”

  “I didn’t get into that and he didn’t mention any name. I spent the remainder of the session discussing his father and his relationship with his brothers and sisters.”

  Maggie thought a moment.

  “Could he have had contact with Dunbar, Grant, being they shared the same psychiatrist and all?”

  “Maybe.”

  “If that’s true, why wouldn’t Dunbar put the blame on your patient rather than on Henry?” Phil asked quickly.

  Grant thought a moment.

  “I can only guess.”

  “Go on.”

  “Henry was probably making enough headway to challenge his paranoia. The irony here is Dunbar’s paranoia caused him to believe Henry had an ulterior motive. So, the healthier he started to become, the more he felt threatened.”

  “Complicated, the work you psychiatrists do,” Phil said, sitting back.

  “We just unravel mental knots. Whereas you guys tie them.”

  Phil laughed. Maggie remained thoughtful.

  “Still, it’s odd this patient of yours referred to Dunbar,” she said, “and was that specific.”

  “Not so odd. Dunbar was available for his delusion, if he is delusional. I need a little more time before I make a diagnosis, of course, but it could very well be that the guy just follows news stories and imagines himself a player.”

  “Don’t be afraid to bring this one home,” she advised.

  “I won’t be. But for now, let’s drop it. I suddenly feel like I’m obsessing.”

  “You ought to know,” Phil quipped. Susan giggled.

  “My husband’s so witty, isn’t he?”

  “So much so, he overwhelms us. Let’s order while I still have an appetite,” Grant muttered, and Phil signaled for the waiter.

  The noise in Brewmeisters in West L.A. was deafening compared to the upscale restaurant in which Grant, Maggie, Phil, and Susan sat. Four men in plaid flannel shirts were arguing heavily at the dartboard, the juke was wailing, men and women around the horseshoe bar were shouting to be heard, and waitresses were screaming orders at the two burly bartenders. Above the bar, two twenty-five-inch television sets played a fight on ESPN. The forty-year-old woman sitting in the rear and hovering over a pint of beer didn’t seem distracted by the noise or activity. She stared ahead, waiting, apparently lost in her own thoughts.

  She was still in her light brown raincoat. Her dark brown hair was down, straggly along her cheeks, the bangs uneven. A cigarette smoked in the ashtray. She picked it up and nervously held it in her fingers for a moment before taking a quick puff and putting it back into the glass ashtray. Then she gazed at her watch, took a deep breath, a swig of her beer, and another puff on her cigarette.

  The stout bald-headed man at the table to her right smiled at her, revealing missing back teeth and an almost purple tongue. She swung her eyes toward the front door, but the stout man continued to stare, continued to smile. He looked like he was about to get up and approach her when she suddenly smiled and he turned to see Jules Bois stroll into the tavern, walking between the couples and groups of men as if unaware they were inches away. Those in his way parted to let him pass, few taking any real note of him even though he wore a jacket and tie and looked like he had made the wrong turn on the freeway.

  “Hello, Mrs. Mosley,” he said when he reached her table.

  “Doctor,” she said.

  The stout man, disappointed, turned to look at a thin woman bent over the jukebox.

  Jules sat and signaled the waitress.

  “I’ll have that Moonlight Amber,” he said, nodding toward the sign that advertised it. “Pint.”

  “Right,” the waitress said.

  Bois turned back to Janet Mosley.

  “How are you today?”

  “Not good, Doctor. Things are getting worse. Allan is so distraught, he’s like another person. Our marriage is very strained. He no longer seems to care about my needs, our needs. All he talks about is his mother.”

  “From what you’ve told me and from what I’ve observed, he’s obsessed. We call it the Oedipus complex.”

  “I heard of that,” she said.

  “Yes, it’s very popular these days,” Bois said. The waitress brought the beer. “Let’s look at your problem logically, intelligently, Mrs. Mosley.”

  “I appreciate your help, Doctor. I don’t have any money.”

