by Neely Tucker
“You’re going to tell me this guy wound up with an endowed chair.”
“Nah. Thorazine came along, like I said. People could take a pill and be better, live at home. It was the beginning of the end for warehousing the mentally ill, for lobotomies. Everybody else eventually stopped doing them. Freeman didn’t. License eventually jerked. Died in disgrace. More or less.”
Sully asked, “So I’m interested in Oklahoma. How would I find that out?”
“Gimme a minute.” Jerry slid off the table and disappeared into the back.
Sully rolled up his sleeves and walked from his table to the next, looking at the pictures Jerry had spread out. The dull faces, the heavy eyebrows, the lightless orbs in the sockets. What hellish world, he wondered, did they see, looking out? What voices echoed in the empty chambers of their minds? How did they see their keepers, as saviors or multiheaded monsters? The worlds of Lovecraft brought to life, an endless existence of mausoleum shadow and molten darkness?
Looking down into the boxes, opening one, then another, a tingling sensation crept over his shoulders and spread up his neck.
In the bottom of one lay two slender black-leather cases. Both had “Dr. Walter Freeman” embossed on the front, one in green, the other in gold. They looked like they had been expensive. They were both about a foot long and each was held closed by a pair of metal snaps, like an old eyeglass case. He reached down to pick them up, finding them heavier than he’d expected.
Jerry materialized at his shoulder.
“Here we go. The photographs from the trips, they’re categorized a couple of different ways, but mostly they’re kept in a box by state. Then the inside folders are kept by the institution, and then the patients are in alphabetical.” He paused. “I see you found the Holy Grail.”
Sully looked down at the leather case in his hand.
“This?”
“Open it.”
He popped open the snaps and pulled the cover back. Clasped to a felt backing by elastic bands was a steel ice pick, dull silver with gray to black spots. Below it was a similar-looking steel rod with a curved top that tapered to a needle-sharp point.
“You can pull them out,” Jerry said.
He did. The ice pick had, on the four sides of its slender handle, “Yolland Ice & Fuel Company.” It was heavy.
“The very first one,” Jerry said. “He thought it was like history, like Edison’s first lightbulb. When he donated his papers here, he mentioned these at the ceremony.”
The second case held two thicker but similar metal picks, with notches at the top and calibrations in millimeters. Each handle was engraved with FREEMAN.
“Those, he had machined specifically for the transorbitals. The notches there are centimeters. He thought that seven centimeters was the right depth for the first lobotomy. God only knows how he came up with that; he should have known from measuring all those corpses that there are differences in facial structure.”
“You said ‘the first lobotomy,’” Sully said, with a dull sense of horror.
“Yeah. You went home, you weren’t acting right, they’d bring you back and he’d knock it up to eight centimeters. Some people he lobotomized three times. The ice picks, he thought they weren’t quite sturdy enough. They could bend after you used them a couple of times. The leucotomes, though, as you can see, were just plain steel rods.”
“Leucotomes?”
“His word. He coined it. The instrument of lobotomies.”
Sully sat back down at his little table, heavy, looking at the paperwork, the narrow rods of glimmering steel in front of him. Jerry, taking the cue, said no rush, take your time, he was going to catch up on his filing.
Freeman had typed up the histories of each patient, usually three or four pages, stapled it, then paper-clipped them to the photographs, and dropped that in a manila folder with the patient’s name across the top. Failing that, he scribbled notes on the back of the photographs themselves. Notations about their age, profession, weight, relationships, sexual habits. The ones that did not do well, Sully was soon able to identify almost on sight—they were marked by only a few notes. Freeman, pitchman that he was, was far more interested in documenting his relative successes.
Miriam Harper, it turned out, was not all that hard to find.
Freeman had worked his way west on—what else—Route 66. That would have brought him right through Lincoln, on the very same road Sully had been on. He would have come in the summer, when the Harpers were at their place outside of town. Had Sully known to look, no doubt he would have found front-page notice of Freeman’s visit in the musty files of the Citizen.
