The Madman's Tale (42 page)

The man directly across from her smiled blankly but said nothing.

For the second time, Lucy asked, “Do you remember the nurse-trainee that went by the nickname Short Blond?”

The man rocked forward in the seat and moaned slightly. It was neither a
yes
moan, nor a
no
moan, simply a sound of acknowledgment. At least, Francis would have described the sound as a moan, but that was for lack of any better word, because the man didn’t seem discomfited in the slightest, either by the question, the stiff-backed chair or the woman prosecutor sitting across from him. He was a hulking, broad-shouldered man, with hair cropped short and a wide-eyed expression. A small line of spittle was collected at the corner of his mouth, and he rocked to a rhythm that played only in his own ears.

“Will you answer any questions?” Lucy Jones asked, frustration creeping into her voice.

Again, the man remained silent, except for the small creaking noise of the chair he sat upon, as he rocked back and forth. Francis looked down at the man’s hands, which were large and gnarled, almost as weathered as an old man’s hands, which wasn’t at all right, because he thought the silent man was probably not much older than he was. Sometimes Francis thought that inside the mental hospital, the ordinary rules of aging were somehow altered. Young people looked old. Old people looked ancient. Men and women who should have had vitality in every heartbeat, dragged as if the weight of years marred every step, while some who were nearly finished with life had childlike simplicity and needs. For a second, he glanced down at his own hands, as if to check that they were still more or less age appropriate. Then he looked back to the big man’s. His hands were connected to massive forearms, and knotted, muscled arms. Every vein that stood out spoke of barely restrained power.

“Is there something wrong?” Lucy asked.

The man gave out another growling, low-pitched grunt, that had little to do with any language Francis had ever heard before he’d arrived at the hospital, but one which he’d grown accustomed to hearing in the dayroom. It was an animal noise, expressing something simple, like hunger or thirst, lacking the edge that it might have, if anger was the basis of the sound.

Evans reached over and took the file away from Lucy Jones, quickly running his eyes over the pages collected inside the folder. “I don’t think interviewing this subject will be profitable,” he said with a smugness that he couldn’t hide.

Lucy, a little angry, pivoted toward Mister Evil. “And why?”

He pointed at a corner of the file. “There’s a diagnosis of profound retardation. You didn’t see that?”

“What I saw,” Lucy said coldly, “was a history of violent acts toward women. Including an incident where he was interrupted in the midst of a sexual assault on a much younger child, and a second instance where he struck someone, landing her in the hospital.”

Evans looked back down at the folder. He nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said
rapidly. “I see those. But what gets written on a folder is often not a precise recounting of what took place. In this man’s case, the young girl was the neighbor’s daughter who had frequently played with him in a teasing fashion and who undoubtedly has issues of her own, and whose family opted to not press any charges, and the other case was his own mother, who was pushed during a fight that stemmed from the man’s refusal to do some mundane household chore, and hit her head on a table corner, necessitating the trip to the hospital. More a moment where he was unaware how strong he was. I think, as well, that he lacks the sort of keen criminal intelligence that you are searching for, because, and correct me if I’m mistaken, your theory of the murder suggests that the killer is a man of some considerable sophistication.”

Lucy took the folder back out of Evans’s hands and looked up at Big Black. “I think you can take him back to his dormitory now,” she said. “Mister Evans is correct.”

Big Black stepped forward and took the man by the elbow, lifting him up. The man smiled, and Lucy said, “Thank you for your time,” not a word of which the man seemed to understand, although the tone and sentiment must have been apparent, because he grinned and made a little wave with one of his hands, before dutifully following Big Black out the door. The pleasant smile he wore never wavered.

Lucy leaned back in her seat and sighed. “Slow going,” she said.

“I have had my doubts all along,” Mister Evans replied.

Francis could see that Lucy was about to say something, and in that second, he heard two, maybe three of his voices all shouting at once
Tell her! Go ahead and tell her!
and so he leaned forward in his own chair and opened his mouth for the first time in hours.

“It’s okay, Lucy,” he said slowly, then picking up some speed. “That’s not the point.”

Mister Evans instantly looked angry that Francis had said anything, as if he’d been interrupted, when he hadn’t. Lucy turned toward Francis. “What do you mean?”

“It’s not about what they say,” Francis said. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense, really, whatever questions you might ask, about the night of the killing, or where they were, or if they knew Short Blond, or have they ever been violent in the past. No matter what questions you ask about that night, or even about who they are, it’s not really important. Whatever they say, whatever they hear, whatever response they make, not one word will be what you should be listening for.”

As Francis might have guessed, Mister Evans waved his hand dismissively. “You don’t think that anything they say might be important, C-Bird? Because, if not, then what is the purpose of this little exercise?”

Francis shrank back in his chair, a little afraid to contradict Mister Evil. There are some men, he knew, that stored up slights and affronts, and then paid one back at some later time, and Evans was one of them.

“Words,” Francis said slowly, a little quietly. “Words aren’t going to mean anything. We’re going to need to speak a different language to find the Angel. A wholly different means of communicating. and one of these people, coming through that door, will be speaking it. We just need to recognize it, when it arrives. We can find it in here,” he continued, speaking cautiously, “but it won’t exactly be what we expect.”

