By Reason of Insanity (49 page)

“What’s his name?”

“You’re not going to believe it.”

“Try me.”

“Louis Terranova.”

The name meant nothing. “So?”

“I forgot you writers don’t read,” said Brown with a touch of exasperation in his voice. “Terranova was the name of the man Caryl Chessman claimed was the real Red Light Bandit twentyfive years ago.”

“Good God!”

“That’s what I said. Could be just a coincidence, though. Lots of people with the name. Anyway, he’s forty-seven now. Which would’ve made him twenty-two in Chessman’s time. Killed his mother in 1950 when he was twentyfour. Been in the mental wards the last twenty-two years till his escape a year ago.”

“Where’d he crash out?”

“Lakeland. It’s down around—”

“I know it.”

“You want me to get a background on him?”

“Everything you can.”

“What about the figures on the matricides? You need them?”

Kenton sighed in disappointment. “No. Between the ones still in and those who’ve died or are too old or sick, there’s nothing left.”

“Except maybe Terranova.”

“You sure you got all of them for those years?”

“All the recorded ones, which may not be the same thing. Those who stood trial and were convicted and sent to prison, those who were found innocent by reason of insanity and sent to hospitals, those who were declared incompetent to stand trial and were put away. For these last, the information came from court sources rather than the state mental health agencies. Naturally, as with any unofficial count, something could slip through.”

“What about the kids under sixteen?”

“That’s a different story. There the court records themselves are sealed tight, so all information had to come originally from newspaper accounts at the time it happened. The papers wouldn’t print the kids’ names but they usually give the sex and age, and that can then be compared against the names of surviving children. Believe it or not, there are people who make a living doing such things for people like you.”

“Any chance of a killing like that missing the papers?”

Mel Brown shrugged in reflex on his end of the phone. “Anything’s possible. Especially in California.”

At 10:30 Doris brought the list of mental institutions in which Vincent Mungo had been placed during his life. There were five. Atascadero, Willows, Lakeland, Valley River and Tremont. Plus the psychiatric divisions of the Stockton and San Francisco General hospitals. All with dates of commitment and names of the doctors who attended him. Kenton saw that one of them was Lakeland, from which Louis Terranova had escaped the year before. He looked at the dates of Mungo’s stay at Lakeland. It included all of 1972.

Maybe he was getting lucky.

For the next half hour he talked into the dictaphone machine, bringing himself up to date. He took calls from Long Island and Manhattan. Long Island would be delivering at 12:30 P.M. The usual arrangement. Kenton had to think a moment—it was more than a year since he had used the service. Manhattan wanted to know where to deliver a package. He named the St. Moritz at nine o’clock that evening, Suite 1410.

Fred Grimes came in with $9,000 cash which Kenton put in the safe. He had met John Perrone in the hall upstairs. Maybe Kenton should give him a ring. Also, he had talked to some people about identity papers the fake Vincent Mungo might seek. Without a picture it was virtually impossible to watch for him. There were just too many men in New York buying phony sets of identification every day. The city was the center of the trade for the whole country plus everybody coming in from Europe. With nothing to go on, nothing could be done. Sorry.

Kenton took it in stride. There were other lines to throw out. One was the mailing address. Assuming Mungo wanted a new identity, he would need somewhere to which things could be sent. He wouldn’t use wherever he was staying, most likely a cheap hotel or rooming house since none of the women he killed had much money. It would make him too conspicuous and might lead to suspicions. And he couldn’t rent a post office box because he’d have to give a home address, which had to be verified by the local mailman. His best bet would be a mail drop, of which there were many around the city. Mostly small stores and shops that took in mail for clients, who usually paid by the month. They would come in to pick up their mail inconspicuously, and then quickly disappear until their next visit. Mail drops were not normally places of social gathering, nor were the clients generally very friendly. It was the type of operation that might appeal to his prey, and Kenton carefully explained the idea to Grimes.

