“Well, she was old,” McCandless said. “Who knows what could happen?”
“And then, after the pillow smothered her, how do you suppose she got from her bed to the staircase?”
“Sleepwalking,” McCandless said.
“Of course,” said Ehrengraf. “I should have thought of that.”
“My parents lived in this ranch house,” McCandless said. “Big sprawling thing, lots of square footage but all of it on one level. No basement and no attic.” He sighed. “In other words, no stairs.” He shook his head ruefully. “Point is, there was never any problem about my grandparents’ death, so I’ve got some money of my own. So you don’t have to worry about your fee.”
Ehrengraf drew himself up straight. He was a small man, but his perfect posture and impeccably tailored raw silk suit lent him stature beyond his height. “There will be no fee,” he said, “unless you are found innocent.”
“Huh?”
“My longstanding policy, Mr. McCandless. My fees are quite considerable, but they are payable only in the event that my client is exonerated. As it happens, I rarely see the inside of a courtroom. My clients are innocent, and their innocence always wins out in the long run. I do what I can toward that end, often working behind the scenes. And, when charges are dropped, when the real killer confesses, when my client’s innocence has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the legal system, then and only then do I profit from my efforts on his behalf.”
McCandless was silent for a long moment. At length he fixed his eyes on the little lawyer. “We got ourselves a problem,” he said. “See, just between you and me, I did it.”
“With stairs,” young McCandless was saying, “it might have been entirely different. Especially with Mom in the wheelchair. Good steep flight of stairs and it’s a piece of cake. Instead I went out and got the gun, and then I bought the gloves.”
“Gloves?”
“A size too small,” McCandless said. “To leave at the crime scene. I thought—well, never mind what I thought. I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly. Hey, that reminds me. You think maybe a Dim Cap defense would turn the trick?”
“Innocent by reason of diminished capacity?”
“Yeah. See, I did a couple of lines of DTT before I went out and bought the gloves.”
“Do you mean DDT? The insecticide?”
“Naw, DTT. It’s short for di-tetra thiazole, it’s a tranquilizer for circus animals, but if you snort it it sort of mellows you out. What I could do, though, is I could forget about the DTT and tell people I ate a Twinkie.”
Court TV, Ehrengraf thought, had a lot to answer for. “You got the gun,” he prompted his client, “and you bought the gloves . . .”
“And I went over there and did what I had to do. But of course I don’t remember that part.”
“You don’t?”
McCandless shook his head. “Not a thing, from the time I parked the car in their driveway until I woke up hours later in my own bed. See, I never remember. I don’t remember doing my grandparents, either. It’s all because of the EKG.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” said Ehrengraf, rather understating the matter. “You had an electrocardiogram?”
“That’s for your heart, isn’t it? My heart’s fine. No, EKG’s this powder, you roll it up and smoke it. I couldn’t tell you what the initials stand for, but it was originally developed as a fertilizer for African violets. They had to take it off the market when they found out what it did to people.”
“What does it do?”
“I guess it gets you high,” McCandless said, “but I don’t know for sure. See, what happens is you take it and you black out. It’s the same story every time I smoke it. I light up, I take the first puff, and the next thing I remember I’m waking up in my own bed hours later. So I couldn’t tell you what it feels like. All I know is what it lets me do while I’m operating behind it. And so far it’s let me do my grandparents and my mother and father.”
“I knew it,” Ehrengraf said.
“How’s that?”
“I knew you were innocent,” he said. “I knew it. Mr. McCandless, you have no memory whatsoever of any of those killings, is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yeah, but—”
“You may have intended to do those persons harm. But it was so much against your nature that you had to ingest a dangerous controlled substance in order to gird yourself for the task. Is that correct?”
“Well, more or less, but—”
“And you have no recollection of committing any crimes whatsoever. You believe yourself to be guilty, and as a result you are in a jail cell charged with a hideous crime. Do you see the problem, sir? The problem is not what you have done, because in fact you have done nothing. The problem is what you believe.”
