Final Jeopardy

CHAPTER 7

I walked into Rao’s a few minutes before eight, while Tina Turner was asking the gathering of diners what love has to do with it, and reminding me once again, as if the lessons of the last week had not been enough, that it was a secondhand emotion. There was no sign of the Gorilla, but I got a warm hello from Joey Palomino when I reintroduced myself to him and said I was happy to wait at the bar. I walked over and sat on one of the handful of stools, next to a very attractive black woman Maureen Forester who was sipping white wine, while her date Mike Chapman was working on what looked like a vodka and tonic.

The bartender was opening a bottle of wine at Woody Allen’s booth, so I began to make small talk with the couple sitting beside me at the bar while I waited for him to return to take my order.

I’ll bet you twenty dollars you don’t know the answer to tonight’s question,“ I said, leaning across Maureen and grinning at Mike.

“What’s the subject?”

“World geography.”

“You’re on.” n I knew I had a winner. I gave Mike the final answer, but before I could sit up straight, he came back at me with s Bayeux.

“What’d you do, call your mother?” Mike’s widowed mother was glued to the television most of the day and night in her little condo in Bay Ridge, and she was his shill when he couldn’t count on seeing the show.

“No. I swear to God, that was an easy one.” “Bullshit. How’d you know?” I couldn’t believe it. And Luther’s worried that Mike’s too unsophisticated to interview a cokehead producer, an illiterate stunt man and a cheating businessman.

He laughed.

“I was there in ‘94 fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. Bayeux was the first French city liberated by the Allies. June 8, 1944.” Mike and his military history.

“Went with my uncle Brendan, who landed with the invasion force, remember? The only other thing in town is the tapestry museum. Had to take Aunt Eunice through it twice. Relax, blondie, you can pay up tomorrow.”

Vie came back behind the bar, shook my hand, told me he was sorry he couldn’t remember my name but he was dead straight on the drink order. Maureen and I pretended to become acquainted while I waited for my host to show up. She complimented my outfit and thanked me, under her breath, for getting her out of the fleabag hotel where we stashed our recalcitrant witnesses during trials.

We three chatted about the music, the changing weather, and what the prospects were for the Knicks this season.

About ten minutes later the door pushed open and Johnny Garelli stood in the frame, striking a pose and waiting to be fussed over by Joey. He was big and solid, as good-looking as the magazine photos, but with the most awful hair plugs dotting the front half of his head.

“ Jesus, Mo, would you take a look at those implants?

How’d she ever get in bed with that guy?“

“Now, now, now, Alex. You know better than that. A man’s hair is like his penis they get very sensitive about comments like that. I’ve had at least three domestics’ men who killed their wives ‘caused by fighting over that kind of insult about hair. Be nice to the man.”

Joey and Johnny finished embracing each other, and I walked toward Garelli as Joey pointed in my direction. He had put us in the second booth Woody had the best table, of course and Johnny gave me the once-over as we made our way to our seats. I didn’t think I was exactly his type, but at least my hair was my own.

“Nice of you to call. How’d you know I was in town?”

“Actually, one of the cops told me, when he was talking to me this morning. I’ve been interviewed by them a lot, too.”

“I forgot what you do. Are you in soaps? Acting?”

“No, I’m a lawyer.”

“Like a defense attorney, that kind?”

“Sort of.” Not exactly that kind, but then, he’s not really an actor either, if you want to be truthful.

“D’you know Isabella for a long time?”

Longer than you, I thought to myself.

“About three years.

I gave her some help back then, when she was starring in Probable Cause. We became friendly after that.“

Johnny and I reminisced for a while over our drinks, and by the time Vie brought him his second Ketel One martini, Joey was ready to take our dinner order.

“No menus here. You gotta tell Joey what you want.”

