The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  “Summoning me?”

  “Indeed,” Gulptilil said. “For I have recently been in contact with your boss, the Suffolk County prosecutor. And he is, shall we say, most curious about your presence here, and your progress.” He leaned back with a crocodilian smile. “But you have a request for me? That has brought you to this office?”

  “Yes,” she replied slowly. “I would like the names and files for all the patients in Williams, in the second-floor dormitory, and if possible, the locations of their beds, so that I can connect names, diagnosis, and location.”

  Doctor Gulptilil nodded, still smiling. “Yes. This would be from the dormitory that is in such upheaval now, thanks to your prior inquiries?”

  “Yes.”

  “The turmoil you have already created will take some time to settle down. If I do give you this information, will you promise me that before engaging in any other activities in that area of the hospital, you will inform me first?”

  “Searched? You mean you want to go through and inspect what few private things those patients own?”

  “Yes. I believe there remains hard criminal evidence available, and I have reason to believe that some might be located in that dormitory, so I would like your permission to search it.”

  “Evidence? And upon what do you base this supposition?”

  Lucy hesitated, then said, “I have been reliably informed that one of the patients in that area was in possession of a bloodstained shirt. The nature of the wound to Short Blond suggests that whoever committed the crime would have clothing marred with her blood.”

  “Yes. That would make sense. But didn’t the police discover some bloody items on poor Lanky when he was arrested?”

  “My belief is that those modest amounts were transferred by another person to his body.”

  Doctor Gulptilil smiled. “Ah,” he said. “Of course. Transferred by this latter-day Jack the Ripper. A criminal genius, no, sorry, I apologize. That’s not the word. A criminal mastermind. Right here in our mental hospital. No? Farfetched and unlikely, but an explanation that would permit your inquiries to persist. And of this alleged bloody shirt … might I see it?”

  “It is not in my control.”

  He nodded his head. “Somehow, Miss Jones, I anticipated your response to that question. So, were I to allow this search you request, would this not create some legal problems with any potential items seized?”

  “No. This is a state hospital, and you have the right to search any area for contraband or any banned substance or item. I would merely ask you to engage in that routine, within my presence.”

  Gulptilil rocked in his chair for a moment. “So, now, suddenly, you believe my staff and I can be of some assistance?”

  “I don’t know that I understand the implication in what you say,” she responded, which was, of course, a lawyer’s lie, for she understood completely what he was saying.

  Doctor Gulptilil obviously saw the same thing, for he sighed. “Ah, Miss Jones, your lack of trust for the staff here is most discouraging. Regardless, I will arrange for the search, as you request, if only to help persuade you of the folly of your inquiries. And the names and the bedding arrangements at Williams, these, too, I can provide. And then, perhaps, we can conclude your stay here.”

  She remembered what Francis had asked, and so she added, “One other thing. Might I have the list of patients scheduled for release hearings this week? If it’s not a burden…”

  He looked askance at her. “Yes. I can give you that, as well. As part of my efforts to support your inquiries, I will have my secretary provide these documents.” The doctor had the ability to easily make a lie seem like the truth, a quality that Lucy Jones found unsettling. “Although, I am not sure what possible connection our regularly scheduled release hearings might have to your inquiry. Would you be willing to connect those particular dots for me, Miss Jones?”

  “I’d rather not, not quite yet.”

  “Your response doesn’t surprise me,” he said stiffly. “Still, I will get the list you request.”

  She nodded her head. “Thank you,” and started to leave.

  Gulptilil held up his hand. “But there is something I must ask of you, Miss Jones.”

  “What is that, Doctor?”

  “You are to call your supervisor. The gentleman that I had such a pleasant conversation with not so long ago. Now, I would wager, would be a good moment for that call to take place. Allow me.”

  He reached down and turned the telephone on his desk toward her, so that she could dial. He made no effort to leave.

  Lucy’s ears still rang with the admonitions of her boss. A waste of time and just spinning your wheels had been the least of his complaints. The most insistent was Show some real progress promptly, or else get back here as soon as possible. There had been an angry litany of the cases on her desk that were piling up, unattended, matters that demanded urgent attention. She had tried to explain to him that the mental hospital was an unusual place to try to conduct an investigation, and not the sort of atmosphere that lent itself to the usual tried-and-true techniques, but he wasn’t very interested in hearing these excuses. Come up with something in the next few days, or we’re going to pull the plug. That had been the last thing he’d said. She wondered how much her boss had been poisoned by his earlier conversation with Gulptilil, but it was irrelevant. He was a blustery, devil-may-care, hell-bent Boston Irishman, and when persuaded that there was something to pursue, was single-minded in his intensity, a quality that got him reelected over and over again. But he was just as quick to drop an inquiry, as soon as it hit his rather low tolerance for frustration, which, she thought, was a political expediency, but didn’t help her much.

  And, she had to admit, that the sort of progress that a politician could point to was elusive. She couldn’t even prove the links between the cases, other than the style of murders. It was a situation that lent itself to complete insanity, she thought. It was clear to her that the killer of Short Blond, the Angel who’d terrorized Francis, and the man who’d committed the killings in her own district were the same. And that he was right there, under her nose, taunting her.