  “Yet,” he said.

  “She’ll eat all of it up,” Janet muttered.

  “Yes, she will,” Bois agreed. “I’ve seen it a hundred times if I’ve seen it once. But getting back to what I said . . . logically, we have identified the problem. Now we have got to eliminate it.”

  “Eliminate?”

  Bois drank some beer and looked around.

  “Look at these people, Janet. Most of them have a lot more problems than you do, yet they play and live as if they’re carefree. Some people can do that. It’s as if a piece of their conscience has been underdeveloped. Others, like yourself, are plagued with too much conscience and therefore suffer unnecessarily. It’s not fair.

  “Does your mother-in-law even know where she’s at these days?” he followed quickly.

  “No, the Alzheimer’s is worse. There are days she eats lunch twice. I swear,” Janet said, sipping her beer. Bois drank more of his and nodded.

  “Almost a crime to keep her going this way. It’s like someone who’s already left her body behind. Janet, your solution is as simple and as obvious as the nose on your face. It’s time your mother-in-law was relieved of her agony, a by-product of which will be relief of your own. You and Allan will become a couple again. Life’s too short to waste it like this.”

  Janet nodded.

  “You’ve heard about that doctor who helps people commit suicide to relieve them of their misery?”

  “Yes.”

  “Janet, this is not much different. Another beer?”

  “What? Yes. Thank you. But how, I mean . . .”

  “It’s easy, Janet. An Alzheimer’s patient could easily overdose on her heart medication. Waitress,” he called, and smiled at Janet. “Relax. Would I tell you to do anything that wasn’t good for everyone, even for Allan?”

  She shook her head. He downed his beer and ordered another for himself as well as for her.

  Suddenly, as if returning to this world, Janet Mosley heard some of the noise around her. She was happy when he finally suggested they leave.

  Less than an hour later, Jules Bois stood in the shadows across the street from Janet Mosley’s mother-in-law’s apartment house. It was a little chilly. He had his collar up.

  “It’s a good time now, Janet,” he said.

  She moved from his side and crossed the street. He watched as Janet, with her hands in her pockets, head down, entered the building. She paused once inside the glass door, looked his way, and then continued.

  His eyes moved up the building to the windows he knew were her mother-in-law’s. And then he smiled, took a deep breath, and turned to walk away, whistling his favorite tune from Damn Yankees.

  3

  As the day of Bois’ next session drew closer, Grant found he was actually nervous, fidgeting with things on his desk, watching the clock, reading and rereading his notes from the first session.

  Fay Moffit, who had been Grant’s secretary for the past fifteen years, was as professional and efficient an employee as he could want. She never asked him about a patient. At times she appeared to be working in a bank, so he was surprised when she said, “Mr. Bois is coming in today, isn’t he?” The question was superfluous. She knew Grant’s schedule better than he did.

  “Yes, why?”

  “Did I tell you I spoke to him for quite a while the other day before he went in to see you?”

  “You
mentioned thinking he was a sincere man, yes.”

  “Don’t you think he’s sincere?” she asked, fishing. Fay was just forty, divorced, with a fourteen-year-old daughter. Her ex-husband was a homicide detective. Grant had done quite a bit of work with policemen and knew the pressures under which they lived and why their domestic lives were so complicated. Fay’s husband had been an adulterer. She had, with Grant’s counseling, forgiven him once; when she discovered a second and then a third and a fourth instance, she filed for a divorce. It had been four years since. In the interim, Fay had dated other men, but still hadn’t found anyone in which she wanted to invest her trust. Although they had never sat down and discussed it formally, she and Grant had had a number of conversations concerning her fear that she was being too demanding on every man because she had been hurt deeply by one in particular. However, Grant was satisfied that she was capable of having another significant relationship.

  “Tell me exactly why you made that conclusion, Fay. You didn’t speak to him very long, did you?” he asked.

  She thought a moment. Fay always claimed Grant made her choose her words more carefully than anyone she knew.

