The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

  Matt opened the window and lit a cigarette as we drove down I-55, across the prairie. It was early summer and the weather was fine.

  “When was the last time you were in a jail?” he asked, talking loudly to make himself heard over Don Williams, who was moaning on a country music station about a girl who never knew him at all.

  “I think the last time was in the fall of 2008,” I said. “I took a statement from a guy on Rikers, in connection with a case I was working on. It was a bad place, pal.”

  “You think where we’re going is any nicer? Every morning when I start my shift, I feel like breaking something. Why the hell didn’t we become doctors or lawyers?”

  “I don’t think we were smart enough, Matt. And I wouldn’t have liked cutting people up.”

  TWO

  The Potosi Correctional Center was a red-brick giant, surrounded by barbed-wire electric fences, that lay in the middle of the prairie like a huge beast caught in a trap. It was a maximum-security prison where around eight hundred inmates eked out their days, along with a hundred guards and auxiliary personnel. The few scraggy trees that flanked the visitors’ parking lot were the only splotch of color in that sad landscape.

  Matt parked the car, and then we went to the staff gate on the west side, passed through a courtyard paved with blood-red stone chips, and entered a corridor that bored into the depths of the building. Matt saluted the men in uniform we met on the way, hulking hard-faced men who’d seen all too much.

  We went through a metal detector, collected our personal belongings from the plastic trays, and arrived in a windowless room with a linoleum floor, where a number of tables and chairs were screwed to the floor.

  An officer named Garry Mott gave me the usual instructions, speaking with a strong southern accent: “The meetin’ will last an hour sharp. If ya wanna end it soonah, tell the officers accompanyin’ the inmate. Physical contact of any kind ain’t allowed durin’ the meetin’, and any object ya wish to give the inmate or which he might wish to give to ya has to be inspected first. Durin’ the meetin’, y’all be under constant camera surveillance, and any information ya obtain may later be used in legal proceedings.”

  I listened to the speech, which I was already familiar with, and then he left. Matt and I sat down.

  “So this is where you work,” I said.

  “It’s not the happiest place in the world,” he said grimly. “And thanks to you, one of my days off has gone down the drain.”

  “I’ll buy you a good lunch when we get out of here.”

  “Maybe you should buy me some booze.”

  “Then you’ll have to drink it by yourself.”

  “You can signal that way,” he said, pointing with his chin toward the corner where a camera was staring at us. “Julia’s on duty in the monitoring center.”

  He stood up.

  “I’ve got to scoot. I’ve got some shopping to do. I’ll be back in an hour to get you out of here. Play nice and make sure nobody gets hurt.”

  Before he left, he waved at the video camera, and I pictured his wife sitting on a chair looking at banks of video screens in front of her. She was a strong woman, almost as tall as Matt, born and raised somewhere in the Carolinas.

  I waited for a few minutes, and then I heard the buzz of the door. Frank Spoel made his entrance, flanked by two armed officers. He was wearing a gray jumpsuit. On the left side of his chest there was a white label with his name on it. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and his legs were shackled with a chain, which shortened the length of his steps and rattled whenever he moved.

  He was short and scrawny, and if you’d met him on the street, you wouldn’t have looked at him twice. But lots of the guys who’ve ended up behind bars for bloodcurdling killings looked just like him—an almost regular dude, like a mechanic or a bus driver. Before the 1980s, you could recognize criminals by the tattoos they’d had done in jail, but these days everybody was inking their hides.

  Spoel sat down on the chair opposite me and grinned, flashing teeth as yellow as scrambled eggs. He had a sandy-colored mustache, which drooped down on either side of his mouth to join a beard. He was going bald, and the few remaining strands of hair covering his scalp were plastered down with sweat.

  One of the officers said, “You’re gonna be a good boy, aren’t you, Frankie?”

  “Otherwise I can kiss my parole good-bye, right?” Spoel answered without turning around. “What do you think I’m gonna do?” he continued, rhetorically. “Lob my dick out and open the cuffs?”

