8:47 P.M.
See now as through a defective windowpane that lets in light but distorts the images that the light bears. See now into Benny Knox as he himself sees out. See a twisted cosmos peopled by phantoms who buy newspapers as they pass and then are seen no more, except for a few who come regularly enough to become real for a while and to be remembered most of the time. Through this pane Benny sees a frightening but basically simple universe run by a good God of Vengeance when sin is done.
But first let us see him from the outside, as others see him. Benny Knox was born thirty-five years ago to a mother who died in bearing him, her firstborn. His father was a Baptist minister, a fiery fundamentalist to whom Heaven and Hell were fully as real as Earth. His father, who never remarried, raised him.
During infancy he seemed perfectly normal and not only seemed but was perfectly healthy and he was always big for his age. If during the next years, those of his preschool childhood, signs of retardation began first to show and then to multiply, his father, who after all had no standard of comparison, failed to recognize them.
The fact that he was retarded wasn't known until he was entered in the first grade of school (his father hadn't 'believed in' kindergarten; all they did there was let children play and Benjamin already knew how to play). Within a month he had been examined by a school psychologist and the Reverend Matthew Knox had been called in for conference and advised to send his son to a special school for subnormal children.
Benny had attended that school for eight years, until he was fourteen. Then the school's principal had told Benny's father: "I'm afraid we've done all we can for Benjamin. He has approximately the equivalent of a third-grade education. Perhaps a little better than that in some subjects—such as reading and arithmetic. Not so good in some others, subjects that require memorizing, such as geography or spelling.
"Socially, the picture is neither too good nor too bad. He gets along reasonably well with people, especially his contemporaries, but only when circumstances force him to. He greatly prefers solitary occupations and activities. He seems to daydream; whether or not that will decrease or increase as he grows older, only time will tell.
"Morally—well, he's almost too good. It's obvious that he had very strong religious training at home and is—well, almost too literally convinced of everything he was taught."
The Reverend Matthew Knox had frowned slightly. "What he was taught at home was literally true," he had said.
"Of course. But, unless tempered with reason, some of the teachings of Christianity are—ah—hardly survival characteristics in our society. Or in any society for that matter. Generosity is a virtue, for example, but it must be practiced with moderation. Recently I happened to learn of a boy having come to school without his lunch. Not, mind you, because his parents are poor; they aren't. Just because he forgot it. Benjamin gave the boy his lunch and went hungry that day. When I learned of it I talked to him and explained that while it would have been a good thing for him to share his lunch with the boy he should not simply have given it away and gone hungry himself. There have been other such instances but that's the most recent one."
Benny's father had nodded thoughtfully. "I'll talk to him about it," he said. As a matter of fact, he already had, a great many times. Benny simply couldn't keep such things as baseball gloves, roller skates or kite reels, and when something was gone it was always because he had given it to a poor boy who didn't have one. Several times, when Benny knew the name of the poor boy and where he lived, the Reverend Knox had gone and got the article back; never had he encountered any poverty more real than his own. He had finally solved the problem—and without crossing Benny's desire to give to the poor—by issuing and occasionally repeating a flat order to the effect that before he gave anything of his to a poor boy he should bring the boy home with him; he would then talk to the boy and decide whether or not the boy was really poor and needed the article in question worse than Benny did. With rare exceptions, when Benny had forgotten, this had worked. Apparently none of the boys who had been taking advantage of Benny had wanted to face an inquisition at Benny's home first. But apparently Benny had not known that this edict had extended to school.
"And there is one other thing," the principal was saying, "that troubles me about Benjamin. I must say that it troubles me much more than his indiscriminate generosity—for I believe you can train him out of that without too much difficulty. He has a tendency to confess to having done things he did not do. His teacher tells me that several times when some prank or bit of minor vandalism has been committed she has talked to the class about it and then asked whoever was guilty of it to raise his hand; each time Benjamin's hand went up. And each time some minor punishment was meted out to him for what she believed he had done. Then one day the prank in question happened to be one she knew positively Benny could not have done, and he still raised his hand. It was a caricature of the teacher drawn on the blackboard during lunch hour and it was rather well done for a child's drawing; Benny is very poor at drawing. The teacher sent Benjamin to me to have a talk.
"His answers to me were vague and confusing. I honestly don't know whether he knew he was innocent and had some compulsive reason for offering himself as a scapegoat—perhaps guilt feelings about something else—or whether he really thought, once the question was put to him, that he had really done it."
The Reverend Knox was troubled; this was something new to him. True, whenever he had asked Benny whether or not he had committed some certain dereliction, the answer had almost always been affirmative, but he had never questioned the boy unless he was already reasonably sure Benny was guilty, so the affirmation had never been a surprise. He asked, "Could Benjamin have been with the boy who made the drawing—aided and abetted him, as it were—and thus felt that he shared the guilt and have raised his hand for that reason?"
