Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

The Man on the Stair by Bryce Walton

Richard Brocia III squirmed with fury on the couch, kicked his stumpy legs, pounded a chubby fist against the wall, and continued his familiar chant.

“—and then I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him...”

The doctor curled deeper into his chair behind the head of the couch. He was touching his thinning gray hair, then his thin face, finally massaging his left temple gently with the tips of two long tapering fingers that quivered very slightly on the ends.

The old aching blood-throb was coming back. He squeezed shut his eyes and snapped them open, resisting a stupor of bored impatience the way a late-night driver desperately battles road euphoria’s deadly spell.

One must hang in there, of course. Wait, listen sympathetically for clues, wait for Richie’s defense to break — and it would. It always breaks if you wait patiently enough, and Richie’s defense — this rigid, obsessive, repetitive account of his wife’s imagined affairs with ghostly lovers — must wear itself out like the groove of a stuck record. Then the shriveled and desiccated fragments of Richie’s personality could start limping out into the open.

Only we mustn’t draw it out too long, Richie. Three months isn’t really long, not in here. Three months is only a beginning when the path leads to the end of darkness; but you haven’t moved at all, Richie. You revealed so little, then stopped there in the groove and it just goes round and round and round; Lara and her demonic fantasy lovers and your plans for sweet vengeance. That’s all I know, Richie, and I must know more; a great deal more about many things.

In your case we simply cannot wait too long. Paranoia, in any form, even that of delusional jealousy and hallucinated lovers, can be dangerous. Proper clinical measures might call for a private sanitarium; but perhaps not. One must be sure — one must have sufficient information...

The doctor stopped writing in the spiral notebook. He stared wistfully at the oversized, prematurely balding top of Richie’s head, the way it twisted like a wounded turtle’s.

“Richie? Where are you?”

“Last night. I almost had him.” Richie’s mouth quivered in a baby’s primal snarl. “I cut out early from my Wednesday bowling and caught them sneaking around at poolside. Heard them laugh as I slipped in through the garden and climbed over the patio fence. Same guy I told you about before when I nearly caught them parked in the car out at Hanson’s Lake. I told you about that.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“Same guy. Tall, with the low voice.”

Richie pounded the wall harder. The doctor rose as quietly as possible and rescued a gold-framed certificate before it jarred loose from the wall and fell to the floor. He put it carefully on the glass-topped desk, Columbia Institute of Psychiatry, Bayne Kessler, M.D.

As the doctor turned to tiptoe back to the chair, Richie was elbowed up on his side, his odd, pale sheep eyes straining up with petulant accusation. “You weren’t even listening!”

Dr. Kessler sighed and managed a benign smile. “Of course I was listening, Richie. I always listen.” He sat down and picked up the spiral notebook and pen from the side table. “Please go on, Richie. You climbed the patio fence—”

Richie flounced over onto his back again. “I had him. See?” He breathed hard as he fumbled from under his suede jacket a strip of raveled white cloth and waved it like a banner. “I chased him. Just as he went over the fence I grabbed his sleeve. He tore loose and ran off through the trees. But I got this. It’ll be his neck next time, and I won’t lose my grip.”

Dr. Kessler squinted uneasily. Tom from a shirt cuff, all right, but from whose shirt, and how? Richie often brought in trophies he claimed were left behind when he frightened away one of Lara’s lovers. The cigarette lighter, the fountain pen, the handkerchief, the cigarette butts, the pocketknife, and the rest, like this bit of shirt cuff, never had initials or any other way of identifying their source. Never a wallet, a driver’s license, a credit card, or anything that might separate substance from shadows.

Their faces or any distinguishing body features were never quite clear to Richie. It was always night, always too dark, or he was too far away for them to be anything but fading outlines, fantasies of men who were never caught in flagrante delicto. They would never be caught except in wish-fulfilling dreams; and then, of course, there would be murder most foul.

But how to murder a delusion? Paranoids were clever at turning up substantiative evidence of systematized delusions.

“Know how I knew she’d be with him last night?” Richie waved the raveled snag of sleeve.

“Tell me, Richie.”

“The night before last, Tuesday, I told Lara I was dead from lack of sleep and had to have a good night’s rest. I pretended to take sleeping pills, only they were aspirin I’d put in the sleeping pill bottle. Then I pretended to be really knocked out on the couch. Lara hung around and shook me to be sure. Later, after she left, I lifted the phone and heard her on the extension setting it up with lover-boy for Wednesday night while I bowled. Same voice, like I told you. I felt sort of cruddy listening and spying... but I have to find out who he is so I can get him.” He curled up on his side, fists clenched against his chest like a baby with colic.

