The Hundredth Man

by J. A. Kerley

  “An old guy who sits on his porch calls us Mussolini’s train; we always run on time.”

  “Every Thursday?”

  “Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, rain or shine.”

  I made one more call to a person I did not enjoy disturbing, then turned to Harry. “Cheryl Knotts, Deschamps’s fiancee, says the thermostat had been dropped to fifty degrees. She couldn’t explain it, said the temp was the one thing she and Peter used to argue about: she liked cool, he was warmer blooded.”

  Harry nodded, started feeling it. “The killer couldn’t control the temperature at the park, but his surveillance told him that the Night Rangers would chug through at ten forty-five.”

  “On the dot,” I said. “He spotlighted his merchandise not just to show off …”

  “But to get it to the cooler as quick as possible. Didn’t want the meat to spoil.”

  “Who watches after a body’s found?” I needed to hear it said.

  Harry ticked the participants off on his fingers. “Cops show up. The ME’s office shows up. Criminalists show up. Fingerprints. Techs. Detectives. Ambulance drivers. Passersby.”

  “Take it to the morgue.”

  “Attendants. Pathologists. Doc P. More forensics types, maybe. Cops. Then the afterward folks; funeral homes.”

  “Maybe the killer’s sending messages to someone in the chain, Harry. I think we can write off passersby and the shifting cast of fire department and ambulance personnel. They’re transients. Ditto the afterward folk.”

  “Leaves morgue and criminalist folk. And us.”

  I cupped my hand behind my ear. “Do you hear it, Harry?”

  He flicked a nail against his glass.

  Bing.

  CHAPTER 20

  “I started drinking when my brother died. Two years ago. Heavily, that is. I’d always liked it, from the first time I had a beer when I was sixteen. It made me feel, I don’t know, smart. I got the grades and did all the right things, but always felt dumb. Like I was faking it.”

  Ava and I walked slowly along the beach. It was midnight deserted, just us and the waves and the slightest thread of breeze. Our footsteps crunched in the dry sand. I said, “Your brother, you mentioned him once. Lonnie?”

  “Lane. He was four years older than me. I called him Smoke. It was my pet name for him because he moved so softly and quietly. I’d be sitting on the porch reading and he’d drift up and point at a cloud and begin describing the shapes in it…”

  She’d started talking when I walked through the door, a flood of disparate thoughts connected only in that she wanted them out. I also felt she wanted to talk about her drinking, to pick it apart and study it. She wanted to understand how to ground herself when shadow lightning hissed and sizzled in her head, how to channel the current harmlessly into the earth.

  “We could spend an entire afternoon studying the clouds. Or I’d watch him draw … “

  We started toward my house, crossing the roll of the small dunes.

  “As early as I can remember he was an artist; not a kid who did art. He’d amaze people with his insights and skill. I have six of his paintings at home.”

  I recalled the brilliantly crafted abstracts on her walls, controlled explosions of color, joyous. “I saw them. No, that’s wrong: I was pulled into them.”

  “The one by the couch? Red and gold and green? It’s called Crows. Most people see dirty black birds, Lane saw beyond, into their beauty. That’s how I felt when he was with me, he saw places where I was beautiful that were hidden to me. He used to call me or even come visit when I was in school. He kept me going, focused. I felt so alive when he was here.”

  “How did he die?”

  She stopped. Behind her, far down the strand, I saw whirling stars. Kids out burning sparklers, the Fourth wasn’t too far away.

  “He committed suicide,” she said. “It turned out he had been seeing a psychiatrist for years. Depression. It tore our family to pieces.”

  I watched the sparkling stars, said nothing.

  “I thought back through all the times he’d seemed so happy, so alive. But he had this this mental cancer in him, a thing with tentacles that kept growing until it tore him away from me, from our family, from everything.

  “That was when I first fell apart. My anger turned to drinking and I took leave from school and stayed drunk for a semester. Sick, rotten drunk. The school knew about Smoke, about Lane. They thought I was just taking time off to deal with it.”

  I wrapped her shoulders with my arm. “You were, Ava. Just not correctly.”

