Over coffee, glumly, my thoughts kept returning to the legend of Faust, irrevocably selling his soul to the devil. By the second cup of coffee I’d decided to write out a check to Mrs. Vennezio for a thousand dollars, mail it and forget it. An hour later I’d packed, got an airline reservation for later that afternoon and notified my long-suffering city editor that I’d be out of town for a few days. It was ultimately a reporter’s overwhelming curiosity, I realized, that had compelled the decision. Although I’d been lucky enough, over the past few years, to solve a few well-publicized murders by the painful process of groping among the dark and confusing images of my subconscious, yet I was nevertheless primarily a professional crime reporter. Even though my employer’s publicity department took great pains to ballyhoo the mysterious methods of their “clairvoyant sleuth of the mind,” it was actually conventional news-gathering techniques that provided me with the disembodied lines and shapes from which, with luck, the final subconscious images unaccountably emerged.
