Ollie Schantz had thrived on the pressure of an intensive murder investigation. When tempers were short and frustration was highest, Ollie’s jokes and wry observations on life and death flowed most freely.
Once, when McGuire was grumbling about attending the funeral of a murder victim in order to record the licence-plate numbers of mourners, Ollie commented, “You gotta be reasonable about funerals, Joe. If you don’t go to other people’s funerals,” he said with a straight face, “how can you expect them to come to yours?”
When Captain Kavander had exploded at a homicide detective in frustration, Ollie waited for the captain to leave, slamming the door violently behind him, before observing, “If Jack could die right now, he’d be the happiest man alive.”
Ollie’s demeanour changed dramatically when a murder case was breaking. As soon as the end was in sight, he became serious and methodical. McGuire commented on this once, and Ollie nodded and said, “Nobody needs me to break up the tension now, see? What everybody needs now is a mechanic to tighten the bolts and clean up all the spills. That’s why I joke, Joe. To keep everybody loose.”
Driving to the psychiatric hospital, knowing in his heart he was about to break the case, McGuire felt his composure relax. He had needed his former partner’s jokes and looseness. Without them, the pressure he felt had spilled out of him, onto Bernie Lipson, Kevin Deeley, Fat Eddie Vance. . . .
“That offer still open for dinner some time, Bernie?” McGuire asked.
Lipson studied him warily. “It’s open, Joe.”
“Let’s do it,” McGuire said, smiling at his partner. “First night after we get our indictments, let’s you and me and Janet—”
“Janice.”
“Yeah, Janice. The three of us, we’ll do dinner.” He banged the steering wheel with his fist. “Damn it, I feel good about this one. This one’s going to break it for us, Bernie. Getting that picture in the paper did it, huh? Didn’t it, Bernie.”
“Hell of a break, Joe,” Lipson said. “Hell of a break.”
Lynwood Institute was a low-rise brick and concrete structure bordering on open parkland. A long asphalt driveway led from the quiet residential street through manicured lawns to a small parking lot. Groups of men were trimming and feeding the trees and shrubbery that lined the driveway. There seemed to be no supervision to their work; the gardening was apparently a productive excuse to be outside and enjoy the warm spring sunshine. A few of the men looked up from their work and waved happily as McGuire and Lipson drove past. Others watched in glum silence.
“You know anything about this place?” McGuire asked as he looked for a parking spot.
“Heard about it,” Lipson answered. “It’s kind of a halfway house for fruitcakes, far as I can tell.”
“Looks like it’s for males only.” McGuire pulled into an open space, facing the car back down the driveway, where the men had resumed their work.
McGuire was wrong. As he and Lipson left the car and approached the front entrance, two middle-aged women were about to emerge from the building. One was dressed in a sweater and slacks; the other wore a loose but expensive-looking dressing gown. The woman in the dressing gown grasped her younger companion’s arm with both hands as they walked. In truth, they clung to each other like a single creature with four legs and two inclining heads, each wearing identical, fearful expressions.
At the sight of the two approaching men both women gave a small whimper and turned quickly to re-enter the building. McGuire and Lipson followed them through the front door into a closed vestibule, where the younger woman struggled to open the inner door. Looking behind her, she saw the detectives enter, and whimpering again she guided her colleague away from the door towards the safety of a corner. The older woman buried her face on the shoulder of her partner, who kept her eyes turned from the men, an agonized expression creasing her face.
“Morning, ladies,” McGuire said pleasantly as he and Lipson passed.
His words propelled the women further into the corner, pressing them against the walls.
Lipson pursed his lips and shook his head sadly, then followed McGuire into the foyer.
A heavy-set woman, her black-dyed hair pulled into a severe bun, approached them from behind a reception desk. McGuire reached into his jacket pocket for his identification, but before he could show it, the woman glanced through the two glass doors into the vestibule.
“Oh, dear,” she said, her smile fading and her expression growing anxious. She lifted a hand as though to hold the men back. “Excuse me, please.”
In the vestibule the two women, still clinging to each other, were watching McGuire and Lipson in wide-eyed fright. Their faces softened as the woman who had greeted the detectives opened the glass doors cautiously. “How are you, ladies?” the detectives heard her ask pleasantly. “Why don’t we forget about our walk this morning and come back inside? I’ll make us some tea.”
