by Wayne Jones
“Fuckin police station is down that way, I’m sure,” the sound man says, indicating north.
“Yeah,” says the camera man.
The reporter seems unconvinced. “Let’s just get down there wherever the damn thing is.”
They walk down the street. I reposition myself, leaning to the left, and open the slats a little wider. They put the equipment into the back of an SUV, get in at three separate doors, and drive away too quickly for me to discern their station letters. I’ve lost all interest in today’s paper now and I have an off feeling that my appetite for reporting on the murders will be seriously diminished by this onslaught. However, I do maintain a sense of responsibility for the whole project—some good will come from my investigation and book—and so I get ready quickly so that I can go downtown to verify my worst fears.
I exit my apartment and start walking up the street with a feeling of hope and adventure in spite of the media invasion (I heard at least two more vehicles while I was shaving). The air is cool and the gawking pedestrian traffic is light as I take a left off Johnson and head for the square in front of city hall. I hear a muffled but strong rumbling as I approach my destination, and as I round my final corner and finally arrive, the sight is disgusting and spectacular and disheartening all at once. I count at least twenty vehicles, each with a bevy of people around them, and from many countries, too, like the worst kind of parody of international cooperation.
In the midst of it all and just as I am about to turn around and go right back home, returning later when my stamina has been reinstated, I hear my name, or think I do. I turn around and see Tony running toward me like a child to her uncle at the fair.
“Isn’t this wild?” she says.
“I guess I’m not surprised to see you here.”
“Oh, now, that sounds a little disapproving.” The woman has elicited more than I intended to share, and I’ve been a boob as well.
“Sorry, didn’t mean it that way,” I lie. “Just that, you know, it’s murder and we both know that we’re both interested in this kind of thing.”
She laughs disconcertingly.
“I have a feeling,” she starts, and there is a loud explosion of something or other to punctuate her thought. “I have a feeling that this media presence is going to do more for solving this damn thing than all the police officers in all the donut shops in town.”
Flippant though her assessment is, I contemplate its validity. I do detest the circus that has evidently come to town (sans elephant), but I can’t argue with throwing every resource imaginable at the problem—easing up on the tendency to be cautious and comprehensive and systematic about the investigation, and instead creating a mess out of which one hopes eventually to extract one shining gem. There was a rumour making its way around town a few weeks ago that the police (or was it the mayor?) had engaged the services of a psychic. My first reaction, of course, was that it was a ridiculous waste of time and money, and even somewhat of an insult to victims whose deaths go unresolved while civic officials fiddle around with fake powers. But suddenly one evening I couldn’t imagine the possible harm in trying everything, no matter how valid: I abhor the chicanery of psychic powers and divining and the rest of it, but as long as the police were not actually diverting their efforts entirely to parading some bescarfed charlatan around to former crimes scenes—well, who am I to judge?
“You might be right,” I say to her, smiling falsely and pretending to mean it.
“So, I know it might be an obvious question, but why are you here anyway?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
There’s a pause while we both calculate whose move this results in.
“OK, well, I know you have a nobler cause than I do, and I feel a bit like the dumb chick at the rock concert,” she is smart enough to say. “I mean, you can chalk it up to research but I’m just here for the spectacle—you know, see how crude and mean the media can really get.”
This sly girl’s forthrightness is disarming.
“My motives may not be any better than that.”
Unconsciously on both sides, I think, we have proceeded to walk together alongside the metal barricade which encloses all the vehicles and their denizens. We are exposed to the back ends of the vehicles for the most part, the same ugly practicality that one sees along the literal and figurative edges of a fairground, keeping the pretty things operating.
“Good that they keep them caged up, I guess, so that they don’t get out and maul anyone.”
I smile.
“Actually, it reminds me of my days in the theatre,” Tony says. “Getting dressed, putting on makeup, sprucing up, all of that. I wonder if at some point they actually sit down and try to figure things out, or even just to come up with some good questions?”
She’s right again, damn her. “It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? I mean, one could imagine that if they all knocked their heads together as well as exercised their power—the fourth estate and all of that—then they might actually be able to force or shame someone into doing something about this mess. Or perhaps they might figure it out for themselves?”
“Oh, now you’re just talking crazy talk.” She shakes her head at me faux seriously.
We continue along the long edge of the barricade and finally round the corner, making our way toward the water. I have a crazy temptation, lasting just a nanosecond, to run screaming into the lake, decrying loudly the poor state of investigative journalism just before I one-and-a-half-gainer into the water, screaming even more loudly about the inept police before I flop in spectacularly. There’s even more activity on this edge of the barricade, starting with a very large man applying his own makeup while his camera and sound operators (both women) wait patiently, and culminating in another man actually being slapped across the face, for what reason I am happy not to know.
