Dead Crazy

by Nancy Pickard

  “Dr. Sandy’s residence.”

  “Joe, is that you?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  I told him and then asked if I might drop by to see him immediately. “I have some questions about the recreation hall, and I want to take advantage of your vacation, to pick your brain.” Sounding interested, he invited me to come on over.

  I looked up, to find Faye standing in my doorway.

  “Do you still want to talk to me, Jenny?”

  She had waited patiently all that time.

  “No, let’s try again tomorrow.” I was feeling jittery, and I wanted to get out of there before the phone could ring and detain me. “I’m sorry, Faye, but I have to do something for Geof right now.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  It’s about time, I thought.

  40

  “Come on in, Jenny.”

  This time Joe was wearing Hush Puppies, blue jeans, and a pullover sweater, but no apron. He escorted me into Marsha’s den, where he had a fire going, and offered me coffee, which I gratefully accepted. After a few sips, to warm my insides as well as my hands that held the cup, I put the coffee down, and leaned back against the pillows on the sofa.

  “Do you mind if I just relax for a minute, Joe?”

  “Course not.” He was hunched over in his chair, elbows on his knees, coffee cup to his mouth. He looked tightly wrapped. Marsha had always liked them intense, I thought as I closed my eyes; she said their energy kept her awake when they otherwise bored her. I thought she held an altogether too detached view of men, but she claimed that was merely a side effect of her profession. “Shrinkage” she called it, saying that her knowledge of human behavior had an unfortunate tendency to shrink people into neatly wrapped and labeled packages that …

  “Jenny?”

  I opened my eyes. He was looking at me quizzically.

  “You have some questions for me?”

  “Uh-huh.” Slowly, I worked myself back up to a sitting position. “I think my problem is, I’m starving. You wouldn’t happen to have a sandwich or something hidden away in the refrigerator, would you?”

  “Sure.” He hid his exasperation pretty well and even pushed himself up out of the chair as if he were almost glad to have something to do to keep busy. “Tuna fish okay?”

  “That would be great,” I said. “I really appreciate this.”

  “Come on out to the kitchen with me,” he suggested. “We can talk about your project while I put your sandwich together.”

  “Oh, no,” I demurred. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just stay here and rest a while longer. It’s been a hell of a week, you know? Being here feels kind of like being at home, it just makes me want to lie back and relax. You go on ahead, Joe. Take your time. Don’t hurry on my account.”

  “Thanks,” he said, with detectable irony.

  Fixing the sandwich took him about ten minutes.

  I consumed another twenty minutes in eating it, along with the chips and the pickles, which I ate slowly, one by one, as if they were delectable, individual beads of caviar. We chatted in a desultory fashion throughout, with Joe growing ever more fidgety. I, strangely, seemed to have been taken over by a torpor that slowed my speech and my movements. I knew I was driving him crazy, and I had to admire him for being so basically damn nice about it.

  Finally, after I’d made a show of brushing off my hands, exclaiming over the crumbs I’d gotten on the carpet, and then insisting on finding Marsha’s Dustbuster, and using it, he said in a clear, loud voice:

  “What do you want to know about the recreation hall, Jenny?”

  I looked at my watch: five-ten, which was almost a full hour since I’d arrived. Marsha tried to end her last appointment of the day by five, so I knew she’d probably walk in the door soon.

  “Joe,” I said, smiling brightly into his annoyance, “I’d like the benefit of your experience. What do you think we ought to accomplish for the clients at our recreation hall?”

  He nodded, obviously relieved to have reached some sort of point, and said with a quick intensity, “Defend them, Jenny. Protect and defend them, because nobody else has and nobody else will. Jenny, you can’t imagine how alone they are and how defenseless, especially when they’re in an episode of their illness. They need some place they can go, at any hour, where they’ll find somebody to whom they can say, ‘Help me. For God’s sake, help me.’ ”

  I was listening, almost as intently as he was talking.

