Cage of Night

by Ed Gorman

"There's nothing to talk about, Josh. There was an accident on the highway and this woman was hurt and bleeding and I helped her and I got some of her blood on me. No big deal."

  "Right," he said. "No big deal."

  I went up to bed.

  Richard Mitchell, KNAX-TV:

  "The prisoner has been under a suicide watch for the last month. Round the clock surveillance, including video cameras in his cell. Some of our viewers may remember that a few years ago, a prisoner in Nebraska tried to hang himself in his cell the day before the execution. He was almost dead but the warden insisted that doctors revive him. The next day, the prisoner was executed as scheduled."

  Tape 34-D, October 31. Interview between Attorney Risa Wiggins and her client in the Clark County Jail

  A: You say the alien made you do it. I guess you'll have to explain that to me.

  C: The chant.

  A: The chant?

  C: In my head. Over and over. Telling me what to do. I tried everything I could to get rid of it but nothing worked. Finally, I realized the only thing I could do was do what the alien told me—and then the chanting would stop.

  From a Police Report-September 24,1903

  The thing was, he didn't put up any resistance at all. I found him in a deserted barn on the edge of town. Somebody had come running to the station house to tell me that something terrible was going on there.

  His name is Abner. He works as a clerk over at First Bank. Very mild-mannered.

  When I got there, I found him sitting there in the middle of the barn. He had a lantern nearby and a completely naked dead woman stretched across his lap. This one, it was her face he mostly mutilated. The eyes were dug out, of course.

  He was skinning her.

  I drew my service revolver and walked over to him and told him to put down the mule knife he was using to skin her.

  He put the knife down, the naked woman with most of her skin stripped off still on his lap, and he said, "I didn't want to kill any of them, officer. I really didn't."

  Then he started telling me about this well up by one of the line shacks the electric company uses. He said there was some kind of Martian or something in the well and that it was the Martian who was making him kill all these women.

  All I could think of was when that meteor crashed out there several years back. Bunch of town kids started the story that there were Martians inside the meteor—like in some story by H. G. Wells, they said—and that the Martians were going to take over the entire planet.

  There was a lot of fuss when that rumor started, and even some adults, who should've known better, started to believe it.

  This Abner Fenton was apparently one of the adults who believed it.

  When I told him it was time to put the handcuffs on him, he just nodded to the dead woman's right arm and said, "I'm almost finished with her arm. Couldn't I just have a few more minutes?"

  I picked up the knife and put my gun on him and told him to set the woman on the floor and stand up.

  He never gave me any more trouble the rest of the night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By morning, Mrs. Swenson's body had been discovered, and I quickly got the feeling that our little town was never going to be the same again.

  In big cities, even the most heinous of murders are quickly forgotten, unless one of the killers or victims is famous.

  But a small town is like a family, and when one of your own is murdered, the death becomes very personal.

  Especially given the way that Mae Swenson was butchered.

  Downtown talk was of nothing else. The women looked scared, the men looked angry.

  A small group of hunters over at Al's Diner talked about getting a posse together and hunting down the killer in the woods, where they were sure he was hiding.

  They just couldn't believe that anybody from our town could murder somebody this way.

  All kinds of rumors and theories were floated.

  Because we live within fifty miles of a prison, there was talk that a multiple-murderer had escaped and killed Mrs. Swenson. According to this story, the killer was black. Of course.

  Another rumor had it that a biker gang did it. The town had always hated this gang, and pretty much forced it to keep to a single tavern down by the railroad spur. I guess the Chief actually did ride out to the old quonset huts where the bikers lived—and mysteriously collected unemployment checks—and ask them a lot of hard questions.

  Finally, and inevitably, there was the rumor about Mr. Proctor. He was pushing fifty now, and quieter than ever, and unmarried as ever. He wrote how-to books for a living and lived alone in a two-story frame house that he'd fixed up by himself. Everybody had long assumed he was gay, and as we all know gay people just can't wait to take a knife to straights like us, and so whenever anything notably terrible happened in town, a lot of people looked to Mr. Proctor.

  I'm told that the Chief also paid Mr. Proctor a visit very soon after one of the farm hands discovered Mae Swenson's body.

  The department store became another gathering place for yarn-spinners. If the clerks weren't huddling together to tell campfire tales, the clerks and the customers were huddling together. The customers told better stories, especially those who'd had a few drinks. One of them even suggested that eighty-one year old Mae had had a boyfriend—"one of them male strippers from what I hear"—who had killed her because she was breaking up with him.

  The horror of the bloody murder lasted most of the morning. But just after lunch, the horror having been dulled somewhat by now, talk turned to Mae Swenson's fabled and fabulous treasure—all that loot, all those diamonds somewhere in her house.

  I was wondering about the loot myself.

  Josh stopped in around two-thirty that afternoon.

  "You hear there's a posse combing the woods?"

  "I wonder if the Chief knows."

  "He's part of it."

  "What're they looking for?"

