Richard Stevenson - Shock to the system

"No. No, the whole thing could have been worse." At this, he quickly looked away, and I began to wonder.

I said, "It was a brutal thing for them to have done to you, Vernon. Whatever foul deeds you may have committed against gay men in that room over the years, none of it was as vicious as what was done to you by Bierly, Haig, and St. James on that night last January."

"No, no. You can't even begin to understand what it was like, Donald."

"But were you…? You know."

"Was I what?"

"Weren't you turned on, Vernon, just a little?"

"Of course not!" he snapped.

"My God, Vernon," I said, "do you mean to tell me that your system doesn't work? That in fact you can't change a man's sexual orientation with dirty pictures and electrodes and lightning storms? Wait till this gets out."

"Don't be absurd. Sexual reparative therapy using aversion techniques requires dozens of hours over a long period of time to achieve lasting results. Moreover, having intercourse with a sheep is not a natural human desire."

"I've heard from friends who grew up on farms that it can be quite pleasant, though."

Being a town boy, I guessed, Crockwell just glared.

I said, "Why didn't you call the police? After they left, I mean. How long did this go on, anyway?"

"From 10:40 P.M. until 1:45 A.M. It was endless, endless."

"I'm sure it was, Vernon. You must have been both mortified and terrified. What was done to you was a felonious criminal assault. So, why didn't you have the three of them prosecuted?"

He glowered and even shook a little. "Can you imagine the- the television coverage of such a trial?"

"Yes, I can."

"I would have been a laughingstock. My patients would have-lost confidence in me."

"It's like the old joke," I said. "A man running for sheriff in Texas wants to spread the rumor that his opponent fucks pigs. A campaign worker says, 'Why do that? It's not true.' 'No, it isn't,' the candidate says, 'but let's make him deny it.' Just being mentioned in a conversation about bestiality is bad for business, and being mentioned in this regard every night at six and eleven between the killer-mom stories and the Lotto drawing would pretty much end a man's professional usefulness in Albany, I would guess. I can understand your reticence, Vernon-although I'm not sure I would have been so forbearing in the matter myself. In fact, I'd have been left with feelings that were downright murderous."

He said, "Of course you would. I had such feelings too. I'm only human."

"But you didn't act on those feelings, Vernon?"

"No, Donald," he said. "I am not a murderer." He looked me in the eye when he said it, and he looked to me as if he either was telling the truth or was a total psychopath.

"You say Haig never tried to blackmail you. What would you have done, Vernon, if he had? What if Paul had come to you and said, 'Pay me sixty thousand dollars or I'll spread pictures around of you involved in what will look to a lot of people like some kind of ritual involving sadomasochistic bestiality'?"

"I'd have told him to take his sordid business elsewhere. First, there are no pictures. No one had a camera that night.

Second, if Paul had spread the story of the incident, I would simply have denied it."

"That would have damaged your campaign for sheriff, Vernon."

"I wasn't running for sheriff, Donald. I'm a respected psychotherapist and Paul Haig was an alcoholic and a sexual deviant. In any case, I can't imagine Paul Haig attempting to blackmail me by threatening to make public an incident in which his-not mine but his -involvement was criminal."

I kept being reminded of that. I said, "You've got a point, Vernon. But Paul Haig was blackmailing someone, and then he was killed. The probability is high that the relationship between the two events is cause-and-effect."

"This may be true, but I think you need to look into Paul's life of depravity for your answers, not my life of professional integrity and Christian probity."

What a pill. I said, "How come for a while you were desperate to hire me, Vernon, to get you off the hook with the cops, and then you changed your mind?"

He blushed again. "I was acting irrationally for a period of time. I was too emotional." He blushed some more.

I said, "You were trying to buy me off. You knew Bierly was trying to sic me on you, and you knew I detested the savage things you were doing to men in your crackpot practice. So you thought that for money I could be turned into your ally instead of your adversary. But then you saw that my aim was to dig out the truth at any cost on Paul's death and Larry's shooting, and I wasn't going to care what I dredged up in the process-your going into training for sheep fucking and whatnot-and you decided you had better take your chances with mere legal representation and Norris Jackacky's chummy relations with the DA, and I could take a hike. Am I right?"

"Donald," he said mildly, "you could not be more wrong. My overture to you was sincere. I believed my best hope was to have Larry's assailant identified and charged-and Paul's, if there was one. And I believed, based on what Norris had told me, that you were the best man to do the job. The Albany Police Department is not as effective in these matters as it might be. It was as simple as that."

"Then why did you change your mind?"

"Well-on the advice of my attorney. He decided that your involvement was-redundant." He was blushing again, of all things.

I said, "I don't believe you, Vernon. Your suddenly distancing yourself from me had something to do with your night of woolly eroticism."

He shook his head. "No."

"Yes."

"No."

"What is it? There's more to the sheep story."

"No, there is not more to the sheep story."

"Anyway, how did they get up here that Thursday night? Doesn't the building have security?"

"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."