  “This recreation hall of yours, Jenny, it’ll be their safe house. Listen, if you want to make somebody—anybody—feel crazy, you take away all his security. Make him sick, make him unemployed, have society shun him, make him vulnerable, make him good and goddamned scared. That’ll make you crazy. And what’ll help you get sane again? Safety. Some safe place to start trying to be human again. You see what I mean?”

  I heard a key turn in the front door. Marsha.

  “Joe, you’re kind of describing someone I know,” I said, thinking of Derek. “But the funny thing is, you remind me of him, too. I think it’s your good intentions …”

  He was frowning, still caught in his intensity, when Marsha appeared in the doorway.

  “Jenny!” she said warmly.

  I looked at my watch—five thirty-five. If the phone didn’t ring soon, I was going to have to finagle an invitation to have dinner with them.

  We broke off our conversation to greet Marsha and to hear about her day at the office. Then we talked about my question and Joe’s answer. Joe fixed drinks. Marsha and I each had white wine; he drank a beer. We talked some more. I hung around, ignoring hints that they were hungry, until Marsha said, “I’d really like to ask you to have dinner with us, Jenny, but this is Joe’s last night here.” She winked broadly and nudged me. “Get it?” Joe laughed. I tried to think of something, anything to delay my departure. I was getting ready to offer to cook and serve for them when the phone finally rang.

  “I’ll get it,” Marsha said.

  In a moment she was back, smiling. “That was Geof, Jenny, he’s going to drop by in a few minutes.” She turned to Joe. “Can your stomach bear it a while longer?”

  He smiled sweetly at her and said it could.

  When the doorbell rang ten minutes later, signaling Geofs arrival, I grabbed Marsha’s arm before she left the room.

  “Marsha?”

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “Please. Remember that we’ve been friends a long time, and that I would never purposely do anything to hurt you.”

  She looked still more puzzled, then grinned over at Joe. “This girl always gets so damned sentimental when she drinks.”

  When she came back into the room, my husband was walking behind her.

  Joe stood up, ready to shake Geof’s hand.

  Geof stood for a moment in the doorway, unsmiling.

  “We’ve got Kitt Blackstone,” he announced.

  And then he looked directly at Joe Fabian.

  Joe sank back in the chair, saying, “I’ll explain.”

  41

  The police in Joe’s home city had, at the urgent request of the Port Frederick Police Department, arrested without a struggle the murder suspect, Christopher Blackstone, aka Kitt, aka Mob, at the home of Joseph Fabian.

  “Did they hurt him?” Joe asked, with some belligerence.

  “Don’t be a bigger ass,” Geof snapped. But then, seeing Marsha’s expression, he relented. “No, he’s okay. He’s in custody up there now, but we’ll have him down here as soon as the paperwork goes through.”

  “What kind of custody, Geof?” Marsha asked.

  “Jail or hospital, you mean?”

  “Yes. Which?”

  “For right now, jail.”

  She made a distressed sound and turned away.

  “Are you going to arrest me?” Joe asked.

  “You’re goddamned right, I am,” Geof said. Making something of a show of it, he “read” Joe Fabian his rights. Then he sai
d, “Look, you’ve got a right to call your attorney before you talk, but I don’t have to call an attorney to tell you I think you’re a son of a bitch. Who the hell do you think you are to harbor a fugitive from a murder warrant? You got it all figured out that he’s innocent, is that it? Or maybe you figure he’s so sick, he doesn’t require due process. You have any idea how many hundreds of man-hours we’ve put in searching for that man? You got any idea how many scared people have been looking over their shoulders in this town? Are you related to him, or something, is that your excuse? Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Joe,” Marsha said, “how was he when you saw him?”

  He hesitated, looked at Geof, and then said, “He was in pretty bad shape, actually.”

  Geof quickly took out a pad and pen and began writing.

