Guardians of the Night (A Gideon and Sirius Novel)

by Alan Russell

  “It was a male, by the way. Corde was probably counting on all its remains disappearing into the ocean. Before the hunting of blue whales was banned, whalers used to inflate them with air so they wouldn’t sink. But some evidence lingered on the surface, and it was gathered. And the crime for killing a blue whale is severe.”

  “I was just a passenger,” she said.

  “What will your court of public opinion say about that?” I asked. “And what will they say about you watching fireworks and drinking champagne and viewing home movies of the carnage that occurred?”

  “I had no choice.”

  “That’s not going to fly. Take Bambi syndrome and multiply it by about a million times. You will be reviled. I am giving you a chance to pick your poison. I am sure you and your mouthpiece will come up with some hanky-waving tearjerker as to why you killed Corde. And in the end, you’ll probably spend about the same time in prison for either crime. But in one scenario you’ll no doubt appear sympathetic to many, whereas in the other you’ll always be the villain.”

  It was something I didn’t need to say. Elle already knew that. And she knew if news of her involvement in the whale hunt got out, it would kill her career and reputation.

  Her sigh was faint, but there was a world of hurt and pain in the sound. I was certain she wasn’t acting, and despite what W.C. Fields said I didn’t think I had seen the devil.

  “You won’t prosecute Robert?”

  “If I can determine he didn’t have anything to do with the death of Novak, there will be no arrest.”

  “And you’ll make sure I’m never implicated in the whale hunt?”

  “I made the same promise to Bass I’ll make to you: if you cooperate I will bury all the evidence that ties you into what happened off the coast.”

  “I’ll talk to my lawyer,” she said. “We’ll be releasing a statement. If you keep my private life private, I’ll admit to shooting Drew.”

  CHAPTER 28:

  ASHES TO ASHES

  The reminder had come in the mail: the month of September had been torn out of a calendar.

  There was no return address on the envelope, and there was no note or explanation. The postmark showed the envelope had been mailed in Larkspur. The only ink applied by a human hand was the circled date of September 23rd. The significance of that date became clear when I read the notation supplied by the calendar: First Day of Autumn.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out who had sent me the page from the calendar.

  A week after receiving the mailer, I found myself behind the walls of San Quentin, being escorted to see Ellis Haines.

  Nine months had passed since my last visit to the penitentiary. Absence hadn’t made my heart grow fonder. The claustrophobia of closing walls, and the dampness of San Francisco Bay, was like a cold vise on my chest. Whenever I visit San Quentin, I can’t help but feel as if I am the prisoner there. It’s a sensation that stays with me long after I escape its walls.

  Haines was housed in the Adjustment Center, a segregated section with six cells that was the most closely monitored prison block in San Quentin. His eight-foot-by-six-foot cell was too small to meet in; we always had our talks in a larger cell known as the lawyer’s room.

  I arrived at our meeting spot before Haines, and took a seat. Before being checked through security, I’d signed my personal possessions into temporary storage. Because pens were considered potential weapons, I had a felt marker to write with. Along with that I had a micro-recorder. I hit “Record” and then stated my name, the date of my visit, where the recording was being made, and the reason I was there. Then I played it back to make sure everything was working. I didn’t like the uncertain sound of my voice. I’d heard war correspondents dodging bullets who sounded less shaky. I took a deep breath and made a second recording. What I heard wasn’t Edward R. Murrow, but at least I now sounded post-adolescent.

  A few minutes later the Weatherman made his approach. A quiet entrance was not his style. He was crooning à la Al Jolson, and his song echoed in the hallways. Hearing a joyous voice raised in prison is usually as unexpected as hearing a songbird trilling in a barren landscape, but this was Ellis Haines after all. He made you listen. Haines seemed oblivious of his surroundings, as insouciant as a poker player holding pocket aces. His song sounded familiar, even if I couldn’t be sure if I had ever heard it before.

  Boy began to sigh, looked up at the sky,

  And told the moon his little tale of woe.

  Oh, shine on, shine on, harvest moon

  Up in the sky;

  I ain’t had no lovin’

  Since April, January, June or July,

  Snow time ain’t no time to stay

  Outdoors and spoon;

  So shine on, shine on, harvest moon.

  My visit had coincided with a full moon, I realized. Haines the meteorologist would know it was the harvest moon.

  Inmates are not usually kind critics, but at the conclusion of Haines’s song there was cheering and a round of applause. I didn’t join in. The song talked about kissing under the harvest moon; Haines would want to kill under it.

  He came with an escort of three correctional officers, and everyone knew the drill. Haines entered the cell, and then the door closed behind him and the two of us were locked in. Facing me, he put his hands through a slot and waited to be unfettered.

  I turned on the tape recorder and said, “The inmate Ellis Haines is now in the room. It is approximately eleven in the morning. Mr. Haines has agreed that I may record our conversation. Is this acceptable to you, Mr. Haines?”

  “It is,” he said, and then pretending excitement said, “Hi, Mom!”

