On The Edge

by Daniel Cleaver

  The Tara Mansion, Mapleton Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90024 – 21:45.

  I got to the mansion carrying a KFC Bargain Bucket hidden within Snyder’s earlier discarded box. I’ll show him planted evidence, the sonofabitch, I thought grimly. I banked on Bruce’s ego allowing me an interview: he was so protected and getting away with everything for so long I thought he’d be smug in the knowledge that I’d be wasting my time and he could battle wits with me knowing that I’d get nowhere. Sure enough, he spotted my arrival and his faced dropped, but, ever the professional, his smarmy grin was back in a flash. “Detective, what a surprise? And to what do I owe this unexpected, unwelcome and extremely late visit?”

  “Just a couple of questions, if that’s alright with ya?”

  “Come on in,” he ushered me in. “I’m always willing to help the police when I can. You know I do many benefit gigs for the local law enforcement officers.” His oily voice oozed what he considered charm. He smiled at me and I could see his teeth were immaculate, not unusual for Los Angeles and someone in the public eye, but certainly not his own, which is what I was hoping for. “If you’d like to wait for me in my office, I’ll be with you in a few minutes. It’s down the corridor on the left. . . Oh, I just remembered, you know where it is.”

  He regarded the KFC with disdain. “Please don’t get grease on the soft furnishings. They cost a lot of money.”

  He left me on my own and I scanned the room and worked out from the corridor where the panic room was. I could just make out a doorway in the wood paneling when Bruce came in. “How’s the Hangman case going?”

  “Not good,” I admitted, as I dropped one of Snyder’s discarded chicken wings on the Persian rug. Bruce flipped and scurried over, picked up the bone and dropped it into a waste bin under his oak desk. “Oh dear.” He oozed what he thought was sympathy. He scrubbed at a stain on the rug with a cloth but it wouldn’t budge. “That is a shame? Is there any way I can help?” he offered insincerely.

  “Yah, I need ya to take out ya teeth and give me an imprint of your bite mark.”

  “These teeth are all mine, I can assure you.”

  “Ya can take ’em out.” I bit into a chicken wing. “Or I can knock ’em out – your choice.”

  “Now, Detective, that’s not very civilized, I’m trying to help –”

  “Why won’t ya assist me in my request?”

  “They’re all mine, I –”

  “That’ll be easy enough to prove and if I find out you’re lying, well. . .” I let it hang and held my arms open wide.

  “They don’t come out, I –”

  “I think they do.” I offered him the box of chicken and he shook his head.

  “Then we’ll have to do this officially because –”

  “What have ya got to hide?” I asked as his smile slipped from his face.

  “That’s not the point, though,” he said, acting flustered and lost for words for a change. “I think I’ll call my lawyer.”

  I stopped him. “Now why would ya need a lawyer?” I tried to replicate his famous smarmy grin. “You’re innocent, right?”

  “I swear it.”

  “Oh, ya swear it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Oh, if ya swear it, then it must be true.” I smiled broadly. “In that case you’re free to go.”

  “Really?” he asked with hope rising in his voice.

  “No,” I said in disbelief: how gullible was he? “You’re giving me a dental imprint, one way or another.”

  “I shall not. I’m calling my lawyer.”

  “Marcus won’t be able to come out to play, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh?”

  “He came over all dead, ya see.”

  “Dead? Marcus?”

  “So he won’t be able to assist ya.”

  “I’m still not giving you an imprint.”

  “Wow. How shallow. Only interested in your scrawny neck. Not caring how ya lifelong friend died. Now, you’re making me very suspicious, you’ve got something to hide.”

  “I know my rights, I’m innocent until I’m proven guilty.”

  “That’s where I come in, one simple imprint.”

