The Murder Channel (23 page)

I skirted the porch and approached the French
doors, peering inside to see the psychiatrist, Lucas Frank, crouched beside a body. I removed the gun from my pocket and kicked open the doors. Broken glass and wood slivers sprayed into the room.

As he turned his hand flew automatically to his gun. He saw me and froze.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Take out the gun and place it on the floor.”

He did as I instructed.

“Move away.”

His eyes were vacant, gray, just as they had been at our first encounter.

“You didn’t kill him,” I said. “He’s old kill.”

“Did you?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I would have,” I said. “You’ve been tracking me. Someone is ahead of us.”

“It looks that way.”

“Do you suppose that person is after me, you, or Ms. Pouldice?”

“She would be my first guess. Her study is a shambles.”

“Someone else believes she is not what she seems, that she knows more than she says. Why did you come here?”

“To talk with her.”

“To seek her assistance in finding me,” I said. “She would have told you nothing.”

“That’s pretty much what she’s been telling me.”

“How foolish of her,” I said. “There are no cars in the garage. Is the Explorer yours?”

He nodded.

I gazed at Pouldice’s paintings, the grand piano, a silver candelabra. “She accumulated wealth at my sister’s expense,” I said.

“Did Fremont talk before you killed him?”

“He was easily persuaded.”

“I made the connection to Fremont through the Theresa Stallings case. How did you do it?”

“I saw him on TV.”

“What about Fremont and Pouldice?”

“High school friends in North Carolina.”

“You witnessed what happened the day your sister disappeared,” he said.

I studied his eyes. “Did you know that there is only a single moment of consciousness when past, present, and future are one?”

“I’ve heard that,” he said. “It is the moment before we die.”

“Perhaps it’s time that you and I talk,” I told him. “You drive. We’re going back to Boston.”

SUNLIGHT GLISTENED ON THE SNOW-
covered pines lining the interstate. A clear cold blue sky heightened the impression that I was driving through a postcard.

This photo had a flaw.

A giant who might slip into a delusional state at any moment sat in the passenger seat with a gun resting on his lap. I had little choice but to be content with my role of chauffeur.

Zrbny wanted to talk, and I listened.

I hoped that he did not bump against one of his crazy buttons, and that I did not nudge him in that direction. I have been in situations where tipping over my subject was essential to getting the information I wanted. This was not one of them.

“When I was ten my sister Levana took me to see tigers in the zoo,” he said. “They are magnificent animals. They lay on rocks licking their paws and stretching like house cats. We can’t see the ferocity, but we know it’s there. I felt the energy. They are … potential. They never lose their desire
to attack and rip and kill. The zoo attendants toss them bloody meat and the tigers tear at it. If they were in the wild, it would be different. They would shred the attendants. Tigers are the supreme predators. Instinct allows little room for moral judgment.”

Zrbny’s delivery was flat. He spoke slowly, as if deliberating briefly between sentences.

“I’ve never been to New York,” he said, “but I could find my way around the city. San Francisco, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and the same is true of Boston. I was fourteen when they locked me up, but I learned from TV. Internet maps were helpful, but I wanted to know what places looked like. If I were to walk on Third Avenue in New York and look up at the buildings, I’d want to be able to recognize landmarks, to know where I was.”

“I got lost in Chicago one time,” I said. “I thought I knew the city. I didn’t. The traffic cop I asked for directions didn’t know it either.”

Zrbny smiled. “I watched TV before they locked me up,” he said, “but I didn’t study it. It was just on, and I was aware of it. At my first court hearing, a psychiatrist said that TV violence had influenced me, contributed to my homicidal behavior. I think she was there to help me, but what she said was not true. I imagine there are people who are infatuated with televised images of shootings, stabbings, beatings, whether they are drama or news footage, but I don’t think the influence TV has is
related to content. It’s the format, the medium itself, and the nature of this country and the people who live here.”

Felix Zrbny positioned himself as an outsider. He talked about the world as a place he observed but did not participate in.

“I don’t know what it’s like for other people who kill,” he said. “I can speak only for myself. There have been arguments favoring televised executions. That would not be a deterrent. When you know what you must do, you do it. When they had public executions in England, the rate of death-penalty crimes immediately increased. The hangings were exciters, not deterrents.”

Zrbny gazed at the snow-covered hills. “TV asks you to sit passively and to receive its entertainment and its commercial messages. We’ve been trained to be acquisitive, to want things we never knew existed and have no use for. We’ve always been good at violence, but never with the frequency and ferocity of the last fifty years. That’s where format comes in. While you sit watching, you’re hit with a never-ending barrage of rapid-fire images that destroy any attention span you might have. Any desire to think, to consider, to reason, is replaced with a need for excitation. The insidious beauty of it is that you don’t know what’s happening. You run out and buy a particular brand of soda or beer and wait for your erection to arrive. That might seem innocuous enough, but then you have to run
farther and faster to find the pleasure you’ve been told you’re entitled to. Then it hits you. It’s not the beer or the soft drink you want. It’s the woman caressing the bottle.”

“Did you view it this way at fourteen?” I asked.

“It was background noise then. When my father watched his sitcoms, sometimes I looked at them. It was different for him. His world had died and he was passing time until it was his turn to be among the dead. He laughed with the laugh track.”

Many of Zrbny’s thought processes and notions were paranoid, but his was a reality-based paranoia. TV can exist only when it sells product. To that end, the medium must influence behavior.

“People search for images of themselves,” he continued. “They crave the resonance that comes with discovering their reflections on the screen. They want to hear and see what they already believe to be true. It happens so fast that they forget the time when they could read, hold a coherent thought, and express themselves in complete sentences.”

