No Lesser Plea (20 page)

“It’s a possibility.”

Conlin made a contemptuous noise. “Boy, have you got a lot to learn! Listen, forensic psychiatry is
the
biggest tar pit in this business. Go near it, and you get dirty.” He started to walk away.

“But …”

“No buts, Karp. Hey, don’t you think I’m pissed off? This was a perfect trial—did you see the press in the courtroom? Now we’ll be lucky to get three inches of ink back by the car ads. But there’s fuck-all we can do now. They’ll examine him at Bellevue, they’ll give us their report. Then we’ll know where we stand. Meanwhile, we’ve got other things to do.”

He left Karp alone in the hallway, confused, feeling like a fool, clutching his meticulously prepared case file, now transformed by the morning’s events into so much scrap paper.

He still couldn’t believe it. He thought, this asshole walks into a store, heavily armed, kills two people in cold blood, throws a patently phony crazy fit in court, and walks away from his trial. Karp knew that delay almost always favored the defense, and he was pretty sure Louis knew it too. Once again Karp thought about how society in its happy idiocy continued to believe that murderers would play the game by the rules, and assist in their own conviction. He also thought about the calm and rational Louis he had met in the Tombs, the man who knew his rights. There was no way that person could have become the flaming lunatic of the courtroom except by way of the underworld equivalent of the Actors’ Studio. But Karp reckoned without the marvelous explanatory power of modern psychiatry.

Dr. Edmund Stone, plump, balding, owlish, thirty-three, a second year resident in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, was dictating his initial report on Mandeville Louis. Stone found court interviews an unpleasant task. They made it necessary for him to spend time in the presence of crazy people, whom he detested. Stone had not become a psychiatrist to talk to crazy people. That was better left to Freudians and other nincompoops. Stone had become a psychiatrist because that was the only way they would let him give experimental drugs to human beings.

“Patient is thirty-eight-year-old Negro male, referred to Bellevue as a result of a violent outburst in court during his trial for murder,” Stone said to his Dictaphone. “I have had one thirty-minute consultation with patient, and this was patient’s first consultation with a psychiatrist since being admitted to hospital yesterday.”

This interview, Dr. Stone reflected, had been more than usually unpleasant. Louis was black, in the first place, and violent. He had thrown a plastic chair across the office, causing in Dr. Stone a disturbing and unprofessional rush of fear. Dr. Stone was not prejudiced. He considered himself a liberal, in that he believed that when black people were violent and committed crimes it was not really their fault. Nothing, in fact, was anybody’s fault. Behavior, so Dr. Stone believed, was merely the result of differences in the flavor of the rich soup that everyone kept in the cauldron on top of their neck. One flavor was Albert Schweitzer, another was Jack the Ripper. When he met a violent black person like Mandeville Louis, something which, as a psychiatric resident at Bellevue, he could hardly avoid, Dr. Stone always thought how wonderful it would be if such people could be given to science, for experimental purposes, drugs or implants or surgical procedures, so we could at last discover the real causes of violence and antisocial behavior, and cure them, and so people like Dr. Stone could walk the streets without fear.

Dr. Stone pulled himself away from these thoughts, and from his perpetual fantasy that one day he would be the scientist to discover the secret of the soup, and resumed his dictation.

“Psychiatric nurses on patient’s hall state patient has been calm. They state patient has been generally lucid, but with three recorded episodes of incoherent shouting, with delusional aspects. On these occasions patient received standard dose of one hundred milligrams of Thorazine, i.m. Response to this medication normal and satisfactory.

“When I first entered the consulting room, patient was seated and appeared calm. I introduced myself but patient did not respond. I asked him if he knew why he was in hospital. Patient sighed and nodded his head. I asked him if he remembered what had transpired in the courtroom. At the word ‘courtroom’ the patient leaped to his feet, shouted ‘No!’ and began to pace the room. Affect agitated and fearful. He began to mumble something about ‘someone telling him to do it’ and the judge ‘trying to get his momma.’ Patient then became violent and threw his chair at the wall. This episode similar to those observed by ward nurses.