  “Now, look –”

  My cellphone rang and I held up my hand for silence. Ferdy was very excitable as he gave me the news I longed to hear. “Well, now, that is excellent news, the nail in his coffin.” I closed my cellphone and grinned at Bruce Matherson in a way that said, ‘I’ve got you,’ and as my grin got wider, his smile got smaller. Top salespeople love silences when they’re near to closing a sale: they stop talking and the first one to break the silence loses. Bruce licked his lips. He was dying to know what I knew. He fidgeted and made gestures with his hands. I let the silence hang between us and eventually he could take it no longer.

  He lost. “Well, tell me, what do you think you’ve got on me?”

  “That storage facility where my colleague was ripped open by the Hangman?” I said, raising my tone at the end of the sentence to make it into a question.

  “Yes, yes that was terrible, terrible,” he said, falling back into his TV persona. “What about it?”

  “Guess who owns it?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yah, you.”

  His world shook. He stood and then sat down again, he looked at me and he appeared to age ten years in front of my very eyes. He composed himself and said, “Detective, I couldn’t possibly know of every building I own. I have investments all over town, all over the world. If something untoward should happen in one of these establishments, then that is unfortunate, but it’s only a coincidence, I –”

  I had him on the ropes and we both knew it: the whole time I kept the lawyers at bay, the more he would unravel. I tried an old police technique – lying. “Our crime tech guys are there. Your prints are all over the place. Would ya care to explain?”

  “I’d like to consult with a lawyer now,” he said, his expression stern. I saw him press a button under his desk and knew his security guards would be there in moments. “I’m going to ask you nicely to leave.”

  “It’s all tumbling down, why don’t ya do the decent thing and hand yourself in: we can put you in a facility where ya can get help.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Yah, ya need help, man. You’re a sick child molester.”

  “I don’t want your kind of help!” he shouted as two guards entered.

  Only two? That was an insult. They were dime store rent-a-cops and no match. I was fired up and ready for a scrap; I only wished Perry could be here. Not that I needed any help against these two. I knew he loved a ‘punch-up’ as much as I did. The ape swung a roundhouse, I deftly ducked underneath and was behind him and punched him twice hard in the kidneys. He went down on one knee. Godzilla’s little brother lunged at me: it was pathetic. I sidestepped him like a matador and elbowed him in the back of the neck and he crashed through a glass cabinet, filled with trophies and awards. I picked up a vase. . .

  “Not that one!” screamed Bruce. “That cost me two thousand dollars.”

  I picked up the next one along the shelf, looked at Bruce for his approval and he reluctantly nodded and I smashed it down on the ape’s head. He was out for the count. I spun back to the first attacker, who was on one knee and breathing heavily; he saw me and thought he ought to stand and try again.

  “Stay down,” I warned him, but he did not want to lose face. What is wrong with this guy? Maybe there was something in the rumors about steroids. This knucklehead’s brain was mush. I gave him room to stand up and allowed him to get his breath back. He was muscular alright, no question, but he had no speed or finesse, and his movements were cumbersome and he telegraphed each punch. I was able to hop around like Ali at his best. It was getting silly: I swung a punch at his head just for something to do. He shook it off easily, and he replied with a one-two combination, leaving his stomach exposed, which I was waiting fo
r and I did a quick jab, I didn’t need power, accuracy was going to win this fight and I caught him precisely in the solar plexus and he dropped on both knees, sucking in air, unable to speak. “Stay down,” I said again. “Ya wanna put your head between your knees and take deep breaths.” I looked around at Bruce Matherson who was pulling a gun from a desk drawer. I lunged across his mahogany desk and caught him on the side of the jaw and as if in slow motion like in a Rocky movie, sweat flicked from his face along with the bridge containing his front teeth which skidded across the floor toward me.

  Result!

  I crunched down on the false teeth, making it impossible for him to replace them in his mouth. Godzilla’s little brother decided to rejoin the fight and I brought my knee up into his face and he fell back into the cabinet, out cold this time. I turned back to his partner who was getting up from the floor to rejoin the brawl. When would they learn?

