by Jim Fusilli
“Grady, don’t give me that do-goody-good bullshit.”
“What?” The phrase gave Grady pause, though for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why.
“This isn’t negotiable,” the man said. “Now turn around.”
Grady held his ground. “Please, no, don’t do this! I won’t tell anybody. You can say somebody drove up, interrupted before you could do the job. Just let me go!”
“What, like give you three steps, a little head start?” The man shook his head. “Dream on,” he said. He motioned with the gun toward the dock. “Now let’s go, walk this way.”
“I want to live!”
The man paused, as if deeply disappointed. Then he said, “Grady, you, of all people, should know, you can’t always get what you want.”
The man zip-tied Grady’s hands behind his back and walked him down the pier. At the end, a few fishing boats tied off on cleats, including a rusty aluminum skiff filled with straw, a single swivel chair rising in the middle on a post. The man pulled a fat cigar from his pocket, a 60 gauge Maduro. “Open your mouth,” he said.
Grady clenched his teeth, shook his head. He wasn’t going to cooperate any more.
The man cracked the side of Grady’s face with his pistol.
“Open!”
Grady let the man put the cigar in his mouth.
The man pulled another cigar and did the same. And another and another until Grady’s jaw was locked open from the pressure of it all. “Get in the boat.”
Hands behind his back, Grady’s balance was compromised, so the man steadied him into the skiff and buckled him into the swivel chair. The man pulled a pack of matches and struck one, tossing it onto the straw. Then he shoved the boat with his foot, sent it gliding onto the lake, like a cut-rate Viking funeral.
“Take it easy,” the man said.
A DEPUTY FOR THE COUNTY sheriff’s office got a call about a report of some kids having a bonfire out on Greasy Lake. When he got to the pier, he saw how someone might think that. A breeze had blown the skiff back near shore. From a distance, it might look like a bonfire. The deputy grabbed his extinguisher, hopped in one of the other boats and went to see what he could do.
He put out the fire and towed the boat back to shore, called it in. “Send CSI,” he said. “Don’t know if it’s homicide or suicide but the man’s dead and I wouldn’t call it natural causes.” Wasn’t long before there was quite a crowd. Coroner, the sheriff along with more deputies, fire department, some press. They found Grady’s wallet in his back pocket, saved from the flames by the swivel chair.
They’d been taking pictures and collecting evidence for a half hour when a black sedan pulled into the clearing. Two men. Agent Yates, fifty-nine, and Agent Ball, mid-thirties. FBI. They got out, went looking for whoever was in charge.
As they approached the command post, Agent Yates was talking to his young partner, saying, “It’s deuce, not douche.”
“Wrapped up like a deuce? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Revved up,” Agent Yates said. “Springsteen? ‘Blinded by the Light’? ‘Revved up like a deuce,’ a ’32 Ford, a hotrod. Jesus.”
They found the sheriff who told them what they had so far. “Middle-aged white male, mouth stuffed with ten big cigars, buckled into the chair, hands tied behind his back. Probably died of smoke inhalation. Would have burned to death but the straw was a little damp, according to the Fire Chief. Made for a lot of smoke.”
The two agents nodded like the whole thing fit a pattern. Agent Yates turned to Agent Ball. “What do you think?”
“Seems pretty obvious,” the younger agent said. “‘Smoke on the Water.’”
The sheriff cocked his head. “Like the song? Dum, dum, dummm . . . dum dum da da. I love that one.”
“Yeah,” Agent Yates said. “So did I the first ten thousand times I heard it.” He looked at his partner and said, “He’s getting more elaborate. He’s combining titles now. ‘Smoke on the Water’ plus ‘Have a Cigar’ and maybe ‘Light My Fire,’ too.”
Agent Ball nodded. “The Floyd for sure, can’t say about the Doors.”
“What’re you guys talking about?”
“Serial killer,” Agent Ball said. “He leaves a signature.”
“Ohhh,” the sheriff said. “And he’s a Deep Purple fan?”
“Not exactly,” Agent Ball said. “The victims’ deaths are staged to evoke the titles of different classic rock songs.”
