Hangman

by Michael Slade

  Jayne instinctively grasped the strangling rope with both hands, but she didn’t have the strength to pull herself up. Instead, she thrashed in the air like a puppet bouncing on a string to the whims of a berserk puppeteer. Her nails tore to the quick as she clawed frantically at the noose biting into her throat, gouging red furrows from her flesh. Her heart pounded in her chest as her blood pressure spiked, panic flooding her bloodstream with adrenaline. Mewling gagged from her mouth as she gasped for air, but struggling against this stranglehold was to no avail. Blood engorged her face, which lack of oxygen turned cyanotic blue, as vessels burst in her bulging eyes, reddening the whites. Her tongue protruded between her teeth from the cinching of the noose, while trickles of blood from popping veins ran from her nose and ears.

  One minute …

  Two minutes …

  Three minutes she danced.

  The shadow of the Hangman embraced her like the shadow of death. Arms flailing, legs kicking, chest heaving desperately from asphyxia, the hanging woman silently screamed for air …

  Air …

  Aiiiiirrrr …

  As consciousness began to ebb, Jayne’s muscles twitched involuntarily and general convulsions took hold. Her bladder and rectum voided, soiling Jayne’s silk underwear.

  She was beyond caring.

  She was abandoning life.

  And the last memory she would take to the great hereafter was the look of contempt on the Hangman’s face as the knife in one crooked arm slashed horizontally across the hanged woman’s tongue.

  Twelve Angry Men

  Vancouver

  November 7

  “Henry Fonda,” Zinc said.

  “I agree.”

  “Lemmon did a fine job.”

  “He’s always good. But each time the camera panned away from him, I thought we’d see Walter Matthau in the jury room.”

  Zinc Chandler laughed. “Pass the popcorn, Alex.”

  Alexis Hunt handed him the bowl.

  “Mmmm, good,” Zinc said, stuffing his mouth. “For such a nerdy-looking guy, Orville Redenbacher pops the best.”

  “He’s no longer popping.”

  “It’s a lie. Next you’ll say Aunt Jemima no longer flips pancakes, Betty Crocker no longer bakes cakes, and the Colonel no longer fries chicken.”

  “Sorry, Zinc.” Alex took the bowl.

  “How did Orville pop off?”

  “Drowned in a bathtub a few years ago.”

  “People drown in bathtubs?”

  “Hey, you’re the cop.”

  “If I knew we’d be eating popcorn from the grave, I’d have picked two horror movies instead.”

  The rain against the window made it cozy, the fire dancing cheerfully on the hearth, the critics snuggled together on the loveseat in front of the TV. Of late, Tuesday had become Movie Night for them, the ritual being they alternated going to the video store and returning with a double feature of flicks connected by theme, director, actor, or locale. Their favorite link was an original and its remake(s) viewed back to back. Last week, Alex had selected The Shop around the Corner and In the Good Old Summertime, and she would have rented You’ve Got Mail, but it was out. That balanced Zinc’s picks of the week before: no fewer than six Dracula movies, so they could crown the king of counts from among Schreck, Lugosi, Lee, Palance, Langella, and Oldman.

  No contest.

  The best was obvious.

  Tonight, the Tuesday critics compared Twelve Angry Men.

  “Best heavy?” Alex said.

  “That’s a tough one.”

  “Tougher than best hero, that’s for sure.”

  “Lee J. Cobb,” Zinc said, casting his second vote for the 1957 version.

  “I disagree. George C. Scott.”

  “Come on, Alex. Scott chewed up the scenery at the end.”

  “And Cobb didn’t?”

  “Put the films in perspective. Acting styles were different in the fifties.”

  “The emotions weren’t. They remain the same. Both actors sat on the same trial in both films. A kid from a broken home in the slums stabbed his brutal father to death with a switchblade.”

  “Allegedly stabbed his father,” Zinc corrected.

  Alex fed him popcorn to shut him up. “You want my reasoning?”

  The Mountie nodded.

