by Jeff Crook
My father had Sean’s body exhumed and examined by a coroner in Little Rock. Turns out he had been beaten to death and his body dragged behind a car to disguise his injuries. The local county coroner had missed these pertinent details because his son, Zack Taylor, had been the driver of the car.
During pretrial, Zack’s father said it had been a normal, everyday fight between two teenage boys that ended tragically when one of them fell and struck his head on a rock. This was the delta, endless fields of mud and damned few rocks bigger than a marble. The Little Rock autopsy said Sean had been beaten with blunt objects while his hands were bound above his head. The coroner saw evidence of left- and right-handed blows from at least three different objects. Under interrogation, Zack named his accomplices. With his friends Wayne English and Dakota DeSpain, Zack strung Sean up and beat him to death, then tied him to the back of his truck, dragged him down County Road 405, and left his body in a ditch beside Highway 67.
At the trial, the defense tried to justify what the boys had done. They put a sophomore named Dan English on the stand. Dan was Sean’s best friend and the younger brother of Wayne. Sean had gone to Dan’s house that Saturday night to watch movies and play pool in their basement. Dan English was a big kid and a burgeoning golden god on the Pocahontas High School swim team, but on the stand he looked small, pale and frightened, like he hadn’t slept in a month.
The defense attorney asked Dan if Sean Pastor drugged him and performed “various disgusting homosexual acts” against his will. The killers claimed they had come home to find my brother raping Dan, and in their rage, they had beaten Sean to death with pool sticks.
Dan English fell apart on the stand and denied the drugging story. Obviously this wasn’t what he had been coached to say. The defense attorney tried to end the questioning, but Dan kept going, hysterical and furious, pounding the rail with his fist. “Wayne and them took us out to the farm and they hung Sean from a tree. They beat him with fence posts and baseball bats and made me watch. I loved Sean. I died that day! I died!”
He wasn’t the only one.
The only reason they hadn’t killed Dan was because his older brother was there. They beat the hell out of Dan for being a fag, but they didn’t go so far as to kill him. If I had been there, they wouldn’t have killed Sean, either. The thing was, I should have been with those boys that night. I was going steady with Dakota DeSpain, but that weekend I was having my period, so I stayed home. I didn’t want to hang out with Wayne and Zack and that crowd, but that’s what Dakota always wanted to do if he couldn’t screw me.
If I had been there, I could have stopped it. They’d have had to kill me, too. Sean died because I was on my menses. My brother would still be alive today if I hadn’t stayed home, and maybe I would still be alive, too.
The judge ordered the jury to disregard Dan English’s emotional testimony. Strangely enough, they disregarded the judge’s instructions. Wayne English got twenty-five years, reduced to five on appeal, but Zack and Dakota were only sentenced to two years apiece. Zack’s father, the county coroner, didn’t even lose his job for trying to cover up my brother’s murder. County coroner was an elected official, after all, just like the sheriff, and there were still a lot of people in that town who thought Sean Pastor got what he deserved. Dan English went on to Southern Cal on a swim scholarship, and in his third year hung himself from a diving board.
That’s why I come home every Thanksgiving weekend, with the hope of seeing his ghost just one more time, so I could tell him I’m sorry, so I could tell him goodbye. I stood by his grave, waiting, probably not more than ten minutes. It had become a ritual, as pointless as any other, but I kept it religiously. I didn’t cry anymore and Sean never showed, not even a prickle of cold on the back of my neck. I superglued the rainbow sticker to Sean’s headstone, got in my car, and drove the fuck back to Memphis. Let Mom try to peel that one off.
Monday
25
ADAM WAS THE FIRST TO call me, about nine o’clock, leaving a message on my voice mail. He didn’t have anything new on the killer, just an interesting detail. Cole Ritter’s first publicly produced play had debuted at the Overton Park Shell in June 1966. About two minutes later, he called back and left another message. He said, “Ashley St. Michael was a professional photographer. You’re buying a camera from her husband. I don’t believe in coincidences, Jackie.” And he hung up again.
