“Could be out of guilt and desperation. Prison's a depressing place.”
“Maybe, but I don't think so.”
Sending Stuart Jackson to Bridgewater would be Sherman's way of making sure he got well fast. After a week with the crazies, going back to county would seem like a day at the beach.
“And she was in a coma for how long?” I asked.
“More than six weeks.”
I whistled. It's unusual for someone who's unconscious for that long to recover memories of events immediately preceding their injury. “They did an MRI?” I asked. Without being aware of it, I'd crossed the threshold. I was well on my way to being hooked.
“Several. I haven't had anyone analyze them yet,” Chip said.
“He's competent to stand trial?” I asked. Chip shrugged his shoulders. I held up my hands. “Don't look at me ⦔
I hadn't been to Bridgewater since â well, since before. I couldn't have imagined myself even contemplating going back into a prison. And yet, that's what I found myself doing. I was imagining myself driving down there, going inside, talking to Stuart Jackson in a little examination room â me on one side of the table, him on the other, one of their panic button beepers attached to my belt. What if Stuart Jackson did kill his wife? What if he was just a very clever actor, playing a part? Ralston Bridges had been cunning enough to fool a jury. But I'd known. So had Annie.
Chip pulled a manila folder from his briefcase and took out
a pen. He started to jot a note. Annie rummaged in her pack for her daybook, opened it, and began flipping the pages. They were smart. They were waiting me out while the forces at war in my head took over. Suppose Stuart Jackson was an innocent man accused of killing his wife. Driven to attempt suicide. Left to rot in a hellhole worse than prison. It easily could have been me.
“So you're going to have someone evaluate him?” I asked.
“We've been trying to find the right person,” Chip said, massaging his chin between thumb and forefinger, “someone who's got the expertise. Someone who'll understand what this guy is going through. Someone he'll trust.”
I sighed. “I suppose I could ⦔ Just one meeting, I told myself.
“I know, I know,” Chip said. “If only things weren't the way they are. You'd be perfect.”
“No, I mean it. I could see him.” If a look of triumph flashed between Annie and Chip, I missed it. All I saw was Chip's dumbfounded look, his mouth hanging open. I swallowed it. “Just to give you a reading.”
“You're sure about this?” he said, sounding genuinely astonished.
I nodded and pushed the phone toward him. A minute later, the wheels had been set in motion. I was to see Stuart Jackson the next morning.
Chip took a fat envelope from his briefcase and laid it on the desk. “Arrest report. Police interviews. You'll need to review them before you see the defendant.”
I stared at the packet as if it were some kind of poisonous viper. You sneaky bastard, I thought. Just a consult, right? So why come armed with these records if you didn't think I'd be doing a competency evaluation?
Chip said apologetically, “We were hoping you'd do it.” Then he looked at his watch. He wasn't going to give me time to back out. He closed his briefcase, snapped the latch shut, stood up,
and shot out his hand. It was automatic. I wanted to get up and, just as automatically, shoot my hand out. But as the reality of what I'd committed to hit home, I couldn't find the strength to stand. His arm sagged. “We need you, Peter. Stuart Jackson needs you. You'll see, this is the right thing to do.”
I let them see themselves out. I turned out the lights and sat in the shadowy office, staring out the window, still not believing that I'd agreed to evaluate another murderer. Hadn't I had enough excitement and fame for one lifetime? I opened the bottom drawer of my desk and pulled out the bottle of Jameson's. It was empty. I uncorked it and sniffed.
After an hour, I locked up and started home. I knew there wasn't much in the fridge. And I couldn't face the five or six hours alone in my house that it would take for me to feel exhausted enough to fall asleep. I found myself taking a detour to the Stavros Diner. Kate and I used to eat there at least once a week.
Jimmy had been running the Stavros since I'd started dropping by at daybreak ten years ago. Back then, I was another snot-nosed Pearce intern looking for a quick fix of salt and grease after night duty. Jimmy was working the grill when he saw me come in. He wiped his hands on the big white dish towel he had wrapped around his belly and nodded. I considered it an exquisite favor, his acting as if my arrival was no big deal.
