“Yes, sir.”
Rockwell stuffs the plugs up his nostrils. “Let’s try this again.”
#
The front door of Boris’s cabin opens into the living area. The floor is covered with green shag carpet. The only objects in the room are a dirty orange recliner, a small bookshelf stuffed with ratty paperbacks, and a writing desk in the corner. When we step inside, a skittish cat runs past us and out through the door.
Rockwell begins examining the room, starting at the bookshelf. He removes a book titled “How to Toilet-Train Your Cat”, runs his fingers through the pages, then puts it back in place. He pulls out the next book, something by Carl Jung, and does the same. “Tell me something, Eugene, do you have any idea who might have committed this crime?”
“Some hoodlums, I suppose.”
“Not much of a policeman, are you?”
“Honestly, I think you may be right.” I’m not offended by Rockwell’s bluntness. At this point, Rockwell is something of a curiosity in my mind. I’m not sure yet if his arrogance is warranted, but he seems methodical and sincere.
Rockwell flips through the last book and returns it to the shelf. He crouches down and looks under the recliner, careful not to let his suit touch the filthy carpet. “What was the hardest job you ever worked on as a law enforcement officer?” he asks.
“I think you already know the answer to that, sir. I’m sure you’ve read all about the kidnappings in Chesterville a few years back.”
“I’ve read about it, but not from the news. I avoid the papers as best I can. I only read official police documents, specifically ones applicable to my current case.” He stands. “Or the location of my current case.”
“It was a big national story at the time. Most of the department lost their jobs over that fiasco.”
“And yet, you remain.” Rockwell disappears into the small kitchen.
“Nepotism, no doubt,” I speak loud enough for him to hear in the other room. “Six kids went missing, and we never found a single one. Shameful, really. But we had no leads. And the Feds didn’t help much either.”
Rockwell re-emerges. “Your personnel file said you have a young son. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If having a son about the same age as the victims didn’t motivate you to find those poor kids, I don’t know how you ever expected to locate the murderer of this old coot.”
I feel more shame than anger at Rockwell’s assertions. “That’s why we brought you in, sir,” I say.
Rockwell enters the bathroom. “Boris has plumbing and electricity in here. That’s strange for a cabin out in the woods, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. Rumor has it that he brought quite a bit of money with him when he immigrated. Must have had enough for a septic tank and a generator at least. There’s solar panels on the roof too, but those are fairly new.” I follow Rockwell from the bathroom to the bedroom. “Sir, can I ask you what your hardest case was?”
“Don’t have a lot of hard cases. Not hard to solve, anyhow. But I’ll tell you about a case that was hard to rationalize.” Rockwell sweeps his hand under the mattress of the bed. “Someone murdered a couple of illegals down in LA, a husband and wife. It was a bloody mess. Stabbed dozens of times each. Cops brought in the young daughter, said she was traumatized from witnessing the murders. She refused to talk about it.”
Rockwell lifts the mattress and props it up against the wall. “But I knew from the first second I saw her: that little bitch killed her parents. Mom and Dad were probably smacking her around. Or worse. So she took matters into her own hands. No one at the department believed me, of course. No one could admit to themselves that an eight-year-old was capable of committing such a brutal crime. People don’t really believe in evil—that’s why the justice system is broken.”
Kneeling down, Rockwell feels the floor under the bed. “I used to be more like you, trying to do good police work but not willing to face the darker side of human nature. I had compassion but not understanding. That was before I had a conversion of sorts. Except, I didn’t find faith, I lost faith. All it took was seeing a murder. Not investigating a murder, the way we police often do, but seeing one. Gang related public execution. Senseless.” He stands and motions for the files again. “Didn’t you find something under the mattress when you first came through?”
I locate the correct papers in the file and hand them over. “We found a handwritten book. Here are photocopies of a few pages.”
Rockwell reads aloud, “Today I gave a blue ball to Ivan and a red ball to Natalya. Both were content. I took the balls away from the subjects and showed interest in the blue ball in front of both. I gave the balls back, and Natalya bit Ivan and took the blue ball from him. Must investigate further.’” He turns to me. “What does this mean?”
“Well, sir. We think Boris was observing and documenting the behavior of his cats.” I shrug. “It’s got to be lonely out here by one’s self.”
“I imagine.” Rockwell hands the papers back. “Show me the basement.”
#
I open the wooden door in the back of the cabin that leads down into the basement and flip on the light switch.
“He has electricity down here too?” Rockwell asks.
“And plumbing. Boris’s mother lived down here for a while. She passed on back in the nineties.”
Rockwell heads down the stairs and mutters, maybe only to himself, “Only a Ruskie would store his own mother in a cellar.”
The basement is set up as one large bedroom, with a toilet and sink in one corner, and a bed in the other. Small plastic balls and stuffed animals litter the floor, and piles of clothes surround a dresser that’s up against the far wall. Rockwell grabs a stuffed bear, holds it up, and gives me a questioning look.
“Cat toys?” I offer.
Rockwell shakes his head and drops the toy. He heads to the dresser. “A bunch of old women’s clothes here. And it looks like it’s been rifled through recently. Did it look this way when you got here, or did you disrupt the evidence?”
