Hangman

by Michael Slade

  The mention of the latest victim’s name on TV galvanized Justin to reach for a sheaf of papers beside the galley proofs. He shuffled through them until he found the jury list from Peter Haddon’s trial. His eyes ran down the list until a name jumped out at him:

  Ron Hughes, foreman

  Denise Weston

  Wally Berekoff

  Darcy Desjardins

  Miles Illington

  Bart Busby

  Carmen Landry

  John Chwojka

  Mary Somerset

  Michael Eastman

  Saranjit Singh

  Rudi Goldman

  Sue was back on the tube. “A KVOT viewer earned a reward this morning when he phoned in the news tip that brought you coverage of the murder first on this station. Now KVOT is offering an all-expense-paid trip to the island of Tahiti for the first viewer who cracks the baffling Hangman word puzzle.

  “Our phone lines are open …”

  Sue’s orthodontically perfect smile gave way to the gruesome hangman game scrawled on the forward cabin of The Yardarm.

  As Justin picked up the portable phone beside the galley proofs, not to call KVOT with the right answer, his mind filled in the letters missing from the bloody word game.

  Married Name

  Seattle

  November 10

  The skulls that had flanked the door on Halloween were gone, as were the tombstone in the hall and the coffin with the count’s bride staked through the heart. Before Detective Thorne could rap on Dag’s apartment door, the nosy neighbor in the adjoining suite stuck out her head, which was pinned up with hair curlers, and shouted, “I hope you’re here to throw that bum out on the street.”

  “Is there a problem?” Maddy asked.

  “You should have heard ’em. Rutting like minks. I didn’t get a wink of sleep because of them. Dag Konrad is the neighbor from hell.”

  “You’re sure it was him?”

  “Of course I’m sure. The bed was pounding against my wall all night. Three of them! Really! There must be a law about orgies. The jerk bellows like a bull when he comes.”

  As if snorting out of his pen to meet the matador, Dag flung his door open and stood there, no less hairy than he had been on Halloween, even though he was devoid of makeup today. His head hair and chest thatch were plastered flat with sweat that glistened on his skin while it fouled Maddy’s nose. Stubble darkened his chin like a dirty shadow, and spikes of hair bristled down at her from his flared nostrils.

  “Animal!” shouted his neighbor.

  “Hag!” Dag yelled back.

  “Evict him!” ordered the woman.

  “Drop dead, bitch!”

  “Asshole!” she cried, and slammed her door to have the last word.

  “My alibi,” Dag said, winking at Maddy.

  There’s a strut some men do after they’ve had sex, much like a take-a-look-at-me cock coming out of a hen house. Dag wore nothing but pajama bottoms held up with drawstrings, and from the front they made him look like a half-and-half satyr. The grin on his face was that of the cat that ate the canary. Bull, cock, goat, cat. Dag was a full barnyard this morning.

  “I’ve been expecting you. Enter,” he said, moving aside so Maddy could step into his dark apartment. It reeked of sex and cheap perfume, like every whorehouse she had tossed when she worked Vice.

  A TV flickered in a bedroom to the left, casting a cold blue glow out at them. Against the wall shared by Dag and his nosy neighbor, a brass bed filled the frame of the door, and in that bed were two naked women with pumped-up breasts.

  “Join the party,” Dag said.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “I’ve been in that bed since last night until late this morning.”

  “No offense, but I suspect those two are paid witnesses.”

  “And worth every penny.”

  “For sex perhaps. But not as an alibi.”

  “You’ll want their names.”

  “That I will.”

  “Girls,” Dag announced as they entered the bedroom, “meet Det. Madeline Thorne. The sexy redhead is Peaches and the luscious blonde is Cream.”

  “Out of bed,” Maddy said, “and show me ID.”

  The bed creaked and rattled as the hookers obeyed, then the headboard banged the wall as the weight of all that silicone left the mattress.

  Dag ogled the pneumatic pair as they bounced away for their purses, then drew Maddy’s attention to the TV, where Sue Frye was reporting.