Agent Yates turned to the sheriff and said, “First guy we found, and I think you’ll appreciate this for obvious reasons, the first guy we found had a plastic sheriff’s badge stuck on his chest. He’d been shot. That was the simplest one.”
“Who was he?”
“Some programmer,” Agent Ball said. “Used algorithms to determine the fewest number of songs necessary to get the best ratings for the format in any given market. Didn’t want anybody to hear a song they’d never heard before.”
“Another guy was beaten to death,” Agent Yates said. “Now, usually that’s done with an easily identified blunt object, you know, a bat, crowbar, a big wrench.” Yates shook his head. “Took the coroner a while to figure out this guy’d been beaten to death by what appeared to be a large cowbell, then beheaded with a scythe.”
“A what?”
“The big curved blade you always see with the Grim Reaper.”
“Ohhh, yeah, I know the song you’re talking about. Love that guitar part,” the sheriff said, playing it on air guitar. “You got a name for this guy? Like the Son of Sam or the Hillside Strangler?”
Agent Yates said, “I call him the ‘Stairway to Heaven Killer.’”
“I prefer ‘Highway to Hell Killer.’”
“It’s a generational thing I guess.”
“You got any suspects? Motives?”
Agent Yates said, “Our profilers have him pegged as a former FM DJ from the free-form era, which makes him a white male in his mid-sixties, most likely. Guy who worked in FM radio during its heyday, when the DJ selected the music from a vast library, none of which was off limits and you were free to speak your mind. They imagine the guy stayed in radio through the late seventies, the AOR years, then eventually got fired or quit when they whittled the playlist down to the last two hundred songs and gave him liner notes to read.”
“You’ll have to forgive the Agent of Aquarius here,” Ball said. “He’s been diagnosed as morbidly nostalgic with a complicating vision problem that makes him see everything from back in the day through rose-colored granny glasses.” He put his hand on his partner’s shoulder. “I’m sorry to tell you, but those days are gone forever, over a long time ago.”
Yates took the ribbing in stride. “Go ahead, hit me with your best shot,” he said. “It’s not your fault you weren’t there, got no idea what you missed. But believe me, FM rock radio was a thing to behold when it was in the right hands. The DJs, the good ones anyway, were curators in a vinyl museum, playing things you’d never know about if they hadn’t unearthed them for you. People were passionate about it. People loved it. And if you take away something that someone loves, something that had meaning in their lives, and you debase that thing? You force it to behave in all sorts of degrading ways, like double-shot Wednesdays, all Zep weekends, and twenty-six minutes of commercials an hour? You force someone to watch as you kill the thing they held so dear? Who wouldn’t snap?” Agent Yates shook his head. “You can only push people so far.”
The sheriff asked about a triggering event.
Agent Yates said, “Profilers can’t say, but my guess is, the poor guy snapped after hearing ‘Free Bird’ one time too many.”
“Yeah, I could see that,” the sheriff said. “They’ve played that one to death.”
WATCHING THE DETECTIVES
BY A. J. HARTLEY
IT’S FUNNY HOW A SONG can take you back.
In the circumstances, it’s kind of hard to believe because I’ve been working my way to driving Janice home from work for da
ys. It was all I’d thought about, getting her in the car away from everyone else, where we could talk and such, you know? But now she is in, and I can smell the perfume she dabbed behind her ears, and she is wearing the skirt—the blue one that hugs her hips and stops a couple of inches above the knee—and I can’t think of anything to say, but I know that when I turn on the ancient cassette player, it will be there: that crooning bassline with the reggae off-beat stutter and the voice insinuating its clever words, jagged as a broken bottle, and I will be suddenly, momentarily back in 1977, hot and sweaty, and loaded with adolescent bafflement.
I say 1977, but Elvis Costello’s second UK single wasn’t really representative of the time, musically speaking, at least when stacked up against the big sellers of the year. “Watching the Detectives” doesn’t even crack the top 100 singles for ’77, a list which is dominated by disco, “easy listening,” and throwbacks like Showaddywaddy, if you can believe that. Every other song on the radio seemed to be by Abba, and Paul McCartney had long since moved from “Penny Lane” to bloody “Mull of Kintyre.” I’d like to pretend I was a teenager hipster, a rebel at the front of the punk revolution blowing the Eagles and the Bee Gees out of the water with the Stranglers and the Sex Pistols, but I wasn’t. I was thirteen and I knew nothing. I’d just got my first cassette player for Christmas and the first song I ever recorded off the radio—and this hurts to admit—was “Don’t Give Up On Us” by that guy from Starsky & Hutch.
