In The Way Ch 02

"Are you sure?" he asked before I could turn the damned thing off.

"What the hell was that?" I shouted at him. "She's lying!"

He sat there, calmly taking in my reaction. Of course, he could afford to be calm - it was not his wife who had just told a perfect stranger that her husband was fooling around with their daughter. He held up his hands in a placating manner even as I took a menacing step towards him. "You," and I pointed my finger accusingly, "You put her up to it. If that is even her on the tape. You are going to pay, mister."

At this point, I suppose he started to get a bit worried. This time, I did not have to pretend to be angry - I was fucking mad at him, excuse me ladies. He jumped out of his chair and pushed me, which was his mistake. A gumshoe, you must know, believes that Newton's third law rules the universe. I shoved him back, and he fell back on his chair that then teetered back, almost toppling, before I pulled at his pants and raised him upright. And then I punched him in his stomach.

Normally, this is where you expect the hero to knock the bad guy out, aim at the jaw and put it there, but I stopped myself at the last moment. An unconscious Chivago was no use to me, though he must be infinitely less irritating. I tugged at his collar and let him fall back on his chair. He was gasping for breath as I picked up the recorder and prepared to fling it at one of his framed diplomas.

"Wait," he croaked. He coughed. He coughed again. "Wait," he croaked again, and coughed again. Jeez, had I really hit him that hard? For a second there, I wondered if I would have to call for the paramedics. I waited, arm cocked as if I were about to throw a javelin. He took his hands off his stomach to motion for me to put the recorder down. Or to sit down or both or maybe to see if he was still alive.

It took him a few minutes to regain his breath, during which I did not stand as if I would throw anything anywhere. I sat down across him, the same as before, but the recorder remained with me. I did not bother taking out the tape - I had already decided that the moment I walked out those doors, it would too.

"I guess you are innocent," he said. I glared at him and cocked my arm again - only this time, I was aiming for his neck. At that range, he knew I could not miss. He amended his statement in the same breath. "No, I mean, I *know* you are innocent."

"What the hell is all this about?" My arm dropped down to my thigh.

"Believe me, I know you are innocent. I spoke to your daughter too, remember?"

"You have her on tape, you piece of shit?"

"No, she didn't want to be recorded. And I would appreciate it if you don't direct that kind of abuse at me anymore."

"And I would appreciate it..." I mimicked him, and nobody told me I did not sound like the petrified bastard sitting in front of me. "What are you, some kinda shrink?" When he opened his mouth to answer, I shook my head. "Don't answer that. Jeez, even I don't know why I asked that question."

"I know you are upset."

"You are really good at this, aren't you?" I asked him sarcastically. A bit of color rushed to his cheeks, but he did not say anything. "What the fucking hell is all this?" I do not normally condone profanity, but I excused myself. This fucking asshole deserved whatever fuck he got for fucking with me. So there.

"Maybe you should just play it back," he said, gesturing to the recorder I still held in my hand.

"Maybe you should just tell me everything, and I'll play it back on the way home," I told him. I received no argument. I suppose he must have wondered whether I had a player in my car that I could run the mini-cassette on, not realizing that I just had myself a good one for the price of a whole lot of bullshit.

He nodded, as if he had any choice in the matter, cleared his throat, sat up straighter and began his salvation. "If you would play that tape a bit longer, you will hear your wife admitting that she does not have any actual evidence that you are sleeping with your own daughter. She simply believes - or, I should say, she prefers to believe it. I told you about the Electra complex, didn't I? That's one form of penis-envy. There's another, though -"

"Come again," I interrupted. "What was that? Penis-envy?"

"That's how Dr. Freud saw it," he said it almost referentially. "He suggested that because the daughter does not have a penis and therefore feels possessive about the dominant male who has it. Often, this is translated into a jealous attitude victimizing her mother who is seen as the reason for the girl being without it. In other words, Daddy's penis belongs to Mom, and it just ain't fair."

Like I said, learn something new everyday. But I would certainly prefer it if they came with instructions attached. "Jesus," I exclaimed, not really meaning it. I am an atheist. "And people actually believed that crap?"

He stiffened for an instant before remembering how his stomach had collided with my fist quite recently. "It's not crap, Mr. Kane; it's a very good piece of psychological science. It helped us understand the human psyche as we know it today."

On any other day, I would have asked if a psyche was what you called a female psycho. Today, I let it pass.

He continued because I had not interrupted, "I believe it, and so do a lot of other psychiatrists across the world. It's based on science, logic and research, quite different from the kind of prejudice that people with misguided anger have." I did not have misguided anger, I felt like telling him. I didn't miss his solar plexus, did I? "But enough of that," he said, clapping his hand once. It did not come out as sharply as he wanted it to, and for a moment there, the frustration showed on his face. It sounded as if someone had slapped a dog's rump. Possibly a Chihuahua.