About eleven o’clock, James called and left a message. He wanted to meet tonight. He didn’t say why, but he didn’t need to say why. It had become painfully obvious that he had sold his wife’s camera because he needed money. And now he needed that last five hundred a lot worse than I did, which meant he was probably still in deep to the same guys as when Ashley was murdered. Maybe they’d killed her to send him a message. But that was too easy, and I didn’t believe in easy any more than Adam believed in coincidences.
I woke up to the rain again, a good steady soaking rain sheeting down the bay window in the bedroom. I rolled off the couch, crawled into bed, and slept until twelve, woke up, crawled back to the couch, and ate cold pizza out of the box. Deiter called and left a message. He sounded excited. He said fock a lot. He said to come over right away. So I dressed, grabbed the Leica, and drove over.
I followed him inside and to the back of his shop, where he had my pictures printed out and thumbtacked to the walls. He had cleaned up the place enough to get close to the photos on the wall without standing on a pile of dirty underwear. While I examined the prints, he opened a beer and a package of Twinkies. He offered me a Twinkie, but I took his beer.
“Is this all?”
“Is this all? What the fock do you mean is this all. There’s your Playhouse Killer,” Deiter said as he pointed at the photos on the wall.
In three out of the dozen a person could be seen hiding behind a piece of scenery. But that’s all it was—a person. Deiter had pulled out enough detail to show that our backstage slinker had short dark hair and thick eyebrows. But that could be anybody. Hell, you could even mistake it for me on a bad day, and I didn’t have very many good ones.
“I’m not a miracle worker.” Deiter was hurt and angry. “I did what I could. I got you a face out of this shit. Maybe the killer looks like Gumby, I don’t know.”
I was sorry. This really was the first solid piece of evidence we had. I told Deiter this and made him jolly again. I liked him jolly. But I knew if I showed these pictures to Adam, he’d say the same thing. It was pretty much useless as evidence, except as a sort of balm of Gilead. But Deiter had done his best. I couldn’t ask for more. Actually, I could. I had hundreds of pictures taken of the Playhouse Killer’s victims and their murder scenes. I didn’t want to bring them all to Deiter, so I asked him to show me how to manipulate the photos to bring out more detail. If the killer was in the habit of watching the police process his murder scenes, I might find his face in one of those older pictures, maybe one good enough to show Adam.
Deiter plugged the Leica into his computer. He scrolled down until he found the pictures of Cole Ritter’s murder scene and opened one I had taken of the construction. “Here’s a good trick,” he said and inverted the colors, basically changing the photo into its own negative on the screen. The effect was surreal. The construction site turned into an alien moonscape in which each block of shattered white concrete became a patch of nearly featureless black, while darker areas leapt out in strange, disturbing brilliance.
“Fock, there he is.” He pointed at the ghostly figure of a man standing behind some trees at the back of the amphitheater.
“There who is?”
“Your killer.”
I leaned over his shoulder for a closer look and got a good noseful of Deiter’s unwashed body. He reverted the image to its original colors, and now that I knew a man was hiding there, I could easily see him among the trees. But there was something dark and bulky covering his face. “That’s just a cameraman from the news,” I said. “He’s holding a video camera.”
“Is that not rather small for a news camera?” Deiter asked.
Maybe so. Still, it made more sense that it was a cameraman. There were news people crawling all over the place trying to get a picture or a comment. The killer would have to be one frosty SOB to stand there in full view, filming the scene of his own crime while we worked it. Of course, he had apparently been ballsy enough to watch us at the Orpheum, hiding in the scenery not twenty feet from dozens of cops.
Deiter opened the other photos of the site, and in each, our voyeur’s face was partially obscured by his video camera. So all we really had were a few more ill-defined photos virtually useless for making a positive identification. The question was, why hadn’t I seen him when I was taking the pictures? I’d been looking right at him through the viewfinder.
