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Authors: G. H. Ephron

BOOK: Delusion
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I watched the ambulance pull away and heard the siren start up again. The woman next door was standing halfway out of her back door, transfixed by the drama.
I went back inside. The dispatcher was still on the phone. I thanked her and hung up.
The quiet house was still full of Richard Teitlebaum's presence. There were large photographs of sailing yachts on the walls, bookcases filled with modern fiction and nonfiction. The smell of coffee wafted in from the kitchen.
I walked into the kitchen and turned off the coffee. I was wiped, like I'd just run a mile in knee-deep mud. I poured what was left in the pot into a cup.
I leaned against the refrigerator and took a sip. How long had he been down there? Would it have made a difference if I'd gone to the basement first instead of farting around, upstairs and down, chatting up the neighbor, climbing in and out of the garage?
I wandered into his office and sank down in a chair. I'd sat there when I first met him. I could picture him pitched forward, kneading his hands together. He'd been upset. Stunned, grieving as if he'd lost a friend.
You don't have to be a psychiatrist to know that husbands kill wives.
Had it all been an act?
I thought about Teitlebaum. A Newton Hill yuppie with callused hands. A calm professional who crackled with anxiety. I tried to envision Teitlebaum creeping into the Babikian home in the dead of night when he knew Nick would be working in the basement, knowing that the only witness to worry about wouldn't be able to tell anyone what she saw. He finds Lisa …
That's where I hit a wall. Teitlebaum may have crossed a few boundaries in his relationship with his patient. But in my heart of hearts, I couldn't picture him as a murderer. And though he knew that it would incriminate Nick to have Lisa found with a mask on, I couldn't imagine him inflicting that final, dehumanizing indignity on a young woman he'd treated and for whom he seemed to care deeply.
Teitlebaum's desk was bare. No neatly folded suicide note providing the explanation we all crave when someone takes his own life. Only two mugs—one full of pens, the other full of
pencils all sharpened and pointing up—lined up alongside the receiverless phone.
I picked up the handset from the floor, put it back in place. Who would grieve for Richard Teitlebaum? Did he have relatives in Rhode Island? On the shelf behind the desk were some framed photographs—looked like a family reunion, maybe Teitlebaum with parents, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. At least I could call and let someone know.
I scanned the room for an address book. I tried the top center desk drawer. It had a neat stack of stationery, envelopes, extra pens and pencils, and in the corner a small container of stamps. I tried the top side drawer. I remembered Teitlebaum opening this drawer when we'd talked here. Sitting on top of a checkbook and a calculator was a small brown leather notebook. I lifted it out and shoved the drawer closed with my knee. The book had a calendar in the front, addresses and phone numbers in the back.
I went to the T's and found several Teitlebaums listed. I called the first one. Michael Teitlebaum turned out to be his brother. Michael's wife Karen was home. I told her what I could, as gently as I could. She seemed stunned, barely able to talk. Finally, she thanked me and said she'd let the rest of the family know. I gave her my phone number.
Then I called Chip to let him and Annie know what was going on. Annie got on the phone and launched into a barrage of questions. She made me take her through my every movement. Finally, she asked how I was feeling.
I gave a tired laugh. “Feeling?” As usual, I'd been trying not to feel anything. “Just beating myself up for not getting here earlier.”
“He may make it,” Annie said.
“And he may be sorry that he did,” I said. “Carbon monoxide can cause permanent brain damage.”
“Maybe you should go over to the hospital. After he regains consciousness. You might get some closure.” She was beginning to talk like me. “Let me know if you want company.”
I hung up and opened the drawer again to put the datebook back where I'd found it. I remembered Lisa Babikian's calendar, her biweekly appointments. If she'd been alive, she'd have had an appointment with Richard Teitlebaum today, Friday, at four o'clock, right around the time Teitlebaum had been sitting in the sauna losing consciousness.
I opened the datebook to today's page. Lisa Babikian's name had been crossed out. All of the other appointments today were scratched out too. Being suspected of murder hadn't just damaged Teitlebaum's practice. It had destroyed it.
THE HEADLINES Saturday morning: “Suspect in Brutal Killing Clings to Life.” There was a picture of a professorial-looking Richard Teitlebaum. I scanned the article. When the paper had gone to press, Teitlebaum had been alive and in intensive care. There were no details about what the police had dug up from Teitlebaum's garden, just that they'd brought back several boxes of evidence.
There was an interview with his next-door neighbor, Barbara Small. She described him as “weird” and “spooky.” “You'd say hello, and he'd just have this distant look on his face. And he had all these strange people going in and out of his house at all hours.” With neighbors like her, who needed enemies?
She also claimed that a large, paunchy person had been skulking around the car, kicking at the dirt in the driveway. She said it might have been before Teitlebaum got taken off, might have been after. Paunchy? I looked down at my stomach. I most
certainly was not paunchy, though I wasn't being as religious about rowing every morning as I'd once been.
I made up my mind to visit Teitlebaum at the hospital. I called Annie to take her up on her offer to go with me. We agreed to meet in the hospital lobby later that morning. I was hoping the visit would reassure me that I hadn't been too late.
