By Reason of Insanity (13 page)

The spinster was known by all the townspeople to have a good heart. She would visit the sick and cry at funerals and comfort the bereaved. That she loved children was obvious, that she at times also loved their mothers was something she kept to herself and safely at a distance.

When the spinster was fifty-four years old she met Sara Bishop and her shy, withdrawn boy. She felt a deep sadness for Sara and saw in the young mother much of the suffering she herself had endured for so many years. Her feeling quickly turned to love, not passionately sexual but quiet and responsive and selfless. Sara soon returned the feeling, finding a strange comfort in the other woman. Perhaps once a month they would cling together in bed, talking quietly of sorrow as desperate women do and giving strength to each other’s bruised psyche. At such times Sara would often tell the spinster that theirs was the only relationship in which she had ever found any peace. The spinster would smile sadly, knowing that such peace came from their mutual loneliness.

Though she had little money to spare, the woman gave Sara sewing jobs whenever she could. She would also give the boy small gifts. She was frightened by Sara’s attitude toward the boy, and for a long time she tried to shut her eyes to her friend’s increasingly strange behavior. The spinster was a passive woman, taught to sit and wait. Taking action was unfamiliar to her, she had no experience at it. She was also very religious, and the idea of coming between a mother and her child was repugnant to everything she had been taught to believe.

Yet the day came when she could shut her eyes no longer, and she quietly told Sara of her fears for both mother and son. Sara, feeling betrayed once again, ordered the woman from her home and vowed never to talk to her again. Before she left that last time the spinster gave the boy a little wallet with a picture of his mother inside, taken some months earlier.

Within a year Sara Bishop was dead. When the police took the boy away, the only possession he had on him was the little wallet with the picture of his mother.

The older woman was grief-stricken at the double tragedy. With the remarkable courage she had shown all her life, she put aside her sorrow and did what she could. Aided by neighbors, she took to her home some of the dead woman’s possessions, paying what she considered a fair price. The money was sent to the institution where the boy was placed, to be held for him until such time as he could make use of it.

For a long while the spinster left the boxes unopened in a darkened room, never going near them. Eventually she rummaged through the contents bit by bit, finally coming to a box of books. In one book, written by someone named Caryl Chessman, she found a sheaf of papers folded neatly in half. Putting on her glasses, she slowly began to read of the life of her friend Sara Bishop. The tears quickly came, and long before she finished the last page she was crying inconsolably.

Over the next dozen years she read the pages many times, never without tears. Each time she would place them back in the book where she had first found them. To her they seemed somehow to belong in that book and nowhere else. Someday, she often told herself, she would give them to the boy.

The spinster never visited the boy in the institution. She felt she would not be able to control her sorrow and would do him no good. She wasn’t even sure if he would remember or recognize her. But she left his mother’s pages in the book for him. When she died the pages were still there.

Now on this hot day, after several hours of desultory bidding, the only items left on the lawn were a worn tufted couch of uncertain origin and two cartons of kitchen utensils and books. The nephew paid a neighbor to haul away the couch in his truck. The two cartons were stored in the shed behind the house and quickly forgotten.

Far from the bucolic scene but at roughly the same time, two men in Fresno were supervising the installation of a neon sign over their new diner. They were brothers, simple men trying to make a living in the fast-food business. They knew nothing of Sara Bishop or her boy, or of the town in which she died, or even of Willows State Hospital. They had, however, heard of Harry Owens. In fact, one of them had killed him.

Don Solis was released from San Quentin in 1968 after serving sixteen years for murder and armed robbery. He considered himself lucky. He could have been sent to the Green Room like Caryl Chessman. He had been there when Chessman was executed, he was there for Barbara Graham’s death and almost a hundred others. In his sixteen years he had seen men die in prison fights, go mad, commit suicide, bleed to death while others watched. He saw brutality beyond anything he experienced in the war, and it all finally sickened him. Now at age fifty-five, a little heavier and a lot smarter, he wanted only to be left in peace and to make a lot of money, this time legitimately. With his brother Lester as his partner, he was doing all right.

