By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  Kenton was not himself a collector, except of papers perhaps, and he fully intended to keep Sara Bishop’s pages about her life. Unless her son wanted them. They belonged to him.

  And after him?

  After Bishop there was only a blind and paralyzed paternal grandmother in Texas who had never seen the boy. He had already checked.

  There was no one else. Thomas Bishop had no known brothers or sisters. And of course no children of his own.

  He was the last of a line.

  A line of warrior kings, thought Kenton in his own paranoiac fantasy. A noble and savage breed. And very rare.

  Thank God, said his logical mind.

  Amen, said the rest of him.

  ON THAT same morning John Perrone phoned near Spokane, Washington, after having taken several days to decide that he owed the call to his close friend and mentor. In a few moments he was speaking to Samuel Rintelcane himself. Though almost a generation apart in age, the two men shared an ideological viewpoint that encompassed not only political and economic outlooks but social morality as well. It was Sam Rintelcane who had given the young Perrone his first boost up the ladder. And it was the same man who had once hoped that John Perrone would marry his daughter. It was not to be.

  Now Perrone had to tell his good friend the bad news. Senator Stoner, his son-in-law, was about to be the subject of an investigative piece in Newstime that would probably crush any hopes for national prominence, if not do worse. He was apparently involved in some illegal business deals, among other things. There was a tape of him talking about himself and others, evidently made by a mistress. It was easily enough to warrant a further investigation of the senator by state governmental agencies.

  Perrone said he would, naturally, try to keep the sexual aspects out of the story, in regard for Helena and the family, but as for the rest—

  Rintelcane understood, His son-in-law had been stupid and had been caught. If Newstime didn’t publish the facts, someone else would, He was grateful that Perrone had told him in advance. Did he have permission to prepare his daughter for the shock?

  Of course. And Helena should use her judgment about letting the senator know ahead of publication. Whatever she decided was all right.

  It was a sad moment and both men wondered how the revelations would affect the senator’s wife. She had always been passive and unassuming, content to live in her husband’s shadow. She was not a strong woman, or so they believed.

  Neither one knew how much Helena Stoner had already withstood in her sixteen years of marriage to a profligate and inordinately ambitious man. Or just how strong she really was behind her quiet demeanor.

  BY EVENING a preliminary report was in on Carl Pandel, Jr. He evidently wasn’t dangerous or even crazy, at least by New York standards. Doctors at Bellevue suggested he was still blaming himself for his wife’s suicide two years earlier. They expected him to snap out of it sooner or later, Until then, his was a relatively harmless delusion except for the trouble it caused others. He was, they found, incapable of hurting anyone. He loved animals and children and, though shy, enjoyed normal relationships with his male friends.

  They intended to hold him for another week or so, just to make certain of their findings. But his confession that he was the muchsought mass murderer of women was obviously based on total fantasy.

  The Bellevue doctors further suggested that he be gently admonished and dismissed should his harmless delusion cause him again to confess to such killings. It was, they stressed, not an unusual occurrence for a person suffering irreconcilable guilt over the death of a loved one. In time those feelings would disappear and with them would go the delusion and other manifestations.

  Kenton looked over the report given him by the inspector. It sounded reasonable to him, and just about what he had expected.

  “I hope this hasn’t taken you from the real pursuit,” he said laconically.

  Dimitri grunted in response. It had been five days since their fearsome discovery on Greene Street, and still no trace of Chess Man. Not a word, a whisper, a warning. Nothing. He had disappeared again. The inspector said as much.

  “Not disappeared,” corrected Kenton, “covered himself, like the chameleon.”

  “Covered himself with what?”

  “With another identity.”

  Dimitri wheezed. How many identities could one man have? And how did he get them all? By the time police found one he was into another. It was uncanny, unnatural.

  “Got any suggestions?” he asked Kenton, exasperated.

  No suggestions. No ideas. At least not for anyone’s ears at the moment. He had written the Chess Man piece and was now working on Stoner. That was crucial, In between he tried to see things the way Bishop would, He had a new name, that much was certain. Probably a New York name. How did he get it? From local outlets. Didn’t Fred Grimes say this was the center for the fake-identity racket? Or he could’ve stolen somebody’s wallet at the beach. In November? So a steam bath, or a gym, or a sex orgy. Maybe he was a homosexual. Easy enough to get a wallet that way. Or he could’ve gone to a cemetery and just picked out a name. Or the death notices in local papers. Or gossip in a bar. Or half a hundred ways a clever man could figure out. And whatever else he was, Thomas Bishop was a clever man. So clever he seemed to be able to get whatever he needed.

  But how did he get physical possession if it wasn’t bought or stolen? He would need an address but not a mail drop again. Too risky. Had to be where he lived, except there was no place for him to live in the city. Not with any degree of safety. So where would he go? What would he do? Kenton didn’t know. He didn’t have the answers, not yet anyway.

  “No suggestions,” he said quietly to Dimitri.

