The Madman's Tale (39 page)

“Generally, Security thinks should be two guys with any transfer like this. One walking on either side. Those are the hospital rules.”

“Well, let me tell you what I’m getting at,” she said, taking a step closer to the men, so that only that small group might hear her, which was probably unnecessary in the hospital, but more a natural response to the meager conspiracy that Lucy had in mind. “I’m only modestly optimistic that these interviews will turn up something, and I’m really about to rely on Francis probably far more than he’s aware,” she said slowly. The others looked over at the young man quickly, who blushed, as if singled out in class by a teacher he had a crush upon. “But as Peter pointed out the other day, what we really have here is a lack of hard evidence. I’d like to try to do something about that.”

Both Big Black and Little Black were now listening intently. Peter, as well, took a step forward, narrowing the small group further.

“What I would like,” Lucy continued, “is while I’m talking with these patients, that their living areas get thoroughly searched. Have either of you ever shaken down a bunk and storage area?”

Little Black nodded. “Of course, Miss Jones. On occasion, that’s a part of this fine job.”

Lucy stole a quick glance over at Peter, who seemed to be controlling his desire to speak with some difficulty. “And,” she added slowly, “what I’d really like is for Peter to be a part of those searches. Like, in charge.”

The two attendants looked at each other, before Little Black spoke up. “Peter’s got a
No Exit
ticket on his jacket, Miss Jones. What that means is he ain’t allowed out of the Amherst Building except on special circumstances. And it would be Doctor Gulptilil or Evans who says what those special circumstances would be. And Evans hasn’t let him outside these doors even once.”

“Is he supposed to be a flight risk?” she asked, a little like she would at a bail hearing before a judge.

Little Black shook his head. “Evans put it on the case file. More like a punishment, really, ’cause he’s facing some serious charges back in your part of our fine state. Peter here under a court order to get evaluated, and that
No Exit
on the jacket, it’s a part of that evaluation, I’m guessing.”

“Is there a way around it?”

“A way around everything, Miss Jones, if it’s important enough.”

Peter had dropped into quiet. Francis saw again that he was anxious to speak, but had the sense to keep his mouth shut. Francis noted that neither Big Black nor his brother had as yet said no to Lucy’s request.

“Why you think you need Peter to do this, Miss Jones? Why not just my brother or me?” Little Black asked quietly.

“A couple of reasons,” Lucy said, perhaps a little too rapidly. “One, as you know, Peter was a fine investigator, and knows how and where to look and what to look for and how to treat any evidence, if we can come up with some. And, because he’s been trained in forensic evidence collection, I’m hoping that he will spot something that maybe you or your brother might miss …”

Little Black pursed his lips together, a small movement that seemed to acknowledge the truth in what Lucy was saying. She took this as encouragement, and continued.“… And another reason—I’m not sure I want to compromise either you or your brother in all this. Say you come up with something in a search. You’re obligated to tell Gulptilil, who will, in turn, then control the evidence. Very likely, it will get lost, or screwed up.
Peter finds
something, quote and unquote, well, he’s just another crazy guy in this hospital. He can leave it, tell me about it, then we can obtain a legitimate search warrant. Keep in mind, I’m hoping that there’s going to come a time when we’re going to need a policeman to come in and make an arrest. I need to preserve some sort of investigative integrity, whatever that is. You see what I’m driving at, here, gentlemen?”

Big Black laughed out loud, although there was no joke pending, except for the concept of
investigative integrity
inside the mental hospital. His brother put his hand to his head. “Man, Miss Jones, I think you’re gonna get us into some heavy duty trouble before all this is finished up.”

Lucy merely smiled at the two men. A wide smile, that showed her teeth and was accompanied by a glistening, welcoming look in her eyes, that spoke of a conspiracy of both need and elegance. Francis noted this, and thought for the first time in his life how hard it is in life to turn down a request from a beautiful woman, which probably wasn’t fair, but true nevertheless.

The two attendants were looking at each other. After a second, Little Black shrugged and turned back to Lucy Jones. “Tell you what, Miss Jones. My brother and I, we’ll do what we can. Don’t you let Evans or Gulp-a-pill know ’bout this.” He paused, letting a small silence hover over all of them. “Peter, you come talk to us in private, maybe we work something out. I got an idea …”

Peter the Fireman nodded his head.

“What we supposed to be looking for, anyway?” Big Black asked.

Peter stepped in, to answer this question. “Bloodstained clothes or shoes. That would be the most obvious thing. Then somewhere there’s a knife or some other sort of handmade weapon. Whatever it is, it will have to be sharp as hell because it was used to cut both flesh and bone. And the missing set of
keys, because our Angel has a means of getting into locked areas pretty much whenever he seems to have the need, and doors don’t seem to mean all that much to him. Anything else that points to a greater knowledge about the crime poor Lanky is in prison for. Or anything that points at the other crimes that have gotten Lucy’s attention, from the other part of the state. Like newspaper clippings. Or maybe an item of woman’s clothing. I don’t know. But I do know there’s one thing out there that’s still missing and it would be helpful to find,” he said. “Things, actually.”

“What’s that?” Big Black asked.

“Four severed fingertips,” Peter said coldly.

Francis shifted about uncomfortably in Lucy’s small office, trying to avoid the glare that came his direction from Mister Evans. There was a heavy silence in the room, as if the heater had been left on at the same time that the outdoor temperature soared, creating a sticky, sickly kind of heat. Francis looked over toward Lucy and saw that she was busy with one of the patient files, flipping through pages with scrawled notations, occasionally taking a note or two of her own on a yellow legal pad at her right hand.