The younger woman in the vestibule whispered something, her eyes darting back and forth between the two detectives and the black-haired woman. Soon the three were engaged in animated, whispered conversation. McGuire turned away to see Lipson studying several of the cheaply framed oil paintings that covered the reception area walls.
The paintings had been executed in a myriad of styles, from primitive to proficient. Most were still lifes or landscapes. A few were awkwardly drawn portraits, which had neither the realism of a professional artist nor the originality of a surrealist.
It struck McGuire that almost all of the artists, whether working in oils, water colours or acrylics, had chosen drab earthy tones—browns, greys, blacks and deep haunting shades of midnight blue.
One painting caught his eye. Larger than the rest it had been painted on stretched canvas and mounted in a plain wooden frame. This artist, unlike the others, seemed to have discovered more colours on his palette and applied them with a striking degree of talent. The painting showed brilliant yellow sunlight flooding into a room through an open window. The artist’s portrayal of the delicate texture of dust suspended in the sunbeam looked so real that McGuire thought he might see the particles move if he watched long enough.
Behind the sunbeam, the wall of the room was rich orange, almost sensual in its depth of colour, especially when compared with the drabness of the works surrounding it. A small side table in the foreground of the painting held a blue ceramic bowl with a bright flower pattern meticulously rendered about its rim. In fact the entire composition, which had a distinctly Mediterranean mood, had been painted with remarkable detail, considering the simple subjects being portrayed.
McGuire moved closer. He studied how the artist had added the most minute details: shadow textures of the sunlight falling on the wall, chipped paint on the open windowsill, even a distinctive oak grain to the table.
But the drama of the painting was clearly centred on the figure slouched in the sunbeam, elbows on its knees. The man or woman—it was impossible to tell which—was dressed in a shapeless robe and sitting bent at the waist on a chair that matched the oak table in design and detail. The figure’s head rested on one hand in an expression of gloom. The other hand hung limply between the figure’s knees.
Squinting and leaning toward the painting, McGuire could see the ridges on the fingernails, the dull worn surface of the plain gold ring on its left hand, the realistic manner in which the fingers hung slightly curved.
He looked back up to the head of the figure. Where there should have been a face, there was nothing. The artist, who had created each limp finger as an individual element, had painted a flat, flesh-toned area where the face should have been.
It was not an unfinished painting, McGuire realized. It was a painting of a faceless, sexless person, sitting gloomily in a simple room, facing a warm and brilliant sun. And it made McGuire uneasy just to look at it.
He shivered and stepped back from the wall as the black-haired woman who had greeted them returned from the vestibule.
“I’m sorry, gentlemen,” she said in a voice that had strength behind its cheeriness. “I really did have to talk to those two girls.”
McGuire glanced past her to the two middle-aged “girls,” who stood staring through the vestibule window at the open grounds.
“What’s wrong with them?” McGuire asked.
“Oh, they’re just a little concerned about going outside,” she replied, smiling. “It takes them a while to be sure everything is safe.”
“Agoraphobia?”
“Yes.” She beamed at McGuire as though he were a grade-school pupil who had guessed the correct answer. “Verna there, the younger one, has been responding to treatment. She’s gone as far as the end of the lane by herself. I’m a little worried about Edith.” She looked back at the women, who were moving carefully towards the outer door. “She hasn’t been outside since she arrived here.” The woman looked back at McGuire. “That was almost ten years ago.”
Her face, which had grown cloudy while discussing the women, brightened. “How awful of me,” she said, and McGuire noticed a trace of British accent. “I haven’t introduced myself, have I? I’m Glennis Metcalf.” She extended her hand and raised her eyebrows. “And you are?”
McGuire took her hand and shook it, surprised at the strength of her grip. “I’m Lieutenant McGuire, this is Lieutenant Lipson.” With his left hand he reached into his jacket and extracted his identification, offering it to the woman who, while shaking Lipson’s hand, turned to study the badge and photograph in detail. “We received a call from a Dr. Taber about a story that appeared in this morning’s paper.”
“The priest desires,” Glennis Metcalf said, raising her eyes from McGuire’s ID. “Yes, I should have realized who you were.” Her eyes flicked up to the wall behind McGuire, where the painting of the forlorn and faceless figure hung. “That was Bobby’s painting you were looking at. Powerful, isn’t it? Just a moment, please.”
