Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories - 3 Page 28

  Judge Rollins closed a folder that he'd been perusing. He grunted. "Tell me where we are with this one, gentlemen."

  "Yessir," Hollow began. "The state is seeking special circumstances murder."

  "This's about that teacher got her throat slit, right?"

  "Yessir. In her house. Broad daylight."

  A grimace of distaste. Not shock. Rollins'd been a judge for years.

  The courthouse was on the crook of Route 85 and Henderson Road. Through one window you could see Belted Galloway cows grazing. They were black and white, vertically striped, precise, like God had used a ruler. Hollow could look right over the judge's shoulder and see eight of them, chewing. Out the other window was a T.J. Maxx, a Barnes and Noble and a multiplex under construction. These two views pretty much defined Wetherby.

  "What's the story behind it?"

  "This Kobel, a therapist. He was stalking her. They met at a Starbucks when she was in Raleigh at an educational conference. Got witnesses say he gave her his card but she threw it out. Next thing he tracked her down and shows up in Wetherby. Got into a fight at Red Robin, near Harris Teeter. She threw a drink in his face. One witness saw him park at Etta's, the diner, the morning she was killed--"

  "Tonight's corned beef," the judge said.

  "They do a good job of that," Ringling added.

  True, they did. Hollow continued, "And he hiked up into those woods behind her place. When she opened the door, he killed her. He waited till her boy left."

  "There's that, at least," Rollins grumbled. "How'd the boys in blue get him?"

  "Unlucky for him. Busboy on a smoke break at Etta's saw him coming out of the forest, carrying some things. The kid found some blood near where he parked. Called the police with the make and model. Kobel'd tossed away the knife and mask and gloves, but they found 'em. Fibers, DNA, fingerprints on the inside of the gloves. People always forget that. They watch CSI too much...Oh, and then he confessed."

  "What?" the judge barked.

  "Yep. Advised of rights, twice. Sung like a bird."

  "Then what the hell're you doing here? Take a plea and let's get some real work done."

  The judge glanced at Ringling, but the defense lawyer in turn cast his eyes on Hollow.

  Rollins gripped his ceramic coffee mug and sipped the hot contents. "What isn't who telling who? Don't play games. There's no jury to impress with your clevers."

  Ringling said, "He's completely insane. Nuts."

  A skeptical wrinkle on the judge's brow. "But you're saying he wore a mask and gloves?"

  Most insane perps didn't care if they were identified and didn't care if they got away afterward. They didn't wear ninja or hit man outfits. They were the sort who hung around afterward and finger-painted with the blood of their victims.

  Ringling shrugged.

  The judge asked, "Competent to stand trial?"

  "Yessir. We're saying he was insane at the time of commission. No sense of right or wrong. No sense of reality."

  The judge grunted.

  The insanity defense is based on one overriding concept in jurisprudence: responsibility. At what point are we responsible for acts we commit? If we cause an accident and we're sued in civil court for damages, the law asks, Would a reasonably prudent person have, say, driven his car on a slippery road at thirty-five miles per hour? If the jury says yes, then we're not responsible for the crash.

  If we're arrested for a crime, the law asks, Did we act knowingly and intentionally to break a law? If we didn't, then we're not guilty.

  There are, in fact, two ways in which the issue of the defendant's sanity arises in a criminal court. One is when the defendant is so out of it that he can't participate in his own trial. That U.S. Constitution thing: the right to confront your accusers.

  But this isn't what most people familiar with Boston Legal or Perry Mason think of as the insanity defense and, as Ed Ringling had confirmed, it wasn't an issue in State v. Kobel.

  More common is the second sanity issue--when defense lawyers invoke various offshoots of the M'Naghten Rule, which holds that if the defendant lacked the capacity to know he was doing something wrong when he committed the crime, he can't be found guilty. This isn't to say he's going scot-free; he'll get locked up in a mental ward until it's determined that he's no longer dangerous.

  This was Ed Ringling's claim regarding Martin Kobel.

  But Glenn Hollow exhaled a perplexed laugh. "He wasn't insane. He was a practicing therapist with an obsession over a pretty woman who was ignoring him. Special Circumstances. I want guilty, I want the needle. That's it."

