The Seducers Page 11

  Rather than defend Shapiro, Jonas preferred to focus on Wayne’s pathology.

  “Why not write, then, that ‘I didn’t like the book,’ or ‘I don’t agree with his premises’?”

  Jonas could envision a cartoonist’s lightbulb glow over Wayne’s head as his acerbic frown was instantly transformed into a sheepish smile.

  “You’ve got me dead to rights, again. I know … don’t say it … my ‘penchant for the dagger.’” He sighed and then continued, struggling against an unaccustomed verbal awkwardness.

  “Also … I feel foolish saying this … I think my telling you about that review was a roundabout compliment.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “By damning Shapiro, I was letting you know how much I appreciated the sort of work that you do.”

  The words were doubly welcome. Besides Jonas’ personal gain—the glow that comes from good feedback—they represented a major breakthrough for Wayne. This was the first time he’d ever expressed any direct affection. Jonas was about to pursue this issue further, but the door buzzer sounded. Peculiar. Who might it be? He had no one scheduled for the next hour.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, leaving his chair. “Let me see what that’s about.”

  He walked out of the office, strode through his waiting room, and opened the front door.

  “I have a paper for Dr. Lippman,” the slight, bespectacled, casually dressed man said.

  “I’m Dr. Lippman.”

  “Here.” He thrust the envelope at him, turned, and was off.

  Who, Jonas wondered, would send him mail this way?

  He glanced at the return address. Koenigsberg, Newfield and Drangel. Obviously some law firm. No names he knew. Tapping the letter down to one side, he neatly tore off the opposite edge of the envelope. It was a summons of some kind, informing him

  that you are being sued for $250,000 for malpractice.…

  The peglegged man above him obviously had a second foot.

  He continued to read. After the initial shock, he felt peculiarly at ease. Relieved, in an odd way, that the waiting game was over. The issue, finally, was joined. The panic would come later on.

  22

  “Deny. Deny. Deny!” were his words as he reached for Newfield’s summons, fingered his glasses from his brow to his nose, and read.

  He rocked back in his swivel chair, his feet, shod in black lisle socks and patent leather moccasins, sweeping up on the teak desk. More like a showman than a lawyer, an old-time film mogul, clad in lightweight gray worsted slacks, a pink cotton shirt with white collar and white French cuffs, and a jeweled stick pin through his wide polka dotted blue silk tie. Upon one wrist, a platinum identification bracelet. On the other an Omega, fastened with a gold-link watchband.

  Jonas was transfixed by his girth, the huge frame, curly red hair, balding at the top, a neatly trimmed fiery moustache, gaudy rings, and the foul-smelling Havana he fondled while Jonas told him, briefly, of the charges.

  Louis Mayer, P. T. Barnum or F. Lee Bailey. Did it matter? All he knew was that Norman Rosenkrantz had the reputation of being one of the best defense lawyers in the business.

  “I must assume,” he went on, pulling his glasses still lower and peering over them at Jonas with pale blue eyes, “that you are innocent of these charges.” Jonas started to respond but Norman cut him off.

  “Before you answer, hear me out. What I say to you now I say to every prospective client. If you tell me you’re guilty, I don’t wish to defend you. I am only interested in representing people who believe in their own innocence. Of course, if you wish to talk about hypothetical guilt, that is something else entirely.”

  It did not take Jonas more than half a second to get the point.

  “Now,” Norman continued, “if I read you correctly, you were about to ask, ‘What if a psychiatrist actually was intimate with his patient?’ Is that not so?”

  “You read me,” he answered, self-consciously, “loud and clear.”

  Norman arose from his desk, tapped the stogie against the rim of a large crystal ashtray, and walked to the picture window of his Madison Avenue office. Staring at the city, thirty-two stories below, he addressed himself to his own query.

  “On an individual level, people have a variety of responses to that issue. Some would consider it a grave breach of medical responsibility. Others might think it to be no different than an affair between a banker and a borrower, Lady Chatterley and her gardener, or a lawyer and his client.”

