The Murder Channel

by John Philpin

  Watching Ralph light his cigarettes was an education in adaptability. He had lost his right arm in a laundry accident twenty years earlier. The Winston dangled from his mouth as he talked and manipulated a matchbook—flipped open the cover, liberated a match but did not detach it, closed the cover behind the match, folded the match with his thumb so that the head touched the strike plate, slid it to one side and released his thumb as the match ignited. It was a fluid motion, requiring only seconds until he was dragging on his smoke.

  “This Albie Wilson was part of the Vigil gang, or whatever they call themselves,” he continued. “He drove up in front of the courthouse, hopped out of the car with an automatic, ran up the steps scattering reporters like chickens when the fox jumps into the coop, and shot up the fucking place. Jesus. You weren’t there because the fucking sheriffs don’t know how to drive.”

  He laughed—a dry, crackling snicker—at his own humor. “Felix, why did you shoot that deputy?”

  I thought about the bloody, semiconscious Finneran lying in the snow on Storrow Drive. “When I walked away from the crash,” I told him, “it didn’t feel right. There was something unfinished there. I didn’t want anyone to have any misunderstanding about what I will do with freedom. I went back and shot him.”

  “I know what you mean,” Ralph said, nodding. “A man’s gotta finish what he starts.”

  He stood, and placed his cigarette in a row of burn marks on the table’s edge. He poured hot water into two hospital mugs, dumped teaspoons of instant coffee into each mug, stirred them, then handed one to me, stuck his Winston in his mouth, and carried the second mug back to the bottom of his cot.

  “What do you know about Vigil, Ralph?”

  “When Terry used to visit, she told me about them. Bunch of fucking crazies want to set up their own government. Terry and her kids had an apartment near a bar called Riddle’s. That’s where these guys hang out. Well, they did back then. I don’t know about now. Terry’s boyfriend ran with that crowd. One night he didn’t come home. She didn’t mind so much ‘cause the guy was an asshole. He used to beat her and the kids. They fished him out of the harbor a couple weeks later. One of the Vigil gang came by her place and gave her twenty bucks for groceries.”

  He tapped out his butt on the metal cot frame. “What do they want with you?”

  I sipped my coffee. “That who came after me?”

  Ralph laughed his short, harsh laugh. “Then you started shooting at them, right? And they came running the other way and the fucking cops mowed ‘em down. They should be in here, and I should be out there … except I don’t want to be out there.”

  “Who killed Sable?”

  “That the girl? The guy who shot her is with Vigil, but they ain’t said his name yet. She a friend?”

  “She helped me,” I said.

  “Reminded me of when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. I saw that on TV too. They were indoors and it wasn’t snowing, but there came Ruby out of the crowd, just like that asshole tonight.”

  “Who was the old guy with her?”

  “Jesus. He about beat that shithead to death. Bunch of cops had to pull him off. His name is Lucas Frank. Believe it or not, he’s a fucking shrink. Not like the wimps we got around this place. Felix, did you really kill Bob Britton? All I saw was your back, then the picture went dead. I thought BTT was gonna tell your story, make you a celebrity, tell the fuckin’ truth. Shit. I thought they was gonna let you finish what you started.”

  It was exactly what I had thought, until something did not feel right about the setup. Pouldice should not have expected me. She did not need her goon around, and I had told her that any talking must be just the two of us. She had someone like Britton working for her, a man filled with self-importance shoving his way among people without seeing them.

  I pushed my hands through my long black hair. “I don’t know what went wrong,” I said.

  “What are you gonna do now?”

  “Get warm. Think. I’d like to get some sleep.”

  Ralph pointed to a plywood loft in the corner. “You see them cases of toilet paper? You push them aside, crawl in there, then shove ‘em back across the front like you see them right now. There’s a mattress up there, blankets, two pillows. You stay as long as you want.”

  I felt like an animal crawling into a cave. I lay on my back and stared at the pipes strapped with metal bands to the ceiling. Ralph switched off his lamp, and I gazed into blackness.

