by D. W. Buffa
He had an apartment for a while, and a job washing dishes at a restaurant. But he didn’t want to follow the rules. That was a couple of years ago. This time, when he was let out, it was to be for just a few days at a time, and, instead of allowing him to have his own apartment, he was put in a halfway house.”
“What rules?” I asked. “What did he do that brought him back inside?”
He sank back in the chair and shrugged. “I don’t really know.
As I say, he wasn’t my patient. I only know about this now because, after what happened, the case became the subject of a staff review.”
“And?”
He raised his eyebrows. “And what?”
“What was the result of the staff review?”
“Everything had been done properly, based on the best evidence of his condition,” he said, as he lowered his gaze.
“He was here because he murdered his father, if I recall correctly. And despite that, he’s let out and murders—or I should say slaughters—a judge, and everything was done properly?”
Friedman sighed. “Look, Mr. Antonelli,” he said, raising his eyes just far enough to cast an irritated sideways glance at me,
“we do our best. I’ll be the first to admit that our best isn’t always good enough. But what would you have us do?”
Sitting up straight, he waved his hand at the window behind him. The bright clear light from the cloudless summer sky left a dull glow on the grimy dirt-covered glass.
“We try to make people well so they can live out there. We’re not a prison, we’re a hospital. Sometimes people are sicker than we think; sornetimes they get better and then get sick again. It’s awful what happened. But given the same diagnosis, the same course of treatment, the same results from the medication he was taking: Would I release a patient into a transition program? Yes, absolutely. Would I be completely confident he would not suffer some kind of relapse, have some kind of psychotic episode? No, I would not. I know that isn’t very satisfying, but there you have it. That’s what we do here. We treat the sick.”
He started to sit back but thought of something else. “You defend people accused of crimes. Have you never gotten someone off and had him go out and commit another one? Have you never obtained an acquittal for a killer and had him kill someone else?
Did that mean you did not do the same thing again: defend another person you knew might harm someone if you won your case and he was found not guilty?”
I was not in the mood to let him take comfort in a false analogy. “My job is to put on a defense; your job is to make sure people who are a danger to themselves or others can’t hurt other people.”
He knew he had struck a nerve, and that gave him sufficient pleasure not to contest the point. “I’m sure we both do the best we can.” With a brief, professional smile, he asked, “You said something about another patient?”
I ignored him. “All right. He wasn’t your patient. Did Elliott know him?”
“Whittaker? I don’t know. He might have.”
“He might have? Don’t you know who your patients know in here and who they don’t?”
Friedman lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes. “They might have known each other,” he repeated. “There are hundreds of patients in the forensic ward. Besides, what’s your point? What if they did know each other? It doesn’t mean the same thing in here that it does out there,” he said, nodding toward the windows and the world outside. “We have people in here who sleep in adjoining beds and never exchange a word. We have people in here who never speak. This is a mental hospital, Mr. Antonelli; it isn’t a private sanatorium for wealthy, intelligent people who don’t happen to feel very well,” he said with a condescending glance.
“So because some of them can’t talk, you don’t take any notice of what any of them might be saying to each other?” I asked sharply. “For all you know they could be spending all their free time plotting the murder of half the people in Portland.”
“Again, Mr. Antonelli, I think you’ve confused the state hospital with the state prison. We provide treatment and a decent, safe place to live to people suffering severe mental illness.”
He pronounced each word of the official declaration of policy with an unquestioning assurance. It seemed to remind him of who he was, and of the great advantages he had over someone who lacked his training. He looked at me with a kind of tolerance and became, in his way, almost considerate.
“I owe you an apology, Mr. Antonelli. I know your office has been trying to schedule an appointment. It’s just that I’ve had so much to do lately. And then, when your secretary called this morning and said you were on your way … I was a little annoyed—more with myself, you understand.” He pressed his fingertips together and, putting me under his observant gaze, waited behind his professional mask.
“Has Elliott been out, the way Whittaker was—on a pass?”
Friedman shook his head. “No, never. Maybe someday, but—
Why? You don’t imagine he had something to do with the murder of the judge—Jeffries? Is that why you wanted to know if he knew Whittaker?” He shook his head again, this time more emphatically. “That’s quite impossible.”
“Why is it impossible? People have been known to convince someone else to do their killing for them. Why is it impossible?
You don’t know if he knew Whittaker or not, and if he did know him you certainly don’t know what they talked about.”
“It’s impossible,” he insisted, spreading his hands apart. “I know Elliott. I’ve worked with him for several years now. He barely remembers what happened to him. It was too traumatic.”
“He remembers he wanted to kill me, and he remembers why.”
“Yes, but he realizes he was sick and that what he thought then had little if any basis in reality. He doesn’t blame anyone for what happened to him. He knows it’s a disease. No, I’m afraid you’re wrong,” he said, watching me over the tips of his fingers as he again pressed them together. “And you’ve forgotten something.
