“There’s something else we need to talk about,” Goodman said.
“Okay, shoot,” said Vail.
“It’s these pictures,” said Goodman. “I thought a lot about them on the trip. Seems to me they set up a pretty good case for premeditation.”
“Oh?” Vail said with a vague smile. “Prove it to me.”
“First, the knife. The perp must’ve carried it from the kitchen. I mean, what would a carving knife be doing in the bishop’s bedroom?”
“I don’t know,” Vail said. “But it could’ve been in there. They have to prove the knife wasn’t in the bedroom, we don’t have to prove it was.”
“Pretty skimpy,” Goodman said.
“Tommy, at this point it’s all skimpy, but we have to start somewhere. Remember, we’re working on the assumption he’s innocent so everything we do must lead to that conclusion. It’s their problem to prove he’s guilty.”
“There’s something else,” Tom said. He went to the photo board and perused the pictures, stopping at the photos of the bloody footprint and the medium shot of the kitchen with bloody smudges on the floor. Naomi walked over beside him.
“What do you see?” Vail asked.
“Well, he definitely went out the back door,” Naomi said.
“That’s a given,” said Vail.
“Look at this close-up,” said Tom. “That’s not a footprint, it’s a smudge. Now look at the other shot. The smudges end here, at the corner of the counter. No smudges the last six feet to the door.”
“So?”
“So my guess is, the smudges are from his socks. I think he had his shoes off. He comes in the kitchen door, takes off his shoes so the bishop won’t hear him, takes a carving knife out of the sliding drawer, walks eighteen feet down the hall, enters the bedroom and gives the bishop forty whacks.”
“Seventy-seven, according to the autopsy,” Naomi said. “Which, incidentally, is almost as bad as the photos.”
“We’ll bypass it in testimony,” said Vail. “Admit to the number of wounds, location, cause of death, et cetera. That’ll take the edge off. The report will be admitted as an exhibit but most likely the jurors won’t read it, they’ll have other things to occupy their time.”
“Anyway, the shoes seem to indicate premeditation,” Goodman said. “Not sudden anger, not temporary insanity. Careful planning and execution.”
“If in fact it happened that way,” Vail said.
Naomi said, “How else could it have happened? He lied about it to you and the cops. Says he came in the front door and was scared by somebody when he left so he ran out the back. Obviously he came in the back door to start with.”
“Maybe. But they can’t use the interviews and we don’t have to. What we do have to find out is if he lied and why.”
“Why did he—if he did?” Goodman asked.
“Could have been confused. Scared. Intimidated,” said the Judge. “Could be innocent but afraid to tell the truth because he looks guilty.”
Vail shrugged. “Once again it depends on whether somebody else was really in that room with him. Look, suppose he came in the front way, took off his shoes and stuck them in his coat pocket or held on to them. When he left he got scared by somebody downstairs, went to the kitchen and then put his shoes back on before he went out in the cold.”
“C’mon,” Goodman said skeptically.
“Can you prove it didn’t happen that way?” asked the Judge.
“No.”
“Then we’re talking reasonable doubt and the shoes and bloody footprints become moot,” said Vail. “Neither choice can be proven so either choice is possible.”
“And in most cases,” added the Judge, “the jury will discount both rather than make an assumption on which way it really happened.”
“Same thing with the knife,” said Vail. “We admit he left with it, we don’t admit he brought it with him from the kitchen.”
“That’s good,” the Judge said. “Let them prove otherwise.”
“Fingerprints on the tray?” Goodman suggested.
“We’ll know that when we see the forensics report.”
“Maybe he was wearing gloves,” Naomi suggested.
“Maybe he danced with the Bolshoi Ballet, too, so what?” the Judge offered.
“In other words, immaterial unless they can prove it,” explained Vail.
“Fibers from the gloves on the tray?”
“Once again, let’s see what forensics says.”
“How do you think Shoat will rule on admitting the photographs?” Naomi asked.
Vail looked at the Judge and raised an eyebrow. Spalding scratched the bridge of his nose with a forefinger while he pondered the question.
