Primal Fear

  “Great!”

  “Check ’em both, then head for Crikside after the arraignment.

  “Judge, the law’s your problem. We need to get case histories on murder by mutilation, murder by stabbing, murder by religion, including sex, denomination and age. And murder by insanity. I want to throw law at Shoat so fast and hard he’ll fall off the bench trying to catch it. Anything that might apply. I want to know what kind of people commit this kind of crime—and why. Shit, I don’t have to tell you. Naom, check your insurance sources on this. They have statistics on everything, just maybe you’ll turn up something we can use.”

  “That’s my job?” Naomi said.

  “Also files, reports, autopsies, rumors, progress, that’s you. The old tracker back at work. Shoat’s giving us a lot of headroom on this because of the time element. All their reports are ours, without having to go through discovery—although we’ll probably do that, too. We want to know everything they’re up to. Stenner and Venable will give you only what’s required, so snoop around, keep your ears open, anything you hear could be important. And background on Rushman, everything you can find out about him as far back as possible. Check newspaper microfilm, magazines, anyplace you might pick up something. Tommy, here’s a subpoena. That’ll get you into the archbishop’s apartment where it all happened. Stenner was still in there this afternoon, playing cut and paste. Wait until you get back from Kentucky to do the search. By that time we should have access to their reports and a shot at the physical evidence.”

  Vail shoved letters and files into a pile and cleared a place on his desk. He threw a legal pad down and made a rough sketch showing the layout.

  “The apartment’s on the second floor,” he said, pointing out features as he mentioned them. “This is the bedroom. Bath here. Hallway here and the kitchen here in the corner. This must be a living room beside it. Stairs leading down from the kitchen. This is the back door of me rectory, here’s a corridor to the church.”

  “Okay, so what does Shirley Temple say happened?”

  Vail took a deep breath. “Now let’s assume that he’s innocent for the moment. Agreed?” They all nodded.

  “Here’s Aaron’s story,” Vail started. “He says he was in the room when the bishop was hit but didn’t actually see it happen. There was a lot of action, things breaking, lamps overturning. The next thing he remembers is seeing Rushman dead on the floor and his ring and the knife lying beside the body. So he puts the ring on, grabs the knife and starts out—”

  “He put the ring on?” Naomi said.

  “Let me finish.” Vail took a pencil and traced Stampler’s movements on his sketch. “He starts out and he hears somebody downstairs, so he goes out the back way, down these wooden steps to ground level. There’s a patrol car coming down the alley, over here, so he dodges back through the door here, runs into the church, down this corridor, and hides in one of the confessionals.”

  Goodman started to laugh. “That’s absolute horseshit, Marty. That’s a horseshit story, pardon my French, if I ever heard one!”

  “And that’s an understatement,” the Judge said. “It’s ludicrous! Why did he pick up the knife? Why did he put the ring on? How did he get covered with blood? Why did he do anything? Why didn’t he just call the police?”

  “He was scared. He panicked.”

  “Shit,” said Tommy. “Shoat’ll throw his gavel at you, you go into court with that story.”

  “He’s a smart kid. Why would he make up a dumb story like that unless it’s true?” Vail asked.

  “Because that’s the way it happened,” said the Judge. “Except for one minor detail—he chopped up His Eminence.”

  “We’re assuming he’s innocent, remember?” Vail said.

  “Not anymore,” said Goodman.

  “Is there any motive here?” Naomi asked.

  “Not so far. He says he and the bishop were friends.”

  “Well if he didn’t do it and he was there, who the hell did?” the Judge asked.

  “He won’t say.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “He says he’s afraid of the real killer.”

  Tommy shook his head emphatically. “His story’s still for shit,” he said.

  “But it’s his story,” the Judge said, staring at the ceiling.

  “What’s that mean?” said Tommy.

