False Memory

58

A low, arched bridge connected Balboa Island, in Newport Harbor, to the mainland. Marine Avenue, lined with restaurants and shops, was nearly deserted. Eucalyptus leaves and blades torn from palm fronds spiraled in man-size whirlwinds along the street, as though Martie’s dream of the mahogany woods were being re-created here.

Dr. Closterman didn’t live on one of the interior streets, but along the waterfront. They parked near the end of Marine Avenue and, with Valet, walked out to the paved promenade that surrounded the island and that was separated from the harbor by a low seawall.

Before they found Closterman’s house, one hour to the minute after her previous seizure, Martie was hit by a wave of autophobia. This was another endurable assault, as lowkey as the previous three, but she couldn’t walk under the influence of it, couldn’t even stand.

They sat on the seawall, waiting for the attack to pass.

Valet was patient, neither cringing nor venturing forth to sniff out a potential friend when a man walked past with a dalmatian.

The tide was coming in. Wind chopped the usually calm harbor, slapping wavelets against the concrete seawall, and the reflected lights of the harborside houses wriggled across the rippled water.

Sailing yachts and motor vessels, moored at the private docks, wallowed in their berths, groaning and creaking. Halyards and metal fittings clinked against steel masts.

When Martie’s seizure passed quickly, she said, “I saw a dead priest with a railroad spike in his forehead. Briefly, thank God, not like earlier today when I couldn’t clear my head of crap like that. But where does this stuff come from?”

“Someone put it there.” Against the counsel of the insistent inner voice, Dusty said, “Ahriman put it there.”

“But how?”

With her unanswered question blown out across the harbor, they set out again in search of Dr. Closterman.

None of the houses on the island was higher than three stories, and charming bungalows huddled next to huge showplaces. Closterman lived in a cozy-looking two-story with gables, decorative shutters, and window boxes filled with English primrose.

When he answered the door, the barefoot physician was wearing tan cotton pants, with his belly slung over the waistband, and a T-shirt advertising Hobie surfboards.

At his side was a black Labrador with big, inquisitive eyes.

“Charlotte,” Dr. Closterman said by way of introduction.

Valet was usually shy around other dogs, but let off his leash, he immediately went nose-to-nose with Charlotte, tail wagging. They circled each other, sniffing, whereafter the Labrador raced across the foyer and up the stairs, and Valet bounded wildly after her.

“It’s all right,” Roy Closterman said. “They can’t knock over anything that hasn’t been knocked over before.”

The physician offered to take their coats, but they held on to them because Dusty was carrying the Colt in one pocket.

In the kitchen, from a large pot of spaghetti sauce rose the mouthwatering fragrance of cooking meatballs and sausages.

Closterman offered a drink to Dusty, coffee to Martie—“unless you’ve taken no more Valium”—and poured coffees at their request.

They sat at the highly polished pine table while the physician seeded and sliced several plump yellow peppers.

“I was going to feel you out a little bit,” Closterman said, “before deciding how frank to be with you. But I’ve decided, what the hell, no reason to be coy. I admired your father immensely, Martie, and if you’re anything like him, which I believe you are, then I know I can rely on your discretion.”

“Thank you.”

“Ahriman,” Closterman said, “is a narcissistic asshole. That’s not opinion. It’s such a provable fact, they should be required by law to include it in the author’s bio on his book jackets.”

He glanced up from the peppers to see if he had shocked them — and smiled when he saw they were not recoiling. With his white hair, jowls, extra chins, dewlaps, and smile, he was a beardless Santa.

“Have you read any of his books?” he asked.

“No,” Dusty said. “Just glanced at the one you sent.”

“Worse than the usual pop-psych shit. Learn to Love Yourself. Mark Ahriman never had to learn to love Mark Ahriman. He’s been infatuated with himself since birth. Read the book, you’ll see.”

“Do you think he’s capable of creating personality disorders in his patients?” Martie asked.

“Capable? It wouldn’t surprise me if half of what he cures are conditions he created in the first place.”

The implications of that response were, to Dusty, breathtaking. “We think Martie’s friend, the one we mentioned this morning—”

“The agoraphobic.”

“Her name was Susan Jagger,” Martie said. “I’ve known her since we were ten. She killed herself last night.”

Martie shocked the physician as the physician had not succeeded in shocking them. He put down the knife and turned away from the yellow peppers, wiping his hands on a small towel. “Your friend.”

“We found her body this afternoon,” Dusty elaborated.

