Hangman

by Michael Slade

“Without a rational reason. She simply gave up to stop Busby from bullying her.”

  Zinc picked up the photo of Mary Konrad hanging dead from the beam in her home. He studied it and said, “The Hangman is on a crusade to punish the jurors who doomed Haddon, and to scare the hell out of anyone who may pervert the course of justice in the future. Mary represents all jurors who have a reasonable doubt but lack the backbone to do their duty. By not hanging the jury, she hanged Haddon instead, and for that Mary became the Hangman’s first victim.”

  “It fits,” said Maddy.

  Zinc continued: “The single word ‘guilty’ from Konrad’s mouth was what hanged Haddon. That’s why her tongue was slashed. Before Mary died, she told the Hangman that Busby was to blame. Busby became the Haddon juror the Hangman hated most. That’s why—unlike the women—he was butchered alive.”

  “You look puzzled.”

  “I am,” said Zinc. “If the Hangman suddenly hated Busby that much, why didn’t he become victim two?”

  “Because he was out of state in Oregon on a selling trip.”

  The sailor searching for the inspector had reached the deck below. After he combed it from stem to stern, his last stop would be the Crown Deck above.

  Maddy took over from Zinc. “With Busby away from Seattle, the Hangman faced a problem: What if we linked Mary to the Haddon jury before Bart returned, and theorized that she was lynched in revenge for Peter’s hanging? In a flash of insight, we might see Peter’s name as the answer to the hangman puzzle and put the other Haddon jurors—including Bart Busby—under police protection.”

  Zinc picked up the photo of Jayne Curry hanging dead from the upper landing in her home. He studied it and said, “To prevent that, the Hangman struck again. The second murder was a smokescreen to blind you until Busby returned. Hanging another Haddon juror would only increase the odds that you would make the connection. That’s why the Hangman went to Vancouver to hang Jayne Curry.”

  “Not only did that hanging blind us to the Haddon motive, but it also advanced the Hangman’s crusade to scare all potential jurors. If Mary hanged because she unjustly convicted an innocent man, Jayne Curry hanged because she perversely freed a guilty one.”

  “The Scream mask, the slashed tongue, and the hangman game ensured that Seattle police would connect Curry and Konrad. While you followed the false lead of that red herring, the Hangman bought sufficient time for Busby to return. That explains why the Vancouver lynching is the anomaly in the case.”

  Zinc tossed the photo of Jayne Curry to one side.

  He picked up the photo of Bart Busby hanging dead from the mast of his boat. He studied it and said, “Busby represents all jurors who break their oath to play out a hidden agenda in the jury room. He was a bully who liked to see people squirm. First he went to work on Mary, the holdout juror. Then, after Haddon was convicted through bully tactics—”

  “Busby enjoyed the effect of what he accomplished for years. Peter was raped and castrated in a prison riot, and thanks to Bart’s hijacking the jury, was eventually hanged for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “Ugly,” Zinc said.

  “It all fits,” said Maddy.

  “And makes me doubt whether courts are fit to try death-penalty cases.”

  “What happens now?” asked Maddy. “Is the Hangman’s crusade over? The two directly responsible for Haddon’s death are dead. The word game is solved. Everyone knows the answer. The lesson to learn from Peter’s hanging is abundantly clear: Fail in your duty as a juror and this could be you.”

  “Do you think it’s over?”

  “All except whodunit.”

  “And who’s that?” Zinc asked. “Someone related to Haddon?”

  “That would explain the Scream mask.”

  “A primal scream?” said the Mountie.

  “Or maybe it’s another juror on the Haddon case. Look at the effect guilt had on Mary Konrad. She grew into an obese woman. What if another juror broke down under the strain of having been on the jury that sent Peter to the gallows?”

  “So he—”

  “Or she—”

  “Wants the world to know who’s to blame—”

  “Or wants to get even with those who burdened him or her with guilt.”

  “A mad juror?”

  “Why not?”

  “Going after bad jurors?”

