The Laughing Gorilla (31 page)

Fell said nothing.

The next day Fell called out to Maloney from his cell, “Say, Tom, do you believe in premonitions?”

“No, Jerry, I don’t. Why?”

Fell laughed. “Well, yesterday up on Skyline, you made a couple of remarks that were just too close to suit me!”

“So,” thought Maloney, “Mrs. Rice is buried somewhere along Skyline Boulevard. But it’s a long, long road and those ravines are deeper than hell. He’s going to have to show us and he’s not going to do that.”

“Do you think I’m screwy, Jimmy,” called Fell to Britt. “What is the consensus of opinion on that?” He bared his strong white teeth, tossed his hair back, and told a joke he’d heard on the radio. Britt laughed and went over to the cell. “Jerry, you can tell me,” he said, putting his hand on his shoulder. “Why can’t you sleep at the house alone?” The little investigator felt fatherly toward the tortured young man. Some time ago his pretense of friendship had blossomed into honest affection for Fell.

When he showed Britt his letter from Sandino, the investigator replied, “Why that’s just wonderful, Jerry.” Maloney discovered that Fell was a tremendous eater with a terrific craving for two-inch-thick steaks and whole fried chickens. As part of his plan, he had the best restaurant in town send over chicken and steak dinners for him. “Don’t put cuffs on him,” he told the deputies when the trays of sizzling food arrived and were laid out on the bunk. He handed the cuff key over to his men. “Let him eat with free hands. Allow the man some dignity.”

“I appreciate that,” said Fell genuinely and dove in.

Maloney flattered him outrageously and Britt paid attention to every word Fell had to say. Both laughed at his every quip and in the late afternoons took him for pleasant automobile rides. In the evenings, they continued to feed him steaks and chickens. “I can see he’s developing a liking for me,” Maloney told Sheriff McGrath. “I want to take over the questioning alone.” The sheriff agreed.

As Britt and Maloney ate with Fell, they spoke conspiratorially about what might have happened to the flighty Ada Rice and wondered aloud if they could help in any way. “Do you have any ideas, Jerry?” they asked.

“Gosh, fellas, I don’t know, but I’ll sure enough think about it.”

“I wish you would, Jerry. It would sure enough help us out of this dilemma.”

Maloney perceived that Fell was very receptive to suggestion. If he planted an idea as a seed in a garden, it might grow as the fruit of Fell’s own fertile mind. Yes, Britt agreed, it was possible to direct the growth of an idea through the flow of their conversation. “We might get him to lead us to the body if he thinks he has a rational explanation for the murder,” Maloney told Britt out of earshot. “Let’s give him an out next. Let’s plant the idea of accidental death in his mind. If he fears no punishment he might tell us where Ada Rice is or at least give us his version of how it happened.” Britt agreed.

“We know there’s a body up there, somewhere in the wilderness, Jerry,” said Britt. “If it were your sister or mother, you’d want it brought in for a decent burial, wouldn’t you? Think about that. How would you feel?” Fell who had laughed throughout the meeting, stopped now and surprisingly became angry for the first time. His fury shocked Britt.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll confess to something I didn’t do!” Fell stood, swaying, and clinched his fists, then sat back down as the passion drained from his body. “No one knows what is in my mind.”

“But you cry out in your sleep because there is something on your mind,” said Maloney. “You know Mrs. Rice was killed.” A pause, then Britt brought up the hypothetical accident. “Look, Jerry, maybe there was a fight over the deed to the house. Maybe Mrs. Rice fell and hit her head—perhaps there was an accident. I figure it this way—she tried to burn the deed to the property [since the investigators had been unable to find that document this was a distinct possibility], and there was a struggle and she was killed in that fight.” Maloney and Britt had planted their seed and now waited for it to take root. Sure enough, a version of their scenario, only slightly skewed burst from Fell’s lips as soon as he forgot its genesis.

“That was a hell of a fight, all right. I’ll give you that,” Fell said with a smile and a wink. “You should have seen it.” His smooth, pink-and-white face beamed. “But give me time to think.” Another fabulous lunch was brought in. “Let me think, let me think,” he muttered and reached for the ketchup. “Let me think,” he said as he dug into the steak and home fries.

All eyes were on him. “He not only responds to friendship and attention,” Maloney thought, “but craves the spotlight. He’s a one man vaudeville act. An audience makes him feel important. As long as he is in the spotlight, he is going to drag out his time on stage. There has to be a way to accelerate the process, but how?”

From their long conversations it occurred to Maloney that they might tap Fell’s honest dread of the FBI. “He has the same fears as a kid. He’s fearful of authority, especially the Secret Service. Not only that, he is intensely patriotic. Defrauding the government certainly would go against his grain.”

Maloney called Captain Thomas Foster of the U.S. Secret Service in San Francisco and asked him to drive out to the Redwood City Jail. As soon as Foster arrived he began enumerating to Fell the serious penalties involved for misuse of the mails and defrauding a national bank by removing funds without permission. Foster reached into his briefcase, took out Photostatted copies of Ada Rice’s forged checks and waved them under the prisoner’s nose. This stopped Fell’s laughter for the second extended time. His terror of federal charges so shook him that he agreed to tell his story or at least
a
story over supper. His first version made no mention of a murder or a body. It was a great story, a thrilling story, and one that brought a tear to the eye.

Nobody believed a word of it.

“Would you take a lie detector test?” asked Britt finally.

Fell studied the forgery evidence on the table and the grim expression on Captain Foster’s face with more than a little consternation. He thought about his options, put down his knife and fork, wiped his lips, and twisted the cap on the ketchup. He replaced the bottle on the table, and said, “Sure, why not?” He gave them a blinding smile.

