This seemed to placate Evans, and Francis thought it was a pretty clever response. Francis realized that maybe when he was a little older he would learn how to say something that wasn’t exactly true, without exactly lying at the same time.
There were another few seconds of uncomfortable silence, and then a knock on the door, and it swung open. Big Black was standing there, dwarfing a man Francis recognized from the upstairs dormitory. “This is Mister Griggs,” Big Black said with a grin. “On the list. Top of the list.” With his massive hand, he gave the man a small push into the room, then stepped back to the wall, taking up a position where he could watch and listen, arms folded in front of him.
Griggs took a stride into the center of the room, then hesitated. Lucy pointed toward a chair, putting him in a position where Francis and Mister Evil could both watch the man’s responses to her questions. He was a wiry, muscled man, middle-aged and balding, with long fingers and a sunken chest, and an asthmatic wheeze that accompanied much of what he said. His eyes darted about the room furtively, giving him the appearance of a squirrel lifting its head to some distant danger. A squirrel with yellowed, uneven teeth and an unsettled disposition. He eyed Lucy with a single, penetrating glance, then relaxed, sticking his legs out with a look of irritation.
“Why am I here?” he asked.
Lucy responded rapidly. “As you may be aware, there have been some questions raised about the killing of the nurse-trainee in this building in the past weeks. I was hoping that you might shed some light on that incident.” Her voice seemed routine, matter-of-fact, but Francis could see in her posture, and in the way her eyes locked onto the patient, that there was a reason this man had been selected first. Something in his file had given her an edgy kind of hope.
“I don’t know anything,” he answered. He shifted about, and waved his hand in the air. “Can I leave now?”
On the file placed in front of her, Lucy could see words like bipolar and depression coupled with antisocial tendencies and anger management issues. Griggs was a potpourri of problems, she thought. He also had slashed a woman with a razor blade in a bar after buying her a series of drinks and getting turned down when he propositioned her. Then he fought hard against the police that had arrested him, and within days of his arrival at the hospital, had threatened Short Blond and several other female nurses at the hospital with uncertain and unspecified, but undeniably dire punishments whenever they attempted to force him to take medication at night, change the television channel in the dayroom, or stop harassing other patients, which he did on a near daily basis. Each of these incidents had been dutifully documented on his case file. There was also a notation that he had insisted to his public defender that unspecified voices had demanded that he cut the woman in question, a claim that had delivered him to Western State instead of the local jail. An additional entry, in Gulptilil’s handwriting, questioned the veracity of the claim. He was, in short, a man filled with rage and lies, which, in Lucy’s mind, made him into a prime candidate.
Lucy smiled. “Of course,” she said. “So on the night of the homicide—”
Griggs cut her off. “I was asleep upstairs. Tucked in for the night. Zonked out on whatever the shit they give us.”
Pausing, Lucy glanced at the yellow pad in front of her, before raising her eyes and fixing them on the patient. “You refused medication that night. There’s a note in your file.”
He opened his mouth, started to say one thing, then stopped. “You ought ’ta know,” he said, “just because you say you won’t take it, it don’t mean you get a pass. All it means is that some goon like this one”—he waved at Big Black, and Francis had the distinct impression that Griggs would have used some other epithet, if he hadn’t been scared of the massive black man—“forces you to take it. So I did. Few minutes later, I was off in dreamland.”
“You didn’t like the nurse-trainee, did you?”
Griggs grinned. “Don’t like any of ’em. No secret in that.”
“Why is that?”
“They like to lord it over us. Make us do stuff. Like we don’t mean anything.”
Griggs used us and we but Francis didn’t think he had any plurality in mind, other than himself.
“Fighting women is easier, isn’t it?” Lucy asked.
The patient shrugged. “You think I could fight him?” he replied, again indicating Big Black.
Lucy didn’t answer the man’s question, instead, she bent forward slightly. “You don’t like women, do you?”
Griggs snarled, slightly, and spoke in a low-pitched, fierce voice. “Don’t like you much.”
“You like to hurt women, don’t you?” Lucy asked.
He burst out in a wheezing laugh, but didn’t answer.
Keeping her own voice steady and cold, Lucy then suddenly shifted direction. “Where were you in November?” she asked abruptly. “About sixteen months ago.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me.”
“I’m supposed to remember back that far?”
“Is that a problem for you? Because I sure as hell can find out fast enough.”
Griggs shifted about in his seat, gaining a little time. Francis could see the man’s mind working hard, as if trying to see some danger through a fog. “I was working on a construction site in Springfield,” he said. “Road crew. Bridge repair. Nasty job.”
“Ever been in Concord?” she asked.
“Concord?”
“You heard me.”
“No, I never been in Concord. That’s in the whole other part of the state.”
“Your boss on that construction crew, when I call him up, he’s not going to tell me that you had access to a company truck, is he? And he’s not going to tell me that he sent you on trips to the Boston area?”
Griggs looked a little scared and confused, a momentary flight of doubt. “No,” he said. “Other guys got those easy jobs. I worked in the pits.”
