The Madman's Tale (15 page)

“Hey!” Francis said, “we haven’t—” but his denial was cut off by a sharp
kick into his thigh from the smaller man. He bit back his tongue and chewed on his lip. He had been spun around, and couldn’t see Peter the Fireman. He wanted to twist in that direction, but also didn’t want to get kicked again, so he held his position, as he heard the sound of a siren cutting through the outside darkness, growing stronger with each passing second. It was blaring as it pulled to a halt in front of Amherst, then faded like an evil thought.

“Who called the cops?” the smaller guard asked.

“We did,” said Peter.

“Jesus Christ,” the guard said. He kicked at Francis a second time.

He aimed his foot and drew it back for a third blow, and Francis braced for the pain, but the guard didn’t follow through. Instead he suddenly blurted out, “Hey! What’re you think you’re doing!”

He said the question as if it were an order, no inquiry behind the sentiment, only a demand. Francis managed to turn his head slightly, and saw that Napoleon and a couple of others from the dormitory had pushed the door open, and were standing hesitantly in the entranceway to the corridor, unsure whether they could come out. The noise from the sirens must have awakened everyone, Francis realized. In the same moment, the main light switch was thrown, and the hallway burst into light. From the south side of the building, Francis suddenly could hear high-pitched, wailing cries, and someone began to slam on the locked door to the women’s dormitory. The steel plates and deadbolt locks held the door fast, but the noise was like a bass drum, echoing down the hallway.

“Goddamn it!” the guard with the Marine haircut shouted. “You!” He was pointing his nightstick at Napoleon and the other timid, but curious men who’d stepped out of the sleeping area. “Back inside! Now!” He ran toward them holding his arm out like a traffic cop giving directions, brandishing his nightstick at the same time. Francis could see the men retreat in fear, and the guard slammed himself into the door, pushing it closed and then locking it tightly. He turned, and then skidded, as his foot slipped in one of the dark splotches of blood that marred the corridor. The door drumming from the women’s side picked up in intensity, and Francis heard two other voices coming from behind his head.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

“What’re you doing?”

He turned again, and could just catch sight beyond where Peter the Fireman was stretched out on the floor, of two uniformed police officers. One of the men was reaching for his weapon, not drawing it, but nervously unsnap-ping the flap that held it in place.

“We got a report of a homicide?” one of the uniformed officers asked. Then, without waiting for a response, he must have seen some of the blood in
the corridor, for he stepped forward, past the nursing station, over to the door to the storage room. Francis tracked the policeman with his eyes, and saw the man stop short outside the door. Unlike the hospital guards, however, the policeman said nothing. He simply stared in, almost, in that second, like so many of the hospital patients who stared off into space, seeing whatever it was they wanted to see, or needed to see, but which wasn’t what was in front of them.

From that moment it seemed that things happened quickly and slowly, both at the same time. It was, to Francis, as if time somehow had lost its grip on the progress of the night, and that its orderly processing of the dark hours past midnight was disrupted and thrown into disarray. Before too long, he was shunted off to a treatment room down the corridor from where crime scene technicians were setting up shop and photographers were clicking off frames of pictures. Each time their flash went off it was like a lightning strike on some distant horizon and it caused the cries and turmoil in the locked dormitories among the patients to redouble in tension. At first he was unceremoniously slammed into a seat by the smaller of the two security guards and left alone. Then two detectives in plain clothes and Doctor Gulptilil came in to see him after a few minutes. He was still in his nightclothes and handcuffed, and uncomfortably seated in a stiff wooden desk chair. Francis presumed that Peter the Fireman was in similar circumstances in an adjacent room, but he couldn’t be sure. He wished he didn’t have to face the policemen by himself.

