Chapter 25.
INSANITY.
Would he, at least, testify for Gary in the Mitigation Hearing, Snyder and Esplin asked.
Yes, said Woods, he could find his way clear to doing that. But, he warned, with the best will in the world, what could he offer in good professional conscience that the District Attorney would not be able to reduce?
They did not ask him if he liked Gary, and if they had, he might not have replied, but the answer he could have given was, Yes, I think I do like Gary. I may even like him a little more than I want to.
Woods felt he understood a few of Gilmore's obsessions. Getting up in the middle of the trestle and racing the train or standing on the railing of the top tier in prison were impulses familiar to Woods. He sometimes believed he had gone into psychiatry so one hand could keep a grip on the other.
Hell, if Gilmore were a free man, Woods might have taken him on a rock climb. That is, he might have, if he were still doing it.
Woods felt again the swoop of his last long fall on an ice face. That had ended climbing. The guy with him had almost been killed in a crevasse. So Woods knew the depression that came when you ceased making crazy bets. He also knew the logic to making them in the first place. No psychic reward might be so powerful as winning a dare with yourself.
If you were really scared, and went through it, and came out on the other side intact, then it was hard not to believe for a little while that you were on the side of the gods. It felt as if you could do no wrong. Time slowed. You were no longer doing it. For good or ill, it was doing it. You had entered the logic of that other scheme where death and life had as many relations as Yin and Yang.
That was the identification Woods felt. Gilmore had also felt compelled to take a chance with his life. Gilmore had been keeping in touch with something it was indispensable to be in touch with.
Woods knew all about that, and it depressed him. Looking back on the times he had seen Gilmore at the hospital, he felt uneasy at the reserve he had maintained between them, even felt shame that he had never had a real conversation with the man.
After a while, he did get Gilmore to talk a little about the murders, but it was no help. Gilmore seemed genuinely perplexed over his behavior. Kept going back to his feeling of being under water.
"Lot of strange things," he would say. "You know, it was inevitable."
This vagueness impressed Woods as pretty straight, a convict trying to convince you he was insane would give more of a picture show. Instead, Gilmore gave the impression of a man who was quiet, thoughtful, cornered, and living simultaneously in many places.
On the other hand, Gilmore had been in seclusion all the way.
That had been altogether against Woods's ideas of treatment, for it cut off interaction with the other patients. They had a new brand of therapy to offer at this hospital and he was all for giving Gilmore some of it. The prison authorities, however, had only agreed to transfer Gilmore from County Jail for these two-and three-day visits if he were kept in lockup all the way. So there you were. A man who had spent nearly all of his last twelve years locked up every night in a cell the size of a bathroom, was still being locked up.
In addition, they had all been concerned, himself included, that no error be made with the guy, so they kept seeing him in pairs.
Later, he heard Gilmore had said, "One thing I have against Woods is that he never talks to me alone." Yes, Woods thought, I really kept my distance.
Of course, he knew why. Becoming a psychiatrist had left Woods in a funny place, philosophically speaking. He did not like to stir his doubts. His own contradictions, once set moving, had a lot of momentum. Woods hadn't had, after all, the kind of upbringing that tended to land you in the psychiatric establishment.
Woods's father had been a hell of a football player in college, and tried to raise his son to be more of the same. Woods grew up on a ranch, but his father made sure there was a football around, and he was one son who spent his boyhood running out for passes. As soon as his hands were large enough, he was pulling them in over his shoulder. When he got through high school, there was an athletic scholarship at the University of Wyoming.
At Wyoming, the real talent seemed to be imported from the East. Woods got the idea that just as the greatest potatoes grew indigenously in Idaho, so football players came naturally from Pennsylvania and Ohio. Woods had always thought he was pretty good and pretty big and pretty crazy until those eastern football players came in from the mill towns. Six of those Polacks, Bohunks, and Italians shared the same girl all freshman year. It wasn't that they couldn't have others, it was that they liked keeping it in the family. It was better that way. One of those monsters, right out of the middle of defensive line, got so tired one night of being turned down by a new date that he proceeded to urinate on her.