Lucy suddenly had one of the crime scene photographs in her hand. Francis saw that it was the body of the second victim. She rose up and leaned across the table and thrust it under Griggs’s nose. “You remember this?” she demanded. “You remember doing this?”
“No,” he said, his voice losing some more of its bravado. “Who’s that?”
“You tell me.”
“Never seen her before.”
“I think you have.”
“No.”
“You know that road crew you worked on, there’s records that show where everyone was each and every day. So proving that you were in Concord’s gonna be easy for me. Just like that notation that you didn’t get any medication the night the nurse was killed right here. It’s just a matter of paperwork, filling in the blanks. Now, try again: Did you do this?”
Griggs shook his head.
“If you could, you would, wouldn’t you?”
He shook his head again.
“You’re lying to me.”
Griggs seemed to breathe in slowly, wheezing, getting a deep, lungful of air. When he did speak, it was with a high-pitched, barely restrained anger. “I didn’t do that to no girl I never seen, and you’re lying to me if you think I did.”
“What do you do to women you don’t like?”
He smiled sickly. “I cut ’em.”
Lucy sat back and nodded. “Like the nurse-trainee?”
Griggs again shook his head. Then he looked across the room, eyeing first Evans, then over at Francis. “Not going to answer no more questions,” he said. “You want to charge me with something, then you go ahead and do it.”
“Okay,” Lucy said. “Then you’re finished for now. But maybe we’ll talk again.”
Griggs didn’t say anything else. He simply rose. He worked some saliva around his mouth, and for a moment Francis thought he was going to spit on Lucy Jones. Big Black must have thought the same, because Griggs took a step forward, only to have the huge attendant’s hand descend like a vise grip on his shoulder.
“You finished h
ere, now,” Big Black said calmly. “Don’t do nothing that makes me any angrier than I might already be.”
Griggs shrugged out of the attendant’s grasp, and turned. Francis thought he clearly wanted to say something else, but instead, exited after pushing the chair a little, so that it scraped a small ways across the floor. A minor display of defiance.
Lucy ignored this, and started to write some notes down on the yellow legal pad. Mister Evans, too, was writing something down on a small notebook page. Lucy spotted this and said, “Well, he didn’t precisely rule himself out, did he? What are you writing?”
Francis kept quiet, as Evans looked up. He wore a slightly self-satisfied look on his face. “What am I writing?” he asked. “Well, for starters, a note to myself to adjust Griggs’s medications over the next few days. He seemed significantly agitated by your questions, and I would say is likely to act out aggressively, probably toward one of the more vulnerable patients around here. One of the old women, for example. Or perhaps one of the staff. That’s equally possible. I can increase some doses over the short term, preventing that anger from manifesting itself.”
Lucy stopped. “You’re going to what?”
“Chill him out for a week or so. Maybe longer.”
Mister Evil hesitated, then added, still keeping the smug tone in his words, “You know, I could have provided a bit of a shortcut here. You are correct that Griggs refused his medication on the night of the homicide. But that refusal meant that he was given an intravenous injection later that night. See the second notation on the chart? I was there for that, and I supervised the procedure. So, when he says he was asleep when the murder took place, I can assure you he’s telling the truth. He was sedated.”
Again, Evans paused, then continued. “Perhaps there are others you want to question, where I can help in advance?”
Lucy looked up frustrated. Francis could see that she not only hated wasting her time, but hated dealing with the situation in the hospital. He thought, it must be difficult for her, because she had never been in a place like this. Then he realized that very few people with any claim on normalcy had ever been in a place like the hospital.
He bit down on his lip, holding back from saying anything. His mind was churning, fierce images from the interview just completed. Even his voices were remaining quiet within him, because, as he’d listened to the other patient speak, Francis had begun to see things. Not hallucinations. Not delusions. But things about the man speaking. He had seen ridges of fury and hatred, he had seen a sneering delight in the man’s eyes as he saw the picture of death. He had seen a man capable of much depravity. But, at the same time, he’d seen a man with a great and terrible weakness inside. A man who would always want but would rarely do. Not the man they were looking for, because all of Griggs’s anger had been so obvious. And Francis knew, right in that second, sitting in that small room, that there would be little obvious about the Angel.
At the very moment that Francis was sitting stricken because he had seen things that went beyond the small office where Lucy, Mister Evil, and he had conducted the interview, Peter the Fireman and Little Black were completing their search of the modest living area claimed by the patient Griggs. Peter had discarded his usual outfit, and set aside his beaten Boston Red Sox cap, and was wearing the ubiquitous snow-white slacks and coat of a hospital attendant. The uniform had been Little Black’s idea. It was, in some ways, a perfect camouflage inside the hospital; one would have to look twice to see that the person wearing it wasn’t really an attendant, but was actually Peter. In a world filled with hallucination and delusion, it would create some doubt. It gave him, he hoped, just enough cover so that he could do the job that Lucy had defined for him, although he knew that if he were to get spotted by Gulp-a-pill or Mister Evil or any of the others who knew him well enough, he would be immediately slammed into an isolation cell, and Little Black would be severely reprimanded. The wiry attendant hadn’t been terribly concerned about this, saying “Unusual circumstances require unusual solutions,” a comment that seemed more sophisticated than Peter would have earlier given him credit for making. Little Black also pointed out that he was the local union’s shop steward, and his large brother was the union secretary, which gave them some armor in case they were caught.