  “Freeze!” said Bruce Matherson in a shaky voice and I was surprised and impressed to see him pointing a gun at me. “Stop or I’ll shoot. . .”

  “Thanks,” I said. I snatched the gun from his hand easily, startling him, and in the same fluid movement caught musclehead on the temple with the gun handle and he crumpled in a heap on the floor.

  I grinned as I turned my attention back to Bruce Matherson. I had his gun pointing at him. I took an apple from the fruit bowl on his desk and said, “Bite it.” He shook his head. He wouldn’t speak as if this would somehow save him. I pulled the trigger back on his gun. “It’s just a formality. I know you’re the butt-biter. I know it’s you and you know it’s you. This seals your fate. Ya get that, don’t ya? It’s over. No get-out-of-jail-free card, your kingdom’s tumbling down.”

  He picked up the apple, bit into it and handed it to me.

  “What do ya know, same bite marks as on the corpses of the Hangman’s victims.”

  “I’ve never met him. I promise you.”

  This did not sound very likely. “How can that be?”

  “We all work in small cells, only knowing one other person up or down the chain so that we can’t reveal too many in the group, although you flat-footed dunce-heads never once make the connection of a network. It’s laughable.”

  “Yah, with you at the very top,” I smirked at him. “What are we gonna do with ya?” I clicked my fingers. “I got it. I shoot ya and stage it to look like a suicide. That is my specialty.”

  “That’s preposterous! How on earth can I shoot myself from six feet away?”

  “You’ve gotta a point.” I sidled closer and rammed the gun under his chin.

  “Wait! Wait! Don’t be hasty.”

  “It’s over, man. You ain’t getting away with it anymore, it’s all gonna come out how America’s all-time favorite celebrity has been leading a double life, kidnapping, raping and murdering innocent little girls. Can ya imagine it?”

  He shook his head and stared at me defiantly.

  “Not forgetting how popular you’ll be in jail. I doubt you’d last the week.”

  Bruce Matherson saw the error of his ways. He’d had a good run and had devised a complicated web of high-profile fellow pedophiles who considered themselves untouchable, beyond the reaches of the law. Their network tentacles were far-reaching, but it was all a house of cards and it was starting to crumble from the top. I’d stumbled into their viper’s nest of poisonous minds. I had taken out an important layer and the kingpin. The Hangman was a recent addition, who had no interest in molestation but had taken the girls onward: it became apparent that he was practicing his art, strangling them, and reviving them again, seeing how long they would last. What an incredibly cruel and wicked thing to do to a young girl. Bruce Matherson had confessed that they videoed the results and that their website was oversubscribed by depraved men who would willingly hand over their credit cards to salivate over images of the innocent runaway girls, practically children, being murdered for their twisted fantasies.

  He told me that simulated rape and murder just wasn’t enough anymore for these folks: they wanted the real McCoy. I felt saddened and depressed that such a high number of people would view such images, let alone pay for them. I got Bruce Matherson to hand over his computer and he was shocked rigid when I used a code to hack into his subscriber list, which was winging its way to the relevant police forces, both here and abroad. It didn’t get me any closer to finding Mia, but I consoled myself that it was a massive win for the good guys, a by-product of the Hangman investigations and a righteous win, with a list running into tens of thousands. I’d also gleaned the address of the Hangman’s slaughterhouse and was biding my time on that while I decided how best to approach it. I could hand the info over to Dekes and his team, but I didn’t know who to trust, and Bruce Matherson had reiterated that the Hangman had someone close on the investigation. I wasn’t sure if it was one of us at the start of the case, or someone in Dekes’s mob, and decided to deal with it on my own. Bruce had grizzled and cried when faced with prison. I’d reminded him that he’d shown no mercy for all the girls that he and his gang of perverts had passed around. He sniffled and apologized. He really was a despicable coward. I desperately wanted to kill him with my bare hands, I even imagined squeezing the life out of him, he’d admitted that he’d been doing it for years and that the runaways numbered into the hundreds, but he didn’t know what happened to the young girls after he’d finished with them. He’d sat at his desk, writing a full confession.

