The Murder Channel (2 page)

“Your honor, this is Dr. Lucas Frank—”

“I know who he is. Do you intend to call him during this proceeding?”

“We asked Dr. Frank—”

His finger still aimed at me, Devaine said, “Sit outside until you are called.”

I folded my newspaper, stood, and hesitated as the prosecutor explained my presence. “The
Commonwealth has asked Dr. Frank to observe Mr. Hastings’s testimony.”

“Get out of my courtroom,” Devaine told me.

I made my exit, followed in five minutes by a deputy prosecutor. “The judge ruled that Hastings’s testimony would influence yours,” she said.

I chuckled. “That was the idea, that part of my assessment of Hastings would be based on his demeanor here.”

“Devaine’s in a rotten mood.”

“Not enough bran this morning,” I said. “It’s immaterial to me whether I get paid to read the
Globe
out here or in there. You, however, may be losing significant testimony.”

“Devaine doesn’t like female prosecutors,” she said.

I wondered how many of a judge’s rulings were influenced by her or his idiosyncracies.

Now, as we entered the tunnel, I warned Bolton, “Zrbny will walk.”

“Because of Devaine?”

“He won’t help. Who else will testify?”

Bolton gave me a file folder. I skimmed a witness list, then flipped to a police summary dated August 1984.

“First cop on the scene was named Waycross,” I said. “There was a victim with that name.”

Bolton sighed. “Neville Waycross was a young homicide detective, one of my people. The victim was his wife. They’d been married six months.”

“He found his wife?”

Bolton nodded. “Zrbny had cut her throat.”

“Jesus,” I muttered, and gazed at the tunnel’s beige walls.

Waycross struggled with alcoholism for two years, Bolton told me, landed in detox, and eventually joined the Brotherhood of the Earth in Christ, an inner-city monastic group dedicated to the Bible and good works in the community.

“Ray, I’m going to need some time to study this.”

“You don’t have it. We’re already late. Your hotel room is stocked with a complete set of the case files. I figured you’d want to go over them tonight.”

I considered what Bolton had said, wondering why Zrbny would wait eight years before making noise about getting out.

“Why the fascination with the media?”

“His shrink says it started with the Simpson trial. Zrbny’s quite an an expert on the case. Claims one person could not have committed the crime.”

“I’m inclined to agree with him.”

Bolton shot me a glance. “Later, over beers,” he said. “Zrbny followed the Woodward au pair case here, and the tabloid TV shows on the JonBenet Ramsay case. He wants that kind of prime-time notoriety. Says he has a message to deliver.”

“Fifteen minutes of fame doesn’t cut it anymore,” I said. “Why now?”

“He has incentive now,” Bolton said. “A year ago, no one remembered his name.”

“Suppose I agree that Zrbny shouldn’t be let out. Then what? He’s probably gonna walk anyway.”

I looked at the back of Bolton’s head and waited. My old friend watched the traffic as we made the climb from the tunnel’s deepest point.

“He’ll make us come after him,” Bolton finally said.

I gazed out the window as we emerged from the tunnel at the expressway’s north ramp and waited for a break in traffic. Despite the snow, the streets bustled with activity.

“So, we’re a few days away from somebody being murdered,” I said. “Maybe that woman with the Macy’s bag, or the girl in the Celtics jacket. She doesn’t know it yet. Maybe she won’t have to know it, but she’ll still be dead.”

“Too existential for me,” he said.

“Does Devaine hold forth in the old courthouse?”

“He refuses to give up his view of the Charles River,” Bolton said as his cell phone beeped. “It’s a pain for security.”

The state trooper drove north, then turned onto Storrow Drive, speeding west beside the river.

When I departed Boston, I couldn’t get away fast enough. At Lake Albert, I read Bolton’s fax and felt an immediate rush of ambivalence laced with mild nausea. Now I watched the city of my birth—a blur of gray walls, black windows, and white streaks. I had lived most of my life here, and committed
most of my sins in the city’s innards. I hated the place with a passion.

Bolton switched off his phone and turned sideways in his seat. “There’s a delay in transporting Zrbny. Probably the weather. How do you feel about coming home, Lucas?”

I considered his question, seeking an appropriate analogy. “Remember when we took the kids to see the circus at Boston Garden?” I asked. “You usually had complimentary tickets.”

He smiled, probably remembering the jugglers, aerial artists, clowns, and acrobats.

“The circus was a chaos of crowds and foul smells shoehorned into the old Boston Garden,” I said. “Your tickets invariably seated me where the elephants could shit under my nose. That’s how I feel.”

I STOOD WITH MY HANDS CLASPED BEHIND
my neck.

Sheriff’s Deputy O’Brien strapped a wide leather belt around my waist; Deputy Finneran, stun gun in hand, stood behind me. Ben Moffatt, the ward attendant, blocked the doorway.

I gazed through the window at the snow and listened to the chain slide through the steel loops on my harness.

“Lower your right hand,” O’Brien said.

He snapped a handcuff in place. I winced from the pain, but continued to watch the swirls of white.