  “That means we’re stuck with it until we either break it or find a better one,” Vail answered. “And that’s my problem. I’ve got to get under his skin and to do that he’s got to trust me. I’ve got to find out what happened that night. And then we have to put it all together and make it work for us. And we need one more thing.”

  “A shrink,” the Judge said.

  “Right, Judge, we need a shrink,” Vail said. “Not one of those jaded old farts from up in Daisyland, that’s who they’ll use for the psychiatric evaluation.”

  “What if they don’t do a P.E.?” Naomi said.

  “We’ll demand it in the arraignment. And we want him moved up to Daisyland, keep him out of the public eye and mind for a while. ‘No comment’ the press to death and hope Venable and company are too busy to manufacture news. Maybe the public’ll cool down.”

  “Unlikely,” the Judge said, “although I agree we should keep him out of sight for a while.”

  Vail was pacing again, slapping a ruler into the flat of one hand. “We need somebody young. Real sharp. Somebody with a fresh approach. New ideas. We need to hit them from the side, knock ’em off balance. They’re going to do everything but dig up Freud to prove Stampler’s sane.”

  “We’re saying he’s not?” said Naomi.

  “We’re saying maybe. Between us? The best chance we’ve got right now is an insanity plea and they know it, so they’re going to try to step on that one early in the game.”

  “Let me find the shrink for you,” the Judge offered. “I have good friends up at the university. I’ll check it out, see if they can recommend somebody good, somebody who can find the mental loopholes while I work on the legal ones.”

  “Somebody who can prove this kid’s crazier than a Mexican jumping bean,” Tommy said.

  The Judge smiled. “Of course, that, too,” he said.

  ELEVEN

  Before dawn, the weather turned warmer, and by nine in the morning the icy streets had turned to brown slush. Cars still moved cautiously, their chains clanging on the street and banging against their fenders. It was a familiar winter sound. Vail dodged splashes of dirty mush as he jumped between puddles on his way from the police station to the courthouse.

  He went inside with the package he had picked up from Precinct One, peeking in doors until he found an empty courtroom he could use for a few minutes. He knew this room well, for he had argued a dozen cases within its oak-paneled confines. He went to the defendant’s table and eagerly opened the thick manila envelope Stenner had left for him.

  The autopsy report was frightening enough, but the photographs were devastating. He went through them slowly, his mouth growing drier as he studied each one before laying it facedown in a stack. There were two dozen of them. Like all graphic police studies of violence, they lacked both art and composition, depicting the stark and sanguinary climate of the crime and the mindless indignity to which the human body was exposed. Pornographic in detail and obscene in content, they were cataloged and garnered in groups; long establishing shots showing the nauseating ambience of the scene, full-length studies, finally the chilling close-ups and extreme close-ups. He could see the jury now, staring in openmouthed horror as each picture made its way down the row.

  When he finished he put them back in the manila envelope and leafed through the transcript of one of two interrogations by Stenner and Turner. It had lasted from 11:41 P.M. until 1:26 A.M. on the night of the crime. The second, between 6:04 A.M. and 7:12 A.M. the following morning, had not yet been transcribed, but there were copies of the tapes of both interviews included in the package. There were also preliminary fingerprint
and forensics reports stamped “Initial report, more to come.” All in all, it was an impressive assemblage for such a short period of time. The transcript told him that Aaron Stampler had repeated the same story he had told Vail to the two detectives, on two different occasions, for a total of two hours and fifty-three minutes. By now everyone in the D.A.’s office would be laughing about that.

  To get his mind off the images of death, Vail stalked the empty courtroom. To Vail, the law was both a religion and a contest, and the courtroom was his church, his Roman Colosseum, the arena where all his knowledge and cunning were adrenalized. It was here he really came alive, his energy and brain fueled by the challenge of law; to attack its canons, dogma, precepts, its very structure, as he invoked the jury to accept his concept of truth. The legal dominion was sacred to Vail but he also felt it had to be defied and challenged constantly if it were to endure.