McCandless looked at him.
“If you don’t believe in your own innocence,” Ehrengraf demanded, “how can the rest of the world believe in it? Your thoughts are powerful, Mr. McCandless. And right now your own negative thoughts are damning you as a murderer.”
“But—”
“You must affirm your innocence, sir.”
“Okay,” McCandless agreed. “ ‘I’m innocent.’ How’s that?”
“It’s a start,” Ehrengraf said. He opened his briefcase, drew out a yellow legal pad, produced a pen. “But it takes more than a simple declaration to change your own thoughts on the matter. What I want you to do is affirm your innocence in writing.”
“Just write ‘I’m innocent’ over and over?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” Ehrengraf uncapped the pen and drew a vertical line down the center of the page. “Here’s what you do,” he said. “Over here on the left you write ‘I am completely innocent.’ Then on the right you immediately write down the first negative response to that sentence that pops into your mind.”
“Fair enough.” McCandless took the pad and pen. I am completely innocent, he wrote in the left-hand column. What a load of crap, he wrote at once on the right.
“Excellent,” Ehrengraf assured him. “Now keep going, but with a different response each time.”
“Just keep going?”
“Until you get to the bottom of the page,” Ehrengraf said.
The pen raced over the paper, as McCandless no sooner proclaimed his complete innocence than he dashed off a repudiation of it. When he’d reached the bottom of the page, Ehrengraf took the pad from him. I am completely innocent. / I murdered both my parents . . . I am completely innocent. / Killed Grandma and Grampa . . . I am completely innocent. / I deserve the gas chamber . . . I am completely innocent. / I’m guilty as sin . . . I am completely innocent. / They ought to hang me . . . I am completely innocent. / I’m a murderer . . . I am completely innocent. / I killed a girl last year and there wasn’t even any money in it for me . . . I am completely innocent. / I’m a born killer . . . I am completely innocent / I am bad, bad, bad!
“Excellent,” Ehrengraf said.
“You think so? If the District Attorney got a hold of that . . .”
“Ah, but he won’t, will he?” Ehrengraf crumpled the paper, stuffed it into a pocket, handed the legal pad back to his client. “All of those negative thoughts,” he explained, “have been festering in your mind and soul, preventing you from believing in your own untarnished innocence. By letting them surface this way, we can stamp them out and affirm your own true nature.”
“My own true nature’s nothing to brag about,” McCandless said.
“That’s your negativity talking,” Ehrengraf told him. “At heart you’re an innocent child of God.” He pointed to the legal pad, made scribbling motions in the air. “You’ve got work to do,” he said.
“I hope you got another of those yellow pads there,” Dale McCandless said. “It’s a funny thing. I was never much of a writer, and in school it was torture for me to write a two-page composition for English class. You know, ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’?”
Ehrengraf, who
could well imagine how a young McCandless might have spent his summer vacation, was diplomatically silent.
“But this time around,” McCandless said, “I’ve been writing up a storm. What’s it been, five days since you got me started? Well, I ran through that pad you gave me, and I got one of the guards to bring me this little notebook, but I like the pads better. Here, look at what I wrote this morning.”
Ehrengraf unfolded a sheet of unlined white paper. McCandless had drawn a line down its center, writing his affirmation over and over again in the left-hand column, jotting down his responses to the right. I am completely innocent. / I’ve been in trouble all my life . . . I am completely innocent. / Maybe it wasn’t always my fault . . . I am completely innocent. / I don’t remember doing anything bad . . . I am completely innocent. / In my heart I am . . . I am completely innocent. / How great it would be if it was true!
“You’ve come a long way,” Ehrengraf told his client. “You see how the nature of your responses is changing.”
“It seems like magic,” McCandless said.
“The magic of affirmation.”
“All along, I would just write down the first thing that popped into my head. But the old bad stuff just stopped popping in.”
“You cleared it away.”