It was just after eight o'clock and the day was already heating up. It promised to be a scorcher—almost ninety in May. It sometimes happened in New England, and when it did, it was not a pretty sight. Unseasonable heat cooked magnolia blossoms right off the trees.
I threw on shorts and sneakers, grabbed my water bottle and Walkman, put in a Jess Klein CD, and went out for a run on the river. I did a circuit, up and over the Longfellow Bridge, then down along the Boston side and back over the Mass Ave Bridge. Then home. As out of shape as I was, I still resisted the temptation to rest along the way. Running gives the mind a break while the body takes over.
I got back dripping with sweat, as if I'd taken a dive into the river. I smelled almost as sweet.
When I got out of the shower, the phone was ringing. It was Detective Boley. “Just a formality at this point,” he said, but could I go over to the police station and give a statement about finding Teitlebaum?
I told him I'd be over around noon. “What did you find at Teitlebaum's?” I asked.
There was a pause. “I'll be holding a press conference in a half hour. Tune in and find out,” he said and hung up. The arrogant bastard. He'd be enjoying center stage.
I drove to the hospital with the heater on high so my engine wouldn't overheat, the windows down, and news radio blaring. At least the roads were empty. I was rolling into the hospital parking lot when the breaking news bulletin came on. The police
had found bloody gardening gloves and human tissue buried in Dr. Richard Teitlebaum's garden. Maybe Lisa Babikian's unborn baby.
I bashed the radio into silence and peeled myself off the seat. Annie was waiting for me under a potted palm in the blessedly cool lobby. She had on jeans and a black scoop-neck T-shirt under an unbuttoned white cotton shirt. “Did you hear the news?” she asked.
I nodded. Annie had her hair up, and tendrils curled down the back of her neck. That's where I kissed her. Her skin felt cool and damp.
“Chip's preparing a motion to get Nick released,” she said. If this were any other case, I'd have been pleased. Getting our defendant off without a trial was a win-win all aro und. Good for the defenda nt, go od for the state, and Chip got paid. But I'd have felt a whole lot better if I thought Teitlebaum was going to get a fair shake from the criminal justice system. For once, I appreciated the way Chip usually shielded me from information I didn't need to know. Now I craved the tunnel vision I didn't have.
We took the stairs to the second floor. Then down a long corridor, following the signs to the ICU.
“I just heard what else they found when they searched Teitlebaum's house,” Annie said. “A miniature surveillance camera.”
“Yeah, I saw it there,” I said. “It was in Richard's desk. He said Nick planted it in his office so he could spy on his wife's sessions.”
Annie started to say something else but stopped. We'd reached the closed double doors to the ICU. A uniformed police officer was seated just outside. He harrumphed to his feet and asked who we were there to see.
“Richard Teitlebaum,” I said. “We're friends. Dr. Peter Zak. Annie Squires.”
“Hey, Annie,” the officer said, turning a warm smile on Annie. “How you been keeping yourself?” Half the police officers in the Western world seemed to know Annie.
“Hey yourself, Eddie. I'm good. Peter's the one who found Dr. Teitlebaum and called the ambulance. Okay if we go in?”
“They only let one person in at a time.”
“That's cool. You go ahead,” she told me.
The officer glanced through the window in the door. “He's unconscious.”
I pushed the intercom next to the door. The nurse, a middle-aged woman with graying hair who looked like she'd seen it all, came over. She asked who I was there to see and buzzed me in.
The beds in the ICU radiated out from a central nurses' station in separate, glass-walled cubicles. The nurse indicated Teitlebaum. She gave her head an infinitesimal shake. “A shame,” she said, “young man like that.”
Teitlebaum lay inert in a hospital bed, a tube up his nose and an IV in his arm. Wires snaked from under the covers, others were attached to his head. They connected to the monitors that surrounded him, each one making its own sinusoidal graph.
“Has he regained consciousness?” I asked.
She took the chart off the end of the bed. She shook her head.
I went over to his bed, pulled up a chair, and sat. I was breathing shallowly, through my mouth, trying not to swallow the smell of the place—denatured alcohol and gardenias.
“Richard?” I said. A monitor alongside the bed was beeping. A machine, breathing for one of the other patients, hissed and clanked. “Richard,” I said a bit louder, putting my hand on
his arm. The nurse's shoes made a squishing sound as she moved from one side of the room to the other. But Teitlebaum didn't stir.
I felt a new surge of anger. Why the hell couldn't he have waited for me to get there? Suicide was the ultimate stupidity. It left so many unanswered questions, so many people blaming themselves and each other. The police would assume they had their killer, and that he'd taken his own life. Case closed. Everyone goes home happy.
But I knew in my gut that this case wasn't closed. Sure it was hard to swallow, Teitlebaum treating two patients who were both brutally murdered. But maybe for once, that's all it was. A coincidence. Nothing in Teitlebaum's demeanor, in his reaction to Lisa Babikian's death, suggested that he killed her.
