Heartstone

“What choice have I got?” Mark said. “You have my promise.”

Caproni sighed and leaned back in his chair. For the next half hour he recounted the events surrounding Eddie Toller’s story and his subsequent disappearance and his meeting with Heartstone in the skid row hotel. He also told Shaeffer about the research that Dr. Rohmer had done for him.

“The problem with all this is that nothing I’ve uncovered can be substantiated. Toller’s gone, so he can’t testify and Heartstone has split. There’s a good chance, given Toller’s background, that his story is a lie he invented to get a deal. And Heartstone might have run away for reasons unco

“There must be something we can do,” Mark said.

“I’ve been thinking and I have an idea. The real importance of Toller’s story is that it places Elaine Murray in that basement alive almost six weeks after the Coolidges are supposed to have killed her. Does your client have an alibi for the first few weeks in January?”

Mark thought for a second, then his face brightened.

“They were in the hospital. It was a car accident or something. Wait, I have it here in my notes.”

He shuffled through some papers until he had the right one.

“January 3, 1961 until early February.”

“All right,” Caproni said. “If you can prove Elaine Murray was alive in January, you get an acquittal.”

“But how do I do that?”

“Have the body exhumed and reexamined.”

“What?”

“Make us dig up the body.”

Mark looked at Caproni to see if he was serious. Caproni stared back. His face showed no trace of humor. Mark felt that events were getting out of hand. Caproni was asking too much of him.

“How am I going to do that? You say you won’t get involved. I don’t see how I could get Judge Samuels to sign a court order.”

Shaeffer’s negative attitude irritated Caproni. He expected Mark to be excited. Instead he seemed afraid of his new responsibilities.

“I’ve thought of that. Line up several of the top gynecologists in Portsmouth and put them on at a hearing. They’ll testify that the acidity in the vagina would have destroyed any trace of sperm shortly after Murray died. Just show Samuels Dr. Beauchamp’s autopsy report and you have your grounds.”

Mark made hasty notes while Caproni spoke. He wondered where he would get the money to hire the doctors. He could not take it from his remaining fee or he would end up trying the case for nothing.

“I brought something else that might help,” Caproni said, laying a thick sheaf of papers on the desk. “This is a copy of a transcript of the hypnosis sessions with Esther Pegalosi. It might help you prepare your cross-examination.”

Caproni stood up and closed his attaché case.

“I…I’m really grateful for all this,” Mark said. “I know what a risk you’re taking and I…”

Caproni was exhausted. All he wanted to do was get some sleep.

“Don’t thank me, Mark. Just pray that I haven’t helped set a murderer free.”

3

“What do you think?” Mark asked.

“I think that there is an excellent possibility that Esther did not see the Walters boy killed,” Dr. Nathan Paris replied.

Mark breathed a deep sigh of relief. He felt well prepared for his cross-examination of Esther Pegalosi, but he needed a medical explanation of her testimony if he was going to convince the jury that she was not worthy of belief. Dr. Paris was a professor of psychiatry at the University Medical School, a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and a respected author and lecturer in the field of memory and hypnosis. In addition to his credentials, he had the boyish good looks and open, forthright ma

They had just returned to Mark’s office from the courthouse where Dr. Hollander had testified. As part of Dr. Hollander’s testimony, the tapes of his hypnosis and amytal sessions with Esther Pegalosi had been played. Dr. Paris had been permitted to listen to them so that he could evaluate the sessions. Mark had prepared him by giving him the transcript to study over the weekend.

“Why do you think she’s lying?” Mark asked.

“She’s not necessarily lying. Are you familiar with the term ‘confabulation’?”

Mark shook his head.

“‘Con’ means with and ‘fabulation,’ coming from fable or fabulary, means talk or discourse. Confabulation may mean just carrying on a conversation or constructing a fable, or it may have the more technical meaning given to it by neurologists when they are discussing the type of story constructed to impress the listener that it is in fact a rendition of reality when the story teller is suffering from a memory defect. In other words, the story teller constructs a fable to compensate for a memory defect. You see this with alcoholics who have brain damage and who have been in a hospital for a few months. You ask them where they were the day before and they will tell you they were at such and such a place having a great time.”

“Is confabulation limited to people with brain damage?”

“No. Psychiatrists and neurologists use the term to mean making up a tale. There is an interesting study that was conducted in 1954 by two Yale researchers named Rubenstein and Newman. They wanted to check the validity of past memories related by people under hypnosis. They reasoned that one way to check on possible confabulation or suggestibility by people supposedly remembering past events would be to put a person in a hypnotic trance and have them visualize themselves ten years in the future and describe what was happening. If they could describe what was happening in 1979, then it would raise some question as to the validity of their recollections of what had happened in 1939.

“The researchers worked with five subjects and found that they could consistently live out ‘future’ experiences when an age or date was suggested to them under hypnosis. The futures that they created for themselves were plausible and well within the realm of probability as judged from a personality study that had been made of the subjects prior to the start of the investigation.

“So, you see, you may have memories of things that did occur, things that occurred only in fantasy and things that have never occurred at all.”

“And Esther?” Mark asked.

“When a person is given amytal for the purpose of suppressing consciousness in addition to hypnosis, this person is placed in a greater state of suggestibility than if she is fully conscious. If a person is suffering from amnesia, we use hypnosis or drugs to make the guardians of that person’s repressed memory lower its guard. When that happens, information comes out more easily. But this is a two-edged sword and the patient becomes more open to the suggestions, intentional or unintentional, of her questioner, because her psychological defenses are depressed and her ability to test reality against unreality is weakened.

“My impression of Esther Pegalosi from hearing the tapes and reading the transcript is that she is a person with an extremely poor self-image. She tried to kill herself once. She longs to be a strong, self-confident woman. She craves love. I think that Dr. Hollander, and to a lesser extent, Detective Shindler, became father figures and love objects during her therapy sessions. As such, anything that they suggested would be eagerly accepted out of a fear of losing their affection as well as a desire to please them.

“Esther originally claimed to have had so much to drink on the evening of the murders that she could not remember what she had done. There is your memory defect, just waiting for a fable to fill up the missing time period.

“I can point to several instances during the hypnosis sessions when questions concerning important information were put to Esther in a ma