McGuire looked behind him at the painting again. The woman reached for a small button mounted discreetly on the counter of the reception desk and pressed it once. Somewhere in the building a bell rang. Almost instantly footsteps could be heard echoing quickly down the hall.
“I would take you to Dr. Taber myself,” she explained. “But I really should keep an eye on Verna and Edith.” She turned to regard the women, who remained standing at the outer door, gazing at the men working in the garden. “Poor things, they do panic so easily. Ah, here’s my sweetie now.”
A small, slight man in white T-shirt and loose-fitting slacks stood smiling nervously at them, his hands behind his back, his feet in sneakers.
“This is Andrew,” Glennis Metcalf said, and the man smiled and bobbed his head quickly. McGuire guessed he was perhaps forty years old. “Andrew will take you to Dr. Taber’s office, won’t you Andrew?” Without waiting for a reply, she looked back at McGuire and Lipson. “Dr. Taber is expecting you. He said to send you right down. Andrew, come back here when you’re finished. I have some boxes I want you to move for me.”
The smiling man nodded cheerfully again, turned and walked rapidly away down the hall, the two detectives following him.
He led them to the rear of the building and the open door of an office where a tall, balding man unfolded himself from behind his desk to greet them, hand outstretched. He wore a white smock coat over a tweed suit, his tie neatly knotted against a white Oxford-cloth shirt.
“Good morning,” he said solemnly. “I’m Clarence Taber. That’ll be all, Andrew.”
The soft, quick-moving steps of Andrew’s rubber-soled shoes echoed away into silence as McGuire and Lipson shook hands with the doctor, introduced themselves and sat on matching straight-backed chairs facing Taber’s desk.
Clarence Taber appeared to be in his fifties—tall, slim . . . “gangly” was the word that came to both detectives’ minds—his long arms sprouting oversized hands, and his long legs ending in a pair of extra-large brogans, which he rested on the corner of a filing cabinet when the other men were seated. With his bald head and bristling eyebrows he was almost menacing. It was a look, McGuire reflected, that a tough street cop might attempt to acquire over the years. But Taber’s flashing eyes, crinkling above a quick smile, relieved the menace. They made him seem not only approachable but appealing, strength made stronger with the temper of sympathy.
“We got a call this morning,” McGuire began. “Apparently the phrase on the blackboard in the murder of Father Sellinger meant something to you. Is that right?”
Taber nodded. “The priest desires. It’s difficult to believe, but it can’t be a coincidence. And Bobby isn’t even here today. He didn’t come back last night. It’s the first time he’s done that.”
“Bobby?” Lipson asked. He held his wire-bound notebook on his lap, his pen already scribbling on the paper.
“Bobby Griffin.” Taber reached for a file folder on the corner of his desk. He looked at the sheet stapled to the front of the folder, holding it at arm’s length to read it. “Robert Kennedy Griffin.” He placed the file folder in front of him and opened it carefully. “Everybody calls him Bobby. Likeable kid.”
Lipson lunged for Taber’s telephone and began dialing.
“Describe him to us,” McGuire snapped.
Taber shifted his chair to make room for Lipson. “About five eight, five nine,” he began. “Slim build. Maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. Fair complexion, blond hair, blue, eyes. I have a photograph of him somewhere—”
“Any distinguishing marks, characteristics?” McGuire asked. “A limp, speech impediment, anything like that?”
The doctor thrust out his bottom lip, thought for a moment, and shook his head as Lipson spoke softly, urgently, into the telephone before hanging up and nodding at McGuire.
“Where can we find him?” McGuire asked.
Taber shook his head. “I have no idea. As I said, Bobby didn’t return last evening. That’s unusual for him . . .”
“How about friends? Family?” McGuire interrupted.
Taber shook his head once more. “In all the years I’ve known him, Bobby has never discussed anyone outside of Lynwood. His mother used to visit him but—” Taber shrugged.
“What’s he like?” Lipson asked.
“Brilliant. In a sane world he’d have been a star athlete for his school, valedictorian prize-winning artist, maybe married his cheerleader girlfriend and run for Congress.”
“What do you mean, in a sane world?” McGuire asked.
“Because he’s not any of those things, even though he deserves to be. And whatever happened to him, it wasn’t his fault. I’m sure of that.”