Even if after all this time he wanted to do something like this, what in the world could he ever have done to convince Whittaker to do it for him? These cases you talk about—aren’t they usually cases in which someone does it for money, or out of some misguided sense of love? What did Elliott have to offer?” he asked with an irritating smile.
“Then you think it’s just a coincidence?”
“Yes, why not? An unfortunate coincidence,” he added with a dour look. “A mental patient takes the life of someone he doesn’t know. Just because another mental patient—who may never have known the other one—happens to have known the victim some dozen years earlier, before he was a mental patient … It’s quite a reach, isn’t it?”
“Now you’re forgetting something. There was another patient who escaped.”
“What are you talking about? There hasn’t been anyone since Whittaker. I can assure you of that, Mr. Antonelli.” He saw the surprise register on my face. “Why? What made you think there was?”
He had to be wrong and I wondered if he was lying. “No one in the forensic ward has escaped? No one who might have been let out on a pass has failed to come back?” I stared at him, searching his eyes, trying to discover if there was something he was attempting to hide. If there was, he did not show it.
“No, as I told you: no one since Whittaker,” he insisted. “I can assure you, we’re even more conscious of our security precautions than we were before.”
Pressing his lips into a brief, bureaucratic smile, he punctuated his decision that there was really nothing more to be said about it with a single, abrupt nod of his head. The next instant he was on his feet, moving with dispatch toward the door, where he flashed another grating smile and waited for me to come.
“I’m sorry I don’t have more time. If you would like to see Elliott, I’ll walk you over.”
We went across the parking lot to the main building. A stoop-shouldered gray-haired man in a denim shirt trimmed the shrub-
bery below the first-floor windows with a pair of steel-bladed gardening shears. I raised my head and squinted into the light, looking up at the painted metal orb on the pole that stood atop the cupola. There was nothing there. The bird I had seen before had found another home.
Friedman was all business as we walked together down the broad central corridor, ignoring the few casual remarks I made as if he was too preoccupied with his own affairs to waste any more time than he had already. We got to the wire mesh screen that fenced off the area where Elliott was kept, and the doctor fumbled for his key.
“I’d like to see Elliott’s file before I leave,” I said as he slid open the gate. He stopped, both hands gripping the edge.
“That’s impossible,” he said, frowning. “Patient records are confidential. You know I can’t let you look at them.”
On the far side of the large day room, a group of patients were crowded together around a table next to a barred window. At the sound of Friedman’s voice, Elliott Winston raised his head and looked around. He seemed to stiffen and draw into himself. Taking it as a cue, the others slunk away and, watching me with curious eyes, scattered to different parts of the room. Elliott stared straight ahead, peering into the distance, his pale features as rigid as ice.
It was the same look, or should I say the same mask, he had worn the first time I had come to see him. The question, which had only just begun to form in my mind, was whether when he wore it, he was lost behind it in a world of his own; or whether he used it to make you think he was not the whole time subjecting you to a scrutiny so close you would have flinched from it had it been more obvious and direct.
We stood next to the table, Elliott staring right past us. Friedman did not seem to know quite what to do. Finally, he cleared his throat and spoke Elliott’s name. When there was no response, he placed his hand on Elliott’s shoulder.
“Elliott, Mr. Antonelli is here to see you.”
Without warning Elliott rose straight up from the chair and with mechanical formality held out his hand. He did everything at right angles. There were no smooth, easy transitions from one movement to the next. It was like watching someone who had studied the manners of well-bred, elegant people, but who had never had a chance to make them his own, and turned them into an awkward parody when he tried to use them.
Excusing himself, Friedman left Elliott and me alone. On the other side of the ward, dressed all in white, the same black orderly who had been here before held a rolled-up magazine in his hand while he gazed absentmindedly at the flickering screen of a television set.
“I wasn’t told you were coming,” Elliott said as we sat down at the square wooden table. He was not wearing the tight-fitting suit and the throat-choking dress shirt and tie he had worn on my first visit. Like the other inmates, he was dressed in a white V-neck short-sleeve shirt and white drawstring trousers. I had taken the chair around the corner to his left. He settled a narrow-eyed glance on me and then looked past me. “Why are you here?”
he asked.
“Judge Jeffries—Calvin Jeffries—was murdered—”
“You told me that when you were here before,” he interjected.
His hands were on the table, one on top of the other. He switched their position, and then, abruptly, as if they moved independently and were fighting over which should be on top, did it again. “You told me that before,” he repeated, a look of impatience on his face.
“Murdered by someone in here,” I said, finishing the sentence I had begun.
We were sitting so close I could see the thin folds of skin, bunched tightly together, at the outer edge of his eye. A smile started on the side of his mouth, crossed over, and vanished on the other. “Was it me?”
“No, I’m afraid it wasn’t you.”
A second smile made the same circuit as the first. “Damn! All the luck.” His eyes seemed to taunt me, challenge me, dare me to figure out what was really going on in his mind.
“It was Jacob Whittaker. Did you know him?”
