She watched him, her mind extending across broad areas of possibility. “This country needs surgeons,” she said. “Quite a few have departed for where they can make a lot of money.”
“But if I come and practice in England, what happens to Mark Whitman, frustrated actor?”
“You might be able to do both, on different levels.”
His mind shifted, as it often did these days, to Mikeljohn, Jeremy, and Amanda. Brenda had reported they were out on bail and facing probably no more than suspended sentences. Their freely given testimony had opened up a wide avenue for the police into south-coast drug operations. The gunman was, of course, inside for the foreseeable future.
“Have you visited Jane Reedie?” he asked.
“I went up there yesterday. She wants to see you when you’re out and about.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing her again.”
“I said we’d come round in a week or two.”
Whitman decided to say something important. “For your information, my name is not Mark Whitman. It’s Morris Weissman.”
“Some of my best friends,” she replied, “are plastic surgeons. I’m more concerned about wives in residence.”
“This particular wife has wanted out for a long time.”
“Then welcome to England.”
Later, when she was preparing to leave, he said, “I took the name of Whitman from the American poet, of course.”
“Leaves of Grass?”
“That’s the man. I used to read him all the time. I’ve been remembering a line of his that might interest you.”
“I’m interested.”
“ ‘A woman waits for me,’ he quoted, ‘she contains all, nothing is lacking.’ ”
Brenda smiled at him before she went away and Whitman was left wondering how he could ever have judged her face plain.
Carbon Copy
by William F. Smith
Wonder Cure
by Reg Bretnor
John Vennah had murdered at least three young girls and two small boys. It was an open-and-shut case — but would his politically powerful family be able to get him off?...
When the police finally tracked John Vennah down and arrested him, half the city where his family was so well known reacted with shocked disbelief. The other half either felt a load of fear lift from them, especially if they were parents, or else grunted grimly and said they’d always thought the guy was weird. Dear little old ladies shook their heads, murmuring, “I simply can’t believe it — he always seemed like such a nice young man. How terrible it must be for his poor mother!”
Men of his own age who’d been to school with him, and one or two of his old teachers, and certain former neighbors of the Vennahs recalled the things they’d caught — or almost caught — him doing years ago. But that had been before the Vennahs started sending him to boarding schools, getting him out of town in one way or another.
There was no doubt about one thing. John Vennah had murdered at least three young girls, after torturing and abusing them in a variety of ways; similarly, he had abused and murdered at least two small boys. The police had found their violated bodies buried near a mountain cabin of his father’s, and he had, surprisingly, not even denied the crimes.
It was an open-and-shut case — or would have been if his father had not been the city’s most important lawyer and his grandfather its most prestigious judge, with enormous political clout locally and on a state and national level.
Even that, of course, could not engineer his release on bail. But his maximum-security cell in the county jail was made more comfortable than it would otherwise have been, and there he granted interviews to avid media men eager to make him a celebrity, sitting in an easy chair completely self-possessed, his light-brown hair combed neatly back from his narrow forehead, his strange blue eyes peering through rather old-fashioned silver spectacles. He smiled at the newsmen with perfect, expensively straightened teeth; he answered their questions in a soft, almost coaxing voice; he kept turning the conversation from the crimes of which he was accused, discussing psychiatric theory, and why some people were superior and destined to survive and dominate, while other, lesser, weaker beings were born only to be victims.
The media men decided that he was either crazy or crazy like a fox, and they said as much. It made him angry, and in subsequent interviews he stated baldly that he was not insane, that it was society that was off the beam. The media ate it up.
In the meantime his grandfather and his father had hired the state’s leading criminal lawyer to defend him, and the three of them had reviewed his situation very carefully. There was his history to consider — the history his family had done its best to cover up, sometimes buying the silence of the injured or of witnesses, sometimes using the sort of pressure only great political clout makes possible. It went back to his early boyhood, when they had discovered that he could not be given pets. What he had done to a cocker spaniel puppy had sent his mother running out wildly, pale and sick.
The episode was still vivid in their minds; and so were those that followed it, involving neighbors’ animals at first, then finally an occasion when a truckdriver had found him in a normally deserted shed, starting to use a razor blade on a much smaller boy.
They had sent him to military schools, to three of them. Twice he had been badly beaten up and had run away; the third time he had been expelled, with the recommendation that he have psychotherapy. They had sent him to a long succession of psychiatrists and psychiatric hospitals, and all had given up, urging his parents to have him permanently institutionalized. Mrs. Vennah, weeping, would have none of that, arguing that there had never been insanity in her family or her husband’s, and that certainly John would grow out of it as he matured.
Strangely, in his last year in high school, and for the three years before he dropped out of college, he seemed to stabilize. He was quiet, withdrawn, very much a loner; his smile was too cold, too much like a sneer, to make others warm to him. He watched the tube a lot; he read oddly and sporadically; he went off on long solitary wanderings. But nothing happened — or at least nothing surfaced. “He isn’t getting any place,” his father said, “but he’s straightened out, thank God!”
And then—
There had been disappearances. Rewards were being offered, mounting up. The city seethed with fear and anger. The press demanded action.
He had been careful, oh, so very careful. But the wrong person had seen the girl get in his car, had wondered, had copied down his license number. The police had come. They had gone out to the cabin with their dogs...
John Vennah’s father and grandfather met with the out-of-town attorney. They went over the whole business point by point, his grandfather still towering, huge and bushy-browed, over his desk; his father lean, tight-lipped, taciturn; his counsel beautifully barbered and tailored for the courtroom.
“He’s guilty as all hell!” his grandfather declared. He looked at them. “We’re agreed on that?”
They nodded.
“And I suppose we also all agree that, the way the MacNaughton Rule is being interpreted these days here in this state and in the Federal courts, he won’t have even a prayer pleading insanity?”