Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (39 page)

“It was Jacob Whittaker. Did you know him?”

Elliott remained silent. There was nothing in his expression, nothing in his eyes, that gave me an answer to my question.

“You didn’t know him, then?” I asked, watching him closely.

“Isn’t that what I just didn’t say?” His eyes glittered at his own grammatical joke, and then turned hard. “How would I know if I knew him? I’m an inmate in an insane asylum.”

We were so close that when he spoke the air from his dead breath filled my nostrils. Placing my hand on his forearm, I moved closer still.

“That’s right, Elliott, you’re an inmate in an insane asylum.

But you’re not insane, are you? You never were. They twisted everything up—Jeffries and your wife. They pushed you as far as you could go: They made you crazy—not like the people who are supposed to be here—just enough to drive you over the edge. You had a breakdown, a nervous breakdown, but you weren’t insane.

You might not have known what you were doing when you came to my office waving that gun around, but you were not out of your mind. Remember when you were a lawyer? Remember the definition? A mental disease or defect: the inability to control your own actions, the inability to distinguish the difference between right and wrong. You weren’t insane then, and you’re not insane now.”

He slipped his arm from underneath my hand, glanced at me, an amused expression on his face, and then looked away. He shook his head and began to laugh.

“And all this time I thought I was a mental patient. I must have been—what?—insane to have thought so.” He scratched his chin and then put his finger between his teeth, gnawing at the edge of it where the skin covers the nail. Behind half-closed lids, his eyes darted from side to side.

“Do you think you’re insane, Elliott?” I asked in an even tone.

His eyes came to a rest, and he stopped chewing on his finger. After a deep breath he no longer seemed quite so agitated or distracted. A wry expression spread along his mouth.

“Dr. Friedman says it’s so. Paranoid schizophrenia: signed, sealed, delivered—a certified nut case.”

“I didn’t ask you that. I asked what you thought.” Pausing, I peered into his eyes, watching for a spark, a glimmer, some sign that he might decide to trust me. “Do you think you’re insane?”

He raised his head and looked around at the patients loung-ing in different parts of the vast white room. “Does anyone think they’re insane? It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? All of you out there think you’re sane, but does that mean all of us in here think we’re not? What difference does it make, anyway? All that counts is that you—I mean the people who put us here, the people in your world—think we aren’t—sane, that is.”

Our eyes were locked together. “Are you sure of that? Are you sure that’s what they thought when they sent you here?”

Alert and expectant, he waited for an explanation, and I wondered if he needed one.

“I read the file, Elliott: the court file, the record, such as it is, of the case, your case, the one in which you were charged with attempted murder, the one in which you entered a plea of guilty but insane. Do you remember that? Do you remember entering that plea? Do you remember anything about that day at all?”

He stared at me with a stern expression, and then turned his head and looked past me. He held himself rigidly erect, the only movement the slight rustle of his thick mustache as the breath passed out of his wide nostrils.

“Do you remember your lawyer—the one Calvin Jeffries hired for you—Asa Bartram? You told me before you didn’t know who the lawyer was who represented you. But you did know, didn’t you? He was Jeffries’s law partner; he took care of Jeffries’s business. You had to have known that, and if you knew that, you had to know that Asa never practiced criminal law in his life!”

His eyes stayed fixed in that rigid forward stare, as if he could ignore me at will. Angrily, I jumped up from the chair and wheeled around into the one directly opposite him. With all the force I could summon, I brought my arm down on the table, and pushed my face as far toward him as I could.

“Asa Bartram was not a criminal lawyer, and you knew it. Jeffries had him take the case, and you knew that, too. What else did you know? What else was going on? What did they tell you was going to happen to you?”

The harsh severity of that unforgiving stare gave way to a look of almost amused disdain. “Asa was old then; he must be ancient now. Tell me, do they still let him leave his car under that NO

PARKING sign in front of his building?”

