Hangman

by Michael Slade

  Justin was proofing this passage when the phone on his desk rang:

  The scene in the prison the night of the riot in 1984 was worthy of Dante’s Inferno. For prisoners in protective custody, it was a living hell.

  The riot began in Cell Block Three as guards were searching inmates for drugs before the night lockdown. Using fists and feet, twenty cold-blooded veterans of incarceration overpowered ten guards, then stormed the prison control center a hundred yards away, breaching it by smashing through inch-thick glass with fire extinguishers. The glass, installed just two weeks before, was supposedly unbreakable.

  Command of the control center gave the rampaging convicts control of the jail. It contained electronic switches and keys for all the cells. First, they opened the hospital to empty it of drugs, then they unlocked Cell Block Two, known as The Predator. The Predator secured the most vicious, hard-core cons in Washington State.

  The party got bigger and bigger as the rioters ran amok. From cell block to cell block they moved through the prison, releasing doors to free their friends or to get at their enemies. The trail they left was littered with pills, bottles, capsules, and hypodermic needles. The drugs they crushed were mainlined indiscriminately, including diuretics that made them pee. They destroyed the prison as they went, gutting the control center to leave it a shambles, torching the hospital so billowing black smoke filled the sky, battering steel doors and concrete walls with pickaxes stolen from a maintenance shed. Armed with baseball bats from the prison gym and homemade knives honed razor-sharp in the workshop, the frenzied mob quickly degenerated into a rabble of stoned psychos out for blood. The blood they craved was that of “skinners” and “rats,” jailhouse terms for the sex offenders and informers who were kept in protective custody in Cell Block Four.

  If you have hate in your heart and the keys to the jail in your hand, there’s no stopping you from slaking your thirst for gore.

  Skinners and rats are always afraid, but no fear is more ferocious than the fear that the guards will lose control. Peter Bryce Haddon was already unnerved from his first week in custody under a death warrant for the sex killing of a nine-year-old girl when he heard the heavy-duty cons in a take-no-prisoners mood unlock the door and come storming into protective custody.

  The first guard to intercept them was beaten to a pulp. “Take that, screw!” the cons shouted as they took bats to his skull, slugging him until his face was a crimson goo and his scalp slipped askew like a cheap toupee.

  “That snitch is mine,” someone yelled as the first informer was dragged from his cell, clutching a Bible and sniveling for mercy in the name of one saint, then another.

  Haddon almost fainted when the screaming began, a shrill shriek that soared to the whine of a dentist’s drill. The rioters pinned the rat to the floor in the hall so all could see, and those whose turn was yet to come watched horrified as the snitch was scorched from foot to head with a blowtorch. The blue flame was held on his twisted face until the flesh bubbled and melted. When it was over, the head had been reduced to nothing but a charred skull.

  A tattooed monster went to work on the rat in the cell next to Haddon’s. He hauled the man out, whirled him around and cuffed one wrist to the bars, then he made him watch as he slowly cut one finger halfway through the joint. “Pull it off,” he ordered, “or I’ll cut your throat.”

  Haddon winced as the mutilated informer tore off his own finger. The savage con wrenched the severed digit from his bawling victim to crush underfoot like a discarded cigarette. Then he sawed deep into another finger, demanding the snitch pull himself apart again, and once that hand was stripped to the palm, made him rip the half-sawn fingers off his other hand with his teeth.

  The gibbering of another informer yanked Haddon’s attention away. The rat was gripped in a hammerlock by a huge psycho known as the Hulk. The Hulk had in his fist a piece of angle iron which he had stuck in one ear of the squirming snitch and was forcefully screwing back and forth to drive the rod through the man’s brain and out his other ear. Death spasms animated the puppet in his grasp as, gripping the bar on both sides of the head like pumping iron, he carried the corpse from cell to cell to show those quaking in terror what to expect from him.

  The clink of a key in the door to his cell pulled Haddon’s attention back.

  “Okay, baby-fucker. It’s your turn.”

