Haftmann's Rules

by Robert White

  That night I tried to write down everything I could remember from my conversation with Lindell. It was a language beyond time and space, an alien tongue in a calming, dispassionate voice. I could hear those precise inflections he gave some words, while others acquired the extra syllables of a Boston accent, but I could not remember how we began or what determined the flow of his thoughts. His voice was mesmerizing, easy to listen to, so much so that despite my own revulsion for him, I wanted to hear him speak again.

  I got my wish. Despite my instruction to have his name removed, he returned on the first Tuesday of June. The previous night had left me more exhausted than usual. The papers said there was to be an annular eclipse today, and my mind focused upon that and worried it into fragments of worthless speculation.

  Cause and effect, I kept thinking. Cause and effect, I would mumble to no one. I sat in the lawyer’s conference room with one arm shackled to an eyebolt in the table and waited for him to be brought in.

  I heard the guard’s shoes coming down the hallway, and the first thing I saw of Lindell was his shoes: the same he wore when I cornered him in the Ritz-Carlton.

  “Apologies. A little business with your warden delayed me somewhat.”

  “I don’t want to see you any longer.”

  “Why?”

  “You and I have no further business. We have nothing to discuss.”

  He said, “I think we do. I think it’s important that we talk to each other.”

  “Lindell, leave me alone.”

  “That’s not what you really want, though, is it?”

  I looked at him. “What exactly is it that you think I want?”

  “You look tired. Aren’t you sleeping as much these days? I understand you were all but comatose earlier. I can get you a prescription—”

  “Just tell me what the fuck you’re doing here.”

  “All right, fine.”

  He drew a packet of photographs out of his blazer and tossed them at me. Ingrid. All of them. She had been snapped by a telephoto lens at work. Outside the Anchor Inn motel where she worked, pushing a cart, entering a room, sweeping a white-blonde lock of hair from her eyes. One caught her inside her room sitting at a table. She was in profile. The last showed her lying on a futon; her eyes were closed. A little surge of adrenalin hit me, but I shifted that photo behind the others and pushed the pack across the table.

  “It’s OK,” he said. “She’s only asleep.”

  I stared at him.

  Shifting the photos to his inside pocket, he said, “Now you see.”

  “See what, fucker?”

  “You see how easy it is for me to get to her. So either we talk like two civilized men or the next photos of her you see will remind you of her daughter. They were shot in a motel too. Like mother, like daughter. An affinity for cheap motels, it would appear—”

  I was out of my seat before I remembered the chain; my free hand reached for him but all I clutched was the air in front of his face.

  He ignored me and began talking, and he didn’t stop for an hour. I remember watching the hand move around the face of the clock. Now, I was convinced they were doing things because the hands were moving ahead way too fast. His speech was just like the first time—slow, measured cadence in a voice of silk. I saw the scars I had given him white around his mouth. On occasion he would pass his hand across his hair in a boyish way that was unlike the primping manner of Booth it brought to mind. My throat was parched; it was as if I had done all the talking.

  He told me about his life, where he grew up, what schools he attended (almost breaking a family tradition to go to Princeton), his friends and family, the names of his pets. At one point he was talking about California and his research, but he digressed from that to speak of a ranch house in the mountains. Although it soothed me with its hypnotic flow, I had to think of other thoughts, and I forced myself to imagine Annaliese’s last moments in the room with Lindell. I fastened on something Reg used to say between shots during our games of pool at the Lake: When crimes are plotted in hell, don’t expect angels for witnesses.

  I tried to keep my mind blank while the words he spoke created a viscous film over the reality of a psychopathic murderer speaking to a captive audience of one miserable convict:

  “ . . . the rain would fall on my mountain. The redwood trees made sweeping boughs of windy delight, roses would bud even in the cool of December offering the rich and fragrant grace of great invention, theirs and not theirs in design and the bountiful gift, not so bad this green rich, rose yellow, rose red. A great horned owl would hoot hello to the cosmos of the nearby. How fine, Thomas. I used to think if we could talk to that owl, that rose and tree, like shamans in the golden time of which Eliades wrote so optimistically where humans beings can venture to the center of the earth, know the tree of life . . .”

