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The Interview

Bob Strother

    Benton Wellborn checked his watch, took one last look at his case notes, and sighed. Almost time for my one-thirty. He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, then rose from behind his desk and walked to the window. The view was unexceptional—paved parking lot, fissured here and there by tree roots that had tunneled their way over from a narrow grassy area dotted with old live oaks and a few pecan trees. Beyond that a high, black wrought iron fence encircled the facility’s grounds and protected the good citizens of Savannah from a veritable hodgepodge of criminally deranged individuals. Nevertheless, and despite its undeniably institutional appearance, the view always had a calming effect on Wellborn.
    A knock interrupted his reverie, and Wellborn turned just as his office door swung open. Gordon Michaels, one of the orderlies, loomed large in the entranceway, and, behind him, Drew Danner, the patient Benton had been seeing for almost three months. “Please,” Wellborn said, “y’all come on in.”
    Gordon stepped to one side and Danner entered, a pleasant expression on his not-quite handsome face. Once again, Wellborn was struck by the man’s appearance and gentle demeanor, thinking, He looks more like a college professor than a serial killer. Danner took a seat in front of the desk.
    The orderly glanced first at Wellborn, then at the back of Danner’s head. “I’ll be outside if you need me, Doctor.”
    “Now Gordon, I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Wellborn said, returning to his chair. As Gordon pulled the door shut, Wellborn leaned forward and interlocked his fingers on the smooth surface of his desk. “Well, Mister Danner, how’re you doing today?”
    Danner crossed one leg over the other and leaned back. “I’m fine, Wellborn. What about yourself?”
    Wellborn smiled. He allowed the informality as a way of getting Danner to feel more comfortable. “I’ll do, I reckon. Thank you.” He took a moment to study his patient. Danner, once a successful shrimp boat operator, was suspected of having murdered three young women. A pre-trial examination had landed Danner at Graves Psychiatric Facility, with Wellborn as his doctor. While the evidence was compelling, it was primarily circumstantial, and Danner had thus far refused to acknowledge his crimes.
    The case was proving to be one of the most challenging of Wellborn’s career, but he remained determined to see it through to a satisfying conclusion. For a while, the two men exchanged opinions on the weather, the hospital food, and other trivialities. Then Wellborn asked, “What should we talk about today, Mister Danner? Got anything on your mind?”
    “Just what everyone’s always asking about,” Danner said. “The murders, I guess.”
    “Well, then, go ahead.”
    Danner shook his head. “You go first.”
    Wellborn closed his eyes. This was the way it had been for months, this little dance that Danner did to begin each session. Wellborn indulged him, trying every trick he knew to draw the man out, to study the multiple signals—word usage, voice pitch, gestures—that, in other patients, often revealed their emotions and motivations. But to Wellborn’s continuing dismay, Danner remained a blank page.
    “All right, then, let’s talk about Kelly Rhodes.”
    Kelly Rhodes had been found behind a night club near the marina, beaten, raped and strangled—the only girl whose body had been recovered to date. She was twenty-two at the time of her death, twice divorced, and the mother a five-year-old girl.
    Wellborn plucked a pencil from the coffee cup on his desk and tapped the eraser end on his stack of case notes. “We know you went to The Outcast on the night Kelly was killed, and we know you were seen having a beer with her. Maybe you just wanted some company. She might even have seemed to come on to you. You know what I mean—the way these young girls dress, belly button rings, too much cleavage, that sort of thing. Could be she was messing with you. There she is, you’ve seen her at the bar before, probably flirting with other guys—young girl, pretty, long hair, and maybe you resisted for a while, maybe a long while.”
    Wellborn paused briefly. Danner stared at him impassively, barely blinking, scrutinizing Wellborn—it appeared—as one might an insect under a microscope.
    “But a man can only resist for so long, right, once his fire kindles? And so maybe you talk her into going out back with you. Just to talk, for all I know, just needing a little companionship. A man gets lonely sometimes. But then, you know, the way girls can get, all hysterical, and maybe you got scared. Maybe she smacked you or threatened you, said she had a boyfriend she’d sic on you. Maybe she tried to run, and you didn’t mean for things to happen the way they did. Maybe it was all an accident, her winding up dead.”
    Wellborn kept talking in his calm voice, as if rape and murder seemed somehow logical, just the natural order of things. “I knew a guy once who started drinking with his best friend, and when the guy woke up, there was his friend with a bullet hole right between his eyes.” Talking about how reasonable it would have been for Danner to have raped and strangled that girl, how sometimes women wanted to get raped, and how maybe Danner was just doing what Kelly wanted all along.
    “Sometimes,” Wellborn said, “we just do bad things without knowing the reasons. Things can kind of get out of hand, and everything moves too fast. Is that what happened with Kelly, Mister Danner? Did things just get out of hand?”
    Danner had not moved—one leg crossed over the other, leaning back in his chair, hands folded in his lap. Wellborn ran his tongue over his lips, thinking, He is the stillest man I’ve ever seen.
    Eventually, Danner turned and looked out toward the window where the afternoon sun was lodged in the upper branches of the live oaks. Then he turned back, a wistful smile playing on his face. “I don’t know, Wellborn. Did they?” Danner tilted his head to one side and the smile widened then disappeared altogether. For several minutes, neither man said another word.
    Finally, Wellborn dropped the pencil he’d been playing with and massaged his temples. Would this game never end? He fought to remain in control of his temper, to remain professional in spite of his apparent inability to make some inroad, some modicum of progress with this most perplexing man.
    When he looked up again, he saw Gordon Michael’s face peering in through the small window of his office door. Thank goodness, he thought. Enough’s enough. “That’ll be all for today, Mister Danner. I have a consult coming up. The orderly will see you out now, but we’ll get together again next week.”
    Danner nodded and rose from his chair. “Yes, Wellborn, we surely will.”

.....

    Gordon opened the door, moved back allowing Danner to pass through, then closed it and thumbed the outside lock. Through the window he saw a frowning Wellborn bent over the rolling tray table he called his desk, scribbling furiously on the pages of blank note paper the facility supplied. Then he turned to Danner and raised his eyebrows. “How’d it go, Doctor? Y’all make any new breakthroughs today?”
    The doctor backed away, red-faced, shaking his head in apparent frustration. “Give me a break, Gordon. It’s Friday afternoon. I’m off in a couple of hours, and all I want to do is go home, drink some bourbon, make love to my wife, and forget about this goddamn hellhole for the next forty-eight hours. The absolute last thing I need right now is to be quizzed on my progress by the help.”
    Gordon shrugged and watched Danner stomp down the hallway. Well, fuck me for asking. He walked back to his station and flipped open the economics text book he used for his night classes. Eight more months and he was out of here. And not a day too soon, either. More and more, he thought, it’s getting harder to tell the staff from the inmates.

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