The Hundredth Man

by J. A. Kerley

  His smirk turned to shark teeth. “Don’t you smart-mouth me, mister.”

  “I was explaining why papers removed from the home of a dead man might have significance.”

  Squill sat back, suddenly disinterested, and made his pronouncement. “Let the district detectives handle the day-to-day work, Ryder. If Piss-it does nothing but walk the tracks of the other teams” he flung his hands up “what the hell good is it?”

  Harry said, “It was walking the tracks of the other teams that gave us the missing papers in the first place.”

  Squill ignored Harry and stood. “Anyone have anything else to say?” His tone said he wouldn’t be happy if they did.

  “Dismissed,” he said. “Next time let’s try for some hard leads.”

  As he strode out the door he spat the words Piss-it just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Harry and I sat at the table and studied our hands as everyone filed out. Tom thumped us each on the shoulder as he passed. “Y’all really eating the shit sandwich on this one, guys,” he said, dolefully. “I’ll be damn glad to get you back.”

  “And we’ll be damn glad to get there,” Harry growled.

  We returned to the office and I flung my notes on my desk. “Squill calls us in, he waves us off. He wants us on the street, he wants us off the street. He’s got no idea what the hell he’s doing.”

  Harry sat heavily in his chair. “It’s Squill, Cars. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Trouble is, we don’t.”

  I tumbled thoughts over in my head. “Harry, if the PSIT turns up leads, but someone else pursues them to a bust, does the unit get any credit?”

  Harry’s sad eyes provided the answer. We’d been rip sawing the cases night and day and in return had just been informed we were incompetent screw-ups, an opinion now churning up the pipe to the brass. But if we did uncover something, Squill could subvert it by claiming the leads had arisen within the normal parameters of the investigation and had had nothing to do with the PSIT. I began to hear the clocking ticking on the unit. Or the first faint notes of a death knell.

  The offices of the Mobile News Beat were in a strip center on the south side of town, tucked between an alley and defunct hobby shop. A hand-lettered sign was taped inside a front window ghosted with the lettering of the previous occupant, AAA-Printing. Darkness hung behind the window and a magnetic sign inside the glass door informed me I was a half hour late. Hands cupped against the glass, I peered inside at cheap plastic furniture in a waiting area. A long counter separated the front from the rear work area, and a sign taped to one end of the counter said, advertising display and personals. There was a sense of bare-bones, ramshackle enterprise, and I surmised the optimum employee would be a reporter who could run a printing press while selling advertising space. Opening time noted, I picked up the latest copy from a rack by the door and headed home. I was rolling south on I-10 when the car suddenly veered off an exit and turned north, as if responding to a distress call from another world.

  Ava lived in a compact white Creole near the end of a cul-de-sac. I drove by slowly, staying low, wearing shades, my cap pulled down. Flowers and a sextet of crepe myrtles bordered her drive and several flower boxes sat on the porch. A Japanese magnolia stood in a circle of pine straw. Everything wanted water, including the yellowing lawn. The morning paper nudged the front door. Her Camry was in the drive. I phoned the morgue and Vera Braden answered. I Yankee-voiced her, talking fast, pushing flat sounds through my nose.

  “I need to talk to Dr. Davanelle and right now.”

  “Ahim sorry, she’s not in the o-fice today,” came Vera’s creamy drawl. “May Ah take a message, sir?”

  “Is this her day off? This is Sanderson. I’m the sales representative from Wankwell Testing. Dammit, I thought she’d told me her day off was tomorrow. Listen, I’ve got some new products I want to show your people “

  Vera spiked her southern cream with venom. “She was s’posed to be in today, Mr. Sanders, but I do believe she called herself in ill. How ‘bout I have her phone you up when she feels perky enough to trouble with it.”

  Click.

  My next call was to Ava. I left nothing at the beep, and drove away.

