By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  And ever since then everyone had been assuming the comment applied to Caryl Chessman! Assuming that Mungo was identifying himself with Chessman publicly for the first time, although still symbolically. How ironic that such a simple statement should work so strongly in Bishop’s behalf.

  Finch was excited and delighted. Even he in his pure scholar’s heart knew that his California Creeper, the now acknowledged equal of Jack Ripper and the other master artists of mass murder, must finally be brought to rest for the good of all.

  And, of course, should it indeed turn out to be Thomas Bishop, he, Amos Finch, expert criminologist and recognized authority on mass murderers, would receive a certain amount of credit and would himself become a footnote in the pages of history. How splendid!

  Any proof yet?

  Kenton was working on it. He would be in touch soon.

  Something in what he had said to Finch suddenly bothered Kenton, something elusive that kept slipping away from him. A word? A fact? What was it? He was missing a connection somewhere. Or was it just his heightened imagination? Was everything his imagination? All of it?

  He would soon see.

  At five minutes past four New York time, he called John Spanner in Hillside, California. Spanner was back in his office in police headquarters. Kenton introduced himself, mentioning Amos Finch and Mr. Hallock in the Los Angeles hospital, and quickly explained his mission. He was doing a Newstime cover story on the escaped Willows madman, who was now in New York. Amos Finch had mentioned the lieutenant as having once held a belief that Thomas Bishop might be the madman rather than Vincent Mungo. He was interested in that belief because of some information that had come to him, even though Finch had also said the current consensus was that it was neither Mungo nor Bishop.

  Spanner wanted to know if Finch had explained how the circumcision angle didn’t work out.

  He had.

  And that there were other expert police authorities, like James Oates of the California Sheriffs Office, who believed it was someone unknown?

  Yes.

  What information had come to Kenton?

  Just some oddities that by themselves meant little but might contribute to a general impression.

  Such as?

  Things like both men born in the same hospital at almost the same time, and Bishop’s father killed by a man who knew Caryl Chessman in San Quentin.

  The police had known about those two, of course.

  As he said, just oddities. The main thing actually was a feeling much like in a chess game, a series of moves that gave evidence of a certain cool precision and brilliance. When he learned that Vincent Mungo did not play chess, he quite naturally turned to other areas. At the moment he was particularly interested in the body found at Willows. Would the lieutenant remember if there had been any recent scars on the body? Knife scars, perhaps, or from some other sharp object, most especially on the arms or shoulders?

  There was a small V-shaped scar on the upper right shoulder that had looked to be fairly recent. How did Kenton know that?

  Only a guess. Mungo told a Willows doctor that he had become blood brothers with the devil. He probably meant it symbolically, but it could also mean the ritual arm cutting and mingling of blood between two men.

  Spanner remembered the scar vividly since he had specifically looked for it when he first tried to prove the body was that of Vincent Mungo. Now he wondered if he had been too hasty. Could it be possible—? No, that was a long time ago. Four months, a lifetime. He wasn’t going to start that business all over again. Absolutely not. It was all settled in his mind. The Willows maniac was not Vincent Mungo or Thomas Bishop but someone unknown to any of them. That was obvious and the New York reporter would soon learn it for himself.

  “Lieutenant Spanner?”

  He pulled his attention back to the phone. “Yes, I’m here, Mr. Kenton.”

  “I asked if you knew where Bishop came from originally. Before Willows, I mean.”

  Spanner shook his head to clear it. Bishop? Bishop had always been at Willows. There was no before. No, that wasn’t right. He had lived with his mother when he was a boy. But Spanner couldn’t remember where and he said so.

  Had he always lived in Los Angeles, perhaps?

  No, that wasn’t right either. It was coming back to Spanner now. Bishop had been born in Los Angeles, but after the father’s death the mother had moved to San Francisco, and then eventually to— Damn! What was the name of that town?

  Spanner told Kenton he couldn’t think of the town but it was about forty miles from Hillside. Just a small country place. As a boy Bishop had lived there with his mother— Justin! That was it. Justin, California. About forty miles west of Hillside and two hundred miles above San Francisco.

  He repeated that to Kenton.

  And after Justin?

  After Jus tin came Willows.

  Kenton didn’t understand. As a boy Bishop had moved with his mother from Los Angeles to Justin—.

  To San Francisco.

  To San Francisco and then to Justin.

  That’s right.

  And after Justin he was put in Willows for good?

  Yes.

  No other mental hospitals?

  Just Willows.

  Kenton tried to figure it out but it didn’t make sense. How old could the boy have been?

  Spanner told him.

  “Ten!” It was more a scream than anything else. “Thomas Bishop was placed in a mental institution when he was ten?”

  He couldn’t believe it. What did the boy do?

  “He killed his mother,” said the lieutenant softly. “Didn’t you know that?”

  IN HIS own tiny office on the twelfth floor of a New York skyscraper, research assistant George Homer was suddenly struck by an odd thought that came out of something he had heard on the dictaphone tapes over the weekened. Kenton had mentioned that Vincent Mungo once talked about chess at Willows, and that it obviously referred to Caryl Chessman.

