Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  “He tied it around his neck, and then he looked around for something to stand up on, I guess, so he could jump off of it. If he’d been smart, he woulda brought a stool along in that bag, but he didn’t. He was trying to dig out a few big rocks, I guess to stand on, but he didn’t have any shovel or anything, and he was using his hands, and he couldn’t do it.

  “So finally he just put the rope around his neck, not a hangman’s noose or anything, but a regular slipknot, I guess, and it was too long. When he tried to put his weight on it, he just went down on his knees and rolled over. There he is lying on the ground looking like a real idiot, I tell you, I nearly laughed, it was so stupid.

  “He gets up again and he tightens the rope, makes it shorter, and puts it around his neck again. This time it’s okay, but he still doesn’t have a thing to jump off of, and he just sort of lets himself sag down so his weight’s on the rope, but he stands up quick again just as he starts to choke. He stands there for a minute or so and then he lets himself down again, but as soon as he does, he stands back up and takes a deep breath and then starts pantin’.

  “He does this maybe two, three more times, and then he just stands there and cries. Cries like a baby, I guess ’cause he can’t make himself do it. So I figure he wants to do it, I want him to do it, maybe I’ll give him some help.”

  Tom Drummond choked a little on the last word, and there was another fit of coughing, thick and phlegmy, and then a pause followed by a click, caused, I guessed, by his setting down a glass of water from which he’d taken a drink.

  “So I come out of the brush where I been hiding,” he went on, his voice clearer, “and held up my rifle so he could see it. He looked real guilty, like I’d caught him doing something bad. And I guess I had at that. I said to him, ‘You tryin’ to hang yourself, right?’ He didn’t say anything for a minute, and then he just nodded, and the rope kinda swayed when he did.

  “He looked awful and smelled worse. He hadn’t shaved in a long time, and his breath stunk fierce and his B.O. almost knocked me down, even far away as I was standin’. There was big yellow pools of sweat under his arms, and he was sweatin’ from beneath his cap too, so that the sweat run down till you couldn’t tell it from the tears on his face. I was sweatin’ too, but not like that.

  “I just looked at him, and I said, ‘Maybe I can help you. You want me to help you?’ And he didn’t say anything still, but he nodded. I thought about it for a minute, how I could do it, and then I told him, ‘You just stand there. I’m gonna get behind you. Just stand there and don’t be afraid. I’ll help you do what you wanta do…’

  “I walked back behind him then, maybe fifteen, twenty yards or so, so’s I could get some speed. He had his back away from the tree, sorta turned catty-corner to it, so it was a good straight run between me and him. I put down my rifle and rubbed my hands on my legs. I weighed about one-eighty then, thought that’d be plenty of weight to do the job good.

  “Then I come runnin’ at him from behind, and he’s just standin’ there, not movin’, and when I’m just a few feet away from him I jump up in the air and I come down on his back, my arms around his shoulders, and I remember thinkin’, thinkin’ so clear when I was in the air just before I landed, thinkin’ I hope his smell don’t come off on me.”

  There was another long pause, and I waited, holding my breath, for Tom Drummond to continue.

  “I landed good on him, too. My weight and my speed brought him almost straight down, and that rope just…well, it busted his neck. His head went over on its side and I heard his neck crack, and as soon as I did, I knew I should let go and jump away and not let his stink get on me…but I couldn’t.

  “I just…hung there on him. I had my arms around him, and he was all sweaty and smelled just so godawful, but I couldn’t let him go, ’cause the way I felt…I’d never felt anything like that before. It was like I thought I ought to feel when I was…holdin’ a woman, maybe.”

  There was a long pause, then he started talking quickly.

  “Now I don’t want anybody thinkin’ I’m queer, ’cause I’m not, and I never was. It wasn’t that he was a man, it’s just that he was…

  “Dead.”

  In the longer pause that followed, I began to feel sick, as I imagined that young man who had been Tom Drummond, his arms wrapped around Elmer Bingley from behind, clinging to him like a lover. Tom Drummond, who had finally found his goal in life.