  Ringling said to Rollins, "Insanity. You sentence him to indefinite incarceration in Butler, Judge. We won't contest it. No trial. Everybody wins."

  Hollow said, "Except the other people he kills when they let him out in five years."

  "Ah, you just want a feather in your cap for when you run for AG. He's a media bad boy."

  "I want justice," Hollow said, supposing he was sounding pretentious. And not caring one whit. Nor admitting that, yeah, he did want the feather, too.

  "What's the evidence for the Looney Tunes?" the judge asked. He had a very different persona when he was in chambers compared with when he was in the courtroom and presumably different yet at Etta's Diner, eating corned beef.

  "He absolutely believes he didn't do anything wrong. He was saving the children in Annabelle's class. I've been over this with him a dozen times. He believes it."

  "Believes what exactly?" the judge asked.

  "That she was possessed. By something like a ghost. I've looked it up. Some cult thing on the Internet. Some spirit or something makes you lose control, lose your temper and beat the crap out of your wife or kids. Even makes you kill people. It's called a neme." He spelled it.

  "Neme."

  Hollow said, "I've looked it up, too, Judge. You can look it up. We all can look it up. Which is just what Kobel did. To lay the groundwork for claiming insanity. He killed a hot young woman who rejected him. And now he's pretending he believes in 'em to look like he's nuts."

  "If that's the case," Ringling said gravely, "then he's been planning ever since he was a teenager to kill a woman he met two weeks ago."

  "What's that?"

  "His parents died in a car wreck when he was in high school. He had a break with reality, the doctors called it. Diagnosed as a borderline personality."

  "Like my cousin," the judge said. "She's awkward. The wife and I never invite her over, we can avoid it."

  "Kobel got involuntary commitment for eight months back then, talking about these creatures that possessed the driver who killed his family. Same thing as now."

  "But he had to go to shrink school," the judge pointed out. "He graduated. That's not crazy, in my book."

  Hollow leapt in with, "Exactly. He has a master's in psychology. One in social work. Good grades. Sees patients. And he's written books, for God's sake."

  "One of which I happen to have with me and which I will be introducing into evidence. Thank you, Glenn, for bringing it up." The defense lawyer opened his briefcase and dropped a ten-pound stack of 81/2-by-11 sheets on the judge's desk. "Self-published, by the way. And written by hand."

  Hollow looked it over. He had good eyes but it was impossible to read any of the text except the title because it was in such tiny handwriting. There had to be a thousand words per page, in elegant, obsessive script.

  Biblical Evidence of malevolent

  emotional ENERGY Incorporated into Psyches.

  By Martin Kobel.

  (c) All rights reserved

  "All rights reserved?" Hollow snorted. "Who's gonna plagiarize this crap? And what's with the capitalization?"

  "Glenn, this is one of about thirty volumes. He's been writing these things for twenty years. And it's the smallest one."

  The prosecutor repeated, "He's faking."

  But the judge was skeptical. "Going back all those years?"

  "Okay, he's quirky. But this man is dangerous.
Two of his patients killed themselves under circumstances that make it seem like he suggested they do it. Another one's serving five years because he attacked Kobel in his office. He claimed the doctor provoked him. And Kobel broke into a funeral home six years ago and was caught fucking around with the corpses."

  "What?"

  "Not that way. He was dissecting them. Looking for evidence of these things, these nemes."

  Ringling said happily, "There's another book he wrote on the autopsy. Eighteen hundred pages. Illustrated."

  "It wasn't an autopsy, Ed. It was breaking into a funeral home and fucking around with corpses." Hollow was getting angry. But maybe it's just a neme, he thought cynically. "He goes to conferences."

  Ringling added, "Paranormal conferences. Wacko conferences. Full of wackos just like him."

  "Jesus Christ, Ed. The people who cop insanity pleas're paranoid schizos. They don't bathe, they take Haldol and lithium, they're delusional. They don't go to fucking Starbucks and ask for an extra shot of syrup."

  Hollow had used the F word more times today than in the past year.

