“A few.”
“I’ve talked to a thousand. Maybe more. I spent ten years in New York, where arson is a high-paying job. Arsonists premeditate all right. They watch to make sure no one’s in the building. Or else the landlord who hired ’em will dock ’em.”
“What about a few years ago? In the Bronx.”
“The social club?”
“Yeah.”
“That piece of dog turd didn’t want to kill anybody. Not his girlfriend, that’s for sure. He wanted to impress her is all. And he sure as hell did impress her. Trouble was, he impressed himself while he was at it. Too much of a wimp to think he was capable of killing a cockroach, let alone all those people. He kept saying, ‘I didn’t kill anybody, sir.’ Called everyone sir. ‘I just set the fire—that’s all I did. I didn’t kill anyone. I just set it.’ Shit.” Hightower stood up straight and rubbed his back. “All arsonists claim the fires are what killed people, not them. Incredible.”
The police detective was getting anxious. Margie could see he hadn’t bargained for more than just a simple little payback for Chick. Quick trip to Canada and home again. He kept glancing back and forth from Charlie to the fire marshal. Neither Charlie nor Hightower was about to back off. So the police detective finally couldn’t take anymore and said, “Well, maybe one of them soldiers on leave took some crackpot’s girlfriend to the circus. Pissed him off enough so that he did something … uh… stupid.”
Hightower looked at the detective as if he were seeing more dog turd. The marshal said, “He’d have confessed, or he’d have let himself get caught. If the idea is to impress someone, how do you impress that person if she doesn’t know you did it?”
Margie said, “Maybe she died.”
He didn’t look at Margie like she was dog turd, but he was still pretty disdainful. “ma’am, there was one person at the social club in the Bronx, New York, that the Cuban goofball made sure was safe—his girlfriend. She was at the doorway when he torched the place. If that’s the scenario at the circus, the guy would have waited for the girlfriend to get out of the tent—waited for her to go out and buy a dog, or go to the toilet. An arsonist is not interested in impressing dead people, understand?”
“Yes,” Margie said. “Sorry.”
He looked into her eyes. “No need to be sorry. What you said made more sense than anything so far.” He lifted his shoulders up and down to relieve the tension. They waited for him to keep going. He did. “Listen, friends, we got this psycho up there in Canada we’re planning on chitchatting with, and that oughta be rich, believe me. He puts people in sheds and then torches the sheds. But that ain’t all he does. They let the pros—me—look further than they let the amateurs—you. This guys hurts his victims first. Hurts them good. He fires them—still alive—one, to cover up what he did, and two, because it’s almost as much fun as the other stuff he’s done to them already. This guy isn’t an arsonist, he’s a sociopath. Father was a drunk, his brothers beat him up all the time, and his mother was borderline retarded, same as him.”
Charlie said, “Which is why he ran away with the circus. Our circus.”
“Yeah. Your circus. So we got a convenient little coincidence here. So what.”
“He disappeared after the fire.”
“So did everyone else. There was no circus after that fire. Just the top brass who flew in to salvage a real big mess. But the rest of them—they were all out of there as fast as they could get, from the manager to the pack of transients who did the dirty work. Including our boy in Canada. Gone.” He snapped his fingers.
Now Hightower came over and sat down. Margie had been wondering if he ever would. He put his empty coffee cup on the table. He was still looking at Charlie. Margie poured him some more coffee. He said, “Thank you, ma’am.” He took a few sips. He didn’t put in any cream or sugar this time. He said, “Who’s got the file?”
The detective had it. Margie had read it already, standing up, as soon as Chick had handed it to her. The file said that Henry Maxson had been confessing to the Hartford circus fire for the last twenty years. But he’d also confessed to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby and to sabotaging the Hindenburg, which had taken place before he was born. So the authorities hadn’t paid much attention to him. They had enough to do paying attention to finding the bodies of the people he had killed—in culverts, in hollow tree trunks, in deserted houses, in barns and under boardwalks, and in boats, too. Charred bodies, all of them.
Charlie said, “Listen, Hightower. Nobody knew till now that this guy was on the Barnum and Bailey payroll.” That was the fact that had grabbed Charlie.
