The Murder Channel

by John Philpin

  I have lived my entire life inside my mind, in a reality I created, a collection of images that has made survival possible.

  For fifteen years, half my lifetime, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has held me in an institution for the criminally insane. I have occupied the same room for five years. The ward is locked; my room is not. I have been a model inmate.

  The view from my window has entertained me. Birds built nests in the willow tree in spring. I cranked open my window two inches in summer and breathed air that did not taste like human waste. I watched children who walked to school beyond the walls, saw them carrying brightly colored lunch boxes and, years later, knapsacks overfilled with heavy books.

  I lived in my world and witnessed yours come of age.

  I thought about what I had done, the actions that resulted in my confinement. I did not experience remorse. That issue—guilt, sadness, whatever you choose to call it—is important to the hospital staff. If I felt those things, they said, it would signify that I was changing, experiencing emotional growth, and becoming a less dangerous person. When my father died, they watched me closely for evidence of grief.

  That makes no sense to me. I felt nothing then; I feel nothing now. People can mimic anything. I have watched them do it. If they do not simulate grief, if they feel it, why are they less likely to commit an act of violence?

  What I did was correct. An increment in the passage of what you call real time required adjustment. A pause was necessary in the passing of people through space. The darkened screen that presents the lives we live begged for a change in contrast, and I provided that.

  That I wear the label of illness is a social convenience, a zero price tag for an action that does not conform to this country’s one-way, lockstep march to production, consumption, and profit. No one knows the chemical, electrical, visual, and auditory peaks and nadirs in another’s mind. No one sees or feels or hears the accumulation of brain static that precedes and defines action. You salivate when the bell chimes.

  I stood behind the last door that separated me from freedom and stared at the blowing snow.

  “When should we expect you back?” Ben asked.

  “We’ll have him here in time for dinner,” O’Brien said. “I’ll call the ward when we’re leaving the courthouse.”

  Ben touched my arm. “I won’t be here when you return,” he said. “We can talk at breakfast.”

  I nodded. I liked Ben as much as any gatekeeper can be liked. I did not wish to kill him.

  “Are you nervous?” he asked.

  I watched columns of snow rise in spirals like miniature white cyclones.

  “You’ll do well, Felix,” he said.

  Three of us stepped through the final door. I paused on the stairs and gazed at the tops of naked trees leaning with the wind. I listened to winter’s howl and felt the sting of ice crystals on my face. A man can be restrained with harness and chain and still feel the rush of freedom.

  Doctors have interviewed me, tested and evaluated me, peered into my eyes and ears, drawn and analyzed my blood, scanned my brain. I have found it useful to remain silent, to allow others to struggle with the mystery. I wrote it.

  The problem as I see it is that I failed to complete my manuscript. A police officer intervened, and my famous final scene remained unwritten.

  O’Brien opened the county van’s rear doors, then followed my gaze at the accumulating inches of snow. “This rig’s four-wheel-drive,” he said. “You’ll be back in time to shower, eat, and watch yourself on the evening news.”

  I stepped into the black metal box and sat on the bench. The doors slammed shut and, in seconds, the van was in motion.

  I have had many years to consider confinement, how isolation peels away selves like the layers of an onion. When we are not confined to a space, we define our cages. Children crawl into cardboard boxes. Their parents creep into boxlike homes. We require limits—walls, bars, locked doors, fences—to define the parameters of our range.

  If for only an instant all barriers drop away, humankind will realize their worst fear. People will be forced to see each other. They might even have to touch one another.

  The clean, crisp exchange of coin for product—which is what life has become—is compromised.

  And there is chaos.

  … on the courthouse steps, Lisa, waiting for this hearing to get under way. There is a delay. We’re told that it’s weather-related and, as you can see, it is snowing steadily. I’d like to explain to our viewers why we’re out here and not in the courtroom. Technically, this is a juvenile hearing. Felix Zrbny is twenty-nine years old now, but he was fourteen when the state committed him, so this is a continuation of that original hearing. One of his victims in 1984 was Florence Dayle. Mrs. Doyle’s sister, Sue Morgan, is with us this morning. Sue, you have been outspoken on the matter of Felix Zrbny’s possible release. You told one Boston newspaper that if he is set free, no one in the city will be safe….