"No. Once the teacher seriously considered drawing styles, the identity of the culprit became obvious; only one boy in the class could have done it. Once the question was put to him directly he confessed—as a matter of fact he was justifiably a little proud of the drawing—and admitted that another boy had been with him but it wasn't Benjamin. Benjamin hadn't even known of the drawing."
"I'll have a talk with him," Benny's father had said.
And he'd had a number of talks with him during the first year or two Benny was out of school. He'd made a number of tests, too. For example, if he himself should accidentally break a drinking glass in the kitchen, later he'd show Benny the broken glass and ask if he had done it. All too often, for a while, Benny would admit guilt. This always led to another and longer talk, and finally he felt sure that he had cured Benny of this fault—and he had, for a long time. Like the principal, he had never been able to decide whether Benny had deliberately made a false confession to court punishment or whether he really thought, when asked, that he had committed the offense in question.
He had given thought, too, to Benny's being able to make a living for himself in the world. At first, since Benny was too young for a full-time job, he had bought him a newspaper route. After a few mistakes, Benny had done all right on it. It was teaching Benny responsibility, he thought, and the five or six dollars a week it brought in helped out immeasurably. After a while the only help he needed was to be reminded once a month when it was time to make his collections.
When Benny was sixteen and already bigger than most men his father decided that it was time to help him find a niche in the world in the way of a full-time job. The good minister was himself in failing health and beginning to realize that, by the time of his own death, Benny's needs must have, not only a means of earning a full livelihood, but a way of living alone without constant parental care and advice. The only alternative would be, after his own death, for Benny to be institutionalized and become a public charge. This was to be avoided if at all possible. Over the course of the next two years he found Benny a variety of jobs—in vain. Benny could handle almost any of them, with constant supervision, but no employer could afford an employee whom he had to watch all the time. Even at manual labor jobs, although he was plenty husky enough to handle them, Benny managed to get into trouble. Set him to digging a ditch and he would dig it into the next county unless you were there to stop him.
When Benny was eighteen and had never held a full-time job longer than a few weeks, and few that long, the Reverend Knox learned that he had only about six months to live. Fortunately, at about the same time, he chanced to learn that an elderly man who for many years made a living running a newspaper stand on a busy downtown street corner was about to retire and wanted to sell his business. Newspapers were the only thing Benny had ever got along with; if he could run a newspaper route maybe he could sell newspapers over a counter. In some ways the latter was even simpler. Every transaction was a simple cash deal instead of a more complicated monthly collection. Knox had a long talk with the retiring vendor, and bought the concession. The seller stayed on for a few days to show Benny what ropes there were. Knox saw the circulation managers of the two newspapers Benny would handle and the manager of the distribution agency that supplied him with the items he would sell; with each of them he arranged to have Benny's bills sent to the parsonage. There was nothing to it, and Benny got along fine from the start. Each evening he brought home his receipts for the day and turned them over to his father, who took care of paying his bills and managed his money for him, starting him out each day with the amount and variety of change he'd need to start business at the stand.
There remained only one problem to solve before he could die, and Knox had had its solution in mind for a long time; he had waited only until he was sure his son could earn a living. A Mrs. Saddler, a widow and a good woman, was a member of his congregation and she ran a boarding house within walking distance of downtown. He went to see her and made arrangements for Benny to room and board with her, and for her, for a small but adequate percentage of Benny's earnings, to take over the management of his affairs.
That, too, had worked out. Each night he brought his money home to her, as he had to his father. She managed it for him, took out what she had coming for room and board, gave him an allowance of spending money—which went for candy and ice cream sodas, his only dissipation—bought clothes for him when he needed any, and put the surplus in the bank, part of it in a special checking account against which she drew for his business expenses, the rest in a savings account in his name—but which she reminded him of only when some extra expense or minor emergency necessitated his help in drawing some of it out.
This accomplished, the Reverend Knox had quit fighting the Reaper. He had given up his ministry and his parsonage, had gone to a hospital and died.
And all had gone well for fifteen years, until Benny Knox was thirty-three. On the surface anyway; Mrs. Saddler sometimes wasn't sure what went on down inside of Benny when occasionally he had dark, unhappy, brooding spells; she wasn't able to get him to talk about them although ordinarily he prattled to her freely about anything and everything. And nothing had ever come of the spells; they'd always worn off.
Until suddenly at the height of one of them Benny, she subsequently learned, had gone to the police station one morning and had confessed to having committed a murder that had been much in the newspapers for two weeks. It had been, according to how one might look at it, a bad time or a good time for him to have confessed to that particular crime; the police had just apprehended the real killer only an hour before; the news had not yet hit the papers or Benny would have read about it. Benny did read the newspapers during dull periods at the newsstand—the parts of them that he was able to understand and make sense of, which included crime stories and the comic page and not much else.
