Irresistible Impulse

by Robert Tanenbaum

  “Now, Detective Featherstone,” said Waley, “you’ve told us in impressive detail how you intuited that the defendant was not what he appeared to be. At that moment, how long had it been since you had learned from forensic evidence that the man you sought was a white man disguised as a black man?”

  Featherstone paused judiciously. He was relaxed now, not on guard at all, and he answered, “Ten days.”

  “Very good. Tell me, Detective, had you ever had a case like this before, this sort of disguise on the part of a homicide suspect?”

  “No, this was a first.” A faint smile.

  “Unique, in other words.” Returning the smile. “Was it hard to believe at first, from your detective experience, I mean?”

  “Oh, sure. But the evidence was pretty conclusive.”

  “Right. And what did you think of the man you were pursuing? What sort of person did you think you were after?”

  Blithely, Featherstone swung at the breaking curve, the fabulous knuckleball that Waley had been winding up for since the trial had started. He said, “Oh, we thought he was a total nut case, crazy as a b—”

  “Objection!” cried Karp, but he also had waited too late to swing. “Calls for a conclusion.”

  “Your Honor,” said Waley, “the witness is a senior police officer of vast experience. His opinion as to the mental state of the defendant was germane to the conduct of his investigation.”

  “The witness is not a forensic psychiatrist—” Karp put in heatedly, but Peoples forestalled him, saying, “I’ll allow the testimony. Please go ahead, Mr. Waley.”

  Waley nodded, paused for three beats, turned to Featherstone. “You were saying, sir, crazy as a—?”

  “Bedbug,” said Featherstone, grimacing now.

  “Crazy as a bedbug,” repeated Waley slowly, with relish, now using the full power of his remarkable voice. “Thank you, Detective. I have no further questions.” He walked back to his seat, seeming four inches taller than when he had started. The jury, Karp saw with a sour feeling in his stomach, was entranced, enchanted, by the transformation. And Karp was stymied; his big witness, whose expertise had been elaborately complimented by even the defense, had declared that the cops thought the defendant was crazy. And Karp could not clarify on redirect either—far from considering it, he wished that the bulk of Featherstone would resolve itself into a dew and vanish right now, taking with it from the jury’s mind these last disastrous minutes.

  Feeling lame, he dismissed the witness and said, “Your Honor, that concludes the prosecution’s case.” It then being close to four-thirty, the judge declared the court in recess until the following day, at which time they would resume with the case for the defense.

  “That was worth a year of law school, my son,” said Karp around a corned beef sandwich to Terrell Collins. They were in Karp’s office, assessing the damage.

  “You mean his cross?”

  “I do. The way he softened Featherstone up? Jesus, Gordon’s been a cop for eighteen years, he knows not to say stuff like that on the stand. Hell, he softened me up. He fed us that little win over the suitcase evidence, we get to show Jonathan’s a serial killer, we’re feeling good, here’s our witness, our last witness, the case is on a clear arc, he’s lying completely low, and so we forget. He wanted us to forget, the bastard.”

  “Forget what?”

  “That he doesn’t care how bad we make Rohbling look, or how guilty. He’s going to walk him on insanity. And so instead of focusing our whole attention on that, we let him allow our major witness to say that he thought the defendant was nuts, just at the end of our case in chief. And of course, Peoples, the prince of fairness, allowed it when he really shouldn’t have, because just a few minutes before, on direct, he gave us a big one, which was just how Waley played it to happen.” Karp crushed his sandwich paper into a ball and flung it at the wastepaper basket he kept perched on a bookcase. It brushed the front rim and spun out, falling to the floor. They looked at each other. No one in the office had ever seen Karp miss a shot to his wastebasket; Karp himself could not remember ever having missed. He stood and retrieved the paper and dropped it in.

  “Not much of an omen,” he said lightly.

  “Hey, we’ll get ‘em,” said Collins. “Look, I’ve got their updated witness list here. There’s something you ought to see.”