Evans snorted slightly, and then pulled out his notebook, and wrote a small notation down on a lined sheet. Lucy Jones was about to respond to Francis, but she saw this action on the psychologist’s part, and instead she turned to him. “What was that?” she asked, pointing to the notebook.

“Nothing much,” he said.

“Well,” she persisted. “It had to be something. A reminder to pick up a quart of milk on the way home. A decision to apply for a new job. A maxim, a play on words, a bit of doggerel or poetry. But it was something. What?”

“An observation about our young friend, here,” Evans replied blankly. “A note to myself that Francis’s delusions are still current. As evidenced by what he said, about creating some sort of new language.”

Lucy, instantly angered, was about to reply that she had understood everything Francis had said, but then she stopped herself. She stole a quick glance in Francis’s direction and she could see that every word that Mister Evans spoke had scorched itself into his world of fears. Say nothing, she told herself abruptly. You will only make it worse.

Although precisely how things could be worse for Francis, she was a little at a loss to imagine.

“So, who do we have next?” Lucy said instead.

“Hey, Fireman!” Little Black said in a slightly lowered voice, but with some added urgency. “You got to hurry up.” He stared down at his watch, then looked up and tapped the face on his wrist with his index finger. “We got to get a move on,” he said.

Peter was running his hands through the bedding of one of Lucy’s potential suspects, and he looked up a little surprised. “What’s the rush?” he asked.

“Gulp-a-pill,” Little Black said quickly. “He usually makes his midday rounds pretty damn soon, and I need to get you back over to Amherst and out of those clothes before he starts wandering around the hospital and spots you somewhere you ain’t supposed to be, dressed like you ain’t supposed to be dressed.”

Peter nodded. He slid his hands under the edges of the bed, palpitating the mattress beneath. One of Peter’s fears was that the Angel had managed to slice a section out of a mattress, and then concealed his weapon and his souvenirs inside. It was, Peter thought, what he himself would have done if he’d had any items that he’d wished to hide from attendants or nurses or any other patient with prying eyes.

He felt nothing and shook his head.

“You just about finished?” Little Black asked.

Peter continued working the mattress, probing every shape and lump to make certain that it was what it should be. He saw that the usual sorts of patients were still eyeing him from across the room. Some were intimidated by Little Black, because they cowered in the corner, pressed up against the wall. A few others were sitting vacantly on the edge of their bunks, looking off into a void, as if the world they inhabited was somewhere else.

“Yeah, just about,” Peter mumbled to the attendant, who tapped his watch face again.

The bed was clean, Peter thought. Nothing immediately suspect. There was now only the matter of a quick search of the man’s belongings, which were gathered in a foot locker beneath the steel frame of the bed. Peter pulled the locker out. He rifled through, finding nothing more suspect than some socks that were in dire need of laundering. He was about to step back when something caught his eye.

It was a flat white T-shirt, folded up and placed near the bottom of the locker. It was no different from the cheap type sold at discount stores throughout New England and worn by many of the men in the hospital beneath a heavier winter shirt during the colder months. But that wasn’t what caught his attention.

The shirt was stained with a huge dark red brown splotch across the chest.

He had seen stains like that before. In his training as an arson investigator. In his time in the jungle in Vietnam.

Peter held the shirt in his hands for a second, rubbing the fabric beneath his fingers as if he could tell something more by touching it. Little Black was a few feet away and finally insistence crept into his voice. “Peter, we got to leave now. I don’t want to have to do any explaining that I don’t have to, and I sure as hell don’t want to have to explain nothing to the big doc, if I don’t need to.”

“Mister Moses,” Peter said slowly. “Look at this.”

Little Black stepped forward, so that he could lean over Peter’s shoulder. Peter said nothing, but he heard the attendant whistle softly.

“That could be blood there, Peter,” he said after a moment. “Sure looks like it.”

“That’s what I thought,” Peter replied.

“Ain’t that one of the things we’re supposed to be looking for?” Little Black asked.

“It is, indeed,” Peter replied quietly.

Then he carefully folded the shirt back precisely as it was when he’d discovered it, and slipped it into the same position that it had occupied before he had drawn it forth. He returned the foot locker to its customary spot beneath the bed, hoping that it was positioned as it had been. Then he stood up. “Let’s go,” he said. He glanced over at the small gathering of men across the room from him, but whether they had noticed anything or not was impossible for Peter to tell from the vacant eyes that stared back at him.

P
eter slid out of the white attendant’s uniform in the area just inside the door to the Amherst Building. Little Black took the baggy pants and loose-fitting jacket from him, folded them up and stuffed them beneath his arm, while Peter pulled on a pair of wrinkled jeans. “I’ll stash these,” he said, “until we’re sure Gulptilil has finished his rounds and we can get back to business.” The wiry attendant then looked narrowly at Peter and added, “You gonna tell Miss Jones about what we saw and where we saw it?”

Peter nodded. “As soon as Mister Evil steps away from her side.”

Little Black grimaced. “He’ll find out. One way or another. Always does. Sooner or later, man seems to know everything going on around here.”