  “Both Cobb and Scott played the same character in both films. The vengeful self-made man tortured by the memory of a son who defied his authority to break away from his rule. So bitter was that rift that father and son have been estranged for years. This patricide case rekindled those repressed emotions in the juror played by Cobb and Scott, presenting him with the opportunity for vicarious revenge. On the hottest day of the year, the jury retired to a sweaty jury room to take a vote on whether or not to convict the slum kid and send him to the electric chair.”

  “It’s lethal injection in the ’97 version,” piped in Zinc.

  “Death is death.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Save that argument for your turn, Ebert.”

  Zinc took the bowl of dwindling popcorn to finish it off while Alex argued her case.

  “The first vote was eleven to one for conviction. The only juror holding out was the man played by Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon. The voice of reason. Then one by one, he began to win the others over for acquittal, which locked him in a verdict tug-of-war with the most recalcitrant juror, played by Cobb and Scott. Finally, that juror was the one left standing alone, overwhelmed by the realization that he would have killed an innocent youth to get back at his own defiant son.

  “I put it to you,” Alex said in her best lawyer’s voice, the one she learned from her father, a Portland judge, “that it matters not whether that juror cracked in 1957 or 1997—such repressed emotions would explode to push him over the top. Scott, therefore, may chew up the scenery all he wants.”

  Zinc handed her the empty bowl.

  “Everything about the remake is wrong,” he said. “What modern jury has only men?”

  “Twelve Angry Persons sounds phony,” she teased. “And the judge is a woman.”

  “That’s what I mean. The remake tries to force a square peg into a round hole. Modern gloss can’t hide the fact that the plot is from the fifties. Each and every change pulls the punch of the story. Lethal injection is not the bad death of the electric chair. Replacing worse with better lessens pressure on the jurors. Men today are encouraged to release emotion, so George C. Scott’s imploding is over the top. Tough guys back then didn’t cry, so Lee J. Cobb unraveling still shakes us today.”

  “Have you ever served on a jury?”

  “No,” said Zinc. “Canadian cops are disqualified by the Jury Act.”

  “I have,” said Alex. “What an experience. It was more like Twelve Angry Men than it wasn’t. There’s no doubt the author of both films also served on a jury. He captured the ordeal.”

  “You believe the characters?”

  “All twelve ring true. Aren’t they as evident today as they were then? The O. J. Simpson trial was Twelve Angry Men in reverse. Instead of passion giving away to reason, it went reason to passion to end in travesty. The evidence was there for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but race blinded the jury from reaching a sound verdict. Every citizen is subject to jury duty, yet we get no training whatsoever in how to achieve justice. Should we entrust a person’s life to trial by his ‘peers,’ when a jury of them consists of twelve strangers who gather together to reach a decision influenced by the emotions, passions, mental quirks, and human failings they take into the jury room?”

  “The judge’s daughter,” Zinc said.

  “Guilty,” pleaded Alex.

  “You’re implying you like the remake better than the original?”

  “No, I’m saying Twelve Angry Men should be shown in school. We should be taught how to plumb ourselves for bias, so if we’re later called upon to be jurors, we can overcome prejudice and think harder about what really matters.”

&nbs
p; “I’d be a good juror.”

  “Would you, Zinc?”

  “I’d sure as hell reach my decision on the facts and nothing else.”

  “Like you did in choosing Lee J. Cobb over George C. Scott?”

  “That was based on acting.”

  “Was it really?”

  “You think I was influenced?”

  “Subconsciously.”

  “By what, Alex?”

  “The fact that George C. Scott looks a lot like your dad.”

  That punch came out of nowhere to knock Zinc back into his past. Again he was standing in the farmhouse of his youth, maybe ten, perhaps eleven years old, he and his brother, Tom, dressed for bed. Pop was seated at the table with his drinking buddies, pouring stiff rounds of Canadian Club. The farmer fixed his rheumic eyes on Zinc and slurred:

  Shall there be gallows in England when thou

  art king, and resolution thus fobbed as

  it is with the rusty curb of old father

  antick, the law?