  “When I started working here … there was no Smoke to call at night, no one to tell me I’d be fine. I’d have a bad day with Dr. Peltier and I’d go home and have a drink and suddenly it was morning and I was on the couch with an empty bottle in the kitchen. I’d fight it until the weekend and fall apart again. Then I’d be so ashamed I’d “

  She hung her head. “Damn, Carson, I have an MD and I can’t even begin to explain alcohol addiction. For an alcoholic to drink is a supremely irrational act. And yet, as scientifically and logically trained as I am, I drink. It’s insane.”

  We stood quietly and watched the sparklers etch silver against the dark until they shrank into black. We headed back to the house. I heard music, Louis Armstrong blowing “Stars Fell on Alabama” through the sea oats. Harry was in my drive, sitting in his old red Volvo wagon and sipping from a bottle of beer. He heard us crunching through the sand and turned off the music.

  “Sorry if I’m interrupting, Cars, but I wanted to run a couple things by you.”

  I did the perfunctories as we climbed the steps. “Harry, Ava Davanelle, Ava, Harry Nautilus.”

  “We met at a couple of posts,” Harry said to Ava.

  “I probably wasn’t the best of company. I apologize.”

  “I didn’t notice, Doctor; I tend to keep my distance when the chitlins are showing.”

  We went inside. Ava picked up her AA book and said she was going to read. Harry sat on the couch and leaned forward, clasping his hands on a bouncing knee. “She doing any better, Cars?” he asked when the door closed behind Ava.

  “Worn and shaky, but talking it out some tonight. Bear said that’s a good sign. What brings you to the water’s edge, bro?”

  Harry scowled at the iced tea I’d set in front of him. “You got anything stronger, Cars?”

  “In my trunk.”

  “Sure could use a tot of scotch.”

  I went to my car under the house and fetched the Glenlivet. Holding the gurgling bottle made me recall scrabbling through Ava’s car and finding the vodka. I stood below the bedroom and heard Ava’s footsteps creaking across the floor above.

  My box in the air above an island.

  The tide was receding, the waves a gentle hiss a hundred yards distant. I listened to Ava padding across the wood and hoped my small retreat might be where she found comfort. That it might do for her what it had done for me.

  While in my first year of college, tired of the questions “Are you any relation to …” and the lies I answered with, I’d changed my name from Ridgecliff to Ryder. I took the name from Albert Pinkham Ryder, the nineteenth-century painter whose most enduring works are of men in small boats on dark and boiling seas. Changing my name was one of many changes back then, all designed to destroy the undestroyable fact that I was the son of a fiercely sadistic man and the brother of one who had murdered five women.

  I’d quit college, joined the navy, returned to college, changing majors like changing shoes, finally planting deepest in psychology. Girlfriends came and went like meals. I changed hair, vehicles, speech patterns, magazine subscriptions. I once had five addresses in a year, not counting my car. I changed my name.

  But every morning I still woke up me.

  My mother died. I intended to use the inheritance money to buy a single-wide trailer and let the rest spin a tight but viable existence. When you sleep upward of a dozen hours a day, basic existence is not a hard nut to make. O
ne day, fishing the surf, I saw this place. It stood in the air, but its underpinnings were sturdy. The windows were wide. The deck overlooked boundless water. It had a For Sale sign.

  I couldn’t push the place from my mind and even dreamed of it, sometimes as a house, sometimes as a helmet with visor. I bought it two weeks later, knowing I’d have to work to keep it. Spurred by Harry’s remark about me making a good cop, I joined the police force and found the work honorable and necessary. It also let me see clearly, for the first time, what had been in front of me for years.

  In the first few months on the street I learned vast helpings of the misery I encountered came from the participants’ inability to tear free of their pasts. Old slights simmered into grudges, grudges into gun-shots. Crackheads shambled inexorably from last bust to next vial. I watched hookers link and relink with the pimps who would eventually kill them, directly or indirectly. Don’t do it, I’d plead into faces confused by paths they felt driven to walk. Stop. Think. It doesn’t have to be like this. The past is nothing but a series of recollections; it doesn’t own you. Change before it’s too late.

  Talking to myself.