  DEAN GARDNER returned to Washington on Wednesday from a Republican policy committee meeting in California. Many matters awaited his attention, among them the Newstime editorial calling for the President to resign. The magazine was not the first to do so, nor would it be the last; of that Gardner was certain. Yet it was a particularly severe blow to the administration because of Newstime‘s prestige and its traditional Republican identification. The President was angry and, thought Gardner, for good reason. It was a vicious stab in the back and indicative of the moral decay sweeping the country. When people of similar interests didn’t stick together, something was radically wrong.

  Especially galling to Dean Gardner was the fact that his little power play via Ned Robbins hadn’t worked. He wasn’t accustomed to failure. The Washington political scene did not pay off for failure, only success. He would quickly line up a dozen newspaper and magazine endorsements of the administration, to repair some of the damage. And he would get back at Newstime for its treachery. By God, he would! He’d investigate every one of the bastards who ran it, right down to the color of their underwear. Everyone working on the maniac story too; that had started the whole thing. There must be plenty they were doing wrong. Everybody did wrong!

  He would call Treasury. The IRS had a big field force in New York. So did the FBI, and a few other agencies he could think of for that kind of work, All would be pleased to accommodate the President of the United States. Pleased or else.

  CARL HANSUN listened as his contact in New York told him of his son. The boy was in Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward but was due to be released in a day or two on the signature of a private psychiatrist, whom he was to visit, That was already in the works. He wanted to continue living in New York and had no intentions of returning to Idaho at the present time. In fact, he was distressed that his family knew of his confession. Apparently it was an aberration caused by lingering guilt over his wife’s death. Such things, the contact had been told, often happen to people but disappear in time.

  Wasn’t there any way to get him home?

  Evidently not at the moment,

  Anything he needed?

  Nothing beyond the usual. There would be the added doctor and lawyer fees of course. But the boy seemed in good spirits. He had his apartment and
his friends and he looked forward to being with them again.

  Carl Hansun was worried about his son. He didn’t understand how anyone could confess to killing women. Who would want to kill them? Without women, where was the joy of life? He had been in the army and he had seen what life without them did to men. It brutalized them, took away the civilized part of their nature, turned them into animals. Without women to give softness and beauty to life, what good was it all?

  Now his own son confessed to killing them. That meant he had thought about it. Didn’t it?

  Or maybe he still just felt guilty about his wife, like the doctors said. But nobody blamed him, The girl was moody, high-strung. She was so insecure she needed constant reassurance and attention, more than any man could give. She always felt betrayed since no man could live entirely for her. Hansun had warned his son. The girl was trouble. Her life was torment and she would make his life the same. But the boy loved her, wanted her, needed her. He wouldn’t listen. They got married and two years later she was dead and he was locked up in California, where his father couldn’t even visit him. But he finally got the boy home again, and eventually his mind had cleared.

  Now this.

  Hansun couldn’t understand it. Where did guilt feelings come from? He never felt guilty even when he was wrong. Maybe the boy was just too sensitive and would grow out of it. He thought of his younger son. Nothing sensitive about him, he’d fight tigers. Just like his father. Had a good head for business too.

  Meanwhile his people in New York were taking care of things. He was a power in the Northwest but New York was different; somebody might get curious about him. He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary to go there. The boy should come home anyway. What the hell could he do in New York he couldn’t do in Idaho?

  SOMETIME LATE that afternoon a man in Miami returned to his beach locker to find his wallet missing. Nothing else had been taken—not his expensive ring or his electronic watch. There was little money in the wallet; he knew better of course. Still, it had all his identification. He cursed loudly as he banged the locker door shut.

  BY FRIDAY, Adam Kenton was well into his exposé of State Senator Jonathan Stoner of California. He expected to be finished by Monday’s deadline. Once the story became public, he was sure the newspapers would pick it up and continue the investigation. He had no personal animosity toward Stoner—they had never met—but he regarded the senator as unfit for public office because he had abused his power and privileges. A miniature White House, Kenton had written somewhere in the article; and he intended to hound all such men out of office. He didn’t regard that as an abuse of his power.

  Two days earlier the top executives of the Newstime communications combine had met briefly in the twentyfifth floor boardroom and voted to divest themselves of all interests in the Western Holding Company. A forthcoming magazine piece on a California state senator would name one of Western’s operations as buying political favors and would call for an investigation. The staff writer of the article knew of the corporate investments and had recommended immediate and total divestiture.

  To protect their vital concern in a huge future source of wood pulp, an equal amount of equity would be purchased in Western Holding through Crane-Morris, a Colorado-based mining group controlled by Globe Packaging, Midwest packer of foodstuffs. Globe was itself a joint venture of Great Lakes Shipping and the Trinity Foundation. Three of the five-member Trinity board of directors were Newstime executives, including James Mackenzie. And Great Lakes Shipping, a Delaware corporation, was owned outright by James Mackenzie’s wife’s family.

  The meeting lasted only fifteen minutes, after which several members repaired to the executive dining room. Martin Dunlop was not among them. He was chairing a discussion at the Columbia University School of Journalism on the opportunities for investigative reporting.