Deiter seemed to read my mind. “This is no ghost, Jackie. I’ve seen pictures of ghosts and I tell you this is a man. The camera does not lie. Only the photographer lies.”
26
MONDAY AFTRERNOON TRAFFIC WAS MASSIVE and sluggish, with a gray drizzle coming down, burying the top of the Clark Tower in thick cloud. I could smell the greasy fumes coming from the KFC down the street. I sat at the stop sign for about five minutes waiting to turn right on Poplar until this POS powder-blue Camaro stopped traffic to let me out. I waved my thanks and drove west, then north on Perkins, headed for home. The stack of photos Deiter had printed out lay on the seat next to me. Every once in a while, I’d look down at them, at the hidden face of the man who had been murdering gay men across Memphis virtually unhindered for four years now. I knew I was going to have to show the photos to Adam. Eventually. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. The more I thought about it, the more I thought the best thing would be just to drop them in his lap. Let him decide what they were worth.
I bottomed out turning into the parking lot behind my apartment and slid to a stop in the spot nearest the door. As I reached across the console for the camera and pictures, a pale blue Camaro eased into the lot behind me and stopped with its ass hanging out in the street. The fenders were beat all to hell, patched with rust and gray primer, and the hood was a darker shade of blue than the rest of the car, but the tires shined new and black and the windows were tinted dark as welder’s glass. It was the same car that had let me out on Poplar over by Deiter’s place.
When the driver saw me, he tried to back out but he had to stop because of cross traffic. I ran up to his car, grabbed the passenger-side door handle and tried to open it, but it was locked. I couldn’t see the driver because of the tinting. I screamed, “Tell that motherfucker Reed if he has me followed again, I’ll kill him! You hear me? Entiendes?” I kicked the side door, adding another dent. I looked around for a rock or brick and spotted a quart bottle of Miller half full of piss sitting on the curb. As I reached for it, dude backed his car out into traffic, tires squalling on the wet pavement, horn blaring. He T-boned a late model Toyota, spinning it 180 degrees into oncoming traffic. I ran back to my car and grabbed the Leica off the front seat, then followed him out into the stalled traffic, snapping away while he shook the cobwebs out behind the wheel. He finally came to his senses before I could get around in front of his car. He put it in drive and floored it, wheels smoking. I zoomed in on his license plate as he sped away. The old lady in the Toyota fell out of her bent car screaming, streamers of gray hair plastered to her face, blood pouring from her nose.
I walked back to my car and grabbed the killer photos off the front seat. It was just like Reed to have me followed, but I had the bastard this time. That old lady would sue his sorry ass for every dime he had. Other people had stopped and walked her over to the curb, gave her a handkerchief to cap the flow of blood from her crimped schnoz. I gave her a business card for the slimiest lawyer I knew and took a full set of photos of her wreck and injuries, which progressively worsened while she waited for the ambulance and her head filled with dreams of avarice and an easy retirement.
I wondered what idiot my soon-to-be ex-husband had sent to follow me. From the look of the car, I guessed one of the illegals he hired to mow lawns and keep up his vacant properties. I hoped so, anyway. I hoped Reed would get nailed for a few immigration violations as well as liability for the reckless driving of his employee. I heard a pack of sirens coming from the other side of the overpass. It wasn’t long before Adam’s unmarked cruiser rolled up, followed by a traffic cop and a fire truck. He climbed out of his car as though aching in every bone. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I heard the call on the radio and recognized the address. You know I don’t believe in coincidences.”
I described the accident to Adam and the traffic cop. The latter seemed inclined to assign at least part of the responsibility to me, since I had threatened the driver with a bottle of piss. I showed them the pictures I had taken. He left to run the plates and report the hit-and-run.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I said to Adam. Now seemed as good a time as any.
“Try me.”
“I’ve got pictures of the Playhouse Killer.”
“Bullshit.” I let him dangle for a few seconds without saying a thing. I just held the bundle of 8x10 glossies to my chest. “You’d better not be bullshitting me, Jackie.”
