The Oedipus Murders Read online

  “Very.” Lucas showed no sign of being self-conscious about his admission.

  “You’re married?” George wasn’t judgmental, an analyst hardly could be, but he wanted to verify his assumptions before continuing.

  Lucas’ face became slack, as if the muscles supporting his aggressive jaw line, the scowling curve of his mouth, had lost their purchase. He avoided looking directly at George. “I was.”

  “Was?”

  “My wife is missing.”

  Suddenly George knew why the man had looked familiar. The disappearance of Lucas Bonaventure’s wife had been the main topic of the local news for the last two weeks.

  Chapter 3

  “I read about your wife’s case in the newspaper.”

  Lucas’ gaze drifted around the room, as if he were looking for something upon which to focus. “There’s been a lot of media coverage,” he said at last. With apparent effort, he drew his attention back to the psychiatrist. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

  “No? It’s this other woman you’re concerned about?”

  His gaze regained its intensity. “As I said, she’s behaving oddly.” Lucas stared at George as if he’d said all he was going to say on the matter.

  “What do you mean she’s ‘behaving oddly'?" George asked.

  Lucas hesitated, as if he were composing his answer. “Provocatively. She’s a nice girl, or woman really, well mannered, shy, or at least she had been until now. Now she acts as if she’s a prostitute.” He spit out the words with venom.

  George was surprised by Bonaventure’s virulent tone. “She acts like a prostitute?”

  Lucas shifted in his chair, casting his gaze around the room, as if he had to swallow his anger before he spoke. “She wears short skirts, low cut blouses,” he answered, his face starting to color. “She deliberately walks past our male employees, swaying her hips, or bending over to reach for something. Sometimes she stops to talk to them for no reason, stays late to talk, or lets them walk her to her car.”

  “And this concerns you.”

  A flash of anger darkened Lucas’ expression. “Of course it concerns me. She’s playing with fire. Those men don’t value her. They don’t know what kind of woman she really is. One of them is going to take her seriously and then she’ll be in real trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Of course, trouble. Those guys would like nothing better than to get her in the back room, or into the back seat of one of their cars. She’s just asking for it.”

  “I see.” George nodded, doing his best to conceal his skepticism. “And this behavior, this provocative behavior, it’s new? She didn’t behave this way before?”

  “No.” Lucas still looked irritated, as if he suspected that George doubted him.

  “When did you notice that she’d changed?”

  He gazed at the ceiling as if trying to recall. “I don’t know, maybe a week and a half ago, two weeks maybe.”

  About the time his wife had disappeared, George noted. “You said that you and this woman were close. Does she have a name, by the way?”

  Lucas looked at him suspiciously. “Why do you want to know her name?’

  “I don’t really. It just makes it easier to talk about someone if we can refer to her by her name.”

  Lucas looked down at the floor. “Sherry, her name is Sherry.”

  “So with this Sherry, things changed about a week and a half or two weeks ago, is that right?”

  Lucas nodded. “That’s about right. She just started acting differently. I spoke to her about it.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  He screwed up his face, as if making an effort to remember. “I think I asked her why she was acting that way. I might have told her that she was taking a risk.”

  “How did she react when you told her that?”

  Lucas’ face hardened. “The first time she thanked me. But it didn’t change the way she acted or dressed. The second time she told me that I was being inappropriate, saying the things I said to her.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  He shrugged nonchalantly. “I don’t remember exactly. I might have said that she was acting like a whore.”

  “Does that sound appropriate to you?”

  Lucas frowned. “Perhaps not. But I was concerned. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her.”

  “And since then?”

  “I called her at home. I thought maybe I could talk to her as a friend instead of her boss.”

  “How did that go… when you called her at home?”

  “She said I was harassing her. She told me not to call her again.”

  “And have you?’

  “A couple of times. She changed her number, so I stopped.” He didn’t look embarrassed by his admission.

  George leaned back in his chair and took a long look at the man across from him. George’s anxiety had dissipated as he became more and more intrigued by what he was hearing from the man. Bonaventure was clearly in denial about the significance of his wife’s disappearance. He seemed to have transferred all of his anxiety about his wife to his secretary. “While all this has been going on between you and Sherry, your wife has been missing. Isn’t that hard on you?” George asked.

  “There’s nothing I can do to find my wife. The police are doing it all. I’m just waiting until they find her.” He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he were referring to someone else’s problem.

  “But it must take an emotional toll on you.”

  Lucas stared back at him with a blank look. “Not really. Like I said, there’s nothing I can do. I’m just waiting.”

  “What do you think happened to your wife?”

  “I have no idea.” He looked disinterested.

  “No suspicions, no theories?”

  “She took chances.”

  “What do you mean?

  “Sometimes she took risks, did dangerous things.” He looked blankly at George, but his jaw muscles were working furiously, as if he were stifling a rage.