The police knew who Benny was and what he was; after fifteen years his downtown newsstand was a landmark and just about everyone in town knew him by sight. Many policemen knew him well enough to stop and talk a moment when they were passing his stand. So they brushed Benny off gently. They asked for his wallet and looked at the identification in it to see if it had an "in case of accident or illness notify" card with a name and address and it did. They phoned Mrs. Saddler and, after talking to her long enough to establish her relationship with Benny, they explained to her what had happened and asked her to come in and talk with them, after which she could take Benny back home with her. Which she did. And she talked to him until he was finally convinced that he had just imagined what he had tried to tell the police. Or perhaps he was not completely convinced until he read an afternoon paper with the story of the capture and confession of the real killer. Along with many people with higher I.Q.'s than his, Benny believed implicitly everything he read in print.
The next time Benny Knox confessed to a crime he did not commit, again a murder, was two years later—a year ago, when Benny was thirty-four. That time he did not get off so lightly, for several good reasons. The crime was not yet solved, and it had been a wanton, purposeless killing that bore all the earmarks of having been committed by a mentally deranged person. A few days later it turned out to have been committed by a pair of teenage heroin addicts, but until then Benny had rather a rough time of it. His story was hard to disprove; it made sense insofar as it covered all the facts that had appeared in the papers. Only one thing saved him from being actually charged with the crime and getting his name and picture in the papers as a murderer—which would have been very bad for business at the newsstand, even though he would subsequently have been cleared. Some people would still have been afraid of him. The thing that had saved Benny had been his choice of a weapon. The news stories had said only that the man had been beaten to death with a blunt, heavy weapon. After the autopsy the police knew that the weapon had been a section of rusty pipe; not only did some of the wounds clearly indicate its diameter but tiny fragments of rust had been found embedded in the victim's skull. But they had not given this particular bit of information to the newspapers, and Benny's imagination had supplied him with a baseball bat as the blunt heavy weapon he had used. Moreover, he was unable to remember where he had obtained it or what he had done with it afterward.
The police, that time, were not so ready and willing to release Benny Knox. He'd given them a hard time and caused them a lot of work. For a while they'd seriously considered charging him despite the one discrepancy in his story. The rest of it made sense and could have been true. Further, they were convinced that he was, or at least had been, sincere in thinking he had committed the crime. That made him a psychopath, and it could be that he was a potentially dangerous one. If he could imagine himself to have committed a crime possibly someday he might really commit one.
They held him while Dr. Kranz, an alienist who was a friend of the police commissioner's and who usually advised the police on borderline cases like Benny's, talked to him twice and also had a long talk with Mrs. Saddler, who knew more about Benny's background and history than anyone else. Dr. Kranz saved Benny.
"Benny Knox," he wrote in his informal report to the commissioner, "seems to have a mental age of about eight. While it is true that many adults with that mental age find themselves unable to adjust to the world and to earn their own way in it, thereby requiring institutionalization, others do make the adjustment, especially ones who still have parents or other mentors to guide and help them.
"Mrs. Saddler stands in loco parentis to Knox, and she is a very sane and sensible woman. With her help, he does all right. Of course she is about twenty years older than he (that is my guess; I did not ask her age) and it is statistically probable that she will predecease him, but even this may not lead to his becoming a public charge. Mrs. Saddler is aware of the problem and has in mind solving it when the time comes, in other words, if and when she finds herself getting too old to run her boarding house any longer. She knows other rooming and boarding house keepers, some younger than herself, and believes she will have no difficulty in finding one willing to take over Benny. She says he is pleasant, tractable and easy to get along with, and his earnings are sufficient that he will represent a profit and not a burden to whoever takes care of him. The biggest problem, in fact, will be to find someone sufficiently honest not to make too much of a profit on him.
"So much for his adjustment to society despite his subnormality and now to what you've been waiting for me to discuss, his abnormality, his fantasy of believing that he has committed crimes of which he is innocent and wishing to be punished for them. From what I can learn he seems to have been a wonderfully 'good' boy and probably did nothing that, even in his own mind, merited the punishment he now seeks. I would say that his guilt feelings were given to him by his father. His father—who raised Benny alone after his mother died in childbirth—was a fiery fundamentalist minister. He taught his son what he himself believed—a good but vengeful God, original sin, a very literal brimstone Hell, eternal damnation for the sinner. These are very heady and frightening doctrines even for a person of normal mentality.
"He feels himself guilty of unnameable sins and since he cannot name them—and thereby obtain punishment and through punishment forgiveness—he builds the fantasy of having committed a real sin, one for which he can be punished. A nameable real sin becomes surrogate for an unnameable one.