  “Yeah, what?” Karp took the list and ran his eye down it. Shrink one, shrink two, shrink three, and … he wrinkled his brow. “Who the hell is Jamal al-Barka?”

  “An angry black man set on destroying the age-old hegemony of you ice people.”

  Karp shot him a look. “You’d like that, would you?”

  “You bet! The day will come when we’re in the big house and y’all’re out there chopping cotton.”

  “Sounds good at this point,” said Karp. “By the way, what is chopping cotton exactly?”

  “Search me, Jack,” said Collins. “I’m from Tarrytown, New York. But, meanwhile, it turns out that Mr. al-Barka is originally Cletis Brown, son of—ta-dah!—Clarice Brown.”

  “The nanny?”

  “The nanny. I think we’re being set up for a tale of child abuse as exculpation.”

  “Yeah, great. What do we have on this guy?”

  “Not much, Butch, just the name and the association with his mother. Who’s deceased, by the way. I got a request in for a full investigation, but they haven’t got back to me yet. Maybe you could stir them up a little.”

  “I can do better than that,” said Karp, reaching for the phone. After dialing and waiting for some minutes, Karp said, “Clay? What’re you up to? Uh-huh. Well, bag that for now. We’re dying here with this trial, and Waley has just slipped us a strange one. Guy name of Jamal al-Barka … Yes, he’s a colored gentleman, which is why I thought of you. Same to you, asshole.”

  Karp read off the man’s address and place of work from the paper Collins handed him, listened for a moment, and then said, “Yeah, actually I do want to impeach his black ass. Find something. Yeah, like tomorrow.”

  Karp was about to break the connection and send Clay Fulton about his business when a vagrant thought popped into his mind. “Oh, yeah, and Clay? After you get that, I got another little thing. Remember Dr. Vincent Robinson? Uh-huh, with the Jew doctor and the nurse, right. We need to take a look at him. No, nothing specific on the death, but the guy’s seriously dirty. Yeah … no, no, not just the Medicaid. There’s a possibility he’s pushing pills big-time. Yeah, bulk. For millions. Talk to Narco, talk to Ray Guma, maybe he knows something. Oh, and make sure he knows you’re poking. Right, harassing a private citizen without cause or evidence, that’s just what we want.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Lionel Waley, “you are participants in what I hope I can make you see is a great tragedy: a woman is dead, a woman has been murdered, a young man, my client, Jonathan Rohbling, aged twenty-two, stands accused of that murder. Ordinarily, a jury such as yourselves is required to examine the facts of the case—the testimony of witnesses, their credibility, the importance of physical evidence and what experts say about what that evidence means—to examine and sift these facts and decide whether the defendant is guilty or innocent beyond a reasonable doubt, whether he did, in fact, do the crime for which he stands accused. But this trial is different. Our plea in this trial is not guilty by reason of insanity. That means you will be called on to decide not whether Jonathan Rohbling caused the death of Jane Hughes, but whether in causing that death he was guilty of the crime of murder.”

  Waley paused for a moment, and Karp saw him cast his look over the jury, selecting the next recipient of his gaze. Waley spoke to the jury one at a time, as did Karp. During the course of an opening statement he would have twelve intimate moments, one with each juror. Karp tried to see which one he was targeting, so he could judge the effect and focus his own intimate conversations on the ones that seemed most susceptible to his opponent’s charm. He did this almost unconsciously, taking notes on Waley’s pitch at t
he same time.

  Waley continued, “Because the law says that in order to be convicted of a crime a person must be capable of making a moral choice. When we convict someone of a crime and punish that person, we are saying, as a society, you made the wrong moral choice and so you must suffer the penalty of the law. But the law recognizes that there are some unfortunate people for whom the capacity to make such a moral choice has been gravely diminished. The law, in fact, says a person is not responsible for criminal conduct if, at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law. In other words, if someone is insane, either we don’t expect him to understand what he is doing or we don’t expect him to be able to tell right from wrong and act accordingly. Now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client, Jonathan Rohbling, is insane. He has been insane for some time. He was insane on April twentieth, when Jane Hughes met her death, and he is insane as he sits here in the courtroom today.”

