Flying Crows (24 page)

XXII

RANDY

SOMERSET

1997

After several days of brooding, Randy realized he could never close his mind on the saga of Birdie and Josh until he went to Somerset, to see what there was to see.

So with the full knowledge and permission of Mack Gardner, his captain, he took a leave day and drove south for ninety minutes on U.S. 71 and a few connecting two-lane country roads to the town—and world— of Somerset.

Randy did have one problem blip with Mack before leaving. It was not about going to Somerset but about what to tell a
Kansas City Star
reporter who had picked up word about a dead homeless guy who'd been found at Union Station.

“He's apparently gotten on to much of the story, Randy,” said Gardner, a dark thin man who, like Randy, jogged every morning and worked out to keep himself fit. “He's even heard something about the guy's claim that he witnessed the Union Station massacre. Can that be?”

They were standing in the open detectives area outside Mack's glass-enclosed office. Randy couldn't afford a loud exchange. He had to speak quietly, routinely—and quickly.

“That was just the crazy talk of a sick old man. Besides, I promised him, just before he died, that we wouldn't put out any publicity about him,” Randy said.

“Why would you do something like that?” asked Gardner. “It's one helluva story, when you think about it. Even without the massacre stuff, here was a guy who claimed he lived in Union Station for more than sixty years!”

“I know the story. Forget it,” Randy said. He spoke with dismissive authority, as if he were the captain and Mack was the lieutenant. “I gave my word. We have to honor it.”

And Randy departed for Somerset.

A service station attendant in town pointed toward a hill— Confederate Hill, he called it—overlooking the town. “There's not much of the old hospital left,” he said to Randy. “Go up to the first red brick building at the end of the entrance road. There's a state office in there. They'll help you out.”

Within a few minutes, Harry Leonard, identified by a woman in the office as “our unofficial archivist and historian,” was leading Randy down some steps to the basement of the red brick building.

“You trying to trace an old relative, Lieutenant,” he asked, “or is it official?”

“It's official,” Randy replied, and then added, “but it's also about a friend.”

They went through a maze of pipes and fairly modern heating, cooling, and maintenance equipment to a door that Harry unlocked with a key— one of several he had on a large round silver ring.

“It's all in here—all that's left,” Harry said. He had the look of an athlete, or at least a weight lifter. A man in his sixties, he wore his gray hair in a crew cut and clearly took very good care of himself. His stomach was flat, his arms hard and muscular.

They walked into a huge, dark, musty room that was full of head-high gray and green metal file cabinets and stacks of cardboard file boxes. After Harry had turned on some lights, Randy could tell this was truly, as they said upstairs,
the
ancient part of the building. The white wooden ceilings were high and in need of patching and painting, the plaster walls were gray and cracking, the floor was concrete, cold, slippery.

“When was your friend here?”

“For only a short time in 1933, I think.”

“That was more than sixty years ago. The best and quickest way to start is by looking at the patient rosters. There's one for every year since this place opened in 1869. They're over here.”

Within a couple of minutes, Harry had a long legal-size sheaf of white papers in his hand. They were stapled together at the top.

“Here's the roster—the official census, they called it then—for 1933. What's your friend's name? Is he still alive?”

“No, he just died. I think his name was Carlucci, Birdie Carlucci.”

Harry looked down at the roster. “You think, huh? Let's see now. The list's arranged alphabetically, so it should be easy to spot him. Once we confirm he was here we can go for his file. If he was here for only a few weeks . . .”

Harry was shaking his head.

“What is it?” Randy asked.

“There's nobody named Carlucci on this list as being a patient at Somerset Asylum for
any
length of time during
any
part of 1933. Here, look for yourself.”

Randy went through the list of typed names. In neat columns after the names were the Missouri county where each person came from and then three designations, either Stearman, Beech, or Cessna. Harry explained that those were the names of the three wings of the institution.

Those wings were long gone. Randy had marveled at a large color photograph of the original building that was hanging in the lobby upstairs. Birdie Carlucci was right about its looking like a castle in a moving picture. It was huge, almost as large as Union Station. But, as Harry explained, all that remained of the gigantic complex now was this center section of what had been called Old Main. The first three of its four floors had been modernized to house a regional office of the Missouri State Health Department and now sat at the entrance of an industrial and business park. The vast asylum grounds here on Confederate Hill had been sold by the state to a developer on condition he rehabilitate and maintain this one small portion of the institution for use by the state. Harry had told Randy all of this on the walk to the basement. He also said he had worked at the state hospital at Somerset, as it was called then, until it was shut down in 1992. Now he was a caseworker for the health department, on the verge of retirement.

Randy couldn't find a Carlucci on the 1933 roster either. There was somebody named Christopher William Carlsen and a Richard James Davenport, but nobody—alphabetically—in between.

“I'm almost certain . . . fairly sure, at least . . . that he was here then,” Randy said to Harry.

Could the old man have made up the whole thing about being at Somerset Asylum as well as the massacre witness story? Sure, he could have. But what about Janice the Harvey Girl and the other little things?