  Ringling said, "They kill people because they're possessed by ghosts. That's not sane. End of story."

  The judge lifted his hand. "You gentlemen know that when the earth was young Africa and South America were right next to each other. I mean, fifty feet away. Think about that. And here you are, same thing. You're real close, I can tell. You can work it out. Come together. There's a song about that. It's in your interest. If we go to trial, you two're doing all the work. All I'm gonna be doing is saying 'sustained' and 'overruled.'"

  "Ed, he killed that girl, a schoolteacher. In cold blood. I want him away forever. He's a danger and he's sick...What I can do, but only this, I'll go with life. Drop Special Circumstances. But no parole."

  The judge looked expectantly toward Ed Ringling. "That's something."

  "I knew it'd come up," Ringling said. "I asked my client about it. He says he didn't do anything wrong and he has faith in the system. He's convinced there're these things, floating around, and they glom on to you and make you do bad stuff. No, we're going for insanity."

  Hollow grimaced. "You want to play it that way, you get your expert and I'll get mine."

  The judge grumbled. "Pick a date, gentlemen. We're going to trial. And, for Christ sake, somebody tell me what the hell is a neme?"

  *

  THE People of the State of North Carolina v. Kobel began on a Wednesday in July.

  Glenn Hollow kicked it off with a string of witnesses and police reports regarding the forensic evidence, which was irrefutable. Ed Ringling let most of it go and just got a few errant bits of trace evidence removed, which Hollow didn't care about anyway.

  Another of Hollow's witnesses was a clerk from Starbucks in Raleigh, who testified about the business card exchange. (Hollow noted the troubled looks on the faces of several jurors and people in the gallery, leaving them wondering, he supposed, about the wisdom of affairs and other indiscreet behavior in places with observant baristas.)

  Other witnesses testified about behavior consistent with stalking, including several who'd seen Kobel in Wetherby in the days before the murder. Several had seen his car parked outside the school where Annabelle Young taught. If there's any way to put your location on record it's to be a middle-aged man parked outside a middle school. Eight concerned citizens gave the police his tag number.

  The busboy at Etta's Diner gave some very helpful testimony with the help of a Spanish translator.

  As for Kobel himself, sitting at the defense table, his hair was askew and his suit didn't fit right. He frantically filled notebook after notebook with writing like ant tracks.

  Son of a bitch, thought Hollow. It was pure performance, orchestrated by Edward Ringling, Esq., of course, with Martin Kobel in the role of schizophrenic. Hollow had seen the police interview video. On screen the defendant had been well scrubbed, well spoken and no twitchier than Hollow's ten-year-old Lab, known to take naps in the middle of tornados.

  Any other case, the trial would've been over with on the second day--with a verdict for the People, followed by a lengthy appeal and an uncomfortable few minutes while the executioner figured out which was the better vein, right arm or left.

  But there was more, of course. Where the real battle would be fought.

  Ringling's expert psychiatrist testified that the defendant was, in his opinion, legally insane and unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. Kobel honestly believed that Annabelle Young was a threat to students and her son because she was infested by a neme, some spirit or force that he truly believed existed.

  "He's paranoid, delusional. His reality is very, very different from ours," was the expert's conclusion.

  The shrink's credentials were good and since that was about the only way to attack him, Hollow let him go.

  "Your honor," Ringling next said. "I move to introduce defense exhibits numbers one through twenty-eight."

  And wheeled up to the bench--literally, in carts--Kobel's notebooks and self-published treatises on nemes, more than anybody could possibly be interested in.

  A second expert for the defense testified about these writings. "These are typical of a delusional mind." Everything Kobel had written was typical of paranoid and delusional individuals who had lost touch with reality. He stated that there was no scientific basis for the concept of neme. "It's like voodoo, it's like vampires, werewolves."

  Ringling tried to seal the deal by having the doctor read a portion from one of these "scientific treatises," a page of utterly incomprehensible nonsense. Judge Rollins, on the edge of sleep, cut him off. "We get the idea, counselor. Enough."

