Angel of Darkness (6 page)

Maggie and Calvano could not get a word in and, after a while, stopped trying. They accepted the old lady's ceaseless complaining as a gift and Calvano began taking notes. They learned that Darcy attended the same high school my son Michael was assigned to and I wondered uneasily if my son and Darcy had been friends. Soon, the old dame launched into a well-practiced and unflattering description of both Darcy Swan and her mother. Despite the fact that they were her flesh and blood, both of them were proclaimed to be selfish, deluded, upstarts who didn't work hard enough to support the old lady and would learn in the end that there was nothing more to life than the fact that it was hard, and maybe then they'd understand why she couldn't work at the beauty parlor any more and would take better care of her.

I started to feel sorry for the woman. I knew that once she found out her granddaughter was dead, she would remember her bitter words and they would likely haunt her for a long time. There are some things that even the most selfish of people can't escape.

Maggie and Calvano finally gleaned that Darcy's mother worked at the new Walmart. Convinced her granddaughter had been up to no good, the old lady gave them meticulous directions to the deli section and asked that they convey a ‘told you so' on her behalf. Maggie and Calvano left to break the news to Darcy's mother that her daughter was dead, but I'd had enough of Darcy's family for one day. Instead, I decided to take a look at the block where Darcy Swan had lived. Darcy had to have met her killer close to home, in school or at the diner. Her life had ended at those meager borders.

I took off on my own for a tour of Helltown. It had been a while since I'd walked its streets. I was startled to see a familiar face half a block down from Darcy's house. The young man who had visited my son Michael at Holloway was sitting in the dark on the open gate of a red truck parked in the driveway of another cheap mill house. His hands were trapped between his knees for warmth as he stared up at the sky. The stars were exceptionally bright and sprinkled like diamonds across the night horizon, a reminder that there was a whole universe out there beyond. I wondered if that realization helped the boy or only made him feel more trapped. He did not seem happy at all. He seemed as lost and depressed as my son, and for just a moment I had a vision of all the lost sons wandering in the darkness together, wondering when their turn might come.

A door slammed behind the boy and a deep voice bellowed for him to get his ass inside. The boy barely twitched as a stocky man in a wife-beater tee shirt and plaid boxer shorts appeared in the doorway, holding a beer can in one hand and a cigarette in the other. ‘Your grandmother needs to be changed,' the man shouted, knowing his son was somewhere near in the darkness. ‘I'll be damned if I'm going to do it.'

The door slammed shut behind him as he ducked back into a brightly lit living room, where the sounds of the television blared almost loudly enough to disguise the bleating of an old lady crying for help. The boy hopped down from the back of the truck and trudged inside, resigned to his fate.

This was the kid comforting my son?

I could only hope that Michael offered him comfort back.

TEN

H
elltown depressed me. By morning, I was sorely in need of therapy. Not my own, of course. I had missed that boat while I was alive and there was nothing I could do about it now. But I could sit in on therapy sessions at Holloway, puzzling out the mysteries of the human soul and reassuring myself that I was not the only one who had lost his way in life.

I'd hoped to learn more about my son, even if it ended in another session consisting of reviewing my failures as a father, but Michael was in group therapy that morning and I could not tolerate being in the same room as a dozen awkward, depressed teens. Just seeing them slumped in their chairs, staring at the clock, staring at their feet, staring anywhere but at each other, made me feel so self-conscious that I had to leave them to the guidance of a tall man with glasses who had been handed the thankless task of trying to get them to open up.

With most of the other patients either in early-morning therapy or painting flowerpots or wandering quietly through the grounds, I decided to head over to the unit where Otis Parker lived to see if I could find out anything new. I came upon him having an argument with the red-haired orderly who had taunted Parker the day before during his interview with Calvano. This time, Parker was unrestrained. He was standing in the center of the common room where he and his fellow inmates spent time in a futile attempt to socialize them and keep them from ripping each other's limbs off. Clearly, Parker had little to fear from the others – many of whom were so doped up that their greatest achievement of the day was probably not drooling on their own trousers. Most of them, however – even the most medicated among them – were alert enough to be watching the fight between Parker and the orderly like it was an Ali-Frazier rematch. As the two men squared off and shouted insults at each other, it became clear that Parker was too smart to resort to physical violence, given the other staff members heading their way. But he was comfortable threatening the orderly with everything this side of dismemberment.

