The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  The Angel laughed a little before adding: “… Unless, of course, I kill you first.”

  These words were as sharp as any knife blade.

  I wanted to say “What are you waiting for?” but instead, shifted about, and crawling like a baby, tears dripping down my face, crossed the floor toward the wall of words. He was right with me, every step, and I didn’t understand yet why he had not seized hold of me. I tried to block out his presence, as if memory was my only salvation, and remembering Lucy’s authoritative demand that seemed to cut across the years.

  Lucy strode forward. “No one should touch a thing,” she demanded. “This is a crime scene!”

  Mister Evans seemed confused by her appearance and stuttered some reply that didn’t make immediate sense. Doctor Gulptilil, also taken aback by her outward change, shook his head, and stepped just slightly into her path, as if he could slow her pace down by forming some sort of obstacle. The security guards and Big Black and Little Black all shifted about uncomfortably.

  “She’s right,” Peter said forcefully. “The police should be called.”

  The Fireman’s voice seemed to penetrate past Evans’s surprise, and he pivoted toward Peter, saying, “What the hell do you know?”

  Gulptilil held up his hand and neither shook his head negatively, nor nodded in agreement. Instead, he shifted about in his place, as if switching his pear-shaped body amoeba-like from one position into another. “I would not be all that persuaded,” he said calmly. “Did we not just go through this sort of discussion with the prior death in this ward?”

  Lucy Jones snorted. “Yes, I believe we did.”

  “Ah, of course. An elderly patient who passed away from sudden heart failure. Which, I recall, you also wanted to investigate as a homicide.”

  Lucy gestured toward Cleo’s misshapen body, still hanging grotesquely in the stairwell. “This, I doubt, could be attributed to sudden heart failure.”

  “Nor does it have the earmarks of your cases,” Gulp-a-pill replied.

  “Yes it does,” Peter said briskly. “The severed thumb.”

  The doctor pivoted about and spent a few seconds staring at Cleo’s hand, and then down at the macabre sight on the floor. He shook his head, as he often did, but replied, “Perhaps. But then, Miss Jones, prior to engaging the local police, and all the trouble that act implies, we should examine the death ourselves, and see if we can reach some consensus. For my initial inspection does not suggest this is a homicide in the slightest.”

  Lucy Jones looked askance, started to say one thing, then stopped. “As you wish, Doctor,” she said. “Let’s take a look at the scene. As you wish.”

  Lucy followed the physician into the stairwell. Peter and Francis moved aside, watching them as they progressed into the small area. Mister Evil trailed after them, as well, after fixing Peter with a snarling gaze, but the others all hovered in the doorway area, as if getting much closer would somehow increase the potency of the image in front of them. Francis saw nervousness and fear in more than one set of eyes, and thought the portrait of Cleo’s death managed to transcend the ordinary boundaries of sanity and insanity; it was equally unsettling to the normal and the mad, just the same.

  For nearly ten minutes, Lucy and Doctor Gulptilil slowly walked around and through the small area, both sets of eyes reaching into every corner, surveying every inch of the space. Francis saw Peter watching them both closely, and he, too, tried to follow their vision, as if he could place their thoughts into his own head. And, as he did this, Francis began to see. It was a little like a camera out of focus, where everything was indistinct and fuzzy, but as he stood there, a certain sharpness slowly came to him, and he began to imagine Cleo’s last moments.

  Finally, Doctor Gulptilil turned to Lucy. “So, tell me Madam Prosecutor, how does this measure up as a homicide?”

  She pointed to the thumb. “My perpetrator has always severed fingers. She would be the fifth. Thus, the thumb.”

  He shook his head. “Look about,” he said slowly. “There are no signs of a struggle. No one has as yet stepped forward to say that there was a disturbance in this area last night. I would find it hard to imagine that your killer—or any killer for that matter—would be able to force a woman who possessed this bulk and strength, into a noose without attracting some attention to his efforts. And the victim here … well, what about this death reminds you of the others?”

