by Neil Mcmahon
She said, “I’d go for it.”
“Can you tell us what happened between your husband and Robby Vandenard?”
She shrugged, her thin shoulders piercing the sweatshirt with skeletal outlines.
“Nobody saw the shooting, but probably the only person surprised was Merle.”
“Why do you say that?”
Music started suddenly inside the house, blaring metallic rock. She ignored it. “Merle was a bully. He pushed around anybody he figured he could.”
“Including you?”
“He’d get drunk and beat the shit out of me.”
“Is that why you didn’t press the case?”
She leaned back inside and yelled, “Turn that down, goddamn it!” A door slammed, reducing the volume.
She closed the front door and leaned wearily back against it.
“Why didn’t I press the case? There were two lawyers here even before the police. That’s how I got the news that Merle was dead. They were like uncles at a funeral, pretending they gave a shit. They left me a thousand dollars cash. Told me that would help me through the next couple days, and they’d be back to talk.”
Larrabee said. “Vandenard lawyers?”
She nodded.
“And they came back with an offer to compensate you?”
“Fifty thousand. It was either that or spend a lot of money I didn’t have, that wouldn’t have done any good anyway. I put up with Merle more than five years. I deserved to get something.”
“Did anybody else know about this?”
“Nobody that counted. They made me sign a bunch of papers, told me I was giving up my right to sue. I don’t know if it was true or not. I didn’t care, then.”
“Why would you be willing to come forward now?”
“I called him to ask for a loan, a couple years ago. The motherfucker wouldn’t even talk to me.”
“You mean the attorney?”
“Yeah. Capaldi.”
“Bernard Capaldi?”
“That’s him.”
Larrabee’s mouth twitched. Monks had heard the name, too. Bernard Capaldi was the kind of old-time lawyer whose strings went inestimably deep into politics, property, and possibly, crime: the major affairs of the city.
She said, “When I got that check, I thought it was going to last forever.”
Monks was willing to bet that most ofthat fifty thousand dollars had gone up her nose, or arm, or both.
“Darla,” he said, “did you ever meet Robby Vandenard?”
“A few times.”
“You think the insanity defense was a lie?”
“He was crazy, all right. But not the kind of crazy where he didn’t know what he was doing; the kind where he just did whatever he wanted. Creepy. Everybody was scared of him.”
“What kind of things did he do that scared people?”
“Besides killing his sister?”
Monks realized that his mouth had opened. He closed it.
Larrabee said, “Would you say that again?”
“It got blamed on somebody else. But that’s what the old-timers around the place thought.”
“When did that happen?”
“When he was a kid, eleven or twelve.”
“Jesus wept.” Larrabee stepped away, hands going into his pockets.
“You guys didn’t know about that?”
“We knew she’d been murdered,” Monks said. “Not that Robby was suspected. Did that information come up in the case?”
The bony shrug again. “I wasn’t invited to the hearing. But I know that’s how it got turned around. They said Robby was paranoid, that he thought Merle was the guy who’d killed Katherine, coming back for him. What bullshit.”
“Darla.” Larrabee passed his hand over his hair. “You say that Merle pushed around people he figured he could. Why would he take on somebody scary like Robby?”
The appraising stare came into her eyes again, judging whether giving away more information was going to buy her anything.
“Merle was a good-looking guy,” she finally said. “He’d done a couple years in Santa Rita.”
Larrabee said, “Are you saying he and Robby had a sexual relationship?”
“Merle thought he was going to get money out of Robby.” She smiled suddenly. It made her look almost pretty.
“Guess he was right,” she said.
Chapter 5
Alison Chapley parked in the staff lot of Clevinger Hospital and lit one more cigarette. She stayed in her car, watching Psychiatric Unit Number Three, known as Three-Psych.
