The Murder Channel

by John Philpin

  “You got a home phone for Hannah?”

  Bolton flipped through his notebook and gave me the number.

  “If I find Braverman, I’ll bring him back,” I said.

  “Preferably alive, Lucas. Right now we have questions. That’s it.”

  “I assure you that I will do my best to preserve his anatomical integrity.”

  BOLTON KNEW ONLY THAT POULDICE’S second home was near Claremont. I stopped in the hotel lobby, grimaced at the phone, then called Hannah, the BTT office manager.

  “Sorry to drag you from sleep at this hour,” I said.

  “I remember you,” Hannah mumbled.

  “Wendy has been overwhelmed by the last two days,” I said. “I have to leave in the morning, and I want to FedEx something to her in New Hampshire, but I need the street address.”

  “I’m not supposed to give that out, Dr. Frank, and I can’t reach her to ask her. Her cell phone is switched off, and the land lines are down from the storm. I tried all evening to call her.”

  “I’m sure this one exception would please her, Hannah. Wendy and I go back a lot of years. You know that. When we had dinner two nights ago, I promised that I would not leave the city before I gave her this small package. We had no way to foresee events.”

  Hannah considered her options. “She did seem eager to see you.”

  She gave me the address.

  I glanced at the wall clock behind the desk. Allowing extra time for bad roads, I could reasonably expect to be in Claremont by six A.M. I found my way out of the city and drove north.

  Road conditions improved outside Boston. When I reached Concord, New Hampshire, and picked up I-89, steep snowbanks lined the highway, but the pavement was clear. Northern New England is prepared to deal with heavy snowfall. Days would pass before the Boston area approached anything resembling normal, whatever that was.

  I left the interstate at the Lake Sunapee exit and drove west. Near Bradford, five deer descended an embankment on my right, crossed the road, and disappeared into the woods on the left. I felt homesick for Lake Albert.

  The dashboard clock read 6:35 when I pulled into downtown Claremont. The lights were on at Daddy Pops Humble Inn, a diner tucked between a row of stores and a dozen dead factories. I had heard of the diner on an earlier trip north. What it lacked in exterior appearance—it looked like a retired city bus—Daddy Pops more than made up for with excellent food at reasonable prices.

  Music played softly from a wooden radio with a cloth-covered speaker—nothing but tunes from the fifties and sixties, and no advertising. I sipped coffee and waited for my eggs and home fries. The front page of a local newspaper was thumbtacked to the wall behind the counter. The headline, INCINERATOR WOES, hyped the hot topic of the day, a controversial trash-burning facility. I doubted that the six-page paper contained a word about the “Bloodbath in Boston.”

  When the cook delivered my breakfast and a coffee refill, I asked him about Pouldice’s rural route address.

  “That’s west,” he said. “Go like you’re going to Vermont. Just before the bridge, take your right. The way the letters and numbers work, this should be a dirt road on your left maybe a mile north.”

  Twenty minutes later I was back on the road following his directions. At first, route 12A swung away from the river; at a half mile, it veered back to the west. There were two dirt roads. I chose the one with the Private Property No Trespassing sign.

  The mailbox displayed the correct rural route address. The private road wound through a snow-laden evergreen forest that opened on a clearing dominated by an expansive white house. I parked in front of the open garage and walked slowly to the porch, glancing in windows as I went.

  Pouldice’s condo in the Towers was stark, post-modern—a collage of white hemp, black leather, and natural wood slapped together from an interior designer’s nightmares. This house had evolved, accepting additions through nearly two hundred years.

  When no one responded to my knock on the front door, I tried the handle. It was locked. I retreated to the garage and found its interior door open. I stepped inside and moved slowly from a mudroom into the main hall.

  The house was silent. I walked slowly through the hall, peering into rooms as I went. Pouldice’s study was a large, bright room on the east side of the house. Four windows offered views of a peaceful, snow-covered field, a scene in sharp contrast with the study’s condition. The place had been ransacked.

