"I know him, know what he thinks, feels, why he did it," he said with emotion. "If I tell you, will you promise to treat what I say with great care, consider it seriously and not- Well, I don't want you running to the police. They wouldn't understand. You see that, don't you?"
"I will very carefully consider what you have to say," I replied.
He leaned forward on the couch, his eyes luminous in his wan El Greco face. I instinctively moved my right hand closer to my pocket. I could feel the rubber grip of the revolver against the side of my palm.
"The police already don't understand," he said. "They aren't capable of understanding me. Why I left psychology, for example. The police wouldn't understand that. I have a master's degree. And what? I worked as a nurse and now I'm working in a car wash? You don't really think the police are going to understand that, do you?"
I didn't respond.
"When I was a kid I dreamed of being a psychologist, a social worker, maybe even a psychiatrist," he went on. "It all came so naturally to me. It was what I should be, what my talents directed that I should be."
"But you're not," I reminded him. "Why?"
"Because it would have destroyed me," he said, averting his eyes. "It isn't something I have control over, what happens to me. I relate so completely to other people's problems and idiosyncrasies that the person who is me gets lost, suffocates. I didn't realize how dramatic this was until I spent time on a forensic unit. For the criminally insane. Uh, it was part of my research, my research for my thesis."
He was getting increasingly distracted. "I'll never forget. Frankie. Frankie was a paranoid schizophrenic. He beat his mother to death with a stick of firewood. I got to know Frankie. I very gently walked him through his life until we reached that winter's afternoon.
"I said to him, 'Frankie, Frankie, what little thing was it? What pushed that button? Do you remember what was going through your mind, through your nerves?'
"He said he was sitting in the chair he always sat in before the fire, watching the flames burn down, when they began whispering to him. Whispering terrible, mocking things. When his mother walked in she looked at him the way she always did, but this time he saw it in her eyes. The voices got so loud he couldn't think and next thing he was wet and sticky and she didn't have a face anymore. He came to when the voices were still. I couldn't sleep for many nights after that. Every time I'd close my eyes I'd see Frankie crying, covered with his mother's blood. I understood him. I understood what he'd done. Whoever I talked to, whatever story I heard, it affected me the same way."
I was sitting calmly, my powers of imagination switched off, the scientist, the clinician deliberately donned like a suit of clothes.
I asked him, "Have you ever felt like killing anyone, Al?"
"Everybody's felt that way at some point," he said as our eyes met.
"Everybody? Do you really think so?"
"Yes. Every person has the capacity. Absolutely."
"Who have you felt like killing?" I asked.
"I don't own a gun or anything else, uh, dangerous," he answered. "Because I don't ever want to be vulnerable to an impulse. Once you can envision yourself doing something, once you can relate to the mechanism behind the deed, the door is cracked. It can happen. Virtually every heinous event that occurs in this world was first conceived in thought. We aren't good or bad, one or the other."
His voice was trembling. "Even those classified as insane have their own reasons for why they do what they do."
"What was the reason behind what happened to Beryl?" I asked.
My thoughts were precise and clearly stated. And yet I was sick inside as I tried to block the images: the black stains on the walls, the stab wounds clustered over her breast, her books standing primly on the library shelf quietly waiting to be read. "The person who did this loved her," he said. "A rather brutal way to show it, don't you think?"
"Love can be brutal," he said. "Did you love her?"
"We were very much alike."
"In what way?"
"Out of sync."
He was studying his hands again. "Alone and sensitive and misunderstood. And this served to make her distant, very guarded and unapproachable. I know nothing about her-I'm saying, no one's ever told me anything about her. But I sensed the being inside her. I intuited that she was very aware of who she was, of her worth. But she was deeply angered by the price she paid for being different. She was wounded. I don't know by what. Something had hurt her. This made me care for her. I wanted to reach out because I knew I would have understood her."
"Why didn't you reach out to her?"
I asked. "The circumstances weren't right. Maybe if I'd met her somewhere else," he replied.
"Tell me about the person who did this to her, Al," I said. "Would he have reached out to her had the circumstances ever been right?"
"No."
"No?"
"The circumstances would never have been right because he is inadequate and knows it," Hunt said. His sudden transformation was disconcerting. Now he was the psychologist. His voice was calmer. He was concentrating very hard, tightly clasping his hands in his lap.
He was saying, "He has a very low opinion of himself and is unable to express feelings in a constructive manner. Attraction turns to obsession, love becomes pathological. When he loves, he has to possess because he feels so insecure and unworthy, is so easily threatened. When his secret love is not returned, he becomes increasingly obsessed. He becomes so fixated his ability to react and function becomes limited. It's like Frankie hearing the voices. Something else drives him. He no longer has control."
"Is he intelligent?" I asked.
"Reasonably so."
"What about education?"
"His problems are such that he isn't able to function in the capacity he is intellectually capable of."
"Why her?" I asked him. "Why did he select Beryl Madison?"
"She has freedom, fame, he doesn't have," Hunt replied, his eyes glazed. "He thinks he's attracted to her, but it's more than that. He wants to possess those qualities he lacks. He wants to possess her in a sense, he wants to be her."
"Then you're saying he knew Beryl was a writer?" I asked.
"There is very little you can keep from him. One way or another, he would have found out she's a writer. He would know so much about her that when she began to pick up on it, she would have felt terribly violated and profoundly afraid."
"Tell me about that night," I said. "What happened the night she died, Al?"
"I know only what I've read in the papers."
"What have you pieced together from reading what has been in the papers?"
I asked.
"She was home," he said, staring off. "And it was getting late in the evening when he appeared at her door. Most likely she let him in. At some point before midnight he left her house and the burglar alarm went off. She was stabbed to death. There was an implication of sexual assault. That's as much as I've read."
"Do you have any theories as to what might have gone on?"
I asked blandly. "Speculations that go above and beyond what you've read?"
He leaned forward in the chair, his demeanor dramatically changing again. His eyes got hot with emotion. His lower lip began to quiver.
"I see scenes in my mind," he said.
"Such as?"
"Things I wouldn't want to tell the police."
"I'm not the police," I said.
"They wouldn't understand," he said. "These things I see and feel without having any reason to know them. It's like Frankie."
He blinked back tears. "It's like the others. I could see what happened and understand it, even though I wasn't always given the details. But you don't always need the details. Nor are you likely to get them in most instances. You know why that is, don't you?"
"I'm not sure…"
"Because the Frankies in the world don't know the details, either! It's like a bad accident you can't remember. The awareness returns like waking up from a bad dream and you find yourself staring at the wreckage. The mother who no longer has a face. Or the Beryl who is bloody and dead. The Frankies wake up when they're running or a cop they don't remember calling pulls up in front of the house."