Stone Shadow

by Rex Miller

  “Let's talk."

  “Yeah. Okay. What?"

  “Your serve. Whatever you want to talk about."

  “Let's talk about me getting outta here, howzzat?"

  “Ukie, come on. You're not seriously expecting anybody to turn you loose after everything that's gone down, are you?"

  “Please, man. I've told you. I didn't do it. I saw the bodies being buried and I made a mistake in judgment. I thought I could fake my way into headlines, be a big star for the week or two, just enough I could maybe get some kinda half-assed shot. Clubs or whatever. Wail with all the publicity. I knew I could act real crazy and carry it off. The thing with the cu—with the woman, I just, you know, let her go, man. I LET her escape. Just like I gave you the graves. Ask yourself this, if I was really the killer why would I want to admit it? Why give myself up?"

  “You didn't give yourself up. You got caught putting one of the bodies in the ground."

  “BullSHIT. I didn't ... I wasn't burying anybody. I was digging to see if there really was a body in there. The thing had been coming and putting all this shit inside my head and I had to see, man. I wanted to know if I was going nuts or if it was for real."

  “Would you want to tell me a little more about the Way of the Viper? That was my favorite so far."

  “Hey. Come on.” He was very quiet and the usual animation seemed to have been drained from him.

  “Or the paradox of syncretism. I'd like to kick that one back and forth a little more."

  “You having fun?"

  “I'm having a pretty good time. Yeah. Matter of fact. How about you? You having a pretty fun time, too?"

  No comment.

  “Or here's one you might like. Try this one on, Ukie. Just for grins. Let's say there was this real sharp fellow, loaded with talent, smart as a whip, one heckuva guy. He just never made it big. And so he goes off the deep end. Whackaroony time. He starts taking lives out of plain old mean, no-good, nutty-as-a-fruitcake craziness. Just to get even with the world let's say.” Ukie sighed in disgust. I'm just talking theory now. So this sharp guy he says to himself, ‘Self, let's really yank everybody's chain. Let's waste as many of these folks as we can and if we get caught'—and here's the real good part—'we'll ADMIT to all the killings. Give them even more than they know about. Act real goofy too. Talk in parables, metaphors, free association, all that good stuff. Ramble. Be incoherent. Memorize a bunch of looney-tunes stuff to mess their minds up with.’ Then, when you've got ‘em going real good, recant. Tell how this guy really didn't do it he saw it inside his mind on a strange pathway. Then, bring in a heavy-duty legal firm and plead your ass insane as a bedbug. How's that sound just for a random scenario?"

  “It sucks."

  “Uh huh. Oh, hey, guess you're really excited your brother came in to see you, huh?"

  “Yeah. That's all I need. THAT asshole."

  “What's the matter? Don't you two get along?"

  “You might say that."

  “Looks like he must think a lot about you to drop everything and come here to see what he can do to help."

  “That may be the way it looks to you but that know-it-all, serf-righteous fuck has come to gloat. Not help, GLOAT. Hey, I love Joseph, and I can't do anything about that. He's my brother. You love your own brother regardless of what kind of a first-rate asshole he is. But I couldn't even get him on the phone when I needed help before. When I asked him for a few dollars a couple of times the dirty son of a bitch lied and jerked me back and forth and let me hang out there on a line to dry. He's got a mail-order business raking the bucks in and he couldn't give a couple hundred measly dollars to pull my ass out of the frying pan. His idea of help was to send me a note reprimanding me for my ways, a fucking twenty-dollar check and a lecture. So don't tell me he's suddenly all interested in helping his poor, dear brother now.” Ukie's eyes blazed with fury.

  “Don't hold back, Ukie. Do you like your brother—yes or no?"

  “Fuck you very much, Officer Krupke."

  And a thing he couldn't name began then and there to reach for his clothing, a sleeve or a pant leg, anything it could get its claws on, a thing that caught hold of fabric then the limb inside, and as it caught hold it began getting a firmer grip on Jack Eichord the man, not so much the cop but the human being, and the claws sunk into the flesh and started taking him somewhere he had no business going. But all he felt now was that first, light touch when the razor-sharp claws first caught on the cloth of his trouser leg. Just a little, harmless tug.

  And the afternoon was like the morning but more of the same and squared and then magnified. Something so unsettling about meeting Joseph Hackabee and having that gut-wrenching feeling of seeing Ukie walk in free as a bird, sans cuffs or restraints of any kind, smiling, speaking in that warm baritone of his. And Eichord found out that:

  1. Joe Hackabee was well-to-do. “Comfortable,” he said.

  2. Joe was single, never married, straight.

  3. Joe liked Noel Collier a lot. He also thought she was pretty sensational-looking. Jack had to listen to a good bit on that subject. He also thought, from his lunch with the counselor, that she was going to provide his brother with “a vigorous defense."