  “Mind your mouth, princess,” the officer replied. Then, to me: “We’ll be right by the door if you need us. If he starts playin’, we’re here in one sec.”

  The two went out, leaving me alone with the inmate.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m Roy Freeman. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me.”

  “You a cop?”

  “Ex-cop. I’m retired.”

  “Could have sworn you a cop. In ’97, I met a freak by the name of Bobby, back there in Indiana. He had a dog named Chill that could sniff out a cop even if he wasn’t in uniform, know what I’m saying? A great mutt, that dog of his. Never could work out how it did it. It’d start barking whenever it got scent of a cop.”

  “One hell of a dog,” I agreed.

  “Yeah . . . I heard you’re interested in that old New Jersey story.”

  “I was one of the police detectives assigned to the Wieder case, the professor who got beaten to death.”

  “Yeah, I remember his name . . . Got a cigarette?”

  I hadn’t smoked for fifteen years but, taking Matt’s advice, I’d brought a carton of Camels with me. I knew that in jail, cigarettes were the main unit of currency, after drugs and sleeping pills. I reached into my bag and pulled out the carton, showed it to him, and then put it back.

  “You’ll get it after I leave,” I said. “The guys have to check it.”

  “Thanks. I don’t have anybody on the outside. I haven’t seen my folks for more than twenty years. Don’t even know if they’re still alive. In four weeks I’ll be gone, and I’d be a liar if I say I’m not scared. So, you wanna know what happened, right?”

  “You claim you killed Joseph Wieder, Frank. Is it true?”

  “Yes, sir, it was me. To be honest, I didn’t wanna do it, I wasn’t a killer. Not back then, anyway. I just wanted to beat him up a bit, if you know what I’m saying. I mean for the hospital, not for the morgue. The guy had done me a bad turn, and I wanted to get even. But it ended up badly, and I became a killer. After two years in that nuthouse, nothing should have surprised me anymore.”

  “How about you tell me the whole story? We’ve got an hour.”

  “The guys outside will be busy washing my Jag in the meantime,” he said, cracking a lame smile, “so why not? I’m going to tell you what I told the other guy, the one who said he was writing a book.”

  At the age of fifteen, Frank Spoel had dropped out of high school and started hanging out with some guys who ran an arcade. He was their errand boy. His dad worked at a gas station, and his mom was a housewife; he had a sister who was five years younger. Two years later, his family moved out of Jersey, and Frank never saw them again.

  At twenty, he already saw himself as a hustler, and was mixed up in all kinds of petty crimes: he took stolen goods to fences in Brooklyn and sold smuggled cigarettes and fake electronic goods. Sometimes he collected small amounts of cash for a loan shark, and sometimes he pimped for a couple of hookers.

  In the gangs there were always lots of petty guys like him, the little fish in a complex chain that went from the streets of poor neighborhoods all the way up to multimillion-dollar houses with swimming pools. Most of them ended up in the same position: chasing after the next twenty-dollar bill, getting older and older and less and less important. Some of them rose through the ranks and got to wear expensive suits and gold watches. And a few ended up committing felonies, rotting away in the joint, forgotten by everybody.

  In the f
all of 1985, Spoel sold two boxes of cigarettes to a couple of guys in Princeton, and they paid for them with some French perfume. He later discovered that more than half of the bottles of perfume were fakes, so he set off to demand his cash back. He met one of the guys, there was a fight, he beat him up and took all the cash he found in his pockets, but a police patrol happened to be passing by, so he was arrested for the mugging. He didn’t say anything about the cigarettes, because that would have gotten him into deeper trouble.

  The court assigned Spoel a public defender named Terry Duanne. By chance, the guy he’d beaten up had a clean record. He was the thirty-eight-year-old owner of a small shop, married, with three kids. Spoel, on the other hand, was a high school dropout and had already received a number of warnings for breaking the law. Duanne tried to negotiate an agreement with the victim, but nothing came of it.