“What we need is just the names of those who signed up this week, that’s all, and the addresses they gave. Then we hire a dozen private detectives to check them out quickly. A look at them would be enough. We eliminate all but the young white males. Those we go after one by one. Can’t be that many in a given week.”

“Suppose he doesn’t sign up till next week? Or next month? Maybe he wants to rest a while.”

“No, his pattern is to do everything necessary as soon as possible. He’s imaginative and thorough and very practical. That’s what has kept him safe all this time and he knows it. There’d be no reason for him to change the pattern.” He glanced over the material on his desk. “I’ve been reading and writing about our man for weeks now and I’m beginning to get a glimmer of how he operates. If he decided to get a mail drop he’d do it right away. He always takes care of business first.”

“But how do we go about getting the names? They won’t give them to us.”

“Not to us, no. But to a city official.” Kenton flashed a smile. “That’s where you come in. Get somebody at City Hall to authorize a pickup of the names. Tell them we’re doing a story on mail drops. If they balk, refer them to Perrone. That should do it. But naturally I’d rather he didn’t get too involved.”

Grimes was dubious. “You think it’ll work?”

“It might get us to him first. If I can only find out who he really is.”

He spent the next few minutes reporting his progress to John Perrone. Then a half hour with George Homer, his other researcher, who gave him a quick report on Jonathan Stoner. Much of it he knew from his own investigation of Stoner but a few things were of interest, especially the senator’s mistress. He hadn’t known about her, since that kind of thing didn’t come into his earlier look. He told Homer to keep digging.

At noontime he took $2,000 out of the safe and put it in a separate envelope. After a fast sandwich down the block he walked to the public library at 42nd Street. In the massive reference room he sat at one end of a long table in the very last row on the left. A man sat across from him, intent on a book he held in both hands. In front of him, toward the middle of the table, was a manila folder. Kenton took out his envelope and placed it next to the folder, then opened the reference book he had selected on his way to the seat. A moment later the man softly closed his book, picked up the envelope and left the room. When Kenton had finished reading several pages of his book he opened the folder and studied the contents.

By 1 P.M. he was back in his office, the folder in the safe. It was 10 A.M. in California and time for work. For the rest of the afternoon he was on the phone talking with staff doctors who had attended Vincent Mungo in the various institutions, their names taken from the list prepared by Doris earlier. Several were out or unavailable but called him back later in the day. He wrote down the names of those patients who were closest to Mungo in each place, according to the records and the best recollections of the doctors. Two in Atascadero, two in Lakeland, and one in Willows, as he remembered from his research for the earlier story on Mungo. These were the only ones he seemed to have had anything to do with in the last five years. He had not been in Valley River or Tremont since adolescence, and though Kenton called both he did not bother with names.

He most carefully questioned the doctor at Lakeland but could not get him to say that Mungo had been friendly with Louis Terranova. Yes, he remembered Terranova, who had been there for a number of years. He believed the two men never knew each other and certainly were not friends. But he was close to two other patients, didn’t you say? As close as that sort could get to anybody. Which isn’t very much, you know. Was either of these two patients guilty of matricide? Perhaps as an adolescent? The doctor wouldn’t answer that. Such information could come only through official channels, and never over the telephone. No, absolutely not. Well, what were they in for? Not that either.

At Atascadero it was much the same story. The names of two friends were given and no more. Neither doctor was surprised, however, by Mungo’s insane violence. Not at all. When that brooding type blows, there’s no limit to the madness.

At Willows he talked again to a Dr. Poole, who had attended Mungo for the months he was there. Poole reminded Kenton that Mungo’s only friend in the institution had been a patient named Thomas Bishop, whom Mungo killed on the night of his escape.

Kenton wrote down the name without interest.

Could Mungo have had another friend, perhaps one he saw only at certain times? Definitely not. No homosexual relationships? Not the type. Never said anything about somebody at another hospital whom he knew or admired? Never talked about anyone.

