John Katzenbach - The Analyst

Sure you did, Ricky thought. Liar.

“Would it surprise you, doctor, to learn that the young woman who made the allegations has subsequently disappeared?”

“I beg your pardon…”

“She never returned for follow-up therapy with the physician in Boston whom she made the initial charges to.”

“That is curious…”

“And that his efforts to locate her turned up the unsettling fact that her identity-who she claimed to be, doctor-was fake.”

“A fake?”

“And it was further learned that her charges were part of a hoax. Did you know this, doctor?”

“But no, no, I didn’t… as I said, we didn’t follow up, after the suicide…”

“In other words, you washed your hands of the entire matter.”

“It was turned over to the proper authorities…”

“But that suicide certainly saved you and your profession a great deal of negative and embarrassing publicity, did it not?”

“I don’t know-well, of course, but…”

“Did it occur to you that perhaps the heirs of Doctor Starks would want his reputation restored? That exoneration, even after death, might be important to them?”

“I did not consider that.”

“Do you know you could be considered liable for that death?”

This statement drew a predictable, blustery response. “Not in the slightest! We didn’t-”

Ricky interrupted. “There are more sorts of liability in this world than legal, are there not, doctor?”

He liked this question. It went to the core of what a psychoanalyst is all about. He could envision the man on the other end of the telephone line shifting about uncomfortably in his chair. Perhaps a little sweat formed on his forehead or dripped down beneath his armpits.

“Of course, but…”

“But no one in the society really wanted to know the truth, did they? It was better if it just disappeared into the ocean with Doctor Starks, correct?”

“I don’t think I should answer any more questions, Mr. uh…”

“Of course not. Not at this moment. Perhaps at a later time. But it is curious, isn’t it, doctor?”

“What?”

“That truth is far stronger than death.”

With that statement, Ricky hung up the phone.

He lay back on the bed, staring up at the white ceiling and a bare lightbulb. He could feel some of his own sweat beneath his arms, as if he’d exerted himself in that conversation, but it wasn’t a nervous dampness, rather a wet and satisfactory righteousness. In the next room, the couple had started up again, and for a moment he listened to the unmistakable rhythms of sex, finding it amusing and not altogether unpleasurable. More than one person having a little workday amusement, he thought. After a moment, he rose and searched around until he found a small pad of paper in the bedside table desk drawer and a cheap ballpoint pen.

On the paper, he wrote the names and numbers of the two men he had just called. Beneath those, he wrote the words: Money. Reputation. He placed check marks by these words, then wrote, the name of the third seedy hotel where he had a reservation. Beneath that, he scribbled the word: Home.

Then he crumpled the paper up and threw it into a metal wastebasket. He doubted that the room was cleaned all that regularly and thought there was a better than even chance that whoever came searching for him there would find it. Regardless, they would undoubtedly be clever enough to check the telephone records for that room, which would turn up the numbers he had just dialed. Connecting numbers to conversations wasn’t all that difficult.

The best game to play, he thought, is the game you don’t realize you are playing.

Ricky found an army-navy surplus store on his walk across the city, where he purchased a few items that he thought he might need for the next stage of the game he had in mind. These included a small crowbar, an inexpensive bicycle lock, some surgical gloves, a miniflashlight, a roll of gray-colored duct tape, and the cheapest pair of binoculars that they had. As an after-thought, he also bought a modest squeeze spray container of Ben’s Bug Juice, with one hundred percent DEET, which, he thought ruefully, was about as close to poison as he’d ever considered putting on his body. It was an odd collection of items, he realized, but he wasn’t certain precisely what the task he had in mind would require, and so he obtained a variety to compensate for his uncertainty.

Early that afternoon, he returned to his room and packed these, along with his pistol and two of his newly acquired cell phones, into a small backpack. He used the third cell phone to call the next hotel on his list, the one he had not checked into yet. There he left an urgent message for Frederick Lazarus to return the call as soon as he checked in. He gave the cell phone number to a clerk, then thrust that phone into an outside pocket of the knapsack, after carefully marking it with a pen. When he reached his rental car, he took out the phone and gruffly called the hotel a second time, leaving yet another urgent message for himself. He did this three more times as he drove out of the city, heading toward New Jersey, each time growing more strident and more insistent that Mr. Lazarus get back to him instantly, as he had important information to pass on.

After the third message on that cell phone, he pulled into the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the Jersey turnpike. He went into the men’s room, washed his hands, and left the telephone on the edge of the sink. He noted that several teenagers passed him on his way out, heading to the bathroom. He thought there was the likelihood that they would grab the phone and start using it pretty quickly, which was what he wanted.

It was on the edge of evening when he arrived in West Windsor. The traffic had been crowded the entire length of the turnpike, cars lined up a length or two apart, traveling at excessive rates of speed, until everything slowed to a horn-honking, raised-voices, overheated crawl past an accident near Exit 11. Rubbernecking further limited the pace, as cars maneuvered past two ambulances, a half-dozen state police cars, and the twisted, impact-shredded shells of two compact cars. He could see a man in a white shirt and tie sitting in a half crouch by the breakdown lane, his head in his hands, obscuring his face. As Ricky crept past, the first of the ambulances took off, its siren starting up insistently, and Ricky saw a state trooper with a measuring wheel start to walk a skid mark on the highway. Another was poised by flares stuck in the black macadam surface, waving people on, wearing a solid, stern, and disapproving look, as if curiosity, that most human of emotions, was somehow out of place, or inappropriate at this moment, when, in actuality, it was merely inconvenient for him. Ricky thought that an analyst’s sort of insight, as telling about who he’d once been, was like the current glare on the trooper’s face.

He found a diner along Route One not far from Princeton where he stopped and killed some time eating a cheeseburger and fries that were actually cooked by a person and not by machines and timers. The day was stretched long with June light, and when he emerged there was still some time before darkness settled in. He drove over to the grave site where he’d been two weeks earlier. The old caretaker was gone, which he’d counted on. He was fortunate that the entrance to the cemetery wasn’t locked or barred, so he pulled the rental car over behind the small white clapboard storage shack, and left it there, more or less concealed from the roadway and certainly appearing innocuous enough to anyone who might spot it.

Before slinging the backpack over his shoulder, Ricky took the time to slather himself in the Ben’s Bug Juice and don the surgical gloves. These wouldn’t conceal his scent, he knew, but at least they would help keep off the deer ticks. The daylight was beginning to fade, turning the New Jersey sky a sickly gray-brown, as if the edges of the world had been burned by the heat from the afternoon. Ricky threw the backpack over his shoulder, and with a single glance down the deserted rural road, started jogging toward the kennel where he knew the information he needed was waiting. There was still plenty of warmth rising above the black macadam, and it crept into his lungs rapidly. He was breathing hard, but he knew it wasn’t from the exertion of running.