“I’m not kidding. I’ve got the pictures right here.” I put them in his hands.
He flipped through them, frowning. “I don’t believe it.”
“I told you. Of course, you can’t see his face very clearly.”
“I’ll want the original image files.”
“Of course.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before now?”
“I only found out just now,” I lied.
I invited him inside. An ambulance drove up as we climbed the stairs. Mrs. Kim stuck her head into the hall, looked at us and slammed her door. We entered my apartment.
“This is a nice place,” Adam said. He walked around, staring up at the ceilings while he pretended not to be scoping the place for drug paraphernalia. “Better than it looks from the outside. Did you go to a meeting yesterday?”
“Yep.”
“Sorry I had to skip out on you. This case is eating every free minute.” It was the first time I could remember that he didn’t question me about my activities in more detail. Maybe he believed me because he had checked—as my sponsor, all it took was one phone call to find out if I had been going. Or maybe he believed me because I didn’t have to lie about it.
I turned on my laptop and plugged in my Leica. Adam examined the photo printouts I had spread on the kitchen table. I offered him a drink, but all I had was beer and tap water. “They got sodas and stuff downstairs,” I suggested.
“I’m OK.” He flicked the pictures aside. “These are useless. You can’t see the guy’s face at all.”
I lit a cigarette and offered him one, and to my surprise he took it. He lit up and sat back in the cheap creaking dinette chair, blew a cloud of gray smoke into the air over his head. God he was good-looking. I wondered if he had a girlfriend. He’d never talked about anybody romantically.
“Think about what these photos mean.” I leaned over the table and laid my hands on top of the pictures. “Our boy was there, watching us the whole time. Maybe watching us every time, for all we know.”
“He’s got balls,” Adam agreed. Then he asked me for a beer. He was falling apart in front of me. This case, especially the last week of it, was killing him. He was weakening to temptation before my very eyes, and I was the source of that temptation. But I wasn’t going to say no to him.
I grabbed a beer from the fridge and opened it. He pulled two prints out of the stack, one from the Orpheum and one from the Shell, laid them side by side and studied them while he sipped his beer. “If these two are even the same guy.”
“It would be a hell of a coincidence,” I said. I opened my photo files from the serial killer’s previous murders.
The first file I pulled up was the Simon twins folder. I clicked throug
h the images without seeing anything unusual. Next I tried the Richard Buntyn scene from the Playhouse, where the killer had earned his infamous moniker. I opened each file and inverted the colors the way Deiter had shown me, hoping I would get a glimpse of the killer hiding backstage like he had at the Orpheum. But there was nothing there. Just cops and more cops, Adam looking a good deal younger than he did now, though it had only been two years ago.
That left the Jim Krews murder—the killer’s first, as far as we knew. It had been four years ago. This killing had always seemed the most personal, the most tragic. The Simon twins had been younger, but something about the scenes I had photographed that day in midtown suggested a brutality unrivaled by any of his subsequent murders. Maybe he thought the same thing and had spent the last four years trying to recapture the magic of that first murder.
27
ONE MAY MORNING FOUR YEARS ago, Jim Krews’s parents had come home from vacation in Europe to find their son’s partially eaten corpse spitted, whole hog, over a brick barbecue pit in their backyard, warm coals still glowing beneath him. His killer had carved off his penis and portions of his buttocks. These relics were nowhere to be found and the investigators on the scene assumed they had been eaten, maybe with fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti. I had several photos of the picnic table and the words scrawled across it, in barbecue sauce—For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
Cause of death was blunt-force trauma. He’d been beaten to death with a brick. During the autopsy, Dr. Wiley found a decorative glass unicorn in the victim’s rectum. He was a poetry major at Rhodes College, the campus not far from his home. After the barbecue-sauce poetry was identified by a brand-new homicide detective as a quote from Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXLVII, they briefly took the victim’s Shakespeare professor into custody. That new detective had been Adam McPeake.
