A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘Looks like it’s from the Post,’ Reid said as Miller inspected it.

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘Beneath the mattress in the back bedroom.’

  ‘Caught there, or did it look like it had been placed there?’

  ‘Like it had been placed. It was flat, like it was placed on top of the wooden slat and then the mattress was lowered down onto it.’

  Miller peered closely at the small shred of newsprint. ‘Unofficial results show he has a clear lead over his four rivals,’ he read. ‘Supporters took to the streets yesterday signing his campaign anthem, “Give Peace A Chance” by John Lennon. A victory would give Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, a strong ally in the region but the U.S. administration has already cast serious doubt on the transparency of the—’ Miller looked up. ‘Of the?’

  Reid shrugged. ‘Any clue?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘No idea. Some South American election thing.’

  ‘I think it’s the Post . . . looks like their typeface,’ Reid said again, and then added, ‘Have something else for you.’

  He backed up, headed toward the front door and leaned down to take something from a case. When he returned he had another baggie, within it a plain manila envelope.

  ‘You have gloves?’ he asked Miller.

  Miller took a second glove from his inside jacket pocket and put it on.

  Reid opened the baggie, lifted the envelope, and slid out some photographs, no more than six by four. There were three of them, two in color, one in monochrome.

  Catherine Sheridan - going back fifteen, maybe twenty years, and in each picture she stood beside the same man. He was taller than her by a good six or seven inches. Miller held them by their edges, laid each one out carefully on the kitchen counter.

  ‘Where were these?’ Miller asked.

  ‘Under the bedroom carpet. Right underneath the bed where she was found.’

  Roth looked closely at each picture in turn. ‘How tall was she?’ he asked.

  ‘Five three?’ Miller said. ‘Maybe five four. She wasn’t that tall.’

  ‘So the guy here is maybe five ten or thereabouts.’

  Miller smiled sardonically. ‘Average height, average build, medium to dark brown hair, clean shaven, no evident distinguishing marks . . . why do these people always have to look like ten million other people?’

  ‘Hey, be grateful you don’t work in Tokyo,’ Roth said.

  ‘There’s something on the back of this one,’ Reid said. He handed one of the black-and-whites to Roth who peered at it closely.

  ‘Christmas ’82,’ Roth said. ‘That’s helpful.’ He looked at the image again. ‘What the hell is this here . . . looks like a forest or what? Jungle maybe?’

  ‘Whatever it is, I’m thinking that maybe this is the guy that went down to see Darryl King with our mystery lady.’

  Roth smiled. ‘As if it could be that simple.’

  ‘Well, maybe it is, Al, but it sure as shit don’t make it simple. Who the fuck is he? We’ve got nothing. No name, nothing that makes him really stand out from anyone else . . .’

  ‘Let’s go see Natasha Joyce,’ Roth said. ‘Let’s go see if she recognizes the guy.’

  ‘You can’t take them,’ Reid said. ‘I have to lab report them, check for prints, all that stuff.’

  ‘How soon?’ Miller asked.

  ‘I’m not done here,’ Reid said. ‘Come see me tomorrow morning. I can get you copies. Call me and check they’re ready, okay? I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do.’

  ‘And the news clipping?’ Roth asked.

  ‘That you can take. I have pictures of that. But bring it back to me in the morning.’

  Miller thanked him. Roth headed toward the front door.

  ‘One other thing,’ Reid said.

  Miller turned back.

  ‘If she had sex with someone . . .’

  ‘She did,’ Miller replied. ‘Coroner confirmed what you said.’

  ‘So she had sex with someone, but right now there are no traces of semen in the bed.’ Reid smiled knowingly. ‘That doesn’t mean a great deal, but . . .’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Miller replied. ‘Coroner’s report said she showered afterwards as well, which would explain why there are no other pubic hairs.’

  ‘So there’s the possibility that she was at someone else’s house.’

  ‘Or a hotel,’ Miller said. ‘But like you say, that’s not something we can prove or disprove.’

  ‘Over to you guys then,’ Reid said.