  Given the choice between being tried as an adult, which would likely mean between five and eight years of hard time, and having a medical expert declare him temporarily insane, Frank was advised by his attorney to take the second option. Duanne hinted that he knew the expert in question well and that in a couple of months Spoel would be discharged from the institution. Trenton Psychiatric Hospital wasn’t the most pleasant place in the world, but it was better than Bayside State Prison.

  Joseph Wieder examined Frank Spoel, came to the conclusion that he was suffering from bipolar disorder, and recommended that he be committed to a mental hospital. A few days later Spoel was taken to Trenton, confident that in a couple of months he would be out.

  “Why weren’t you discharged?” I asked.

  “Ever been in a nuthouse?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t ever go there. It was horrible, man. Shortly after I got there, they made me drink a cup of tea, and I woke up two days later, not even knowing my fuckin’ name. There were guys there who’d start howling like wild animals or jump on you and beat you up for no reason. One guy ripped off a nurse’s ear with his teeth as she was trying to feed him. The things I saw there, man . . . I heard that up until the sixties they used to pull all the patients’ teeth out, claiming that it was to prevent infection. Infection, my ass . . .”

  He told his story. He’d been beaten up, by both the security guards and the inmates. The guards, he claimed, were corrupt, so if you had cash you could get hold of anything you wanted, but if not, you were dead meat.

  “People think that if you’re doing hard time, the thing that’s most on your mind is women,” he said. “But I tell you it ain’t like that. Sure, you miss getting laid, but the most important thing is cash, believe me. If you’ve got no money, then you’re as good as dead—nobody’s interested in you, except the ones who’re going to kick your ass. And I didn’t have a penny, man. In the joint, you can work to earn some cash, even if your folks aren’t sending you dough. But in the nuthouse, you just spend all day staring at the walls if you haven’t got anybody on the outside to send any dough. And nobody sent me a dime.”

  Three weeks after his admission, Spoel said, he was taken to a special ward, where there were another ten or so inmates, all of them aged between twenty and thirty, all of them violent offenders. He later found out that he and the others were being given experimental medication, as part of a program coordinated by a professor named Joseph Wieder.

  “I talked to my lawyer a couple of times, but he just strung me along. In the end, he told me straight out that in a year he could apply to the judge to have me discharged or sent to a hospital with lower security. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. Two guys had ripped me off, I’d beaten one of them up and took eighty dollars from his wallet, money that didn’t even cover my losses from the cigarettes, and there I was, locked up in the nuthouse for at least a year.”

  “Didn’t you get an opportunity to talk with Professor Wieder?”

  “Sure, he sometimes came to our ward. He asked us all kinds of questions, made us pick colors, fill in questionnaires, stuff like that. We were just guinea pigs, man, white rats, you know? Told the guy straight out: ‘That shit Duanne told me he knew you, so I agreed to the nuthouse just to get out of anything more serious. But I’m just as sound in the head as you are. What’s the problem?’ The guy just looked at me with those dead-fish eyes of his—I can almost picture them even now—and do you know what he said? That he didn’t know what I was talking about, that I was there because I had mental issues, and that it was in my own interest to take the treatment, so I’d stay there as long as he saw fit. Bullshit.”

  Then Spoel told me that he’d started having terrible nightmares, not even sure whether he was awake or dreaming, and that the pills he was being given did him more harm than good. Most of the guys on the ward had terrifying headaches, and as the treatment went on, many of them ended up spending most of their time tied down to their beds, hallucinating. Most of them vomited back up what they ate and got skin rashes.

  A year later, he was visited by another attorney, named Kenneth Baldwin. The guy said he’d taken over the case from Duanne, who’d left New Jersey. Spoel told Baldwin how he’d ended up there and what the original agreement was. He didn’t know whether the new lawyer believed him, but even so he applied for a judge to reexamine his client’s case. Spoel found himself again face-to-face with Wieder, who turned down his request and also refused to recommend his transfer to the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital, which had a better regime. Spoel was sent back to Trenton.