William Harper, taciturn, humorless, would have opened the paper to see the news and taken the chance on the procedure more out of exasperation than love. What had Sly told him? That the family had not wanted Uncle Reggie back anymore? Maybe it was the same out there in the house by the lake. Maybe William Harper looked up from his paper, saw his delusional wife, and figured he had nothing to lose.
Miriam had been lobotomized at a doctor’s office in Lincoln, on June 15, 1961, Freeman’s file noted. In the first picture, taken before the procedure, she had a high forehead, cheekbones, dark hair pulled back into a severe bun. It would have been the day of her lobotomy—how could it not have been?—and she stood outside, on a sidewalk, the asphalt street and parked cars behind her. She looked at the photographer beyond the camera. She looked like she was staring at eternity. The attached notes had descriptions of her symptoms—agitation, outbursts, delusions, insomnia, violence.
The second photograph and attached note was from four years later. Miriam Harper, haggard, hair scattered, lopsided smile, Freeman taking the picture from five feet away.
This, then, was the grandmother George Harper grew up with. Haunted, empty eyes, vacant stare, errant hair, no makeup, sagging features.
This was the ghoul that Harper had burst out in court was coming to kill the judge, living in the diseased mind of her grandson. Miriam Harper, lobotomized and brain destroyed, had cut her throat and then bled out on him and the blood never left. It had soaked into the boy’s skin. His mind. His dreams.
The eyes of Miriam, the supposed windows of the soul, held nothing in this photograph but reflected light. They had no spark of their own. It had be to terrifying, coming home to this every day as a child. The smell, it came across him, unbidden and unwanted, the musty old-woman smell that George would have inhaled when he embraced her, stale sweat and talcum powder.
There were very few notations on the sheet attached to this photograph. She was “better” and “much improved, husband reports.” At the bottom was a one-line scrawl: “Suicide, 1971.”
He turned the photograph over before flipping the folder shut, and there was another line of handwriting that froze him to his schoolboy’s chair.
“Lobotomized daughter, Frances Harper, 4/16/67. D.C. office. Last session.”
* * *
It took Jerry twenty minutes of digging in the stacks, but he eventually returned with the Frances Harper folder. While he was gone, Sully worked out the knots in his mind. The mom “off in Washington,” they’d said out there in Oklahoma. Christ. Schizophrenia. It ran in families. The father, seeing the traits of the mom blossoming in their only child, sent her for a cure before it could get worse. To Washington, to the great lobotomist himelf, the patron saint of lost causes.
Jerry set the folder on the table. There were only two photographs inside.
The first one, the day of the lobotomy: an attractive young woman, maybe thirty, fair features, full lips, shoulder-length blond hair that she had tucked behind her ear on one side. But her face was drawn, nervous. She wore a turtleneck sweater, arms folded across her chest, eyes bright, frightened, like a small animal in the grip of something more powerful.
Jerry, though, wasn’t looking at that at all. He was focused on the date, tap
ping it with his finger.
“Wow. Dude. Remember I told you Freeman died in disgrace? That’s because he kept doing the transorbitals in his office, long after everyone else had quit, after it was considered malpractice. The last session he did were two women. One died the day after. The other, it went bad. There was an investigation. That’s why his license got pulled. Manslaughter charges were considered. This chick here, she had to be the second lobotomy that day. She’s the very last lobotomy he ever did.”
The other photograph in the folder was the “after.” Sully pulled it out.
“Holy shit,” Jerry said.
Frances Harper lay on her back in a single bed, wearing nothing but a white smock. Her eyes were lidded, heavy, the eyes rolled up. The mouth gaped. The skin on her face was sallow, barely clinging to the underlying bone. The once blond hair was white, listless, cut boy short. The only note on the back was, “St. E’s, January 1970.”
