The Madman's Tale

by John Katzenbach

  Mr. Evans looked relieved that the first questions were so easily answered. He leaned back on his steel chair and replied, “Lanky was taken to the county lockup. He’s being held in an isolation cell there under twenty-four-hour observation. Doctor Gulptilil went over to see him this morning and to make certain that he’s receiving his proper medications in the proper dosages. He’s okay. He’s a little calmer than he was before the”—he paused—“incident.”

  This statement took the assembly a moment or two to absorb.

  It was Cleo who burst forth with the next question. “Why don’t they bring him back here? This is where he belongs. Not in some jail with bars and no sunshine and probably a bunch of criminals. Bastards. Rapists and thieves, I’ll bet. And poor Lanky. In the hands of the police. The fascist bastards.”

  “Because he’s being charged with a crime,” the psychologist said quickly. Francis thought him oddly reluctant to use the word murder.

  “But I don’t understand something,” Peter the Fireman said in a voice low enough to make everyone in the room turn toward him. “Lanky is clearly crazy. We all saw how he was struggling, what’s the word you like to use …”

  “Decompensating,” Mister Evil said stiffly.

  “A real dumb-ass word,” Cleo said angrily. “Just a real stupid, dumb-ass, goddamn completely useless bastard of a word.”

  “Right,” Peter continued, picking up some speed. “He was really in the midst of some big moment. I mean, we could all see it, all day, growing worse and nobody did anything to help him. And so he exploded. And he was already here in the hospital for all of his problems, why would they charge him? I mean isn’t that pretty much the definition of someone who didn’t really know what he was doing?”

  Evans nodded, but also bit his lip slightly before answering. “That’s a determination the county prosecutor will have to make. Until then, Lanky stays where he is …”

  “Well, I think they should bring him back here where his friends are,” Cleo said angrily. “We’re all he knows now. He doesn’t have any family except us.”

  There was a general murmur of assent.

  “Isn’t there something we can do?” the woman with the stringy hair asked.

  This comment also inspired a round of mumbled agreement.

  “Well,” Mister Evil said in a less-than-convincing tone, “I think we should all continue to address the problems that put us here. By working at getting better, perhaps we can find a way of helping out Lanky.”

  Cleo snorted in obvious disgust. “Goddamn wishy-washy stupid,” she said. “Idiotic, dumb bastards.” It was a little unclear to Francis precisely whom Cleo was referring to, but he didn’t find himself disagreeing with her choice of words. Cleo had an empress’s ability to cut to the crux of the matter, in a most condescending and imperious manner. Obscenities began to sprout throughout the group. The room seemed to fill with an unruly noise.

  Mister Evil held up his hand, clearly exasperated. “This sort of angry talk doesn’t do Lanky—or any of us—any good,” he said. “So let’s shut it off now.”

  He made a dismissive, slicing gesture with his hand. It was the sort of motion that Francis had grown accustomed to seeing from the psychologist, one that underscored once again who was sane and thus, who was alleged to be in control. And, as usual, it had the properly intimidating effect; the group slowly settled back, grumbling, into the steel seats, the small moment heading toward rebelliousness dissipating in the stale air around them. Francis could see that Peter the Fireman was still deep within the moment, however, his forearms crossed in front of him and his brow knitted.

  “I think there’s not enough angry talk,” he said, finally, not loudly, but with a sense of purpose behind each word. “And I fail to see how it doesn’t do Lanky any good. Who knows what might or might not help him at this point? I think we should be even more vocal in protest.”

  Mister Evil spun in his seat. “You probably would,” he said.

  The two men glared at each other for a moment, and Francis saw they were both on the verge of something a little bigger and more physical. Then, almost as swiftly the moment disappeared, because Mister Evil turned away, saying, “You should keep your opinions to yourself. Where they best belong.”

  It was a dismissive statement, and it froze the group.

  Francis saw Peter the Fireman considering a response, but in that second’s delay, there was a sound at the therapy room door.