  “He was scared,” Joe said, “but not just of being caught. He told me that he saw a dead body in the old church basement, and lots of blood, and that he ran to his sister’s, and she made him stay there. But he got scared again, stole her car, and left. That’s when the police almost caught him, and then he was really frightened. He didn’t know why they were after him, although he thought it probably had something to do with the body he saw. That’s the night he showed up here.” His glance at Marsha was a guilty one. “You were working late.”

  She only shook her head.

  “What else did he see?” Geof asked.

  “He told me there was somebody else in the church that night, somebody who hated him …”

  “That might be his paranoia,” Marsha murmured.

  “Did he name this person or describe him?”

  Joe shook his head. “I … hid him in your basement the first night, Marsha. I’m sorry. But if I had told you, you’d be an accessory to what I was doing—”

  “No,” she said firmly, “I would not have been.”

  “Maybe if you’d seen him … he was so frightened. Anyway, after you went to work the next day, I drove him up to my place in Alban, and told him to stay there. There was plenty of food, you know. I called him regularly. But.”

  “But,” Geof said angrily. “But an old lady died.”

  “I know.” Joe’s shoulders slumped. “He told me he … well, I believed he didn’t do it, that’s all, I just believed him. But he was getting incoherent by that time, and-”

  “And you allowed him to get sicker?” Marsha’s voice rose.

  He looked pleadingly at her. “They’d have killed him.”

  “Who?” Geof asked. “We would? Are you talking about us? The police? We wouldn’t have killed him, Fabian. We’d have arrested him, that’s all.”

  “Joe,” Marsha said, “you could have killed him.”

  “I meant well,” he said defensively.

  “You meant well,” Geof repeated, in a disbelieving tone.

  “How’d you know?” Joe asked him.

  “We thought he might try to reach Marsha,” Geof said. “But Jenny told me that if he did, you were the one who’d be at home to greet him.”

  He and Marsha both looked at me, their expressions quite different from one another.

  Marsha chose not to accompany Joe when Geof took him out of the house to the waiting police car, but she squeezed his hand and then reached out to hug him strongly as he walked by her. While they embraced, he whispered something to her that I couldn’t hear. She nodded and smiled slightly. When they were gone, and she had returned to the den, she looked at me.

  “He asked me to sneak a file into jail in a cake,” she said.

  “I think he ought to take this more seriously than that,” I told her.

  She nodded wearily. “I think so, too.”

  “Are you pissed at me, Marsha?”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she said simply.

  “Well, but …”

  “What will happen to Joe?”

  “Probably nothing, considering the justice system.”

  “Oh. I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m so tired.” She waved a hand at me. “Go home. I need to think. We’ll talk later, all right?”

  Very late that night, she called me at home.

  “Hi,” I said, a little nervously.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’ve got permission to get in to see Kitt at that jail up in Alban. I thought I’d drive up there first thing in the morning. Is there any chance you could get away and go up there with me?”

  “What time?”

  “I’d like to pick you up at six o’clock, but, Jenny, if you think this might be too painful …”

  “Because of my mom? I don’t know; I can’t predict things like that. But I’ll be ready. After what I did to your love life this afternoon, it’s the least I can do.”

  “You didn’t do it,” she said calmly. “And, no, it isn’t.”

  It was the shorthand of friendship, and I understood it.

  42

  “Compassionate to a fault,” Marsha said, during our drive up to Alban the next morning. “That’s Joe. If he’s not careful, he’ll give bleeding-heart liberals a bad name.”

  “I hear you joking,” I said.

  “But not laughing,” she concluded. It was another of our old lines, used for those circumstances when, as Adlai Stevenson once remarked, “It hurts too much to laugh, but I’m too old to cry.” One of the reasons she was attracted to Joe, she told me, was that he cared so much about the same people who concerned her. “I knew he was a shade impulsive,” she admitted, “not to mention being fanatical on the subject of fair treatment for the mentally ill, and both of those traits did give me pause, yes, they did. But …”

  “I know.”