  “Think lively, son. Name the bard.”

  “Shakespeare, Pop.”

  Her workday far from over while her husband held court, his mother turned from scrubbing dishes at the sink and sighed. “Run along, boys. And say your prayers.”

  “Got one for you, Chandler,” old MacKinnon said. He owned the farm next to theirs.

  “A buck?”

  “Two.”

  “Three.”

  “Four,” the two men wagered.

  Ed MacKinnon thumbed through the thick anthology that settled their bets. Blinking to focus his bloodshot eyes on the poem, he read:

  For they’re hangin’ Danny Deever, you can

  hear the Dead March play,

  The Regiment’s in ’ollow square—they’re

  hangin’ ’im to-day.

  “Kipling!” hooted Pop with triumph. “Pay up, you cheap son of a bitch.”

  “Shit,” MacKinnon grumbled. “Two out of three?”

  Lying awake in the bunk bed he shared with Tom, Zinc had listened for hours to them carousing in the kitchen, wagering who could identify the most obscure poem. The Plowmen Poets got so drunk they could barely communicate, and that’s when Zinc’s dad began to bully his mom.

  “Look at her, boys. Ravaged by time. The prettiest girl in Saskatchewan the day we wed. Now she’s sagging tits and a spreading ass.”

  Oh, how he hated Pop for that, feeling his punctured heart bleed for his mom. Why did she take it? Because she was afraid? Or did she endure him for the sake of their sons?

  Come morning, Zinc knew what to expect. Hung over and sleep-deprived, Pop made him run the gauntlet of the bards, whacking him with quote on quote to bring him to his knees and flaring at his mom if she tried to intervene.

  “Stand back, woman,” bellowed Pop. “I’ll not raise an illiterate lout.

  The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,

  And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

  “Think lively, son. Name the bard.”

  “Pope, Pop,” he said.

  Then came the time Zinc stood up to his father, telling him face to face that he didn’t deserve his wife, telling him eye to eye that he was a piss-tank bully, but the beating he took in return made his mother scream, so he didn’t mouth off again to save her pain.

  Got Pop back, though.

  With his job.

  Chandlers had worked that Saskatchewan farm for a century. Zinc’s dad raised two boys to inherit the land, and he never forgave his elder son for abandoning it to become a Mountie. Pop had hated cops since the Depression, when he was clubbed senseless during the Regina Riot. Father and son had never reconciled, and Pop’s last words on his deathbed were “At least Tom … turned out …”

  … a man …

  That memory bled into the jury room in Twelve Angry Men, except that Juror Number 3 was no longer George C. Scott. “It’s the kids,” Pop said in Scott’s role. “The way they are—you know? They don’t listen. I’ve got a kid. When he was eight years old, he ran away from a fight. I saw him. I was so ashamed, I told him right out, ‘I’m gonna make a man out of you or I’m gonna bust you up into little pieces trying.’ When he was fifteen he hit me in the face. He’s big, you know. I haven’t seen him in years. Rotten kid! You work your heart out …”

  Alex was right.

  Scott looked like Pop.

  Is that why Zinc chose Cobb over him?

  Because of bias?

  What if Zinc were a juror and Scott was on trial?

  Might he convict instead of acquit because he was Pop’s son?

  “You’re right, Alex. I was biased. Which is, I guess, the reason we did away with the gallows. Not because killers don’t deserve to be hanged, but because the legal system—”

  His cellphone rang.

  Grabbing it off the table, the Mountie answered the call. “Chandler,” he said.

  Zinc jotted notes.

  “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  Zinc punched off.

  “See you later,” Alex said.

  “Want to come along? There’s definitely a book in who just got herself killed.”