“Tough call for him,” said Spalding. “Personally, I think they’re germane. But if he lets them in, it could become grounds for an appeal.” He thought a moment more. “My guess is, he’s going to permit them.”
“Jesus!” Naomi said.
“Hold on,” said Vail. “It could work for us.”
“How?”
“Depends on motive,” the Judge suggested.
“Exactly,” Vail answered. “You can bet the loyal opposition is working overtime on that one. If they don’t come up with one, we can make a pretty good case for McNaghten by using the pictures.”
“Who’s McNaghten?” Molly asked.
The Judge offered the answer. “McNaghten shot and killed a member of the British Parliament in 1843. The court found him not guilty by reason of insanity and the public went berserk, so the Queen’s Bench—that’s the British appeals court—formulated the McNaghten Rule. It says that in order to acquit, it must be clearly proved that at the time the act occurred the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, caused by a disease of the mind, that he did not know the nature and quality of the act he was committing.”
“Or even if he knew it,” Vail added, “he didn’t know it was wrong.”
“Translation: Only a nut case would do something like that without a reason,” said Goodman. Molly winced at his use of the term nut case.
Vail stood up and began pacing. “Then we have the concept of irresistible impulse,” he said. “People who know the difference between right and wrong but can’t control their actions because of some mental disorder. There are a lot of ways we can go with this—we’ve got to determine which is the most convincing—and the one that we can logically whip the D.A. with.” He smiled at Molly Arrington. “Which brings us to the good doctor. I realize you’ve only talked to Aaron once but…”
“I’d like to defer until after I hear Mr. Goodman’s report,” she said.
“It’s Tom,” Goodman corrected with a smile.
“Fair enough,” said Vail. “How about it, Tommy?”
“Look, I’m not a shrink, okay? It’s just what I learned and what I think. In fact, I’m not real sure what I think.”
“What the hell did you find out down there?” Vail asked.
“It’s not that, exactly, it’s just, uh …”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know, Marty. This kid really got fucked over when he was growing up. I’ve got mixed feelings about him.”
“We all do, Tommy.”
Goodman stared at the photographs as he talked, as if the horror of the pictures somehow grounded him in reality. He described Stampler as a misplaced child who had grown into a gifted but frustrated young intellectual, his accomplishments scorned by a stem and relentless father determined that the boy follow him into the hell of the coal mines and a mother who considered Aaron’s education akin to devil’s play; a boy to whom the strap and the insults of his parents had done little to discourage from a bold and persistent quest for knowledge, abetted by Miss Rebecca, who saw in the lad a glimmering hope that occasionally there might be resurrection from a bitter life sentence in the emotionally barren and aesthetically vitiated Kentucky hamlet; a loner, attracted to both the professions and the arts, who had wanted—as do most young pe
ople at one time or another—to be lawyer, doctor, actor, and poet—and whose dreams were constantly thwarted except by his mentor, Rebecca.
And he talked about Rebecca, who appeared to be Crikside’s only beacon, a lighthouse of lore and wisdom in an otherwise bleak and tortured place mired by its own stifling traditions; a woman whom some of the townsfolk regarded as a necessary evil; a woman who threatened the bigotry of their narrow and obdurate heritage, a notion possibly vindicated by Rebecca’s “education” of Aaron Stampler. And finally he talked about the sexual liberation of Aaron Stampler.
Goodman checked his little black notebook, the one in which he always kept copious notes.
“There’re a couple of other things,” he said. “On the table in her living room there were half a dozen pictures of Aaron at various ages—reading a book, sitting beside the creek, fishing, a class picture showing eleven children of various ages with Rebecca in the center, all standing kind of stiffly in front of the schoolhouse, you know how those pictures go, they all looked so serious. But there were no pictures of Rebecca and Aaron except that group shot.
“He also marked a lot of quotations in books. He stuck slips of paper in them and wrote down the references. I wrote down two of them. ‘Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.’ And there was a Chinese proverb: ‘There are two perfect men—one dead, the other unborn.’”