  “Lindell,” I begged, insensate from listening to a voice that had become a whisper, “I don’t want to understand you. I don’t want to know what potty training you had that warped you into the way you are.”

  That stopped him for a moment. “Insane? I suppose. I am an optimist, Mister Haftmann. One does not ignore the hard practical work of the optimism of Pericles, Cicero, Boethius, Luther, Jefferson, and Lincoln. We owe an immense debt. I did not ask to respeak the message or be the old new dream enacted. I am one who, like others, has come forward at this time of crisis in our nation. My civil courage is undaunted but the range of my civilizing voice is but as a whisper, none I think to hear.”

  “You kill people. You don’t create anything. You are the reason we have prisons.”

  He checked his wristwatch and stood up. “Ah well, fortunate enough are we to know you, Mister Haftmann. I shall visit you one more time, and then I shall tell you why I killed those women. I’ll tell you why your little Annaliese had to die.”

  He arose and with a Harvard ring tapped on the glass reinforced with chicken wire. The guard left me chained to the table so long that I fell asleep and when I awoke, I discovered that I had wet myself. They escorted me back and I could feel dozens of pairs of eyes witnessing my shame.

  His third visit came three days afterward. I was called out of my cell at eight o’clock at night, so I didn’t expect a visit from anyone. When I was bolted to the table, I knew it must be Lindell. This time, my free hand was cuffed to the chair.

  He came in wearing a tuxedo under his trench coat. His gold cufflinks contained diamond inserts in the shape of his initials. He sat right down, and as if we were resuming a conversation in which there had been no hiatus, completed the story of his life where he had left off. He had, it seems, experienced a midlife crisis or a nervous breakdown at the very zenith of his success, a glimpse into the abyss:

  “. . . so many books one recalls one has written yet no echo of an audience fossilized as proof any word or idea left an imprint. Such petty offices as might have been held, or political engagements fought, or entered on calendars . . . even a grain of sand in a sirocco-whipped desert seems more readily placed and counted. That public voice of mine is only softly heard in its structured place. St. Paul’s dark and enigmatic Prince of this World as Iatros of sorts teaching within institutionalized medicine. Tiny steps to continue the Enlightenment. I believed that knowledge will relieve pain. I could make women well, and that thought itself, as scientific imagination, is itself beauty. . . . One marks Thucydides in exile, Origen writing the greatest theology before his torture and death, Servetus at the stake, Anne Frank trusting in her attic, all those wise innocents who insist upon the anthropic dream, that humankind has a place in the cosmos, and that both might reciprocally benefit, if only . . .”

  I broke in. “You were going to tell me why you killed those women.”

  He laughed. “Haftmann, you should read the classics. Prison affords such time. I commend Boethius to you, the last good man of the classical world. He explains the richness of classical civilization as only lately having left the savagery of Emperor Theodoric and the despicably d
ecadent, ever so modern in the politics of cunning—”

  “Lindell, tell me.”

  “Sheer good fun. Why else?”

  I must have been screaming but I don’t remember. I heard the clacking of the guards’ shoes in the hallway. Some scuffling at the lock on the door before it opened and then I remember being held down and somebody was wrapping one of those old-time straightjackets we used to call Kansas City vests around me. Then I found myself in a lit room with a bulb in the ceiling behind a grill mesh. Isolation. I slept and dreamed lurid dreams of angelic figures pirouetting and cutting. Blood spatter all over the walls, a regular season of blood.