“Besides,” Margie chimed in, “even if he didn’t do it, he might have seen who did. Charlie’s point is, he was there. So Charlie wants to talk to him. That’s what Charlie does.” Margie listened to herself defending the actions she had so recently attempted to stop.
So now all their eyes swiveled to her. The fire marshal said, “And you were there, ma’am.”
“Yes.”
“You make good coffee.”
Margie said, “Thanks.”
They all sat quietly, drinking their coffee and thinking. Then Margie said, “I believe the Sox are playing the Blue Jays this week. Away.”
She got four blank stares.
“I checked the atlas. Brampton is a suburb of Toronto.”
They kept staring at her while their brains reregistered. Chick’s brain settled in before the others. He said, “How many games we out?”
The detective said, “Six.”
Margie said, “Five in the A.I.L.C.”
Hightower said, “What the hell is that?”
Margie said. “The All Important Loss Column. What’s the matter? Don’t you like baseball?”
A grin broke out. He roared. He did know how to act human, Margie was relieved to see.
They flew out to Toronto the next day. Margie noted that Clemens would be pitching that night—a little bonanza. Hightower said, “I saw that in the Courant this morning.” Margie brought something to read on the plane, the new paper edition of Presumed Innocent. The fire marshal brought a book, too. The same one as Margie’s.
Chapter Fourteen
First the warden showed them a picture of him; it was a photo of a madman. The word stereotype came immediately to Margie’s mind. But in addition to his wild eyes and an Albert Einstein shock of hair, he was scarred. His arms and his face were almost all scar tissue, and the gaps in his hair showed shiny white patches. The warden said, “Whenever he gets near a match, near a stove, near anything that burns, he tries to set fire to himself”
Margie said, “Don’t you have hospitals for people like that in this country?”
The warden said, “You’re in it. Hospitals for the criminally insane are also called prisons.”
The warden had led them through a series of locked doors, through a maze of corridors, and down flights of damp staircases, and Margie figured they were at least three floors below ground when the warden said, “He’s just down this hall.”
Hall is not what Margie would have called the grim and dirty cement tunnel they were in, the echoes of their footfalls a lot louder than the footfalls themselves. Margie whispered to Charlie, “You know who else is in this basement, don’t you?”
The Hartford detective heard her. He said, “Who?”
Charlie whispered, “Hannibal Lecter.” He’d seen the video.
The detective said, “Who’s he?”
The fire marshal smiled. He whispered, “Not to worry. He’s in Rio.”
Margie said to Charlie, “I told you it was Rio. It just looked like Jamaica.” She said to Hightower, “You read the book, right?”
He said, “I only read the book.”
No wonder I like him, Margie thought.
Chick said, “Can it, you guys.”
When death has been a major part of your day-to-day living, you develop a sick sense of humor. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Margie thought. Chick put the hobbles on them because the
warden kept eyeing them—the way they were whispering and giggling, their nerves jangled. Hightower and Margie had become conspirators, suddenly, and she was wired. Hightower composed himself. He said to the warden, “Frankly, I’ve never heard of an arsonist who likes to set fire to himself.”
The warden said, “Count your blessings. Wish I never heard of any.”
Henry Maxson was in a lounge. It wasn’t really a lounge; it was some sort of all-purpose room. Nonpurpose room was what Margie thought. Now it had been cleared out for people needing a meeting. The walls were cement block, unpainted, the floor was cement, too, and there were chairs and a table with a phone. The phone didn’t have any sort of dialing mechanism. Henry Maxson was handcuffed, wrists and ankles, to a chair. A state psychiatrist was in another chair. The warden said, “This is Dr. Glass.” Dr. Glass nodded. Everyone nodded back, including Henry Maxson. The warden didn’t introduce anyone to Henry Maxson. Instead, the warden said to him, “Well, Henry, here are the people I told you about.”