  BEFORE HE went fishing on Saturday, John Spanner read of his nemesis in the latest issue of Newstime. He found himself mentioned a number of times in the early part of the article. Kenton had given him full credit for his deductions and surmises; he had seen through some of Bishop’s incredible plot. But not all of it, nowhere near all of it. As Kenton fitted the pieces together, as the various parts of the puzzle took shape, the complexity slowly became evident. The sheer brilliance of the mind behind the scheme was staggering. Even at that early stage all the moves had already been planned.

  As Spanner read on he began to see Thomas Bishop, the maddened child who had killed his mother, growing to young manhood, still in pain, still insane, Only by then he had learned to conceal his homicidal urges, to control his emotions. He had fooled everybody, all the doctors. And after his escape, the police too. Even him. Lieutenant John Spanner, fooled by a twentyfive-year-old mental patient who had spent almost his entire life behind walls. And who just incidentally was the most imaginative and resourceful mass murderer of modern times, as Kenton stated in the article.

  Spanner closed the magazine. He didn’t feel bad at all. Not really. He had been up against the best.

  What it had needed finally was someone not so set in police ways, someone with equal imagination, to work it out. Adam Kenton had done it, he had crashed through and almost got the killer of women.

  Almost.

  The one word that stood between success and failure.

  In truth, Spanner didn’t give the New York police much of a chance. They were casting for trout in a stream that held a shark. And he had strong doubts about Kenton doing any better. Bishop had made mistakes he wouldn’t be likely to make again. Not unless—.

  There was one flaw in Bishop’s planning, as Spanner saw it. His ego, the same monstrous ego of all such maniacal minds. Spanner had come across it before in his own police work and had occasionally been able to use it against his prey. Perhaps Kenton could do the same. Or by now Bishop might be so sure of himself he would try anything, risk anything.

  The lieutenant refused to dwell on the implications of such a thought.

  OVER THE weekend the Chess Man piece in Newstime was read as well by others who were involved in the search, or had been once. In his Berkeley home Amos Finch was delighted with Kenton’s progress thus far. The man had made some imaginative moves to get at the truth, moves Finch himself could have made, to be sure, with the proper information and resources. But he was not an envious man. Having finally decided that his latest and greatest crank artist must be caught, Finch waited anxiously. He wished only that Bishop could be captured alive. It would be like finding a living dinosaur or a creature from another galaxy. The knowledge gained from such an encounter, should Bishop talk, would be of great benefit to all, and not least to Amos Finch, who would be writing the definitive study of the man’s life and deeds. But he knew better than to expect the impossible.

  In Los Angeles, Ding thought the reporting superb, which was only natural since he had started the whole thing with Kenton back in July when they worked on the Caryl Chessman story. He sometimes found himself wishing he had been chosen for the assignment—it was a reporter’s dream. But he was strictly the California type, wouldn’t know how to operate in New York and wasn’t about to try.

  NEAR THE Oregon border Dr. Baylor read of Thomas Bishop without emotion. Having tendered his resignation to the proper authorities, he was no longer involved. In six short weeks he and his wife would be free to leave the second-rate institution, the wretched town, the uncomfortable house. They would travel and enjoy life again, meet new people. The world was a big place, and Henry Baylor had his fill of mental defectives and criminal minds. In the future he would deal only with normal people who had minor neuroses. That would be the extent of his private practice.

  Meanwhile he naturally wished success to the police and all those concerned with the apprehension of Bishop. Personally, he didn’t think the madman would ever be caught. If anything, he expected Bishop finally to kill himself, or allow himself to be killed—which amounted to the same thing—in one last grandiose public display of alienation and contem
pt. What the authorities didn’t seem to understand was that his present course of action was self-destructive as well. Degeneration was taking place and he would wind down. It was only a question of time. No one was totally alienated from his own species, no matter how bizarre the conduct. That unconscious thread of species survival that ran through all humans was Bishop’s Achilles’ heel and would finally be his undoing, even if nothing else intervened.

  Dr. Baylor was certain of that. It was what eventually stopped all true mass murderers, from a Hitler to a Bishop. Drove them to destruction or irrational madness leading to the same thing. The degenerative process, which was cumulative and could not be controlled. A species could not kill its own kind indefinitely and indiscriminately. That was abhorrent to nature. Which was why national leaders in wartime had to tell citizens that the enemy was not human. They were fiends, devils, demons, gooks, savages. Anything but human. But even then the reaction set in sooner or later.

  In the matter of individual mass murderers Baylor found the evidence overwhelming. He knew, for example, who Jack the Ripper was and why he suddenly stopped his horrific slaughter of women. The murders stopped because the degenerative process finally overcame him after an incredibly satanic slaying, and he committed suicide. Weighted his pockets with stones and jumped in the Thames River, where his decomposed body was found on December 31, 1888, some seven weeks after the last murder.

  The name of Jack the Ripper was Montague John Druitt.

  Baylor even knew why he had killed women. His father left a large estate to three daughters instead of to him, forcing him to teach school, which he hated. And his mother went insane and he believed he was following in her footsteps. Inheriting nothing from his father and only insanity from his mother, blaming all his misfortune on women but not being able to touch his mother or sisters, he turned to other, more accessible women, women of the streets. Each murder became more horrible, each mutilation more gruesome, until he lost control entirely with the body of Mary Kelly. Self-destruction followed.