The Hearts of the Condemned

The sound of the phone call that had roused me from dreamless sleep was still ringing in my head as I leapt the stone steps and crashed through the front doors of the precinct, coat pulled over my head to shield me from the driving rain. Security didn’t seem remotely surprised by the violent intrusion, but then again they knew who I was and why I was there. As a matter of fact, I’d passed in and out of those same glass doors at least twice a day for the past eight years – rain or shine, day and night.

Case in point.

The night was unseasonably chilly. It was the kind of cold you feel in your bones regardless of how many layers you put on, and the rain was frigid to boot. It was perfectly ironic, almost tragically beautiful in a Hollywood sense of the word: the perfect setting for the opening scene to a horror movie, a tragedy, a sappy love story. Unfortunately, while the cinema paints rosy pictures, life pierces you with the roses’ thorns.

I stood in the marble foyer, shaking rain from my hair, and by the time I heard the footsteps approaching, Lieutenant Chardonnay Driscoll was standing in front of me. I often wondered if her parents had been connoisseurs of fine wine or if they’d just liked French words, but I figured it would be rude to ask directly. It was a pretty word to say, regardless. Hers was a thin face and a nice figure – even in rigid cop blues. She’d been born with a cleft palate, but the scar was somehow becoming. There had been a mutual interest between us ever since her transfer to the force almost a year ago, but she was still receiving letters from back home signed “love” and I was still wearing my wedding band.

She thrust the thick folder into my arms without introduction, flashing white teeth in a weary smile. Apparently she hadn’t gotten much sleep either. “Want a coffee?”

“Please,” I grunted, embracing the folder tightly to my chest to keep its contents from sliding to the linoleum. “What’s this all about?”

She turned to walk, so I fell into step with her – dripping and fighting the shivers. The precinct’s main hall was dark and narrow but wide enough for us to walk comfortably abreast. “He’ll tell you himself,” she replied without elaboration. “Basically we’ve got a full confession now.”

I frowned, busy collecting the case folder safely beneath one arm. “He confessed at the crime scene and led us to the body. That’s more than enough for indictment.”

“Sure, but now we have the whole story.” She sent me a sidelong look – the meaningful kind that you’re meant to notice but not acknowledge. “He’s gonna get a full twenty–five to life, guaranteed.”

“Dorsey coulda gotten that sentence without a confession,” I remarked, like it was really worth discussing. Ross Dorsey, our prosecuting attorney, had a stellar career. In ten years, he’d only lost three cases, won 147 convictions, and settled twice that many outside the courtroom. With that territory naturally came a tremendous ego, but I’d cede that to him any day for putting away my perps.

“Still,” Chardonnay said, “it’s nice to seal the deal.” We’d reached the interrogation room, so we came to a halt side–by–side, looking through the two–way mirror at the convict.

Unlike Dorsey, I’m not a braggart. However, I do have to say that in all my years with law enforcement, I’ve seen a lot of disturbing things. I’ve arrested my fair share of whack jobs after catching them in the middle of things the common man could never possibly imagine – even in his worst nightmares. Yet despite all my experience and the callousness I’d developed towards violence of all kinds, there was something chilling about this man in particular – something eerie that set my skin crawling when I looked at him. I’d definitely seen worse than him, dealt with bloodier crimes, gotten my hands filthier.

Yet he was the one to make me uneasy.

The nature of the crime itself was certainly disturbing. The guy commits murder in the dead of night with intent but without credible motive – suffocates an old man with his own mattress. Then, he dismembers the body and hides it in the floor. When cops come to the house in response to a 911 call, he parades them around the crime scene, confident that he did the thing perfectly. Then, he suffers a nervous breakdown before my police detail and confesses everything – starts tearing up the floorboards to reveal the bloody remains, ranting about the old man’s rotten heart.

We had incriminating evidence full of fingerprints: the hacksaw used to cut off the old man’s head and limbs, the antique lantern the perp had carried with him into the bedroom, the crowbar he’d used to pry up the floorboards. But the man’s un–coerced admission of guilt would render all those items mere trinkets before a jury.

I cleared my throat and turned to Chardonnay. “Coffee?”

She blew a laugh out of her nose and tipped me a mock–salute. “As ordered.”

She turned to go, and I turned to the heavy door. I tapped the pin number into the keypad and waited for the electronic beep to herald entrance. The atmosphere remained the same as I stepped inside, yet I felt the oxygen tighten palpably in my lungs. Frost prickled in my spine, making me shiver. Maybe it was just leftover chill from the rain.

Behind me now, the door chimed again, and I was locked in with the murderer.

He looked up at me as I approached, but only for a second. He was rocking tirelessly in the wooden chair, manacled hands threaded through the slats behind his back. His eyes were wide and rolling, darting ceaselessly to each corner of the room and back again, never still.