  “Well, he was polite, but not ingratiating. As I said, when I talked, he looked like he was interested, like he was really listening. Most people ask questions just to make conversation. They nod or grunt, but you know they’re not really listening.”

  “A-huh. But you felt he really listened?”

  “Yes. Just like you do, only . . .”

  “Only what, Fay?”

  “Only with his eyes so fixed on me, I felt . . .”

  “What?” Grant asked, now fascinated.

  “Important. What I said mattered to him. I hope I’m not wrong about him.”

  Grant nodded. Fay didn’t expect him to say anything about his patient, but she lingered a bit this time, obviously hoping he would. Of course, he didn’t and she returned to her desk.

  Bois arrived promptly.

  “You look surprised to see me, Doctor,” he said with a wry smile. “Didn’t you expect I would return?”

  “Most of my patients are quite unpredictable,” Grant replied, feeling the need to be clever, “so I don’t expect anything. Would you like the lounge or the chair?”

  During the first session Bois had sat in the chair in front of Grant’s desk, but most of his patients were more comfortable not looking at him when they spoke to him and released the thoughts and events they had kept secreted most of their adult lives.

  “Today I think I’ll take the lounge. I believe I can free-associate better on my back,” Bois added. His eyes twinkled impishly.

  “So,” Grant began, pulling his chair up beside Bois. Bois lay with his eyes closed and Grant studied his face. It was a handsome face, the features carved with perfection, from his straight nose to his even lips and smoothly shaped chin. His cheekbones were high and his forehead not too big or too small. He had firm shoulders and a slim figure with long arms and rather long fingers, upon the right pinkie of which he wore what looked like a ruby set in white gold. Grant remembered Bois said he wasn’t married, nor, according to what he had told him, ever had been. In fact, he hadn’t mentioned any significant relationship with a woman, although he was quick to add that he wasn’t gay.

  Grant opened with, “How did you feel after coming here and making the sort of confession you made?”

  Bois turned toward Grant, opening his eyes and smiling with surprise.

  “Confessing, as I understand it, implies guilt, remorse, and as you should recall, I don’t feel that.” Bois relaxed again, and with his eyes closed added, “You’re not sure whether I’m for real or not, are you, Doctor?”

  “You wouldn’t be my first patient to confess to crimes he didn’t actually commit,” Grant replied.

  “The husband’s name was Dunbar,” Bois said, turning to him. Grant felt a heat in his face, but he kept rather cool.

  “You could have read that in the newspaper,” Grant said quickly, perhaps too quickly. It brought that small smile to Bois’ lips.

  “Why so anxious to have me delusional, Doctor? Is it because you wouldn’t have a moral dilemma?”

  “No, but I have to be skeptical to be objective,” Grant said.

  Bois shook his head as if Grant had given the wrong answer.

  “Clarence Dunbar has suffered from impotency this past year. That won’t be in the news,” he said, and lay back again. “We met in the lobby of Doctor Flemming’s offices. I saw this vulnerability in him and I couldn’t pass it up. My compulsion took over,” he said. Then he lay back again and closed his eyes. “I must say he was easy to manipulate. I just fed the paranoia, reinforcing his belief that his wife was to blame for his condition.

  “He began calling me on the phone all the time, relating these silly stories, blaming her for the most mundane things. He likes salt on his salad,” Bois said, imitating a disturbed man’s whine, “but she always put an empty saltshaker on the table. When she put his socks in the drawer, she deliberately put a black and a dark blue one together so he would put them on and look foolish later.

  “I told him if he didn’t do something about her soon, he’d be totally dysfunctional.” Bois paused to see Grant’s reaction. Grant simply nodded. Bois continued, “Dunbar had one of these home shops. Used to be quite handy before he became quite paranoid. You know the type: he could build anything they needed in the house, fix anything. It was just natural to recommend he use a hammer. It was something with which he felt comfortable.”

