By Reason of Insanity Read online

  This wasn't right. Something was very off about this entire scenario.

  Lawrence was a billionaire, for the love of God. Regina thought that a guy like him was probably going to get his freak on with strange people who were rich, just like him. Regina thought that rich people preferred to hang with people like them. The rich people on ALT.com would attract other rich people. They wouldn’t be attracting a toothless wonder living in a little slum like this Brock person was.

  “Yeah, I was going to ask you Lawrence and Marina. I guess you’ve been hooking up with them for the past few months?”

  Brock smiled. He was sitting on the floor next to Regina, who was leaning back in the leather recliner that was apparently taken off of the street somewhere. It wasn’t the most comfortable recliner in the entire world, considering it not only had a hole going down the middle of it, but the back cushion was so worn down that she could feel the springs jabbing into her spine. Not that she really cared about that. She wasn’t exactly somebody who had to have comfort at all times. She was anything but. But she still thought it was very strange that this individual was somebody who knew two people like Marina and Lawrence.

  "Yeah, they're a lot of fun,” Brock said.

  "What did you do with them?"

  "Well, I sold them drugs." And he smiled his toothless smile. “Oh I know that you actually got my name from some of the people that they were hooking up with on alt.com. Listen, I put certain codewords into my profile that told anybody who was looking at me what it is I really wanted to do. They weren't swinging with me. I can almost guarantee that."

  Regina was still confused. I mean, this guy was a drug dealer, but he couldn’t have been a very good one. He was obviously broke. If somebody was going to sell drugs to a rich guy like Lawrence and his wife, he certainly would not be staying in a slum like this.

  "Nice try. What did you really do with them?” Regina asked.

  "What do you mean?” he asked. “You don't believe me?"

  "No. I don't believe you. I'm sorry, I hate to be blunt, but that's kind of the way I roll. You are not a high-powered drug dealer. If you were, you wouldn’t be living here. You would have had your teeth fixed. You would have showered in the past week or so and I would hazard a guess that the reason why you haven’t showered is probably because your shower isn't working. And you probably have called your supervisor time and time again about it, and he refuses to fix it . How close am I?"

  The smile never left the guy’s face. "Okay, you got me."

  "So, how did you really know Lawrence and Marina?” Regina asked. “That's the question of the day. What were they to you? I refuse to believe that you were hooking up with them with either sex or drugs. So, what gives? How did you know them?”

  At this point, the guy’s smile finally left his face. “What is it that you want to know about Marina and Lawrence?" he asked her without answering her earlier question.

  “Well, you know what happened to Lawrence, don't you?" Regina asked him.

  "Of course. Somebody shot him in the face three times. Marina was arrested for the murder. I mean I just know about this because this is what I read about in the paper.”

  “So, are you telling me that you didn't know about the murder except for what it is that you read in the paper?" Regina asked.

  "That's exactly what I'm telling you,” he said. “I was not that close with them.”

  "Listen, I don't know what kind of game you think that you're playing here,” Regina said impatiently. “I asked you a question earlier, and I would like an answer to it. Lawrence and Regina contacted you on your Alt.com profile. You’ve been in contact with them ever since. You and I both know that you're probably not their type. Not sexually, and not as a drug hook up, either. I’m going to hazard a guess that you probably have no visible means of income, except for maybe welfare or disability."

  Regina thought that she might've been onto something. Maybe the guy was mentally disabled and he knew Marina from the mental institution. That would actually make a lot of sense, one hell of a lot more sense than that he actually knew them some other way. She felt sorry for the guy, in a way, but at the same time, she was getting impatient with his obvious lying.

  "What makes you think I don't have any visible means of income, besides disability?” he asked.

  “Isn't it obvious?" Regina shot back. “Listen, the reason why I'm talking to you is because I thought that there was a possibility that maybe you were hooking up with these two and you know something. Maybe you knew that there was some kind of a jealous lover’s quarrel or something of the sort. Maybe you wanted kill him, and you knew that Marina and Lawrence were fighting, so you knew that you could frame her. Maybe you had something against both of them, and killing him and framing her would be the perfect mode of revenge. Wouldn't it?" She was shooting in the dark and she knew it, but, still, she watched him carefully for his reaction to her accusations.

  Regina was disappointed when he simply said “yes, I suppose it would be. I suppose it would be at that."

  But that was all he said. He was not going to commit to anything else, and Regina knew it.

  She was still extremely curious as to exactly how it was he knew these two, and she was going to have a keep him in mind. After all, he apparently was violent, judging from the fact that he had restraining orders against him. So she was going to have to keep him at the top of her list of people who she was going to have to follow up on.

  Still, she decided that she was going to try to press him a little bit more. "Listen, I don't know what kind of game you're playing. And quite frankly, I don't really care. I just want to know if there is anything that you know about these two that you can tell me. Anything at all."

  He rocked a little bit on the floor next to her, the smile never leaving his face. It was almost creepy the way he smiled. He certainly didn’t have a reason to smile at that moment. Regina was pressing him, and he could possibly have been in trouble. But it didn't matter to him, apparently, because he just kept smiling.