  THE COURTHOUSE STEPS WERE AS CLOGGED with humanity as the airport. This time we waded through the reporters and their hardware, and two camps of demonstrators. As I ducked microphone booms that sound technicians swung like Louisville Sluggers, I deduced from the protesters’ signs that the group on my right wanted Felix Zrbny eviscerated, while those on the left demanded that he be released from his gulag.

  Writers and talking heads screamed questions. Cameras recorded the lead story for the news at noon.

  A woman on the right threw a snowball, narrowly missing my head. “You fucking bastard—” she screamed.

  I stared at her wide, crazy eyes. She had no idea who I was or why I was there, but I was the target that allowed her to become a bleeped screech on Brokaw.

  Two sheriff’s deputies allowed us through the courtroom doors, then slammed them.

  I looked at Bolton. “Let me guess. The media came first, followed by what is euphemistically referred to as public interest.”

  “Fifteen years ago Pouldice lived in the Raven-wood subdivision,” Bolton said. “That’s where Zrbny lived, and that’s where he did his killing.”

  “Those people didn’t know they gave a shit about this guy until Pouldice told them they did.”

  May Langston, the deputy attorney general handling the case, was a forty-something African-American woman dressed in a dark blue suit. “Three dead in Ravenwood,” she said as she approached and eased herself into the conversation. “There’s even a rock song about it … ‘Three dead in Ravenwood, not so good.’ We’re behind the eight ball on this one.”

  Bolton completed the introductions.

  “We’re running late,” Langston said. “There was a delay at the hospital. They’re on the road now. You know what a little snow does to this city. Devaine is pissed.”

  “It’s already a Yogi Berra kind of day,” I said.

  Langston gave me a quizzical look.

  “Déjà vu all over again. Devaine should do something about his diet.”

  The courtroom is a poor choice of forum in which to decide matters of the mind and soul, but I confess to having played the game. I saw judges catch catnaps on the bench, heard defense attorneys refer to their clients by the wrong names, watched prosecutors have tantrums, and observed expert witnesses reduced on cross-examination to stuttering, muttering mindlessness.

  Like nearly everything else, the legal-psychiatric industry is entertainment. We were asked to buy the “Twinkie defense,” that Dan White’s dietary habits explained his assassination of San Francisco mayor George Moscone—with a pause to reload—and City Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. Experts explain away complex chains of behavior with vague and, in most instances, unverifiable claims. The limbic lesion explanation is always a tough one. An autopsy is required to prove the existence of the lesion.

  The history of broken laws and bent minds is easily traced to thirteenth-century England. Five centuries later the M’Naughton Rule became the standard at bar for mens rea, the state of mind that allows the formulation of i
ntent to commit crime. Later refinements required that the test for sanity be not only cognitive—knowing the difference between right and wrong—but that the defendant also possess the capacity to conform his or her conduct to the requirements of the law.

  In 1981, John W. Hinckley, Jr., attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. A storm of protest quickly followed the court’s decision. Post-Hinckley refinements to the laws in many states shifted the burden of responsibility. The prosecution was not required to prove defendants sane; defendants had to prove they were a few light-years away from the mother ship. Several states adopted a guilty-but-insane option; the question left at bar was where the culprit did time.

  Laws affecting juveniles who commit violent offenses were quicker to change. If Felix Zrbny waged war on his neighborhood today, he would face life without parole. In some states he would be executed.

  As we talked, Devaine’s bailiff emerged from the judge’s chambers and signaled Langston. “Five minutes,” he said.

  Langston held out her hands, palms up. “No Zrbny. No attorney for Zrbny.”

  “Five minutes,” he repeated, and stepped back through the door.

  “Devaine’s gonna hang this delay on me,” she grumbled.

