The Killer's Game

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Anyway, I was working in the store one day—well, working on reading a detective novel—when Martha and Jasmine came in.

  “Get your goddamn feet off my desk,” Martha said.

  “Glad to see you,” I said, lowering my feet and putting a marker in the book.

  “Get off my stool,” Martha said. “Quit reading that damn book and put some up.”

  I got off the stool. “You two have a pleasant day, Massah Martha?”

  “Eat shit, Plebin,” Martha said, leaning her golf club against the counter and mounting her stool.

  “Daddy, Martha and I have been snooping. Listen what we got. Martha had this idea to go over to the newspaper office in LaBorde and look at back issues—”

  “LaBorde?” I said.

  “Bigger town. Bigger paper,” Martha said, sticking one of her dainty cigarettes into her mouth and lighting it.

  “We went through some older papers,” Jasmine said, “and since LaBorde covers a lot of the small towns around here, we found ads for the Jim Dandy Circus in several of them, and we were able to pinpoint on a map the route of the circus up to Mud Creek, and the latest paper showed Marvel Creek to be the next stop, and—”

  “Slow down,” I said. “What’s the circus got to do with your so-called investigation?”

  “You look at the papers and read about the towns where the circus showed up,” Martha said, “and there’s in every one of them something about a missing woman, or young girl. In a couple cases, bodies have been found. Sometimes they were found a week or so after the circus came to town, but most of the news articles indicate the missing women disappeared at the time of the circus.”

  “Of course, we determined this, not the papers,” Jasmine said. “We made the connection between the circus and the bodies.”

  “In the case of the bodies, both were found after the circus passed through,” Martha said, “but from the estimated times of death the papers gave, we’ve been able to figure they were killed about the time the circus was in town. And my guess is those missing women are dead too, and by the same hand.”

  “Waldo’s?” I said.

  “That’s right,” Martha said.

  I considered all that.

  Jasmine said, “Pretty coincidental, don’t you think?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean—”

  “And the two bodies had been mutilated,” Martha said. She leaned against the counter and reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out the fold-out I had found. She smoothed it out on the counter top. “Body parts were missing. And I bet they were cut up, just like this fold-out is marked. As for the missing body parts, eyes and pussies, I figure. Those are the parts he has circled and blacked out.”

  “Watch your language,” I said to Martha.

  No one seemed to take much note of me.

  “The bodies were found in the town’s local dump,” Jasmine said.

  “It’s curious,” I admitted, “but still, to accuse a man of murder on the basis of circumstantial evidence.”

  “One more thing,” Martha said. “Both bodies had traces of black paint on them. Like it had been used to mark the areas the killer wanted to cut, and I presume, did cut. That’s certainly a lot of goddamn circumstantial evidence, isn’t it?”

  “Enough that we’re going to keep an eye on Waldo,” Jasmine said.

  I must admit right now that I didn’t think even then, after what I had been told, there was anything to this Waldo the Great as murderer. It struck me that murders and disappearances happen all the time, and that if one were to look through the LaBorde paper carefully, it would be possible to discover there had been many of both, especially disappearances, before and after the arrival of the circus. I mean that paper covered a lot of small towns and communities, and LaBorde was a fairly large town itself. A small city actually. Most of the disappearances would turn out to be nothing more than someone leaving on a trip for a few days without telling anyone, and most of the murders would be committed by a friend or relative of the victim and would have nothing to do with the circus or marked-up fold-outs.

  Of course, the fact that the two discovered bodies had been mutilated gave me pause, but not enough to go to the law about it. That was just the sort of half-baked idea that had gotten my ass in a crack earlier.

  Still, that night, I went with Martha and Jasmine out to the trailer park.

  It was cloudy that night and jags of lightning made occasional cuts through the cloud cover and thunder rumbled and light drops of rain fell on the windshield of Martha’s van.