This was a flat I-shaped building at the center of the hospital’s grounds. It had an asphalt courtyard surrounded by a twelve-foot-high cyclone fence, topped with turned-in iron spikes and strung with razor-wire. In the corners, video cameras perched like vultures on high stalks. There was a single basketball hoop with no net, and a worn heavy punching bag hung on a welded chain.
Several men were standing inside the fence smoking or pacing, or talking to each other or to no one visible. Even from that distance, there was something unsettling about the way they moved.
These were me NGIs: at any given time, eight to ten men on-ward who had killed or seriously injured others, had been found by the courts Not Guilty by reason of Insanity and been recommended for psychiatric treatment instead of regular prison. The program here was known as JCOG: the Jephson Cognitive Therapy for Management of Psychotically Violent Behavior at Clevinger Memorial Hospital.
Almost all the JCOG inmates had lengthy records, with several stays in prisons or institutions before new psychiatric evaluations triggered the NGI ruling. Roughly eleven percent washed out within the first weeks. Most of the rest achieved stability, enforced by combinations of Haldol, Ativan, Clozapine, and lithium, with an average stay of twenty-two months, dien were released as rehabilitated.
From her car, Alison could identify most of them: Perez, Holger, Odum—aggravated assault, child abuse, manslaughter. The fourth NGI was a good-looking man with dark spiky hair, wearing gray hospital pajamas: John James Garlick, soon to be released. Garlick was standing well apart from the others, talking to someone his body was blocking. She could not see who it was.
She got out of the car and started up the walk. Except for Three-Psych’s razor-wire fence and a patrolling security car, the hospital could have been an aging junior college: three acres of grassy hillside with half a dozen unattractive, functional buildings surrounding the original brick structure. The afternoon was heavy with clouds, but flashes of sunlight brightened the old brick. She wondered what the philanthropist founder, turn-of-the-century grande dame Edith Clevinger, would think of her pretty hospital now.
Alison unlocked the main door to Three-Psych and walked down the hall to the courtyard’s inside entrance, stopping in the doorway.
By chance or instinct, Garlick swiveled with feral speed. His eyes were already focused when they met hers, hard as a stag beetle’s shell, seeming able to pierce her thoughts and perhaps her very being. Two seconds later his gaze moved on as if the contact had never happened, leaving a faint chill, as if something had been taken away.
The man he was talking to stepped aside, a hasty move that had a guilty appearance. She could see who it was now.
Dr. Francis Jephson.
Jephson said something more to Garlick, then crossed the courtyard to where she stood. He wore an expensive gray wool suit, an ecru shirt with cufflinks, and gold-rimmed glasses over pale blue eyes.
“Alison. Could you wander by my office in a few minutes?”
“Of course, Doctor.”
“We do need to talk.” It seemed to her that he emphasized the word do ominously.
She nodded and watched him leave: slim, balanced, moving with an athletic stride. He had been a distance runner at Cambridge and still trained with exacting discipline.
Garlick had moved to the courtyard’s far end, a lone figure staring out through the fence at the freedom which, in a few weeks, would be his.
> Garlick, who had arrived twenty months earlier from the maximum security facility at Atascadero, along with a detailed report on the incident that had landed him there: gripping his girlfriend by the hair and repeatedly ramming her face into a bathroom sink until a sliver of skull pierced her brain.
Who had assaulted two ex-wives and several other girlfriends in a similar way. Who tested significantly above normal in intelligence, with two years of college and a history of success as an electronics salesman. Who was ruled schizophrenic, but whose powers of persuasion had kept a string of women unwilling to testify against him.
Whose falsified psychiatric evaluation was her first inkling that Francis Jephson had been coaching a selected few.
Garlick, soon to be released.
Alison turned back inside and stopped short, almost running into a man passing by. He raised his hands apologetically and she smiled, but the thought flashed across her mind, as it had with Jephson, that he had moved too quickly, that she had caught him at something covert.
Perhaps, standing behind her, listening.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, Dr. Chapley.”