  Miller hesitated for a moment, standing there in the brightly lit kitchen that only three days before had seen Catherine Sheridan preparing a meal, perhaps drinking a glass of Chardonnay, listening to the radio.

  And then someone came to visit. Someone who’d done this thing three times before.

  Eight months. Four dead. Not a word.

  ‘Sorry,’ Miller said. ‘I forgot to ask you . . . the DVD that was playing, any fingerprints on it?’

  ‘Only hers,’ Reid said. ‘Sorry.’

  Miller sighed. He thanked Reid and followed Roth out.

  A while back Catherine and I went down to the projects. We drove along the John Hanson Highway that runs between Landover Hills and Glenarden. We went to find a man named Darryl King, a young black heroin addict with a daughter named Chloe. We did not find Darryl, but we found Chloe’s mother, Natasha Joyce. Chloe was with her. Sweet girl, couldn’t have been more than four or five. Reminded me of other children, other times. Catherine did most of the talking. I watched the car. I watched the road. I chewed gum and craved a cigarette. Natasha Joyce could not tell us where Darryl King was. I could see the fear in her eyes. I wanted her to be unafraid, but I could say nothing. I gave her twenty bucks. ‘For your daughter,’ I said. ’Buy her something nice, eh?’ I think they were the only words I uttered.

  We left empty-handed. I knew then that Darryl had lost his grip on things, that he’d become what he’d most feared.

  I thought of my father as we drove away, an expression he wore that appeared more and more frequently and eventually seemed permanent. That anything good was transient, short-lived, too easily forgotten. The belief that there was always something worse around the corner.

  I thought of Natasha Joyce, looking so much older than her years. Too much life too quickly. All sharp corners and rough edges. A decade of living collapsed between grades nine and twelve. I thought of the four noble truths of Buddhism: that all life is subject to suffering, that the desire to live is the cause of repeated existences, that only the annihilation of desire can give release, that the way of escape is the elimination of selfishness. I thought of how stupid I had become. The old joke: I know a guy who’s so dumb he got fired from a job he didn’t have.

  I thought of these things as we drove back toward Washington, out beyond Chinatown, to the small apartment on the corner of New Jersey Avenue and Q Street. Catherine dropped me off a couple of blocks away. A habit we’d gotten into months before. She didn’t say goodbye. Neither did I. Another habit. I raised my hand and smiled. She did the same. I walked home. She drove away.

  It would be a while before Catherine Sheridan died, but we both knew it was coming.

  Back a long time - before I knew Catherine Sheridan, even before I became John Robey - there was a history.

  Some of that history was about my father.

  Everyone knew him as Big Joe. Big Joe the carpenter. Hence I became Little Joe, even though my name was something else entirely. I stayed Little Joe until my father died, and then everyone disappeared quietly, effortlessly, and I became myself.

  ‘Center of the tree is the heartwood,’ he told me. ‘The spine, the backbone, the skeleton.’ He lifted a piece of timber, turned it between his hands, showed me the cross-section, the whorls, the way it grew lighter toward the edges. ‘The sapwood is the flesh. The flesh is weak, prone to the ravages of time and nature.’

  He smiled, set the wood down, turned back to his bench.


  ‘If you want something to last, build it from the heart.’

  Sometimes I would watch the wood turn in the lathe, or lie still as the chisel or router scored its flesh. The wood was alive. Still and silent, but nevertheless alive. My father worked the wood as if merely helping it become what it had always wished to be. The grain was symbolic of dreams. White cedar dreamed of shingles, boats, canoes and cabinets; cottonwood dreamed in loose whirls, perhaps of veranda posts and rocking chairs; hickory was hard, a relentless wood, its thoughts of floors and shelving; tupelo gum soft, remembering days of brilliant foliage, yet now considering the patient hands of old men, whittling through their final years. Black walnut was dense, almost unintelligible. I believed that walnut dreamed of walking canes and caskets.

  ‘Your mother will never be what she once was,’ he said. I could smell the oil on his hands, the varnish, the glue. He smiled. ‘This is something I don’t know how to explain to you,’ he added, ‘because I don’t understand it myself.