“Yes, I know.” Rao’s had the best roasted peppers I had ever eaten, so I chose them for an appetizer, while Johnny got both Ls the baked clams and the seafood salad for himself. Joey Ier suggested the shells with cabbage and sausage, and the lemon chicken. Johnny added another pasta and some salad, as if he had been pumping iron without eating for five days.

“So did Iz talk about me a lot?”

“She told me a lot about you, yes.”

“Good things, mostly?” he said jokingly.

“We had some good times together, her and me.”

The English major in me winced. He may have been great in bed, but his syntax was as atrocious as his manners. He was shoving the bread in his mouth each time he came up for air, rinsing it down with the vodka.

“Did Isabella tell you how we met and everything? We was a hot ticket for a while.”

Enough about me, now let’s talk about what Iz thought about me. This was going to be a long evening.

Garelli wanted to make sure I knew all about his career.

The appetizers came and he inhaled his clams without missing a beat, taking me through his days in the Marine Corps. Stallone was his role model; he’d discovered Garelli when he got out of the service and cast him as a soldier of fortune in one of those blockbuster summer movies that I would have paid dearly never to have to see in my life.

“He was good to me, man, still is. Semper Fi.”

“Did you have to learn all that technical business about guns for the movie?” I asked, realizing as soon as I did that it was not the most subtle approach for the nature of the investigation.

His head was apparently thicker than his deltoids ‘cause he didn’t seem to get the connection at all.

“Are you kidding?

Didn’t Isabella tell you how I taught her to shoot when we were in Central America making that Clancy movie? Man, I grew up on that stuff, from G.I. Joe right to the Marines.“

“No, she just talked about your romance.” That had been nearly enough to make me question her sanity. I suppose I hadn’t asked too many more details.

“We used to sit around at night, drinking and making love. There wasn’t much else to do down there. I tried to teach her how to shoot. We’d set up the empty vodka bottles on a tree stump in the jungle and blast them to pieces.

Some day what do you call those guys archaeologists?

Someday, one of ‘em will come along and do a dig right on that movie set. Iz used to say they’d think the Aztecs had invented Absolut, there’d be nothing but fragments of glass buried there.

“Then I could really make her laugh when I could nail one of them snakes, you know, like when they were moving?

Man, she hated those snakes. Green mambos. Those jungles were full of ‘em. She used to say she never wanted to see another snakeskin shoe or pocketbook in her life. I could spot those suckers as soon as they came out in the daylight to sun themselves and I could blast ’em in half while they tried to slither back into their holes. It used to be quite a game. Iz had a nice reward for me every time I killed her a green mambo.“ He winked at me, so I was sure to know that Isabella was taking good care of Johnny’s snake whenever he played sharpshooter.

To me it seemed like quite a skill. Not one that I wanted to master, much as I hated snakes. But Garelli had to be pretty good with a gun to hit that kind of skinny moving target. ey Plates were exchanged for other plates, Maureen continued to ply the jukebox with dollar bills so that fine music constantly flowed out of it, and Johnny sluggedvodka as if it were the last time he would ever have rer anything to drink. he “Why do you think the police want to talk to you?” I asked naively.

“Do you know anything about Isabella’s murderer ”Clueless, Alice, I am really clueless.“

I didn’t correct him on my name. He was pretty drunk, and I guess his mind was on the dancer he was due to meet in another hour.

“They ran me through every conversation I had with her lately, wanted to know about the man she was with all week, wanted to know which of her lovers she’d fought with. I guess they’ll do the same with you,” I suggested to him.

“Well, they’ll get shit from me excuse my language, sweetheart. She and me didn’t see each other for weeks.

We talked on the phone, she was some kinda tease, but if these motherfuckers think they’re gonna dredge up my past and try to knock me outta the box, they got another thought coming.“

“You got a lawyer?”

“No way, man. I mean I got a lawyer back home, I got plenty of lawyers. But you walk into a police station with a lawyer, those cops know you did something wrong. I can go in by myself, tell ‘em what they wanna know, and take the Fifth when I feel like it. I’m not payin’ some sleazebag to tell me, ”You don’t have to answer that, Johnny.“ I been around the block a few times. No problem.”

