“I had to,” said the man. “Doris, Jennifer, and little Edgar, and the maid. It was the Holy Ghost. It didn’t say anything about the maid. You understand, I wouldn’t have done anything to the maid if she had stopped yelling. But she wouldn’t, and I couldn’t hear the Voice. So what could I do?”
Louis nodded agreeably, and said that no, there was nothing he could have done.
“I have been washed in the Blood of the Lamb, did you know that?” said the elderly man. “The Holy Ghost told me, I should wash them in the Blood of the Lamb, too, Doris, Jennifer, and little Edgar. But afterwards, not the maid.” He cocked his ear as if listening to a distant sound. Grimace. Smile. “Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you.”
Part of Louis wanted to get up and walk away from this nut, and another part of him wanted to invite the nut for a walk, and beat his brains out with a rock. But these parts of Louis were separated from the part of Louis that actually did things by the thick, pleasant buffer of the psychoactive drug.
Then it was noon, and time for more of the red liquid. Then it was evening, and tucking-in time and more medication. Then it was tomorrow. And the next day. On Thursday, Louis saw the psychiatrist, Dr. Ghope.
“How are you feeling?” Dr. Ghope wanted to know. Actually, Dr. Ghope had a pretty good idea of how Louis was feeling, since it was he who prescribed the Thorazine. Dr. Ghope did not like trouble. When planning his medical career, years ago in his native Bangladesh, he never imagined himself in charge of a ward full of homicidal maniacs. He had specialized in psychiatry—a field of medicine his young nation needed about as much as it needed fashion models—so that upon finishing his studies, he could emigrate to the United States, to New York, and listen to the troubles of wealthy matrons at one hundred dollars an hour.
But it had not worked out that way for Dr. Ghope. There was some difficulty about his diploma, and more difficulty about his license to practice. He had assiduously sought out the correct person to bribe, but had been unsuccessful, probably because, so he believed, of his problems with idiomatic English.
He felt himself lucky to have landed this job. It was hardly any work at all, consisting mainly of regular interviews with patients who were either perfectly sane or incurably crazy. His colleagues were largely drawn from the subcontinent or the various corners of the developing world, so he did not feel isolated, as he might otherwise have in the upstate backwater in which the mental hospital was situated.
Every so often, Dr. Ghope would meet with several of his colleagues to decide if any of the crazy people had become sane. How this could have happened as a result of weekly interviews with a psychiatrist who barely spoke English and massive doses of tranquilizers was a question beyond the theoretical grasp of Dr. Ghope. But lacking theory, Dr. Ghope had developed a technique. Upon arrival, each new patient would be slammed with a dose of Thorazine, the chemical equivalent of the maul that slaughterhouse workers use to drop steers. Thereafter, the dose would gradually be reduced. If the patient did not show any obvious signs of mental disturbance during his interviews with the psychiatrist during a certain period, he would be pronounced cured, and ready to rejoin society. It was a simple technique, but effective. It had earned him the nickname “Dr. Dope” throughout every level of the hospital.
The period necessary to obtain a cure varied with the number of intakes from the outside. The more people sent in from the courts, the more people became sane. Dr. Ghope and his colleagues did not want crowded wards, which meant trouble, budget problems, and more work. The only restriction on this system was the notoriety of the patient. They knew better than to let an infamous ax murderer out on the street while the memory of the crime was still fresh. They did this as infrequently as they could, but after all, they were only human. In short, the hospital was part of the criminal justice system.
Dr. Ghope consulted Louis’s case file. He read what Dr. Werner had written. It was always a pleasure to read Dr. Werner’s notes. Such a learned man! And his referrals seemed never to give much trouble. He, Ghope, had cured so many of them. Dr. Ghope looked across his desk at the thin, yellowish-skinned man slumped in the plastic chair. He certainly didn’t look violent now. Perhaps he would be an easy cure.
“How are you feeling?” he asked again.
Louis raised his eyes. “Feel fine. Sleepy.”
“Excellent! Well, let us see. Mandeville, your name is? What an unusual name! Yes, indeed. Well, Mandeville, have you experienced any delusions this week? Have you acted out?”
“Wha’?”
