The Headsman

by James Neal Harvey

  “I don’t have anything. I’m only trying to find something that might give me a direction to follow.”

  “I don’t believe you, but sure—I’ll help. Just don’t get your hopes up too high.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  “Now tell me who you have in mind.”

  “Like I said, anybody who’s around today but lived here back then. And any kind of pictures you can round up. Group shots of any kind, portraits—anything. Okay?”

  “I guess so. But I can tell you right now, this is a project. When do you want the pictures—tomorrow, I suppose?”

  “Wrong. I want them tonight.”

  She groaned.

  “Well?”

  Her tone brightened. “If I bring them over, do I get a repeat performance?”

  “Sure, do I?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t appreciate the way you sneaked out on me last night.”

  “I was just being careful not to wake you. I couldn’t stay there anyway, I didn’t have my uniform.” Jesus, why was he making all these dumb excuses?

  2

  Jud left his office a little after eight. He drove over to Memorial to see the kid who’d been struck by the Cadillac and gave him the baseball he’d bought earlier in the day. The kid was in good shape, considering. He’d suffered deep cuts and a concussion, and a compound fracture of his left wrist, but the doctors had said he’d have no problem mending. The cast would come off in a couple of weeks. He was due to leave the hospital the next day, and he was tickled with the ball. After that Jud went home.

  He drank a beer and then took a shower and put on jeans and an old flannel shirt and went back into the kitchen to see what he could find to eat.

  There wasn’t much; for dinner he had one of those frozen things in a plastic and foil package. He took it out of the freezer and stuck it into the microwave and by the time he finished another beer it was ready. It was a mixture of ground beef and gravy over noodles and it made him think of the stuff you got in the army they called shit on a shingle. Except here you didn’t even get the shingle. Nevertheless it was hot and it didn’t taste too terrible and with another beer it went down all right.

  The best thing about it was that when you finished you didn’t have dishes or pots and pans to clean up; you just heaved the plastic into the garbage and that was that. It occurred to him that the meal made quite a contrast with the one he’d had at Armando’s the night before.

  He cracked a fresh beer and went into the living room. There was still some kindling left and a few logs on the hearth and in a couple of minutes he had a good blaze going. He got out the Gibson and sat in front of the fire as he tuned the guitar.

  His fingers were a little stiff and he ran some chords to warm them up. When they were limber he tried a walking rhythm he’d been practicing, one he’d heard on a Roy Orbison record and admired. Then he went into a song, accompanying himself with the new rhythm.

  Goin’ down a long and lonesome road

  Carryin’ an awful heavy load

  Hopin’ that my trip will end

  Hopin’ that I’ll find a friend

  Wanna quit this long and lonesome road

  Not bad, he thought. He liked the way the rhythm worked; sort of fit the lyric, too. Not that it was much of a lyric, but it was all he’d thought of so far. He kept the rhythm going, trying a variation of it by emphasizing the first and third beat of each bar. He was in F, because he preferred keys with flats over the ones with sharps. They were the traditional blues keys, for some reason or other, and he didn’t know why they worked so well for R&B but they did. He stayed with it for eight more bars, then modulated into E-flat and sang the song again.

  He’d been at it for over an hour when Sally arrived. She came in the front door carrying a cardboard box and an overnight bag. Jud kissed her lightly and took her coat. As he hung it in the closet she put the box on the kitchen table and carried her bag into the bedroom.

  When she came out she turned to him and smiled. “How about a drink? It’s the least you could do after I’ve been playing detective for you for hours.”

  “How’d you make out?”

  She gestured toward the kitchen. “See for yourself. I don’t know if you’ll find what you’re looking for, but I pulled out a lot of pictures. If nothing else they’ll give you a good laugh. It’s amazing to see how much people change in twenty-five years or so.”