  “That’s how the Hangman knew what went on in the jury room. And why Mary—for her part—became the first victim.”

  “You don’t have to be a juror to learn that in the States, do you? Canada has a law that makes it illegal for jurors to discuss their deliberations. From what I see on TV, however, American jurors are ready to blab a second after the verdict is in.”

  “True,” said Maddy. “Which is too bad. If we had your law, it would narrow the suspects.”

  “What about another defendant facing death? Would that not give someone a motive to spook the jury pool? He takes Washington’s only hanging to date and converts it into a scare tactic to save his own skin.”

  “If he’s in jail, who does the hanging? A contract killer?”

  “Or an accomplice. Or a lover on the outside.”

  “Ironic,” said Maddy, “if the death penalty gave someone a motive to kill. It’s supposed to work the other way ’round.”

  “What about a zealot against the death penalty?”

  “Have you ever witnessed a hanging?”

  “Indirectly,” said Zinc. “On Deadman’s Island, we suffered a lynching in the dark.”

  “But not an execution?”

  “No,” he said. “The death penalty was gone when I joined the Mounted.”

  “I have.”

  “What? Witnessed a hanging?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Peter Haddon.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “I was at Walla Walla in 1993.”

  “How’d that come about?”

  “Between you and me?”

  “Whatever you tell me, Maddy, is in strict confidence.”

  Beyond the door to the Regal Lounge, the sailor searching for Inspector Chandler climbed to the Crown Deck.

  “A cop and a reporter. You know how it is? Justin and I occasionally help each other out.”

  “Sure,” said Zinc. “Symbiosis. Sometimes it’s best to work hand in glove with the press.”

  “Justin was looking into whether Peter was guilty. This was in the months before Haddon hanged. The appeal process had almost run its course. Peter’s last hope was for Justin to find something. What Justin required was some digging on the inside. I became a cop years after the Haddon trial. He asked me to check if the detectives who’d worked the case had influenced Anna’s dad into changing the time he said he got home to find her missing.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. That’s why I became a cop. To ensure that justice was done in an unjust world.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Nope. We still don’t know. Anna’s dad refused to waver from his testimony. The bulls who dealt with him maintain they did it by the book.”

  “Why’d you go to the hanging?”

  “Justin asked me to. By then, he was obsessed with Peter’s innocence. He feared Haddon was going to the gallows because he had fucked up.”

  “Justin?”

  “Yes. By not breaking the story.”

  “You went as moral support?”

  The detective nodded.

  “How’d you get a seat in the gallows gallery?”

  “Justin arranged for Peter to make me one of his witnesses.”

  “Must have been grueling.”

  “It was,” sighed Maddy. “The execution attracted a horde of pros and cons. Those For and those Against were caged outside, in the prison’s parking lot. Except for that surrounding abortion, there’s no hotter moral rift in America. Zealots against abortion have shot doctors who perform them. From the zeal I witnessed in the shouts of those against hanging Haddon, I w
ouldn’t be surprised if the Hangman was spawned among zealots violently opposed to capital—”

  “Inspector Chandler?”

  Interrupted, Zinc and Maddy turned. A North Star crewman was approaching their table.

  “Yes?” said the Mountie.

  “I was sent to find you. It’s urgent that you come with me. Captain’s orders.”

  Bleeding Heart

  Pacific Ocean

  November 10

  “Urgent?” said Zinc. “What’s the problem?”

  The crewman glanced at Maddy.

  “I’m a Seattle detective.”

  The crewman hesitated.

  “Out with it,” said the Mountie.

  “There’s been a murder, sir. The captain needs you below.”

  “A murder?”

  “A hanging.”

  “That’s in poor taste,” said Maddy.

  Both cops knew from the invitations that there was to be an interactive murder mystery on the crime cruise sometime tonight. Those who wished to play the game for a magnum of champagne would be summoned to the scene of the crime. There, they would face a mess of clues about the “body” and, from the evidence left by the murderer, would try to guess whodunit and why. The closest answer would win the booze. That’s what Zinc and Maddy thought this was. A summons to play.