  “But what,” Jonas interjected, “if it were done neither as an affair nor seduction? Suppose it were an attempt at sex therapy; the sort of thing Masters and Johnson have popularized. Except that instead of employing a surrogate, the therapist himself was the instructor?”

  Norman turned to face him. “That brings us to my next point: the legal implications. Here, my friend, it is no longer a matter of an individual juror’s personal predilections. Any judge would instruct any jury to find such a defendant guilty of malpractice.

  “In your profession you must have come to realize what a superficially moralistic society we are. Our laws embody every puritanical ethic. Accordingly, it is illegal in many states to be a pederast, adulturer or cunnilinguist. People have been tried and imprisoned for acts of fellatio, homosexuality, and prostitution.

  “By what right does society legislate against pleasurable acts between consenting adults? ‘None,’ would be the gut reaction. Yet civilized men have always taken it upon themselves to set standards of behavior for all to live up to. Failure to conform to certain agreed-upon practices constitutes a crime.

  “You would protest, probably, the stupidity of certain of these laws.” Jonas nodded. “Why, for instance, should pleasure be associated with sin? Why, going further, even punish an otherwise law-abiding cocaine user or heroin addict simply because he uses a certain substance? Another crime without a complainant. On the other hand, how does one justify certain laws that allow private corporations to exploit public property?

  “Still, for all its faults, law is the best protection we have against anarchy. Not to mention,” he added with a sly twinkle in his eye, gesturing, with a wide sweep of his hand, toward the four corners of the room, “a hell of a way to make a living. But I’ll return to the matter of my fee later on.”

  He again tapped the ash from his cigar.

  “So,” he puffed lazily, releasing a perfect ring, “if a surrogate cohabits with an inhibited patient under the psychiatrist’s supervision, the law would possibly consider it sex therapy. But once the doctor eliminates the middleman—if he dares attempt to heal and find pleasure at the same time—it is considered a crime.”

  “Isn’t there any defense for that hypothetical situation?” Jonas asked, hoping to weld law and truth.

  “Yes.”

  His spirits rose.

  “What?”

  Norman sat down again. “You can always plead not guilty by reason of insanity. But that wouldn’t augur too well for someone interested in continuing his practice.

  “No. I’m afraid one is left with two choices. You admit guilt, try to explain your benevolent motivations, hope that the jury awards the plaintiff considerably less than the quarter of a million dollars in damages she seeks, and accept the fact that you will probably lose your medical license. Or.…”

  “Or what?”

  “You deny, deny, deny.”

  “It’s that simple, is it?”

  “Simple? I’m afraid not. For if we deny these charges we must offer the jurors some plausible explanation that enables them to dismiss the charges.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we must account for why the plaintiff would make such unfounded, vindictive, and preposterous charges. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  It was a bitter prescription Counselor Rosenkrantz was ordering. Reflexively, Jonas swallowed.

  “Indeed you do.”

  23

  He would have to save Jonas from his good intenti
ons. Apparently, a few well-meant intimacies had already placed him on this road to hell. Norman was not going to allow his prospective client to be destroyed by similarly honorable resolves.

  The case had intrigued him from the moment Jonas phoned. It should be the sort of trial Norman loved: a courtroom drama played before an audience of millions. How could the press resist it? The public’s curiosity must be served.

  He’d sized Jonas up as a man of integrity, somewhat naive in spite of his intelligence; a person with a measure of idealism. And Norman believed in the case. Was it right to deprive a man of his livelihood because of an error in clinical judgment? Did any spurned lover deserve a quarter of a million dollars in damages? Clearly, no. Intent, in his eyes, counted. He, Norman Rosenkrantz, would have to create a suit of facts that, draped upon his client, would clothe him in respectability.