  “Sure, let’s look. But first I’ll get you that drink.” He started for the kitchen and over his shoulder asked if she’d had dinner. She replied that she had. Which was a good thing, because the only food he could have offered her was another of the frozen conglomerations. He got out a glass and poured her a bourbon over ice. Then they sat together at the table and Jud went through the contents of the box.

  She was right—the photos were funny as hell. There were dozens of them, individual shots as well as all manner of group pictures, and Jud didn’t recognize half the people in them.

  Sally pointed to one of a young man with bushy hair and sharp features, skinny as a weasel. His eyes were peering out through wire-rimmed glasses. “Bet you can’t tell me who that is.”

  Jud stared at the photo. It was black and white, a snapshot showing the guy standing outdoors on a flight of steps, his arms folded. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but as hard as he tried, Jud couldn’t identify him. Finally he turned his hands palms up. “Okay, you win. Who is it?”

  “Dr. Reinholtz.”

  “You’re kidding.” He peered closely at the print, recognizing its subject now but disbelieving what he saw. “He’s got hair, and no mustache, and he’s thin. Also the hair’s black. No wonder I didn’t know who it was.”

  “Isn’t that something? There are lots of them like that. Sometimes they sort of look like somebody you know, but you’re just not sure.”

  “So how’d you know who these guys were?”

  “They’re kept in alphabetized jackets in the photo file, and their names are on the backs of the pictures.”

  He turned over the shot and saw the doctor’s name printed in ink along with the date: April 16, 1963.

  Shuffling through the stack he picked out another at random. It was a color shot, the kind a cheap portrait studio turned out. It showed a smiling, heavyset youth with blond hair, and this time Jud had no idea who it might be.

  “That’s Gil Bishop,” Sally said. “The fire chief.”

  He shook his head. This one was even more surprising than the one of Reinholtz. Nowadays Bishop was still burly, but he was bald as an egg. And instead of appearing heavy but fit, as he did in the photo, his features drooped, so that whenever Jud saw him he thought of a bulldog with loose jowls.

  He riffled through more of the pictures, checking the backs to identify the subjects and organizing them into groups. Most of the photos he kept, but some he discarded for one reason or other. Mel Richards, a partner in the law firm of Richards & Ward, was dying of cancer, and there were others who also were now infirm. The ones of that type he put aside.

  But he still had quite a collection. A lot of them were of people he saw around Braddock every day.

  Some of the men were in uniform. There was Ben Tucker, who now ran the Tucker Construction Company, wearing Marine Corps dress blues and with his arm around the girl he later married, and Bob Ormandy and Elmer Hobbs and Dieter Bloch, all in navy uniforms, and Tom Hecht in the green beret of the Rangers.

  Frank Hathaway was there too, slim and clean-shaven, wearing army olive drab. Jud studied the photo of the man who was now confined to a wheelchair and teaching English at Braddock High School. The uniform Hathaway was wearing was that of an enlisted man, so the shot must have been made before Hathaway went to OCS. Seeing it reminded Jud that he’d intended to check out the man’s army record and hadn’t got to it. It was just one more thing he had to remember to do.

  The pictures of the men in uniform had all been taken during the time of the Vietnam War, and Jud realized h
e was looking at photos of the lucky ones. These were the guys who’d come back. There were plenty of young men from Braddock who hadn’t—at least not with their lives. They were the ones who’d returned in stainless steel boxes and whose names were now on the wall in Washington. What a total fuckup that war had been.

  So intent was he on his inspection of the photos he hardly realized it when Sally got up and made herself a fresh drink, becoming aware of her presence again when she set a fresh beer down in front of him. She bent over and kissed his cheek, then sat down again alongside him.

  She sipped her bourbon. “You gonna let me in on the big secret now?”

  He glanced at her. “I told you, you’re not to write anything that could give somebody the idea you’re in on what I’m doing.”

  “And I said okay, I won’t. But after all this trouble I went to for you, you could at least let me know what’s going on.”

