TRANSCRIPT
COMPETENCY INTERVIEW
Prisoner: Dideroff, Emmylou (NMI) MPD CASE # 7716
Dade County Criminal Court Docket # 331902
Interviewed by: Lorna C. Wise, Ph.D.
Tape #: 2
Recording Started: 11:02A.M.
Lorna Wise: Now about this voice you mentioned to the police officers. Are you still hearing it?
Emmylou Dideroff: No.
W: Did you at one time?
D: Yes.
W: And this voice identified itself as a saint?
D: Yes. St. Catherine of Siena.
W: I see. Any besides that?
D: No.
W: No other hallucinations at all?
D: They’re not hallucinations.
W: Yes, well, do you still hear voices or sounds that no one else can hear? See people or things that no one else can see?
D: Not since the day of the murder. But sometimes before I drop off to sleep I hear the sound of my gun. And sometimes during the day too. Is that what you mean, stuff like that?
W: Tell me more about it, please.
D: Well, it’s not exactly hearing it, like I can hear you, like I hear the noises in the jail, or people talking and like that, but like an extra-sharp memory. Like Ijust heard it, so I get startled out of whatever I’m doing.
W: What kind of gun? Like a pistol?
D: A pistol is a pistol. A gun is an artillery piece.
W: You thought you had an artillery piece? You mean like a cannon?
D: Yes. It was a L-70 Bofors gun. A forty-mm automatic cannon.
W: Mm-hm. Can you describe this sound?
D: It was very, very loud. [laughs]
W: Well…yes, cannons are very loud.
D: Uh-huh. And it’s hard to describe, if you’ve never been near gunfire, um, how loud it is. It’s louder than thunder, louder than a jetliner flying low. It’s louder than one of those pneumatic drills. The only thing louder is bombs. A lot of noise. Of course, we all stuffed rags in our ears, but you can hear a sound like that through your nose. Through your elbows and feet. [laughs] After you’ve been firing on auto for a while, the sound takes you over, like God, in a way. I mean you’re completely deaf, but it seems you can still hear thingsinside the noise, like the clang of the breech closing, a kind of hammer-on-anvil sound, and the rattle of the pawls and rammer in the autoloader, like a train on railroad tracks? And the brass falling, tinkle tankle, like bells. You shouldn’t be able to hear any of that, but you do. Or seem to. And then there’s the sound of the shells, the roar in the air and the bang of the explosion, but you’re not so aware of that so much, except when you’re firing single rounds. Are you bored yet? [laughs]
W: Not at all. You make it sound very interesting. Where did you learn all this about…what did you say it was? An automatic cannon?
D: Yes, a Bofors gun. From the manual. Foy always said read the f…read the dah-dah, manual, RTFM. And I did. Plus I had some help from a friend.
W: Who is Foy?
D: Percival Orne Foy. The late. A teacher I had.
W: In school.
D: This was more extracurricular. He taught me a lot of stuff, and I just sucked it in, never mind if I thought it was worth anything. I just gave myself over, I was so tired of thinking for myself. That was before I joined the Bloods and God found me. I was real surprised when so much of it came in useful. His providence is sometimes extremely strange in its working out.
W: By Bloods?do you mean the street gang?
D: [laughs] No, I meant the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. The Bloods. Which we’re not supposed to call ourselves, but we all do. Did. I did.
W: Excuse me, are you saying that you’re a nun?
D: Oh, no. I was only a postulant. I never took vows. And they threw me out, needless to say.
W: Why was that?
D: Because we’re a medical order. We…I mean they take the Hippocratic Oath on top of their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. To do no harm. And I did a lot of harm, may God forgive me.
W: What sort of harm did you do?
D: It’s in my confession.
W: Yes, but Emmylou, this, what we’re doing here, is not part of the criminal case. We’re dealing here on a basis of confidentiality. What you tell me won’t be part of the court record and can’t be used against you.
D: You’re supposed to find out if I’m crazy or not.
W: Well, really, if you’re fit to stand trial, to aid in your own defense.
D: You wouldn’t understand.
W: Try me.
D: Do you believe in the devil?
W: The important thing here is do you believe in him?
D: Oh, I’m so tired! I am so tired of this. I thought it was over, that he didn’t have a use for me anymore, that I’d be let alone to live in peace, and now it’s all starting again, and people are going to get hurt.
W: Who’s using you?
[Silence, thirty-two seconds]
W: Who’s going to be hurt?
D: Anyone. Anyone around me. Maybe you.