The small room stank of his nervousness and somehow seemed to crush him down where he sat. The fluorescent overheads were dim – certainly not bright enough to clearly make out any distinguishing features – but I already knew what to expect. Waxen cheeks, hollowed and yellow; crow’s feet blackening his bloodshot eyes; ratty hair just brushing his shoulders; perspiration shining on his upper lip. Aside from the brutal crime he had committed, there was no reason to doubt the fact that John Halloway was mentally unstable. The nervous habits he displayed were only byproducts of nature’s deeper sin. Dr. Rudey, the precinct’s resident shrink, had pronounced Halloway a paranoid schizophrenic experiencing persecutory delusions – in his words, “clear as day”. In short, the kid was a mental and emotional wreck. According to the folder which I dropped onto the tabletop, Halloway was only 24 years of age, yet the general pallor of unhealthiness hanging on his bones aged his appearance by a decade or more.

“Hi, John,” I said, politely but not quite warmly. It was the type of greeting you save for an unloved relative: familiar but distant. “Do you remember me?”

Silence, save for the squeak of the chair. The pace of his rocking had increased.

Then, he mumbled: “Detective Spence.”

I tried to smile, but it manifested as more of a pained grimace. He wasn’t looking at my face anyway, so it didn’t make much of a difference.

For a moment, I stood there, then pulled out the second chair and seated myself facing him. I folded my hands on the steel table and leaned forward, pursing my lips. Our eyes met for the barest of moments, and then he looked away again almost in sheer panic. He hated being seen – as though he fully recognized what a wretch he was. Yet, from the background checks we’d run on him, I’d come to understand that it had not always been so.

Before I could say anything else, he surprised me. “Did you look at it yet?”

I drew my brows together. “Look at what, John?”

He twitched almost violently, and his eyes came to rest upon the folder lying on the table between us – the barrier between order and chaos. “My story.”

For a moment I watched him in confusion. Then, I looked down at the folder too. Suddenly I realized that it was thicker than it had been the last time I’d perused its contents, which meant Chardonnay had actually secured a written statement.

Jackpot, I thought, and then looked back up at Halloway. “What’s your story about, John?”

He was looking frantically around the room again, rocking faster than ever. “I’m not mad.”

“I didn’t say you were,” I replied calmly.

“Read it,” he demanded, and suddenly his voice was stronger. Almost angry. “Read it, Detective Spence.”

Warily, I flipped open the packet and looked down at the topmost leaf of paper – the newest addition. It was lined and ragged at the edges, clearly torn from a spiral–bound notebook. The sheet and the five or six more beneath it were crumpled and ragged, covered – margins and all – in an untidy scrawl of childlike letters, large and mostly capitals. I glanced down the page, trying to ignore the sensation of ice water trickling into my guts.

“This is your confession?” I asked finally, looking up at him again.

“My explanation,” he countered. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t meet my eyes. “You have to know why.”

“Why what, John?”

His twitching eyes grew more intense, more fanatical. They became fixated on a random spot of floor. “Why I killed him.”

I watched him intently as he visibly worked his jaw, still rocking. The veins in his temple and neck were pulsing in time with the squeaking of his chair. “John, Detective Sable and I have both heard your explanation already. You killed because you’re unstable.”

“I’m not mad,” he said immediately, repeating himself.

Methinks you protesteth too much, I thought. Aloud: “Don’t put words in my mouth, John. I didn’t say you’re mad –”

“I’m not fucking mad!!” he screamed, catching me by surprise, rocking me back in my seat. “I’m not!”

His shriek echoed in the room, eerily, like a wraith filling the shadowy corners. His breathing was suddenly intense, laborious, raising and dropping his thin shoulders like waves. My own heart was pounding now and every fiber in my body was screaming at me to leave the room and – more importantly – leave him.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I was a cop – a detective – and I had a job to do.

For a long moment, we were both silent, listening to the buzzing overheads. Finally, I leaned forward again and spoke in a slow, disarming tone. “Okay, John. I’m sorry. You’re not mad. I understand. So will you… please… tell me why you killed your father?”

For a moment he said nothing, breathing noisily through flared nostrils. “My story,” he repeated finally, insistently. There was desperation in his broken voice: “Read it.”

“I will, John,” I promised. “I will.” And I certainly would. I’m a man of my word, with the one major exception of my failed marriage. Besides, the investigation demanded I be thorough. “But I want to hear it directly from you.”

He swallowed hard, and I watched him rock without saying anything else. Finally, he drew in a deep, steadying breath and began to speak in short, broken sentences – like a child first learning to string words together. There was an intense feeling of pity in my guts as I listened, much against my better judgment. The pain Halloway felt over the affair was very much physical and emotional, very much tangible. Yet, as a cop, I didn’t allow myself to feel perpetrators’ pain. They deserved the pain they felt in return for the pain they’d caused.

John Halloway was no exception.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” he said hesitantly, struggling to keep his voice even. “Not always. The old man was always kind to me. He never did anything to hurt me. But… but he got… he got under my skin. I couldn’t stand him. I loved him, but I hated him. Do you understand, Detective?”

I thought I did – far too well. After all, I’d been married for eight years before the divorce.

When he got no visible reaction from me, he licked his chapped lips, rocking now at an almost pensive rate. And then he began shaking his head back and forth, squeezing his demented eyes shut in agitation. “I just had to do something. I couldn’t live… like that. God, his awful… his awful, fucking awful eye…”

My throat tightened. “You killed him… because of the way he looked at you, John?”