  “Nothing, not yet,” Lucy said.

  “Do you imagine, Miss Jones,” Doctor Gulptilil said cautiously, “that suicide is unheard of here in this hospital?”

  And there, Francis thought, it is.

  “Of course not,” Lucy replied.

  “And was not the woman in question unhealthily fixated on the nurse-trainee’s murder?”

  “I don’t know that for a fact.”

  “Perhaps Mister Evans can enlighten us?”

  Evans stepped out from the doorway. “She seemed to take a far greater interest in the case than anyone else. She had had several significant outbursts, where she claimed knowledge or information about the death. If anyone is to blame, it is me, for failing to see how critical this obsession had become …”

  He said this last mea culpa in a tone that implied the exact opposite. In other words, Francis thought, he thinks he’s the least to blame. He looked up at Cleo’s bloated face and thought the entirety of the situation surreal. People arguing back and forth about what had taken place literally beneath the feet of the dead woman. He tried to remember her alive, but had trouble. He tried to feel sad, but, instead, he was mostly exhausted, as if the emotion of the discovery was like climbing some mountain. He looked around again, staying quiet, and found himself thinking: What did happen?

  “Miss Jones,” Doctor Gulptilil was saying, “death is not unheard of in the hospital. This act fits a sad scheme that we are familiar with. It is thankfully not as frequent as one might imagine, still, it does occur as we are sometimes slow to recognize the stresses that drive some patients. Your alleged killer is a sexual predator. But here we have no signs of such activity. Instead, we have a woman who, in all likelihood mutilated her own hand as her delusions connecting her to the prior murder grew out of control. I imagine we will find scissors or a razor hidden among her personal items. In addition, my guess is that we will discover that the bedsheet that she fashioned into a noose comes from her own bunk. Such is the resourcefulness of a psychotic bent on taking his own life, alas. I am sorry …”

  He pointed to the waiting security personnel.

  “… We must get this residence hall back on some kind of routine track.”

  Francis expected Peter to say something, but the Fireman kept his mouth closed.

  “And, Miss Jones,” Gulp-a-pill added, “I would like to discuss at your earliest convenience the impact of your, ah, shall we say haircut.”

  With that, the hospital director turned to Mister Evil and added, “Serve breakfast. Get the morning activities started.”

  Evans nodded. He looked over at Francis and Peter and he gave them a small wave. “You two, back to the dining hall, please,” he said. The words spoken carried polite tones but were as much a command as any issued by a prison guard.

  Peter seemed to bristle at Evans giving him any sort of instructions. But instead he looked over at Gulptilil. “I need to speak with you,” he said. Evans snarled, but Gulp-a-pill nodded.

  “Of course, Peter,” he said. “I have been anticipating that conversation.”

  Lucy seemed to sigh, and take a last look up at Cleo’s body. Francis could not tell whether it was discouragement that went through her eyes, or some other sense of resignation. It was almost as if he could see that she thought that everything was coming to an end unhappily, no matter what she did. It was the look of someone who believes that something is just beyond reach.

  Francis turned back and stared at Cleo’s body as well. He let his eyes survey the scene one last time as the security personnel moved to lower her to the ground
.

  Murder or suicide, he thought. For Lucy, one was likely. For the hospital director, the other was obvious. Each had his own needs for one outcome or the other.

  Francis, however, felt an empty cold deep within his heart, because he saw something different.

  Murder or suicide? he thought to himself. He stepped back from the stairwell door and took a quick glance into the women’s dormitory. He knew Cleo’s bed was right inside the door. He took notice that both sheets were intact, and there was no sign of a knife or blood, if that had been the place where she’d severed her thumb. He could hear echoes from his own voices shouting conflicting visions inside, but he shut them all away almost as if he could close the lid on their complaints. Murder or suicide? How about both? he whispered to himself, as then he turned and followed Peter back down the corridor.

