Fall from Grace

by Wayne Arthurson

  When Larry settled in his chair, he motioned for me to sit. I did, but again said nothing. I would give Larry the chance to speak first. And when he did speak, his tone surprised. It sounded gentle and caring, like one old friend inquiring about another’s health. “You okay, Leo?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. Had a bit of the flu but—”

  He waved my comment away, telling me that he knew I was lying. “Fuck that. I’m being serious. Are you really okay? Is everything all right?”

  “I said I’m fine, Larry. It was only the flu.” I kept the lie going because with it I could see some way out. I wouldn’t have to tell anyone what had really happened to me, because in the end everybody always assumed something else, like my gambling, was the reason I had missed work.

  “Come on, Leo, I’m a friend here,” Larry said, his voice rising in annoyance. “Just tell me if I’m going to lose you to gambling, because if I am, it’s better for all of us if we cut our losses right now.”

  I sighed, falling into the act that he expected me to play. “Sorry, Larry, I had a slip but I managed to get it together before I completely lost it.”

  “Yeah, I figured something like that must have happened,” he said. “And when you didn’t answer your phone, I headed over to your place the other day, but you weren’t home. I figured you were at the casino or something.”

  Even though his reasoning was completely off, I was shocked and touched by this display of friendship. He actually cared enough to come look for me to stop me from going to the casino. He was the one who had been banging at my door, not the police. I felt a pressure behind my eyes and they began to mist over.

  “No need to feel ashamed over what happened,” Larry said, taking my tears as shame rather than an emotional response to his efforts. “But next time something like this happens, I want you to realize that you do have friends in this newsroom, and instead of wallowing in pity at one of those bloodsucking video lottery terminals, come into my office and talk to me. And if I’m not here, talk to Whittaker ’cause she’s a member of AA and knows something of what you experience.

  “I hate to use a cliché but, as a group, we’ve seen it all. Take your pick, gambling, drugs, booze, whatever, probably a third of the people out there have had some difficulty with something, and for the most part, we’re actually tired of watching good reporters fuck themselves over. So next time, don’t go off half cocked all alone, just hang out here and find someone to talk to.”

  “So I’m not fired.”

  Larry and Whittaker both chuckled, which meant that the topic had come up. “Not this time, but next time, yeah. You only get one chance and that was yours. If I get the hint you’re falling back on gambling, I’ll either bounce you out the door or put you back on the copy desk. You tell me which one is worse and that’s the one I punish you with. You got me?”

  “Yeah, I got you.”

  “Seriously. I am not fucking around. We are here. And next time, you either find me or someone else to help or you’ll be out. Understand?”

  I nodded, glad that some good had come from my gambling, that I wouldn’t have to explain what had really happened.

  “Okay, then,” Larry said, clapping his hands together. “Whittaker, I’ll give you the honor of filling in our boy on what’s been happening while he’s been playing games of chance.”

  Whittaker nodded and tossed a copy of the front page on the desk in front of me. It was yesterday’s edition and the hed screamed the whole story:

  Prostitute Killer Captured?

  “What the fuck?” I stammered, quickly reading the story. It said that acting on an anonymous tip, police had questioned an inmate at the Edmonton Max who had been serving time for one conviction for attempted murder and several for living off the avails of prostitution. Simply put, he was a pimp who had almost beaten another one to death a few years ago. After he’d been subjected to some questioning, the story said, the police had charged him with two of the murders I had listed in the serial-killer story.

  “Jesus,” I said, shocked by this development. “Are they charging him with others?”

  “Don’t know,” Whittaker said with a shrug. “Police aren’t saying much.”

  “Not surprising,” I said, but the look on both Whittaker’s and Larry’s faces told me there was more to this story. I gave them each a look and then held out my palms. “What am I missing? What are you two holding back?”

  Larry smiled the biggest smile I had ever seen from him. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Who does?” I said, but the instant I said it, I knew exactly who he was talking about. I blinked because this was something completely out of the blue. I came to the paper expecting and accepting the fact that I was going to be fired and now there was a possible serial killer who wanted me to interview him.

  “Maybe you should put me on the copy desk. That would be more fun,” I said.

  “No chancey, Mr. Whalen,” Larry said, mimicking a catchphrase from an obscure wrestler in a long-canceled local wrestling program. “No chancey.”

  38

  Justin Conlee didn’t look like a serial killer, but then again, what does a serial killer look like? In movies and books, we expect a serial killer to be clean-cut and neat, almost to the point of fastidiousness; we expect serial killers to be cold and shrewd but with a touch of unexpected charisma that’s at once intriguing and repulsive.

  Justin Conlee was nothing like that. He looked like one of those working-class guys you see hanging around a small-town bar, nursing his beers not because he doesn’t like to drink but because he only has ten bucks left and he needs to keep five to buy a pack of smokes for tomorrow. He was the kind of guy who, even though he was approaching middle age, wore his hair long as some type of residual youthful rebellion and sported a tattered Fu Manchu mustache that he doubtless thought made him look tough.

