Evil Season

by Michael Benson

  “I got punched in the mouth.” He accused a guy of stealing his stuff; and later, while Murphy was headed for the shower, the guy punched him. “I needed four stitches,” Murphy concluded.

  Glover explained that they had brought with them some photographs of Murphy’s art, and he hoped they could discuss it.

  “All right,” Murphy said.

  Glover then looked for the photos of Murphy’s artwork, but he couldn’t find them. Because of that, he continued the interview without his visual aids.

  “If I recall, they were plates with images painted on them. My question would be, what are they supposed to be?”

  “That’s up to the person,” Murphy replied. “Each person can interpret them as they will. The plates want each person to do something, to enjoy the work the way I felt,” Murphy said. “I am not going to give them to anyone else. You interpret them your own way, and each person sees something different.”

  “How many of those plates did you do?” Glover asked.

  “About thirty.”

  “And where did all of those end up?”

  “I’m not going to answer that one.”

  It was true, he added, that he did give some paintings to a girl to sell for him. That artwork had not been plates. The girl’s name was Ann Marie. He didn’t recall a last name.

  Detective Grant asked, “Was the painting you gave to the girl to sell in the same style as the plates?”

  “Different. Different,” Murphy replied. “The first ones were manipulated. The paint just moved around, so they work two different types together.”

  “Okay, yeah, but it was all pretty much abstract, right?” Glover asked.

  “Interpret what you think. I say you draw your own conclusions.”

  Glover pointed out that a lot of the stuff was abstract, but he had seen Murphy’s artwork done in jail that involved very fine line drawings.

  Murphy said he’d been drawing his whole life, although there were gaps, years when he created no artwork at all. There was a gap during both of his marriages, he said, apparently forgetting about the “Boneyard Gallery” that he created when married to Paula. He maintained to the cops that he needed to be single to be an artist. He didn’t know why that was.

  Glover said he knew of both wives, Elaine and Paula, but wondered if Murphy had cohabitated with any other women without being married. Had he ever shacked up?

  Murphy said there was one he almost married. He tried to think of her name and either couldn’t recall or decided not to say her name aloud, so he moved on to another woman.

  “No, I lived with Jane Wingate.” He started to tell the cops about her, when Glover interrupted his story to ask if Murphy was right-handed. He was, and he used right-handed shears to cut hair. He could use a comb in both hands, however. “I’m always switching,” he said.

  Murphy’s hairstyling training was not limited to just the course he took at the barber school at Sunstate Academy, but also many weekend seminars. More than a hundred seminars. The seminars were routine when he worked at Regis. They did education classes once a month, so everyone was up on the latest stuff. After a while Murphy taught as many seminars as he attended. He didn’t really need the classes anymore, but he went because he wanted to. He enjoyed them. You can’t kid a kidder. Murphy knew that many of the seminars were thinly disguised infomercials. The pitch “usually boiled down to a new product you needed to get.”

  There was also a course regarding AIDS and cutting hair that Murphy had to attend once a year.

  Then the lightbulb went on over Murphy’s head.

  “Mary Border! That’s the name of the other girl. I was engaged to her when I was twenty-two or so.” She was so gorgeous. They’d stand on their balcony that overlooked the water.

  Glover snapped the prisoner out of it with a question about religion.

  Murphy said he hated the word “religion.” He hated talking about it. He preferred the term “spiritual.” To him it was just a quiet thing—no conversation necessary.

  “I can sense people really well,” Murphy boasted. “I know where their spirit lies. I don’t talk to people unless they connect. . . .”

  “Where do you see me?”

  “You’re not here on my level.”

  “I’m very open-minded.”

  “Uh-huh. I don’t know of anybody who has the same beliefs as me, to tell you the truth. I don’t know a single person with my exact beliefs, and I’ve talked to hundreds of them.”

  Detective Grant told Murphy that he used to study religion, and the spiritual part that Murphy was saying reminded him of Myrtle Fillmore and the Unity Christian Church.