  “Well.” She sighed, and downshifted around an icy curve on the two-lane highway. “His attorney will have to help him now. I can’t. Frankly, the psychiatrist in me is sorely tempted to let him learn the hard way—to show him that one of the consequences of his actions is that I’m not so sure I want anything more to do with a man stupid enough to pull such a stunt. Anyway, right now I’m more concerned about Kitt. He’s my patient and a good deal more my responsibility than Joe is. How do you suppose we’ll locate the jail when we get there, Jenny?”

  “Break a law,” I suggested.

  Kitt Blackstone had a court-appointed attorney who allowed me to watch through a two-way mirror with him while Marsha went into a small room alone with her patient. The attorney and several police officers tried to talk her out of it, saying the suspect was “crazy” and “out of control,” but she calmly and firmly insisted that she could handle it.

  “I’m his doctor,” she reminded them.

  “Well, fine,” one of the officers finally said, throwing up his hands in evident disgust. “You do it. I’m glad if somebody can handle the crazy son of a bitch.”

  The attorney, whose name was Marty Burack, and I watched Marsha edge into the room, close the door behind her, and then lean up against it.

  “Kitt,” she said in a gentle, clear voice. “Hello.”

  In the room, there were two wooden chairs and a wooden table. Kitt Blackstone was crouched on top of the table. His head was tucked between his knees, so that I couldn’t see his face. His arms stuck straight out from his sides like tree limbs, and his fingers were spread stiffly, as though someone were counting to ten on them. From the time Marty Burack and I had sat down in our room to the time Marsha spoke to him, Kitt Blackstone hadn’t moved. The police officers had informed us that he had adopted that posture as soon as they had put him in the room and that he hadn’t moved for them, either.

  “Is it the demons, Kitt?” Marsha inquired, calmly.

  No response. No movement. Nothing.

  “Mob,” she said in a louder voice.

  The huddled figure on the table moved slightly. The top of his head was bald. I judged him to be about five feet eight inches tall. He was overweight, like his sister. His clothes looked as if they had been expensive, but now they were filthy and they hung in folds from his stiffened body like thin blankets.

 
; Marsha moved close to him, so that she would be facing him directly if he looked up.

  “Do you call yourself Mob?”

  The figure moaned.

  Beside me, the attorney breathed, “Fascinating.”

  “Why do you have your arms stuck out like that, Kitt?” Marsha asked. “Are you trying to hold the demons off?” She paused. “Listen to me, Kitt. I am going to help you. I have brought medicine for you. I am going to get someone to help me give you the medicine. The medicine and I will make the demons go away. Can you hear me, Kitt?”

  The figure tucked his head down farther toward his crotch.

  “My poor Kitt.” Marsha walked over to the door and opened it. She called out into the hall for assistance, saying she needed at least three police officers. Together, with her instructions, the burly men managed to uncurl Mob just enough to allow her to give him two shots. While they did that, Marty Burack told me that he’d been appointed because the suspect was indigent. When I pointed out that his family wasn’t, Burack shrugged and said, “You don’t see them here, do you?”

  We turned back to the tableau.

  “I want him in the hospital,” Marsha said. She looked commandingly up at the mirror.

  The attorney beside me rose instantly and left the room.

  “In the meantime,” Marsha said, “could he at least have a eot in here?”

  When the officers brought the cot in, they pushed it against a wall and then lowered Kitt Blackstone, still in his contorted position, onto it. Then Marsha shooed them out. She sat down in one of the chairs, to wait. The figure on the cot seemed to relax, too, though only slightly.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon before Kitt Blackstone woke up. The attorney had never come back, so I was the only one watching from the anteroom when the man on the table stretched slowly out of the crouch—in which he’d slept all that time. He lowered his arms as if they were jointed, metal attachments he could not feel. He brought his head up, and then he fell to his side on the cot so that he was lying sideways, his face toward me.

  What I saw was an older-looking version of the face in the picture the maid had given me. His pale head was a moon—round, bare, and frozen. His expression was as stiff as a mask.