Hangman

by Stephan Talty

  I thought I was rescuing Sandy from a horrible situation. I felt good about it. I was an idiot, of course.

  When I got to the motel with Sandy, Dr. Lipschitz hadn’t arrived yet. Sandy and I talked about fun things, like summer trips to the theme park Fantasy Island, classes at her school. When Dr. Lipschitz arrived, I introduced him and said this was the friend I’d told her about, and that he was a psychiatrist. He asked to speak to Sandy alone and took her out to my car. She was comfortable with him. He was so good with people; it’s hard to explain, but she didn’t tense up for a moment. I waited inside, watching some TV while relaxing on the bed. When Dr. Lipschitz returned, he came through the door alone. He was smiling. That is the last thing I remember about that day. Lipschitz shot me, I believe, and placed the gun in my hand. But I don’t remember it. I certainly didn’t shoot myself.

  I was numb inside and out those first four years after the shooting. Even if I felt my mind get clearer, I’d try to coax it back into numbness, into not feeling or thinking. Because what was there to think of besides what a sick, demented person I was. I believed I was Hangman, of course I did. Everyone else told me I was; it was just the reality I woke up to. My memories were very disjointed, never fitting together. I remember bits and pieces of my time in the hospital. There was one fat-necked nurse, Dennison, that was awful to me, letting me piss myself in my bed without coming to help. The trial? It was like watching a show on a black-and-white TV with bad reception, a trial in which you wanted the defendant to burn. Except I was the defendant.

  It was only last year that I felt my head getting clearer. I didn’t remember Dr. Lipschitz from before the shooting. I only knew he was my psychiatrist, and he became important to me again. The same warmth, the same real attention to my life, the same feeling of closeness. We talked about the murders. I was consumed with guilt, even though I couldn’t remember the actual details. The papers and the authorities and the other inmates said I did it, so I assumed I did. I questioned every other thing in my life, but for some reason I thought that the justice system would never convict the wrong man in such a big case. I trusted people like you, Detective Kearney.

  But about seven or eight months ago, Sandy’s face started coming back to me clearer and clearer. At first, I would just pound my head against the wall in my cell, trying to get that image out of my head. I didn’t deserve to remember her; I didn’t want to see her face, with her eyes trusting me, the way I’d left her. I couldn’t stop them, though. I started to remember the times we’d spent together when she was young. I drew her face; I enjoyed it, it helped me remember Sandy the eight-year-old, Sandy the carefree troublemaker. But the day at the Warsaw Motel, that was still a blank to me.

  The other inmates used to give me advice on killing myself, how to do it. Some of them even offered to donate their sheets to the cause. I didn’t blame them. How could I hate them when the same thoughts were running through my own head? But Carlson. Him I hated.

  Every night, I’d hear his footsteps as he came up to my cell. I’d close my eyes and he’d start whispering, “Why’d you kill those girls? Where’s Sandy?” The funny thing is, I wanted to answer him, more than you can believe. I’d rack my brains trying to remember, where is Sandy. A few times I screamed back, “I don’t fucking know!” But that never stopped him. He was relentless. Don’t believe that bullshit you read in the papers. He enjoyed what he was doing. He’d just keep whispering, and then when he saw me in the hallways, he’d give me this little smirk. I dreamed of catching him alone in a prison hallway, some night, without my cuffs on.

  The day of the escape I remember clearly. Carlson and the other CO were talking back and forth about something they’d planned and Carlson was being a dick, as usual. He let the white CO out at an AutoZone. I was thinking the whole time about Sandy, remembering driving some of these same roads with her. Carlson brought me to the hill and he tried to degrade me even more, treating me like I was some kind of a dog. Then, a miracle. Dr. Lipschitz came out walking from the tree line with a gun. He was smiling, and I knew he was going to take care of the guard and free me. He was my friend, you see? I believed that. And so I leaned over and told Carlson that he was going to get his answer. He was finally going to find out what happened to the girls, after all his torturing of me. Because he was going to join them! Don’t ask me to feel guilty about that, because I don’t.

