High Profile by Robert B. Parker

Author:Robert B. Parker [Parker, Robert B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Romance
ISBN: 9780399154041
Amazon: 0425206092
Goodreads: 69613
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2007-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

32

Jonah Levy held his office door for Jesse and waited until Jesse was seated before closing it and going to his own desk.

“Dix called me,” Dr. Levy said, “on your behalf.”

“Good,” Jesse said.

“He says you are a very smart man.”

“He would know,” Jesse said.

“How can I help you?”

“Did you treat Walton Weeks?” Jesse said.

“Myself and my colleagues.”

“For infertility?”

“Yes.”

“Successfully,” Jesse said.

“I gather that he had fathered a child before his death,” Levy said.

“Yes. With Carey Longley.”

“We worked with her as well,” Levy said.

He was a small man in a gray suit and white shirt. His hair was receding. His glasses had gold rims. His tie was flamboyantly red and gold.

“What was the problem,” Jesse said.

Levy examined one of his thumbnails for a moment.

“Mr. Weeks rarely ejaculated,” Levy said.

“He was impotent?”

“No. He had no trouble erecting. He had trouble ejaculating.”

“So,” Jesse said. “He could do the deed, but he couldn’t, ah, finish it off.”

Levy smiled.

“One could put it that way,” he said.

“Did he ever?” Jesse said.

“Infrequently. Too infrequently, it seems, to give him much chance of engendering a child.”

“That’s it?” Jesse said. “Just that? No biomechanical obstruction, no physical dysfunction, just didn’t finish?”

“Just didn’t finish,” Levy said. “Had it been something physical, it might well have been easier to fix.”

“Why?” Jesse said.

“Why didn’t he, ah, finish?”

“Yes.”

Levy leaned back, clasped his hands behind his head, and smiled at Jesse.

“How much time do you have?” Levy said.

“I don’t need to be board-certified,” Jesse said. “A concise summary would work.”

Levy closed his eyes and pursed his lips and tilted his head back and thought for a moment.

Then he said, “You are, I assume, familiar with ambivalence.”

Jesse smiled.

“My old friend,” he said.

“Weeks wanted a child,” Levy said. “And desperately did not want to share it with a woman.”

“That’s it?”

“There’s never an it,” Levy said. “There are always several its. There were issues of power—if he could arouse a woman sexually, he had power. If she could cause him to ejaculate, she had power. There was rage against all the women who had failed to give him full sexual release.”

“Whom he punished by not achieving full sexual release,” Jesse said.

“And punished him by denying him what he wanted.”

Jesse whistled softly.

“Craziness has a nice symmetry, doesn’t it,” Jesse said.

“Often,” Levy said.

“Can we say concisely why he was like this?”

“Not really,” Levy said. “No surprise—it had to do with his mother and his childhood encounters with women. Certainly his mother sexualized their relationship.”

“She molest him?”

“In the conventional way?” Levy said. “Probably not. But because of the inappropriate nature of their relationship, sex became the ultimate expression of love and, because it was his mother, horribly frightening. And it remained so, lodged there in his unconscious, all his life.”

“So what happened?” Jesse said.

“To bring him here?”

“Yeah. He’s fifty, he’s had three wives, a million women, no kids. What made him come to you all of a sudden?”

Levy looked at his thumbnail again. He didn’t answer. Jesse waited. Finally Levy looked up at Jesse.

“I don’t know.”

“Wow,” Jesse said.

Levy smiled.

“We don’t like to say that much.

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