  We drove out to the road behind the park about dark, peeked out the windows and through the gaps in the trees. The handful of pole lights in the park were gauzy in the wet night and sad as dying fireflies. Their poor, damp rays fell against some of the trees—their branches waving in the wind like the fluttering hands of distressed lunatics—and forced the beads of rain on the branches to give up tiny rainbows. The rainbows rose up, misted outward a small distance, then once beyond the small circumference of light, their beauty was consumed by the night.

  Martha got out her binoculars and Jasmine sat on the front passenger side with a notepad and pen, ready to record anything Martha told her to. They felt that the more documentation they had, the easier it would be to convince the police that Waldo was a murderer.

  I was in the seat behind theirs, my legs stretched out and my back against the van, looking away from the trailer most of the time, wondering how I had let myself in on this. About midnight I began to feel both sleepy and silly. I unwrapped a candy bar and ate it.

  “Would you quit that goddamn smacking back there,” Martha said. “It makes me nervous.”

  “Pardon me all to hell,” I said, and wadded up the wrapper noisily and tossed it on the floorboard.

  “Daddy, would you quit?” Jasmine said.

  “Now we got something,” Martha said.

  I sat up and turned around. There were no lights on in the trailers in the park except for Waldo’s trailer; a dirty, orange glow shone behind one of his windows, like a fresh slice of smoked cheese. Other than that, there was only the pole lights, and they didn’t offer much. Just those little rainbows made of bad light and rain. Without the binoculars there was little to observe in detail, because it was a pretty good distance from where we were to Waldo’s trailer, but I could see him coming out of the door, holding it open, the whole pack of poodles following after.

  Waldo bent down by the trailer and pulled a small shovel out from beneath it. The poodles wandered around and started doing their bathroom business. Waldo cupped his hands over a cigarette and lit it with a lighter and smoked while he noted the dog’s delivery spots. After a while he went about scooping up their messes with his shovel and making several trips to the dumpster to get rid of it.

  Finished, he pushed the shovel beneath the trailer and smoked another cigarette and ground it hard beneath his heel and opened the trailer door and called to the dogs. They bounded up the steps and into the trailer like it was one of their circus tricks. No poodle tried to fuck another poodle. Waldo didn’t kick anybody. He went inside, and a moment later came out again, this time minus the poodles. He was carrying something. A box. He looked about carefully, then placed the box in the back of his pickup. He went back inside the trailer.

  “Goddamn,” Martha said. “There’s a woman’s leg in that box.”

  “Let me see,” I said.

  “You can’t see it now,” she said. “It’s down in the bed of the truck.”

  She gave me the binoculars anyway, and I looked. She was right. I couldn’t see what was in the bed of the truck. “He wouldn’t just put a woman’s leg in the back of his pickup,” I said.

  “Well, he did,” Martha said.

  “Oh God,” Jasmine said, and she flicked on her pen light and glanced at her watch and started writing on her notepad, talking aloud as she did. “Twelve-o-five, Waldo put woman’s leg in the bed of his truck. Oh, shit, who do you think it coul
d be?”

  “One could hope it’s that goddamn bitch down at the county clerk’s office,” Martha said. “I been waiting for something to happen to her.”

  “Martha!” Jasmine said.

  “Just kidding,” Martha said. “Kinda.”

  I had the binoculars tight against my face as the trailer door opened again. I could see very well with the infrared business. Waldo came out with another box. As he came down the steps, the box tilted slightly. It was open at the top and I could see very clearly what was in it.

  “A woman’s head,” I said. My voice sounded small and childish.

  “Jesus Christ,” Martha said. “I didn’t really, really, believe he was a murderer.”

  Waldo was back inside the trailer. A moment later he reappeared. Smaller boxes under each arm.

  “Let me see,” Jasmine said.

  “No,” I said. “You don’t need to.”

  “But…” Jasmine began.

  “Listen to your father,” Martha said.

