No Lesser Plea (21 page)

“God, that’s the best offer I’ve had in weeks. I’ll give you some money.” She reached into a desk drawer for her handbag.

“Hell, no. My treat. Don’t you love those petitions?”

“Yes, indeedy. I was just thinking that I gave up the opportunity to be a plumber in a Tijuana whorehouse to come to work in the New York DA’s office and sort through this garbage.”

“A plumber?”

“A figure of speech. That’s what they call the girl who does the stuff that nobody else will touch for any amount of money.”

“Champ, how do you know all this shit?”

She gave him an evil grin. “It’s my Ivy League background. So what’s with you? Getting any?”

Karp laughed. “Only up the ass. Conlin just put it to me.”

He related the story of Louis’s trial and the Werner report.

“Poor Butch! I always thought our fearless leader was just a tiny bit of a slime ball. However, things will be different when I run the bureau, which I will not get to do if we sit here bullshitting all day. I promised myself that if I got through two more of these, I would treat myself to a cigarette and a trip to the ladies’ room for a nice pee and, perhaps, a vomit.”

“See you, Marlene.”

“Knish me, big boy.”

Karp left her office and was about to go down the stairs when he realized he was still holding the Louis case file. He walked back to the big room where the Homicide clerk kept the bureau’s files. The clerk, a largish black woman of immense civil service seniority, was sitting at her desk, and Karp dropped the folder like a dead rat in front of her.

“Wrap that in plastic, please, and refrigerate it,” he said.

“Why, what’s wrong with it?”

A light went off in Karp’s head. “What’s wrong with it? Cora, it’s just missing one little detail. Have you got a red pen?”

She rummaged in her desk and pulled out a red ballpoint.

“That do?”

“No, something bigger.”

“I got a Magic Marker.”

“Great, let’s have it.”

Karp had realized that there was a way to scam Louis’s scam. The criminal had read the system too well. He knew that delay worked in his favor because the system was so overloaded that there was no continuity. Judges changed, prosecutors changed. He expected that when he came out of Matteawan in six or eight months, “cured,” he would face a cast of characters for whom his case was just another unit to move along the assembly line, people who would be more than willing to let a poor sick man from a mental institution cop a plea to a lesser crime than murder in the first degree. Karp thought, you scumbag, nice try, but no cigar.

He opened the file. On the first page he wrote, for all future prosecutors to see, in letters three inches high: “CALL KARP—ACCEPT NO LESSER PLEA!”

Chapter 11

S
o far, so good, was what Mandeville Louis thought, upon waking up in his little room in the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. They put him in a private room because he was a potentially violent case, which was fine with Louis. He figured he might have to stay here for six months, let things cool down, maybe see what could be done about fixing the witnesses. Six months—certainly not more; then a change of scene, permanently. He figured he was washed up in New York. The cops, the system, had his name, and since his way of life depended on complete anonymity, it followed that he had to get out of town and change his identity. He had no desire to be known as a criminal, to be rounded up whenever there was an armed robbery, to have cops intruding on his private life. He did not regret having to leave. Hell, he had had a damn good run anyhow. But he was not going to go to prison.

Louis lay with his hands behind his head and thought about places to go. He also tried out new names. Maurice Pemberton of Los Angeles. Lewis Pemberton. Forrest Stanton. Of Detroit. Of Philadelphia. Of D.C. Louis smiled. In his confinement, he was beginning to feel liberated. He thought, that’s why I got into trouble. I was getting in a rut. No more.

He heard the key turn in the lock. He put his glasses on and sat up. The door opened and a big, beefy male ward nurse filled the doorway. He was carrying a tray filled with little white paper cups.

“Medication,” he said. He had a farmer’s face, decorated with pockmarks. Louis gave his most winning smile, and got a cold stare back. “What is it?” he asked.

“Just take it, huh.”

Louis swallowed the spoonful of red liquid.

Later he went to the dining room and had breakfast. He observed his fellow inmates. They did not look particularly crazy. He suspected a fair proportion of them were pulling the same sort of scam he was to get off some crime. In all, a better class of people than you might expect in a loony bin. Nobody screaming or jerking off, like you read about. Everybody nice and calm, he thought as he looked around the room. He felt calm himself. He was sure everything was going to be just fine.