W: And…the devil is going to make this happen, to hurt people?
D: Or God. It’s a crossfire. You can’t understand this. It won’t fit in your kind of head.
W: Then help me to understand.
D: It’s right in front of your eyes, but you can’t see it. I’m sorry. That detective did, though…Oh, Christ, oh Christ have mercy!
W: Emmylou? It’s very important that you talk to me. I just want to help you.
[Silence, one minute, twenty-two seconds]
W: Emmylou, what is it? Did you see something?
D: Could I go back to the jail now? I don’t feel like talking anymore.
INTERVIEW TERMINATED AT 11:38A.M.
Lorna Wise listens to the tape a third time, checking it against the transcript, occasionally stopping the flow of words with the foot pedal and writing in her notebook. After that, she reads through her notes, feeling dissatisfied with the familiar jargon. Inappropriate affect. Hallucinations. Fabulation. Resistance. Religious mania. Particularly disturbing, this last. Is Emmylou Dideroff a religious maniac? How is that different from being merely religious, if mere religion means ascribing reality to what cannot be verified by others? And what happened there at the end? An actual hallucination? She leans back in her squeaking swivel chair, kicks off her shoes, puts her stockinged feet up on the table, and rubs her eyes.
She is in a room reserved for such interviews in a nondescript county building on NW Thirteenth Street, convenient to both the Dade County Women’s Detention Center and the main jail. It is a small room, the size of a rich man’s bathroom, in two shades of brown, like a mutt. There is a wooden table with an artificial wood-grain surface, a swivel chair for the interviewer, a straight chair for the interviewee, one dirty window with a heavy grille on it, a four-tube fluorescent fixture with one tube dimmed out. And a wall clock, which she now consults. No time for this mooning, she thinks; she has another interview in twelve minutes. The county likes her to keep things churning.
Religious mania. Lorna picks up her copy ofDSM-IV, theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual, a thick maroon-colored paperback that exists to classify all the ills that mind is heir to, and thumbs through it. She does not recall such a classification, and if she does not, there is most probably none, for she has the whole volume practically by heart. Yes, here it is: a one-liner noting that some schizophrenic hallucinations took religious forms. And, helpfully,”Hallucinations may also be a normal part of religious experience in certain cultural contexts.” But not ours, typically. One can apparently no longer officially be a religious maniac. In the materialist religiosity of America we don’t see saints or demons anymore. Other than that, there was no way that Dideroff is schizo. She had a job, no history of hospitalization, was clearly alert, well spoken, in control, or at least in as much control as any number of mental health professionals Lorna knew. So: initial diagnosis is: 297.1 delusional disorder, grandiose type. The “grandiose” type is because of the religion stuff. If you think God is talking to you, that’s grandiose per se, according to theDSM.
Lorna writes this diagnosis down on the appropriate line on the court form. There is a larger space for describing the subject defendant, and here she inscribes a precis of her impressions, or as much of it as she thinks is to the point, and copies in the results of the tests?Rorschach, MMPI, Wechsler IQ?she has had administered to Emmylou Dideroff over the past week. Now her ballpoint hesitates, because here is where she must write down the magic formula, attesting that in her professional opinion the subject knows the nature of the charges against her, and the consequences if she is convicted, and that she is capable of assisting in her own defense. She finds that she is reluctant to write this statement.
She puts her pen down and again leans back in her chair. Five minutes, the clock tells her. She is thinking about something her forensic psych professor once did in class. Professor Benicke, one of her favorites, may be the reason she’s chosen this peculiar and not very prestigious and certainly unremunerative branch of psychology. A winter’s afternoon at Cornell, the sun slipping behind the bluffs at a quarter to four, scant leaden light through the windows, the room darkened, the clicking sound of a film projector. He’d shown them nearly the whole of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film,The Passion of Joan of Arc. They had all watched the silent movie in silence, and then as the lights came up on the blinking class, he’d demanded: Well? Is she competent? Forget she’s a saint, forget the trial was rigged, forget the politics. From what you see, is this woman competent to stand trial on a capital charge?
It had been an interesting debate. What had she said? She knows where she is, she knows the gravity of the charge, she puts up a spirited, logical defense, and it doesn’t matter if she’s hearing voices. If we declared everyone who heard voices incompetent, there wouldn’t beany trials, because we all hear voices, in a manner of speaking. We hear the voice of our conscience, don’t we? And if some people project the voice of their conscience outward onto the figures of saints, what does that have to do with competence? What indeed? After ten years of practice, however, the distinction seems less clear in the tangled life of the crazy poor than it was in the classroom or the law books.