  I handed the binoculars back to Martha. She didn’t look through them. We didn’t need to try and see what was in the other boxes. We knew. The rest of Waldo’s victim.

  Waldo unfolded a tarp in the back of his pickup and stretched it across the truck bed and fastened it at all corners, then got inside the cab and cranked the engine.

  “Do we go to the police now?” Jasmine said.

  “After we find out where he’s taking the body,” Martha said.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Otherwise, if he’s disposed of all the evidence, we’ve got nothing.” I was thinking too of my record at the police station. Meaning, of course, more than my word would be needed to start an investigation.

  Martha cranked the van and put on the park lights and began to ease along, giving Waldo the time he needed to get out of the trailer park and ahead of us.

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea where he’s going,” Martha said. “Bet he scoped the place out first day he got to town.”

  “The dump,” Jasmine said. “Place they found those other bodies.”

  We got to the street and saw Waldo was headed in the direction of the dump. Martha turned on the van’s headlights after the pickup was down the road a bit, then eased out in pursuit. We laid back and let him get way ahead, and when we got out of town and he took the turn off to the dump, we passed on by and turned down a farm to market road and parked as close as we could to a barbed wire fence. We got out and climbed the fence and crossed a pasture and came to a rise and went up that and poked our heads over carefully and looked down on the dump.

  There was smoke rising up in spots, where sounds of burning refuse had been covered at some point, and it filled the air with stink. The dump had been like that forever. As a little boy, my father would bring me out to the dump to toss our family garbage, and even in broad daylight, I thought the place spooky, a sort of poor-boy, blue-collar hell. My dad said there were fires out here that had never been put out, not by the weight of garbage and dirt, or by winter ice or spring rainstorms. Said no matter what was done to those fires, they still burned. Methane maybe. All the stuff in the dump heating up like compost, creating some kind of combustible chemical reaction.

  Within the dump, bordered off by a wide layer of scraped earth, were two great oil derricks. They were working derricks too, and the great rocking horse pumps dipped down and rose up constantly, night or day, and it always struck me that this was a foolish place for a dump full of never-dying fires to exist, next to two working oil wells. But the dump still stood and the derricks still worked oil. The city council had tried to have the old dump shut down, moved, but so far nothing had happened. They couldn’t get those fires out completely for one thing. I felt time was against the dump and the wells. Eventually, the piper, or in this case, the pipeline, had to be paid. Some day the fires in the dump would get out of hand and set the oil wells on fire and the explosion that would occur would send Mud Creek and its surrounding rivers and woodlands to some place north of Pluto.

  At night, the place was even more eerie. Flames licking out from under the debris like tongues, the rain seeping to its source, making it hiss white smoke like dragon breath. The two old derricks stood tall against the night and lightning wove a flickering crown of light around one of them and went away. In that instant, the electrified top of the derrick looked like Martian machinery. Inside the derricks, the still-working well pumps throbbed and kerchunked and dipped their dark, metal hammerheads then lifted them again. Down and up. Down and up. Taking with them on the drop and the rise, rain-wet shadows and flickers of garbage fire.

  Waldo’s truck was parked beside the road, next to a mound of garbage the height of a first-story roof. He had peeled off the tarp and put it away and was unloading his boxes from the truck, carrying them to a spot near one of the oil derricks, arranging them neatly, as if he were being graded on his work. When the boxes were all out, Waldo stood with his back to us and watched one of the derrick’s pumps nod for a long time, as if the action of it amazed or offended him.

  After a time, he turned suddenly and kicked at one of the boxes. The head in it popped up like a Mexican jumping bean and fell back down inside. Waldo took a deep breath, as if he were preparing to run a race, then got in his truck, turned it around, and drove away.

  “He didn’t even bother to bury the pieces,” Jasmine said, and even in the bad light, I could see she was as white as Frosty the Snowman.

