Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (38 page)

“Why do you want to see Elliott again?” he asked presently, his attention concentrated on the quick, abrupt movement of his thumbs.

He could have asked that question anytime during the last three weeks. Helen had tried to get him on the phone every day, and every day there had been some new excuse, some new reason why Dr. Friedman had not been able to return any of the calls that had been made.

“I don’t care if I see Elliott or not.” I turned over the fingers of my right hand and pretended to study my nails. “I came to see you.”

His lashes stopped blinking. Slowly, he lifted his eyes. “You came to see me?”

I examined my nails more closely. “Yes, to see you.” I closed my fingers into a fist and shoved it down next to my leg. “Do you remember a patient by the name of Jacob Whittaker?”

He turned the swivel chair and placed both hands on top of the desk. “You mean the patient who murdered the judge?”

“Yes—the judge, Calvin Jeffries: the judge who married Elliott Winston’s wife. You remember: We talked about him when I was here before.”

Tapping his fingers together, he gave me a look meant to suggest that he was far too busy to remember much of anything we might have discussed.

“You remember,” I said, returning his look with one that said I did not believe him.

“Yes, of course. The name escaped me,” he said, brushing it off. “What would you like to know about him? There isn’t much I can tell you, I’m afraid. He wasn’t one of my patients.”

“Whose patient was he?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to check.”

“You didn’t know him at all?”

“No, not directly. You have to understand, Mr. Antonelli. We have hundreds of patients, and we’re constantly getting new ones.”

I leaned forward and looked straight at him. “But you knew that he had escaped?”

“No, actually I didn’t. You see, strictly speaking, he didn’t escape. He was out on a pass and that time he didn’t come back.”

“That time? You mean he had been out before?”

Friedman seemed surprised that I had even asked. “Yes, of course. Whittaker had been here for years. He was quite stable—

so long as he stayed on his medication. He was in the process of being transitioned back into the community.” He hesitated before he added, “It had not been an entirely smooth transition.

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.