Garelli was working the tortoni now, for dessert, and Rick had brought over a bottle of anisette to place on the table.

The espresso was thick as mud and delicious, but Johnny cut his with the syrupy liquor, as though he needed more fuel. He lit a cheap cigar, leaned forward and eyeballed me.

“They ask you anything about me and Iz?”

“Yeah. They asked me some things, and I know they’ve been talking to a lot of other people about you, too.”

“They tell you what they know about me, I mean, besides me being like in the movies?”

“They haven’t told me everything. I know they talked about your bad temper, your fights with Isabella-‘ ”Shit, that’s nothing to talk about. That is zero, nada. You know these cops. They any good? Or are they complete fuck-ups, like the ones in L.A.?“

“I don’t really know them. There’s some jerk from the FBI who thinks he’s running the show.”

“Yeah, Luther Waldo or something like that. Did they find out anything about you they didn’t already know?”

Boy, am I the wrong one to ask.

“Yeah, actually, they did.”

“Something bad?”

“Very bad.” Put Tina on again, Maureen. Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?

Now Johnny was puzzled. He had been convinced the meeting with the cops was going to be a complete cake-walk when he agreed to do it.

“D’you have something to hide?”

“I didn’t know it at the time, Johnny, but it turns out that I did. Why, is there something you don’t want them to know.”

I had started to confide in him, and he leaned further into my face to return the favor by trying to trust me with his secrets.

“I didn’t have anything to do with killing Isabella and, man, you know she coulda driven me to it but I;y got things I don’t want nobody to know about. We all do,, don’t we?” “You bet.”,s “They’re gonna wanna know where I was the day sheer got it, right?” He was well oiled now and getting sloppy.

“Well, I got nothing to tell them about that. I’m not gonna ruin somebody else’s life that’s got nothing to do with their; business, see?”

“Hey, Johnny, I’d be careful about lying to them. You know with credit cards and telephone bills and things that leave a trail of dates and records, it’s stup- It’s not too smart to lie about something they can check on as easily as that.”

He tried to absorb that for a minute.

“Well, I don’t have to lie to them, I could just take the Fifth, right?”

“Well, not exactly.” I tried to explain the difference between being questioned by the police and being on the witness stand in a court of law. Forget about it.

I decided to try the direct approach.

“Maybe it’s not all that tough, Johnny. Where were you last Wednesday? I mean, as long as you weren’t on Martha’s Vineyard I think you’re absolutely right it’s nobody’s business. Try your story on me see how it flies. Isabella always trusted me.”

That was a one-way street.

I smiled sweetly at him, and hoped it looked warm and fuzzy as he stared back at me through his alcohol filled haze.

He propped one elbow on the table and rested his chin in the palm of his hand.

“You know The Tempest?”

“Shakespeare?” The Gorilla and I are gonna talk Shakespeare tonight? The lieutenant won’t believe it.

“No, not the movie. The boat, the yacht.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Sir Robert Ardmore’s yacht. That one?”

What unlikely shipmates: Johnny Garelli and British department store mogul, recently knighted, Sir Robert Ardmore.

“Yeah, Alice, that one. It’s like an ocean liner. I don’t know Ardmore, but you could say I’m a good friend of his wife.”

Garelli smiled.

“When Iz dumped me, I thought I’d drown my sorrows in the ocean.”

Ardmore ’s fifth wife, a twenty-six-year-old stripper whose instep was reputed to be higher than her I.Q., had met the elderly billionaire when he was in Vegas, doing a site inspection for a series of shopping malls. He was still married at the time, and his fierce batt leto retain the remarkable yacht which had originally been named for his fourth wife in the divorce proceedings led to its lavish rechristening as The Tempest.

“So you and Tiki Ardmore were together last week?”

“Obviously, that goes no further than this table, right?

