by Wayne Jones
I wonder and worry about the poor man. One part of me is relieved that he has murders to occupy his mind, that he can channel his anger towards all aspects of those bloody facts—people dead, inept police, no end in sight—instead of the vagaries of his unfortunate domestic and personal life. Is it perverse of me to think that the murders serve as a distraction, that it is better for him to exercise himself about the incompetent investigation than to be stewing about his family? Doesn’t a person have only a finite fund of mental energy, which in the raver’s case is better expended on anger about murder than anger about a (perhaps) conniving wife?
I dry myself off and step out onto the bathroom floor again as if I am regaining refuge, the safety of terra firma. I quickly do the usual at the sink and head to the bedroom to get myself ready for a day which I have not planned yet. The phone rings again and I pick it up this time without checking the call display.
“Hey, Andrew?”
“Oh, hello, how are you?” It’s the raver.
“Good. Listen, I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time.” (Silly boy, and of course he continues with barely a pause.) “I was wondering if you’d be up for right now, you know, getting together today some time in order to talk about the murders. You know, like I was telling you about the other day?”
The reader who is surprised at my taking no more than a nanosecond to decide to comply with the man’s request does not quite understand the drives that animate a scholar, the quest for knowledge, the virtual inability to resist any occasion that might move the research forward in even the smallest way.
He rambles on a bit while I see that I am dripping onto the hardwood, but ultimately we agree to meet at that new place where I can get strong coffee and a sandwich that does not feature white bread or those atrocious wraps. He is dressed better than I have ever seen him and I can’t pinpoint why this bothers me: the shirt is a very elegant white linen, wrinkled to just the right degree, the shorts are a lovely faded blue cotton, and he is clean shaven and more tanned than I remember him from our last meeting.
“You look all set for summer,” I say to him before I am able to edit what comes out of my mouth.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re dressed right for it. Keep it short, keep it cool,” I conclude, trying to affect a casual demeanor which is naturally foreign to me.
“Oh, yeah, right,” he says, and laughs a little uncomfortably.
“So, you’ve seen some patterns in the murders?” I say, changing the topic and salvaging my purpose in coming out at all.
“Well, I can’t be totally sure, of course,” he says and then takes a very demure bite of his muffin (morning glory). I am quite struck by the contrast in his demeanor from the loudmouth I have witnessed up till now. I wonder what it is that has quieted him down like this: perhaps the social intimacy of being on an actual arranged outing with an acquaintance, as opposed to the chance meetings he and I have had up till now; or perhaps a genuine insight which has sobered him. He continues.
“I can’t be totally sure, but I’ve been looking at the names of the victims, like, I mean, looking at the letters in the names.”
“The letters?”
“Yes, I know it sounds a bit crazy but hear me out.” I shall spare the reader the deluded details, but he then launches into an incredibly contrived thesis about the last letters of the victims’ last names, or some such drivel (it may have been some other letters, from the killer’s name, or I don’t know what). In any case, at the end of it I find myself in the awkward position of having to pretend to give any credence at all to his ridiculousness. And somewhere inside me, I sigh disappointedly as I realize that his calm exterior does not really indicate or presage any concomitant alteration in his crazy raving interior character. The waiter arrives with exquisite-looking napkins enrobing chunky utensils and I sigh again when I realize that there is no way for me out of this engagement: I must just make the best of it.
In fact, things go rather well, considering. I make some polite perfunctory inquiries about his theory, but I do believe that he puts two and two together (or rather less than that) and concludes somewhere in the depths of himself that he may have been overly open to suggestion or wild imaginings, or perhaps that an investigative scholar demands more than a little hint or coincidence here and there. The turkey on the brown bread is fresh and moist and adorned with a flavoured mayonnaise which imparts just the right taste overall. I swill my beer like a Viking and by the end of the meal he and I are joking about things that have nothing at all to do with killing.
After all the food has been consumed, the waiter arrives to clear away our dishes and to inquire if we want anything else. The raver (he does have a name: Wilson) and I exchange sad, tentative glances, neither wanting to be the first to commit the other to an unwanted extension. I smile, first at Wilson and then at the waiter, and indicate that I will permit myself one more beer (what is getting into me?). Wilson visibly beams at this and babbles his own order for a rum and Coke.
“Listen, Andrew,” he says when the waiter has gone, “let me just say that about the, about the theory and all of that. I’m not saying that it’s the God’s truth or anything like that: it’s just something I put together. I mean, I do believe that there is something to it, but, well, I know that it might be a bit out there.”
I smile and try not to make it paternalistic or condescending. He catches me before I have the chance to say a word.
“It’s OK, no problem. You’ve been nice and polite.” He laughs a little more loudly than I would have preferred.
There’s a lot of silence for the rest of our outing after that, though I don’t think that it is the result of resentment on his part. At one point I notice that each of us is unintentionally mimicking the movements of the other: a sip taken, a glass set down, a barely perceptible slouching down to just the perfect position of comfort into chairs which are evidently not made for regular human behinds.