  "No, there's not much I can really tell you about them."

  "Okay then. I'm going to keep you on my list, however. And I would appreciate it if you could tell me if there’s anybody else I should talk to about Lawrence's murder."

  He shook his head a bit. "And how do you know he was murdered?"

  What kind of question was that? “Because he was shot in the face three times. Of course he was murdered. Why would you even ask that question?"

  “Are you saying that he definitely was shot in the face three times? You got the ballistic report?”

  Regina had to admit that she had not yet gotten a hold of the file for this case. She'd ordered it, and it wasn’t like her to not get the file before talking to witnesses, which was her first mistake. A rookie mistake. She had to admit to him that she had not seen the ballistics report. In fact, she had only heard that Lawrence was shot three times in the face through the media. Did the media get it wrong? That wouldn’t be unheard of.

  "What are you saying?" Regina asked.

  He just shrugged his shoulders. "I'm not saying anything. Although I will tell you that I did know the two of them. They didn't get along very well. I'm sure that Marina probably said something about the fights. Right?"

  "Yes, of course she talked about the fights. But maybe you can tell me a little more about them?”

  "All I know is what she told me. She would confide in me. She told me that they would have terrible fights, where he would beat on her. He was very controlling. According to Marina, he didn't want her to do anything outside the house, really. You know, he definitely didn’t want her to work. He had a hard time with her even going out with her friends. He isolated her. You know, like an abuser would. And I don't really know if he was abusing her, but I do know that he made her feel like she was a bit of a prisoner in her own home."

  Regina watched Brock while he spoke. There was something off about his body language. About the way he just kept smiling when he
was talking about the supposed emotional and physical abuse that Marina was going through at the hands of Lawrence. Regina was very good at reading people, and she thought that he was probably lying.

  Why he was lying, she didn't know. It was like he was covering for Marina.

  Why would he be covering for her? She still didn't know exactly what relationship he had with the two of them. But it seemed that there was a possibility that he was closer to her than he was with him.

  "I see." Regina narrowed her eyes. “That's not how I understood things to be. I know she wasn't working, but she did have friends. She went out with them, sometimes a lot. She wasn't isolated at all. So why would you say that she was?"

  He just shrugged his shoulders, “Listen, I’m just trying to blow smoke up your butt. I didn't really know those two. Not at all. I just wanted to give you a good story, and I suppose that was as good of one as any. But I think you need to talk to somebody else."

  "Okay, could you give me any names of people who I should talk to?"

  He just chuckled a little bit. “I’ll be sure and get back with you if I can figure that out. In the meantime, I really have to get to work." He motioned over to a computer that was on a card table in the corner of the room. The computer was so old that it still had the old-school monitor – the glass face with the large cone of hard plastic behind it. It wasn’t a flatscreen like a modern monitor.

  He looked over at the computer, and Regina looked over at him. "I got it off the curb,” he said. “What can I say, I can't afford much of anything."

  “What do you do on that computer?” Regina asked.

  "I do surveys online. It's all I do. And they don't pay much at all. And, as you can probably tell, I do live on the government dime. Disability."

  "Can I ask what your disability is?" Regina asked.

  "You can probably figure it out. You're a smart person. You can probably figure out what my disability is. If you figure that out, you can probably figure out how it is I know Marina. Now, really, I would like for you to leave."

  Regina felt stupid. Of course. Of course he probably knew Marina through one her stays in the hospital.

  “Are you mentally ill?" Regina asked him, point blank.

  He shook his head and smiled.

  "No. I’ve not been diagnosed with mental illness. At least not yet."

  He was speaking in riddles, and Regina didn't like it. "Okay, dude. I guess then that this is where I leave you. Although, as I said, I am not going to necessarily let you off the hook. I'm going to try to figure out what's going on, and I might come back to talk to you some more. So don't go too far. That's all I'm asking."

  "Okay. I won't."

  Regina left the stinking apartment, making her way to her car, which she was afraid was going to get jacked in this neighborhood.

  That guy was extremely odd. To say the very least. And nothing that he told her made sense. It all seemed to be either a lie, or just plain nonsensical.

  At the same time, deep down, Regina knew that there was something familiar about that guy. Like she had seen him before, although she knew that she hadn’t. So why did she get the feeling of déjà vu?

  And what was all that about him being disabled, and that somehow was associated with Marina?

  Or maybe it was associated with Lawrence?

  Whatever it was, Regina knew that she was going to have to try to figure it out.

  Chapter 8

  Aidan

  When I got to the courtroom for Marina’s arraignment, I saw her walking in with the other inmates. They were all chained together, their wrists and ankles shackled together. They moved as one over to the cubicle were they would address the judge from behind a bulletproof glass. A guard unlocked them, but they still had their hands shackled together, even though they were now individuals, not just part of one large mass of people.

  "You going to get me out of this joint?" Marina asked me.

  “I’ll try. I think I can. The prosecutor’s telling me that she's going to ask for a $5 million bond, and it looks like the judge is probably going to go along with it. I think you have that kind of money, don't you?"