  “Risks? Dangerous things?”

  “You know, went out at night, things like that.”

  “She was having affairs?”

  Lucas scowled. “I didn’t say that. She just ran around. I warned her.”

  “Warned her?”

  “That she was playing with fire, that something could happen.”

  “Something like…?”

  “I don’t know. Like what happened. Now she’s missing.” He looked at George with suspicion. “Why are you asking me about my wife? That’s not what I’m here for.”

  “And what are you here for?”

  Bonaventure sighed. “I told you, I want to find out what’s wrong with Sherry; how I can help her. I want to stop her from doing something that could lead to her getting hurt.”

  George placed both hands on his desk. “I can’t really figure out Sherry for you, Mr. Bonaventure. She’s not the one who’s here, you are. It seems to me that you’re very mixed up about how you feel about this Sherry woman. It also sounds to me as if your feelings for Sherry may be related in some way to how you feel about your wife. If you’d like to come back and talk to me more about these things, I’m willing to see you. But we will be learning a lot more about you than about Sherry.”

  Lucas gazed down at the floor, a glum expression on his face. When he looked up, he seemed to have lost his aggressiveness. “OK, I’ll come back and talk some more,” he said meekly. Then he straightened, regaining his self-assurance. “But I still intend to help Sherry. M
aybe you can teach me something about myself that will help me do that. I feel better now than before I came in here.”

  George was surprised. He had been certain that Bonaventure would reject his offer. “I’m glad to hear that. Shall we say day after tomorrow at three?”

  Lucas pulled out his cell phone and tapped it a few times. “That will work.”

  Chapter 4

  “I can’t believe you’re planning to take that man as a patient,” Madeline Farquhar said to her husband. “You always make the wrong decisions.”

  She raised her pencil-thin eyebrows and stared at him, her thin lips pursed in a frown. It was an expression George was used to, but he still felt intimidated by it. By her.

  Madeline was a tall, slim woman. With her narrow face and heavy makeup, she had a severe look about her, a look that George felt she had developed, perhaps even cultivated, over the years of their marriage. She was a novelist, an Avant-garde artist, committed to breaking barriers, to creating new icons for the intelligentsia. In the early years of their marriage, she had admired George’s status as a physician, his intellectual sophistication represented by his identification with Freudian theory, which had not yet completed its descent from its position of prestige in Western culture. His degrees and his position should have made him feel as if he were her superior, although they never had. In time, she had lost her respect for him and his profession, grown to disparage what she called his “slavish” adherence to psychoanalysis, which she referred to as a “worn-out theory of human behavior.” She told him that his continued belief in the methods of psychoanalysis was a symptom of his timidity, his reluctance to try anything new, traits that she claimed characterized his personality.

  “But I’m fascinated by the man,” George answered, feeling, as usual, as if he were on the defensive. “He seems to have completely denied any emotional attachment to his wife.”

  “And that’s unusual?” Madeline replied. “Physician, examine thyself.” Her dark eyes, under her arched eyebrows, were filled with scorn.

  “I mean he’s displaced all of the emotions he should be feeling toward his wife so they’re now focused upon his secretary,” George continued, doggedly. “That’s unusual, especially since his wife may still be alive.”

  Although his professional ethics forbade it, George often discussed his cases with his wife. Her curiosity, and even more, her insistence, trumped his ethical reservations. The only rule upon which he insisted was that she not use any of his revelations as material for her novels.

  “But he’s in the news, George,” she said. “And so will you be as his psychiatrist.” They were in their living room, sitting in matching curved-back Queen Anne chairs, sharing their ritualistic evening gin and tonics, looking out at the sunset over the Pacific Ocean from their house’s perch high on the western side of Newport Beach’s Spyglass Hill. The sea, in the distance, was a glistening silver in the light of the descending sun. “The press has already convicted the man of his wife’s disappearance, and no doubt of her murder. The police haven’t said so directly, but the newspapers say the police are treating him as a suspect. And you, you’re considering taking this psychopath on as a client. What do you think people will say about you when he’s found guilty and it comes out that you began seeing him as a patient after he’d murdered his wife? Whatever possessed you to do such a thing?”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions,” he said, feeling the sweat beginning to form under his arms. He couldn’t tell her that he hadn’t even been aware of giving Bonaventure an appointment. His history of dissociative states and their recent reappearance were something he shared with no one, least of all his wife. “The man hasn’t been accused of anything, except by the press and by people like you who can’t wait for the police to do their job. Besides, why would me seeing him for therapy get anyone’s attention? Why would the papers even mention it?” George knew why Madeline was upset. She was afraid that he would do something foolish to jeopardize their income. It was her chronic fear. His wife had grown up in an impoverished household, her father an alcoholic who was often unemployed. She acted as if the financial success she and her husband enjoyed could be wiped out at a moment’s notice. George suspected that it was his earning power as a physician that had attracted her to him, even more than the prestige of his profession, certainly more than his personality, which she rarely hesitated to disparage.