Closterman sat at the table and took one of Martie’s hands in both of his. “And you thought she was getting better.”

“That’s what Dr. Ahriman told me yesterday.”

Dusty said, “We have reason to think that Martie’s autophobia — as we now know it’s called — isn’t naturally occurring.”

“I went with Susan to his office twice a week for a year,” she explained. “And I’ve begun to discover…odd memory lapses.”

Sun-seared, windburnt, with permanent dashes of red in the corners, the doctor’s eyes were nevertheless more kind than damaged. He turned Martie’s hand over in his and studied her palm. “Here’s everything important I can tell you about the slick sonofabitch.”

He was interrupted when Charlotte raced into the kitchen with a ball in her mouth, Valet on her heels. The dogs slid on the tile floor and shot out of the room as pellmell as they had entered.

Closterman said, “Toilet training aside, dogs can teach us more than we can teach them. Anyway, I do a little pro bono work. I’m no saint. Lots of doctors do more. My volunteer work involves abused children. I was battered as a child. Didn’t scar me. I could waste time hating the guilty…or leave them to the law and to God, and use my energy to help the innocent. Anyway…remember the Ornwahl case?”

The Ornwahl family had operated a popular preschool in Laguna Beach for over twenty years. Every opening in their classrooms led to heated competition among parents of potential enrollees.

Two years ago, the mother of a five-year-old preschooler filed a complaint with the police, accusing members of the Ornwahl family of sexually abusing her daughter, and claiming that other children had been used in group sex and satanic rituals. In the hysteria that ensued, other parents of Ornwahl students interpreted every oddity in their kids’ behavior as an alarming emotional reaction to abuse.

“I had no connections with the Ornwahls or with families whose children attended the school,” Roy Closterman said, “so I was asked to perform pro bono examinations of the kids for Child Protective Services and the D.A.’s office. They were getting pro bono work from a psychiatrist, too. He was interviewing Ornwahl preschoolers to determine if they could give convincing accounts of abuse.”

“Dr. Ahriman,” Martie guessed.

Roy Closterman got up from the table, fetched the coffeepot, and refreshed their cups.

“We had a meeting to coordinate various aspects of the medical side of the Ornwahl investigation. I instantly disliked Ahriman.”

A twinge of self-reproach caused Dusty to shift uneasily in his chair. That persistent inner voice shamed him for his disloyalty to the psychiatrist, for even listening to this negativity.

“And when he mentioned offhandedly that he was using hypnotic-regression therapy to help some kids revisit possible incidents of abuse,” Closterman said, “all my alarm bells went off.”

“Isn’t hypnosis an accepted therapeutic technique?” Martie asked, perhaps echoing her own inner counselor.

“Less and less so. A therapist without finesse can easily, unwittingly implant false memories. Any hynotized subject is vulnerable. And if the therapist has an agenda and isn’t ethical…”

“Do you think Ahriman had an agenda in the Ornwahl case?”

Instead of answering the question, Closterman said, “Children are highly susceptible to suggestion, even without hypnosis. Study after study has shown they’ll ‘remember’ what they think a persuasive therapist wants them to remember. Interviewing them, you have to be very cautious to avoid leading their testimony. And any so-called repressed memories recovered from a child under hypnosis are virtually worthless.”

“You raised this issue with Ahriman?” Martie asked.

Resuming his work with the yellow peppers, Closterman said, “I raised it — and he was a condescending, arrogant prick. But smooth. He’s a good politician. Every concern I raised, he answered, and no one else in the investigation or the prosecution shared my concerns. Oh, the poor damn doomed Ornwahl family didn’t like it, but this was one of those cases when mass hysteria subverts due process.”

“Did your examinations of the children turn up any physical evidence of abuse?” Dusty asked.

“None. There’s not always physiological evidence of rape with older children. But these were preschoolers, small children. If some of the things claimed to’ve been done to them actually had been done, I’d almost certainly have found tissue damage, scarring, and chronic infections. Ahriman was turning up all these stories of satanic sex and torture — but I couldn’t find one scintilla of medical backup.”

Five members of the Ornwahl family had been indicted, and the preschool had nearly been torn apart in the search for clues.

“Then,” Closterman said, “I was approached by someone aware of my opinion of Ahriman…and told that before all this started, he’d been treating the sister of the woman who accused the Ornwahls.”

“Shouldn’t Ahriman have disclosed that connection?” Dusty asked.

“Absolutely. So I went to the D.A. The woman, it turns out, was the sister of the accuser, but Ahriman claimed he’d never been aware of their relationship.”

