The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  Lucy took the folder back out of Evans’s hands and looked up at Big Black. “I think you can take him back to his dormitory now,” she said. “Mister Evans is correct.”

  Big Black stepped forward and took the man by the elbow, lifting him up. The man smiled, and Lucy said, “Thank you for your time,” not a word of which the man seemed to understand, although the tone and sentiment must have been apparent, because he grinned and made a little wave with one of his hands, before dutifully following Big Black out the door. The pleasant smile he wore never wavered.

  Lucy leaned back in her seat and sighed. “Slow going,” she said.

  “I have had my doubts all along,” Mister Evans replied.

  Francis could see that Lucy was about to say something, and in that second, he heard two, maybe three of his voices all shouting at once Tell her! Go ahead and tell her! and so he leaned forward in his own chair and opened his mouth for the first time in hours.

  “It’s okay, Lucy,” he said slowly, then picking up some speed. “That’s not the point.”

  Mister Evans instantly looked angry that Francis had said anything, as if he’d been interrupted, when he hadn’t. Lucy turned toward Francis. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not about what they say,” Francis said. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense, really, whatever questions you might ask, about the night of the killing, or where they were, or if they knew Short Blond, or have they ever been violent in the past. No matter what questions you ask about that night, or even about who they are, it’s not really important. Whatever they say, whatever they hear, whatever response they make, not one word will be what you should be listening for.”

  As Francis might have guessed, Mister Evans waved his hand dismissively. “You don’t think that anything they say might be important, C-Bird? Because, if not, then what is the purpose of this little exercise?”

  Francis shrank back in his chair, a little afraid to contradict Mister Evil. There are some men, he knew, that stored up slights and affronts, and then paid one back at some later time, and Evans was one of them.

  “Words,” Francis said slowly, a little quietly. “Words aren’t going to mean anything. We’re going to need to speak a different language to find the Angel. A wholly different means of communicating. and one of these people, coming through that door, will be speaking it. We just need to recognize it, when it arrives. We can find it in here,” he continued, speaking cautiously, “but it won’t exactly be what we expect.”

  Evans snorted slightly, and then pulled out his notebook, and wrote a small notation down on a lined sheet. Lucy Jones was about to respond to Francis, but she saw this action on the psychologist’s part, and instead she turned to him. “What was that?” she asked, pointing to the notebook.

  “Nothing much,” he said.

  “Well,” she persisted. “It had to be something. A reminder to pick up a quart of milk on the way home. A decision to apply for a new job. A maxim, a play on words, a bit of doggerel or poetry. But it was something. What?”

  “An observation about our young friend, here,” Evans replied blankly. “A note to myself that Francis’s delusions are still current. As evidenced by what he said, about creating some sort of new language.”

  Lucy, instantly angered, was about to reply that she had understood everything Francis had said, but then she stopped herself. She stole a quick glance in Francis’s direction and she could see that every word that Mister Evans spoke had scorched itself into his world of fears. Say nothing, she told herself abruptly. You will only make it worse.

  Although precisely how things could be worse for Francis, she was a little at a loss to imagine.

  “So, who do we have next?” Lucy said instead.

  “Hey, Fireman!” Little Black said in a slightly lowered voice, but with some added urgency. “You got to hurry up.” He stared down at his watch, then looked up and tapped the face on his wrist with his index finger. “We got to get a move on,” he said.

  Peter was running his hands through the bedding of one of Lucy’s potential suspects, and he looked up a little surprised. “What’s the rush?” he asked.

  “Gulp-a-pill,” Little Black said quickly. “He usually makes his midday rounds pretty damn soon, and I need to get you back over to Amherst and out of those clothes before he starts wandering around the hospital and spots you somewhere you ain’t supposed to be, dressed like you ain’t supposed to be dressed.”

  Peter nodded. He slid his hands under the edges of the bed, palpitating the mattress beneath. One of Peter’s fears was that the Angel had managed to slice a section out of a mattress, and then concealed his weapon and his souvenirs inside. It was, Peter thought, what he himself would have done if he’d had any items that he’d wished to hide from attendants or nurses or any other patient with prying eyes.

  He felt nothing and shook his head.

  “You just about finished?” Little Black asked.

  Peter continued working the mattress, probing every shape and lump to make certain that it was what it should be. He saw that the usual sorts of patients were still eyeing him from across the room. Some were intimidated by Little Black, because they cowered in the corner, pressed up against the wall. A few others were sitting vacantly on the edge of their bunks, looking off into a void, as if the world they inhabited was somewhere else.

  “Yeah, just about,” Peter mumbled to the attendant, who tapped his watch face again.

  The bed was clean, Peter thought. Nothing immediately suspect. There was now only the matter of a quick search of the man’s belongings, which were gathered in a foot locker beneath the steel frame of the bed. Peter pulled the locker out. He rifled through, finding nothing more suspect than some socks that were in dire need of laundering. He was about to step back when something caught his eye.

  It was a flat white T-shirt, folded up and placed near the bottom of the locker. It was no different from the cheap type sold at discount stores throughout New England and worn by many of the men in the hospital beneath a heavier winter shirt during the colder months. But that wasn’t what caught his attention.