  “Sally, I can’t. Don’t ask me, at least not now. Later, if it goes anywhere, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “That means I get an exclusive interview?”

  “God, don’t you ever quit?”

  “Nope. That’s the secret of my success. One of them, anyway.”

  He put the pictures he wanted to keep back into the box and handed her the others. “Like I told you, we’ll see where it goes.”

  She pointed at the box. “How long will you need these?”

  “Just a day or two. I’ll take good care of them.”

  “Please do. I can’t have them out of the files too long. Not that I can imagine anybody asking for them, but I didn’t sign them out.”

  He cocked his head. “Why not?”

  “Because I figured you wanted this kept as quiet as possible.”

  He smiled. “Always thinking, huh?”

  “Sure. As I told you yesterday, I think it’s exciting, and it didn’t take too much to figure out what you were up to.”

  “No?”

  “Oh, Jud—stop pussyfooting around. I know damn well you think this is going to give you something in the Donovan case.”

  At least he knew one sure way to shut her up. He drained his beer and rose from the table. “Listen, woman—you planning on sitting here and arguing all night?”

  She grinned and got up from her chair, pressing herself against him and drawing her arms tight around his waist. “Okay, Chief. I give up.”

  He led her into the bedroom, and although it was good, their lovemaking didn’t have the explosiveness it had the night before. But then, even the best things in life weren’t perfect all the time.

  3

  In the morning Jud went through the routine business he had to handle as quickly as possible. The day was slipping by and he was anxious to get on the road. There had been another two-car accident on Route 23 the night before; an old man driving an aged Buick had sideswiped a station wagon with a bunch of kids in it. Two of the kids had been injured slightly and the old man had suffered a broken leg. All three had been taken to Memorial and the kids were released after a quick patch-up in the emergency room. The old man was still in the hospital.

  Jud looked at the officer’s report and shook his head. This was the third accident the duffer had been in this year. In the previous one he’d slammed into another car in a supermarket parking lot and crushed a woman’s pelvis. His license had been suspended, which meant last night he’d been driving illegally.

  That was one of the crazier aspects of the motor vehicle laws. Here this guy, whose age according to the report was eighty-six, thought nothing of getting into his mangy pile of junk and putting people’s lives at risk, and there were thousands like him all over the country. Jud believed the laws concerning drivers over sixty should be tightened, and had thought so from the time he’d become a cop. Statistically, kids were the worst drivers as far as causing accidents was concerned, but old people weren’t far behind. From sixty on, he believed, they should be given an annual driver’s test and a physical as well. And maybe there should be a mandatory cutoff age, say seventy-five or so.

  And on the subject of drivers, Grady told him Victor Scalzo’s lawyer was threatening to sue for false arrest. Jud asked if the witness who’d seen him hit the kid on the bike was willing to testify and Grady said she was. Good, Jud thought. With a trial in this county they could stick it up Mr. Scalzo’s ass.

  After that Jud went into Pearson’s office and asked the inspector how it was going.

  Pearson gave him one of his tolerant smiles. “Just a question of time now.”

  “You seem pretty sure it was Buddy Harper who killed the Dickens girl.”

  The inspector sat back in his chair. “After a while you see patterns in these things. The facts may be different, but the overall pattern is there. And that’s what we’ve got here. The kid was fucking her, the autopsy showed that. They were together that night, and in the morning she was dead. He used the ax because he knew everybody in this town would believe that headsman crap. Then something scared him. Maybe it was the pressure I was putting on him. Whatever it was, he lost his nerve and took off. The rest of it is nothing but details.”

  “What about a motive?”

  Pearson shrugged. “Who knows? Jealousy, maybe. Maybe something else. Far as I’m concerned, that’s just one of the details. When we pick him up we’ll get the rest of the answers and that’ll be it.”

  “Where do you think he went?”