  The door to the courtroom opened and Goodman peeked inside. Vail was lost in his own cosmos, appraising an imaginary jury, formulating some ingenious argument. Vail walked past the empty jury box, sliding a finger along the polished rail that separated the sanctioned twelve from the rabble of the courtroom, remembering phrases from past oratories: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the evidence …” Evidence? Call it evidence, or conjecture, or guesswork, insinuation, circumstance, lies, whatever, it was all constructed for one purpose, to define the crime and hopefully help the jury to separate fact from fiction—Vail’s fact, the prosecutor’s fiction. And so, as he speculated on the D.A.’s initial evidence against Aaron Stampler, he subconsciously practiced the demands of his sport the way a long-distance runner practices stride, timing and breathing.

  His mind strayed back to Aaron Stampler. Could this quiet, almost pretty mountain boy have committed such a crime? Stampler just didn’t fit the mold. He was quick and articulate but also blunt and unsophisticated. There was a mountain boy’s naturalness about him, yet he was not naïve. And he seemed strangely apathetic to the charges against him. Stampler was well aware that he was accused of an absolutely unspeakable crime, but it did not seem to concern him, which was one of Vail’s tests of innocence: lack of fear. In Aaron’s mind, there could be no punishment because he had committed no crime, therefore he was apathetic to any threat of consequence.

  What the hell happened that night? Vail wondered. Was it possible that it happened the way Stampler described it? And if so, how would Vail ever prove it?

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Goodman asked.

  Vail looked up, startled by the intrusion, then shrugged.

  “A moment of prayer,” he answered. “Enter the arena.”

  “I brought coffee,” Goodman said, putting a sack with three cups of coffee and three donuts on the table beside the D.A.’s package.

  “Great. Take a good swig and sit down before you look at the pictures.”

  “Bad?”

  “Invent a darker word.”

  Vail sat on the comer of the desk dunking a donut and sipping coffee, watching Goodman flip slowly through the catalog of savagery, uttering an occasional “Whew” or “Good God.” When Tommy was finished, he leaned back in his chair and breathed a silent whistle through pursed cheeks.

  “When the jury sees these, Stampler’s a dead man,” Goodman said.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Vail answered.

  “They’re prejudicial they’re so inflammatory. How the hell could you possibly make these work for us?”

  “Do you think a sane person could have done that?” asked Vail.

  “We going for insanity?” Goodman asked.

  “If it’s all we’ve got.”

  “Then you’re assuming Stampler’s guilty,” Goodman said.

  “Not necessarily. But if we can’t prove he’s innocent, insanity could be the only way to keep him off the fryer.”

  “So how do we plead him tomorrow morning?”

  “Not guilty.”

  Tommy Goodman headed his battered VW out the Crosstown Boulevard to Lakeview and turned toward the cathedral. As he drove out the wide boulevard with its tree-lined divider, he could see Savior House off to his right. He turned and took Banner Street down to the old high school building and parked. He sat staring at the halfway house with the motor running. The street was deserted except for a couple of teenagers who were working on an old Chevy sitting on cinder blocks half a block away. They tinkered with the engine, stopping frequently to warm their hands over a garbage can filled with burning refuse.

  As he sat there, fragments from the past seeped into his memory. Franklin Roosevelt High. Graduation day, 1973. He had been one of those “goddamn long-haired hippies” the mayor had condemned, refusing to give them their diplomas if they didn’t get haircuts. And so thirty-two of them had stood during the entire ceremony, capped and gowned, with their hair tucked up under tassled mortarboards and their hands over their lips, while a legless Vietnam veteran named Robbie DeHaviland, an alumnus of the school, had delivered the graduation address.

  About halfway through the speech, and to everyone’s shock, DeHaviland had suddenly unloaded on the mayor, the school principal and just about everyone in the city, the state and the U.S. government.