  Bolton excused himself, saying he would get an arrival time.

  “Why is there such a rush in this case?” I asked. “Zrbny has been sitting in a hospital for fifteen years.”

  “There shouldn’t be,” Langston said. “Civil commitment procedures should have begun a long time ago. Nobody noticed until Wendy Pouldice did. Then the daytime TV crowd got militant, the Internet spilled over with misinformation, and nobody connected with the case could use a bathroom without a camera on them.”

  Bolton returned. “Twelve minutes.”

  “Jesus,” Langston snapped, then turned and walked to the prosecution table.

  “A fucking circus,” I muttered.

  The old courthouse had changed little since my last visit. The same centuries-old portraits of dour jurists blemished the walls. They were ancients who had claimed to search for truth while dispensing their singular notions of justice.

  Maybe I was in the wrong business. Nothing had changed. In seventeenth-century Salem, a finger pointed was sufficient to conclude guilt until, after deprivation of liberty and livelihood, innocence was proven beyond a shadow of doubt and in accordance with the will of God. We are all witches awaiting exorcism—our days in court.

  I headed for the bathroom, eager to relieve my bladder of the load it carried from Detroit. I could have used the bathroom on the plane and, with the 737 bouncing around the sky like a kid’s beachball, I could have doused my shoes with a soaking they did not need. I had elected to wait.

  Danny Kirkland stood at the sink. “Hey, Doc,” he said, adjusting his tie in the mirror. “It’s been years.”

  The business card Kirkland gave me identified him as a freelance journalist. He was a digger, a sleaze peddler who sold his exclusives to the highest bidder. Microcassette recorders, miniature cameras, and an array of pea-sized bugs were Kirkland’s tools of trade.

  “Does Bolton know you’re in the building?” I asked.

  “C’mon. Surely you’ve heard of the First Amendment.”

  “Surely you’ve heard of contempt of court.”

  “Easy. Slow down. I’ll split. Just thought I might catch a quote in here. It’s been a tight-ass day.”

  I pushed open the stall. Kirkland’s tape recorder rested on the commode, its tiny red light glowing. I tipped it into the toilet.

  “You sonofabitch,” he said. “That fuckin’ thing set me back five hundred bucks.”

  “Shouldn’t have left it in a precarious position.”

  “You’re gonna work this city like you always did,” he said. “There are your rules and everyone else’s rules. You watch out. Somebody’s gonna take offense.”

  I grabbed Kirkland, spun him around, and yanked down his jacket. He had clipped another tape device to his inside pocket. I removed it.

  “You want to produce the rest or should I strip you?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “Don’t fuckin’ dunk it.”

  I did. “That’s a grand,” I said. “Want to go for double or nothing?”

  I dragged Kirkland into the hall and led him to a side door.

  “This fuckin’ case stinks,” he said. “You’re going to find out the hard way that it ain’t only Zrbny you got to worry about.”

  I shoved Kirkland into the alley.

  THE TWO SHERIFF’S DEPUTIES SWUNG OPEN the doors for a man who was as wide as the doorway. He carried a straight staff and brushed snow from his brown wool cassock. I could not decide which of Robin Hood’s friends he more resembled, Friar Tuck or Little John. His hair was thin on top, but flowed below his shoulders. His beard stopped immediately above a large wooden cross that hung on a length of rawhide.

  Bolton warmly greeted the man. “It’s been a long time, Neville,” he said.

  The gentleman I had pegged for Sherwood Forest was Bolton’s former detective, Neville Waycross.

  “I thought you’d want to avoid this,” Bolton said.

  “May slapped me with a subpoena. It wasn’t necessary. I would have been here anyway.”

  Waycross turned and introduced himself. “You’re Lucas Frank,” he said. “I remember you from TV years ago. Ray talked a lot about you. He used to complain that when you nailed down a profile, you didn’t tell him whether the perp would be wearing boxers or briefs.”

  “I figured Ray could do that when he booked the bastard,” I said.