After breakfast, he found himself in the dayroom, although he did not remember walking there. A large television set was on in one corner, and vinyl couches were grouped around it, all occupied by men in bathrobes. They watched the gray flicker, their eyes dull, their faces slack—soap operas and situation comedies. Nobody laughed.

Louis watched, too. There seemed no reason not to, although he rarely had watched television on the outside. He noticed the man next to him was urinating on the floor, the pool slowly spreading toward Louis’s foot. He got up.

He found himself walking across the dayroom to the terrace. Two male nurses stood talking near the door to the terrace. Louis thought he should tell them about the man peeing on the floor, but when he got to them it didn’t seem that important. He went out on the terrace, which was furnished with steel and plastic chairs in primary colors.

He sat down and faced the sun, which was full and warm. An elderly white man with scarlet rashes all over his face sat down in a chair across from Louis. He stared at Louis for a moment and then put his face through an elaborate grimace, eyes screwed up, tongue thickly protruding. He smiled at Louis, as if nothing odd had passed.

“You’re new here?”

“Yes, this week.”

“I’ve been here for months and months. I’m the oldest inhabitant.” Again he let loose a spectacular grimace.

Louis wanted to ask why the man was making faces. Then he remembered he was in a booby hatch. A ripple of discomfort passed across his mind, but soon faded.

“I killed them, you know,” the Oldest Inhabitant said. “But it wasn’t my fault.” Another grimace. Louis thought the man was doing a good imitation of a crazy person. He recalled doing a very similar thing with his face in Judge Braker’s courtroom. In fact, the grimaces had nothing to do with the man’s mental state. They were the result of a condition called tardive dyskinesia, one of the unhappy side effects of fifteen years of maximum dosages of Thorazine. Thorazine gave quiet wards to the people who ran mental hospitals. It gave the people in the wards blotched faces, facial spasms, tremors, incontinence, and massive deterioration of just those portions of the brain that distinguish us all from the turtles. Also impotence, not that people with tardive dyskinesia got a lot of nooky.

“I had to,” said the man. “Doris, Jennifer, and little Edgar, and the maid. It was the Holy Ghost. It didn’t say anything about the maid. You understand, I wouldn’t have done anything to the maid if she had stopped yelling. But she wouldn’t, and I couldn’t hear the Voice. So what could I do?”

Louis nodded agreeably, and said that no, there was nothing he could have done.

“I have been washed in the Blood of the Lamb, did you know that?” said the elderly man. “The Holy Ghost told me, I should wash them in the Blood of the Lamb, too, Doris, Jennifer, and little Edgar. But afterwards, not the maid.” He cocked his ear as if listening to a distant sound. Grimace. Smile. “Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you.”

Part of Louis wanted to get up and walk away from this nut, and another part of him wanted to invite the nut for a walk, and beat his brains out with a rock. But these parts of Louis were separated from the part of Louis that actually did things by the thick, pleasant buffer of the psychoactive drug.

Then it was noon, and time for more of the red liquid. Then it was evening, and tucking-in time and more medication. Then it was tomorrow. And the next day. On Thursday, Louis saw the psychiatrist, Dr. Ghope.

“How are you feeling?” Dr. Ghope wanted to know. Actually, Dr. Ghope had a pretty good idea of how Louis was feeling, since it was he who prescribed the Thorazine. Dr. Ghope did not like trouble. When planning his medical career, years ago in his native Bangladesh, he never imagined himself in charge of a ward full of homicidal maniacs. He had specialized in psychiatry—a field of medicine his young nation needed about as much as it needed fashion models—so that upon finishing his studies, he could emigrate to the United States, to New York, and listen to the troubles of wealthy matrons at one hundred dollars an hour.

But it had not worked out that way for Dr. Ghope. There was some difficulty about his diploma, and more difficulty about his license to practice. He had assiduously sought out the correct person to bribe, but had been unsuccessful, probably because, so he believed, of his problems with idiomatic English.

He felt himself lucky to have landed this job. It was hardly any work at all, consisting mainly of regular interviews with patients who were either perfectly sane or incurably crazy. His colleagues were largely drawn from the subcontinent or the various corners of the developing world, so he did not feel isolated, as he might otherwise have in the upstate backwater in which the mental hospital was situated.