  Killing the Dancer was clearly his work. He knew it, she knew it. It all made sense.

  But no sense, at the very same time. Criminal arrests and prosecutions aren’t based on what you know, but on what you can prove, and so far, she couldn’t prove anything.

  She realized that for the moment, the Angel remained untouchable. Lost in a tangle of thoughts, she made her way back to the Amherst Building. The early evening had a touch of chill in the air, and some vacant, lost cries reverberated around the hospital grounds, and Lucy was unaware that whatever agony was attached to any of these plaintive noises evaporated in the cooling air around her. Had she not been so wrapped up in the impossibility of her own beliefs, she might have noticed that the sounds that had so upset her when she first arrived at Western State had now disappeared within her into some location of acceptance, so much so that she was slowly becoming something of a fixture in the hospital herself, a mere tangent to all the madness that lived so unhappily there.

  Peter looked up and realized that something was out of place, but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. That was the problem with the hospital; everything was twisted around, backward, distorted or misshapen. Seeing accurately was nearly impossible. For an instant, he longed for the simplicity of a fire scene. There had been a sort of freedom in walking amid the charred, wet, and smelly remains of one fire or another, and slowly picturing in his mind’s eye precisely how the fire was started, and how it had progressed, from floor to walls to ceiling to roof, accelerated by one fuel or another. There was a certain mathematical precision in dissecting a fire, and it had given him a great amount of satisfaction, holding burnt wood or scorched steel in his hands, feeling residual warmth flowing through his palms, and knowing that he would be able to imagine everything that was destroyed as it had been in the seconds before the fire took grasp. It w
as like the ability to see into the past, only clearly, without the fogs of emotion and stress. Everything was on the map of the event, and he longed for the easier time where he could follow each route to a precise destination. He had always thought of himself like one of the artists whose duty it was to restore great paintings damaged by time or the elements, painstakingly recreating the colors and brushstrokes of so many ancient geniuses, following in the path of a Rembrandt or Da Vinci, a lesser artist, but a crucial one.

  To his right, a man wearing loose-fitting hospital clothes, disheveled and unkempt, burst out into a raucous, braying laugh, as he looked down and saw that he had wet his own pants. Patients were lining up for their evening medications, and he saw Big Black and Little Black trying to keep some order in the process. It was a little like trying to organize stormy waves that were pounding a beach; everything ended up in more or less the same place, but everyone was being driven by forces that were as elusive as winds and currents.

  Peter shuddered and thought: I’ve got to get out of this place. He did not think himself crazy yet, but he knew that many of his actions could be seen as mad, and, the longer he stayed in the hospital, the more they would dominate his existence. It made him sweat, and he understood there were people—Mister Evil for one—who would happily see him disintegrate at the hospital. He was fortunate; he still clung to all sorts of vestiges of sanity. The other patients gave him some respect, knowing that he wasn’t as mad as they. But that could end. He could start hearing the same voices that they did. Start shuffling, start mumbling, wet his pants and line up for medication. It was all right there and he knew if he did not escape, he would get sucked in.

  Whatever the Church was offering, he knew he had to take it.

  He looked around, eyeing each patient as they crowded forward, heading toward the nursing station and the rows of medications lined up behind the iron grating.

  One of them was a killer. He knew this.

  Or maybe one lining up at the same time, over in Williams or Princeton or Harvard, but moving to the same schedule, was the killer.

  But how to pick him out?

  He tried to think of the case as he would have an arson, and he leaned back against the wall, trying to see where it started, because that would tell him how it had gained momentum, took flower and finally exploded. It was how he processed every fire scene he was called to; work backward to the first little flicker of flame, and that would tell him not only how the fire occurred, but who was standing there, watching it. He supposed it was a curious gift. In olden times kings and princes surrounded themselves with folks who purportedly could see into the future, wasting their time and money, when understanding the past was probably a much better way of seeing what lay ahead.

  Peter slowly exhaled. The hospital had a way of making one dwell on all the thoughts that echoed within him. He stopped in midthought, realizing that he had been moving his lips as he spoke with himself.

  Again, he breathed out. Close. Almost talking to yourself.

  He looked down at his hands, for no real reason other than to reassure himself that he was still intact. Get out, he told himself. Whatever you have to do, just get out.

  But as he reached this conclusion, he saw Lucy Jones enter the corridor. She had her head down, and he could see that she was both deep in her own thoughts and upset. And, in that second, he saw a future that frightened him, leaving him with an empty, helpless feeling. He would exit, disappearing off to some program in Oregon. She would exit, returning to her office and the steady processing of crime after crime. Francis would be left behind, with Napoleon, Cleo, and the Moses brothers.

  Lanky would go to prison.

  And the Angel would find someone else’s fingers to take.

  chapter 26

  Francis spent an unsettled night, sometimes lying rigid on his bunk, listening for any sound that was out of the ordinary in the dormitory that would signal the return of the Angel to his bedside. Dozens of these noises penetrated past his squeezed-shut eyes, echoing as deep as his own heartbeat. A hundred times he thought he felt the Angel’s hot breath against his forehead, and the sensation of the cold knife blade was never far from his memory. Even in the few moments when he slid inexorably away from the night fears that had driven him to sweat and anxiety, into a semblance of sleep, his rest was disturbed by frightening images. He imagined Lucy holding up her own hand, mutilated like Short Blond’s. Then, this image evaporated into one of himself, and he’d felt as if his own throat had been slashed and he was in his nether state desperately trying to hold the gaping wound together.