  All the heads turned as the door swung open. Big Black languidly moved his immense bulk into the room. For a second, he filled the doorway, blocking everyone’s vision. Then he was followed by the woman that Francis had seen through the window at the start of the session. She, in turn, was followed by Gulp-a-pill and finally, by Little Black. The two attendants took up sentrylike positions by the door.

  “Mister Evans,” Dr. Gulptilil said swiftly, “I am so sorry to interrupt the session …”

  “That’s okay,” Mister Evil responded. “We were close to finishing anyway.”

  Francis had the radical thought that they were more at the start of something than the finish. However, he didn’t really listen to the exchange between the two therapists. His eyes were locked, instead, on the woman standing just between the Moses brothers.

  Francis saw many things, it seemed to him, all at once: She was slender and exceptionally tall, perhaps only an inch or so beneath six feet, and he would have put her age at just around thirty. Her skin was a light, cocoa brown, close in shade, he thought, to the oak leaves that were the first to change in the fall and her eyes had a slightly oriental appearance. Her hair dropped in a vibrant black sheen past her shoulders. She wore a simple tan trench coat, open to reveal a blue business suit. A leather briefcase was clutched in long, delicate fingers, and she stared across the room with a singularity of purpose that would have quieted even the most distraught patient. It was, he thought, almost as if her presence silenced the delusions and fears that occupied each seat.

  At first, Francis thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and then she turned just slightly, and he saw that the left side of her face was marred by a long, white scar, that creased her eyebrow, jumped over the eye, then raced in a zigzag fashion down her cheek, where it ended at her jaw. The scar had the same effect as a hypnotist’s watch; he couldn’t pull his eyes away from the jagged line that bisected her face. He wondered for a moment whether it wasn’t like looking at some mad artist’s work, where overwhelmed by an unexpected perfection, the deranged painter had seized a palette knife and decided to treat his own art with utter cruelty.

  The woman stepped forward. “Which are the two men who found the nurse’s body?” she asked. Her voice had a huskiness to it that Francis thought penetrated right through him.

  “Peter. Francis,” Doctor Gulptilil said briskly. “This young woman has driven all the way out here from Boston to ask some questions from you. Would you please accompany us to the office, so that she might question you properly?”

  Francis rose, and in that second became aware that Peter the Fireman was staring equally hard at the young woman. “I know you,” he said, but beneath his voice. As he heard the words, Francis saw the young woman focus on Peter the Fireman’s face, and for just an instant, her forehead creased in a sudden touch of recognition. Then, almost as swiftly, it returned to its impassive scarred beauty.

  The two men stepped forward, out of the circle of chairs.

  “Watch out,” Cleo said abruptly. And then she quoted from her favorite play: “The bright day is done, and we are for the dark …” There was a momentary silence in the room, and she added, in a hoarse smoky voice, “Watch out for the bastards. They never mean you any good.”

  I stepped back from the living room wall and all the words gathered there and thought to myself: There. That’s it. We were all in place. Death, I think, sometimes is like an algebraic equation, a long series of x factors and y values, multiplied and divided and added and subtracted until
a simple, but awful, answer is arrived upon. Zero. And, at that moment, the formula was in position.

  When I first went to the hospital, I was twenty-one, and had never been in love. I had never kissed a girl, not felt the softness of her skin beneath my fingertips. They were a mystery to me, mountaintops as unattainable and unreachable as sanity. Yet they filled my imagination. There were so many secrets: the curve of a breast, the lift of a smile, the small of the back as it arced in sensual motion. I knew nothing, envisioned everything.

  So much in my mad life has been beyond my grasp. I suppose I should have somehow expected to fall for the most exotic woman I would ever know. And, I suppose, too, I should have understood that in the single moment, the flashing glance between Peter the Fireman and Lucy Kyoto Jones, that there was much more to be said, and a connection much deeper that would emerge. But I was young, and all I saw was the presence, suddenly, in my little life of the most extraordinary person I had ever set eyes upon. She seemed to glow a little like the lava lamps that were so popular with hippies and students, a constantly melding, twisting form that flowed from one shape to another.

