Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 5, October 1960

Good Sound Therapy by Rog Phillips

It wouldn’t have been strictly true to say that elderly Dr. Fogg was a psychiatrist without a conscience. But his limitations in that respect made the wrong diagnosis dangerous.

Dr. Melvin Fogg sighed heavily and shut off the array of instrument panels and recording meters that occupied most of the desk-space in his therapy room.

“We aren’t getting anywhere yet, Walter,” he said, crossing to the man lying on the analysis table. At his words the voice typewriter beside the desk clattered swiftly. “Of course this is only our fifth session. We can’t expect much yet. But we should be picking up one or two clear-cut syndromes by now and we aren’t. I could almost believe you are consciously hiding everything from me that is of any importance.”

He began unstrapping electrodes from the wrists, temples, ankles, and bared chest of the patient.

“We haven’t even established your truth curve. Your reactions are too mixed up. For example when you think of your wife you go into a rejection psychosis that would be interpreted by an ordinary technician as lying — that you actually had no wife at all. But that is because you reject her. To your subconscious you have no wife.”

The voice typewriter ejected the sheet of paper into the hopper and inserted another, then typed faster to catch up. Dr. Foggiwether sighed again.

The patient, Walter Myers, freed of the dozens of electrodes, sat up. He was a small, thin man, about thirty, with sandy hair and eyebrows, and sallow, slightly freckled skin.

“I’m trying not to hide anything,” he said defensively.

“Yes, yes, I know.” Dr. Fogg ran his stubby fingers through his mane of thick black hair and brought his bushy eyebrows together in a frown.

“I wouldn’t throw away twenty-five dollars every Wednesday if I didn’t intend for you to do me some good.”

“Let’s hope not,” Dr. Fogg grunted. He glanced at the gold wristwatch on his thick, hairy wrist. “My next patient is waiting. You can find your way out, Walter. Down the hall to the side door.”

“Of course, Doc.” Walter Myers slipped into his suitcoat, the right hand pocket slapping his side from the weight of something small and heavy. His eyes darted in alarm to the doctor who seemed not to have noticed.

In the hallway he pressed his ear to the door until he heard the doctor’s deep voice and a reply in a shrill female voice. Then on tiptoe he stole down the hall to another closed door. With great care he turned the knob and inched the door open.

The room he entered was a comfortably furnished office with wall to wall carpeting, a walnut desk, walnut-finish, all metal file cabinet and strongbox assembly, davenport, floor lamps, and three large comfortable chairs. The drapes over the windows were partly open, letting in enough moonlight to make objects in the room visible.

Walter Myers took the heavy object from his pocket. It was a blue-steel, blunt-nosed revolver. He released the safety on it, then climbed over the davenport and settled down behind it to wait.

His eyes glittered feverishly in the darkness...

Dr. Fogg let Mrs. van Jason out the front door and locked it, and turned out the lights in the waiting room on his way back through. In the therapy room he put away the electrodes, and stared moodily at the array of instruments on his desk, wishing he knew more of what they could tell him.

If only he knew how to read them.

He did know, of course — as well as the average psychiatrist. But all it brought him was a clearer realization of how little he knew about the human mind. God, how little! The primary function of all this modern equipment still remained the one of dazzling the patient.

Dr. Fogg picked up the stack of typed sheets from the hopper behind the voice typewriter.

Why did he feel so depressed tonight? It had all the earmarks of presentiment. He chuckled dryly at the thought. Presentiment was one manifestation of the god-drive, the attempt of the archetypal I-symbol to occupy the central symbol position, to be God, to exercise the sophism, I am omniscient, therefore I am invincible.

That heavy object in Walter Myers’ pocket had bothered him. But it had probably been only an apple. No, not round enough for an apple. Perhaps a bottle of aspirins. Certainly not a gun.

Still, a negative little psychopathic liar like Walter might some day turn into a killer to protect his lies. You stood and listened to him and impressed him with encephalographs, cardiographs, neurographs, a clattering voice typewriter that typed page after page for the wastebasket, and prayed the lid would stay on while you worked it dangerously loose.

Dr. Fogg turned out the lights in the therapy room and went out into the hall. Here with all the doors shut it was peaceful and quiet — a symbol of life’s road, perhaps. Straight toward the grave, down at the end of the hall, with doors every few steps that opened into rooms, the symbols of jobs, ways of life, marriages. But always again there was the hallway, with the door at the end leading into the hereafter — and the garbage can.

Smiling at his little joke he went down the hall and out to the back stoop, and dropped the day’s accumulation of typewritten sheets into the garbage can. A practical and sensible act, but also haying its adverse symbolic effect on his mind as he well knew. More and more he was beginning to consider the purgative ramblings of his patients as deserving no other fate.

Returning to the hall he closed and locked the door, then walked quickly to the door to his private office, feeling almost cheerful as he opened it. He turned on the lights and crossed to the filing cabinet. He twirled the combination on the strongbox and pulled open the door. From its interior he brought out a half filled fifth of a good grade of whiskey and carried it to the desk with him and sat down.

Leaning back, he tipped the bottle to his lips and drank several swallows as though it were water. Then he put the bottle down in front of him and sat very still, waiting for the alcohol to work.

Suddenly the impulse to get really drunk possessed him. He lifted his bushy eyebrows in surprise at the impulse. His trained mind went to work tracing it to its source.

