The Mask of Sanity Read online

  “Maybe you can convert them,” proposed Balint.

  The rabbi winced. “That’s not our objective, Dr. Balint.” He then explained the nature of the initiative in painstaking detail: a coalition of local synagogues dispatched suburban housewives into inner-city neighborhoods to serve as “supplemental mothers” to children ages eight to eleven. The goal was violence prevention—to use maternal affection to steer the children away from crime. If Eve had been more devoted to Cain, their reasoning went, he’d have thought twice before slaying Abel—hence the project’s idiosyncratic name.

  “Several good studies show that lack of quality time with their mothers is directly correlated with school-age children’s risk for arrest as adolescents,” expounded Steinhoff. “But the solution is harder to implement than you might think. These mothers want to spend time with their sons and daughters, but they’re often single, and they’re too busy earning their livings at Walmart or some fast-food joint. So that’s where our volunteers come in. While the biological mothers are on the job, our supplemental mothers run workshops for the kids . . .”

  Balint couldn’t imagine Emmanuel Felder hatching such a harebrained scheme; he doubted Felder had ever stepped foot in Newark. “Why not just have the volunteers work at Walmart?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You could ask your enthusiastic housewives to do the menial work at Walmart or McDonald’s or wherever, freeing up the biological mothers to spend time with their kids. And then your volunteers could donate their earnings directly to the bio moms . . .”

  Steinhoff didn’t appear to realize that he was being mocked. “I imagine that might work too, Dr. Balint. But the organizers prefer this approach. They believe the supplemental mothers will provide good role models.” He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose, then tucked the cloth back into his jacket. “It’s a great program. Trust me on that. The only problem we have is convincing these inner-city families to participate.”

  “Too much competition from other charities?” asked Balint.

  “We’re not sure what the hurdle is. We’ve even tried offering free pediatric checkups to participating children . . . But it didn’t work. Most of these kids are already eligible for free care via CHIP or Medicaid . . .”

  “Maybe you could pay them cash,” suggested Balint. He was beginning to relish poking fun at the oblivious rabbi. “If you shelled out fifty dollars a session, I bet you’d increase your participation rate rather quickly . . . Or I have an even better idea: Why not just figure out the average salary at Walmart and offer a dollar more per hour? You’d have a packed house every afternoon . . .”

  Balint kept a straight face. Steinhoff appeared flummoxed. “We need your help, Dr. Balint,” he said. “What we’re hoping to do is to establish a free medical clinic for the parents. As an incentive for them to bring their kids to our program . . .”

  “And let me guess. You’d like me to set it up for you.”

  “It would be a great mitzvah, Dr. Balint.”

  “Not just a little mitzvah?”

  The rabbi smiled. “I think you were joking,” he said. “But that’s my fault. I should simply have said a mitzvah. Not great or small. One should not measure good deeds against each other . . . So can we count on you?”

  Needless to say, the decision had been reached long before Steinhoff ever stepped foot inside Balint’s office. Amanda had practically ordered him to tender his services and to recruit his colleagues to work at the site one afternoon each month. On the other hand, he relished keeping his visitor on coals.

  “Let me ask you something, rabbi. Do you really believe a program like this will make a difference?”

  “I can send you the studies.”

  “No need. I’m sure the data says what you’re telling me. But I’m more interested in the psychological aspects. The philosophical dimensions, if you will. Isn’t it possible that some of these children are just bad apples?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy? Or seen the film?”

  The rabbi had not.

  “Well, I’d take a look. I think Dreiser was onto something.” Balint had pointedly avoided mentioning a book about serial or spree killers—although he might as easily have cited The Stranger Beside Me or even The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “I’ve always been curious myself about individuals with antisocial personality disorder. What you might call sociopaths. And it seems to me that they’re naturally evil—born rotten to the core—and no after-school program with a herd of swanky housewives is going to fix that. You might steer these kids into more upscale versions of sociopathy, so they end up like Bernie Madoff or the folks who ran Enron, but you can’t alter their inherent natures.”