  Waley paused and obligingly pointed. The jury looked, as did Karp. Yes, thought Karp, he did look, in the immortal words of Detective Featherstone, crazy as a bedbug. Waley picked up the rhythm again, outlining for the jury how he was going to demonstrate just how insane his boy was. He named his expert witnesses (three) and told the jury that they would additionally hear shocking evidence about the horrible childhood experiences that had contributed to little Jonathan’s mind snapping, and to the peculiar form that his insanity had eventually taken. He closed with his usual flashing lights and gongs. As Karp’s notes recorded: the great tragedy theme again, a tragedy without a villain, one victim of homicide, one victim of insanity—let us not victimize him once again by imposing—a disease killed Jane Hughes, a mental disease …

  By the time he finished, it was near noon. The first of Waley’s witnesses, a psychiatrist named Lewis Rosenbaum, was first on the schedule. Peoples looked at the clock and motioned the counsels forward.

  “Mr. Waley, how long do you think on direct?”

  “An hour, certainly, Your Honor.”

  “Mm-hm. And Mr. Karp, I assume you would prefer that your cross came immediately after the direct.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Karp. “I think it’s particularly important in this sort of case, when the issues are technical.”

  “Well, yes. Let’s break for lunch early, then,” said Peoples, and announced this to the jury, from whence issued an audible murmur of relief.

  After a brief conversation with his client, Waley came back to the bench and addressed the judge, who listened and then called Karp over.

  “Mr. Waley has something to say to us,” said Peoples.

  “Yes, Your Honor. I am extremely concerned about my client. His mental state appears to be deteriorating seriously. He has been self-abusive. You observed the bruises on his head. His parents are frantic. With all due respect for Bellevue as an institution, and despite the current suicide watch, it seems unreasonable for Mr. Rohbling to expect proper care for his disease from an entity that is a part of the same state apparatus that maintains that he has no disease. I would like to apply again for appropriate bail so that my client can be placed in a secure private facility where he can receive actual treatment.”

  “Mr. Karp?” inquired Peoples.

  “Your Honor, the situation has not changed. We acknowledge that Mr. Rohbling is unhappy. He is a wealthy young man used to the best and most comfortable surroundings, and Bellevue is not in the class of what he’s used to. Nevertheless, he has all the care he needs if he decided to avail himself of it—”

  “He’s not going to open up to a psychiatrist who works for the state,” Waley interrupted angrily. “Have some sense!”

  “If I may finish my remark, Mr. Waley? Thank you. The suggestion that the doctors at Bellevue are in some sense in league with the district attorney’s office in slighting Mr. Rohbling’s condition and denying him treatment is either slanderous or, frankly, delusional. If Mr. Rohbling finds himself for the first time in his life in a situation where his parents’ money is of no avail, then he has my sympathy, but I would hardly call it a medical emergency requiring the upset of long-established custodial procedures. As for bail, Mr. Rohbling’s father has a personal fortune of some three hundred and eighty million dollars—that we know about. He has connections all over the world and access to a private transcontinental jet plane. I think the risk of escape is enormous and justifiable, and therefore the People would oppose any bail.”

  “I believe I agree with the People in this case, Counselor,” said Peoples.

  Waley took a deep breath, and seemed to be struggling to retain his legendary control. No one had ever seen Waley lose it in a courtroom. He was white around the nostrils, however, and Karp almost regretted the jab about delusions. But only almost.

  “In that case, Your Honor, may I request that my client’s personal psychiatrist, Dr. Erwin Bannock, be allowed free access to Mr. Rohbling, as free as if he were on the Bellevue staff?”

  “No objection, Your Honor,” said Karp charitably.

  Karp returned to the prosecution table to help Collins gather up their material.

  “Boss, that man don’t like your ass one little bit,” said Collins.