Her husband’s got a lousy sense of humor, if you know what I mean. Really straight guy. Jeez, I’ve know Tiki since she was working the door at Motion’s.”

I think Lord Ardmore and I could do very well together, sailing off into the sunset, faithful and loyal like a pair of cocker spaniels.

“Where was the boat?”

“I flew on board by helicopter when Ardmore went back to London last Monday. I was in Easthampton, and the boat was cruising off Montauk, at the end of Long Island.”

Fifty-five miles from the Vineyard, as the crow flies.

“Well, at least you’ve got witnesses, Johnny. Crew, pilots, deckhands-‘ ”I got ’em all right, but one thing Tiki don’t want is witnesses. Everybody who works for Ardmore is deaf, dumb, and blind, if you follow me. This marriage may pn be hard work, but it beats the shit out of the last two jobs she had. I can’t burn her on this.“ ps ”Did you put into port anywhere?“

“Are you kidding? Those dinky little islands can hold stinkpots and Sunfishes, but not a yacht the size of this one. The Tempest needs its own dock. Nah, last thing we wanted to see was other people.”

I guess Tiki Ardmore was a snake-charmer, too.

Johnny gave me a few more details about his shipboard adventure, and I was confident that there were enough people who could confirm or contradict his story, were his involvement really to become a major factor in the investigation. I don’t know that I was any help to Lieutenant Peterson, but I would not have to eat again for at least a week.

The rain had started to come down heavily while we were eating dinner, and I was glad to see that there was a stretch limo waiting for Garelli at the curb. He left generous tips for Vie and the waiter, exchanged kisses on both cheeks with Joey, and asked me if I wanted to be dropped at my apartment on his way back to the hotel. Maureen and Mike had slipped out while Johnny was settling up his bill, and I saw their car parked just beyond the streetlight, as they watched me get into the rear seat before starting up their engine.

It was only a ten-minute ride down the drive to my place.

Garelli leaned his head back against the seat cushion and let the alcohol do its work, while I played out the visions of a helicopter or a speeding launch whisking him from The Tempest to the Vineyard, to kill Isabella, while Tiki Ardmore soaked in a bubble bath. The logistics of it were certainly possible, as any navigator could tell you. I had gotten the basics for Chapman and his team they would have to go the distance.

I thanked Johnny for the meal and wished him good luck with Luther tomorrow, then I got out of the limo and waited in the lobby for Mike and Maureen to park and join me.

“You guys must be starved, watching me eat all that food while you just sat at the bar the whole time I’ll send out for a pizza for you.”

“One glass of wine and three bottles of Pellegrino water, just to keep our glasses looking full. I’ll be running for the powder room as soon as you unlock your door,” Maureen responded.

“What d’ya get?” Mike asked.

“Nothing memorable. Has no use for cops, plans to lie to you guys tomorrow and stonewall you about where he was. Has a thing going with the wife of a billionaire, so he doesn’t want you to know the truth and blow it for her by going public. And yes, in fact he was on the East Coast the week of the murder, cruising in the Atlantic Ocean on his personal ”love boat,“ not too far from the Vineyard. He’s a superb marksman, especially good at moving targets.

Don’t remind me that I’ve been fooled before, Mike, but somehow I don’t think he killed Isabella. Too stupid to have actually formulated and carried out something that needed to be planned in advance like this murder. See what he tells you when he comes in to the office, but I don’t think he’s your man.“

We went into my apartment and I showed Maureen where to freshen up while I went into the den to call Steve’s Pizza. It was only ten-thirty, so I called David Mitchell, too, to ask him to join us. I’ve got two detectives with me. Is this a good time to come by and talk things over with us?”

“It’s great. Didn’t you get my message? I just got home twenty minutes ago and suggested you call if you got in before midnight. I’ll be right over.”

“Oh, I haven’t even gone into the bedroom yet to check?r the machine. Glad it’s still working. My mother seems to ie have given up on me this week. The door’s open.”;t Maureen called out to me from the bedroom.