  It was time to consider the adjustments that I needed to make, the corrections in space and time, and to those who move, unseeing, through those dimensions.

  SLEEP WAS ELUSIVE.

  I rolled over at four A.M., glanced at the clock radio’s digital display, then I faded. It seemed only moments later—slumber has a way of making hours feel like seconds—that I was deep in rapid-eye-movement sleep, the dream state.

  My trip into the unconscious was a Cecil B. DeMille epic, complete with a cast of thousands—well, maybe dozens. I needed no technology to enhance the special effects, and there was nothing virtual about my reality.

  I can sum up the dream in one sentence: I walked endlessly up and down stone stairways, through long castle halls, knowing there was no escape from what seemed to be a series of interlocking, multidimensional squares and rectangles. What my one sentence does not convey are the faces and shapes, my feelings of rage, and the notions of meeting people that I don’t see, or seeing people that I can’t meet.

  I saw the slope of a slate roof at an odd angle—too pitched—from the window where I stood. Fear of the height chilled me, but then I turned and there was no window, no roof, no possibility of a drop from an unreasonable height. A man sat in silence at a cabaret table sipping a glass of wine. When I walked to him, opened my mouth to speak, he might have been there, but I was gone, on another plane, watching a woman carry a basket on her head.

  The experience was oddly enjoyable, and disconcerting. In sleep, I marveled at my dream’s complexity. When I knew that I was dreaming, I could have opened my eyes, made the world simple again by focusing on the light beyond the window drapes or the glow from the clock radio. I did not want to stop. I wanted to prowl those halls, climb the stairs, test the air between me and other humans to see if I could penetrate it, touch him or her, engage in conversation, smile, some fucking thing.

  If there can be another dimension to silence, I went there. It began to snow inside the castle walls, and no one cared—or no one noticed. There had been no sound, so there was nothing to be muted by the indoor blanket of white. All of us continued to trudge the halls.

  Pounding broke the silence and cracked the snow shroud. I looked down, but the sound was up—from a window space with no glass. A dove distressed by the noise fluttered in and out. I searched for the source of the repeated, thunderous battering.

  I had to open my eyes. The hammer-pounding was happening on my door.

  “What the hell?” I mumbled, glancing at the clock. “Five-fucking-thirty.”

  I hauled myself out of bed and walked to the door. Through the peephole’s fish-eye lens, I saw Bolton’s distorted features. I opened the door.

  “I can’t sleep,” he said, gliding past me into the room.

  “You woke me up to tell me that?”

  He tossed me a pack of Player’s cigarettes. “I hate myself for that, but I figured it was the only way to get you to talk at this hour.”

  “Excellent bribe,” I said, opening the box and lighting the cigarette that I had wanted hours ago.

  “I figured if I was pissed off, you had to be. When you get that way, you smoke.”

  “So you wake me at five-thirty in the morning, when I’ve been asleep for an hour and a half. Which is more hazardous to my health?”

  “Shut up and smoke.”

  I did, and enjoyed the quick nicotine rush, the satisfying feel of the cigarette between my fingers. “Okay, I’m awake,” I said. “Now, not unhappily so. What do you want?”

  “I don
’t understand what’s going on here.”

  “Join the club.”

  “I think you should talk to Dr. Kelly.”

  “Zrbny’s shrink? Why? I read his report.”

  “You’ve always said that reports aren’t worth shit. ‘Aseptic,’ I think you called them. Kelly had the most recent contact with Zrbny. He’s in D.C. I’ve got the number.”

  “You do it,” I said, always aversive to phones. “I’ll talk to him.”

  “It would be nice if you joined us here in the twenty-first century,” he said, unfolding a piece of paper and punching numbers on the phone.

  “Ray, this smoke is an excellent way to get me awake and keep me awake. No tobacco is good enough—”

  “Got him,” he said, handing me the phone.

  “You woke him up?”

  “He’s on the line.”

  “You didn’t offer him a smoke,” I said, taking the phone. “Dr. Kelly? This is Lucas Frank.”