  “Are you serious? Why do you think a man suspected of killing his wife would seek psychiatric help and then display symptoms that made his doctor—you—think that he’s some kind of psychotic who doesn’t know what he is doing; or more pertinently, what he might have done?”

  “You think he’s trying to set up an insanity plea?”

  “Don’t you?”

  It had occurred to him, although he had dismissed the idea. “I don’t think that’s what’s going on. His manner was genuine. I had to drag some things out of him. The indifference he displayed regarding his wife was real, I’m convinced of that. And it’s that symptom that points to some kind of neurosis, an unhealthy, even abnormal, reliance upon repression. That would hardly serve as a basis for an insanity plea.”

  “Sometimes, dear, you intellectualize things so much that you can’t see what’s right before your eyes. The man is a psychopath. He is a dissimulator. He presents exactly the kind of picture that convinces you that he has some kind of mental illness, and you fall for it hook, line and sinker.” Her expression was one of disgust.

  George struggled to keep his feelings under control. It didn’t pay to show his anger around Madeline. She just got angry back and he couldn’t face that, the days of not speaking to him. He always felt abandoned. “Well I don’t think so,” he answered.

  “You’re playing with fire, George.”

  He was caught off guard by her use of the same phrase that Lucas Bonaventure had used in talking about both his wife and his secretary. “Are you warning me?” He looked up at her, trying to read her expression.

  She scowled at him. “Damn right I am. You can’t afford to have your reputation compromised. Analytic patients don’t grow on trees, and you haven’t kept up with new developments in biological psychiatry enough to be able to do anything else. Other doctors can always fall back on something like moonlighting as emergency room physicians if their practices begin to fail. But what could you do in an emergency room, dear? I wouldn’t allow you to give me a shot and I certainly wouldn’t want you to be wielding a scalpel in my presence. You’ve become a one-trick pony, and that trick has a very limited audience.”

  He had a momentary vision of standing in front of his wife with a scalpel in his hand. He felt his palms beginning to sweat. He refocused his mind on their conversation. “You never complain about the money my one trick brings in.”

  “You earn well, I admit that dear. But your income is fragile. It’s built upon a fading cultural phenomenon. Look at your colleagues. They’re mostly in their seventies, some even older. You’re always dreaming of publishing your cases in one of your hallowed journals, but half of those journals have gone out of publication. Nobody’s coming into the profession but a few impressionable social workers. How many of them are going to want to claim that they received their training from the man who treated a psychopathic murderer and didn’t even know it?”

  He’d finished his third gin and tonic. He remembered his recent fugue episodes. He needed to rein in his anger… and his drinking. “I’ll think about what you’ve said,” he answered her, trying to sound sincere, perhaps even contrite. “Why don’t we have dinner and then we can watch some TV?”

  “Dinner is in the oven. I’ll get it out. But after dinner I have some writing to do. The UC Irvine MFA program wants me to give a talk to their students next week and I have to come up with something.”

 
“Really? That’s great. You’ll probably enjoy talking to some aspiring writers, you always enjoy teaching, and students love you.” He knew he was trying to ingratiate himself, to change the tone of their conversation.

  “Perhaps I should talk about knowing the difference between fiction and real life. How novelists are sometimes more perspicacious in this regard than others are. But then I’d have to censor my temptation to mention psychoanalysts as the prime example of those who fail to make this distinction. That would be difficult.”

  He knew she was joking, but he still felt a twinge of panic that she might talk about him and some of his cases in order to make a point. But then, she really was only interested in making her point to him, he reminded himself.

  “I’m sure you’ll come up with something,” he said, standing. “I’ll set the table for dinner.”

  Chapter 5

  “The police are on their way,” Mrs. Schrempf greeted him. Her round face was fixed in a polite smile, but the look in her eyes suggested that she knew things she wasn’t saying. Her voice was as cheery as if she were announcing a visit from the Girl Scouts.

  George was standing in the waiting room, having not yet entered his office. He froze, thoughts of turning around and going back home flooding his mind. His stomach was churning. He willed himself to remain calm. “Did they say why they want to talk to me?” He knew it was about Lucas Bonaventure.

  “A Detective Reynolds said that your new patient, the one you scheduled while I was away,” she said pointedly, “told them that he was seeing you and they want to talk to you about him.”

  Was even Mrs. Schrempf distancing herself from him? Suddenly he was overwhelmed by the same sense of foreboding and guilt that he felt when he returned from one of his fugue episodes. He reminded himself that the police were interested in Lucas Bonaventure, not in him. He picked up his battered briefcase, which contained only unread journals and unused notebooks, items he ferried back and forth to the office each day because carrying the leather briefcase made him feel more like a doctor, or perhaps a scholar. Most of the time he felt like neither.