By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  The world had changed drastically during his fifteen years of institutional life; television had taught him that. Communications among law-enforcement agencies had improved to the point where the whole country was one big police network. People were more suspicious, everyone carried identification. Even bail bonds and court fines were paid by credit card.

  With the outside so altered, what chance would he have? His picture would be in all the papers, on the TV. Posters would be in every police station wherever he went. People would look at him, recognize him. He wouldn’t be able to get a job or a place to live. Without money or papers he wouldn’t be able to travel far away or even to another country.

  Perhaps he could live all alone in the woods or mountains where there were no people, but he didn’t know how to hunt or cook. And he didn’t know where any woods or mountains were, he didn’t even know if there was a place without people anymore.

  If he dyed his hair and grew a beard he might slip by for a while, but his face would still be the same, his general description still the same. The first time anybody stopped him for any reason, and he couldn’t prove who he was, he would be caught. He would be hunted down like an animal.

  His face set in a grimace, his eyes still closed in thought, Bishop again and again ran through the consequences of his escape as he saw them. Without money or identification, without friends or means to survive, his face and description broadcast everywhere, he would not last as he was for more than a day or two.

  Satisfied in his organizational mind with the summary, he started taking it apart, running each thought over and over in his head until he began to be bothered by something he couldn’t quite catch. Against his will he kept returning to it. As he was, he wouldn’t stand a chance once he did escape. But what if the police were not looking for him, Thomas Bishop, and didn’t care anything about him? What if …

  His eyes shot open in surprise. A smile slowly formed at the corners of his mouth. Suppose he was dead. He blinked in nervous anticipation. If he was dead, no one would search for him. He rubbed his hands together in the dark, thinking furiously. He had it, he had the key.

  For the rest of the night into the early morning hours his mind raced, devising a plan. A hundred times he searched for flaws and found none. It was perfect, he kept telling himself Perfect.

  In the morning Bishop took his two spare uniforms to the tailor’s shop in the basement of the main building to have his name sewn on all the garments. When asked the reason, he said that he wanted everyone to know who he was. The tailor, nodding, told him he would have to be dead first, since the name could be sewn only on the inside. Bishop laughed, said nothing.

  Afterward he spoke with the attendant who sold watches and rings to the patients. For five dollars he bought a birthstone ring, the fake stone set in heavy imitation onyx. He worked the flashy oversized ring onto his right index finger, saying that he would never take it off again. They’d have to kill me first, he announced gravely, letting the guard see the tight fit.

  The next day he exchanged his radio for a small harmonica and a comb. The harmonica was wildly distinctive, silver and red, with a cross on each side panel. He took to humming on it constantly, and he soon came to be identified with it. The pocket comb, shaped like an alligator with a mouth full of teeth, was equally noticeable. He took it out often to comb his hair.

  Over the following weeks Bishop keenly felt the loss of his radio, especially at night lying in his bed, but he shrugged it off Only one more thing to find, he would tell himself Just one more thing and he would be free. Let them laugh; his day was coming.

  During that time a middle-aged man was taking a vacation he had long promised himself and on a certain day in June he returned to California aboard the express running from Chicago to San Francisco. His face, though heavily creased, was bronzed and his body trimmer than it had been in years. Walking the streets to the bus station he decided that he had made a mistake in coming back so soon, that he should have stayed in Colorado for a month. Maybe even two months, he told himself. Or better still, forever. He smiled at the thought.

  A thousand miles to the east, in a pastoral retreat midway between Boulder and Idaho Springs, he had led a momentary existence of an animal in communion with nature. He had fished—his pet passion— and he had strolled lovingly by mountain streams and through wooded hills. It was a perfect life, a life fit for a man along in years, and as he boarded the northbound bus he called himself a fool for leaving it. He hoped and prayed that, at the least, his first weeks back on the job would be easy.

