“I believe I agree with the People in this case, Counselor,” said Peoples.
Waley took a deep breath, and seemed to be struggling to retain his legendary control. No one had ever seen Waley lose it in a courtroom. He was white around the nostrils, however, and Karp almost regretted the jab about delusions. But only almost.
“In that case, Your Honor, may I request that my client’s personal psychiatrist, Dr. Erwin Bannock, be allowed free access to Mr. Rohbling, as free as if he were on the Bellevue staff?”
“No objection, Your Honor,” said Karp charitably.
Karp returned to the prosecution table to help Collins gather up their material.
“Boss, that man don’t like your ass one little bit,” said Collins.
“Who, Peoples?”
“No, Waley. You should’ve seen the look he gave you when you walked away. I’m surprised you’re still wearing a suit. What’d he want anyway?”
“Oh, he’s still bitching his boy’s got to bunk with the low-class homicidal maniacs at Bellevue. He wants him to stay in some private nuthouse. I told him no way, and the judge backed me.”
“What’s it matter to us?”
“Risk of flight. His folks could have him out of there and on a private jet to Switzerland in twenty-four hours, and walk away from a five-million-dollar bond without breathing hard. Besides …”
“What?”
Karp shrugged. “Besides, fuck them both. The little shit wanted some consideration, he shouldn’t have killed five women.”
Dr. Lewis Rosenbaum was one of the editors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the famous DSM III, in which it is written how to tell the crazy from the sane. Rosenbaum was a hefty, gray-bearded man who wore his own sanity like a suit of mail. His speech was slow and judicious, and he took an unusually long time before replying to questions, as if he were generating scientific knowledge before your eyes.
Waley wanted to establish how psychiatry defined paranoid schizophrenia. This Rosenbaum was notably able to do, recounting in detail the four major symptoms of this disorder: blunted affect, that is, a lack of ordinary emotional arousal; retreat from reality, including delusions and hallucinations; depression, including suicidal tendencies; and severe impairment of social function, including inability to hold a job or to establish normal social relationships with peers. Rosenbaum had examined the defendant and (no surprise here) had discovered that he evinced all the symptoms.
In his cross, Karp was careful not to challenge Rosenbaum’s definition of psychosis. Instead, he focused on the specific acts that Rohbling had done and asked the doctor to explain how these accorded with the defendant’s supposed insane state. When the defendant was crushing the life out of Jane Hughes, did he think she was a statue? A monkey? Did he know he was killing a human being? Answer: it was part of his delusional pattern. What part? What was the nature of the delusion? The doctor could not say. If he did not know that he had killed a human being or that it was wrong, why did he flee? Why did he take care not to be associated with the suitcase full of incriminating evidence? Rosenbaum’s answers to these and similar questions seemed like blather to Karp and, he hoped, to the jury as well. Karp was attempting to use his cross-examination to paint a picture of what a real crazy person would have done-hung around in Jane Hughes’s apartment, say, talking to a corpse.
“Now, Doctor, you’ve testified that when the defendant killed Jane Hughes, he was responding to the dictates of an inner world, a world cut off from ordinary reality, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And this inner reality also prompted him to carefully don theatrical makeup and a wig, travel up to Harlem, pose as a man of a completely different race and culture, and pose convincingly, inveigle himself into Jane Hughes’s good graces, extricate himself from the scene of the crime, and, finally, to understand the consequences of the damning evidence of the blue suitcase and its contents? Is that what this psychotic inner reality did, Doctor?”
The doctor took his usual time before responding. “Well, the psychosis acts chiefly in the areas relevant to the delusionary system. In this case the delusionary system is focused on hostility to elderly black women. We should not let ourselves believe in the stereotype of the raving lunatic foaming at the mouth all the time.”
“So, you’re saying that Mr. Rohbling was competent, sane in his actions up until the moment when he killed Mrs. Hughes, when he became insane, and then he became sane again while he made his getaway. Is that a fair summary?”
A patronizing smile from Dr. Rosenbaum. “I think I would call it an oversimplification of what I said in my testimony. Often psychotics can be extremely clever and perform convincingly in the ordinary world. This, uh, says really nothing, really, about their inner mental states, which are disturbed.”
“I see. Fascinating, Doctor. So you would say, would you not, that although Mr. Rohbling acted in every way as if he were sane-he disguises, he calculates, he escapes-he acts in every way like he knows what he is doing and that it’s against the law, he’s still insane, because when he eventually talks to a psychiatrist, that psychiatrist finds the symptoms of psychosis laid out in DSM III?”
“Urn, yes. In effect, that is the case,”
Pause. Face the jury. “How terribly convenient for Mr. Rohbling that must be-”
“Objection!” from Waley. “Not a question.”
“Sustained.”
“Withdrawn. No further questions, Your Honor.”
A draw, is what Karp thought. It was not hard to make psychiatrists seem like fools in court, which was one reason why insanity pleas failed nine out of ten times. On the other hand, a big-shot shrink, the “guy who wrote the book,” as he had been presented, had testified that the kid was nuts. There was nothing he could do about that except keep the focus on Rohbling’s actions and hope the jury was heavy on common sense and resistant to voodoo.
SIXTEEN
“Isn’t this a pain in the neck!” said the district attorney.
“So to speak,” said Karp. The D.A. scowled and sent over a black look. It was a Sunday, far too early on a Sunday, and the two men were sitting in a spare bedroom fitted out as study in Jack Keegan’s apartment, Keegan behind an oaken desk in a black leather judge’s chair, Karp in a comfortably worn armchair opposite. This apartment was a large, high-ceilinged one on West End Avenue. The Keegans had been in it since the fifties, but Karp had never before visited there, which served as well as the unlikely date and hour to demonstrate just how remarkable a pain it was. Karp looked out the window. He could see the trees just beginning to leaf out, the palest fuzz of painfully delicate green. It was April 2; the previous night, appropriately, Jonathan Rohbling had tried to hang himself in his cell in Bellevue, and had very nearly succeeded.
“Waley’s going to sue the city, you know,” said Keegan, “and maybe me too.”
“What the hell for?”
“I don’t know. Failure to yield to the wealthy, maybe. He’ll think of something. You talk to everybody already?”
“Uh-huh. Cops, Bellevue administration, the orderly who found him, the ER doctor who treated him yesterday-I mean, this morning-and the current attending doc. Also Rohbling’s private guy.” “And how is the little piece of shit?” “Not that great,” said Karp. “He apparently found a burr of metal on his bunk and used it to tear his T-shirt into narrow strips, which he then braided into a thin, strong rope …”