“A bench?” Tony suggests, and I nod approvingly.
The silence and solitude are genuinely soothing as we make it to the side of the water and find an idyllic little bench under a tree. I have to admit to being still a little suspicious of Tony: I am fairly certain that she is not a killer, but there is something disingenuous in her interactions with me that I find troubling even though I cannot quite identify the problem.
“So how goes the research for the book?” she asks. “I haven’t seen you at the library and I’ve wondered whether maybe you just gave up on the whole thing.”
“Oh, not at all. I’ve changed my schedule a little, that’s probably part of it, but I’ve also been doing a lot of reading at home. The other thing—and this may sound a little precious—the other thing is that I’ve just been trying to spend some quiet time, sometimes at home, sometimes right here along the lake or in the park, just trying to think, to try to figure things out.” I hate the fact that she is so straightforward: I always say too much. I feel like that caricature of a nervous suspect whom the police have sent their most adept interrogator to shake down, the officer showing up in civilian clothes and seemingly distracted by the quality of the coffee at the station or the antics of his misbehaving teenaged son, but somewhere in the aw-shucks method he manages to extract a confession.
“I’ve been thinking about it myself,” she says.
“Oh?”
“Yes. I’ve developed a sort of conspiracy theory. It’s crazy, but …” She trails off and looks at me for permission to indulge.
“Go on.”
“OK, it’s like this. The main question is, who has benefited most from these murders?”
“Benefited?”
“Obviously not the dead people or their families. But look at the cops and the media and the mayor’s new, what’s he calling it, crime agenda now. They’re getting attention and funding and the people are just following along like sheep. I’m no better myself: if it takes a million dollars to find this guy, I’m willing to pay the higher taxes or for the city to go into debt so that we can fund it.”
I let the utter ludicrousness of her th
eory settle into my already harried brain a little before I reply.
“I’m having some difficulty fathoming exactly what you are suggesting,” I say diplomatically, trying to avoid the tone I might use with, say, a child who had just told me about a monster in her bedroom. “You’re not saying that the police and the—the mayor and—what are you saying, exactly?” I am experiencing genuine difficulty framing my response as part of a conversation that adults might be having.
“No, of course not, I’m not saying that they’re all in on it, or anything like that.” She seems slightly angry. “I mean, I’m not implying that they’re sitting around in city hall hashing out who’s going to get whacked next and who they should hire to do it.” She laughs now, and I take some relief in that.
“So …?” I prod.
“I guess my main point is that it’s in the interest of many police and civic officials to let this drag on a bit. Not that they’re killing, of course, but that maybe they aren’t trying their hardest to track the guy down. All these people murdered, some of them in pretty horrific ways, and they don’t even have a lead or a suspect or anything? It boggles the mind. The longer it goes and there is nobody caught, the more money that gets added to their law-and-order budget or whatever.”
Though this more nuanced assessment is several degrees superior to what I had suspected, I still remain flummoxed at the relative simplemindedness of her analysis. Yes, the facts are as she says they are, but I am not cynical enough, perhaps, to reduce this mess to a merely financial rationale. I see incompetence and a lack of drive in the police and in the general coordination of the “investigation” (one hesitates even to grace it with this word), but nothing more sinister than that.
“I’m not sure I agree,” I say rather hesitantly. “The most I would say is that it might be as you say, but only unconsciously.”
“Yes, maybe you have a point. In fact, I hope that you are right, because even the hint of what I am suggesting makes me very worried and depressed.”
There’s a loud thudding sound which startles us both, and when we turn around to look at its source within the barricade there is another, though more muted. We get up immediately and run toward the vehicles, Tony ahead of me at a good clip and me, alas, lagging and panting. I see flames and shout that fact to her and she adjusts her trajectory to head in that direction.
Tony arrives and I pull up behind her about five seconds later. I can feel the heat from a small fire, but most noticeable is the panicked shouting on the part of several of the media people within the barricade.
“What the fuckin fuck?” I hear, the strictured eloquence not really boding well for the future of informed, articulate reporting in this town.
Tony, ever the bold charmer, goes over to one of the reporters who is standing to the side observing the melee. I run up behind her, staying close enough to hear the conversation but far enough away so as not to spook the reporter.
“So, what gives?” she says.
“It’s nothing really,” says the reporter, evidently more interested in the territory of Tony’s physique than in prosaic explosions. “Someone dropped a match into a chemical or something that one of the women was using for her hair, I think. Or maybe it was one of the men.” He laughs and so does Tony.
“What the hell could go in anyone’s hair that would be that explosive?”