Goodman had written some questions to himself. Was Stampler physically or sexually abused in the legal sense? Was his sexual orientation as perverse as it might seem? Did these two factors alone contribute to an inner rage that led Aaron to Bishop Rushman’s bedroom and the mutilation killing of the prelate?
Perhaps, he suggested, Molly Arrington could answer these questions.
“You know what I’m beginning to wonder?” Goodman concluded.
“What?” asked Vail, who had listened without emotion, his eyes narrowed, as Tom Goodman detailed the short, unhappy life of Aaron Stampler.
“If maybe he didn’t escape from one set of frustrations in Crikside and end up with a different kind of frustration here. Maybe … maybe it all just fell in on him.”
“You think he did it?”
“Christ, I don’t know, Marty. That kind of background? Shit, that’s enough to screw up anybody’s head.”
Vail didn’t answer. He turned instead to Molly.
“Okay, Doc, you’re up,” he said.
“Let’s watch the tape first,” she said. Her voice suddenly became sterner, authoritative, commanding.
And Vail thought, My God, she’s taking over the meeting.
“Okay,” he said, and wheeled over to the tape machine and slipped Molly’s video interview into the slot.
“Before it starts,” Goodman said, “how can you tell somebody’s got a mental disorder?”
“It’s a very structured procedure just like medicine,” Molly said. “You look for symptoms, manifestations, influences—the same way a physician identifies a physical disease.”
“Is there some kind of standard for all this?” Vail asked.
“Yes. It’s called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. DSM3 for short. The American Psychiatric Association publishes it and it’s our bible. It’s to psychiatry what Gray’s Anatomy is to physiology.”
“I know this is a dumb question,” said Naomi, “but why do they always lie on a couch with you sitting behind them?”
“Simply to put the subject at ease. Not being able to see the analyst minimizes distraction. It’s like they’re talking to themselves rather than conversing with someone. Removes the personal barrier.”
“What’s the ultimate objective?” Vail asked.
“Free association. Encourage the subject to concentrate on inner experiences … thoughts, fantasies, feelings … hopefully create an atmosphere in which the patient will say absolutely everything that comes to mind without fear of being censored or judged.”
“How does that help you?” Naomi asked.
“Eventually it brings on a state of regression. They remember things from the deep past—traumatic events, painful encounters—very clearly. The re-experience and the fears and feelings that go with it are all clues to the diagnosis. This first session was pretty much surface stuff, but it was an excellent beginning.”
They all watched and listened in silence until the tape ended. Nobody said anything for a few moments.
“Well, Molly, what do you think so far?” Martin asked.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap and said nothing for perhaps a minute. What do they want to know? Did he do it and if he did, why? Is he a cold-blooded killer or is his reality an illusion? Is he puppet or puppeteer?
“I’m not sure yet,” she said finally. “As I see it, we’re all faced with the same challenge, how to save Aaron Stampler from the electric chair. The difference is, your approach involves legal strategy and tactics, mine involves scientific logic, which can sometimes take years, if it ever gets solved at all.”
“And we have fifty-one days left,” Goodman said.
“Any conclusions yet?” Vail asked.
She shook her head.
“Nothing at all?” said Vail.
“I’m not ready yet.”
“Look, we’re getting mixed signals on this kid,” said Martin. “He says he got laid when he was sixteen. The teacher says she seduced him two years earlier. He says his brother was killed in an accident, we hear differently.”
“It didn’t sound like a seduction,” said Goodman. “It sounded more like—”
“More like what, Tommy? Bottom line—a woman in her thirties balled a fourteen-year-old kid.”
“I know, I know, but she made it sound, I don’t know, very natural.”
“Yeah, well I’m sure our prosecutor won’t look at it as natural. She’ll paint this woman as a pervert and worse. We can’t even subpoena her. If she volunteered to testify, Venable would have her in chains for raping a juvenile before she got off the witness stand. Hell, even if her testimony could help save him, I’d advise her to take the fifth. We couldn’t let her incriminate herself.”