  “That’s how I knew you’d come after me. And here’s why, as much as you may wish it isn’t so, I can prove the Hangman doesn’t live here.”

  Dag fingered a button on the VCR to convert the TV picture from one that came in on cable to one recorded on videotape. Onscreen, Peaches gripped the headboard for dear life while Dag gripped her hips from behind to pound her toward the wall, against which—bang! bang!—banged the brass bed. Sure enough, Dag let out the bellow of a bull, as if he had just been jabbed by a picador’s lance, though truth was the one impaled with the lance was Peaches.

  “What time did we start filming, girls?”

  “An hour after you ordered in Chinese,” responded Cream.

  “You’ll want to check the delivery time,” Dag told Maddy. “The name of the restaurant is on the cartons in the garbage under the sink. Is seven o’clock last night a good enough alibi?”

  The cop nodded. “If you were here,” she said.

  “You think we shot that scene some other night?”

  “Why not?”

  Dag grinned. “You do agree that hunk is me? Where would I find a body-double hung like that?”

  “It’s you,” Maddy conceded.

  “Hark,” said Dag, cupping an ear. “Is that a voice you recognize?”

  “Animals!” the nosy neighbor was heard to shout on tape.

  “The walls in this dump are paper thin,” Dag said matter-of-factly. “And what is that? I do believe it’s a TV program.”

  As if to demonstrate how two could play this game, the neighbor next door had cranked up the volume of her TV on tape, so between the cries of ecstasy—fake or real, it was hard to tell—pounded from Peaches, Alex Trebek was heard asking questions on Jeopardy!

  “What time did we stop filming?”

  “We haven’t,” giggled Cream.

  The ID Maddy took from Peaches confirmed that her name was Peaches Hoite. Cream’s ID said her name was Shirley Creame.

  Wonders never cease.

  Dag ejected the tape from the VCR. He stacked it on two others and offered the three to Thorne. “I need ’em back for the Academy Awards,” he said. “Match what you hear in the background with last night’s and this morning’s TV schedules. You’ll find my alibi is water-tight.”

  Maddy pulled on a latex glove to accept the homemade pornographic tapes.

  Dag scratched his belly and cocked his head.

  “You got balls, you know. Coming here alone. What if I was the Hangman at the end of my rope? Look at me and look at you. If push came to shove, you’d be dead, Detective.”

  Maddy shrugged. “You say you’re innocent. So what have I to fear?”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “Injured.”

  “You think I did that too?”

  “No,” she said, and managed a smile.

  “I should have been a cop. I’ve got the knack. You think that’s bullshit?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Want me to prove it?”

  “How?” she asked.

  “By giving you the motive for the Hangman crimes.”

  “Bullshit, Dag.”

  “Try me, partner.”

  “Why was your wife killed?” Maddy asked.

  “The same reason as Busby. Because she was on the jury that convicted Peter Haddon.”

  That shut her up.

  “You do remember him? The guy the state hanged in 1993? The con that reporter later proved was innocent? Mary was on that jury. Under her marr
ied name. The name of her first husband. Mary Somerset. It was Bart Busby who secured the conviction. That guy was a bully in the jury room.”

  Takes one to know one, Maddy thought. “You’re right,” she said. “You should be a cop.”

  Dag puffed his hairy chest with pride. “Told you, Detective. I got the knack.” Unconsciously, his hand dropped to give his balls a heft.

  “I’m listening,” Maddy said. Out came her pen and notebook to flatter him.

  “Mary was a country girl from eastern Washington. Grew up on an apple farm as Mary O’Grady. Mary married a local hick named Bill Somerset. She tired of him and working the earth, so she escaped to Seattle. One day, as happens to most of us, she got a jury summons. This was back in the eighties, when she was twentysomething. Mary was a looker up to a year ago, but beauty didn’t give her confidence to deal with men. When guys looked her over, their eyes locked on her body, and that made her feel physically threatened.”

  “Mary was submissive?”

  “She liked her man on top.”

  “What happened in the jury room?”

  “Busby fucked her over.”

  “How so?” Maddy asked.

