Stories: All-New Tales

okay?”

Hollow was a lean man, with drawn cheeks and thick black hair close to a skullish head-defendants said he looked like a ghoul; kinder reports, that he resembled Gregory Peck in Moby Dick, minus the beard. He was somber and reserved and kept his personal life far, far away from his professional life.

He now nodded at the secretary in the ante-office of Judge Brigham Rollins’s chambers.

“Go on in, Glenn.”

Inside were two big men. Rollins was midfifties and had a pitted face and the spiky gray hair of a crew cut neglected a week too long. He was in shirtsleeves, though noosed with a tie, of course. He wore plucky yellow suspenders that hoisted his significant tan pants like a concrete bucket under a crane. Gray stains radiated from under his arms. As usual the judge had doused himself with Old Spice.

Sitting opposite was Bob Ringling-the circus jokes all but dead after these many years of being a defense lawyer in a medium-size town, and, no, there was no relation. Stocky, with blondish brown hair carefully trimmed, he resembled a forty-five-year-old retired army major-not a bad deduction, since Fayetteville wasn’t terribly far away, but, like the circus brothers, not true.

Hollow didn’t like or dislike Ringling. He was fair, though abrasive, and he made Hollow work for every victory. Which was as it should be, the prosecutor believed. God created defense lawyers, he’d said, to make sure the system was fair and the prosecution didn’t cheat or get lazy. After all, there was that one-in-a-hundred chance that the five-foot-eight black gangbanger from Central High presently in custody wasn’t the same five-foot-eight black gangbanger from Central High who actually pulled the trigger.

Judge Rollins closed a folder that’d 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 distasteful grimace. 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 Galloway-belted cows grazing. They were black and white, vertically striped, precise, as if 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 amp; 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’d 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. Sang 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 to 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 fingerpainted 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 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 Bob Ringling had confirmed, it wasn’t an issue in State v. Kobel.

More common is when defense lawyers invoke various offshoots of M’Naughten 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 Bob 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.”