“I don’t know what I did,” McCandless said. “Maybe I just wore it out. But it got to the point where it didn’t seem natural to write that I was a born killer.”
“Because you’re not.”
“I guess.”
“And how do you feel now, Mr. McCandless? Without a pen in your hand, just talking face-to-face? Are you innocent of the crimes of which you stand accused?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“It’s almost too much to hope for,” the young man said, “but maybe I am. I could be, couldn’t I? I really could be.”
Ehrengraf beamed. “Indeed you are,” he said, “and it’s my job to prove it. And yours—” he opened his briefcase, provided his client with a fresh legal pad “—yours to further affirm that innocence until there is no room in your consciousness for doubt and negativity. You’ve got work to do, Mr. McCandless. Are you up for it?”
Eagerly, McCandless reached for the pad.
“Little Bobby Bickerstaff,” McCandless said, shaking his head in wonder.
Ehrengraf’s hand went to the knot of his necktie, adjusting it imperceptibly. The tie was that of the Caedmon Society, and Ehrengraf was not entitled to wear it, never having been a member of that organization. It was, however, his invariable choice for occasions of triumph, and this was just such an occasion.
“I never would have dreamed it,” McCandless said. “Not in a million years.”
“You knew him, then?”
“We went to grade school together. In fact we were in the same class until I got held back. You know something? That’s hard to believe, too.”
“That you’d be held back? I must say I find it hard to believe myself. You’re an intelligent young man.”
“Oh, it wasn’t for that. It was for deportment. You know, talking in class, throwing chalk.”
“High spirits,” Ehrengraf said.
“Setting fires,” McCandless went on. “Breaking windows. Doing cars.”
“Doing cars?”
“Teachers’ cars,” the young man explained. “Icepicking the tires, or sugaring the gas tank, or keying the paint job. Or doing the windows.”
“Bricking them,” Ehrengraf suggested.
“I suppose you could call it that. That’s what’s hard to believe, Mr. Ehrengraf. That I did those things.”
“I see.”
“I used to be like that,” he said, and frowned in thought. “Or maybe I just used to think I was that way, and that’s why I did bad things.”
“Ah,” Ehrengraf said.
“All along I was innocent,” McCandless said, groping for the truth. “But I didn’t know it, I had this belief I was bad, and when I was a little kid it made me do bad things.”
“Precisely.”
“And I got in trouble, and they blamed me even when I didn’t do anything bad, and that convinced me I was really bad, bad clear to the bone. And . . . and . . .”
The youth put his head in his hands and sobbed. “There, there,” Ehrengraf said softly, and clapped him on the shoulder. After a moment McCandless got hold of himself and said, “But little Bobby Bickerstaff. I can’t get over it.”
“He killed your parents,” Ehrengraf said.
“It’s so hard to believe. I always thought of him as a little goody-goody.”
“A nice quiet boy,” Ehrengraf said.
“Yeah, well, those are the ones who lose it, aren’t they? They pop off one day and the neighbors can’t believe it, same as I can’t believe it myself about Bobby. What was the name of the couple he killed?”
“Roger and Sheila Capstone.”
“I didn’t know them,” McCandless said, “but they lived in the same neighborhood as my folks, in the same kind of house. And was she in a wheelchair the same as my mom?”
“It was Mr. Capstone who was wheelchair-bound,” Ehrengraf said. “He’d been crippled in an automobile accident.”
“Poor guy. And little Bobby Bickerstaff emptied a clip into him, and another into his wife.”
“So it seems.”
“Meek little Bobby. Whacked them both, then went into the bathroom and wrote something on the mirror.”
“It was Mrs. Capstone’s dressing table mirror,” Ehrengraf said. “And he used her lipstick to write his last message.”
“ ‘This is the last time. God forgive me.’ “
“His very words.”
“And then he put on the woman’s underwear,” McCandless said, “or maybe he put it on before, who knows, and then he popped a fresh clip in his gun and stuck the business end in his mouth and got off a burst. Must have made some mess.”
