It felt right to people who judged things somewhere. They said the series was ?vital.?
So I was lucky in ?69.
I figured things were beginning to even out the day I drove into the William Pound Institute in West Hampton, Long Island. On account of my assignment there I wouldn?t be writing any of the article about Horn?s murder. The good Horn assignments had already gone elsewhere. Higher up.
I parked my rent-a-car in a crowded yard marked ALL HOSPITAL VISITORS ALL. Then, armed with tape recorder, suitcoat over my arm too, I made my way along a broken flagstone path tunneling through bent old oak trees.
I didn?t really notice a lot about the hospital at first. I was busy feeling sorry for myself.
: The man looking most obviously lost and disturbed at the William Pound Institute?baggy white suit, torn panama hat, Monkey Ward dress shirt?must have been me.
Here was Ochs Jones, thirty-one-year-old cornpone savant, never before having been north of Washington D.C.
But the Brooks Brothers doctors, the nurses, the fire-haired patients walking around the hospital paid no attention.
Which isn?t easy?even at 9:30 on a drizzly, unfriendly morning.
Generally I?m noticed most places.
My blond hair is close-cropped, just a little seedy on the sides, already falling out on top?so that my head resembles a Franciscan monk?s. I?m slightly cross-eyed without my glasses (and because of the rain I had them off). Moreover, I?m 6?7?, and I stand out quite nicely without the aid of quirky clothes.
No one noticed, though. One doctory-looking woman said, ?Hello, Michael.? ?Ochs,? I told her. That was about it for introductions.
Less than 1% believing Ben Toy might have a story for me, I dutifully followed all the blue-arrowed signs marked BOWDITCH.
The grounds of the Pound Institute were clean and fresh-smelling and green as a state park. The hospital reminded me of an eastern university campus, someplace with a name like Ithaca, or Swarthmore, or Hobart.
It was nearly ten as I walked past huge red-brick houses along an equally red cobblestone road.
Occasionally a Cadillac or Mercedes crept by at the posted ten m.p.h. speed limit.
The federalist-style houses I passed were the different wards of the hospital.
One was for the elderly bedridden. Another was for the elderly who could still putter around?predominantly lobotomies.
One four-story building housed nothing but children aged over ten years. A little girl sat rocking in the window of one of the downstairs rooms. She reminded me of Anthony Perkins at the end of
I jotted down a few observations and felt silly making them. I kept one wandering eye peeled for Ben Toy?s ward: Bowditch: male maximum security.
A curious thing happened to me in front of the ward for young girls.
A round-shouldered girl was sitting on the wet front lawn close to the road where I was walking. She was playing a blond-wood guitar and singing.
she just about talked the pop song.
I was Ochs Jones, thirty-one, father of two daughters ? The only violent act I could recall in my life, was
?as a boy?that my great-uncle Ochs Jones had been hanged in Moon, Kentucky, as a horsethief ? and
I didn?t know what was going on.
As a matter of fact, I knew considerably less than I thought I did.
The last of the Federal-style houses was more rambling, less formal and kept-up than any of the others: It bordered on scrub pine woods with very green waist-high underbrush running through it. A high stockade fence had been built up as the ward?s backyard.
BOWDITCH a fancy gold plaque by the front door said.
The man who?d contacted the
Dr. Alan Shulman, met me on the front porch. Right off, Shulman informed me that this was an unusual and delicate situation for him. The hospital, he said, had only divulged information about patients a few times before?and that invariably had to do with court cases. ?But an assassination,? he said, ?is somewhat extraordinary. We
to help.?
Shulman was very New Yorkerish, with curly, scraggly black hair. He wore the kind of black-frame eyeglasses with little silver arrows in the corners. He was probably in his mid-thirties, with some kind of Brooklyn or Queens accent that was odd to my ear.
Some men slouching inside behind steel-screened windows seemed to be finding us quite a curious combination to observe.