  But did it?

  Homer loved the game of chess. He had been at it for over forty years, and he found it incomparable for sharpening one’s wits. At the moment he wondered if perhaps he wasn’t being just half-witted instead. Still—

  FOR MANY minutes after his California conversation, Kenton, face immobile and body rigid, stared at the silent phone in front of him. His mind reeled and he fought to bring it back under control. Thomas Bishop had killed his mother at age ten. Bishop! It had been right there under his nose almost from the beginning and he hadn’t seen it. All the conditions were being fulfilled. Everything he had said weeks earlier, everything needed to discover Chess Man’s identity. But he had been so sure of himself that he had lost sight of the most important condition of all. Chess Man was someone who as a boy had killed his mother and was now reliving the experience over and over. The only thing missing was the connection to Caryl Chessman, which had to come through the mother or father. It was there somewhere, it had to be. And he would find it.

  When he moved again it was mechanical. A call to Mel Brown.

  Thomas Bishop killed his mother in California and went to a mental institution. Why wasn’t he on the matricide list of ninety-seven names?

  How old was he when it happened?

  Ten.

  That was why. Under sixteen the court records were sealed shut.

  But the list supposedly included those under sixteen whose matricide made the newspapers at the time.

  Which meant that Bishop’s didn’t make the papers. In the cities they usually print the fact of the crime but not the name of the youth of course. But in small towns they often just list the death as something else. He probably came from one of those.

  Why wasn’t Bishop’s matricide mentioned in all the Vincent Mungo stories that told how he killed a fellow patient at Willows?

  Because newspapers were not allowed afterward to print the fact of matricide if the killer was under sixteen at the time it happened. Sealed records meant exactly that.

&nb
sp; At least his name should have been on the list of released or escaped mental patients in the past five years.

  How could it be? Thomas Bishop was not released from Willows and he did not escape. He was officially listed as dead.

  Dead.

  Kenton walked the halls for a few minutes to clear his head. Something still was twitching in the back of his mind but he couldn’t bring it up. Try! Try! When did it start? All right. It started— It started when he was talking to Amos Finch about Bishop’s being born in the same hospital as Mungo. That’s right. And about his mother living in Los Angeles at the time, and his father getting killed by someone who later came to know Caryl Chessman—

  Kenton froze, his hand suspended at the nape of his neck.

  Bishop’s father killed by someone who knew Chessman.

  Christ!

  The connection!

  That too had been there all the time. He didn’t yet know exactly how it worked but it had to be that, From Chessman to Bishop. Through Don Solis.

  All the pieces were coming together.

  If nothing came along to blow them apart.

  When he got back to his office George Homer was waiting for him, seated at the second desk reading a copy of Batman comics.

  Batman! Kenton felt a sudden chill in the room. That was the latest signature of his prey. “Bat Man,” he had signed himself on the victim’s mirror. Did he think he was fighting the forces of darkness? Or was he a vampire bat that fed on blood?

  Homer looked up and smiled. “Just trying to see why he would choose such a name.” He closed the magazine on the desk. “Not my usual fare, you know.”

  “Got any ideas?”

  “Not about that, no.” He swiveled round as Kenton moved to his own desk nearer the window. “Something else though.”

  “Always willing to listen.”

  “Might mean nothing.”

  “Try me.”

  Homer paused a moment, pursing his lips into a thoughtful frown.

  “Do you play chess?”

  “Not really. Do you?”

  “Yes, I do as a matter of fact. Still haven’t mastered the damn board. But you know something about the game, right?”

  “Sure. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “That’s just what I was thinking before. Most people know about the game even if they don’t play it themselves.”

  “I just don’t have the patience for it. But it’s funny you should bring that up. Chess has been on my mind more in the last few days than almost anything else.”

  “On the tapes you say somewhere that Vincent Mungo mentioned chess to a doctor before he escaped with his only friend, the one he was supposed to have killed. And that it was probably a reference to Caryl Chessman.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, chess is a funny game, you see. It’s got all those strangelooking pieces. Now, I’m sure this is just a coincidence and has nothing to do with what you’re working on. But the pieces are separated by their shapes into different kinds. There’s the King and the Queen, the Rook and the Knight and the Pawn. And there’s also this other piece, you see, called the Bishop—”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” said Kenton and leaped out of the chair. He didn’t know if he kissed Homer or just shook his hand.

  At the moment he was sure of only one thing. Chess Man’s real identity.

  For almost a month he had known who it wasn’t.

  Now suddenly he knew who it was.

  “Bishop!”

  The roar was both an accusation and a shout of triumph.

  “Bishop!”

  Nobody shouted back.

  He still had to be found.

  Twenty

  IN THE eight-day period between November 7 and the 15th, four young New York women—freelance models, students, one a mother, all having a need for extra money or men—disappeared from their homes and regular routines, never to be seen alive again. Their dreadfully mutilated bodies would not be found until the morning of November i6, along with three other fearful remains. The ghastly discovery was to trigger a manhunt unparalleled in the city’s history, a manhunt involving law-enforcement officials and local politicians in bitter acrimony as civil liberties were widely and indiscriminately violated in the first flush of frantic activity, a manhunt embracing thousands of searches and hundreds of seizures by elements ranging from the police to groups of private citizens to the mob. Its like would not be seen again until the Son of Sam killings four years later.