I took a seat at the counter. Suddenly, I was ravenous. “Got any moussaka?” I asked.
He shook his head mournfully. “All out.”
“All out?” I glanced around, noticing for the first time that the place was packed. “What's good, then?”
“How about some pastitsio?” he asked, putting a dish of his world-class olives under my nose. I nodded and put an olive in my mouth. It may as well have been sawdust for all I could taste.
“Pastitsio, then. And some stuffed grape leaves. A salad. And a Sam Adams.”
Three hours later, I was still there. Jimmy had long since locked up and flipped the sign on the door. I was on my third beer. Just like old times, he was complaining about the twenty hours a day he worked his butt off for a brother-in-law who barely showed up to turn on the lights.
He turned his back to me to scrape the grill. “So, it's good you're here,” he said.
I shrugged and swallowed the last of my beer.
“Really,” he said, his back to me still. “You're alone. You're here. Not such an easy thing to do. It's old habits that are the hardest to get back to.”
I mumbled something into my empty glass and got up to go home. Going home was the habit that was the hardest of all to get back to.
I'D SET my alarm for seven-thirty the next morning but woke up, as usual, long before six, finding myself, also as usual, sleeping on the left side of the bed leaving the right side looking untouched. I made a pot of coffee and poured myself a huge mug, intending to take it out to the garage where I'd been bringing my 1967 BMW back to life. For more than a year, the car had been my silent companion, the friend who got me out of the house, out of myself. Slowly it was turning into a swan. Under the hood it looked great. The trunk, the rear bumpers and fenders were waxed and pristine. I was just getting to the front fenders, which were dented from multiple encounters with hard objects. Formerly owned, no doubt, by a typical Boston driver.
I stopped halfway to the garage. Something wasn't right. I turned and stared at the house. The porch light was on, just the way I'd left it when I'd come home. My mother should have turned it off when she got in. She never forgets to turn out a light. It's part of her religion. I bounded up the steps and rang her bell. When I didn't hear her footsteps inside, I started banging on the front door. “Hey, Ma!” I called. “You in there?” I
tried to ignore the strident note of panic in my voice. I was getting my keys out of my jeans pocket when the door jerked open.
My mother looked out, bleary-eyed, wisps of white hair escaping from the gauzy pink scarf she had tied around her head. She clutched the top of her pink bathrobe, the tendons standing out on the back of her hand. I stared down at her furry pink slippers, back up into her anxiety-filled eyes. “What is it? What's wrong?” she asked.
“You forgot to turn out the light,” I accused her.
Relief flooded her face. She came out on the porch and stared at the light in disbelief. “My goodness, so I did.” She looked at me. “Oh ⦔ She reached up and put her cool hand on my cheek. “I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to worry you.”
I closed my eyes, exhausted. Life had turned into a walk along a narrow precipice. It's so tiring, having to pay attention every instant so the people you love don't fall into the abyss. I knew I was being irrational. It had been understandable, predictable even. After all, last night was the first time in years that my mother had gotten home later than me and needed to be the one to turn off the porch light.
“So, how was your date?” I asked. She gave me a blank look. “Remember? Mr. Kuppel?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Kuppel,” she said and actually blushed. “We went to dinner, took in a movie.”
“How was dinner?”
“Eh,” she dismissed it.
“That memorable, huh? How about the movie?”
“Feh!” She screwed up her face as if she'd just taken a whiff of sour milk. “What language! And so much violence.”
“And what about Mr. Kuppel? Was he eh or feh?”
She thought about that before she answered. Then she lowered her eyes and said, “Actually, he was good company.” She smiled sheepishly. “I quite enjoyed myself.” She looked as surprised
as I felt. How could she be ready to move on when I wasn't ready yet myself?
I turned down my mother's offer of French toast and spent an hour working on the car. I deliberately left myself with barely enough time to shower and dress. If I was moving fast, I wouldn't think about where I was going. I decided to tempt fate and drive the BMW to Bridgewater. It was the longest I'd dared drive the car but I was feeling reckless. Maybe it wouldn't make it. Better yet, maybe it wouldn't start. But when I turned the key, the engine caught without a murmur, without a complaint.
