Evil Season (24 page)

“I don't know him,” Murphy said crisply.

Glover continued, “He painted the Stations of the Cross and they were on display in Sarasota during the 1960s, when they were stolen.”

“Too young for that,” Murphy said, thinking perhaps he was being accused.

“No, no, we're all too young for that,” Glover said, smiling.

“Okay, I just wanted to make sure,” Murphy replied. He reiterated that he'd never heard of Stahl and knew nothing of the stolen paintings.

Grant interjected that he remembered the stolen paintings being the subject of a report on
60 Minutes.
Murphy said he might have seen the paintings somewhere, but he was totally unaware of that artist's name.

Murphy admitted to being in Sarasota within the last year and said that he left because it “was time to go.” The detectives wondered what he meant by that.

The prisoner said he'd always been that way. His mind would tell him it was time to go and he would up and leave.

Glover said, “You left shortly after the Manatee Sheriff's Department came and talked to you about the [inappropriate touching] incident at Great Clips. Is that what drove you to leave Sarasota?”

Murphy said no, he had other reasons.

“Okay, what were those other reasons?”

“I'm not telling you.”

“Okay, that's fine.”

“Does that buy me a cup of coffee?” Murphy asked with a laugh. They all laughed and someone brought Murphy a cup of coffee. Murphy said he loved caffeine. They could keep the coffee coming if they wanted.

Glover switched subjects: “A detective talked to Paula. She said at one point when you were living in Tallahassee, she went over and cleaned out your apartment.” When Murphy had nothing to say about that, Glover noted that Paula had informed the detective that Murphy was a collector. He was always collecting different things: magazines, coat hangers, for example.

“What are some of the things you've collected?” Glover asked.

“Cameras. I own a lot of cameras. Over one hundred. All antique. I had a fascination with military photography and antique cameras. I never bought a new camera. They were all old.”

“What else?”

“Antiques of all sorts. Old books. Bottles I found when scuba diving. Stuff like that.”

“I heard somewhere that you collected forks,” Glover said.

“Yeah, various silver forks and what have you. I had unique forks.”

“Where did you find that stuff ?”

“Goodwill, Salvation Army, yard sales. Pay fifteen cents or so apiece.” No particular design. Just what caught his fancy. At one point he had thirty forks, and he kept them in a special tray in a drawer.

“I heard you collected keys.”

“Not true. I might have had keys, but I didn't collect them. If I had a key, it was because it opened a door.”

Murphy said when he was through with a collection, he would just throw it away and move on to something else. Grant found that amazing, but Murphy pointed out that he got rid of collections because he moved so frequently. Transients don't want to lug stuff around.

“I'm not a huge keepsake person,” he said. “I don't have anything that I've had throughout my life.”

Grant wondered if he ever gave stuff to his brother, Dean, to keep for him. Family photos, photos from when he was a kid, or anything. Murphy said no, Dean had his own stuff. “I have no storage facility of any sort. I have no home. I don't have a place to put anything.”

Murphy didn't want the police to know about things he might have stashed and where. Better to tell them he never stashed anything. Glover caught on.

Glover asked, “What did you do with your barber equipment?”

“That's one thing I did stash. I'm not going to tell you where.”

“We could retrieve it for you,” Glover offered hopefully.

No dice. “I don't intend on barbering anymore,” Murphy said. “I hate it with a passion.”

“I imagine at the state jail you're going to have to give a lot of haircuts! What? Thirty or forty people a day.”

“That's no big deal. At the state jail you get mostly black, you know, and I have to cut their hair. Some Hispanic panic. Maybe ten percent white.”

His complaint was not racist, he claimed, but a matter of fashion. Darker-skinned prisoners wanted their hair cut in a specific way, with very precise edging, and he didn't know how to do that.

Plus, the customers were not very nice. “Cut my hair and I'll kill you.” Murphy heard that a lot. Usually, prisoners were getting their hair cut on a voluntary basis. However, every once in a while, you got a guy who'd been ordered by a guard to get a haircut, and they were the dangerous ones.

Glover asked if Murphy was in a cell alone. He said he was. Did he have a TV? There was one downstairs, not a big one, but they could see it from their cells, and the guards kept the volume up so they could hear it. Reading material? Some books. Pencils? No.

Glover said that detectives had talked to Murphy's first wife. She said she wasn't upset when they split up, but Paula had more to say. She told the story about his threats, how he requested to watch her having sex with another man, and how she did that for him.

Glover said that detectives had talked to his brother, Dean, and he was
not
upset that Brutus was in jail.

Murphy said he suspected as much. Dean had hung up on him the last time they spoke.

Glover taunted the prisoner: “Dean also said you are a lousy barber, and that Mr. Solomon only purchased your artwork because he felt sorry for you.”

“
Pity
money,” Grant interjected.

Glover added, “He said the artwork just wasn't—”

“Just didn't turn him on,” Murphy finished the thought.

“He said it wasn't marketable pretty much anywhere. You flunked out of the navy.”

“The second time. . . .”

“You flunked out of the SEALs first day.”

“Not first day. Three weeks into it. Three weeks and change. They might have written first day. They want you to look humiliated on the paperwork.”

Glover said, “We pulled all the reports from the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department. We pulled the report to your mother's death. There was a lot of suspicion surrounding your mother's death at the time.”

“All unfounded and stupid,” Murphy said with disgust. “Every bit of it.”

“A lot of the suspicions were aroused by the actions you took at the time.”

Murphy said that those suspicions belonged mostly to Dean. He didn't know why. Dean also thought there was a life insurance policy he didn't know about. Ridiculous.