  I made it two blocks before returning to park behind her car. There was a hose falling from the side of the house and I gave everything a good soaking, almost hearing the dry lawn drink its way back to green. I found it oxymoronic that the word dry described sober but lush meant drunk, when few things parch body and mind more than addiction to alcohol. I stayed fifteen minutes and didn’t knock at the door. If she was awake she knew of my presence, and the choice of coming out was hers to make.

  CHAPTER 14

  Morning took me straight to the NewsBeafs offices, hoping for information to set my day’s structure. Harry had a meeting at the DA’s office on a previous case, and would spend most of the day either there or in the courtroom. I smelled wet ashes before turning onto the NewsBeafs block. Where yesterday stood an alternative newspaper, today squatted a fire-gutted building. The interior was a sodden pile of wreckage with the blackened carcass of an offset press and scorched file cabinets. A tall, stovepipe-lanky woman in a black shirt, jeans, and work gloves kicked disconsolately through ashes at the rear of the building.

  A siren whooped as a cruiser slipped beside me, Officer Bobby Neeland’s thick wrist over the wheel. Neeland was a square-built thirtyish pecker wood who never smiled when he could smirk or laughed when he could sneer. Even the most desperate cop groupies at Flanagan’s avoided Neeland and gigglingly referred to him as Baby-Dick behind his back. His excessive-force complaints needed a separate folder, but since there were never witnesses beyond the aggrieved, he dodged them all. Neeland slowly lowered his window and peered over dark shades.

  “Why you here, Ryder? No one died.” The blackheads clogging his nose looked like pencil leads.

  “I’m following up on something, Bobby. What the hell happened?”

  Neeland slipped off his glasses and stuck a sidepiece in his mouth, sucking noisily as he talked. “Somebody busted the window and tossed a can of gas inside.” He sneered. “Bye-bye hippie paper.”

  “Any idea who did it?”

  “Check the alley side, Ryder. It’s autographed.”

  I walked to the side of the building. Spray-scrawled against the discolored brick was white power in letters two feet high. Actually, it said, white po … , the last three letters a horizontal swipe toward the back alley.

  When I returned, Neeland was gnawing his glasses with tiny sharp teeth. The clicking made me queasy.

  “Whoever did it was more interested in running away than making a statement, Bobby.”

  “Huh? What say?”

  “Forget it. Not important.”

  He stuck his spit-wet frames on and stared through black ovals. “Heard the paper’d been writing about the white power folks lately. Guess them boys got a little pissed. Shit, Ryder, you’re a college boy, you tell me, hows come the ni blacks can have all their shit like the NCPA, but white people want to stand up for their own and it’s a big deal? I mean, where the fuck’s the justice in that?”

  Inside the front of my skull a hornet started buzzing. I said, “Know who the woman in the building is?”

  “Owns the paper. No, owned it. She ain’t s’posed to be in there on order of the fire marshal. I kicked her skinny ass out an hour ago and I’m about to do it again. Stay and watch, Ryder. It’ll be fun, she’s a real cop-hating cunt.”

  “Keep your pimply ass on the seat, Neeland. Drive away.”

  “Hell, you say.”

  “Go tickle your baby dick.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that, you fuck.”

  I stuck my face in front of his, provocation for the terminally insecure. “I’m believing I just did, Bobby.”

  Neeland’s knuckles were white on the wheel. I felt his hatred through the sunglasses; must not have been polarized. His voice shook with anger. “Get outta my face, cocksucker, or we’re
gonna have trouble.”

  I snatched his glasses from his face and tossed them over my shoulder, stepping back as I pulled his door open. Without the glasses his eyes stopped glaring and started blinking. He jutted his fat jaw and screamed at me from inside the cruiser. “I know what you’re doing, you crazy bastard! I beat your ass and who goes up on charges? Me. You ain’t getting me busted down, Ryder. I know your shit.”

  I gave Neeland his redemptive moment of grabbing the door and slamming it shut. He screeched away howling curses. His sunglasses lay on the pavement glistening with saliva. Not wanting rabies, I let them lie. Then, not wanting anyone else afflicted, I stepped on them.