The two detectives wore suits that seemed slightly rumpled and ill fitting. They had close-cropped haircuts and hard jawlines, and neither man wore any sense of softness in his eyes, or the manner in which he spoke. They were of similar heights and builds and Francis thought he would probably mix them up if he were to ever meet them again. He didn’t really hear their names, when they introduced themselves, because he was looking over toward Doctor Gulptilil for reassurance. The doctor, however, perched himself against one wall, and saying nothing after admonishing Francis to tell the detectives the truth. One of the two policemen sidled up next to the doctor, and leaned beside him against the wall, while the other half sat on a desk in front of Francis. One leg swung in the air almost jauntily, but the policeman sat so that his black holster and steel blue pistol, worn on his belt, were obvious. The man had a slightly lopsided smile, which made almost everything he said appear dishonest.

“So, Mister Petrel,” the detective asked, “why were you out in the corridor after lights-out?”

Francis hesitated, remembered what Peter the Fireman had told him, and then launched into a brief recounting of being awakened by Lanky, and then following Peter out into the hallway, and subsequently discovering Short Blond’s body. The detective nodded, then shook his head.

“That dormitory door is locked, Mister Petrel. It’s locked every night.” The
detective stole a quick glance at Doctor Gulptilil, who nodded vigorously in assent.

“It wasn’t locked tonight.”

“I’m not sure I believe you.”

Francis did not know how to respond.

The policeman paused, letting some silence creep around the room and making Francis nervous. “Tell me, Mister Petrel. Okay if I call you Francis?”

Francis nodded.

“… Okay then, Franny, you’re a young guy. You ever have sex with a woman before tonight?”

Francis reeled back in the chair. “Tonight?” he asked.

“Yeah,” the detective continued. “I mean, before tonight when you had sex with the nurse. Did you ever have relations with any girl?”

Francis was genuinely confused. Voices thundered in his ears, shouting all sorts of contradictory messages. He looked over toward Doctor Gulptilil trying to see if he could see the tumult that was taking place within him. But the doctor had moved into a shadow, and it was hard for Francis to see his face.

“No,” Francis said, hesitancy marred the word.

“No, what? Never? A good-looking guy like you? That must have been pretty frustrating. Especially when you got turned down, I’ll bet. And that nurse, she wasn’t all that much older than you, was she? Must have made you pretty angry when she turned you down.”

“No,” Francis said again. “That’s not right.”

“She didn’t turn you down?”

“No, no, no,” Francis said.

“You mean you’re telling me she agreed to have sex, and then killed herself?”

“No,” he repeated. “You have it all wrong.”

“Right. Sure.” The detective looked over at his partner. “So, she didn’t agree to have sex, and then you killed her? Is that the way it went?”

“No, you’re wrong again.”

“Franny, you’ve got me all confused. You say you’re out in a corridor past a locked door when you shouldn’t be, and there’s a raped and dead nurse-trainee, and you just happen to be there? Why it doesn’t make any sense. Don’t you think you could be a little more helpful here?”

“I don’t know,” Francis responded.

“What don’t you know? How to help out? Why just tell me what happened when the nurse turned you down. How hard is that? Then it will all make sense to everyone, and we can wrap this up tonight.”

“Yes. Or no,” Francis said.

“I’ll tell you another way it makes sense: If you and your buddy got together
and decided to sneak out and pay the nurse a little nighttime visit, and then things didn’t exactly go the way you planned. Look, Franny, just level with me, okay? Let’s just agree on one thing, all right?”

“What’s that?” Francis asked tentatively. He could hear the cracks in his voice.

“You just tell me the truth, okay?”

Francis nodded.

“Good,” said the detective. He continued in a low, soft, seductive voice, almost as if each word spoken could only be heard by Francis, that they were speaking some language only they knew. The other policeman and Doctor Gulp-a-pill seemed to evaporate from the small room, as the detective continued speaking, sirenlike, enticing, making it seem as if the only possible interpretation was his. “Now the only way I can see this happening is maybe a little bit of an accident, huh? Maybe she kinda led you and the other guy on. Maybe you thought she was going to be a little friendlier than she turned out to be. A little misunderstanding. That’s all. You thought she meant one thing, and she thought, well, she meant another. And then things got out of hand, right? So, really, it was all an accident, right? And look, Franny, no one is going to blame you all that much. I mean, after all, you’re here. And you’ve already been diagnosed as being a little crazy, so this is pretty much in the same ballpark, right? Have I got it down now, Franny?”