  “Out of state someplace. It’s obvious he even had that planned.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Leaving the car like that, as if he’d been working on it. That was just to throw his parents off, and they went for it. Said he’d never go off and leave his car behind. What happened was, he squirreled some money away and then he beat it. Maybe took the train to New York or whatever. From there a bus or maybe a plane. But he won’t leave the country—kids never do that, they’re afraid to go out of the States. So sooner or later we’ll get a call from someplace and we’ll go pick him up.”

  “Good luck,” Jud said.

  By the time he left headquarters it was after ten o’clock. He told Grady where he was going and drove one of the unmarked blue Plymouth sedans. He wore his uniform, however, and carried the box of photographs with him.

  It was a sunny day, relatively mild for late winter, and as always his hopes came up that they’d seen the last of the snow. Which was wishful thinking, of course—the heaviest snowstorms of the year were almost always the ones that came at the end of March. They’d had some riproaring blizzards after St. Patrick’s Day, and even well into April. But today’s weather was pleasant compared to what they’d been having, and he relaxed and enjoyed the drive.

  There was a fair amount of traffic on the roads, especially on the throughway. He kept to the righthand lane and nailed the speedometer on sixty miles an hour, noting that he was one of the few drivers who did. Most of the others blew by him as if he were standing still. Even the tractor trailers, the huge sixteen-wheelers, went pounding along at well over seventy. On the whole trip he passed only one police car, a state trooper going in the opposite direction.

  The way Jud saw it, the issue wasn’t staying within the speed limit, it was staying alive. Which was another thing his years as a cop had taught him. If you wanted to avoid becoming a statistic, you drove defensively. He’d spent too much time sweeping fatalities up off the roads to ignore that rule. The only time he exceeded the limit was when there was an emergency.

  It was past noon by the time he reached Bedford, and he was hungry. He stopped at a diner and wolfed down a couple of hamburgers and a cup of coffee, pondering as he did how long his stomach was going to stand for the punishment he dealt it on an almost daily basis. When he finished he asked directions to the Westchester Correctional Facility and drove to it.

  At the entrance two guards checked out his shield and I.D. He told them Superintendent Wallace was expecting him. They telephoned Wallace’s office and then opened the gate and waved him through, point
ing to a parking area in front of the administration building.

  Security here was light. There was only a single chain-link fence. No high stone walls, no searchlights, no towers with guards carrying rifles and machine guns, even though this place was classified as a maximum security institution. Nothing like Attica or Sing-Sing, some of the really tight prisons he’d visited.

  He knew the reason: Westchester was for females. And even though there were some very tough cookies in these ugly old buildings, women prisoners were a breeze to handle compared to men. Male inmates often carried weapons ranging from sharpened screwdrivers to homemade knives, and even zip guns that had been fashioned in the prison shops.

  Men also fought constantly with each other and with the guards, taking the resultant hitch in solitary as just another part of the routine. And if an inmate stole or ratted or made it with somebody else’s punk, he stood a good chance of being found dead in the shower room or the place where his job was. To most of those guys, life inside the walls had no more value than it did outside—maybe less.

  Women, on the other hand, rarely became violent, either in their rebellions or their squabbles with each other. Sure, there was the occasional punch-out and biting fray, and once in a while even a knife rip or a gouged-out eye. But murder among female prisoners was rare. For that matter, so were female prisoners themselves. Of the thirty thousand or so inmates in the state of New York, less than five percent were women.

  Jud parked the cruiser and went into the building.

  Wallace was heavy and slow-moving, with a gut that must have taken years to nurture. His black hair was pasted over the top of his skull, and his eyes looked at you from under bushy brows with innate suspicion, even though you were a cop. He had a slow, deliberate way of talking as well, which Jud knew would drive you nuts if you had to listen to it every day. He indicated a chair in front of his desk. “You’re here to see Joan Donovan,” he said.

  “Right.” Jud took off his cap and unzipped his jacket as he sat down. He kept the box of photos on his lap and placed his cap on top of it.