  Haines spoke to me while a correctional officer worked on his cuffs. “The fall is my favorite time of year, Detective. What about you?”

  “I think I prefer spring.”

  “You’re not serious, are you? The spring is like some harlot feigning sensuality. It is not until the fall when the year gets down to its real business. I always await the Harvest Moon with enormous anticipation.”

  “Next time I see the Great Pumpkin I’ll give him your regards.”

  “Please don’t squash my hopes and forget.”

  Two of the correctional officers groaned. I didn’t want Haines to have even that satisfaction and didn’t react. Finally freed of his cuffs, Haines took his place across from me at the table where I was sitting. All the guards took their leave except for one; he positioned himself outside the cell.

  “How nice of you to join me at the start of fall,” he said. “I even love the name of my favorite season. You don’t want to be a fall guy, and no one wants to fall to pieces. People are afraid of falling under a spell. You fall in the gutter, and you fall into disgrace. And in your case, you’ve always worried about a fall from grace, haven’t you Detective?”

  “Right now I’m more worried about falling asleep.”

  “And then there’s the biggest fall of all, to fall in love. Did you fall in love with that woman in your life?”

  “If you cross that line again,” I said, “I will take my leave of you right now and never come back.”

  “Excuse me, Detective; I wouldn’t want to fall out of your favor.”

  “You’ve never been in my favor.”

  “I doubt that,” said Haines in an insinuating tone that I tried to ignore.

  “Your recent visit to L.A. piqued the interest of the Feds,” I said. “Most of the questions they wanted me to ask stemmed from your court appearance.”

  “It was a tour de force, if I do say so myself.”

  “Tour de farce,” I said, pretending to write that down.

  “I was hoping you might visit with me again during my visit in L.A., but you were being a busy bee weren’t you?”

  I wasn’t drawn in by his Dumbledore reference.

  Ref
erring to my notes, I said, “When you were under oath in court, you expressed your disdain at how victim number nine was strangled.”

  “How could I not have? To use a Texas idiom, the murderer was all hat and no cattle. His premise of using fishnet stockings wasn’t bad, mind you, even if it did seem derivative of some desperate Hollywood screenwriter. The stockings would have made an effective garrote if used properly, but our bumbler clearly botched it. That’s why he resorted to bludgeoning her. I could respect the work of a copycat, but only if the imitation was artfully done.”

  “And yet you said it took you some time to become proficient in dispatching your own victims.”

  “I believe you’re taking that statement out of context. I said that the more you practice your craft, the better you get. I was not specific as to what I was practicing.”

  “But you were referring to the women you killed, were you not?”

  “Everyone interprets art differently.”

  I referred back to the questions the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) wanted answered.

  “You’ve never addressed how you chose your victims, but judging from what you said in court, you indicated that you were looking for a certain ‘type.’ ”

  “It was more a case of knowing it when I saw it.”

  “And what was ‘it’?”

  “I call it the Danse Macabre.”

  He said it with a French accent, but that didn’t make it sound romantic.

  “Can you elaborate?”

  “ ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ ”

  His quoting from the Bible surprised me, and he looked pleased at that.

  “My actions were designed to expose the vain glories of our everyday existence,” he said. “Mine was a call to the Danse Macabre.”

  “You said that victim number nine’s—and I’m quoting here—‘mousy brown hair, styled like a cross between a flapper and Princess Leia, would have kept her safe from me.’ Were specific looks a part of your selection process?”

  “Most victims of homicides are prostitutes and the disadvantaged,” said Haines. “The dispossessed have always been expedient victims, and their deaths have gone largely unnoticed. I tried to take an evenhanded—excuse the pun—approach and made sure my selections were based on suitability rather than mere opportunity.”

  I continued with my questions, and Haines surprised me by keeping his word and playing a minimal amount of games. Among our topics were the amount of premeditation he practiced, his ability to compartmentalize, how he maintained the appearance of normality to friends and family, and whether anger was a motivation in his murders.

  He balked a few times, playing around with his answers. He was coy about whether he used a machete before settling on a garrote as his weapon of choice, telling me, “One must keep handy a bargaining chip—or bargaining knife.”

  And he took exception when I asked questions that tried to determine his various personality disorders.

  “Don’t waste our precious time,” he said. “I know the headshrinkers like their labels. I have seen how they’ve slotted me into the personality disorder categories of being antisocial, borderline, and narcissistic. But with each of those generalizations, they’ve done their best to fit a square peg into a round hole.”

  I made a few notes while Haines was talking, and he seemed to find that amusing.

  “Are you playing at being my shrink?” he asked.

  “That’s about the last job in the world I would want.”

  “Then why are you scribbling? You’re already taping everything I’m saying.”

  “In case BSU asks me about context, I’ll have my notes.”

  “Then perhaps I should be the one making notes. That is, if anyone has cause to ask about you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ll leave it as an open-ended observation. But I wish I had been a fly on the wall when shrinks asked you about the experience we had together. Everyone wants me to be honest, but what about you? I suspect that for all concerned it was better that you lied.”