  That was around the time I arrived at the prison, landing in a chopper chartered by the Seattle Star. A full moon shone down on the burning buildings as firefighters shot water in through broken windows to quell the flames. Police in riot gear and National Guardsmen armed to the teeth besieged the jail. Rescued inmates stumbled out, eyes swollen and covered in blood from head to foot. Most were unrecognizable; many were in shock. Naked and shivering, a con slumped outside his burnt-out block, jabbering about the horrors he had seen inside. “They killed! They butchered!” he yelled as another con staggered out. “They butchered! They killed!” yammered the second man.

  Deep within the dark, smoke-filled, sodden ruin, tactical squads moved cell to cell to reclaim the prison. What they encountered was utter destruction. Steel-barred cell doors torn off hinges. Reinforced concrete walls six inches thick sledge-hammered apart, with wires dangling. Toilets smashed and water ankle-deep along the halls, forcing them to wade around broken glass, debris, and smoldering mattresses. A stench of fear seemed to rise from blood streaks in the water. When they got to Cell Block Four, they found a foot-wide swath of caked gore running twelve feet along the wall to end above the propped-up bodies of three men. Their slashed throats testified to the orgy of violence continuing inside. Wails from Peter Haddon’s cell corroborated the warning.

  Haddon’s clothes lay tossed out in the hall. His light gray prison-issue shirt and baggy blue jeans. His socks and navy blue Velcro running shoes. His T-shirt and underwear soaked from dread. Four cons, none of whom could lay valid claim to being human, had locked themselves in with him. They were known in prison as the Back Door Boys, and as the tactical squad moved into Cell Block Four, the last thug was pounding at Haddon’s back door.

  “Nut him!” someone shouted as the squad came down the hall.

  Slight, naked, and wide-eyed, Haddon was standing up. The grunting con behind him wasn’t as huge as the Hulk, but he was big enough. Muscular arms ran under Haddon’s shoulders to lock fingers behind his neck, holding him in a vise grip while he was sodomized. A pair with their pants around their ankles held his legs apart as a fourth con squatted in front of his groin. Like a living jockstrap, Haddon’s hands tried to cup his genitals in a frantic attempt to save them from castration. Crisscrossing his abdomen, hands, and thighs with red slits, the squatter slashed a knife back and forth around Haddon’s exposed crotch.

  The squad had almost reached the cell when Haddon squealed. The pair spreading his legs each grabbed a wrist and held his hands away. The con with the knife grasped his penis to jerk him into the air, then swept the blade across in a groin-level arc. The shriek from Cell Block Four was heard outside.

  I was there when they brought Haddon out on a stretcher. His testicles came out in a plastic cup. He didn’t undergo surgery to have them reattached. By the time he arrived at the hospital, his mangled manhood was dead.

  Imagine his fear the moment before the knife gelded him. It sends shivers down my spine. If there were justice in this brutal world, Haddon’s sentence would have been commuted to life. But it wasn’t, and nine years passed, during which his appeals ran out. Finally, the death warrant was executed, when, on February 14, 1993, the state of Washington hanged an innocent man.

  That was the passage Justin was proofing when the phone on his desk rang.

  “Newsroom,” he answered.

  “Justin Whitfield, please.”

  “Speaking,” he said.

  “My name’s Alexis Hunt. I’m a writer in Vancouver researching the Hangman case.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the reporter.

  “You sound suspicious.”r />
  “Competition tends to get my back up.”

  “I’m not a reporter. I write crime books.”

  “So do I. I’m proofing one now.”

  “Is it your first?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve written several. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.”

  “Deadman’s Island, right?”

  “Yes,” said Alex.

  “I’ve read your stuff.”

  “And I’ve read your reporting. It’s first-rate. That’s why I called.”

  “You’ve got five minutes. No more. We’re on deadline here.”

  “The depth of your scoop on the Halloween hanging hints at an inside source. I suspect you’ve also seen the Hangman’s word game. It’s under wraps, so you can’t print it. But when the case is solved, you’ll be first with the story.”