  “I don’t pay attention to Myrtle Fillmore. I don’t worry about it. I don’t worry about Main Street religions. I don’t worry about any of it. It’s my own thing.”

  Murphy said when he met people—in a bookstore, on the street, or in a gas station—he only talked to them for five minutes or so. No long conversations. He didn’t believe in them. He very seldom talked to anyone for more than an hour.

  Murphy admitted that he met his first wife in church, but he didn’t go to church anymore. He didn’t believe in any of the “affiliated religions.”

  Glover asked if his spirituality had anything to do with the Bible. Murphy said part of it, but part of it also had to do with all books. Glover noted that a lot of artwork was associated with various religions. The detective wondered if Murphy had ever studied that type of art. Murphy said sure, he’d studied all art. His favorite religious artist was Michelangelo.

  Glover got around to geography. How familiar was Murphy with Sarasota? Had he spent any time there, as a kid or as an adult?

  Murphy said not really. He didn’t remember ever going to Sarasota before he was old enough to drive. After that, maybe just once.

  The detective decided to introduce an element from the crime scene and see if Murphy bit. “There was an artist who had a gallery down on the South Trail in Sarasota and his last name was Stahl.”

  “I don’t know him,” Murphy said crisply.

  Glover continued, “He painted the Stations of the Cross and they were on display in Sarasota during the 1960s, when they were stolen.”

  “Too young for that,” Murphy said, thinking perhaps he was being accused.

  “No, no, we’re all too young for that,” Glover said, smiling.

  “Okay, I just wanted to make sure,” Murphy replied. He reiterated that he’d never heard of Stahl and knew nothing of the stolen paintings.

  Grant interjected that he remembered the stolen paintings being the subject of a report on 60 Minutes. Murphy said he might have seen the paintings somewhere, but he was totally unaware of that artist’s name.

  Murphy admitted to being in Sarasota within the last year and said that he left because it “was time to go.” The detectives wondered what he meant by that.

  The prisoner said he’d always been that way. His mind would tell him it was time to go and he would up and leave.

  Glover said, “You left shortly after the Manatee Sheriff’s Department came and talked to you about the [inappropriate touching] incident at Great Clips. Is that what drove you to leave Sarasota?”

  Murphy said no, he had other reasons.

  “Okay, what were those other reasons?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “Okay, that’s fine.”

  “Does that buy me a cup of coffee?” Murphy asked with a laugh. They all laughed and someone brought Murphy a cup of coffee. Murphy said he loved caffeine. They could keep the coffee coming if they wanted.

  Glover switched subjects: “A detective talked to Paula. She said at one point when you were living in Tallahassee, she went over and cleaned out your apartment.” When Murphy had nothing to say about that, Glover noted that Paula had informed the detective that Murphy was a collector. He was always collecting different things: magazines, coat hangers, for example.

  “What are some of the things you’ve collected?” Glov
er asked.

  “Cameras. I own a lot of cameras. Over one hundred. All antique. I had a fascination with military photography and antique cameras. I never bought a new camera. They were all old.”

  “What else?”

  “Antiques of all sorts. Old books. Bottles I found when scuba diving. Stuff like that.”

  “I heard somewhere that you collected forks,” Glover said.

  “Yeah, various silver forks and what have you. I had unique forks.”

  “Where did you find that stuff ?”

  “Goodwill, Salvation Army, yard sales. Pay fifteen cents or so apiece.” No particular design. Just what caught his fancy. At one point he had thirty forks, and he kept them in a special tray in a drawer.

  “I heard you collected keys.”

  “Not true. I might have had keys, but I didn’t collect them. If I had a key, it was because it opened a door.”

  Murphy said when he was through with a collection, he would just throw it away and move on to something else. Grant found that amazing, but Murphy pointed out that he got rid of collections because he moved so frequently. Transients don’t want to lug stuff around.

