“What was her father’s name?”
“I don’t know. I had assumed it was Nelson.”
“She ever mention the name Rankin?”
“No.”
“Cheryl Anne?”
“No.”
We were quiet. Dr. Cockburn maintained her ponderous certitude even in silence. The way she sat bespoke rectitude.
“She did say that she used another identity to get into graduate school, someone else’s records and such,” Cockburn said finally. “She herself had not finished high school. She left home at seventeen and went to Atlanta, and made a living as best she could; she said, including prostitution. At some point she came to Boston, motivated, I think, by some childhood impression of gentility, became a graduate student, made a point of frequenting the Harvard-MIT social events and met her current husband.”
“She didn’t say whose identity she used.”
“No, but if in fact she is not Olivia Nelson, as you imply, then one might assume she used that one.”
“One might,” I said. “How did her father’s rejection manifest itself?” I said.
“He failed entirely to acknowledge her.”
“Tell me about that,” I said. “How does that work? Did he pretend she wasn’t there? Did he refuse to talk to her when she came home?”
Dr. Cockburn gazed ponderously at me. She let the silence linger, as if to underline her seriousness. Finally she spoke.
“He was not married to her mother. The lack of acknowledgement was literal.”
I sat in the heavily draped room feeling like Newton must have when the apple hit him on the head. Dr. Cockburn looked at me with heavy satisfaction.
“Goddamn,” I said.
* * *
“Was that all?” Susan asked later.
“Everything essential,” I said. “I used my full fifty minutes, but the rest of it was just her doing Orson Welles.”
We were having a drink at the Charles Hotel, which was an easy walk from Susan’s home. Susan had developed a passion for warm peppered vodka, olives on the side. In an evening she would often polish off nearly half a glass.
“She did say that Olivia was obsessed with money, and that apparently the family business was slipping.”
“That would support the bounced check and the checkbook with no running balance,” Susan said.
“Yeah. Cockburn said she had some sort of desperate plan, but Olivia wouldn’t tell her what it was.”
“Plan to get money?”
“Apparently. Cockburn doesn’t know, or won’t say.”
“Dr. Cockburn has, in effect, waived her patient-therapist privilege already. I assume she’d have no reason to withhold that.”
“Agreed,” I said. “What do you think.?”
“Dr. Cockburn’s theory about Olivia Nelson is probably accurate. It doesn’t require a great deal of psychological training to notice that many young people attempt to reclaim a parent’s love by sleeping with surrogates. Often the objects of that claim are in some way authority figures.”
“Like a U.S. Senator,” I said.
“Sure,” Susan said. “Sometimes it’s apparent power like that, sometimes it’s more indirect. Money maybe, or size and strength.”
“Does this explain our relationship?” I said.
“No,” Susan said. “Ours is based, I think, on undisguised lust.”
“Only that?” I said.
“Yes,” Susan said and guzzled half a gram of her peppered vodka. “I always wanted to boff a big goy.”
“Anyone would,” I said.
“Why,” Susan said, “if she were sleeping with all these prominent men, would the police not discover it?”
“Partly because they were prominent,” I said. “The affairs were adulterous, and prominent people don’t wish to be implicated in adulterous affairs.”
Susan was nodding her head.
“And because they were prominent,” she said, “they had the wherewithal to keep the event covered up.”
“She wasn’t telling,” I said, “and they weren’t telling, and apparently they were discreet.”
I shrugged, and spread my hands.
“What’s a cop to do?” Susan said.