  “One minute down. Four to go.”

  “My boyfriend is Insp. Zinc Chandler. He’s the Mountie investigating last night’s hanging. Needless to say, I have a good source too. But my source is good for only half the case. I lack a similar source for the half down there. As I see it, your situation is the reverse.”

  “So?”

  “So I think we should consider teaming up.”

  “Woodward and Bernstein?”

  “They got the Pulitzer Prize.”

  “There’s a joint task force in the making. Chandler will get everything you need from down here.”

  “It’s one thing for him to give me the scoop about what he controls. It’s another for him to tell me what was told to him in confidence.”

  “True,” said Justin.

  “The same with you. I’ll bet your piece on last night’s hanging proves me right.”

  “I’m still listening. Are you through?”

  “The Hangman case is huge. There will be lots of competition. Either I’m just one of many out to scoop you, or we forge a partnership that’s greater than the sum of its parts and scoop the competition.”

  “How many words in the puzzle?”

  “An odd number,” said Alex.

  “How many letters in the first word?”

  “Uh-uh. Your turn.”

  “The same number as in the second,” said Justin.

  “Which is one less than in the third.”

  “The guess in the Seattle Star after the Halloween hanging was the letter A. How many A’s were filled in last night?”

  “That you’ll have to get from your source.”

  “Okay, Alexis. You pass the test.”

  “Call me Alex. My friends do.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “That we meet face-to-face. I’ll bring my file and you bring yours. It may work out. It may not. But if it does, we’re both better off.”

  “When and where?” said Justin.

  “This Friday. On a boat. Did you get an invitation to the Northwest Writers’ Crime Cruise?”

  The Scream

  Vancouver

  November 8

  To the eye of a judge’s daughter, it was still a courthouse. Though banners promoting the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit hung between the Ionic columns soaring from the grand stairway up to the words VANCOUVER ART GALLERY beneath the cupola, Alex wasn’t fooled. This edifice wasn’t built to hang paintings; it was built to hang people.

  The fence at the top of the stairs was a blatant clue. It secured the original entrance to safeguard the art. A public building that bars the public from its doors is suspect. Long flanking wings ran east and west, with access to the gallery now off Hornby Street, where Alex spotted another clue as she rounded the corner. Someone had tried to cover it with a blending color, but the word POLICE was still etched above the door that once led to the holding cells beneath the prisoner’s dock. The accused went in presumed innocent and came out, after trial by their peers, as cons destined for the gallows.

  The Rattenbury courthouse.

  Back when the law had fangs.

  Replaced by the kinder, gentler law courts a few blocks south after Canada did away with the noose in 1976.

  To the mind of this judge’s daughter, clues were everywhere. Convicts went to the gallows because they left clues behind for detectives to follow back to their human source. Convicts were saved from the gallows because police left clues behind for lawyers to twist into reasonable doubt. A lesson Jackson Hunt had taught his daughter well was always to keep an eye peeled for that telling clue that hid the solution to any mystery.

  Clues …

  Clues …

  Clues …

  Always watch for the clues.

  The clue that lured Alex here today was the clue of the mask from The Scream.

  A green awning guided her in from Hornby Street. The walkway was flanked by a pair of evergreens. The fountain beyond dated from those deadly days when the noose was loose; it was raised in 1912 by the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire as a colonial monument for King Edward VII, now KING DEDWARD EVIL, thanks to graffiti additions. With changing times the relic had become a civic nuisance, and it was trundled about until it had ended up here as a butting bowl for cigarettes. The entrance to the gallery was by a door in the colonnade that ran from the rear of the west wing to the south wing, known as the Annex. Another relic from the past greeted her inside: a plaque thanking the Women’s Auxiliary for its support of the old gallery from 1943 to 1979. The ladies had been retired in less sexist times, for the gallery was now run by five women, with the support of a lonely male.

