Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues by Loren Rhoads

Author:Loren Rhoads
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Brain Salad Surgery

by Seth Flagsberg

I heard him before I saw him. The clink and clank from the metal chains around his ankles announced his arrival. When he turned the corner, the fluorescent jail lights reflected off the handcuffs on his scrawny wrists. He was joking with the steroid advertisement in the blue corrections officer jumpsuit escorting him to me.

I was still shaking off the early November chill, standing to the right of the painted red line that ran the length of the linoleum floor. I leaned against the open doorway of one of the little attorney conference rooms—with the red panic buttons and the white plastic chairs—waiting to meet my new client.

I wasn’t scared when the red metal door shut with a dull thud and I heard the latch locking us in. Ron Donsteel was the first murderer I was ever locked alone in a room with, but he looked like a retired accountant or high school science teacher or someone’s grandfather. He didn’t look like a guy who would use a ballpeen hammer to bludgeon a sleeping man to death in the middle of the night while four other people, including a six-year-old girl, slept nearby.

Ron was in his late sixties, short and wiry, with a day’s growth of salt-and-pepper stubble and a shock of grayish white hair sticking up from his head like a lawn whose owner had been on a lengthy vacation. He was dressed in a red jumpsuit, the usual garb for violent prisoners, which made his pale skin even whiter and his gray-blue eyes even shinier. The one idiosyncrasy was his fingernails. They jutted from his fingers like dirty icicles. He looked more like an elderly Howard Hughes than a cold-blooded killer.

Before I could introduce myself or give Ron the business card I’d been nervously shuffling in my pocket, he asked, “Why do American men prefer Mexican prostitutes?” (Not the first question I expected.) Eyes glinting, Ron cackled, “Frijoles.”

For the next ten minutes, while Ron told a few more dirty jokes, I wondered if I’d chosen the right profession. Then he fixed me with those gray-blue eyes and asked, “You’re my lawyer, huh? When are you going to get me out of here?”

Ron expected to be released soon. Very soon. Ron was adamant that he had no choice but to kill. Ron believed he was no different from a man who finds a burglar in his house and shoots and kills him. Ron had absolutely no doubt the jury would see that he was justified. He insisted on a speedy trial so he could get back to work. As I packed up my belongings to leave, Ron said, “I’d like to be out in time for Thanksgiving.”

The police reports made it clear the case was no whodunit. At 4:19 A.M. on October 24, the 911 operator received a call from a Denny’s restaurant two blocks from Ron’s house. A traumatized woman breathlessly reported that her landlord had attacked one of his tenants with a hammer, there was blood everywhere, and the tenant might be dead.

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