Bridgewater State Hospital is about forty-five minutes south of Boston. To get there, I took the Pike inbound, poking along in traffic, wondering if I was going to overheat. The temperature gauge was dead so I turned on the heater for extra insurance and opened the windows so I wouldn't pass out. When I got on 93 South and headed away from the city with a trickle of other vehicles, I opened it up. At 60 miles an hour, it felt like a 2,000-pound stallion, cantering along at a comfortable pace.
I got off the highway, passed through the picture-perfect New England town of Bridgewater (complete with town green and steepled church, McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King), continued through housing developments, then corn fields. I turned left on a narrow wooded lane. About a mile farther on, the woods abruptly ended, giving way to a vast wasteland punctuated by five bleak cement warehouses, surrounded by metal fencing topped with razor wire.
I followed the HOSPITAL VISITORS sign and parked.
Then, I opened the car door and sat there, listening to my heart pound. This was where I'd met with Ralston Bridges. Nothing had changed. Chain-link fencing, expanses of graffitifree concrete, not a tree in sight, utter silence â and that feeling that someone, somewhere is watching you.
Annie's words came back to me. “If he's a murderer, then I'm the Easter Bunny.”
I closed my eyes and breathed, in through the nose, out through the mouth, concentrating on a point just between my eyes through which I imagined ribbons of air flowing. I counted backwards from fifty. I focused on releasing the tension from my neck, from my forehead, from around my mouth. I tried to find a completely peaceful, stress-free zone between my shoulder blades. When I got to zero, I took a deep breath and blew out hard. “Find automatic pilot,” I ordered as I opened my eyes, grabbed my briefcase, got out of the car, and strode toward the entrance.
I pressed the button on the little box hanging alongside the prison hospital gate. “Dr. Peter Zak, here to see Stuart Jackson,” I said and waved my driver's license and mentioned the official letter Chip's office should have faxed over. The little wall-mounted video camera swiveled toward me. A buzzer sounded and the gate silently slid aside. I stepped inside a wire cage and the gate closed behind me. I waited until a second gate opened. Once I was through and it had closed, a steel door just beyond clicked and an armed guard pulled it open from the other side. He checked my letter, pocketed my driver's license.
“You okay?” he asked.
It wasn't what I expected him to say and I didn't have an answer ready.
“We thought you might be sick, you sat there so long. One of the guards was about on his way over to check you out.”
I glanced around the room and noticed two surveillance cameras tucked discreetly alongside fluorescent ceiling lights. “Just getting myself organized,” I said.
“You're here to evaluate Stuart Jackson.” He examined the paper attached to his clipboard and frowned, grunted, took a pen from behind his ear and delivered a big checkmark to the page. Then he steered me over to a metal detector.
This particular metal detector was a distinguished adversary that had once held me at bay for thirty minutes. It made the one at the entrance to the Cambridge courthouse seem like a
wuss. While the guard checked through my briefcase for incendiary test materials, I shed my wallet, keys, change, jacket, belt, watch, and wedding ring. Finally, I took off my shoes and padded through in my stocking feet. I was rewarded by silence.
When I'd reassembled myself, the guard gave me a visitor's badge and an emergency beeper. I followed him to an examining room â a ten-foot cubicle painted brilliant yellow, barren inside except for a wooden table, two steel folding chairs, and an orange radiator.
He left me there. Alone, I paced the perimeter of the room and then pressed myself into a corner and stared at the small table, its top scratched with obscene graffiti. I'd evaluated Ralston Bridges over a table just like it. He'd been accused of stalking and killing a woman he'd met in a bar. She'd rebuffed him. According to the bartender, she'd walked away with a sniff and the words “What are you, some kind of a nut?” It was the one thing Bridges couldn't stand.
He was furious that I'd been sent to evaluate his competency to stand trial. He explained that he didn't need me to tell the court he wasn't competent because he was going to get off. “Look at me,” he said, “who's going to believe this is the face of a fuckin' killer?” He had a point. He was Boy Scout clean-cut and blond, handsome in a soft kind of way.
