by Tom Wright
‘Hi, Jim,’ said Li’s telephone voice.
I told her what I had in mind.
She said, ‘Whatcha cooking?’
‘The Special.’
‘With that weird sauce?’
‘It’s the only one I know how to make.’
‘Count us in. I know Johnny’ll want to hear all about your hot case.’
I heard Johnny’s voice in the background: ‘Ask him what’s going on with that. He got any suspects yet?’
‘Tell him when I catch somebody I’ll give them his number,’ I said. ‘If they’re rich enough to afford a big-time lawyer.’
Hanging up the phone, I sipped beer, thinking about what Li had said. It resonated weirdly in my mind because, although the coin had felt warm to me, the case itself didn’t at all. It felt cool, like old mausoleum air or the dank and unfresh stirring of the breeze off a swamp at night.
I put Mutt on the arm of the chair and stood up, thinking about what I wanted to ask Jonas and about the way things ought to be. ‘Your watch, boy,’ I said to the cat. ‘Don’t let any rats get by you.’
He just stared at me, looking mystified.
SIX
I took Border Avenue south, with Arkansas and its liquor stores on my left, Texas with its car dealerships and Baptist bookstores to the right, and a mile ahead, the Louisiana Quarter, which some said existed only to show the world just how much political corruption and fine cooking it was possible to cram into one medium-sized town.
Catching the light, I downshifted the F-250 around the corner onto Eastern and listened to the exhaust grumble and roar, a sound Jana called the ‘Serengeti baritone’. It was probably more of an indication of my thinking than I understood at the time, but a few years ago when Jana and the girls were still with me, I realised I was tired of our number-two car, the Acura I’d been driving to work for the last six years. The first vehicle I’d ever been able to call my own had been a pickup, and after my time on the Flying S working for Dusty, nothing felt as natural under my feet as a truck. Which is probably why this one, parked under a huge oak beside the highway with a For Sale sign wedged behind one windshield wiper, had caught my eye. After a ten-minute test drive I bought it from the alcoholic mechanic who’d reworked it, a committed Jehovah’s Witness until he came down with depression, started mixing his medications with vodka and fell from grace. He wasn’t definite about exactly how it happened, but I got the impression it involved several counts of interrupting services at the Kingdom Hall to offer his opinions in favour of wholegrains and anal intercourse. Losing business, he decided to cash in some of his assets, starting with the big four-wheel-drive Ford. It had a heavy brush-buster and winch, oversized knobby tyres and a ceramic eyeball the size of a peach for a shift knob.
‘Throw a hook down the well, you could turn the world inside out with this hoss,’ the Witness said, his breath a weapon of mass destruction as he patted the brush-buster affectionately.
My daughter Casey’s judgement had been, ‘It suits you, Dad.’ Later she had decided for some reason that the truck ought to be called Buford, and painted the name neatly in purple fingernail polish on the left fender just back of the wheel well.
Her sister Jordan had said, ‘Mom keeps the van, right?’
‘What does this thing eat?’ had been Jana’s first question as she did a walkaround of the vehicle.
‘Scornful wives.’
‘Knock yourself out, Thunderfoot,’ she’d said, giving me a quick kiss and going back to her flowerbeds.
I found Jonas at a window table in John Boy’s, staring at the screen of his laptop. He was dressed in faded jeans, sneakers and a red Centenary sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up, and had a bottle of Corona at his elbow, but still somehow looking monkish with his prematurely white, close-cut hair and beard, and lean frame. I hung my jacket on the back of the chair and sat across from him, which gave me a view up into the split-level bar where most of the drunks and coloured neon were.
‘Nachos coming,’ he said, picking up the beer and taking a sip.
‘What’re you working on?’
‘Exam for tomorrow. What’s on your mind, JB?’
‘Crucifixion.’
He cocked an eye at me and said, ‘You trying out for Messiah?’