  Within a month Bishop had found the last link in his plan of escape. He was ecstatic, and fought to conceal his joy as he looked at his discovery. The inmate was the same height and approximate weight, had the same body structure and hair color. But his face was vastly different, dark and heavily lined, in contrast to Bishop’s boyishly bland features. He had bushy eyebrows almost hiding small squinting eyes, his nose was large, his mouth set in a scowl. Lines criss-crossed most of his face, deepening the glaze of the pockmarked skin. When he smiled he provoked distaste in others rather than friendliness. He was ugly as sin, and Bishop was overjoyed. His name was Vincent Mungo and he was twentyfour years old.

  Mungo was living in a ward on the second floor of Bishop’s building, one of several recent transfers from other state mental institutions sent because of the experimental unit. They were all considered severe disciplinary problems, and it was hoped that they would benefit from the new unit, the first of its kind in the state, and that others could then be sent.

  Bishop sought his man out immediately, offering him advice and friendship. He found Mungo aggressive, somewhat dull-witted and wholly unpleasant. He also saw him filled with despair and desperate to get out. Mungo had been in and out of mental institutions for much of his childhood and early youth. At nineteen he was finally committed by helpless relatives who could no longer control him or take care of him. Five years and three mental hospitals later he was firmly convinced that he would never leave. His despair led him to an everincreasing hatred of authority but no further. Though readily violent if confronted, he was incapable of the sustained planning required for escape. He had never even thought of it. Until, that is, he met Thomas Bishop.

  Almost from the start Bishop talked of escape to his new friend, for he too was desperate, though his desperation was far more concrete and dangerous. At first in supposed jest, then with increased insistence, he filled Mungo’s head with visions of a new life. He was careful not to mention anything definite, emphasizing that no one else must know of their plan. Only the two of them were to go, only they would be free. “But how?” Mungo kept asking. “How do we do it?” And when he received no answer he would always ask, “When?” Bishop would smile. “Soon,” he would say. “Very soon.”

  While the two men waited, one for the moment and the other for the word, the beginning of summer splashed itself up and down the California coast. In a splendid office atop a building in Los Angeles a man sat waiting for the arrival of two of his staff. He was Derek Layery, West Coast editor and bureau chief of one of the country’s biggest newsweeklies. Fortyish, silver hair crowning a large energetic body that kept itself in athletic trim, Lavery devoted his professional life to speed and facts. Each week he would assign his crew to work up stories of public interest. Though timeliness was the keynote, Lavery often developed articles of some depth on burning issues of the day that he would get out to the public before anybody else.

  One such topic of the moment was capital punishment and Lavery, who was very good at his job, could feel the interest building up. He was determined to get in on the ground floor. What he needed was a kickoff story, and he believed he had found the angle.

  Adam Kenton was the first to arrive for the ten o’clock meeting. He paid the cab driver and hurried into the six-story building.

  “Is he in yet?” he asked the elevator man, gesturing upward with his thumb.

  “Ten o’clock? Are you kidding?”
The operator closed the doors. “He gets in before I do.”

  At the sixth floor Kenton turned left and marched down the hall, passing blowups of magazine covers hanging on the walls, each encased in glass with a small lamp above. The cumulative effect of the covers was obvious to him: nothing is as it seems. To which he often added the thought: Shoot the bastards who did it to us. At the end of the hall he opened the wood-paneled door.

  “You’re late,” said the female voice behind the desk. But the face smiled pleasantly enough. She reached for the phone. “Adam Kenton is here,” she said after a moment. Replacing the receiver, she indicated a door on her right. “He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  Inside Lavery’s office he stopped. Sunlight flooded his eyes. The room was immense, almost the entire east side of the top floor. At one end was a huge living and dining area, carpeted and furnished with expensive sofas and easy chairs and tables, and a tiny kitchen set in an alcove along one side. At the other end, up several steps, was a large work area equipped with two long layout tables, design boards and rows of files stacked against the far wall. Louvered windows ran the entire length of the office and around one side of the living space. In the middle of the room stood a massive oak desk, behind which sat Derek Lavery. He motioned Kenton to a chair.