“Mind if I;r use the phone to call my husband? You know how jealous he gets when I’m out dancing with Chapman.”

“Next to the bed, Mo.” Mike had gone through the Police Academy with Gene Forester, who left the job a few years back for a top position in corporate security.

David came in a few minutes later and the four of us positioned ourselves in the living room for an attempt to brainstorm with the information we had to date about Isabella’s death. Mike had brought Maureen up to speed while they were sitting at the bar at Rao’s, and David had spent some of his day considering the psychological aspect through the mumbo-jumbo of the correspondence found in Iz’s apartment.

Each of the known suspects went up and down as possible perps in my view, depending on the hour of the day and the latest information. We filled David in on Jed’s role and today’s photo confirmation by the Quinn sisters, and I could see him watching me out of the corner of his eye to try to measure the effect of that news on my emotional well-being. Burrell had been an early consideration whom I had eliminated, but who now had reinjected himself into the mix with his deception and the fact of his drug delivery.

Garelli was a long shot, but certainly within geographic range and a great shooter. Whenever we thought we could narrow the field, a name like Freddy Weintraub, the felonious accountant, muddied the view.

“What’s the likelihood that the killer is someone you’ve never even considered, someone whose name has never come into this yet? An unknown, a complete ringer?” David asked, directing his inquiry to Mike.

“Better than even, Doc. You know how low the clearance rate on homicides is if you don’t break ‘em in the first forty-eight, seventy-two hours? It’s abysmal. We’re starting with guys who knew her and may have had a reason to do her in God knows how many freaks we never heard of who hated her. And then there’s the simple fact that celebrities are fair game for more whack jobs than there are jail cells. Sometimes they just heckle and harass, other times they go for the gold.”

“So these aren’t the only people to consider?”

“Nope. Just the first wave. Still a lot to do on these guys. If Segal’s lawyer were smart and really wanted to give his client a shot, he’d tell us how and when his man left the island. There must be some way to prove that.

The ferry’s not much help. I’ve checked airport records by name and came up empty. But there’s a couple of guys who paid cash on the P.M. Cape Air flight. If he used an alias and no credit card, just ‘cause he didn’t want to get caught cheating on Alex, we might be able to clear him. Either he doesn’t have that kind of alibi ’cause he was still on the scene when Iz was shot, or he’s a horse’s ass.”

“Or the lawyer’s waiting for Mr. Green before he does any heavy lifting,” Maureen added as a possibility.

“Mr. Green?” David looked puzzled.

“Mean’s Jed hasn’t paid him yet. Sometimes, the defense attorney wants a big bundle of green bills up front, before tey he lifts a finger.

Wants to keep the client on the hook a little ion longer, then the guy’s really grateful when he’s cleared,” I explained to David. as “If he’s cleared,” Mike threw in, as a warning to me. je No question that Jed was still Chapman’s number-one he suspect. st “Those letters mean anything to you, Doc? Did Alex tell ie you about the poem Isabella had copied into that script we found when we packed up her belongings? That also had ”Dr. C.“ written next to it.”

“No, I don’t think you mentioned that, Alex.”

At this point I couldn’t remember whether I had or not.

“It was a few lines out of a Pope poem, David. The passage Iz had transcribed included the lines ”Is it, in Heaven, a crime to love too well?“ It looked like she thought this ”Dr. C.“ had been the poet. I guess that’s Cordelia Jeffers. Maybe it’s got more to do with this than we thought.”

David tried to take us through his reasoning.

“Start with the fact that there is no psychiatrist named Cordelia Jeffers. I expect that no such person even exists, that it’s a name assumed for the purposes of this particular correspondence.”

Why?“ Chapman liked to get right to the point.

“I don’t know why, at the moment. But it’s clear that the writer knew that Isabella was going to Martha’s Vineyard, and it’s even more clear that Isabella was not the source of that information.” He quoted back to us from the first paragraph, in which Jeffers commented on Isabella’s trip, which she learned about quite indirectly.

