“But …”
“No buts, Karp. Hey, don’t you think I’m pissed off? This was a perfect trial-did you see the press in the courtroom? Now we’ll be lucky to get three inches of ink back by the car ads. But there’s fuck-all we can do now. They’ll examine him at Bellevue, they’ll give us their report. Then we’ll know where we stand. Meanwhile, we’ve got other things to do.”
He left Karp alone in the hallway, confused, feeling like a fool, clutching his meticulously prepared case file, now transformed by the morning’s events into so much scrap paper.
He still couldn’t believe it. He thought, this asshole walks into a store, heavily armed, kills two people in cold blood, throws a patently phony crazy fit in court, and walks away from his trial. Karp knew that delay almost always favored the defense, and he was pretty sure Louis knew it too. Once again Karp thought about how society in its happy idiocy continued to believe that murderers would play the game by the rules, and assist in their own conviction. He also thought about the calm and rational Louis he had met in the Tombs, the man who knew his rights. There was no way that person could have become the flaming lunatic of the courtroom except by way of the underworld equivalent of the Actors’ Studio. But Karp reckoned without the marvelous explanatory power of modern psychiatry.
Dr. Edmund Stone, plump, balding, owlish, thirty-three, a second year resident in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, was dictating his initial report on Mandeville Louis. Stone found court interviews an unpleasant task. They made it necessary for him to spend time in the presence of crazy people, whom he detested. Stone had not become a psychiatrist to talk to crazy people. That was better left to Freudians and other nincompoops. Stone had become a psychiatrist because that was the only way they would let him give experimental drugs to human beings.
“Patient is thirty-eight-year-old Negro male, referred to Bellevue as a result of a violent outburst in court during his trial for murder,” Stone said to his Dictaphone. “I have had one thirty-minute consultation with patient, and this was patient’s first consultation with a psychiatrist since being admitted to hospital yesterday.”
This interview, Dr. Stone reflected, had been more than usually unpleasant. Louis was black, in the first place, and violent. He had thrown a plastic chair across the office, causing in Dr. Stone a disturbing and unprofessional rush of fear. Dr. Stone was not prejudiced. He considered himself a liberal, in that he believed that when black people were violent and committed crimes it was not really their fault. Nothing, in fact, was anybody’s fault. Behavior, so Dr. Stone believed, was merely the result of differences in the flavor of the rich soup that everyone kept in the cauldron on top of their neck. One flavor was Albert Schweitzer, another was Jack the Ripper. When he met a violent black person like Mandeville Louis, something which, as a psychiatric resident at Bellevue, he could hardly avoid, Dr. Stone always thought how wonderful it would be if such people could be given to science, for experimental purposes, drugs or implants or surgical procedures, so we could at last discover the real causes of violence and antisocial behavior, and cure them, and so people like Dr. Stone could walk the streets without fear.
Dr. Stone pulled himself away from these thoughts, and from his perpetual fantasy that one day he would be the scientist to discover the secret of the soup, and resumed his dictation.
“Psychiatric nurses on patient’s hall state patient has been calm. They state patient has been generally lucid, but with three recorded episodes of incoherent shouting, with delusional aspects. On these occasions patient received standard dose of one hundred milligrams of Thorazine, i.m. Response to this medication normal and satisfactory.
“When I first entered the consulting room, patient was seated and appeared calm. I introduced myself but patient did not respond. I asked him if he knew why he was in hospital. Patient sighed and nodded his head. I asked him if he remembered what had transpired in the courtroom. At the word ‘courtroom’ the patient leaped to his feet, shouted ‘No!’ and began to pace the room. Affect agitated and fearful. He began to mumble something about ‘someone telling him to do it’ and the judge ‘trying to get his momma.’ Patient then became violent and threw his chair at the wall. This episode similar to those observed by ward nurses.
“Violent episode lasted about three minutes, after which patient appeared confused, disoriented, and subdued. He picked up chair and sat in it when asked to. Patient responded well to reality-testing questions: name, current date, present location, common facts. On questioning, patient gave lucid responses as to subjective state during ‘seizure.’ He believes something is taking control of his body against his will. He says he ‘feels it coming’ but is powerless to stop it.
“General impressions: Patient appears to be suffering from some acute, episodic, delusional syndrome associated with courtroom proceedings. During these episodes, patient is uncontrollably violent. After them, he appears confused and states that he lacks all recollection of what occurred during the episodes. Recommend patient be retained for further observation. Referred case to Doctor Werner.”
Dr. Stone flipped off his Dictaphone. He picked up Louis’s case file and wrote out a medication order for a daily dose of 40 mg. of Thorazine, orally, four times a day. That should hold the little bastard, he thought.
Dr. Werner, unlike Dr. Stone, was delighted to have Mandeville Louis as a patient. Unlike Dr. Stone, Dr. Werner was not just passing through forensic psychiatry on the way to the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. The study of the criminal mind was his whole life. Dr. Werner was a portly man in late and comfortable middle age, heavy of jowl, beetled of brow. He wore black horn-rims and a white coat over his vest, which sported a gold watch chain and a Phi Beta Kappa key. Although born and raised in the Bronx, Werner cultivated a middle-European manner. When he spoke on a professional matter, for example, he might occasionally look up to the ceiling and wave his hand as if hard-pressed to ferret out, from among his many languages, the correct English idiom.
As he read Dr. Stone’s report, Dr. Werner became increasingly excited. The purity of the reaction! Here was a man whose insanity was triggered exclusively by the prospect of trial and punishment. Louis was a living representation of everything Werner thought was wrong with the way society treated criminals. It was perfectly clear to him that criminals, especially violent ones, were mentally ill. Take such a person and place him in an environment in which everyone assumed he was mentally competent-in, say a courtroom-and the mental disease could not help but get worse. Dr. Werner had observed the most extreme form of this reaction once before, in a rapist named Ganser, and had written a paper about it. Now, to his delight, he was observing the Ganser syndrome once again, in Mandeville Louis. He regarded it as a confirmation of his theory.
Dr. Werner continued to be delighted when he met Louis in person. In an interview he set up the following day, Louis was intelligent and articulate about his mental and emotional states. In this he resembled the people seen by Dr. Werner’s Park Avenue colleagues more than he did the typical rubbish of the Bellevue criminal ward. All Dr. Werner had to do was to hint at some aspect of the Ganser syndrome and in a short while Louis would confirm it in extravagant and inventive detail. Dr. Werner saw a major journal article developing.
Louis was even more delighted with Dr. Werner. He had studied forensic psychiatry as he had the Bible in his father’s house, as an aid to exculpation, his abiding and lifelong interest. Becoming an exemplar of Ganser’s syndrome was in fact much easier than accepting Jesus as your personal savior. For starters, you didn’t have to kneel and spend a lot of time praying. Also, those church ladies, some of them, were pretty sharp, and it took a bit of doing to jerk them around to the proper Christian forgiveness. Werner, on the other hand, did half the work for you.