  “Who, Peoples?”

  “No, Waley. You should’ve seen the look he gave you when you walked away. I’m surprised you’re still wearing a suit. What’d he want anyway?”

  “Oh, he’s still bitching his boy’s got to bunk with the low-class homicidal maniacs at Bellevue. He wants him to stay in some private nuthouse. I told him no way, and the judge backed me.”

  “What’s it matter to us?”

  “Risk of flight. His folks could have him out of there and on a private jet to Switzerland in twenty-four hours, and walk away from a five-million-dollar bond without breathing hard. Besides …”

  “What?”

  Karp shrugged. “Besides, fuck them both. The little shit wanted some consideration, he shouldn’t have killed five women.”

  Dr. Lewis Rosenbaum was one of the editors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the famous DSM III, in which it is written how to tell the crazy from the sane. Rosenbaum was a hefty, gray-bearded man who wore his own sanity like a suit of mail. His speech was slow and judicious, and he took an unusually long time before replying to questions, as if he were generating scientific knowledge before your eyes.

  Waley wanted to establish how psychiatry defined paranoid schizophrenia. This Rosenbaum was notably able to do, recounting in detail the four major symptoms of this disorder: blunted affect, that is, a lack of ordinary emotional arousal; retreat from reality, including delusions and hallucinations; depression, including suicidal tendencies; and severe impairment of social function, including inability to hold a job or to establish normal social relationships with peers. Rosenbaum had examined the defendant and (no surprise here) had discovered that he evinced all the symptoms.

  In his cross, Karp was careful not to challenge Rosenbaum’s definition of psychosis. Instead, he focused on the specific acts that Rohbling had done and asked the doctor to explain how these accorded with the defendant’s supposed insane state. When the defendant was crushing the life out of Jane Hughes, did he think she was a statue? A monkey? Did he know he was killing a human being? Answer: it was part of his delusional pattern. What part? What was the nature of the delusion? The doctor could not say. If he did not know that he had killed a human being or that it was wrong, why did he flee? Why did he take care not to be associated with the suitcase full of incriminating evidence? Rosenbaum’s answers to these and similar questions seemed like blather to Karp and, he hoped, to the jury as well. Karp was attempting to use his cross-examination to paint a picture of what a real crazy person would have done—hung around in Jane Hughes’s apartment, say, talking to a corpse.

  “Now, Doctor, you’ve testified that when the defendant killed
Jane Hughes, he was responding to the dictates of an inner world, a world cut off from ordinary reality, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this inner reality also prompted him to carefully don theatrical makeup and a wig, travel up to Harlem, pose as a man of a completely different race and culture, and pose convincingly, inveigle himself into Jane Hughes’s good graces, extricate himself from the scene of the crime, and, finally, to understand the consequences of the damning evidence of the blue suitcase and its contents? Is that what this psychotic inner reality did, Doctor?”

  The doctor took his usual time before responding. “Well, the psychosis acts chiefly in the areas relevant to the delusionary system. In this case the delusionary system is focused on hostility to elderly black women. We should not let ourselves believe in the stereotype of the raving lunatic foaming at the mouth all the time.”

  “So, you’re saying that Mr. Rohbling was competent, sane in his actions up until the moment when he killed Mrs. Hughes, when he became insane, and then he became sane again while he made his getaway. Is that a fair summary?”

  A patronizing smile from Dr. Rosenbaum. “I think I would call it an oversimplification of what I said in my testimony. Often psychotics can be extremely clever and perform convincingly in the ordinary world. This, uh, says really nothing, really, about their inner mental states, which are disturbed.”

  “I see. Fascinating, Doctor. So you would say, would you not, that although Mr. Rohbling acted in every way as if he were sane—he disguises, he calculates, he escapes—he acts in every way like he knows what he is doing and that it’s against the law, he’s still insane, because when he eventually talks to a psychiatrist, that psychiatrist finds the symptoms of psychosis laid out in DSM III?”