  After he shot the guard, Lipschitz said to me, “Marcus, do you remember this?” It was a brochure from Hoyt Lake, the rowboats there. He was testing me to see how much had come back to me, if I remembered telling Sandy we’d go rowing there. But I didn’t remember anything. Maybe he would have killed me if I had remembered.

  The rest of the escape, I can’t tell you much. I felt like a vegetable. Lipschitz said to me, “I have to give you a little medicine.” I trusted him, I thought he was trying to help me get away from that horrific cell in the prison, so I let him inject me. From then until the police took me away from him, I was walking through a cold fog. I remember a small room and being in the trunk of a car, but I can’t tell you which day was which or if it was day or night. Dr. Lipschitz asked me to write some things, like letters, and I was happy to help. I was the perfect unwitting accomplice. It makes me sick to think about it.

  When he shot me at the asylum, it was a terrible shock. It ripped away the fog in my brain and I thought the pain itself would kill me. But you know what? I thought it was you, Detective Kearney, who’d fired the gun. It’s true. Why would my friend do something like that? It couldn’t be. So even in the depths of my drug-induced state, I was defending Dr. Lipschitz.

  That’s all gone. I know now that Lipschitz was the killer and that he was probably insane, in some very strange way. But it’s hard to get those years out of my system. For a few days after I was freed, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and think I’m back in that cell at Auburn, and my drawings of Sandy are looking down at me from the wall where I’d taped them, and Carlson is whispering outside and I will never, ever get out of there.

  I’ve gotten a different therapist now. The dreams have stopped. I have to learn to forgive myself for being a messed-up human being who was used by a far more messed-up human being. And I’m learning to do that. Lipschitz stole so much time from me, I won’t let him take another day.

  After this interview, I’m going to see my daughter, Nicole. My beautiful, athletic daughter, who plays volleyball at Stanford, did you know that? She believes in all the things I never did, like family. In a sick sort of way, this whole ordeal has reunited me with her. I don’t even feel the need to punch people in the face who talk about silver linings, because it’s true, it really is. My suffering does have a reward.

  OK? That’s all I remember. I can’t add anything that would help you understand Lipschitz, if that understanding is even possible. If I do remember something, I’ll send you an email, Detective Kearney, or I’ll write you a nice long letter. Because this part of my life is over and I am never, ever coming back here again.

  67

  Mills slabbed some sauce on the meat sizzling on the grill in Abbie’s backyard and a puff of smoke erupted from the grill. Abbie studied the lines of his back as he worked, the broad shoulders, the curlicue at the base of his hairline that she liked to play with. She took a sip of her Chardonnay, holding it in her mouth, savoring the taste of late summer in its tartness.

  Ron sat across from her, dressed in a sharp cotton windbreaker, a white polo shirt, and jeans. He took a sip of his wine and eyed Mills nervously. “Abbie?”

  “Mm-hmmm?”

  Ron leaned toward her. “It’s not really moose,” he whispered.

  Abbie shrugged. “So he says. I hear it’s delicious. If you bite down on a bullet, just ignore it.”

  Ron made a face. “Honey, thank you very much, but I’m not eating that. I don’t care how much wine you pour into me.”

  Mills clicked the top of the grill shut and more smoke came leaking out the side vents. He walked to
the table, sat next to Abbie, and took a swig of his Molson Golden. He smiled pleasantly at Ron.

  He’d come back the night before, the moose meat packed in ice in the cooler. Forty-six-inch antlers, he’d said. And that was about all he’d said.

  “How long?” Abbie said.

  “Ten minutes.” He didn’t look at her. His voice was neutral, even cold.

  Ron raised his eyebrows and smiled at Abbie. “Great. I, uh, better get Charles.”

  “And the salad,” Abbie said.