“How did you avoid the trap?”

“I told you. I studied TV. I was the aggressor, not the passive victim. Did you watch the Simpson trial?”

My daughter Lane had sent me tapes of key testimony. “Some,” I said.

“I watched it with a friend. Do you think that
Lance Ito was influenced by the presence of the camera in the courtroom?”

“I have heard that criticism of the judge, but not that it affected his rulings.”

“His demeanor,” Zrbny said. “Marcia Clarke was oblivious at first. She was uninteresting, all sharp edges. Then she became aware of her celebrity. She had her hair done, wore clothes that were less severe, softer colors, feminine. She smiled more often. When someone complimented her on her hairstyle, she told the person to get a life. She didn’t know that she was no longer a prosecutor. She had no idea that she had become an actor in a drama. The dead were no longer relevant to the proceedings. The trial had developed a theatrical life of its own. DNA had nothing to do with the case outcome. Few of the witnesses mattered. Kato Kaelin is memorable because he was media-savvy. Clarke had the power of the state of California, but Kato was charismatic. Point to Kaelin. No one remembers the name of the limo driver. His testimony was important, but he had no rerun potential. One person in that courtroom fully understood how to play the media.”

“Johnnie Cochran,” I said.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? What shaped public opinion had nothing to do with evidence. The trial was theater and Cochran was Olivier.”

“What about Simpson?”

“All he had to do was struggle to pull on a glove. He was probably disappointed that his role was minor, but he played it well. I used to watch TV docudramas with my friend. After a while they all seemed the same. The content was similar. The format was identical. At nine
P.M.
, without a commercial break, the network slips into opening scenes and credits. They load the first twenty minutes with story essentials and something to hook the audience, some bit of soft pornography or violence. After that, the commercials come like automatic weapons fire. The story is irrelevant until ten
P.M.
, when you discover a plot complication. The network takes a major break for sales, and the script coasts into meaningless drivel. The made-for-TV movie is a homogenized morality play. The good guys always win. Justice is served. We all live happily ever after. Have you ever noticed how they have a voice-over preview of the late news while the minor credits are scrolling?”

“I don’t watch much TV, but I have noticed that.”

“Sometimes it’s a bit confusing. The news is like a series of mini-dramas. Bombs and missiles and guns and knives, then break for the commercial message. There really isn’t any morality. There are collective points of view, beliefs, thou-shalt-nots. TV reflects how this country wants to see itself. All the scrubbed white faces selling product and promises. People want to think of themselves as
moral. They are right with the world only when they buy, not when they attend church.”

Zrbny shrugged and gazed out the window. “They consume. They are compliant. Some of them even register to vote. Then maybe they cross themselves and kneel.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t fit in your world,” he said. “I am glad that I don’t. There was a time when I thought I was pretty much like everybody else, but nobody thought I was like them. For a while I resented being excluded. I brooded about it. Then I realized that living at the slender end of the bell curve is not a bad thing.”

Zrbny suddenly went silent. I glanced at him and saw what I had seen on Severance’s video of their session. His eyes were locked on something far in the distance, something only he could see. He was erect, rigid, motionless.

“When I got to the hospital, they badgered me about feelings,” Zrbny said, with the same flat delivery. “They said that I lacked the capacity to care for another person.”

He slammed his fist against the dash and buckled it. Plastic cracked and snapped, fragments of vinyl flew through the car. Zrbny’s violence was sudden, totally unexpected, and unaccompanied by even the slightest hint of anger.

“I cared about my sister,” he said. “She needed the time to study, to make high scores for her
scholarship, so I washed the dishes, did her laundry and mine, took care of the bed linen, cleaned the house. When Levana was unhappy, I cried with her. I knew her thoughts and she knew mine.”

Zrbny slammed the dash a second time, crushing it. “If feeling love is believing that someone else’s life is more important than your own, then I loved my sister and she loved me. I did feel. Then it stopped.”

“When she was abducted.”

He nodded.

“And the world had to pay?” I asked.

“Not the world. People want a simple picture of the killer—a hulking, drooling, slobbering primitive who is totally insane, incapable of reasoning, and who runs slashing through the city at night. They want to execute him or lock him away forever.”

“Some people paid,” I said.

“It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?”

Zrbny sat in silence. “Levana would not have wanted me to hurt anyone,” he said finally. “Sable asked me when I planned to shoot someone. She didn’t want me to shoot Mr. Guzman.”

“The man who has the store at the Towers.”

He nodded. “He is a kind man. He is abused and insulted but still he smiles, listens to his music, and invites others to listen. He gave me flowers to take to Sable.”

I remembered the flowers Sable Bannon grabbed as we walked to the door and to her death.

“I would like these things to matter,” Zrbny said. “They don’t. This world moves too fast for kindness to matter.”

“You saw Fremont take your sister,” I said.

Zrbny said nothing.

“You couldn’t help her.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said with a sigh. “Whatever I might have felt I no longer feel. I watched the world for fifteen years and was still startled when I stepped back into it. I saw a man stop on the sidewalk, snow blowing around him, and piss into the gutter. There were not many pedestrians, but there were some. They don’t show homeless men relieving themselves on TV. Three kids stood outside Children’s Hospital with a large boom box blasting at top volume. They were near a sign reminding passersby that this was a hospital zone and asking them to please be quiet. The three kids were a blend of baggy pants, oversized Chicago Bulls jackets, earrings, and untied basketball shoes, listening to music whose only discernible lyrics were ‘fucker’ and ‘motherfucker.’ They tried to bum money and when they were refused they called the people entering and leaving the hospital ‘fuckers’ and ‘motherfuckers.’”