Francis took a deep breath. “Not in the slightest,” he said sharply. For a moment he wondered if denying the detective’s persuasive tones wasn’t the bravest thing he’d ever done.

The detective stood up quickly, shook his head once, and glanced at his partner. This other policeman seemed to vault the room in a single stride, slamming his fist against the table violently, abruptly lowering his face to Francis’s so that the spittle and spray from his screamed words fell all over him.

“Goddamn it! You fucking Looney Tune! You killed her and we know it! Stop fucking around and tell us the truth or I will beat the shit out of you!”

Francis recoiled, pushing the chair back, trying to gain some space, but the detective grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him forward. In the same motion, he jammed Francis’s head down, smashing it against the tabletop, dazing him. When he lurched upright, Francis could taste blood on his lips, and could feel it dripping from his nose. He shook his head, trying to regain his senses, only to be sent spinning by a vicious openhanded slap across his cheek. Pain seared his face and soared behind his eyes, and then, almost simultaneously, he felt himself losing his balance, and he fell to the floor. He was dizzy and disoriented, and he wanted something or someone to come help him.

The detective grabbed him, lifted him up as if he were almost weightless, and slammed him back down into the chair.

“Now, damn it to hell, tell us the truth!” He pulled back his hand, readying it to punch Francis again, but held up, as if waiting for a reply.

The blows seemed to have scattered all his voices within him. They were shouting warnings from locations deep within him, hard to hear and hard to make out. It was a little like being in the back of a room filled with strange and unfamiliar people speaking in different languages.

“Tell me!” the detective repeated.

Francis did not reply. Instead, he grasped hold of the chair frame and readied himself for another blow. The detective lifted his hand, then stopped. He made a grunting noise of resignation and stepped back. The first detective stepped forward.

“Franny, Franny,” he said soothingly, “why are you making my friend here so angry? Can’t you just straighten this out tonight, so we can all go home and get to bed. Get things back to normal? Or,” he continued, smiling as he spoke, “whatever passes for normal around here.”

He leaned forward and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Do you know what is happening next door, right now?”

Francis shook his head.

“Your buddy, the other guy who was in on the little party tonight, he’s giving you up. That’s what’s happening.”

“Giving me up?” Francis asked.

“He’s blaming you for everything that happened. He’s telling the other detectives that it was your idea, and that you were the one who did the rape, and the murder, and that he just watched. He’s telling them that he tried to stop you, but that you wouldn’t listen to him. He’s blaming you for the whole sorry mess.”

Francis considered this for a moment, then shook his head. The detective’s suggestion seemed as crazy and impossible as anything else that had happened that night, and he didn’t believe it. He ran his tongue over his lip and felt some swelling to go with the salty taste of the blood. “I told you,” he said weakly. “I told you what I know.”

The first detective grimaced, as if this response wasn’t acceptable, not in the slightest, and made a small hand gesture toward his angry partner. The second detective stepped forward, lowering his face so that he was looking directly into Francis’s eyes. Francis shrank back, awaiting another blow, unable to move to defend himself. His vulnerability was total. He squeezed his eyes shut.

But before the blow arrived, he heard the door scrape open.

The interruption seemed to put everything in the room into an odd, slow motion. Francis could see a uniformed officer in the doorway, and both detectives leaning toward him, in muffled conversation. After a moment, it seemed to gain in animation, though the tones stayed low and impossible for Francis to make out. After a moment or two, the first detective shook his head and sighed, making a small sound of disgust, then turned back toward Francis. “Hey, Franny-boy, tell me this: The guy you said woke you up, the guy you told us about at the start of our little conversation, before you said you headed out into the corridor, that the same guy that attacked the nurse earlier tonight, during dinner? Went after her in front of just about every damn person in this building?”

Francis nodded.

The detective seemed to roll his eyes, and toss his head back in resignation. “Shit,” he said. “We’re wasting our time here.” He turned toward Doctor Gulptilil, still lurking in the shadows, and angrily asked, “Why the hell didn’t you tell us about that earlier? Is everybody in here flat-out nuts?”