  “I’m not a huge keepsake person,” he said. “I don’t have anything that I’ve had throughout my life.”

  Grant wondered if he ever gave stuff to his brother, Dean, to keep for him. Family photos, photos from when he was a kid, or anything. Murphy said no, Dean had his own stuff. “I have no storage facility of any sort. I have no home. I don’t have a place to put anything.”

  Murphy didn’t want the police to know about things he might have stashed and where. Better to tell them he never stashed anything. Glover caught on.

  Glover asked, “What did you do with your barber equipment?”

  “That’s one thing I did stash. I’m not going to tell you where.”

  “We could retrieve it for you,” Glover offered hopefully.

  No dice. “I don’t intend on barbering anymore,” Murphy said. “I hate it with a passion.”

  “I imagine at the state jail you’re going to have to give a lot of haircuts! What? Thirty or forty people a day.”

  “That’s no big deal. At the state jail you get mostly black, you know, and I have to cut their hair. Some Hispanic panic. Maybe ten percent white.”

  His complaint was not racist, he claimed, but a matter of fashion. Darker-skinned prisoners wanted their hair cut in a specific way, with very precise edging, and he didn’t know how to do that.

  Plus, the customers were not very nice. “Cut my hair and I’ll kill you.” Murphy heard that a lot. Usually, prisoners were getting their hair cut on a voluntary basis. However, every once in a while, you got a guy who’d been ordered by a guard to get a haircut, and they were the dangerous ones.

  Glover asked if Murphy was in a cell alone. He said he was. Did he have a TV? There was one downstairs, not a big one, but they could see it from their cells, and the guards kept the volume up so they could hear it. Reading material? Some books. Pencils? No.

  Glover said that detectives had talked to Murphy’s first wife. She said she wasn’t upset when they split up, but Paula had more to say. She told the story about his threats, how he requested to watch her having sex with another man, and how she did that for him.

  Glover said that detectives had talked to his brother, Dean, and he was not upset that Brutus was in jail.

  Murphy said he suspected as much. Dean had hung up on him the last time they spoke.

  Glover taunted the prisoner: “Dean also said you are a lousy barber, and that Mr. Solomon only purchased your artwork because he felt sorry for you.”

  “Pity money,” Grant interjected.

  Glover added, “He said the artwork just wasn’t—”

  “Just didn’t turn him on,” Murphy finished the thought.

  “He said it wasn’t marketable pretty much anywhere. You flunked out of the navy.”

  “The second time. . . .”

  “You flunked out of the SEALs first day.”

  “Not first day. Three weeks into it. Three weeks and change. They might have written first day. They want you to look humiliated on the paperwork.”

  Glover said, “We pulled all the reports from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department. We pulled the report to your mother’s death. There was a lot of suspicion surrounding your mother’s death at the time.”

  “All unfounded and stupid,” Murphy said with disgust. “Every bit of it.”

  “A lot of the suspicions were aroused by the actions you took at the time.”

  Murphy said that those suspicions belonged mostly to Dean. He didn’t know why. Dean also thought there was a life insurance policy he didn’t know about. Ridiculous.

  “Paula says you told her that your mother fell off a ladder,” Glover said.

  “I did not tell her that. That’s stupid.”

  “There was no ladder in the kitchen when your mother fell?”

  “I didn’t see a ladder. I don’t know what resulted in her falling in her home.”

  Glover asked, “Where were you at the time of your mother’s death?”

  “Over in, um, Ruskin. I didn’t have anything to do with her death, and that’s the God’s honest truth. I swear on my mother’s grave. I loved my mom more than anybody in this world. I didn’t bother her. I did all I could to help her during the last year I was with her. She was good to me. She loved me when she died, very much. My brother might find that hard to believe, but it’s a fact.” Murphy said his brother only suspected him of killing their mother when Dean was drinking, which he did more than usual during the stressful days after his mother’s passing. Dean, Murphy claimed, once told them that if he really thought Brutus had murdered their mother, he would have killed himself. Dean’s period of suspicion was brief.