She finds herself checking the box for Further Consultation Required and is somewhat surprised at herself. She is one of three experts charged by the criminal court of Dade County to determine competency in this case, and very, very occasionally the three experts do not agree, in which case the judge has the option of calling in another panel, or going with the majority. But it is considered bad form in the shrink world not to present a united front on competency, which is one reason for the consult request box. Lorna is signaling to her peers that this is a hard case and that the three of them should get together and try to get their ducks in a row. Into the out basket with Emmylou, then, and push the button to tell the guard to bring in the next one. She examines the top sheet on the file. Oh, good, a grounder!
A knock on the door and a big guard brings in the familiar shambolic figure of Rigoberto Munoz. This is his eighth run through the system. Munoz is a stocky man with tangled lank hair, skin the color of an old grocery bag, and a lot of tattooing on his thick arms. His face twists into bizarre expressions from time to time, for he suffers from tardive dyskinesia, the result of all the Thorazine and other major tranquilizers the helpful state has pumped into him over the decades, in order to, among other things, render him competent to stand trial. Munoz has no money and nowhere to live and has a venereal disease and, of course, the tardive dyskinesia, but his main problem, Lorna now learns from him, is that space aliens have implanted a robot in his belly, which robot is gradually pulling his penis into his body cavity. The robot is activated by alien agents, who use remote control devices disguised as cell phones. But Rigoberto is not fooled. That’s why he’s here, he explains to the interested lady, he stabbed one of the aliens on Flagler Street with the nail-equipped pole he uses to pick up the bits of trash that often contain secret messages from the good kind of space aliens.
It does not take Lorna long to classify Mr. Munoz as: 295.30, schizophrenia, paranoid type. The guard takes him away. Lorna knows that they will conduct him to a locked ward at Jackson, shoot him full of Haldol, drag him zomboid and tractable before the court, register his plea of guilty, sentence him to time served, and dump him back on the street with a prescription for antipsychotics and a pat on the back. Sooner or later he will kill someone, and after a good deal of passing forms similar to the one Lorna now slips into her out box, Florida will kill him by lethal injection. This evil was not in her department, however, and she had learned to confine her thoughts to zones affecting personal action. She declares him unfit to stand trial, signs the form, and now it is time for lunch.
The ladies’ room in the facility is tiny, as befits an institution (the Jail) run and populated almost entirely by men. After using the toilet (and wasn’t a capacious bladder essential to doing psychological work in the public sector!), she checks herself out in the spotted mirror. Fawn cotton suit, pale gray knit underneath, unobtrusive. The mad do not like screaming colors, or so she justifies her taste, but she has dressed in such shades since long before she became a demi-shrink. Girl, why you want to look like some dead leaf? Her pal Sheryl. She is going to have lunch with Sheryl today, in fact, and she knows Sheryl will make a comment of that type. Look like a damn tree. To please Sheryl, she carefully applies rather more makeup than is her usual wont. Eye shadow barely blue, mascara on her pale lashes, blusher, darkish lipstick, matte. She does not really need the blusher because she has flawless skin. Her best feature, she thinks, although “she has beautiful skin” is what they always say of fat, unattractive girls.
As she was. As she sometimes still thinks she is. She is tall, and has to stoop a little to get her face in the mirror. She will retain part of this stoop when she leaves the ladies’ room, for it is her habitual posture. Stand up straight, her father was always telling her, but here as in so many other aspects of life she had not been a dutiful daughter. She walks with her broad shoulders rolled slightly forward and her neck drooping slightly from the vertical. This is to hide her breasts, which are large and round. Jutting, as the pulp writers like to say. She has also a defined waist, and broad hips, which she conceals with her suit jacket. This she removes briefly to dab her underarms with industrial strength antiperspirant. Lorna was not made for the tropics, and once again a vagrant query registers in her mind: why does she stay here? Again, no answer, for the answer is inertia. Although she is courageous in defense of self and her prerogatives, she fears change.
Her other good feature is her hair, which is long, silky, honey-colored. She knows she should cut it into a sensible shape, but she resists this and wears it instead pulled back in a troublesome French knot. She adjusts this now and tucks back the various pennants that have come loose. Jacket back on, a final frowning inspection. A century ago, Lorna Wise would have stopped traffic in any large city of the western world, teams of horses would have run wild through shop windows, and even fifty years before she would have been considered Marilynesque, but now she is 180 degrees out of fashion, and women are required to resemble seventeen-year-old male basketball players. Lorna has what she thinks of as good feminist credentials, but her conviction stops at her skin. So she dresses subfusc and stoops.