Henry remained relaxed, except that Margie could see the tendons sticking up from his wrists. He was exerting tension on his wrist and ankle restraints, but managed to make the rest of his body slack. Once when Margie had gone to a La Leche League meeting, hoping someone would be able to show her how to go about breast-feeding, a woman was there who said that when her baby took the breast, the first few seconds of sucking hurt her nipples. The La Leche leader said to treat her tender nipples with ice, but until her nipples toughened up she should grit her teeth, grip the armrest of her chair with her free hand, and relax the rest of her body so the baby wouldn’t feel the tension. Until this day at the Canadian prison, Margie couldn’t see how a person could possibly manage such a feat. Or why. You can’t protect babies from tension, anyway. But Henry needed to hide his tension so they’d believe whatever it was he intended to say.
There were two empty chairs facing Henry, and three in a row behind those two, and then two more behind them. Margie was reminded of the flight deck of the Challenger. The shrink was in the last row. She took the chair next to him. She thought: Christa McAuliffe’s. The warden and Charlie sat up front, and Chick, the detective, and Hightower were in the middle. Charlie opened the briefcase he was carrying. He unrolled a miniversion of the Map, reached over, and laid it across Henry’s lap. Henry didn’t look down at it. Instead, his eyes took in everyone assembled in front of him, and he said, “The devil come riding on his red horse that day. The devil come riding.” He paused. He spoke like a third-grader reciting the lines of some mediocre poem deemed suitable for children to memorize. Then he said, shifting his face toward Margie, “When the devil come on his red horse, I gotta set a fire.”
The psychiatrist said, “He’s talking about masturbation.”
The men turned to look at the psychiatrist. Margie just glanced toward him, but then went right back to Henry. She was mesmerized by Henry Maxson. The psychiatrist continued in his monotone, “When he masturbates he is usually unable to ejaculate, so when he becomes aroused, he looks for something to kill. His first choice is a female, young or old, he doesn’t care. But he kills men and boys, too. He kills each victim by setting them on fire. Foreplay consists of torturing them—well, usually her—first. Then he’s able to ejaculate while he watches, and of course listens, to the begging and pleading, and finally the screaming. In the cases of animals he’s burned, I don’t know what he’s listening for.”
The men looked back to Henry. The whites of his eyes were red. Margie wondered what they had him on. Henry said very quietly, “I only kill people that are happy.”
Charlie, calm as stone, said, “Why is that?”
Henry said, “Because I didn’t ever know a happy day in my life.”
The psychiatrist cleared his throat. Everyone looked back to him except Margie and Henry. “His father and brothers would take turns beating him at night. They’d hit him every time he managed to fall asleep. Actually, the father forced the brothers to help. A child tortured in his sleep—so that he can’t sleep—is a human being in such torment that there is simply no telling what that torment will lead to.”
Margie felt her stomach turn over. Henry’s eyes changed a little bit as he saw the reflection of her distress in her face. Charlie said to him, “Why did you set the tent on fire?”
Henry said, like a person scornfully addressing someone he considered a dumbbell, “Because the people inside were happy.”
The psychiatrist’s turn, in his same calm voice: “What it comes down to is that he wants us to believe that he was trying to kill his father. That’s what the social workers keep telling him. Now he’s beginning to think that if he goes along with that, he’ll get out of here. Get out of here so he can get his hands on some matches.
“He’s killed at least fifty people by my count. A few animals. Four dogs, as a matter of fact, and cats. Lots of cats. He burned all of them alive. When he got the fire going, he’d masturbate to the sight and sound of their suffering. He became so adept at… it, that he’d hold his ejaculation to what he calculated to be the final scream.”
Margie was still looking into Henry’s eyes, he into hers. Then his ravaged lips turned up. He was smiling at her. Charlie’s head turned slightly back, and though he didn’t take his own eyes off Henry, he spoke carefully to Margie. “Leave the room.” The others were confused. Margie wasn’t. Henry wasn’t. She got up and went to the door, Henry’s eyes touching her back like a hand, leaving his thumbprint.
Two guards were just outside. Margie asked to be taken to a bathroom. Another guard had to come to take her with him and by the time she got to a bathroom she had willed away throwing up. She said to the guard, “I want to go back. Can I listen to them without going into the room?”