  One aspect of a tectonic shift in self-awareness a revelation if you will is it is ineffable, beyond description. So I can only say that on a normal afternoon one thousand and fifty-two days ago, I went to a locked footlocker in the farthest reaches of my closet and withdrew a black-handled knife I’d seen plunged into a squealing, desperate shoat. A knife Jeremy had hidden in the basement of our home. I tucked the knife beneath my shirt and took the ferry across the wide mouth of Mobile Bay. Midpoint in the journey, without ceremony or even a second glance, I sent the knife to join the broken craft of older wars.

  The ferry brought me home, which is here, not there, now, not then. I figure if we are prisoners of the past, we are jailer as well.

  I turned to go back upstairs and again heard Ava’s footsteps creak across the floor. She stopped directly above and for a moment we aligned from sand to stars. A need arose in my fingertips which I resisted as a quaint and silly notion, yet reached to touch the joists above my head. They’re wood, rough hewn and salt crusted, but to my fingers they seemed a kind of holy relic, one mingling human frailty with ceaseless faith … the bones of light, perhaps.

  I heard the door open and Harry called my name into the night, wondering where I was.

  CHAPTER 21

  I poured Harry a scotch and soda and we sat in the living room.

  Harry rolled his glass between his hands and said, “After you took off tonight I hung around at Flanagan’s. Guess who comes in? Rhea Plaitt.”

  “From legal.”

  “Witchy woman, sexy and hexy. We get to talking. Bayside comes up and she says, no problem, the state’s got a database of incorporations. Suddenly Rhea’s got a teensy computer wired into the wall and her lovely fingers are tapping away. Bingo, Rhea’s reading about a company called Bayside Consulting. Incorporated a couple years back. A sole-proprietorship, something with evaluation of medical equipment. Vague.”

  I felt an electric prickle run up my spine, leaned forward. “One owner. Usually a smaller business. And?”

  Harry looked at his size-fourteen black loafers and shook his head.

  “What? Come on, give.” I said.

  “I think the lines are getting confused.”

  “Harry? What are you “

  He looked at me and said, “Bayside Consulting is owned by Clair Peltier.”

  My breath stopped. I closed my eyes and heard the low burr of the refrigerator, a drip of water from the shower head in the bathroom, Harry’s breathing. I heard Ava turn a page in the book she was reading two dozen feet away behind a door.

  “There’s a simple explanation,” I said.

  “Doesn’t the doc spend a lot of time out of town?”

  “She’s a consultant, Harry. She consults out of town. It’s in the job description. She also goes to seminars, symposia.”

  “I’d be interested if she was symposia ting when Nelson was in Biloxi.”

  After Harry left I tried relaxing on the deck, but it was a windless night and the mosquitoes were a crawling blanket. When I retreated to bed my head showed unwanted movies: Nelson, Clair; penumbras of distant worlds converging in muddy shadow. I heard the bedsprings bouncing beneath Ava; Bear said she’d have a tough time sleeping; alcohol impairs the body clock and sends dense, creepy dreams. After slipping into a T-shirt and shorts, I knocked on her door and said I couldn’t sleep, either, maybe it would help if we both didn’t sleep together. She was beneath a quilt and patted beside her. I lay down and we both yielded to a welcome, temporary darkness.

  Dawn was at the curtains when my vagabond dreams evaporated. My eyes focused on Ava, turned toward me with her head snuggled into the pillow and slender hands tucked to her chin. I moved slowly getting off the bed, keeping her safely in sleep.

  I awoke fully in the surf, the waves chilled by an offshore current, saline taste in my mouth and salt sting in my eyes. The sun was hazed, the air already curdling with heat. I sluiced off the salt in the cold-water shower beneath my house and went inside to the scent of coffee. I dressed and came out to find Ava at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. A glass of orange juice and plate with toast crumbs sat by her elbow.

  “I was watching you swim,” she said. “Why so far out? Why not back and forth along the beach?”

  “I swim straight out until I’m breathless and can’t go another stroke, then turn around.”

  She gave me a raised eyebrow.

  “I hate exercising,” I explained. “I either keep swimming or drown. It’s good incentive.”