Sully looked down in the folder, pulling out a small scrap of paper. It was a copy of a hospital ledger entry. “Harper, Frances, DOD, 11/26/1993. Plot seven, row seventy-two, grave nine.”
“You mean,” Sully said, “she lived another twenty-three years like that?’
And then it came to him, the nightmare he was supposed to understand. George Harper had known St. E’s nearly all his life. Freeman had destroyed his grandmother. His mother was sent to St. E’s and destroyed by Freeman, too. George Harper would have visited her for two decades, washing her face, her feet, brushing her hair, a mindless lump of flesh that wouldn’t die. And then she did, buried there still.
Who had killed his mother? It wasn’t a who. It was a what.
St. Elizabeths.
THIRTY-ONE
WHEN HE CAME gimp-legging it out of the library, he was stunned to see it was after five, lines of cars pulling out of parking garages, the quad empty. The light was muted and diffuse overhead, thick gray clouds piling in. When he turned his cell back on, the messages were stacked up.
Clicking into the voicemails as he walked, he noticed, to his great exasperation, that the G.W. library at this time of year wasn’t a haven for taxis. Not a one. Not even in the distance. He started up H, past the quad, then hooked left on Twenty-first, realizing too late that it was a one-way running south, and now he was going to have to hoof it up to Pennsylvania Avenue before he’d be able to flag one.
The first two messages were from Josh, wondering if maybe he and Sully and Alexis could take the boat out this weekend, because he was flying home next weekend, and really, no kidding, it would be great if Alexis could come. The second message, five minutes after the first, was also from Josh, this one accentuating his fine record of emptying the dishwasher and throwing out the trash and cleaning even the countertops as meritorious conduct, fully deserving, if he hadn’t mentioned it in the first message, of letting him drive the boat. With Alexis there.
The shit started with the third voicemail.
“Sully Carter. Hey. Janice Miller, over at PDS. I need to know, like yesterday, why my client, I’m going to repeat that, my client, is going ape shit. Says he wants to make some sort of statement today at St. E’s—but if and only if you are there. Says he has a ‘bond’ with you. This is what I need to know. Why and how does my client have a bond with you. The fuck, Sully. Call me.”
He pulled it away from his ear, fumbling at the buttons to make it play the message again—holy shit, had George ratted him out? That he’d been in the asylum? He patted his pockets, his shirt, like a pen and paper was going to materialize, before he stopped and got one out of his backpack, writing on the back of his notes from the library.
The next message wasn’t any better.
“Mr. Carter. This is Eduardo Lantigua. I am the director of St. Elizabeths Hospital. For many years. I have a most unusual request from a pretrial inmate. His name is Terry Waters. He says he will end his case, of which you are acutely aware, this very evening. It is based upon the condition that you are present. He has become very agitated. This is a very unusual request. Please call to discuss.”
The fourth call, he could have predicted.
“Sullivan,” R.J.’s voice boomed. “One, where are you? Two, Special Agent Gill, that lovely woman from the FBI? She just crawled up my ass so far she could tickle my tonsils. She wants to know why Waters, or Harper, or who the fuck ever, is demanding you be at St. E’s tonight. Three, and savvy reporter that you are, you’ll already know this: Call me. Right. Fucking. Now.”
He leaned his head into a palm. George was playing some fucking cards, leading him by the nose after his visit. And there was nothing to do about it but go, take the bait, see what it was, and then make a decision about what to do with it. George was going to tell them all—the FBI, Janice, Lantigua, the U.S. attorney’s office—that he’d been there.
How could he do that and keep his job? He couldn’t.
No, wait, turning to look for a cab, Jesus, anywhere. Just hold your water, he thought to himself. This would still work. On the inside, the staff? Who was going to back George and say that they’d seen Sully in the place, that there had been a huge altercation this afternoon?