  Waycross smiled. His dark, deep-set eyes added to the intensity he radiated. He was a walking power plant, ready to infuse with his energy whatever he touched.

  “Ray mentioned that you were involved with the church,” I said.

  “Not the church. The Brotherhood of the Earth in Christ. Our mission is on the Roxbury streets. Our monastery is a storefront on Humboldt Avenue.”

  “I’m familiar with the area. I lived there when I was a kid, in a tenement on Wakullah Street.”

  “Then you were on intimate terms with some of the neighborhood’s early problems. Now we’ve got drugs and guns, the absence of adequate work, food, and clothing, a welfare system that’s a farce. Roxbury has its own secessionist group. They want to split from Boston and establish an independent city government, and there’s considerable merit in their arguments. When the Brothers organized twenty years ago, they fed breakfasts to schoolkids, soup and sandwiches to the homeless. Now we dodge bullets like everyone else on the streets.”

  At that instant the doors exploded open, slamming one deputy to the floor. The second deputy never had a chance to draw his weapon; slugs from a Mac-10 spun him around and down.

  Waycross dove for the floor. I groped for a gun I did not have. Bullets smashed into the wall, ripping away two antique judges and chunks of plaster.

  Bolton’s nine was in his hand. “On the floor, Lucas,” he screamed.

  As I dropped to the floor, Devaine’s chambers’ door opened. The judge and a deputy emerged and were hit immediately. I did not see May Langston.

  Bolton fired rapidly, followed by four shotgun blasts, then silence.

  “Who’s hit?” Bolton yelled.

  “The judge and a deputy at the front,” I said.

  “Okay here,” Waycross called.

  “One officer dead, one injured at the rear,” another voice snapped. “The shooter’s dead.”

  “Outside?” Bolton asked.

  “Steps are clear.”

  “Lucas, check the two at the front,” Bolton said.

  I pushed myself to my feet and glanced at the doors. Two shotgun-wielding tactical officers had ended the assault. No more than thirty seconds had passed since the courthouse erupted with gunfire. In that time, the presumed sanctity of the halls of justice had been violated, officers of the court la
y dead or dying, and the rule of law had become a sick joke.

  “Give me your boot gun,” I told Bolton.

  He handed me his .38 from an ankle holster. I walked to the front, watching the doors on both sides of the bench. May Langston sat at the prosecution table, what remained of her head resting on a legal pad.

  “Langston’s dead,” I called.

  I kneeled beside the deputy. “Where are you hit?”

  “My thigh. It stings like a bastard, but I’m okay. I think the judge is dead.”

  I felt Devaine’s neck for a pulse. The deputy was right.

  “Tac get the shooter?” he asked.

  I nodded, placing Bolton’s .38 on the floor and cutting open the deputy’s pant leg to examine his wound. There was little bleeding.

  “Somebody has to radio the van,” he said. “Turn them around. Send them back to the hospital.”

  Bolton aproached from behind. “Already took care of it, Robbie. How you doing?”

  “I’ll live,” he said, straining to view the scene. “Jesus Christ, Ray. It’s bad.”

  The courtroom filled with emergency medical teams and cops.

  “Who’s the shooter?” I asked.

  “He’s a member of Vigil, a militia group that has no use for the courts. The only rules they follow are their own. This one’s got the V tattoo on his forearm. We expected trouble, but nothing like this. The kind of media interest we’ve had in this case brings the bugs out of the woodwork.”

  I was less than twenty-four hours away from the relative sanity of Lake Albert. I knew little about political extremists of any stripe, gun-or bomb-toting terrorists, the reality-challenged true believers who make the world a crapshoot for the rest of us. For a quarter century I described personality and behavioral characteristics and hunted the predators who matched the profiles. They are the loners among us who use their anonymity as a tool to track, torture, and cut down their prey. They approach the moment of murder with an excitement that is equaled only by our revulsion when we read about their nocturnal exploits in the morning paper. As a rule, they don’t travel in packs, and they don’t invade public buildings.