  His smile widened and his eyes brightened with a deep and clear sense of self-satisfaction.

  “You see, Doctor,” he explained, “my compulsive behavior has an intelligence to it. It’s what makes this sort of evil interesting, don’t you think?”

  Bois glanced up at Grant.

  “You look skeptical, Doctor Blaine,” he said. “Do you still suspect I might be one of those people who imagine and hallucinate?” Bois rolled his eyes and laughed. “Do you think I’m making all this up in my madness?”

  “As I said, you wouldn’t be the first,” Grant replied coolly.

  Bois roared.

  “I like you, Doctor. I really think you’re going to help me, despite yourself.”

  “Despite myself? Why despite myself?”

  “Because you’ve had similar experiences.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t act so innocent, Doctor. Wasn’t there ever a time in your life when you instigated someone to commit an illegal or immoral act? Kids especially like to say, I dare you, and challenge one of their friends to do something forbidden.

  “Ever challenge a friend to throw a rock through a school window?”

  Grant felt himself blanch.

  “Ah, you have, I see.”

  “Look . . .”

  “What about your college days? I’m sure you coaxed someone, a girl perhaps, to smoke some pot with you, right? Didn’t that lead to something else . . . a little hanky-panky in the sack?”

  Grant just stared, the crimson in his face deepening.

  “It’s all right, Doctor. I’m not condemning you for it. I think what makes it possible for us—not just you and me, but all mankind in general—to understand an obsessive compulsion is the fact that we have all experienced something like it. I mean, we have all deliberately started something burning, even if it was just a piece of paper in an ashtray . . . fascination with fire and our power to make it . . . goes back to our caveman days . . . but that doesn’t make us pyromaniacs until we can’t stop, right?

  “You lit something on fire once, didn’t you, Doctor? Did it get out of hand? Were you frightened? Did you ’fess up when you were asked how it happened or did you lie and pretend innocence?

  “Am I getting warm?” Bois concluded with a thin smile on his lips.

  “Even if I admitted any of those conjectures were true, the big difference is I felt guilt about something that was bad. At your own admittance, you seem to flourish or feel am
biguous at the worst. You don’t experience any real remorse.”

  “Yet I came here to have you analyze me. Most evil people avoid discovery,” Bois countered. “They don’t want to have themselves scrutinized. Doesn’t that imply I am eager to be more like you?”

  “Of course, that bodes well . . . your desire to stop the compulsion.”

  “Or perhaps enjoy it without remorse. Just think of the freedom that brings, Doctor. Perhaps you could indulge a sexually active patient, for instance, and not feel guilty about it afterward.”

  Grant raised his eyebrows.

  “Have I touched a fantasy?”

  “Let’s stick to your problems, Mr. Bois.”

  “I suppose when you get down to it, it’s all about control, isn’t it, Doctor? Doctor Flemming and I often talked about this.”

  “Oh?”

  “We’re all out there trying to control events, people. The more control we experience, the more confident and safe we feel about ourselves. That’s why people do evil things,” Bois said, his eyes brightening. “Yes. Murder, robbery, rape, embezzlement . . . you name it, it involves the criminal having control over the victim.

  “When you get to the core of the issue, then, we find we are all driven by the urge to have power. That’s what drives me,” he concluded, nodding.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, and you know what, Doctor, that’s what drives you, too. You’re trying to control your patients, change them, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know if I would attribute my motives to a drive for power, Mr. Bois.”

  “Of course it is,” Bois retorted. “That’s all it is.” Bois leaned forward, his eyes penetrating. “Why deny it? Why not admit it and finally and purely enjoy it, Doctor? Just as I do,” he said in a soft whisper. “Doctor Flemming was just starting to do that when . . . he was unfortunately terminated,” Bois said with a smirk.

  Grant stared at him silently a moment. Then Bois lay back again, smiling.

  “Fortunately, he had begun to write it all down. He and I were actually collaborating on something, did you know that?”