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

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?”