by Jeff Crook
Then the Warren Academy auditorium burned down and in the ruins they found two seniors, Roger and Loeb Simon, twin brothers, and both noted homosexuals. They were naked and cooked in their own juices inside an antique iron bathtub that was part of the set for a production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. They had been trussed up with twine and left in the tub with a heavy piece of carpet covering them while the auditorium burned down around them.
Because all three victims were young homosexual men, the police began to suspect the killings might be related. But as there were no similar murders for almost a year after the Simon boys, the possibility of a serial killer faded as a working theory. All other trails led to dead ends and the investigation stalled.
That ended on a Tuesday morning a little over two years ago. On the Monday night before Thanksgiving, the body of an art historian named Richard Buntyn was discovered on the stage at Playhouse on the Square. My photos of the scene showed a naked man stuffed headfirst into a wine barrel. Imagine everyone’s surprise when the body was removed and a severed pig head floated to the top. Adam McPeake immediately recognized the scene as a staging of the death of the Duke of Clarence from Shakespeare’s Richard III, in which the Duke is stabbed and drowned in a malmsey-butt. Dr. Wiley later determined the victim had been raped with a butcher knife.
Adam was the first to connect the dots between the Buntyn, Krews and Simon murders. The Simons, he observed, had been trussed up and baked in a pie, like the characters Chiron and Demetrius in Titus Adronicus, again Shakespeare. But Adam’s most remarkable detective coup came when he identified the Krews backyard as the same place where Tennessee Williams’s first (now lost) play Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! was performed. That’s something you won’t learn from the Chamber of Commerce. The glass unicorn discovered in the victim’s rectum pointed to Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. That the victim had been cannibalized suggested Suddenly, Last Summer, also Tennessee Williams, in which Sebastian, a frustrated young homosexual, is killed and eaten while on vacation in Europe.
Because of the pig’s head, the police suspected the killer might be a local butcher or pig farmer. Under normal circumstances, a pig’s head isn’t particularly easy to get hold of, but this was Memphis, where you can pick up a pig head for a song at the barbecue festival. Krews had been barbecued, pointing to someone into the competitive barbecue scene. That all four victims were known homosexuals suggested hate as a motive. They thought he might be a repressed homosexual with religious delusions. The FBI sent in a profiler who suggested a white male, late twenties or early thirties, who had held a variety of menial jobs, socially inept and pathologically shy, a creature of the social shadows, a wallflower who probably grew up with a domineering father figure who sexually abused him. His victims likely were people he encountered on a daily basis, thus the extremely personal nature of the crimes. But they never found a solid connection between the four victims other than the theatrical nature of their deaths. They shared no mutual friends or relatives. With the Buntyn crime referred to as the Murder at the Playhouse by the press, it wasn’t long before a local theater critic dubbed him the Playhouse Killer. He became Memphis’s most famous serial murderer since George Howard Putt. The police were certain he would strike again, sooner rather than later, now that he had captured the media’s attention.
They were wrong. Two years went by without a murder. Billet began to suspect the killer had either moved away, died, or been imprisoned for an unrelated crime, but the media never let the story go. Every time a young man turned up dead, whether a cracker white boy from Germantown or a gang banger from North Memphis, they wanted to know if it was the work of the Playhouse Killer.
Two years passed with no official victims. There was, however, one unsolved murder that Adam argued also belonged to our killer. The victim was a transsexual named Patsy (Patrick) Concorde, her body found raped with a cedar branch on the Monday night before Thanksgiving on the corner of Walker and Neptune. The killer tied her to the bumper of her own car and dragged her down Neptune Street. He torched the Mustang and left the body unposed beside it. Adam was certain it belonged to the Playhouse Killer, despite the lack of an obvious connection to a play. Through a local antiquarian, he learned that the old Dionysian Theatre once stood at the corner of Walker and Neptune, but it burned down in 1928. In the Greek play Hippolytus, by Euripedes, young Hippolytus rejects the advances of his stepmother and is dragged to his death behind his own horses (Mustangs) after Poseidon (Neptune) frightens them. And finally, Hippolytus was first performed at the Dionysian Festival in Athens in 428 BC.
