“His name?”
“No.”
“Anything about him?”
“No.”
“Where was it done?”
“I was in jail at the time.”
“Was it done there?”
“I suppose.”
“Are you sure there was one?”
He stopped what he was doing and raised his head. “You read the file.”
“Part of it is under seal.”
“Oh,” he said with a show of indifference.
“I came here to see you, Elliott, because a second judge has been murdered. Did you know about it?”
His lifted his head and twisted it a quarter turn away. “Of course I know that. After all, I’m completely sane, aren’t I? I know everything. What judge?”
“The judge who sent you here: Quincy Griswald. Remember him?”
He was watching me, waiting to see where I was going with this. Or was he perhaps testing me, seeing how far I could get without his help?
“Jeffries is murdered in the courthouse parking lot, stabbed to death by a patient who escaped from here. The police get an anonymous call telling them where they can find the killer. The killer confesses and then, that same night, smashes his brains out on the concrete floor of his jail cell.” I was leaning forward, my weight on my arms, peering deep into Elliott’s eyes. “There’s no record he ever knew Jeffries. Maybe it’s just a random act and it’s only a coincidence he spent years in this place with you.”
There was no reaction, nothing to betray what Elliott was thinking, if he was thinking anything at all.
“Then Quincy Griswald is murdered, murdered in the same place and in almost exactly the same way. Everyone thinks it’s a copycat killer, but there’s another anonymous call, and another arrest is made in the same place as the first one. Only this time they arrest the wrong man, someone who has the murder weapon because the real killer gave it to him. And the real killer, like the killer of Calvin Jeffries, is an escaped mental patient. Two murders, two killers, both of them escaped from here, and the only thing that links both the victims and the killers together is you, Elliott, just you.
“Jeffries took everything away from you, and Griswald helped him do it-that is the only thing that links them together, the only thing that supplies a motive for a double homicide. Neither killer had any connection with his victim. You’re the one who would have wanted them dead, and you’re the only one who could have put those two up to it.”
His expression did not change. He sat there, the detached observer, perfectly content to listen, as if nothing I said had anything directly to do with him. I pushed back from the table and locked my hands around my upraised knee.
“I’m not sure how you managed it, but I must tell you,” I said admiringly, “in all the years I’ve practiced law, it’s the most ingenious thing I’ve ever seen. It isn’t just a perfect crime. It’s better than that. It’s the perfect defense: You can’t be held responsible for anything. You’re insane, aren’t you? The state says so. They can’t turn around and say you’re not: You’re locked up in the hospital for the criminally insane.”
Elliott listened intently, rubbing his index finger back and forth across his lower lip. “Why would I need that defense, or any other? What crimes would I have committed?”
I thought he must have forgotten one of the most basic principles of criminal responsibility. “Solicitation carries the same penalty as the crime solicited.”
He raised his thick eyebrows. “Solicitation requires a specific request for a specific act.” I looked at him, unsure of what he meant. “Besides,” he went on, “these two killers you speak of were both escaped mental patients, correct? Then tell me: How do you go about soliciting someone insane to do anything?”
I had not thought of it, and with a flash of intuition, he saw it. He sat up and leaned forward. “Have you ever thought about how easily people are led to believe things that have no rational foundation at all-religion, for example-and not just this religion, or that religion, but all religions? Have you thought about the way some people believe the same thing is evil that other people believe is good? Or about the way some people are willing to die for what they believe, while other people think it’s lu-dicrous, unless, of course, it is for what they believe in?”
The idea seemed to ignite something inside him. His eyes grew larger, more intense, and he sat straight up, once again rigid and erect, the veins throbbing in his neck. And then it happened, the same thing that had happened when I had been here before, that terrifying, inexplicable lapse into complete irrationality.
“Everyone has to believe… grieve… weave… heave…
achieve…” He stopped, his eyes wide open, while his long lashes beat down over them, measuring the rhythm of his now silent speech. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over. “What makes you think whoever killed Griswald was a patient here?” he asked, without any apparent awareness of what he had just been doing.
I had something else on my mind, something I wanted to leave him with. “Don’t you think it would be difficult to accomplish something so ingenious and never have anyone know about it?
Do you really think it would be enough to know that you had gotten away with a remarkable act of revenge when everyone else thought you were still either insane or the pathetic victim of someone much smarter?”
His head jerked up and his eyes narrowed. “Do you know why people seek revenge? It isn’t to even the score, or to settle things once and for all; it isn’t even to punish. It’s to do the one thing everyone claims you can never do: change the past.” His eyes flared open. “Yes, to change the past. You think that’s impossible? You think you can never change the past?” He gritted his teeth, and in three spastic bursts pulled his lips back as far as they would go. “The past is the only thing you can change. Turn away from the perspective of the present, look ahead into the future, then look back and correct what the past will be. That’s what revenge accomplishes. You can think of yourself as a victim because of what was done to you; or you can think of yourself in quite a different light because of what you did to them.”
He cocked his head, like someone catching the sound of something far off in the distance. “If I were condemned to live my life over and over again, always the same thing, forever, what do you think I would want it to be? What Jeffries did to me, or-just for the sake of argument-what I did to him?”
“Just for the sake of argument?” I asked skeptically.
“For the sake of argument, because, again, what makes you think whoever killed Judge Griswald was a patient here?”
“Because it’s the only way it could have happened.”
“Ah, the only way if I was the one who somehow persuaded two different mental patients to commit two different murders.
And tell me, my old friend, just who is this second murderer, this second patient you think I sent out into your world to extract this little measure of revenge?”
Friedman had denied that anyone after Whittaker had escaped, but I did not believe him.
“The history teacher, the one who does tricks with numbers, the one who slashed someone’s throat in Portland because he thought he was in Vietnam-the one who asks permission to go to the bathroom.”
He looked over my head, scanning the room. “You mean him?”
he asked as I turned around to see where he was looking. On the other side of the room, the patient I was certain had escaped, the one I knew had killed Quincy Griswald and given Danny the knife, the one I was sure had drowned in the river, was standing next to the orderly, waiting to be taken to the bathroom.
Twenty-three
Idrove directly from the state hospital to the downtown bridge where I had lived for a night and a day as one of the homeless, but I could not find him. The only witness I had to the identity, and even to the very existence, of the man who had given the knife to my innocent client had disappeared, moved on to some other temporary encampment, vanished into the vast migration that, right in front of our eyes, took place every night and every day. I had been so certain, so confident that I knew who had done it and why; and now, as I sat listening to the prosecution make its opening statement, I wondered if I knew anything at all.