“Elliott, Mr. Antonelli is here to see you.”
Without warning Elliott rose straight up from the chair and with mechanical formality held out his hand. He did everything at right angles. There were no smooth, easy transitions from one movement to the next. It was like watching someone who had studied the manners of well-bred, elegant people, but who had never had a chance to make them his own, and turned them into an awkward parody when he tried to use them.
Excusing himself, Friedman left Elliott and me alone. On the other side of the ward, dressed all in white, the same black orderly who had been here before held a rolled-up magazine in his hand while he gazed absentmindedly at the flickering screen of a television set.
“I wasn’t told you were coming,” Elliott said as we sat down at the square wooden table. He was not wearing the tight-fitting suit and the throat-choking dress shirt and tie he had worn on my first visit. Like the other inmates, he was dressed in a white V-neck short-sleeve shirt and white drawstring trousers. I had taken the chair around the corner to his left. He settled a narrow-eyed glance on me and then looked past me. “Why are you here?”
he asked.
“Judge Jeffries-Calvin Jeffries-was murdered-”
“You told me that when you were here before,” he interjected.
His hands were on the table, one on top of the other. He switched their position, and then, abruptly, as if they moved independently and were fighting over which should be on top, did it again. “You told me that before,” he repeated, a look of impatience on his face.
“Murdered by someone in here,” I said, finishing the sentence I had begun.
We were sitting so close I could see the thin folds of skin, bunched tightly together, at the outer edge of his eye. A smile started on the side of his mouth, crossed over, and vanished on the other. “Was it me?”
“No, I’m afraid it wasn’t you.”
A second smile made the same circuit as the first. “Damn! All the luck.” His eyes seemed to taunt me, challenge me, dare me to figure out what was really going on in his mind.
“It was Jacob Whittaker. Did you know him?”
Elliott remained silent. There was nothing in his expression, nothing in his eyes, that gave me an answer to my question.
“You didn’t know him, then?” I asked, watching him closely.
“Isn’t that what I just didn’t say?” His eyes glittered at his own grammatical joke, and then turned hard. “How would I know if I knew him? I’m an inmate in an insane asylum.”
We were so close that when he spoke the air from his dead breath filled my nostrils. Placing my hand on his forearm, I moved closer still.
“That’s right, Elliott, you’re an inmate in an insane asylum.
But you’re not insane, are you? You never were. They twisted everything up-Jeffries and your wife. They pushed you as far as you could go: They made you crazy-not like the people who are supposed to be here-just enough to drive you over the edge. You had a breakdown, a nervous breakdown, but you weren’t insane.
You might not have known what you were doing when you came to my office waving that gun around, but you were not out of your mind. Remember when you were a lawyer? Remember the definition? A mental disease or defect: the inability to control your own actions, the inability to distinguish the difference between right and wrong. You weren’t insane then, and you’re not insane now.”
He slipped his arm from underneath my hand, glanced at me, an amused expression on his face, and then looked away. He shook his head and began to laugh.
“And all this time I thought I was a mental patient. I must have been-what?-insane to have thought so.” He scratched his chin and then put his finger between his teeth, gnawing at the edge of it where the skin covers the nail. Behind half-closed lids, his eyes darted from side to side.
“Do you think you’re insane, Elliott?” I asked in an even tone.
His eyes came to a rest, and he stopped chewing on his finger. After a deep breath he no longer seemed quite so agitated or distracted. A wry expression spread along his mouth.
“Dr. Friedman says it’s so. Paranoid schizophrenia: signed, sealed, delivered-a certified nut case.”
“I didn’t ask you that. I asked what you thought.” Pausing, I peered into his eyes, watching for a spark, a glimmer, some sign that he might decide to trust me. “Do you think you’re insane?”
He raised his head and looked around at the patients loung-ing in different parts of the vast white room. “Does anyone think they’re insane? It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? All of you out there think you’re sane, but does that mean all of us in here think we’re not? What difference does it make, anyway? All that counts is that you-I mean the people who put us here, the people in your world-think we aren’t-sane, that is.”
Our eyes were locked together. “Are you sure of that? Are you sure that’s what they thought when they sent you here?”
Alert and expectant, he waited for an explanation, and I wondered if he needed one.
“I read the file, Elliott: the court file, the record, such as it is, of the case, your case, the one in which you were charged with attempted murder, the one in which you entered a plea of guilty but insane. Do you remember that? Do you remember entering that plea? Do you remember anything about that day at all?”
He stared at me with a stern expression, and then turned his head and looked past me. He held himself rigidly erect, the only movement the slight rustle of his thick mustache as the breath passed out of his wide nostrils.
“Do you remember your lawyer-the one Calvin Jeffries hired for you-Asa Bartram? You told me before you didn’t know who the lawyer was who represented you. But you did know, didn’t you? He was Jeffries’s law partner; he took care of Jeffries’s business. You had to have known that, and if you knew that, you had to know that Asa never practiced criminal law in his life!”
His eyes stayed fixed in that rigid forward stare, as if he could ignore me at will. Angrily, I jumped up from the chair and wheeled around into the one directly opposite him. With all the force I could summon, I brought my arm down on the table, and pushed my face as far toward him as I could.
“Asa Bartram was not a criminal lawyer, and you knew it. Jeffries had him take the case, and you knew that, too. What else did you know? What else was going on? What did they tell you was going to happen to you?”
The harsh severity of that unforgiving stare gave way to a look of almost amused disdain. “Asa was old then; he must be ancient now. Tell me, do they still let him leave his car under that NO
PARKING sign in front of his building?”
The question was unimportant-trivial even-but whether it was a premonition, or just an instinct born of years of keeping my own counsel, I would not tell him. Besides, I was here to get answers, not give them.
“What did Jeffries tell you-that the fix was in? Did he tell you that you’d be sent here, to the hospital, and that you would be out in a few months?”
I could see Jeffries in my mind, giving assurances, making promises, and all of it with that confident sense of inevitability with which he regularly disguised his deceptions.
“Did he tell you that you didn’t have anything to worry about-
that he’d take care of everything?”
Elliott’s gaze seemed to soften and draw inward. He sank into the chair and laced his fingers together. “I always trusted Calvin Jeffries,” he said with a small, self-deprecating smile. “Even when I was in my right mind.”
That was all he was going to say about it. I asked him about the psychiatric report, the one without which he could never have been committed in the first place. He claimed not to remember anything about it.
“Do you remember the doctor?”
“No,” he said, tapping his thumbs together.