Boyfriend from Hell (19 page)

“Veronica, we dream in code, in symbols. What does Satan symbolize to you?”

“Evil, I would say. Evil in the world.”

“What about evil in you? Do you believe you’re evil? You did an article about Randall Cummings, maybe you went too far, you told me, and he was killed. You’re in a sexual relationship with a man that wouldn’t have been approved of by your father or the church of your childhood. Could be that makes you a bad girl, an evil girl? So you summon the clearest image of evil we know of, Satan, and bring him into your dreams as a reprimand. And it’s a symbol of evil you have easy access to in your work. Probably that woman also thought of herself as bad, as evil. We don’t know. What we do know is that you dream a symbol of evil, and my sense, based on doing this for thirty-five years, is that if we can get you beyond thinking that you did something bad with Cummings or bad with this man you’re seeing, your symbol of evil will vanish.”

Ronnie thought hard about Kaufman’s appraisal, then said lightly, “Then I’m done here.”

Kaufman smiled in response and said, “If only. Something else is there, I don’t know what it is yet. See you next time.”

Homicides by strangulation did not rank high on the list of causes of death at the Twenty-sixth Precinct, or anywhere in the city, ranking far below stabbings and gun-related crimes, and the investigation was not gaining traction. The MO was rare; they recalled the Boston Strangler at the precinct, nobody could recall anything similar locally in recent years. The break in the hit-and-run case was straightforward; the nature of the crime indicated the assailant’s car was damaged, the fax went to car repair shops where someone might bring a damaged car, and Batrak, through his damaged vehicle and his peculiarity, drew attention to himself. Cummings would have been facing the assailant, and the strangling to death of a man, six feet two, weighing 240 pounds, set physical requirements for the perpetrator. The assailant needed to be powerful enough to commit the crime, accounting for Santini’s reluctance to consider Ronnie a true suspect. Cummings would have towered over her. Gomez, however, brought his worldview to bear so that anyone was a suspect, and on a couple of mornings he still insisted on parking at a distance from her building in an unmarked car to observe. They knew she went out for the newspaper or jogged, they trailed after her to the extent that they could, and then she went back into the building a while later; innocent activity.

In Staten Island, Carter and Greenberg spent time similarly shadowing the former members of the Anti-Satanist Group, which quickly seemed a waste. The easy breakthrough was not going to be forthcoming, like a false move by the perpetrator in an attempt to sell something valuable stolen at the crime scene. Nothing was stolen. A man was strangled, period.

Cummings’s father called Rourke and the police commissioner every day from Chicago and they had little to offer him. They were going nowhere. With empathy, Rourke said to his detectives, “Cummings was an adult, a forty-two-year-old man, and for his father, his son is like any child who went to the big city to make his name—and got killed.”

In the next session, Kaufman tried to make her patient understand that writing an article about someone who was marketing himself, created his own Web site, lobbied for congregants for his misguided cult, was not the same as outing an innocent who wanted to be anonymous. Ronnie still thought the world was not a better place for her having written about Cummings, that there were many pieces to be written, it didn’t have to be hers. The guilt was fascinating to Kaufman and she pursued it.

“What’s the source of this highly refined guilt, Veronica? Church? How religious were you at home?”

“Sunday churchgoers.”

“Were you in parochial school?”

“No.”

“Not even that. Do you still go to church?”

“No.”

“When was the last time you went?”

Ronnie didn’t answer right away, her eyes momentarily distant. Kaufman noticed the pause.

“When I was eleven.”

“Eleven. And that’s when your parents stopped going to church?” Kaufman caught herself, remembering the biography, and rerouted the question. “Veronica, you told me your mother
died
when you were eleven.”

A longer pause now, significant to the patient, as well. Dark waters.

“I stopped going when my mother died.”

“Yes?”

“I wouldn’t go again. My father did, but I wouldn’t.”

“Is there more you should be saying here?”