  "Nobody's saying."

  He paused a moment and said, "You get off at five?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "I'll meet you at the front door."

  "Where we going?"

  He stared at me a long and somber time. "I think we need to talk a little bit about last night."

  "The blood?"

  "Yeah. The blood."

  I looked around the empty shoe department. I wanted to make sure that nobody was within hearing distance.

  "I didn't kill her, Josh."

  "Maybe not. But I have a feeling you know something about it."

  "That's different from killing her."

  "Not necessarily. You ever hear of 'accessory after the fact?'"

  I forced a smile. "You been watching Court TV again?"

  "Yeah. I had to do a paper on it. They spent a whole half hour talking about this guy who'd been charged as 'an accessory after that fact.' He got his ass nailed."

  "How bad?"

  "Ten to fifteen years."

  "Wow."

  "Something you should think about, brother."

  "I'll see you at five."

  But right before five Josh called.

  "Coach Beaumont's on the rag again. He doesn't think our practices have been going all that well. So he's making us stay till seven."

  "We can talk tonight."

  "I'm scared for you, Spence. I really am."

  And the way his voice quavered when he said it, I could tell that he really was.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Dad said, "I hear there's this nephew."

  Mom said, "Nephew?"

  We were at the dinner table.

  "A nephew who can't hold a job, and who's been in trouble with the law, and who already owed her a lot of money anyway."

  "Oh," Mom said, "I heard that one, too. Except it was a niece."

  "A niece?"

  "Yeah. According to Mrs. Finch there was a niece who's a wet T-shirt gal over in Muscatine."

  "What's a wet T-shirt gal?"

  "You know, goes around to all the
se taverns where they have wet T-shirt nights, and always wins first prize. But she was always bumming money off Mae, and last night Mae said no, and so the niece killed her."

  "The niece," said Dad, "makes a better story than the nephew."

  "She sure does," Mom smiled. "Especially the part about the wet T-shirt contests." Then she looked sad. "Poor Mae. Old woman out there all alone, and somebody does something like this to her."

  "I'm glad we've got the death penalty back."

  To me, Mom said, "I never used to agree with your dad about the death penalty, remember?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "But now I do. There's some things that people do that are so terrible there's only one way to punish them." She looked sad again. "And this is one of them."

  Fifteen minutes later, I was in the upstairs john, brushing my teeth and combing my hair, and getting ready to go out for the evening.

  Not that I had any idea where I was going. But I was restless. I just kept seeing poor Mae there on the bed. There weren't any words for what Garrett had done to her.

  I heard the phone ring but I let Mom get it. Most of the calls were for her and Josh.

  I was just walking to my room when Mom called up the stairs. "For you." Beat. "Cindy Brasher."

  A great joy and a great anger and a great panic came over me. I was already trying to contrive a personality for the phone.

  Debonair? Not likely for somebody like me.

  Glad to hear from her? No, that would sound like I'd eat up any crumbs she was willing to scatter on the ground.

  Ominous—hinting that I knew about last night? No; I didn't want to sound like a blackmailer.

  I picked up the receiver in my room.

  "Hi, Spence."

  "Hi."

  "Is this a bad time? I mean, are you busy?"

  "Not especially. Just getting ready to go out."

  "Oh, should I call you back some other time?"

  "This is fine."

  My heart was threatening to tear out of my chest, like that monster in Alien that comes bursting out.

  "I wondered if you'd talk to me."

  "I thought I was talking to you."

  "I mean in person."

  "Oh."

  "I'd really appreciate it."

  "I don't know, Cindy."

  "I'm really sorry for the way I treated you."

  "Yeah, I'll bet."

  "There were things going on, Spence—things I couldn't talk about till now."

  I decided to have a little mean fun.

  "Boy, that was terrible about Mrs. Swenson, wasn't it?" Long pause. "I really need to see you, Spence. Tonight."

  "What time?" It felt great to have control of a situation that involved Cindy.

  "An hour from now."

  "Where?"

  "Old Franklin school. The one that burned down?"

  "Why there?"

  "Somebody's following me, Spence. It's not too far from my house. I can slip out the back way and he won't see me go."

  Some more mean fun.

  "You sound like you're in trouble, Cindy."

  "I don't want to talk on the phone, Spence."

  "All right."

  "I really appreciate this."

  "I'm not going to let you use me again, Cindy."

  "I don't blame you for being angry."

  "What's Garrett going to think about you seeing me?"

  Long pause again. "He's the one who's following me."

  "Why?"

  "I'll tell you when I see you."

  "An hour?"

  "An hour. And—thanks, Spence."

  An hour from now I was going to see Cindy Brasher again. I didn't even give a damn about the murder anymore. All I could think of was Cindy.

  All I could think about was what it would be like to hold her again, and have her whisper those things I carried around with me like fragments of a half-forgotten song.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I was just leaving my room when Josh appeared in the doorway.

  "We need to talk," he said.

