“This is a subpoena, Miss Higgs. It says you got to come downtown and talk to us some more.”
“Do I got to? Pres, he say …”
“Yeah,” said Hrcany, “you got to.”
The four of them and the child rode down to Centre Street in Dunbar’s car. The child pointed and chattered. Everyone else was stonily silent.
In his office, Hrcany seated Vera Higgs in a wooden armchair. He sat in a leather chair behind his desk. Dunbar and Kaplan stood in opposite corners of the room. The little boy sat on the floor near his mother, tearing up yellow legal paper and scribbling with an assortment of markers.
Hrcany began, speaking slowly and gravely. “Miss Higgs, I want to talk frankly to you about your situation. My name is Roland Hrcany, and I’m with the District Attorney’s office. I am concerned about you, Miss Higgs. I fear that you may be the victim of a cruel hoax, one that is going to land you in a lot of trouble.”
She looked at him blankly. “What you talkin’ about?”
“Well, Miss Higgs, to put it bluntly, Preston Elvis seems to have convinced you to lie for him-”
“I ain’ tellin’ no lie! I tol’ you …”
“Please, let me finish! — convinced you to lie for him concerning his whereabouts on a certain night in March, Nineteen-seventy, when we believe he was involved in a brutal murder. You are also helping to cover up his involvement in a bombing at the New York District Attorney’s Office, in which a woman was badly maimed. These are felonies, Miss Higgs, and by refusing to help us, you have involved yourself as an accomplice. You could go to prison yourself.”
Vera Higgs said scornfully, “He tol’ me y’all would say that. Pres say, you cain’ do nothin’ to me.”
“Yes, he would say that. But it isn’t true. He’s using you, Miss Higgs. He intends to dump you as soon as he’s safe and go off with a woman named DeVonne Carter-whom he has been seeing intimately for many months.”
“You lie! They ain’ no woman. I his woman! I want to go home!”
Hrcany silently reached into his pocket and tossed a pack of color Polaroid photographs across his desk. She looked through them slowly, one by one. Slowly, tears formed in her large eyes and dropped onto her hands and onto the photographs. Finally, she began to sob, crumpled the pictures into a ball and flung them across the office. Her little boy picked one up, examined it solemnly and put it in his mouth. Dunbar picked one up, too. It showed two people screwing. You couldn’t see the woman’s face very well, but Preston Elvis as clear as day on top of her, grinning into the camera.
“Well, Miss Higgs. Do you still feel Preston Elvis is going to take care of you? Or would you like to tell me what really happened?”
Vera Higgs wiped her nose with a scrap of tissue. “I guess,” she said. “Goddamn him. An’ goddamn you, too. Goddamn you all to hell!”
Two hours later, Hrcany was smoking a thin celebratory cigar, with his feet up on his desk. Kaplan was slouched in a side chair. Vera Higgs had been formally deposed of her revised testimony about Preston Elvis, and driven back home. Kaplan had called Karp and told him the news. Karp had been ecstatic which hadn’t made Kaplan feel any better. Hrcany looked over at the younger man.
“What’s the matter, kid, you look like shit.”
“I feel like shit. I feel like there’s a thin crust of old turd over my whole body.”
Hrcany laughed, not nicely. “A thin crust? Don’t worry, it’ll thicken up. A couple of years it’ll go right down to the bone, like me.”
“Yeah, I can tell. God, that woman! Did you get how she asked what would happen to Elvis? She still cares about that rat.”
“Right, it’s that Frankie and Johnnie bullshit. So what else is new? Hey, as soon as I saw that Polaroid on the tripod in the bedroom, I knew we had pay dirt. I wish I had kept some of them. By the way, how was old DeVonne, stud? Hot stuff?”
“Marvelous. I worked a chess problem in my head the whole time.”
“No shit? Did you win?”
“I lost. But, really, what will happen to Elvis? Will he cop one if he gives us Louis?”
“Damned if I know,” said Hrcany, grinding his cigar out in a glass ashtray. “It’s Karp’s case.”
Dr. Werner was ecstatic. Another perfect example of Ganser syndrome. He regarded Lennie Trevio-the squat figure across the desk from him-with something like affection. He envisioned an international symposium on Ganser syndrome, an event that would make forensic psychiatric history, with himself at the center of it all.
He continued the interview. “So tell me, ahh, Lennie, have you ever had hallucinations or seizures-like the one you had in court today-outside of court?”
Guma said, “No doc, I never had nothin’ like that before.”
“Good. Now please go on. You say you saw the judge change into a giant chicken?”
“Yeah, right, more like a rooster. So he started squawkin’ and then, and then I heard this voice, like it was coming from the ceiling, sayin’, ‘I will turn you into, ah, bread crumbs.’ ”
“Bread crumbs?”
“Yeah, you know, like the rooster was gonna eat me?”
“Ah, yes, I see.”
“So I started making a fuss, y’know? So here I am.” He laughed.
“Yes. Well, Lennie, I think that will be all for today. You will have to see another doctor, but I think what’s troubling you is clear enough.”
“Doc, will I have to go back to the trial?” asked Guma, in as nervous a tone as he could manage without cracking up.
“No, of course not. It would be inhuman. No, Lennie, you’re in good hands now.”
“Aw, thanks, doc, you’re a saint!” exclaimed Guma.
Werner beamed. This was why he had gone to med school. That, and power.
The next day Guma sat in the dayroom of Bellevue’s lock-up ward, reading the Post and feeling grumpy. He had breakfasted on what tasted like warm, damp clay and he hadn’t had a beer or a cigar in more than twenty-four hours, a violation, in his view, of the constitutional safeguards against cruel and unusual punishment. And he was no closer to getting the goods on the docs. He had seen Werner, who was a dingbat, but they already knew that.
He looked up from his paper and glanced around the dayroom. He saw a couple dozen people, a cross section of male New York. Some guys talking to the air. One or two jerking off. A guy peeing in the corner. Most of them sitting and watching TV or playing cards. Nothing you couldn’t see any day in Times Square or on the subway. It seemed only happenstance could explain why these men were here and not on the southbound IRT.
Guma noticed a small, skinny old man in a shiny dark suit wandering through the crowd. He carried a notebook and a stack of file folders. Guma watched him approach a large black man who was arguing with the ceiling. The old man argued with the ceiling for a while, too. The madman paused in his ravings and the two of them had a brief conversation. They smiled and shook hands. The black man went over and sat down in front of the TV. The old man spoke with some of the other inmates in a cheerful and conversational manner. Then he came over to where Guma was sitting and pulled up a chair.
Close up the man looked even older than he had across the room: a thin fringe of silver hair around a speckled scalp; a sallow, wrinkled face; a large, lumpy nose that looked as if it had been broken at some time in the remote past; bad, yellow teeth; and deeply sunken brown eyes with heavy grayish pouches beneath them. But the eyes were sharp and bright.
“Well, young man, how do you feel today?” he asked. Unlike the psychiatrists he had met previously, this guy seemed genuinely interested in the answer. He had a slight German accent.
Guma gave him the Ganser syndrome cover story. The old man listened carefully, occasionally making a note with a fountain pen in a cheap spiral-bound notebook. He said “mmm-ahh” from time to time, to keep the story moving. When Guma had finished, the old man sighed and pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up on his forehead. He held out his hand.