Dead Write: A Forensic Handwriting Mystery (6 page)

The spatial arrangement of the words and lines was wide, the margins large. Unique connections strung one letter to the next, which attested to Avram’s innate intelligence. His biographical notes indicated that he was the CEO of a computer graphics company. In light of the handwriting, that made sense.

Since she’d already met him, Claudia knew that Avram had charisma and was at least outwardly comfortable in social situations. Seeing it in black and white only verified what she had felt at their meeting. Now she was able to add to that intuitive sense the knowledge that, as charming as he was, Avram was more of an intellectual than a social creature.

The way he had arranged the handwriting on the page, the way he laid out the margins and spaces between the letters, words, and lines, were all symbolic of his need for what Claudia thought of as elbow room. He was not the type of person who would take kindly to someone hanging over his shoulder, breathing down his neck. Getting to know him on more than a superficial level would not be easy.

Like peeling the layers off an onion
, Claudia decided. It would take a long time and not a little effort to gain his confidence to the degree that one would be allowed into his trust.

Something jumped off the page at her: The punctuation looked too heavy, too round.

Getting off the bed, she laid the sample on the desk and withdrew from her briefcase the small padded velour bag that contained the pieces of her portable inspection microscope.

She unzipped the bag and quickly assembled the microscope. After removing the protective lens cap, she placed the scope over the sample Avram had written in English and slowly moved the objective lens from left to right until it came to the end of a sentence. When the lens was positioned exactly where she wanted it, she took a penlight and pointed it into the rectangular cutout in the acrylic base to illuminate what she was seeing through the eyepiece.

What Claudia had eyeballed now became clearer as she adjusted the rotary focus ring. She followed the same procedure throughout his English sample, moving the scope around until she found several heavy-pressured commas and periods. Dot grinding. The result of spending too long with the pen pressing on one spot.

The Hebrew script had a different kind of punctuation, but the pen pressure on the points and accents was as heavy as it had been in the English sample. Claudia slid the microscope off the page, feeling a keen disappointment.

She didn’t deceive herself into believing that a person’s handwriting could reveal
everything
about them, but one thing she had learned from her years of observation and experience was that handwriting did not lie. Dot grinding was a red flag that was often a demonstration of guilt feelings, and it pointed to the potential for abusive behavior, even violence. It could be that he had been harshly treated as a child and as an adult would take out the unresolved feelings on others. Coupled with the wide spaces between words, which meant that he didn’t feel strongly attached to other people, the dot grinding hinted at potential problems.

Had Avram Cohen used a different type of pen, she might not have as readily picked up on the dot grinding. A roller ball or gel pen would have been less apt to produce the same level of intensity on the ink line. But given the amount of pressure she was seeing in those dots, a fountain pen nib would have been wrecked. If she had asked to examine his pen after he wrote the sample, she would without question have been able to see the damage.

As Claudia continued her microscopic examination of the handwriting, something else came to her notice: tiny tics at the bottoms of the letter g that indicated sexual frustration and often pointed to problems with impotence.

Avram was a young man for that type of problem, yet there were many causes of impotence. She leafed through the pages until she came to Andy Nicholson’s analysis, expecting to see some mention of the red flags she had spotted. But as he had done in Shellee Jones’ report, Nicholson focused largely on Avram’s sex drive, which he had concluded was about average. There was no mention of anything troublesome, like possible violent acting out or sexual frustration. Had Andy not noticed the heavy punctuation or the tics? Or had he noticed and put a different construction on them?

If the potential for violence was something he had observed and for some specific reason failed to mention, his rationale was lost on Claudia. Part of the handwriting analyst’s job was to alert the client to possible problem areas.

If Grusha was going to make a successful match for Avram, it would be important for her to introduce him to an independent woman who would not expect him to make her a whole person. Because his locus of control was internal, Avram would have less interest in making the emotional needs of a demanding partner a high priority. He might know how to behave in social situations, but he was more likely to give the bulk of his time and energy to intellectual pursuits.

And there was the larger, more important issue: Under stress, he might well strike out physically at someone weaker. If indeed he was experiencing sexual potency problems, his frustration level was already high. A woman who was particularly emotional and demanding might be attractive to him at first, but she would soon press his hot buttons and then the situation could be dodgy.

Claudia continued to graze on her sandwich as she thought about Avram’s handwriting. She asked herself, given the level of aggression she was seeing, what sort of problems a woman might face in a relationship with a man like him.

It would have been helpful if she could see into handwriting like a crystal ball, but the truth was, handwriting reflected past behavior and the
potential
for future behavior. There was no way to know for certain whether all the conditions needed for the writer to act on that potential would come together in just the right mix at just the right time.

She recalled a client who had submitted samples of her own and her future husband’s handwriting for analysis. The droopy rhythm in the bride’s handwriting had marked her as having emotional dependency of a type that attracted her to abusive partners. The groom’s rigid, muddy-looking writing was that of an explosive personality seeking someone to abuse. True to type, the bride had ignored the warnings in the handwriting analysis report. When she later contacted Claudia, hysterical and running for her life after coming close to being beaten to death by this man, it came as no great surprise.

There was no surefire way to predict that someone would in fact become violent, but the fact that such a strong potential for violence existed in Avram Cohen’s handwriting was crucial information for Grusha to have.

Again Claudia asked herself—was this one of the mistakes Andy had made, that she had been brought in to find? She thought of how suave and smooth Avram had been that afternoon. Could she be wrong in her evaluation? She was certain that she was not. Her final assessment was that, thanks to the important information Andy Nicholson had left out of his report, Avram had probably acted badly with a match Grusha made for him and it was now coming back to bite her.