“Excellent. First-rate! Any problems with your medication?”
“Medi’shum.”
“Oh, very good. Very good, indeed. Well, Mandeville, you seem to be progressing splendidly. Steady progress is our rule here, as you shall find.” Dr. Ghope made some notes with his fountain pen, capped the pen, replaced it in the breast pocket of his white lab coat and closed the folder. “I will see you next Thursday. Until then, please do continue your excellent progress,” he said, and rang the buzzer for the nurse to come and lead Louis away.
Louis was in the Arts and Crafts room, coiling a clay candy dish, trying to remember what he had to do that was important. His dosage had been reduced over the last few months, but he still felt like there was a concrete block tied to his higher mental functions. Louis was extremely sensitive to drugs, which was why he had never used any himself on the outside; and of course nobody paid enough attention to him on the inside to find this out. Had he not met Fallon he might have continued inexorably declining into carrothood, and so truly have reached that state—for which the hospital had been designed—of not being a danger to himself or others. He stopped coiling the clay and glanced idly around the big, light-filled room. Most of the inmates were busy with clay or rubber band and wooden toy boats. In the corner, by the window, one man was painting at a large easel. Louis wandered over to see what he was doing.
“Holy shit!” said Louis, when he saw the painting.
“Ah, a connoisseur,” said the man, with a friendly smile. He was a big, soft, moon-faced man, pasty of complexion, with a hooked nose, thick moist lips, longish, thinning black hair and a fringe of dark beard, like Henry VIII.
He held out a large, long-fingered hand, blackened with paint. “Robert Fallon,” he said. Louis shook the hand and said his name. He could not take his eyes off the painting. Its subject was a scene of sadistic pornography brilliantly executed, explicit, and suggestive at the same time. It was as full a realization of the lower reaches of the human spirit as Rembrandt or Monet were of the higher.
Louis watched Fallon paint for a while. Fallon didn’t mind. He enjoyed adulation. At one time Fallon was considered one of the most promising artists of his generation. Were it not for his unfortunate desire to rape, murder, and mutilate little girls—a desire to which he had given full vent some six years before in the art colony of Millbrook, New York—he might have continued as an ornament of the Manhattan salons forever. He had got himself put into Matteawan, after being arrested, by his version of the same scam Louis had used. He had just gone semi-catatonic and refused to admit that he remembered anything at all about the four little girls, the sink in the basement, the plastic bags, and the box of blood-clotted industrial razor blades.
The hospital was really his only choice, since he understood that his life span—had he been sent to Attica—would have been no more than a few weeks. Thugs have their standards, too. He was happy in the hospital, although, as the Millbrook Ripper, Fallon was on Dr. Ghope’s list of unreleasable inmates. He painted, he sold his paintings at premium prices to a small group of wealthy admirers, and saved his money in a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. One day he planned to escape and live out his days in a less effete country, perhaps in South America, where they still appreciated extraordinary men, and where little girls could be purchased like bananas.
The light began to fade and Fallon got ready to put away his work. As he cleaned his brushes he fixed his companion w
ith his huge and shining blue eyes, and said, “You’re the shotgun artist, right?”
“What’re you talking about, shotgun artist?” said Louis coldly.
Fallon chuckled. “Hey, it’s OK. I know everything that goes on here. No, really, just making conversation—why should I care if you slaughter a hundred shopkeepers? Let me just finish up here and we’ll go into the lounge and have a nice chat.”
Louis let himself be towed by the big man into the day room. He had little enough will in any case, and the painter seemed to be the only inmate he had met so far who was not a zombie. He thought maybe Fallon would be able to help him remember what he had to do.
“Friend,” said Fallon, “the first thing is, we’ve got to get you off the dope. You see, decadent societies always try to clip the wings of their superior men. Three centuries ago it was the stake and torture. Now it’s tranquilizers. You understand what I’m saying? The sheep can’t handle wolves like us and they haven’t got the balls to kill us any more. So they send us to so-called hospitals to ‘cure’ us. And what’s the cure? Slow poison. Hey, you can barely understand what I’m saying, you’re so doped up. Listen, next time that asshole with meds comes by, do what I do. Give him a dumb smile, take the drink, hold it in your mouth, and then spit it out into some toilet paper. Here, take some of mine.”