  Death Row

  Vancouver

  November 7

  Door after door, house after house, was strung in a continuous line along the rain-slicked street. Until the 1970s, this two-block stretch sandwiched between a pair of creeks that rushed down from the North Shore peaks above to the harbor below had pocketed miniature homes built during the war. Except for a few holdouts on the next street, the building boom of the age that gave us disco, bell-bottom pants and platform shoes had razed the past to leave its mark. A red door, a beige front, a false brown gable, each townhouse was a clone of its neighbor, born of the same blueprint, as Siamese twins are from the same genes.

  Zinc turned the car away from the creek and drove along the row.

  Too many houses.

  Too few parking spaces.

  The row of identical houses prompted Alex to hunt for details. Something in her psyche rebelled at human molds, at any attempt to string individuals into paper dolls. Squinting through the windshield as Zinc parked the car, she searched for clues that exposed the lives lived behind similar masks. A TV flickered blue beyond half-closed blinds. Was the image pornography from Red Hot Video or Disney on the Family Channel? Rainwater overflowed the gutters next door. Had the lazy resident neglected to clean the eaves? Surely, because his Christmas lights were still up. The smell of foreign spices was pungent in the air as Alex swung open the car door and forded the river of rain rushing along the curb. Sniffing the air while she popped her umbrella on the sidewalk, she couldn’t place the ethnic cuisine cooking in the house with the tinkling wind chimes.

  “Irani,” said Zinc, reading her mind or her twitching nose.

  “Smells good.”

  “It is.”

  “I’d like to try it.”

  “Lots of Iranian restaurants on the North Shore. Those who turned refugee when the ayatollah overthrew the shah settled where the geography reminded them of home.”

  “I thought Iran was desert.”

  “So did I.”

  Alex took out her notebook and a pen. While Zinc held the umbrella, she drew a sketch of the street on a fresh page, jotting details as they splashed toward the crowd and cop cars besieging one door. At the top of her notes she wrote “Death Row.”

  Those who make murder their business have a choice at a fork in the road. One route leads to danger, the other to relative safety. Zinc had embraced adventure by becoming a cop; he thrived on the adrenaline rush in hands-on crime and the thrill of chasing human foxes. Alex had opted for the safety of a true-crime writer, and, like forensic techs, lawyers, and judges, she got her kicks vicariously.

  To look at her you wouldn’t suspect that she was what she was. Dark-side habitués, like female cops, invariably develop a hard edge. More than a decade younger than Zinc, which put her nearing thirty, Alexis Hunt was a honey blonde with
blue eyes the color of a tropical lagoon. What she lacked in curves to hourglass her figure, she more than made up for with ballerina’s grace. Alex in motion was the flow of a tide. Alex in Zinc’s bed was an erotic writhe. She could be a dancer. She could be a model. So how did she end up at this aftermath of blood?

  It all began with cannibals and a boy in a lifeboat. It was a warm summer day in the Oregon of her youth. Alex, then ten, liked to laze up high in the canopy of leaves, sunlight stabbing her treehouse through gaps in the green. As birds chirped above and bees buzzed below, words wafted up with the clink of ice in gin and tonics from the lawyers lounging by the pool.

  This was before her dad became a judge.

  “Here’s a bone to chew on,” said Jackson Hunt, addressing the partners in his firm. “I came across a case from 1884 in which three men and a boy were shipwrecked and forced to brave the open sea in a lifeboat. Eighteen days adrift and both food and water gone saw Dudley and Stephens suggest the boy be killed and eaten. The third man balked at their plan. Two days later, starving and thirsty, the two plotters killed the boy. The three men feasted on the body until they were rescued four days later.”

  “Jackson.”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Five minutes to lunch.”

  His wife was flipping burgers on the barbecue.

  “Dudley and Stephens were tried for murder. By a special verdict, the jury made three findings. One, the men probably would have died within four days had they not eaten the boy. Two, because the boy was in a weak condition, he probably would have died before them. And three, except by sacrificing one for the others to eat, the chance of survival at the time of the killing was unlikely. The verdict was then referred to a bench of judges to decide whether a defense of necessity was justified in law.”

  “Who likes their meat rare?” called his wife.