  “Probably wants it to be found,” Martha said. “We know where the corpse is now. We have evidence, and we saw him dispose of the body ourselves. I think we can go to the law now.”

  We drove back to town and called Sam from Martha’s bookstore. He answered the phone on the fifth ring. He sounded like he had a sock in his mouth.

  “What?”

  “Plebin, Sam. I need your help.”

  “You in a ditch? Call a wrecker, man. I’m bushed.”

  “Not exactly. It’s about murder.”

  “Ah, shit, Plebin. You some kind of fool, or what? We been through this. Call some nuthouse doctor or something. I need sleep. Day I put in today was bad enough, but I don’t need you now and some story about murder. Lack of sleep gives me domestic problems.”

  “This one’s different. I’ve got two witnesses. A body out at the dump. We saw it disposed of. A woman cut up in pieces, I kid you not. Guy named Waldo did it. He used to be with the circus. Directed a dog act.”

  “The circus?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And he has a dog act.”

  “Had. He cut up a woman and took her to the dump.”

  “Plebin?”

  “Yes.”

  “I go out there, and there’s no dead body, I could change that, supply one, mood I’m in. Understand?”

  “Just meet us at the dump.”

  “Who’s us?”

  I told him, gave him some background on Waldo, explained what Martha and Jasmine found in the LaBorde newspapers, hung up, and me and my fellow sleuths drove back to the dump.

  We waited outside the dump in Martha’s van until Sam showed in his blue Ford. We waved at him and started the van and led him into the dump. We drove up to the spot near the derrick and got out. None of us went over to the boxes for a look. We didn’t speak. We listened to the pumps doing their work inside the derricks. Kerchunk, kerchunk, kerchunk.

  Sam pulled up behind us and got out. He was wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes and his pajama top. He looked at me and Jasmine and Martha. Fact is, he looked at Martha quite a while.

  “You want maybe I should send you a picture, or something?” Martha said.

  Sam didn’t say anything. He looked away from Martha and said to me, “All right. Where’s the body?”

  “It’s kind of here and there,” I said, and pointed. “In those boxes. Start with the little one, there. That’s her head.”

  Sam looked in the box, and I saw him jump a little. Then he went still, bent forward and pulled the woman’s head o
ut by the hair, held it up in front of him and looked at it. He spun and tossed it to me. Reflexively, I caught it, then dropped it. By the time it hit the ground I felt like a number one horse’s ass.

  It wasn’t a human head. It was a mannequin head with a black paint mark covering the stump of the neck, which had been neatly sawed in two.

  “Here, Jasmine,” Sam said. “You take a leg,” and he hoisted a mannequin leg out of another box and tossed it at her. She shrieked and dodged and it landed on the ground. “And you that’s gonna send me a picture. You take an arm.” He pulled a mannequin arm out of another box and tossed it at Martha, who swatted it out of the air with her putter cane.

  He turned and kicked another of the boxes and sent a leg and an arm sailing into a heap of brush and old paint cans.

  “Goddamn it, Plebin,” he said. “You’ve done it again.” He came over and stood in front of me. “Man, you’re nuts. Absolutely nuts.”

  “Wasn’t just Plebin,” Martha said. “We all thought it. The guy brought this stuff out here is a weirdo. We’ve been watching him.”

  “You have?” Sam said. “Playing detective, huh? That’s sweet. That’s real sweet. Plebin, come here, will you?”

  I went over and stood by him. He put an arm around my shoulders and walked me off from Jasmine and Martha. He whispered to me.

  “Plebin. You’re not learning, man. Not a bit. Not only are you fucking up your life, you’re fucking up mine. Listen here. Me and the old lady, we’re not doing so good, see.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. Toni has always been so great.”

  “Yeah, well, you see, she’s jealous. You know that.”

  “Oh yeah. Always has been.”

  “There you are. She’s gotten worse too. And you see, I spend a lot of time away from the home. Out of the bed. Bad hours. You getting what I’m saying here?”