The Mask of Sanity Read online

  To his surprise, Delilah Navare laughed. A high-pitched, almost musical laugh. Even her father cracked a thin smile.

  “I’d like to see you every three weeks, Mr. Navare,” said Balint—which was twice as often as he usually booked his heart failure patients. “We’ll set up some evaluations for you and get you on as many transplant lists as possible . . . and then we’ll have to keep you alive until you reach the top. There’s no choice in the matter. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds reasonable,” answered Navare. “If it happens, then it will sound good.”

  “Fair enough.” Balint liked the man’s style, the sort of stoic reserve that comes from a lifetime of disappointment. “I’m going to give my cell phone number to your daughter. You have any concerns or questions—any at all—you call me. Night or day. I mean it. If I find out you have an emergency and you don’t call me, I’m going to be mad as hell.” He wrote his private number on the flip side of a business card. “I’m also going to include my pager number. It’s always on—so no excuses.”

  Balint passed the card to Delilah and she thanked him. Then he took the liberty of escorting the patient and his daughter out to the elevators. He found himself wondering whether this girl was truly the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, or whether there had been others whom he hadn’t noticed because he’d been fully committed to Amanda. He couldn’t be certain. What he did know was that Delilah Navare was stunningly attractive—and he had every intention of seeing her outside his office.

  DELILAH INTRIGUED him; she didn’t distract him from his mission. Once he’d mapped out the general contours of his scheme, Balint set about methodically laying the groundwork. Most murderers killed in haste, desperation trumping their common sense. But Balint promised himself that he wouldn’t act prematurely. Whether it took him two years to bump off Sugarman, or ten, was entirely beside the point. Hadn’t it taken Oppenheimer half a decade to build an atomic bomb? Every step from acquiring the materials to selecting his victims—he’d decided that his plan required multiple victims—deserved the same painstaking care as a heart transplant. So while he’d charted his strategy in his head, Balint held off an entire month before launching his first preparations. If a month goes by and I still don’t uncover any glitches, he assured himself, that will be my cue to act.

  In early October, he finally felt comfortable enough with his plan to begin assembling his equipment. Even before he purchased any supplies, he required a safe place to store them. Balint didn’t dare conceal them inside his home, where one of the girls might stumble upon the evidence at the bottom of a drawer or behind the boiler. For a few days, he contemplated stashing his materials in his office—possibly in the locked cabinet where he kept an emergency supply of tranquilizers and analgesics—but he knew that he’d never sleep easy while the cleaning crew had access to the suite at night. It was true that he possessed the only key to the cabinet; he could even have installed a second strongbox beyond its steel doors. Yet he couldn’t risk one of the maintenance workers jimmying the lock in search of pharmaceuticals or cash. Eventually he decided that the safest hiding place was his stepfather’s fishing cabin on Lake Shearwater, an hour west of Laurendale in the Onaswego Hills.

  The two-room cedar cabin had been in Henry Serspin-sky’s family for multiple generations. Shortly after he’d married Balint’s mother—her second marriage, his third—the veterinarian invited his new stepson out for a weekend of hooking trout. Balint had been in college at the time. They’d repeated the pilgrimage annually, for another eight years, until Balint acquired children of his own and the retired vet declared himself “too old” to survive without creature comforts. On the final few excursions, the old man had needed to return to shore frequently to self-catheterize. Every year, Balint promised himself he’d make the trip on his own—or at least help Serspinsky rent out the cabin for a profit—but all he ever managed to do was drive to the site for a couple of hours to check on the upkeep and make sure squatters hadn’t burned down the place. It was a secluded structure at the end of a shaded dirt lane, and since the state’s Fish and Game Bureau had stopped stocking Lake Shearwater with trout several years earlier, even the neighboring lodges went largely unvisited. In short, the cabin offered the perfect spot to salt away his supplies.

  Balint drove out one day after work. Nothing strange about that, he assured himself. Early autumn was usually the season he inspected the property. Yet even as he steered up the poorly maintained roadway, his adrenaline surged. After weeks of planning, he was finally taking action.