  An aluminum awning hung off the building. I enjoyed its shade until the forty something woman trudged from the wreckage. She seemed overpoweringly familiar until I realized she looked like Abraham Lincoln. First, it was the eyes, deep set under cragged brow, as dark and honest as coal. Her cheekbones were high and prominent and her chin was firm and square. Black hair rose like a wave before being pulled back and secured behind her neck by a blue bandanna. Though her motions were reserved, her feet lifted high and coltish when she stepped, gangly frame following the large boots like it was surprised where it was going. She sat on the step to the parking lot and pulled off her gloves to reveal lovely hands. She leaned back on her elbows and closed her eyes.

  “Salvage anything?” I asked.

  She looked up, squinting against sunlight. “What do you care?” She’d seen me with Neeland, knew I was Cop.

  “Just do, I guess.”

  “We’ve published enough negative stories about your people that I doubt it.”

  I sat down beside her. The smell of smoke was thick on her clothes. “My people? On my daddy’s side or my mama’s?”

  The nuggets of coal inspected me. I said, “I read the article on the white power movement last night.”

  “And?”

  “It made me angry at people whose hatred of others is based on something as transparent as skin color or personal beliefs. Then I realized most of those folks have been stewed in those prejudices since they slid into the world.”

  “Don’t apologize for them. They can change.”

  “Many do. The ones that don’t spend ugly lives wallowing through inner poisons and never seem to be happy or grow into anything remotely worthwhile. Their hate-diluted lives seem ample punishment for the venom they squirt into the world. Still, it’s a damn shame on all sides.”

  She thought for a moment, and pointed an elegant finger at a storefront bakery down the street. “Grab a cup of coffee?”

  We made introductions on the walk to the bakery. I learned Christell Olivet-Toliver was the editor and publisher of the News Beat I gave her my impressions without giving away too many of my facts.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said, stirring sugar into steaming coffee. “You’re not totally convinced it was the white-power types last night?”

  “I’m just saying immediately I start poking into the NewsBeafs personal ads you get burnt down. Coincidence fascinates me.”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Is it the headless murders that you’re investigating?”

  “Without going into details, yes.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “Basically, how the personals work.”

  She cradled a ceramic mug in her violinist hands. “Let’s say you want to run an ad. All you do is write your ad, and e-mail it to the News Beat We assign your ad a code number and run it. If someone, let’s say Muffy Duffy, wants to respond “

  “I could never hit it off with someone named Muffy.”

  She flipped a stir stick at me. “Hortense goes to the personals section of our Web site and e-mails a response. Our computer system directs it to your assigned number.”

  “How does one pay?”

  “Our personals are like a club, there’s a small fee both ways. Pay online, or mail a check or money order to our office.”

  “Doesn’t sound secure, especially using check or plastic.”

  “There’s no way the public can know who’s placing an ad or responding. People trust us, and we don’t violate that trust.”

  I wagged a skeptical finger. “But computers will be computers; I’ll bet somewhere in its innards is a record of the electronic addresses of the respondents. I imagine a tech type could dig them out.”

  “Maybe. With a court order” she jabbed a long thumb at the charred building “and the computer.”

  “Everything’s gone?”

  She smiled sadly. “Ashes to ashes and all that.”

  So much for the personals. I switched gears. “Anyone strange hanging around lately?”

  “White-power types? Skinheads? Tattooed bubba boys. Like that? The other cops already asked me. I see weird characters all the time.”

  “Anyone set off alarms?”

  She tented her hands and her fingertips tapped together like butterfly wings drying in the sun. “Just one little thing. Two days ago I saw a car parked across the street from the office. I had taken the trash out about a half hour earlier and I saw the same car going down the alley as well.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “A Jaguar. XJ series. With the three-seventy horsepower Super V-eight aad the long wheelbase.”

  I gave her a look.

  “Hey, even us tree-hugging, ball-busting, feminazi communist anarchists can dream.”

  “Your titles on the paper’s masthead?”

  She sighed. “From my mail.”

  “How much did you see of the driver?”