Stooping then, she leaves the bathroom and the building, waving to Ernesto in his security window on her way out. Ernesto sighs with desire as he watches the sway of her fine ass, but Lorna does not hear this, and would not have appreciated it if she had, not because of any class or ethnic bias (from which she is remarkably free) but because she has only ever been attracted to men who want her to lose weight. All her psychological training has not hipped her to this catastrophic twist of taste.
Outside it is, of course, hot and humid, although not as hot and humid as it will be in a few hours. It is late September, still summer in Miami, and the city yearns for the relief of tourist season. She crosses to the shady side of NW Thirteenth and pauses on the curb, in the shadow of the huge redbrick jail. Even in the shade she begins to sweat, and she hopes that she can avoid armpit stains on her suit. Before long, a silver Chrysler sedan pulls up to the curb and she enters it, grateful for the air-conditioning within. Sheryl Waits, her best friend, is wearing a linen suit too, but hers is fuchsia. Under it she wears a white polyester shirt gushing ruffles at the throat. Her lipstick is fuchsia too, and glossy, startling in its effect against her skin, which is the color of a large drip coffee into which one of those little plastic cups of half-and-half has been poured. Sheryl is nearly as tall as Lorna and twenty pounds heavier, but she has absolutely no body image problem. She thinks she looks terrific. She goes dancing with her husband all the time, and from what Lorna can observe, he thinks she looks terrific too. Lorna often wonders if this difference is basic to their friendship, and she is occasionally subject to shaming thoughts, yet another exploitation of black womanhood, fat white girl gets fat black friend so she doesn’t look bad? But she genuinely loves the woman and feels loved in return. Is that an illusion too? Who can tell nowadays?
The two have been friends since the first day of classes at Barry College, where they both took their MSW degrees. Except for the years when she went north to do her psych Ph.D. at Cornell, she has had lunch with Sheryl Waits on average once a week and is thoroughly integrated, so to speak, into the Waits family circle. Sheryl is a psychiatric social worker and runs a unit in a community mental health center in Liberty City, an impoverished black district of Miami, where she is considered both a saint and a tough-ass bitch, often by the same people on different days.
They go to a moderately expensive restaurant in a waterfront hotel, with a nice view of Biscayne Bay. It is rather overpriced, they both agree, but they are worth it. They are scrupulous about taking turns picking up the tab; what they never do is to minutely divide up the bill, arguing about who had what and how much to tip. While they wait for their meal, they exchange news, which given their lives means that 80 percent of the news will be Sheryl’s, always announced with the phrase “dysfunction in the intact black family,” a torrent of amusing folderol about the husband, Leon, a patrol lieutenant in the Miami PD, the most useless husband ever invented, and the three children, defective, insubordinate, no ‘count, doomed to failure and the streets. None of this is true. Sheryl is creating a mythos, propitiating the gods to continue what Lorna knows she believes is the most colossal good fortune. In return, Lorna tells some anecdotes about her patient load, including the Dideroff woman and her saints?no names, of course. Sheryl seems particularly interested in this one, but Sheryl is a church lady, a Catholic, strangely enough, and thus pretty much in the same bin, in Lorna’s mind, as Dideroff. The remainder of their conversation is devoted, as it usually is, to Lorna and men.
“Anybody on the horizon?” Sheryl asks.
“Not as such.”
“Ticktock.”
“Oh, stop! I’m only thirty-four.”
“Uh-huh. And as far as I know, you ain’t never yet been out with anybody really gave a damn about you. All of them’re these skinny little whiteboy intellectuals want you to be they momma, while they play around on you. You need to get your life sorted out, girl.”
“I’mfine, Sheryl. Being between men is not a felony in this state. And, you know, I’m wondering why every lunch we have ends up with an elaborate critique of my sex life. I mean it’s getting a little old, don’t you think?”
“I’ll tell you what else is gettingold, darlin. You ringing on my phone at twoA.M. in the morning, oh, wah, Sheryl, he done itagain, boo hoo hoo!”
“All right, I’ll never call you except during business hours,” snaps Lorna.
“Oh, for God’s sake! That’s what friends are for, you nut! All I mean is it just breaks my heart. I want you to behappy! Regular. Walking in green fields full of flowers with a nice guy.”
“Like in a toilet paper commercial.”