That premonition. That damned premonition. He hadn’t gotten rid of it. He had pushed it down and it had come up again — as a desire to get drunk.

He took another stiff drink, and leaned back, half closing his eyes.

Then he said, only because he had to say something, “Well what in the world are you doing here, Walter?”

Walter Myers had stood up behind the davenport, his snub nosed revolver pointed at Dr. Fogg.

“Stand up,” Walter Myers rasped. “Stand up and don’t make any sudden moves. Cup your hands against the back of your head.”

Very carefully Dr. Fogg obeyed, and at the same time he talked soothingly. “I understand what is driving you to this, Walter,” he said. “Actually, you don’t have to come back for more sessions. No law says you have to. No, it is something within you that says you must — and to escape that commanding voice you feel you must do this thing. Isn’t that so?”

“Nuts,” Walter said. “You’re a lousy quack. Nothing is wrong with me. Absolutely nothing. You hear?”

“Of course there isn’t, Walter,” Dr. Fogg said, straightening up, his hands locked behind his head. “Nothing monumental, at any rate. If I’ve seen it once I’ve seen it a thousand times, a person concealing something that he would almost rather die than confess. And almost invariably it is something perfectly normal which he has been taught since early childhood to think of as a monstrous sin!”

He saw the amusement in Walter’s expression.

“Now,” Dr. Fogg said, smiling with a calmness that belied the beads of perspiration on his forehead, “You feel safe. You are going to kill me, so that I can never learn what it is you hide from yourself and the world.”

Walter Myers put one leg carefully over the back of the davenport and sat straddling it while he brought the other up.

“You sound to me, Doc,” he said, “As if you wished me to kill you.” He sat on the back of the davenport with his feet on the cushion, and for an instant there was a look of sympathy and pity in his eyes.

Dr. Fogg saw the pity and it terrified him. He was quite sure that only a killer who had made up his mind to kill could experience pity at such a moment. But perhaps he could capitalize on it...

“Possibly I do — or part of me does, anyway,” he said heavily. And in seeming blind forgetfulness he lumbered up from his chair and came around the desk, putting his hands in his pockets. In the center of the room he stopped, aware of the flattening of Walter’s eyes, and the whitening of his knuckle against the trigger.

As Walter slowly relaxed again Dr. Fogg breathed a silent prayer of thanks. He was in a much better position now.

“You almost got it right then,” Walter Myers said.

“Sorry,” Dr. Fogg said gruffly. “I forgot myself.” He waited an appropriate interval, then added, “In the therapy room I am used to keeping my own feelings in the background. Here in my private office—” He nodded toward the whiskey bottle. “My feelings come out.” He smiled a twisted smile. “Would you like a drink, Walter?”

“Ha!” Walter snorted. “You’d like the chance to turn the tables on me and send for the police.”

“No, Walter, I would like to help you.”

“I thought you wanted me to help you,” Walter Myers said, smiling slightly.

Dr. Fogg nodded. This might be the way out. Walter seemed to be swinging to a somewhat paranoid expansiveness. It might pay to coax it along a bit. “Maybe I do,” he said slowly. “In some ways, sometimes, I’m as confused as my patients seem to be.”

“And you think maybe I could help you?” Walter Myers said, a toying indecision in his voice and expression.

Dr. Fogg found it difficult to conceal his surge of hope. He was succeeding! With remarkable self control he put on an expression of almost hopeless discouragement and said, “I wish somebody would help me.”

“Well...” Walter Myers stepped down off of the davenport. “As a matter of fact, in a manner of speaking, that’s what I was planning on doing. I really don’t want to kill you, unless I have to. You see, like you I’m a specialist in my line of work. I specialize in helping people like you.”

“What is your line of work?” Dr. Fogg asked eagerly. Things were working fine now. Later, when Walter was gone, he could have his nervous reaction, but right now he must play his fish with infinite care.

“I’m a thief,” Walter Myers said.

Dr. Fogg blinked. “A... a what?” he said.

“Let’s see if I can get you to understand,” Walter Myers said. “As you know, most people’s aberrations stem from their search for a father-substitute. Some tear up traffic tickets to force the police to punish them. One special kind, the kind I’m interested in, doesn’t tear up traffic tickets. Instead, they fail to report all their income. They report enough to keep from being investigated. The rest? They can’t bank it because then it would be on record, so they keep it in cash somewhere where they can get their hands on it quickly.”

Dr. Fogg’s face began to turn pasty. His eyes darted toward the open strongbox section of the file cabinet, and away again with great rapidity.

“What they subconsciously want,” Walter Myers said, smiling, “Is — not the money — but to be caught at it and punished so they can feel that someone or something — Fate, perhaps — has become a father-substitute to them. And that’s where I come in. I locate such people. It’s fairly easy. You’d be surprised how many there are. When I find one I study him until I know all I need to know. Then I step in and take the money he’s saved up. He doesn’t dare report the theft because then the revenue boys would want to know where he got so much money. He just has to take it on the chin and keep his mouth shut, like any well-disciplined kid getting a licking.”

Walter Myers inched toward the strongbox, his gun pointed at Dr. Fogg’s chest.

“Don’t move, Dr. Fogg,” he said as he filled his pockets with packs of currency. “Don’t try anything foolish that will get you killed. Try to understand that what I’m doing is for your own good. It’s rough.” Walter Myers shook his head in what appeared to be genuine sympathy.

“But it’s good sound therapy.”