  The shirt was stained with a huge dark red brown splotch across the chest.

  He had seen stains like that before. In his training as an arson investigator. In his time in the jungle in Vietnam.

  Peter held the shirt in his hands for a second, rubbing the fabric beneath his fingers as if he could tell something more by touching it. Little Black was a few feet away and finally insistence crept into his voice. “Peter, we got to leave now. I don’t want to have to do any explaining that I don’t have to, and I sure as hell don’t want to have to explain nothing to the big doc, if I don’t need to.”

  “Mister Moses,” Peter said slowly. “Look at this.”

  Little Black stepped forward, so that he could lean over Peter’s shoulder. Peter said nothing, but he heard the attendant whistle softly.

  “That could be blood there, Peter,” he said after a moment. “Sure looks like it.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Peter replied.

  “Ain’t that one of the things we’re supposed to be looking for?” Little Black asked.

  “It is, indeed,” Peter replied quietly.

  Then he carefully folded the shirt back precisely as it was when he’d discovered it, and slipped it into the same position that it had occupied before he had drawn it forth. He returned the foot locker to its customary spot beneath the bed, hoping that it was positioned as it had been. Then he stood up. “Let’s go,” he said. He glanced over at the small gathering of men across the room from him, but whether they had noticed anything or not was impossible for Peter to tell from the vacant eyes that stared back at him.

  chapter 19

  Peter slid out of the white attendant’s uniform in the area just inside the door to the Amherst Building. Little Black took the baggy pants and loose-fitting jacket from him, folded them up and stuffed them beneath his arm, while Peter pulled on a pair of wrinkled jeans. “I�
��ll stash these,” he said, “until we’re sure Gulptilil has finished his rounds and we can get back to business.” The wiry attendant then looked narrowly at Peter and added, “You gonna tell Miss Jones about what we saw and where we saw it?”

  Peter nodded. “As soon as Mister Evil steps away from her side.”

  Little Black grimaced. “He’ll find out. One way or another. Always does. Sooner or later, man seems to know everything going on around here.”

  Peter thought that was an intriguing bit of information but he didn’t comment on it.

  For an instant, Little Black seemed indecisive. “So, what we gonna do about a man got a shirt hidden away all stained with blood we don’t think is his own?”

  “I think we need to keep quiet and keep what we found to ourselves for the time being,” he said. “At least until Miss Jones decides how she wants to proceed. I think we need to be very careful. After all, the man whose bunk that was is in there talking with her right now.”

  “You think she’s gonna pick up on something, talking to him?”

  “I don’t know. We just need to be cautious.”

  Little Black nodded in agreement. Peter could see that the attendant was alert to the volatility of the knowledge they had acquired. A single bloodstained T-shirt, that could cause all sorts of difficulties. Peter ran his hand through his hair, as he considered the situation, recognizing that he needed to be both wary and aggressive. His first thought was technical: How to isolate and proceed against the man who slept in the bunk where he’d made his discovery. There was much to do, he realized, now that he had a genuine suspect. But all his training suggested caution in his approach, even if that contradicted his own nature. He smiled, because he recognized the familiar dilemma that he’d faced throughout his life, the balance between small steps and headlong plunges. He was aware that he was where he was, at least in part, because of a failure to hesitate.

  In the corridor outside the office where Lucy was conducting interviews, the larger of the Moses brothers was standing, keeping watch on a patient that rivaled him in size, and perhaps in strength as well, though if this detail concerned Big Black, he didn’t show it. The man was rocking back and forth, a little like a truck with its wheels stuck in mud, running through the gears until he found one that would help him to get going. When Big Black spotted Peter and his brother approaching, he nudged the man forward.

  “We need to be escorting this gentleman back to Williams,” he said, as they closed distance. Big Black made eye contact with his brother, and added, “Gulp-a-pill’s upstairs, doing rounds on the third floor.”

  Peter didn’t wait for the attendants to tell him what to do. “I’ll just wait here for Miss Jones,” he said. He pushed himself up against the wall, trying, as he did so, to get a really good assessment of the man Big Black was accompanying. He attempted to look into the man’s eyes, to measure his posture, his appearance, as if he could see into his heart. A man that might be a killer.

  As Peter slouched nonchalantly, and the trio of patient and attendants stepped past him, he could not resist speaking out loud, but under his breath, a whispered impulse designed for the ears of the man being escorted past: “Hello Angel,” he said. “I know who you are.”

  Neither of the Moses brothers seemed to overhear his greeting.

  Nor did the patient hesitate in the slightest. He merely shuffled along, plodding just behind the Moses brothers, seemingly unaware that he’d been spoken to. He moved a little bit like a man wearing hand and leg restraints, in short choppy steps, although there was nothing actually restricting his motion.

  Peter watched the man’s broad back disappear through the front door before he lifted himself off the wall and stepped toward the office where Lucy Jones waited. He didn’t exactly know what to make of what had just happened.

