By Reason of Insanity (30 page)

He was also amused at the authorities’ lack of imagination in not realizing they needed help. Without being privy to inside information, he could’ve already told them a few things. He could tell them, for example, that Vincent Mungo did not kill the young woman in Los Angeles.

In the Willows killing only the face was destroyed, supposedly by Mungo. In Los Angeles the body apparently was greatly damaged but the face was untouched. If there was no logical motive behind either mutilation, if each was a simple act of rage, as seemed certain, then the conclusion was inescapable. Each had been killed by a different person. Homicidal maniacs operated in set patterns, just like anyone else, and it was incredibly harder for them to break out of their patterns.

Amos Finch was aware of the horror of his conclusion. Somewhere in California was a second maniacal killer, infinitely more dangerous than Vincent Mungo. Faceless, nameless, unknown and even unsuspected, he was driven by a rage so great he destroyed whole bodies. Under the guise of Vincent Mungo he could do anything, go anywhere. Anywhere …

Eight

ON THE morning of his wedding day in Las Vegas, Bishop bought a ticket for Phoenix. Toward evening he emerged from the bus station on E. Jefferson. He was not impressed by what he saw or felt. Phoenix was oppressively hot. The late afternoon sun shone on everything within reach, baking man and metal alike. Shade was rare and offered little solace from the stark sunlight. Bishop removed his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves; the raincoat bought in San Francisco had been discarded in Vegas, much to his relief now. He was not used to such heat, it stuck to him like a straitjacket. Within minutes his shirt was soaked as sweat ran down his ribs and back. His eyes blurred, his hair suddenly felt matted. Flight bag and zippered money case in hand, jacket under the arm, he trudged down the street, already weary.

His first look at the city reminded him of a miniature Los Angeles, all plastic and glass and steel. Everything that wasn’t straight up seemed absolutely flat, flat and squat; endless rows of squat tract homes and little lawns on perfectly even land, all manicured and symmetrical and incredibly, irrevocably flat. Yet the streets were wider, the spaces larger. There was less crowding, less impatience. The tempo seemed a bit slower to him. Slower, too, was his own pace in the blistering summer heat.

In a half hour he had seen enough, or at least as much as he could stand. He ducked into an air-conditioned restaurant on E. Washington and ordered a steak and coffee. When the steak came he ate ravenously. At Willows he had eaten mostly casseroles over the years, and he found himself developing a positive passion for real meat.

The man around the bend in the counter watched him eating. As he pulled his possessions even closer to him, Bishop smiled in his direction. “Kind of hot out there,” he said in friendly fashion.

“Ain’t the heat,” snapped the old man. “It’s the damn humidity.”

“Is it always like this?” Bishop asked.

“Only in the damn summer.” The old man sugared his coffee. “The winters is just hot.”

Bishop continued working on his steak. He had eaten nothing since the previous evening in Las Vegas after his return from Death Valley alone. In the morning he had been too busy.

“It’s the damn canals.”

He looked up to find the old man staring at him.

“It’s the damn canals,” the man repeated.

“What canals?”

“The damn canals they got all over this town. Right in the streets.” He shoveled in more sugar. “The damn sun pulls the water right out and makes everything too humid.” He stirred the coffee. “I read that somewhere.” Put the cup to his parched lips.

“They got canals in the streets?” Bishop asked in surprise.

“Damn right.”

“What’s in the canals?”

“The damn water, what else?” He eyed Bishop suspiciously. “Don’t you know ‘bout the canals?”

Bishop slowly shook his head. “Never saw them.”

“They there all the same.” He reached for the salt shaker. “Everybody knows ‘bout them.”

“That’s the salt.”

“What’s that?”

Bishop pointed. “You got the salt there.”

“Damn right.” He poured salt in the cup. “Too much sugar’s no good for you.”

Bishop went back to his steak. As he ate he kept thinking about canals filled with water in the streets. It seemed like a good idea to him, certainly better than the dusty streets of Los Angeles. Suddenly he saw himself fall in the canal. He couldn’t swim.

“How deep is the water?” he abruptly asked.

The old man looked at him with blank eyes. “What water?”

“The water in the canals in the streets.”