Louis did as he was told. By that evening, his head was clearer. The feeling of being wrapped in a warm blanket was fading. The next day he spat out all three doses. The day after that, he remembered what he was supposed to do.
Elvis almost fell out of bed when he heard the voice on the phone. What made it especially unnerving was that the bed he was in belonged to the voice on the phone, as did, in a manner of speaking, the woman who shared it with him.
“Elvis, my man! How you doin’, bro? You comfortable an’ all?”
“Man? Hey, that really you, huh? Where you at, Man?”
“Where I at? Where the fuck you think I at, asshole? I’m in the goddam nuthouse, where I got to be to keep from goin’ to the slams for about a thousand years, cause goddam Snowball Walker snitched on my ass, instead of bein’ dead in his grave, where you was supposed to put him. Now what the fuck happened?”
Elvis explained about leaving the package in Room 10.
“You left the shit! Goddam, Pres! If I wanted to leave the fuckin’ package I coulda hired a goddam white man from the Railway Express Company to leave the package. You suppose to watch the mutha-fucka take the stuff. An’ since Snowball wasn’t there you didn’t get the damn paper with my phone number on it, did you? No, you sure as shit didn’t.
“Now listen to me, little bro. You fuck up once, OK, you jus’ learnin’. You fuck up again, you dead. You dig what I’m sayin’?”
Elvis dug. And resented it. He had moved into Louis’s apartment, which apparently included, as an appliance, the occasional favors of the luscious DeVonne. He told himself he would keep an eye on things until Louis’s situation cleared up, which, he hoped, would not be for a long time. Meanwhile, he could live damn good on Louis’s stash, and after that was gone, he was pretty sure he could, with a solid base like Louis’s pad, figure out some ways of bringing in easy money. Elvis had big plans.
Which was why the voice on the phone had come as such a shock. Elvis tried to get his thoughts together. There was obviously no need for panic. Louis was behind bars, prison or crazy house didn’t make no never mind, and Elvis was outside. Shit, Louis needed him, right?
“Now wait a second, Man,” said Elvis, putting a little sass into his voice, “don’t go comin’ at me like that. I ain’t your nigger.”
“You ain’t?” said Louis after a long pause. “I think you wrong there, little bro. But I see how you could maybe think that, I do indeed. Now say if I go wrong now, but you thinkin’ ‘Shit, Louis in the can now, I get to play with his toys, play his fine stereo, an’ all, sleep on his soft bed, nothing can’t touch old Pres.’ That right? Yeah.
“But the problem with that, see, is if it turns out I gotta do time in Attica, well then it’d be my duty to stand up in court and tell them all ’bout you, boy, how you help me plan the crime, how you stood right by me when I blew those two dudes away. That make you guilty, same as me, the law funny that way. So we both be in Attica at the same time. You gonna love that, Pres, I promise you that. Shit, Pres, there’s dudes in there, they’d shove goddam broken glass up your asshole for ’bout fifty dollars apiece.”
“Ah, Man, I din mean …”
“No, lemme go on, Pres,” said the soft voice on the line. “It hurt me you not doin’ all you can to help me out, especially since it was your own self got me into this. Anyway, let’s say I don’t go to Attica, let’s say I stay here in Matteawan. Shit, Pres, this place—a fuckin’ blind man could walk outa here. So you see, Pres, I figure we friends, you gonna help me outa the fine affection you feel for your main man, but if not, you know I’m gonna come after you, one way or the other. I’m up on murder one already, so I don’t have shit to lose, you dig? An’ when I catch you, an’ I will catch you, cause you a dumb muthafucka, I will cut your black ass into tiny little pieces. Now, you dig how you might of been wrong about you not bein’ my nigger anymore?”
Elvis was bathed in sweat, both from fear and from the effort of having ventured to suggest an independent course of action for himself. Elvis did not fear the law; there were thousands of ways of avoiding it, and even if it caught you it was no big deal. But he was pretty sure there was no way on earth of avoiding Mandeville Louis, and he was absolutely sure that if Louis caught him, it would be a big deal.