  “What do you know about capital punishment?” he suddenly asked, his eyes fixed on the younger man.

  Kenton crossed his legs. “Just what anyone knows,” he observed smoothly. “Either it works or it doesn’t work. Either it’s justice or just plain revenge.”

  “Exactly,” replied Lavery. “Nobody knows for sure so everybody has strong feelings about it. And where there’s strong feeling there’s plenty of steam.”

  “And a lot of hot air.”

  “That too.” He gestured toward the papers on his desk. “I’ve been reading up on it. From what I can see this is only the beginning; it’ll get a lot hotter. What we should do,” he lowered his voice, “we should get in on it now.”

  “You got an angle?”

  “Might be.” His face creased but he broke it in mid-smile to scowl. “Let’s wait for Ding. The son of a bitch was never on time in his life.” He pushed his chair back and lit a fresh cigar from the humidor on his desk.

  Kenton sat in thought. It was a good subject if handled right. After years of silent approval and thousands of executions, people were thinking seriously about capital punishment. States were stopping it, even the Supreme Court was calling it cruel and unusual. And people were separating into two warring camps.

  The phone buzzed and Lavery picked it up. Another moment and the door opened to a booming voice.

  “Derek, sorry I’m late.”

  Lascelles Dingbar crossed the room hurriedly and stuffed himself into a chair, his overweight body squealing in delight. He nodded to Kenton, at the same time pulling out an enormous handkerchief and mopping his huge brow. “The weather, you know.”

  “Glad you could make it,” murmured Lavery in mock sarcasm. The two men were good friends, having put in almost twenty years together. Lavery knew Dingbar—Ding to everyone—to be a good legman and tenacious with facts. But he would never trust him to be on time anywhere.

  Ding ignored the remark, squeezing himself further into the chair. Roughly the same age as Lavery, of average height and many pounds overweight, he had a shade of sandy hair left atop a large oval face, usually florid. His hands were soft and flabby, his legs mere pipestems, and he suffered from innumerable disorders to which he paid absolutely no attention. He could move fast if he had to, and he had the knack of putting people at ease, a valuable asset in his work. He was also a very good listener.

  “We were talking about capital punishment.” Derek Lavery placed his cigar carefully in the heart-shaped ashtray and looked at the two men in front of him. Neither spoke.

  Swiftly and expertly he outlined the controversy on the subject in the 1950s and sixties, from the Rosenberg aftermath to Barbara Graham to the civil rights movement and the disproportionate number of black men executed. He was interrupted only by his puffings on the cigar.

  “For twenty years capital punishment has been dying on its own, through disuse. But it was slow and didn’t attract the headlines or the sustained passion.” Puff, puff “And without passion we have no news.” He smiled briefly.

  “In 1952 there were eighty-three executions in this country; in 1965 there were seven. But for the past six years—none. Not one, nothing. Two years ago fifteen states had abolished it. Now the Supreme Court has finished the job.” He clamped the cigar between his teeth. “Only they ain’t.”

  Kenton shifted in his chair, unbuttoned his jacket.

  “I said they haven’t finished the job. All they really did was draw the battle lines. From now on the shit’s going to be flying.”

  “I don’t see it that way,” said Ding, still mopping his brow. “When the Court ruled 5—4 against it last year, seems to me that was the end of capital punishment.”

