The Executioner's Song (84 page)

John Woods had had an upset stomach the night before, coughed up some blood, and thought, Jesus, now I’m getting an ulcer. He decided to stay home from the hospital, but a frantic call came in from the ward. They said, “Nicole Barrett’s on the way to

US.”

“Like hell she is,” said Woods.

He went over the Superintendent’s office and first thing Kiger said was, “I sent her to your unit. That’s where I want her.”

Woods said, “Nicole oughtn’t to be in Maximum Security. This is just another indication that the rest of the hospital can’t carry their

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share. Thera-Mod should be able to take her.” Kiger agreed. He started to interrupt, but Woods was so mad, he said, “Let me finish.” He revered Kiger, thought he was the only man who had had a new idea in treating psychopaths since they coined the word, and so it got to him whenever he thought Kiger was doing something for less than the noblest motive.

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way, that his program could receive an irreparable couldn’t supervise Nicole. Nonetheless, it was the pits.

blow if they

Of course, Woods’s unit was the only one with enough security to protect Nicole from the press. As Kiger said, “This is going to be sticky, newswise.” Every wire service, major newspaper and magazine was going to try every trick to interview Nicole. That meant heavy pressure. The media would squeeze the politicians, and they in turn would squeeze the hospital. If Nicole pulled off another attempt, all their heads were on the block. It irritated the hell out of Woods how much this was going to interfere with the therapy of everyone else on the ward. His job had shifted, Now he was there to keep Nicole alive.

Nicole wanted to go to sleep like she never had before, but immediately a boss-looking chick, probably a patient, but domineering and awful sure of herself in a rotten limited way, was telling her, “No lying on beds in the daytime.” “Take a shower!” “Take off your jewelry.” They started to grab her, and she began to fight. That was when Nicole realized everything she did from here on out was going to be a fight. It came down on her like a disease. It would be a losing battle all the way. “I’m going to be suffocated by these fucking sheep,” she said to herself. Yes, this was the place Gary had described where everybody ratted on everybody.

Instead of working with the antisocial impulses of each patient as it came into conflict with the group interest, instead of the group being the anvil on which each patient’s personality might get forged into a little more social responsibility, the emphasis would now have to be on surrounding Nicole, insulating her and cutting off the day-to-day influence of Gary, so that he could not brainwash her with the idea — oh, beautiful guru I — that their souls were scheduled to meet on the other side. Woods would have to issue orders that no aide or patient was to mention Gilmore’s name. Not ever. If he was going to keep Nicole alive, he had to neutralize that relationship. Woods could recognize that ifnobody would talk to Nicole about Gary, she was nonetheless going to think about him all the time. Woods couldn’t stop that. He just didn’t want Gilmore able to influence her thinking anymore.

She tried to go to sleep, and they wouldn’t let her. She lay on the floor and they woke her and she went right back to the floor and went to sleep again. Then Norton Willy’s wife was shaking her. May-vine her name was. The wife of Norton Willy who grew up right next door to her grandmother. Nicole couldn’t believe that Norton had married this witch, a horrible huge ass-kisser who was now helping to run the place. They kept trying to get Nicole up and wouldn’t let her sleep on the couches, but she felt three times as weak as in the other hospital. All she was interested in was being alone, and thinking about Gary.

Yet, it killed him. It just wasn’t Woods’s idea of therapy. They’d be junking a lot of their program just to keep a 24-hour watch on Nicole.

Schiller went out to the airport. His girl friend, Stephanie, was coming in. Since she had once been his secretary, he knew she would not be surprised when he greeted her with the announcement that they had to go right away to Pleasant Grove near Orem, a good forty miles from the airport, to visit with Kathryne Baker.

The ideal way to run a hospital was to take your chances on suicide. That was part of the risk in any innovative therapy. Here, they had to cut the risk off. Kiger’s ideas were so unconventional anySchiller expected there’d be press outside, but, in fact, the house was hard to find. Naming the streets by compass directions didn’t

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work in Pleasant Grove. There were too many old country roads, paved cow pastures, and dry riverbeds. 4oo North was likely to twist across 9oo North and 2oo East intersect with 6o West. It was not the kind of address that a reporter, fighting a five o’clock deadline, was going to lose a half a day looking for.

