The Fregoli Delusion (13 page)

“So he told you what happened?
Finding Jarrett? Seeing Holland run away from the scene?”

“Yes.”

“He told you Holland knocked him
down and took his camera?”

“Yes.”

“Did he mention the gun to you?”

“No. Maybe because he was still so
upset.”

“Have you seen him before when
he’s had one of these Fregoli delusions?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Was this another one of them?”

Jensen grimaced and stubbed out
her cigarette in the little red pocket ashtray. “I can’t say for sure. It’s—”

“Before, though, you could tell
for sure?”

“Yes. He thought his father was
Richard Holland.”

“Okay. Tell me about that one.”

“I was with him at the time.”
Jensen put the ashtray back in her pocket. “We were in the middle of something,
I forget what, nothing important, and Mr. Parris came into the room. In itself,
that’s not unusual. Unless I say otherwise beforehand, it’s understood our
sessions here at the house are interruptible. This time, though, Brett became
extremely upset and insisted his father was Holland.”

“How upset? To the point that he
had to be sedated?”

“Unfortunately. He threw a few
things around the room, was yelling, and was very angry that I didn’t believe
him when he said his father was Richard Holland. I was able to calm him enough
to convince him to take the sedative, but he was so close to the edge I had no
other choice. Otherwise it would have been necessary to hospitalize him, which
has happened in the past.”

“So it sounds like he was
different yesterday.”

“Yes, I suppose you could say
that. I know you’re trying to establish whether or not he was delusional
yesterday when he said he saw Richard Holland running away, but it’s just not
possible with any degree of confidence. According to his file, there’ve been
other times when he wasn’t upset enough to need hospitalization or even
sedation, although he was clearly in the grip of a Fregoli delusion. The
problem with all of this is that it’s an extremely rare condition. There have
been so few cases, there’s not enough data to make generalizations. We can’t
point to a set of definitive behaviors that will tell us yes, this is a Fregoli
delusion, the way we can with paranoid schizophrenia or other well-known
conditions. In the other incidents with Brett we have on record, someone was
with him who was able to say that the person Brett identified as Richard
Holland was in fact not Holland. Yesterday morning, he was alone. So,
basically, it’s impossible to say who he actually saw.”

“Crap.” Karen felt her frustration
mount. “His old man’s convinced he was delusional.”

“He’s not a trained psychologist,”
Jensen said, “but on the other hand, he has a great deal of practical
experience with his son. I’d be inclined to believe him.”

Karen compressed her lips,
frustrated. “All right. He was able to tell me what car he saw, from the photo
array I showed him on my phone, and identify it as Holland’s car. Can I at
least rely on that?”

“I’m sorry.” Jensen shook her
head. “Again, it’s impossible to say for sure. Brett’s memory isn’t very good.
It goes with the territory, as I probably don’t need to tell you as someone
familiar with schizophrenia. Did he pick the car that actually does belong to
Richard Holland?”

“He sure as fuck did.” Karen stood
up. “I gotta ask. Does this Fregoli thing include objects and the like, or just
people? Could he look at an antique Studebaker, for example, and say it’s a
Ferrari?”

“Not that I’m aware of. I haven’t
noticed it in him so far.”

“Well that’s one little shred of
sunlight, anyway.”

Jensen stood up, smoothed her
skirt, and cocked her head at Karen. “You know, positive psychology can provide
some very effective life coaching for professionals like you. I could recommend
a few books on the subject.”

“I’m not much of a book reader,”
Karen replied. “Thanks for your cooperation.” She stalked across the lawn on a
straight line toward the Crown Vic, and didn’t look back.

14

That evening, Hank and Meredith
arrived at the Edward C. Barton Art Gallery in his mother’s smaller Mercedes.
Their driver was Danny, the son of Anna’s full-time driver, Earl Day. Danny was
a student at State and his major was criminal justice. He was about to begin
his junior year. During the drive he peppered Hank with questions about the
professors and the courses. Hank answered patiently through Danny’s constant
interruptions of his conversation with Meredith, who smiled out the window.

They arrived just after 7:00
p.m.
and walked together up the wide
staircase to the art gallery while the media behind the velvet ropes on either
side took their photograph.

Meredith grinned. “I feel like a
Hollywood celebrity.”

“You look like one,” Hank smiled
back. She was lovely in a full-length black Dolce & Gabbana evening gown
with gold and bronze details and a black bow at the back. In the Mercedes she’d
whispered to him, between Danny’s questions, that she’d bought it in a second-hand
shop in Paris several years ago at a fraction of its original price. Now, as
they left the head of the stairs and followed the corridor to the doorway
leading into the reception, he watched her move in it and could have sworn it
had been made for her. In two weeks she would turn forty-seven years old, but
she bounced alongside him now as though she were twenty years younger, her
blond hair moving lightly on her shoulders.

