Robert Bloch's Psycho (25 page)

Dick moved to the wall of tools and grabbed a small shovel. Ben thought that seemed like a good idea and took what he thought was an edger, and gestured to Dick to move against the wall at the side of the door. The noise continued outside. There was a scraping sound, then a climactic
click
. The inset lock had been forced.

Ben licked his lips, held the edger like a baseball bat, and watched as the door slowly opened. In the doorway, he saw the shadowy shape of a man moving into the room. “Easy, partner,” Ben said. “Let's get those hands high in the air, huh?”

But instead of raising his hands, the man reached behind him and his right hand came back holding something. Ben squinted to make out what it was and felt the hair on his neck prickle as the dull light glinted off the metal of a pistol.

“Okay,” he said, slowly lowering the edger. “Okay, no need for that, just—”

But he didn't have to finish his sentence. Dick swung the shovel at the man's head, there was the sound of steel against skull, and the pistol fired with a dull
pop.
Fire sparked from the muzzle, but the shooter had already started to fall, and the bullet harmlessly ricocheted off the cement floor. The body hit the floor face-first with a crack that made Ben think the nose had broken for sure.

Dick dropped the shovel and they both knelt by the man's side. Ben turned him over, but didn't recognize the face with the bleeding nose. “Who the hell…,” Dick said.

“Never saw him before,” Ben answered. He took the gun and set it on the floor where the man couldn't reach it, then felt his wrist for a pulse. It was there, good and strong. “You didn't kill him, anyway,” he told Dick. “Let's tie him up.”

They turned on the light and found a roll of baling wire hanging on the wall. A hedge trimmer cut the pieces easily. They bound the unconscious man's wrists behind him, then wrapped more wire around his ankles. By the time they were finished and had firmly shut the outside door, the man had started to moan and move slightly.

“Go upstairs and call the cops,” Ben told Dick. He picked up the pistol, which he now saw was an automatic. “I'll watch him. Send some guys down and we'll take him upstairs.”

Dick ran out of the storage room, and Ben heard his footfalls echoing down the corridor. When he looked back at the man tied up on the floor, the man was looking at him with dark eyes. “Head hurt?” Ben asked as he picked up the man's pistol. When there was no answer, he said, “Who are you, anyway?”

The man didn't speak. He only looked at Ben with deep anger in his gray eyes.

“The police are on their way here now. You gonna clam up for them too?” Nothing.

“Okay, suit yourself. You don't have to talk to me. They'll get it out of you.”

*   *   *

It wasn't the dream that woke Norman Bates in his room. It was the dampness of his scalp against the pillow. The cotton pillowcase was saturated with his perspiration. He noticed that first, then remembered the dream, and sat up in the darkness.

It was patchy, and he could recall only fragmentary glimpses of it, like a remembrance of when he was a very young child, before the machinery of memory had assembled itself in his mind. A dark room, a figure before him, narrow walls, dragging something heavy, then a large room, the smell of dampness thick in the air, and beneath it a weightier smell, a smell of rot and corruption. And death.

Norman whined deep in his throat and stood up, trying to banish the bits and pieces that remained of the dream. He felt his way to the door, slid back the slot, and looked into the hall. He could see nothing but the wall on the opposite side, but at least there was light, and a slight breeze that came through the slot, chilling but drying the sweat on his neck. What, he wondered, had he seen? Had it been only a dream? Or had he once again seen through Robert's eyes, seen what Robert may have done, or, Norman hoped, what Robert had only imagined, desires and fantasies so strong that they spanned the gap between brothers, between twins?

Norman closed his eyes and breathed in the fresher air from the hallway until he felt better. Then he went back to his bed and turned over his pillow so the dry side was facing up. He lay down and tried not to think about the dream. Because, after all, that's what it was. Only a dream.

Just before he drifted back to sleep, he wondered vaguely why, if it was just a dream, he could still smell, very faintly, that odor of corruption.

