The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  The medical director paused, half started to turn back, then obviously thought better of it. Francis could see that his face was set, unsuccessfully trying to hide the discomfort of the moment.

  “We’re all in danger and you sons of bitches aren’t doing anything about it!” Cleo bellowed.

  Then she gave a little giggle, took a long drag on her cigarette, cackled to herself and slumped back down into her seat, where she continued to watch the director move down the corridor, grinning with a self-satisfied look on her face. Holding her cigarette in her hand like a baton, she waved it in the air. A conductor satisfied with the final notes of the orchestral arrangement.

  Francis was oddly encouraged by Cleo’s bombast. It seemed to him that her outburst had gained the attention of every patient wandering the ward. Whether it meant anything to any of them, Francis could not tell, but he smiled to himself at her meager display of rebelliousness and wished that he had the same confidence to be as demanding. Cleo, for her part, must have sensed Francis’s thoughts, because she blew a large elaborate smoke ring into the still corridor air, watched it dissipate, then gave Francis a wink.

  Peter sidled into the space next to Francis, must have thought the same, and whispered, “When the revolution comes, she’ll be on the barricades. Hell, she’ll probably be leading the rebellion and she’s big enough to be a barricade all by herself.”

  “What revolution?” Francis asked.

  “Don’t be so literal, C-bird,” Peter said with a small laugh. “Think symbolically.”

  “That may come easy for the Queen of Egypt,” Francis replied. “But I don’t know about me.” The two of them grinned.

  Gulptilil, however, still apparently unamused, approached them. “Ah, Peter and Francis,” he said, the lilting tones returning to his voice, but with none of the pleasantry ordinarily associated with the lighthearted sound. “My pair of investigators. And how is your progress?” he asked.

  “Slow and steady,” Peter replied. “That is how I would describe it. But it is really for Miss Jones to determine.”

  “Of course. She determines one sort of progress. I, and the others in charge here, are more concerned with a totally different sort of progress, are we not?”

  Peter hesitated, then nodded.

  “Of course, we are,” Gulptilil said. “And to that end, this is a fortuitous meeting. Both of you need to come to my office this afternoon. Francis, it is time you and I had a chat about your continuing adjustment. And Peter, you will have a visitor of some significance this afternoon. The Moses brothers will be informed when they arrive, and they will escort you to administration.”

  The pear-shaped medical director arched one eyebrow upward, as if curious as to the reactions of each man. He watched both their faces for an unsettling half minute or so, then continued on a few paces, turning to Lucy. “Miss Jones, good day to you. And have you managed to make inroads in your dilemma?”

  “I have managed to eliminate a number of potential suspects.”

  “That, I presume, is something you consider valuable?”

  She did not reply.

  “Well,” Gulptilil continued, “please keep at it. The sooner we have some conclusions, the better for all involved, I believe. Mister Evans has proven to be of assistance in your inquiries?”

  “Of course,” Lucy said rapidly.

  Gulptilil then pivoted toward Mister Evil. “You will keep me posted, as well, as matters develop and the circumstances warrant?” he said.

  “Of course,” Evans said. This, Francis thought, was all a bit of bureaucratic playacting. He was certain that Evans was keeping Gulp-a-pill assessed of everything at every point. He assumed that Lucy Jones knew this, as well.

  The medical director sighed, and then continued down the corridor, and exited by the main door. After a moment, Evans turned to Lucy Jones, and said, “Well, I gather we’re taking a break now, and I have some paperwork to do.” He, too, exited quickly.

  Francis heard someone from the dayroom laugh out loud. High-pitched and mocking, it swirled around the Amherst Building. But when he turned to see where the laughter was coming from, it stopped, fading away invisibly in the shafts of midday sunlight that filtered through the barred windows.

  Peter peeled himself from the wall, whispered to Francis, “Come on,” and approached Lucy. In that moment the Fireman changed abruptly, immediately focused on something other than Cleo and her demands or his pleasure at seeing Gulptilil discomfited. Francis saw that Peter’s face was set. He took Lucy Jones by the elbow, turned her around and said, “I found something I need to tell you about.”

  Wordlessly, she nodded, after, Francis thought, measuring the look on Peter’s face. The three of them returned to her small office.

  “That last man,” Peter said, as they took chairs around the desk, “What sort of impression did you get speaking to him?”

  Lucy arched an eyebrow up. “The short answer is none,” she said, and then she turned to Francis. “Isn’t that right, Francis?”

  He nodded, and she continued: “The man, while possessing the physical strength and the youth to do some of the things we are considering, is severely retarded. He wasn’t able to communicate anything of any importance, mostly just sat there about as dense to what I was asking as imaginable, and Evans thought he should be ruled out. The guy we’re looking for has some brains. At least enough to plan his crimes and avoid detection.”

  Peter looked a little surprised, then said, “Evans thought that man should be eliminated as a suspect?”

  “He made that point,” Lucy replied.

  “Well, that’s curious, because I discovered a bloodstained white T-shirt hidden near the bottom of his belongings.”