“Paula says you told her that your mother fell off a ladder,” Glover said.

“I did not tell her that. That's stupid.”

“There was no ladder in the kitchen when your mother fell?”

“I didn't see a ladder. I don't know what resulted in her falling in her home.”

Glover asked, “Where were you at the time of your mother's death?”

“Over in, um, Ruskin. I didn't have anything to do with her death, and that's the God's honest truth. I swear on my mother's grave. I loved my mom more than anybody in this world. I didn't bother her. I did all I could to help her during the last year I was with her. She was good to me. She loved me when she died, very much. My brother might find that hard to believe, but it's a fact.” Murphy said his brother only suspected him of killing their mother when Dean was drinking, which he did more than usual during the stressful days after his mother's passing. Dean, Murphy claimed, once told them that if he really thought Brutus had murdered their mother, he would have killed himself. Dean's period of suspicion was brief.

Murphy admitted that he didn't spend a lot of time looking at the future, and he hadn't for years. That was because his dad died at age forty-three, so Murphy figured he would die at forty-three, too. That was a long year—2000—when he was forty-three. He still figured that every day he lived past forty-three was a bonus.

Glover said Murphy had lived a life that one might think was full of regrets. Murphy agreed that was true. If he had to do it all over again, he'd change just about everything—all except having kids. That was a good part.

Maybe he would choose not to live his life over again at all. Maybe he would just “cancel it out,” so that he'd never have been born into this life.

Glover said they'd spoken to Dave Gallant, who said he was a religious mentor to Murphy. Gallant said it was he who had taught Murphy that people were on Earth to mine gold for aliens. Murphy acknowledged that this was true.

“He showed me some knowledge,” Murphy allowed.

“He said he was your mentor.”

Murphy didn't like that: “Everybody's my mentor. He was one of frickin' thousands.”

“You said you had a DNA connection with God, that you have followers,” Glover said, adding,
“You got no followers!”

“In your opinion. The thing is, I connect with my people immediately. . . .”

“Connect with them now and have them meet me in the lobby,” Glover said.

“That's not going to happen.”

“Of course not, because they don't exist. Even your family isn't behind you. If you have followers, they would know you were in trouble and they would rally—”

“I told them not to.”

Glover decided to continue his efforts to make Murphy face facts. He was a sex criminal with an
inadequate
personality. Paula had said so—and she wasn't alone. Both the Regis in Tampa, where Murphy had worked, and the Great Clips, where he briefly held his last job, were being sued because Murphy—word was— couldn't comb a woman's hair without touching her breasts.

“We talked to a girl at the Great Clips on Bee Ridge Road and she said you worked there for three point eighty-three hours. Three point eighty-three hours! A nineteen-year-old woman customer said she had to repeatedly shift her position in the chair because you were trying to rub your penis up against her as she sat there. You never went back there. You never bothered to pick up your check, so you are very complicated.”

“Extremely,” Murphy concurred.

“People might say you have an impulse-control problem,” Grant said.

“I'm very impulsive,” Murphy agreed. He didn't care what people thought. “It's just my thing,” he added.

“If you don't care, then why don't you tell us the truth?”

“I like to play a little game with your head. People fuck with my head. I fuck with their head. Every time.”

“You say you don't care about yourself, but you
love
yourself. That's why there are things about your time in Sarasota that you don't want to tell us.”

“If my intuition tells me not to tell you things, I won't tell you.”

“Tell us about Sarasota. . . .”

“I refuse to tell you because I'm fuckin' with your head, that's why.”

“At some point, are you going to tell us the truth?”

“Probably not. I'd rather leave you hanging. You can think I'm the worst person on the planet. When I leave this planet dead as a doornail, you can say, ‘That crazy, stupid motherfucker never told me whatever I wanted to know.'”

“It's not important to me that you tell, it's—”

“I don't give a damn about anyone's family, none of that shit.”

“Obviously. If you cared about their family, you wouldn't have hacked up their mother.”

Mother.
That got Murphy's attention: “What are you talking about? Whose mother are you talking about here?”

“The family of Joyce.”

“Who are you talking about? Joyce. Joyce who?”

“Wishart.”

“Oh, oh. That one. That Joyce. I don't know anything about her. Never met that woman in my life, as far as I know.”

“You cut her,” Glover said.

“You cut her,” Grant echoed.

“I might have cut her hair” was Murphy's perfect reply. “I don't know who she was.”

Glover said, “I don't know if you cut her hair or not, but you cut her. How is Elton Brutus Murphy going to be portrayed?”

“It doesn't matter. They could paint me as a beast with ten horns and ten dragon heads, and it would not matter.”

“Well, do you have ten horns and ten dragon heads?”

“I might have. It was my destiny, predestined thousands of years ago.”

Grant said, “Everything you've done, you've pretty much messed up. . . .”

“Always,” Murphy concurred.

“The only thing you managed to do with any degree of success was kill this woman, and that's the one thing you won't talk about.”

“Umm-hmm,” Murphy said. “It's none of your business. It is only the business of those who are blessed.”

“Are you among the blessed?”

“Yes. That is why I have the authority to say what I say.”

“And that's why you can decide who lives and dies?”

“If need be.”

“A blessing is supposed to be something good. This blessing you've acquired is kind of like the plague.”

“Yeah, a plague and a curse. A blessed curse.”

“You said you had the power to cause people to have a heart attack. When you were cutting hair in jail and afraid of getting beat up, why didn't you just give those guys a heart attack?”

“Once, in a Tallahassee jail, one person pissed me off and he died in his cell that night.”