Donovan’s Brain

by Curt Siodmak

  “I understand. You want Hinds spared, as an example. We might be able to save him from hanging, and later get him released.”

  “You misunderstand me,” I said. “I want Hinds acquitted. Pronounced innocent by the jury.”

  “You contradict your first assertion that you only want to save his life,” Fuller answered uneasily. He could not be sure what I was after.

  “I am not here to argue with you,” I answered, knowing the brain wanted Hinds to be free at once.

  “But there is no doubt of this man’s guilt!” Fuller exclaimed. “And I never touch hopeless cases.”

  I got up, ready to leave.

  Fuller said hastily: “You must give me a few days to study the case. I hope there will be a way. But if I can’t see it, I cannot take the case.”

  “I am sure you will take it,” I said.

  He went with me to the door.

  “Would you object to depositing the amount of the fee until the trial is over?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Ring me at the Roosevelt Hotel tomorrow morning and you can have the check.”

  I stopped in the reception room.

  “Could you get permission for me to talk to Hinds?” I asked.

  “Of course. I assume he is related to you?” Fuller asked politely.

  “No,” I answered.

  Fuller hid his surprise.

  “He must be a good friend of yours!”

  “To tell the truth,” I said, “I have never seen Hinds in my life, and only came across his name a few days ago.”

  This time Fuller was dumbfounded.

  DECEMBER 8

  Today Sternli left for Reno to see Miss Geraldine Hinds. I told Sternli that Donovan, dying, had told me to look after this woman and also to get in touch with another Hinds, a plumber in Seattle.

  Sternli becomes more and more bewildered. He cannot comprehend how sometimes my writing is Donovan’s, how I draw money from an account that is not mine. And how can this illogical curiosity about people I do not seem to know be explained?

  Sternli is glad to get away from me.

  DECEMBER 9

  Fuller telephoned me this morning. He has spoken to the chief jailer at the county prison to get permission for me to see Cyril Hinds.

  As Fuller could not explain my relation to the accused, that official wants to talk to me before he gives consent,

  Fuller has studied the case and in his opinion only one defense could succeed. He would not discuss his plan over the phone. He told me he would see me at my hotel.

  Fuller’s optimism sounded forced. I have a strong conviction that without the money I have promised him he would never touch this case. Before he hung up he reminded me to deposit the fee in his bank.

  I am sure the brain is thinking clearly. It cannot be insane as I feared, for its instructions are precise and seem logical. The one disturbing element is that repetitious line, which enters my mind mostly when I am asleep. It sometimes also crops up during the day, without warning, and I always am unable to suppress the incongruous feeling of terror that accompanies it.

  The brain’s identification with my consciousness has increased, and by having penetrated to another part of my cerebellum it may already be transmitting my sensory impressions to its own consciousness. It may receive the sensations of sound and sight and feel the gusto reactions of my palate. I cannot prove that yet, but I believe the brain lives through me the full life of a normal human being.

  If my theory is right, Donovan’s brain should be able to converse with other people, since my hearing relayed to its nervous centers, and my tongue directed by its commands, are all the tools it needs for intelligent self-expression.

  The brain uses my motor nerves like instruments controlled by a deep-sea diver, working in a diving belt. Donovan may see the world, through my eyes, and he should be able to see me too, when I look at myself in the mirror.

  DECEMBER 10

  On my way to the Hall of Justice I stopped at a tobacco store and bought a dozen Upman cigars.

  I have not smoked a cigar in years. I dislike the cold wet taste. I made the purchase under command.

  At once I lit one of the cigars, but I had no sensation of taste. When I tried to throw the rag away, however, my hand held it fast, and I had to continue to puff slowly, as if enjoying the smoke profoundly.

  I was smoking with my left hand, which is unusual, as I smoke cigarettes with my right hand.

  Donovan was left-handed!

  If I could find out what cigars Donovan smoked, I would have part of the proof I need. Have I lost my sense of taste? Last night, with a sudden dislike for meat, I ordered nothing but vegetables for dinner. They had no taste at all. Was Donovan a vegetarian? I must inquire. Sternli would know.

  I inhaled the cigar smoke deeply, and it was like breathing tasteless water vapor. Does Donovan’s brain receive these impressions instead of my five senses? Or has this state of schizophrenia deadened my physical sensibilities because the brain, ruling my hippocampal gyrus, has taken over the sensations of smell and taste?

  The brain’s penetration is slow, but irresistibly it has engulfed every part of my cerebellum.

  One day it may take over my activities completely. The impulses which prompt my actions will generate in Washington Junction, while my body roams the world directed by remote control.

  Thus in a future state a human being could be commanded by a chosen super-brain and be guided robot-like from a central station.

  The county jail covers six upper floors of the Hall of Justice, a huge square building at Broadway and Temple.

  I entered a room with the inscription: “Public Relations,” and an employee in shirt sleeves took me nine floors up to the office of the chief jailer.

  The elevator boy wore the smart gray outfit of the sheriff’s office, with the six-pointed star of the police force.