“You didn’t believe him?”

“No. But the D.A. did — and kept him on board. Because if they had admitted Ahriman was tainted, they couldn’t have used any of his interviews with the kids. In fact, any stories the children told him would have to be treated as coerced or even induced memories. They wouldn’t be worth spit in court. The prosecution’s case depended on unwavering belief in Ahriman’s integrity.”

“I don’t recall reading any of this in the papers,” Martie said.

“I’m getting to that,” Closterman promised.

His knife work at the cutting board grew less precise, more aggressive, as if he were not slicing just yellow peppers.

“My information was that Ahriman’s patient was often brought to his office by the sister, by the woman who had accused the Ornwahls.”

“Like I took Susan,” Martie noted.

“If that were true, then there was no way he couldn’t have met her at least once. But I didn’t have proof, just hearsay. Unless you want to be sued for defamation of character, you don’t go ranting in public about a man like Ahriman until you’ve got the evidence.”

Earlier in the day, in his office, Closterman had tried a frown, which hadn’t worked on his balloon-round features. Now anger overcame facial geometry, and a hard scowl fit where a frown had not.

“I didn’t know how to get that proof. I’m no doctor detective like on TV. But I thought … Well, let’s see if there’s anything in the bastard’s past. It did seem odd that he’d made big moves twice in his career. After more than ten years in Santa Fe, he’d jumped to Scottsdale, Arizona. And after seven years there, he came here to Newport. Generally speaking, successful doctors don’t throw over their practices and move to new cities on a whim.”

Closterman finished cutting the peppers into strips. He rinsed the knife, dried it, and put it away.

“I asked around the medical community, to see if anyone might know someone who practices in Santa Fe. This cardiologist friend of mine had a friend from med school who settled in Santa Fe, and he made introductions. Turns out this doctor in Santa Fe actually knew Ahriman when he was out there…and didn’t like him a damn bit more than I do. And then the kicker…there was a big sexual abuse case at a preschool out there, and Ahriman did the interviews of the children, like he did here. Questions were raised then, too, about his techniques.”

Dusty’s stomach had soured, and though he didn’t think that the coffee had anything to do with it, he pushed his cup aside.

“One of the children, a five-year-old girl, committed suicide as the trial was starting,” Roy Closterman said. “A five-year-old. Left a pathetic picture she’d drawn of a girl like her…kneeling before a naked man. The man was anatomically correct.”

“Dear God,” Martie said, pushing her chair back from the table. She started to get up, had nowhere to go, and sat down again.

Dusty wondered if the five-year-old girl’s body would flicker through Martie’s mind in grisly detail during her next panic attack.

“The case might as well have gone to jury right then, because the defendants were as good as cooked. The Santa Fe prosecutor obtained convictions across the board.”

The physician took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and twisted off the cap.

“Bad things happen to good people when they’re around Dr. Mark Ahriman, but he always comes out looking like a savior. Until the Pastore murders in Santa Fe. Mrs. Pastore, perfectly nice woman, never known to have a bad word for anyone or a moment of instability in her life, suddenly loads a revolver and decides to kill her family. Starts by blowing away her ten-year-old son.”

This story fed Martie’s fear of her own violent potential, and now she had somewhere to go. She rose from the table, went to the sink, turned on the water, pumped liquid soap from a dispenser, and vigorously washed her hands.

Although Martie hadn’t said a word to Dr. Closterman, he didn’t appear to find her actions either forward or peculiar.

“The boy was a patient of Ahriman’s. He was a severe stutterer. There was some suspicion that Ahriman and the mother had been having an affair. And a witness placed Ahriman at the Pastore house the night of the murders. In fact, standing outside the house, watching the carnage through an open window.”

“Watching?” Martie said, pulling paper towels off a wall-mounted roll. “Just…watching?”

“As if it were a sporting event,” Roy Closterman said. “Like…he went there because he knew it was going to happen.”

Dusty couldn’t sit still, either. Getting to his feet, he said, “I’ve had two beers this evening, but if your offer still stands…”

“Help yourself,” Roy Closterman said. “Talking about Dr. Mark Ahriman doesn’t promote sobriety.”

Tossing the paper towels in the trash can, Martie said, “So this witness saw him there — what came of that?”

“Nothing. The witness wasn’t believed. And the rumored affair couldn’t be proved. Besides, there was absolutely no doubt at all that Mrs. Pastore pulled the trigger. All the forensic evidence in the world. But the Pastores were well-liked, and a lot of people believed that Ahriman was in the background of the tragedy somehow.”