“He did that painting of the faceless person, the big one hanging in the foyer, didn’t he?”
Taber’s face brightened. “Yes!” he said. “Isn’t that brilliant? We use painting as therapy for our patients. It’s an effective method of generating indirect self-expression. We tell them talent isn’t important, but expressing yourself is. Bobby, as you can see, has immense talent.”
“What’s it mean when somebody with that much talent leaves the face off?”
Taber shrugged. “Loss of identity. Fear of exposing true feelings. It’s not that uncommon. You may have noticed that most of the patients avoid showing faces altogether. Not because faces are difficult to draw, but because they reveal identity or interpersonal factors, which are the basic problems of most people here.” He turned to frown at his shoes. “The most fascinating thing about the painting is the use of light. Did you notice how Bobby’s painting is the only one with a brilliant, specific light source in it? I found that very significant, although I’m not sure what it means.”
“Why don’t you tell us about him?” McGuire urged.
Taber studied McGuire for a moment, as though weighing the advice before replying. “Of course, of course. But you must understand how difficult this is for me. First because I genuinely like Bobby. And second because . . .” The doctor looked back and forth between the two detectives. “Because if Bobby has committed these terrible murders, then we’ve misread him completely.”
“You misread him?” Lipson asked, looking up from his notebook.
Taber nodded. Folding his hands behind his head he sat back in his chair. “This hospital is not a mental institution as such,” he explained. “For one thing, we try desperately to avoid the use of any psychotherapeutic medications. The last time either Dr. Metcalf or I—”
“Metcalf?” McGuire interrupted. “The receptionist?”
Taber smiled indulgently. “Glennis Metcalf is not only a highly qualified clinical psychiatrist, she is also one of the most physically intimidating people you will ever meet. When she has to be. You shake hands with her?”
McGuire nodded and raised his right hand, flexing the fingers to indicate the firmness of her handshake.
“If she ever asks you to arm wrestle, don’t put any money on it.”
“Sorry,” McGuire said. “We thought she was just someone in the vestibule greeting people.”
“That’s part of our approach here at Lynwood,” Taber replied. “I spend as little time behind this desk as I can. Dr. Metcalf and I and our staff of therapists intentionally mingle with the residents.” He brought his hands back to the desk and leaned forward again. “Too much mental-health treatment in this country, in my opinion at least, consists of warehousing people. That’s obsolete. It has to be. Our idea is to make our residents feel a part of society instead of being isolated from it. That’s why we encourage them to go out and blend in with the real world.”
“How about safety?” McGuire asked. “Don’t the sane people on the streets deserve protection from the kind of patients you’re got here?”
“We don’t have dangerous patients here,” Taber answered. He looked down at the file folder in front of him. “At least, we didn’t have, until now.” He opened the folder and withdrew a piece of paper from the top. A line of perforations along the left side indicated it had been torn from a notebook and random creases across its surface showed it had been crumpled.
But it was the writing, scrawled on every line on the page from margin to margin, that caught McGuire’s attention. Taber slipped the paper from the folder and handed it across the desk. Lipson leaned closer to his partner to study the sheet.
The entire page had been covered, front and back, with repetitions of the same three words, written over and over in a hand familiar to both of the detectives: The Priest desires.
“Where’d you get this?” McGuire demanded.
“In Bobby’s room about a year ago,” Taber answered. “Shortly after he finished his painting. Which he spent almost an entire year completing, by the way. He seemed to be writing those three words everywhere as a form of automatism—”
“What’s that?” Lipson interrupted.
“Automatic actions or behaviour that the patient goes through without being conscious of it. You find it in some amnesiacs or when a patient is in a hysterical trance. For a while Bobby was repeating the same three words in writing everywhere. He filled a notebook with it, he wrote it on the walls of his room, on the margins of books, everywhere.”
“Didn’t you ask him what it meant?” McGuire asked.
“Of course. But he wouldn’t answer. Worse, he would withdraw more deeply inside himself. Which we didn’t want, because he was just beginning to emerge from his illness, and the prognosis was looking good.”
“What was his illness?”
“At first we suspected schizophrenia, because when he was admitted here . . .” Taber studied the front of the file folder “. . . four years ago, he exhibited catatonia, which is often a phase of schizophrenia.”
“He came here in a catatonic fit?” McGuire asked.
