A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  ‘He’ll be a lonely man,’ his father had said. ‘He doesn’t make friends easily. I worry about him.’

  ‘He’s independent, that’s all,’ his mother had replied.

  ‘It’s not independence, it’s a lack of social interaction. He should join some clubs, go out, meet other kids.’

  ‘He’s happy by himself.’

  ‘Happy? What the hell is that when it’s at home? The kid’s not happy. Jesus, look at him. Has to stretch his face sideways to break a smile.’

  ‘Leave him be, he’ll be fine. So he doesn’t mix well. He’s smarter than most kids, you ever think of that?’

  Evidently not, for Ed Miller had chided his son until the day he died.

  You don’t go out enough. What’s up? You don’t have a prom date? Jesus Christ, Bobby . . . what the hell is the matter with you? You just don’t like people, is that it?

  Miller had joined the Washington Police Department at twenty-four. Wondered if such a decision had contributed to the coronary that ultimately killed his father.

  What the hell did you go join the police for? What the hell’s gotten into you?

  Nothing further was said. Ed Miller acted as if his son was someone else entirely, but this attitude did not last. Robert was there when his father collapsed. Used his police training - mouth-to-mouth, cardio-pulmonary resuscitation - but the coronary was bigger than the man and it crushed him effortlessly.

  Miller’s mom hung in there a couple years more. Saw him graduate, watched him rise rapidly within his department, saw him grow serious and intense and spend too much time with books instead of girls and friends and social situations. Worried some, like now Ed was gone she’d taken on the job, but things didn’t change. Her son stayed the same. Excelled as a cop. Had she hung in there a while longer she would have seen him promoted to detective, youngest to date in Washington’s history. Proud smile, discreet tear, a wish that Ed could have been there beside her to see what his son had made of himself. But no, not to be. Both of them dead long before Robert Miller stood on the podium and shook hands with the Washington chief of police, took his badge, turned to face the snapping, flashing camera. It had been important, a moment of significance, but all of it was now behind him, a series of fractured memories, meaningless in the face of these recent months.

  From his pants pocket Miller took the baggie with the shred of newspaper inside. A clipping from a Washington Post article about a South American election. A murdered woman with cancer who appeared not to have registered with a doctor, appeared not to be taking any medication at all. A coroner whose hunch and intuition told him that the first three killings had been perpetrated by a different man . . . if this was so, there was someone within the police, the emergency services, even the coroner’s office who’d copied a brutal killing for their very own particular reasons. And still he and Roth had not really confronted the fact that there was almost nothing to be known about Catherine Sheridan’s life. They had not found out where she worked or where her income originated; they did not have the names of her friends, her parents or brothers or sisters . . .

  And even her own name became someone else’s when they looked beneath the surface.

  Evening of Monday November the 13th. Eight months since the first killing. No solid leads.

  He figured this was the kind of thing that fucked up a performance review.

  The kind of thing that made some people resign.

  Robert Miller longed to sleep; knew he wouldn’t.

  He was exhausted. His eyes were heavy, his head hurt, but still he sat there for a while, something haunting the back of his mind, something he knew bore some significance.

  James Stewart, Miller thought. I keep thinking about James Stewart, the film that was playing . . . the music I could hear when we were upstairs . . .

  There had been no fingerprints on the DVD other than those of the victim herself. The killer would not have been so foolish as to leave prints behind, but Miller had hoped there would be a smudge, a rubber smear from his latex gloves, something that told him that the killer had put the DVD in the machine and set it to play. Why? Because it would have been something else to consider about their perpetrator, something that could have shone a light toward the truth. He had put on a movie and ordered pizza. Put on a movie and ordered pizza . . .

  Some time close to midnight Miller finally rose from the chair and made his way through to the bedroom.

  Despite once again passing the boxes in the hallway, the last reminder of a wasted fourteen months, it was not Marie McArthur that occupied Miller’s thoughts. He did not think of the final slow demise of their relationship, the seemingly endless nature of its death, like falling from a cliff, walking toward it in slow-motion, believing perhaps that the edge would never come . . .

  No, it was not these things that consumed his thoughts, for he now believed he had expended more than adequate energy trying to understand all that had happened.

  His final thought - the one that closed his eyes - was of Marilyn Hemmings. The way she’d looked through the porthole in the door as he’d reached the end of the corridor. The slight nod, the awkward smile. He remembered how she felt when he hugged her after the coroner’s inquiry, the moment before the camera flash, before they realized how it would look - as though something was going on between them, that she had conspired to fabricate evidence to exonerate him from manslaughter . . .

  He recalled the image of them together in the Globe. The caption beneath had said nothing significant. Nothing significant needed to be said. The world believed what it wanted to believe.

  Robert Miller slept at last but he did not dream. And though he woke in the early hours of the morning and replayed everything that had occurred, he reached no better understanding of its meaning. He felt invaded.

  That was the only way he could describe it: invaded.

  Middle-aged man in a dark grey pinstripe suit. Stood in the hallway of his house. Held a newspaper, a copy of the Washington Post. Stared at the grainy photograph of Catherine Sheridan. She looked back at him, expression on her face like she was waiting for him to say something.