  “I finally let him go, and come around in front where I could see his face. He was dead all right. I guess he’d gone dead when his neck broke. I could smell his pee now, and worse, where he’d crapped his pants when he died. I looked down at myself, but none of it had got on me.

  “When I was done lookin’, I went back and picked up my gun and walked away, sorta parallel to the road, thinkin’ that I didn’t want to meet anybody comin’ into the woods. After I walked a fair spell, I turned back to the road and come out of the woods and went home. Nobody saw me to speak of. I changed my clothes and then just sat in my room until my mama called me down for lunch.

  “That afternoon somebody found Elmer Bingley, and I went up when some of the others did. I took my gun along, I don’t know why, but I did. And I don’t even know why I went up, I guess ’cause it woulda looked funny maybe if I hadn’t. But when I got there, I was glad I went.

  “All those people were there lookin’ at Elmer hangin’ there, and I thought…I did that.” A long pause, then he spoke, very softly.

  “I did that.”

  You did indeed, I thought. And you were so excited about it that you got physically excited too, didn’t you? You liked it so much. And did you do it again? Did you? Will you tell me?

  It was beyond eerie, lying there by candlelight, listening to the confessions of a dead man. Outside, the whole world was dark and heavily shrouded with snow, and in my apartment, the dead man spoke again.

  “I wanted to do it again. But I didn’t till a few years later. When I started selling, started in on the road. That made it easy. When I’d go door to door, sometimes I’d find women who lived alone—widows or young women on their own. If I could get it right, get things set up so that no one else knew they were with me, then I’d do it. But not all the time even then. If I thought there was even a chance I’d get caught, well then, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t ever take a chance, no sir. Wouldn’t be worth it.

  “‘Cause there was always gonna be one who’d go with you, who’d wanta do it, go for a drive to do it. And we’d go out in the woods, down some little lane…I knew where I was going, because I always scouted around the area beforehand…and then I’d take her to where I planned to, and do with her…whatever I wanted. But it always ended the same way. The way it had with Elmer Bingley…

  “They call that a serial killer now, but back then in the magazines and such, they called it a sex killer. I don’t know about that. I don’t know as I like to think about it like that. It didn’t seem like that to me. I mean, that was part of it, but not…well, not the best part…”

  I pushed the button to turn off the tape. Even lying down, Tom Drummond’s voice and the things he was saying made me feel sick and dizzy. His tone was so matter of fact that it made things even worse, and I needed a break, just a few moments of not hearing that voice over the high-pitched ambient whine of the cheap machine.

  I lay there for a while, until curiosity overcame my nausea, and I turned the machine back on.

  “I mostly did it in summer, late spring, early fall, when the weather was good. You hadda be outside, and cold weather was no good for it…I always left them there when I finished. I never buried them or anything. I didn’t think it was…well, right that their families wouldn’t know what happened to them. It woulda been safer for me if I’d buried them or made them disappear some other way, but I always felt I owed them that much anyways.

  “Just like it had to be kinda neat when I was done. Oh, I left them hanging there, but I’d always take their clothes and fold them just so, and put
their purse on top of them. I thought that was important. I never took any money or any jewelry or anything at all from them.

  “Except their lives.”

  Chapter 21

  He was it then, wasn’t he? He hadn’t come right out and said it yet, but he was the Hangman Killer. And I’d just heard his origin story, like hearing Superman tell about Krypton, or Batman tell about when his parents were gunned down. Only they were good guys. And Tom Drummond, in spite of his straightforward, tell-it-like-it-is style, was a bad guy. One of the baddest bad guys of all.

  “There was only one time,” he went on,” when I wasn’t careful enough and got caught. But I got out of that, just the way I’d planned…we’d planned. And that’s what I gotta tell about, how I got out of that problem back in 1946. But before I do, I gotta tell about what happened about seven, eight years before. I think it was the fall of, oh, must’ve been 1938.

