By Reason of Insanity (3 page)

“Go back home, I guess.”

“Back to more of that, you mean.”

They stood at the foot of the bed watching the boy, unconscious now. He was wrapped in white.

“Can’t he be taken away from her?” asked the nurse, her voice cracking. “I mean, can’t somebody—” She stopped, her eyes watery.

The administrator shook his head. “There are cases like this all over the city,” he said quietly. “Thousands of them. Parents who burn their children, beat them, starve them. Sometimes they kill them. And if they don’t, they get scared and come running to a hospital. It’s always an accident.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The hell of it is you can’t prove anything most of the time. The boy
could’ve
burned himself accidentally.”

“Not hardly likely,” said the intern.

“Not likely,” agreed the administrator wearily. “But without definite proof the hospital can’t go to the authorities. No one can.” He replaced his glasses.

“And so she gets a second shot at the boy, and then a third.”

“Only if he’s lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“If he’s lucky enough to survive the second,” whispered the resident physician, walking toward the door.

“You can never tell how these things work out. No one knows for sure.”

“I know one thing for sure,” said the intern vehemently in the hall. “One thing I know for goddam sure.” His voice shook with anger. “That boy in there is doomed. No matter what happens, he’s doomed.”

The others nodded, their lips tight, their eyes sad.

“Doomed,” he repeated.

Doomed or otherwise, the boy was visited every day by his mother, a bundle of concern. When she finally took him home she bought him a pint of chocolate ice cream, his favorite. The next day she banged his head on the side of the bathtub when he accidentally splashed water on her. Screaming, he fainted.

Sara decided that she had better give up drinking in the house. Frightened now, because she still had feeling for the child even though he was a hated male, she sought help from a self-styled minister of the Astrological Church of the Planets, one of the many religious sects that seemed to grow like crabgrass in southern California. He listened politely to her problem, then told her that for a fifty-dollar offering to the church he would study her astrological chart. Two days later he sadly informed her that she labored under a double cosmic cross, “perhaps the gravest sign in the heavens.” However—and here he brightened considerably—her planets were such that she would soon enter a peaceful phase, one filled with great opportunities and rich rewards. How soon? He couldn’t tell unless he did her horoscope, which would require a further offering of course. Sara thanked him and left, stopping in the bar next door for a glass of wine.

After the third glass she felt better, thinking about the peaceful phase to come. God knows she deserved some peace. When the man came in and sat next to her, she smiled back at him. Later in the motel room, looking at the stranger sleeping alongside her naked body, Sara just knew that her phase had already begun.

By the end of September she also knew that she was pregnant again. Scared now, more scared than she had ever been in her life, and insanely angry at the gods, all males naturally, who somehow conspired to bring this fresh horror on her head, Sara Owens vowed that she would not have another baby. No, never. Whatever else happened she would take, but not that. Never again.

Set in her determination, the helpless fright subsiding, she tried to figure out how such a thing could happen. All those years with her husband produced nothing. Now, the second time she strayed in almost four years of marriage, and she’s pregnant again. It wasn’t just punishment and it couldn’t be mere coincidence. Suddenly the answer seemed clear. Of course. Her husband was sterile, that had to be it. For all his crazy sex urges, he couldn’t make a baby if he tried. Sara nearly burst out laughing, the thought was so delicious. He’s only half a man, the poor bastard. Wait a minute—if he’s sterile, then the boy really is Chessman’s. Or the rapist, whoever he was. Sara shook her head. It was Chessman, all right. She needed to believe that, for it was easier living with a name than a faceless nobody, so over the years she had convinced herself that Chessman was her rapist.

Sara saw what she must do. She would get an abortion. First, somehow, she would get the money. Then she would never again have sex with a man, any man. Not even her husband. Let him go to hell for it, let them all go straight to hell. She didn’t need them and didn’t want them. All she ever really wanted was to be left alone.

