The Executioner's Song (88 page)

                "I am a producer," said Schiller. "I don't consider myself in your league, but I've produced some movies you don't even know about."

                "Well, I think you're being unrealistic," said Susskind. "Of course, maybe you'll be lucky. Maybe you'll get the whole thing."

                "I certainly hope so," said Schiller.

When Susskind spoke again to Greenberg, Stanley said, "I wouldn't feel too badly. It's not what we hoped it would be." Susskind agreed. "I don't think I'm going to bid anymore. Everybody's getting kind of crazy there. It's no longer a story about the breakdown of the criminal justice system, it's a farce, the girl's suicide, poison being slipped in." They agreed they didn't like the smell of it. Stanley said, "I think anybody who does the story now is jumping on a dead and putrefying body, It's bizarre and sick." They agreed. One of those to-hell-with-it conversations.

                Still, they didn't really want to let go. Once some dust settled, the story might still have a lot to offer. They decided Stanley would try to keep himself available in case the right arrangements could yet be made.

Chapter 9

NEGOTIATIONS

Next day, Gary brought it up again. "Are you ready, Vern, to take Boaz's place?" he asked.

                "I don't know," said Vern. "Am I supposed to feel ready?"

                "I'm going," Gary said, "to turn everything over." He nodded. "I just want a few thousand dollars to pay off a couple of people, and a couple I want to help."

                "I don't know yet," said Vern, "who to make a deal with. A lot of people are ringing my phone these days."

                "Vern, it's your decision."

                "Well, if you think I can handle it," said Vern.

                "Being a businessman in town," said Gary, "you know the way."

                "This is a different type of business."

                "Hell," said Gary, "I've seen you operate in your own store. You can do it better than Boaz."

In the afternoon, Vern got a call from Dennis. "Did you know Gary is talking of firing me?" he asked.

                "Well, why did he do that?" asked Vern. "You mean he came right out and said it?"

                "Between us," asked Dennis, "do you think you can take my place?"

                Vern said softly, "I think I can do as well as you have."

After this conversation, Vern spent a couple of hours in thought.

                Then he called a few friends in Provo to ask advice about a lawyer.

                That evening around ten, he phoned one fellow at home that they all recommended, a lawyer named Bob Moody. Vern could practically hear Moody think about the proposition. Then he answered, "I would be happy to take the case. I'll help you all I can. Do you want to get together tonight, or tomorrow morning, or Monday?"

                "Monday's good enough," said Vern.

                He felt as if he were moving an immense weight. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.

Nicole's cigarettes were becoming a problem. They had a lot of oxygen tanks around in Intensive Care, and wouldn't let her strike a match. She kept complaining, "I want a cigarette." They couldn't do much with her. "You had one a few hours ago," they would tell her.

                "Well, I want another."

                Finally, they let Kathryne take her out to the utility room where, among the laundry sinks and old dirty cloth mops soaking in the bowl, Kathryne could sit with Nicole while she smoked. There they would relax. Once Nicole even said, "Maybe I'm glad I'm here. I don't know." Nicole never admitted it exactly, but Kathryne decided she hadn't really wanted to die, just had to prove to Gary she loved him enough. Finally, Nicole did say right out loud, "I thought it was wrong to take my life, and if God thought so also, then I'd stay alive. But if it wasn't a sin, I would die." Kathryne felt close to her then.

Naturally, next thing, this awful jumbled-up mess had to begin.

                The doctors wanted Kathryne to sign papers putting Nicole in Utah State Hospital. In the administrator's office, Kathryne tried to argue, but the man there said, "It isn't going to make any difference. There are already two physicians' signatures that she's incompetent and suicidal, and Nicole has also signed." Kathryne didn't know what to do. She didn't think Nicole was ready to come home. Come home to where? On the other hand, she was afraid that once they put Nicole in the nuthouse, she might never get out. Kathryne was afraid of state hospitals. Anyway, they pulled out the paper, and Kathryne wrote her name under Nicole's. She was shaking.

                The moment Nicole had put her signature on the page, she knew it was an awful mistake. "Why didn't I just walk out of this motherfucker?" she asked herself. All the way to the ambulance she kept telling herself, "The reason you didn't, girl, is because you got nothing but hospital pajamas and a blanket." They had wrapped her good and she couldn't move her arms or legs. A bug all trussed up. As they drove, she couldn't see out of the ambulance, but there was something about the whine of the gears as the vehicle went up one long grade that sounded like the end of the trip. She was on the long approach road to Utah State Hospital. Oh God, the nuthouse they had had Gary in.

She was familiar enough with that. Same feeling. Even the same ward. It was shaped like a U, with the boys in one wing, the girls in the other, and a social room connecting them. The halls were long and narrow, with bedrooms and cells, and bright linoleum on the floor. Goddamned asshole paintings all over the place. Thoroughly stupid stuff like COMMUNITY IS US! painted in pastel watercolors that had caked and gone dead. Orange couches, yellow walls and plastic cafeteria chairs and tables. It depressed the hell out of her—like she was condemned to live in a visiting room forever. Everybody looked all tranked out. It would take you 150 years to die. Everything so god damned cheerful and phony.

John Woods had had an upset stomach the night before, coughed up some blood, and thought, Jesus, now I'm getting an ulcer. He decided to stay home from the hospital, but a frantic call came in from the ward. They said, "Nicole Barrett's on the way to us."

                "Like hell she is," said Woods.

He went over the Superintendent's office and first thing Kiger said was, "I sent her to your unit. That's where I want her."