When Lester got out of prison in 1962 after a ten-year stretch for armed robbery and accessory, he drifted back to Fresno. Always the follower, he worked at odd jobs until Don came out. They had no money and no plans. Johnny Messick, who was in on the Overland Pacific job, had disappeared after his release in 1960. Hank Green had been killed in 1954 by a fellow inmate. Carl Hansun, who started the whole thing, had been gone since the robbery. Harry Owens was dead of course. Don still thought hard of Harry, though he wished he hadn’t killed him and thereby wasted those years.

Two weeks after his return Don Solis was contacted by a local lawyer, who had a $10,000 check waiting for him. It was no joke, the check was his to do with as he pleased. No, the lawyer couldn’t tell where the money came from; he was paid only to pass on the certified check that had arrived in the mail.

Shortly thereafter the Solis brothers bought a diner in Fresno with the money. They did well. Five years later they bought a bigger place and put up a bigger sign. By July 1973 Don Solis no longer thought about the original $10,000. The future looked bright.

On July 22, three days after the brutal axe murder, a second elderly woman was killed in the same savage manner, this time with a large butcher’s knife. Again the index finger was missing. But from the left hand.

Her house was ten miles from the first killing, and both were within a thirty-mile radius of Willows. Panic immediately gripped the area. People stayed off the streets at night, admitted no strangers to their homes. Windows were locked, doors barred, guns kept loaded and ready. Women refused to stay home alone during the day, and many banded together with friends for protection or visited distant relatives. In other households men refused to go to work and leave their families. During that week millions of dollars were lost in unearned wages and unproduced goods and services.

By then the police were no longer in the dark, at least not entirely. The axe found at the first murder site had been checked with the Willows Hospital authorities. It definitely did not belong there. Where it did belong, and where it had been kept for many years, was in the woodshed of the murder victim. Neighbors identified it by the initials the frugal owner had scratched into the wood handle. Apparently the killer had gone to the unlocked woodshed looking for a handy weapon, perhaps he had even known of the axe.

Relatives verified that the woman, living alone in the house, had often hired handymen to help around the place. These were usually locals who were unemployable for one reason or another; most had drinking problems, some were of unsavory reputation. During the past year five or six had been seen on the property. Police set about finding and questioning each one. There was no particular urgency to their quest since they still believed the killing was the work of the maniac, who had gone to the shed looking for anything and found the axe.

After the second murder the urgency suddenly increased. Sheriff Oates called Spanner in Hillside, told him about the new killing and the missing finger. “It’s from the left hand this time, for chrissake. What the hell’s going on, John? Are we all nuts?”

Spanner laughed mirthlessly. “Maybe someone’s trying to make it look that way.”

“He’s doing a damn good job of it,” Oates growled over the phone.

Spanner agreed. After a moment he grew serious. “I don’t think Mungo’s the one you’re looking for. It’s not his style. Somebody’s using him as a cover-up, that’s why the fingers are missing. He read about it in the papers.”

“But why the left hand?” Oates demanded.

“He might be just too dumb to remember. Or too careless, or drunk. The important thing is, he picks his shots and seems to know the layout. And he grabs whatever weapon’s handy.”

The sheriff grunted. The word suddenly stirred something in the back of his mind. “We’re checking on some handymen the old lady used around the house.” He paused. “You think there might be something in it?”

“Might be.” Then: “Look for a connection, Jim. Somebody who knew both women and knew his way around. Chances are he’s your man.”

“What about a motive?” Oates objected. “Without a motive we’re back to a nut like Mungo.”

“Not quite.” Spanner, unseen, shook his head. “These killings are too methodical, too planned for that. Whoever it is, he’s not mad, just very angry. Get your connection and you’ll find your motive.”

By the evening of the twenty-third police learned that the second victim had also employed an occasional handyman. Neighbors remembered one some months earlier who had argued with the woman over the number of hours he worked. They didn’t know his name, but the description given police matched that of one of the men known to the earlier victim. He was quickly called in for questioning, and this time the police were too short-tempered for any further evasions.