Another night, with a lot of snow on the ground, a group of them took off in two cars for a ride through the mountains. A bottle of booze for each car. On the way back, in a snowstorm, the lead vehicle came around a curve, went into a skid, and smashed into a snow bound Chevy by the side of the road. There were only two football players in the first collision, and they jumped out into the middle of the highway. Woods, in the second car, following at high speed, came around the same turn and went into the ditch to avoid hitting them. The two from the first car and the three in the second got together and lifted Woods's car onto the road again. That felt so good that the fellows from the first car now ripped their license plates off, and pushed the vehicle over the mountain and into the ravine. It struck on rocks with the great noise of thunder, and made soft deep sounds like the wind when it plowed through deep snow. They watched with the awe attending large events.
Of course the car they had smacked into was a mess. So they decided to roll it down the highway. Woods tried to talk them out of that. Right in the middle, he could not get over the fact that he, with his own big reputation to maintain, was being the peacemaker.
He failed. They set that wreck rolling. A police car coming up the grade just avoided a head-on collision. Some rich alumnus settled the cost. One did not lose five talented sophomores for too little.
Woods never starred. After a while he was too scared. You could get maimed out there. The coach he liked moved on, and the new coach disapproved of the hours Woods had to give to pre-med labs.
Told him to switch to Phys. Ed. Woods didn't. He never starred.
Nonetheless, he didn't have any illusions about the scope of the problem. There were two kinds of human beings on earth and maybe he had been placed to know both kinds. The civilized had their small self-destructive habits and their controlled paranoia, but they could live in a civilized world. You could tinker with them on the couch. It was the uncivilized who caused the discomfort in psychiatric circles.
Woods had long suspected the best-kept secret in psychiatric circles was that nobody understood psychopaths, and few had any notion of psychotics. "Look," he would sometimes be tempted to tell a colleague, "the psychotic thinks he's in contact with spirits from other worlds. He believes he is prey to the spirits of the dead. He's in terror. By his understanding, he lives in a field of evil forces.
"The psychopath," Woods would tell them, "inhabits the same place. It is just that he feels stronger. The psychopath sees himself as a potent force in that field of forces. Sometimes he even believes he can go to war against them, and win. So if he really loses, he is close to collapse, and can be as ghost ridden as a psychotic."
3.
For a moment, Woods wondered if that was the way to build a bridge from the psychopathic to the insane.
But he always came back to the difficulty. The speech was of no legal use to Snyder and Esplin. You could not appear in court with spirits from other worlds.
There did remain one legitimate possibility. In the record from Oregon State Penitentiary was Dr. Wesley Weissart's psychiatric entry for November 1974: IT IS MY IMPRESSION THAT AT THIS TIME GILMORE IS IN A PARANOID STATE, SO THAT HE IS UNABLE TO DETERMINE WHAT HIS BEST INTERESTS ARE. HE IS TOTALLY UNABLE TO CONTROL HIS HOSTILE AND AGGRESSIVE IMPULSES.
. . . I FEEL COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED IN GIVING GILMORE MEDICATION AGAINST HIS WISHES AS HE CREATES A SERIOUS PROBLEM TO THE PATIENTS AND TO THE ENTIRE INSTITUTION.
That was the unclean report to which Dr. Kiger referred when the staff interviewed Gilmore. "Why," asked Woods, of Snyder and Esplin, "don't you get that doctor down here to testify."
Gary didn't want him, that was why. Gary had said: Of all the dirty, mean, rotten sons of bitches. He did not want to be evaluated by that man.
Woods said even if they had to go to Oregon and rope the fellow, they ought to get him for the trial.
It was very hard, they replied, to get a person to respond to a subpoena if he lived out of the state. Woods said, "Man, that seems critical to me."
Snyder and Esplin called Weissart, but he told them he did not wish to be involved. They received the impression that, if he had to get on the stand, he would say that Gilmore might be four-plus paranoiac, but was not, in the legal sense, psychotic. Another dead end.