“Well,” he says with a kind of flourish after his glass has been set down for the last time, and both actions do have the feel of terminal punctuation. “I think I should be heading off. Listen, Andrew, it was very good of you to come out and meet me about this. Thanks a lot.”
“Not at all,” I say, the apex of self-sacrificing civility. “It was my pleasure.”
He smiles, stands up quickly to leave, and suddenly I am just left there alone. I have the odd feeling that I have averted something, confronted the enemy and emerged victorious, and I have no idea of the genesis of such crazy ideas. I shake my head at my own craziness, and not seeing anything of any particular interest as I survey the room, I prepare myself to leave as well. I hold back for a few minutes, though, in order to be sure that Wilson has cleared the area.
Chapter 9
Responding, perhaps, to a challenge that I have never issued and can therefore legitimately abjure any responsibility for, the killer kills again. The victim’s name is Juan Rutherford, 45 years old, a relatively recent arrival in the Knosting area, about a year and a half ago. A short (5 foot 5, I record unmetrically) and slender (125 pounds) man, short greying hair, handsome by most standards, at least according to the picture of him published in the Gazette.
I cite the man’s height and weight only because they may have been contributing factors in the way he died. “Blunt-force trauma,” most of the media called it—aping the police jargon, as usual—but the fact is that Mr. Rutherford was beaten and kicked to death, and at some point the underlying bone structure of most of his face was destroyed. I have not seen the effects on this poor man, and do not want to, but in the course of my research I have seen close-up photographs of the same brutality inflicted on others. One stands out, partly for the white-trash context. A woman asks her current boyfriend to kill her former boyfriend, and he agrees. The man is beaten to death, his face is trampled, and later the head is cut off, a cigarette is inserted in the mouth, and the whole disgusting installation is put on a pillow.
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sp; I wonder how people can be so insanely violent. Taking some pride in not being a naive gawker, I accept the hardships of life, the twists and turns of fate, and I do not expect glorious light to shine from all the actions of humans who are sullied and imperfect as I am. Still, dare I say that I am shocked that a fellow human’s head could be dealt the same practical injustice that most of us reserve for pesky insects? I spoke somewhat sarcastically about journalists copying the sterile lingo of the police, but perhaps the practice derives more from self-preservation than from laziness. The euphemism of technical terminology can sometimes convey the facts accurately without conjuring up images of the cruel mess.
This is not a day to spend alone, and certainly not with my nose or any other part of me buried in dusty, bloody tomes. I realize in a flash that this is a good sliver of time when my landlady, poor dear, is not napping or watching one of her shows. During my first visit with her, when I first moved to Knosting, she and I spent a lovely hour or two in her place discussing not only the practicalities of my renting arrangement, but also the details of her daily schedule. She is a charming woman really, though with a distressing tendency to overestimate her own physical abilities. Generally speaking, she should not be walking around much at all, but I have seen her returning from a “stroll in the park,” as she called it, as if her very life were not in danger from a simple fall to the ground, or worse, from not quite making it across the street before the yellow roadster with the inattentive driver barrels over her.
I shake off these thoughts as I descend the stairs and head for her door. The rug in the foyer is looking a little shabby, even in this generously muted light, and I can see as I am knocking that dust bunnies are scurrying into the hardwood corners.
“Well, hello, Andrew,” she says with genuine enthusiasm. “Is everything all right? Is there something that I could do for you?” (Another thing: she frets too much over her tenant. The old girl is going to worry herself into an early grave.)
“Oh, yes,” I say. “Everything’s fine. I was just wondering if you could do with a little company?”
Her face brightens noticeably—she spends a lot of time alone—and a smile forms and stays there for a batch of awkward seconds before she steps out of the way and makes room for me to enter. I’d forgotten about the utter elegance of her apartment. When I was there the first time, admittedly I was focussed on making conversation and a good first impression, and on getting the messy logistics of the renting out of the way (cheques, no lease but a bit of an arduous and dubious “signing agreement,” as she styled it). In a medium-sized space, or at least in the living room to which I have access, she has managed to accommodate a lot of furniture without the place seeming cluttered or tacky. She seats me in an extraordinarily comfortable old armchair of a deep maroon colour. The fabric is a soft, rich velour with a pattern of flowers in bas relief.
“Could I get you something to drink, Andrew? Some tea, perhaps—I was just about to put on a pot.”
“That would be lovely,” I say. As she smiles and turns to go toward the kitchen, I ask, “May I help you with anything?” but she declines with a vigorous shake of her head and a waving finger, the latter of which I am at a loss to interpret. Perhaps she misunderstood?
I sit back in the chair and take the opportunity to do absolutely nothing, a real luxury for me. A kettle whistles shrilly in the kitchen for a few seconds and then goes quiet. There’s a brief rattle of dishes, the fridge door opens and closes, and finally she appears in front of me with a tray of delights.