The two of them had appeared quite chummy in her office, but it was possible that the hundred thousand dollars the Israeli client had paid for Grusha’s services might have had something to do with that.

She scribbled some notes and stuck them in Avram’s file. When they met the next afternoon, she would have some pointed questions to ask the baroness. Claudia had not yet seen the matchmaker’s handwriting, which was a foolish omission on her part. If there hadn’t been such a rush to bring her to the East Coast, she would have insisted on first seeing a sample.

Deciding that she had earned a break, Claudia left the files on the bed and went to check her e-mail on the laptop. She found one from Peggy Yum, the producer
.
It looked like Yum had been serious about wanting to have her appear again on
Hard Evidence
.

Claudia looked over at the clock. Eight fifteen. Three hours earlier in L.A. Yum might still be in her office.

“
Hard Evidence
,” Yum’s voice chirped on the other end of the phone. “Peggy Yum, segment producer, speaking. How may I help you?”

“Peggy, hi. It’s Claudia Rose. I just got your e-mail.”

“Claudia! Fantastic; we were just talking about you at the production meeting. We want to schedule this segment ASAP. Can you be here Thursday morning? We’ll talk about—”

“Wait, Peggy, I can’t. I’m in New York for a few days, so this week is out. And listen, it’s a problem for me to talk about dating services right now.”

“So, Olinetsky
is
using you? That’s way cool! It’d be perfect, like, you’d be undercover. You can give us the scoop on what goes on behind the scenes.”

“I didn’t say she was using me, but if she were, don’t you think it would be a little unethical for me to accept this kind of assignment?” Claudia’s reflection in the mirror behind the desk mouthed back at her,
Can you spell conflict of interest?
“You’re probably looking for dirt on her, right? I’m not interested in being part of an exposé.”

“It doesn’t
have
to just be dirt.” Yum’s self-righteous indignation made it sound as if she were pouting. “I guess we could use some success stories, too. Look, Claudia, I really want to do this segment, and you’d be perfect for it. You’re so great on camera. You have bunches of credibility. This could be a really awesome segment.”

“Thanks for the compliment, Peggy. I appreciate it; really, I do. If it were any other time, I’d jump on it, but for now, I think you need to find another story if you want me to be involved. How about one on handwriting analysis for employers? That’s mostly what people use graphology for.”

“That’s not sexy.” Yum was now into full sulk. “Just forget it. Talk later.”

Claudia was left listening to dead air, debating whether she wanted to work with the young producer at all. Their conversation had left her feeling old and cranky, but as long as Grusha was her client, she didn’t see how she could accept an assignment such as the one Peggy Yum was proposing. She would think about it, see if she could find some sort of compromise, but she refused to bend her principles.

A few stretches of stiff muscles to help refocus her attention; then she settled back on the bed with the next client folder and a couple of cold French fries.

The glam shot in the next folder in the stack showed a sloe-eyed gamine beauty with black hair cut short and punked into spikes. Heavy black eyeliner and purple shadow made pale cheeks paler. Heather Lloyd, a fashion model. Twenty-five, five-nine. With those looks, Claudia guessed, probably successful in her field.

A selection of snaps that were supposed to be informal had obviously been posed for maximum effect. One scene had been shot on Ellis Island with a backdrop of Lady Liberty, Heather’s skirt billowing in the breeze, à la Marilyn Monroe. In another she was dressed in cutoffs and a halter top, sitting on the steps of a brownstone, blowing an exaggeratedly puckered kiss at the camera. A third showed her on a fashion show catwalk in filmy lingerie, revealing legs that were close to being anorexic thin.

Before she turned to the handwriting, Claudia tried to imagine what it might look like. From Heather ’s modeling photos, it was clear that she spent a lot of effort creating her appearance. Chances were the same was true of her handwriting.

When she came to the sample page, the stylized script told Claudia that her educated guess had been right, and the content agreed.

The text described what Heather wanted, but she had written nothing about what she might have to offer a mate. Even without the narcissistic sentiments she had expressed, her painstakingly constructed handwriting with its many arcaded forms revealed a woman who would make security and financial reward the highest priority in her life. It was all about image and how she projected it. The way others perceived her was of paramount importance, so she would take pains to hide anything about herself she believed flawed. For anyone to see her as less than perfect would give her a sense of shame.

The handwriting had one uncommon characteristic: Several of the lower loops were twisted into something resembling a bow. In handwriting, lower loops were connected to, among other things, biological urges.

In virtually all cases Claudia had examined, the particular form Heather had adopted was made by victims of sexual assault. The convoluted path that Heather’s loops followed was a strong indicator that, like Avram, she had sexual issues. The question was, would that affect her ability to form a healthy intimate relationship? In Claudia’s opinion, it would.

Had Andy Nicholson explained all this to Grusha?

She read his report, which said little of substance: “She is a cumulative thinker who builds one idea upon another. She has the trait of yieldingness, but there is some resentment.”

He’d written about her gregarious personality and generosity. What Andy’s report failed to state was that the handwriting painted a portrait of a sweet-natured but naive girl who acted younger than her years, whose self-image was tied in with her beauty. That would all make sense if she had been the object of unresolved sexual abuse.

Cumulative thinking, gregarious, yieldingness, resentment
—
a superficial laundry list of traits that meant little in the big picture of Heather Lloyd’s egocentric self-absorption or the sexual implications of those lower zone bows.