“We were on our way to church and afterward we were going to Pelham Bay Park, something my father had to do there, so we took the car. My father was driving, my mother was in the front seat, I was in the back. We’d just pulled out and I was fussing about a magazine I wanted them to buy for me. My father turned to tell me to settle down. He took his eyes off the wheel. When he looked back, somebody stepped off the curb. He pulled wide to avoid the person, hit a truck to his side, we spun around and a car hit us head-on. My mother went through the windshield. She died that night.” Ronnie began to weep. “My father blamed me.”

“He told you that?”

“I knew it. He was an internalized, reserved man, and she was beautiful and gregarious, and she chose him, and she was the love of his life, and I took her from him, and he always resented me.”

“An accident. It wasn’t your fault. It was an accident. Did you talk to anyone, see a therapist? To be present at the death of your mother!”

“A priest tried to help. Father Connolly. A good man. He came to see us a few times, and he talked to me privately in my room. He tried, I know he did. He told me my mother was in heaven and her dying had nothing to do with me. But I got into my head that I was going to hell for what I did.”

“This is the guilt of all guilts.”

“I told him my mother’s death was Satan’s work, that Satan won over God. I never set foot in a church again.”

“Satan. Veronica, Satan. It’s so clearly your symbol of evil.”

“My mother was an elementary school nurse, but she was more than that, a counselor for the children, a confidante for them, a wonderfully good person. My father died on an ordinary day, without any prior heart problems. Like he went as far as he could go, and any private pact he may have made in his heart for her, to look out for me as I was growing up, to keep a roof over my head, wasn’t needed any longer. I was an adult, on my own, and he couldn’t go on another day of this life without her, and three years ago, he just expired.”

“If I look a little, I can even see you folding your father’s death into this somewhere, that you were somehow responsible. It’s not far to go, someone who carries these feelings around, to think that you had something to do with Randall Cummings’ death, too. You didn’t. You had nothing to do with any of these events. Your mother’s death—so many things had to happen in succession. You were one element and not even the most important one.”

“But still an element.”

“The broken glass in your dreams. The broken glass of the car? The shattering of your life?” Ronnie did not respond, trying to absorb the thought. “Do you know the term ‘magical thinking,’ as regards children?”

“A child conceives of itself as the center of the universe.”

“Exactly. So if the parents fight, or get a divorce, or one of them dies, the child believes it’s the child’s fault. This is what you did, classic magical thinking.”

“There may be a term for it, but the child still feels it.”

“Veronica, there’s no medical cause the doctors could discover for your blacking out. My sense is, when you’re under serious stress, and you have been, you react as a traumatized child would, which is what you were when your mother died. You recreate, as an adult, your childhood behavior.”

“I regress?”

“You regress. You were helpless then, so in stress, this blacking out, this fog you go into, could be a way of acting out the feeling of being helpless again.”

“I don’t know if it works that way.”

“I don’t either. It’s my best sense.”

Nancy was back from vacation and Ronnie sat with her and Bob at the dining room table, the friends dissecting the therapist’s observations.

“One night
Spellbound
was on television and Michael wanted me to see it. Ever see it, the Hitchcock movie?”

“I don’t think so,” Nancy said, and Bob shook his head, no.

“With Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. He’s a really screwed-up guy. And suddenly, the shrink figures everything out about him, like in one burst, ‘There’s your secret repressed experience!’ Bingo. That’s how I feel. This shrink is saying, Aha! You’re blacking out because you’re guilty over your mother’s death and you’re regressing!”

“Why can’t that be true?” Bob asked.

“It can. It’s possible. Acting on the knowledge is another matter.”

“See,
you’re
looking for bingo. It’s a process. Give it time,” Nancy said.

“There’s something I can’t keep from you anymore. The day I went to see Cummings, the day he died, I blacked out then, too. I was in his office, I don’t remember leaving it. The next thing I know I was on a bench a few blocks away, and during that time, according to the police, Cummings was murdered.”

“What are you saying?” Bob asked.

“That I blacked out that day.”

“Yes, now we know why,” Nancy said. “Being in the room with the man, a really stupid thing to do by the way, probably upset you a lot, and as the shrink says, when you’re really upset you feel helpless all over again, like you can’t cope, and you black out.”

“I can’t account for myself when Cummings was murdered.”