Sad.
But a part of me knew even then that that was all kinds of fucked up, and I know that because I’d seen Costello and the Attractions doing “Watching the Detectives” on Top of the Pops, and something about it had got under my skin. At first it was just the look of the bloke in his jacket and tie and those huge glasses, pulling faces into the camera and twisting his lip into that pre-Billy-Idol Billy Idol sneer. I couldn’t decide if it was ridiculous or brilliant, and because I was a kid who didn’t know any better, decided not to like it in case I was wrong. In those days what you listened to said a lot about who you were, so you had to pick carefully.
I was scared of being different.
So I taped the bloody David Soul song and sang along to Leo Sayer and nodded in time—God help me—to the plodding, rubber-mallet-to-the-skull creative genius of Status Quo. Come back Noddy Holder, all is forgiven, right?
Anyway.
It was two, maybe three years before I ditched all that stuff, taped over my collections of whatever the hell Radio 1 thought I should be listening to, and started carving out my own little taste cave in the musical landscape. Over time I stuffed it not just with the Pistols, the Clash, the Dead Kennedys, and the Jam, but with Joy Division, the Cure, the Smiths, early XTC, Echo and the Bunnymen, and whatever else the so-called alternative eighties generated. I built my cave and it was me, and if anyone wanted to know me, they had to come into the cave, right? First thing I’d do when I met a girl was find out what she listened to. It wasn’t like they had to have the same taste exactly. I mean, some people just don’t know any better, do they? But you have to know where you stand on these things. I’m not going to make a serious play for someone who spends her days listening to Boney M. or—as time passed—Banana-fucking-rama. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Half the time I’d find myself wanting to slit them open just to see what they had inside them in place of blood.
The fact is that not many make the grade, especially when you factor in the other basics you want in a woman, the right kind of eyes, the figure, the way they wear high heels without looking like pigs on stilts, the shade of blond, the right amount of make up. You know what I mean. Makes things difficult.
There was this one girl, Michelle Rawlinson, who checked every box, or so I thought. Not too tall, shoulder-length hair, green eyes which wouldn’t usually work for me, obviously, but which she managed to pull off somehow, and this smile that made her look ten years younger than she was. Innocent, you know? But not so innocent that it’s not worth the attempt. It was a good combination.
We had met at what you might call a mixer at the local sixth form college. I’d already finished my A levels and was trying to figure out what I was going to do next. My qualifications should have gotten me into Oxford and Cambridge but as soon as I got into the interviews the wheels came off. With this one professor who showed me ’round you could actually see him backing off the more I talked, like he knew that I already had nothing to learn from the likes of him. That’s what it’s like with universities. They say they want smart, talented students, but they don’t. Not really. They want kids who won’t challenge them and will write down whatever they say. Society should take a big scalpel and slice the lot of them out, you know? All the worthless sheep people. Make some room for the rest of us.
So yeah, by 1985 my educational career had come to a bit of a hiatus, but I still went back to the college dances and such, and since some of the teachers recognized me no one thought to ask me why I was there. This one woman who had taught me history gave me a baffled look one time, and I just smiled at her and asked her how her husband was, even though I knew she wasn’t married, and she got all flustered and left me alone.
Anyway. Michelle.
She’d asked me what I was studying and since it was obvious that she was a literature type, I said English, and then went on about Hamlet and Coriolanus for, like, ten minutes. I knew what the set books were on the A-Level exams and made sure I was ready to say things about them. It’s not hard. Anyone can do English literature. It’s a joke subject. So Michelle was well impressed and I suggested we go to see As You Like It at the Exchange. She was even more impressed with that. Thought me a real high-culture type. The fact that I could give a definitive qualitative analysis of every act at Live Aid sealed the deal.