Woods had seen the difference between experienced trial lawyers and young attorneys. It was a hell of a difference. He said to them as diplomatically as he could, Why don't you get somebody else in on this who can pull some shots? He couldn't get across. They kept on trying to get some evaluation of Gary as a victim of mental illness.
Actually, Woods did hate Prolixin. He saw it as incarceration within the incarceration. One morning he even woke up exhausted from the ardors of a dream that had him conducting a cross-examination: QUESTION What was his dosage?
ANSWER Fifty milligrams a week, that's pretty much an average, standard dose.
QUESTION But he swelled up under it, didn't he?
ANSWER Well, they get side effects from all these antipsychotic drugs. The more potent the drug, the more apt they are to develop side effects. Prolixin causes many more side effects than Thorazine.
QUESTION What would be the advantage then of using Prolixin?
ANSWER You'd only have to give him medicine one time a week, rather than try to give it to him every day.
QUESTION It's really a matter of administering it.
ANSWER That's right.
QUESTION If you have a saddle a bad horse, you want to be able to do it once a week, not twice a day.
ANSWER That's right. Prolixin is the only drug out now that we can give at infrequent intervals. Everything else has to be given hourly, two or three times a day, or daily.
QUESTION What were Gilmore's side effects?
ANSWER He had a real severe reaction. Oh, as I recall, he had swelling in his feet and it was difficult to get his shoes on, he had trouble walking and his hands swelled, he really had a severe reaction.
QUESTION How long did it last?
ANSWER Well, let me put it this way, that's a long-acting drug, Prolixin, you give a shot today, probably there will be some of that same shot in his system maybe six or eight weeks from now. That's why, if they develop a reaction it takes them two or three months to get over it.
QUESTION Well, what did you use for medication after that didn't work, the Prolixin?
ANSWER I don't think I used any medication after that at all.
QUESTION So he was just a problem then . . .
ANSWER Just talking, we just talked.
QUESTION How did Gilmore himself respond to the Prolixin? I mean, when the side effects had hit him, how did he respond in his relationship with you?
ANSWER Well, he was very unhappy with me, naturally.
QUESTION He got paranoid about you, wouldn't you say?
ANSWER Oh, yes, yeah.
QUESTION He thought you were out to get him.
ANSWER Uh-huh, yes.
QUESTION Did you feel bad about the Prolixin, sort of like oh, Lord, you know, what have I done?
ANSWER Well, I don't like to see that type of reaction on anybody, and I certainly didn't on Gary. The way it developed, though, I thought that we got along reasonably well after that.
QUESTION Aren't you worried about Prolixin in the sense that you don't really know? You've got a machine, which has two levers sticking out of it. You walk up and push one lever in, and the other lever comes out at the other end of the machine. What goes on in the machine, you don't know. Is that a fair description of its effects? That you can't name the inner process that goes on?
ANSWER Well, there . . . well, I guess maybe you're right. Really, we don't know the direct effects of these antipsychotic drugs on the brain cells . . .
Woods wasn't at all certain that the Prolixin hadn't done a real damage to Gary's psyche. Whole fields of the soul could be defoliated and never leave a trace. Yet how did you convince a Jury? The medicine had been accepted by a generation of psychiatrists. Once again, Woods wished for some absolute dazzler of a lawyer who could handle a Jury like a basketball and take them up and down the court.
Chapter 26.
STONE IN LOVE.
Nicole asked Gary if there wasn't a chance to get a real good lawyer.
Gary said big leaguers like Percy Foreman or F. Lee Bailey sometimes took on a job for the publicity, but in his case there were not special elements. A big man would want money.
Of course, one of the really good ones, he said, might be able to get him acquitted. Or bring in a short sentence. Without money, however, they had to forget it.
She had no idea what a big lawyer would cost, but that was when she got the idea of selling her eyes. She never told Gary, and in fact felt a little dumb about it. She really didn't know how it came into her head. It could have had a lot to do with those commercials where they told you how much your vision was worth. She thought if she could get $5,000, maybe that would pay for a good lawyer.
