Bishop continued working on his steak. He had eaten nothing since the previous evening in Las Vegas after his return from Death Valley alone. In the morning he had been too busy.
“It’s the damn canals.”
He looked up to find the old man staring at him.
“It’s the damn canals,” the man repeated.
“What canals?”
“The damn canals they got all over this town. Right in the streets.” He shoveled in more sugar. “The damn sun pulls the water right out and makes everything too humid.” He stirred the coffee. “I read that somewhere.” Put the cup to his parched lips.
“They got canals in the streets?” Bishop asked in surprise.
“Damn right.”
“What’s in the canals?”
“The damn water, what else?” He eyed Bishop suspiciously. “Don’t you know ‘bout the canals?”
Bishop slowly shook his head. “Never saw them.”
“They there all the same.” He reached for the salt shaker. “Everybody knows ‘bout them.”
“That’s the salt.”
“What’s that?”
Bishop pointed. “You got the salt there.”
“Damn right.” He poured salt in the cup. “Too much sugar’s no good for you.”
Bishop went back to his steak. As he ate he kept thinking about canals filled with water in the streets. It seemed like a good idea to him, certainly better than the dusty streets of Los Angeles. Suddenly he saw himself fall in the canal. He couldn’t swim.
“How deep is the water?” he abruptly asked.
The old man looked at him with blank eyes. “What water?”
“The water in the canals in the streets.”
His eyes came alive again. “Damn deep,” he said vehemently. “So deep nobody knows for sure.”
“Why don’t they send divers down?”
“They do. Only they never come back. Soon’s they go down nobody ever sees them again.”
Bishop didn’t believe him.
“It’s the damn truth, s’help me,” said the old man. “Not only that but lots of people drown in them canals, and their bodies never come up either.”
“Why don’t they drain the canals?”
“Can’t.” He ordered more coffee.
“Why not?”
The old man took out a cigarette. “The damn water is used for irrigation. This whole town lives on irrigation.” He broke off the filter and stuck the tobacco end in his mouth. “If they ever let the water go, this damn town’d die overnight.” He lit the broken end. “You ever see a town die overnight?”
Bishop shook his head.
“I seen it once. In New Mexico when I was no older’n a pup. A little place called Los Rios.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette. “One night a dust storm hit. Rained dust all night, not just grit but big rocks of dust. Sounded like bombs going off By morning everything was buried, must’ve been a hundred foot deep. Killed every living thing in town.” Took another drag. “For years they tried to find that damn town.” Sugared his coffee again. “Couldn’t find it. The whole damn place was dead and buried in one night.” Put in the salt, “Never found it again neither. Not so’s I know ‘bout.” Dunked his cigarette in the coffee. “Same thing’d happen here if they ever drained off the damn canals.” Stuck it in his mouth. “The banks over on Central Avenue need the water to wash all the dirty money they get. The squatters need the water to flush their damn toilets. And the rest of us need the water to get the electricity to run the damn air-conditioners ‘cause the water makes everything so damn humid.” He picked up the cup. “Without it we’d all turn to dust by tomorrow. The whole town.” He swallowed the coffee, ran his hand across his mouth. “Dust to dust,” he said softly. “Dead and gone.” He looked into the drained cup.
Bishop shoved his empty plate across the counter. He slowly drank his coffee. After a while he placed the cup on the plate; they seemed to belong together.
“How’d you get out?” he asked finally.
“Get out?”
“From the dust town. You said everybody died and was buried.”
The old man gave him a toothless grin. “A giant bird come down and pulled me out just as I was sinking. Carried me far away.”
“A giant bird?”
“Big as a house.” He chuckled. “Bigger.”
Bishop got up. “You better hope he don’t come around again.”
“Why’s that?” asked the old man at his back.
“He might drop you in the canals this time,” said Bishop over his shoulder.
Later that evening he checked into a quiet hotel on Van Buren and slept soundly. The next morning he rented a car, again using his Daniel Long identification and disguise. He told the clerk he expected to be in town only a few days on business. In truth, he found little in Phoenix to hold him and he intended to remain just long enough to give them something to remember him by.
THREE WEEKS earlier, on the morning of August 15, certain people were trying desperately to remember him, though they had never met him and knew of him only by one of his many aliases. Derek Lavery officially began the meeting at 9:25, when Adam Kenton finally arrived.
A story on Vincent Mungo was needed, and quickly. One that would demand the death penalty. The snag was that a legitimate angle was also needed. They didn’t have one. Not yet anyway. The Chessman piece had been easy; he was dead, executed. The angle was that he hadn’t deserved death. Mungo was a lot harder. What they needed was not so obvious.
“Then we got it,” said Ding suddenly.
“Got what?”
“The angle.”
“What is it?” pursued Lavery.
“I don’t know.”
“You just said—”
“We need what’s not obvious. Right?”
Lavery nodded, suspicious now.
“Since it’s not obvious to us, that must mean we already got it.” His face beamed angelically, his eyes shone. “Otherwise it would be obvious that we didn’t have it.”
“That’s right,” said Kenton. “We have got it, but we can’t use it—”
“Because we don’t know what it is,” finished Ding.