  “I was out in northern Pennsylvania, Potter County, I believe, and I just finished with this woman. I folded everything nice and neat and looked around to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind that could be linked to me in any way, and then I heard these footsteps coming through the dead leaves and I didn’t know what to do. I mean, there I was, and there she was clear as day.

  “I thought about runnin’, and then I thought maybe I should just hold my ground and maybe I could kill whoever it was, though I didn’t have a gun or anything, I never used a gun. But I was still pretty big and strong, I’d been doin’ those Bernarr Macfadden exercises ever since high school, so I just stayed put and up comes this guy, tall guy, young, and I could hardly believe my eyes.”

  Tom Drummond took another pause, and then said, very slowly and distinctly, and with more life in his voice than I’d heard yet:

  “He got this woman, all tied up, over his shoulder.”

  It sounded as though he was finding it hard to breathe. Then I heard him take in a deep gasp and clear his throat. He continued.

  “Well, he can hardly believe his eyes neither, ’cause he just stares at my woman and then at me, and then back at my woman again. And then he laughs. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect that. He laughs, and he says, ‘Well, it looks like two brothers have found each other,’ or something like that, it was a long, long time ago.

  “But anyway, I realize that he’s brought this woman out here for the same reason I brought mine. It’s a hell of a coincidence, but not so surprisin’ when you think about it. You figure that two guys like us might show up in the same area, and we’d both be scoutin’ the same kinda place, easy to get to but kinda remote, not many people goin’ there, and we both pick the same place, so there we are, both at the same time.

  “Then he asks if he can put his woman down, and I recall exactly what he said, he said, ‘May I lay my burden down?’ Lay my burden down, like a hymn, y’know? And he sets this girl down and he says let’s talk like men here, says that he can see what I’ve been doin’, and that he knows that I know what he’s plannin’ to do, so let’s just let bygones be bygones and not try and stop each other because if one of us squeals on the other, then he can turn around and squeal on him, and I say that makes plenty of sense to me, ’cause he’s right. We’re both doin’ the same thing after all.

  “So he says he’s glad that’s settled then, and he says he’ll just take up his burden, that’s what he said, take up his burden and go somewheres else. He says it’ll have to be far enough away so that they won’t find his when they find mine. He tells me it’s a lot safer to bury ’em, but I tell him why I don’t like to do that, and he laughs again, says that I’m a real thoughtful fella, ain’t I, and I say I guess I am at that.

  “Then he gets a funny look in his eye, like he just thought of something, and he says, ‘Yessir, real thoughtful…maybe we could be thinkin’ of each other, too,’ and I ask him what he means by that, ’cause I work alone, no way I’d want a partner in somethin’ like that though I don’t come right out and say it, but it turns out that’s not what he means.

  “‘Look,’ he says, ‘we could maybe help each other if we get in trouble. If we get caught. Say one of us does. Well, maybe the other one could help by doin’ a job that’s just exactly like the one he got caught for.’

  “Then he explains it out to me. He gets caught for something, it’ll be in the papers, so right away I do a job just like what he got caught for, so it looks likes it couldn’t be him ’cause he was in jail when it happened. Then they let him go. Same with me—I get caught, he does one of mine just like the way I do it.

  “Well, I think about it, and I tell him we’d have to know all about how we do what we do, so we could get it to look right, and he agrees with me. He goes up and looks at my woman hanging there, and I tell him how I break the neck when I get done doing what I do, and he sees the clothes and the way I fold them, and the knot I use, and all the little details, and he says that if I get caught he’s seen enough to do what we talked about, and he’ll do it close enough to a road or where guys hunt that somebody’ll find it quick.

  “But I ask him what should I do if he gets caught, since he buries his, and he tells me just bury one somewhere where somebody’d find it easy. Don’t cover up the dirt or try to hide it. And then I ask him how he does his—if there’s anything special that when the cops see it, they’d know it was the same. And he asks me if I want to watch.