Harold Henley was the chief public service officer, a euphemism for guard. He stood six four and weighed close to three hundred pounds. He moved deliberately and spoke softly, and was the only person on the ward the NGIs feared as much as each other.
Abruptly, she wondered if he knew what Jephson had been doing, knew what she had found out. Harold had worked more than a decade at Clevinger, and not much in this small world escaped him.
“I’m a little jumpy today, Harold.”
“Yeah?”
Rattled, she grasped for a diversion.
“I’m on the run from the law. I shot my boyfriend.”
A flicker of respect showed in his eyes, as if she might lead a more interesting life than he had imagined.
“Fine example you set. You supposed to be showing these people how to act.”
“He was insensitive. He treated me like an object and never did the dishes. There’s not a court in the land would convict me.”
Harold grinned fiercely. “Worse than that. They’d sentence you to some kind of codependency group.”
She walked on toward her office. He paced beside her, a thick fold of ebony skin bulging above his blue uniform collar as his head swiveled to scan the hall. His radio and nightstick hung like a child’s toys on his massive hips.
Attendants and techs passed by on missions real or feigned. The hallway’s interior colors gave the sense of having been put together out of leftovers from other buildings: the walls flat gray, the trim pink, the linoleum, heaved and uneven from decades of settling, a vague tan. The sharp smell of pine antiseptic cleaner blended with, but did not cover, the decades-old reek of urine and unwashed bodies. There were no handrails for the handicapped, for fear they would be torn off and used as weapons. Pastel floral prints, intended to be soothing, were immovably affixed. The kitchen had never contained a stove or sharp utensils.
She said, “You still want to sell that Buick?”
Harold’s interest quickened. “You finally ready to get you a real car?”
“The Mercedes is a money sink,” she admitted, “but I love it. Another bad relationship.”
“Huh.” He ruminated, then said, “Buick’s gone. Ain’t no money in cars.”
“So what next?”
“Apartment building.”
“An apartment building?”
He looked both embarrassed and proud. “You get in for next to nothing. Live there and manage till you own it. Then you buy another one.”
“I never realized it was quite that easy.” She unlocked her office door.
“You got to know some people. So next time you looking for an apartment, Alison, you tell Harold.”
With others around, he was the essence of formality. But alone, he would call her by her first name, lapsing into street accent to shade the L into a W and drop the I. It was a sound personalized and gently possessive. Early on, perhaps the first moment she had walked on the ward, Harold had decided that here, in this place, she was his.
She smiled again. “You’ll be my first call.”
Her office door, like the others on the ward, locked itself behind her. She exhaled, annoyed at herself for her edginess.
But the sense was inescapable that she was the one locked in a cell. The room was tiny, packed with books, paperwork, and files. The desk she kept clear, a last outpost of defense against the surrounding chaos. Her gaze moved across a shelf of videotapes on assault management and AIDS protection; a medication list, a reminder that most psychiatric treatment came in the form of tranquilization; her teaching schedule, with the world assault figuring again and again. On the ward, she wore earth-toned clothing, pale lipstick, and no jewelry or scarf that could be grabbed.
She took out a compact, touched up her makeup, and paused with her hand on the doorknob. She could hear more patients in the hall now, word of her arrival having spread. Three-Psych had been built to house thirty, which meant in practice that the administration tried to hold it down to fifty. Most of the non-NGIs were public admissions from the community, comprising the full spectrum of mental illness. They gathered around her, and a part of her mind believed that this was the best healing she could give, just to be there.
She recognized most of the voices, not from what they said or how, but a peculiar quality beyond any ofthat, like vocal pheromones audible only to a tuned ear: Corinne, wrists and neck heavily scarred, who occasionally stripped naked and walked screaming down the hall; Lewis, who could get drunk on water and had to be restrained from bellying up to a toilet like a bar; Edward, who had ripped antennas off cars in a supermarket parking lot to keep them from broadcasting his thoughts to the world, and who now paced tensely, flipping the pages of a special Bible to keep demons away. Many of the patients reflected the vast range of subfrequencies known as thought insertion, hearing the voices of angels, demons, the dead, urging anything from suicide to the sacrifice of a baby they pronounced evil; or sometimes voices just keeping them company. It was a major problem in maintaining schizophrenics on medications. Without those inner companions, they got lonesome.