At the Stockton and San Francisco psychiatric divisions Kenton talked to two staff doctors who had seen Mungo. No, no friends. Their facilities were short-term. People were in and out all the time, and there was little chance for close relationships among the patients. Vincent Mungo was not particularly memorable to either one of them. He had been a patient several times in earlier years, according to the records. His homicidal proclivities were not apparent then, though he obviously had a violent nature and sadistic tendencies. Too bad.

Kenton thought a moment about what he now had. Five men close to Mungo when he was inside, where it counted. He looked at the names. James Tumbull. Peter Lambert. Carl Pandel. Jason Decker. Thomas Bishop. He crossed out the last name. No use chasing a dead man.

He sent the names up to Mel Brown to match against those who had escaped or had been released in the past five years. He already saw they didn’t match those of the mother killers, including Louis Terranova.

Another good idea down the drain.

Mel Brown eventually called back to say that the only name on the list was Carl Pandel, released from Lakeland in May 1972. The other four were either still inside or dead and thus out of the running. At least their names were not on the list of those released or escaped. Kenton reminded him that the final man, Thomas Bishop, had been killed by Mungo while escaping from Willows. Which was why he had crossed out the name. Brown thought it familiar, now remembered reading it at the time.

What about Pandel?

Would he check on the man first thing Monday? Maybe he killed his mother as a boy and the record was sealed. Maybe he lived in a small country town that had no newspaper. Maybe he’s young and white and Christian and crazy and in New York killing women.

It was almost eight o’clock before Kenton left the office for the weekend. The last thing he did was to put $6,000 from the safe into an envelope and stick it in his pocket. He also took home the folder from Long Island and all the unread material from his desk.

At nine o’clock a man delivered a small package to his rooms at the St. Moritz. He gave the envelope of money to the man, who counted it in front of him. Afterward he had dinner at the Italian Pavilion, dining alone in the garden. A half hour with a prostitute in a Lexington Avenue hotel relieved him of the week’s tension, and he returned home to sleep soundly.

On Saturday and Sunday he stayed close to his quarters reading the complete financial reports on the dozen men who headed the Newstime empire. It was well worth the considerable expense, especially since it was their money. From the reports he learned many useful things, some of which could be most helpful should they try to thwart his efforts or reduce his authority or steal his glory. And he now knew something else about one of them, at least one of them, that surprised and shocked him, and he was not a man easily shocked.

When he drifted into sleep Sunday night Adam Kenton felt good about the week coming up. He had all the balls bouncing in air, all under control and in perfect rhythm. He was at his investigative best. No matter how many things he worked on, he would handle them. It was all a question of timing and balance, and genius.

As his eyelids fluttered heavily, he didn’t notice one of the balls slip beneath the corners of his mind.

Fifteen

JOHN SPANNER was crushed, deflated. Finally defeated. He had been so sure, not in the sense of hard fact or even evidential circumstance but in a primary gut feeling. An instinct that had gradually developed over twentyfive years of police work and had never totally let him down. Until now. For more than three months, since the very morning of the Willows murder, he had in turn fought the feeling and indulged it. No matter how he tried he could not shake loose the suspicion that something had gone amiss in the investigation of that murder, something planned and executed by an insanely devious mind, something that had resulted in the ultimate appearance of the fiendish killer known as Vincent Mungo. The suspicion gnawed at him and grew in his mind until he began to see the outlines of a diabolical plot. And the shadowy figure of the devil lurking behind it. Thomas Bishop.

Now he saw that the devil was within himself and the plot was a creation of his own restless imagination. Even more, of his willful desire. He had wanted to beat Sheriff James Oates, to show the man how brilliant he was. And to demonstrate once again to his own department the absolute necessity of finely imaginative police work. Most of all, he had needed to prove to himself that he was still valuable, his skills and knowledge still important in a rapidly changing world.

Pride, that monstrous measure of self-worth, had goaded him on and now had vanquished him. Nor was he the first to fall under its weight; a thought that did not comfort him in the slightest.