The gist of the argument seemed to be that Parker was refusing to take his medication and the red-haired orderly was threatening him with an injection if he did not comply.

I wondered why Parker had let the fight get this far. He could have hidden the pills in his cheek and spit them out later. Patients did it so often that the mice at Holloway wandered around in a happy daze from scavenging the booty. The orderly, who was easily half of Parker's size, should have known that – but then he should have known better than to take on Parker in the first place. Both of them had clearly been waiting for an excuse to go at each other. While Parker stood rooted to his spot on the worn linoleum floor, the aide circled him like a prizefighter looking for a spot to jab.

‘I'll pull your privileges, too,' he threatened Parker. ‘Don't think I won't do it. I don't give a crap how much your lawyer earns an hour or how many times he threatens to sue. I'm sick of your bullshit, I'm sick of your bullying, and I'm sick of this act you pull every day. You're no crazier than I am. I've watched you when no one else is looking and I know you're a fake. Your ass belongs on death row with the rest of the losers waiting to die.'

It was one thing to taunt Parker with his authority. It was another to let Parker know outright that he didn't believe he belonged at Holloway. If I knew Otis Parker, the orderly had just made his workplace a very unsafe place to be.

‘I'm on to you,' the red-haired orderly repeated, poking a finger in Parker's chest.

Parker let loose one of those crazy, high-pitched laughs of his, but the orderly continued to taunt him. ‘I've seen you at the back fence,' he told Parker. ‘Don't think I don't know what's going on.'

At this, Parker lunged for the orderly but four other staff members had arrived by then and they pulled Parker off. They led him away, casting glances at the red-haired orderly that made plain they had little patience for either his methods or his judgment.

I followed Parker, curious as to where they might take him to calm him down. But it turned out that he was scheduled for a session with his psychiatrist. He was taken to a spacious room where a short, tubby man awaited him, notebook in hand, his legs crossed precisely as he perched on the edge of a leather chair. He gestured for Parker to sit on the couch across from him.

Two of the orderlies forced Parker to sit and started to handcuff him to the legs of the leather couch.

‘Is that really necessary?' the psychiatrist asked, casting a thin smile at Otis Parker as if to say, ‘I'm on your side. Isn't it awful how backward these brutish men are?'

The psychiatrist had all the degrees in the world, but he was a fool.

‘Yes, it's necessary,' one of the orderlies said. As if to make his point, he pulled on one of the chains that attached a couch leg to Parker's wrist, forcing Parker to wince.

The shrink glared at the orderly, but said nothing. Parker looked mildly interested in the disagreement between the two men. I knew he was filing the information away, just in case he could use it to his advantage later.

The two orderlies left the room and stationed themselves outside the door, in case something went awry. I wondered what this session was all about. Was it an attempt to rehabilitate Parker or a court-mandated session to assess whether or not Parker was any better than he had been when admitted?

I was not keen on getting closer to Parker's mind. I knew what I would find there. But I was interested in how much he had fooled the psychiatrist sitting across from him, and if he would be able to resist revealing his connection to Darcy Swan's murder.

I found out the answer to my first question when the psychiatrist put his notebook aside and leaned forward, clasping his hands together as he stared at Parker with what he thought was professional detachment but I decided was perilously close to admiration. The shrink was not a big man. In fact, he was barely five and a half feet tall and he was plump in that way people are when they've spent a lifetime unable to resist overeating. He could not take his eyes off Parker. I had seen that look before. People hated following the unwritten rules of their world each day and often secretly admired those who ignored them. Especially those who did it without apology. The psychiatrist had fallen for Otis Parker's charisma, mistaking an excess of testosterone for evidence that Parker was somehow a superior kind of human being worth saving.