The waitress brought a plate of nachos piled high with cheese, refritos, chopped tomatoes, fajita strips, guacamole and pico de gallo, set a bottle of Corona with a slice of lime in front of me then disappeared back into the kitchen. I passed the lime around the mouth of the bottle a couple of times, shook some salt onto the rim and took a sip. ‘This is about a case,’ I said. ‘I want to get your thoughts.’
He nodded. ‘Always been your method: send you out for a bagel, you’re not coming back until you find out who invented wheat. And why. But what are you doing investigating cases – aren’t you supposed to be some kind of boss now?’ He paused to sip from his own beer then studied my face for a moment. ‘Wait a minute, I know that look,’ he said. ‘Like the time that little girl got kidnapped. You’re on something big.’
He was talking about Joy Dawn Therone, the Girl Scout whose body had been found behind an old warehouse ten years ago. She had been raped both before and after her throat was slashed to the spine. I hadn’t been one of the lead investigators, only one of the guys volunteering time, but I couldn’t help thinking about the case, and had never believed it was a regular serial killing. I wasn’t sure why, but I thought the murder more likely came under the heading of what the guy who kept the department statistics called HAMs – homicides of ‘happenstance and misadventure’. Nobody knew one way or the other, though, because no suspect was ever identified and no arrest ever made, but everybody at Three had kicked in to help pay for the giant angel she was buried under at Sylvan Memorial Park. Counting the marble plinth, it was over ten feet tall – big, but not nearly big enough to make up for us failing to protect her, or at least make the killer pay for what he’d done.
‘Yeah, I’m on something,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how big yet.’
Catching my tone, he said, ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to wake up any ghosts. What can I do for you?’
‘You can start by telling me about crucifixion,’ I said. ‘Not the religious stuff. I mean who did it to who, and how it was done.’
‘Interesting you should put it that way,’ he said, wiping a little edge of foam from his upper lip with the knuckle of his left thumb. ‘Because the actual procedure probably didn’t look much like what you see in the stained glass at church. But it was nasty enough. The Romans got famous for crucifying people because of all the press Jesus got, but it had about a thousand-year run as a common form of capital punishment, probably starting with the Persians around the sixth century BCE, then the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Seleucids, even the Jews themselves. But a lot of them, including the Romans, tended not to do it to each other. Saved it for slaves and conquered peoples. Odd thing, though: the idea that Jesus was crucified – I mean on a cross – didn’t crop up in any texts of known authenticity until a century or two after the fact.’
‘So what did happen?’
‘Oh, I’m sure they didn’t let him walk,’ Jonas said. ‘But what they actually did to him is anybody’s guess.’ He crunched a nacho and drank from his own Corona. ‘Anyway, Constantine outlawed crucifixion in the Roman Empire in 330-something.’
‘How’d it kill the victim?’
‘Open question,’ Jonas said. ‘The leading candidates are things like exhaustion, shock, heat stroke, heart failure. On the other hand, I read a paper a few years ago to the effect that it was most likely asphyxia.’
‘How would that work?’
‘When they used a crossbeam, the arms were fixed to it, usually before it was put up on the stanchion, which more often than not was a tree, by the way, but probably never by just nailing through the hands. Then, whether it was a post or crossbeam, the weight of the body pulling down on the arms and restricting chest movement prevented proper respiratio
n. The victim suffered progressive hypoxia leading to eventual death by asphyxiation.’
‘What’s the story on using trees?’ I asked.
Jonas shrugged. ‘Convenience, probably. Who’s gonna hunt up a beam the size you’d need for a stanchion, drag it out there, dig a two- or three-foot hole for it in that rocky soil and plant it just to kill one troublesome Jew, when there’s an olive tree or whatever right there?’
‘Why not nail the hands?’
‘Probably wouldn’t have supported the weight of the body passively, much less with the victim struggling. What the Romans apparently did most of the time was drive the spike between the forearm bones just above the wrist, then add some kind of binding to prevent the nails from ripping out.’
‘What about the feet?’
Jonas wiped his hands on his napkin. ‘That’s another deviation from lore, I think. If I’m not mistaken they usually drove one spike through both heels. In fact, there was a calcaneus found in the Holy Land a few years back – ’
‘Calcaneus?’
