L F Robertson - Madman Walking

CONTENTS

MADMAN
WALKING

Also available from L.F. Robertson and Titan Books

Two Lost Boys

MADMAN
WALKING

L.F. ROBERTSON

TITAN BOOKS

Madman Walking

Print edition ISBN: 9781785652837

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652844

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: May 2018

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Futility by Wilfred Owen is from Wilfred Owen: The War Poems

(Chatto & Windus, 1994), ed. Jon Stallworthy

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright 2018 by L.F. Robertson. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Richard Robertson

AUTHORS NOTE

Truth really is stranger than fiction. The story that follows is inspired by something that happened, in California, late in the twentieth century. The characters and a lot of the details of the story are invented, but the basic premisethat a man with serious mental illness was charged with murder, allowed to represent himself at his trial, and ended up on death row, even though everyone involved knew that the actual killer had confessed to the crime and exonerated himis fact.

For a DREAM is a good thing from GOD.

For there is a dream from the adversary which is terror.

For the phenomenon of dreaming is not of one solution, but many.

For Eternity is like a grain of mustard as a growing body and improving spirit.

For the malignancy of fire is oweing to the Devils hiding of light, till it became visible darkness.

For the Circle may be SQUARED by swelling and flattening.

For the Life of God is in the body of man and his spirit in the Soul.

For there was no rain in Paradise because of the delicate construction of the spiritual herbs and flowers.

For the Planet Mercury is the WORD DISCERNMENT.

For the Scotchman seeks for truth at the bottom of a well, the Englishman in the Heaven of Heavens.

CHRISTOPHER SMART (172271), Jubilate Agno

(WRITTEN IN ST. LUKES HOSPITAL FOR LUNATICS, BETHNAL GREEN, LONDON)

Still I sing bonnie boys, bonnie mad boys,

Bedlam boys are bonnie

For they all go bare and they live by the air,

And they want no drink nor money.

TOM OF BEDLAM (ENGLISH FOLK SONG)

You have to help me.

The mans voice on the phone both pleaded and commanded. You have to help me, Ms. Moodie, as an officer of the court. A terrible fraud has been committed against me by the court and the police. Im the victim of an unconstitutional conspiracy by the district attorney of Taft County and the court and the County of Ventura. Sandra Blaine and Judge Redd must be exposed. God will judge them, the betrayers, he will judge them on the final day The voice was rising now, the tone more urgent, the words clattering out in a jumble of legal language and fragments of biblical-sounding passages.

Dammit, Ms. Moodie, they framed me because they knew they cheated me in my legal settlement, he went on. They knew I was in jail when the man was killed. I have the proof, all the paperwork. You have to write to the director of the FBI. No, you have to go see him in his office, tell him to come talk to me, they have trampled on my constitutionalrights, Ms. Moodie, they have my blood on their hands. And every day you let this happen, you are as guilty as they are. Call my lawyer, Brian Morris, tell him to come see me right away, tell him he needs to petition the Supreme Court to hear my case now

He continued talking, stopping only for breath, for the entire fifteen minutes before the prison phone system automatically cuts off inmate calls. Once in a while I managed to utter a syllable or two when it seemed I should respond to something, but I dont think Id managed ten words by the time the phone went dead in the middle of one of his sentences.

I shook my head a couple of times to clear the clattering from my ears and looked up Brian Morriss phone number on the State Bars website. He answered on the second ring.

Mr. Morris, I said, this is Janet Moodie from the state defender. I just had a call from a client of yours, Howard Henley?

Oh, yes, Howard. I could hear a sigh in his voice.

He seemed pretty agitated, I said. He wanted me to call you. I left out the part about petitioning the Supreme Court.

Did he want you to call the heads of the FBI and the CIA and both senators and representatives from his district, andoh, God, I cant remember all the people hes told me to contact, Morris said, with weary humor.

Most of them. He wants you to come see him, too, Isaid. He seemed pretty delusional, but really desperate. Is he all right?

It depends on what you mean by all right, Morris said. Hes always delusional and desperate; that never changes. Ive had his case for two years, and I dont know how many lawyers hes called, not to mention judges, the governors officeanyone who happens to take his calls. Did he talk about the colonies on Mars?

No, not that.

Poor guy, hes his own worst enemy.

I can see that, I said.

Yeah. Thanks for letting me know he called. You may hear from him again, now that he has your phone number.

Lucky me.

Yeah, Im sorry.

That was the first Howard call, something over ten years ago. He did call again; in fact he called me a half-dozen times before apparently giving up and moving on to someone else. By the last call, I flinched when the receptionist said his name. But for some reason I couldnt refuse him. It seemed important, somehow, to hear him out and let him run headlong through his pleas, his patchwork of Old Testament fulminations, and his speculations on outer space.

After me, Howard called almost all the other attorneys in the office. Eventually his name became a rueful joke, a trigger for rolled eyes and guilty laughter among those of us who had been treated to his breathless monologues. And whenone of us complained about a difficult client, someone would inevitably say, Hey, at least you dont have Howard Henley.

* * *

And then one late-winter morning a few years later, my husband drove to a lonely park road in the Oakland hills and shot himself.

Terrys death shattered my little family, sending me and our son, Gavin, reeling apart like fragments from an explosion. But it wasnt just a private family tragedy. Terry Moran was famous in the small community of attorneys who defend capital casesa trial lawyer with a string of miraculous wins; an expert at identifying and litigating the legal and factual issues that can save a client from the death penalty; a speaker at criminal law conferences all over the United States. I was also in that community, but much lower in the pecking order. Along with the genuine sympathy I received from people who stayed close to me in the dark, numb months after Terry died, I learned some uncomfortable lessons about who had befriended me only because of him. And I felt, from some colleagues, particularly those who had been close to Terry, but not me, a hurtful undercurrent of judgment, a conviction that I was somehow negligent in not preventing Terrys death, that I Should Have Seen It Coming.