  Charles was next door, finishing up grading some papers for his class at UB. Ron got up and sauntered toward the front of the house. “I have a yen for salad today,” he said, looking back at Abbie.

  She pulled the collar of Mills’s heavy fisherman’s sweater close to her cheeks. Mills looked at her. In his eyes, so many things. Anger, yes. Love, maybe. Definitely exasperation.

  Mills wasn’t the only one exasperated with her. She was suspended from the Buffalo Police Department while her conduct in the Hangman investigation was reviewed by a disciplinary board. Rumors were flying around Buffalo about unauthorized checks of certain basements in the North. Perelli had told her that the fact she’d caught the real Hangman, and saved Katrina Lamb, was the only thing that had saved her job, that and the fact that she was John Kearney’s daughter. She hadn’t talked to McGonagle, but she wondered if someone in the old boys’ network had released the fact that she’d used the Network. Maybe they wanted her gone. Or maybe they wanted to punish the Network for cooperating with someone like Abbie.

  In any case, her job was hanging by a thread. She hadn’t slept more than three hours each night since the shooting of Dr. Lipschitz. To lose her father’s badge … it would be a humiliation. A disgrace she didn’t want to think about.

  “Our last cookout of the year,” she said to Mills.

  “Probably.”

  Leaves scrabbled across the little concrete deck that the lawn set rested on. Abbie took a pita chip from the bowl that Ron had brought over and dipped it in the hummus. Delicious.

  “Another beer?” she said.

  Mills shook his head.

  “Are you going to talk to me?” she said. “Like, ever?”

  Mills said nothing.

  “Mills …”

  “How’d you do it?” he said flatly.

  It had been nine days since she’d shot and killed Dr. Andrew Lipschitz. Sandy Riesen’s body had been found buried in a grave twenty feet from where Lipschitz had died. Marcus Flynn had been discharged from Erie County Medical Center already, the wounds less serious than they appeared at the time. He was moving to California to be near his daughter, a junior at Stanford. Of all the people who’d emerged from the Hangman case, he—ironically—seemed the happiest.

  Katrina Lamb was with relatives in the suburbs. Abbie had met with her a few days before at a Tim Horton’s donut shop—unofficially, because she wasn’t supposed to be in touch with anyone connected with Hangman. Katrina had apologized about freaking out and running off at the asylum. “Honey, if you don’t freak out when a serial killer’s trying to recapture you,” Abbie told her, “you probably aren’t normal.” They’d sipped hot chocolates and quickly moved on to other subjects—Katrina didn’t want to talk about what happened. Abbie listened as the girl gushed about her upcoming performance as Cordelia in King Lear. Her eyes were bright, the words tripping as they came out. Abbie saw a tiny bit of desperation in the gushing report, a desperation to be normal again, but that was to be expected. She told Katrina she’d be at the opening night performance, and made a mental note to check in on the girl regularly after the play had run its course.

  Abbie had spent the last few days leafing through the diary of Mona Lipschitz, Andy Lipschitz’s mother, composed while at the asylum, 1979–82. Abbie had painstakingly matched descriptions of the many homes where Mona had worked as a maid. She’d been an immigrant from Belorussia, abandoned by her husband, hoping for a new start in Buffalo with her young son. It hadn’t worked out that way. She’d committed suicide at twenty-nine in the asylum’s third ward. Her diary was filled with memories of her rape in one of those houses years before as a teenager. But she never named the attacker.

  The names of the first two victims did match up with the family names in the diary, Breen and Kent. Those families had hired Mona Lipschitz in the late 1970s. But after that, Abbie’s hunt had turned up nothing. There was no evidence that Mona had ever worked for Maggie’s family, or Sandy’s, or Katrina’s. Blinded by the vision of his mother hanging by a rope in that shabby asylum ward, her son had gone after every family in the North who had a young girl in the house. He’d simply been killing a class of people, the evil-doers. There was a kill list, it turned out: every brunette teenager in the North.