No contact of Sly Hastings who wanted to keep breathing, much less keep his job, that’s who. None of Sly’s sources were going to cross him. Nor were any of their colleagues, once it was explained exactly who it was they were about to cross. Most of the staff lived in Southeast, anyway. They would know the name of Sly Hastings, and they would know they did not ever, ever want to see the man up close.
A deep breath now. Right, right. Tell them all he had no idea what the delusional Terry Waters was talking about. Skip the meeting at St. E’s. Write his story exposing George Harper that night for tomorrow’s paper. The resulting shit storm would so advance the story that the soap opera of today would be forgotten, lost in the confusion. That wasn’t bad.
But, he thought, coming up on Pennsylvania now, no, wait. Turning down an interview in the nuthouse with the Capitol Hill killer? That would be insane. He could still deny it all there. He could sell that. He could make that play. All he had to do was play it straight for, what, half an hour? So he’d go, okay, sure. But the party was over, like he’d told George—the exposé had to run tomorrow. He had to set it in motion now, before he went up to St. E’s for the sit-down.
There was one more voicemail, this one from Susan, in news research, saying to call her back as soon as he got this.
By now, he was making Pennsylvania and, there, the first taxi he saw, an old beat-up Chevrolet Caprice with a wobbling yellow TAXI sign on top and faded lettering on the side, pulled to the curb for him.
Ducking into the backseat, telling the driver, a disaffected Sikh in a turban, the guy’s eyes not even rising to look at him in the rearview, to head for the paper. Susan picked up on the fourth ring.
“So,” she said, “the name you gave me? This George Harper, his granddad, William Harper?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve run it fifteen ways to Sunday. You got something to get this down?”
“On the way in, but gimme the highlights now. I can scribble.”
“Okay. Look, he bounced around, but mostly he ran an oil drilling supply business out of Odessa, Texas. Made things called g-force hammers, drill bits, diverter boxes. The business editor from the American, the newspaper in Odessa—I called—remembered the company. Said the old man was a hard-ass.”
“I’m with you.”
“LexisNexis is showing he was a landowner, too. Not sure if it was mining, livestock, timber, what. The place you found in Oklahoma. Land in Arizona, outside Houston, and a good chunk of property, a couple hundred acres, in Wyoming. Two hundred acres in Georgia, an hour west of Athens. You’re going to rack up some frequent flier miles.”
“What happened to the business, the oil-drilling supplier?”
“Shuttered in 1991. Nine years ago. That’s
the year after he died.”
“The family cashed out?”
“I would guess.”
“Who inherited the estate?”
“Not clear. He was a widower, you already got that. Appears to have had one child.”
“A daughter named Frances.” The taxi, making good time in the light August traffic. It was like the city had been turned upside down and emptied.
“Correct. Looks like she was born in Odessa. Grew up there, mostly. She also had one child, no father listed.”
“This is going to be our boy.”
“Yep. George Hudson Harper, born in Odessa, September 30, 1962. But look, Frances, she all but disappears after 1970. It’s like she fell off the Earth or—”
“I got that. She got committed to St. E’s that year. I been in the G.W. library all afternoon. Freeman, he lobotomized her, she got left in St. E’s, a vegetable, died in, what was it, 1993.”
She started off again, but then stopped. “Wait, ninety-three?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t be.”
“Why not?
“Because she’s shown here opening an electrical maintenance business in the District last year.”
“Not possible. Saw a picture of her on the ward. Trust me.”
“It’s right here, FKH Electrical. Down in Southeast. It’s her initials. Frances Kelly Harper.”
His phone started buzzing at his ear. He lowered his hand to look at it. The caller ID showed R.J.’s cell. His Bat Line, the no-bullshit-pick-this-up signal.
“Okay, look, quick,” he said back into the phone. “I gotta get this. Gimme the address of that electrical place. Then call Melissa and get her to tell Keith to get to that place right now, beat on the door.”
“FKH Electrical, 3964 Xenia SE, the District. That’s deep Southeast, off King, up on the bluffs, overlooking the river. Call it a mile from St. E’s.”