  I don’t remember how long I was kept in solitary. I kept hearing voices and had imaginary, intense conversations. I remember, very clearly, hearing Lindell’s words in that soporific voice of his talking about Annaliese and about Annaliese’s mother. Try as hard as I could to recall it, I no longer knew what he had said to me in the lawyer’s conference room and what, in my delusional state, I had made up. I remember trying to convince him not to go after her. I made every appeal and threat I could, but he refused to promise me he would not harm her. At times, I thought he was in this cramped cell with me. I shivered in the bunk at night and gagged on the smell because someone before me had left feces in the toilet, and large flaking brown turds swam about as if we were shipboard and the room had a list. The Judas window opened and closed a few times in the midst of my babbling, and I remember trays of food being set into the room and withdrawn, but the hand that brought them and took them out must have come while I slept. After an interval of time, I was returned to my cell, allowed to clean up under an escort of guards, and restored to the daily routine of prison life. I recalled what Lindell had said during his first visit about the “finitude of despair.”

  I was summoned on a Tuesday or a Wednesday from my assigned job as toilet cleaner by no less a personage than the assistant warden. “Let’s go, Haftmann. You have a homicide detective here to see you.”

  Detective Cooney had a twisted smile on his face when I sat down behind the plexiglass. He brought me the photos.

  “They just faxed them from Ohio,” he said, “so the quality’s not good but you can see well enough.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I can see.”

  He held them up against the scarred plexiglass like a kindergarten teacher showing flashcards to a dull child. One at a time, each one a knife in the guts.

  He said, “The manager thought she was ill, sleeping in or something, so he didn’t knock until about ten o’clock.” He opened it with a master and there she was.”

  There she was.

  Her hands were tied to ropes that were stretched taut and tied off somewhere out of the range of the photographs. Maybe the table and the futon if they were solid enough. She thrashed around a lot from the looks of the blood.

  “Autopsy will tell us whether she was doped. But it doesn’t look like a struggle. Looks like she expected it. He had her there all night, apparently. Columbus CID is on this one, so we’ll get all the paperwork, the photos, and the ME’s report as soon as possible. Your man Booth has pulled some more strings, right to the governor. I’m hoping there’s no jurisdictional hassle on this. FBI’s liaising—so far. They haven’t taken over the investigation, but I figure that’s just a matter of time.”

  I wasn’t saying anything. I didn’t have the words.

  Cooney said, “I’m sorry, if it means anything.”

  “Did she—” I groaned.

  “I know she meant something to you.”

  “Did she have anything under her nails?”

  “Word right now is no. FBI’s sending a hair and fiber team in, assuming your yokel cops from that two-bit resort town of yours didn’t fuck it up completely.”

  “How, how bad was it?”

  “How bad does it look to you? He gave her a mastectomy among other things. What are you, a glutton for punishment? The woman died horribly. She suffered like hell while that maniac cut on her—”

  I was trying to control the sobs in my throat from bubbling out.

  “No witnesses, naturally. A resort motel in summer has people coming and going all night. Nobody noticed anything. When is your release date?”

  “End of the month.”

  “Use your FBI juice to get out of general population. Stay out of trouble is all.”

  “I’m going to kill him this time.”

  “Haftmann, you can’t say that to a cop.”

  I must have had a weird look on my face.

  “What the fuck’s so funny?”

  “Reasonable. He said you have to adjust to a world where steel beams fall out of the sky and a world where steel beams don’t fall out of the sky.”

  “I heard you came this close to getting transferred to the state’s rubber room. Your FBI man must be arm-sore from pulling strings to keep you here.”

  “It wasn’t Booth.”

  “Huh?”

  “It was Lindell,” I said, rubbing my face as if I could rub all the exhaustion and pain out.

  He asked me how I could know that.

  “It’s a reasonable assumption,” I said.

  Realism is paranoia. I thought: I’m thinking like him now.

  Despite the fact that my brain was frazzled by too little sleep and troubled by darkish nightmares that came with an hour’s sleep at dawn, I knew that Lindell was still orchestrating events from afar like a dark omniscient anti-God in his private universe.

  The routine of my day before my release date was identical to the thirteen months before it. If they were going to get me, I’d be an easy target. I was aware of clusters of men everywhere I went, and as much as I could, tried to change my route to and from my cell. I thought of staying inside, but I figured that would force their hand; they’d just come for me there. I had more options if I stayed mobile as long as I could.

