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Authors: G. H. Ephron

BOOK: Delusion
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Now I understood. After her son didn't come home, Mrs. Gratzenberg looked around in Jeff's basement room, hoping to discover where he might have gone to. She'd found my business card and tracked me down, thinking I was his new employer.
“Did you call the police?”
“I tried. Yesterday. Again today. They say he's not gone long
enough. He's young. It's probably nothing. But I know, it's not nothing.”
“Can't you help?” my mother said. “You work with the police. Can't you make them do something?”
I picked up the phone and called the Cambridge PD and asked for Detective Sergeant Joseph MacRae. The angels must have been with us, because he was there. I told him the story and asked if he could lean on whoever needed to be leaned on to take Mrs. Gratzenberg's story seriously.
MacRae pointed out the obvious: A twenty-five-year-old who's been missing for a day and a half is an unlikely missing person. I told him I knew that, and would he do it anyway. He said he'd try. Ten minutes later he called back. An officer from missing persons would be on his way over to Mrs. Gratzenberg's house shortly.
I thanked him. I hated thanking MacRae. “It's nothing, Peter. Don't sweat it,” he said. I hated that even more.
“You'll drive Dobra home?” my mother asked, tilting her head my way after I told her a police officer was on the way. “And help her with the police?”
These only sounded like questions. They were actually commands.
A police cruiser was waiting for us. Mrs. Gratzenberg glanced at the neighboring houses, then across the street. I could read her face. What would they think? That her Jeffrey had another run-in with the law?
The officers introduced themselves and Mrs. Gratzenberg hurried them inside. She darted about in the living room smoothing cushions and straightening bits of lace that rested on the backs and armrests of her sofa and one stuffed chair.
The officers sat. One flipped open his pad. Sitting in the soft,
deep upholstered chair with his knees up around his shoulders, he made the furnishings seem doll-sized. Neither one of them was a day older than Jeff Gratzenberg.
“You say your son is missing?” the one with the pad said.
Mrs. Gratzenberg slowly explained how two days ago, he said he'd gotten a call about a job. He'd gone off and hadn't come back. She described what he'd been wearing—jeans and a black T-shirt with white letters, some kind of slogan on it.
“That's what he wore to a job interview?” one of the officers asked.
Mrs. Gratzenberg shrugged.
“He's a computer programmer,” I explained. “That's what they'd expect him to wear. If he showed up in a suit, he'd lose his credibility.”
They asked about her son's friends. Girlfriends. Mrs. Gratzenberg knew next to nothing.
“You should tell them about the incident a few months ago,” I told her. “When Jeff was arrested.”
“You know about that?” she asked me.
I nodded. I wished it didn't matter, but I knew it might.
Mrs. Gratzenberg looked tired, her eyes sad. “You tell them. Please.”
Mrs. Gratzenberg leaned back and shut her eyes, her mouth trembling, as I told the police that a few months ago Jeff Gratzenberg had been arrested for breaking into his employer's company and making a bomb threat. I told them that his employer was the man who'd been under suspicion in his wife's murder. That got their attention.
The officers asked to see her son's room. Mrs. Gratzenberg opened the door to the basement. The smell of mildew wafted up. She turned on the light. The police officers followed her down.
The lava lamp glowed orange in a corner and the refrigerator
hummed. Mrs. Gratzenberg pulled a string and the fluorescent ceiling fixture flickered to life.
One of the officers started to work his way around the paneled rec room, just as the investigators had done at the Babikian house after the murder, spiraling in from the outside.
Gratzenberg's computer sat on the bar in the middle of the room. The screen was black with a glowing red, blue, and black drawing at the center. Tiny blue stars pulsed away from images that changed every few seconds. The images—the inside of a spaceship, an explosion in space, and so on—were comic bookish and flat.
I jiggled the mouse. There was an E-mail on the screen. “Hey, look at this,” I called to the officers. They came over. The E-mail contained a job description. It was from [email protected].