“It’s also obvious that she knew Isabella was going with a man shall we assume Jed? which is far more than you knew, Alex.”

“So if we want to know more about Dr. C, we’re looking for someone who knew both Isabella and Jed, is that what you’re telling us?” Mike asked.

“For openers, yes.”

“I thought I was the common denominator there,” I was quick to acknowledge. “Perhaps there were one or two Hollywood acquaintances they had in common, but I was certain that there was no real link independent of me, except for friends of mine like Nina and her husband. Even Nina confirmed that she thinks this liaison only began a few weeks ago, when they ran into each other on the Concorde.“

“And the pretext for Isabella calling on Jed?” David asked me again.

“The fact that her accountant had been stealing her blind.

Jed gave her the name of his man when we all had dinner together, and later on I urged him to follow up and make sure she was in good hands.“

“Yeah, but by the time she invited Jed to the Vineyard, the week before last, she had a new stalker, didn’t she?”

Mike went on.

“Did you tell David that Jed had been stalked when he ran for office? That’s one of the reasons he told you he was so sympathetic to Lascar.”

“What was that all about, Alex?”

“I hardly know what to believe at this point, guys. When we first met, in June, one of the things Jed talked about when he heard I was a prosecutor was the time he’d been harassed. His version of the facts was that he shook hands with a young woman in a receiving line when he was running for the Senate and he couldn’t get rid of her after that. Phone calls, letters, showed up everywhere he went, got on airplanes with him. Finally he had to go to the police to put an end to it.”

David addressed me in his soft, professional tone.

“Did Jed sleep with her, Alex? Did they have an affair?”

“For what it’s worth, he denied they ever did. Of course, I wouldn’t trust him from here to the kitchen now, but the first night I met him, when he told me the story, he had no reason to lie to me. st ”In fact, he made quite a point of telling me that it played r a big role in his divorce. The stalker actually called and spoke to Jed’s wife. Tried to convince her that they had been having an affair which didn’t take much for his wife to believe. I’m so confused by him now I don’t know what to believe anymore.“

“Do you know any more about this than you’ve just told me?”

“No, David. I don’t. It’s sort of like what happens to doctors. Every time you go to a cocktail party, people complain to you about their aches and pains and hope for a free diagnosis. Well, for me, it’s the high crimes and misdemeanors they all unload on me. I listened to Jed’s story, but he thought the situation had ended when he moved to New York and neither one of us dwelt on it.

I guess it had a certain resonance for Isabella.“

“Alex‘ David was in his most sincere mode now ”Alex, would you mind if I talked to Jed about this a bit more?

Perhaps something Isabella confided in him, because of his history with a similar problem, perhaps that will shed some light on these strange letters.“

Of course I minded. Mike leaped in over me.

“Hey, that’s a great idea. His lawyer won’t let him talk to us, but if you call him, as Coop’s friend, I bet he’ll be hungry to talk to you. He’s screaming to get her back, Doc. That’s a great angle to work with him.”

“How do you feel about it, Alex?”

“What difference does that make?” I could feel a good pout coming on.

Maureen came to my defense. She could see I was flagging and knew that I didn’t want Jed to get his toe back in the door.

“Do what you gotta do, guys, but don’t put Alex in the middle of it, okay? Cut her a break, will you?

Where do you think this exercise in futility will get you?“

“I’m not proposing that there’s any direct connection between Isabella’s killer and Jed’s problem, but it would certainly be interesting if they discussed the phenomenon with each other. He can tell us that, of course. Very interesting.”

Riveting. Ask him if they ever bothered to talk about me, while you’re at it.

David tried to draw me back into the conversation.

“Alex, I’m sure you’ve come across this in some of your stalking cases. Obsessional love, delusional disorders it’s in all the forensic psych literature. Quite fascinating material. Do you detectives ever work with the DSM?” “I’ve seen the book in Alex’s office. Can’t say I’ve ever used it,” Maureen replied. Chapman just shook his head.