“Exactly. And every fourth commercial the couple is black, except you can tell the dude is, like, a little queer? Seriously, hon, you got to change your way of living.”
“And if that ain’t enough, I’m gonna change the way I strut my stuff.”
“Oh, right, be a smart-ass about it. But the songs don’t lie, honey. Uh-uh. They don’t lie.”
“You’re bound and determined to reshape my life into domestic bliss, aren’t you? Guided by the eternal wisdom of old popular song lyrics?”
“And my highly honed social worker skills. Let me ask you something: you ever thought about a cop?”
“When I got my stereo ripped off, sure.”
“Moron. I mean to date one.”
“You’re still confusing me with you, dear,” Lorna says uncomfortably. “It’s not my kind of thing.”
“Because…?”
“Because. Let me think. Look, you know I love Leon, but I need…how can I say this without sounding like an arrogant shithead…?”
“Oh, go on, go on! If I was going to dump you for being an arrogant shithead, I would’ve done it years ago.”
“Thank you. I want someone I can talk to. I don’t respond well to ‘how about those Marlins’ as a conversational gambit. I want someone who reads books.”
“Leon reads books.”
“I meanbooks. Come on, Sher, I don’t want to get into a fight. You’re happy, God bless you, but I need something different. Let it go.”
“Got to be an intellectual, huh?”
“I think so.”
“Just like Daddy.”
Lorna mimes looking around, as if searching for a public notice. “Excuse me, I thought this was a psychotherapy-free area. Waiter!”
Sheryl ignores this and studies her friend appraisingly. “Mm, I just had an interesting thought.”
“What? And I don’t like that look on your face.”
“My thought was you ought to meet Jimmy Paz.”
“And why is that? He’s an intellectual?”
“He reads books is what I hear. Leon says most people in the department think he’s the smartest guy who ever worked there.”
“And he’s probably got three semesters at Miami-Dade Junior College too.”
“Now youare being an arrogant shithead.”
Sheryl is now giving her the stare she usually reserves for one of her children gone seriously over the line or a junkie trying to hustle her. Lorna feels herself blushing again. “All right. That was low.”
“I forgive you, or I will forgive you if you show up at our place the Saturday from next. We’re throwing a retirement party for Amos Greely. You’ve met him.”
“The mentor.”
“Uh-huh. Anyway, Paz will be there. We’ll have white folks too. We ain’t prejudice or nothin.”
“He’s a Cuban, right?” There is some eye-rolling action here.
“An Afro-Cuban.”
“Sonot another male chauvinist piggie?”
Sheryl laughs long and loud, drawing looks from some of the neighboring tables.
“Darlin, they’reall male chauvinist piggies, and your skinny whiteboy intellectuals are the worst kind because they’ll never admit it. And Paz cooks too.”
“He cooks?”
“Yeah, he’s a chef in his off hours. His mom owns Guantanamera.”
“Very impressive,” says Lorna, who is actually impressed. She has eaten at that restaurant, widely considered to be the finest Cuban place in Miami, the best of a tough league. “Let’s see, reads books, cooks for his mother, unmarried at what…? Thirty-five?”
“About there.”
“Gay.”
Another laugh from Sheryl, even louder than before. She has to dab at her eyes with her napkin. “Oh, no, sugar. You don’t have to worry about that. Not Jimmy Paz. The book on him is he likes smart girls. Smart white girls. I am going to get cast out of the sisterhood for setting this up, but I’ll have to learn to live with it.”
“Lucky me,” say Lorna sourly.
“No, this is right,” says Sheryl. She looks up, cups her hand to her ear. “What’s that you say? No lie? Made inheaven? Well, lawsy me!”
“I’m calling 911,” says Lorna.
“You may laugh, but I got a good feeling about this. And let me slip a little professional note into your file, honeybunch. Us Catholics talk to the saints all the time. And sometimes they talk back. You need to find out some more about Emmylou’s religious background before you toss her among the lunatics.”
Lorna finesses this uncomfortable moment by signaling for the waiter, and then she makes much out of checking the time and fretting about an appointment she has at one-thirty. That Sheryl is sincerely religious she regards as an amusing flaw, like the fat. On the other hand, Sheryl’s point is a good one and supported by theDSM. She will find out about that the next time she sees Emmylou. As they leave the restaurant, she is already planning her questions. She will have to get through the consult first, but that should not pose a problem. Mickey Lopez thinkseveryone is crazy, which means she will only have to roll Howie Kasdan, which she knows she can do and will take grim pleasure in doing.