Halloway shivered violently. The chair creaked and the manacles clanked. “Yes.”

“But you said he never did anything to hurt you,” I pressed. As much as I detested criminals, it was my responsibility to uncover all details of their crimes – regardless of whether or not it would mean lessening their sentences. “Correct?”

A sharp, singular nod.

“So… you killed him because he… irritated you?” I asked, trying to keep incredulity out of my voice. Halloway may have been unstable, but he wasn’t stupid enough to miss patronization.

His eyes were glassy and opaque as he flicked his gaze upwards to meet mine briefly. Soulless. “I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud of it at all. But I did it. And there’s nothing to be done about it. Not now.”

“For him, maybe,” I agreed grimly. “John, I hope you understand that you’re going to be put away for a long time. You’re not going to successfully plead insanity – a judge won’t hear it.”

“I plead guilty,” Halloway said immediately, not quite eagerly, but certainly with a firm resolution. “I did it. I’m guilty.”

“Tell me something, John,” I said, leaning forward on the table again. “Why didn’t you run after you killed your father? Why did you wait for police to come?”

A slack sort of smile split his pale lips. His teeth were very, very yellow, even in the darkness. He was a smoker for sure – a religious one. “I did it right, Detective. Don’t you take pride in your work?”

The implied comparison sparked a flash of anger and disgust within my chest, causing me to clench my jaw, but I held back the badgering comment that immediately came to mind. “Why did you give in?” I asked instead, evenly. I knew it would probably be easier to just leaf through his impromptu autobiography for the answer, but for some reason I’ve never really trusted things written on paper. “You’re right – you did it perfectly. We probably never would have found him if you hadn’t told us, and you could have gotten away with it. Why did you tell us, John?”

The smile was gone – instantaneously, like a candle’s flame under glass. He shook violently, and for a moment I thought he was having a seizure. But then he grew still again, no longer rocking, no longer looking nervously around the room.

His eyes met mine.

He said: “I… I heard… his heart.”

It was ridiculous, but the way he said it chilled me to the bone. There was suddenly cold sweat on my back and no moisture whatsoever in my mouth. My heart was suddenly thumping.

“Under the floor, he was giving me away. He was trying to tell your officers. He was calling to them.” John’s breathing was increasing again. He was sweating visibly, soaking the neck and underarms of the thin shirt he was wearing. “I had to give in. He was… he was in my head, Detective. He was still alive, even though I’d been so careful. He won. His fucking heart kept beating and beating… In my ears… I couldn’t stop it… I couldn’t let him win! He couldn’t have the last say.”

Halloway lapsed into silence again, and a moment later had resumed his rocking.

I stood slowly, almost numbly. His eyes followed me upright but fell short of my face. I gathered the folder without looking down and stuck it beneath my arm once again. “Thanks for your cooperation, John,” I said – because it was customary, not because I felt any real gratitude.

He said nothing in reply, so I turned to go. Security buzzed open the door, and I stepped back out into the hall, somehow feeling helpless and nonplussed. Weariness was weighing heavily on my mind, and I couldn’t seem to think about anything other than what Halloway had just said.

…his heart kept beating and beating…

Like mine the night Sammie had finally said “good–bye”.

The door slammed shut behind me and I turned to see Chardonnay approaching, carrying a Styrofoam cup in each hand. She fixed me with a surprised look – probably because she hadn’t expected me to be finished already. I shook my head as she came to stand before me, allowing the strange helplessness I felt to convey through the gesture. But I couldn’t speak.

“What is it, Jacob?” she asked, frowning with concern that ran deeper than mere partnership.

“His heart,” I said, and my voice came out in a croak.

“What about it?” she asked, almost in a whisper. Whatever it was that was eating me inside had suddenly taken root in her guts as well. It was a contagious weakness, a vulnerability against which every cop and soldier steels himself: fear.

I swallowed, and my throat scraped like sandpaper. “His conscience is what did him in, Chard. His own self–hate.”

Some semblance of relief crossed her face, smearing the worried wrinkles from her gentle forehead. But she still looked uneasy. “Well, Jake, that’s not so unusual. Criminals usually feel some sort of guilt over what they do. They are human after all. Most just choose not to show it.”

“I know, I know,” I said impatiently, shaking my head. My heart was still thumping in my ears, painfully loud. “It’s just…”

Patiently, Chardonnay waited. “Just what, Jake?”

“His heart,” I repeated pathetically, smiling in helpless abandon. The answer was simple because there was no mystery to solve: guilt and love can’t coexist. My failed marriage was a grim testament, a horribly grotesque parallel. “It was all his goddamn tell–tale heart.”

END

A/N: Just wanted to point out that I obviously took creative liberties with the factual matter of Poe’s The Tell–Tale Heart because there are no names in the text and there is no indication that “the old man” is actually the narrator’s father. Also, the original story obviously doesn’t take place in modern times.

Thanks, all.
“Ken”