“If we knew it, we wouldn’t need it.”
“Obviously.”
Both men glanced at Lavery, sputtering incoherently.
Twenty minutes later the most obvious thing in the room was the grin on the editor’s face. He had found his angle. Something in what Adam Kenton had said at one point: Everybody assumed Mungo was crazy. But suppose he was crazy like a fox…
Crazy like a fox.
That was their angle. Maybe Vincent Mungo was not really crazy at all. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. And therefore deserved the death penalty.
He killed the other inmate to get whatever the man had on him. The girl’s murder could have been a sexual thing. Both bodies were then mutilated to make it seem he was nuts,
Who was Vincent Mungo anyway? Just another young man in a hostile world. Angry, resentful. His mother choked to death, his father committed suicide. He was brought up by women, he was considered strange. He had problems, he had fits. So did a lot of people. They didn’t all kill and destroy.
“That’s it,” said Lavery. “That’s the angle we go with. Assuming it’s legit and he’s not really nuts. Let’s find out.”
Kenton was to dig into Mungo’s record in the upstate hospital.
“Willows.”
“He was there a few months. I want everything he did up there. Who he talked to, what he ate, where he slept, who his friends were, his enemies, what the guards thought of him, everything you can get.”
“What about the other hospitals? His years at home? His people?”
“No.” Lavery held out a pointed finger to emphasize his words. “Whatever happened to him happened at Willows. Before that he was just another guy walking around. If he hatched any kind of plan, it was at Willows.” He turned to Ding. “I want you to check into other killers
who used the insanity laws to get away with murder. See what happened to them, if they got out and what they did afterward. Especially if they killed again. Make them recent if you can. Then we’ll pull everything together and match Mungo to it.” Back to Kenton. “You look into Mungo.”
Kenton nodded. “I just hope he doesn’t look into me.”
“If he does,” said Lavery quickly, “look out.” He glanced at the calendar on his desk. “I want it for the September 4 issue. That gives you five days.”
“Not much time,” Kenton told him.
“We need it running soon as possible. Mungo’s been out a month already.”
“Six weeks now,” said Ding, who always liked to have the last word.
“That’s just a long month,” said Lavery, who never liked to give it.
DON SOLIS had taken a week to get his story together. He had spent almost two years on San Quentin’s death row. In 1952 he had been whisked up in the elevator to the fifth floor, strip-searched and deposited in a ten-foot by five-foot cell. He had paced that cell a thousand times; three steps one way, six steps the other way. He had been fed twice a day, let out for exercise in front of his cubicle each morning. He had listened to music and the outside world on earphones. Between the pacing and eating, the exercise and music, he had watched men walk to their death. Some walked bravely, others had to be supported or even carried. Almost all wanted to live longer. Just a little bit longer, please. A month, a week, even a day, anything. Anything at all.
He had talked with many of them; there was little else to do on death row. He had known the good and the bad, the famous and the infamous, the killers and the cripples. He had known Caryl Chessman.
They had talked often, he and Chessman. Talked of the things they did or would like to do, their dreams and fantasies, their hopes and fears. They respected each other and got along well, at least well enough for two men facing death.
Sometimes Chessman talked of his youth and how everything seemed to go wrong. His mother, whom he had loved dearly, was paralyzed in a tragic automobile accident. His father, a weak but kind and gentle man, tried to hold the family together financially. It was impossibly difficult. Chessman began to steal in his earliest teens to help with fain ily expenses. He was soon caught. After that his juvenile record grew until finally he was sent to reform school. As a child he had been considered a musical prodigy but a bout with encephalitis ended the promise of a career in music. Acutely intelligent, embittered by the truly incredible misfortune constantly stalking his parents and himself, the youth isolated himself from society’s acceptance and turned to a life of crime.
By age seventeen Chessman was committing armed robberies and shooting from stolen cars at pursuing police. He carried guns, he formed gangs, he sneered and bragged and bullied his way around. He knew it all. But misfortune still dogged him. He was eminently untalented as a criminal. Before he was twenty years old he was imprisoned in San Quentin. The die had been cast. His entire adult life, with minor exception, was spent behind bars. Eventually his young wife, whom he had married in Las Vegas, divorced him. Several years later his mother died of cancer in agonizing pain. Her death was a severe blow to him. She had been abandoned as an infant in St. Joseph, Michigan. Once he had spent thousands of stolen dollars in an attempt to learn, through private detectives, who his mother’s real parents had been. He learned nothing. That seemed an apt appraisal of Chessman’s life, at least to Don Solis at the time.
On rare occasions the two men would get in a competitive spirit when recalling past deeds. Chessman usually won since he had done many things and was much more vocal. But Solis could always point to the men he had killed in wartime. Chessman had killed nobody. But he had come close a lot of times, he kept insisting.
Solis remembered one time they were talking about women and he told Chessman about the Italian peasant girl he had raped during the war. A bunch of American soldiers had caught her in a barn during a lull in the fighting around Salerno. They kept her in that barn all night taking turns at her. Did everything to her too.