“He shouldn’t be here, Miss Jones. Despite what assistance you think he will bring, and despite the permission from Doctor Gulptilil, I still think it remains highly inappropriate to involve a patient in this process in any capacity. Certainly any insight that he might have is significantly less educated than any that I or any of the other support staff here in the hospital might incorporate into these proceedings.” Evans managed to sound undeniably pompous, which, Francis thought, wasn’t his usual tenor. Generally, Mister Evil had a sarcastic, irritating tone, that underscored the differences between them. Francis suspected that his pretentious large-word and clinical vocabulary was a tone Evans generally adopted in hospital staff meetings. Making oneself
sound
important, Francis realized, wasn’t exactly the same thing as
being
important. The usual chorus of agreement stirred within him.

Lucy looked up and simply said, “Let’s see how it works. If it creates a problem, we can always change things around, later.” Then she dipped her head back to the file.

Evans, however, persisted. “And, while he’s in here with us, where is the other one?”

“Peter?” Francis asked.

Again, Lucy lifted her head. “I’ve got him doing some of the more menial tasks associated with this inquiry,” she said. “Even though we remain somewhat informal, there’s always some really dull but necessary stuff to do. Given his background, I thought he was extremely suitable.”

This seemed to placate Evans, and Francis thought it was a pretty clever response. Francis realized that maybe when he was a little older he would learn how to say something that wasn’t exactly true, without exactly lying at the same time.

There were another few seconds of uncomfortable silence, and then a knock on the door, and it swung open. Big Black was standing there, dwarfing a man Francis recognized from the upstairs dormitory. “This is Mister Griggs,” Big Black said with a grin. “On the list. Top of the list.” With his massive hand, he gave the man a small push into the room, then stepped back to the wall, taking up a position where he could watch and listen, arms folded in front of him.

Griggs took a stride into the center of the room, then hesitated. Lucy pointed toward a chair, putting him in a position where Francis and Mister Evil could both watch the man’s responses to her questions. He was a wiry, muscled man, middle-aged and balding, with long fingers and a sunken chest, and an asthmatic wheeze that accompanied much of what he said. His eyes darted about the room furtively, giving him the appearance of a squirrel lifting its head to some distant danger. A squirrel with yellowed, uneven teeth and an unsettled disposition. He eyed Lucy with a single, penetrating glance, then relaxed, sticking his legs out with a look of irritation.

“Why am I here?” he asked.

Lucy responded rapidly. “As you may be aware, there have been some questions raised about the killing of the nurse-trainee in this building in the past weeks. I was hoping that you might shed some light on that incident.” Her voice seemed routine, matter-of-fact, but Francis could see in her posture, and in the way her eyes locked onto the patient, that there was a reason this man had been selected first. Something in his file had given her an edgy kind of hope.

“I don’t know anything,” he answered. He shifted about, and waved his hand in the air. “Can I leave now?”

On the file placed in front of her, Lucy could see words like
bipolar
and
depression
coupled with
antisocial tendencies
and
anger management issues
. Griggs was a potpourri of problems, she thought. He also had slashed a woman with a razor blade in a bar after buying her a series of drinks and getting turned down when he propositioned her. Then he fought hard against the police that had arrested him, and within days of his arrival at the hospital, had threatened Short Blond and several other female nurses at the hospital with uncertain and unspecified, but undeniably dire punishments whenever they attempted to force him to take medication at night, change the television channel in the dayroom, or stop harassing other patients, which he did on a near daily basis. Each of these incidents had been dutifully documented on his case file. There was also a notation that he had insisted to his public defender
that unspecified voices had demanded that he cut the woman in question, a claim that had delivered him to Western State instead of the local jail. An additional entry, in Gulptilil’s handwriting, questioned the veracity of the claim. He was, in short, a man filled with rage and lies, which, in Lucy’s mind, made him into a prime candidate.

Lucy smiled. “Of course,” she said. “So on the night of the homicide—”

Griggs cut her off. “I was asleep upstairs. Tucked in for the night. Zonked out on whatever the shit they give us.”

Pausing, Lucy glanced at the yellow pad in front of her, before raising her eyes and fixing them on the patient. “You refused medication that night. There’s a note in your file.”

He opened his mouth, started to say one thing, then stopped. “You ought ’ta know,” he said, “just because you say you won’t take it, it don’t mean you get a pass. All it means is that some goon like this one”—he waved at Big Black, and Francis had the distinct impression that Griggs would have used some other epithet, if he hadn’t been scared of the massive black man—“forces you to take it. So I did. Few minutes later, I was off in dreamland.”

“You didn’t like the nurse-trainee, did you?”

Griggs grinned. “Don’t like any of ’em. No secret in that.”

“Why is that?”

“They like to lord it over us. Make us do stuff. Like we don’t mean anything.”

Griggs used
us
and
we
but Francis didn’t think he had any plurality in mind, other than himself.

“Fighting women is easier, isn’t it?” Lucy asked.

The patient shrugged. “You think I could fight him?” he replied, again indicating Big Black.

Lucy didn’t answer the man’s question, instead, she bent forward slightly. “You don’t like women, do you?”

Griggs snarled, slightly, and spoke in a low-pitched, fierce voice. “Don’t like you much.”

“You like to hurt women, don’t you?” Lucy asked.

He burst out in a wheezing laugh, but didn’t answer.

Keeping her own voice steady and cold, Lucy then suddenly shifted direction. “Where were you in November?” she asked abruptly. “About sixteen months ago.”

“Huh?”

“You heard me.”

“I’m supposed to remember back that far?”

“Is that a problem for you? Because I sure as hell can find out fast enough.”

Griggs shifted about in his seat, gaining a little time. Francis could see the
man’s mind working hard, as if trying to see some danger through a fog. “I was working on a construction site in Springfield,” he said. “Road crew. Bridge repair. Nasty job.”