Gibbs got a little excited by the idea. There was a fellow in Salt Lake who happened to be the biggest criminal defense man in Utah, Phil Hansen. In the past, Phil had been Attorney General and everything. Had more volume of cases going through his office than anybody in the state. He could perform miracles. Once, he even got a guy off who shot a Sheriff in front of another Sheriff. Sometimes, Gibbs said, Hansen would take a case for free. Gary lit up.
Gibbs now said he wasn't going to pull any punches with Gary when he knew how jealous a man could get, so he also wanted to tell him that Phil Hansen was reputed to have a yearn for attractive ladies.
Gary sat right down and wrote Nicole what Gibbs had said, then remarked it was up to her if she wanted to hitch a ride to see Hansen.
But "If the guy makes any suggestive motions, get up and walk out."
Same night, a guard gave him a note from Nicole, "He didn't ask for my bod, but will meet me at 2 o'clock Saturday at the jail and talk with you."
She had seen Hansen in a big office and he did treat her like she was sure attractive, only he didn't put any pressure on. He was middle-aged, kept smoking a cigar, and liked to laugh a lot. After a while, he told her a story. Said the last man executed in Utah was named Rogers, and he had been asked to defend him, and told Rogers to get some money together. Phil was informed there'd be no problem. Rogers had a sister in Chicago who was well off.
Well, no telling about the sister, Rogers never called back. Hansen let it slide. Then the man was executed.
The lawyer never knew if it was coincidental, but the morning Rogers met his death, Hansen bolted out of bed. Didn't even know it was the day. Just woke up in a cold sweat.
Hearing about the execution over the radio, he swore he would never turn another person down for lack of funds if a life was involved.
Look, Hansen said, even if there was no money, he would represent Gilmore. Then he made the arrangements to meet Saturday afternoon at the jail.
Before she left, he put his arms around her, and gave a nice hug and said, "Don't worry. Don't look so sad. They're not going to execute him." He told Nicole he had never seen a case yet, didn't matter how bad it looked when you first took it, as you got into the story, you could explain it to the Jury.
For instance, he said, even a person who would swear by capital punishment might have to change their mind if it was their own mother on trial. "My mother's not like that," they would say. "Something went wrong." People were ready for capital punishment only if they were sentencing a stranger. The approach was to get the Jury feeling they understood the criminal.
Saturday came. Even though Hansen had said two o'clock, she was there at one-thirty.
She waited until three, but Mr. Hansen never showed up. Christ, she made an idiot of herself waiting. She called him later that afternoon, but it was Saturday, and his office didn't answer. While visiting Gary, Nicole began to cry. She couldn't help it. She had really been counting on getting a good lawyer, She was even more depressed when she received Gary's next letter: Sept. 26 All Snyder and Esplin want to do is leave themselves a good case for appeal. Thats the way they're paid by the state to think. I'm not saying they are paid to sell me out, I'm not paranoid about it. But they are court appointed lawyers, they don't have the resource to do a proper job. I'll get no more than a token defense from them.
Sept. 27 I can't sleep in the daytime. Sometimes I try but I always wake up in a cold sweat and I hear the cars on the hiway and see the light coming brightly thru the bars and know how far away I am from it all.
I know that dying is just changin form. I don't expect to escape any of my debts, I'll meet them and I'll pay them. I want to quit racking up such heavy debts thought.
I fucked you all night in my mind Nicole. I sent love over all the distance to Springville, which is not at all a ball o'chalk, I could run that meagre distance without stopping. I loved you so hard and wet and long last nite Angel and I held you to me tite tite tite and you felt good. I kissed your forehead your nose your eyes, your cheeks and long and wet on your lips your neck I fucked your ears with my tongue and heard you cry out oh oh oh ooooh baby I kissed all down your body, put your tits in my mouth all I could get in there and l put my face between them sucked your big nipples fucked your belly button pushed my tongue in your mouth in your cunt in your ass your pretty fuckin ass. God I love your pretty pretty ass. Whew! You got ass that won't quit! You got a blue ribbon first prize ass. You got an elf ass.