I thought about the occasional psychopaths I'd met over the years, killers who managed to mask their malevolence. Wasn't it a shame about that woman he was accused of killing, Ralston Bridges had asked when I evaluated him. Did I know that she had a five-year-old daughter, now left without a mother? It made him so sad to think about it. He had a little girl himself. He'd been there when she was born. It was the most incredible experience of his life. As he said this, as if on command, a single tear appeared at the corner of a dead, emotionless eye. I'd met only two other real psychopaths, and they had the same dead eyes.
When Teitlebaum's eyes went dead, it was from despair, not emotional impotence. I was convinced that he genuinely cared about Lisa Babikian.
I asked the nurse if I could borrow a piece of paper. Then I scribbled a note. In case he came to, I wanted Teitlebaum to know I'd been there and wished him well. I left it folded on the nightstand.
I left the ICU and Annie and I started down the hall. A
dapper-looking man, skin the color of light coffee, moved toward us with the fluid grace of a dancer. It was Naresh Sharma, another public defender with whom I'd worked over the years.
“My good friend Peter!” he said. His voice was flat Midwest. Careful word choice—he picked his words as one would pick up shells on a beach—was all that remained of what must have once been an Indian accent. “And is that Annie Squires?”
He and Annie embraced. Then she stood away from him. “You're looking swell,” she said.
As always, the tall, somber-looking fellow was dressed, if anything, more elegantly than my good friend Kwan, in polished wing tips and a dark suit that fit as if it had been made for him.
Naresh and I shook hands. “How are you? How's Lakshmi?” I asked. I'd never forget the extraordinary shrimp curry and homemade chutney his wife, also a lawyer, had cooked to celebrate the end of a trial.
“She's fine. I'll tell her you asked after her,” Naresh said. He glanced toward the ICU, then back at me with concern. “Your mother? She's well?”
“She's fine,” I reassured him. “Alive and kicking. I was here to visit Richard Teitlebaum.”
“You're acquainted with Dr. Teitlebaum? He's my client.”
“He hired you?”
“A few days ago. You know I'm in private practice now too.”
The three of us moved to the end of the hall. I lowered my voice. “I didn't realize he'd hired an attorney. That's great. I'm the one who found him and called the police. I've been working with Annie and Chip, defending Nick Babikian, the man who …” Naresh put up a hand to let me know he didn't need it explained.
“I know it sounds bad,” I said. “And after they dug up his garden and found what they did. But there's something about this that doesn't feel right.”
“You don't think this was suicide?” Naresh asked sharply.
“Actually, the attempted suicide is the only part that feels right about it. What I can't figure out is why.”
“He was pretty distraught,” Annie said.
“Not why the suicide. That makes sense. But why would Richard Teitlebaum kill Lisa Babikian, then slice her open and bury her unborn child in his own garden?”
There was a pause. “Well,” Annie suggested, “suppose it was his child.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Say he and Lisa are having an affair. She gets pregnant. Hysterical. Wants to leave her husband and go off with the man who truly understands her. Teitlebaum freaks out, kills her, then destroys the evidence that would show their relationship was more than doctor-patient. Buries it in his own garden because he is, after all, the baby's father. He can't just throw it away.”
“That's certainly what the DA would have us believe,” Naresh said.
“That baby is not Teitlebaum's,” I said, surprised at the conviction in my own voice. “I'll bet you anything that a DNA test—”
“I don't bet when it comes to my clients,” Naresh interrupted.
“If he dies,” I said, “he'll be condemned in the court of public opinion, based on circumstantial evidence confirmed by his own final act. But he's not dead now. A DNA test would at least show he didn't abuse his position as her therapist.”
Naresh didn't look convinced. “I don't know, Peter. I always say, never open a door unless you're one hundred percent sure what you're going to find on the other side.”
“They've already taken fingerprints, interviewed him,” I said. “I tried to get him to call a lawyer when they questioned him. But he ignored me. I warned the detective in charge of the
investigation, told him Teitlebaum wasn't acting in his own best interest.”
“You told him that?”
“I went to the police station where they were holding him. I told Boley that anything they got from him would get thrown out of court. We argued about it—lots of people overheard.”
“Very interesting,” Naresh said. I could see the wheels turning as Naresh strategized about how to prevent the police from using the evidence Teitlebaum had given freely while overwhelmed by despair.
We left my car at the hospital and Annie drove, her Jeep's A/C on full blast. “You have to admit, the evidence is stacking up,” Annie said, as she barreled along winding back roads to get to the Middlesex County Courthouse and Boley's office.
She was right. Bloody shoes. What looked like Lisa Babikian's unborn child and bloody gloves buried in his garden. And a suicide attempt that made him look guilty. “On the other hand,” I said, “no witnesses. Unless you count Mrs. Babikian. Too bad that surveillance data is missing.”
“That's what I forgot to tell you,” Annie said, swerving around a dead raccoon. “They also found the hard drive that was missing from Babikian's computer.”
“Where?”
“In Teitlebaum's desk.”
“Shit.” I felt as if the ground had been yanked out from under me. Here was yet another piece of evidence implicating Teitlebaum in Lisa Babikian's murder.

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