Schiller, however, had time for a long talk with Mrs. Baker. He thought it was a sloppy house, with old tires out in the front yard and metal skins rusting in the grass—you couldn’t tell if the metal came from old jalopies or old washing machines. There were bits of jam on the table and dust and dirt and grease formed a pomade on many a surface in the kitchen, There were also an as tonishing number of kids — he saw Rikki and Sue Baker’s kids go through, plus some neighbors’, and got them mixed up with Kathryne Baker’s youngest child, Angel, who might have been six or seven and was astonishingly beautiful, looked like Brooke Shields. With all that noise it could have been confusing, but Schiller was counting on his ability to sell a proposition in a palace or a poolhall. He went right into a rap like the one he gave to Vern. “Whether I get the rights to your daughter’s life or not,’ this, I think, is what you should do.’ And he set out to give her confidence in his under standing of the problems facing her. He told her she should change beT phone and get the kids away ‘with a relative. That way, the press wouldn’t discover them. “You want to avoid having the children feel this is an indelible experience of horror.” All the while, he knew what was impressing her most is that he did not sit there asking questions and writing her answers down, ]Jke he was stealing an interview, but was saying: Mrs. Baker, go get a lawyer. Kathryne said, “I don’t know one.” “Who do you work for?” asked Schiller. When she told him, Schiller said, “Call your boss and ask who his lawyer is.” He could see it surprised her agreeably that he wanted her to obtain a repre sentative to take care of her rights. He knew she was not used to talk like that.

Schiller had learned from the deal he made for Sunshine that if you wanted to get into big deals with movies and books, and play with producers and publishers, then you had to lay the right founda tion, and draw up the right contracts from day one. Otherwise, you could end in a tree, swinging from limb to limb. With Sunshine, he had failed to get a separate contract from the dying woman’s hus band. Therefore Universal had to spend a lot of money later to buy

his rights. That had been an item to haunt Schiller. So, he laid it out now for Mrs. Baker. “Get yourself a lawyer,” he told her. “Get it before we even talk money.”

On the drive away from the house, he had his first big fight with Stephanie. Her father was in the garment business. Way Schiller saw it, Stephanie’s father had always been as deep in business as a sheep is thick in wool, but Stephanie was her dad’s delight, and dad had done his best to protect her. Stephanie Wolf was one beautiful princess who hated to see business operating. She might have worked as a secretary, but it never rubbed off. She detested business.

Now, Stephanie was telling him that he’d acted like a manipula tor with Kathryne Baker. “How dare you take advantage of that woman by talking business in the middle of all her grief? Her daughter was just committed yesterday.” Larry tried to lay it out for her. “You don’t mind,” he said, “going to ABC’s cocktail parties, but ABC couldn’t care less whether they’re going to have Larry Schiller at their party next week. I’m only as good as what I can do for ABC. Damn it,” he said, “if you’re interested in me, you’ve got to accept me as who I am. You’ve got to love the part you love, and if there’s a part you don’t like, you’ve still got to learn to deal with it. You can’t bawl the shit out of me because of what I say in a living room, the very minute I walk out of that room.” They really had a big fight, Stephanie, after all, was the girl for whom Schiller was ready to break up a marriage that had gone on for sixteen years, but he could see that their relation was going to be put to every strain during this Gilmore business. Part of his brain was beginning to work already on the possibility of sending Stephanie to Europe to take care of foreign rights. If she stayed around, he could lose the Gilmore story. The aggravations between him and her over this one episode had been close to apoplectic.