“That’s just one of the stories. I’ve also heard that there was a fight between one of the male reporters and his camerawoman. He claimed she shot him in bad light or something and made him look bad on camera. She said—well, I’ve heard it quoted like, ‘I didn’t have much to work with.’ And then he apparently threw something at her, which ended up in a vat of something. The details are a little fuzzy, and who knows what’s the truth anyway?”
Tony turns away to rejoin me and I can see that the reporter is interested in her departing assets as well. Quite disgusting.
“Did you catch that?” she asks.
I sigh in response and we both head away from the barricade as we hear the sirens of the firetrucks making their way closer.
Chapter 14
Yet another body, yet another convulsion of rage against the ineffectual police.
A woman is thrown off a highrise, thirteen unlucky storeys to her death. The pedestrian who discovered her was rushing home to his wife, and was not used to being out this late. He feared that she would suspect him of infidelity (the things that people will admit to newspaper reporters!), when the real cause was that he had met an old high-school friend and they had drunk at the bars until they closed down and then went to a party of a friend of a friend where—
Anyway, he had just checked his watch (3:39 am) when he heard a sound behind him, “sort of a clapping sound,” as he described it to the radio reporter, “but also kind of like a thud, too.” He stopped, stared at the woman now splayed face down on the sidewalk, and didn’t immediately make the connection that she had gotten there from above. When he did, he backed away, sat on a bench on the street, and called 911.
The town is scared and sympathetic at first. Flowers, stuffed animals, candles, handwritten messages, poems, Bibles, billets doux, all appear at the site of the fall after the police have cleared the scene. I watch it on the news first. One of the reporters, from the channel that likes to highlight the human element of all stories, crouches in front of the mass of gifts and wishes, and then actually picks up one of the teddy bears and brandishes it in front of the camera, looks down at it as if to glean some explanation for the senseless crime, and then into the camera again, and signs off. I am nearly apoplectic with disbelief, seeing such exploitation, seeing such a desecration.
The next day I visit the site myself. The pile of things, mostly pinks and blues, is even bigger, and I just stand off to the side for about fifteen minutes, watching more and more people bring even more things, people standing silently not unlike myself, people crying. A woman in her 20s, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a short black dress, walks up to within inches of the edge of the pile, and then removes a small light-blue box from her purse. She looks at it for a moment, then presses it to her lips, and as a tear rolls down her cheek she bends down slowly and places the box in amidst the rest of the things. Standing again, she wipes her tears, then pinches the top of her nose, the thumb and index finger of her left hand on either side and nearly protruding into her eyes. Her head is bowed and she maintains that pose, almost completely stationary, for a solid minute, while cars buzz by her and other people walk up to the shrine as well, most of them pausing to look at her after they have dropped off their own bit of sympathy.
Three days later there is a demonstration in front of city hall on Saturday, waves of people with placards who make their way to the police headquarters. I have trouble knowing whom to support: perhaps such a balance of mind, such equanimity, on my part is the result of having spent so much time in academic research, for which an ability to sift through evidence is much more valuable than making facile accusations. I estimate that there must be a couple of thousand people cramming the streets. A chant starts—“Arrests now! Arrests now! Arrests now!”—but eventually subsides. A man dressed in wrinkly linen heads to a makeshift podium set up at the bottom of the steps leading to city hall, squints and starts back a bit at the squelch of microphone feedback, and finally addresses the now silent crowd.
“People, thank you for coming out this afternoon.” There are a few shouts and some applause, and then silence again. “Thank you for being part of this citizens’ protest against a lack of action on the part of the police and the politicians to get something done about this ... about this atrocious series of crimes in our beautiful city. Let me tell you some of the things that our community action committee has done to—”
While the speech drags on, a little too long if I may say so, I do marvel at the power of democracy, as naive and simple-minded as that might sound. Crimes are committed and the law-enforcement institution which has been charged with discovering the cr
iminals has not been effective: whether or not it has tried to do its job—and I suppose that to be generous one must assume so—it has not been successful. Victims continue to pile up and a murderer is on the loose. The people rise up. Demand action. Threaten, or imply, that they will take the law into their own hands if there are no results.
“—no results we will do our own damn investigating, and find this killer ourselves!”
This last bit is fairly shouted into the microphone and there is distortion on the last syllable but the message is clear. The crowd roars, hands in the air, a chant started (I cannot make out the words) and then abandoned, and at first there is confusion. Finally, a rough choreography is initiated and a woman with a megaphone at one corner of the crowd, farthest away from the man at the mike, speaks.
“People, people. We are going to march down King Street and then circle back here for our last rally. There are colleagues in red and white jackets to the left and right of me, and in front of me. They are going to lead the walk, and we’re going to start right now. Please follow them. We don’t want this to be violent or anything like that; we don’t want a riot. We just want to show the police that there is a big problem here.”