"The prognosis? Incurable. He may 'grow out of it' or its symptoms may become worse or at any rate more frequent.
"Does this mean he should be put in an institution? I personally do not think so. He will probably again—and possibly again and again—become a mild thorn in your side by confessing to other crimes. As a matter of police routine you'll have to check his story out, and thereby run into a little extra work and expense. But—at his present rate of two years having elapsed between his last confession and his current one—the cost of this slight amount of police work once in a while will be a minute fraction of the cost to society of institutionalizing him and supporting him for the rest of his life. So my recommendation is that you give society a break by letting Benny support himself as long as he can.
"I don't think there's any chance of his becoming dangerously insane. I can't guarantee that, of course—but neither can I guarantee it in your case or mine. And I can say for him what I can say for you or me: at present none of the three of us shows signs or inclination toward any dangerous aberration.
"I do suggest one precaution, however. Any time he again comes in with a confession, whether or not it's one you can immediately rule out without investigation, hold him until I can talk to him again and determine whether his degree and kind of mental disturbance is at that time such that I might want to change my recommendation."
That had been a year ago. Now Benny Knox was disturbed again. Not suddenly, not just tonight; his realization that he was the man who had murdered the two women, the man the police were looking for, had come to him gradually over the past week. At first he hadn't been sure, he couldn't really remember. But that wasn't surprising; from time to time there were so many things that he couldn't remember. Even now he couldn't remember why he had killed them—it must have been just because he was bad, evil. People were born evil and only through God and Jesus could they become good and even then before they could get into Heaven they must confess to the evil things they had done and be punished before they could be forgiven.
He closed his eyes and had a mental picture of his father and his father was holding out a hand to him and saying, "You've done wrong, Benjamin. Confess and let them punish you so you can be forgiven, or I'll never see you again. You'll go to hell and burn forever." His father's face was really his father's face, for there was a picture of his father's face on Benny's bureau and he saw it every day and couldn't forget what his father had looked like. But his father's body was clad in shimmering robes and seated on a throne. Benny often got his father in Heaven and his Heavenly Father mixed up and was as likely to pray to one as to the other.
He said, "Yes, Father, I will," aloud and opened his eyes. They fell upon his hands lying in front of him on a pile of newspapers. Big, strong hands. Strangler's hands. Hands that could kill easily, and had killed.
Footsteps approached and stopped, and he looked up. Officer Hoff stood there, grinning down at him. "Hi, Benny. Will you take your big paws off that pile of papers so I can take one?"
Benny lifted his hands and dropped them in his lap, out of sight, and Officer Hoff took one of the papers and put it under his arm. He didn't put down a dime, but Benny hadn't expected him to; policemen didn't have to pay for papers. He didn't know why not, but the man from whom his father had bought the newsstand had explained to him that policemen didn't have to pay for little things like newspapers. It was part of the cost of doing business, he'd explained, whatever that meant. You didn't charge policemen for their papers and then they liked you and helped you if you needed help. Well, he needed help now. Maybe Officer Hoff would want to arrest him right now. Officer Hoff was a nice man.
He said, "Mr. Hoff, I killed them two women. You want to arrest me? Or should I walk around to the station myself?"
Officer Hoff had quit grinning. He shook his head sadly. "Not again, Benny. You didn't—"
"I really did, Mr. Hoff. I—choked them to death." Benny held up his hands, the evidence.
Officer Hoff shook his head again. "Well—I'll radio in from the car. Maybe they'll want me to bring you in. I'll see. We're pretty busy tonight."
He walked downstreet to the curb where the squad car was waiting, another officer at the wheel. He got into the squad car. Benny was afraid at first that they'd drive off, and then he saw that the squad car wasn't moving. And after a couple of minutes Officer Hoff got out of it and came back.
He said, "No, they don't want us to bring you in. Lieutenant Burton—you know him? Red hair?"
Benny hadn't known the name but when Officer Hoff said, "Red hair," he remembered he'd talked a lot with a policeman with red hair, down at the station. He couldn't remember what they'd talked about, but he remembered the hair. He nodded.
"Well, he wants to see you. But there isn't any hurry. You can go ahead and sell the rest of your papers, no use their going to waste. Then you go to the station and he'll see you."
Benny nodded again. "All right, I'll go round."
"Be sure you do, and don't forget." He shook his head a third time. "Benny, you didn't kill them dames—we checked you out on it, long ago. You and a lot of other people. But just the same don't you forget to go to the station. If you don't go there right after you quit we'll have to come to the rooming house to get you."
"I won't forget, Mr. Hoff. I'll go there."
Benny sadly watched Officer Hoff get back into the squad car and watched the squad car drive off.
Officer Hoff hadn't believed him either. But the policeman with the red hair would believe him, when Benny told him all about it.