Free Pain Killers by Jerry Stahl Page A

Father-in-law rejected him.
     
    I studied his sideshow grill. The drama of the nongifted criminal. Can’t stalk her if you can’t find her, huh, buddy? Who hasn’t been
there
?
     
Perp purchased gun from Mex. (unknown) gardener who kept the .45 in a case of hose nozzles. Seepage may have warped the barrel.
     
    “Andre Duquesne” was handwritten on the next file. Possibly the classiest name I had ever heard. But the file was empty.
     
BERNARD ROOKS, 21, African-American, possession with intent to distribute 100 grams of crack cocaine, 15 years.
     
    As opposed to the one and a half he’d have gotten if it had been powder. The photo showed a burly, sad-faced youngster. There was a CDC memo paper-clipped to the file cover. Now that the U.S. Sentencing Commission had issued retroactive sentence reductions to balance the crack versus powder disparity, offenders could appeal to the original judge who sentenced them. Nothing said willingness to a sentencing board more than completion of a drug program. Someone else with real motivation.
    And finally, his file yellow—“Fritz Ullman, 97, Caucasian” stared up from his mug shot with the same mocking, outraged eyes, trim mustache, and Jack Lemmon–esque features I’d seen the day I stumbled onto Sun Myung, Clarence Thomas, and Jerry Falwell on my bedroom dresser. The face had another five decades on it. The hair was white. Gone was the smart SS uniform.
    The original file was almost completely blacked out, leaving only a few “of”s and “the”s. Along with this information-free document, someone had inserted a single folded sheet of legal paper. I unfolded it and read, in pencil:
     
Arrested for attempted vehicular manslaughter, perp convicted of hit-and-run and fleeing the scene of an accident. Three years.
     
    …More intriguing, a search turned up evidence of “lab equipment—probably drug-related—in his van, which belonged to the Department of Animal Control. A public defender got the van search thrown out, so “Fritz” did not have narcotic charges added to his vehicular manslaughter…. A supplemental psych eval revealed:
     
Inmate C-899923 exhibited delusional behavior, possibly methamphetamine psychosis. (The court noted defendant’s “angry affect” and “explosive outbursts.”) Inmate claims to be “Dr. Josef Mingola” (sic) a “high-ranking SS man and ‘race scientist,’” and demanded to speak with the head of the FDA. …Asked if he heard voices, perp responded in affirmative—“but none of them speak German.” Believed to be highly intelligent. Prescribed Depakote for bipolar disorder, Effexor for depression, a senior multivitamin supplement, and a weekly enema.
     
    Maybe he was enjoying himself.
     
     
    I sat back to ponder my quarry.
    He seemed, on the face of it, an unremarkable old man. Who was possibly a mass murderer. He wanted the world to know. Which was either a strong indication he was lying or evidence of his veracity. Assuming he wasn’t simply schizophrenic, possessed of a peculiar sense of humor or paid to impersonate Josef Mengele…My guess was poor Number Four: senility.
    Zell wanted my opinion. I needed the work. I didn’t tell him the dirty little secret: the least-effective method of finding out if someone over eighty is telling the truth is by talking to them. Everybody told stories. But, unlike younger liars, sometimes our senior prevaricators did not know they were telling them.
    I’d known Alzheimer’s victims who took on the identity of TV characters and historical figures. They forgot details of their own past but superimposed, like senior idiot savants, facts and details from the lives of others. Back in Upper Marilyn, the small town where I cut my cop teeth, I’d rounded up two wandering octogenarian men who thought they were famous, one Lincoln and one Lee Marvin, and a great-grandmother who claimed to be Lady Bird Johnson and kept taking her clothes off in mall fountains. If you were old