  But in reality, especially since he was forced to wear his prison-issue jeans and light blue shirt buttoned to the top, he looked sad, like the loser he really was. It was hard to believe that this man had been charged with the murder of two prostitutes. I knew guys like him—hell, I could have easily become one. They, with their entrenched ideas of what made a man, felt as if the world had let them down. And because of that, they had a ton of suppressed anger, bottled up just beneath the surface, ready to explode at the merest perceived slight.

  Based on Conlee’s record, which was provided to me by his lawyer, it looked like his anger had a tendency to burst forth more often than not. He had so many charges of simple assault against him that following his trial for attempted murder—that conviction was the reason he was now in jail—the Crown tried to have him declared a dangerous offender, a uniquely Canadian legal term that allowed courts to imprison him for life. The attempt failed but no doubt the Crown would try again, even though Conlee would get life without the possibility of parole for twenty-five years if he was convicted of the two murders he was charged with.

  I spent ninety minutes with Conlee, and from the first moment I was in the generic interview room with its white walls and metal furniture bolted to the floor, I felt the urge to get up and walk out. His story, which he laid out in a distracted tone, punctuated every few sentences with a nervous laugh, paralleled Grace’s story. Like her, he was a child of the foster care system. His mother was a young teenager who, instead of giving her child up for adoption, had been forced by her parents to raise the child on her own, as some sort of punishment for getting pregnant. He lasted almost three years under her care until Children Services took him away, and he never saw or heard anything about her again.

  Like Grace, Conlee was bounced from foster home to foster home, some not so good but most of them decent. Despite anyone’s good efforts, they just couldn’t handle him. He grew up not angry or violent but unconcerned. Unconcerned about anyone else, unconcerned about himself, unconcerned about what would happen whenever he did something stupid or criminal.

  Since his mother smoked and dr
ank every day of her pregnancy, he probably suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). When I asked him about it, he offhandedly noted that some doctor of some type at the prison had diagnosed him with FAS and had told him that it was important to keep a routine.

  For the only time in our interview, Conlee laughed freely at that, not the nervous one that disrupted his speech every few minutes. “I’m in fucking prison pretty much for the rest of my fucking life, they tell me when to sleep, when to eat, who I should talk to, and what the fuck I should be doing every minute of my fucking day, including when I can take a shit and smoke a smoke, and he tells me it’s important that I keep a routine. What the fuck they paying him for?”

  That was the only thing, word for word, that I remembered him saying.

  I didn’t care what he said, how he felt, what annoyed him. I didn’t care if he thought he didn’t deserve prison, if he thought he had been set up, misunderstood, and fucked up by the system. Sure, that was probably partly true, but since he seemed so unconcerned about everyone, even himself, I was completely unconcerned about him.

  Most reporters would kill to have an interview like this, even though the story couldn’t be written till after the trial. But I really couldn’t have cared less. My desire for a great story was fading, because I felt that someone like Conlee did not deserve the same coverage of his life as had Grace. It seemed that every time there was a horrendous murder or violent act, everyone, not just the media but the readers and consumers of the media, was keen to get as much information as they could about the murderer.

  It was the name of the perpetrator that would get the biggest play, that would get filed in the memory of the event, when in truth it was the victims that deserved to be remembered. It was sad that most everyone can remember the name of the Son of Sam or the guy who shot the twelve women at the Polytechnique in Montreal, but hardly anyone, save for the families, remembers the names of the people who were killed. The perpetrator was the one that should be forgotten, not the act they carried out. Because if we remember the act, then we could perhaps prevent it from happening again.

  A number of times during my meeting with Conlee, I thought about erasing my interview. In fact, I almost erased it as soon as I stood up from the table at the end of the interview. Both Conlee and his lawyer offered hands to shake but I just turned and left the room, my finger poised on the delete button. But I pulled my hand away, the journalist in me aware that even though I could write nothing prior to the trial, I had another story.

  Canadian law is extremely strict about prohibiting the release of any information in any way related to a trial, save for the basics like the charges and the names of the victim and the accused. Judges even regularly issued publication bans on information prior to the information being heard in front of a jury, and any reporter or person who violated those bans could face huge fines or even jail time. These laws were considered so serious that if you violated them, a judge could hold you in jail for an indefinite period the same way they could hold someone deemed a dangerous offender.

  Only sometime in the future, sometime after Conlee was found either guilty or innocent of the two murders, would there be a major feature that could run for at least two pages, probably more. Instinct made me hold out for the story.

  Detective Whitford had been watching the interview through the one-way glass and was waiting for me outside the room. His face was a mixture of disgust and relief as I walked out. “Get what you wanted?” he asked, with a slight bit of sarcasm. “All set to write your ‘Inside the Mind of a Killer’ story?”