  Lucy Kyoto Jones was the product of a union between a black American serviceman and a Japanese-American mother. Her middle name was the city where her mother had been born. Hence the almond-shaped eyes and the cocoa skin. The undergraduate degree from Stanford and Harvard Law part I would come to learn later.

  I would come to learn about the scar on her face, later, as well, for the person who put that scar there, and the other one that she wore less obviously deep within her, set her on the course that brought her to the Western State Hospital with questions that were soon to become very unpopular.

  One of the things I learned in my maddest years was that one could be in a room, with walls and barred windows and locks on the doors, surrounded by other crazy people, or even stuffed into an isolation cell all alone, but that really wasn’t the room one was in at all. The real room that one occupied was constructed by memory, by relationships, by events, by all sorts of unseen forces. Sometimes delusions. Sometimes hallucinations. Sometimes desires. Sometimes dreams and hopes, or ambition. Sometimes anger. That was what was important: to always recognize where the real walls were.

  And that was the case then, as we sat in Gulp-a-pill’s office.

  I looked out the apartment window and saw that it was late. The daylight had fled, replaced by the thickness of the small-town night. I have several clocks in my apartment, all provided by my sisters, who, for some reason I have yet to be able to ascertain, seem to think that I have a near constant and deeply pressing need to always know what time it is. I thought to myself, the words are the only time I need now, so I took a break, smoking a cigarette, and collecting all the clocks from the apartment and unplugging them from the walls, or removing the batteries that ran them, so that they were all stopped. I noticed that they were all paused at more or less the same moment—ten after ten, eleven after ten, thirteen after ten. I picked each clock up and changed both the hour and the minute hands on each, so that there was no longer even a semblance of consistency. Each was stopped at a different moment. This accomplished, I laughed out loud. It was as if I had seized time and freed myself from its constraints.

  I remembered how Lucy had sat forward, fixing first Peter, then me, then Peter again with a withering, humorless gaze. I suppose, at first, she meant to impress us with her singleness of purpose. Perhaps she had thought that was how one dealt with crazy folks—in a decisive manner, more or less like one would with a wayward puppy. She demanded, “I want to know everything about what you saw the other night.”

  Peter the Fireman hesitated before replying.

  “Perhaps you might first tell us, Miss Jones, precisely why you are interested in our recollections? After all, we both made statements to the local police.”

  “Why am I interested in the case?” she said briskly. “There are some details that were brought to my attention shortly after the body was discovered, and after a phone call or two to the local authorities, I felt it of some importance to personally check them out.”

  “But that says nothing,” Peter replied, with a small, dismissive gesture of his own. He sat forward on his seat, bending toward the young woman. “You want to know what we saw, but both C-Bird and I are already nursing bruises from our first encounter with hospital security and the local homicide cops. I suspect we are both fortunate not to be stuffed in some isolation cell at the county jail, having been erroneously accused of a serious crime. So before we agree to help you, why don’t you tell us once again why you are so interested—in a bit more detail, please.”

  Dr. Gulptilil had a slightly shocked look on his face, as if the notion that a patient might question someone sane was somehow against the rules. “Peter,” he said stiffly, “Miss Jones is a prosecuting attorney in Suffolk County. And I think she should be the one asking the questions.”

  The Fireman nodded. “I knew I’d seen you before,” he said quietly to the young woman. “In a courtroom, probably.”

  She looked at him for a moment or two before she answered. “Sitting across from you, once, for a couple of court sessions. I saw you testify, in the Anderson fire case, maybe two years ago. I was still an assistant handling misdemeanors and DUI’s. They wanted some of us to see you get cross-examined.”