  “What has happened to freedom in this country?” he roared in anger. “I didn’t leave half my body in that godforsaken garbage dump to come back here and have our elected officials walking all over our rights as citizens. What has happened to freedom of speech? Freedom of expression? What the hell are we fighting for? If you hate this war as much as I do, speak out! And if growing your hair down to your ass is your way to express your feelings, then I say grow it. You who are about to graduate and go into the adult world today earned your diplomas. And if the mayor and the principal of this high school don’t give them to you, I say they should get down on their knees in the nearest veteran’s cemetery and eat every goddamn one of them!”

  The crowd had gone berserk, and principal Joe Leady had indeed given out every diploma. And as each protester had mounted the platform and received his diploma, he had whipped off his cap, let his hair tumble down around his shoulders and thrown his mortarboard to the winds.

  June 2, 1973. What a great fucking day that was.

  Later they discovered that DeHaviland was so stoned when he made the speech he didn’t remember what he said until the next day. No one could have known that the school would be closed before the war in Vietnam ended, a victim of old age and disregard.

  Goodman sadly regarded the wonderful old building, now dressed in luminous rainbow colors, with its vital organs renovated, the field where they once played touch football lathered with concrete. Another one of Cardinal Rushman’s great achievements, raising the money to clean up the place and turn it into a boarding school for runaways and rehabs. But what the hell, you had to give the Saint of Lakeview Drive credit for pulling off such a grand project.

  Well, it might be Savior House to the late, great Archbishop Rushman, but it was still FDR High to him. His high school, by God, and nothing would ever change that.

  He got out of the car, crossed the playground, went in through the back door and strolled down the hall. The place seemed strangely subdued and sterile. No yelling, no scuffling, no kids running to class. The lockers were gone. The old-fashioned pebbled glass doors had been replaced. Walls had been torn down to make room for dormitories and recreation rooms. The old physics lab was now the TV room. And the winners case was gone.

  He still remembered the pride he had felt each morning when he passed it, always gazing sideways at the trophy he had brought back from the state boxing finals with the brass bust of John L. Sullivan above the plate on its base: THOMAS GOODMAN, STATE WELTERWEIGHT CHAMPION, 1968–1969.

  In its place was a framed front page of the Daily News with Rushman in his shirtsleeves, hands raised over his head, surrounded by cheering kids, the headline below the photograph: SAVIOR HOUSE BECOMES A REALITY.

  He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at the wall,
lost in time, when a young girl walked up to him.

  “Can I do something for you?” she asked.

  He turned and looked at her. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, a cute little thing, just beginning to bud, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  “I went to high school here,” he said.

  “I didn’t know it was ever a high school,” she answered. “I guess I never thought about it being anything before it was Savior House.”

  “Well, it was a great high school in its day,” Goodman said. “Guess we ought to be thankful they found a use for it. Better than tearing the old girl down.”

  “Never heard a school called an old girl before.” She laughed, then said, “So, you just visiting or do you want to see somebody?”

  “I guess I need to talk to whoever’s in charge.”

  “The sisters are at vespers but maybe I can help you, I’m a hall monitor. My name’s Maggie.”

  “Hall monitor, huh,” he chuckled. “Well, it’s nice to know some things never change. Maggie, do you know Aaron Stampler?”

  The question shocked her. She moved back a step, stood with her feet together and suddenly looked over her shoulder, as if she thought someone might be sneaking up on her.

  “You’re not the police,” she said suspiciously. “They’ve already been here.”

  Good old Stenner, right on top of things.

  “No,” he said. “I work for the lawyer who’s going to defend Aaron. I’d like to talk to some of his friends, find out what he was really like.”

  “Well, we all knew him. Everybody knows everybody here.”

  “Knew him?”

  “Oh, what I meant is, uh …”

  “It’s okay,” he said, and smiled. “I know what you meant. The whole thing’s a terrible shock for all of us.”

  “Aaron was okay,” she said, still speaking in the past tense. “Real smart, y’know. Kinda quiet. He moved out a couple of months ago.”