“Let me take that,” I say gallantly.
“Thank you.”
She sits in a chair beside me and sets out a cup and saucer for each of us. The pouring is a careful operation: she tips the pot slowly with her right hand and places the index finger of her left on the lid of the pot so that it won’t fall off. The cups full, she sets the pot down and fans her hand over a plate of assorted biscuits, apparently shortbread and with some of them covered in chocolate.
“That’s so nice of you,” I say, taking one of each and setting them on my napkin on the coffee table. We both settle back in our chairs.
“That’s a terrible business about the murders, though,” she says, as if the domestic comfort of our situation demands to be counterbalanced with harsh reality.
“Yes,” I say. “Hard to know what to make of it. Are you OK? I mean, you’re not nervous about just going about your daily life, are you?”
She laughs.
“Oh, no, I don’t think like that. I’m an old lady as you can see, but I don’t worry about that kind of thing. When the Good Lord feels that it is my time for Him to call me home, then that will be my time. Until that happens”—she takes a bit of a cookie, and then a sip of tea as if to emphasize her point—“I’ll go on living my life as I always have.”
“That seems like an eminently healthy outlook,” I tell her sincerely, sipping my own tea (it is exquisite, I notice, and attribute that to practice).
“Tell me,” she says, her stare more piercing than I’ve seen it in other interactions with her. “This book you are writing, this—it is a book, is it?”
“Yes,” I assure her.
“Well”—she is shaking her head and her lips are pursed—“are you managing to find anything out? Have you come across anything that the police have not been able to?”
“A lot of people ask me that, and I wish I could say yes. But, no, so far, I haven’t found out much.”
She shakes her head at that, as if she is a bit disappointed in me. She’s not, I don’t think, but I am feeling a bit rattled with the very fact of the multiple murders and consequently having difficulty interpreting her mannerisms.
“Let me tell you a little story, Andrew, if I may.”
“Of course.”
“When I was a child, I had faith in everything. God, of course, and my friends and the fact that my parents would be always around, and generally that I was living in a good and safe world. Firemen rescuing your cat from a tree, policemen patting you on the head and letting you see inside their cars. That kind of thing. Now, I am afraid, I don’t believe in many of those things, and though I am not implying that you do either, yet I have to mention one or two of them in particular. The police, dearest Andrew, oh, the police. I have little confidence in their ability to find criminals, to treat evidence with respect, to treat people with respect. You know the stories. Things have been good here in Knosting only because nothing has really happened before these murders, and so the police have had quite an easy time of it, if I may say so. Now that a real crime has—now that real crimes have happened, I am not sure they know what they are doing, or what they should do. You know how they say that for murder, the killer is always the last person you suspect? The butler did it, kind of thing? Same with the police, I believe. I mean, they can be incompetent boobies just like anyone else in any other profession. Especially the ones in this town. I’m sorry, I sound bitter. I’m not really, just practical.”
She picks up her cup and takes a long slow sip. Her smile is impenetrable: I can’t tell if she’s nervous or guilty or pleased with herself. We both let the silence just sit there between us, both comfortable with it—or, at least, I can speak for myself and say that I am genuinely happy to be here in her wordless presence.
Later that evening I meet Rachel at the library. It’s late and not very busy on a Wednesday night and she has told me that she will be able to devote more time to helping me with my research. I should note here as I did perhaps somewhat peevishly with her that I am quite familiar with how to carry out research—methods, ethics, tools, the whole gamut. It was the stickler in me and not the potential friend who even bristled at the suggestion that I needed help, and moreover who insisted on pointing out this fact. What she could show me, I explained to her, were the various unique local resources that the library might have about the town that could help me profile or identify a killer. “It’s a long shot, but you could really help me there,” I said, truthfu
lly, but mostly to assuage any hurt feelings I may have inadvertently caused.
She finishes with a library patron (“just over there by the microfilm reader”) as I am walking up to her at the desk. Her smile is weak, almost perfunctory, and my first fear is that I have hurt her feelings.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“Does it show that badly? I’m sorry. It’s been tough here today.”
I pause, wondering why that would be, and of course it’s the obvious that I have ignored in my narrow pursuit of my immediate goal: another person, a fourth, has been killed.
“This makes me more determined than ever,” she says.
“Right,” I reply, a little awkwardly.
“One of the main things I wanted to show you is the file we keep on all the previous murders in Knosting—I mean, the ones before these ones recently have started.” She leads me to a large blue binder, just around the corner from the city directories and, as she points out, generally within view of the reference desk.
“People are weird: we’ve got this thing security-stripped and everything, but we don’t want anyone just walking away with it. I mean, it’s all online, too—I’ll point you to that, if you haven’t come across it already—but it’s a bit of a pain to be printing this whole thing out again.”
We sit down at a table and Rachel leafs through it, narrating as she goes. It’s a collection of clippings relating to murders dating back about fifteen years, but also with some original research and commentary by library staff.