Mercy Read online

  "Can you tell me about that?"

  The man leaned back and set his glass on a coaster made of shellacked beer-bottle caps. "It wasn't a real good time for me. My sister had a stroke and she never came out of it. For a few months there, Marie and me were up at the hospital almost all day long. Maggie took some vacation time off work and ran the store for us, and she got Jamie to clean our house on the weekends. She used to bring those cookies with M & M's in them and big loaves of pound cake, right to the hospital, because she said we needed to keep up our own strength.

  "Anyhow," he continued, sighing, "one night when Marie went off for the call of nature, Maggie came closer to the hospital bed than she ever had. She'd come into the room before, but she'd always run away like she was afraid of catching some disease. She looked right down into Frances's face, which was still frowning on the side that got took by the stroke, and touched her cheek. 'That isn't a way to live,' she told me."

  Graham whipped a notepad out of his breast pocket and began to scribble down what Watchell Spitlick said. "Anything else?" He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice.

  "I told her that Frances would go when God wanted her. And"--he shook his head--"Maggie said to me that if it was her, she'd want someone to wake God up and ask Him what the heck was keeping Him."

  Graham leaned forward, balancing his elbows on his knees. He knocked over the eight-tracks, David Cassidy and Joni Mitchell and the Bee Gees spilling over his black loafers. "Mr. Spitlick, would you be willing to testify to all this in court?"

  Bud smiled sadly, looking out the window at the empty MacDonald house. "I'd do anything for those two." He stood up and Graham stood with him, then he clapped Graham around the shoulders with a big, work-rough hand. "I figure she's an angel now," he said, his voice sounding oddly thin.

  Graham glanced toward Jamie's house, where a bronze wind chime cried on the overhang of the porch. "I figure she is."

  Dr. Roanoke Martin was thinking more about his secretary than about the man in front of him. As a psychologist on call for the state of Massachusetts, he had seen his share of deadbeats and schizophrenics and borderline psychotics. Once he'd even interviewed a guy who believed he had been given a transplant of the left side--mind you, only the left side--of Charles Manson's brain. Roanoke Martin had no reason to believe that James MacDonald would be any different, any more or any less than ten minutes he could be putting to better use with a lunchtime fuck.

  He had asked the standard questions: Did he know his name? The year? The president? Could he talk a bit about his childhood, his family? The man who sat before him was calm and soft-spoken, although he had a good eight inches on Roanoke, which made the doctor a little nervous--you couldn't be around mentally ill people who flew off the handle without prejudging someone strictly on their size.

  "Can you tell me what happened on September nineteenth?" Roanoke asked. He tipped up his thin black watch so that its LED display reflected on his glasses. Angela would be swinging back and forth in his swivel chair by now, her feet propped up on the desk, her skirt hiked to midthigh.

  "I killed my wife," Jamie said. "I put a pillow over her face and I smothered her like she'd asked me to."

  In spite of himself, the doctor leaned forward. "And are you sorry you did this?"

  Jamie made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort, but Roanoke knew it wouldn't be that, it couldn't--defendants always knew they were supposed to impress the State, and even the truly crazy ones managed to behave accordingly. "Sorry? That's a loaded word, Doctor"

  Roanoke tapped his fingers on the conference room's table. "What does it mean to you?"

  "The same thing I imagine it means to everyone else who speaks English," Jamie snapped. He pushed a hand through his hair. "Am I sorry I killed Maggie? No. Am I sorry that I had to? Yes. Am I sorry that she's not here anymore? More than you could possibly know by talking to me for ten fucking minutes."

  Roanoke was silent for a moment. "You seem to have a great deal of anger in you."

  Jamie laughed. "You went to school for this?"

  The doctor shuffled around the papers that comprised the file of James MacDonald. He already knew what he'd write in his report. The defendant was articulate, hostile, and perfectly sane. He was capable of standing trial. He had a full comprehension of what he had done to his wife three months before. And no remorse.

  With a sigh he pulled out the morality test he always gave to the state patients pending trial. Kohlberg had created it; it was controversial in his field--something about the scoring that was disadvantageous to women, but Roanoke tended to simply listen to the responses of the patients rather than rating them on a scale of scrupulousness. It involved a hypothetical situation: someone is suffering from a very rare and painful disease. All the medicine in the world to treat this disease is located in a drugstore in Switzerland, kept under lock and key, and is outrageously expensive. Without the medicine, this person will die. Would you steal the medicine?

  Morality was judged, supposedly, by the criteria a patient used to make a decision. Some inflexibly refused to break the law. Others said that exceptions could be made. Still others suggested trying to bargain with the owner of the drugstore.

  But then you tried to change their answer by giving a name to the person who was ill. What if it was not a stranger, but your friend? Your pet? Your mother?

  Roanoke cleared his throat. "I'm going to present a situation to you, I'd like you to tell me what you'd do in the circumstances." He raised the paper to scan it in the original situational form, as Kohlberg had designed it. " 'Your wife,' " he read, " 'is dying of a very rare and painful disease.' "

  He stopped when he realized something was casting a shadow on the page. Jamie MacDonald was standing, all six feet four inches of him towering over Roanoke Martin and effectively ending the interview. "You'll forgive me," Jamie said quietly, turning to leave, "but I think we've already covered this."

  Was she joking when she said it?" Graham asked. "You know, a funny ha-ha kind of comment you'd make to your best friend?"

  He and Allie were sitting on one side of a red plastic booth at the Cummington Taco Bell; Pauline Cioffi was on the other side.

  She had come with her children, apologetically saying she really didn't have a choice in the matter; they seemed to be parasitically attached until they got their learner's permits for driving.

  "Maggie had a sense of humor," Pauline said, "but she also had taste. You don't say, 'I'm going to ask Jamie to kill me,' in the same breath you'd say you were going to ask him to take the luggage down from the attic and then fix the back sprinkler."

  "Those were the words she used?" Allie asked. "Exactly?"

  Pauline shook her head. "I can't be entirely sure, but it was close."

  "And what did you say?" Graham pressed.

  "I offered her the use of my kids for a week," Pauline said. "That would do in Mother Teresa."

  Graham scrunched down slightly on the banquette. "So you did make a joke out of it."

  "I did, but when I said that, she grabbed my hand. That wasn't something she did a lot--you have to understand, she wasn't one of these touchy-feely friends who hug all the time. Anyway, so she grabbed my hand and she made me look right at her and she said, 'I mean it.' "

  From the indoor playground at the back of the restaurant, one of Pauline's children starred wailing. "What made her think Jamie would do it?" Allie asked.

  Pauline turned her head in the direction of her crying son. "You're all right," she called out. "Now what was that? Why would Jamie do it?" She shrugged. "Jamie would have slit his own throat if it made Maggie happy, and thought about the consequences after the fact."

  Graham made a low, strangled noise. Allie glanced at him, but his fingers were steepled together in front of his face and she could not read him well enough to know what he was thinking. "You'd call their relationship a close one, then?"

  Pauline smiled sadly. "Apparently too close for comfort."

&n