  “Alex sent you?”

  “No, sir. The captain.”

  “Give us a moment.”

  The crewman withdrew to the door.

  “He’s good,” said Maddy.

  “They use actors.”

  “Are you game?”

  “Are you?”

  “Why not?” said Maddy.

  “If we win, the champagne is yours.”

  “Alex will be cross.”

  “She’s behind this charade.”

  They followed the crewman from the lounge and down the stairs to the Sun Deck. The scene of the murder was to be in the solarium around the indoor pool, under the crystal canopy of the deck above. Through the open door to the solarium, Maddy and Zinc could see a mannequin sprawled by the water. Those arranging the murder were fussing with clues in final preparation for the passenger sleuths’ arrival.

  “This way,” said the crewman, holding the elevator door for them.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To ‘A’ Deck, sir.”

  “‘A’ Deck?”

  “Yes, sir. To one of the cabins.”

  Five decks down, the elevator stopped outside the dining room. The door slid open on a shouting match. A lawyer-turned-author was regaling the diners who were too drunk to leave the room with tales of his research safari to Africa. The drunks were involved in deep conversations of their own, and it was hard to hear with this guy at the mike yakking. The author was angry that his pearls fell before swine, so he used the amplification system to drown out the drunks. The drunks were pissed at the nerve of this little Hitler, and they began chanting, “Shut the fuck up!” In effect, it was nothing more than your usual squabble of lawyers. My, how they love the sound of their own voices.

  Zinc looked for Alex.

  Alex was nowhere around.

  The crewman told the drunk who tried to enter the elevator to take the next one.

  The door closed.

  The lift continued its drop.

  Zinc put one and one together and began to wonder if they would all be embarrassed. Alex Hunt was a sexy trickster. Many were the times she had sexually shanghaied Zinc. The clues were there to indicate she might be up to that. The stateroom assigned to them was down on “A” Deck. He wouldn’t put it past Alex to leave the lawyers and Justin talking somewhere on the ship while she slipped away to their cabin. Dispatching a crewman to lure Zinc to the “murder” would be her kind of fun, and when he entered the stateroom, there she would be, in the nude with nothing but a blood red rose between her teeth.

  “Take me,” Alex would say.

  And usually he would. That being one of the reasons why Zinc loved Alex to death.

  But if that was how this game played out tonight, there would be red faces when Maddy entered the cabin with him.

  Maddy, too, was puzzled by what was going on. The “murder” was a hanging, the crewman had said. With the Hangman on the loose, that was in poor taste. Would those who had organized the festival make such a mistake? It wasn’t a faux pas befitting an arty crowd. Besides, if the mystery was planned for the solarium, why lead the Mountie and her down here?

  It must be a prank.

  But it wasn’t.

  That was evident the instant the elevator stopped and the door slid open on “A” Deck. North Star crewmen were everywhere, corralling passengers who’d come down to their staterooms or barricading the entrance to the starboard passageway. The crewman sent to fetch Zinc ushered the Mountie and the detective around the cordon and along the almost-deserted corridor to where the captain stood by an open cabin door.

  The captain was a lanky man uniformed in white. He had the bearing of ex-navy in his mastlike spine. Whatever perils he’d faced at sea were masked by the cut of his jib, but what he had witnessed in the cabin had rammed his even keel.

  No introductions.

  “The Hangman’s aboard,” he said.

  The captain stepped aside so Zinc and Maddy could gaze in.

  The stateroom was an oblong with two portholes in the far wall. The portholes were over twin beds with a floor space between. The flowered quilts on the beds matched a curtain that could be drawn across the cabin as a privacy screen. The curtain was pushed back to bare the curtain rod.