“It looked very similar to this when I found it.”
“Why would old Boris be digging through his mother’s clothes? And why is the bed unmade?”
“Well, maybe Boris was one of those Norman Bates types...without the knife murder part. More likely, the murderer was searching down here for valuables.”
“I’ve seen enough. Come with me.” Rockwell marches up the stairs. I keep close behind as he walks around the cabin and heads down to the pond. He tugs at the rope that’s tied around a tree on one end—the other end runs down into the murky water. He lets out a dramatic sigh, then sits in the dirt and pats the ground next to himself. “Sit here with me.”
I obey. Rockwell is noticeably pale and covered in sweat.
“It’s getting dark now,” he says.
I follow his gaze to where the sun has moved down over the farthest lines of trees in the distance. “Yes, it is.”
“I hoped I was wrong,” Rockwell says. “I don’t know why I do that—I’m never wrong. But I really hoped I was this time.” He now seems transfixed on the glimmering surface of the pond. “Tell me, what did you and old Boris talk about when you would come up here to visit?”
“I’d ask him how things were going, and he’d talk about the latest book he checked out from the library in town. He always had a lot to say about politics and philosophy and science, was always reading Einstein or Tolstoy or something.”
“He ever talk about Schrödinger?”
“I don’t know who that is, sir.”
“Erwin Schrödinger was a physicist who wrote about cats. He said if you put a cat in a box with a flask of poison and closed the lid, the cat would be both alive and dead until you opened the lip and observed it. This demonstrates the theory of quantum entanglement.”
“Is that one of those ‘if a tree falls in the forest’ things?”
“Not really.” Rockwell sighs again. “Eugene, who do you think co
mmitted this crime, if you had to make a guess right now?”
“I’d say it was someone from Chestervillie who heard a rumor that Boris had some money stashed up here somewhere. Probably a junkie or someone in desperate need of cash.”
“You’re completely wrong. Are you ready for me to tell you who really killed the old fellow?”
“Sure, if you figure you know.”
“It was a child, about ten or eleven. Overpowered him, stuck him with a syringe of his own cat tranquilizer.”
Rockwell’s mind has clearly formulated a macabre and improbably explanation for Boris’s death, but I play along. “It seems farfetched for a child to be all the way out here.”
“Not really.” Rockwell gives me a penetrating stare. “Try to look at things the way I do. Try to think of the worst possible explanation.”
“You’re telling me that Boris kidnapped all those kids, three years back.”
“That book you found under his bed. He wasn’t documenting the behavior of his cats. He had your town’s kids down in that basement, and he was doing some crazy Russian science experiments on them. He may have even been sending the results back to the home country.”
Again, I study Rockwell’s face for signs of humor. Is he trying to pull one over on me?
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” I say. “I’ve been up to this cabin more times than I can count, and I’ve never heard or seen anything strange. I’ve even been down in that basement a number of times. I helped him fix a leaky faucet down there.”
Rockwell points. “At the end of this rope, you’ll find a submersible container. Old-school Russian technology. It probably has wheels on the bottom, and Boris could easily put the children down there whenever he knew you were coming up to visit. He was even able to get them down there after he got stuck with the tranq, but he didn’t make it very far after that.” Rockwell looks back towards the cabin. “You should be able to pull the container up with your truck—Boris was able to do it with his pile of rust. I’m not sure what you’ll find down there. The kids probably ran out of oxygen days ago, and if not, it might be worse. They’d be more animal than human at this point.”
I try to process Rockwell’s reasoning. And it starts to make a little sense. It at least seems possible.
I leap up. “I should pull up whatever’s down there. Even if you’re wrong, it’s worth the peace of mind to find out.”
Rockwell stands up and wipes the dirt off his suit. “Better hurry up. It’ll be completely dark soon.”
I rush past him up to my truck.
“I’m going to leave now,” Rockwell says as he ambles along behind me. “I’m going to go find a stiff drink in town. You don’t have to tell anyone I was here if you don’t want. Just take credit for breaking the case yourself.”
“But what if I need help getting those kids out? That is, if it turns out they’re down there.”
“I don’t handle well in a crisis. The truth is…” Rockwell looks at the pond one last time. “I intend to never learn the details of what you find down there. I’m sure it’s downright horrific.”
We both climb into our trucks and start the engines. Rockwell quickly pulls around and speeds away down the dirt road. I’m shocked that he would just leave like this, but I don’t dwell on his strange behavior; instead, I back my truck down to the pond.
After untying the rope from the tree and attaching it to the hitch, I climb back into my truck and pause for a moment. Detective Rockwell’s theory has to be crazy. There’s no way an eighty-year-old man would become some type of backwoods evil scientist, especially not someone as pleasant as old Boris.
I slide the truck into drive and slowly accelerate. At first there’s little resistance, but then the truck begins to pull something massive from the pond. In the rearview mirror, under the little remaining daylight, I see a large mass rise from the gloom.
When the object jerks up over the bank, I stop the truck and apply the emergency brake. I exit and look at what’s been dragged up.