Chessman said that was nothing. He had raped at least a half dozen women in Los Angeles, forcing most of them to give him oral sex which he particularly liked. He was the famous Red Light Bandit who had robbed couples in lonely spots, sometimes taking the women to his car for sex. He never thought any of them would identify him because of shame. When two women did, he decided to bluff his way through. He was smarter than any dumb cop, and he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing they got the right man. Also, his mother was alive at the time and he’d never do anything to bring her grief. Now they could all go to hell. He’d beat the rap yet! He would somehow get out through legal means, and then watch out! He’d pay them all back for the years they’d kept him locked up. When the time came he would rob and rape his way clear across the country. He’d show them, he’d show them all!
That was the story he, Solis, would tell Senator Stoner. Caryl Chessman had admitted he was the Red Light Bandit and had stated that once he got out he would continue his activities. Proof? For one thing, the attacks stopped completely as soon as Chessman was arrested. For another, he was captured in a car that had merchandise from one of the robberies still in the back seat. Then, too, in the police station he confessed to almost all of the robberies and attacks, though he later repudiated the confession. Oh, just one last thing. On that prison day when he admitted his guilt, Chessman bragged that one of the women he had raped told him she liked it but she was cheating on her husband with a mutual friend and he was going to get her in a lot of trouble. Chessman also bragged that a young girl he attacked had a large mole on the small of her back that looked like a flower.
Why was he coming forward after all these years to tell what he knew? Because he was a legitimate businessman now. He lived by the law and recognized his responsibility to tell the truth. He hadn’t thought of Chessman for many years and believed that what he knew just didn’t matter any longer. Now he saw that he had been wrong, and he wanted to tell the truth to others so that he could go back to his quiet, peaceful life.
Satisfied with his story, Don Solis, against his better judgment, picked up the receiver in his office and called Stoner in Sacramento. He gave his name and said he would like to speak to the senator about Caryl Chessman, He was told that Stoner was out of town but would return on August 17. Could he call back then? Solis left his number and agreed to call again in two days.
When he cradled the phone his palms were covered with sweat.
TWO THOUSAND miles away Jonathan Stoner was having the time of his life. For two days he had been wined and dined by the political bigwigs in Kansas City. He had met and talked with the top men, the bottom men and a half dozen groups in between. He knew they were sizing him up and so he was on his very best behavior. From all the attention accorded him, Stoner could only conclude that they were thinking of backing him nationally. To see how he went over, of course. He already had firm commitments for exposure throughout the Midwest. And he was doing a creditable job of exposure on his own in the western states, though more attention would have to be given to Washington and Idaho. He felt certain that the Southwest would fall in line, especially if he got the backing he now expected.
Stoner was well pleased with himself. He was still youngish, still in good shape. He intended to pay even more attention to his physical appearance and style. He would affect a mod look, but a bit sterner and somewhat westernized of course. If he went national, there was no telling how high he could go. Governor, United States senator. And then?
He smiled at the thought. A boy from the California valley, from the lower middle class. The goddam working class, for chrissake. Harry Golden was right. It could only happen in America.
After a while he stopped daydreaming. There were a lot of problems to solve before dreams came true. In two days he would be home, with much to do and important people to see. A dozen TV shows were waiting for him, innumerable speaking engagements. A lecture tour ha
d been arranged for later in the month. Roger was doing a good job, a terrific job. Now he had to do his job. He had to convince these old bastards that he was a hotshot, a sure winner if they gave him the chance. All it took were the right keys to open the right doors; that’s all he needed. Give him the exposure, push him across the country. He’d do the rest. Goddam right he would! He’d smile and shake and kiss and take. Yeah, and if he had to diddle a few, he’d do that too. He had the guts, he had the drive, he had the ambition, the brains, the body, the style, the look. He had it all.
And he had the issue too. Capital punishment was national, a nationwide concern. It was moving across all economic levels but most especially with the moneyed whites. The phony liberalism of the sixties was dying. Too many people were being hurt in the pocketbook, where it counted. Too many were being killed. Things were getting out of control. Maybe the death penalty wasn’t the whole answer but it was a damn good start. It was big and getting bigger, and it would take him along with it. By then he’d find other issues of national concern. A man grew as his responsibility grew. Stoner firmly believed that. Look at all the dumb sons of bitches who became near-great presidents. The office made the man. Especially if he was straight to begin with. Stoner was straight.
He suddenly thought of Vincent Mungo. God bless him! Wherever he was, Stoner hoped that he could hold out a while longer.
Meanwhile he had work to do. He called his mistress to tell her he would be back in two days. He called his wife and told her he’d be back in two, maybe three days. Then he put on his best face and went into another meeting.
WHILE THE senator was having the time of his life in Kansas City, a woman with saddened eyes was identifying a body in the Sacramento morgue. Cause of death was massive injuries suffered when struck by an automobile; since no one had reported the death to police it was listed as a probable vehicular homicide. The identification was positive. The body was that of Velma Adams, who lived in Los Angeles and owned a beauty parlor there. She was fifty-four years old and had been traveling alone around the state on vacation.
By Reason of Insanity Page 24