While the officers checked out Gratzenberg's computer, I wandered around the room. On a small plasterboard bookcase was an array of sci-fi cyberpunk novels, from William Gibson's
Burning Chrome
to Neil Stevenson's
Snow Crash
. He also had what looked like the complete works of C. J. Cherryh. His taste in literature wasn't half bad.
I went over to a shadowy corner of the room where a twin mattress sat on a box spring. A T-shirt, jeans, and jockey shorts lay in a crumpled heap on the bed. On the bedside table was a clock and a comb. At one end of the bed, stuck to the cement wall, were some strips of cork. Pinned to them were ticket stubs, a couple of postcards, some photographs. I turned on the gooseneck lamp so I could see better.
In the middle of the hodgepodge was a photograph cut from the newspaper. It was Lisa Babikian. And above it, stuck under the pushpin, was a dried clover flower. Was this a little memorial to an acquaintance? A friend? Or something more?
THAT NIGHT, Annie and I went to the movies. I was quickly reminded why I avoided Saturday night movies—long lines and kids running around inside, throwing popcorn at each other. Annie had wanted to see a new Chinese martial arts flick. By the time we got to the front of the line, it was sold out. We decided to go down the street for sushi instead.
Over a bowl of steamed edamame, I told her about Gratzenberg. Annie put one of the soybean pods in her mouth and pulled it out between her teeth. She chewed. “You think Jeff Gratzenberg was Lisa's lover?”
“I don't really know what I think. He liked her. It made Nick jealous the way he chatted her up. More than that? Maybe.”
“If Gratzenberg did it.” Annie said, tossing the empty pod into the bowl, “don't you think he'd have buried the fetus in
Nick's
backyard? To incriminate him, not Teitlebaum.”
It was a good point. He'd want to get back at Nick for setting
him up for burglary. “But it leaves us with the question: Where's Gratzenberg,” I said.
“Probably with a girl. Or he had a car accident. Or maybe he's been working seventy-two hours straight. I've heard those guys can work through day after day and subsist on pizza and Mountain Dew.”
I hoped it was one of the above. I'd barely met him, but I liked Jeff Gratzenberg. He deserved a break. I wished him better luck choosing his new employer.
I reached for Annie's hand. I tasted one of her fingers. It was salty and moist. Annie smiled and offered me a pod of edamame. I took it in my mouth and bit down as she slowly pulled the pod out through my teeth, releasing the nutty-tasting beans.
That's when I realized Annie looked tired. There were dark smudges under her eyes. “You having trouble sleeping?” I asked.
“I got new locks, but it isn't making me feel any safer. You've got to feel safe to sleep well.”
“You should have called me. I'd have come over and …”
“Peter, I've been living alone ever since I got out of school. I'm a big girl. I don't want to feel like I need someone to take care of me. I want to fix the problem, make whoever is doing this stop. Not change my lifestyle.”
“It's got to be Bridges,” I said. “He bragged to Nick that he knew about the ‘special-delivery packages,'” I said, drawing quote marks in the air. “But he's in jail.”
“He couldn't be orchestrating this unless he's using a phone to contact an accomplice. Or maybe he's sending E-mail from the prison library computer. If we can get his phone and computer privileges suspended, that might shut him down.”
“I like it. But other than what he told Nick, we haven't got any proof that it's him.”
“I think he could get a stranger to post notices in bars. But to break in, steal, mail those packages—I say it's someone he
knows. An accomplice.” Annie took an edamame pod and gestured with it. “If we could lure him out.” She split the pod open with her fingers. A soybean dropped onto the table. “Catch him.” Annie pressed her thumb down on it. “Then squeeze until he admits that Bridges is behind all this.” There was a little popping sound as the skin burst and the bean flattened.
I winced. “How?”
“You're the psychologist,” she said. “What would he find irresistible?”
Past behavior was a potent predictor. He put up degrading posters. He'd defaced my father's grave marker. Destroyed Kate's pot. Dismembered Annie's doll. And rubbed our noses in the damage he'd wrought. “He's targeting the people I care about. Finding their vulnerable spot, and …” Nick's comment about Ralston Bridges came back to me.