  At the ninth floor an inner door with thick iron bars protected the entrance to the jail. A guard opened this side to scrutinize the passengers in the elevator.

  My shirt-sleeved attendant must have seen curiosity in my eyes, for he began to spiel like a tourist’s guide, informing me that more than two thousand prisoners were here—the largest county jail in the world. Eighteen hundred men and two hundred women, he said proudly.

  At the ninth floor we stepped out and crossed a corridor to the private office of the chief jailer. We passed through an anteroom, the walls of which were plastered with photographs of the sheriff’s farm, where prisoners work out the greater part of their sentences.

  The chief was a man of about fifty, dressed smartly in a gray-green uniform. He seemed to be expecting me. The man in shirt sleeves left, and the chief waited till the door had closed behind him.

  He stood up then and walked over to a second writing desk, which looked unused. It was of heavy black wood, elaborately carved, and there to impress visitors. A blue vase with one dahlia in it stood on the blotter. On the wall behind hung a huge electric clock with a jeweller’s name printed on the dial, a present for services rendered. Photographs of officers and their wives adorned the walls. It was a room where a man has spent most of his life.

  The chief sat down ponderously in a high-backed chair.

  “Mr. Fuller phoned me,” he said. “He asked me to let you talk to Hinds.”

  He looked reflectively through his spectacles. He gave the impression of being a scholarly man who did not belong in a uniform.

  “Yes. I asked Mr. Fuller to talk to you,” I answered.

  “Mr. Fuller is the most successful—and also the most expensive—criminal lawyer in this state,” the chief began again. “I wonder what prompted him to take over a hopeless case.”

  “Has Hinds confessed?” I asked.

  “Oh no—his kind never confess,” the chief said quietly. “But Hinds has no money himself. As I understand it, you are greatly interested in the case. Have you engaged Mr. Fuller’s services for Hinds?”

  He smiled at me ben
evolently, and I felt certain our conversation was being recorded somewhere in the next room.

  “I am a pathologist,” I answered, “and extremely interested in cases like Hinds’s. Is there any objection to my talking to him?”

  The chief pondered. He was slightly disappointed, for he had expected an answer to his question. But since Fuller had not chosen to inform him, I had no reason to tell more than my lawyer.

  “I know you are not related to Hinds,” the chief said. He had made investigations.

  We sat silent for a moment until he began again.

  “Hinds is much disliked in this prison. He gives us a great deal of trouble, and I have had to put him in solitary confinement for a couple of days for striking an officer. That isn’t done in my prison. The officers are courteous and friendly. The other prisoners solidly dislike Hinds.”

  The chief looked up and smiled a little with the air of a professor pleased with his class.

  “My boys despise cowardice. They don’t mind cruelty. They even look up to a mass murderer. But this cowardly way of killing!”

  He was ready to give a lecture on criminal psychology. Jailers, like physicians, are overcharged with case histories and have to have an outlet. I have rarely met a doctor who did not write. Jailers are as bad.

  I had to listen politely, for it was in his power to refuse me admittance to Hinds.

  “You know him well?” he asked casually.

  “No,” I replied, glad he had not asked if I knew Hinds at all.

  “Well, he does not know you either.” The chief smiled. “That makes your request unusual.”

  “I am writing a book about psychopathology,” I answered, to give him a motive he could accept.

  He nodded.

  “You know the charges?” he asked. When I did not reply, he explained: “He ran over a woman with his car—purposely!”

  He studied my blank face and added: “The crudest part of it is he backed up and ran over her again in reverse, crushing her face. Then he drove away. But we got him. The car left plain tire marks.”

  “His sweetheart?” I asked.

  “His mother,” the chief said.

  As if that revelation was too brutal for him, even accustomed as he was to cruel slayings, he continued: “Of course Hinds does not remember having hit anybody. He said he was coming from a party and was slightly drunk. A strange coincidence he just happened to kill his mother!”

  “The motive?” I asked again.

  The chief shrugged, suddenly drying up. As keeper of a strange assortment of prisoners, he was supposed to be impartial, but he seemed to have a strong personal dislike for Hinds.

  After a certain length of time the atmosphere of a prison affects keepers and inmates alike. Guards, after a few years of duty, begin to see the world differently. Right and wrong acquire only abstract meanings, and a strong understanding for the motive of crimes develops.

  Only a man who has worked with his hands can understand workmen. Only one who has sailed ships knows men who love the sea. Every future judge ought to have an apprenticeship as guard in a prison. Justice should not be taught theoretically, alone.

  But in the Hinds case prisoners and warden alike had condemned the murderer.

  “May I see Hinds?” I asked.

  The chief got up and rang a bell.

  “I had to segregate him or the other prisoners would have killed him. I have never seen such antagonism among them. They would poison his food if they had the chance.”

  An officer entered and saluted leisurely.

  “Take Dr. Cory to the fifteenth floor,” the chief said, “and get Hinds.”

  The man saluted again and we left.

  We walked over to the elevator, and the iron barred door slid back.

  “Fifteen,” the officer said to the elevator boy. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye as if he resented my going to see Hinds.