It’s a pile of metal covered in pond slime. It doesn’t look like a container, more like a random mess of scrap, and yet, it’s strangely symmetrical. I can’t tell if there’s any type of intentional design to it. It creaks and moans as water seeps out of crevasses and the weight resettles.
I timidly approach. When I’m close, I reach out and wipe slime from the front of the object. Underneath my hand is a solid metal sheet with bolts along the edges. It’s not exactly a door, at least I can’t find anything that resembles a handle.
“Hello?” I call.
I hear more moans.
It’s darker now, too dark to really make out the details of the object. I walk backwards, farther, and farther, until I’m back at my truck. Rockwell’s “narrative” of Boris’s death seems like such a paranoid delusion that I can’t bring myself to believe that there are children locked inside this heap of metal. The idea that old Boris was running experiments on children at his isolated cabin and “sending the results back to the home country” is laughable. Is it possible Rockwell spotted the scrap metal under the water when it was still light out and his imagination ran crazy with it?
The small part of me that believes Rockwell’s theory is terrified. I don’t think I’m capable of processing what I would find if I somehow opened this...submarine, if it is one. If it were my child inside, would I even want to know the truth?
My hand moves down and grabs hold of the pocketknife clipped to my belt. Then, almost as if moving under its own power, my arm begins cutting through the rope. This is just a pile of rubbish, I tell myself.
The rope breaks and I watch as the object wobbles then slides back into the water. When it’s gone, I walk over to the porch of the cabin and pick up the unfinished train whistle.
The pond gurgles.
Bio: LB Thomas is a writer and musician from a small town in Montana you’ve never heard of. As a kid, he programmed his own video games, and he grew up to have a master’s degree, a hit reggae album, and a Great Dane.
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Jake Hinkson Interview
By Tim Hennessy
Issue 56
I’m not one to judge a book by its first sentence, but this opening from Jake Hinkson’s first novel Hell on Church Street caught me off guard and propelled me down an unforgettably dark and twisted path:
“I’d been working three weeks at a plastics factory down in Mississippi when the foreman—a bucktoothed redneck named Cyrus Broadway—made the mistake of calling me a lazy asshole.”
The first thirty pages of this book provided one helluva introduction to Hinkson’s work, which is just as startlingly confident in craft as it is possessed with an infectious narrative energy.
I had a chance to chat via email with Jake Hinkson about his novellas The Posthumous Man and the recently released Saint Homicide, both of which are equally fantastic. Some of Jake’s short fiction can be found in the recently released Lee Anthology, and Beat to a Pulp Vol. 1&2 among other places. Additionally, Jake writes film criticism for the quarterly journal Noir City and Criminal Element. His blog The Night Editor is a great source for criticism and recommendations of classic crime films and fiction
Tim Hennessy: I’m really drawn to Southern fiction despite having lived in the Midwest my entire life. Did growing up in the South influence or impact your decision to write?
Jake Hinkson: Well, the influence of where you grow up is nearly impossible to overstate, I suppose. Having said that, I’m usually pretty suspicious of Southerners holding forth on the uniqueness of “the South” especially in this day and age. I grew up in a small town in the middle of the Ozarks, but we watched the same TV and listened to the same music as the rest of the country. The big music was Garth Brooks, Nirvana, and Dr. Dre. You know what I mean? There’s a certain homogeneity to modern life, a banality that unites us all. At least there was in my day.
The difference for me, I guess, was the religious environment I grew up in. I was raised
in a devout Southern Baptist house. For a while, my family lived at a religious campground, and I spent summers at a Boy’s Work Camp where we did manual labor and studied the Bible. That’s all pretty unique. My uncle was preacher (in his youth he’d been what they called a “circuit-riding preacher”) and I used to ride from town to town with him when he preached at different churches. I loved tagging along with him—he was such a great raconteur. So from an early age, I was steeped in both the literature of the Bible and the oral storytelling tradition of old time country preachers.
So I come by the storytelling gene naturally. Now, just why it morphed into writing fiction, that’s harder to pin down. I guess it comes from a dissatisfaction with the world. You think about, at its core, writing fiction is an essentially blasphemous act, a recreating of the world. All fiction holds a criticism of the world as it is.
TH: What got you interested in studying film and writing?
JH: I saw The Fox and The Hound at the movies when I was five or six, and I became a cinephile for life. I really have no memory of a time when I wasn’t interested in movies. Some people just have movies in their blood. Can’t really explain it. When I was in college, I used to skip classes I didn’t like (math, mostly) and go to the library and read film books and watch old movies. My grades suffered—I did this a lot—but I got a real education. I hadn’t grown up with much access to movies (especially older, harder to find stuff and foreign films) and I discovered a whole world in the library. For a few years there, without ever planning to do it, I basically did a self-directed study of world cinema.
And I still suck at math.
To go back, I guess the real key turning point was seeing Casablanca when I was about thirteen or so. I was the only kid in our high school who was obsessed with Humphrey Bogart. That obsession led me into the worlds of classic film and, once I saw The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, into classic crime literature.
Crimespree Magazine #56 Page 11