  She shook her head. “I actually understand that.”

  I studied her. “You look better.”

  She gestured at her garb: pink ribbed tank top, white jeans, hair held back with a golden scrunchy. “DKAA. Casual wear for the recovering alky.”

  “I meant you,” I said. “You’re getting color. Your “

  ” hands aren’t shaking as much,” she said, holding her OJ semi-steady in front of her. She took a sip and set it down. “I slept good,” she continued. “Other … bad times, I no, dammit, on other drunks I always sleep rotten after quitting. But when I woke up, I heard you breathing and I thought, I’m safe, and went back to sleep.”

  I walked behind her and my fingers found her shoulders, lightly kneading. She spun a kink from her neck, let her cheek rest against my hand. The sun crested the roofline of the house to my east and the kitchen slowly brightened through my curtains. Dust motes glittered in the sunlit air like pinpoint flares. I watched them burn and felt strangely at peace.

  Ava said, “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about the first night. It’s a little fuzzy, but I remember discussing the physical similarities between Deschamps and Nelson; how they were basically the same, just that Deschamps had a more pronounced musculature.”

  I sat beside her. “Twins, or brothers, you said, one worked out more than the other.”

  “Something else popped into my head.” Ava sipped juice and probed her memory. “We had a head trauma victim the second day the new facility opened. A nineteen-year-old boy from a party in the north end of the county. The county police brought the body in and I did the post.”

  I remembered the incident, but it was out of our jurisdiction and I hadn’t paid much attention to it.

  “He had the same basic body type, tall and long-limbed, plus his skin was smooth and unblemished, non hirsute as well.”

  “Musculature?”

  “Very similar to Nelson. Probably high-rep lifting of lighter weights resulting in more definition and less bulk, especially in the arms and shoulder.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “He was struck in the head with a round, blunt object. A softball-sized stone, judging by the wounds. Or something similar.”

  My connection to Sergeant Clint Tate of the Mobile County Police was a patch-through and the signal struggled to reach his cruis
er in Citronelle.

  “There’d been a rave, buncha kids in a watermelon field,” Tate said, a constant crackle beneath his words like someone crumpling a pretzel bag. “Never seem to find out about raves till they’re done, couldn’t do a helluva lot if we did. They pay some farmer a couple hundred bucks to rent a few acres, haul in a generator for lights and music, and it’s a party. The vie you’re talking about’s a kid named Jimmy Farrier, a student at University of South Alabama. No brushes with the law, nothing. A decent kid that heard about a party and thought he’d give it a try. We’re still digging but we’re spread kinda thin.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Nearest we can come up with is he must have pissed someone off. Blunt-force head trauma in a dry creek bed in the woods, about three hundred feet from the rave proper. He took a while to die.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “Anonymous call about two a.m. Fake voice. Kid voice, girl. Scared. Probably off in the woods stoned and fell over him.”

  “Anything unusual about the body? Maybe marks on the neck where someone tried cutting?”

  “All I recollect is that the clothes were” there were a few loud pops and Tate sounded like he was drowning in flames “… bit … zipped … neck.”

  “I missed that, Sergeant. Repeat please.”

  “I said, his clothes had been pulled around a bit. Pants unzipped. Shirt yanked up to the neck.”

  “Any leads?” I said, yelling over the electronic warfare. For a moment the signal cleared enough for me to hear Sergeant Tate sigh.

  “Got about two hundred half-naked dope-addled kids dancing in a little circle of light with nothing beyond but woods. A killer’s dream party, Detective.”

  “When you get done, Carson, just drop ‘em off to my desk.”

  Vera Braden left me and the three files in one of the morgue’s small meeting rooms. Neither Clair nor Will Lindy were in this morning, something to do with a budget meeting. Vera didn’t know when they’d be back.

  I pulled a facial shot of Farrier from the shots taken when he entered the morgue. A square and beardless baby face with eruptions of acne. Prominent ears and shave-sides haircut. There was dirt on his lips and teeth from the field where he’d fallen. I traded the facial for a full-length photo and held a similar shot of Jerrold Nelson beside Farrier.