Hangman

by Michael Slade

  Law is about connections.

  Law is about hooks.

  When we came out of law school, Ethan and I, the milk from the milk cow was dribbling dry. Politicians here had made a big mistake when they gambled that the Pacific Rim was where the future lay, so when Asia took a dive in the global marketplace, we—unlike the rest of North America—went into recession. Penny-pinchers grabbed hold of the public purse, and the first to suffer the stinginess of politics in the nineties were those who didn’t vote: our client base.

  The legal-aid system crumbled.

  And took us with it.

  Son of a bitch!

  Just my luck.

  The net effect of that crumbling was the scene in Kline & Shaw last November 1. Ethan had disappeared into his office right of Suzy’s desk, and there would while away the day at cheap paperwork. Everything from landlord and tenant to immigration to divorce to real estate to wills and estates to creditors’ remedies to motor-vehicle claims. Meanwhile, our admin was on strike. I sat at Suzy’s desk, surrounded by a mess of bills we could ill afford to pay, not a single client referral from legal aid in the mail, daydreaming that I was retained to act for the Hangman down south, and hoping that across the street in the courthouse cells the Salvation Army was filling out a referral form in my name: the Big Case that somehow would catapult me away from all this.

  Jesus Christ!

  Not only was I still saddled with student loans; not only did I still live in the East End in a rented house; not only was my office once a hippie head shop that still stank of patchouli oil; not only did I—after seven years of university, a year of articles to an ambulance chaser, and several years of practice here on skid row—still make God knows how much less than a plumber … but now some drunk who was staggering by had turned into our entrance alcove to piss on the door to Kline & Shaw.

  I saw red.

  I threw down the newspaper piece on the Hangman.

  I stormed from the desk, tromped to the door, and yanked it open.

  The drunk pissed on my shoe as I clutched him by his grubby coat.

  I bunched my fist, cocked my arm, and was into a punch to launch his head into outer space, a reaction of the sort Mike Hammer would respect, when I spied a cop across Main Street, in front of the police station, eyeballing me.

  I’m a defense lawyer.

  Cops hate my guts.

  So at the last moment, I pulled the punch to save myself from murder one.

  The cop cocked his finger at me like a gun.

  I tipped an imaginary hat on my head.

  The drunk staggered away with his penis dangling out.

  Another depressing day at Kline & Shaw.

  The only sure cure I know is a walk uptown. So in I went to my office left of Suzy’s desk, and there I packed my secondhand briefcase with a file requiring a factum for the court of appeal. No, not a murder—a measly B and E. I popped in to tell Ethan where I’d be, and then, since I’m also janitor for Kline & Shaw, mopped up the pool of piss at the door before escaping north toward the harbor inlet.

  A black hooker wearing an orange scoop-necked blouse and tight orange crotch-cleaving shorts stood at the corner of Powell and Main, in front of a strip bar called Number 5 Orange.

  “Trick or treat?” she said.

  “A day late,” I replied.

  “Honey, it’s never bad luck to have black pussy cross yo’ path.”

  “Later,” I lied.

  “I be here,” she cooed.

  I turned west on Powell to enter Gastown, where Gassy Jack once served booze at Maple Tree Square; a statue of him on a whiskey barrel commands the five roads converging there today. Water Street ran along the inlet with the mountains beyond to the financial district, marking uptown. I angled along Granville, pausing at the Birks clock (beneath which lovers have rendezvoused since 1907) to retie my shoe, then turned west on Georgia and strolled a block over to the old courthouse, now the art gallery.

  To me, the old courthouse epitomizes law.

  That’s where I witnessed Kinky. The Hanging Judge.

  Our history of murder and hanging.

  Including the architect.