Harry let out an exasperated breath. “This would not be the first time somebody who was here didn't turn up in the records. They tinkered with the records all the time. Somebody must have decided they didn't want there to be any trace of your friend Carlucci. Why was he here just a short time?”

“He escaped.”

“Never located afterward?”

“Not until recently.”

“That's it, then. An administrator, probably in 1933, didn't want to have anything in writing about somebody who had escaped and was still at large. He could always claim the guy was never here: ‘Hey, look at my records!' ”

“That doesn't make sense.”

Harry laughed. “Making sense was not what this place was all about back in those days, Lieutenant. Was your friend involved in something . . . you know, controversial? Criminal?”

“Why? Would that matter?”

“Well, I was told they sometimes used the asylum to hide people.”

Randy's mind was working fast. “Like who?”

“Oh, gangster types mostly, back in the thirties and forties. My dad—he used to work here, too—said the Pendergast boys in Kansas City and their Italian mobsters used to send people here to get lost for a while. It was a perfect place to hide somebody. They paid off the asylum administrator to drop them into the patient population without even telling the doctors or any other staff they weren't really crazy.”

Bingo! That was it. There
was
a phony newsboy signalman for the Union Station gunmen. And it was Birdie Carlucci, or whatever his name was. Afterward, with the help of the people who hired him, he was sent to this place.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe. Who knew? Who would
ever
know?

Birdie died in peace; let him rest in peace too, thought Randy. “Nope,” was his answer to Harry about whether his friend Carlucci was involved in anything criminal.

But as he said it, Randy quickly flipped the pages of the roster until he came to the name of Joshua Alan Lancaster.

He showed the name to Harry and said, “How about this guy? Could you find his file?”

“Joshua Alan Lancaster. When was he admitted?”

“August 1905.”

Harry Leonard smiled. “You don't have to be a genius—or a cop—to figure out this one could not have been a friend of yours. If you weren't a cop I wouldn't go any further with this without a court order. These files are under lock and key to protect people's privacy. Even to this day, there are folks who are not tickled about word getting out that they're kin to people who were inmates in a state lunatic asylum. I made an exception for that first guy of yours, but now you're asking about another—”

“But I
am
a cop, and Lancaster was the best friend of
my
friend.”

“All right, all right. Did the guy die here?”

“Most likely, yes.”

“When?”

“I have no idea . . . other than that it was after 1933.”

Harry reached down in the file cabinet and pulled out several more census lists. He handed a bunch to Randy and kept an equal number for himself.

“We'll look at each year until his name disappears. The year before would be the year he either died or left the institution. It's under that year his patient history would be kept.”

Randy, covering himself with flying dust as he went through the lists, saw that Josh was still there in 1935 . . . '36 . . . '37 . . . '38 . . . '39 . . . '40. . . .

“Here we go,” said Harry, holding up the papers he was checking. “He was on the 1967 roster, gone in 1968. That means, assuming everything's in order, we should find his file in 1967.”

And within a few minutes, they did.

With Harry's permission, Randy took it over to a corner, sat down on a stack of boxes, and began skimming through it.

Most of the early section in the two-inch-thick file was already familiar to Randy. That had to do with Josh's murdering his family in 1905 and the circumstances of his committal to Somerset. A sobering notation, usually in large type, appeared on many of the pages about Josh's future. For example, one of them read: THIS PATIENT, IF PRONOUNCED SANE, MUST BE TURNED OVER TO PRISON SYSTEM. DO NOT RELEASE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!

Randy's eye zeroed in on a write-up signed by Dr. Will Mitchell in 1920. Mitchell declared Josh Lancaster to be “making remarkable progress in overcoming his inability to sleep normally.” He recommended that Lancaster be “allowed and encouraged” to assist his fellow patients who suffered from similar maladies.

The rest of Josh's Somerset story was mostly about routine matters and about how helpful he had been to various doctors and attendants. A major exception was a four-sentence account of his being “recaptured” by an “alert attendant” following an “unauthorized absence” from the asylum for a full day in 1933. The key sentence was: “The patient Lancaster, using devious methods, left the asylum grounds with another male patient.” That was Birdie. That had to be Birdie. He was here; Harry probably had it right. Some on-the-take administrator had simply eliminated Birdie Carlucci from the asylum's main records.

Another most interesting series of entries were those through the years expressing the opinion that Joshua Alan Lancaster appeared to be cured and thus probably no longer insane or suffering from acute lunacy. Shortly after each such entry from a doctor or attendant, there would be another about a sudden recurrence of his lunacy, usually marked by uncontrollable fits and an inability to go to sleep. It didn't tax Randy's cop mind much to figure out what that was all about. Birdie's friend Josh had clearly decided that life at Somerset Asylum definitely beat being hanged.

It was at the end of the file—toward the last of its hundred or more pages—that Randy took sharp notice. Josh Lancaster became ill with what was diagnosed as pneumonia and died peacefully in his sleep on February 12, 1967, at the age of seventy-seven.