Every afternoon Sara put on her best dress and stockings, her highest-heeled shoes and a freshly made face and sat in elegant cocktail lounges in the best sections of town, smiling at moneyed men with murder in her heart. She could still act, and if she no longer gave Academy Award performances she was nonetheless a better player than many wives waiting at home.

In three weeks she had nine hundred dollars. Fifty of it bought her the name of a doctor who would handle her problem. Eight hundred more bought the doctor. An overnight stay in an elaborate address on Mulholland Drive and she was free to go.

Free! Even the air in this part of town felt better to Sara. She had the cab stop at a plush lounge, where she ordered a glass of very expensive wine. Then another. Though it was early afternoon, several well-dressed men were at the bar. She returned their smiles and when one joined her she engaged him in conversation. She was charming, animated, flirtatious, seductive, everything a man could desire. When he finally asked if he could help make her day profitable as well as pleasurable, Sara turned to him with eyes wide and a sweet smile and told him in graphic language what he could do with his manhood. She then delicately put her last fifty-dollar bill on the bar in payment for her drinks and walked out, head held high.

At home she fed the boy, who hadn’t eaten since the previous day, and then slept for fifteen hours. She had no intention of telling her husband anything. He wasn’t home half the time anymore and she wished he would never come home again.

Harry didn’t really want to go home, it was just that he wasn’t ready to make the break yet. All he needed was one big score, anything, and it would be goodbye forever. There was nothing more for him at home, not since she had told him about Chessman and the brat. Harry didn’t like that, made him feel foolish. What he should do was just pack up and go, he kept telling himself. Sure, it’d serve her right, serve them both right. Her and that damn brat.

For months Harry had been brooding about Chessman and the night in the woods years before. He had never been sure it was Chessman; he didn’t remember any flashing red light. But she was so damn sure, at least since the kid came. She probably enjoyed it, the slut. And then lying to him like that, telling him the guy did nothing. Forcing him to make love to her right after someone did a thing like that. He should have hit her and driven away, just he felt sorry for her.

Harry was very certain that his wife would suffer terribly when he finally left her, and for that he was glad. But it was Chessman who really bothered him, laughing at him, taking what was his, insulting him that way. The more Harry thought about it, the angrier he got, until one day he decided that he would kill Caryl Chessman. He would wait for them to bring Chessman to Los Angeles again for something and then he would shoot the bastard, just like that.

Three months later, in January 1952, he got his chance. Chessman was whisked into town for a hearing on a petition filed by his lawyer. Harry bought a stolen gun through a friendly connection and waited across the street from the courthouse. The gun, a Colt .45 army issue, was in his topcoat pocket and Harry fingered it warmly. He had never killed anyone, never even fired a gun in his life. All he knew about guns was what he had seen in the movies. The good guy always killed the bad guy, and he always had more bullets in his gun. Harry knew he was the good guy, so all he had to learn was how to load the bullets. When this was done, he felt ready for anything.

As he sat on a bench in the small park waiting for the bad guy to show, Harry’s mind raced through all the war movies he had ever seen. Machine guns, tanks, bombs, grenades, dead bodies everywhere. He remembered Bogart hitting the beach, his trusty .45 in his hand, killing every Jap around him, crawling under barbed wire, racing forward ahead of his men. When the tank rolled over him he just slid between the treads, then leaped on it, opened the turret and dropped a grenade down its throat before diving off. Boom! One dead Jap tank. Only Bogart could’ve done that. Wait a minute—it was John Wayne. Was it John Wayne? Goddam right it was. So what, same thing. Harry wished he could have been there, he would have shown them a few things. If only his trick knees hadn’t kept him out of the army.

Two police cars braked to a halt across the street, one behind the other. A half dozen reporters rushed down the courthouse steps. Harry jumped up, his hand still on the gun in his pocket. The people suddenly looked so small across the street, he didn’t think he could hit anything. Hesitating, he watched as a wedge of cops hustled somebody up the stairs and into the building. Then they were gone. The whole thing had taken only a few seconds and he had hardly caught a glimpse of Chessman.