  On cross-examination, Hollow couldn't do much to deflate this testimony. The best he could do was: "Doctor, do you read Harry Potter?"

  "Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have."

  "The fourth was my favorite. What was yours?"

  "Uhm, I don't know really."

  "Is it possible," the prosecutor asked the witness, "that those writings of Mr. Kobel are merely attempts at writing a novel? Some big fantasy book."

  "I...I can't imagine it."

  "But it's possible, isn't it?"

  "I suppose. But I'll tell you, he'll never sell the movie rights."

  Amid the laughter, the judge dismissed the witness.

  There was testimony about the bizarre autopsy, which Hollow didn't bother to refute.

  Ed Ringling also introduced two of Kobel's patients, who testified that they had been so troubled by his obsessive talk about these ghosts or spirits inhabiting their bodies that they quit seeing him.

  And then Ringling had Kobel himself take the stand, dressed the part of the madman in his premeditatedly wrinkled and dirty clothes, chewing his lip, looking twitchy and weird.

  This idea--insane in its own right--was a huge risk, because on cross-examination Hollow would ask the man point-blank if he'd killed Annabelle Young. Since he'd confessed once, he would have to confess again--or Hollow would read the sentence from his statement. Either way the jury would actually hear the man admit the crime.

  But Ringling met the problem head-on. His first question: "Mr. Kobel, did you kill Annabelle Young?"

  "Oh, yes, of course I did." He sounded surprised.

  A gasp filled the courtroom.

  "And why did you do that, Mr. Kobel?"

  "For the sake of the children."

  "How do you mean that?"

  "She was a teacher, you know. Oh, God! Every year, thirty or forty students, impressionable young people would come under her influence. She was going to poison their minds. She might even hurt them, abuse them, spread hatred." He closed his eyes and shivered.

  And the Academy Award for best performance on the part of a crazed murder suspect goes to...

  "Now, tell me, Mr. Kobel, why did you think she would hurt the children?"

  "Oh, she'd come under the influence of a neme."

  "That's what we heard a little abou
t earlier, right? In your writings?"

  "Yes, in my writings."

  "Could you tell us, briefly, what a neme is?"

  "You could call it an energy force. Malevolent energy. It attaches to your mind and it won't let go. It's terrible. It causes you to commit crimes, abuse people, fall into rages. A lot of temper tantrums and road rage are caused by nemes. They're all over the place. Millions of them."

  "And you were convinced she was possessed?"

  "It's not possession," Kobel said adamantly. "That's a theological concept. Nemes are purely scientific. Like viruses."

  "You think they're as real as viruses?"

  "They are! You have to believe me! They are!"

  "And Ms. Young was being influenced by nemes."

  "One, just one."

  "And was going to hurt her students."

  "And her son. Oh, yes, I could see it. I have this ability to see nemes. I had to save the children."

  "You weren't stalking her because you were attracted to her?"

  Kobel's voice cracked. "No, no. Nothing like that. I wanted to get her into counseling. I could have saved her. But she was too far gone. The last thing I wanted to do was kill her. But it was a blessing. It really was. I had to." Tears glistened.

  Oh, brother...

  "Prosecution's witness."

  Hollow did the best he could. He decided not to ask about Annabelle Young. Kobel's murdering her was no longer the issue in this case. The whole question was Kobel's state of mind. Hollow got the defendant to admit that he'd been in a mental hospital only once, as a teenager, and hadn't seen a mental health professional since then. He'd taken no antipsychotic drugs. "They take my edge off. You have to be sharp when you're fighting nemes."

  "Just answer the question, please."

  Hollow then produced Kobel's tax returns for the past three years.

  When Ringling objected, Hollow said to Judge Rollins, "Your honor, a man who files a tax return is of sound mind."

  "That's debatable," said the ultraconservative judge, drawing laughter from the courtroom.

  Oh, to be on the bench, thought Glenn Hollow. And maybe after a few years' stint as the attorney general I will be.

  Rollins said, "I'll let 'em in."

  "These are your returns, aren't they, sir?"

  "I guess. Yes."

  "They indicate you made a fair amount of money at your practice. About forty thousand dollars a year."