"You keep mentioning all these complexes," I reminded him. "And I keep telling you that her father died a long -" I stopped myself as a thought struck me. "Shit, is it Nikki? Is she the one with the Electra complex?"

"No, no, no, no, no," he said, echoing himself. Was he the hollow man, you might wonder - but I didn't care at the time. "You've got it all wrong. Once again, Mr. Kane, you've jumped before the horse."

I pointed out that he had mixed up his idioms, and he replied that I was mixing up his digestive system. "So we're even," I told him. "Now why don't you cut the crap - I think I am repeating myself here - and tell me, please, what this is all about."

Maybe it was the 'please' that did it, maybe he was tired of the comic routine he was running for me, maybe he needed to go to the bathroom because his digestive system had worked too well, or not at all, or maybe he felt sorry for me. "I'll spell it out for you, but please don't interrupt me. I hope we are agreed on that. No, don't say anything, just listen. For once in your whole goddamned life, just listen. And then you can ask me questions at the end."

Should I raise my hand? Oh, shuddup!

"Your wife does NOT have Electra complex. Now. She had it once upon a time, when she was just into her teens, long before she had met you, a time when she thought her father was her soul mate. Her one true love, I believe was the phrase she used, and she told me you know all about her and her father. That nothing happened, that he died of a heart-attack at their table during dinner and that she blamed her own mother for a long time afterwards."

I knew all that, and a bit more. If he had not died, she might never even have become my girlfriend, let alone my wife. She had admitted as much to me when I took her to my apartment the day after I had proposed to her. I also knew that she had not forgiven her mother until after she too had passed away. It was only that evening, with her sobbing at her parents' graves, that I knew that finally, her love was all mine. Nikki came barely a year later.

"Her counselor at the time managed to convince her she was not to blame, but I don't think he did enough to keep her from transferring that on to her mother. That hatred remained long enough for Rachel to decide that she would never be to her daughter what her mother had been to her. A hurdle."

I wanted to interrupt but didn't. He was on a roll, and I did not want to derail him into things that made less sense. What he was telling me sounded something like Morpheus would tell Neo - if you can believe this one thing, then everything that flows from this must also be true. It took me ten times to understand what the Matrix was all about. I had a feeling I should have recorded Dr. Chivago's monologue - maybe he went to the same writer the Wachowski brothers did. Therefore, I did what everyone else does when they don't really understand.

I kept nodding.

"I don't really think that Rachel woke up one morning and decided that she would allow her daughter to have a physical relationship with her father if she so wished. It was more likely a gradual change in her attitude and acceptance, and maybe it so happened that one day, she asked herself what would happen if, and she realized that she didn't really mind. Not only that, but she really didn't want to be the reason it never happened. It was such a strong sentiment that it scared her - what if they were really in love and never realized it because she was always around, maybe ruining what could have been the defining, or redefining, moment in their lives."

"Damn," I said, unable to help myself.

"What?" he asked anxiously. I did not blame him - somebody says that in my house, my first instinct is to wonder if the guy's lost his bladder.

"I really should have recorded this. I don't have the faintest idea what you said just now."

He smiled patronizingly. "I don't buy this act of you being as dumb as you try to let me think you are. Impulsive, yes, but not dumb. Your wife told me you are one of the sharpest knives in the drawer."

He did not say that, actually. I wanted him to, but what he did say was, "Let me rephrase. Your wife promised herself that she would never interfere if you had an affair with your daughter. In fact, she would try to stay out more often so that you could have more privacy. Do you understand?"

I understood what he was telling me. It was exactly the kind of situation that had let to an increasing number of spats in the household over the past few months. Ever since my last case, when I had escaped death simply because my bullet was a tenth of a second faster than that of the guy whose head it went into, she had alternated between fussing over me and suddenly withdrawing herself, going off for hours and leaving me alone with Nikki, for whom I had actually taken the bullet. The simmering tension over her signing up for overtime at her hospital, working well into the night, would boil over from time to time once I had recovered completely. I would tell her to relax, take some time off, spend some of it with me, and she would accuse me of not being supportive enough in her career growth. She was a nurse, which is the reason I usually scoffed at her when she said this.

Now I understood why she was acting as if I didn't need her, as if she no longer mattered to me. Pushing me away from herself and into our daughter's arms. I asked him if she really thought that.

He nodded gravely. "It's slightly more complicated than that, but you've understood the fundamentals."