When she stepped out of her office into the crowd that had gathered, some of the faces turned away with quick shyness, while other gazes clung like unseen nets, without social grace or remove, the straight blank curiosity of children or primitives.
“I need,” a voice said. She turned to the man who stood shuffling in a slow dance of agitation: Raymond Coolidge, recently arrived from the streets of Oakland, late twenties, Psychosis Not Otherwise Specified, which in practice meant heroin addiction coupled with HIV dementia.
“Some pussy.”
Raymond had the habit of declaring himself to whatever female staff or patients happened to be around when the urge struck him. His face was sweating and earnest, grayish skin stretched tight, leaning toward her at an odd angle as if his neck was broken. The thin fingers of his right hand ceaselessly moved up and down his thigh, squeezing his penis, which hung visibly inside his loose pajama pants.
“I need some pussy,” he said again, more firmly now, as if she could not help but agree. “Now, baby. You got to understand.” His flexing fingers left his thigh and hovered imploringly in the air between them. She considered the textbook response: explaining to this psychotic man, who stood before her massaging his cock, that his behavior was inappropriate.
“If you touch anybody, Raymond, you’re going to Seclusion.”
His face turned morose and he shuffled off, hand returning to its work. He was not known to be assaultive, but she decided to recommend increasing his Haldol dosage. Each four-person dorm slept eight, with patients close enough to touch each other and many unable to defend themselves or fully understand what might be happening.
The far end of the ward’s I-shape was commanded by the Nurses’ Station, which stood glassed-in like a gun turret on a raised dais. Past that were ten ide
ntical concrete cells, eight feet square, euphemistically called seclusion rooms. Furniture in each consisted of a one-piece stainless steel bed bolted to the floor. The windows in the steel doors were shock-resistant glass reinforced with wire mesh, too small for a human body to pass through if the glass were broken. Video cameras, recessed in the ceilings out of patient reach, broadcast twenty-four hours per day on a bank of monitors at the Nurses’ Station.
Only the plastic-covered bedding was vulnerable to assault. The thin mattresses and pillows occasionally got shredded or eaten, but it was the sheets, provided for patient comfort by California law, that made the staff nervous. Before coming to Clevinger, Alison had not known that you could hang yourself—quickly—without your feet leaving the floor.
The Clevinger Administration Building was a different world from Three-Psych. Here the doors were not locked. Jephson’s outer office was spacious, with the luxury of a large and ungrated window.
Paula Rivinius, Jephson’s secretary, was on the phone. Mrs. R, as she was known on the wards, was dressed in a peacock-patterned sheath of lavender, purple, and cobalt. It was low-cut, slinky, laden with jewels, an outfit more at home at a Las Vegas dinner show featuring Tom Jones than in a hospital office. She was in her late forties, but worked hard to look ten years younger, and brought it off with fair success. Her longish hair was dark blond, the once black and now graying roots dyed and teased into careful disarray. Good legs and generous breasts allowed her to look Rubenesque rather than plump. Indigo eyeshadow and heavy jewelry lent an exotic, vaguely Eastern touch, as of a Hungarian gentlewoman in reduced circumstances.
She looked up over cat’s-eye glasses and held up two fingers for minutes. From the conversation, it was clear that she was trying to place a patient in a halfway house. Alison walked to the window, her suspicions widening again to include Mrs. R among those who might know about the phony NGIs. Paula had been with Jephson since the program’s start. She was divorced, Jephson never married, and Alison was sure that Mrs. R would be only too happy to scratch whatever itches the great man might have.
The door to Jephson’s inner office remained closed as Mrs. R talked on.