The search itself had been utterly fruitless.
It had not taken him long to rifle through the patient’s personal items, stored in an unlocked suitcase beneath the bed. Nor had it been particularly difficult for Peter to run his hands through the bedding, checking the sheets and mattress for anything that might connect the man to the crime. He had moved swiftly through the adjacent area, as well, hunting for any other location where something like a knife could be concealed. It was easy to be efficient; there weren’t really all that many spots in the living area that might hide something.
He stood up and shook his head. Little Black wordlessly gestured for the two of them to get back to the place where he’d arranged to meet with his brother.
Peter nodded and took a single step forward, then suddenly pivoted, and looked about the room. As always, there were a couple of men lying on their beds, eyes fixed on the ceiling, lost in some reverie that he could only guess at. One old man was rocking back and forth, crying to himself. A second seemed to have been told some joke, because he had wrapped his arms around himself, and was giggling uncontrollably. Another man, the hulking retarded man that he’d seen before in the corridors, was in the distant corner of the dormitory room, bent over, sitting on the edge of his bed, eyes cast down, staring steadily at the floor. For a moment, the retarded man looked up, across the space, blankly absorbing something, then turning away. Peter could not tell, in that second, whether the man understood that they were searching an area of the room, or not. There was no way to determine what the retarded man comprehended. It was possible, of course, that their actions were simply being ignored, lost in the near total impassivity that enclosed the man. But, Peter realized, it was equally possible that the man had somehow deep in his head dulled by circumstance and daily psychotropic medications, made the connection between the patient taken off to the interview room, and the subsequent search of the area. He didn’t know whether this connection would leave the room, or not. But he feared that if the man they were hunting for came to that understanding, his task would be much more difficult. If people in the hospital knew that various areas were being searched, it would have some impact. How much, he was unsure. Peter did not make another critical leap of observation, which would have been that the Angel might want to do something about it, if he learned what Peter was doing.
He looked back at the motley collection of men in the room and wondered whether word would travel quickly across the hospital, or not at all.
To his side, Little Black muttered, “Come on, Peter. Let’s move.”
He nodded, and joined the attendant, pushing rapidly through the dormitory door.
chapter 18
Sometime later that day, or maybe after the next, but certainly at some point during the steady procession of mad folks being escorted into Lucy Jones’s office, it occurred to me that I had never really been a part of something before.
When I thought about it, I believed it was a curious thing, growing up and understanding in an odd, peripheral, or maybe subterranean way that all sorts of connections were going on all around me—and yet I was destined forever to be excluded. As a child, not being able to join in is a terrible thing. Maybe the worst.
Once I lived on a typical suburban street, lots of one- and two-story, white-painted middle-class homes, with well-trimmed, green front yards with perhaps a row or two of vibrantly colored perennials planted under the windows and an aboveground pool in the back. The school bus stopped twice in our block, to accommodate all the kids. In the afternoons, there was a constant ebb and flow up and down the street, a noisy tidal surge of youth. Boys and girls in jeans frayed at the knees, except on Sundays, when the boys emerged from their homes in blue blazers
and stiffly starched white shirts and polyester ties and the girls wore dresses that sported ruffles and frills, but not too many of either. Then we were all collected, along with parents, in the pews of one or another nearby church. It was a typical mix for Western Massachusetts, mostly Catholic, who took the time to discuss whether eating meat on Friday was a sin, with some Episcopalians and Baptists mixed in. There were even a few Jewish families on the block, but they had to drive across town to the synagogue.
It was all so incredibly, overwhelmingly, cosmically typical. Typical block of a typical street, populated by typical families who voted the Democratic ticket and swooned a little over the Kennedys and went to Little League games on warm spring evenings not so much to watch as to talk. Typical dreams. Typical aspirations. Typical in every regard, from the first hours in the morning, to the last hours of the night. Typical fears, typical concerns. Conversations that seemed riveted to normalcy. Even typical secrets hidden behind the typical exteriors. An alcoholic. A wife beater. A closet homosexual. All typical, all the time.
Except, of course, for me.
I was discussed in quiet tones, the same under the voice whispers that were ordinarily reserved for the simply shocking news that a black family had moved in two streets over, or that the mayor had been seen exiting a motel with a woman who was decidedly not his wife.
In all those years, I was never once invited to a birthday party. Never asked to a sleepover. Not once shoved into the back of a station wagon for an off-the-cuff trip to Friendly’s for an ice-cream sundae. I never got a phone call at night to gossip about school or sports or who had kissed whom after the seventh grade dance. I never played on a team, sang in a choir, or marched in a band. I never cheered at a Friday night football game in the fall, and I never self-consciously put on an ill-fitting tux and went to a prom. My life was unique because of the absence of all those little things that make up everyone else’s normalcy.
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