Bastard like that
.
Knows just where to stick it, and how to twist it.
“So we need to offer up a spot so soft and vulnerable that he can't resist. Something he knows I care about, have labored over. And then wave it in his face.”
We said it in unison. My car.
“I don't know,” I said, immediately having second thoughts. “All that work—” I'd spent hundreds of hours working on the 1967 BMW, painstakingly restoring it until it was like new, inside and out.
“Come on, Peter,” Annie said. “It's perfect. You know it's perfect. It's in your garage, not in the house. We can get the place wired so even a pro can't detect it. The only question is, once we lay the trap, how to get him to take the bait?”
I'd worked on the car to keep myself from thrashing around half the night, unable to sleep because the bed was too big and too empty without Kate. To keep myself from obsessing about what I should have sensed, how I should have acted. A benign
variant of classic obsessive-compulsive behavior, working on the car served me as a distraction.
That was it. The answer to how to get Bridges's attention. I told Annie about the call I'd gotten from a journalist asking if she could interview me about obsessions and the compulsive behaviors people use to deal with them. I could do the interview and talk about the less debilitating obsessions that help turn an ordinary person into a performing artist, a collector, or as in my own case, a car restorer. The article might draw Bridges's attention.
“Maybe they'll even run a picture of you with your car,” Annie said.
I groaned. I hated it. But it could work. It had to work. And it felt a whole lot better than cringing behind a barricade.
Monday morning I scanned the paper for news about Gratzenberg's disappearance. There was nothing. After rounds, I went up to my office and found the scrap where I'd scribbled Kelly from the
Globe's
phone number. I called and told her I'd changed my mind.
She said the article was already written, ready to go in the Science section this week.
I knew I sounded certifiable as I explained to her that I could talk about obsessions and compulsive behaviors as a therapist, and also as someone who'd seen the positive aspects of it. I told her about my car. “It's extremely rare. A 2000 TC. There were only about nine hundred made, and mine is one of about two hundred imported into the country. Maybe the only one in New England,” I added, laying it on thick. “A pile of scrap metal when I first got it. You could even run a picture of me and my car,” I said, putting the cherry on top.
“Oh, God, that would have been so great,” she said. “If only you'd changed your mind a few days ago.”
“It's really too late?” I asked.
“Maybe not,” she said. “Hang on.” There was a moment of dead air before a Muzak version of “New York, New York” came on.
She came back on the line, breathless. “They'll hold it until tomorrow. Can I interview you this afternoon?”
“This afternoon?” I said, swallowing any second thoughts. “No problem.” We agreed to meet after I'd finished work.
Now all I needed to do was get the garage wired to trap an intruder. I remembered Nick's advice: Install infrared cameras that could see in the dark; hook up the alarm to my beeper. I called Argus Security. I told Bill approximately what I wanted, and he said he could have it installed in a couple of days, easy.
That left me only one detail to take care of. I called my mother and asked if she had any lunch plans. There was silence on her end of the phone. Then, “Lunch?”
“Why? You've eaten already?”
“It's ten-thirty in the morning. I'm still digesting my oatmeal.”
“So you'll be hungry by twelve or one?”
“And why exactly is it that you want to take me to lunch?” my mother asked. “It's not my birthday. It's not your birthday.”
“We can go to Carberry's.” No response. “Or the S&S?” I could just barely hear her breathing. “Why can't I just take you to lunch? Does there have to be a reason?”
My mother sighed. “Just come here, why don't you? I'll make you a nice lunch, and you tell me whatever it is that you don't think you can tell me on the phone.”
Later, I sat in my mother's kitchen and drank coffee while she cooked cheese blintzes. Alongside the stove, she had a plate of a half dozen yellowish pancakes. Her metal bowl held a mixture that looked like creamy cottage cheese and smelled like
vanilla. She sliced a hefty chunk off the end of a stick of butter. It sizzled when it hit the pan.