But the Shakespeare, it turned out, was a mistake, though I suppose it saved a lot of time, showed me things I wouldn’t have seen for a while. The show was weird. The woman who played the lead strode about the stage like she was a man or something, bossing people about and being all clever and funny, or so everyone else thought. Michelle about wet herself at one point, and came out all pink and happy at the end. I hated it. I don’t know why, but it felt all wrong. Poisonous. As we walked back to my blood-red Ford Escort she just talked and talked about how great it was so I kissed her just to stop her mouth. I hadn’t really meant to, and it didn’t really go well, but I was just so angry and she was so stupid and I needed her to shut up for five minutes.
She did too. Actually she went really quiet and sat statue still in the passenger seat, and when I asked her if she wanted to get something to eat or go back to my place, she said she thought she should get home. That made me mad too. Still, it might have been okay if I hadn’t turned the radio on, if Elvis hadn’t started those biting, slashing lines about the girl who pulled your eyes out with a face like a magnet, the one who filed her nails while the detectives were dragging the lake. I turned it up till the bass made the floor shake, and when she asked me to turn it down I ignored her. Elvis did the bit about the parents bracing themselves for the bad news about their daughter’s disappearance, and I gritted my teeth with a kind of furious joy I’d never felt before, something that took all the rage and confusion I had been feeling—had always been feeling—and put a match to it so it burned hot and furious and bright.
There was electrical tape in the backseat, the thick, double-width kind. I don’t think she realized what was happening till it was too late. I’m not sure I did either. She never even screamed. The scissors weren’t as sharp as I would have liked, but they did the job.
Afterwards I just drove around with her sitting next to me, trying to calm down and find somewhere to dump the body. I hadn’t meant it to go like this, even though I’d thought about it before. That’s normal, right? I mean, people have these dark ideas, fantasies, but they listen to Abba and Boney M. and somehow that keeps you in line, stops you from being antisocial or whatever. That’s how it is. If you feel, really feel, and think fo
r yourself, then you find the monster which is inside all of us. Love will tear us apart, right? At least it’s honest. I didn’t feel bad exactly, not for Michelle. It wasn’t like she was a real person. Not really. But I knew that I could get into serious trouble and that was scary.
I went over the people she might have told who she was going out with, who would have seen us together in the theater, and I knew I couldn’t hide the fact that I’d been with her. The best solution, I decided, was to chuck her in the canal and then say I’d dropped her at the bus station because I had to get home. I’d lined the backseat with a plastic tarpaulin before I’d put her back there, so clean-up wasn’t going to be a problem, and if the police found any of her hair or anything that would just prove she’d been in the car, which I wasn’t trying to hide. I even thought how I’d play it if it went to court. I was confident that I could put some doubts in a jury’s mind. I’m a pretty good actor, if I say so myself, way better than the bitch who played Rosalind at the Exchange.
But you know what? It never came to that.
It was a week before they found the body. Some loser walking his dog and probably whistling Mull of fucking Kintyre found her the same day—as luck would have it—that another girl went missing from the same school. That one was nothing to do with me, but the cops thought the two cases were connected, and though they brought me in for questioning, looked over the car and my bedroom, even kept a tail on me for a few days, I was never charged with anything. Two months later they got the perv for the murder of the other girl—Peterson, his name was—but they didn’t find all the remains. Handy for me, you might say, because they just chalked Michelle up to that bloke. I resented that a bit, because he was the lowest of the low and you’d think any halfwit would have been able to tell the difference between what he had done and what had happened to Michelle, but I suppose it was just as well.
I went to the funeral, partly for form’s sake, partly because I wanted to see what I had done. I parked right by the graveyard and set the cassette player just right before going out to stand a bit away from the family while the coffin was lowered into the ground. It’s a terrible thing to see parents grieving for a lost daughter. Terrible and great and I felt it all again, the rush of it, the power. They saw me there, of course. They were supposed to. I looked sad and serious and gave them a nod, but Mrs. Rawlinson just gave me this haggard stare and her husband had to be stopped by some brother or other from coming over. He was a big bloke who ran a scrap metal and towing service. Not someone I wanted to tangle with, to be honest, but he couldn’t do anything about it, not that day, standing there in his funeral black with the sun shining and everyone watching, and that made me feel powerful too.