  On that same morning, November 16, in Fresno, California, the owner of a local diner stepped into his Dodge hardtop and turned on the tape deck to Sinatra. As the music flooded the car he began feeling better already.

  At about the same time in San Diego a sedan quietly pulled up to a small one-story house on Valley Road, near the end of the block. Two men slowly got out and walked up to the front door. They seemed in no particular hurry.

  Earlier that Friday morning in New York City, four men rendezvoused in lower Manhattan at a restaurant near the Criminal Courts Building on Centre Street below Canal. From there they proceeded by car to a further destination. Three of the men carried guns. The fourth, quite ordinary in appearance except for his eyes, sat next to the driver and led the silent group. Hands clasped on his lap, he kept wetting his lips in nervous anticipation.

  AS KENTON celebrated on the evening of November 5 his certain knowledge that Chess Man was in reality Thomas Bishop, young madman-about-town, the subject of his celebration prepared for bed. He had to be up and away at 6 A.M. and he needed eight hours of sleep. The necessity itself had always vexed Bishop and, while he enjoyed the moments before sleep when he would lie in bed and plot and plan, he resented the idea of having to spend one-third of his life in dreamy pursuit. Especially since all his dreams were nightmares in which he was usually pursued by the most frightful monsters from the deepest recesses of the subconscious mind, wherein lurked all the hideous ogres of his origin. Oftentimes in the dead of night he would scream himself awake, only to find the demons out of reach until he again lay down and die. Over the years they had never relented, nor had he, and in due time he came to regard the battle as one unto death itself.

  Sliding under the covers on this blustery night, Bishop checked the alarm on the clock by the bed and turned onto his stomach, with his arms curved over his head. He fidgeted for a long while in that position before surrendering to sleep. To a spider near the ceiling the dark shadowy object thrashing below might perhaps have seemed to be some immense beast with rounded body and giant claws, an inca!culable enemy, different and fearsome and not to be fought, but by then Bishop was already locked in mortal combat with his own kind.

  AT MIDNIGHT Adam Kenton had a final drink and went upstairs to bed. He too had a full day planned and though he could operate with five hours’ sleep, a Scotch hangover was not the ideal companion for a workday. With a great deal of persistence and a bit of stumbling he finally maneuvered out of his clothes and into bed. He tried to concentrate on a riddle someone in the bar had posed—Who shaves the town barber if he shaves only those who do not shave themselves?— but he was asleep before he could even repeat it.

  Kenton had told no one of his new knowledge. All evening he had thought about it, weighing its import, wary lest he do the wrong thing. After weeks of frustration and disappointment, false leads and blind alleys and poor assumptions, the impossible had happened. He had succeeded where thousands had failed. With a lot of hard work, some imaginative investigating and a sprinkle of luck, he had discovered the identity of the notorious Chess Man. He was sure of it. Thomas Bishop was his man, his madman, his maniac, his batman, his superman, his manson, his son of man. His Chessman!! He had all the pieces of the puzzle but one, and they all fit. The last piece would fit too.

  Now he awaited the miracle. No! That was not right. He hoped for a miracle. He would work hard for it, give it all he had, his very best. With work and some more luck, maybe a miracle would happen. If the impossible could happen, why no
t a miracle? Against all odds he had found out who Chess Man was. Now he needed to know where Chess Man was. And he would know. By God or the devil himself, he would!

  Meanwhile he would tell no one. Bishop was to be his secret. To tell the police at this point was useless. Without proof it was merely suspicion, and in truth he had no proof What he knew to be a certainty was all in his head, and none of it was demonstrable. The pieces of the puzzle were all shaped by his desire, his passion. They fit because he willed them to fit, because he chose to see them that way. Without him they were shapeless and nonexistent. His certitude was nontransferable.

  A name in the hands of the police would do nothing, except perhaps scare away the fox. The authorities in California had a name, the correct name. At least a few of them did. They suspected Bishop, maybe even knew in their hearts he was the one. Yet nothing was done because they couldn’t get any proof. And he wouldn’t stand any better chance now, especially since there were no pictures of Bishop. Those from his file at the state hospital were gone, according to Spanner. Which meant Bishop had taken them before he left, another audacious move. And which further meant the newspapers didn’t have any to print at the time of the escape, at least none he had seen in the material on Vincent Mungo. A tight drawing could be made for the newspapers and posters but by itself it would mean little. With all the possibilities of beards and hair dyes and even cosmetic facial surgery, positive identification was virtually ruled out.

  No! The fox would have to be caught on its own ground, not scared away. And for that it would have to be made to see the viewpoint of the hound too.

  Kenton hoped he wasn’t just rationalizing his wishes. He wouldn’t want to be responsible for even more women being killed, but he believed he had the best chance of catching his prey. After all, he had been thinking like the fox for a long time now.