  Lucy rocked back in her seat, initially not saying anything. Francis watched her absorb this information and noted how guarded she became. His own imagination was energized, and after a second, he leaned forward and asked, “Peter, can you describe what you found? How can you be sure it was what you say?”

  It only took Peter a moment or two to fill in a picture for the two of them.

  “You are absolutely sure that it was blood?” Lucy finally asked.

  “As sure as I can be without lab tests.”

  “There was spaghetti for dinner the other night. I’m wondering whether this guy has trouble manipulating utensils. He might have spilled sauce on his chest …”

  “It wasn’t that sort of stain. It was thick, a maroonish brown in color, and was smeared about. Not as if it had been dabbed at, by someone with a damp rag who wanted to clean it up. No, this was something that someone wanted to keep, intact.”

  Lucy spoke slowly, “Like a souvenir? We’re looking for someone who wants to keep souvenirs.”

  “I suspect,” Peter said, in reply, “that this had more or less the same effect as a snapshot. For the killer that is. You know, a family goes on vacation and later, they have their pictures developed, and they sit around watching slides of the trip and reliving the memories. My guess is that for our Angel, this shirt would provide much the same thrill and satisfaction. He could hold it up, touch it, and remember. I would imagine that remembering the moment is probably nearly as powerful as the moment itself,” Peter concluded.

  Francis could feel a din of voices within him. Conflicting opinions, advice, fear, and unsettled feelings. After a second, he nodded, in agreement with what Peter was saying. But he asked Lucy, “Was there any indication, in any of the other killings, that anything was taken from the victims, other than the finger joints?”

  Lucy, on the verge of responding to what Peter had said, shifted gears, and pivoted toward Francis. She shook her head. “Not that we could tell. No articles of clothing were missing. At least, not from any inventory of items that we came up with. But that doesn’t completely rule it out.”

  Francis was troubled by something, but he was unable to say what, and none of his voices were clear and decisive. They echoed contradictory opinions within him, and he did his b
est to shut them out so that he could concentrate.

  Lucy was nervously tapping a pencil on the tabletop. She turned to Peter, and asked, “Did you find anything else that was incriminating?”

  “No.”

  “The fingertips?”

  “No. And no knife, either. Or the building keys.”

  She leaned back, but it was Francis who spoke.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that what I said earlier is true.” He was a little surprised that he was as forceful as he was. “Before you came back, Peter. When Evans was here.” It was a little, he thought, as if he was hearing his own voice, but that it was coming from some other Francis, not the Francis that he knew he was, but a different Francis, a Francis that he hoped he someday might be. “When I said we need to uncover the Angel’s language.”

  Peter looked at Francis with an intrigued eye, and Lucy bent to his words. Francis hesitated for an instant, ignored a surge of doubt and then said, “I wonder if this isn’t the first lesson in communication.” The others remained quiet, and then he added, “We just need to find out what he’s saying, and why.”

  For a moment or two, Lucy wondered whether her pursuit of a killer in the hospital might render her mad, as well. But she saw madness as a by-product of frustration, not some organic illness. This was dangerous thinking, she realized, and with a bit of mental weight lifting, dismissed the notion from her head. She had sent Peter and Francis off to eat lunch, while she tried to map out a course of action. Alone, in her small office, she spread the hospital folder of the man she had tried to interview that morning out on her desk. Some things should make sense, she thought. Some connections should be obvious. Some steps should be clear.

  She shook her head, as if that might remove the sense of contradiction that overcame her. Now she had a name. A piece of evidence. She had begun successful prosecutions with far less. And, still, she was uneasy. The dossier in front of her should have indicated something persuasive, and yet, it did the opposite. A profoundly retarded man, incapable of answering even the simplest of questions, who had stared across at her seemingly unable to understand anything she asked, had an item in his possession that only the killer would have. This did not add up.

  Her first inclination was to send Peter back to take the shirt from the box beneath the man’s bed. Any competent crime lab would be able to match the bloodstains against Short Blond’s. It was also possible that hair, or fiber evidence was on the shirt, and a microscopic examination might turn up further links between the victim and the assailant. The trouble with simply taking the shirt was that it would be an illegal seizure and probably tossed out by a judge in any subsequent hearing. And there was the curious matter of the lack of the other items that they were searching for. That, too, did not make sense to her.

  Lucy had considerable capabilities of concentration. In her short, but meteoric career in the prosecutor’s office, she had distinguished herself by being able to see the crimes she investigated in more or less the same way that one watched a movie. In the screen of her imagination, she was able to put details together, so that sooner or later she could envision the entire act. It was what made her so successful. When Lucy came into court, she understood, probably even better than the man she was prosecuting, why and how he’d done what he’d done. It was this quality that made her so formidable. But inside the hospital, she felt adrift. It simply wasn’t the same as the criminal world she was accustomed to.

  Lucy groaned, frustrated. She stared down at the dossier for the hundredth time, and was about to slam it shut, when there was a tentative knock on the door. She looked up, and it swung open.

  Francis was leaning in, poking his head around the corner.

  “Hello, Lucy,” he said. “Can I disturb you?”

  “C-Bird, come in,” she said. “I thought you’d gone to lunch.”