  “The next time I visit I’ll leave time for you to ask your questions of me,” I said, “but right now I have a flight to L.A. I need to catch.”

  I closed with the five W’s on the tape, but as I reached to click off the recorder, Haines said, “That’s all, folks!”

  “Couldn’t resist?” I said.

  “Oh, I could,” he said, “and I did.”

  “Am I catching some undercurrent?”

  “I think it’s more like a rip current.”

  He leaned close to me and whispered, “Your secret is safe with me.”

  “Thank God. When the Colonel trusted me with the secret of his eleven herbs and spices, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.”

  Haines said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  “I think I’m missing something here.”

  “I was just doing a little musing. I find it interesting that our journey through fire continues.”

  “I’ll let you take the scenic tour of hell by yourself, if you don’t mind.”

  “I hope you’re not mired in guilt,” he whispered. “After all, it was a case of self-defense.”

  “What I’m mired in is trying to make sense of whatever the hell you’re saying.”

  “The Chinese say the fire you kindle for your enemy often burns you more than it burns your enemy. But I am glad to say that you weren’t the one that burned, were you?”

  And then I realized what he was saying, but wished I didn’t. “No,” I said.

  “That’s right,” whispered Haines encouragingly. “Cryptic words are best. We’ll call him ‘No’ for short, won’t we? There’s something very classical about that, much like Odysseus telling the Cyclops that his name was Noman.”

  I opened my mouth, but no words came out. The Novak homicide was still open. Elle’s brother Robert had been able to prove to me he wasn’t responsible. For the past month I had been looking for a killer that Haines was saying was me.

  “And when Odysseus blinded the Cyclops,” said Haines, “and he and his men escaped, the Cyclops screamed for revenge, but his desires were foiled by his own words, for he yelled out, ‘Noman did this to me.’ ”

  “You,” I said.

  “I was hoping you would at least send me a thank-you card, but I understood the need for you to be circumspect.”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “What you wouldn’t have done is tell me about the fire, and the drone, if you hadn’t wanted protection. From that starting point, it was just a matter of following the man that was following you.”

  “It was never—I never—”

  “You’re beginning to sound like Lady Macbeth. Don’t go there, for my sake and for yours. You need not dwell on this conversation with all its hypothetical suppositions. But if you do, remember that had not certain actions been taken, you would be dead.

  “And in the fiery landscapes that we both continue to walk, remember it was fire that saved your life.”

  My words and my breath kept catching, but finally I was able to yell, “Guard! Let me out.”

  CHAPTER 29:

  COMING HOME FROM WAR

  On the flight home I kept trying to get a handle on what Haines had said and my role in what had occurred. It was like trying to navigate through a fog—no, more like killer smog. It hurt to breathe, and my eyes stung because I kept forgetting to blink. I was trying to arrive at a truth, even if I couldn’t see it.

  I wondered if my blind spot could explain my having missed the obvious or if it was wishful thinking that protected me. In the not too distant past, three men had tried to kill me. At the time I had blamed Haines for sending out a hit squad, but he had distanced himself from those followers and claimed they acte
d of their own accord. The threesome had subsequently turned up dead. The investigators working the case were convinced Haines had ordered the executions from prison. No one knew if Haines had acted to protect himself or to exact revenge, but no one doubted that he had committed murder from behind bars.

  I knew what he was capable of doing, so how was it that I had speculated in Haines’s presence? Had I thrown out the bait to him? Had I purposely enticed him to look into who had set fire to my house? I had even introduced drones into our conversation. Or he had drawn me out and made me try to look smarter than I really was. He had quoted from the Shocking Blue song “Venus,” and I had tried to be cute, tried to show him that I was cleverer than he was, and I had said, ‘It was Mars, not Venus.’ My martial comment was clue enough for him, especially when I added a drone to the equation. As it turned out, most of my suppositions proved to be wrong, but I had been right enough for Haines’s purposes.

  During my visit to L.A. County Jail, Haines had wanted me to whisper a name to him. He had asked me to sanction a hit. At the time, I’d refused. But had I? Had I whispered just enough to condemn Novak?

  When I confronted Elle Barrett Browning, I’d told her that I couldn’t let her get away with murder. Was I holding myself to that same standard?

  In my fog/smog I drove home. Sirius was waiting for me, and he could tell right away how much I was hurting. I went into my dark bedroom, and I didn’t turn on a light. It wouldn’t help penetrate my gloom, I knew. I was sure nothing could. And that’s when Sirius brought me a ball. I tried to ignore him, but it’s hard to ignore a hairy muzzle breathing hot air just inches from your face. He dropped the ball, and it rolled into me. When I refused to respond, he retrieved the ball and dropped it again. And when I still didn’t react, he grabbed the ball and rolled it toward me for a third time.

  I broke my silence and said, “I don’t want to play, Sirius.”