His eyes came alive again. “Damn deep,” he said vehemently. “So deep nobody knows for sure.”

“Why don’t they send divers down?”

“They do. Only they never come back. Soon’s they go down nobody ever sees them again.”

Bishop didn’t believe him.

“It’s the damn truth, s’help me,” said the old man. “Not only that but lots of people drown in them canals, and their bodies never come up either.”

“Why don’t they drain the canals?”

“Can’t.” He ordered more coffee.

“Why not?”

The old man took out a cigarette. “The damn water is used for irrigation. This whole town lives on irrigation.” He broke off the filter and stuck the tobacco end in his mouth. “If they ever let the water go, this damn town’d die overnight.” He lit the broken end. “You ever see a town die overnight?”

Bishop shook his head.

“I seen it once. In New Mexico when I was no older’n a pup. A little place called Los Rios.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette. “One night a dust storm hit. Rained dust all night, not just grit but big rocks of dust. Sounded like bombs going off By morning everything was buried, must’ve been a hundred foot deep. Killed every living thing in town.” Took another drag. “For years they tried to find that damn town.” Sugared his coffee again. “Couldn’t find it. The whole damn place was dead and buried in one night.” Put in the salt, “Never found it again neither. Not so’s I know ‘bout.” Dunked his cigarette in the coffee. “Same thing’d happen here if they ever drained off the damn canals.” Stuck it in his mouth. “The banks over on Central Avenue need the water to wash all the dirty money they get. The squatters need the water to flush their damn toilets. And the rest of us need the water to get the electricity to run the damn air-conditioners ‘cause the water makes everything so damn humid.” He picked up the cup. “Without it we’d all turn to dust by tomorrow. The whole town.” He swallowed the coffee, ran his hand across his mouth. “Dust to dust,” he said softly. “Dead and gone.” He looked into the drained cup.

Bishop shoved his empty plate across the counter. He slowly drank his coffee. After a while he placed the cup on the plate; they seemed to belong together.

“How’d you get out?” he asked finally.

“Get out?”

“From the dust town. You said everybody died and was buried.”

The old man gave him a toothless grin. “A giant bird come down and pulled me out just as I was sinking. Carried me far away.”

“A giant bird?”

“Big as a house.” He chuckled. “Bigger.”

Bishop got up. “You better hope he don’t come around again.”

“Why’s that?” asked the old man at his back.

“He might drop you in the canals this time,” said Bishop over his shoulder.

Later that evening he checked into a quiet hotel on Van Buren and slept soundly. The next morning he rented a car, again using his Daniel Long identification and disguise. He told the clerk he expected to be in town only a few days on business. In truth, he found little in Phoenix to hold him and he intended to remain just long enough to give them something to remember him by.

THREE WEEKS earlier, on the morning of August 15, certain people were trying desperately to remember him, though they had never met him and knew of him only by one of his many aliases. Derek Lavery officially began the meeting at 9:25, when Adam Kenton finally arrived.

A story on Vincent Mungo was needed, and quickly. One that would demand the death penalty. The snag was that a legitimate angle was also needed. They didn’t have one. Not yet anyway. The Chessman piece had been easy; he was dead, executed. The angle was that he hadn’t deserved death. Mungo was a lot harder. What they needed was not so obvious.

“Then we got it,” said Ding suddenly.

“Got what?”

“The angle.”

“What is it?” pursued Lavery.

“I don’t know.”

“You just said—”

“We need what’s not obvious. Right?”

Lavery nodded, suspicious now.

“Since it’s not obvious to us, that must mean we already got it.” His face beamed angelically, his eyes shone. “Otherwise it would be obvious that we didn’t have it.”

“That’s right,” said Kenton. “We have got it, but we can’t use it—”

“Because we don’t know what it is,” finished Ding.

“If we knew it, we wouldn’t need it.”

“Obviously.”

Both men glanced at Lavery, sputtering incoherently.

Twenty minutes later the most obvious thing in the room was the grin on the editor’s face. He had found his angle. Something in what Adam Kenton had said at one point: Everybody assumed Mungo was crazy. But suppose he was crazy like a fox…

Crazy like a fox.