  “About six months before I got the hell out of there,” he went on, “we were moved to other wards, and the experimental ward was closed down. They changed my treatment, and I began to feel better. I didn’t have nightmares or headaches anymore, but I still used to wake up not knowing who I was. My nerves were crawling, even if I tried to hide it and keep on everybody’s good side, to show I wasn’t insane. How could they do that to me, man? All right, I wasn’t a good boy, but I hadn’t killed anybody, and I wouldn’t even have beaten up that guy if he hadn’t ripped me off. They treated me like an animal, and nobody gave a shit.”

  When his case was reviewed the next time, Spoel saw that Wieder was no longer on the commission. His request for a discharge under legal supervision passed, and a couple of weeks later he left the hospital.

  That was in October 1987. When he got out, he didn’t even know where he was going to live. All his belongings had been sold for rent by the landlord of the dump where he had lived before being busted. The guys from his gang didn’t want to know him anymore, afraid that they would attract the cops’ attention if they hung out with him. One guy alone, a Chinese American he’d met before he got sent to Trenton, took pity on him and gave him food and shelter for a couple of days.

  A few weeks later, he managed to get a job as a dishwasher at a diner near Princeton Junction, and the owner, a nice guy, let him sleep in the storeroom. Right away, he started following Wieder, who lived nearby, in West Windsor. Spoel was determined to move away and start a new life, but he didn’t want to leave before taking his revenge on the professor. He was convinced that Wieder, along with Duanne and maybe some other accomplices, was running some kind of scheme and supplying subjects for secret experiments, and that he’d fallen into their trap. He was going to make them pay. But as Duanne was nowhere to be found, Wieder would have to be the one to foot the bill.

  He found Wieder’s address and saw that he lived alone in an isolated house. Originally, he’d planned to beat him up on the street, under cover of darkness, but after he staked out the professor’s house, he decided that it was the best place for the attack. Spoel didn’t intend to kill the professor, he stressed again as he explained his process to me; he just wanted to beat the crap out of him. So he got hold of a baseball bat from some kids and wrapped it in an old towel to soften the blows. He hid the bat on the shore of the lake by the professor’s house.

  At the time, Spoel said, he became friends with one of the bartenders in a local pub, a guy from Missouri named Chris Slade. Slade was looking to get out of J
ersey and he’d found a job at a trailer park in St. Louis, so he suggested that Spoel go with him. He wanted to leave right after the winter holidays, so that made events move more quickly than they might have otherwise.

  Spoel staked out Wieder’s house over the course of a number of evenings. At ten p.m. the diner closed, so by about ten-thirty he’d be hiding in the backyard, watching the house. He noticed that two people came to the house quite often: a young guy, who looked like a student, and a tall, well-built, scruffily bearded guy who seemed to be some sort of handyman. But neither of them stayed overnight.

  “On December twenty-first,” Spoel said, “I quit my job at the diner and told the owner I was headed for the West Coast. As I was leaving, he gave me cash and two packs of cigarettes. I didn’t want to be seen around the area, so I headed up to Assunpink Creek, where I hid out in a woodshed until it got dark, and then I set off for the professor’s house. I think I got there at around nine p.m., but the professor wasn’t alone. He was with the young guy, and they were both drinking in the living room.”

  I asked Spoel whether he remembered what the young guy looked like, but he told me that he wouldn’t be able to describe him, saying that he looked the same as all the other spoiled kids who lived off their parents’ cash on campus. About three days before the attack, when he’d been staking out Wieder’s house, the young guy had almost seen him through the window; he’d looked straight at him before he managed to hide. Luckily for him, it was snowing heavily, so the guy had probably thought he was mistaken.

  “I think it must have been a guy by the name of Richard Flynn,” I said. “Are you sure there wasn’t a young woman with them?”