  At lockdown I went back to my cell from the cafeteria, and I found Donald inside weeping. He had had another fight with Frank that day. As I lay on my bunk, I tried to imagine the minutes dropping one at a time into a bucket like prisoners playing dominoes, slamming them onto the metal tables. At ten o’clock in the morning they were going to set me free. I knew I was afraid of dying, and that’s when I realized I wasn’t free in my head. The sounds of the tier finally shut down, the coughs and grunts of men rose above the faint hum of the generator, and the lights went down. Donald sobbed into his pillow for another hour and then I heard the rhythmic breathing of his sleeping.

  I thought of Annaliese, then her mother. Two lives chewed up by the savagery of men. All of life’s horror comes down to brutalized flesh. I was sickened by my own kind, every variation of it, every human face I saw. Life’s bounty and variety came down to nothing more than a jumble of genetic equations in search of an answer over millions of years. No answer was ever going to be found, I thought, as long as human beings populate the planet. Lindell obsessed me, frightened me to the very marrow of my being, and made me sick at the cringing desperation of the cells comprising me to preserve themselves. For what? What? Lindell’s face and soothing voice intruded so often into my reflections that I didn’t know whether I was awake or dreaming with my eyes open. I wanted to write down something in the dark before I forgot it—something about Lindell’s view of God as a violent force, visible in history. Donald was nattering on about the “crucial” difference between two shades of Maybelline. I was a split-second from tuning him out. I felt a clammy sweat all over. That’s when I knew Donald was my designated killer.

  I had just moved my arm over my face to fetch the pen and notebook I kept under the pillow when my forearm connected with the downward thrust of his arm.

  I deflected his aim just enough to see the shiv in his fist plunge through the pillow, sheet, and mattress. He tried to jerk it out, but I locked my arm around his wrist and held it so that it stayed embedded. He tried to whipsaw it out of my grasp, neither of us uttering a word, except to expel breath in the struggle. Then h
e lowered his face over our clutching hands and bit me hard at the base of my thumb. He was leaning over me from behind and pinning me as much by my exertion as by his force. I felt the blood flow warm over our locked hands and then I heard his teeth snap on bone as he tried to get a deeper purchase on the flesh of my hand. He was too small a man to hold me long. I measured the distance and drew back my left hand and sent it toward his face. My awkward position kept the blows from being more than jabs, grunting with each, but not losing his hold. The pain was numbing my arm by now, but I was so twisted that I couldn’t change position for better leverage. I began striking him in series of three and then resting. This ludicrous struggle in the darkened cell went on a long time but I couldn’t tell how long we stayed like that—him panting for air, bubbling the saliva and blood that flowed over our joined fists, a ratcheting pain up my arm as he twisted his teeth around the bone of my thumb. Neither of us spoke a word throughout the struggle.

  I was afraid the numbness was going to make the difference, so I gave myself a long moment to imagine how I should do it first and then stopped struggling. That was all the signal he needed because he let go with his teeth, snapped his head out of the way, and joined both hands around the shiv. I felt the air of it passing my face as he prepared to strike once more, both arms upraised with one to guide it downward. In that moment of hesitation, I struck first: one shot to the center of his face, just an oval blur in the dark, but I had shoulder behind it. I missed his nose but caught the upper bridge of his mouth and felt teeth break. He just went backward and struck the toilet and lay there motionless.

  When I could sit upright without fainting, I crawled over to him and felt the pulse along his neck. Weak—but alive.

  That’s how they found him in the morning.

  I was interrogated and put back in isolation during the investigation.

  No charges were filed because the shiv was seen by a rookie guard who wrote it into his report. The fix was in on all the other guards on the shift except one; apparently, he didn’t have the stomach for it, and the man’s cousin was put on this crew at the last minute by the shift captain. If it weren’t for that, I might have faced trumped up charges that would have kept me inside.