  Abbie shivered, stuffed her hands in the pockets of the nubby sweater.

  “Well?” Mills said, taking a pull on his Molson.

  Abbie squinched up her eyes. “Patterns. Everyone seemed to have some connection to psychiatry. I got to thinking about psychiatrists, about asylums, about people who believed they were kings.”

  Mills nodded.

  “Marcus Flynn had been taken to the Psych Center,” she continued. “Lipschitz worked there part-time. It was on the list of buildings with coal bins. Simple, really.”

  Lipschitz had been the dark matter warping things. Calling her to claim he’d been offered money for the Hangman transcripts, so that she would think there was a second man out there. Telling Flynn that Sandy Riesen was being abused. Volunteering to talk to Sandy about the alleged abuse if Marcus would bring him the girl. Then he took Sandy and shot Flynn. Then, years later, roaming the city, Lipschitz snatched new victims, while everyone was looking for his escaped patient. Cocky.

  Flynn was even in the trunk of Hangman’s ’77 Cadillac when he’d put Katrina in there. Lipschitz had even played part of his recordings of Flynn’s prison interviews to her over the radio at the Stone Tower so she would think he was the killer.

  “Hangman, Hangman, what do you see?” Abbie said.

  Mills eyed her. “Like hell it was simple.”

  Abbie tilted her head back and regarded him. “Are you mad at me or proud?”

  Mills ignored that, squinted into the afternoon light. He crossed one leg over the other and looked back at Abbie. “So because Hangman was on the loose, Lipschitz had nothing to worry about,” Mills said finally. “He kept him in one of those cells in the basement of the old asylum—I don’t even want to imagine why they put the inmates in there years ago—and he was going to kill Flynn and the girl and bury them where no one would find them.”

  He looked over at her.

  “That’s about right,” Abbie said.

  Mills watched smoke pour through the vents of the grill and disappear into the evening air.

  “You stopped a lot of killings,” he said, raising his beer. “Congratulations, Ab.”

  Abbie drank. “But you don’t like how I saved them, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Abbie crossed over to him, pushed his leg off its perch, and scooched onto his lap. “Mills?”

  “Kearney?” His eyes, up close, were startlingly green and none too friendly.

  “I had to do it. Show me another way I could get there before he kills Katrina.”

  Mills’s eyes were cool. “You go down that alley you never walk back out, Abbie. Like I told you.”

  “I’ve seen it a thousand times,” she said in a husky voice, imitating him.

  Mills eyed her dangerously. “You wanna play?”

  “No,” Abbie said, sinking into him until she was laid out against his chest. “I want to have a nice peaceful life. For the first time in my life, that’s what I want. Maybe even with you.”

  She didn’t feel as lighthearted as she sounded. Sometimes she believed that each case left a bit of sediment behind, traced along the lining of her heart. Accumulating. Like black lung disease. An occupational hazard.

  But the su
n was out and Mills was here and Buffalo was her city now.

  “Maybe you weren’t cut out for a nice life,” Mills was saying.

  Abbie made a face. “That remains to be seen.”

  “If I see that guy McGonagle around, by the way, I’m going to bury him in the backyard.”

  “He’d poison the roses,” she said.

  “Abbie.”

  She put her fingers to his lips.

  “It’s over,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. You just have to believe in me.”

  She was going to a public memorial service for Wendy Lamb, Katrina’s mother, the next day. Her clothes were all picked out, the black dress with the thin leather belt and the new heels. She would go with a full heart. But she’d held up her end. She was at peace with Wendy Lamb.

  And what about Mills, she thought. What about yourself? That would take a little longer.

  To my brother James, at last

  By Stephan Talty

  Fiction

  Black Irish

  Hangman

  Nonfiction

  Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day

  Escape from the Land of Snows: The Young Dalai Lama’s Harrowing Flight to Freedom and the Making of a Spiritual Hero

  The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army

  Empire of the Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign

  Mulatto America: At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History