The question was unimportant—trivial even—but whether it was a premonition, or just an instinct born of years of keeping my own counsel, I would not tell him. Besides, I was here to get answers, not give them.

“What did Jeffries tell you—that the fix was in? Did he tell you that you’d be sent here, to the hospital, and that you would be out in a few months?”

I could see Jeffries in my mind, giving assurances, making promises, and all of it with that confident sense of inevitability with which he regularly disguised his deceptions.

“Did he tell you that you didn’t have anything to worry about—

that he’d take care of everything?”

Elliott’s gaze seemed to soften and draw inward. He sank into the chair and laced his fingers together. “I always trusted Calvin Jeffries,” he said with a small, self-deprecating smile. “Even when I was in my right mind.”

That was all he was going to say about it. I asked him about the psychiatric report, the one without which he could never have been committed in the first place. He claimed not to remember anything about it.

“Do you remember the doctor?”

“No,” he said, tapping his thumbs together.

“His name?”

“No.”

“Anything about him?”

“No.”

“Where was it done?”

“I was in jail at the time.”

“Was it done there?”

“I suppose.”

“Are you sure there was one?”

He stopped what he was doing and raised his head. “You read the file.”

“Part of it is under seal.”

“Oh,” he said with a show of indifference.

“I came here to see you, Elliott, because a second judge has been murdered. Did you know about it?”

His lifted his head and twisted it a quarter turn away. “Of course I know that. After all, I’m completely sane, aren’t I? I know everything. What judge?”

“The judge who sent you here: Quincy Griswald. Remember him?”

He was watching me, waiting to see where I was going with this. Or was he perhaps testing me, seeing how far I could get without his help?

“Jeffries is murdered in the courthouse parking lot, stabbed to death by a patient who escaped from here. The police get an anonymous call telling them where they can find the killer. The killer confesses and then, that same night, smashes his brains out on the concrete floor of his jail cell.” I was leaning forward, my weight on my arms, peering deep into Elliott’s eyes. “There’s no record he ever knew Jeffries. Maybe it’s just a random act and it’s only a coincidence he spent years in this place with you.”

There was no reaction, nothing to betray what Elliott was thinking, if he was thinking anything at all.

“Then Quincy Griswald is murdered, murdered in the same place and in almost exactly the same way. Everyone thinks it’s a copycat killer, but there’s another anonymous call, and another arrest is made in the same place as the first one. Only this time they arrest the wrong man, someone who has the murder weapon because the real killer gave it to him. And the real killer, like the killer of Calvin Jeffries, is an escaped mental patient. Two murders, two killers, both of them escaped from here, and the only thing that links both the victims and the killers together is you, Elliott, just you.

“Jeffries took everything away from you, and Griswald helped him do it—that is the only thing that links them together, the only thing that supplies a motive for a double homicide. Neither killer had any connection with his victim. You’re the one who would have wanted them dead, and you’re the only one who could have put those two up to it.”

His expression did not change. He sat there, the detached observer, perfectly content to listen, as if nothing I said had anything directly to do with him. I pushed back from the table and locked my hands around my upraised knee.

“I’m not sure how you managed it, but I must tell you,” I said admiringly, “in all the years I’ve practiced law, it’s the most ingenious thing I’ve ever seen. It isn’t just a perfect crime. It’s better than that. It’s the perfect defense: You can’t be held responsible for anything. You’re insane, aren’t you? The state says so. They can’t turn around and say you’re not: You’re locked up in the hospital for the criminally insane.”

Elliott listened intently, rubbing his index finger back and forth across his lower lip. “Why would I need that defense, or any other? What crimes would I have committed?”

I thought he must have forgotten one of the most basic principles of criminal responsibility. “Solicitation carries the same penalty as the crime solicited.”

He raised his thick eyebrows. “Solicitation requires a specific request for a specific act.” I looked at him, unsure of what he meant. “Besides,” he went on, “these two killers you speak of were both escaped mental patients, correct? Then tell me: How do you go about soliciting someone insane to do anything?”