Chief Billet told Adam it was too big of a stretch to connect the murder to the Playhouse Killer. Patsy Concorde’s death had all the hallmarks of a traditional hate crime. He argued that the anniversary of the Buntyn murder was merely a coincidence. I agreed with Billet. The theater references were too obscure and depended on the killer possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of local history. But Adam stuck to his theory, mostly because the killer had already proven that he knew more than most about Memphis theater lore. He argued that the killer was interrupted before he could pose the body in its proper theatrical scene, otherwise there would have been little doubt.
Now it looked like Adam might have been right. Last Monday was the one-year anniversary of Patrick Concorde’s murder, and the second anniversary of Richard Buntyn’s slaying. The Simon and Krews murders all happened on Mondays as well. It looked like the killer was even more cunning than we thought. And now he was really getting busy.
* * *
The photos of the Krews murder scene were distressingly repetitive. It was my first job of this type and I was trying to impress the boss with the quantity of my work. There was one angle I kept returning to—I don’t know why. It was a portrait of the victim. Jim Krews had been found skewered on a rotisserie above an outdoor barbecue pit, facing the sky with his arms and legs curled up against his body. I had taken numerous photos of his profile against the far fence and the green trees beyond it.
In one of the photos I noticed something I’d never seen before—the top half of a head sticking up over the fence. All I could see were the eyes and a crop of short black hair, but even these were blurry. I remembered how they had found the body while the coals under it were still warm, plates on the picnic table, ice in the plastic picnic cup of fizzing Diet Coke sitting on the brick wall of the barbecue pit. The killer had almost been caught sitting down to his dinner. The cops made a thorough search of the area, but apparently not thorough enough, because here he was peeking over the fence. The best part of that day for him was probably watching us process his handiwork. Maybe that was the thrill he had been trying to recapture ever since.
Someone knocked on the door. It was the traffic cop. He’d run the plates on the hit-and-run. They’d come back stolen, which pretty much figured. Reed wasn’t that stupid after all.
Adam thanked him and started to close the door when I asked, “Who do the tags belong to?” The traffic cop told us the name. Adam closed the door, turned to me and leaned against the door.
“That’s a hell of a big coincidence,” I said. “Almost as big as this.” I turned my laptop around, showing him a photo of the back of the smashed-up Camaro. I pointed to the bottom right corner of the rear window, where a faded rainbow apple sticker was peeling from the glass.
28
ADAM DROVE, EVEN THOUGH HE shouldn’t have. He’d had a beer while still on the clock, and now he was driving a police vehicle with alcohol in his system. Not enough to get a DUI, but you only needed enough to register on a breathalyzer if you were on duty. If anything happened, the department would cover it up as a matter of course. But he was still technically on probation for cocaine abuse, which was how he became my NA sponsor. If somebody wanted to make a stink about it, they could. Somebody like Wiley, for instance.
“Rape kit came back on Ritter,” Adam said as he wove through traffic. He was doing about ninety down Union even though the other drivers weren’t exa
ctly falling over themselves to get out of his way.
“Yeah?” I said through clenched teeth. “Not even a week. What got into Wiley?”
“He thinks he’s gonna solve this one himself.”
I grabbed the dash as he slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a school bus. As we whipped by, I saw the terrified faces of about twenty kids staring down at us.
“Jesus, be careful.”
Adam leaned across me, flipped off the bus driver and kept going. “Turns out Ritter wasn’t raped.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Damn. Wiley couldn’t wait to tell the chief about it and make me look bad.” He barely slowed down to take the left turn onto Belvedere, whipping across oncoming traffic. I saw cars piling up sideways to avoid us.
“Wiley thinks Ritter’s is a copycat murder?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Adam asked. We slid to a stop about a hundred yards north of Michi’s house. Adam slammed the door so hard I thought the glass would cave. He figured Wiley was right.
