Fact ot Fiction. I wish it was a dream and that I would wake up in bed next to Jane with Kevin and Sam arguing over the Nintendo game they were playing, but that won’t happen. I wish. I wasn’t much of a father for a few years after she was killed. I played that self-medication game for a couple of years, which didn’t work out. What were shrinks going to do – I went on an anti-depressant for a couple years – but therapy was a joke. I finally decided I needed to get on with my life – I stare into that pit of depression still, but I’m not going to fall in. Can’t. I thank the powers at Conrail that the fucking train didn’t come that day.

I’m working. Building decks. Some furniture – the four-poster bed is popular enough that I have orders to fill through the winter.

But you can believe the story or not. I lived through it. Whoever said that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction was probably making a delivery to the office the that first day Frank Morton was there – standing outside the door and hearing Morton tell me he was a fucking vampire. That’s right. A vampire. I had to bite the back of my hand to keep from laughing when he said that so matter-of-factly. Fucking lunatic. I had my defense of the murder case right there. Didn’t have to make one up. And he said it like he really believed it. That was the thing. I knew some weird people – I represented a couple people who thought they were Jesus Christ. Well, one of them thought he was the Second Coming, the other thought he was just plain ol’ Jesus Christ. Of course, the latter guy had risen from the dead. Again. So, a vampire? Okay. Like I said, he was a lunatic; or so I thought.

I wish I could laugh about it. It would be a good story – just that part of it. It sounds funny when I read it back, but what happened to him wasn’t funny. And it was weird, sitting there across from him, listening to him whining about how he loved his wife and how he didn’t kill her. And he said he had an alibi. He was with a few people when she was killed. That’s what he told me before he let me in on his little secret.

Alibi was a matter of timing, I told him. We needed witnesses to establish the time he was with them and then we needed witnesses, maybe the medical examiner, to establish the exact time of death, which would be difficult, given the fact that there was very little blood in the body. I won’t get into the science of lividity and body temperature and shit like that. But he seemed to know what I was talking about. I did tell Morton that it was premature to talk about alibi because I didn’t know what the prosecutor had in the way of evidence, other than what I read in the paper. "We don't want to be hemmed in by an alibi theory without knowing what evidence the prosecutor has and the witnesses she'll be calling" is what I told him, as I recall. He wasn’t happy at that point because I wasn’t doing what he wanted me to do and wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear.

So, to give him his money’s worth, I told him I needed to know who he was with and where he was the entire day, and that once I had a list of the prosecution witnesses, I'd need to know if he knew them before I contacted them. He wanted me to get sworn statements from his witnesses, explaining to me that the prosecutor would dismiss the charges. I shot him down on that notion. I shouldn’t have written that – indelicate. I told him that his friends would end up testifying at the trial, unless he agreed to make some kind of plea bargain.

"They won't testify. You said they have to testify," he told me. He tugged at his collar and then pulled the tie down and unbuttoned the top button. The gold collar pin skittered across my desk, and I caught it before it fell to the floor. The reflexes were still good.

He was shaking when I told him that I would talk to them and that they would testify. And then I told him that talking about an alibi was premature at that point in the proceedings, but he was agitated nonetheless. He muttered, shaking his head, right hand rubbing just above his right eyebrow. I asked Morton, "Why not?" He knew them, I didn't.

He looked at me. He chewed on his lip for a few seconds, then wiped his face with his pudgy right hand. He shook his head, closed his eyes, then cut the silence. "They're vampires."

Oh, yeah, ri-i-i-ight. That’s what I was thinking. But it was going to get worse – or better, depending on how you looked at things. I was thinking better, actually. I had a shrink who would love the guy – delusional system – insane, no prob.

“They're vampires," I repeated back to him. Morton's manicured nails glistened. His fingertips came together then, like he was praying, but the fingers were spread apart. He touched his lower lip with the tips of his index fingers.

He closed his eyes and lowered his head. His pink scalp shined, just like his fingernails. The small hairs on his head were almost invisible. His head bobbed in the affirmative. He took a deep breath and then shook his head. He grabbed the point of handkerchief that stuck out of his breast pocket, pulled it out, and dabbed at his eyes as he raised his head. Morton manipulated the handkerchief into a pentagon shape with his sausages and stuffed it into his breast pocket. He arranged it so that the point was now peaking out of the pocket. He brought his hands back together in a ball under his chin. The index fingers unfolded into a church steeple. He rested his upper teeth on the tip of the church steeple.

So, I figured what the hell at that point. The guy was a loon – I told him that what this was very unusual and would be hard for people to swallow – only I used legal talk. I told him that I had a hard time swallowing his story whole and that I needed him to see a shrink so that I could prepare a proper defense for him.

Tears welled up in Morton’s eyes. "Then they win. I'll be found insane, get put in an asylum for a few years, and be right back in his clutches."

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him, "Whose clutches?" This was better left to a shrink to sort out. He was a nut -- paranoid delusions. His reality was the netherworld -- better to stay away from it. I had no business making a foray into this territory.

"Joseph Butcher," Morton said, his hands clenched now. He took a deep breath and shook his head. He grabbed the point of handkerchief that stuck out of his breast pocket, pulled it out, and dabbed at his eyes once again.

Well, hell, what was I to know? This was far stranger than anything I had ever encountered; and at that point, I should have just shut down the whole thing and shipped him off to a shrink. The case was a dead-bang winner on the insanity defense; in fact, I marked on the file NGRI – that was the plea I heeded to file – Not Guilty By Reason of Insanity.

But instead of doing that, I asked one question too many. Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to. Sometimes, that’s good advice for asking questions in everyday life. "Do you think you're a vampire?" was the question I should not have asked.

Morton let out a raspy laugh, like the dog in Saturday morning Hanna-Barbera cartoons. He threw his head back. His double chin disappeared. His whole body shook. Tears rolled down his cheeks. The sausage fingers on his right hand reached again for the white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit. He coughed into the handkerchief. He took a couple of wheezing breaths. "Oh, my, my, my . . ." he said, trying to catch his breath. One last raspy, wheezy laugh flew up from Morton's diaphragm and shot across the room. "Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink," he quoted from Coleridge. "I met him once."

I looked at Morton, my eyes squinting, my question unasked.

"Coleridge. I met him on the street. It was about 1820, '21, somewhere in there. Opium addict. Did you know that? He wrote Rime of the Ancient Mariner while he was on drugs. Kublai Khan, too. The '60's had nothing on him. In fact, he was probably reincarnated as Jim Morrison of The Doors."

The comment asked: Fact or fiction? Well, obviously, either Morton was making up an elaborate story to aid in his case – an insanity defense – or he was living in this paranoid delusion he called life where vampires were out to get him – whatever.

Anyway, he wasn’t done. "Yes, I'm a vampire." Morton's gaze fell upon me. He gave me a thin-lipped smile.

I should have bailed. But there were 40,000 reasons the partners would tell me to fuck off. And 60,000 more on that little pink check. I should have quit.

Comments

[Amber]

When 'The index fingers unfolded into a church steeple. He rested his upper teeth on the tip of the church steeple.'...Couldn’t you see then if there was anything unusual with his upper canines?

keep going, I'm still reading...