  ‘Your mother is going to die,’ he went on quietly, and he laid the palm of his hand against my cheek, and I could smell the wood, the sap, the varnish, the amber, could sense the grain, the density . . . could feel the tree itself, aching with the weight of fruit, the way the leaves would turn towards the sun as the day progressed.

  Believed I could. Wanted to believe I could.

  Child with an imagination.

  Only later - so many years later - would I understand the danger of imagination, but by then it was too late.

  ‘She will leave us,’ he whispered, and then he closed his eyes for a moment and breathed deeply. ‘And then it’ll be just you and me, kiddo . . . just you and me.’

  I find it ironic, so utterly ironic.

  I’ve been watching the news these past few days. Right here in Washington, no more than a hop, skip and a jump away from the White House, and with the mid-term results now in I can see where this thing is going to go.

  Catherine is dead, and I know what she would have thought, what she would have said.

  ‘This has been my life. This has been the only one I’ll remember for now.’

  She would have looked right at me, looked right through me the way only Catherine Sheridan could, and said, ‘Way this thing is rigged . . . the world, you know? The way the world is rigged - the media, the propaganda, the whole mindset they create with TV and movies and advertising and all this stuff . . . they want you to believe you’re nothing. Haven’t met an adult yet who still believes in happiness. Happiness is a kid’s thing. Get kicked enough times before the eighth grade and you’re already beginning to wonder what the goddamned point is. I’ve seen all of it. Seen things the like of which I would never wish on another human being. It’s been a beautiful story of terrible things, as American as napalm.’

  Or maybe not.

  Perhaps she would have just said goodbye.

  Or perhaps not goodbye, for goodbye was too final, and Catherine believed in the ultimate circularity of all things.

  Perhaps ‘Au revoir . . .’.

  But hell! I am bitter and tired. I have seen and heard the worst of it for so long, and it has colored my judgement. Maybe it’s not all that bad. Maybe we really didn’t do the things that I saw. Maybe I was mistaken. My vision got blurred. I saw things and imagined they were something else. That’s what happened.

  Except for one thing. The thing that started all of this. The thing that Catherine Sheridan and me figured we could do something about.

  And so we did. We’ve done it now. Now it’s too late to go back.

  And while the world does what it does, while the American people wonder whether the situation will change now the Republicans have lost their stranglehold on Congress, I go to work, I do my job, and I wait for the police to arrive at my door and tell me what I’ve been expecting to hear.

  Sometimes I catch myself holding my breath in anticipation.

  TEN

  Seated in the car, Roth pre-empted Miller by saying, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Think?’ Miller said, a rhetorical tone in his voice. ‘I don’t know that I have any clearer idea of what happened than when we started.’

  ‘About the fact that this woman doesn’t seem to exist I mean.’

  Miller kind of laughed. ‘No-one doesn’t exist, Al. Believe me, there’s a glitch in the system somewhere. She has a social security number, she has dental records, she has fingerprints and DNA and God only knows what else.’

  Roth didn’t reply, didn’t challenge Miller. He simply asked, ‘So where to now?’

  ‘The Washington Post.’

  ‘You got the address?’

  ‘Eleven-fifty, Fifteenth Street - it’s about three blocks east of Farragut North Metro.’

  Roth reached forward and started the engine. Miller glanced at his watch.

  Miller was used to people knowing who they were by how they looked. He took it for granted. The Washington Post receptionist - pretty girl, late twenties, hair cut in a shoulder-length bob - smiled an acknowledgement, and when they reached the desk she said ‘Gentlemen?’ like she knew there was going to be trouble of some sort.

  Miller took out his pocketbook, showed his badge. The girl didn’t give it a second thought.

  Miller glanced at her lapel tag: Carly Newman.

  From the inner pocket of his jacket Miller took the plastic baggie. ‘I give you some text from an article, can you tell me which article it was?’

  ‘We have the whole paper online, you know?’ she said, something slightly superior in her tone. ‘Washingtonpost dot com. Go there, type in half a dozen or so words, and it can search every copy of the Post that’s in the system. Goes back I don’t know how many years.’