  The rabbi rubbed his eyes. “If I truly believed that, Dr. Balint, I don’t think I’d be able to put on my tefillin in the morning.”

  Balint wondered if he believed that himself. He knew he was capable of murder—but why? Because he’d suffered? Because of his father’s death and the sudden financial hardship that followed? Or because of something deep inside him that made him different from other human beings? He honestly didn’t know. What he did know was that if life had treated him more kindly—if Amanda had treated him more kindly—he’d have had no reason to kill. So maybe Steinhoff had a point: when society gave people what they wanted—what they needed—they had no cause to test its rules.

  “Maybe I’m too much of a cynic,” he said. “In any case, my wife is a great admirer of your program—and I’m a big fan of my wife. So my personal misgivings and instinctive pessimism aside, I’ll be glad to help you.”

  “ You’ll serve as medical director?”

  “If you’d like,” agreed Balint. “I suppose I’ll win extra points with Saint Peter.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “That’s right. We don’t do Saint Peter. But whoever the Jewish version of Saint Peter is, I’m banking on his being impressed.”

  Steinhoff opened his mouth as though he intended to educate Balint regarding Talmudic approaches toward admission to heaven. Then he seemed to think the better of it and merely thanked him for his support.

  BALINT’S FINAL patient of the afternoon proved to be a complicated case. She was an elderly blind woman who lived alone—and she’d apparently been concealing an increasingly severe state of cognitive decline. She was, as his rival might have said, a good candidate for dementia cookies. As a result, she’d been ingesting her heart failure medications haphazardly. On a different day, Balint might have gone “above and beyond” to coordinate a home-care nurse for Mrs. April, but that inevitably required numerous phone calls and several hours of paperwork. Instead he arranged for her to be admitted to the hospital’s medical service. Let the social worker on the ward find her a nurse, he decided. But even the process of arranging for transport to the cardiac-care unit took far too much time. He waited with the confused woman, his own heart sinking as the minute hand on his watch advanced relentlessly toward six fifteen—and beyond. At twenty past the hour, the orderlies finally wheeled Mrs. April away on a gurney.

  Balint’s nerves were just starting to slacken when, in the elevator, he bumped into Warren Sugarman. His rival carried a dozen vermillion roses wrapped in paper. He was whistling “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” perfectly on key, but broke off when Balint entered. They had the car entirely to themselves.

  “Hot date, Sugarman?” asked Balint.

  The words were already out of his mouth when he registered that the “hot date” must have been with his own wife—that while he was supposedly lecturing on cholesterol, Amanda had arranged a tryst with his foe. Sugarman paused before answering, confirming Balint’s suspicions.

  “I’m meeting up with an old flame,” said Sugarman. “A woman I knew long before I met Gloria.”

  “Someone from college or med school?” inquired Balint. Sugarman had obviously forgotten, for an instant, that the
y’d been at school together—twice. He toyed with his wedding ring inside the pocket of his slacks and decided to press his advantage. “Does this hot date of yours have a name?”

  “Not one you’d recognize.” Sugarman looked up at the elevator console, where the green light illuminated the numbers of the passing floors as they descended. “No need to mention this to your wife, Balint . . . She’s bound to tell you-know-who, and the less Gloria finds out about my private life, the better.”

  “Your secret is safe with me,” promised Balint. Yet he found himself seething at his rival’s audacity, so he added, “Of course Amanda may find out on her own. It wouldn’t surprise me if she already knew. That woman practically has eyes in the back of her skull when it comes to these sorts of affairs.”

  Balint prided himself on choosing the word affairs.

  “I’m sure she does.” The elevator doors opened and Sugarman stepped out. “Good night, Balint,” he said—and strode briskly toward the exit.

  Any rage Balint felt melted as soon as he spotted Delilah.