Elliott remained silent. There was nothing in his expression, nothing in his eyes, that gave me an answer to my question.
“You didn’t know him, then?” I asked, watching him closely.
“Isn’t that what I just didn’t say?” His eyes glittered at his own grammatical joke, and then turned hard. “How would I know if I knew him? I’m an inmate in an insane asylum.”
We were so close that when he spoke the air from his dead breath filled my nostrils. Placing my hand on his forearm, I moved closer still.
“That’s right, Elliott, you’re an inmate in an insane asylum.
But you’re not insane, are you? You never were. They twisted everything up—Jeffries and your wife. They pushed you as far as you could go: They made you crazy—not like the people who are supposed to be here—just enough to drive you over the edge. You had a breakdown, a nervous breakdown, but you weren’t insane.
You might not have known what you were doing when you came to my office waving that gun around, but you were not out of your mind. Remember when you were a lawyer? Remember the definition? A mental disease or defect: the inability to control your own actions, the inability to distinguish the difference between right and wrong. You weren’t insane then, and you’re not insane now.”
He slipped his arm from underneath my hand, glanced at me, an amused expression on his face, and then looked away. He shook his head and began to laugh.
“And all this time I thought I was a mental patient. I must have been—what?—insane to have thought so.” He scratched his chin and then put his finger between his teeth, gnawing at the edge of it where the skin covers the nail. Behind half-closed lids, his eyes darted from side to side.
“Do you think you’re insane, Elliott?” I asked in an even tone.
His eyes came to a rest, and he stopped chewing on his finger. After a deep breath he no longer seemed quite so agitated or distracted. A wry expression spread along his mouth.
“Dr. Friedman says it’s so. Paranoid schizophrenia: signed, sealed, delivered—a certified nut case.”
“I didn’t ask you that. I asked what you thought.” Pausing, I peered into his eyes, watching for a spark, a glimmer, some sign that he might decide to trust me. “Do you think you’re insane?”
He raised his head and looked around at the patients loung-ing in different parts of the vast white room. “Does anyone think they’re insane? It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? All of you out there think you’re sane, but does that mean all of us in here think we’re not? What difference does it make, anyway? All that counts is that you—I mean the people who put us here, the people in your world—think we aren’t—sane, that is.”
Our eyes were locked together. “Are you sure of that? Are you sure that’s what they thought when they sent you here?”
Alert and expectant, he waited for an explanation, and I wondered if he needed one.
“I read the file, Elliott: the court file, the record, such as it is, of the case, your case, the one in which you were charged with attempted murder, the one in which you entered a plea of guilty but insane. Do you remember that? Do you remember entering that plea? Do you remember anything about that day at all?”
He stared at me with a stern expression, and then turned his head and looked past me. He held himself rigidly erect, the only movement the slight rustle of his thick mustache as the breath passed out of his wide nostrils.
“Do you remember your lawyer—the one Calvin Jeffries hired for you—Asa Bartram? You told me before you didn’t know who the lawyer was who represented you. But you did know, didn’t you? He was Jeffries’s law partner; he took care of Jeffries’s business. You had to have known that, and if you knew that, you had to know that Asa never practiced criminal law in his life!”
His eyes stayed fixed in that rigid forward stare, as if he could ignore me at will. Angrily, I jumped up from the chair and wheeled around into the one directly opposite him. With all the force I could summon, I brought m
y arm down on the table, and pushed my face as far toward him as I could.
“Asa Bartram was not a criminal lawyer, and you knew it. Jeffries had him take the case, and you knew that, too. What else did you know? What else was going on? What did they tell you was going to happen to you?”
The harsh severity of that unforgiving stare gave way to a look of almost amused disdain. “Asa was old then; he must be ancient now. Tell me, do they still let him leave his car under that NO
PARKING sign in front of his building?”
The question was unimportant—trivial even—but whether it was a premonition, or just an instinct born of years of keeping my own counsel, I would not tell him. Besides, I was here to get answers, not give them.
“What did Jeffries tell you—that the fix was in? Did he tell you that you’d be sent here, to the hospital, and that you would be out in a few months?”
I could see Jeffries in my mind, giving assurances, making promises, and all of it with that confident sense of inevitability with which he regularly disguised his deceptions.
“Did he tell you that you didn’t have anything to worry about—
that he’d take care of everything?”
Elliott’s gaze seemed to soften and draw inward. He sank into the chair and laced his fingers together. “I always trusted Calvin Jeffries,” he said with a small, self-deprecating smile. “Even when I was in my right mind.”
That was all he was going to say about it. I asked him about the psychiatric report, the one without which he could never have been committed in the first place. He claimed not to remember anything about it.
“Do you remember the doctor?”
“No,” he said, tapping his thumbs together.
“His name?”
“No.”
“Anything about him?”
“No.”
“Where was it done?”
“I was in jail at the time.”
“Was it done there?”
“I suppose.”
“Are you sure there was one?”
He stopped what he was doing and raised his head. “You read the file.”
