'I can see the tracks of the animal all through your life. The monster has been there. I think you see it, too, but you've covered it with layers of dirt. Can we scrape through that dirt, can we uncover the monster?'
'I don't know.'
Click. What the hell was that? The faint sound of the recorder being turned off.
Then Schein's voice. 'Let's talk about your father.'
Wait a second! I stopped and rewound the tape. The same click, and then Schein continued. How long was the gap? A second, a minute, eighteen and a half minutes? Who knows? And what happened then? What did Schein say in the darkness of his office to the troubled young woman, groggy under hypnosis? And what was he saying now?
'Let's talk about your father.'
'I always loved my daddy. Always.'
'Good Chrissy. That's a good girl.'
'And my daddy always loved me.'
'Did he?'
'Daddy told me I was his best girl, and now that Mommy's sick, I..'
'What, Christina?'
'I remember now. I remember.'
'Very good, Christina. Very good. What do you remember?'
'I make Daddy happy. I pretend I'm Mommy.'
'Does he come to your bedroom?'
'Yes.'
'Do you have sex with your daddy?'
'Of course I do, silly. I'm his wife.'
I listened to the rest of the tapes. The memories became more vivid and graphic. Chrissy's little-girl voice re-created the nighttime whispers with her father. 'Our little secret,' he had told her. Her adult cries reflected her anger. She was in and out of a hypnotic trance. I heard her sobs when she described the pain she had felt in her 'peepee.' I heard her voice waver between the innocent confusion of a child and the angry cries of a woman.
The male of the species. His chromosomes tuned for survival of the fittest, he wages war and slaughters his fellowman. His soul shriveled, he defiles the earth, mocks his Creator, and lives by no code other than his own. At the low end of the evolutionary scale, he lords his physical superiority over women, beating and raping. At the very bottom, this reptilian cousin of Homo sapiens neander-thalensis, this horned beast of hellish evil, is the father who would rape his own child.
I felt sick and angry and, for a moment, felt like killing Harry Bernhardt myself. Which made me think. Whether the memories were real or not, they sounded authentic. And though I knew that the prior abuse was not a defense to murder, I wondered if a jury might not be persuaded to come back on a lesser charge of manslaughter or even to acquit.
On the final tape, Chrissy wasn't hypnotized at all. She was telling Dr. Schein about her adult life, the failed romances, the drug and alcohol abuse, and thanking him for opening the door to her past. 'I've thought more about what we discussed yesterday,' she said.
'The need for goals?' he asked.
'No. What we talked about afterward.'
There was a pause. 'Oh, that.'
'I've made a decision that you're not going to like.'
'Maybe you shouldn't tell me,' he said.
What the hell was this all about? What were they dancing around?
'But I've told you everything else. I can't imagine not telling you first.'
'All right then. But first, let me…'
I heard papers rustling and the sound of a chair squeaking.
Click.
Again. Damn! I waited, but this time, nothing. Just a faint mechanical hum as the tape wound out. I looked for another tape, but there was none. I checked the date on the plastic box: June 14, 1995.
I considered all the things Chrissy might have said to her psychiatrist two days before shooting her father, and I didn't like any of them one bit.
8
A short, stocky Nicaraguan woman in a white uniform dipped a ladle into a bowl and served me chilled gazpacho. I tasted some without slurping or leaving a tomato stain on my blue oxford-cloth shirt. Refreshing on a steamy July day, but a tad too heavy on the cayenne pepper for my taste.
'I hope you like mangoes,' Guy Bernhardt said. He was wearing jeans and a red-plaid western shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His forearms were work hardened and cabled with veins, but his face was soft, his cheeks pudgy, giving his little eyes a permanent squint.
'Love them. Have a tree in my backyard. Kents.'
Guy gestured to another servant, who began pouring mango iced tea from pitchers into tall glasses. 'You must live in Coconut Grove.'
'How'd you know?'
'Leith Kent planted the first mangoes there in 1932. Just about the best eating ones, but so fragile they don't ship well. We grow Cushmans, Hadens, and Glenns, plus some Nam Doc Mais brought over from Thailand. Sweet as can be and no fiber.'
We were sitting at opposite ends of a table of Dade County pine on the patio of a ranch house at Bernhardt Farms near Homestead, thirty miles south of Miami. A cedar overhang kept us in the shade and paddle fans waved at the soggy air. Sitting between us on one side of the table was Guy's wife, Loretta, a woman in her mid-thirties with dyed red hair and some extra weight around the hips. Across from her sat Dr. Lawrence Schein, who wore a Florida Marlins ball cap, khaki shorts, and a matching shirt with epaulets. Loretta had already consumed three mango daiquiris, thick as milk shakes, which left a creamy mustache on her upper lip.
'Guy's a nutcase when it comes to mangoes,' Loretta said, a trace of Georgia in her voice. 'He's got 'em on the brain.'
'Pop grew them even before he had the Castleberry money,' Guy said. 'I use the same fertilizer mix he formulated thirty years ago. If it ain't broke, why fix it? Mangoes are in my blood, that's all.'
'Sure, darlin',' she cooed. 'And thank God I love them, too.' She turned to me and winked. 'Guy won't admit it, but he divorced Mary Ann because she wouldn't eat mangoes.'
'She was allergic,' Guy said, finishing his gazpacho.
'Could have been psychosomatic,' Dr. Schein said. 'If Guy and Mary Ann were having other problems, the mangoes began to represent Guy.'
'Oh, fiddle!' Loretta nearly shouted. 'No more headshrinking talk, Larry.'
'Think about it,' the doctor continued, a little smile forming. 'Were not the mangoes the fruit of Guy's labor, both figuratively and literally? So Mary Ann rejected him by refusing to eat his mangoes.'
'That ain't all she refused to eat, if Guy's telling the truth,' Loretta said, with another wink and a laugh, followed by a burp.
'Mangoes would make her break out in a rash,' Guy said. 'Stomach cramps, headaches. Didn't have anything to do with me.'
Loretta leaned back in her chair. 'Seven years we've been married and I've never had a headache, have I, honey?'
'No, Loretta. You're a real trouper.'
'My mama raised me that way. I don't cause a man any trouble.' She shot me a look to make sure I was