Dr. Kessler was conscious of covering his growing irritation with a deliberately low, gentle tone. “And Lara? She, of course, denied again that there was anyone there?”

“Sure. Same old business. Maybe it’s a plot. Maybe they’ve made Lara go along with a plot to brainwash me, to make me think I’m out of my tree and seeing little men who aren’t there.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Some of my daddy’s bank. Nearly a million dollars in community property. Hell, don’t you know? But I don’t care. I know what I see and next time I’m going to get what I see.”

Yesterday upon the stair, Dr. Kessler thought, I saw a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

This really mustn’t go on. Continuing treatment depended on knowing the exact nature of the disease. Persisting doubts about the original diagnosis must be settled. Either real or delusional lovers could serve Richie’s defensive needs, but his possible cure could not be served at all by insecure, unsubstantiated diagnosis.

His original, tentative diagnosis of delusional pathological jealousy still seemed right; what evidence he had been able to gather pointed to it. Richie could never identify a lover. He heard their whispers on the phone, in the dark, through walls, in his nightmares and daydreams — but he never turned up a single supportive fact or clue, never any addresses, phone numbers, names, or descriptions. He said they used secret codes, even used telepathic extrasensory perception to frustrate him. On several occasions during sessions, Richie insisted that while Lara waited for him in the car, she was talking with some ubiquitous playmate. When Dr. Kessler looked down there, however, he saw the car, but no one in it — no Lara — no lover.

“There they go,” Richie shouted. “Around the corner!”

Dr. Kessler saw no one disappearing around a corner, or into a crowd, or even into thin air. Delusional jealousy was not uncommon. Many had such a low opinion of themselves they couldn’t imagine anyone not preferring someone else; but Richie’s case added up to a rather extreme, dangerously paranoid form of the disorder. Dr. Kessler still believed that was his problem.

Yet what if that tentative diagnosis had been wrong — or just partly wrong? What if Richie’s “delusions” were based on justified suspicion? What if Lara really cheated? Very discreet social inquiries had turned up nothing about Lara that supported Richie’s claims, but those inquiries had been very limited by necessary prudence.

Dr. Kessler didn’t believe he was wrong, but it was always possible. If he were, it called for a radically different approach to Richie’s therapy.

On the other hand, if he were right, he couldn’t allow a dangerous state of delusion and fantasy to continue; not without direct clinical action.

Irritation flared up suddenly, out of control. Dr. Kessler stood, leaned over Richie, and heard himself using a surprisingly hard and critical tone. “You’re not kidding me, Richie. And you’d better stop kidding yourself. It isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?”

Richie looked up and blinked incredulously. After a while he whispered, “What?”

“You don’t want to find out who these guys are, Richie. And you never will, because you’re a coward. You’re afraid to find out. If you do, you know you’ll find out something else, the final, unbearable truth — that you’re too weak and helpless and afraid to face up to them.”

Richie sat up slowly and slid down the couch away from Dr. Kessler’s shadow. His face was a pale mixture of betrayed trust — and fear. He began shaking his head from side to side in painful denial.

“Yes, that’s how it is, Richie, and in your heart you know it. In your imagination, your fantasies, you enjoy endless plans of bloody vengeance, but all the time you know that in reality you can only face the terror of your own helplessness and cowardly cringing—”

“No,” Richie said. He jumped up and backed away. “You’re all wrong. So wrong it’s ridiculous.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, yes, and when I catch him you’ll find out how wrong you are, damn you!”

Dr. Kessler shrugged. “It’s so easy to find out who they are, Richie. Do what anyone else would do — hire a private investigator.”

Richie stared for half a minute. “Why... how can you — a doctor — suggest such a filthy thing? How can you even think of it?”

“The question is, Richie, why haven’t you thought of it?”

“No! Do you think I’d really have some stranger, some outsider, sneak and spy on my — on Lara — to find out... to see what she...”

“Sorry, Richie. Your time’s up.”

Richie straightened, snarling, “My time’s up here, period. I’ve had it with you, doctor. You can’t do me any good. You don’t even know why I came here, do you? I came here hoping to be able to help Lara. She’s the one who is sick. She blames me for everything and won’t admit she needs help. But you don’t understand and you can’t help, and I don’t need your help. I know what to do.”

“You may feel differently tomorrow, Richie. I hope so. Call me whenever you feel like it. And—”

Richie went out and slammed the door. His squatty shape blurred on the other side of the frosted pane and seemed to drift away through murky water.