‘Heel bone. This one still had part of the actual nail through it.’ He stopped suddenly as he noticed the expression on my face. ‘You look like a possum just walked over your grave,’ he said.
‘How long does it take to die by crucifixion?’ I said, taking a blue crayon from the little clay pot next to the salt and pepper shakers and fiddling absently with it.
‘How come you’re not asking a doctor about this?’
‘I am asking a doctor.’
‘I mean a pill doctor.’
‘Who can say where medicine ends and history begins?’
Jonas snorted. ‘Count on you for the philosophical slant,’ he said.
I waited.
‘Okay, let’s see,’ Jonas said, picking up his Corona and waggling the bottle as he thought. ‘Figure at the low end a few hours to, worst case, a few days. Among other things it would’ve depended on whether they broke the victim’s legs, which supposedly was a common practice. If the guy was able to support his weight with his legs at least some of the time he’d last longer. Not sure why, but the story is they didn’t do that with Jesus. There was also a time problem, because Jewish law didn’t allow for the body to remain out overnight.’
Overnight. I imagined Deborah Gold hanging out there through a night that must have seemed longer than endless, dying one atom at a time. Maybe not as bad, minute for minute, as what was done to her beforehand, but bad enough.
I said, ‘Did they ever crucify women?’
‘Nothing to stop them, I guess, but I’d imagine it was fairly rare,’ Jonas said. ‘Kind of people we’re talking about, they’d probably be more inclined to stone the women.’
‘Was it a usual part of the procedure to mutilate the body, cut the tongue out, anything like that?’
Jonas shot me a strange look. ‘Not that I ever heard of,’ he said. ‘Are you saying – ?’
‘Hold on,’ I said. I saw that as Jonas was talking I’d been doodling with the crayon on the brown wrapping paper that served as a tablecloth, producing a couple of versions of a flexed arm holding a heavy hammer, like the picture on a box of baking soda, and several of a figure with a wide base and drooping serifs:
T
‘What’s that stuff?’ asked Jonas.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. Looking at the shapes, I assumed the one that looked like a T must have been a cross, but something about the pictures felt wrong to me.
‘What’re they about?’ Jonas asked.
‘Nothing, as far as I know,’ I said, dropping the crayon back into its holder. ‘But it kind of feels like it could have a connection with a case we’ve got.’
‘What kind of case?’
‘A homicide.’
Jonas looked at me for a few seconds. ‘This wouldn’t be a homicide by crucifixion, would it?’ he said.
‘It would,’ I said. ‘Unfortunately.’
I looked down at my doodles, saying nothing, wishing I’d paid more attention in whichever of my two Psychology classes had covered personality structure and the unconscious mind.
Jonas said, ‘And this also involved somebody’s tongue getting cut out?’
I nodded.
‘Jesus,’ Jonas said. ‘Pun intended.’ He picked up his beer, looked at it for a second, set it down again. ‘If you were anybody else I’d probably ask if you were kidding. You aren’t, are you?’
Staring at my doodles, I didn’t answer.
‘Who was your murder victim, can you say?’
‘Deborah Gold.’
‘The psychologist? I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘And you’re sure it wasn’t just a display of the body? I mean, was it actually the crucifixion that killed her?’
‘No autopsy results yet. But it was done pretty much the way you described. Why, is the big question.’
‘No shit,’ Jonas said. ‘Pretty damn labour-intensive way to do murder.’ He finished off his Corona. ‘You thinking it was a hate crime of some kind?’
‘You mean as opposed to a crime of goodwill?’
‘The jock waxes jocular,’ Jonas said. ‘So who’d do something like this? And why?’
‘That’s more or less what I’m asking you,’ I said.