Returning to the table with his beer, Dusty said, “So he didn’t like the atmosphere in Santa Fe anymore, and he moved to Scottsdale.”

“Where more bad things happened to more good people,” Closterman said, stirring the meatballs and sausage in the pot of sauce. “I’ve got a file on all this. I’ll give it to you before you leave.”

“With all this ammunition,” Dusty said, “you must’ve been able to get him off the Ornwahl case.”

Roy Closterman returned to a seat at the table again, and so did Martie. The doctor said, “No.”

Surprised, Dusty said, “But surely the other preschool case was enough, by itself, to—”

“I never used it.”

The physician’s deeply tanned face darkened further with anger, grew stormy and empurpled under the sun-browned surface.

Closterman cleared his throat and continued: “Someone discovered I was phoning around to people in Santa Fe and Scottsdale, asking about Ahriman. One evening, I came home from the office, and two men were here in the kitchen, sitting where the two of you are sitting. Dark suits, ties, well-groomed. But they were strangers — and when I turned around to get the hell out of the house, there was a third one behind me.”

Of all the places Dusty had expected to follow Closterman, this wasn’t on the list of itineraries. He didn’t want to go here, because it seemed to be a highway to hopelessness for him and Martie.

If Dr. Ahriman was their enemy, he was enemy enough. Only in the Bible could David win against Goliath. Only in the movies did the little guy have a chance against leviathan.

“Ahriman uses cheap muscle?” Martie asked, either because she hadn’t quite leaped to the understanding that Dusty had reached — or because she didn’t want to believe it.

“Nothing cheap about them. They’ve got good retirement plans, excellent medical coverage, full dental, and the use of a plain-Jane sedan during working hours. Anyway, they’d brought a videotape, and they played it for me on the TV in the den. On the tape was this young boy who’s a patient of mine. His mom and dad are my patients, too, and close friends. Dear friends.”

The physician had to stop. He was choking on rage and outrage. His hand was clamped so tight to his beer that it seemed the bottle would burst in his fist.

Then: “The boy is nine years old, a really good kid. Tears are streaming down his face in the videotape. He’s telling someone off-camera about how he’s been sexually molested, since the age of six, by his doctor. By me. I have never touched this boy in that way, never would, never could. But he’s very convincing, emotional, and graphic. Anyone who knows him would know that he couldn’t be acting, couldn’t sell a lie like this. He’s too naive to be this duplicitous. He believes all of it, every word of it. In his mind, it happened, these vile things I’m supposed to have done to him.”

“The boy was a patient of Ahriman’s,” Dusty guessed.

“No. These three suits who have no damn right to be in my house, these well-tailored thugs, they tell me the boy’s mother was Ahriman’s patient. I didn’t know. I’ve no idea what she was seeing him for.”

“Through the mother,” Martie said, “Ahriman got his hands on the boy.”

“And worked him somehow, with hypnotic suggestion or something, implanting these false memories.”

“It’s more than hypnotic suggestion,” Dusty said. “I don’t know what it is, but it goes a lot deeper than that.”

After resorting to his beer, Roy Closterman said, “The bastards told me…on the tape, the boy was in a trance. When fully conscious, he wouldn’t be able to remember these false memories, these dreadful things he was saying about me. He would never dream about them or be troubled by them on a subconscious level, either. They would have no effect on his psychology, his life. But the false memories would still be buried in what they called his subsubconscious, repressed, ready to gush out of him if he were ever instructed to remember them. They promised to give him that instruction if I tried to make trouble for Mark Ahriman in regard to the Ornwahl Preschool case or in any other matter. Then they left with the videotape.”

The advocate for Ahriman, in the corridors of Dusty’s mind, had wandered to far reaches, its voice fainter than before and no longer convincing.

Martie said, “You have any guesses who those three men were?”

“Doesn’t matter much to me exactly which institution’s name is printed on their paycheck,” Roy Closterman said. “I know what they smelled like.”

“Authority,” Dusty said.

“Reeked of it,” the physician confirmed.

Evidently, right now, Martie didn’t fear her violent potential as much as she feared that of others, because she put her hand over Dusty’s and gripped him tightly.

Panting and the pad of dog paws sounded in the hall. Valet and Charlotte returned to the kitchen, played out and grinning.

