transfers, so that we won’t be wasting time at our appointment. I will not be accompanied by the SEC detectives on this initial examination, but that might become necessary in the future. It’s a matter of cooperation, you see.”
Ricky guessed that the initials so cavalierly used as a threat would have an immediate and significant impact. No broker likes hearing about SEC investigators.
“I think you’d better speak with-”
He interrupted the secretary. “Certainly. When I call back in the next day or so. I have an appointment, and another series of calls to make on this matter, so I will say goodbye. Thank you.”
And with that, he hung up, an evil sense of satisfaction creeping into his heart. He did not think that his onetime broker, a boring man intrigued only by money and making it or losing it, would recognize the name of the character who wandered the ancient world fruitlessly searching for an honest man. But Ricky did know someone who would instantly understand it.
His next call was to the head of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.
He had met the doctor only once or twice in the past at the sort of medical establishment gatherings that he’d tried so hard to avoid, and had thought him then to be a priggish and wildly conceited Freudian, given to speaking even to his colleagues in long silences, and vacant pauses. The man was a veteran New York psychoanalyst, and had treated many famous people with the techniques of couch and quiet, and somehow had added all those prominent treatments into an exaggerated sense of self-importance, as if having an Oscar-winning actor or Pulitzer Prize-winning author or multimillionaire financier on the couch actually made him into a better therapist or a better human being. Ricky, who had lived and practiced in so much isolation and loneliness right up to his suicide, did not think that there was the remotest chance that the man would recognize his voice, and so he did not even attempt to alter it.
He waited until it was nine minutes before the hour. He knew that the best likelihood of the doctor picking up his own telephone was right at the break between patients.
The phone was answered on the second ring. A flat, gruff, no-nonsense voice that dropped even a greeting from the reply: “This is Doctor Roth…”
“Doctor,” Ricky said slowly, “I’m delighted to have reached you. This is Mr. Diogenes. I represent Mr. Frederick Lazarus, who is the executor for the estate of the late Doctor Frederick Starks.”
“How may I help you?” Roth interrupted. Ricky paused, a bit of silence that would make the doctor uncomfortable, more or less the same technique the man was accustomed to using himself.
“We are interested in knowing precisely how the complaints against the late Doctor Starks were resolved,” Ricky said with an aggressiveness that surprised himself.
“The complaints?”
“Yes. The complaints. As you are completely aware, shortly before his death, there were some charges made against him concerning sexual impropriety with a female patient. We are interested in learning how that investigation of those allegations was resolved.”
“I don’t know that there was any official resolution,” Roth said briskly. “Certainly none on the part of the Psychoanalytic Society. When Doctor Starks killed himself, it rendered further inquiry pointless.”
“Really?” Ricky said. “Did it occur to you, or anyone else in the society you head up, that perhaps his suicide was prompted by the unfairness and the falseness of those allegations, instead of his suicide being some sort of verification by self-murder?”
Roth paused. “We, of course, considered that likelihood,” he answered.
Sure you did, Ricky thought. Liar.
“Would it surprise you, doctor, to learn that the young woman who made the allegations has subsequently disappeared?”
“I beg your pardon…”
“She never returned for follow-up therapy with the physician in Boston whom she made the initial charges to.”
“That is curious…”
“And that his efforts to locate her turned up the unsettling fact that her identity-who she claimed to be, doctor-was fake.”
“A fake?”
“And it was further learned that her charges were part of a hoax. Did you know this, doctor?”
“But no, no, I didn’t… as I said, we didn’t follow up, after the suicide…”
“In other words, you washed your hands of the entire matter.”
“It was turned over to the proper authorities…”
“But that suicide certainly saved you and your profession a great deal of negative and embarrassing publicity, did it not?”
“I don’t know-well, of course, but…”
“Did it occur to you that perhaps the heirs of Doctor Starks would want his reputation restored? That exoneration, even after death, might be important to them?”
“I did not consider that.”
“Do you know you could be considered liable for that death?”
This statement drew a predictable, blustery response. “Not in the slightest! We didn’t-”
Ricky interrupted. “There are more sorts of liability in this world than legal, are there not, doctor?”
He liked this question. It went to the core of what a psychoanalyst is all about. He could envision the man on the other end of the telephone line shifting about uncomfortably in his chair. Perhaps a little sweat formed on his forehead or dripped down beneath his armpits.
“Of course, but…”
“But no one in the society really wanted to know the truth, did they? It was better if it just disappeared into the ocean with Doctor Starks, correct?”
“I don’t think I should answer any more questions, Mr. uh…”
“Of course not. Not at this moment. Perhaps at a later time. But it is curious, isn’t it, doctor?”
“What?”
“That truth is far stronger than death.”
With that statement, Ricky hung up the phone.
He lay back on the bed, staring up at the white ceiling and a bare lightbulb. He could feel some of his own sweat beneath his arms, as if he’d exerted himself in that conversation, but it wasn’t a nervous dampness, rather a wet and satisfactory righteousness. In the next room, the couple had started up again, and for a moment he listened to the unmistakable rhythms of sex, finding it amusing and not altogether unpleasurable. More than one person having a little workday amusement, he thought. After a moment, he rose and searched around until he found a small pad of paper in the bedside table desk drawer and a cheap ballpoint pen.
On the paper, he wrote the names and numbers of the two men he had just called. Beneath those, he wrote the words:
Then he crumpled the paper up and threw it into a metal wastebasket. He doubted that the room was cleaned all that regularly and thought there was a better than even chance that whoever came searching for him there would find it. Regardless, they would undoubtedly be clever enough to check the telephone records for that room, which would turn up the numbers he had just dialed. Connecting numbers to conversations wasn’t all that difficult.
The best game to play, he thought, is the game you don’t realize you are playing.