  I continued through the hall until I reached the oversized entryway.

  I saw the gun first, a magnum, resting on a black and crimson Persian carpet. Two feet beyond the gun was an inert Donald Braverman, a single black hole in his forehead.

  THE DREAM WAS REAL, FILLED WITH THE TEXtures, odors, and images of my world when I was fourteen years old.

  My T-shirt was soaked with sweat as I stepped from the August heat into the cool, dark, damp dungeon. A muffled scream echoed somewhere deep inside the concrete corridors. I walked into the blackness that I knew so well. I avoided the deep pools of stagnant water, fingered my way along the wall, listened, and moved forward, staring into endless night.

  I stood enveloped by darkness and listened to a long, deep sigh. The slow erosion of the walls by moisture, the dripping of water into accumulations of itself, grew faint. A new trickling thundered from the black recesses ahead of me. I was certain that I heard the sound of my sister’s tears, but when I reached her side, I knew.

  I had heard Levant’s last breath, and the blood drain from her body.

  I opened my eyes, surveyed the drab motel room, and felt a curious calmness. I was near the end of my brief odyssey in a world that had no use for me, nor I for it.

  Morning sunlight reflected on the snow and created the illusion of warmth. Everything is a matter of sensation and perception.

  I showered, then tried the phone number listed for Wendy Pouldice. A recording told me that phone lines in the area were down.

  I asked the morning clerk about large riverfront homes.

  “Pouldice,” he said. “North. About a mile up you take your first left after the curve. It’s a big white house on the river.”

  I bought coffee and walked along the side of the road, watching snow buntings flutter into the air as I approached, then settle again in the field behind me. The birds sought last year’s corn stubble, and they were successful despite the new inches of snow. I wished that I had been born to this world of farms and forests and few people.

  The dirt drive had been plowed. Pine and spruce trees that lined both sides of the road leaned with the weight of snow, creating a quarter-mile tunnel that remained stunningly bright despite the lack of direct sunlight. At the end of the natural corridor, an open field stretched another quarter mile to the white, three-story, New England house.

  One car was parked in the circular drive. There were no cars in the garage.

  I skirted the porch and approached the French doors, peering inside to see the psychiatrist, Lucas Frank, crouched beside a body. I removed the gun from my pocket and kicked open the doors. Broken glass and wood slivers sprayed into the room.

  As he turned his hand flew automatically to his gun. He saw me and froze.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Take out the gun and place it on the floor.”

  He did as I instructed.

  “Move away.”

  His eyes were vacant, gray, just as they had been at our first encounter.

  “You didn’t kill him,” I said. “He’s old kill.”

  “Did you?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I would have,” I said. “You’ve been tracking me. Someone is ahead of us.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Do you suppose that person is after me, you, or Ms. Pouldice?”

  “She would be my first guess. Her study is a shambles.”

  “Someone else believes she is not what she seems, that she knows more than she says. Why did you come here?”

  “To talk with her.”


  “To seek her assistance in finding me,” I said. “She would have told you nothing.”

  “That’s pretty much what she’s been telling me.”

  “How foolish of her,” I said. “There are no cars in the garage. Is the Explorer yours?”

  He nodded.

  I gazed at Pouldice’s paintings, the grand piano, a silver candelabra. “She accumulated wealth at my sister’s expense,” I said.

  “Did Fremont talk before you killed him?”

  “He was easily persuaded.”

  “I made the connection to Fremont through the Theresa Stallings case. How did you do it?”

  “I saw him on TV.”

  “What about Fremont and Pouldice?”

  “High school friends in North Carolina.”

  “You witnessed what happened the day your sister disappeared,” he said.

  I studied his eyes. “Did you know that there is only a single moment of consciousness when past, present, and future are one?”

  “I’ve heard that,” he said. “It is the moment before we die.”