“Violent episode lasted about three minutes, after which patient appeared confused, disoriented, and subdued. He picked up chair and sat in it when asked to. Patient responded well to reality-testing questions: name, current date, present location, common facts. On questioning, patient gave lucid responses as to subjective state during ‘seizure.’ He believes something is taking control of his body against his will. He says he ‘feels it coming’ but is powerless to stop it.

“General impressions: Patient appears to be suffering from some acute, episodic, delusional syndrome associated with courtroom proceedings. During these episodes, patient is uncontrollably violent. After them, he appears confused and states that he lacks all recollection of what occurred during the episodes. Recommend patient be retained for further observation. Referred case to Doctor Werner.”

Dr. Stone flipped off his Dictaphone. He picked up Louis’s case file and wrote out a medication order for a daily dose of 40 mg. of Thorazine, orally, four times a day. That should hold the little bastard, he thought.

Dr. Werner, unlike Dr. Stone, was delighted to have Mandeville Louis as a patient. Unlike Dr. Stone, Dr. Werner was not just passing through forensic psychiatry on the way to the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. The study of the criminal mind was his whole life. Dr. Werner was a portly man in late and comfortable middle age, heavy of jowl, beetled of brow. He wore black horn-rims and a white coat over his vest, which sported a gold watch chain and a Phi Beta Kappa key. Although born and raised in the Bronx, Werner cultivated a middle-European manner. When he spoke on a professional matter, for example, he might occasionally look up to the ceiling and wave his hand as if hard-pressed to ferret out, from among his many languages, the correct English idiom.

As he read Dr. Stone’s report, Dr. Werner became increasingly excited. The purity of the reaction! Here was a man whose insanity was triggered exclusively by the prospect of trial and punishment. Louis was a living representation of everything Werner thought was wrong with the way society treated criminals. It was perfectly clear to him that criminals, especially violent ones, were mentally ill. Take such a person and place him in an environment in which everyone assumed he was mentally competent—in, say a courtroom—and the mental disease could not help but get worse. Dr. Werner had observed the most extreme form of this reaction once before, in a rapist named Ganser, and had written a paper about it. Now, to his delight, he was observing the Ganser syndrome once again, in Mandeville Louis. He regarded it as a confirmation of his theory.

Dr. Werner continued to be delighted when he met Louis in person. In an interview he set up the following day, Louis was intelligent and articulate about his mental and emotional states. In this he resembled the people seen by Dr. Werner’s Park Avenue colleagues more than he did the typical rubbish of the Bellevue criminal ward. All Dr. Werner had to do was to hint at some aspect of the Ganser syndrome and in a short while Louis would confirm it in extravagant and inventive detail. Dr. Werner saw a major journal article developing.

Louis was even more delighted with Dr. Werner. He had studied forensic psychiatry as he had the Bible in his father’s house, as an aid to exculpation, his abiding and lifelong interest. Becoming an exemplar of Ganser’s syndrome was in fact much easier than accepting Jesus as your personal savior. For starters, you didn’t have to kneel and spend a lot of time praying. Also, those church ladies, some of them, were pretty sharp, and it took a bit of doing to jerk them around to the proper Christian forgiveness. Werner, on the other hand, did half the work for you.

As Louis spun out the fantasy of his mental incompetence, his mind drifted. It was pleasant in Bellevue Hospital, far more so than the Tombs. It was less noisy and the food was better. As a violent patient under observation, he had a room of his own. He expected they would send him to Matteawan for a while, and he didn’t mind that either. As a mental patient, he had better access to the phone, for example. He had already called DeVonne Carter and got her to stay in his apartment, so the place wouldn’t get ripped off while he was away. He would lay low in Matteawan for a while, let the case get stale. Maybe something would happen to the witnesses. He made a mental note: in a couple of weeks, maybe call up old Elvis. He’ll be anxious to get back on my good side after the way he fucked up his delivery.

Louis figured he had experienced an unusual run of good luck during his years as a robber and was not particularly surprised that he had at last been caught. Now it seemed his luck had changed back. How else could you account for falling into the care of such a perfect asshole as Dr. Milton C. Werner?

When Karp had finished reading Dr. Werner’s report on Mandeville Louis, he was almost nauseated with fury. He called Conlin.