  The Rattenbury case is one of the crimes of the century. Look it up in any blood history. Rattenbury was a turn-of-the-century British architect who made his name in British Columbia. The courthouse and the legislature are his legacy. Polite society threw him out in 1924 for having an affair with Alma Pakenham, thirty years his junior. The outcasts fled to England to marry in 1928, and set up house in Bournemouth. Within six years Alma was bored, so she placed an ad in papers for a houseboy, the upshot of which was that a dim-witted youth named George Stoner ended up doing service in her bed. George got jealous of Rats, what Alma called her husband, so he bashed the old boy on the head with a mallet and did him in.

  The next day, Alma confessed to save George. Then George confessed to save Alma. Their trial at the Old Bailey was a cause célèbre. Husband 67. Wife 38. Stud 18. Alma was acquitted. George was sentenced to hang. So Alma stabbed herself to death beside a Bournemouth stream where the lovers used to go. Ironically, George didn’t hang. The sentence of death imposed on him was commuted to life without Alma.

  That’s the kind of case I dreamed would come my way.

  A cause célèbre.

  With lots of press.

  Enough to catapult me away from depressing skid row.

  Standing in front of Rattenbury’s courthouse at noon that day, facing the stone lions flanking the steps up to its soaring pillars and listening to the noon-horn blast the first four notes of “O Canada” over the harbor at 115 decibels, I imagined I was an attorney in Seattle defending whoever the Hangman was against that state’s gallows.

  As luck would have it, the Hangman was about to cross the border.

  Soon, there would be bones on my picking ground.

  And if the Hangman gets me tonight, the next bones will be mine …

  Lady-Killer

  Vancouver

  Tuesday, November 7 (Nine days ago)

  Doesn’t anyone believe in romance anymore?

  In love at first sight?

  A tempest worthy of Shakespeare whooped and rained outside the windows of her townhouse at the foot of the mountains as Jayne Curry, surrounded by candles and sipping a glass of red wine, worked on the Web site she would launch to relate her side of the story. Tap-tap-tap … her fingers tapped the keyboard of her computer in counterpoint to the tap-tap-tap … of a windblown branch that rapped against the nearest pane.

  The first time I set eyes on him my heart began to flutter. I had waited my entire life for such a man. He was handsome in the classic sense, a full head of salt-and-pepper hair graying at the temples, the profile of a Greek god from a marble bust, his lean body tall and confident in a charcoal suit. When he turned to cast a gaze around the gallery, I’m sure every female present felt like me.

  The doctor had sex appeal …

  Here she would import a headshot of him from the graphics file, a photo she had surreptitiously snapped for her fantasy wall, a montage of irresistible males around her bedroom mirror. Those visiting her Web site could judge for themselves.

  Tap-tap-tap went her fingers.

  Tap-tap-tap rapped the branch.

  Blow any harder and it might break the glass.

  The doctor turned away from me when the presiding judge took the bench. The lawyers introduced themselves to her, then Chief Justice Morgan Hatchett ordered the court clerk to read the indictment.

  “John Langley Twist, you stand charged that on the eighth of January of this year, in the city of Vancouver, in the province of British Columbia, you did commit the first-degree murder of Lena Hay.”

  I was shocked.

  This man a killer?

  No way, I recall saying to myself.

  Then, seconds later, the doctor confirmed my first impression.

  “Having heard the charge, how do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?”

  “N
ot guilty,” the doctor said in a voice that rang with truth.

  The clerk turned to the judge. “The accused pleads not guilty.”

  “Proceed,” the judge ordered.

  With a wooden box of names in hand, the clerk addressed the dock. “These good persons who shall now be called are the jurors who are to pass between Our Sovereign Lady the Queen and you at your trial. If therefore you would challenge them or any of them, you must challenge them as they come to the book to be sworn, and before they are sworn you shall be heard.”

  My heart skipped a beat when I was the sixth name called …

  Her fingers stopped tapping.

  But not the branch.