  We arrived. The door opened into a large room where tables with ten-inch partitions down the middle separated visitors from the prisoners.

  “Wait here. I have to get him from High power,” the officer said gruffly.

  High power is the tenth floor, where they keep the murderers.

  I sat down on the bench and read the sign on the partition: “This side for Attorneys.”

  Another side read: “Prisoners.”

  The room was rather crowded. Prisoners in blue jeans entered, sat down, and talked in low voices. The attorneys did not take off their hats, and everyone seemed to be in a hurry.

  The place hummed with voices. Faces were pale in the yellow light.

  My policeman returned and Hinds was with him.

  At the iron-barred door, guarded by two officers, Hinds was set free. The one who had accompanied him pointed sullenly at me, then turned at once as if he was afraid of being infected by proximity to Hinds.

  Hinds stepped searchingly forward. He did not look in any direction but mine, but he must have felt the antagonism his presence generated everywhere. The voices went on humming, somehow louder, but it was as if everyone had turned his back to Hinds.

  He stepped up to me and looked at me blankly.

  “My name is Patrick Cory,” I said, across the width of table, and stretched out my hand, which Hinds ignored. He sat down opposite me and gazed at me as if I were the prisoner and he the visitor from outside.

  He was a good-looking boy, about twenty-five, well built, lean and muscular. His straight blond hair was combed back, his blue eyes clear, but his mouth was hard and nearly lipless. There was not one soft feature in his face. He was the prototype of discontented youth, who, with a strange concept of bravery, do not price life very highly.

  This boy might be cynical up to the steps of the hangman’s trap. He might joke on his way to the gallows, and act his role right to the death. Or he might suddenly lose this grand, contemptuous manner and fall into a coma of fear, which would change him to a cringing coward in a second’s time.

  If he had had it in mind to play insane, he might have carried out the scheme until he really was mad and had to be confined in an asylum.

  But as it happened he considered himself a hero, and with a conceit stronger than his will to live, he treated the whole world with contempt. He was a fanatic without a cause and there is no use arguing with a fanatic.

  “I wanted to ask you if you know a Roger Hinds,” I said.

  He had expected a different opening. He mistrusted me for he was suspicious of the tricks the law might play to get a confession out of him.

  “Well,” he answered gruffly, “I had an uncle who hanged himself, if you mean him.”

  “How long ago?” I inquired.

  “Before I was born, but I remember my mother talking about him.”

  The mention of his mother did not move him.

  We sat quiet for a moment. Hinds stared at his hands, which were thin and white, with broad nails.

  I was on my own, without any compulsion from the brain, and I could ask whatever my curiosity prompted.

  “Then you know Warren Horace Donovan?”

  “Not personally,” Hinds said. “Isn’t he the guy who got killed in a plane a few weeks ago? I read it in the papers!”

  He kept on staring at his hands, unmoved by my questions. We maneuvered like two fencers, each waiting for the other to open up.

  “I am here to help you as much as I can.”

  Immediately he was resentful.

  “I don’t need help. If they want to hang me, okay. But they can’t break me down. They’re treating me lousy, but I don’t care.”

  He kept up his resistance by hating everybody.

  “Mr. Fuller is going to defend you,” I said.

  “That’s what he told me. He’s a big shot, they say. I wonder who hired him.”

  He looked at me questioningly, but the sullen expression returned quickly. He wanted to be on his own. It would only weaken his self-reliance to know someone was helping him. Querulously he reversed cause and effect to
put himself in the right.

  “They can’t do anything to me. I didn’t run over the old woman purposely. They can’t prove it. Even that big lawyer can’t do nothing but tell the truth.”

  He suddenly grinned.

  “They sent you to make me talk. Go on, tell them I didn’t run over her purposely!”

  In stating his innocence he repeated the same phrases. He had laid out his defense. If he refused to confess, the law was powerless, he thought.

  “If you are innocent they will set you free!” I said.

  “They’ve got to. I have a lot of things to do. I’d hate to go now!”

  His thin mouth closed hard and the muscles in his jaw sprang out.

  “Tell ’em they won’t get me down. Even if they put me in the hole again and beat me up, and give me rotten food and turn all the boys here against me! I know their tricks. They can’t hurt me! And they’re going to pay for it! Just let me out of here!”

  He got up. The interview was over so far as he was concerned. Through me he had broadcast to the world his contempt of it.

  “Even if they hang me, they won’t see me yellow,” he said loudly, and walked back to the officer, his head up, knowing the room looked after him.

  The elevator took me down.

  This boy is a murderer if ever there was one.

  But he had been badly introduced to life, and no one bothered to develop forces in him which would restrain him. He is not entirely to blame, though there was no reason to defend him either.

  He will kill again if he thinks anybody stands in his way.

  But what had Donovan to do with this boy? Cyril Hinds is Donovan’s illegitimate child, Donovan’s action is understandable.

  Fuller may know the truth.

  DECEMBER 11

  The desk clerk handed me a note inviting me to dine at Howard Donovan’s house in Encino, on the 13th at seven o’clock.

  I will certainly go to see him and listen to all the questions which I am not willing to answer.