Every so often, Dr. Ghope would meet with several of his colleagues to decide if any of the crazy people had become sane. How this could have happened as a result of weekly interviews with a psychiatrist who barely spoke English and massive doses of tranquilizers was a question beyond the theoretical grasp of Dr. Ghope. But lacking theory, Dr. Ghope had developed a technique. Upon arrival, each new patient would be slammed with a dose of Thorazine, the chemical equivalent of the maul that slaughterhouse workers use to drop steers. Thereafter, the dose would gradually be reduced. If the patient did not show any obvious signs of mental disturbance during his interviews with the psychiatrist during a certain period, he would be pronounced cured, and ready to rejoin society. It was a simple technique, but effective. It had earned him the nickname “Dr. Dope” throughout every level of the hospital.

The period necessary to obtain a cure varied with the number of intakes from the outside. The more people sent in from the courts, the more people became sane. Dr. Ghope and his colleagues did not want crowded wards, which meant trouble, budget problems, and more work. The only restriction on this system was the notoriety of the patient. They knew better than to let an infamous ax murderer out on the street while the memory of the crime was still fresh. They did this as infrequently as they could, but after all, they were only human. In short, the hospital was part of the criminal justice system.

Dr. Ghope consulted Louis’s case file. He read what Dr. Werner had written. It was always a pleasure to read Dr. Werner’s notes. Such a learned man! And his referrals seemed never to give much trouble. He, Ghope, had cured so many of them. Dr. Ghope looked across his desk at the thin, yellowish-skinned man slumped in the plastic chair. He certainly didn’t look violent now. Perhaps he would be an easy cure.

“How are you feeling?” he asked again.

Louis raised his eyes. “Feel fine. Sleepy.”

“Excellent! Well, let us see. Mandeville, your name is? What an unusual name! Yes, indeed. Well, Mandeville, have you experienced any delusions this week? Have you acted out?”

“Wha’?”

“Excellent. First-rate! Any problems with your medication?”

“Medi’shum.”

“Oh, very good. Very good, indeed. Well, Mandeville, you seem to be progressing splendidly. Steady progress is our rule here, as you shall find.” Dr. Ghope made some notes with his fountain pen, capped the pen, replaced it in the breast pocket of his white lab coat and closed the folder. “I will see you next Thursday. Until then, please do continue your excellent progress,” he said, and rang the buzzer for the nurse to come and lead Louis away.

Louis was in the Arts and Crafts room, coiling a clay candy dish, trying to remember what he had to do that was important. His dosage had been reduced over the last few months, but he still felt like there was a concrete block tied to his higher mental functions. Louis was extremely sensitive to drugs, which was why he had never used any himself on the outside; and of course nobody paid enough attention to him on the inside to find this out. Had he not met Fallon he might have continued inexorably declining into carrothood, and so truly have reached that state—for which the hospital had been designed—of not being a danger to himself or others. He stopped coiling the clay and glanced idly around the big, light-filled room. Most of the inmates were busy with clay or rubber band and wooden toy boats. In the corner, by the window, one man was painting at a large easel. Louis wandered over to see what he was doing.

“Holy shit!” said Louis, when he saw the painting.

“Ah, a connoisseur,” said the man, with a friendly smile. He was a big, soft, moon-faced man, pasty of complexion, with a hooked nose, thick moist lips, longish, thinning black hair and a fringe of dark beard, like Henry VIII.

He held out a large, long-fingered hand, blackened with paint. “Robert Fallon,” he said. Louis shook the hand and said his name. He could not take his eyes off the painting. Its subject was a scene of sadistic pornography brilliantly executed, explicit, and suggestive at the same time. It was as full a realization of the lower reaches of the human spirit as Rembrandt or Monet were of the higher.

Louis watched Fallon paint for a while. Fallon didn’t mind. He enjoyed adulation. At one time Fallon was considered one of the most promising artists of his generation. Were it not for his unfortunate desire to rape, murder, and mutilate little girls—a desire to which he had given full vent some six years before in the art colony of Millbrook, New York—he might have continued as an ornament of the Manhattan salons forever. He had got himself put into Matteawan, after being arrested, by his version of the same scam Louis had used. He had just gone semi-catatonic and refused to admit that he remembered anything at all about the four little girls, the sink in the basement, the plastic bags, and the box of blood-clotted industrial razor blades.