But if Wiley was right, whose picture had I taken? Who was the guy with the video camera hiding in the trees near the Shell?
I joined Adam on the sidewalk and we started toward Michi’s house—just a couple of regular people out for a stroll in the pouring rain. I had my Leica in its case under my jacket and Deiter’s ghost-hunter ball cap pulled down low over my eyes. Adam wore jeans, a black polo, and a Memphis Grizzlies windbreaker.
You couldn’t see Michi’s house until you were right up on it because of the neighbor’s hedge. The limbs of the sycamore trees dangled as though already weary of winter and rain, the water dripping off their twig ends and pattering the brim of my cap. Adam paused at the end of the hedge and pointed at a shard of red reflector plastic lying in Michi’s driveway. He was wearing his class ring, East High class of ’91, with a ruby for his birthstone.
“Don’t you think we ought to call in the cavalry on this one?” I asked.
“First I want to see if anybody’s home.”
We walked down the hedge bordering Michi’s property. The neighbor’s backyard was surrounded by a high brick fence topped with iron. I climbed up on Adam’s shoulders for a scout. The yard was shaded and landscaped, with about two hundred variegated hostas growing under the trees. They also had a big doghouse in one corner. I didn’t see a dog, but I didn’t particularly want to be climbing over the fence when White Fang came busting out.
The side hedge ended at the fence and there was a narrow, overhung path lined with stepping stones running along the foot of the wall. We crept through and squatted, staring up at Michi’s brooding brown mansion, streamers of rain dancing among the fairy ironwork and lightning rods. Adam sat back on his heels. “Jesus. That’s one big fucking house. Where’d Michi get his money?”
“His wife.” She was old Memphis money, cotton baroness, in control of her own fortune before she was thirty. She and Michi met at the theater. She left him after he was castrated, but for whatever reason they never divorced. Maybe she still loved the old perv. When she died of breast cancer, she left her entire fortune to him.
“Some people have all the luck,” Adam said.
The garage in back was an old carriage house, the kind of place that people in this neighborhood remodeled and rented out to hip young liberal-arts majors. It was detached from the mansion, sitting about twenty feet back. We couldn’t see the doors. There were several cars parked along one side of the driveway. We used these as a screen to make our way around back.
As we squatted behind the fender of the last car, I could see Michi’s kitchen window at the far corner of the house. It was dark. All the windows on the bottom floor were dark. We’d have to cross a fair amount of open space to reach the garage. Anybody could be sitting in one of those windows watching us and we’d never see them. The garage door was open and inside it sat the powder-blue Camaro with the caved-in rear end and the faded rainbow apple sticker in the window. The driver had removed the stolen license plate.
The same car had been parked in Michi’s driveway a week ago Sunday when I came to sell him the photos of the Simon twins. As soon as I saw that rainbow sticker in the picture of my fleeing hit-and-run stalker, I knew it was one coincidence too many. String enough coincidences together and you’ll find a conspiracy, Adam always said.
“Let’s call in backup,” I suggested. He stared up at the house and fiddled with his class ring as though it bothered him. “We can’t let this guy slip by us.”
“If he’s smart, he won’t even be here.”
“He’s smart.”
“Let’s go talk to Michi.”
“I thought Michi was in ICU.”
“He was released this morning,” Adam said.
“What about his heart attack?”
He shook his head. “Panic attack. They sent him home with a scrip for Xanax.”
We crept back along the line of parked cars and paused for a minute in the shelter of the hedge path. Adam looked back at the house, quietly casing it. He said, “If the killer is one of Michi’s boys, maybe we can get an ID without telling him what we’re looking for. He probably just ditched the car here because he’s familiar with the place. We don’t want to spook the others if we don’t have to. One of them might tip the guy off.”
