“Yes.”
“Would you say they were attractive youngsters?”
“They were. Nice-looking young people from a good family. Good manners, I’m told. You’re not saying they provoked him?”
“Certainly not. But early torment makes torment easily … imagine
d.”
He looked up at me and his countenance changed, seemed to pop wider, like a moth flashing the owl face printed on its wings.
“You are a journalist, Mr. Harris. How would you put that in your journal? How do you treat the fear of torment in journalese? Might you say something snappy about torment, like ‘It puts the hell in hello!’?”
At this point a guard rapped on the door and stuck his head in. “Doctor, the patients are here.”
Dr. Salazar rose. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said.
I thanked the doctor and invited him to call me if he were ever traveling in Texas—we’d have a drink, lunch, something. Looking back I cannot recall any trace of irony in his reply:
“Thank you, Mr. Harris. Certainly I will, when next I travel.”
In the prison corridor outside his office, two guards and a nursing sister from a nearby convent waited with a small group of townspeople.
There were both men and women in pressed work clothes and huaraches, well-scrubbed for their doctor visit. They were patients from outside, people from the neighborhood whom the doctor treated for free.
The warden walked me out. I thanked him for his time, and said I appreciated the doctor’s help. I asked how long Dr. Salazar had worked there.
“Hombre! You don’t know who that is?”
“No. We talked about Simmons.”
The warden turned to me on the steps. “The doctor is a murderer. As a surgeon, he could package his victim in a surprisingly small box. He will never leave this place. He is insane.”
“Insane? I see patients going into his office.”
The warden shrugged and spread his open hands. “He is not insane with the poor.”
* * *
I went home and wrote my article about Dykes Simmons.
Way ran on to way. I covered crimes in other parts of Mexico and I did not see the doctor again.
Meanwhile, Simmons’s wife announced her pregnancy. As the weeks went by, she expanded little by little. Sometime in the third trimester there was a conjugal visit on a Saturday, the day the nursing sisters came from the convent to take care of ill prisoners. Simmons’s wife bade him a fond farewell as the day drew to a close.
When the nursing sisters came to the prison earlier in the day they numbered twelve. Thirteen left at day’s end. One of them was Dykes Simmons, who wore a nun’s habit and shoes his wife smuggled in under her maternity dress.
Simmons fled back to Texas. A few months later he was found dead in a car in Fort Worth after a fight.
Dr. Salazar served twenty years in prison. When he was released he went to the poorest barrio in Monterrey to serve the aged and the poor. His name is not Salazar. I leave him in peace.
* * *
Many years later, I was trying to write a novel. My detective needed to talk to somebody with a peculiar understanding of the criminal mind. Lost in the tunnel of the work, I plodded along behind my detective when he went to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to consult with an inmate. Who do you suppose was waiting in the cell? It was not Dr. Salazar. But because of Dr. Salazar, I could recognize his colleague and fellow practitioner, Hannibal Lecter.
Thomas Harris
Sag Harbor, New York