  The man walked down the hallway and into his study, and despite the late hour he lifted the receiver and dialled a number.

  Paused, patient expression on his face.

  Line connected.

  ‘You’ve seen Sunday’s Post?’

  Nodded, then a slight frown.

  ‘She was one of ours? Did we do this?’

  Shook his head.

  ‘I thought we put a stop to that bullshit with the luggage tags—’

  Frowned intensely. ‘I don’t care if it is or not. This is getting attention now. Last thing in the world we want is press, for God’s sake.’

  Listened, shook his head.

  ‘No, you listen to me,’ he retorted, his voice louder, the tight edge of anger approaching. ‘Bullshit theatrics I can do without. This isn’t some made-for-TV movie. I give you a job and I trust you to use the right people, not some burned-out psycho who thinks he’s playing games.’

  Clenching his fist, trying so hard to be patient.

  ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Evidently that is not the case. I don’t care what the fuck happened to him. Right now I have a newspaper story in front of me that says this shit is still going on. Find out where it came from. Put a stop to it. There isn’t anything—’

  Interrupted, he listened, started nodding.

  ‘So deal with it. Fucking well deal with it. This is the last I want to hear about this shit, you understand?’

  Nodded.

  ‘Good, make sure it is.’

  He hung up, looked once more at the face of Catherine Sheridan, and then tossed the newspaper onto the desk to his right.

  ‘Fucking assholes,’ he whispered through clenched teeth, and then turned and left the room.

  ‘Anchor to windward, son,’ my father used to say. ‘Anchor to windward.’

  One time I asked him what that meant.


  ‘Ship comes into port and ties up to the jetty. Wind is blowing inland, will drive the ship against the jetty, so the captain puts the anchor down on the other side to stop the ship moving. Means you think about everything both ways. You make your preparations. You take your security measures.’ Held up a thin layer of wood, varnished smooth as glass. ’Veneer,’ he said. ‘Gonna make a pattern with black walnut and abalone shell and mother-of-pearl. Gonna be the most beautiful thing you ever saw . . . and you can help me son, you can help me do this thing.’

  Wouldn’t tell me what it was. Asked him ten times if I asked him once, but still he wouldn’t say.

  All of it anchor to windward.

  I helped my father make his preparations without any understanding of what he was planning to do. Would I have refused to help him had I known?

  I would sometimes go up there to see her. Fifteen years old. Walking up those stairs, listening to treads creak beneath my feet. Feeling my heart in my chest, wondering how she would be, if she’d be awake and crazy, or asleep, as good as dead, the sound of phlegm rattling in her chest as she breathed.

  She scared me. I was a teenager - stuffed with hormones, thinking about girls, about football, about all manner of things I should have been thinking about - and my own mother scared me. Other kids didn’t have to deal with this. Other kids had normal parents, normal lives, their greatest concern whether they had dollars and a date for the weekend.

  Stood on the landing for quite some time, my hands sweating. And then I approached her door and stood silently for just a moment - a moment to steel myself, to gather my nerves. I felt the handle slip between my fingers and I had to wipe my palm on my tee-shirt to gain purchase.

  Pushed the door open gently. Couldn’t see through the curtain my dad had rigged above the bed. Could hear her breathing, raspy and deep. She was sleeping, and for this I was grateful.

  Her skin was pale and transparent. Skin like tissue, like mother-of-pearl - and like the skin of a drum, taut across her face, the tension was visible as she murmured and sighed. Fingers thin, incapable of grasping anything with more than a featherweight touch, her body beneath the covers like a scarecrow. Nothing to her. Eaten away from inside, that’s how she looked, and she’d been this way for as long as I could recall. This was not who I wished my mother to be. This was someone - or something - else, and I watched her silently, not daring to breathe, not to make a sound, for if she woke she would start screaming or crying or talking crazy, and I’d heard that too many times to deal with it any more . . .

  I didn’t know what my father was going to do, but Big Joe always had an answer, always had a solution to the problem.

  ‘Son,’ he said, ‘your mom has an illness. She has an illness that doesn’t really have a cure.’

  I felt breathless and dizzy, tears welling against my lower lids. I didn’t want to cry. I never wanted to cry again.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with crying,’ Big Joe said, and he reached out his hand and held it against my cheek. ‘Cry if you want to.’

  ‘Is it going to help?’ I asked.

  He smiled, shook his head. ‘Some people think it does.’

  ‘And you? What do you think?’

  ‘Don’t see how it can.’

  ‘Then I ain’t gonna do it.’

  There was silence for a little while longer, and then I closed my eyes and asked, ‘How long?’

  ‘Before she goes? I don’t know son, I just don’t know.’

  ‘Does anyone?’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘So what do we do then?’

  ‘Do? I don’t know that there’s anything we can do except wait.’

  ‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ I said. ’We’ll wait.’

  Such memories from an age ago, and now it is Monday evening, the 13th of November, and Catherine is gone. Just like my mother. That, more than anything else, turned out to be the greatest irony of all.