We circled the hedge and walked up Michi’s driveway. Being a cop was an easy enough role to slip into again. It was like riding a bicycle. The only part I didn’t like was not having somebody to cover the back door, in case our boy bolted. No way he would hang around once he spotted us.
At least the porch was out of the rain. Adam rang the doorbell and we waited. We waited a long time, ringing the doorbell every minute or so. I tried to see in through the porch windows. Nobody answered the door.
“I’m gonna kick it in,” Adam said.
He rang the doorbell again, keeping his finger on the button for a long time. I put my ear to the door and listened to it ring again and again, somewhere deep within the house. Finally, I heard someone swearing as he approached the door. I didn’t recognize the voice.
The door popped open violently. A big linebackerish boy of about nineteen filled the doorway with his naked white chest and telephone pole thighs. He wore backwards sweatpants and was barefoot. The veins standing out on his neck were as thick as my thumb. “What the fuck!” he yelled.
Adam showed him a badge. The veins shrank and his face went white. He swallowed and looked from Adam to me and back again. “Yes sir?”
“Can we talk to Michi?” I asked.
“You know Michi-san?”
“We’re old friends.” The boy looked doubtful, but the badge in Adam’s hand didn’t give him much choice. “I’m his photographer.” I stepped in front of Adam. “Can you find him for us? It’s really important.”
He stepped back, but only far enough to let us into the hall. Adam closed the door. I took off my cap and hung it on the hall tree, then kicked off my shoes like I was at home. The boy relaxed a little, seeing that I knew the house rules. There were eight pairs of men’s shoes under the hall tree—tennis shoes, loafers, work boots.
“Who’d you say you were?”
“Jackie Lyons. Tell him it’s Jackie.”
“Y’all wait here, OK?” He headed off to find the old man.
I sat in the slipper chair by the door. Adam dragged his brogans across the Persian rug, drying them off. “This place gives me the creeps,” he said.
“You OK?”
“Yeah. I just wish I hadn’t drank that beer.” He smacked his lips and grimaced. “You shouldn’t have given it to me.”
“I thought I was being a friend.”
He shrugged and sighed, then wandered down the hall. He looked into a room, then stepped inside and turned on the light. “Jackie?” he said. The way he said my name hit like a cold finger on the back of my neck in the dark.
He stood in a dining room beside a big oval mahogany table polished so you could see the reflection of the ceiling fourteen fee
t overhead. The far wall was a huge window streaked with rain. The wall to the right had built-in cabinets, panes of glass in the doors, glass shelves, mirrors in the back to double the recessed lights. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of antique china, Japanese pottery, silver, gold and crystal crowded the shelves. The opposite wall was covered with two medieval tapestries.
Only there should have been three tapestries.
29
“YOU REALIZE WE CAN’T USE anything we see here to get a warrant.” I stood beside Adam looking up at the huge blank space on the wall. He stooped and picked up a chunk of plaster lying on the floor at the edge of the Persian rug.
“The killer must have ripped it down and used it to wrap Cole Ritter,” he said. He pointed out a pair of ragged holes high up the wall near the ceiling.
“That kid told us to wait in the entry hall. He doesn’t even live here. He can’t grant us legal entry. We have to wait until Michi sees us.”
Adam continued to poke around the room. He opened a drawer in the china cabinet and picked up a sword, a perfect mate to the one we’d found skewering Cole Ritter’s body like a cocktail weenie. “This cabinet was open, wasn’t it?” Adam asked me.
“The sword was just laying there in plain sight.” He wouldn’t listen to me and now I was going to have to lie for him.
“Excuse me!” a man said as he walked by me. He was an older guy, balding, wearing a white knee-length kimono. “Do you have a warrant?”
Adam laid the sword back in the drawer and turned. The man stopped as though he’d hit a wall. “Adam!”
“Hi, Dave,” Adam said.
Dave Straw, theater manager from the Orpheum, backed up until he bumped into me. He jerked a step forward and whipped around with a vicious glare. “Excuse me,” he snarled, then turned back to Adam. “What are y’all doing here?”