“Detective, please, you know and I know this is never even going to trial, let alone jail time. Why don’t you save the state the cost of a trial they will never possibly win and let him loose now?”
“Maybe it will and maybe it won’t, but that isn’t for me to decide.”
I held up my hand for a moment, and then leaned over to whisper to my two lawyers. “Does it help any if we can prove that Hamilton was crazy? I mean real go-see-a-shrink crazy?”
“You have proof of that?” asked DeAngelis.
“I have a copy of a psychiatric report, stating he was a paranoid schizophrenic. I also have a copy of a police report from when he was a teenager and tried to sabotage my car.” I turned towards John. “Remember, that’s the reason I moved out of the house back then.”
He looked at DeAngelis and nodded.
DeAngelis sat upright, so John and I did, too, and he said, “Detective, would it make any difference if we offered proof that the deceased was clinically insane, and had threatened our client before?”
That made Carstans sit upright. “Really? Why didn’t you ever tell us this before?”
“Hey, until today, Hamilton wasn’t even on the radar screen. I had no idea he was involved. I don’t even know how he found us! Besides, with all of the people you asked me about, we never knew who was important. Marilyn and I’ve known he was nuts from the time he was a kid!”
He didn’t say anything, but left again. Half an hour later, he returned. “Okay, you can go. For now! I need to know where you will be, and how to reach you, and you can’t move back home. That’s still a crime scene and hasn’t been released yet.”
John handled that. “Can we send somebody over to get clothes from the bedroom at least? I can get somebody from the security company over there.”
Carstans agreed to that, and John said he would put me into a suite at the Hyatt downtown, under his name. I would stay there until they needed me, after the investigation was over and the house could be released and cleaned up. I promised to get the various reports on Hamilton to both the cops and the lawyers, and I was led outside. DeAngelis made a comment about how there weren’t any reporters yet, which made me cringe. John loaded me in his car, and we drove down to Baltimore.
It was the early evening, and it had been a long day, and I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I was tired and hungry. I sat there in the car while John went inside to make arrangements, and only got out when he came out to fetch me. We went directly to the elevators and then rode up to a mid-size suite. He left me after telling me to call Marilyn and order room service. Under no circumstances short of a hotel fire was I to leave the suite, and if anybody called, I was to let him know before answering any questions. I was on lockdown, which suited me just fine. John would handle calling my father, who was far and away the best grounded of my parents.
I’m ashamed to say that the first thing I did was call for a meal. Only after I ordered a burger and a beer did I call the camp at Sacandaga Lake. The telephone was answered by the security guard, who had already been alerted by his boss. John had been busy. He set the phone down and got Marilyn to pick it up.
“Hello? Carling? Is that you?”
“Yes, honey, it’s me. You can come home now. It’s all over.”
“What happened?! Who was it?!”
“It was Hamilton, Marilyn. He finally cracked up. He was coming for you and Charlie. It’s safe now, you can come home,” I told her.
“What happened? Did you catch him?”
“I killed him. Come home, honey, I’ll tell you all about it. It’s over now.”
“Oh my God!” she cried.
“Come on home, honey. It’s safe now.” I had her put the security guy on the phone and told him to confirm it with his office, but that the situation was over and Marilyn and Charlie and Dum-Dum could come home now. He was to get them to the Hyatt, however, and not let them near the house. Dum-Dum would need to be kenneled at the vet’s. We hung up. There was too much to tell on the phone.
I spent the weekend at the Hyatt, and half the time I was on the phone with John and the security company. Mid-afternoon Sunday, one of the security guys showed up at the suite with several plastic bags of clothing, including a couple of suits and underwear and khakis and a bunch of other stuff. He also dug through my desk in the den to find my file on Hamilton, with the copy of the psychiatric report and police report from when he tried to vandalize my car in high school. He also told me that the house was a disaster. The cops had basically been through everything, looking for weapons, knives, guns, and anything to tie me to Hamilton (as if being his brother wasn’t enough!) Worse, although the body was gone, enough people had rampaged through to track blood all over the place. He even had to kick out a reporter who had ignored the crime scene tape and was going through photographing my wife’s lingerie. He handed me all the film he had confiscated, and we yanked it from the canisters and rolls and destroyed it. A security guard was now on site to keep the curious away.
Marilyn arrived just before six, just in time to see her loving husband being discussed on the local news. Fortunately, nobody had any photos of us. Unfortunately, somebody managed to track down and stick a camera in front of my mother, who told the entire world that I was Lucifer incarnate and generally ranted like a crazy woman. Then the cameras segued to a shot of my father punching out a reporter on the front lawn of the house in Lutherville. This was a clusterfuck and a half!
I told Marilyn the chilling story of what had happened, including Hamilton’s plan to kill her and Charlie first. She simply cried and shivered in my arms. That night she just slept in my arms, exhausted.
On Tuesday we got the word from John that the District Attorney was not going to be pursuing any charges against me. They had been able to verify that Hamilton actually was crazy, and they had found the knife and traced it back to the store where our mother had purchased it for him for Christmas the year before. Furthermore, although Hamilton drove a red Nissan, our mother owned a green Buick, and she let him drive it whenever he wanted. Thanks, Mom, a whole bunch! The autopsy had shown that one bullet had blown through his heart and continued on out the back (it was found in the wall of the kitchen), while the other had gone through his sternum and heart, and then buried itself in his spine. Either shot was immediately fatal.
Marilyn asked me if I thought my mother knew what Hamilton was up to, and I said “No.” That seemed farfetched even for my mother, but the fact we could even raise the question was chilling. The house was released as a crime scene, and I contacted the contractors for the kitchen and the flooring to come in and start ripping out and replacing. I wasn’t going to let Marilyn see what had happened. A cleaning company was brought in for everything else.
The media frenzy was not letting up. Cain and Abel was just too good a story to let go, especially when Mom kept stirring the pot. Then she had a nervous breakdown and ended up in Sheppard Pratt under observation. That was reported, too.
Bob DeAngelis found part of the problem. The State Troopers were having a pissing contest with the Baltimore County Police over me. They wanted me arrested and charged with first degree murder. (They were claiming I had ‘lured’ Hamilton to my home and then ‘trapped’ him in the kitchen, and that this constituted ‘intent’, the prerequisite to a first degree murder charge.) They didn’t care that it would get thrown out of court, since they had done their job by getting a murderer off the street, and the courts and prosecutor’s offices would take the blame for letting a killer go. DeAngelis said it really wasn’t about me, but about budget issues. It didn’t really matter though, they were leaking like a sieve, pushing edited versions of everything they were copied in on right out the back door to the media.