  Classes are done. I am packing books into my bag and brushing chalk from the cuffs of my jacket.

  I turn and look at the board, and there - right across it - I have written a very famous quote.

  ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’

  I think we killed the man who said that.

  What was I telling them today? What was I feeding hand-over-fist into their impressionable minds? The ethics of literature. The responsibility of the author to maintain honesty, integrity, to present the reader with as accurate a representation of the issues as can be managed.

  ‘But according to whose perspective?’ one student asked. ’Surely truth is relative. Surely truth is perceived very differently from one person to the next.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Truth is relative. Truth is personal, it is individual. ’

  ‘So where do we draw the line?’ the student asked. ‘Where does one individual’s perception of what he considers to be the truth become a lie?’

  I laugh. I do my very best Jack Nicholson and say, ‘Truth? You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth . . .’

  The bell goes. Class dismissed. The student looks at me as he leaves and I see suspicion and accusation in his eyes. The question was never answered.

  And I think: I was like you. A long time ago I was like you.

  And then we found the line that divided the truth and the lies. We crossed it so many times it became obscured and faded and eventually disappeared altogether.

  Perhaps the worst lies were those we told for the best.

  Perhaps the worst lies were those we told ourselves.

  ELEVEN

  Tuesday morning, sky the color of a dirty bandage, struggling with the idea of rain. Natasha Joyce was home after the school run, seated on the lowest step of the stairwell. Phone receiver pressed against her ear, expression absent-minded, a little vacant. She’d been on hold for minutes, had maintained her patience while the mayor’s office treated her to elevator music. White folks’ elevator music. Chloe would be away for several hours. The house was clean and she was alone. Kept thinking about the older of the two detectives, that he’d seemed so similar to the man that had come with the Sheridan woman. The woman who had not been named Sheridan. They had not looked physically similar, but there was something about them. Maybe the first one had been a cop too . . .

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here,’ Natasha said.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, we seem to be having some sort of difficulty with our computer system. You said King, right? Darryl Eric King?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Registered date of death was October 7th, 2001.’

  ‘Yes, that’s correct.’

  A moment’s hesitation. ‘It should be here, ma’am, there’s no question about it.’

  ‘Maybe the delay in sending the records over . . . I spoke to someone before and they told me that after five years the records all go into archives, and maybe there’s a delay or something?’

  ‘It’s done electronically, ma’am,’ the woman at the other end of the line said. She was black, no doubt about it. Seemed like she wanted to help Natasha Joyce get her question answered. ‘They just shoot that stuff right over here and it uploads onto our system directly. If the record exists it should be here.’

  ‘So what does that mean?’ Natasha asked. She felt nervous, agitated. Something else now didn’t make sense.

  ‘What does it mean?’ the woman asked. ‘It means that someone somewhere has f-u-c-k-e-d up, that’s what it means.’

  ‘So what do I do?’

  ‘You give me your number, Miss Joyce, and when I get a chance I’ll e-mail the IT people and see what they have to say about this, okay?’

  ‘And you’ll call me back?’

  ‘You have internet?’

  Natasha smiled. As if. ‘No, I don’t have internet.’

  ‘Then I’ll call you back, yes. Bear with me though. It may take a little while to get an answer from these fellas.’

  ‘Okay,
thank you,’ Natasha said, and then she gave the woman her number.

  ‘I’ll do what I can, alright?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No problem . . . you have a nice day now.’

  ‘Yes, thank you . . . you have a nice day too.’ Started to put the phone down, and then suddenly, an afterthought. ‘Miss?’ she said. ‘Miss?’

  Meant to ask the woman’s name, but the line was dead.

  Natasha Joyce hesitated for a moment, and then she lowered the receiver into the cradle and got up from the stair.

  For some unknown reason she thought she might not hear back from the Police Department Administration Unit.

  For some other reason she felt afraid.

  Miller logged onto imdb.com, looked up It’s A Wonderful Life. Two hours ten for the feature. Called Tom Alexander at the coroner’s office and got a breakdown of the timeframe within which they had to work. Looked at the notes he’d made in the car. Already he’d been up for the better part of three hours, in the office for most of two. What he’d found unsettled him greatly. If what it implied was true . . .

  Alexander was saying that Catherine Sheridan had been murdered between four forty-five and six, afternoon of Saturday, November 11th. The old guy next door had seen her coming into the house around four-thirty. Pizza had been ordered at five-forty, this confirmed by the telephone records from the Sheridan number. Delivery guy had arrived around five after six. Had taken maybe two or three minutes to find the body. Miller took the call from the Second just after six-thirty, had arrived at six fifty-four. Roth had appeared in the yard about ten minutes later. The two of them went upstairs, and by the time they entered her room it must have been seven-fifteen. Spent no more than a few minutes up there, came down again, and by this time the credits were playing on the TV. Say it had been seven-thirty, then the movie must have been started at about five-twenty. Maybe the guy killed her and then put the movie on. Miller scratched his head, rose from his seat and walked to the window. Something about the movie. Something about this stupid goddamned movie.