  Murphy admitted that he didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the future, and he hadn’t for years. That was because his dad died at age forty-three, so Murphy figured he would die at forty-three, too. That was a long year—2000—when he was forty-three. He still figured that every day he lived past forty-three was a bonus.

  Glover said Murphy had lived a life that one might think was full of regrets. Murphy agreed that was true. If he had to do it all over again, he’d change just about everything—all except having kids. That was a good part.

  Maybe he would choose not to live his life over again at all. Maybe he would just “cancel it out,” so that he’d never have been born into this life.

  Glover said they’d spoken to Dave Gallant, who said he was a religious mentor to Murphy. Gallant said it was he who had taught Murphy that people were on Earth to mine gold for aliens. Murphy acknowledged that this was true.

  “He showed me some knowledge,” Murphy allowed.

  “He said he was your mentor.”

  Murphy didn’t like that: “Everybody’s my mentor. He was one of frickin’ thousands.”

  “You said you had a DNA connection with God, that you have followers,” Glover said, adding, “You got no followers!”

  “In your opinion. The thing is, I connect with my people immediately. . . .”

  “Connect with them now and have them meet me in the lobby,” Glover said.

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Of course not, because they don’t exist. Even your family isn’t behind you. If you have followers, they would know you were in trouble and they would rally—”

  “I told them not to.”

  Glover decided to continue his efforts to make Murphy face facts. He was a sex criminal with an inadequate personality. Paula had said so—and she wasn’t alone. Both the Regis in Tampa, where Murphy had worked, and the Great Clips, where he briefly held his last job, were being sued because Murphy—word was— couldn’t comb a woman’s hair without touching her breasts.

  “We talked to a girl at the Great Clips on Bee Ridge Road and she said you worked there for three point eighty-three hours. Three point eighty-three hours! A nineteen-year-old
woman customer said she had to repeatedly shift her position in the chair because you were trying to rub your penis up against her as she sat there. You never went back there. You never bothered to pick up your check, so you are very complicated.”

  “Extremely,” Murphy concurred.

  “People might say you have an impulse-control problem,” Grant said.

  “I’m very impulsive,” Murphy agreed. He didn’t care what people thought. “It’s just my thing,” he added.

  “If you don’t care, then why don’t you tell us the truth?”

  “I like to play a little game with your head. People fuck with my head. I fuck with their head. Every time.”

  “You say you don’t care about yourself, but you love yourself. That’s why there are things about your time in Sarasota that you don’t want to tell us.”

  “If my intuition tells me not to tell you things, I won’t tell you.”

  “Tell us about Sarasota. . . .”

  “I refuse to tell you because I’m fuckin’ with your head, that’s why.”

  “At some point, are you going to tell us the truth?”

  “Probably not. I’d rather leave you hanging. You can think I’m the worst person on the planet. When I leave this planet dead as a doornail, you can say, ‘That crazy, stupid motherfucker never told me whatever I wanted to know.’”

  “It’s not important to me that you tell, it’s—”

  “I don’t give a damn about anyone’s family, none of that shit.”

  “Obviously. If you cared about their family, you wouldn’t have hacked up their mother.”

  Mother. That got Murphy’s attention: “What are you talking about? Whose mother are you talking about here?”

  “The family of Joyce.”

  “Who are you talking about? Joyce. Joyce who?”

  “Wishart.”

  “Oh, oh. That one. That Joyce. I don’t know anything about her. Never met that woman in my life, as far as I know.”

  “You cut her,” Glover said.

  “You cut her,” Grant echoed.

  “I might have cut her hair” was Murphy’s perfect reply. “I don’t know who she was.”

  Glover said, “I don’t know if you cut her hair or not, but you cut her. How is Elton Brutus Murphy going to be portrayed?”