The VIP reception had already
taken place and the cocktail reception was now underway in the loft, an event
space on the second level of the gallery that overlooked the atrium, where
dinner would be served in an hour. They joined the crowd and circulated for a
few minutes before Hank went over to the bar, coming back with a Rob Roy for
her and a Maker’s Mark on the rocks for himself.

She was talking to a woman he
didn’t know, and for no particular reason he decided to stand behind her for a
moment. He looked at a lock of honey-colored hair resting lightly on her
shoulder, just behind the strap of her dress. The dress was low-cut in back and
her hair reached down mid-point on each shoulder blade, but for some reason his
eyes, after noticing the light freckles on her skin, settled on this particular
lock of hair. He could see how lightly it lay on her skin, so lightly that she
probably couldn’t feel it.

Involuntarily he thought about the
look on Perry’s face this afternoon as he struggled to make sense of what was
happening to the body of his former friend in Jim Easton’s autopsy theater.

I don’t know how you do it.
Why
you do it.

Meredith sensed him behind her and
turned. He handed her the Rob Roy and smiled.

They found Anna and Roberts in the
crowd. Hank performed the introductions. After a few minutes Anna suggested
they go down into the atrium early, to avoid the rush. Meredith thought that
was fine, as she and Hank had already met the VIPs, including state Senator
Bernard Brickland, Congressman Peter Quick, Mayor Darrien Watts, Mary Strong
Ferguson, the president of State University, Bill Keating, head coach of the
Baltimore Ravens, and Judge Janet Falcone, chief judge of the state court of
appeals.

As they found their table and sat
down, Hank glanced at his watch and saw that it was still fifteen minutes
before eight o’clock. Roberts began to talk about a contract he’d just
completed in Costa Rica. Hank listened politely. He liked Roberts. Despite his
age, Roberts was still very active and enjoyed a very good reputation in his field.
Costa Rica had no army per se, Roberts explained, but they did have a small
special forces unit attached to their intelligence area. He’d gone in to help
set up a training program and had been impressed with the people he’d met.

Roberts was small, barely five feet
eight inches tall, and he was as bald as a cucumber, with a prominent Roman
nose and thick lips. As an army general he’d been known for his strict sense of
discipline and unsympathetic disposition, but with Anna he was always polite,
quiet, and deferential. He had an apartment downtown and was often out of the
country, but he and Anna went out together when he was home, and he spent most
of his evenings with her, watching CNN or just reading material in preparation
for his next contract. He was an ideal companion for Anna in that he made no
demands of her and was good company.

While Roberts distracted Hank,
Anna subjected Meredith to a brief but intense interrogation, showing the
talent for questioning that had been her hallmark as a state’s attorney.
Meredith smiled throughout, unperturbed.

Trying to follow their
conversation as well as pay attention to Roberts, Hank could tell that Anna had
already done her homework and was following the ancient precept of all
attorneys that one should never ask a question for which one does not already
know the answer. She merely wanted to listen to Meredith’s responses and make
her judgments based on what information Meredith chose to include or omit.

Once the preliminaries were
disposed of and Anna had apparently made her decision on Meredith’s worthiness
as a companion for her son, she got down to the business of passing on what she
felt Meredith would need to know about Hank. Roberts continued to keep Hank
occupied enough that he was unable to head it off. At first he thought Meredith
might not understand Anna’s intentions, but very soon he could tell from their
body language that both women were enjoying his discomfort. Since there was
nothing he could do about it, he sat there and took it.

“He was a wonderful boy,” Anna
said, easing back in her seat. “He was the baby of the family and had such a
perfect disposition as a child. Lord knows I was entitled to have at least one
easy one. The others were a bit of a chore, each in their own way.”

“All children are,” Meredith said,
diplomatically.

“My oldest, Thomas, has had an
especially difficult time.” She sipped at her drink. “He's a very talented
musician. A pianist. He doesn't speak to any of us anymore.”

“I'm very sorry to hear that.”
Meredith glanced at Hank, who said nothing.

“I don't blame him at all,” Anna
went on. “It was his decision to make a clean break with us, and I respect
that. There was a lot of fighting, and he felt very isolated. He's a heroin
addict, and we really didn't understand his point of view, I'm afraid. He had a
difficult time in Vietnam and when he returned with the addiction, we were very
upset.
I
was upset. Hank was the wisest of all; he stayed out of it completely.
I wish I had.”

“Hank,” Roberts said suddenly,
“did I tell you about the fellow I met once in Argentina who could throw a hand
grenade the entire length of a soccer pitch?”

“No, you didn't,” Hank lied,
fatalistically.

“I daresay,” Anna went on, “as
intelligent as the others all are, Hank’s by far the brightest. As a child, he
found schoolwork so easy they skipped him twice, from Grade One to Grade Three,
and again from Four to Six. He knew his fractions before most of the other
children in his class could spell words of more than one syllable.”

“Mother,” Hank managed, clipping
off the end of one of Roberts’s sentences, “Meredith’s not interested in
ancient history.”

“No, it’s all right,” Meredith
said. “I don’t mind. It’s very interesting.”

