X In the Mind Reader’s Lair

When I finally woke the next morning, my head was heavy with the detritus of dreams and difficult sleep. I once read that a year or eighteen months after losing them, you dream of your dead as they were in their prime. I suppose I must sometimes dream of my mother as she was in my childhood, vivid and intense, but last night she was dying, eyes heavy with morphine, face unrecognizable as disease had leached flesh from bone. Lotty and my mother are such intertwined strands in my mind that it was almost inevitable that her distress would overlay my sleep.

Morrell looked at me questioningly when I sat up. He had come in after I went to bed, but I was tossing, not sleeping. His impending departure made him feverishly nervous; we made love with a kind of frantic unsatisfying energy but fell asleep without talking. In the morning light he traced my cheekbones with his finger and asked if it was his leaving that had disturbed my sleep.

I gave a twisted smile. “My own stuff this time.” I gave him a brief synopsis of the previous day.

“Why don’t we go to Michigan for the weekend?” he said. “We both need a breather. You can’t do anything on a Saturday, anyway, and we can give each other better comfort away from all these people. I love Don like a brother, but having him here right now is a bit much. We’ll come back in time for Michael and Carl’s concert on Sunday.”

My muscles unknotted at the thought, and it sent me into the day with better energy than my tormented night warranted. After stopping at home to take the dogs for a swim, I drove into the West Loop to the Unblinking Eye, the camera and video place I use when only the best will do. I explained what I wanted to Maurice Redken, the technician I usually work with.

We ran my copy of the Channel 13 video through one of their machines, watching Radbuka’s naked face as he went through the torments of his life. When he said, “My Miriam, where is my Miriam? I want my Miriam,” the camera was right in his face. I froze the image there and asked Maurice to make prints of that and a couple of other close-ups for me. I was hoping Rhea Wiell would introduce me to Radbuka, but if she didn’t, the stills would help Mary Louise and me track him down.

Maurice promised to have both the stills and three copies of the tape ready for me by the day’s end. It wasn’t quite ten-thirty when we finished. There wasn’t time for me to go to my office before Don’s appointment with Rhea Wiell, but I could walk the two miles from the Eye to Water Tower if I didn’t dawdle-I hate paying Gold Coast parking fees.

Water Tower Place is a shopping mecca on North Michigan, a favorite drop-off place for tour buses from small Midwestern towns as well as an oasis for local teens. Threading my way through girls whose pierced navels showed below their cropped T-shirts and women pushing expensive baby buggies overflowing with packages, I found Don leaning against the back entrance. He was so engrossed in his book he didn’t look up when I stopped next to him. I squinted to read the spine: Hypnotic Induction and Suggestion: an Introductory Manual.

“Does this tell you how Ms. Wiell does it?” I asked.

He blinked and closed the book. “It tells me that blocked memories really can be accessed through hypnosis. Or at least the authors claim so. Fortunately I only have to see if Wiell has a sellable book in her, not sort out whether her therapy is legitimate. I’m going to introduce you as an investigator who may help collect background data if Wiell and the publisher come to terms. You can say anything you like.”

He looked at his watch and fished a cigarette from his breast pocket. Although he’d changed clothes, into a pressed open-necked shirt and a tweed jacket, he still looked half-asleep. I took the book on hypnotic induction while Don lit his cigarette. Broadly speaking, hypnosis seemed to be used in two main ways: suggestive hypnosis helped people break bad habits, and insight or exploratory hypnosis helped them understand themselves better. Recovering memories was only one small part of using hypnosis in therapy.

Don pinched off the glowing end of his cigarette and put the stub back in his pocket. “Time to go, Ms. Warshawski.”

I followed him into the building. “This book could help you end that expensive habit for good.”

He stuck out his tongue at me. “I wouldn’t know what to do with my hands if I quit.”

We went behind a newsstand on the ground floor, in a dark alcove which held the elevators to the office floor. It wasn’t exactly secret, just out of the way enough to keep the shopping hordes from straying there by mistake. I studied the tenant board. Plastic surgeons, endodontists, beauty salons, even a synagogue. What an odd combination.

“I called over to the Jane Addams School, as you suggested,” Don said abruptly when we were alone on an elevator. “First I couldn’t find anyone who knew Wiell-she did her degree fifteen years ago. But when I started talking about the hypnotherapy, the department secretary remembered. Wiell was married then, used her husband’s name.”

We got off the elevator and found ourselves at a point where four long corridors came together. “What did they think of her at UIC?” I asked.

He looked at his appointment book. “I think we go right here. There’s some jealousy-a suggestion she was a charlatan, but when I pushed it seemed to stem from the fact that social work had made her rich-doesn’t happen to too many people, I gather.”

We stopped in front of a blond door with Wiell’s name and professional initials painted on it. I felt a tingle from the idea that this woman might read my mind. She might know me better than I knew myself. Was that where hypnotic suggestibility got its start? The urgent desire to be understood so intimately?

Don pushed the door open. We were in a tiny vestibule with two shut doors and a third one that was open. This led to a waiting room, where a sign invited us to sit down and relax. It added that all cell phones and pagers should be turned off. Don and I obediently pulled out our phones. He switched his off, but mine had run down again without my noticing.

The waiting room was decorated with such attention to comfort that it even held a carafe of hot water and a selection of herbal teas. New Age music tinkled softly; padded chairs faced a four-foot-high fish tank built into the far wall. The fish seemed to rise and fall in time to the music.

“What do you think this setup costs?” Don was trying the other two doors. One turned out to be a bathroom; the other was locked.

“I don’t know-installing it took a bundle, but looking after it wouldn’t take too much. Except for the rent, of course. The nicotine in your system is keeping you awake. These fish are putting me to sleep.”

He grinned. “You’re going to sleep, Vic: when you wake up-”

“It isn’t like that, although people are always nervous at first and imagine the television version.” The locked door had opened and Rhea Wiell appeared behind us. “You’re from the publishing company, aren’t you?”

She seemed smaller in person than she had on television, but her face held the same serenity I’d noticed on screen. She was dressed as she had been on camera, in soft clothes that flowed like an Indian mystic’s.

Don shook her hand, unembarrassed, and introduced both of us. “If you and I decide to work together, Vic may help with some of the background checking.”

Wiell stood back to let us pass in front of her into her office. It, too, was designed to put us at ease, with a reclining chair, a couch, and her own office chair all covered in soft green. Her diplomas hung behind her desk: the MSW from the Jane Addams School of Social Work, a certificate from the American Institute of Clinical Hypnosis, and her Illinois license as a psychiatric social worker.