  ‘You can do it for us?’ Miller asked. He wanted to tell Carly - sweet girl though she was - that they’d just come from the coroner’s office. He wanted to tell her about a smart, attractive woman that someone had taken it upon themselves to strangle, to beat relentlessly, to leave in a very undignified pose, despite the fact that she was dying of cancer. He wanted to tell Carly Newman this before she said something else condescending.

  ‘Of course I can, officer,’ Carly said, and she smiled like she’d had second thoughts about what she’d planned to say.

  Miller handed her the baggie. She typed a few words from the article and waited a moment.

  ‘Article is entitled “Ortega Set To Landslide Nicaragua Election”. Byline is Richard Grantham.’ Carly looked up. ‘He’s one of our staff writers, not a freelance. Political section.’

  ‘Can you print that for me?’ Miller asked.

  ‘Sure I can,’ she replied. Clicked, scrolled, clicked. Something whirred beneath her desk. She reached down, retrieved it, handed the single page to Miller.

  Miller scanned it. ‘Election,’ he said to Roth.

  Roth frowned.

  ‘The word that was missing at the end, remember? “A victory would give Venezualan president, Hugo Chavez, a strong ally in the region but the U.S. administration has already cast serious doubt on the transparency of the . . . election.” That was the word missing off the end of the clipping.’

  ‘What’s the date?’ Roth asked.

  ‘The tenth.’

  ‘Day before she was killed.’

  ‘Someone was killed?’ Carly Newman asked, and Miller looked at her and saw the expression he’d seen so many times before. Something real had touched her life. Something dark and awkward, something that would give her pause for thought several times before she forgot it . . . and then tomorrow, perhaps the day after, perhaps next week, someone would say or do something, someone would use the word ‘election’ or she would meet another person named Miller, and all of a sudden it would remind her of the vague and insubstantial transience of it all.

  ‘Yes,’ Miller said. ‘Someone was killed.’ He looked at Roth. Roth held out his hand for the clipping. Miller asked if Richard Grantham would be available should they need to speak with him.

  ‘Not n
ow,’ she said. ‘Most of the day staff are gone. We just have the night staff here now,’ she said. ‘But he’s here most of the time.’ She smiled. ‘Richard is a legend around here, you know?’

  ‘A legend?’

  ‘He’s about seven hundred years old,’ Carly said. ‘He looks so amazing for his age. He was here when Woodward and Bernstein went after Nixon.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Miller said.

  ‘Sure is,’ she said. ‘Richard did the copy-editing on their articles before they went to the typesetter. He has some stories, real interesting stories.’

  Miller thanked her again, and as they turned to leave Carly said, ‘The person that was killed? Did that have anything to do with the paper?’

  Miller smiled reassuringly. ‘About as far from the paper as you could imagine,’ he told her, and he could sense the small relief she felt. Perhaps, after all, she wouldn’t think about it again. Perhaps she deserved never to think of such things at all. Some people chose this life. Some people just shouldn’t be subjected to it.

  Outside, now close to eight, Roth and Miller stood silently, their breath visible, the sky clear.

  ‘You take the car,’ Miller said. ‘I’m about seven blocks north. Say hi to Amanda for me, okay?’

  ‘Sure I will . . . see you in the morning.’

  Robert Miller stood for a while longer, hands buried in his overcoat pockets. He exhaled and watched his breath disperse. Winter had set in. What did The Keener’s Manual say? ‘Minutes trudge, Hours run, Years fly, Decades stun. Spring seduces, Summer thrills, Autumn sates, Winter kills.’

  He started walking, trying to think of nothing but the sound of his footsteps on the sidewalk. When he reached his apartment he went up the back stairwell. He turned on the central heating, kicked off his shoes, stood before the open drapes and looked through the window toward the lights of Corcoran and New Hampshire Avenue. This, he thought, is my life. This is the world I have created for myself. Is this what I really wanted?

  Remembered standing on the stairs as a child, overhearing a conversation between his parents.