  “The hell it was.” Lavery shook his head. “A lot of the states will vote to restore the death penalty, some will call for a constitutional amendment. But all that doesn’t interest me. What I’m talking about is the public reaction, that’s where the news will come from.” He put the cigar down. “Look at it this way. The do-gooders think they won and the hard-liners are watching for the first wrong move. There’s maybe a thousand men in jail right now that a lot of people want dead. Meanwhile the killings on the outside go on as they always do. People are afraid to go out at night, they’re afraid to leave their houses. They’re buying dogs and gates and locks, and they’re buying guns too. Every time somebody gets raped or killed, they scream for capital punishment.” He tapped the desk. “The next time some punk knocks off a half dozen people there’ll be holy hell to pay. That’s where the action is, not in some court. And that’s where we should be.”

  Kenton and Ding exchanged glances. Both were certain now that he had something specific in mind.

  “If what I say is right,” continued Lavery, “we should be doing stories on the issue, because it’s timely and it’s passionate.” He blew his nose into a silk handkerchief, which he neatly tucked back in his breast pocket. “What I want for a kickoff is a lead piece on the man who was the big symbol in the sixties.”

  “And who might that be?” asked Ding.

  “Without him,” said Lavery, ignoring the question, “we might still have the death penalty. He pulled all the do-gooders together, he started the whole idea of cruel and unusual punishment. Before he came along there was just an automatic appeal and a call to the governor. He polished the technique of appeals right to the top. He was granted more stays of execution than anybody, and he lived in the death house longer than anybody.”

  No one spoke for a long moment. Finally Kenton was unable to contain his curiosity. “What happened to him?” he blurted out.

  “He was executed.” Ding sighed, looked at Lavery. “Chessman?”

  “Caryl Chessman,” Lavery said softly.

  The room darkened as passing clouds hid the sun. After a while Ding sighed again, a long low moan of resignation. “It was a long time ago,” he whispered.

  “Thirteen years,” replied Lavery. “And twelve years before that on death row. But I don’t want a rehash, I want a fresh look at the crime and those twelve years. The angle is capital punishment. You know what I mean,” he said, glancing at Ding. “‘Was Caryl Chessman a Victim of Capital Punishment?’ Something like that.”

  “I just remember the name. Who did he kill?” asked Kenton.

  Lavery turned to him. “That’s just the point. He didn’t kill anybody. That’s why it’s a good lead story. His death got a lot of people mad and paved the way for abolishing the death penalty. That’s the angle you use: he died for nothing but his death helped others to live.”

  “I don’t understand. If he didn’t kill anybody—”

  “He was convicted,” interrupted Ding, “of robbery, rape and kidna
pping with intent to commit bodily harm. In those days, after the Lindbergh thing, that was worth execution. But his kidnapping, if I remember right,” he turned back to Lavery, “was just moving the woman someplace else to rape her.”

  “That’s right.” Lavery tapped the desk with his finger. “He killed nobody. His crime wasn’t worth execution. And he faced death for twelve long years.”

  Another silence filled the room. At length Lavery spoke. “There’s another thing you should know. Right up to the end Chessman claimed he was innocent. Now, I don’t give a damn if he was guilty or not, but”—he stopped to emphasize the word—”if we could cast doubt on his guilt, any doubt at all, we’d have not only the fact that the crime wasn’t worth death but maybe he didn’t even do it. Just remember that,” he added calmly, “when you write it up.”

  “What’s the time on it?”

  “None,” snapped Lavery. “I want it running in four weeks. You got one, that’s all.”

  Kenton sucked in his breath, looked over at Ding who nodded back. They had worked together on several stories and had attended many of Lavery’s briefings. When he wanted something that quickly it usually meant he was determined to go all the way with it, no matter what. They were visibly impressed.

  “Actually,” continued Lavery, “the idea came to me last month when I heard a radio show about capital punishment. They mentioned Chessman. Since then I’ve been trying to find the right lead, and yesterday it hit me. Chessman was perfect.” He shoved a folder toward Kenton. “There’s a transcript of the trial and a few other things the research people dug up. Like Ding says, it was a long time ago.”

  “That’s all we got?”

  “That’s all we got now,” said Lavery. “You get more.” He leaned back in the Barclay Lounger, cigar in hand.