  The cabin was almost exactly as he’d left it twelve months earlier: same squeaking front step, same burned-out light bulb in the bedroom, same aroma of wood chips. None of the dust on the floorboards appeared disturbed. Along the far wall, Serspinsky’s shelf of “inventor’s tools” gathered dust. Someone or something had shattered one of the cabin’s windowpanes, but the lock on the sash below didn’t bear any indications of tampering. Balint slipped into a pair of gloves. No reason to risk leaving stray fingerprints in whatever nook he selected as a hiding place—on the extremely remote chance that the authorities ever did search the cabin. But where to conceal his gear? His first instinct had been among the box springs beneath the bed; then it crossed his mind that a potential squatter might shift the mattress if he found himself unable to sleep. Instead Balint located a steamer trunk inside one of the closets that contained an assortment of tablecloths and draperies and vintage women’s undergarments. A few strands of ribbon and a pair of scissors, tucked into the bottom of such a chest, would hardly draw notice.

  On his way out, Balint dusted the entire cabin and fractured a second, larger windowpane, creating the illusion that a squatter had been trespassing on the premises. Even if the police ever found his supplies, he could deny knowing how they’d gotten there.

  His next step was to acquire the ribbon itself. He had to obtain a sufficient length to last him through his spree—but not so much that buying it attracted notice. Obviously he did not want to have to purchase additional ribbon after the initial murder. Here, he congratulated himself on making his first wise choice. Although he had a hypertension conference in Las Vegas on his calendar for the second weekend of the month, where he could easily have bought the ribbon at a local stationery shop—far from New Jersey, in case anybody ever tracked the materials to their point-of-sale—he realized that he’d draw suspicion if he wore gloves into a store in the Nevada desert during October. Not wearing gloves, however, ran the risk of leaving fingerprints on the ribbon. So he held off. Two weeks later, at the American Cardiology Association meetings in Minneapolis, he drove out to a suburban shopping plaza and purchased his supplies. (He avoided the city itself, because he’d read that some urban centers—New York, Washington—now had police cameras mounted along every block. He hadn’t been able to find any evidence of Big Brother in Minneapolis, but why take chances?) It was a windy, bracing afternoon and his leather gloves, if not essential, didn’t stand out.

  Balint chose green ribbon. His inspiration was the Red Ribbon Strangler, who’d terrorized Creve Coeur, Rhode Island, in the 1960s, but he feared—irrationally—that someone might associate red with blood, and from blood it was a short leap to cardiology. He also considered yellow, but too many families used yellow ribbon for a military tribute, and he didn’t want the authorities thinking the choice of yellow ribbon was incidental, that he’d found the trimming at the crime scene and made use of it. No, he needed them to think the killings were carefully planned. Black posed similar problems. Lots of people already owned black ribbons—employed them to transform hats and dresses into funeral attire. So green. He bought enough ribbon to produce thirty-two identical two-foot-long strands, far more than he anticipated using. He also purchased three packages of wrapping paper, an assortment of children’s toys, a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey set, and sufficient party favors to entertain every six-year-old child in Minnesota.

  “What birthday is this for your kid?” as
ked the sales clerk.

  “My niece,” he replied, correcting the girl in an effort to make his deception sound authentic. “Six—going on sixteen.”

  Balint found himself glancing at the girl’s cleavage, something he would never have done in his previous existence. She was cute. Not stunning like Delilah, but pretty enough. Under different circumstances—had he not been accruing supplies for his killing spree—he might have flirted, or even invited her out for a cup of coffee. Instead he thanked her politely and asked her to double bag his purchases. Then he traveled across the city to a different suburban shopping plaza and deposited all of the merchandise, except for the ribbon and scissors, into a Salvation Army dumpster. The following Tuesday morning, he detoured to Lake Shearwater on his way home from the airport and secured his equipment inside the steamer trunk.