That was their angle. Maybe Vincent Mungo was not really crazy at all. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. And therefore deserved the death penalty.

He killed the other inmate to get whatever the man had on him. The girl’s murder could have been a sexual thing. Both bodies were then mutilated to make it seem he was nuts,

Who was Vincent Mungo anyway? Just another young man in a hostile world. Angry, resentful. His mother choked to death, his father committed suicide. He was brought up by women, he was considered strange. He had problems, he had fits. So did a lot of people. They didn’t all kill and destroy.

“That’s it,” said Lavery. “That’s the angle we go with. Assuming it’s legit and he’s not really nuts. Let’s find out.”

Kenton was to dig into Mungo’s record in the upstate hospital.

“Willows.”

“He was there a few months. I want everything he did up there. Who he talked to, what he ate, where he slept, who his friends were, his enemies, what the guards thought of him, everything you can get.”

“What about the other hospitals? His years at home? His people?”

“No.” Lavery held out a pointed finger to emphasize his words. “Whatever happened to him happened at Willows. Before that he was just another guy walking around. If he hatched any kind of plan, it was at Willows.” He turned to Ding. “I want you to check into other killers who used the insanity laws to get away with murder. See what happened to them, if they got out and what they did afterward. Especially if they killed again. Make them recent if you can. Then we’ll pull everything together and match Mungo to it.” Back to Kenton. “You look into Mungo.”

Kenton nodded. “I just hope he doesn’t look into me.”

“If he does,” said Lavery quickly, “look out.” He glanced at the calendar on his desk. “I want it for the September 4 issue. That gives you five days.”

“Not much time,” Kenton told him.

“We need it running soon as possible. Mungo’s been out a month already.”

“Six weeks now,” said Ding, who always liked to have the last word.

“That’s just a long month,” said Lavery, who never liked to give it.

DON SOLIS had taken a week to get his story together. He had spent almost two years on San Quentin’s death row. In 1952 he had been whisked up in the elevator to the fifth floor, strip-searched and deposited in a ten-foot by five-foot cell. He had paced that cell a thousand times; three steps one way, six steps the other way. He had been fed twice a day, let out for exercise in front of his cubicle each morning. He had listened to music and the outside world on earphones. Between the pacing and eating, the exercise and music, he had watched men walk to their death. Some walked bravely, others had to be supported or even carried. Almost all wanted to live longer. Just a little bit longer, please. A month, a week, even a day, anything. Anything at all.

He had talked with many of them; there was little else to do on death row. He had known the good and the bad, the famous and the infamous, the killers and the cripples. He had known Caryl Chessman.

They had talked often, he and Chessman. Talked of the things they did or would like to do, their dreams and fantasies, their hopes and fears. They respected each other and got along well, at least well enough for two men facing death.

Sometimes Chessman talked of his youth and how everything seemed to go wrong. His mother, whom he had loved dearly, was paralyzed in a tragic automobile accident. His father, a weak but kind and gentle man, tried to hold the family together financially. It was impossibly difficult. Chessman began to steal in his earliest teens to help with fain ily expenses. He was soon caught. After that his juvenile record grew until finally he was sent to reform school. As a child he had been considered a musical prodigy but a bout with encephalitis ended the promise of a career in music. Acutely intelligent, embittered by the truly incredible misfortune constantly stalking his parents and himself, the youth isolated himself from society’s acceptance and turned to a life of crime.

By age seventeen Chessman was committing armed robberies and shooting from stolen cars at pursuing police. He carried guns, he formed gangs, he sneered and bragged and bullied his way around. He knew it all. But misfortune still dogged him. He was eminently untalented as a criminal. Before he was twenty years old he was imprisoned in San Quentin. The die had been cast. His entire adult life, with minor exception, was spent behind bars. Eventually his young wife, whom he had married in Las Vegas, divorced him. Several years later his mother died of cancer in agonizing pain. Her death was a severe blow to him. She had been abandoned as an infant in St. Joseph, Michigan. Once he had spent thousands of stolen dollars in an attempt to learn, through private detectives, who his mother’s real parents had been. He learned nothing. That seemed an apt appraisal of Chessman’s life, at least to Don Solis at the time.