  She snorted. "Well, let me see. I was married to my husband for the past eight years. He gave me a million dollars a year. And I never spent that money, because I lived off of him all this time. So, yeah, you're in luck. I have that kind of money. You think you can actually get it done?"

  "I wouldn’t say it to you if I didn't think that it was doable. I wouldn’t get your hopes up like that."

  Marina nodded her head. "My roommate, Alyssa, she killed her self last night." She smiled. "You ever hear a rumor in college where they said that if your roommate killed herself during the school year that you would be able to get automatic As in all your classes? They even made some kind of movie about it, you know. Some kind of horror flick."

  I had a laugh about that. Yes, that was a story that went around my college, just like with everyone else's college. I went to UCLA, and, just like Regina was talking about, there was a story that if one's roommate committed suicide during the year that you would get an automatic free pass throughout all your classes. Automatic As. I never believed it, and I knew that it was some kind of bullshit urban legend. But I wondered what she was getting at.

  "Yeah, I heard about that. Why?"

  "Well, my cellmate died. She hanged herself from a bed sheet. I saw her do it. I don't know why they gave her a bedsheet in the first place, but I guess that they probably wanted her to hang herself. What can I say. Anyhow, I'm traumatized. I think you should ask the judge if I could just go free, because of the trauma of seeing my roommate, my cellmate, off herself like that."

  Just then, one of Marina's jail mates, a girl by the name of Sabrina, with dirty blonde hair, a washed out complexion, and pox all over her face, piped in. "She shouldn't get any kind of favors, because she's the one who made her cellmate kill herself. Telling her that lie about her boyfriend. What kind of person are you?"

  Marina just shrugged her shoulders. "Hey, I was doing her a favor. That guy is a tool, to say the very least. I mean, he let her take the fall for his bullshit? What kind of guy is that? She deserved so much better. I was just trying to get her away from him.”

  "No you weren't. You didn't care if Alyssa was involved with a guy who was using her. You just wanted to hurt her. And that's just the way you are. You just want to hurt people. The weaker they are, the more you want to twist the knife. You twisted that knife so hard that she couldn't stand it."

  Marina just smiled at me. “You're looking extremely handsome today. Who’s your tailor?”

  I looked down at my suit, which was charcoal gray, and I had to admit that it did fit like a glove. The one thing I really wanted to do when I got this job was to look extremely sharp, so I didn't go to Men's Warehouse to get my clothes - I went to Nordstrom's, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale's. I found a personal shopper who made sure that everything was tailored just-so. Part of me was happy that she noticed my suit, but part of me also knew that she was just saying stuff to me because she wanted me to be buttered up. She probably didn’t want me to ask her questions about the death of her poor cellmate.

  “I don’t have a tailor. Listen, tell me about this Alyssa chick. What really happened with her?"

  "I don't know. All I know is that I told her a few white lies about her boyfriend, who caused her to be in jail in the first place. The next thing I know, she’s hanging from the top bunk. It wasn't my fault that happened. It was the fault of the jail for letting her have a bedsheet in the first place. She should’ve been under suicide watch after she found out that her boyfriend was banging somebody else."

  I was confused. "I thought you said that the story that you told her about her boyfriend was a lie?”

  Marina's blue eyes seemed to darken, although I was sure I was just imagining that. She blinked a few times, and then she smiled. “Do you believe everything I tell you?” she purred sweetly. “Now listen, I told you two differen
t things. You obviously have to believe one of them, don't you? Do you believe that I lied to her about her boyfriend, or do you believe that I told her the truth about her boyfriend, and she just didn't want to hear it? Which do you believe?"

  I looked over at Sabrina, who was shaking her head. "Don't fall for it. Nothing that comes out of this woman's mouth is the truth."

  "That's not true,” Marina said. “I do tell the truth. I also tell a lot of lies. It's up to you to try to determine which is which. If you can do that, then you’ll have no problem at all defending me. Now, back to my original question. Which story do you believe about Alyssa?”

  "I'm not playing your games,” I said. “I’m your attorney, and just as sure as I'm on your case, I can withdraw from it. In fact, I would like to."

  "No, in fact you cannot withdraw from my case,” she said. “You don't think I know that James gave you this case, and that if you decide to go ahead and drop me as your client, James is going to fire you? He will, you know. You'll be out on the street tomorrow. Of course, a guy as gorgeous as you would have absolutely no problem trying to find another job, but I think you like this one. And, I think that you don't want to admit it, but I think you like me. I think you like me like you like that other girl, that Regina girl that came in with you. I think you just don't want to admit it, though. Sad, really."

  I had to admit that when Marina was talking to me that there was something that was stirring inside of me that was very uncomfortable. That was the one thing that I’d always learned about people with Borderline Personality Disorder. They can be extremely seductive. Charming. You always had to watch your back with them, because if you didn't, there would soon be a knife protruding from it.

  "No, actually, I think of you just as another client."

  I looked at Marina, and I noticed that she was breathing very heavily, in and out of her nose and mouth.

  "You leave me, and you'll see what happens to you,” she said in a tone of voice that almost made me think that she was possessed by something. It was a strange, like Mercedes McCambridge's voice coming out of little Linda Blair in The Exorcist.