“He
is
interesting, isn’t
he?” Anna said, tilting her head to study him with bright eyes. “Imagine him
being two years younger than the other boys in his class and still smarter than
any of them. For a while, they picked on him. But Henry, that's what I always
called him when he was a boy, was big for his age—which he gets from his father—and
he was quite athletic, like Robert Junior, so the fights didn’t last very long.
I had to make a couple of trips to the principal’s office to straighten things
out, so they’d realize he was only defending himself. They were basing their
judgments on the outcome alone, and they thought he was the aggressor.”

“Imagine!” Meredith said.

“But after that, things settled
into a very nice routine for him. He made friends, played basketball and
baseball, and had a summer job caddying at Woodfern. Before you knew it, he’d
breezed through high school and was about to enroll in State as a
fifteen-year-old freshman.”

“Well,” Meredith said.

“He’s very much like his father
was,” Anna went on, “tall, shaggy, well-meaning, and very, very bright. Bob and
I met on opposite sides of the court room. I was the first female assistant
state’s attorney here and Bob was a criminal defense attorney. He was from
Alliance, Ohio, and you could hear that flat Midwestern twang in his voice
right up to the day he died. He was defending a man accused of murdering his
mistress and her young son. I liked our case, and I still do to this day,
because we had overwhelming circumstantial evidence, but Bob handed me my rear
end on a plate. We married four months later.”

Meredith smiled, clearly enjoying
herself.

“My father,” Anna continued,
“Charles Goodwin Haynes, was governor of this fair state and my grandfather,
Edward Willis Haynes, had the honor of serving as chief judge of the court of
appeal. Bob’s father, on the other hand, was a small-town physician in Ohio and
his grandfather was a watchmaker. Honorable professions, and completely
indispensable to the community in which they lived, but quite a different
philosophy of life, if you will. The Donaghues took their status and influence
entirely for granted, and I daresay felt a little self-conscious about it,
whereas we Hayneses
never
take power and influence for granted. It takes
generations to establish and can be lost overnight.”

Listening, Hank remembered a
baseball game he and his father had attended the summer before he entered
college. As they ate hot dogs and drank sodas in the stands, his father said, “Some
day you and I will make a trip to Alliance so you can see the other half.”

“We could take the Amtrak,” Hank
said, anxious to show his father that he knew something about the place. “We
could fly into Cleveland and go from there.”

“We could do that,” his father
replied. “I’ll show you where my grand-dad had his shop. It’s a jewelry store
now, according to your Aunt Betty. I remember spending Saturday afternoons in
the back room with him, just the two of us, watching him work, listening to him
tell stories about the old days. I never saw so many pocket watches in my
entire life. He had big cabinets filled with movements, watch faces, empty
cases, you name it.”

“Wow,” Hank said.

“Yeah.” His father smiled. “I
probably mentioned before, the house I grew up in is a bed and breakfast now.
My father ran his practice out of rooms at the back. My bedroom was on the
third floor, above the rear entrance. Sometimes the patients came around in the
middle of the night. I could hear them opening and closing the door.”

“We could stay there when we go,”
Hank suggested.

His father shook his head. “I’d
rather stay at a motel and just drive by for a look.”

“It would seem strange,” Hank
ventured, “staying in your old house with a bunch of strangers.”

“That’s right.” His father took a
bite of hot dog and chewed. “It’s a pretty small town. Just over twenty
thousand altogether. It was smaller than that when I was growing up. We didn’t
have a lot of money, even though Dad was a doctor. Back then, people couldn’t
always pay their bills, and Dad would take other forms of payment. A
fifty-pound bag of potatoes, a barrel of apples, and one time a man repaired
our roof to repay him for attending to the birth of his daughter. His wife had
complications, and Dad spent almost two days with her, pulling her through.

“Now, Grandfather Haynes was a
fine man, make no mistake, but he spent his career building much different
relationships than my father did. It can’t help but affect your outlook on life
when the cement that holds your relationships together is a mixture of politics
and money, rather than compassion and empathy. Trust and respect were much more
fundamental emotions at my father’s level than they are in the board room.”

He frowned at Hank. “I’m not
making value judgments here, you understand that, right? I’m not saying that
the Donaghues are better people than the Hayneses or that our value system is
better or anything like that, at all.”

He paused as they watched a batter
hit a fly ball to right field for the second out of the inning. “I’m just
saying, you have to take everything into account when you decide how to conduct
yourself in life. It’s not always just money and power. You’re the richest fifteen-year-old
I’ve ever known, but life is more than just a number printed in a bank book.
I’ve tried to explain that to Robbie, but I don’t think he gets it. He thinks
I’m a damned bleeding-heart liberal.”

Hank nodded, having heard his
brother call their father that on more than one occasion. It was something he’d
picked up from their mother.

“Anyway,” his father grinned, “I’ll
take you back to the Midwest, some day soon. We have to work on that awful
Maryland accent of yours.”

It was a promise his father would
not live to keep: he passed away from a heart attack when Hank was a sophomore
at State.