  “Mary’s vote was to acquit Haddon. Busby’s vote was to convict him. The final day of deliberation was Halloween. The pressure was on to reach a verdict so those jurors with kids could get home in time for the trick-or-treating. One by one, the acquitters buckled under Busby’s bully tactics, until the only remaining holdout was Mary.”

  “Eleven to one—they ganged up on her?”

  “No,” said Dag. “It was Busby’s show. What’s that fancy term for a person’s weakness?”

  “Your Achilles heel?”

  “Bingo,” he said. “Busby was a bully who saw Mary’s Achilles heel. He knew his victim, and how to get to her. When she was talking, he stripped her with his eyes. When she got up from the table, he did too, and he invaded her personal space to confront her man to woman. After the others gave in, when Mary stood alone, he accused her of having rape fantasies. That’s why she was trying to hang the jury, he said. Because secretly she got off on the thought of Haddon raping the little girl.”

  “So she crumbled?”

  “Mary didn’t have the strength of her conviction,” said Dag.

  “In Haddon’s case, the strength of her acquittal,” said Maddy.

  “She should have hung the jury. Like the Hangman’s doing now.”

  Peaches snickered.

  Cream joined in.

  Gallows humor caused their big balloons to bounce about.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Maddy asked.

  “I didn’t connect the dots until Busby was hanged overnight. Besides, only a fool who’s under suspicion of his wife’s murder talks to the cops trying to loop a noose around his neck.”

  Maddy glanced at Peaches and Cream, still ajiggle with aftershocks.

  “Why’d you marry? Mary wasn’t your type.”

  “I made a mistake. It seemed right at the time. I was a reformed drunk and womanizer. Mary was an eyeful. She’d kept herself in shape. And she was looking for a man her love could save. The downside was that Mary couldn’t save herself. She thought she had put the Haddon verdict to rest. Appellate courts had ruled the jury was right to convict. Haddon was hanged. Justice was done. Then just after I married her a year ago, that reporter proved Haddon was innocent of raping and strangling the little girl.”

  “Mary couldn’t take the guilt?”

  “So she began to eat. You saw the size of her when she died.”

  “And you fell off the wagon?”

  “Yep,” said Dag. “What can I say? I like ’em slim, with big hooters.”

  Maddy closed her notebook and put it away. “I’ll leave you to your budding movie career.”

  “Before you go. Is there a reward?”

  “For what?”

  “Helping Seattle police solve the hangman game.”

  “Come again?” Maddy said.

  “I already called it in to KVOT. I won the reward they offered for the solution. The hangman word puzzle spells Haddon’s name.”

  Crime Cruise

  Seattle

  November 10

  Zinc was as easy for Maddy to spot as Dr. Livingstone was for Stanley in darkest Africa. The scarlet tunic glared as red as an open wound.

  “Zinc.”

  “Maddy. Justin.”

  “Hi,” said the reporter.

  The Mountie shook hands and introduced them both to Alexis Hunt.

  “Nice dress,” Maddy said.

  “Thanks,” Alex replied. “Tonight’s attire harks back to when Zinc and I met.”

  The two women looked each other over as if each thought the other a window onto Zinc’s libido.

  He felt naked.

  This meeting took place at the top of the gangway up from the dock as those Vancouver passengers who had arrived in Seattle by Amtrak were boarding the North Star, a mid-sized cruise ship. A long line of Canadian cops, lawyers, techs, crime writers, and PIs snaked up to join their American counterparts already aboard, so the four moved toward the Champagne Terrace to clear the way.

  “What a ship,” said Maddy. “This cruise must cost a fortune. Where does a writers’ festival get the cash for this?”

  “Drugs?” suggested Justin. “Bank robbery?”

  “Actually,” Alex said, “money’s being made off us. This is a fund-raiser. Not a fund-spender.”

  “Fooled me,” Maddy said. “That you’ll have to explain.”

  “Vancouver makes millions off a U.S. law. Foreign ships cannot traffic between two American ports. That’s been the law forever. Since when, I forget. But one thing I know for sure is that whoever thought that up never cruised to Alaska. Most cruise ships are foreign, so they can’t carry passengers north to that state from southern U.S. ports. Consequently, Vancouver is the dominant port of departure and has a lock on the lucrative Alaska cruise trade.”

