Yes, Gussie, he thought, you do sweat, I know that now, and you belch and you fart, too, and I’ve seen you sitting on the toilet bowl, and once when you got drunk with all those flitty photographer friends of yours, I held your head while you vomited, and I put you to bed afterward and wiped up the bathroom floor, yes, Gussie, I know you sweat, I know you’re human, but Jesus, Gussie, do you have to... do you have to do this to me, do you have to behave like... like a goddamn bitch in heat?
“...thinking of going down to South America to do it,” Augusta said.
“What?” Kling said.
“Larry. Shoot the spot down there. There’s snow down there now. Forget the symbolic mountain, do it on a real mountain instead.”
“What symbolic mountain?”
“Long General. Have you ever seen it? It looks like—”
“Yeah, a mountain.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“So you’ll be going to South America, huh?”
“Just for a few days. If it works out.”
“When?”
“Well, I don’t know yet.”
“When do you think it might be?”
“Pretty soon, I guess. While there’s still snow. This is like their winter, you know.”
“Yeah,” Kling said. “Like when? This month sometime?”
“Probably.”
“Did you tell him you’d go?”
“I don’t get many shots at television, Bert. This is a full minute, the exposure’ll mean a lot to me.”
“Oh, sure, I know that.”
“It’ll just be for a few days.”
“Who’ll be going down there?” he asked.
“Just me, and Larry, and the crew.”
“No other models?”
“He’ll pick up his extras on the spot.”
“I don’t think I’ve met him,” Kling said. “Have I met him?”
“Who?”
“Larry Patterson.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Augusta said, and looked away. “You sure you don’t want me to fix you something?”
“Nothing,” Kling said. “Thanks.”
9
Manfred Leider was a police psychologist who had once helped Carella while he was investigating the murders of several blind victims. He was a man in his fifties, sporting a gray beard that he thought made him look like a psychiatrist. In this state a psychiatrist had to go through four years of college, four years of medical school, one year of internship, three years of residency, and another two years of clinical practice before taking the written and oral examinations he had to pass for a license to practice. That was why psychiatrists charged a minimum of fifty dollars an hour for their services. Leider was only a psychologist. That was why he was working for the Police Department at an annual salary of $36,400.
When Carella called him early Thursday morning, he was in with a patient, a patrolman who’d suddenly developed conversion hysteria symptoms about drawing and firing his pistol should the need arise. You did not have to be a psychiatrist or even a psychologist to know what a pistol symbolized. Leider’s secretary told Carella that the doctor (he was a doctor, if only a lowly PhD) would call him back when he was free. He returned the call at a quarter past eleven.
“Dr. Leider here,” he said.
“Hello,” Carella said, “how are you? I don’t know if you remember me, this is Detective Carella at the 87th Precinct. We had a talk not too long ago about—”
“Yes, involving a screen memory, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, the nightmares and the—”
“Yes, I remember. How’d that one work out?”
“Well, we got the guy.”
“Good,” Leider said, “glad to have been of help.”
“I’ve got a very simple question this time,” Carella asked.
“Mm,” Leider said. He was used to very simple questions that required marathon explorations.
“I’ve got an apparent suicide victim, overdose of Seconal. The man’s former wife and his brother tell me he was averse to taking medication of any kind.”
“Phobic about it?”
“Had a reaction to penicillin when he was a teenager, wouldn’t go near even an aspirin since.”
“I would say that might be termed phobic.”
“The question: Would such a person have voluntarily swallowed twenty-nine Seconal capsules?”
“Mm,” Leider said.
Carella waited.
“The problem with asking a psychologist such a question,” Leider said at last, “is that I can think of circumstances in which he might have, yes.”
“What circumstances?”
“Well, there are two ways of dealing with a phobia,” Leider said. “The first way is to avoid whatever it is that’s causing the fear. If you’re phobic about open spaces, for example, you stay in your apartment, you simply refuse to go outside, where the phobia will cause extreme anxiety.”
“And the second way?”
“You confront the fear, you rush at it headlong. Many war heroes, for example, were terrified of battle. They conquered their fear, well, that’s too strong a word, ‘conquered.’ They dealt with it by volunteering for dangerous missions, which for them proved more effective in dealing with the phobia than simply sitting still and shaking with terror every time a grenade exploded. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
“There’s what we call phobic avoidance, and then there’s the reverse mechanism, counterphobic confrontation. Rushing into the fear itself. When I was in private practice, oh, this was many years ago, I treated an airline pilot who’d become a flier because he was afraid of heights. That was his way of overcoming the phobia.”
“That’s very reassuring,” Carella said.
“Yes, well,” Leider said.
“I mean, for airline passengers,” Carella said.
“Yes,” Leider said, and Carella realized he was dealing with a totally humorless human being. “So,” Leider said, getting immediately back to the point, “your man could have attempted to overcome his phobia to medication by deliberately ingesting more of the barbiturate than was needed as a soporific. When we consider what he was about to do—”
“About to do?”
“You did say this was an apparent suicide?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, the man was about to kill himself—”
“Yes.”
“—which may have been his way of finally submitting to the phobia, rushing into its embrace, so to speak, surrendering to the phobia and to death at the same time. His final solution, so to speak.”
“I see,” Carella said.
“I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you,” Leider said.
“No, no, I’ve got to consider all the—”
“I understand,” Leider said.
But Carella was disappointed.
He had hoped for a conclusive professional opinion unlike the one he’d received from James Brolin only yesterday: I have no way of answering that without knowing the case history of the person in question. Perhaps psychologists were wont to venture where psychiatrists feared to tread, but couldn’t Leider just as easily have said “No, no way. This man definitely would not have taken pills of any kind to commit suicide”? It would have been so easy then. Oh, so very easy. All Carella would have had to do then was find a murderer. There did not seem to be many murderers lurking in the bushes these days.