“It’s the forensic psych bible,” I explained. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, weighty scientific tomes that detailed and outlined the elements and criteria for a mind-boggling array of psychiatric disorders, which guided doctors and lawyers through all the odd routes of affirmative defenses and excuses for criminal conduct.

“Yeah, I know it.

”I killed my mother because I was born with very short earlobes and webbed feet and wasn’t allowed to eat Cheerios for dinner; I skinned the cat because Uncle Harry never let me kiss Aunt Mary’s ass after church? on Sundays; I put the baby in the microwave because Jupiter didn’t align with Mars and no one ever lets me do what I want to do anyway.“ Yep, for every violent crime 35 there’s a shrink with an excuse. I didn’t know it all came out of one big book.” Mike’s disdain for the psychiatric community was beginning to rear its head.

“What are we looking for here, Doc?”

“I’ll have to do some more reading tomorrow. There’s one category called obsessional love. Those are the cases where there was some kind of relationship between the subject and the victim a love affair, a one-night stand, a ”fatal attraction,“ if you will. The harasser begins a campaign to regain that relationship, or to seek revenge.

“The more unusual category is quite different. It’s called erotomania and-‘ ”Erotomania? That sounds like something I’d like to catch.“ Mike was clowning again, trying to get me to cheer up.

“In cases of erotomania,” David continued, ‘there was never an affair or a romance between the parties exactly like Jed told you, Alex. The stalker suffers from a delusion, the delusion that the man she fixates on actually loves her, even if she’s had only the briefest contact with him. It’s extremely bizarre.“

Maureen questioned him, ”Are you serious, that this is a real disorder? The woman believes the man’s in love with her or vice versa, even though there has never been any kind of social or sexual interaction?“ ”Exactly. It’s a delusion that they are loved by another person. And other than that delusion, the patient’s behavior is completely normal. In fact, these people are usually extremely intelligent. No other signs of mental illness or dysfunction.“

“Would you call Segal for us tomorrow, Doc? I bet he’d jump at the chance to crawl on your couch and talk to somebody about this, really.”

“Certainly, Mike, I’ll call him. I don’t think we can ignore that history of his in view of these references that Cordelia Jeffers makes, whoever she is. I’ll leave a message for Jed at his office. Alex, you can jot down his number for me.

And I’ll pull some of the literature so we can find out more about the disorder. I have to take the shuttle to Washington first thing tomorrow meeting with the Drug Czar about funding treatment programs. But I can see Segal in my office at the end of the day, and if that works with his schedule, we should know a lot more about whatever Isabella may have discussed with him by the same time tomorrow.” “Great. I’ll call the LAPD. They’ve actually got a special bureau called the Threat Management Unit only one I know of in the country. Maybe they can pull up Segal’s file and see if there’s anything we should know about in it.” I wrote down the CommPlex number and handed it to David as he left. Chapman answered the intercom and told the doorman to send the kid with the pizza upstairs. I sat and chatted with Maureen and Mike as they devoured their dinner, then sent them on their way home just before midnight. I undressed, brushed my teeth, and started to get into bed, and remembered that I had a dog-eared copy of the DSM on the shelf with my reference books in the second bedroom, which I used as a home office. It was my habit to bring the old editions of penal codes and trial manuals here whenever the new ones arrived in my office, so I had a version to work with instead of carrying the oversized books back and forth each night.

The Diagnostic Statistical Manual was hardly bedtime reading, but I had put myself to sleep so many times with autopsy photographs and Emergency Room medical records that this would be relatively light fare. I carried the volume I needed back to my bed and climbed in, looking in the Index for Delusional Disorders.