He said, “Sure.”
When they got back Margie sat down by a narrow slit in the wall. She could see Henry’s profile. She sat down just in time to hear Henry say, “Because I seen someone set it.”
She thought, damn! She’d missed something big. Henry was reneging. Maybe what Henry was trying to do now was simple—if he testified that someone else had set the fire, he’d still have a chance of convincing them to let him out, get his hands on some matches. Margie waited for Charlie to speak. Finally, Charlie asked, “Who set it?”
Henry said, “A kid.”
“What kid?”
“A little kid. He sat down right behind the tent… over here.” His profile turned downward. He was looking at the Map, pointing, kind of, with his chin. “Behind Grandstand A. Nobody back there. Just me. I didn’t have nothing to do till it was time for intermission. Then I’m supposed to help at the food stands. When the animal act gets finished up, the animals need a lot of attention, so the roustabouts, they were all on the other side of the chute over by the wagons, along the side of the wagons in case some animal got stubborn and wouldn’t move. Or got stuck between ’em. Sometimes that happened.
“The kid didn’t see me. He twisted up a bunch of newspapers, lit ’em, and held ’em up against the canvas. A wind came up and blew some of the paper out a his hands. The pieces hit the tent and it caught. About eight feet up. Then the kid ran away. I watched the tent burn. Then I ran away, too. I knew they’d blame me for it. I got blamed for everything, especially shit I didn’t do.”
No one said anything, so Henry said to Charlie, “That your wife was in here before?”
Charlie stood up and took the Map off Henry’s lap. He headed for the door but he wasn’t fast enough. Henry said, “I would burn her cunt first.”
Margie knew he’d say something like that. The guy who wrote The Silence of the Lambs knew what this business was all about. She was beginning to wonder if maybe the author had interviewed Henry. Even though Charlie tried to get out before Henry spoke, the others weren’t expecting he’d say what he said, and they were still sitting, stricken. Henry saw to it that they’d hear, once he realized that he was not going to get out. Henry planned it. Margie knew he was planning it. The words
themselves meant nothing to Henry; but Margie suspected he got the reaction he was looking for.
Nobody could look at Margie when they left the room. Except the psychiatrist. He said to Margie, “He was a terribly abused child.”
Margie said, “I know. That’s why this isn’t really bothering me.”
That night at SkyDome, Margie realized what a pretty song the Canadian national anthem was. Even though it took “Oh Canada” to make her feel she was back in the real world again, she couldn’t get into the game and neither could anyone else. They’d glance up when a roar rose from the crowd, glance up whenever the new guy stepped up to the plate—the big black rookie from Connecticut—glance up at each of Clemens’s pitches, all the while talking and cracking peanuts. They shelled bag after bag of peanuts, eating them the way chain-smokers devour cigarettes. They took turns going for beer. As soon as the beer person came back, he’d say, “What’d I miss?” just like at a normal ball game. But he wasn’t talking about the game. He was referring to the Henry Maxson debate. It took them six innings to stop discussing Henry Maxson and his version of the story; the kid he saw set the fire. It was Hightower who couldn’t take any more, who just got tired of trying to convince them what he believed about Henry Maxson. So he changed tack. He became philosophical instead as he tried to get across what he felt one last time.
He sat back into his seat, looked out at the game, and said, “I do my job. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Just my job. When there’s a fire in Hartford, some black family or some ’Rican family—sometimes even some white family—they don’t have a place to live anymore. That’s why I know where you’re comin’ from, Charlie. I want to catch the firebugs so they don’t set more fires. So two old people won’t be out on the street without even a photograph to remember their lives before they get shuffled off to somewhere they don’t want to go. But here, you and me split off. This guy Maxson set that fire. I know it. You know it. He was describing himself, telling us how he did it. And he’s caught. He’s not going to get out of there because this isn’t a book where the bad guy escapes by eating the face off a dumb guard and then ends up in Rio. No more fires from Henry Maxson. So what’s your point, Charlie? Why is it that I’m satisfied and you’re not?”
Masters of Illusions Page 15