One by one, she lay each pancake in the skillet and warmed it on both sides, ladled on the cheese filling, folded it, and set it on a plate warming in the oven. There are no cheese blintzes between here and Brooklyn that can hold a candle to my mother's.
When she'd finished cooking, we sat together at the table. She put three blintzes, now browned at the edges, on my plate. Then another. I started to protest but didn't, promising myself instead that I'd row an extra Head piece, from the boathouse past the Cambridge Boat Club, to pay for this lunch.
I spooned a few dollops of sour cream over the blintzes and dug in. I closed my eyes and savored the thin, resilient pancakes tasting of egg yolk, the sweet filling, and the tang of sour cream. My father would have had them with a glass of hot tea with a teaspoonful of marmalade stirred in.
“So,” my mother said when I pushed back from the table feeling uncomfortably full. “You wanted to tell me?”
I plunged in. “You know the break-in I had? The packages we've gotten?”
“So?”
“Well”—I hadn't quite figured out how I was going to say this so it wouldn't sound as if I'd be setting out the welcome mat for a career criminal—“I'm having them wire the garage too. In case someone breaks in there.”
“And why on earth would anyone want a car that's thirty years old and falling apart?”
I laughed. “It's not falling apart! It's probably working better now than when it was brand-new. And it's worth twenty times what it cost brand-new.”
Her look, the way she had her lips pursed together and raised her eyebrows, said I'd be trying to sell her a bridge next.
I went on, “And also because there's going to be an article in the paper about how I've been working on it.”
My mother's look turned incredulous. “My son, the mechanic?” Minnie Sadowsky would not have been impressed.
“Actually, it's an article about obsessions, and the compulsive behaviors people use to deal with them. The car's just a sidelight.”
“But why in the paper?”
“They asked me to do it.”
She didn't say it, but I could hear her thinking:
And if they asked you to jump out a window?
“Anyway. I wanted to warn you. About the article. About the garage. Just in case you decided to go looking for those boxes in the back …”
“The ones with Uncle Louie's postcards from Florida? And your father's harmonica collection?”
“Because if you go in there, an alarm will go off. You won't hear anything, but the police will be coming …”
“Before I could play ‘Pop Goes the Weasel' on the harmonica.”
“I didn't know you could play the harmonica.”
“I can't.”
She tilted her head and gazed at me. It was like watching a Pachinko game, when all the silvery balls rain down and find their way into the slots. “You
want
him to break in,” she said.
“No. I don't. I just don't want you to set off the alarm. Or get frightened. Or be upset when you see the article.”
She folded her arms over her chest. “This is an excellent plan. I approve. Then maybe when we're rid of him, we can get rid of these foolish alarms and cameras and keypads. And I can stop worrying about forgetting where I put the little piece of paper I keep in case I can't remember the pass code.”
As I was leaving, she handed me a videotape. “Mr. Kuppel
recommends,” she said. It was
The Conversation,
a Gene Hackman movie I'd seen when I was in high school. I vaguely remembered the dark story of a guy who's hired to tape a conversation between a young couple in a park.
“I already saw it,” I told her and began to hand it back. Then I remembered more. Like the Gene Hackman character in the movie, Nick Babikian was an expert on surveillance. And like Nick, the character had become paranoid about his own life. “On second thought,” I said, “I wouldn't mind seeing it again.”
Kelly Quinlan turned out to be a tiny brunette who weighed about as much as a large housecat. She had glasses that slid down her nose when she got excited. She got excited when I showed her the car. She ran her hand over the fender. When I opened the door and she sat in it, she sighed and sank back into the leather seat and closed her eyes. Then the photographer who'd come with her took a picture of me with a chamois cloth in my hand, polishing the chrome.
We went in the house. She sat at my kitchen table, switched on a tape recorder and set it on the table between us. We talked for a while about the differences between healthy and unhealthy habits, when normal behavior shades over into obsessive behavior, and how to tell when habits become compulsions. I talked about my car and how working on it was a habit that helped me when I needed to be distracted.

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