  We talked for thirty minutes. Kelly had kept up with Zrbny’s exploits on TV, and online with his computer. Nothing had happened that surprised Kelly, he said, except the Vigil involvement.

  “I know about Vigil,” he said. “I’ve met J-Cubed. We were at a community resources meeting a couple of years ago. He said his concern was the neighborhoods. I think he’s a white supremacist.”

  On the subject of Felix Zrbny, Kelly was equally emphatic. “I was going to testify about his lethality, his desire for recognition. I think I could have predicted this. I know I’m not supposed to say that.”

  No one in a mental health field can claim to know the future behavior of a subject. There are studies showing that a layperson’s predictive ability is more accurate than a clinician’s. The first outfit to land on Kelly would be the American Psychological Association. The psychiatric equivalent of that professional labor union had dropped on me a time or two, but I had beaten them off. Others were not so fortunate. Reprimands and citations flew like confetti at a field day. All of it was bullshit. If shrinks used their common sense nearly as much as they dove into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for guidance, their predictive record would be far less dismal.

  I asked Kelly, “Can you think of any reason why Vigil would want Zrbny free?”

  “Felix wants celebrity. Boston Trial Television can give him that. The woman who runs that outfit—I think her name is Pouldice—is somehow connected with J-Cubed. I don’t know the whole story.”

  “Tell me what you do know,” I said, thinking about my own gut feeling that there was some connection, and Hensley Carroll’s description of how he became Zrbny’s attorney of record.

  “She was one of the speakers at the neighborhood meeting that I mentioned. She and the Vigil guy had lunch together. The dining room was crowded, so we had to barge in on other groups where there were vacant seats. They were at a table for five. A colleague and I sat at their table. They were friendly enough, but it was apparent that we were intruding. They knew each other. That was obvious.”

  Pouldice had told me she did not know Fremont. Her people tried to interview him, she said. He would not talk to them. She had shot a glance at her Neanderthal, who was probably Hensley Carroll’s big man bearing money.

  “What about Donald Braverman?” I asked.

  “The name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  I did a quick inventory of what I knew and what I suspected. Vigil was supposed to spring Felix Zrbny for BTT. That much was news-as-entertainment at its worst. Somewhere a line item on a production budget reflected the cost of liberating a multiple murderer. The more I considered that possibility, the more I felt what a short haul it was from reporting the news to creating it. The competition is fierce; the profits are staggering; and journalistic propriety leaves with the journalists. On TV the investigative reporters are replaced with personalities, voices, faces. As the line blurs between tabloid and traditional press, good reporters are replaced by diggers like Danny Kirkland, newshounds with fat budgets who are ready to print any unsubstantiated rumor or allegation. Their audience is prepared to gobble up whatever tale arrives on the tube or smells foul at the grocery checkout.

  Simpson in Los Angeles. Ramsay in Boulder. Clinton-Lewinsky in the nation’s capital. Zrbny in Boston.

  Cary Stayner, the alleged killer of four in Yosemite National Park, was next in line to inherit the media mantle. Stayner was in his late thirties, handsome, rugged, in love with the outdoors. His confession to police, and his statement to a television reporter, included the near-decapitation of one of his victims and the decapitation of a second. It was the stuff of great media because it passed as news and spawned few complaints of violence during the family viewing hours. Everyone knows kids don’t watch the news.

  “You there, Lucas?”

  “Just thinking. What about the Escher print?”

  “Relativity,” Kelly said. “Felix doesn’t want to talk about that any more than he will discuss his delusional activity, his ‘lady of sorrow.’ He had a copy of the print on his wall. He stared at it and seemed to enter a hypnoid state. If I or one of the staff spoke to him, he didn’t respond, and I don’t think he heard us.”

  “What about his voices?”

  “Like I say, some topics were off-limits with him. He wouldn’t go there, and he didn’t want me to go there. I did some Internet research because that phrase, ‘lady of sorrow,’ sounded like a literary reference.”

  I remembered making my own association to Jean Genet.