  He welcomed the first morning light that slithered through the window-panes, past the metal bars and grates, if only to signal that the hours when the Angel seemed to own the hospital were finished. For a moment he remained in his bunk, clinging to the oddest of thoughts, which was some half-finished notion that it was somehow wrong for the patients in the hospital to have the same fears of dying as the normal people outside the walls. Inside the walls, life seemed to be much more tenuous, it didn’t seem to have precisely the same quotient as outside. It was, he thought, as if they didn’t amount to as much, and were not quite as valuable and therefore shouldn’t put such a high price on their lives. He remembered reading in a newspaper once, that the sum total value of the parts of the human body only amounted to something like a dollar or two. He thought to himself that the inmates of Western State were probably worth just pennies. If even that.

  Francis went to the washroom and cleaned up, readying himself for the day. He felt a little comforted by the familiar signs of life in the hospital; Little Black and his huge brother were out in the corridor trying to get patients to make their way to the dining room for breakfast, a little like a pair of mechanics tweaking an engine, trying to get it to turn over and start running. He saw Mister Evil cruising the hallway, ignoring the entreaties from various folks about one problem or another. Francis wanted to embrace the routine.

  And then, as quickly as this thought hit him, he feared it.

  It was how the days slipped away. The hospital, with its compulsion for simply getting through time, was like a drug, even more powerful than those that came as pills or hypodermics. With addiction, came oblivion.

  Francis shook his head, for one thing was clear to him: The Angel was much closer to the world outside, and he suspected that if he ever wanted to rejoin it, that was the mountain he would have to climb. He thought: Finding Short Blond’s killer might be the only sane act left in the entire world to him.

  Inside his head, his voices were a jumble of turmoil. They were clearly trying to tell him something, but it was as if they couldn’t all agree on precisely what it was.

  One warning did come through, however. All the voices agreed that were he to be left behind to face the Angel alone, without Peter and Lucy, he was not likely to survive. He didn’t know how he would die, or precisely when. Sometime on the Angel’s own timetable. Murdered in his bed. Smothered like the Dancer or throat slashed like Short Blond or perhaps some other way of killing that he hadn’t considered yet, but it would happen.

  There would be no place to hide, other than to descend into some greater madness, which forced the hospital to lock him up each day, all day, in one of the isolation cells.

  He looked around for his two fellow investigators, and thought, for the first time, that it was time for him to answer the questions that the Angel kept asking.

  Francis slumped up against the corridor wall. It’s there. It’s right there in front of you! He looked up and saw Cleo steaming up the corridor, arms waving, like a great gray battleship slicing through a regatta of timid sailboats. Whatever was disturbing her this morning was lost in an avalanche of obscenities muttered in tempo with the wildly swinging arms, so that each “Goddamn!” “Motherfuckers!” “Sons of bitches!” was issued like the stroke of a clock. Patients shrank aside as she cruised past, and in that second Francis saw something. It’s not that the Angel knows how to be different. It�
�s that he knows how to be the same.

  When he looked up, in Cleo’s wake, he saw Peter. The Fireman seemed to be engaged in a heated conversation with Mister Evil, who was shaking his head negatively, back and forth, as Peter inched first closer to the psychologist, then back. After a moment, Mister Evil seemed to dismiss what Peter had to say, and turned on his heel and cruised back down the corridor. Peter, left standing, raised his voice and shouted after Mister Evil, “You need to tell Gulptilil! Today.” And then he quieted. Mister Evil kept his back turned, as if to refuse to acknowledge what Peter had shouted. Francis peeled himself off the wall, and quickly went over to the Fireman.

  “Peter?” Francis asked.

  “Hey, C-Bird,” Peter responded, looking up a little like someone who has been interrupted. “What is it?”

  Francis whispered. “Peter, when you look at us, the rest of the patients here, what do you see?”

  He hesitated, then responded, “I don’t know, Francis. It’s a little bit like Alice in Wonderland. Everything is curiouser and curiouser.”

  “But you’ve seen all the types of crazy that there are in here, haven’t you?”

  Peter hesitated, suddenly bending forward. Lucy was coming down the corridor, and Peter gave her a little wave, as he stepped closer to Francis. “C-Bird sees something,” he said quietly. “What is it?”

  “The man we’re looking for,” Francis whispered, just as Lucy hovered close, “is no more crazy than you. But he’s hiding by pretending to be something else.”

  “Keep going,” Peter said softly.

  “All of his madness, at least, the murdering madness and the finger-cutting madness, all that isn’t like any of the regular craziness we have in here. He plans. He thinks. It’s all about being evil, just like Lanky kept saying. It’s not about hearing voices or being deluded, or anything else. But in here, he hides because no one would think to look at him and not see a crazy person, but instead see something evil …”