That night, unable to sleep, he got up at two in the morning and dictated a contract for the Gilmore rights to a legal service in Salt Lake City. Over the telephone, his words were recorded, and early in the morning some girl would type it up. However, he didn’t like the idea that a stranger would hear the terms of the contract. It could easily be leaked to a newspaper. Schiller knew that if he was working for a local paper, he would try to have a pipdine into such places. You could get a story that way.

Still, he had to have something ready to show Vern’s and Mrs. Baker’s separate lawyers. So he pretended to be a buyer of sheep and cattle from California, and dictated how many lambs and cows were to be sold in return for conveying full rights to said stock. The humor of it appealed to him at two in the morning.

Tomorrow, he would change the sheep and cows into specific people. There were a lot of good businessmen in the world, and a lot of good journalists, thought Schiller, but maybe he was one of the few who could be both.

Over the weekend Barry Farrell interviewed Larry Schiller in Los Angeles. They had worked together on Life years ago, but Farrell had not been feeling friendly to Schiller lately. A little over a year before, Larry had been getting a book of photographs together on Muhammad All. He had called Barry to say he wanted him to do the text, and Farrell had gotten into conversations with his publisher about it. Then Schiller signed Wilfred Sheed. Farrell felt he had been merely another name to feed into the hopper, and was pissed off over that.

Every December, however, he liked to Clean the slates, so he wrote Schiller a letter saying in effect, “I’m over my pique. We did some good things together in the past and maybe we will again.” It cleared the air for Farrell. He thought he could talk without bias to Larry ff something came up.

Nonetheless, soon as he heard that Schiller was in Utah trying to get the Gilmore story, Farrell was ready to travel with a sharp pencil. Larry would be exposing himself to the very thing he’d been criti cized for in the past. It would be a great opportunity to observe how he would bid for Gilmore’s corpse.

So Farrell arranged to do a piece for New West, and talked to the Warden of the prison, to Susskind, and finally got together with Schil ler in Los Angeles on the weekend. By then, Farrell was hardly happy about Dennis Boaz. That fucking hippie, he told himself, persistently

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fails tO understand the stakes. Here Farrell had started with a little animus against Schiller, but Susskind was talking future profits up to fifteen million dollars while offering peanuts. Farrell began to think somewhat gloomily—since Christmas resolution or no, he had looked forward to doing a couple of numbers on Schiller-that the man might be the only one with a realistic notion of what could hap pen when you died in public. Schiller had done it before, seen the rel atives, held their hands. He was closer to the difficulty than Boaz, who was always presenting himself as more organic than thou.

God, Gilmore had need of protection. Nothing got covered on TV more than public death. Farrell listened to Dennis talking about Gary and Nicole in a prison cottage with a couple of pet plants in the backyard, and it disgusted Farrell. Gary’s life was running out. There was no way they were not going to kill him in the State of Utah. Why, if Gilmore was not executed, a major wave of executions might be touched off. Every conservative in America would say: They couldn’t even shoot this fellow who wanted to be shot. Who are we ever going to punish?

Schfller’s rap, at least, was solid. Build foundations. Get those contracts up like walls. Let everybody know where they stand.

Farrell found himself being kind to Schiller in the piece he wrote for New West.

Schiller was on the radio a couple of times, and the nature of his phone calls was changing. He could feel the press coming nearer. He decided to get in contact with Ed Guthman of the Los Angeles Times. “Ed,” he said, “I need an outlet. I’ll give you two thousand words for your front page and an exclusive interview with Gilmore sometime before the execution date, if you’ll give me one of your top criminal reporters now as a sounding board.” Guthman had a good man named Dave Johnston, who was available for a day, and Schiller and Johnston tried to foresee the problems. If, for instance, you could get only one interview with Gilmore, what were the questions to ask?

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In addition, Schiller needed a story in the next week or so about himself. Not a large story, but a quiet one on a Monday. He wanted to scale down the importance of his presence on the scene. No sudden focus of attention with everybody saying: Carrion bird is getting it. Instead, Johnston would write a piece about how the press had come into Salt Lake from all over the world, and Schiller would only be mentioned in the third or fourth paragraph.