  Tough as she was from all the death she had seen in her life, Maddy was shaken to her core by the sight of the hanging corpse. The body was hoisted a foot off the floor by a rope looped over the curtain rod and tied to the leg of one bed. The head in the hangman’s noose was crooked to one side. The face was blue from asphyxia. The bulging eyes were bloodshot from burst vessels. Strangulation had forced out the tongue, which the killer had slit with a slash across the gaping mouth. Blood gushing from that wound had poured down the torso, soaking the victim’s formal dress red. Both arms and both legs were slashed as well. The blood from those cuts had pooled on the floor, where it oozed around the body of a man crumpled unconscious at the feet of the corpse.

  In the blood that crept from him toward the cabin door lay a knife with its blade pointing at the side wall.

  On that wall, scrawled in blood, was a hangman game:

  “What in hell …” said Maddy.

  She turned to face Zinc.

  And found herself face to face with a likeness she knew well.

  Shock had tightened Zinc’s flesh hard against his skull.

  Disbelief had shot his eyelids wide.

  Outrage had twitched one pupil to the side.

  His mouth was frozen open in the elliptic O of a silent shriek.

  He was Munch’s The Scream.

  The victim hanging from the rod was Alex Hunt.

  The Brig

  Vancouver

  Tonight

  The practice of criminal law consists of fighting courtroom battles and recounting legendary war stories. How successful a lawyer is can be gauged by whether the battles making news are being fought by him, and whether the war stories he tells make up his reputation. If both focus on gunslingers other than him, then he’s no more than a wannabe yearning for his mirage in the desert. That was me, six days ago on that fatal cruise, full of battles and war stories that other lawyers had fought and earned.

  But all that was going to change.

  I was talking death with a couple of American gunslingers from Seattle when Det. Maddy Thorne found me in a bar called the Brig. The North Star seemed to have more bars than passengers, no doubt to ward off the titanic chill of all those Alaskan icebergs that played chicken with the ship on its northern cruises. The Yank with the handlebar mustache—his trademark, I’ll bet—was a slippery snake in the grass named Josh Hand. He referred to himself as “the Learned Hand,”
an attorneys’ in-joke about a famous U.S. judge. Sporting a bolo tie with a steer’s-head clasp, his sidekick was an urban cowboy named Russ Russell. He referred to himself as “the Rustler,” but I fixed him in my mind through alliteration. Russ Russell was the sound of a snake in the grass.

  “Do you gamble, Jeff?”

  The question came from Josh.

  “All lawyers are gamblers,” I replied.

  Russ took a twenty from his wallet and slapped it on the bar.

  The snake and the slither gave each other the eye. I felt like a mouse being sized up as a meal.

  “As sentence stories go, Kinky’s not bad. But when it comes to gallows humor and the bench, twenty dollars says I can better that.”

  “Better Mrs. Mudge going ballistic when the judge slammed her son?”

  “Yep.”

  “With whom?” I asked.

  “José Gonzales.”

  “A client of yours?”

  “Nah,” said Josh. “A bit before my time. Gonzales was sentenced back in 1881. In U.S. District Court. New Mexico Territory Sessions.”

  I glanced at the twenty.

  It would buy a round.

  I picked up the gauntlet Josh had thrown down.

  “So let’s hear it.”

  “Whoa,” said Russ. “To coin a phrase, show me the money, pal.”

  I pulled a Canadian twenty from my wallet and put it down.

  The Yanks stared at the colorful bill as if it should be hanging on a roll beside the toilet.

  “We’re not playing Monopoly.”

  “Place a bet,” said Russ.

  “With legal tender.”

  “Which I can take to the bank.”

  “See that?” I said, pointing out the window. “It’s Vancouver Island. We’re in Canadian waters. So my money is legal tender here.”

  “It should be thirty.”

  “With exchange.”

  “Hey, big spender. Don’t be cheap,” I said. “That twenty’s worth as much to me as yours is to you. Why should I gamble one and a half times your bet?”

  “Whatever,” said Josh. He stroked his mustache.

  “It’s only money,” Russ said. He tugged his bolo tie.

  “So,” I said, “tell me a story that’s better than Kinky and Mudge.”