  Would it be admissible in a court – probably not. I’m sure his lawyers would bleat that it had been coerced, but the fact remained that it was the truth and I didn’t want him to retract it. I wondered whether he knew it was also going to be his suicide note. As he scribbled out his apology to the world, I casually walked behind him, took the cord from the heavy drapes, and slowly fashioned a noose.

  He wiped his nose with the back of the sleeve. “Please,” he said. “I’ve got money, more than I know what to do with. Let me go, I’ll get help, I’ll make amends somehow.”

  “Nope, ya gotta stand trial for your misdeeds.”

  “I’m begging you, have mercy.” He was pitiful and I found myself waning: it was hard not to when a fellow human begs pitifully, but then he must have heard it a hundred times from the timid, scared teenage girls.

  He saw the noose and his eyes widened in fear. “Wh . . .what the hell are you going to do with that?”

  “What do ya think?”

  “You’re going to hang me?”

  “No, you are.”

  “Think again.”

  “You could opt for prison, but you’ll only prolong your life a short while. The warders might keep an eye on you until you get to court, although they may overlook the beatings, as long as the bruises won’t show. I doubt they can stop powdered glass being put in your food, that’s particularly nasty, it does all sorts of damage to your insides. You’ll be repeatedly raped and you’re not equipped to fight them off. You’ll be passed around like just like you did to all those girls: poetic justice, wouldn’t ya say?” I saw a wet patch form at the front of his pants, but I felt no sympathy. How many times had he seen one his victims wet herself? I continued. “Then, after the court case and all the vile, sick, disgusting facts come out, you’ll get the death sentence. But ya bound to get shivved long before then and you’ll be glad of it, I can assure ya.”

  He paled. “Help me out here. What do you want me to do?”

  I dangled the noose as my answer.

  “You said you’d let me go if I helped you.”

  “Yah, I lied.”

  “What?” he said, truly shocked.

  “I know, I was surprised, too, but I’ve double-checked and I was definitely lying.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Yah. I can. The State versus lying-scumbag-child-molesters set a precedent.”

  He looked at my crudely fashioned noose and sighed. “Where do you think we are, Dodge City?”

  “You’d prefer to go to court?”

 
; “No, I wouldn’t. Isn’t there an option three I could take?” he asked hopefully.

  I shook my head.

  Bruce Matherson surprised me by leaping for his little pea-shooter of a gun and pointed it at me. I was astonished and didn’t really have time to register it when he decided against shooting me, and instead he placed the gun under his chin and went to pull the trigger when my cellphone rang.

  “Do ya mind if I take this call first?” I asked, more as a formality.

  CHAPTER 40

  My blood turned to ice as I heard the Hangman’s chuckle. “You’re a Dudley Do-Right,” said the Hangman. “A regular Boy Scout. I was going to say whiter than white, but we both know that isn’t true. I wonder what your fans think, Detective Jackson.”

  “My fans?”

  “Yes, your fans. Didn’t you know? You should Google ‘Spooky Jackson’. You’d be surprised.”

  The Hangman prowled, as his mechanically changed voice said, “We’re probably the two most famous people in America right now. Myself at number one, by a mile, I may add. You, too, have your fair share of followers, the right-wing, the gun-lobby nutters, Klansmen. They love your Wild West style of justice.”

  “Well, it cuts down on paperwork.”

  “This is no time for jokes, Detective.”

  “Yah, well, I’m kinda busy, what do ya want?”

  “What I want is for you to die.”

  “Okay. Sure. Why not?”

  “Don’t be flippant. I want you to swop your miserable life for that of your girlfriend.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “That was a quick decision.”

  “That’s because I love her.”

  The Hangman was thrown momentarily. “Well, ain’t that sweet? You will come here tonight and confess your crimes.”