  “Perhaps it’s time that you and I talk,” I told him. “You drive. We’re going back to Boston.”

  SUNLIGHT GLISTENED ON THE SNOW-covered pines lining the interstate. A clear cold blue sky heightened the impression that I was driving through a postcard.

  This photo had a flaw.

  A giant who might slip into a delusional state at any moment sat in the passenger seat with a gun resting on his lap. I had little choice but to be content with my role of chauffeur.

  Zrbny wanted to talk, and I listened.

  I hoped that he did not bump against one of his crazy buttons, and that I did not nudge him in that direction. I have been in situations where tipping over my subject was essential to getting the information I wanted. This was not one of them.

  “When I was ten my sister Levana took me to see tigers in the zoo,” he said. “They are magnificent animals. They lay on rocks licking their paws and stretching like house cats. We can’t see the ferocity, but we know it’s there. I felt the energy. They are … potential. They never lose their desire to attack and rip and kill. The zoo attendants toss them bloody meat and the tigers tear at it. If they were in the wild, it would be different. They would shred the attendants. Tigers are the supreme predators. Instinct allows little room for moral judgment.”

  Zrbny’s delivery was flat. He spoke slowly, as if deliberating briefly between sentences.

  “I’ve never been to New York,” he said, “but I could find my way around the city. San Francisco, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and the same is true of Boston. I was fourteen when they locked me up, but I learned from TV. Internet maps were helpful, but I wanted to know what places looked like. If I were to walk on Third Avenue in New York and look up at the buildings, I’d want to be able to recognize landmarks, to know where I was.”

  “I got lost in Chicago one time,” I said. “I thought I knew the city. I didn’t. The traffic cop I asked for directions didn’t know it either.”

  Zrbny smiled. “I watched TV before they locked me up,” he said, “but I didn’t study it. It was just on, and I was aware of it. At my first court hearing, a psychiatrist said that TV violence had influenced me, contributed to my homicidal behavior. I think she was there to help me, but what she said was not true. I imagine there are people who are infatuated with televised images of shootings, stabbings, beatings, whether they are drama or news footage, but I don’t think the influence TV has is related to content. It’s the format, the medium itself, and the nature of this country and the people who live here.”

  Felix Zrbny positioned himself as an outsider. He talked about the world as a place he observed but did not participate in.

  “I don’t know what it’s like for other people who kill,” he said. “I can speak only for myself. There have been arguments favoring televised executions. That would not be a deterrent. When you know what you must do, you do it. When they had public executions in England, the rate of death-penalty crimes immediately increased. The hangings were exciters, not deterrents.”

  Zrbny gazed at the snow-covered hills. “TV asks you to sit passively and to receive its entertainment and its commercial messages. We’ve been trained to be acquisitive, to want things we never knew existed and have no use for. We’ve always been good at violence, but never with the frequency and ferocity of the last fifty years. That’s where format comes in. While you sit watching, you’re hit with a never-ending barrage of rapid-fire images that destroy any attention span you might have. Any desire to think, to consider, to reason, is replaced with a need for excitation. The insidious beauty of it is that you don’t know what’s happening. You run out and buy a particular brand of soda or beer and wait for your erection to arrive. That might seem innocuous enough, but then you have to run farther and faster to find the pleasure you’ve been told you’re entitled to. Then it hits you. It’s not the beer or the soft drink you want. It’s the woman caressing the bottle.”

  “Did you view it this way at fourteen?” I asked.

  “It was background noise then. When my father watched his sitcoms, sometimes I looked at them. It was different for him. His world had died and he was passing time until it was his turn to be among the dead. He laughed with the laugh track.”

  Many of Zrbny’s thought processes and notions were paranoid, but his was a reality-based paranoia. TV can exist only when it sells product. To that end, the medium must influence behavior.

  “People search for images of themselves,” he continued. “They crave the resonance that comes with discovering their reflections on the screen. They want to hear and see what they already believe to be true. It happens so fast that they forget the time when they could read, hold a coherent thought, and express themselves in complete sentences.”