*   *   *

Marie Radcliffe was at the nurses' station of Ward D when Dick O'Brien came running down the hall toward her, followed by three other attendants. “Marie!” he yelled. “Go get Dr. Goldberg! Me and Ben caught a guy trying to break in down in the cellar.”

“Is Ben okay?” she asked as the men ran by.

“He's fine, yeah,” Dick called over his shoulder. “Get the doc, okay?”

Marie dashed down the corridor, turning toward the row of offices. Dr. Goldberg's door was closed, and she knocked loudly, but there was no answer. It was after midnight, and he might have gone home, but most of the time when he worked late, he slept on the daybed in his office. She knocked again, even more forcefully, but there was no response.

Marie turned the door handle and found it was unlocked. She pushed it open and called, “Dr. Goldberg?” There was no answer, so she entered the office.

The desk lamp was on, but Goldberg wasn't seated at his desk, nor was he lying on the daybed. The room seemed to be empty. The papers on the desk were stacked neatly, and the chair was pushed up flush to the desk. Had Dr. Goldberg changed his mind and left early? If he had, he would have had to walk past the nurses' station at which Marie had been sitting most of the evening.

She walked over to the door to the doctor's private bathroom and knocked lightly. Hearing no answer, she opened the door and turned on the light. The room was empty, the shower stall dry.

Then Marie went over to the record player. A red light at the bottom of the console indicated that the power was still on. She opened the lid and looked down at the turntable. A black-and-white angel sitting on a record looked up at her from an otherwise red label. She leaned farther over and read,
WAGNER “
DIE
MEISTERSINGER
VON
N
Ü
RNBERG
” ACT II (PART 2)
, and saw the number
5
at both the nine and three o'clock positions on the label.

Side 5? But Dr. Goldberg had said there were ten sides and he had intended to listen to them all. If he had changed his mind, why hadn't he put the record away, since he was so meticulous about caring for his “children,” and turned off the machine?

Maybe he'd gone to the break room to get some food or coffee from the machines, though that seemed unlikely. Whatever the answers, Dr. Goldberg wasn't in his office.

Marie was crossing to the door to search for him elsewhere when her peripheral vision caught a glimpse of something glinting on the floor, a small object on the carpet just beneath the desk. She knelt, and when she saw what it was, a little shock passed through her. It was the polished piece of petrified wood that she had given as a good luck charm to Norman Bates.

She picked it up and looked at it more closely. There was no mistaking something she had carried in her pockets and her purse for years. But how did it get here? Marie knew that Dr. Goldberg had recently talked to Norman, but that had been in Norman's room, not Goldberg's office. Perhaps she would ask Norman about it, then thought that it might be wiser to talk to Dr. Reed about it first.

She dropped it into the pocket of her uniform and went to look for Dr. Goldberg.

*   *   *

Even with the strong wind blowing the fresh rain through the air so that it drenched his face and clothing, the man still thought the swamp smelled rank and corrupt, like a cemetery in a nightmare, with open graves and coffins whose lids had rotted away, exposing their residents to the elements. It was a fitting simile, he thought, since a graveyard was precisely what it had been and was again.

True, he was using it as a graveyard for automobiles, but Norman Bates had been faithful to the original meaning of
graveyard
. He had sunk Mary Crane in it, along with her car, not all that long ago. And now the man was only following in Norman's footsteps.

Collar up against the wind and rain, he watched as the Lincoln slipped slowly into the muck. In the darkness, its peach color had turned black against the dark of the swamp. Odd that Goldberg had chosen such a color, he thought, almost feminine. Perhaps the psychiatrist might have benefited from some treatment himself.

Be that as it may, the car was sinking more quickly than Myron Gunn's. He had chosen a different place, a dozen yards or so to the right of where he had sunk the previous one. It wouldn't do to have Goldberg's Lincoln slip into the muck, hit the other one, then stop dead. He could imagine the sign such an occurrence would cause:

To ensure a tidy swamp,

please dump all victims' cars next to rather than behind each other.

Thank you.