Harry was so mad he sat down and cursed his lungs out, vowing to remain there forever if necessary. Staring with grim determination at the court, Harry’s mind eventually saw Chessman walk out alone, whereupon he ran over him with a tank, stuck a grenade in his mouth, chopped him to pieces with a machine gun and killed him eighteen times with one clip of his trusty .45, after which he shot him ten times in the groin just to make sure. Satisfied, Harry did it all over again.

After a while the rain started and Harry left the park. When he got home he found the loaded clip in his other pocket. He had indeed learned to load the bullets, but he forgot to insert the clip in the .45. The gun was empty.

That same night Harry sold the gun and made back the fifty he had paid for it. The buyer told Harry that he already knew how to load it. “Don’t everybody?” he said.

The very next month Harry Owens got the break he had been waiting for all his life, a shot at a big score, the big money. The bankroll he needed to get away. He was twenty-eight years old and had never really had much of anything. A drifter since his teens, he had come out of the west Texas slums working whatever jobs he could find. Always moving on down the line, he hit Los Angeles at twenty-one and stayed a while. Then he met Sara Bishop and got in over his head. Now was his chance to get out with something, maybe the only one he’d ever get.

Hany was good with cars, driving them, fixing them. His aptitude was quickly noted by a few acquaintances at one of his hangouts, a bar on the city’s north side that catered to a rough-and-ready sort. Like him, these men were drifters of little education and limited job potential. They were not criminals in the usual sense of the word; rather, they were blue-collar opportunists who worked at whatever was available while they sought a big killing that would put them on easy street. Dreamers all, they were yet realistic enough to know that such a venture would require a certain risk. War veterans mostly, they had lived with violence and had seen death and destruction, and they were just alienated enough to be willing to gamble their futures on a quick throw of the dice. None had records beyond the misdemeanor stage, and only one was married. When Harry joined the group he made them six. Complete now, they plotted and planned and waited for their turn at the dice.

They did not have long to wait.

February is a bad month in Los Angeles and gets worse toward the end. On this dark February morning the rain had been falling steadily since midnight. The sky was an angry gray and even the sun had trouble finding the city. In the business areas people stumbled into offices and stores soaked to the skin. Everywhere houses leaked, lawns drowned and new foundations settled. It was February 22, 1952, the day six men had picked to rob Overland Pacific, the country’s biggest armored-car company, of a million dollars.

While mothers all over the city hurried their children off to school and policemen on the day shift lined up for inspection, a massive black-and-white fortress on wheels lumbered out of Overland’s main terminal, eased past the barbed wire-topped steel fence and slowly turned right into traffic. Built short and stubby, its riveted 12-gauge steel-plated body sprouting concealed air vents and gunports on all four sides, the ten-ton monster gradually picked up speed.

Inside, behind tinted bulletproof windows, the driver and his partner cursed the weather, the world, and the work they were doing. Friday was a “dog day,” a day of heavy cash flow and many stops. Their schedule called for seventy-five such stops in the eight hours they would be on duty. The grumbling continued in good-natured fashion until the first stop, a Los Angeles branch of a statewide loan company. From his seat the driver locked the steel door separating the cab from the truck’s main compartment. In the back the guard opened the rear door and peered out cautiously. Seeing nothing suspicious, he quickly hopped out with a bag of currency and entered the squat building, his gun in hand, barrel pointed down. In a moment he returned and, after a look from the driver, the electrically operated rear door opened and he reentered the truck.

In the next hour the driver-guard team made nine more stops, mostly to banks and stores. The cash flow was heavy, as expected, and several times required the assistance of a dolly. At some stops money was delivered, at others it was picked up. But always the procedure was the same. The driver would park, with the motor running, in such a way that he could see his partner enter and leave the building. He would then lock the compartment door, which was usually left open for conversation when both men were in the truck. While his partner used the rear door for money handling, the driver would sit safely in the cab, encased in steel and bulletproof glass. If anything went wrong he could set off a siren and quickly radio for help. When a stop was completed the guard would show himself to the driver before the rear door was again opened for him. At no time would the team leave the truck together.