by Wayne Jones
“As you can see, it’s a manageable size. We’ve been lucky—up till now—in Knosting: there haven’t been that many murders. If my memory is right, I think we basically have less than one a year. This latest spate is really screwing our average.” She laughs. “Sorry, that’s not really very funny.” She looks at me, trying to gauge I am not sure what, and I return her gaze. She looks down and then up again when something else occurs to her.
“Oh, I mentioned about online. This whole binder is digitized and on our website. Just click on the Knosting’s Past link and that should lead you right there. I guess my idea wasn’t that the killer would be among the guys in the binder, but who knows what kind of clues there might be there—I don’t know, like something from the former police investigations, or some forensic detail, or something like that.”
I now sincerely regret my finickiness over an imagined sleight to my research abilities: this lovely, dependable woman has already provided me with a trove that I would not have discovered on my own, and that would have taken me a lifetime to compile. I am impressed by her selfless dedication to organized information, by her lack of any agenda other than providing service to a half-patron half-acquaintance whom she barely knows really.
“There’s more,” she says, her voice now with the excited tone of a child rummaging through a toy store. She stands up and is nearly rounding another bay of books before I can muster enough sense to follow her. I arrive slightly breathless (must do more walks along the lake) and this time she is standing next to a bank of three computers.
“We keep a few DVDs here that are, I guess, strictly speaking in violation of copyright, but they serve a good purpose and I don’t think we’re costing anyone any money and I think the networks know about it, so—anyway, enough with the caveats. We’ve basically copied the television coverage of various murders onto DVDs, and again I think these might be a long shot for you, but there might be something there, who knows? And just so you know, we haven’t always been obsessed with murder in Knosting. With the DVD copying, we’ve done that for various civic issues: the disagreement in town council over the sports arena, for example, the rezoning for those condos by the lake, the big noise bylaw debate last year. A bunch of them.”
She puts one of the discs into the player, mutes, and skips it ahead a few tracks. It freezes a second or two but then there’s a shot of a reporter, talking straight on to the camera at first but then turning his head as he motions to a house behind him.
“I remember this,” Rachel says, turning her own head back to me. “Terrible tragedy: husband fell in love with another woman and so he killed his wife so that he could be with his new girlfriend. That’s the house they raised their kids in. He was sentenced to life, I think it was.”
I am sitting in the chair beside her like a patient, leaning in while she talks in soft, confidential tones, while she points to the screen as if my life depended on it. I listen raptly for only about half the time and for the rest, I am somewhat ashamed to say, I just waft along on her cadences, up a little, down a little. She might be telling me about murder or she might be reciting the most mellifluous of poetry.
“Andrew?”
I am caught, of course. I hasten to explain to the reader, though not to Rachel, that this is not doe-eyed love, but just the understandable result of a tired scholar having a long week and succumbing irrevocably to a soothing voice.
“You’ve been very kind to show me all of this,” I say, and that invisible cloud that passes across her eyes, narrowing them, darkening them for a moment, is her realization that I am ending the evening.
“You’re going,” she says flatly.
“I hope that is all right—and I want you to know that you’ve provided me with much to help me in this investigation.”
This simple fact seems to brighten her. “Great,” she says and smiles a sad smile.
We stand up simultaneously.
“You are all right?” I ask.
“Yes, I’m all right. Thanks. It’s just that it hits me, you know, hits me hard when I realize what this is all about. People dead. A murderer out there.”
“I know.” I move forward to hug her, surprising myself as much as her, and the sentiment is successful but the mechanics are bad. We hit noses and our arm movements are asynchronous.
“Perhaps …”
“Yes, perhaps we could get together some time again soon,” I suggest. “If you could spare the time, and I promise that I won’t monopolize your time with your helping me. Dinner, perhaps?”
“That would be fine. I mean, that would be great.”
She waves good-bye to me as in those old movies where the man is on the train and the devoted wife is on the platform, her eyes to the ground in regret at first but then up and gazing at her fading man, her arm high in the air and waving broadly. It will be better next time.
Chapter 10
I receive another email:
I can only imagine the thoughts that drag their rotting carcasses through the muddied mind of a failed and desperate hack. “Oh, dear, these random senseless killings.” “Only a maniac with a complete lack of conscience could even dream of inflicting such pain.” “When will this madness end?” And on and on it goes, and I don’t know whether it is the annoyance of this blathery drivel or the complete lack of any semblance of a challenge in dealing with you that is the more annoying. There have been, what, four of them killed so far, and let me deflate this much of the mystery: there will be six more, an even ten, straight across the row, a range of decimal and literal perfection. There’s a certain ease to systematic killing, perhaps the same comfort that you derive from writing your books and articles with an outline in hand first rather than just plunging in. A sense of order, however false and factitious, can provide solace, and make you think that you are on the right path even though you know in your heart of hearts (“as if you have one,” I hear you muttering pathetically)—even though you know that it’s all made up.
One of the faults which scholars are sometimes justly accused of is a tendency toward over-interpretation, and so I hesitate at any detailed exegesis of this frightening message. At what level does the truth exist? Is there a meaning beneath the literal one? How much can we believe about any of the factual assertions? How much can we believe or glean about any level of assertion in this email?