  Peter smiled. “I recall that I held up pretty well,” he said. “I was the one who found where the torch had set the fire. It was pretty clever, you know. Fixing an electrical outlet next to where the flammable material was stored in the warehouse, so that their own product pushed the fire. It took some planning. But then, that’s what a good arsonist is all about: planning. It’s part of the thrill for them, the construction of the fire. It’s how the good one’s really get off.”

  “That’s why they had us come watch,” Lucy said. “Because they thought you were on your way to becoming the best arson investigator on the Boston force. But things didn’t work out, did they?”

  “Oh,” Peter said, smiling a little more widely, as if there was some joke in what Lucy Jones had said, but Francis hadn’t heard. “One could argue that they have, indeed. It really just depends on how you see things. Like justice and what’s right and all that. But, really, now my story isn’t why you’re here, is it Miss Jones?”

  “No. The nurse-trainee’s murder is.”

  Peter stared at Lucy Jones. He glanced over toward Francis, then to Big Black and Little Black, who hung in the back of the room, then finally at Gulp-a-pill, who was sitting a bit uneasily in his seat behind his desk. “Now why,” Peter said slowly, turning back to Francis, “why, C-Bird, would a prosecuting attorney from Boston drop everything she was doing and drive all the way out to the Western State Hospital, to ask questions of a couple of crazy folks about a death that happened well outside her jurisdiction, where a man has already been arrested and charged? Something about that death must have piqued her interest, C-Bird. But what? What could have caused Miss Jones to rush out here so urgently and ask to speak with a couple of Looney Tunes?”

  Francis looked over at Lucy Jones, whose eyes had centered on Peter the Fireman with a mingled look of intrigue and a recognition that Francis couldn’t quite name. After a long moment, she turned to Francis and with a small grin that was skewed slightly in the direction of the scar on her face, asked, “Well, Mister Petrel … can you answer that question?”

  Francis thought for a moment. In his imagination, he pictured Short Blond just as they found her. Then he said, “The body.”

  Lucy smiled. “Yes indeed. Mister Petrel … may I call you Francis?”

  Francis nodded.

  “Then what about the body?”

  “Something about it was special.”

  “Something about it might have been special,” Lucy Jones continued. She looked over at Peter the Fireman. “Do you want to jump in here, now?”

  “No,” Peter said, crossing his arms in front of him. “C-Bird is doing just fine. Let him con
tinue.”

  She looked back over at Francis. “And so …?”

  Leaning back for an instant, then, just as swiftly pushing himself back forward, Francis thought about what she might be driving at. Images flooded him, of Short Blond, over and over, the way her body was twisted in death, and the manner in which her clothes were arranged. He realized that it was all a puzzle, and a part of it was the beautiful woman sitting across from him. “The missing joints on her hand,” Francis said abruptly.

  Lucy nodded and leaned forward. “Tell me about that hand,” she said. “What did it look like to you.”

  Doctor Gulptilil stepped in suddenly. “The police took photographs, Miss Jones. Surely you can inspect those. I fail to see what it is …” But his complaint dissipated, as the woman made a gesture for Francis to continue.

  “They looked like someone, the killer, had removed them,” Francis said.

  Lucy nodded. “Now, can you tell me why the man accused, what’s his name …”

  “Lanky,” Peter the Fireman said. His own voice had gained a deeper, more solid tone.

  “Yes … why this man Lanky, whom you both knew, might have done that?”

  “No. No reason.”

  “You can think of no reason why he might have marked the young woman in that fashion? Nothing he might have said beforehand? Or the way he’d been behaving. I understand he’d been quite agitated …”

  “No,” Francis said. “Nothing about the way Short Blond died fits with what I know of Lanky.”

  “I see,” Lucy said, nodding. “Would you concur with that statement, Doctor?” She turned to Doctor Gulptilil.

  “Absolutely not!” he said forcefully. “The man’s behavior leading up to the killing was exaggerated, very much on edge. And he’d tried to attack her earlier that day. He has had a distinct propensity to threaten violence on numerous occasions in the past, and in his agitated state, he slipped over the edge of restraint, just as the staff feared he might.”