  He came in and closed the door and went over and sat on the edge of the bed.

  "Somebody saw you," he said.

  "Somebody saw me what?"

  "Drive away from the Swenson house last night."

  "How the hell would you know that?"

  "You forget. The Chief's son is on the team."

  "Oh."

  I leaned against the door. I felt exhausted now. I wanted to crawl into bed and sleep forever. Not even the prospect of Cindy seemed so dazzling.

  "They said it was an old brown car."

  "There are a lot of old brown cars."

  "Not that many."

  "Who saw me?"

  "Guy Everback. The farmer who lives out near there."

  "He say it was me?"

  "No, he just said it was an old brown car." He sighed, shook his head. "So you were out there?"

  "Yes. But I didn't kill her. She was dead when I got there."

  "What the hell were you doing out there?"

  "Checking on somebody."

  "Checking on somebody? What the hell does that mean?" He got up, started pacing. "This is the kind of thing they execute you for in this state."

  "I didn't kill her."

  "There was sure a hell of a lot of blood on your clothes last night."

  "I know."

  "That's all you've got to say? 'I know.'"

  "I'm going to take care of it."

  "What'd you do with the clothes?"

  "Buried them."

  "Where?"

  "Out by the garage. Under the garbage cans."

  "A dog could dig that up."

  "Not in winter."

  He looked sad now. "You know what this kind of thing would do to Mom and Dad?"

  "What 'kind of thing'? I didn't do anything."

  "You admit you were out there."

  "All right."

  "And somebody saw a car like yours pulling away."

  "So?"

  "And you had bloody clothes on when you came home."

  "All right."

  "And then you buried them underneath the garbage cans. How do you think all this is going to sound to the Chief?"

  I walked over to the window. Looked out. All the roof tops looked familiar, snug and snow-mantled in the night. I'd seen them from this perspective for so many years. Once again, I had the desire to be a boy, and to face nothing more serious than a boy ever faced.

  "It's only a matter of time until the Chief starts rounding up everybody in town who has a car like yours."

  "By then, I'll have figured it out."

  "Figured what out?" Josh said.

  "How to turn the real killer over."

  He looked startled. "You really know who the killer is?"

  "Yes."

  "And you haven't told the Chief?"

  "Not yet."

  "Why?"

  "Because—there's somebody I have to help first."

  "The only person you should worry about is yourself. This is first-degree murder we're talking here."

  "I know. I just need a day or two."

  "In a day or two, you could be in jail."

  "I'll have to take that chance."

  "You're taking too many chances, Spence."

  He came over and put his hand on my shoulder. Big brother. Except he was little brother. "I want to help you, Spence. I can talk to the Chief before you do, if that'd help."

  "Maybe later. Not now."

  "This thing is only going to get worse, Spence."

  "I have to go now."

  "Maybe I'll go to the Chief myself."

  "No!"

  I spun around and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. It was kind of funny, me holding him like this. He was so much taller than me.

  "No, Josh," I said. "Please. I need a few days, and I need to do this my way. There's somebody innocent involved. I need to help—"

  I stopped myself. I'd been about to say "her."

  "
You need help, Spence. Maybe a psychologist or somebody like that. You could be the prime suspect, man, and you don't even seem to care."

  "There's something I have to do first, Josh. You'll just have to trust me."

  And with that, I left my room.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Something was wrong.

  I stood next to the door on the driver's side of my car and saw that it was open by half an inch or so.

  Getting it to close took a certain trick, one I'd mastered a long time ago, one I used every time I left the car.

  But now the door was open. Somebody had been in here. I did a quick search of the front and back seats but couldn't find anything missing.

  All I could think of was what Josh had said about the Chief being told of a car that looked like mine.

  Had the Chief decided to check mine out himself?

  I'd parked, as I usually did, alongside the garage. Josh always parked at the curb out front, and Dad, to baby the family Buick, always took the garage.

  I had some trouble getting the car started. I prayed to the god of old and obstinate motors and he finally came through for me. The engine kicked over.

  I was two blocks from my house when I saw Garrett in his police car.

  There'd been a fender bender at a stoplight.

  Garrett stood by one of the cars, his foot up on the bumper, writing things down in his book. He was wearing his new cowskin western boots.

  His Magnum rode his Sam Browne with imposing and impressive majesty. This was what gave Garrett his superiority to all other merely mortal citizens—not his badge, not his officer's oath, but his weapon. And his legal right to use it when he saw fit.

  He seemed to sense me.

  He glanced up just as I slowly entered the intersection. Our eyes met, held.

  Only because I started to fishtail a little bit did I look away.

  I gripped the wheel and steered the car through the intersection.

  Did he know that I was going to see Cindy tonight? Did he know that Cindy had turned to me when she was in the worst trouble of her life?

  Heady feelings. That a girl so beautiful would choose me as her confidante.

  Garrett no longer scared me.

  Soon enough, he'd be in prison for the murder he'd committed last night, and Cindy would be free to see me again.