Behind them came footsteps, and a stocky, affable-looking man in a Hawaiian shirt and calf-length shorts entered the kitchen. He was carrying a manila envelope in his left hand.

“This is Brian,” Roy Closterman said, and made introductions.

After they shook hands, Brian gave the envelope to Dusty. “Here’s the Ahriman file that Roy put together.”

“But you didn’t get it from us,” the physician cautioned. “And you don’t need to bring it back.”

“In fact,” said Brian, “we don’t want it back, ever.”

“Brian,” Roy Closterman said, “show them your ear.”

Pushing his longish blond hair back from the left side of his head, Brian twisted, pulled, lifted, and detached his ear.

Martie gasped.

“Prosthetic,” Roy Closterman explained. “When the three suits left that night, I went upstairs and found Brian unconscious. His ear was severed — and the wound sutured with professional expertise. They had put it down the garbage disposal, so it couldn’t be sewn back on.”

“Real sweethearts,” Brian said, pretending to fan his face with his ear, exhibiting a macabre je ne sais quoi that made Dusty smile in spite of the circumstances.

“Brian and I have been together more than twenty-four years,” the doctor said.

“More than twenty-five,” Brian amended. “Roy, you’re hopeless about anniversaries.”

“They didn’t need to hurt him,” the physician said. “The video of the boy was enough, more than enough. They just did it to drive the point home.”

“It worked with me,” Brian said, reattaching his prosthetic ear.

“And,” Roy Closterman said, “maybe now you can understand how the threat of the boy had extra punch. Because of me and Brian, our life together, some people would more easily credit accusations about child molestation. But I swear to God, if I ever felt any temptation along those lines, any yearnings for a child, I’d take a knife to my own throat.”

“If I didn’t slit it first,” Brian said.

With Brian’s entrance, Closterman’s throttled rage had slowly subsided, and the stormy clotted coloration under his tan had faded. Now some of that darkness gathered in his face again. “I don’t much love myself for backing down. The Ornwahl family was ruined, and all but certainly were innocent. If it was just me against Mark Ahriman, I’d have battled it out no matter what the cost. But these people who crawl out from under their rocks to protect him…I just don’t understand that. And what I don’t understand, I can’t fight.”

“Maybe we can’t fight it, either,” Dusty said.

“Maybe not,” Closterman agreed. “And you’ll notice I avoided asking you exactly what might’ve happened to your friend Susan and what your own problems with Ahriman are. Because, frankly, there’s only so much I want to know. It’s cowardly of me, I guess. I never thought of myself as a coward until this, until Ahriman, but I know now that I’ve got my breaking point.”

Hugging him, Martie said, “We all do. And you’re no coward, Doc. You’re a dear, brave man.”

“I tell him,” Brian said, “but to me, he never listens.”

Holding Martie very tightly for a moment, the physician said, “You’re going to need all your father’s heart and all his guts.”

“She’s got them,” Dusty said.

This was the strangest moment of camaraderie that Dusty had ever known: the four of them so dissimilar in so many ways, and yet bonded as though they were the last human beings left on the planet after colonization by extraterrestrials.

“May we set two more places for dinner?” Brian wondered.

“Thanks,” Dusty said, “but we’ve eaten. And we’ve got a lot to do before the night’s out.”

Martie clipped Valet to his leash, and the two dogs sniffed crotches in a last good-bye.

At the front door, Dusty said, “Dr. Closterman—”

“Roy, please.”

“Thank you. Roy, I can’t say that Martie and I would be in less of a mess right now if I had trusted my instincts and stopped calling myself paranoid, but we’d be maybe half a step ahead of where we are now.”

“Paranoia,” Brian said, “is the clearest sign of mental health in this new millennium.”

Dusty said, “So…as paranoid as it sounds…I have a brother who’s in drug rehab. It’s his third time. The last two have been at the same facility. And last night, when I left him there, I had a disturbing reaction to the place, this paranoid feeling…”

“What’s the facility?” Roy asked.

“New Life Clinic. Do you know it?”

“In Irvine. Yes. Ahriman is one of the owners.”

Remembering the tall and imperial silhouette at Skeet’s window, Dusty said, “Yeah. That would’ve surprised me yesterday…but not today.”

After the warmth of the Closterman house, the January night seemed to have a colder, sharper edge. Skirling wind skimmed a foamy scruff off the surface of the harbor and flung it across the island promenade.

Valet pranced at the limit of his leash, and his masters hurried after him.

No moon. No stars. No certainty that dawn would come, and no eagerness to see what might arrive with it.