“It’s tight,” Ben said.

“Lower your left, then I’ll adjust them.”

“He works out,” Ben explained. “His wrists are big.”

“He’s big all over.”

O’Brien adjusted the restraints. “How’s that?”

“He’ll be okay,” Ben said.

“What about the leg shackles?” Finneran asked.

Ben laughed. “Felix is getting his day in court. He won’t run on you.”

“He won’t run far in this snow anyway,” O’Brien said. “But it’s standard transport procedure. How tall are you?”

I looked down at O’Brien. Finneran attached the leg shackles.

“Felix is six foot seven in his socks,” Ben said. “Two hundred and ninety pounds.”

“Does he talk?”

“Only when he wants to.”

“Let’s get out of this fuckin’ bughouse,” Finneran said. “This place gives me the creeps.”

We were a soft parade, a muffled procession through the halls, waiting briefly for doors to unlock in advance of our passage. Ben led the way, followed by O’Brien, me, and Finneran.

Ralph Amsden paused with his laundry cart and nodded. He was my closest friend, a wisp of a man, an inmate who lived in the basement in a storage area adjacent to the furnace only he could tend.

I have lived my entire life inside my mind, in a reality I created, a collection of images that has made survival possible.

For fifteen years, half my lifetime, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has held me in an institution for the criminally insane. I have occupied the same room for five years. The ward is locked; my room is not. I have been a model inmate.

The view from my window has entertained me. Birds built nests in the willow tree in spring. I cranked open my window two inches in summer
and breathed air that did not taste like human waste. I watched children who walked to school beyond the walls, saw them carrying brightly colored lunch boxes and, years later, knapsacks overfilled with heavy books.

I lived in my world and witnessed yours come of age.

I thought about what I had done, the actions that resulted in my confinement. I did not experience remorse. That issue—guilt, sadness, whatever you choose to call it—is important to the hospital staff. If I felt those things, they said, it would signify that I was changing, experiencing emotional growth, and becoming a less dangerous person. When my father died, they watched me closely for evidence of grief.

That makes no sense to me. I felt nothing then; I feel nothing now. People can mimic anything. I have watched them do it. If they do not simulate grief, if they feel it, why are they less likely to commit an act of violence?

What I did was correct. An increment in the passage of what you call real time required adjustment. A pause was necessary in the passing of people through space. The darkened screen that presents the lives we live begged for a change in contrast, and I provided that.

That I wear the label of illness is a social convenience, a zero price tag for an action that does not conform to this country’s one-way, lockstep march to production, consumption, and profit. No one knows
the chemical, electrical, visual, and auditory peaks and nadirs in another’s mind. No one sees or feels or hears the accumulation of brain static that precedes and defines action. You salivate when the bell chimes.

I stood behind the last door that separated me from freedom and stared at the blowing snow.

“When should we expect you back?” Ben asked.

“We’ll have him here in time for dinner,” O’Brien said. “I’ll call the ward when we’re leaving the courthouse.”

Ben touched my arm. “I won’t be here when you return,” he said. “We can talk at breakfast.”

I nodded. I liked Ben as much as any gatekeeper can be liked. I did not wish to kill him.

“Are you nervous?” he asked.

I watched columns of snow rise in spirals like miniature white cyclones.

“You’ll do well, Felix,” he said.

Three of us stepped through the final door. I paused on the stairs and gazed at the tops of naked trees leaning with the wind. I listened to winter’s howl and felt the sting of ice crystals on my face. A man can be restrained with harness and chain and still feel the rush of freedom.

Doctors have interviewed me, tested and evaluated me, peered into my eyes and ears, drawn and analyzed my blood, scanned my brain. I have found it useful to remain silent, to allow others to struggle with the mystery. I wrote it.

The problem as I see it is that I failed to complete my manuscript. A police officer intervened, and my famous final scene remained unwritten.

O’Brien opened the county van’s rear doors, then followed my gaze at the accumulating inches of snow. “This rig’s four-wheel-drive,” he said. “You’ll be back in time to shower, eat, and watch yourself on the evening news.”

I stepped into the black metal box and sat on the bench. The doors slammed shut and, in seconds, the van was in motion.

I have had many years to consider confinement, how isolation peels away selves like the layers of an onion. When we are not confined to a space, we define our cages. Children crawl into cardboard boxes. Their parents creep into boxlike homes. We require limits—walls, bars, locked doors, fences—to define the parameters of our range.

If for only an instant all barriers drop away, humankind will realize their worst fear. People will be forced to see each other. They might even have to touch one another.

The clean, crisp exchange of coin for product—which is what life has become—is compromised.

And there is chaos.

THE COURTHOUSE STEPS WERE AS CLOGGED
with humanity as the airport. This time we waded through the reporters and their hardware, and two camps of demonstrators. As I ducked microphone booms that sound technicians swung like Louisville Sluggers, I deduced from the protesters’ signs that the group on my right wanted Felix Zrbny eviscerated, while those on the left demanded that he be released from his gulag.