  “I did. Or I am. But something occurred to me on the way there, and Peter told me to right away come and tell you.”

  “What is that?” Lucy asked, gesturing for the young man to come into the office and seat himself. This Francis did with a clumsy series of motions that seemed to indicate that he was both eager and reluctant.

  “The retarded man,” Francis said slowly, “he didn’t seem at all like the sort of person that we’re looking for. I mean, some of the other guys that have been in here, who have been ruled out, they seemed, outwardly at least, like much better candidates. Or at least, what we think a candidate should look and sound like.”

  Lucy nodded. “That’s what I thought, too. But this one guy—how does he have the shirt?”

  Francis seemed to shudder, before replying. “Because someone wanted us to find it. And someone wanted us to find this man. Someone knew that we were interviewing and searching, and he made the connection between the two events, and so he anticipated what we were going to do, and he planted the shirt.”

  Lucy inhaled sharply. This made some sense to her. “Why would someone drag us to this person?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Francis said. “I don’t know.”

  “I mean,” Lucy continued, “if you wanted to frame someone for a crime that you’d committed, it would make more sense to plant things on someone whose behavior would be truly suspicious. How can this man’s behavior get our interest?”

  “I know that, too,” Francis said. “But this man is different. He’s the least likely candidate I think. A brick wall. So there needs to be another reason why he was selected.”

  He stood up suddenly, looking skittish, as if a disturbing noise had exploded close by. “Lucy,” he said slowly, “there is something about this man that should tell us something. We just need to figure out what it is.”

  Lucy grasped the man’s hospital folder and held it up. “Do you think there’s something in here that might help us?” she asked.

  Francis nodded. “Maybe. Maybe. I don’t know what goes into a folder.”

  She thrust it across the desk. “See what you can see, because I’m drawing a blank.”

  Francis reached out and took the folder. He had never actually looked at a hospital file record before, and for a moment he felt as if he were doing something illegal, staring into another patient’s life. The existence that all the patients knew about one another was so much defined by the hospital and the day-to-day routine that after a short time confined there, one more or less forgot that the other patients had lives outside the walls. All those elements, of past, of family, of future, were stripped away inside the mental hospital. Francis realized that somewhere there was a file about him, and one about Peter, as well, and that they contained all sorts of information that seemed in that moment terribly distant, as if it had all happened in another existence, at a different time, to a different Francis.

  He pored over the retarded man’s file.

  It was written in clipped and nondescript hospitalese and divided into four sections. The first was background about his home and family; the second contained clinical history, which included height, weight, blood pressure, and the like; the third was course of treatment, outlining various drugs assigned; and the fourth was prognosis. This final section consisted of only five words: Guarded. Long term care likely.

  There was also a chart that showed that the retarded man had, on more than one occasion, been checked out of the hospital for weekend furloughs to his family.

  Francis read about a man who had grown up in a small town not far from Boston and who had only relocated to Western Massachusetts in the year before his hospitalization. He was in his early thirties, and had a sister and two brothers, all of whom tested normal and lived seemingly humdrum lives of exquisite routine. He had first been diagnosed as retarded in grade school and had been in and out of various developmental programs all of his life. No plan had ever stuck.

  Francis rocked back in his seat, and quickly saw a simple, deadly situation that resembled a box. A mother and father growing older. A childlike son, larger and less able to be controlled with every passing yea
r. A son who was unable to understand or control impulses or rage. Of sexual interest. Of strength. Siblings who wanted to get away, far away, as fast as possible, unwilling to help.

  He could see a little bit of himself in every word. Different, but the same, still.

  Francis read through the file once, then again, all the time aware that Lucy was watching his face closely, measuring every reaction that he had to the words on the page.

  After a moment, he bit down on his lip. He could feel a little quiver in his hands. He could sense things swirling around him, as if the words on the pages combined with the thoughts in his head to make him dizzy. He felt a surge of danger, and he breathed in sharply, then pushed himself away from the file, sliding it across the desktop to Lucy.

  “Do you have any ideas, Francis?” she asked.

  “Nothing, really,” he said.

  “Nothing jumps out at you?”

  He shook his head. But she could see that this was a lie. Francis did have ideas, she realized. He just didn’t want to say what they were.

  I tried to remember: What scared me the most?

  That was one of the moments, that time in Lucy’s office. I was beginning to see things. Not hallucinations, like those that rang in my ears and echoed in my head. Those, I was familiar with, and while they might have been irksome and difficult and helped define my madness, I was accustomed to them and their demands and fears and the things they might or might not ask of me at any given moment. After all, they had been with me since I was a child. But what scared me right then was seeing things about the Angel. Who he might be. How he might think. For Peter and Lucy, it wasn’t the same. They understood that the Angel was an adversary. A criminal. A target. Someone hiding from them, whom they were empowered to uncover. They had hunted people before, stalked them and brought them to justice, so there was a different context to their pursuit than what I had suddenly surrounding me. In those moments, I had begun to see the Angel as someone like me. Only far worse. He had taken footsteps, and, for the first time, I believed that I was able to retrace them. Placing my own shoe in his well-trod path was something that everything inside me screamed was wrong. But possible.