The DSM noted a clear distinction in the two categories of behavior that David Mitchell had discussed. The more common was the one he referred to as ‘obsessional love.“

It was fascinating to read, because it seemed to have been written about Isabella Lascar and her kind of problem. The manual described the prototypical obsessional love victim as a ‘sexy actress or bombshell’ that was our girl. In these cases, the women who became victims had prior knowledge of their harassers, usually intimate, and most of the stalking activity began following a ‘love gone sour’ relationship.

The majority of the subjects the stalkers were male, who harassed with letter and telephone contact. Garelli and Burreil certainly fit the bill as soured lovers, and if she had told Jed he was just a one-week stand, he’d be in exactly the same category. I couldn’t wait to show this stuff to Mike tomorrow afternoon.

It was impossible to plow through it all, with clinical examples and scads of footnotes, but it was Thursday morning already exactly a week since I received the news of Isabella’s death and I had all weekend to research this material to see if it had any relevance to our work.

I skimmed down the pages to get to the related section on erotomania. If Jed had been truthful about his stalking experience, it appeared as though he and Isabella had been plagued by opposite aspects of a similar delusion.

In cases of erotomania unlike obsessional love most of the victims were men, and most of the harassers were women. Like the situation Jed had described to me, the person stalked has had no relationship with the stalker, who is fervently convinced that the victim would return the affection if not for some outside influence. Of course, I thought to myself, Jed’s wife would have been the obstacle.

The harasser kept calling his wife to tell her that Jed was unfaithful. Once she could get the wife out of the way, she was deluded enough to think the path to Jed’s affection would be cleared.

No wonder Isabella and Jed had so much to talk about.

It was really weird.

I wondered why I had never heard the term erotomania before, so I read on.

“Erotomania is the delusional belief that one is passionately loved by another.” But as recently as the third edition of the DSM, just a few years ago, there was no specific mention of the condition. It was only with the later publication of DSM-III-R the one I was reading that it was included as a specific category, as physicians began to document more and more cases of patients exhibiting this unusual conduct.

I was getting sleepy, so I decided to stop after the next few paragraphs, which described the history of the original diagnosis of the condition. It was originally documented in 1921 by a French psychiatrist named G.G. de Clerambault and, therefore, named for him: de Clerambault’s Syndrome, and referred to in the literature of the time as psycho se passionelle. As I lay in my bed each of these last few nights, suffering from a serious bout of post-breakup depression, ley I longed for a malady with a fancy French name like this, on and hoped some obscure footnote would drop a hint that would dignify my pathetic condition with a Gallic accent. as The early case descriptions were all quite interesting, jer as they typified the illness. The patients were usually women from modest backgrounds, while the male victims st were generally from a higher social and financial status ier executives, physicians, media figures. These otherwise sane women insisted they could provide evidence for their beliefs, in the form of signs from their love objects like ‘meaningful glances, messages passed through newspapers, or telepathic communications.“

I had to admit my amusement at de Clerambault’s first case analysis, comparing in my mind that victim King George V of England and the one I knew, Jed Segal.

The French psychiatrist wrote that one of his most dramatic cases involved a fifty-year-old compatriot who became completely convinced that King George was in love with her although, of course, they had never met. She believed that British tourists and sailors were emissaries of His Majesty, sent abroad to declare his love for her. The deluded woman made several trips to London, and on one of them, in 1918, she stood for hours outside Buckingham I Palace, waiting for a glimpse of her beloved. When at last she saw a curtain moving in a window, she interpreted this as a signal from the King. As she told all those who tried to bring her to her senses, “The King might hate me, but he can never forget me.”

It was a merrier note on which to close the book for the night and go to sleep.

I reached for the light switch and took note of the still unblinking red light on my answering machine. It seemed to me that David Mitchell said he had left a message shortly before I got home from Rao’s this evening, but then I remembered that Maureen had been in here using the phone to call her husband, and probably hit the rewind button by mistake. Tomorrow I would call my parents just to say hello, but for now I would give myself to dreams of some kind of psycho se passionelle. Everything even mental illness sounded better in French.