  “I only saw it side-on and it had the deep window tinting. Nothing.”

  “Plates?”

  “I looked at it for a half second and thought about it for two. Then something else grabbed my thoughts and …” Her hands made flyaway motions.

  “You recalled the car because it’s your dream machine?” “Partly. But there’s nothing across the street from us but a second-hand clothing shop and a busted-down Laundromat. The car didn’t belong. It was just a tiny wrong note.”

  Wrong note, wrong note… Ms. Olivet-Toliver’s words echoed in my head all the rest of the day and on the way home. They pursued me through the stand-up fueling from a bowl of cold red beans and rice, and out to the deck, where I propped my feet on the rail. The sun was fading and several beachcombers sifted the surf with their little white nets. Watching them sift, I slowly realized Abraham Lincoln’s message: This case was discordant.

  Discordant. The wrong notes, maybe. Or the right notes played incorrectly, something awry in timing or interpretation. I’ve always been attuned to discord, sensitized, perhaps, so that even slight akilters can be measured.

  Something about this case had been out of true from the first moment I laid eyes upon the topless corpse of Jerrold Nelson. It was not so much the incongruity of the body lacking a head that tilted my psychic equilibrium, but rather the lack of expression in the crime or the scene. If the motive was, as Squill sold and resold at every opportunity, vengeance killing, where was the vengeance, the anger? Not in the textbook-precise removal of the head, nor the time-consuming inscriptions on the flesh. Both seemed more the work of a ghoulish accountant than a hate-charged spree killer or ritual-driven murderer. And if so, where was the sense of spree, of abandonment to savage and wanton destruction?

  The more I thought, the stronger my sense of dischord grew.

  I grew up attuned to discord, my child’s antennae sifting the air for the subtle vibrations that presaged violent change, much as seismologists use lasers and mirrors to measure hair’s-breadth motion between mountains. We all want warning before the earthquake strikes.

  I learned to want it more than most.

  Truth be told, my first memory is of a kind of earthquake. I had no warning and no one outside of our house felt it. Though it was twenty-fours years ago, I remember the event with a clarity unmarred by time, perhaps even sharpened by its passage.

  It’s night. I rise from b
ed and walk in dreamlike detachment through a narrow gray corridor that seems to span miles. Ahead is a black square set into the wall that reaches to the sky. It is the hall of our house outside of Birmingham, and it is gray with moonlight through glass and the dark square is the doorway to my brother Jeremy’s room. Screaming pours from the dark square.

  I am six and my brother Jeremy is twelve.

  I stand at the threshold and listen quietly, knowing somehow I must not enter. I need to visit the bathroom and, continuing down the hall, pass my mother’s room. She is a seamstress specializing in wedding dresses. My mother sits at her sewing machine as white fabric flows through it like liquid. Her hands are motionless above the cloth and her eyes are focused on sewing. The high whine of the sewing machine mutes the grunts and shrieks from down the hall. A floorboard creaks beneath me and she turns. Her eyes are wide and wet and she speaks, not knowing that I will remember her words, keep them forever.

  “I know it’s wrong,” she hisses through clenched teeth. “But he works so hard. He’s a professional man, an engineer. Who would think that someone like me could marry an ” A scream slices down the hall like a scythe. My mother’s brow furrows and for a moment her hands fly out of control like startled sparrows.

  “And what could I ever do anyway?”

  Mother contains her hands and turns back to her sewing but becomes still and her head droops. White fabric covers her lap like a deflated ghost. She whispers, Go back to bed, it will be quiet soon …

  At an age when most children are learning to handle a bicycle, I became a student of the transformations that preceded these events, every two or so months at first, then with accelerating frequency. It seemed I could feel the air in the house charge with negative particles that gathered in force and intensity until discharging in a night of black lightning. I learned to take shelter at the first hint of the gathering storm, to hide in my treehouse in the woods, or in the backseat of the car at night. After the storm’s passage I would seep back inside, antennae quivering for vibrations of the next explosion, ready to run.