Within hours the man confessed to both murders. A forty-five-year-old uneducated laborer with a history of alcoholism and a long record of arrests for disorderly conduct, he had harbored a grudge against both women. When the escaped mental patient wasn’t promptly caught he decided to kill them. Cutting off the fingers was meant to throw suspicion on Vincent Mungo but on the second job he got the hands mixed up. Both times he had been half drunk.

Why did he kill them? “They cheated me. I worked hard for them and then they didn’t pay me all my money. They were too stingy to live.”

Sheriff Oates was jubilant as he took full credit for the capture. He mugged for the cameras and joked with the reporters and generally made everyone feel at ease. He went over details of the two murders lovingly and lingered longest on how he had solved the case by sheer brain power. “It was all a matter of finding the right connection,” he told smiling reporters. “After that the motive comes easy.”

When someone finally asked about Vincent Mungo and
that
investigation, the sheriff suddenly excused himself. Urgent police business, he told them as he flew out the door.

Toward the close of the first week of July, as the manhunt for Mungo was getting under way, another manhunt of sorts was winding up. But not soon enough to suit Derek Lavery, who sat in his Barclay Lounger scowling at the two men on the other side of his huge oak desk.

He put the cigar down. “You had a week and even a day extra on this story. Now you say you want another week?” He looked pained.

“Less than a week,” said Adam Kenton. “Just five days.”

“That’s a week,” snapped Lavery.

Kenton took a deep breath. “I got a few more leads I want to track down.”

“Like what?”

“Like a couple of ex-cons who were in the death house with Chessman.”

“They out now?”

Kenton nodded.

“Where?”

“One’s in Long Beach, he saw Chessman go. The other’s right in town.”

“And they’ll talk about him?”

“They’ll talk.”

Lavery shrugged. “That’s worth a day. What else?”

“There’s a woman who worked in the prosecutor’s office at the time of the trial. She remembers a lot of things that never got in the papers. But …” He let the word hang.

“She wants money,” Lavery said.

“She wants money,” repeated Kenton.

Lavery sighed. “You know we never pay for information. It’s unethical.” He paused a moment as Ding coughed loudly. “How much she want?”

“A hundred.”

Another sigh. “Take it from travel. Is she in town? So from now on she lives in Vegas. Anything else?”

“Just Chessman’s final confession.”

“His what?”

“His final confession.”

Lavery looked at Ding, then back to Kenton. “What are you giving me? Chessman claimed his innocence to the end, except for the alleged confession the cops beat out of him.” He put the cigar in the heart-shaped ashtray. “I never heard anything about a final confession.

“Neither did anyone else,” Ding said softly.

Kenton scratched his chin. “There was a psychiatrist used to be up at San Quentin in Chessman’s time. His name was Schmidt.”

“So?”

“So I got a connection in San Rafael near the prison who knows a guard there. He swears the guard told him that Chessman confessed to the psychiatrist before he died. Told him he was the robber-rapist back in ‘48 when they caught him.”

Lavery glanced over at Ding, who shook his head.

“Me neither,” he muttered and put the cigar back in his mouth. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“The guard supposedly said that he was passing Chessman’s cell,” Kenton continued, “when he overheard the confession.” He paused. “Personally I don’t believe it, because he’d have no business being there. What I think might have happened is, he got Chessman mixed up with a man named Bud Abbott who was executed a couple years earlier.”

“Who’s Abbott?”

“Bud Abbott was convicted of killing a young girl in San Francisco but he never confessed, and just like Chessman, he claimed he was innocent right up to the end. But just before he died he apparently told this Schmidt in confidence that he was guilty. I have his words here—” Kenton leafed through his notes for a few seconds “—here they are. Abbott supposedly said to Schmidt, ‘I can’t admit it, Doc. Think of what it would do to my mother. She could not take it.’” Kenton closed his notebook, looked up. “After his execution the authorities claimed that was his confession but not everybody was happy about it.” He paused for effect. “I think the guard—”