  WHILE BALINT led a second life, amassing the accoutrements for his vengeance, his first life continued in all its regular chaos. He attended Allison Sucram’s wedding, to a red-haired woman in a wheelchair, and spent the reception discussing with the tax attorney seated to his right whether it was grammatically preferable to refer to the couple as two brides, or as spouse and spouse. He remembered only one other event from the evening: an aunt of the bride—the bride whose parents played bridge with Amanda—approached him in the cloakroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where the reception had taken place, to ask whether her diuretic could be responsible for her rash. At the end of the evening, he still wasn’t sure whether he’d ever met the Sucrams before.

  Later that month, he also attended a bar mitzvah in Philadelphia for the son of Amanda’s childhood piano teacher and a funeral for the father of a woman from her former “babies group.” He strove to appear extra attentive to his wife and to avoid arguments. He deferred to her on matters over which they might previously have bickered—like whether Jessie was too young to trick-or-treat without a chaperone. To outsiders, they must have appeared the perfect couple. To Balint, it felt as though they talked much less than they had previously—or, at least, less intimately—but he couldn’t actually pinpoint any specific examples. Maybe, it crossed his mind, they’d never spoken to each other with much intimacy.

  In mid-October, Balint’s mother tripped in the produce aisle at the Shop ’n Save and fractured her hip and her collarbone. She required a two-day stay in the hospital, six weeks of casting, and then another three months of rehab. She also required twenty-four-hour attention—a level of care that her husband couldn’t manage alone. During her first few weeks at home, Balint spent nearly every night in Hager Heights. Even Amanda had no excuse to justify staying away. He derived particular pleasure in insisting that his wife join him and the girls for lunch at the retirement village the following Saturday, claiming that he couldn’t look after both his mother and his daughters at the same time, all the while knowing this would disrupt Amanda’s date with Sugarman. She offered no objection. For a woman conducting an affair, she had a frustrating knack for prioritizing her own family—and this made it difficult for Balint to stay angry with her.

  Work also kept Balint busy. Chester Pastarnack, the senior heart-transplant surgeon at Laurendale-Methodist, announced his retirement—effective the first of November. Shortly afterward, Warren Sugarman, at thirty-five, was appointed acting head of thoracic surgery. That meant he joined the Wednesday morning leadership meetings that Balint attended each week, forcing him to endure his rival’s banter over croissants and coffee. It also meant that if he murdered Sugarman before Laurendale recruited a second heart-transplant surgeon, his crime would effectively shut down the hospital’s entire program for the time being. Unless, of course, Pastarnack agreed to come out of retirement during the crisis. Balint crossed paths with Sugarman at the synagogue on the second day of Rosh Hashanah and congratulated his rival on his promotion. “More like a punishment,” observed Sugarman. “I work harder . . . and Gloria gets more alimony.” But he sensed the smug bastard was pleased as punch.

  Balint found himself acutely aware of how peculiar it felt to be preparing for another man’s assassination—attending to the gruesome business in a detached, practical manner, as though arranging a medical symposium—but he refused to let these feelings trouble him. Occasionally, he even saw the matter-of-fact nature of his preparations as humorous. For instance, one day Jessie repeated a John Lennon quotation she’d picked up at school: “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” How very true. At the same time, Balint thought to himself with amusement, he highly doubted that his variety of plans were what the singer had meant.

  DELILAH NAVARE telephoned after nine o’clock on a Sunday evening. Balint had finished reading The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little to the girls, and was sitting in his study, his legs propped atop his ink blotter, proofreading a review article on valvular diseases. Amanda lay in bed upstairs, watching a documentary about female aviators. Or perhaps she’d already drifted off to sleep. He answered the call with irritation, assuming the hospital’s page operator had phoned the wrong service attending by mistake.

  “Dr. Balint?” asked the delicate voice. “I’m so sorry to call you this late. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  He recognized her immediately. “Delilah?”

  “You said we should call anytime—or I never would have interrupted your weekend. Is now an okay moment?”

  “It’s fine. Just fine. What’s going on?”

  “Papa’s getting worse,” she explained. “I’m scared.”