Taber frowned, obviously displeased with McGuire’s suggestion. “I don’t care for that term,” he said. “Let’s just say he was unresponsive verbally and emotionally to any stimulus.”
“How long did he stay that way?”
The psychiatrist let his eyes roam down the page, looking for information. “About two and a half years,” he said finally.
“Two and a half years?” McGuire almost shouted.
“Jesus,” Lipson muttered.
“There were small signs of progress during that time,” Taber added, his eyes still on the sheet. “Especially when he began painting. He did hundreds of sketches but destroyed them all. Which was acceptable, because it was the act not the result that was important to his recovery. But my goodness, they were fine. Brilliant even. Anyway, he certainly wasn’t a hopeless case. In fact, his psychosis was fascinating. From a clinical standpoint, I mean.”
“What drives a bright, eighteen-year-old kid to just clam, up for over two years?” McGuire asked.
Taber shrugged. “We don’t know,” he said. “We suspected it might be organic, but I’m not so sure of that. So we looked at trauma.” He opened the file folder again and flipped through its contents, stopping at a worn, blue typewritten sheet near the back. “He suffered a mental trauma when his father died. He was aged six at the time. We talked about his father when he began responding to verbal stimuli. His father was a hero to Bobby, made all the more so by the fact that he died when Bobby was such an impressionable age.”
“How did his father die?” Lipson inquired.
“Vietnam. Air force. Shot down, body recovered. Posthumous valour award. Buried in Arlington.”
“A lot of kids lost their old man in Vietnam,” McGuire said dryly. “That wasn’t enough to make them catatonic, was it?”
“No, no,” Taber agreed, still studying the blue report sheet. “And neither did this. He underwent a personality change. Became much more withdrawn and intense, according to his mother. . . .”
“Is she still alive?”
Taber glanced up at McGuire and nodded sadly. “Oh, yes. Mrs. Griffin is alive. And well. And living in Lexington.”
“Where can we find her?” Lipson asked.
Taber read him the address and telephone number.
McGuire asked if she ever came to visit her son.
“At the beginning,” Taber replied. He wrinkled his nose as though smelling something unpleasant. “But around the time he ceased acting catatonic, they had a falling out. After that they would talk on the telephone, but she wouldn’t come to visit him. Mrs. Griffin is what I would describe as something of a religious fanatic. She believes unhesitatingly in her religion, including the fact that her late husband is preparing a home in heaven for her and her son, on the right hand of God.”
“You say religious,” McGuire said. “Any special faith?”
“Oh, most definitely,” Taber answered. “Roman Catholic.”
“Couldn’t she give you any clue about what her son was going through?” McGuire asked. “Wasn’t she any help at all?”
“Not really. She claimed he came home one day, went up to his room and wouldn’t speak or come out. He just sat in a corner and cried to himself. Her family doctor examined him and referred him to us.”
McGuire again: “Why here? Why not a state mental home or private therapy?”
“Well, it began as a short-term stay. Or at least that’s what we expected it to be. Besides, he wouldn’t have responded to the assembly-line treatment of a state hospital. His mother wanted something better for him, something private and intense. Apparently veteran’s benefits cover most of the costs of his treatment here.”
McGuire was staring at the writing on the notebook paper, the same three words that had been scrawled on the blackboard in Sellinger’s classroom. “Did you ever figure out what this means?” he asked, tapping the paper.
“I’m not sure what it means,” Taber replied. “But I’m sure of the source.” He turned to a small credenza behind his desk. “I was looking it up again, waiting for you to arrive,” he said, his back to the two detectives. When he turned to face them again he was holding a small green book. “It’s in here. Along with painting, one of the things used to pull Bobby out of his catatonia was encouraging him to read. And he did. He devoured everything we gave him.” He flipped through the book. “Did I tell you he graduated from high school at sixteen, and his I.Q. was measured at 153?”
McGuire shook his head. Lipson wrote down the facts in his note pad.
“Anyway, he started to work his way through our library, reading everything available when he wasn’t working on his painting. Novels, politics, mystery-adventures and poetry. Around the time we hung his painting in the foyer, Bobby began responding from his withdrawal. I remember the day I first heard him speak. He was sitting in the reading room, halfway through A Farewell to Arms. As I passed him, I asked casually, ‘How’s the book, Bobby?’ I spoke to him all the time, never expecting a reply, just keeping the door open, so to speak. Usually he would ignore me entirely or smile shyly. This time he said, ‘It’s a good book, Dr. Taber.’ As normal as could be. I didn’t make a big thing about it, but I knew we had achieved a breakthrough. Then he got into poetry . . . ah, here it is.”