  Before he reached the office, however, Lucy Jones emerged, closely followed by Mister Evil, who was clearly speaking to her in an energetic way, and Francis, who was hanging back, as if to distance himself from the psychologist. Peter could see that C-Bird had a troubled look, as if some thought or some idea had diminished him slightly. He looked lighter. But the young man lifted his head up abruptly, saw Peter approaching, and seemed to recover in that second, immediately moving away from Mister Evil toward Peter. At the same time, Peter saw Gulptilil enter the hallway from the far stairwell, leading a small coterie of staff members. Lots of notepads and pencils, scribbling observations, taking notations. Peter saw Cleo, cigarette dangling from her lower lip, launch herself out of an old and uncomfortable chair, and directly into the medical director’s path. She held her ground like some ancient warrior defending the gates of her city.

  “Ah, Doctor!” Her voice was just a little shy of being a shout. “What do you intend to do about the inadequate food portions being served at mealtimes? I don’t believe that the state legislature envisioned starving us all to death when they established this place. I have friends who have friends who know people in high places, and they just might have the governor’s ear on issues of mental health …”

  Gulp-a-pill hesitated and turned toward Cleo. The group of interns and resident physicians accompanying him paused, and like a chorus line at a Broadway show, turned in unison. “Ah, Cleo,” the doctor replied unctuously, mimicking her choice of words. “I was unaware that there was a problem, and equally unaware that you had complained. But I do not think it necessary to involve the entirety of state government in this matter. I will speak with the kitchen staff and make certain that everyone gets all they need at mealtimes.”

  Cleo, however, was just getting started.

  “The Ping-Pong paddles are worn,” she continued, picking up some momentum with each word. “They need replacing. The balls are frequently cracked, thereby rendering them useless and the nets are frayed and held together with string. The table is warped and unsteady. Tell me, Doctor, how is one supposed to improve their game with inferior equipment that doesn’t meet even the minimum United States Table Tennis Association standards?”

  “Again, I was unaware that this had arisen as a problem. I will examine the recreation budget to see if there are funds for a purchase.”

  While this might have placated some, Cleo was far from finished. “There’s far too much noise in the dormitories at night to get a good sleep. Far, far too much. Sleep is critical to one’s sense of well-being and overall progress toward health. The Surgeon General recommends at least eight hours per day of uninterrupted sleep. And furthermore, we need more space. Much more space. There are death row prisoners with more living space than we have. The overcrowding is out of control. And we need more toilet paper in the bathrooms. A lot more toilet paper. And …” By now her voice was a cascade of complaints, “… why aren’t there more attendants to help people out at night, when we have nightmares? Every night, someone screams for help. Nightmares, nightmares, nightmares. You call and call and cry and no one ever comes. That’s wrong, just plain, flat-out goddamn son of a bitch wrong.”

  “We, like many state institutions, currently have staffing problems, Cleo,” the doctor responded with a condescending tone. “I will, of course, register your complaints and your suggestions and see if there’s anything we can do. But if the skeleton staff that works the overnight shift were to respond to every cry they overheard, they would be worked to a frazzle within a night or two, Cleo. I’m afraid nightmares are something that we will all have to learn to live with from time to time.”

  “That is hardly fair. With all the medications you bastards pump us full of, you ought to be able to find something so folks can sleep without being excessively troubled.” Cleo seemed to inflate herself as she spoke, rising up with a regal haughtiness, a Marie Antoinette of the Amherst Building.

  “I will examine the physician’s guide for some additional medication,” the doctor lied. “Are there any more issues that you need addressed?”

  Cleo looked a little flustered, a little frustrated, but, then almost as swiftly, this look d
issolved into something considerably more sly. “Yes,” she said briskly. “I want to know what is happening to poor Lanky.” And then she lifted her arm and pointed at Lucy, who was standing patiently waiting by the side of the corridor. “And I want to know if she’s been able to find the real killer!”

  The words echoed in the hallway.

  Gulptilil smiled wanly, and answered quietly, “Lanky continues to remain in solitary confinement, accused of first degree murder. I believe I have explained this to you before. He had a bail hearing, but, as one would expect, none was granted. He has been assigned a public defender, and he continues to get his medications from the hospital. He’s still being held in the county jail, pending additional court hearings. I am told his spirits are fine …”

  “That’s a lie,” Cleo said angrily. “Lanky’s probably miserable away from here. This is his home, such as it is, and we are his friends, such as we are. He should be returned here forthwith!” She took a deep breath, and then, sarcastically, mimicked the doctor’s words. “I have told you this before. Why don’t you listen to me?”

  “… And as to your other question,” Gulptilil continued, ignoring Cleo’s accusation, “well, that is better directed to Miss Jones. But she is under no obligation to inform anyone as to what progress she feels she has made. Or not made.” The last words were underscored by Gulptilil’s acid voice.

  Cleo stepped back, muttering something to herself. Gulptilil separated himself from her, and like a scout leader on a hike in the woods, waved the accompanying group of residents to follow him down the corridor. He had only taken a few steps, however, before Cleo burst out, loud, insistent and ringing with accusation, “I’m watching you, Gulptilil! I can see what’s going on! You may fool some of the people around here, but not me!” Then, slightly under her breath, but not enough so that the physicians couldn’t hear her, she added, “You’re all bastards.”