“I imagine it did.”
McCandless shook his head in amazement. “Little Bobby,” he said. “Mr. Straight Arrow. Cops searched his place afterward, house he grew up in, what did they find? All these guns and knives and dirty magazines and stuff.”
“It happens all the time,” Ehrengraf said.
“Other stuff, too. Some things that must have been stolen from my parents’ house, not that anybody had even noticed they were missing. Some jewelry of my mom’s and a sterling silver flask with my dad’s initials engraved on it. I don’t think I ever even knew he had a flask, but how many are you going to find engraved W. R. McC.?”
“It must have been his.”
“Well, sure. But what really wrapped it up was the diary. From what I heard, most of it was sketchy, just weird stuff that was going through his mind. But the entry the day after my parents died, that was something else.”
“It was a little vague as well,” Ehrengraf said, “but quite conclusive all the same. He told how he’d gone to your parents’ home and found you passed out in a chair.”
“From the EKG, it must have been.”
“He thought about killing all three of you. Instead he gunned down both your parents, making sure that you and your clothes were spattered with their blood, then wiped his prints off the empty gun and pressed it into your hands.”
“Bobby’s mom was crippled,” McCandless remembered. “I remember kids used to say we ought to be friends because of it. Like him and me were in the same boat.”
“But you weren’t friends.”
“Are you kidding? A hood like me team up with a goody-goody like Bobby Bickerstaff?” His expression turned thoughtful. “Except it turns out I was innocent all along, so I wasn’t such a hood after all. And Bobby wasn’t such a goody-goody.”
“No.”
“In fact,” McCandless said, “he might have had something to do with his own parents’ death. Bobby was still a kid at the time. They weren’t too clear on what happened, whether it was a suicide pact or the old man committed a mercy killing and then killed hims
elf afterward. I guess everybody figured it amounted to the same thing. But now . . .”
“Now there’s suspicion that Bobby may have done it.”
“I suppose he could have. There’s a pattern, isn’t there? His mom was crippled, my mom was in a wheelchair, and this Mr. Capstone was more of the same. Maybe the shock of what happened to his folks drove him around the bend, or maybe he was the one responsible for what happened to them to start with, and the other two murders were just a way of reenacting the crime. I wonder which it was.”
“I doubt we’ll ever know,” Ehrengraf said gently.
“I guess not,” McCandless said. “What we do know is I didn’t kill anybody, and I already knew that, thanks to you. Bobby killed my parents, and my grandparents both had simple accidents. That’s what the police decided at the time, and it was only my own negative thoughts about myself that led me to believe I had anything to do with their deaths.”
“That’s it,” Ehrengraf said, delighted. “You’re absolutely right.”
“I’ll tell you, Mr. Ehrengraf, this business with affirmations is pretty amazing stuff. I mean, I did some bad things over the years. Let’s face it, I pulled some mean stuff. But do you know why?”
“Tell me, Dale.”
“I did it because I thought I was bad. I mean, if you’re a bad person, what do you do? You do bad things. I thought I was bad, so I did some bad things.”
“ ‘Give a dog a bad name—‘ “
“And he’ll bite you,” McCandless said. “And I did, in a manner of speaking, but I never killed anybody. And now that I know I’m innocent, I’ll be a changed human being entirely.”
“A productive member of society.”
“Well, I don’t know about productive,” McCandless said. “I mean, face it, I’m a rich man. Between what I had from my grandmother and what I stand to inherit from my parents, I can live a life of ease.” He grinned. “Even after I pay your fee, I’m still set for life.”
“An enviable position to be in.”
“So I may not knock myself out being productive,” McCandless went on. “I may just focus on having fun.”
“Boys will be boys,” said Ehrengraf.
“You said it. I’ll work on my suntan, I’ll see that the bar’s well stocked, I’ll round up a couple of totally choice babes. Get some good drugs, plenty of tasty food in case anybody gets the munchies, and next thing you know—”