“What do you think?”
She stared at him, shocked. “You mean you think I would?” She got to her feet angrily. “Why, you dirty sonofabitch! You think I liked fucking the band?”
“Did you?”
In a fury she picked up a vase and flung it at him. It shattered against a table. “Does that answer you?”
“No. That vase was two hundred dollars. I’ll put it on your bill.”
She stared at him helplessly. “Did I really like it?” she whispered.
“You tell me.”
Her voice dropped even lower. “I must be sick,” she said. “Oh, God, I’m sick. Please help me, Judd. Help me!”
Judd walked over to her. “You’ve got to help me help you.”
She nodded her head, dumbly.
“I want you to go home and think about how you feel, Teri. Not while you’re doing these things, but before you do them. Think about why you want to do them. When you know that, you’ll know a great deal about yourself.”
She looked at him a moment, then her face relaxed. She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose again. “You’re a helluva man, Charlie Brown,” she said. She picked up her purse and gloves. “See you next week?”
“Yes,” he said. “See you next week.” He opened the door to the corridor, and Teri exited.
He knew the answer to Teri’s problem, but she would have to work it through for herself. She would have to learn that she could not buy love, that it had to be given freely. And she could not accept the fact that it could be given to her freely until she learned to believe that she was worthy of receiving love. Until that time, Teri would go on trying to buy it, using the only currency she had: her body. He knew the agony she was going through, the bottomless despair of self-loathing, and his heart went out to her. But the only way in which he could help her was to give the appearance of being impersonal and detached. He knew that to his patients he seemed remote and aloof from their problems, dispensing wisdom from some Olympian height. But that was a vital part of the facade of therapy. In reality, he cared deeply about the problems of his patients. They would have been amazed if they had known how often the unspeakable demons that tried to batter down the ramparts of their emotions appeared in Judd’s own nightmares.
During the first six months of his practice as a psychiatrist, when he was undergoing the required two years of analysis necessary to become a psychoanalyst, Judd had developed blinding headaches. He was empathetically taking on the symptoms of all his patients, and it had taken him almost a year to learn to channel and control his emotional involvement.
Now, as Judd locked Teri Washburn’s tape away, his mind came forcibly back to his own dilemma. He walked over to the phone and dialed information for the number of the Nineteenth Precinct.
The switchboard operator connected him with the Detective Bureau. He heard McGreavy’s deep bass voice over the phone, “Lieutenant McGreavy.”
“Detective Angeli, please.”
“Hold on.”
Judd heard the clatter of the phone as McGreavy put the receiver down. A moment later Angeli’s voice came over the wire. “Detective Angeli.”
“Judd Stevens. I wondered whether you’d gotten that information yet?”
There was an instant’s hesitation. “I checked into it,” said Angeli carefully.
“All you have to do is say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” Judd’s heart was pounding. It was an effort for him to ask the next question. “Is Ziffren still at Matteawan?”
It seemed an eternity before Angeli answered. “Yes. He’s still there.”
A wave of disappointment surged through Judd. “Oh. I see.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” Judd said. Slowly he hung up.
So that left Harrison Burke. Harrison Burke, a hopeless paranoiac who was convinced that everyone was out to kill him. Had Burke decided to strike first? John Hanson had left Judd’s office at ten-fifty on Monday and had been killed a few minutes later. Judd had to find out whether Harrison Burke was in his office at that time. He looked up Burke’s office number and dialed it.