The Management

He chuckled to himself as he watched the car slowly sink. He'd had to be more patient tonight. The black car was there, the one he saw earlier, the one that obviously didn't belong. And, as before, there had been someone in it. So he'd waited to take Goldberg's car, waited until the stranger had gotten out of his own car and melted into the stormy night, moving around to the back of the building.

Once the stranger had gone, the man moved fast, under cover of night and rain, jumped in the car, and drove it away unseen. It was a long shot that people would think Goldberg had followed Myron Gunn and Eleanor Lindstrom's lead and hit the highway, but it had worked out nicely before, and maybe Goldberg had his own secrets that he wanted to hide. At least it would confuse the police more to have Goldberg disappear rather than have his body found. In this case, his death wasn't a given.

Over the sound of the rain, he heard that nauseating, sucking sound that told him the swamp was fully claiming the car. He watched with deep satisfaction as the trunk and finally the tips of the tailfins went under the surface. Thick, viscous bubbles of muck and mire belched their way upward, and then the car was gone.

He pressed his hat down more tightly on his head and turned away from the swamp, beginning his long, wet walk back to his own car.

*   *   *

An hour later, in one of the patient interview rooms of the state hospital, Captain Banning and Sheriff Jud Chambers sat across a table from the man who had been discovered in the cellar. The man was now handcuffed, and behind him stood two highway patrol officers. A leather wallet lay on the table, with an assortment of cards spread out on the table's wooden surface.

“All right, Mr. Dov Bergmann, if that's your name,” Captain Banning said, “you've got some interesting ID here. Seems you're from Israel, huh?”

“I'm not answering any questions,” Bergmann said. “I want you to call the nearest Israeli consulate and inform them of my detainment.”

“Oh, you do, do you? Well, I'll tell you something, Dov, my friend. You haven't been detained, you've been
arrested.
And I don't care where you're from. You're not gonna see the backside of any consul or even a lawyer until we get some questions answered here.”

“I have the right to counsel,” Bergmann said.

“I told you, Dov,” Banning said, as if explaining to a child, “no consul, no lawyer.”

“I said
counsel.
An attorney. Do you not have that right in the United States?”

“Well, I couldn't tell the difference, with your accent. And you're a foreigner, so you got no U.S. rights,” Banning said.

Jud Chambers leaned toward Banning and whispered, “I'm not sure that's right.”

“Don't worry about it,” Banning whispered back. “I'm not having this guy walk out of here on some diplomatic-immunity bullshit.”

“Well, I don't think he's really a diplomat,” Chambers whispered.

“Just let me handle it…” Banning raised his voice, “Now, look, Dov. You're in my jurisdiction. You, a foreigner, break into a state institution with a loaded handgun, which you then fire at people who are authorized to detain you until an official arrest takes place. Which has been done. And I want to know what you were doing here with a gun. You're not gonna see daylight again until I get answers.”

Bergmann looked down at the tabletop, his mouth a thin line, and did not reply.

The silence was broken by the sound of the door opening. Another officer came into the room. He was holding a portfolio made of thin cardboard with an attached elastic band around it. “Found the car his keys fit,” the officer said. “This was under the seat, along with some other weapons and stuff.”

Banning motioned the officer out, then opened the portfolio and looked at the paper files and photographs inside. Some of the documents were in Hebrew, but others were in English, German, and French. For several minutes, Banning browsed and read what he could, passing the papers to Jud Chambers, who was the first to speak. “I'll be damned,” he said softly.

“Holy hell,” Banning breathed in response. He looked up at Bergmann. “Who are you with? That Jewish secret service? The one that got Adolf Eichmann last year down in Argentina?”

“Mossad,” Jud Chambers said.

“I prefer to speak to an Israeli consul,” Bergmann said.

“You broke in here to
kill
somebody, didn't you?” Banning said. “What these papers say … you came in here to kill Dr. Goldberg?”

Dov Bergmann looked at Captain Banning for a long time. “All right, then,” he finally said. “It's all there in front of you. Maybe … maybe if I tell you
nearly
everything, it can end here.”