Britt was so pleased he briefed Dullea on the case. The captain of inspectors was always interested in the deaths of lonely, older women who had fallen under the spell of younger men and met fatal ends. Britt had no idea why, but suspected it had to do with some great failure on his part.

—ROBERT LOWELL

 

 

 

 

 

ON
Monday, March 9, by order of Sheriff McGrath, Fell was to endure a lie detector test in Berkeley across the Bay. By morning, the Bay Area was sweltering in a heat wave. By afternoon it was even hotter, especially for Frances Hall sweating inside a cab idling outside the Folsom Prison gates. Inside, George Hall, a condemned double murderer, was unwrapping the two loaded pistols she had smuggled to him. Taking the warden’s secretary as hostage, Hall cut across the prison yard and made a beeline for the outer gate where his wife was waiting. At the last minute, guards battered him into submission and arrested his wife. Now, Frances was in a cell, too, and it was still hot. By late afternoon, the day was torrid. By evening the heat was unbearable. Only a strong northeast wind kept the temperature from climbing any further.

As Maloney, Britt, and Fell reached the University of California the hot wind was so brisk that small craft warnings were posted. They parked at the Berkeley Police Station and, fighting the gale, entered and were escorted to a small room. “Well, here’s the queer machine,” said Fell. He felt relaxed among Maloney and Britt, his prized friends who clustered around him as if to cheer him on. “How’m I doing today?” he asked, eyeing the long tubing and dials. The “Enigma Man” stripped down to his sleeveless white undershirt and placed his right arm, elbow to wrist, flat on the table to his right. His muscles were impressive and shining with perspiration in the heat. Fell was confident in his ability to spin stories, but these police technicians had not only developed the polygraph at the Berkeley station but perfected it there.

Former Berkeley Police Department Chief August Vollmer, now a University of California professor, had made Berkeley’s Scientific Police Department renown the world over through his scientific innovations. In 1923, Leonarde Keeler, a young Berkeley police recruit, devised a portable lie detector that registered stress in a person’s breathing rate, pulse, and blood pressure and plotted each on a long paper trace.

Inspector Anthony Bledsoe, the examination monitor, watched as Inspector Ralph Pidgeon, the polygraph examiner, attached a pair of plates, the electrodermal response unit, to Fell’s fingers and then clipped the electrodes of the galvanometer to the fingers of his left hand to measure skin resistance. Ten years earlier, Keeler added a device for registering skin resistance to electricity. Pores exude small quantities of sweat when a person lies and skin resistance drops. Pidgeon wrapped a black sphygmomanometer cuff around the prisoner’s considerable right biceps to detect fluctuations in blood pressure. He inflated the blood pressure cuff with air sufficient to partially cut off circulation and make his arm numb. Next, with some difficulty, Pidgeon stretched a pneumographs strap around Fell’s barrel chest to measure changes in the depth of breathing.

The room was comfortable, soundproof, and pleasantly lit. When Albert Riedel joined the Berkeley force six years earlier, he realized Keeler’s machine was not foolproof. Noise, any distraction, and the environment of the test room affected the subject’s reactions. Riedel limited questioning to blocks of three minutes interspersed by long breaks, then a repetition of the questions. As a subject tired, his adrenaline dropped, and he ceased reacting when being deceptive.

Pidgeon signaled he was ready to conduct the test. The chart was started. He placed a hand on Fell’s shoulder as if to calm him and began by asking irrelevant questions to compare Fell’s responses to later more important questions. He spoke softly. The upper lines on paper track showed Fell’s breathing; the lower recorded his heart action. A needle with an ink reservoir registered Fell’s heartbeats on a tape down to a fifth of second, the length of time between breaths. Another needle logged his changing blood pressure. At the beginning both horizontal lines traveled side by side uniformly in response to innocuous questions like “Do you smoke?” (question 4).

“Yes,” said Fell, “roll your own and spare your roll.”

A 5¢ sack of tobacco made about thirty-three cigarettes. Fell wise-cracked at every turn. Pidgeon had to reign him in constantly. Bledsoe knew there were ways to outwit the machine—aspirins swallowed with Coca-Cola, iron self-control, drugs, alcohol, hunger, and pain (a tack in the shoe). One other flaw. A madman might pass the test.

Question 5: A direct question about Mrs. Rice’s death—“Did you shoot her?”

The broad grin left Fell’s face for the first time. “No.” The machine registered a sudden surge of blood pressure, and there was a visible flinch of his muscles. Fell saw the chicken scratches become a seismographic explosion. “I’m in for it, aren’t I?” he whispered to Britt. Embarrassed, Britt studied his shoes.

Question 6: “Did you kill Ada Rice? You did kill her didn’t you?”

Fell’s breath line receded until it hardly registered, but his blood pressure shot up. His heart registered trip-hammer activity, the biggest spike in the test.

“Maybe she needed it!” said Fell. The needle leaped. For a moment it looked as if he would tear off the cuff, but Britt put a calming hand on his shoulder. “There, there, pal.”

Question 9: “Did you destroy the body with acids or alkaloids?”

Silence. Fell’s blood pressure bolted again.

Afterward they went over the test with Fell. They held the long paper track so he could see where he had failed. His face retained a trace of a smile until he saw the twin peaks of questions 5 and 6 and the huge rounded mound of question 9. Pidgeon circled the spike with his pen. “You have guilty knowledge,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

Unstrapped from the machine, Fell put on his shirt, plunged his hands into his blue zipper jacket, then said he might begin a confession. “But not now. I may talk later.” Most of all it unnerved Fell that Maloney repeatedly asked about the murder of Bette Coffin and if Fell had lived near the Bay Hotel.

“Why don’t you give McGrath a break?” said Britt as they got back in the car. “We know there is a body up there, somewhere.” Britt was sweating and loosened his tie.