  4. Joe had a direct-mail marketing firm in Houston. He had learned his trade in professional fund-raising for charitable organizations. He sold mailing lists to companies—was what the thing sounded like to Eichord. He computerized lists of names and addresses and sold them to other mail-order houses. He told Jack he could sell him “a thousand males working in law enforcement, aged twenty-one to thirty-four, sorted by Zip/income/credit rating, and merge-purged with Jack's existing mailing list.” X dollars for a thousand preaddressed stick-on labels and onetime usage rights.

  5. Joe liked his brother more than Ukie liked him. He told about all the times he'd tried to help him. Followed behind him paying his brother's debts, cleaning up after him, mending fences. But he didn't feel bitter or angry. “I just finally gave up.” Ukie had never had the breaks he'd had, he said. He thought that “Bill could have been anything he wanted. He had a fine mind. He just couldn't control himself, is what it boils down as, a lack of control. But not so out of control he'd ever kill anybody. He just isn't capable of that sort of violence."

  Jack ran a couple of verbal-response tests by Joe as was his usual style and came up with nothing. Example:

  “Joe,” he'd said, “I noticed you said when you were describing looking like Ukie, uh, or Bill, you said you probably were a little tanner than he was. If you hadn't seen him in four years"—he allowed his voice to take a bit of an edge to it—"how could you know that?"

  “I saw that awful picture in the paper. Jeez, he was so pale-looking.” It was a sadly smiled throwaway without the slightest hint of resentment or con in it. All the litmus tests ran that way. Eichord asked questions like that in the standard cop interrogation manner, not so much listening to WHAT you said but the rapidity with which the words came back in return, the tone of the answer, the emphasis of the words. Interrogation as an art form was a kind of mental tennis match. And the best interrogations were those in which an unspoken thread of something could be seen weaving itself through the texture of the Q-and-A give-and-take.

  In that way a copper was like a trial lawyer. It wasn't like on Perry Mason. You didn't often catch the man or woman in the lie, if you were a prosecutor, show them the picture taken by the hidden surveillance camera ("Isn't this YOU we see holding the smoking gun?"), at which point the person on the stand collapses in tears. Today, first of all, nearly everyone has become so damn smooth at stonewalling, and the criminal justice system has become so overloaded in the favor of the accused criminal (thanks to some DANDY Supreme Court rulings), that they could simply look at the photo, smile, and if their lawyer didn't object to the introduction of inadmissible evidence, shake their head politely and say, “Nope. Sorry. Looks a little like me, all right. But it's not me."

  Two of the most famous trials of the last quarter-ce
ntury had involved photographic evidence of “smoking guns,” and the two perpetrators, both of whom had been SEEN, caught in the act by national network television, seen in the commission of the crimes, walked. Both trials had resulted in the defendants’ respective acquittals.

  As Eichord led Joseph Hackabee through the step-by-step progression of orphanage, foster-parent, high-school, puberty memories, he began to taste that next drink the way he had when he was at his lowest ebb—a decade ago. It was all he could do at one point not to conclude the meeting so he could go get a couple of real stiff ones. It took a supreme effort of will on his part to concentrate on the exchange of words.

  Joe genuinely thought Ukie was innocent. It was sufficiently clear and sincere that Eichord was sure of it. There's no faking a certain type of sincerity. But the Hackabee brothers were not easy to question. In Joe's case he had a way of turning all the questions back in your court. Not in evasion. He'd answer what you said but point the responses back, often as not, toward you. He'd compliment Eichord, in the way he answered, for his masterful intuition or whatever, and do it in such a way that it kept a soft, fuzzy-sided interrogation, the overall effect being a lulling, soporific one on Jack. When the afternoon reached its shank Jack Eichord had learned nothing, was exhausted, wanted a drink, and couldn't wait to get to a telephone.

  He struck out at Jones-Seleska. He didn't just want to hear his dream girl breathe into the phone at him. He wanted to hear somebody else's reaction, other than a cop's, to the shock of gentleman Joe Hackabee. But Noel Collier was not to be found.

  Cops don't talk much about paperwork but it is the ultimate bugaboo. The voluminous pile of paper trails that had been stacking up in the wake of the homicides now accumulating as the caseload even the cops called Grave-digger threatened to mire Eichord in pulp. Lab reports and forensics on so many bodies eventually take on a life of their own. Identifications made, confirmed, disputed, denied, changed, revised. Notifications. Probes. Summaries. False leads. It all took time, talent, manpower, hours and space and patience and wear-and-tear on the collective cop psyche. The legal aspects alone were becoming a nightmare. The case had attracted international attention.