  Tap-tap-tap … Its rap kept time with the click of her high heels across the hardwood floor as Jayne left her writing desk to refill her glass from the bottle of Beaujolais on the table. The table was set for two—as it was every night this lonely heart dined alone—with fine linen, a silver service, and red roses in a crystal vase. Warm glow from the candlesticks mingled with that from the other candles throughout the room, bathing her with afterglow to soften her age. Tonight, Jayne wore a dinner dress the color of the wine, V’d for décolletage to please her imaginary beau. Rachmaninov set the mood for wishful love.

  Bastard, she thought.

  And drained the glass of wine.

  And refilled the glass.

  And carried it back to her desk.

  In retrospect, I wish I had asked the trial judge to excuse me from jury duty. But how could I have said, in front of the entire panel, that my reason for asking to be excused was that I found the accused to be a dashing, attractive charmer, as I’m sure did every other female—including the judge—in that court? So I kept quiet and was chosen to take the jury oath.

  “Do you swear you shall well and truly try and true deliverance make between Our Sovereign Lady the Queen and the accused at the bar, whom you shall have in charge, and a true verdict give, according to the evidence, so help you God?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  And that is what I did.

  The case outlined by the Crown counsel in his opening to us was weak from the start. Dr. John Twist owned a geriatric clinic in the city. Lena Hay was a patient of his, an elderly woman who died from an undetermined cause shortly after she changed her will to leave her substantial estate to Doctor Twist’s clinic. What led the police to investigate were similarities between that death and two others, also elderly widows who changed their wills to benefit the clinic shortly before they died of natural causes.

  The only autopsy done was on Lena Hay.

  The forensic pathologist, Gillian Macbeth, could find no sign of foul play. What she did find on Hay’s body was a needle prick, which a bitter nurse fired from the clinic told police was caused by Doctor Twist secretly injecting Lena at midnight with some drug. The clinic had no record of that injection having been given, and no drug had been dispensed by its pharmacy. Potassium, maintained the Crown, is the drug of choice of murdering doctors. The effect of a shot of potassium is it knocks out the heart, and it can’t be detected at autopsy because potassium is in the body naturally.

  That was the case.

  Would you convict …?

  Again her concentration was broken by that branch insistently rapping on the window. Tap-tap-TAP. It was rapping harder. Through snakes of black rain squirming down the glass she could see the skeletal limb clawing at the pane. Because she was dressed in her finery, she didn’t want to go out, but if the storm blew the branch at the window any harder, her reluctance would result in a shattered hole.

  Better safe than sorry.

  So Jayne stood up.

  What she was writing for publication through the Internet had reached a crucial point. How much of her lonely life should she reveal? Should she inform the world that she was called Plain Jayne at school, and that she remained a wallflower at every dance, fantasizing she was the belle of the ball in the arms of the best-looking boys? Unmarried and nearing fifty, she still romanticized alone at night, attending the theater by herself for Romeo and Juliet or My Fair Lady, and the ballet by herself for Sleeping Beauty. When she stayed home, it was to read books like The Bridges of Madison County and Wuthering Heights, or any novel by Danielle Steel.

  No! thought Jayne.

  I won’t do it!

  Why should it be me who bares my soul when he’s to blame?

  Fueled by resentment, Jayne sat down again and began to tap the keyboard furiously.

  That first day of the trial, while I sat eating a bag lunch on the steps near the law courts fountain in Robson Square, the shadow of someone fell over me and paused. I looked up to see a black silhouette against the sun, and instantly knew it was the doctor looming above.

  “You’re on my jury,” he said.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Good. At least one member will treat me fairly. You know what Robert Frost said about juries? ‘A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.’”

  Then he was gone, and I shielded my eyes against the blinding sun …

  Tap-TAP-TAP!

  That damn branch!

  After that, everywhere I went when the trial was recessed …

  Tap-TAP-TAP!

  John Twist …

  TAP-TAP-TAP!