  “It’s from Thomas De Quincey.”

  “Confessions of an Opium Eater,” I said, referring to the nineteenth-century writer’s most famous prose poem.

  “That’s the guy. This piece is called Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow.”

  “His sister’s name.”

  “I don’t imagine De Quincey is where the Zrbnys came up with the name, but it is the same. Felix always used the singular, one lady. There are three in De Quincey, sisters. One for tears, one for sighs, one for darkness. I’m convinced that Escher and De Quincey are in his delusional mix, but I don’t know the thought processes.”

  Tears, sighs, darkness. A trinity.

  “Was his sister’s disappearance the trigger? A couple of years to incubate, then he breaks out?”

  “He did tell me about the day she vanished,” Kelly said. “He never acknowledged this, but I always had the feeling that he witnessed her abduction.”

  Which would explain a lot of things, I thought. If Zrbny saw his sister grabbed, his pathology had an event around which to crystallize. He could also be Pouldice’s unnamed source.

  Kelly’s parting suggestion was that I be sure to talk to the hospital attendant Ben Moffatt. “I think Ben had a better relationship with Felix than any of the rest of us.”

  I thanked Kelly and hung up.

  “Helpful?” Bolton asked.

  “Very much so.”

  Kelly’s information fit well with what I already knew, but it did not unlock the mysteries of Zrbny’s mind. The killer had an agenda; I did not know it. He had moved on from the Riverway and the Towers; where was he? An army of police officers prowled the streets; no one saw Zrbny.

  “Any word on Waycross?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Did you ever figure out what he reacted to?”

  He shook his head. “This is the file he was reading,” he said, tossing it on the bed. “It’s mostly lab reports.”

  “I’m gonna take a quick shower,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you at your office.”

  “You may have trouble getting there from here,” he said. “It’s still snowing.”

  … twenty inches of the white stuff has accumulated in the last twenty-four hours, and it’s still snowing. Good morning. I’m Lily Nelson, and this is Boston Trial Television Headline News. We’ll get to the weather story in just a moment, but first let’s recap the events of what history will remember as the Bloodbath in Boston. The day started …

  AS I CLIMBED FROM THE L
OFT, RALPH WAS heading for the door.

  “Gotta do the linen,” he said, ready to make his tour of the wards and units, distribute clean sheets and pillowcases and collect the dirty bedding. “After lunch I’ll take a break. I’ll bring some food.”

  I switched on the small TV.

  “The police media relations department has scheduled a news conference for nine o’clock this morning,” Lily Nelson said. “We’ll be going to that live. In a related story, BTT’s former news director and now the station’s owner, Wendy Pouldice, is in seclusion at an undisclosed location. Early this morning, Ms. Pouldice had this to say about the carnage that has swept the city since Felix Zrbny’s escape.”

  Pouldice stood at a lectern, gripping its edge with one hand and balling tissues with the other. “Bob Britton was a friend,” she said, “not just an employee, but one of the best newscasters in the business, and a close, personal friend. He will be missed. The sadness I feel, that all of us at Boston Trial Television feel, is immense and unremitting. In the wake of this bloodbath in Boston, we have become a city under siege.”

  “She is an actress,” I said.

  “In seclusion at an undisclosed location” meant her retreat on the Connecticut River near Claremont, New Hampshire. She had mentioned the place, her “big empty cave where I do nothing but watch the river flow.”

  When we talked during our visits, Pouldice seemed to understand what I wanted. I would give her exclusive rights to my story. I would answer all questions. She would give me my sister’s killer.

  She had waffled on my only demand. There was no way to be certain, she said. Seventeen years have passed, she said. Then, after her fourth visit, she called on the phone.

  “I think I might have something,” she said.

  Pouldice told me about a girl named Theresa Stallings. “The kid was with a friend, playing basketball in Dorchester. A few days before she disappeared, a red-haired guy in a white car was hanging around the playground. He got out of the car, smoked, watched the kids play, got back in the car. It was like he was waiting. He had no reason to be there.”