Twenty long seconds passed.
“I don’t know what you mean. Why did I come to see you? I need your help to… get the situation with Sterling taken care of.”
“Really?” I said. Her defenses had stiffened and become awkward as she tried to parry my thrust. My compassion for her swelled. With my simple question I was trying to sound dubious. It wasn’t too difficult.
She dissembled. “What else could it be?” Gibbs asked. “I can’t live with-what he’s done. What else could it be?”
A tough question, one I was not prepared to answer.
I knew she wasn’t, either.
I asked myself another tough question:Well, Doctor, if this isn’t all about sex and murder, what is it about?
Something else.
Deep in my gut I believed that Gibbs Storey was distracting me. First with her tale of murder. Then with the suggestion of serial murder. And now with sex in St. Tropez. I had to give her credit. As distractions, those were good hooks. Major league hooks. And yet I’d taken the bait for only three days.
Not too bad. For me, anyway. Skilled sociopaths had been known to suck me in and drag me along in their off-Broadway dramatics for months at a time. Diane liked to say that when sociopaths had me for lunch, they didn’t spit out the bones until bedtime.
Diagnostically I didn’t think Gibbs was a sociopath, but her diversion ammunition was as high quality as anything I’d run across recently.
The fact that I thought Gibbs was setting up psychological screens with me didn’t mean I no longer believed her contention that Sterling was a murderer. And it didn’t mean I no longer believed her tale about the summer thing on the yacht in St. Tropez. Nor did it mean I felt her efforts to dissemble were consciously driven.
My conclusion about her psychological deke-that’s one of Sam’s hockey words-wasn’t even a hundred percent firm. From a therapy perspective, I wasn’t prepared to put it to her in the form of an interpretation, or a confrontation. But it was my new working hypothesis: Gibbs was talking about murder and sex as a way of distracting me-and yes, possibly herself-from something that felt even more psychologically dangerous to her.
So what was more dangerous than extramarital sex and a husband who was a murderer?
Her final words of the session surprised me. She said, “It’s as though you can read my mind.”
I left her thought there, hanging. The truth was, I couldn’t read minds.
On good days I could see a short ways into the dark, but that’s as far as it ever went.