  “How did you avoid the trap?”

  “I told you. I studied TV. I was the aggressor, not the passive victim. Did you watch the Simpson trial?”

  My daughter Lane had sent me tapes of key testimony. “Some,” I said.

  “I watched it with a friend. Do you think that Lance Ito was influenced by the presence of the camera in the courtroom?”

  “I have heard that criticism of the judge, but not that it affected his rulings.”

  “His demeanor,” Zrbny said. “Marcia Clarke was oblivious at first. She was uninteresting, all sharp edges. Then she became aware of her celebrity. She had her hair done, wore clothes that were less severe, softer colors, feminine. She smiled more often. When someone complimented her on her hairstyle, she told the person to get a life. She didn’t know that she was no longer a prosecutor. She had no idea that she had become an actor in a drama. The dead were no longer relevant to the proceedings. The trial had developed a theatrical life of its own. DNA had nothing to do with the case outcome. Few of the witnesses mattered. Kato Kaelin is memorable because he was media-savvy. Clarke had the power of the state of California, but Kato was charismatic. Point to Kaelin. No one remembers the name of the limo driver. His testimony was important, but he had no rerun potential. One person in that courtroom fully understood how to play the media.”

  “Johnnie Cochran,” I said.

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? What shaped public opinion had nothing to do with evidence. The trial was theater and Cochran was Olivier.”

  “What about Simpson?”

  “All he had to do was struggle to pull on a glove. He was probably disappointed that his role was minor, but he played it well. I used to watch TV docudramas with my friend. After a while they all seemed the same. The content was similar. The format was identical. At nine P.M., without a commercial break, the network slips into opening scenes and credits. They load the first twenty minutes with story essentials and something to hook the audience, some bit of soft pornography or violence. After that, the commercials come like automatic weapons fire. The story is irrelevant until ten P.M., when you discover a plot complication. The network takes a major break for sale
s, and the script coasts into meaningless drivel. The made-for-TV movie is a homogenized morality play. The good guys always win. Justice is served. We all live happily ever after. Have you ever noticed how they have a voice-over preview of the late news while the minor credits are scrolling?”

  “I don’t watch much TV, but I have noticed that.”

  “Sometimes it’s a bit confusing. The news is like a series of mini-dramas. Bombs and missiles and guns and knives, then break for the commercial message. There really isn’t any morality. There are collective points of view, beliefs, thou-shalt-nots. TV reflects how this country wants to see itself. All the scrubbed white faces selling product and promises. People want to think of themselves as moral. They are right with the world only when they buy, not when they attend church.”

  Zrbny shrugged and gazed out the window. “They consume. They are compliant. Some of them even register to vote. Then maybe they cross themselves and kneel.”

  “What about you?”

  “I don’t fit in your world,” he said. “I am glad that I don’t. There was a time when I thought I was pretty much like everybody else, but nobody thought I was like them. For a while I resented being excluded. I brooded about it. Then I realized that living at the slender end of the bell curve is not a bad thing.”

  Zrbny suddenly went silent. I glanced at him and saw what I had seen on Severance’s video of their session. His eyes were locked on something far in the distance, something only he could see. He was erect, rigid, motionless.

  “When I got to the hospital, they badgered me about feelings,” Zrbny said, with the same flat delivery. “They said that I lacked the capacity to care for another person.”

  He slammed his fist against the dash and buckled it. Plastic cracked and snapped, fragments of vinyl flew through the car. Zrbny’s violence was sudden, totally unexpected, and unaccompanied by even the slightest hint of anger.

  “I cared about my sister,” he said. “She needed the time to study, to make high scores for her scholarship, so I washed the dishes, did her laundry and mine, took care of the bed linen, cleaned the house. When Levana was unhappy, I cried with her. I knew her thoughts and she knew mine.”