I haven’t reported any of these emails to the police, my reasoning being that they are directed at me personally and contain nothing in the way of explicit information that might lead to the killer’s apprehension. Yes, I hear you, strident reader, saying that the significance or not of potential evidence is not for a writer, however skilled and professional, to decide. I do hear you, but I am considering my options. Allow me to lay them out as I did my ever-decreasing supply of pants this morning across my meticulously made bed:
Show the emails to the police immediately. The reasons are numerous and obvious. There is a possibility that the killer is deriving some satisfaction from these exchanges with me, that the contrivance of a sort of secondary victim both enlivens and angers him, perhaps to the extent that in some way I might be contributing to the tally of people who are being murdered. This thought does give me significant pause, but Libran counterarguments also influence me.
Ignore the emails as I have been doing.
Engage the killer in a correspondence. I have to admit that I don’t trust my own integrity enough to do this. Allow me to explain in crude terms. Once my book is published, sales would be helped enormously if the inclusion of actual emails from the killer could be touted in a breathless but respectable blurb somewhere on the jacket. However, I am not writing this book merely so that it will sell a lot of copies, but for the psychological research value, for—well, for many things that have nothing to do with money or fame or anything remotely of such crass self-interest. What I crave from a prolonged exchange with such a depraved conscience (or lack of one) would be to see how the animal works, observe it in its habitat, see it manoeuvre
, hear it roar. I do believe that my intentions are pure in this regard, but the chance that somewhere buried deep inside me lurks a desire for exploitation for selfish ends—my own dark animal—keeps me from making the correspondence a two-sided one.
Taunt the bastard, as the raver might say. This is not a viable option, but I list it here merely to complete the various possibilities. I am averse to the risk that such a strategy would entail, and in any case, though I do consider myself someone with psychological acumen well above that of the average person, yet I am not an expert who would know what to say to a killer in order to make him stop or reveal himself or otherwise act to my (and the community’s) advantage. Of course, one would fear the opposite, that the rage I might incite would drive him to kill more. Or, it just now occurs to me, to kill me as well.
I procrastinate, which amounts to option two above, I suppose. For distraction, no media beckon me this evening, nothing electronic, no books, nothing at all. I settle back in my armchair, the light just right from the blue lamp behind me and to my left. There is absolute quiet while I pore over the pages of notes I have taken. I wish I could say that I have identified suspects: rather, I have simply compiled bits and pieces here and there, a detail, a quotation from the newspaper, some apparent inconsistency (dare I say clue?) that may in fact turn out to be simply a misreporting by one source or another. I start to doubt myself. How does anyone ever put all this together and come to a conclusion, make a profile of a killer, actually catch the guy?
I have to admit to myself an odd and uncharacteristic feeling of depression that I have been experiencing for the past couple of weeks. I sit in my most comfortable of chairs, or I take a long walk on the sunniest of days, but I fail to energize myself at all. My friend Simon who talked me through a bout of this some ten years ago told me at the time that it was “chronic low-level depression” or “ahedonia” or something of the sort. In sum, an inability to make myself happy or to take pleasure in any activity or situation. The doctors say, apparently, that it is all chemical, and hence the quick dispensing of a variety of medications which “inhibit” this or “uptake” that or some such thing (I never have had much of a head for medical mumbo-jumbo). Simon swore by his own therapist and the resultant medication (called AlphaFlex), and said that in a matter of weeks he was back to his happy, regular self, presumably from the drugs having readjusted his body’s chemicals back to their primordial balance.
I abhor such artificially induced states and so am loath to consult a physician for fear that he or she might cajole me into experimenting with this or that elixir. Yet I do crave some relief. I try to concentrate on my research but often find my poor deranged mind wandering. I seem to vacillate between worry whether I will ever boost myself out of this dreadful down, and disorganized mental sleuthing about what the bloody cause of it all is. Perhaps it is quite simple: a bookish scholar is bound to go a little wonky when he spends his days trolling through reports about killing instead of reading delightful old books in some quiet sanctuary where the silence is deafening and the sound of a polite, suppressed cough is a welcome distraction.
I search for my own cures. I try St. John’s wort and Omega 3-6-9 without success. I choke down two of the foul-smelling SJW with each meal, and on some days I sense just the hint of, of something—not relief, for sure, but just the thinnest slice of something—but it is illusory, like a shimmering chimera you only think you see in the distance. The 3-6-9 are no better, either alone or in combination, and to make matters worse they are gigantic urine-coloured caplets about the size of two-thirds of my pinky finger. Still, I persist with them for a few weeks until my supply is exhausted and I cannot justify the expense of replenishing them, wandering again in the aisle of the drugstore devoted to home remedies and herbal medicine.
I try treating myself to luxurious foods, high-quality ice cream, pizzas from that specialty place, Thai food that is both spicy and elegant, but nothing of that strategy works either, and I also worry that I will gain weight (the scales, thank God, tell me otherwise). I abandon the whole project when I realize that they are superficial pokes at a perhaps insoluble problem. I wonder whether I may simply need a temporary change of venue, a shakeup of my routine, some time off. I would find it hard to justify a vacation this early in the research, and my finances would not permit me anything more than the most rudimentary escape.