  I looked at Whitford for several seconds, then I held up my recorder to Whitford and pointed at the erase button. “Push that,” I said. He froze, so surprised I was making such an offer that he probably thought I was joking. I shook my head to show him I wasn’t. “Go ahead, push it. You took a chance on me by taking me into the orange tent to see Grace. You put your job on the line because you thought it was the right thing to do, so now I’m returning the favor.” I kept holding up the recorder, and after a second or two, he reached out and pushed the button. It beeped once, indicating that the information included in file number twenty-eight was now erased.

  “Now there will be no story,” I said with a nod.

  “There’s no way you can get the information, no backup button that you can push to renew the file?” he asked.

  I wasn’t insulted by his questions because it was something I would have asked. “No chance. These recorders are pretty flimsy that way. One wrong push of the button and the interview is gone. That’s why the first thing we do when we get back to the office after an interview is to download the file into the computer. Because we don’t really trust these things.”

  “What about your notes, didn’t you take notes?”

  “Only to mark down times on the recorder at which I thought he said something interesting. As a rule, most of us reporters are pretty lazy and if we’re conducting an interview using a tape machine, we rarely take notes.”

  Whitford shook his head at me. “You never cease to surprise me, Leo. Usually it’s for the bad, but this time … wow, I don’t know what to say.”

  “You could just tell me how you managed to find out about this dipshit in the first place?”

  “Geez, Leo, don’t hold back. Tell me how you really feel about him.”

  “Come on, I’m curious.”

  “That’s because you’re a journalist who likes a good story.”

  “That’s a load of bullshit and you know it. You know that I can’t write anything about that.”

  “That’s true, but you could later.”

  “Yeah, but by then all the information would have come out in the trial and every journalist and their dog will have the same information, the TV guys hours before our paper gets out. I’m just curious, that’s all.”

  “All right, that’s true, but it’s no big deal, though. Just basic police stuff dealing with luck and a stupid criminal and another one looking out for his own interests,” he said with a shrug. “Conlee, as you could probably tell, isn’t the smartest person in the world, so for the last few years in the Max he’s been quietly bragging about how he killed someone. Mostly, everyone’s been ignoring him because almost everyone in the Max says the same thing. Makes them look tough and dangerous so no one will mess with them.

  “But one day he mentioned a name and an astute fellow inmate overheard him and offered the information in return for a move to a less strict facility. Once we got the info, we plucked a hair from Conlee and matched his DNA to some we found at two of the sites.”

  “Any way to connect him with any other of the murders?” I asked, Grace’s name being the one at the back of my mind.

  Whitford shook his head, reading my mind. “Sorry, Leo, but Conlee was inside when Grace got murdered so there was no way he killed her. And there are a few others that are the same. As for some of those that occurred when he was out, we just didn’t collect that kind of DNA evidence at the time to make a conclusive link.”

  “So he might have been involved?”

  “Maybe, but my gut feeling is that he wasn’t.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, after we used DNA evidence to link Conlee to two of these murders, we found that he had some personal connections to those women. He was, for a time, their pimp. As for the others killed when he was not in prison, we found no connection between him and them. My experience tells me that in most cases, someone like Conlee kills on an impulse. Usually at first he just wants to do harm and isn’t intending to kill them, but he does anyway. He’s not the kind of guy to randomly pick someone up and kill them.”

  “But what about a serial killer? They usually don’t know the people they are killing.”

  “That’s not entirely true. Even with serial killers, especially their first victim, there is some sort of a connection, directly or indirectly. Something about that first victim made them go through with the act of murder for the first time, and
from that they progressed to more random killings. But the first one, there is always a reason and connection, always.” He paused and clapped his hands together twice, bringing his index fingers together and pointing them at me.

  “Although I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, that I am conceding that there is a serial killer at work. In fact, our arrest of Conlee in these two murders proves to me that we’re not dealing with just one murderer, but a bunch like Conlee. The fact that there are similarities about the murders, how they were killed and where they were found, just makes sense. Strangulation is a pretty personal and impulsive crime, and a farmer’s field on a quiet rural road is a perfect place to drop off a body of someone you’ve killed, especially those a few kilometers from the city limits and especially at night. And if you look around in any area just outside the city, you’ll find many quiet fields.”

  My ears heard what Whitford said, but my mind barely registered. When he told me that even a serial killer has some sort of connection with the first victim, two disparate details that had been floating around in my brain finally connected. And disappointment filled me.

  39

  I found him at a car repair shop near the Westmount Mall located in the west-central part of the city, one of the spots where the blending of older neighborhoods and suburban sprawl begins. I stormed into the shop, my anger barely contained. But once I saw him at the desk, talking to a customer, I held back.

  How does one take on a person they believe to be a serial killer? Do you confront him with your suspicions face-to-face, accuse him of the crimes in front of everyone to ensure that even if he isn’t charged with anything, those witnesses to your accusations will spread the word? But what would that accomplish besides the ruination of his reputation, or more likely, provide further proof that I had a tendency to become so overwhelmed with an obsession that I’d accuse someone of being a serial killer with little or no real evidence. But would it be wise to meet the person in private? If my suspicions were correct, would I become his next victim in an attempt to keep from being exposed?