  Alex maneuvered through paintings on dollies to reach the reception desk. Once signed in and issued a security tag, she continued on toward the Annex stairs, past a vase of sunflowers arranged like Van Gogh’s, except they were plastic. On her way up the marble staircase, Alex glanced out the windows of the second-floor landing to enjoy the autumn colors in Robson Square. Outside, street kids lounged casually on the steps of the rear portico, beneath columns rising to the roof line of the Annex, inscribed across which was PLACED UPON THE HORIZON (CASTING SHADOWS). True, you can’t get much artier than that, though Alex suspected whoever foisted that nonsense on the taxpaying public had smoked too much weed.

  Phelan Phelps was a work of art too.

  Alex found the librarian in the midst of a made-for-TV movie shoot on the third floor. How any man in this day and age dared sport an ascot at his throat she had no idea, but poofed and puffed beneath his chin, Phelps was a cravat-sporting kinda guy. The billow of paisley was nestled in the neck of his Dior shirt, which was striped with threads of spun gold complementing the gold links through his French cuffs. His fine-boned hands were manicured to perfection, and his coif was manicured too. One look at Phelps and you knew the librarian knew his art.

  “Mr. Phelps?”

  “Yes?”

  “Alex Hunt.”

  “Alex? My, my. I expected a man.”

  Was that disappointment in his silky voice?

  “You got my message?”

  “Yes.”

  “About Edvard Munch?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “For pronouncing his name ‘moonk.’ I tire of those who pronounce it ‘munch.’ Munch is what we do to candy bars.” He cast her a smile akin to the one in history’s most famous painting.

  “Am I interrupting?”

  “Certainly not. I while away time waiting for you among these philistines.”

  “What are they filming?”

  “I don’t think they know. I’m told it’s a courtroom drama set in Savannah, Georgia. The courtroom is supposedly on the ground floor, so special-effects wizards raised scaffolding outside to plant a garden with appropriate vegetation beyond the windows. I’m sure they’re currently plotting how to change the weather.”

  “Why not film in Georgia?”

  The librarian shrugged. “The Canadian peso makes it cheaper to move Georgia here?”

  The Annex, Phelps explained as they descended to the library on the second floor, attends to the administ
rative needs of the gallery next door. Because one of those needs is money, and Vancouver is Hollywood North, the new gallery decided not to renovate two of the old courts, which could be rented to movie companies for easy cash. The courtrooms retain the majesty of the past, with “banjo” windows and wainscoting and carved judges’ benches. Neither has a prisoner’s dock because both were civil courts, so they meet the requirements of American justice.

  “Let’s hope this lot doesn’t expect money back,” sniffed Phelps. “They contracted for a courtroom and a cell in the basement. Did you notice the tap gushing water outside?”

  “Yes, beside the lion. Washing the front plaza.”

  “No, it was bilging water from the basement after last night’s storm. The cell for the film is currently flooded.”

  Damn, thought Alex.

  She had misread the clue.

  The library that once supported the courts now stored the art gallery’s books, prints, and history. High windows faced east to greet each new day, and except for parallel rows of shelves advancing from the door, the librarian and his assistant had the vault to themselves.

  “A conspiracy is afoot,” said Phelps, “to relegate me to the basement. The board wants to entice Gucci and Saks Fifth Avenue into my realm. Have you read Wells’s The Time Machine? I was born an Eloi. Am I to live as a Morlock?” He raised a plucked eyebrow.

  “I get it,” replied Alex.

  Phelps U’d her around to the bookshelf facing the side wall. He paused for effect as he reached for a text and stopped short.

  “The name of that artist, Ms. Hunt?”

  “Moonk,” she replied.

  He plucked Munch: The Scream from the bookshelf.

  “Painting or lithograph?”

  “Lithograph,” Alex said.

  Phelps opened the book to page 88 and held it out:

  “What you see,” Phelps said, “is the most recognizable image of fear, pain, and outrage in the history of art. To see The Scream is to hear its cry. No need to take Art History 101 to grasp what Munch is saying. What he achieved in his signature work is the direct communication of hysteria.