  She had phoned from the emergency room at Laurendale. As soon as he hung up the receiver, Balint tracked down the night resident in the ER and learned that the team planned to admit Norman Navare for management of fluid overload. Thirty-five minutes later—after kissing his daughters and urging Amanda not to remain awake—he strode across the ambulance bay in his crisp, knee-length white coat.

  “Dr. Balint. Chief of cardiology,” he introduced himself to the dumbstruck emergency resident. “You can admit Mr. Navare under my name. VIP. If we have any private rooms that we can comp for him, make it happen.”

  “Sure thing,” agreed the junior clinician. “I didn’t realize . . .”

  “Of course, you didn’t. If Jesus Christ showed up at this hospital, you’d tag him as a homeless dude wearing a loincloth and keep him waiting for hours. Now please do your best to keep Mr. Navare comfortable.”

  He poked his head around several curtains before he found the out-of-the-way alcove to which they’d consigned Delilah’s father. The patient sat propped at a right angle to the bed, on cannular oxygen, yet he still appeared desperate for air. Some idiot hadn’t properly removed the EKG electrodes from his chest, leaving the poor man’s hirsute body dappled with adhesives. His daughter stood beneath the cardiac monitor, dabbing his forehead with a damp towel. “Dr. Balint,” she exclaimed in surprise. “I figured you’d stop by in the morning. I didn’t dream you’d show up tonight.”

  “Jeremy,” he corrected her. “Please.”

  Something in his tone penetrated her reserve—and registered his intentions. This was her opportunity to draw a line in the sand, if she so desired, to remind him ever so subtly that he was her father’s cardiologist, not her friend. Balint actually felt as nervous as a teenager for a moment—as on edge as he’d been sixteen years earlier when he’d invited Molly what’s-her-name to the senior class prom. Certainly far more tense than he had felt while stockpiling materials for his murder plot. But to his relief, Delilah smiled—a gentle, unmistakably inviting smile—and she said, “Jeremy.” Just his name. Nothing more. But in those three syllables, she’d communicated everything Balint needed to know.

  Once the overnight nursing administrator learned to her surprise that Norman Navare, a Venezuelan-born disabled housepainter, was a VIP patient, and that the chief of cardiology had come to see him in person on a Sunday evening, she managed to find the man a complimentary private room in under an hour. Navare’s lab values came back better than Balint had anticipated. His oxygen sat
uration improved. With the appropriate pills and fluid regulation, he’d do fine—at least in the short run. Over the long haul, of course, he’d end up in the emergency room again sooner rather than later.

  “I do believe we have everything under control,” Balint assured both father and daughter, once the patient was safely ensconced in his room on the hospital’s luxurious top floor. Outside, the lights of the mansions along Laurendale Beach twinkled down to the coast. “You’ll be back on your feet in a couple of days—tops. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ears,” said Navare.

  “I’m sorry I dragged you out of bed,” said Delilah, but now she sounded affectionate and not particularly apologetic. “I didn’t know where else to turn. It’s just been the two of us since my mother passed away . . .”

  “I’m glad you dragged me out of bed. I’ll stop by in the morning, but I’ll have my phone on all night.”

  Suddenly, Delilah clasped his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you, Jeremy,” she said. “I trust you.”

  THIS LATE-NIGHT exchange with Delilah reminded Balint of the key advantage he had in comparison with history’s other murderers. People trusted doctors. People also harbored strong prejudices regarding serial killers. The men who shot strangers or blew up public fountains were assumed to be loners, delinquents, enemies of civilization. Poor, hungry bastards who thought too much. Theodore Kaczynski. Not leading cardiologists at tertiary medical centers, certainly not the husbands of tennis-playing librarians or the fathers of adorable, well-adjusted princesses. Never Alpha Omega Alpha graduates of Ivy League medical schools and fellows of the American College of Physicians and founding members of the Hager Park Racquetball Association. In short, beyond all of his painstaking preparations, he benefited from the simple reality that he didn’t remotely fit the bill of what people expected from a sociopath. Whether he actually was a sociopath, Balint decided, was not worth thinking about. All that he knew for certain was that life had dealt him an unjust hand and he was evening out the score.