“Jack, have you read this incredible bullshit they sent us on Louis?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“What about it? What about it? It sucks, that’s what! They, this Werner character, they want to send him to Matteawan until he’s competent to stand trial. The guy’s a fraud, him and the shrink both.”

“Karp, I’ve explained to you about Bellevue. What do you expect me to do?”

“Fight the report, that’s what. Jack, this guy is gaming the system, he’s malingering. We can’t let him get away with it.”

“He’s off the streets, Butch.”

“Until when? Hey, they do some marvelous cures up in Matteawan. One of our witnesses is seventy-six. The other one is a junkie who’s probably going up for three-to-five. What if somebody knifes him in prison? His porch light is a little dim in the first place. Give him a year or two and he won’t remember shit, and Sussman will eat him up on the stand. Come on, Jack, this bastard is setting himself up to stale the case and walk.”

Karp listened to Conlin breathe on the line for a few moments. “Butch, let me tell you straight out, I’m not going to get caught in a pissing contest with Bellevue on this case. It’s not worth it to the bureau.”

“Why not? Look, Jack, we can win on this. I got the transcript of the
voir dire
here. Louis was participating in his own defense like a son of a bitch on practically every page. We can blow Werner away in two minutes on the stand. Did you read this crap he wrote? Ganser syndrome, my ass! Listen to this, on page three: ‘Mister Louis shows all the signs of sanity, because, ironically, he is generally sane.’ Get that ‘ironically?’ And it gets worse.”

Karp continued, “ ‘However, the defendant suffers from delusional constellation of pathogenic paranoia arising from his fear of impending imprisonment. Given the proper stimulus, the defendant invariably exhibits psychotic behavior. In the present case this stimulus may be seen to be a courtroom during a trial. Mister Louis can be expected to maintain appropriate affect and rational behavior absent this stimulus.’

“Jesus, Jack, this is like, like a criminal saying we can’t incarcerate him because he suffers from claustrophobia. This asshole is saying that Louis will never be competent to stand trial because he goes crazy when we try him. No judge in the world will fall for that.”

Conlin sighed. “You’re wrong there, Butch. No judge is going to take on Werner within his field. It ain’t done.”

“Then let’s get another shrink to say that all this Ganser business is bullshit.”

“Uh-uh. Butch, it’s not just Louis. I’m not, the bureau is not, taking on the mental health establishment to nail one scumbag. We’ve got thousands of psycho reports every year. There’s one for just about every other damn homicide. You got any idea of how badly they could fuck up the criminal justice system if they thought we were second-guessing their professional expertise? They’d go batshit. And the bastard is black—that’s the cherry on top. Can you see the papers? DA’s office persecutes poor mentally ill nigger, hospital administrators fight to get underprivileged shithead the treatment he needs. No thank you!”

Conlin’s voice had turned loud and gravelly, a sign the bully in him had emerged and the courtly and distinguished public servant had taken a hike. Karp realized there was no way Conlin was going to court negative publicity while he still entertained the notion of running for DA. Karp thought of his Polish lancers picture. Time to cut and run, he thought. Hey, great, I’m getting corrupt.

“Fine, OK Jack, whatever you say. You want the case file back?”

“Nah, just give it to my girl. Hey, Butch, chin up now—there’ll be other cases.”

After Karp had hung up, he sat in a frozen rage for about twenty seconds, then flung Werner’s report as hard as he could at his open window. It sailed out into the warm spring air and fluttered down on to Foley Square, where it was snatched up by a passing bag lady. At last, she thought, my message from God.

Karp grabbed up the Marchione murder case file and stormed out of his office. As usual when he was angry—which occurred more and more often recently—he had to move. Maybe I’ll run over to the East Side, to Yonah Schimmel’s and get a kashe knish. I haven’t had a kashe knish in months—no wonder I’m depressed.

He was about to trot down the stairs when on impulse he stuck his head through the door of an office, which had been recently constructed out of painted plywood, in what used to be waste space in the hallway past the fire stairs. It was Marlene Ciampi’s, and she was in, sitting behind her desk, frowning and answering
coram nobis
petitions. She had been in Homicide a month.

“Champ, you want a kashe knish? I got to get out of here.”