  Ambivalence, a term popularized by the followers of Freud, clearly applied to this good doctor. Norman deduced that Jonas had watched “Perry Mason” too often: television trials where the great defense attorney wins each case while remaining scrupulously honest. Well, he would have to enlighten him, for a successful defense meant committing Jonas to “The Story.”

  What Story? That remained to be seen. Each defense had its own Story. First he’d have to determine just what evidence the plaintiff had. Then he must get Jonas to weave the cloth that Norman would trim and shape; to bend truths and create likely scenarios that would justify a legitimate end: keeping the doctor in business.

  It would be done surely, if indirectly; done in such a way that no embittered client could ever claim “my attorney told me to lie.” It would be done as it was done by lawyers everywhere.

  “So.…” Norman cleared his throat, removed his glasses, exhaled moisture on the lenses, and polished them clean with the handkerchief he took from his trouser pocket: blue silk with white dots that matched his tie. Jonas seemed like a man in a dentist’s waiting room, knowing he needs the consultation to ease the pain, but dreading the pain of the consultation.

  “Let us get down to details. According to Newfield’s covering letter, you began sleeping with your patient in July of this year. Later on, he alleges that you continued your intimacies outside your office.”

  Jonas fidgeted with his watchband, avoiding Norman’s gaze.

  “Tell me, Dr. Lippman … or do you prefer to be called Jonas?…”

  He looked up. “Jonas will do.”

  “Good. And I prefer Norman. If we’re going to work together on this, we’ll be seeing quite a bit of one another. Mister and Doctor do seem a bit stuffy.” He smiled, ground out his cigar, reached into a humidor and came up with two panatelas. “Want one, Jonas?” he asked, leaning across his desk and waving them before him.

  He was pleased that Jonas accepted the offering in spite of his grimace. The Braun cigarette lighter that lay on his desk was a marvel of design, engineering, and aesthetics: steel mechanisms enclosed in Bauhaus lucite. The sort of appliance that might be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. Pushing it toward Jonas, he watched him puff mightily before the tip of the Havana glowed; watched the puckering of his lips, unaccustomed as they were to the sharp bite of the tobacco. Then, with easy satisfaction, he lit his own and continued his line of interrogation.

  “Can anyone substantiate her story? Were there any witnesses to these claimed intimacies?”

  Jonas straightened in his chair, wondering how he must appear to be asked such a preposterous question.

  “Of course not.”

  “Good. Just checking. Don’t get your hackles up, my friend, for you’ll be asked many more embarrassing questions before we’re done. But it’s part of my job not to let any possibly harmful testimony take us by surprise. And you can be sure that Mr. Al Newfield will make my inquiries seem like those of some Mother Superior.

  “So.…” along with now, his favorite adverb, “it’s simply a question of your word against hers.

  “Now … was Miss Lewis ever in your home?”

  “My office is on the ground floor of the brownstone I live in.”

  “But was she ever upstairs? In the living quarters?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Another plus. If she took the stand and described the furnishings of your private quarters—even if she were there innocently—it would appear suspicious.”

  They both puffed on their stogies, like two pols in a well-furnished back room, quite satisfied with the arrangement that they were negotiating.

  “Let me ask you,” Norman continued, eying the wet end of his cigar, then smoothing back a slight tear in the wrapper, “have the two of you ever been seen together in public?”

  Jonas stammered out a hesitant yes.

  “Who? When? How?” Norman looked menacing.

  “In late July we went to a few restaurants together. A film. Did some shopping.”

  “Bad. Then again.…” His smoke had gone out and he relit it. “Waiters and shopkeepers are not likely to remember one face among thousands. Particularly when they appeared months ago.”

  “And that’s good?” Jonas asked, falling into the rhythm of Norman’s comments.

  “Yes.” Norman leaned back, feet propped, again, upon the desk, lost in thought. And then he grasped an essential element of The Story.

  “Of course,” his voice was coaxing, reassuring, “part of the treatment for seriously disturbed individuals sometimes involves extraordinary measures, does it not?”