I had not thought of it, and with a flash of intuition, he saw it. He sat up and leaned forward. “Have you ever thought about how easily people are led to believe things that have no rational foundation at all—religion, for example—and not just this religion, or that religion, but all religions? Have you thought about the way some people believe the same thing is evil that other people believe is good? Or about the way some people are willing to die for what they believe, while other people think it’s lu-dicrous, unless, of course, it is for what they believe in?”

The idea seemed to ignite something inside him. His eyes grew larger, more intense, and he sat straight up, once again rigid and erect, the veins throbbing in his neck. And then it happened, the same thing that had happened when I had been here before, that terrifying, inexplicable lapse into complete irrationality.

“Everyone has to believe … grieve … weave … heave …

achieve …” He stopped, his eyes wide open, while his long lashes beat down over them, measuring the rhythm of his now silent speech. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over. “What makes you think whoever killed Griswald was a patient here?” he asked, without any apparent awareness of what he had just been doing.

I had something else on my mind, something I wanted to leave him with. “Don’t you think it would be difficult to accomplish something so ingenious and never have anyone know about it?

Do you really think it would be enough to know that you had gotten away with a remarkable act of revenge when everyone else thought you were still either insane or the pathetic victim of someone much smarter?”

His head jerked up and his eyes narrowed. “Do you know why people seek revenge? It isn’t to even the score, or to settle things once and for all; it isn’t even to punish. It’s to do the one thing everyone claims you can never do: change the past.” His eyes flared open. “Yes, to change the past. You think that’s impossible? You think you can never change the past?” He gritted his teeth, and in three spastic bursts pulled his lips back as far as they would go. “The past is the only thing you can change. Turn away from the perspective of the present, look ahead into the future, then look back and correct what the past will be. That’s what revenge accomplishes. You can think of yourself as a victim because of what was done to you; or you can think of yourself in quite a different light because of what you did to them.”

He cocked his head, like someone catching the sound of something far off in the distance. “If I were condemned to live my life over and over again, always the same thing, forever, what do you think I would want it to be? What Jeffries did to me, or—just for the sake of argument—what I did to him?”

“Just for the sake of argument?” I asked skeptically.

“For the sake of argument, because, again, what makes you think whoever killed Judge Griswald was a patient here?”

“Because it’s the only way it could have happened.”

“Ah, the only way if I was the one who somehow persuaded two different mental patients to commit two different murders.

And tell me, my old friend, just who is this second murderer, this second patient you think I sent out into your world to extract this little measure of revenge?”

Friedman had denied that anyone after Whittaker had escaped, but I did not believe him.

“The history teacher, the one who does tricks with numbers, the one who slashed someone’s throat in Portland because he thought he was in Vietnam—the one who asks permission to go to the bathroom.”

He looked over my head, scanning the room. “You mean him?”

he asked as I turned around to see where he was looking. On the other side of the room, the patient I was certain had escaped, the one I knew had killed Quincy Griswald and given Danny the knife, the one I was sure had drowned in the river, was standing next to the orderly, waiting to be taken to the bathroom.

Twenty-three

_______

Idrove directly from the state hospital to the downtown bridge where I had lived for a night and a day as one of the homeless, but I could not find him. The only witness I had to the identity, and even to the very existence, of the man who had given the knife to my innocent client had disappeared, moved on to some other temporary encampment, vanished into the vast migration that, right in front of our eyes, took place every night and every day. I had been so certain, so confident that I knew who had done it and why; and now, as I sat listening to the prosecution make its opening statement, I wondered if I knew anything at all.

Cassandra Loescher was clear, precise, every word so freighted with moral outrage that you might have thought the defendant had been charged with the murder of his mother rather than the killing of someone he never knew. I had heard the same thing a hundred times before and seen it in a dozen different dreams.