  “Instead of Seattle,” said Maddy.

  “Which should have the business. There may, however, be a loophole in American law. Can a foreign ship sneak around the ban by docking briefly in Canada along the way?”

  “You mean split the cruise?”

  “In law, though not in fact. One cruise sails from Seattle to Vancouver. A separate cruise sails from Vancouver to Alaska.”

  “Will it work?”

  “Who knows?” Alex said. “The cruise line that owns the ship we’re on is going to run the blockade as a test case.”

  “We’re guinea pigs?” said Justin. “Let’s hope the U.S. Navy doesn’t fire on us.”

  “Undoubtedly some lawyer dreamed this up,” scoffed Maddy. “Lawyers believe loopholes are the substance of the law. They’re willfully blind to the fact that a hole is lack of substance.”

  “Hear! Hear!” said Zinc.

  “I still don’t see how funds are raised from us?” said Maddy.

  “The ship is on a dry run to acquaint the crew. We are aboard to make it seem real. Wealthy people love to support writers’ festivals. It makes them look and feel like artistic patrons. This ship was sailing anyway, so someone rich who knows the owner of the cruise line got it comped to the festival. No overhead means the ticket price and whatever we drink is profits.”

  “Loopholes,” echoed Maddy. “I’ll bet they write it off.”

  “Does that make them writers too?” wondered Zinc, and everybody laughed.

  There is no snazzier uniform in North America than that of a Royal Canadian Mountie in full peacock plume. As egalitarians, Americans dress to impress the common folk. Canada, however, is still under the Crown, so Canadians who dress to kill dress to impress the queen.

  Zinc wore the classic scarlet tunic of the Mounted Police, except that both sleeves had black-bordered cuffs to signify his rank. A stripped Sam Browne without a side arm harnessed his chest. His blue breeches had a yellow stripe down the outside of each leg and were tucked into riding boots fitted w
ith spurs. Flashes of gold glittered from buttons and regimental badges. The Stetson known around the world crowned his noggin.

  At this stage of boarding, most passengers on the Champagne Terrace were American, so Zinc drew stares when he entered with Alex on his arm. A wolf whistle from Ruth Lester made the Mountie blush. Zinc thought Ruthless Ruth was whistling at him. Maddy knew Lester the Les was whistling at Alex.

  With good reason.

  Alex wore the same plain cream dress complemented by basic gold jewelry that she had on Deadman’s Island. Here, like there, the occasion was a gathering of crime experts, and both invitations had stipulated “dress to kill.” That evening would have been the most romantic of Alex’s life had a real killer not embarked on a carnival of carnage. Here was an opportunity to begin again. That was the in-joke between Zinc and her. The net effect—déjà vu—was Alex looked as ravishing tonight as she had looked on the day she and the Mountie met.

  Who says you can’t go back?

  “I feel like a horse’s ass,” the Horseman mumbled to Maddy. “Where’s your uniform?”

  “Give me a break. I wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have to compare files.”

  Sensible shoes, blue jeans, an open-throat blouse, and a leather jacket were her party clothes.

  “Save me a dance,” said Maddy.

  “Tough guys don’t dance,” said Zinc.

  “Make that a minuet.”

  And lose a glass slipper? thought Alex.

  As you would expect from a group tied together by crime, the topic that danced on everyone’s lips was the hangman puzzle. That afternoon, KVOT had broadcast Dag Konrad’s solution, so tonight the largest cluster hung around Sue Frye. Sue looked haggard from working since before dawn. Was her camera crew aboard for late-breaking news?

  “I’m in the wrong medium,” Justin complained. “Sue bled the scoop dry and I have yet to print.”

  “Justin and Sue are rivals,” Maddy explained. “It goes back to the night Peter Haddon hanged.”

  “Let’s grab a table before the crush,” said Zinc. “Alex and I caught the news as we rushed for the train. We didn’t have time to refresh ourselves on the Haddon case.”