Dr. Kessler moved a hand as if to call him back. Then he sank onto the couch while the office slowly turned gray and the aching blood-throb pulsed past his left temple. He massaged the ache ritualistically with the fingertips of his left hand, the way his mother used to do, knowing it was anger at himself — and fear. Also guilt and uncertainty, for losing his professional control, and giving in to exasperation — letting Richie have such an unprepared shocking broadside of cold truth.

Really shook Richie up, though, the doctor reflected. Shocked through his defenses a little. Really frightened him, without warning, without preparation. Suddenly switching from the role of warm, supportive, sympathetic listener to hard, uncompromising, directive coercion. Sometimes that can be effective; so can shock therapy — sometimes. Coercive, manipulative, authoritarian methods can also be dangerous. He really did not approve of the technique, especially with a patient about whom he still knew so little. It was almost like performing a surgical operation in the dark. Sometimes it seemed necessary to take risks, but he should be ready to assume responsibility for the result.

Dr. Kessler stood up heavily. He kept massaging his temple as he went to the window and opened the Venetian blind and realized that it was the first time all day that he’d looked out on the world. It had been snowing for hours, and it was nearly dark. There was no sky or earth in the falling quiet, only sifting snow. The world could end and he would never know it as he sat immersed in the debris of some wrecked personality.

He sat at his desk, switched on the green-shaded lamp, and a tatter of white caught his attention. The tom bit of shirt cuff fluttered on the rug near the door like a dead moth.

After peering at it for a moment, Dr. Kessler picked up the phone book and flopped it onto his desk. He riffled nervously through the yellow pages.

Dreams, delusions, lies — they are helpful clues to the unconscious; but first you must have a fair idea what is or is not true.

Ice Cream... Ignition Service... Illustrators... Incinerators... Insurance...

Investigators — Private.

“Flynn Detective Agency,” he read. “Investigations made everywhere. Domestic troubles, personal relations, shadowing, tracing missing persons, locating, surveillance. Skillfully performed — low rates — quick results. Strictly confidential.”

He called and told Mr. Flynn to start work at once, that same Friday night, even though it would count as a full day, at fifty dollars a day plus expenses. When Flynn found out anything — or an indisputable absence of anything — he was to phone Dr. Kessler at home or at his office.

Dr. Kessler waited with a tension of which he was conscious even while listening to other patients. Richie did not turn up for his Monday appointment, nor for his Tuesday or Thursday appointments, and he didn’t call.

Mr. Flynn phoned Thursday night. “Mrs. Brocia never played around, I can assure you of that. And I’m absolutely sure she isn’t playing around now. I’ll have a full report for you tomorrow, but first I want to check something out. Something’s weird here, doctor.”

“Weird?”

“Yes, I think it’s weird. I’ll call you later.”

Friday morning, as Dr. Kessler showed his ten fifty patient out, a heavy, solid man wearing a dark suit of uncertain vintage and a porkpie hat stood in the waiting room.

“Dr. Kessler?” he said softly. His face seemed dour and inflexible, with a permanent cleft of distrust between thick eyebrows.

“Yes,” Dr. Kessler said, noticing that the man also had an odd sadness marking the corners of his eyes.

He opened a worn wallet. A golden badge glittered. “Detective Bates,” he said. “Homicide.”

Dr. Kessler felt a drop of sweat slide down the left side of his nose. It loosened a nervous flush down his back that rippled painfully. “Homicide?”

“We just took Richard Brocia into custody on suspicion of murder. You know him?”

Dr. Kessler realized that his mouth was open and the inside of it was dry. “He’s a patient of mine.”

“So Mr. Brocia has been telling us.”

Dr. Kessler touched his fingers to his left temple. “Can you tell me what happened? Can I see him? I’d like to see him as soon as possible.”

“He said he didn’t want to see you,” Detective Bates said without expression. “But he wanted me to give you this.” He held out a folded paper.

Dr. Kessler took it, unfolded it, and read:

“I’m... I’m—” Dr. Kessler held the paper out as if he didn’t know what to do with it. Detective Bates took it, folded it, and put it back into his pocket as Dr. Kessler went on, “—I’m sorry... very sorry to hear this. Who—”

“His wife, first of all.”

“Lara?”

“Found her buried, or rather half buried, in the basement. Medical examiner says she’s probably been buried there for about three months.”

Something skidded slightly.

“The other victim was a guy who evidently tried to dig her out. Brocia came into the basement from the side door and surprised the intruder and started shooting. The victim ran, and died on the stairs leading up out of the basement.”

He held out a card. “He had your calling card on him, Dr. Kessler. You know anything about him? A private investigator, name of Flynn?”