“Hey, Man, hey be cool. Jus bullshittin’, that’s all. Shit.”
“Good. I like your attitude, Pres. Now, listen, here’s what I want you to do.”
“The problem,” Karp was saying to V.T. Newbury, “is that he only has two weeks to get certified as a candidate. Vierick’s been campaigning for months. Every time somebody gets mugged, the mayor puts Vierick on TV, with the implication that the city needs a war on crime under a new general, which is him.
“Meanwhile, Conlin is going batshit. He can’t come out publicly as long as Garrahy is hanging fire, but short of that he sure as shit is acting like a candidate. Hogging press? Fucking guy is now inviting reporters from the Times and the News to sit in on Homicide Bureau meetings. It’s unbelievable. Morale is in the toilet.”
The two men were sitting on a bench in Foley Square. It was spring again. The Marchiones had been in their graves for over a year. Karp was carrying a full load in Homicide, as was Ciampi. Hrcany was in Felony Trial. Newbury was in Frauds, conducting interminable and arcane investigations of the financial markets, most of which involved, according to him, jailing his relatives and their friends. He loved it. Guma was in the new Narcotics Bureau, also, presumably, jailing his relatives. Conrad Wharton had been named chief administrative officer of the District Attorney’s Office.
“Something’s wacky there, Butch,” said Newbury. “Why doesn’t Conlin get together with the other bureau chiefs and tell Garrahy he’s either got to run or to declare for a successor, you know, for the sake of the glorious DA’s Office? I mean, the thought of Vierick in there ought to shake him up. Or, dare I say it, a Republican.”
Karp laughed. “Bite your tongue. Yeah, I can’t figure it out either. I’ve heard some weird rumors, but Conlin assures me that he’s been pushing Garrahy to run for a year.”
“What does he say Garrahy says?”
“That he’ll see how he feels when the time comes. Anyway, the time has come. I’ll tell you though: I wish I was a fly on the wall at the next bureau chiefs’ meeting.”
They were silent for a while. Then V.T. said, “We couldn’t bug his conference room, could we? I mean, that would be wrong.”
“Oh, very wrong, and besides there isn’t time. The meeting’s today at four-thirty. However, talking about ‘flies on the wall’ and ‘bugs’ has got me thinking. You know that big wooden wardrobe at one end of Garrahy’s conf
erence room? If somebody was standing in it, he could hear everything that was going on at the meeting.”
“Yes, he could. But surely you’re not suggesting that you or I …”
“Of course not, V.T. I’m way too big and you’re way too couth. No, for this venture we need somebody small, slimy, utterly devoid of moral discrimination, yet possessed of a kind of animal cunning, and most of all, somebody who has absolutely nothing to lose as far as career goes.”
“I believe you’re right, Butch. But where are we to find a colleague so utterly devoid of professional ethics, so desperate a villain that he would stoop to spying on our esteemed leaders? I mean, where in the New York District Attorney’s Office would we find a creature so vile?”
“Where indeed?” said Karp.
“No fucking way!” said Guma. “You guys are crazy.”
Karp, Newbury, and Marlene Ciampi were ranged around Guma’s desk, like detectives around the suspect in an old-time movie. Karp had been inspired to drag Ciampi along on the theory that the presence of a woman would turn Guma’s brain to mush, a necessary preamble to the plot. She came, but was not amused.
“Come on, Goom,” said Karp. “There’s nothing to it. We got to find out what Conlin’s been feeding Garrahy about the election, and this is the only way. There won’t be another chiefs’ meeting until it’s too late.”
“You do it, then!”
V.T. said, “Raymond, where’s your spirit of adventure? What happened to the Mad Dog we used to know? You lost your nerve?”
Guma scowled like a sulky Pekinese. “Up yours, V.T.! Look folks, I’m a busy man—got places to go, people to see. Let’s have lunch sometime …”
“Guma, we got to have you in on this. Name your price.”
“Fuck you too, Karp. What d’you think, I’m some kinda sleaze bag? ‘Name your price,’ my ass! It’s unprincipled, that’s why I’m not gonna do it, and nothing you can say is gonna make me change my mind.”
No Lesser Plea Page 17