  If the nursing student looked gorgeous in casual attire, then decked out for dinner—in a floral-print skirt and ruffled yellow blouse—she was dazzling enough to induce an arrhythmia. Possibly a fatal one. Balint had dated his share of attractive women in his day, but even he found himself awed that Delilah Navare had agreed to join him on a date. It was hard to believe she was single. She greeted him with an adorable wave, flickering her fingertips. He glanced around the lobby, kicking himself for not choosing a less public meeting place. Fortunately, other than the security guard, he didn’t see any familiar faces.

  “I’m sorry I’m late. We had an emergency upstairs.”

  She flashed a mock frown. “You’ve got to stop apologizing for yourself, Jeremy. I’m sure whatever you were doing was far more important than meeting me . . .”

  “Far from it.”

  He steered her rapidly through the revolving doors and onto the pedestrian mall. At least he’d had the good sense to park on the street—to avoid the hospital lot, where he’d have been forced to chat with coworkers while waiting in line to pay. Outside, dusk had settled over the granite plaza and its marble statues of medical pioneers. A crisp chill hung in the air. Balint opened the passenger door of the Mercedes for his date, then whisked the two of them off to a seafood restaurant in Hager Park. It wasn’t his favorite eatery—far from it—but it was an establishment that Amanda despised, because she found the waitstaff oppressively attentive. He’d originally intended to take Delilah to the romantic bistro overlooking the harbor—he’d even booked a reservation—but he suddenly feared that he’d run into Amanda and Sugarman.

  “So tell me about your work,” Delilah said, after they’d been installed at a snug table beyond the lobster tank. “Can I ask what your emergency was—or are you not allowed to tell me?”

  “I’ll tell you anything,” said Balint. “Just please don’t shout it from the rooftops. Or post it on the Internet.”

  “I won’t even tell Papa.”

  Balint felt the girl’s warmth radiating toward him and he longed to impress her. “The big news of the day is that we’re setting up a free medical clinic for the parents of inner-city youth,” he said. “I met with one of our local rabbis today. The goal will be to give the parents an incentive to bring their kids to crime-reduction workshops.”

  He filled in the details on Project Cain, embellishing and fabricating as necessary. Delilah was left with the impression that the program had been entirely his brainchild, although he never claimed as much overtly. He also neglected to mention that he’d met Steinhoff through his wife—or that he even had a wife—which necessitated further half-truths to paper over inconsistencies. He didn’t even reveal that he was Jewish, and gave the distinct impression that he wasn’t, as he’d discovered that his potential mistress was a practicing Catholic, albeit a lax one, and he wanted to minimize their differences.

  As he shared his life story, or at least the version that didn’t include a wife and two daughters, and as he listened to Delilah’s own innocent tales of girlhood visits to cousins in Caracas and of deciding between a career in nursing and social work, he was struck by how easily he might embrace a new life with this exquisite creature—how he could simply abandon Amanda, cast off all thought of harming Sugarman, and enjoy fifty years alongside the earth’s most beautiful specimen of femininity. He was confident that, if he admitted to Delilah that he was married, but was in the process of getting divorced, she would forgive him. Alas, that wasn’t what he wanted. If he didn’t yet know his endgame with this attractive woman, he had no intention of disrupting his daughters’ lives for his own personal pleasure. Balint also acknowledged another, more troublesome reality: he was genuinely looking forward to wrapping his hands around Warren Sugarman’s neck.

  Together they polished off a carafe of wine. The notion entered Balint’s mind that he might be over the legal limit, but he felt in control enough to drive.

  “Shall I take you home?” he asked.

  “You don’t have to.”

  So they kissed. Tentatively at first, then less so. And soon Balint found himself checking in to the Hager Heights Motor Inn.

  THE FINAL logistical decision was the when.

  Selecting a date for a first attack was as important in serial killings as it was in military onslaughts. Balint would be choosing his D-Day, his H-Hour. Now that he had supplies and a location to target, he had no excuse to hold off.