Taber passed the book across the desk to McGuire, who followed the doctor’s finger down the lines of text.
“It’s a poem by Wallace Stevens. See? Here?”
The poem had been marked carefully with red ink in two places. The first section, near the top of the page, was one line. McGuire spoke the words aloud, tonelessly: “The death of one god is the death of all.”
Taber grunted. “The poem’s called ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.’ Now read the second part, further down.”
McGuire’s gaze dropped to four lines framed within a box of red ink.
“The monastic man is an artist,” he read in the same flat voice. “The philosopher appoints a man’s place in music, say, today.” Then, his voice rising in urgency. “But the priest desires. The philosopher desires. And not to have is the beginning of desire.” He looked up at Taber. “What’s it mean?”
The psychiatrist shrugged. “It’s poetry,” he said. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
McGuire said he wanted to keep the book as evidence, and Taber agreed. “I think Bobby was the only person to ever read it here anyway,” he said. “We won’t miss it.”
At McGuire’s request Taber allowed the two detectives to make notes from Bobby’s file but refused to provide the records unless they obtained a court order. McGuire said that would be fine, they would just copy what appeared to be important.
“How was he behaving in the last week or so?” McGuire asked when he and Lipson had finished.
“A little tense. In retrospect.” Taber picked up a pencil from his desk and toyed with it as he spoke. “I thought it might have to do with his leaving us next month.”
“Why was he leaving?”
“Because he had responded to treatment and appeared normal in virtually every way. After he practically mastered oil painting, he began working in the kitchen, doing basic things at first, peeling vegetables, that sort of thing. Then he started reading all the gourmet cook books he could get his hands on. Soon he was making sauces and soufflés and tackling difficult dishes with ease. He became an excellent cook. So good, in fact, that our regular cook became a little jealous.” Taber smiled at the memory. “The creativity helped him. Helped his identity and his ability to communicate. There was little point in keeping him here. It was time for him to experience independence. His father had left him a fair-sized bequest, to be paid when he turned twenty-one. Which was last fall. Over the years it’s built up in value. I’m not sure how much it’s worth exactly, but Dr. Metcalf told me it was over a hundred thousand dollars. It’s held in trust for him at a bank near here. I believe he can draw a reasonable amount out against the principle each month.”
“So he didn’t have any money worries?”
“Not really. He could have gone to college. We talked about that a good deal. He began taking tennis lessons last fall and played all winter at an indoor club over in Brookline. He bought himself the best racquets, the best shoes, and really got into it. To the point where you always saw him carrying this big gym bag, a big black thing, with his racquets and his tennis outfits inside. The last couple of weeks you’d never see him without it. Heard he played well, too, considering he’d only taken up the game recently.” Taber shook his head. “Bobby is amazing. He can do just about anything he puts his mind to.”
“And he could come and go as he pleased?”
“Sure. Some mornings he’d be up and gone long before breakfast—”
“And back after dark?” McGuire said pointedly.
Taber blinked. “One of those priests was killed early in the morning, wasn’t he?”
McGuire nodded.
“And two others at dusk?”
McGuire nodded again.
Taber wiped his forehead with his hand. “It’s still so very difficult to believe.”
“Dr. Taber, we’d like to see Bobby’s room,” McGuire said. “Then we want to seal it off and have it checked for Bobby’s prints.”
“Would you have a photograph of him?” Lipson added.
“I anticipated that, too,” Taber said, swivelling around to his credenza again. When he turned to face them, he held a snap shot in his hand. “This was taken at Christmas. I think it was the happiest period I can recall in Bobby’s life.”
The photograph showed two people standing next to a decorated Christmas tree. McGuire recognized Dr. Metcalf, wearing a long formal gown. Beside her a slim attractive blond man leaned on her shoulder, his eyes squeezed shut either in laughter or in anticipation of the camera’s flash. He looked nothing like the composite drawing made under Harvey Jaycock’s direction.