                Woods said, "Nicole oughtn't to be in Maximum Security. This is just another indication that the rest of the hospital can't carry their share. Thera-Mod should be able to take her." Kiger agreed. He started to interrupt, but Woods was so mad, he said, "Let me finish."

                He revered Kiger, thought he was the only man who had had a new idea in treating psychopaths since they coined the word, and so it got to him whenever he thought Kiger was doing something for less than the noblest motive.

                Of course, Woods's unit was the only one with enough security to protect Nicole from the press. As Kiger said, "This is going to be sticky, newswise." Every wire service, major newspaper and magazine was going to try every trick to interview Nicole. That meant heavy pressure. The media would squeeze the politicians, and they in turn would squeeze the hospital. If Nicole pulled off another attempt, all their heads were on the block. It irritated the hell out of Woods how much this was going to interfere with the therapy of everyone else on the ward. His job had shifted, Now he was there to keep Nicole alive.

                Yet, it killed him. It just wasn't Woods's idea of therapy. They'd be junking a lot of their program just to keep a 24-hour watch on Nicole.

Nicole wanted to go to sleep like she never had before, but immediately a boss-looking chick, probably a patient, but domineering and awful sure of herself in a rotten limited way, was telling her, "No lying on beds in the daytime." "Take a shower!" "Take off your jewelry."

                They started to grab her, and she began to fight. That was when Nicole realized everything she did from here on out was going to be a fight. It came down on her like a disease. It would be a losing battle all the way. "I'm going to be suffocated by these fucking sheep," she said to herself. Yes, this was the place Gary had described where everybody ratted on everybody.

                Instead of working with the antisocial impulses of each patient as it came into conflict with the group interest, instead of the group being the anvil on which each patient's personality might get forged into a little more social responsibility, the emphasis would now have to be on surrounding Nicole, insulating her and cutting off the day-to-day influence of Gary, so that he could not brainwash her with the idea—oh, beautiful guru!—that their souls were scheduled to meet on the other side. Woods would have to issue orders that no aide or patient was to mention Gilmore's name. Not ever. If he was going to keep Nicole alive, he had to neutralize that relationship. Woods could recognize that if nobody would talk to Nicole about Gary, she was nonetheless going to think about him all the time. Woods couldn't stop that. He just didn't want Gilmore able to influence her thinking anymore.

She tried to go to sleep, and they wouldn't let her. She lay on the floor and they woke her and she went right back to the floor and went to sleep again. Then Norton Willy's wife was shaking her. Mayvine her name was. The wife of Norton Willy who grew up right next door to her grandmother. Nicole couldn't believe that Norton had married this witch, a horrible huge ass-kisser who was now helping to run the place. They kept trying to get Nicole up and wouldn't let her sleep on the couches, but she felt three times as weak as in the other hospital. All she was interested in was being alone, and thinking about Gary

The ideal way to run a hospital was to take your chances on suicide. That was part of the risk in any innovative therapy. Here, they had to cut the risk off. Kiger's ideas were so unconventional anyway, that his program could receive an irreparable blow if they couldn't supervise Nicole. Nonetheless, it was the pits.

Schiller went out to the airport. His girl friend, Stephanie, was coming in. Since she had once been his secretary, he knew she would not be surprised when he greeted her with the announcement that they had to go right away to Pleasant Grove near Orem, a good forty miles from the airport, to visit with Kathryne Baker.

Schiller expected there'd be press outside, but, in fact, the house was hard to find. Naming the streets by compass directions didn't work in Pleasant Grove. There were too many old country roads, paved cow pastures, and dry riverbeds. 400 North was likely to twist across 900 North and 200 East intersect with 60 West. It was not the kind of address that a reporter, fighting a five o'clock deadline, was going to lose a half a day looking for.

                Schiller, however, had time for a long talk with Mrs. Baker.

                He thought it was a sloppy house, with old tires out in the front yard and metal skins rusting in the grass—you couldn't tell if the metal came from old jalopies or old washing machines. There were bits of jam on the table and dust and dirt and grease formed a pomade on many a surface in the kitchen, There were also an astonishing number of kids—he saw Rikki and Sue Baker's kids go through, plus some neighbors', and got them mixed up with Kathryne Baker's youngest child, Angel, who might have been six or seven and was astonishingly beautiful, looked like Brooke Shields.

                With all that noise it could have been confusing, but Schiller was counting on his ability to sell a proposition in a palace or a pool hall.

                He went right into a rap like the one he gave to Vern. "Whether I get the rights to your daughter's life or not, this, I think, is what you should do." And he set out to give her confidence in his understanding of the problems facing her. He told her she should change the phone and get the kids away with a relative. That way, the press wouldn't discover them. "You want to avoid having the children feel this is an indelible experience of horror." All the while, he knew what was impressing her most is that he did not sit there asking questions and writing her answers down, like he was stealing an interview, but was saying: Mrs. Baker, go get a lawyer. Kathryne said, "I don't know one." "Who do you work for?" asked Schiller. When she told him, Schiller said, "Call your boss and ask who his lawyer is." He could see it surprised her agreeably that he wanted her to obtain a representative to take care of her rights. He knew she was not used to talk like that.

Schiller had learned from the deal he made for Sunshine that if you wanted to get into big deals with movies and books, and play with producers and publishers, then you had to lay the right foundation, and draw up the right contracts from day one. Otherwise, you could end in a tree, swinging from limb to limb. With Sunshine, he had failed to get a separate contract from the dying woman's husband. Therefore Universal had to spend a lot of money later to buy his rights. That had been an item to haunt Schiller. So, he laid it out now for Mrs. Baker. "Get yourself a lawyer," he told her. "Get it before we even talk money."