  “Yes.” Jonas was obviously wondering where he would lead him.

  “Including resocialization experiences? The sort of thing where the therapist hangs out, informally, with the patient?”

  “Certainly. That goes back some time. To Frieda Fromm-Reichman, in the 1940s, or to Sechahaye, a European therapist who wrote The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, where she had an adolescent living in her home.”

  “You’ll write those names down for me,” Norman tapped his ash again. “Along with more recent authorities, I trust.”

  “Surely. R. D. Laing writes about that, too. At Kingsley Hall. Milieu therapy. Halfway houses. They’re all part of that trend of working with severely ill people.”

  “So,” Norman nodded, “if you spent time outside your office with Arlene Lewis it would have been as part of this type of therapy.”

  The statement was open ended. He looked for Jonas’ affirmation. Nothing came.

  “I said, you would have been conducting a form of resocialization therapy. Right?” The right was insistent.

  “Yes. I guess so.”

  “Guess so? You must know so.”

  Jonas answered by rote, not choice, out of the realization that any other response meant that no defense was possible.

  “The next question is, was she so socially isolated that this type of treatment would appear logical?” He hoped the answer wouldn’t undermine The Story before it developed.

  “A case could readily be made for that,” Jonas said flatly, and Norman breathed an inner sigh of relief. “She’d been basically friendless, asocial, involved only in her work.”

  “Good.” Norman took another self-satisfied puff.

  “But,” Jonas added, “that sort of treatment is done with schizophrenics; really wasted people. Arlene worked—and still does—as a very competent editor.”

  “No contradiction,” Norman said, dismissing the argument with a flutter of his hand. “Schizophrenics are everywhere. The last presiding judge I had was schizophrenic. My first wife was schizophrenic. Richard Nixon was schizophrenic.

  “Achievement and pathology are not necessarily contradictory, if I might play psychiatrist myself. Now are they?”

  “No.”

  “So … think. Now why, if I am to defend you, would she bring such unfounded charges?”

  “I don’t know,” Jonas squirmed.

  “Bad. You’re her psychiatrist and you don’t know her motivations?”

  “Unstable?” Jonas’ voice was tentative.

  “S
chizophrenic, perhaps?”

  Jonas winced, Norman beamed. “And,” he continued, “possessive? Jealous of you? Caught up in every patient’s fantasy: to live happily ever after with their therapist?”

  Again, a hesitancy in response.

  “Now look. I can appreciate your concern for truthfulness. But I trust you are also concerned with survival. Unless we have a conceivable explanation of these charges, you’re going to be considered the number one sex pervert of the century. A medical Svengali, exploiting a host of helpless Trilbys.”

  Jonas blinked. Norman went on.

  “Trials are not the civilized things of soapbox drama. They are no-holds-barred combat, fought with words, but battles to the death, nonetheless. Each lawyer convinces himself that his client is just and the other party devious. And each adopts devious tactics to defeat and counter the opposition. It’s no different from our good guy CIA carrying out assassinations to defeat the bad guy NKVD.

  “The role of the plaintiff’s lawyer is to convict. Any lawyer worth his salt—and Al Newfield is a good lawyer—will work tooth and nail to do this. He will imply guilt and stealth in your most innocent action. Natural lapses will be scorned as deliberate cover-ups; errors of judgment implied to be cynical misdeeds.

  “Now … you must decide. Is it right to lose your license and a substantial amount of money because of some alleged intimacy? To be shamed before the public for a mistake in clinical acumen? For being human?”

  “No.”

  “So.… Could your patient have been a particularly difficult schizophrenic? Even before her hospitalization?”

  “Yes.”

  “Louder,” said Norman. “I can barely hear that.”

  “Yes!”

  “And when you realized how hopeless the situation was, you discontinued treatment and referred her to someone else?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  “How did you know I referred her to someone else?”