I cocked my head. “And he did have a motive.”
Just one nod this time, some sadness in it. “Sirhan does display great emotional distress reliving his childhood in Israel, when he lived in an area that took heavy bombing during the ’48 Arab-Israeli conflict. He witnessed atrocities that scarred him, no question.”
“So he does have definite deep feelings about Palestine and Israel.”
This nod was in slow motion. “He does. To me, however, his comments about Arab-Israeli politics have a strangely rote feel — like an actor reciting his lines. He doesn’t speak with the hesitancy and rephrasing common in genuine expressions of thought and emotion.”
I was nodding now. “Which could have been played upon by his programmers. How long would that kind of programming take?”
He frowned. “I would say a few months. There seems to be a period of about three months leading into the assassination where Sirhan’s movements are largely unknown. That programming wouldn’t require him disappearing off the face of the earth, being shipped off somewhere into the hands of some mad doctor. No, it might be akin to a job he took, meaning he would not drop entirely out of sight from his friends and family. But many hours each day would be devoted to this programming.”
I locked eyes with him. “The question is, doctor, would he have been a willing participant?”
The caterpillars rose again. “More to the point is, how willing? I have attempted to get through the barrier concerning those three missing months and get nowhere. Just that during that time he isn’t working and at night occasionally sees friends from his college days, spends time with his family... but what of the days?”
“Let’s get back to ‘How willing?’”
A one-shoulder shrug. “He may have thought he was involved in study of mysticism, magic, philosophy, metaphysics, all areas of interests of his, dating back at least to his interest in the Rosicrucians. Perhaps he was told he could play a role in pro-Arab activism. And he might have known he was being prepared to participate in an assassination. None of that matters.”
That rocked me back. “Well, of course it matters!”
He calmed me: “I mean, in the sense of understanding that Sirhan Sirhan was deprived of a fair trial. That he was at best manipulated by unknown programmers under false pretenses, or at worst was just another cog in a wheel.”
“But an important cog.”
Another nod, again of the slow-motion variety. “An important cog. How do they say it in the old private eye movies, Mr. Heller? He was set up to be a patsy... to take the fall?”
That got a smile out of me — not much of one, but a smile. “What do you think, doctor?”
A long sigh. “I think Sirhan Sirhan has always been a loser. He failed at Pasadena City College. He played horses and lost. He wanted to be a jockey and fell off a horse. He finally found a role he was suited for.”
“Political assassin?”
“Arab hero. He likes to say he doesn’t remember killing Robert Kennedy, yet he takes pride in helping Arab refugees by doing so. And yet...”
“And yet?”
“He is willing, eager, for me to hypnotize him and find out what really happened. He says over and over, ‘I don’t know what happened. I know I was there. They tell me I killed Kennedy. But I don’t remember!’ It is the only time an emotion really comes through.”
I let some air out. “He does recount everything in a frustratingly passive way.”
“Like he’s reciting from a book. And where are the details? Yes, there’s a girl he wants to sleep with, and the Tom Collins drinks and the coffee in the urn, but what else? A psychologist looks for details. If a person is involved in a real situation, there are always details. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, Mr. Heller. Other murderers I’ve interviewed speak with great expression and in horrific detail about their crimes.”
“And all you get out of Sirhan,” I said, “is that he was hoping to get laid.”
“Well, he did get screwed,” the doctor said.
Fourteen
Nita was still sleeping the next morning when I made the call from the bungalow’s living room to attorney F. Lee Bailey in his Boston office. We were old friends — I’d been his investigator on the Sam Sheppard re-trial a few years ago and the A-1 had handled a few minor things for him in the meantime. I told Lee only that I was trying to get a bead on Dr. Joseph W. Bryant and he didn’t pry about the reason.
“Well, I can tell you this about him,” he said in his mellow courtroom baritone. “Bryant may be the most brilliant man alive in the field of hypnotism — certainly the most knowledgeable and imaginative.”
“How did a New England lawyer happen to connect with a Hollywood hypnotist?”
“Back in ’61, in San Francisco,” Bailey said, “Melvin Belli put on a hypnosis seminar for trial lawyers with Bryant the star attraction. Bryant hypnotized three of us, myself included, and instructed us to hold out our right arms while he droned on about how our arms were feeling numb. I was just waiting for something interesting to happen, and only sensed my arm being lightly rubbed. When Bryant brought us around, we each of us had hypodermic needles stuck through the fleshy part of our arms.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not a bit. He informed us this was an example of hypnosis as anesthesia. The punctures had not caused bleeding. He removed the needles painlessly, sent us to our seats and resumed the lecture. That, Nathan, is what brought Dr. Bryant to my attention.”
“And then you pulled him in on the Boston Strangler case.”
“Yes, but before that to assess another strangler — the so-called Hollywood Strangler, Harvey Bush, who’d killed three elderly women. Bryant’s theory was that Bush hated his mother and was killing her over and over. In Bush’s cell, with the prisoner in a hypnotic trance, I played the role of the mother. The son of a bitch attacked me and if Bryant hadn’t been there to grab him, Bush would have made victim number four out of me.”
“Were you in a dress like Tony Perkins at the end of Psycho?”
“Very funny, Nathan. Now as to the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, it was Bryant himself who nearly became a victim. After repeatedly telling the hypnotized DeSalvo that the victims represented him strangling his daughter over and over — for diverting his wife’s love from him to her — DeSalvo clutched Bryant by the throat. Bryant grabbed his attacker’s shoulders and shouted, ‘Sleep!’ And that did the trick.”
“Well. He would seem to be the genuine article.”
“Oh, he’s that, all right. But I’d never use him in court. Wouldn’t dare put him on the stand.”
“Why not?”
“He’s too damn full of himself. A pompous ass. A showboat.”
Of course Lee had been called all those things, too.
“And then,” the attorney went on, “there’s his sexual proclivities, which any competent prosecutor would use to impeach him. He’s on probation now for hypno-hanky-panky with female clients. And his receptionists are a parade of bosomy bimbos right out of a Russ Meyer movie — they last in their well-paid jobs only as long as they can take it. Apparently not all women are attracted to tubs of lard.”
“That heavy, is he? I heard 400 pounds.”
“An exaggeration. Really, I wouldn’t put him past 380.”
“Can you buy this character working with the CIA?”
“Hell, Nathan, he bragged about it! That doesn’t make it necessarily true, of course — he’s an insufferable egotist and shameless grandstander.”