  “I’m kinda…I dunno, uncomfortable with that, but I figure I oughta know, so I say okay, and he picks up this girl and we walk deeper into the woods, pretty far from where mine’s hangin’. And when we get where he thinks is a good spot, he throws her down and starts in. But what he did…”

  Tom Drummond was silent for a long time, and I realized that tears were running down my face at the thought of the poor women that these two monsters preyed upon. I tried to wipe the horrible images out of my head, but I couldn’t. Then Drummond started talking again.

  “I couldn’t watch it. I told him so. He said go off in the bushes and he’d tell me when he was done, so’s I could see how he left them, and I did. I didn’t watch, but I heard what was goin’ on, and I got sick and threw up. Then I just sat down and waited.

  “It took an awful long time, but finally I heard him shout okay, and went back. I saw what he’d done and looked away, and I hoped I’d never have to do one for him. Then he said, c’mon, look here now, you gotta see this, and that was when I saw that he cut off the little finger of her right hand just above that middle knuckle there. ‘That’s my modus operandi,’ he said. That was what he took from them, and that was what I’d have to do to, so I said okay.

  “He had hangin’ on his belt one of them kinda portable shovels like the Boy Scouts use? Comes in two parts and you screw it together? That’s what he dug the grave with—only about two feet down so when he put her in there, there was maybe a foot of dirt over her, so I had to remember that too.

  “And at the end we had to tell each other our names so we’d know if we ever saw them in the papers. And then we went our own ways.

  “I never had to do one for him, but he had to do one for me once, oh, around 1946, ’47. And it worked. It worked just fine. They let me go once my lawyer found out about the other killing—the details cleared me, just the way we’d planned it. I never heard from him about it and never tried to get in touch. That was the smart way to do it.

  “Gettin’ caught like that, though…that sorta put the damper on things for me, and I did it a whole lot less and finally stopped altogether in the fifties. That was when I met Ella and we got married in 1958. Never wanted to after that. She was good for me. Never had any children, and I guess that’s just as well, maybe they woulda turned out like me, I dunno.

  “Anyways, when she died, I was too old to do anything like I did before, and now I was older I didn’t want to. I felt bad about it. Time changes you, I guess. But I just went on livin’, thinkin’ about what I’d done now and then, thinkin’ about that fella who really saved my life, you come right
down to it.

  “I didn’t see him again after that day in the woods, never even knew he was alive after he did that job for me.

  “So, I was just surprised as all get out when I moved in here last summer and saw him sittin’ on the front porch readin’ a book.”

  Chapter 22

  Just like that, as soon as I heard him say that, I knew, and my heart leapt into my throat. But I had to keep listening, to be sure. There was no way I could skim ahead, jump to the back, or fast forward the tape. I had no idea what I’d miss. I had to just sit there, my stomach churning, and listen to this old terrible monster drone on:

  “It’s no big surprise that we’d both end up in the same place, I guess. I asked around a little, and found out that he’s originally from this area too. You usually go to where you started when you get old, it just works out that way. Or who knows, maybe it was fate.

  “But I knew him soon as I saw him. He was still tall and skinny, still had that little moustache. ’Course his hair’d gone gray and he was lots older, but I knew him right off, just the way he knew me.

  “‘Cause he looked at me and he nodded, and I knew he recognized me. Some things don’t change, I guess. Maybe it’s the eyes or somethin’, but he knew me, and his eyes got narrow. I didn’t say a word to him nor him to me, and we haven’t talked at all. Let bygones be bygones, like he said all those years ago. I figured he was just like me, he had his fill of it and then he got old too. Best to just stay quiet about it.

  “But then that lady died, that Enid. I heard about how she looked, heard that one nurse tellin’ another one what her face was like, and it made me think back all those years ago to when I saw that woman after he’d got done with her. And I just wondered…well, I wondered.

  “And then the other one, the Jew lady. And it was the same thing. I heard her face was awful too. And that morning I saw him, and I saw his face when he didn’t know nobody was lookin’ at him, and I just knew, ’cause I saw my own face look like that in the mirror too many times not to know.