“Excuse me,” Molly said stiffly. “That’s tactics and that’s your problem, not mine. It’s also meaningless at this point. Perhaps he seduced her. Or maybe the event is so painful he doesn’t want to admit it. The brother and his girlfriend? It’s a local myth, why is it so odd that he should choose to perpetuate it? As far as the quotes go”—she shrugged—“they probably appealed to him. My guess is, his IQ will go off the charts. For God’s sakes, he read the Bible when he was a six-year-old. He probably should have been in Harvard med school instead of cleaning up the library.”
The Judge smiled. Well, he thought, it appears we have a live one. He said, “I take that to mean you want to get back to Daisyland?”
“Tomorrow,” she answered. “I have a lot of work to do.” She turned to Tommy. “I do want to congratulate you, Tom. You learned a great deal in two days.”
“None of which seems to matter.” There was irritation in his voice.
“In time,” she said with a smile, and then added, “I think you should try to find the girl.”
“Stampler’s girl, Linda?”
“Yes.”
“She probably split,” said Goodman. “A lot of kids clean up at Savior House and then go back where they came from.”
“To what?” Molly said. “Whatever ran them off in the first place? Do you think Aaron would have gone back to Crikside?”
“So maybe she didn’t go home,” Vail said. “Maybe she’s still around someplace. Maybe she’s hiding out.”
“Maybe she knows what really happened,” Goodman said.
“Stampler says she left three weeks ago,” said Naomi.
“Maybe he’s covering for her,” Goodman suggested.
“You think she killed Rushman?” said Naomi.
“Not necessarily,” said Vail. “Maybe they did it together. Or maybe she was there. May
be he’s really afraid for her, not himself.”
“You’re reaching, Marty.”
“Did we ever have a case when we weren’t reaching?”
Tom laughed. “Well, now that you mention it…”
“The Doc says find her, Tommy,” said Vail. “Go find her.”
EIGHTEEN
The street was deserted. He could hear the rumble of traffic a few blocks away on the highway. A freezing breeze rattled the dead limbs in the trees that lined Banner Street. Otherwise it was quiet. The kids had even abandoned the brown Chevy near the comer.
When he entered Savior House, he heard the hesitating notes of a saxophone as someone upstairs picked away at “Misty.” He found Maggie in the TV room. She was pleasant, but an hour of interrogation brought him no closer to solving the riddle of Aaron Stampler.
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “You got to understand, there’s a lotta trust among us here. Nobody wants to talk about anybody else. It would kind of, I don’t know, break the spell. It’s the one thing that the bishop was real good about, protecting people. That’s why we don’t give away last names or hometowns.”
“I respect their privacy, Maggie. Thanks for your help.”
“But if something comes up that might help, I’ll call you,” she said.
“What are you, the den mother?”
“I was going to be the next mascot of the altar boys,” she said with a melancholy smile.
As he approached the VW, he saw a slip of paper flapping under his windshield wiper. It was a folded paper napkin, with a message written on it in a small, delicate hand: “Alex. B Street. Batman and Robin.”
Goodman looked up and down the street but there was no one in sight. He got in his car, cranked it up and sat for a minute, waiting for the ancient heater to warm up. As he looked back at Savior House he saw the curtains moving in a second-story window.
“Shit,” he said. And headed for B Street.
In years gone by, B Street had been one of the more fashionable shopping districts of the city. Dowagers and debutantes arrived in chauffeur-driven limousines to be fawned over by eager merchants who caressed mink and ermine pelts, wafting the soft fur with their garlic breath, or flattered throats and fingers with dazzling creations described by color, point and carat. The shops had retreated to skyscrapers with breathtaking views, indoor parking lots and uniformed guards at the elevators, leaving behind four blocks of dismal storefronts, most of them boarded up, except for bars where burned-out strippers waddled dispassionately on littered runways and pawnshops whose barred windows flaunted Saturday night specials, retirement wristwatches and guitars.