  Amanda inadvertently decided the matter for him. He’d arrived home from his date with Delilah to find his wife watching television in bed. It was approaching midnight. “The girls are having a sleepover at Ellen Arcaya’s. They begged,” she announced. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Why would I mind?”

  He removed his tie and draped it over the back of a chair.

  “On a less pleasant note,” continued Amanda, “do you remember Herb Pickering?”

  “Should I?”

  “Dentist with bad teeth. His daughter is in Jessie’s ballet class.”

  Balint didn’t recall any dentists with bad teeth. He did know an ophthalmologist with a glass eye—but that seemed less than topical.

  “Are we having dinner with him?” asked Balint.

  “I hope not. Herb’s dead. Ruptured his aorta yesterday morning.”

  “And why are you telling me this?”

  “Because we have to make a condolence call. Tomorrow night. Both of us.” Amanda looked at him directly for the first time. “Don’t drop dead on me,” she said.

  “I’m not planning to.”

  But the thought took hold of him that he could drop dead—that thirty-four-year-old men did keel over from ruptured aortas and massive MIs and rare parasitic infections. During the three hours he endured in Alyssa Pickering’s parlor the next evening, he kept thinking: that sobbing little girl could be my Phoebe. This could be me. The logical corollary to these morbid thoughts was that he required additional life insurance, particularly if he planned on turning to a career of violent crime. In a pinch, he promised himself, he could always choose suicide—which was far preferable to a life of confinement. Assured that his daughters were financially protected and well-cared for, he’d easily choose death over prison. Balint had learned to his amazement, after a patient’s intentional overdose several years before, that some life insurance policies actually covered suicide, as long as six months had elapsed between signing up and kicking off.

  He intended to buy more insurance—much more. At the same time, he didn’t want to raise Amanda’s suspicions that anything was amiss, nor did he wish to leave yet another obvious clue for potential investigators. Fortunately their impending trip to Disney World offered an excellent excuse for maximizing his coverage: in case their plane crashed—and by some trick of fate, he was killed, while his wife and the girls survived. It was a preposterous concern, but also a theoretically plausible one; Amanda was easily convinced of his sincerity, even i
f she thought him paranoid. So that answered the when. He’d purchase insurance, enjoy his family time in Florida, and then return to target his first victim before Thanksgiving.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Every inch of the vacation bore the stamp of Amanda’s meticulous preparations. While he’d been occupied researching the nature of evil and hiding ribbons, his wife had planned twelve days of nearly continuous activity for the entire family. And yet all of her arrangements almost fell through when Balint was suddenly scheduled for a deposition on the morning of their departure, a crucial piece of his lawsuit against the firm that had installed a defective filtering system in their swimming pool. The contractors, a father and son from Portugal, had also damaged the concrete pavers, leaving a gap where rabbits and woodchucks could climb under the gate. Every few months, Balint had to fish a dead mammal from the water. His attorney assured him the case would ultimately settle in his favor—but opposition counsel appeared determined to make his life hell in the interim. “You can postpone the deposition,” the lawyer warned him, “but then they’ll ask the judge for a continuance, and we won’t get on the docket for another year.” Ultimately they decided that Amanda would fly to Orlando with the girls as planned, and that he’d meet up with them the following morning.

  The deposition itself was a humdrum affair; it took place in a rented conference room at a local real estate office and lasted less than an hour. Afterward Balint drove Delilah into New York City for dinner at a five-star French restaurant and a night of passion at an equally opulent hotel. She did most of the talking, which was fine by him, as he couldn’t discuss either his testimony or his plan to purchase life insurance without revealing his marriage. He paid cash. No need to leave a paper trail on his credit card. As far as Delilah knew, he’d be traveling to Orlando for a meeting of the American College of Physicians. The next morning, Balint boarded a flight to Florida—armed with an additional $800,000 of term life insurance that he’d purchased from an unctuous agent at the airport.