"Does anybody else know about this? I mean, Nikki? Your nurse?"

"I wasn't as graphic with Ms. Kane," he said. "What I mainly wanted from her was confirmation of your actions one way or another. She convinced me that you were either a terrific father or a terribly impotent one." He smiled at his own joke - at least, one of us appreciated it more than it was worth. "No, she doesn't know her mother wants to set it up so that the two of you can have an illicit relationship with each other."

I was really impressed that he had managed to describe the alleged incestuous union - hey, now I'm doing it too - without ever having to use the F-word. Kinda reminded you that there were other words in the English language too.

"And your nurse, with the pretty legs?" I asked him, jerking a thumb at the door.

"With the fake tits?" he added, and it convinced me that the room was definitely not bugged. She had to be in on it if it were a con job - a possibility I still hadn't dismissed - and I was sure would never take kindly to being addressed as a bimbo with silicone jobs, even if half the silicone in the entire world was concentrated within twenty square miles of where she was. "Nah, she knows nothing. I keep her so that I can get guys - like you - to visit me. I do my own filing because she doesn't know what comes after Q, and she does not have a key to this room. I could have a heart-attack in here and she can't come in unless she kicks the door in."

"With those legs? Wouldn't be worth it," I told him, grinning. He said, "Amen to that, brother."

Look at us - five minutes ago, I was all set to murder him. Now we sat around, chatting about a woman we hardly knew, like a couple of friends from college. It's the air, I tell you. It makes you do strange things. I once even heard a defendant say that under oath and the jury let him walk. Of course, he walked into a speeding car just outside the courts and was no longer concerned about the air by the time he hit the pavement, and the driver, who was actually the brother of the girl the deceased defendant had murdered a year ago, tried the same tactic in the same court to a different jury and got ten years. Must be the air, I tell you.

"Are you sure? That no one else knows?" I asked again.

"Look, when I told your wife I wanted to see you, I asked her not to say a word about it to you or your daughter. I made the same request to your daughter, too, and she promised me she wouldn't say anything about it until after you had seen me. I called you up personally on my cell phone, and if you remember, all I told you was that your family had been in to see me, my time was paid for anyway, and my nurse had pretty legs, all of which is perfectly true. And you've got that tape, which I want you to return as soon as you've heard it all so that I can make copies of it and sell it on eBay."

Thanks, I said, and he asked what for. "Letting me keep the recorder. It's so nice of you, Dr. Chivago."

"Damn, I always listen to a tape before I go to sleep."

"You pervert," I told him. "You are supposed to be helping people, not jacking off listening to their intimacy issues."

"What else?" he remarked as I glanced at my watch. "You thought I was in it for the money?"

We had another beer each, in companionable silence. When I finished, I brought up the subject of what my daughter had said. He shook his head. "She's not a patient of mine, so I can't violate her confidence."

I stared at him. Wouldn't you? "You had no problem violating Rachel's confidence, and she's your patient."

He took a last drag on his bottle and set it down on the floor. "I told you about Rachel because she would be in trouble if I didn't. I won't tell you about Nikki because she would be in trouble if I did."

I didn't understand that, either, but let it go. I figured I could ask her myself. It was a thought that gave me pause. In all my life pursuing suspects, parole-offenders, criminals, witnesses and the occasional client who skipped facts or payments, I had never had a problem asking the right question. Nikki had always been the exception. If I asked her how was her boyfriend, she would retort that I shouldn't care about a guy whose name - even - I didn't know; if I asked her how was Mr. So-and-so, it was always the answer that he was not the current boyfriend.

And now all I had to do was sit her down and ask her what she had told a strange, if not weird, psychiatrist - named after a guy who had sold his soul to the Devil, and what was the deal with that, anyway? - about her parents' sex lives, especially one which was supposed to involve her. Ha! For a moment, I wished that I had been the one who had explained to her about the birds and the bees. It should have given me some kind of practice for this sort of thing. Maybe there was a book about it I could order online - like 'How to Ask Your Teenage Daughter if She is Having Sex with You.' On the other hand, maybe, 'Does She Know What I Did to You Last Summer?' might have some useful insights too.

I stood up to leave and shook hands. We played the usual my-hand-is-stronger-than-yours game that grown heterosexual men do whenever they come in physical contact, and I would like to say I won because I was not the one rubbing my hand when we stopped. However, just as I turned towards the door, I realized that I had left one question unasked.

"So what did you tell my wife in the end, anyway? That she could go home and stop all this nonsense?"

His smile was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma surrounded by two rows of pearly white teeth that was definitely high maintenance. "You've got the tapes. Why don't you find out for yourself?"