“This is the best you’ve got?” McGuire asked, and Taber said he was afraid so. McGuire passed the photograph to Lipson, who studied it, then slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Let’s see the kid’s room,” McGuire said rising from his chair.
Bobby Griffin’s room was a plain, square cubicle with one window facing the front gardens. A neatly made bed, wicker night table and easy chair were the only furnishings. A small black-and-white television set had been placed on a wall-mounted bookshelf beside the easy chair. McGuire scanned the books on the shelf. Most of the titles were classics: Dickens, Thackeray, Proust, Hemingway, Faulkner. The only non-fiction books were two figure-drawing guides for artists, and three instruction manuals on tennis.
A faded photograph in a brass frame sat on the night table, a picture of a smiling, tall man, Hollywood-handsome and wearing an air force uniform. He was standing next to a jet fighter, resting his arm on its wing with the casual aggressiveness of a warrior enjoying a respite from his labours.
“Joe, look at this,” Lipson called from the closet.
McGuire walked over, glanced up at the shelf in the top of the closet. “Bobby got his big black athletic bag with him?” he asked Taber, who was standing in the doorway.
“I assume he has,” Taber answered. “The last time I saw him, yesterday morning, he had it. He was off to a tennis match.” Taber nodded vigorously at the memory. “Yes, because I remember seeing him walking down the pathway to the subway station.”
“Funny,” McGuire said in a voice that said it was anything but humorous. “He left all his tennis equipment in his closet.”
McGuire used the telephone in Taber’s office to instruct Ralph Innes and a team to take statements from each member of the institute staff and bring a squad of uniformed officers to seal off Bobby’s room and provide round-the-clock surveillance of the building. Norm Cooper was to sweep Bobby’s room for prints and compare them with those found at the scene of the Lynch and Sellinger murders.
“How about the priest, Deeley?” Lipson asked when McGuire had hung up.
“What about him?”
“This kid’s mother is as crackers as the shrink says, we might be able to use him. Why not arrange for him to meet us there?”
McGuire thought about it for a moment, then nodded and called Berkeley Street again. This time he spoke to Janet Parsons, telling her to contact Deeley and ask him to meet the detectives in Lexington. “You better alert Lexington cops, too,” he added. “Have them send a patrol car around to meet us at the house. Remind them the kid is armed and dangerous.”
“Got it,” Janet answered. A nice voice on the telephone, McGuire noticed. Low and purring. “I’ve got some messages here for you—”
“Don’t want ’em,” he answered. “Gotta go.”
“Not even one from Kavander?”
“Especially one from Kavander.”
In the foyer he and Lipson thanked Taber for his co-operation. “We’re off to see Bobby’s mother,” McGuire said, “but we’ll be coming back to talk to you, I’m sure. Obviously if you hear from him or about him, call us immediately.” He handed Taber his card, turned to leave, then looked back at the psychiatrist again. “Two questions,” he said.
“What are they?”
“Are the patients allowed to have crucifixes in their room?”
“Of course. Anything that helps them fit back into normal society is encouraged.”
“Why wasn’t there one in Bobby’s room, if he’s such a devoted Catholic?”
“He wouldn’t have one. That’s what the fight with his mother was about as a matter of fact. When he ceased being catatonic, she brought him a crucifix to hang over his bed, and he became violent.” Taber allowed himself a quick smile. “Threw the crucifix out the window.”
“Okay, second question. How the hell can you treat a patient for four years and not know he’s liable to commit a murder?”
Taber stiffened. “You still haven’t proved he did it, Lieutenant,” he said coldly. “No matter what it looks like, until someone shows me a connection between Bobby’s illness and these horrible murders, I can’t accept it.”
“But you don’t even know what made him catatonic in the first place, right?”
“You’re right. I fully expected the reason to emerge, especially when the catatonia passed. But with his steady progress, the appearance of an outgoing personality, and his total absence of any hostile or self-destructive tendencies, I considered it a relatively minor concern.”
“Except for the crucifix. That he threw out the window.”
Taber smiled. “Lieutenant,” he said in a low voice, “I suggest you hold your opinion of Bobby’s actions until you meet his mother. That was an isolated incident. And it’s my opinion that his mother was the inescapable catalyst.”
As they left, Lipson and McGuire passed the two agoraphobic ladies huddled in a corner near the window still undecided about the prospect of venturing outdoors.