At the barber shop the next morning, the talk is all about the Rutherford murder. I flip through a surprisingly recent issue of Newsweek while I wait for an empty chair, and in between photos and the odd headline which grabs my attention, I mostly eavesdrop on the conversations. No subterfuge is of course necessary in order to listen in: it’s an accepted fact that the talk is all communal, so that even though Ella is engaged in a heated debate with the fat man who always gets his head shaved, nobody minds the silent attendance on the part of the others in the shop.
“I can’t really agree with you on that one, Jim,” Ella says as she expertly shaves another deep furrow in his curly brown hair. “I think we all have to give the police a break on this one. I mean, yes, four people have been killed, but this kind of thing never happens here in Knosting, and the—”
“It’s not just that,” Jim says, and I worry for an instant that Ella might not like the interruption, and she with a straight razor near at hand too. The electric shaver whirs as she makes a circuit around his left ear. She pulls the ear out from his head and probes with the shaver, cutting the hair very short.
“It’s not just that,” Jim repeats. “I guess I just expect something, instead of just murder after murder after murder, and all they can say is that they presume—I heard one of them use that word, presume—that they presume that they’re all done by the same person, but they have no leads and the public are asked to contact them with any information. I mean, Jesus—pardon my French.”
Ella is working on the back now. She has the edge of the shaver against Jim’s head, making a tapered trim, and she then stands back a little to assess her accuracy.
“Well, yes,” she says while she touches Jim lightly on the forehead in order to make him sit up so that she can have a better look at her handiwork. “But I think you need to give them a bit of a break, allow some time, is all.”
The debate ends there for now and in the silence the rest of us look around the room and then resume our reading with new attention. For me, that lasts about ten seconds and soon I am flipping through distractedly, a photo of a car bomb here, a headline about torture there. After about five minutes I happen to look up as Ella is finishing off Jim. She deftly removes the cape, pulling it to one side and making a large pouch so that the sheared hairs don’t fall into Jim’s lap. She shakes the contents out onto the floor and then folds it into a rough half and lays it over the back of the chair.
She meets Jim over at the cash register and I can see that he favours her with only one of the loonies that she gives him back as change from the ten. I’ve seen her smile several times now at this kind of modest tip.
“Thanks for coming in, Jim. See you next month.”
“Yeah,” Jim says, now halfway out the door.
Ella smiles at me and waves her hand in the direction of the chair. I put down my magazine and seat myself after she has removed the cape. I like this part of the whole ritual, I have to admit. Perhaps it is the lack of female company that I have had to endure for the last several months, no woman actually touching me in any way. Or perhaps it is the atmosphere of utter attention, the ethos of dedicated personal service. She puts the cape on me, clips it at the back, and then adjusts it over me at the front.
“The same?” she asks.
“You know, I thought maybe a little shorter this time. I mean, even nothing with scissors: just the shaver. Perhaps number two or one and a half?”
“Oh my, quite a change. You know what they say? Once you go that short you never go back.” She laughs lightly and then turns her attention to the selection of shaver heads arrayed on the counter
in front of her mirror. She chooses one and snaps it on. The thing whirs to life.
“OK, here goes,” Ella says.
We talk very little, as usual, and especially for me this time as veritable masses of hair come tumbling off my head, onto the cape and then the floor, and in a few cases which I note with distress, into my shoe. It is fascinating to see myself in the process of being transformed. I start off relatively nondescript, I think, a man whose short hair is still short but who has allowed the telltale tufts to form on his neck and sideburns, grey and wiry and brittle. Ella uses the furrow method on me just as she did on Jim and at various points during the job it looks like something has gone horribly wrong. However, I end up very, very clean.
I rub my hand over my sharp stubble, from forehead to the trim back. “I feel like a new man,” I tell her, and she just smiles, removes the cape in her careful way again, and we meet over at the cash register. I give her both loonies and she smiles again.
“Thanks, Andrew. It looks good, by the way.”
I return her smile and head out the door. It’s only when I am out in the sunshine of a main street on a busy Saturday morning that I realize that for those glorious fifteen or twenty minutes, while I was being ministered to by able hands, I did not think of killing at all. Once Jim had left I was in my own little world there, the hair tumbling safely all over me.
Chapter 11
Evil is indeed banal and the crude practicality of murder is more horrible than the noisy, shiny spectacle that one has seen countless times on television and at the movies. Guns don’t make that booming sound, people don’t bleed like that, death throes involve more slumping than flailing. I suspect that I am not the only viewer whose sympathy has been attenuated rather than aroused by the sight of an actor in paroxysms of faked death, seconds dragging by while he conveniently has the chance to complete his last desire (declare love, reveal the secret code, “Marco did it”), and then the head either being thrust back as an ultimate punctuation, an exclamation mark, or the chin dropping to the chest and the eyes often remaining open so that they may be ever-so-gently closed by the person (girlfriend, fellow spy) left behind.