“You don’t have to,” Bob said.
“You
didn’t murder him. He was a big galoot. If he wanted, he could’ve strangled
you.
Consider yourself one lucky girl you got out of there before the murderer showed up.”

“I didn’t tell the police. I didn’t want
them
harassing me.”

“I don’t blame you,” Bob offered.

“Should I tell them?”

“No!” Bob said. “You haven’t been yourself. You want to go into a room with the police and tell them you weren’t fully conscious around the time Cummings was murdered? They’ll grill you. They’ll stress you out, for which you are the ideal candidate, and you’ll end up admitting what you didn’t do. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That’s a little fantastic,” Ronnie said.

“It’s realistic. Do your book. Work on your therapy.”

“It is work, the therapy.”

“I didn’t know about the way your mother died. I’m very sorry,” Nancy said.

“She was a wonderful person.”

“So are you,” Nancy told her.

Richard surprised her, he was in New York, he did have to fly to Rio, but he arranged a one-night stopover so he could see her. “Going there on CIA business?” she teased.

“A conference,” he answered, “‘Ritual Behaviors in Modern Societies.’”

Did they really have these things around the world, and so many of them to keep him occupied? Skeptical, before she met him for dinner, she checked online and the Rio de Janeiro Conference of Behavioral Science did feature Richard Smith as “a renowned expert on cults,” along with a psychiatrist and an anthropologist appearing in a workshop on ritual behaviors.

Taking into consideration her feelings about choices of restaurants, he suggested a moderately priced Greek restaurant on the West Side. They went back to his apartment for sex, no Eiffel Tower, still blissful, and in a reversal it was she who couldn’t dally the next day; she needed to get back to the apartment so she could work on the book.

“I’m thrilled you’re so into it.”

“Seems like I want to get it right.”

“You will. I spoke to Antoine. He’s open to some illustrative material. So, as you’re going through, think about it. See you in a couple of weeks.”

“See you,” and she kissed
him
good-bye.

Two days later she received a package from Pierre Frateau. He sent the material at Richard’s request. Enclosed were twenty-six immaculately photographed 9 X 12 black-and-white images of the drawings from the book in the shop, the fantastic delusions of a nineteenth-century nun, as interpreted by a gifted, unknown artist. She looked through the images, taking more time to examine them than in the shop when the others were looking on. The overall effect reminded her of the naive asylum drawings and paintings she once had seen at the Outsider Art Show in SoHo.

The demon had bulging eyes in a savage bird’s face with a long serpent’s tongue extended, and talons, stretched and grasping, a hideous creature. Ronnie awoke, frightened into wakefulness. She had seamlessly transferred into her sleep one of the more violent images from a nineteenth-century delusional nun.

T
HE BALANCE BETWEEN CYNICISM
and commitment was significant for the man—when to let it go, the hell with it, there’s always another psychopath, and anyway I’m not going any further in the department than this, I’m no good at the politics, too much like my father, a cop on the beat, I can’t do the politics. And then there was the other side of it, his father’s sense of duty, and his, so Ed Rourke couldn’t slide the Cummings folder farther down on his desk or into a drawer. It stayed on top and every day he took the call. Never “How is the case going?” or “Any leads?” Always the same question, “Anything new on my son?” Cummings’s father always said “my son,” and it tore at Rourke. And he had little to tell him.

Rourke’s wife was a secretary in a midtown law office, forty-three, petite; long, loose red hair; their daughter, the teacher who lived in Brooklyn, had the mother’s hair, the daughter he worried about living on her own now. Another balance—to be the civilized husband and father, although his work often brought him in touch with the uncivilized. The way it was troubling him, he needed to bring this case home. They were in the bedroom of their apartment on East Twenty-eighth Street.

“The Cummings case, we have nothing.”

“He wasn’t a saint. He actually encouraged violence, didn’t he?” his wife said.

“I don’t know if he did. I can’t find it. We did a lot of checking. A couple of people in the cult were caught for things like shoplifting, and that’s it. The father calls, I haven’t got a thing for him. I don’t see us ever solving this case.”