Wasn't it a shame, he said, about that woman he was accused of killing? Did I know that she had a five-year-old daughter, now left without a mother? It made him so sad to think about it. He had a little girl himself. He'd been there when she was born. It was the most incredible experience of his life. As he said this, as if on command, a single tear appeared at the corner of a dead, emotionless eye.
He was just as Annie described him â a dangerous wacko. But not the kind of wacko who gets declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. Intelligent, charming, hyperattuned to other people's expectations, he could morph, chameleonlike, to fit your expectations. He was a true psychopath.
Still, he might have had a shot at an insanity defense. When I suggested it, he bellowed, “I'M NOT CRAZY!” slamming each word down like a fist and coldly watching my reaction, as if his eyes were detached from his body.
“Do you understand what not guilty by reason of insanity means?” I'd asked, trying to engage him.
But he wouldn't engage. Instead, he shot back, “I keep a list, you know. A list of all the people who've ever called me that” I asked him where he kept this list and he tapped his forehead three times with an index finger. “I take care of them. Maybe not right away. But sooner or later, I take care of them. So you don't want to call me that” He smiled a nasty smile. By the end of my session with Ralston Bridges, he had added my name to his little list.
Bridges wouldn't allow Chip to call me to testify. And it turned out he was right â he didn't need me to tell the jury that he was insane, a psychopath with no capacity for feeling sympathy for his victims or their families, only a drive to satisfy his own cravings. He didn't need an insanity defense because the jury found him not guilty. Bridges, with his supreme self-confidence, his smug certainty that he could get away with murder, went free.
I stared up at the little window at ceiling level that let in a shaft of sunlight. This was the first time I'd allowed myself to remember Ralston Bridges, the interview, the calm empty watchfulness, the solitary tear that was more frightening than any wild-eyed rage. My memories of that interview, up to then, had come as involuntary warped nightmares in which I press and press the panic button, pound on the door, and watch myself through a glass panel making a cup of tea in my own kitchen.
I was startled when Stuart Jackson rushed into the cubicle like a burst of static. I peeled myself off the wall. “Mr. Jackson?” I said. “Dr. Peter Zak. I'm a psychologist working with your
attorney. I'm here to interview you and assess your competency to stand trial.”
He shook my extended hand and nailed me with intense, dark eyes. He was a wiry little man whose nondescript face was punctuated by a toothbrush mustache. “Are you here to screw me, too?” he asked, shifting from foot to foot, a scrawny bantam cock.
I sat down and waited. He backed into the empty chair and sat.
“What do you mean, screw you?” I asked.
“Please, Doctor. Don't patronize me,” he said, clipping his words. His right knee jiggled. “I'm the only one without an alibi. Ergo, bingo. Prime suspect.”
“Who do
you
think did it?”
Stuart Jackson looked down at his shoes, running sneakers without laces. One knee still jiggled up and down. “It could have been any one of them. Sylvia's like a cat in heat when it comes to attracting men. They cluster around her like bees to honey.” He looked up at me. “Flies to puke.”
He waited for a reaction. I blinked. “Tell me about your relationship.”
“It's too corny.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“We were high school sweethearts.” Jackson snorted a laugh. “We really were. I'd have done anything for her. Did anything for her. Oh, shit.” Jackson stared up at the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. Then he looked at me hard, his eyes rimmed with red. “I could easily have killed any of them. But I never, ever would have laid a finger on my wife.”
“So why did she accuse you?”
“Christ Almighty. Ask her.”
“She's not here. You are.”
Jackson grimaced and shook his head. “I guess I've always been there when she needed someone to fix her up. Right now,
she needs an answer to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question and, as usual, I'm it.”
“But you're innocent?”
Jackson blinked at me. “You're a smart guy. Suppose your ex-wife is killed at home. You'd be the most likely suspect, wouldn't you? Your fingerprints on the fireplace poker, the kitchen knives. All the killer has to do is be careful and all the evidence points to you.” His logic took my breath away. I wondered if he knew. But he wasn't looking for my reaction. He was wrapped in his own tale of woe. “And you know as well as I do she can't remember zilch with a traumatic fronto-temporal injury to the brain.”