  Was there …

  The fury she felt over how the accused doctor had set her up suddenly focused on this branch threatening to break into the sanctuary of her home, much the same way John Twist had plundered the passion of her heart, and then her yearning body. Jayne Curry leaped up from her desk and crossed to the security panel on the wall beneath the upper landing of the split level, punching in the code that disarmed the alarm. Then she left the two-story vault of the combined living and dining room for the staircase in the entry hall that ran up to her bedroom. At the top of the stairs, the arch to the right brought her out onto the landing, from which she gazed down on the sea of candles flickering around the glow of the computer screen.

  Her ruby nails scraped the banister as she kicked off her high heels and stomped toward her bedroom door, which was halfway along the landing. Entering, she traversed her boudoir, passing between the canopy bed in which the doctor had seduced her and the mirror encircled by her montage of dreamboat men in which she had watched John Twist take her from behind while the secret bug planted by police recorded her undoing. In the walk-in closet, she found a full-length, hooded raincoat to protect her from the storm, and then, carefully removing her expensive dress so she was in her underwear, she pulled on the coat, tied the belt, and went downstairs.

  The hall continued past the stairs to a door that opened on the L-shaped backyard. Jayne grabbed a pair of gardening shears from the tool shelf, then, with her other hand, tugged on a pair of rubber boots. The hood up, she opened the door and ventured out into the wind and rain besieging her home.

  Rounding the corner, Jayne splashed up the arm of the L beside her townhouse. The wind whipped the flaps of the coat away from her garters and nylons. The rain invaded the hood to spatter and spoil her makeup. Cold goosebumped her skin as she seized the branch nearest to the assaulted window and severed it viciously with the shears.

  In her haste, Jayne overlooked the footprints in the mud and failed to notice how the bark was rubbed off the branch, as would happen if a gloved hand had bashed the wet limb repeatedly against the glass.

  She dropped the cutting in the muck and returned to the back door. Shedding the boots and shucking off the soggy coat, she relocked herself inside, replaced the shears on the shelf, and shivered in her underwear back to the main room.

  What was that?

  Nothing?

  Just the storm?

  She looked around.

  Spooky.

  Too many candle shadows.

  A night like this, you hear and feel things that aren’t there.

  Like phantom breathing.

  And eyes watching you.

  Which make you fear yo
u locked yourself in with something evil.

  Creepy.

  She shuddered.

  Enough turmoil, she sighed.

  What Jayne would do instead of working longer on the Web site was run herself a bubble bath and settle in with a bottle of wine and drown her sorrows in the usual fashion. But before she turned off the computer for the night, Jayne padded across the hardwood floor in her stocking feet to punch the alarm code into the keypad on the wall under the split-level landing overhead.

  That’s when her toe touched wet on the floor.

  Her first thought was that the wet was from her, some drops of rain shed as she moved. But when she felt her hair, she found it dry, which you’d expect, thanks to the hood. When she felt her body, she found it dry, too, as you’d expect, thanks to the coat. She crouched in the shadows to feel her legs, also finding them dry, what with the boots, and that’s when she saw the spreading pool.

  A leak? thought Jayne.

  But how can that be?

  The puddle on the floor was beneath the overhead landing, so not only was this spot covered by another level, but Jayne had walked the landing herself a few minutes ago, when she went up to her boudoir to fetch her coat.

  In stocking feet, she recalled.

  I kicked off my shoes.

  So if the puddle isn’t from me …

  Still crouched in the shadows, she began to turn her head.

  And if it isn’t from a leak …

  Her eyes traced the trickle that fed the pool.

  The explanation must be …

  She caught a glimpse of the feet sneaking toward her.

  I’m trapped …

  She looked up.

  With an intruder!

  A split second before the noose cinched about her neck.

  The rope running up to the landing above, looping over the banister before it descended to the Hangman’s grip down here, was hidden in the shadows of a soaring indoor palm. The Hangman yanked on the rope to jerk Jayne a few inches off her feet, then yanked again to raise her a foot off the floor, before tying the loose end around the bottom of the post supporting the landing.