‘Well, okay,’ he said, ‘as for anti-Semitism, there’s no news there. Besides pretty much the entire Islamic world, some of the survivalists, paramilitaries and Christian fundamentalists get their bad on against Jews. The skinheads tend to focus on blacks, but they’re pretty broad-spectrum, talking about Jews controlling the TV networks, the banking system, and so forth. But brainpower has never been their long suit. Way they’d have it would put us back at about the level of the Mongol warlords before anybody got them organised. And these assholes wouldn’t like it if they had it because the first thing they’d find out is nobody’d salute them. They’re always fatally ignorant of sociology and psychology, not to mention history. People just never behave the way these clowns think they would, especially themselves. I don’t see players like that knowing enough to pull off a historically correct execution by crucifixion. Even if you throw in some personal animus to sweeten the pot, it’d be a hell of a stretch.’
‘Could it be some kind of political statement?’
Jonas scratched his beard as he thought about it. ‘Yeah, that would make a certain kind of sense, considering how easy it is to just shoot somebody if all you’ve got is a grievance,’ he said. ‘Kind of fits with the tongue thing too – like maybe it was about something she said to somebody. Or threatened to say. But except for the occasional Democratic fundraiser or something along that line, I never heard of her being particularly political. Was she involved in a trial, or had she testified somewhere recently? Some custody deal maybe?’
‘Not that I know of,’ I said. Maybe it was my unconscious mind at work again, but for some reason I decided to keep what Wayne had found in Gold’s mouth on the list of things I wasn’t going to tell Jonas.
‘Or,’ he said, holding up a forefinger, ‘maybe all the philosophical stuff is trying too hard. What if it was something related to her profession – some disgruntled patient or some other psychologist she pissed off? Could be a better way of looking at it. The simplest explanation that covers the facts is usually the right one. Occam’s razor and all.’
‘They did her in for some ordinary reason, and all the drama is just to create confusion?’
He shrugged, found a couple of nacho fragments under some lettuce and ate them. ‘Truth is not always in the distance,’ he said.
Suddenly I remembered the morning Jonas and I had stood side by side flipping pancakes at the church, and the flour Father Joe had carried in. The round logo on the bucket had identified it as a Roman Meal product.
‘Last question,’ I said. ‘Did any of the old Romans ever make it to this part of the world?’
He looked at me curiously. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Are you gonna tell me what that’s got to do with anything?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
SEVEN
I made it back to Lanshire a little before ten, got a bottle of beer from the fridge and a not-quite-empty bag of pretzel sticks from the cabinet, sat down and checked for phone messages. Nothing but sales calls. I clicked the TV on and watched a cheetah chasing a little gazelle of some kind across the tan plains. Mutt had taken up his breadloaf position on the arm of the couch next to me and seemed to be watching the screen.
The gazelle made a last hard cut to the left, causing the cheetah to overshoot and break off the chase, dropping to her belly in the grass and panting desperately.
I nodded off and drifted away into a dream of cheetahs and gazelles chasing each other the wrong way around a clock face –
– their speed increasing steadily, accompanied by a strange hum, until they merge into a blur, the numbers on the clock face transforming into the names of months, then years depicted in roman numerals, the numbers rapidly growing lower as time rewinds itself, the hum rising in pitch and volume until it becomes an ear-splitting shriek. Then all sound and movement instantly stops, the once-again-ordinary clock face hanging silently in dark space for a minute, the gazelles and cheetahs gone. Now the clock face is a merry-go-round with a series of corpses instead of wooden horses impaled on the steel uprights, circling the carousel as they rise and fall in synchrony with the strange tuneless calliope music that fills my ears, their dead, empty eyes fixed on mine. I realise they are the eyes of Deborah Gold. Then one at a time the figures become LA, until her dead body is repeated at every station around the carousel, each one looking at me with the same indecipherable expression. Now the carousel lights suddenly go dark, followed by the lights of the fairground surrounding it, a spreading radius of darkness that reaches the horizon and continues into the sky, extinguishing planets, stars, galaxies. I know now that everyone I love, everything I care about, is gone for ever – know it but will not accept it. I am desperate to get away from here and find the girls and Jana and get them to safety somehow, wherever that is, maybe in some alternate universe, some other spacetime. But I can’t move –