  chapter 28

  Cleo’s body was hustled out of the Amherst Building by Security at the same time that Big Black and his brother herded the distraught patients into the dining area for the morning meal. The last Francis saw of the sometime empress of Egypt was a great misshapen lump encased in a shiny black rubberized body bag disappearing through the front doors as he was being directed to stand in line by the serving counter. After a few moments, Francis found himself staring down at a desultory plate of French toast, dripping with sticky, tasteless syrup, trying to assess what had taken place in the hours that most of them had been asleep. He was joined at the table by Peter, who seemed in a deeply foul mood, and took to pushing his food about on his plate. Newsman wandered by, took one look at Peter, started to say something, only to stop when Peter said, “I know what today’s headline is. Patient in Hospital Dies Hard. No One Gives a Damn.”

  Newsman looked as if he might burst into tears and hurried over to an empty table. Francis thought Peter was wrong, because there were a number of people who were upset by Cleo’s death and he looked around as if to point these folks out to the Fireman, but instead, he saw the hulking retarded man first, who was having trouble cutting his toast into bite-size pieces, then his gaze traveled over to one of the other tables where three women sat, each indifferent to the meal in front of them, indifferent to each other, talking to themselves.

  Another retarded man glared at Francis, as if there was something in the way he was sitting that made him angry, and so Francis looked away, back to Peter.

  “Peter?” he asked slowly. “What do you think happened to Cleo?”

  The Fireman shook his head. “Everything that can go wrong, did go wrong,” he said. “She was filled with something evil, you know, where all the things that are supposed to connect up and keep us levelheaded somehow got short-circuited or frayed, and no one saw it or did anything about it and so there you have it. She’s gone. Poof! Like a magic trick on a stage. Evans should have seen something. Maybe Big Black or Little Black or Nurse Wrong or Nurse Riches or even me, maybe, but someone should have seen something was happening. Just the same as Lanky, back before Short Blond’s murder. All sorts of things happening inside his head. Hammers pounding, bulldozers, earthmovers, like a construction project going on by the side of the highway, except no one noticed. And then when they do take notice, it’s too late.”

  “You think she killed herself?”

  “Of course,” Peter said.

  “But Lucy said …”

  “Lucy was wrong. Gulp-a-pill was right. No signs of a struggle. And the severed thumb—well, that was probably just her craziness coming out. Some utterly weird delusion. Cutting her own thumb off probably made some crazy sense to her right at the last moment. We just don’t exactly know what her logic was and we’ll never know.”

  Francis swallowed hard, and asked, “Did you really examine that thumb, Peter?”

  The Fireman shook his head. “I liked Cleo,” he said. “She had personality. A character. She wasn’t a blank slate, like so many people in here. I wish I could have gotten inside Cleo’s head for just a second, to see how it all added up for her. There had to be some unique and twisted Cleo-like logic. Something to do with Shakespeare and Egypt and all of that. She was her own theater, wasn’t she? Belonged on a stage somewhere, I guess. Or maybe, turned everything around her into its own stage. Maybe that’s the best epitaph for her.”

  Francis could see churning within Peter some great storm of thoughts moving back and forth like tossed seas driven by wild winds. Nowhere in Francis’s view, at that moment was Peter the arson investigator. Francis continued to ask questions, a little under his voice. “She didn’t seem like the type who would kill herself, especially after mutilating herself.”

  “True enough,” Peter answered, sighing deeply. “But I’m thinking that no one exactly seems like the type who would kill themselves, until they do, and then, all of a sudden everyone around here nods their heads and says, ‘Why of course …’ because it seems so damn obvious.”

  He shook his head. “C-Bird,” he said, “I’ve got to get out of here.” He took another deep breath, then amended this statement: “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Then Peter looked up and saw something in Francis’s face, because he stopped short and spent more than a few seconds simply staring at the younger man. After a long stretch of quiet, he said, “What is it?”

  “He was there,” Francis whispered.

  Peter knit his brows and leaned forward. “Who?”

  “The Angel.”