He'd learn soon enough.

‘What's this I hear about an altercation?' the shrink asked. ‘Was it with the same orderly as before?'

Parker managed to look downright perplexed. His trademark shit-eating grin faded and he looked quite sad, as if he could not understand the injustices visited upon him. ‘I do everything he asks,' Parker explained. ‘But it's never good enough. The guy has some kind of complex about me. He thinks I'm faking it. Sometimes I don't even feel like going through with my therapy because of him. What's the use?'

Oh, he knew what buttons to push. The psychiatrist nearly hopped in his agitation. He could not, I noticed, stop staring at Parker's immense biceps nor refrain from glancing at Parker's narrow torso and powerful thighs. I wasn't sure it mattered at all what Parker said; the shrink was under the spell of Parker's sheer physical power. He was in no position to evaluate him objectively.

‘You can't think that way,' the shrink told him. ‘We've worked too hard to throw it all away. If you keep accepting your illness, and doing what I ask you to do, you'll have a chance at starting a new life one day.'

‘But will that day ever come?' Parker asked. He flexed his arms and rubbed the tops of his thighs, shifting his weight from leg to leg. He knew exactly what he was doing. If he'd had a spotlight he couldn't have shined the psychiatrist on any more. ‘First I get arrested for something I didn't even do, and then they say I'm crazy, and then they send me here with no release date in sight. I would've been better off going to prison. At least then I would have had a shot at getting out.'

He managed to pour such hopelessness into this series of preposterous statements that even I felt sorry for him, until I remembered that there had been overwhelming evidence that Parker was indeed the killer. So much evidence, in fact, that even I had been able to connect the dots at a time when I was rarely sober for more than an hour at a stretch and could hardly find my files, much less solve the cases in them.

‘If I knew when I had a chance to get out of here,' Parker added slyly, ‘it might give me a reason to work even harder getting over what's wrong with me.'

The shrink was staring at him thoughtfully. Even he, so enamored of Parker, had his doubts. ‘I'm not likely to begin a conversation about your release from here for several years,' he explained to Parker. ‘The things that are wrong with you are serious psychiatric disorders. We may never be able to change their power over your behavior. The best we can do may be simply to find the right mix of medications to help you control them. Whether or not I can let you out into the world under those circumstances is still uncertain. I want to be upfront with you. I want you to know that I will always tell you the truth.'

‘But I'm in here for something I didn't do,' Parker insisted. ‘I'm presumed to be violent because of something that someone else did. And now I've got the proof. The other patients are saying a girl was killed yesterday,' Parker said. He looked sorrowful with this loss of life. ‘That she was killed in the same way as the girls I was accused of murdering.' He looked up at the psychiatrist, his eyes wide with hope. ‘Doesn't that prove I wasn't the one who killed those other girls? It's the first ray of hope I've had in years.'

The psychiatrist looked confused. ‘I hadn't heard about another murder,' he said cautiously. ‘I'll have to look into it and see what I can find out.'

Parker nodded eagerly. ‘Can you talk to my lawyer about it?' Parker asked. ‘I don't think he is smart enough to understand without your help.'

‘I can consult with your lawyer about your condition,' the psychiatrist said uneasily. ‘Beyond that, I cannot get involved. After all, I may be called to testify at your next competency hearing.'

Parker leaned forward again, staring at the psychiatrist intently. He was really working it. ‘I can pay for your time, if that's what you're worried about. I have a lot of people who believe in me, who know I'm not guilty. Your support would mean so much to them.'

Of course he had people convinced of his innocence. Even Charles Manson had his fan club. There were probably dozens of misguided women across the nation sending Otis Parker checks and transferring cash into his legal defense fund. If they had seen the same crime scene photos I had seen, they would have held on to their hard-earned dollars. And probably never gone outside their own front doors again, either.