  Peter shook his head. “I don’t think so …”

  Francis whispered. “He was. He was in at my bed the other night telling me how easy it would be to kill me, and this night he was there with Cleo. He’s everywhere, we just cannot see him. He’s behind everything that has happened here in Amherst, and he’s going to be behind whatever happens next. Cleo kill herself? Sure. I guess so. But who else would unlock the right doors for her?”

  “Unlock the doors …”

  “Someone opened the door to the women’s dormitory. Someone made sure that the stairwell door was unlocked. And someone helped her get past the nursing station so that she wasn’t seen …”

  “Well,” Peter said, “that’s a good point. Actually, several good points …” He seemed to chew this over for a moment, before saying, “You’re right, C-Bird, about one thing. Someone opened some doors. But how can you be so sure it was the Angel?”

  “I can see it,” Francis answered quietly.

  Peter looked slightly perplexed, and more than a little doubtful. “Okay,” he said. “What do you see?”

  “How it happened. More or less.”

  “Keep going, C-Bird,” Peter said, lowering his voice a little.

  “The bedsheet. The one that was fastened into the noose …”

  “Yes?”

  “Cleo’s bed was intact. Sheets still on it.”

  Peter said nothing.

  “The thumb …”

  The Fireman nodded encouragingly.

  “The thumb wasn’t dropped directly downward. It was like it had been moved a couple of feet. And if Cleo had sliced it off herself, well, there should have been something—scissors or a knife or something—right there. But there wasn’t. And if it had been cut somewhere else, well, then there would have been blood. Maybe a trail of blood, leading out into the stairwell. But there wasn’t. Just the single pool beneath her body.”

  Francis took another deep breath, and then whispered again: “I can see it.”

  Peter was a little openmouthed, about to ask the obvious question, when Little Black hovered up to where they were sitting. He pointed an index finger at Peter, jabbing the air, interrupting the conversation abruptly. “You’re up,” he said. “The big doc says for you to come over right now.”

  Peter seemed to waver between questioning Francis more closely and the impatience that Little Black seemed to have just at the edge of his voice. So, what he did say was, “C-Bird, just keep your opinions to yourself until I get back, okay?”

  Francis started to respond, but Peter leaned forward and added, “Don’t let a
nyone around here think you’re any crazier than you already are. Just wait for me, okay?”

  The point Peter was making made some sense, and Francis nodded. Peter deposited his tray over by the cleaning station and dutifully followed the attendant out the door. For a moment or two, Francis remained at his seat, alone in the midst of the dining area. There was a constancy of noise—the clatter of plates and utensils, some laughter, some shouts, and one person singing off-key an unrecognizable tune that just didn’t quite match up with the distant sound of a radio playing from back in the cooking area. The usual morning, he thought. But when he rose, unable to mouth another forkful of French toast, he saw that Mister Evil was standing in the corner eyeing him carefully. And, as he crossed the room, he had the sensation that there were other eyes watching him as well. For a moment, he wanted to turn, to see if he could spot the people tracking his path, but then he decided not to. He wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to know who might or might not be taking notice of his movement around the dining hall. He wondered for a moment, as well, whether Cleo’s death had prevented something from happening. He picked up his pace and started moving more swiftly, because it occurred to him that it might have been his own murder that had been planned for that night past, and interrupted only by another opportunity presenting itself.

  When Peter, accompanied by Little Black, entered Doctor Gulptilil’s waiting room, he could hear the high-pitched noise of the psychiatrist’s voice, raised in frustration and barely restrained anger coming from the inner office. The attendant had only handcuffed him, having left the leg shackles off on this trip across the hospital grounds, so that Peter was, at least in his own mind, only a partial prisoner. Miss Luscious was behind her desk, but she only glanced in Peter’s direction as he came through the door, gesturing with a nod of her head toward the waiting bench. Peter strained to hear precisely what Gulp-a-pill was so upset about—because he thought that a compliant medical director was one far more likely to help him than a furious one. After a second, he realized that the object of the doctor’s wrath was Lucy, and this startled him.