  The problem with pontificating to people about your abilities and your work and your life was that sometimes you ended up ruining things for yourself. Putting your mouth all over your own self-esteem didn't do much for positive thinking. His comments of late to the guys in Buckhead had returned to haunt him. For the rest of the day he sat there, alternately clock-watching and sorting through Grave-digger nastiness, remembering things said and thought that would have been better left untouched. A hundred percent of zero is zero, was one that came back around again on him.

  When you were deep into a murder case as sordid and confusing as this one it dirtied you, if you had much humanity about you at all. It took real compartmentalization of one's life not to let the personal life and the pro life intermix and commingle to the point where you could never completely shake loose from the dark shadows. That was one of the things that made it so easy for cops to reach for crutches like booze. One of the reasons why so many copper marriages went down the pipes.

  The desktop was strewn with crime-scene photos and nothing could be more depressing than shots of lifeless murdered humans such as these. Only the starving skeletons of the camps could compete as a visual downer. Some were mutilation murders, others—like the old lady—were even more horrible. The random, wasteful, mean, sad evil of acts like these. How could someone do this?

  He couldn't take his eyes off the old woman. What was her age? He had the data somewhere on the desk. She was somebody's mother. Grandma to a couple of kids, no doubt. And Ukie and his accomplice or Ukie alone had clubbed her to death for no reason. Maybe because like the mountain—because she was there. How? WHY would you take lives like that? Madness. Insane horror without purpose.

  Sorry, lady, he thought, looking at the woman sprawled like a rag doll tossed into a corner, skirt hiked up indecorously in death. Talk to me, Mom. Who did it? How many were they? What is the secret? And he went back to where the beginning was, where he was sure it had already begun, the random killing, and he concentrated with all his might on the names, life-styles, demographics, biographical commonalities.

  And he squinted his eyes and tried to see a pattern somewhere. But look as hard as he might he saw only dead bodies. Corpses without connectives that could link them in death to perp-or-perps-unknown. He saw no telltale footprints in the cottage cheese. Only mystery and the aftermath of madness and murder.

  Come on, Grandma. Show me something I've overlooked? Tell me why they did it. Was it the Way of the Viper? Some mystical Oriental thing? Some secret of the Five Triads? Hypno-assassins sent to do the bidding of Dr. Fu? Lobotomized Dacoits on a mission of vengeance? I've seen this movie, he thought, and I walked out on it.

  “The most secret of all the combat ryus...” And an all-vanquishing force...” He knew Ukie's mumbo-jumbo could be largely discounted. But still there might be something. Ukie might even believe some of that garbage himself, he bore that sort of a psychogenic profile—at least superficially. The congenital liar who has created so many lies to becloud his real activities, nature, motivation, purpose, past, the haze of pseudepigrapha becoming murky pseudoreality. Ukie might not be able to differentiate between the imagined and the real.

  But Jack knew enough not to discount the possibility of otherworldly forces, whether or not they might be connected to the martial arts and sciences. He would never NEVER forget the lesson learned from seeing the man in Kowloon. He had witnessed something, no matter how much he'd like to erase it, that would stay forever pressed between the crevices of the brain. The man in Kowloon had been a practitioner of what might be called a ninjitsu life. Jack could still see his image as vividly as if he carried the man's photo in his wallet.

  His philosophical antecedents included such luminaries as Sun-tse, Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kai-shek, with a little help from their friends at Run-Run's fantasy factory. But this was a serious oh mighty Buddha yes serious student and disciple. Eichord would never forget the way he was able to brain-freeze himself into a frightening autohypnotic state as he snapped through a fierce dance of the final forms, psyching himself up to the point where you can drive needles through the skin or sledgehammer blocks on the forehead. But those are tricks and the man in Kowloon was no trickster.

  And for reasons that were explained to him but his Western mind could never grasp, the man took a very sharp-edged ceremonial sword, and in a chanting, shouting throng of Triad brethren he took his hand like so—the fingers forming a claw—to snag the wet and slippery tongue in his mouth and pulling it out to its fullest extension the man from Kowloon proceded to ... Oh, Jesus, he could see it even now, the sawing action of the blade, the tongue bloodying as the sword bit in but no leverage and it seemed impossible to sever completely and yet the man's whole life was resting on this his life of dedication his stature not on earth not in the secret brotherhood but the honor or lack of it that would go with him to the grave and beyond and so it was that with the fiercest human determination Eichord had ever seen the man's adrenals sluicing out the hyped adrenaline, sending the signal to SAW HARDER to his tunnel-visioned brain cells, he was able to saw through the thick blood-squirting pinkness and sever his own oh God even now he tried to wrench his mind off it and look at the old woman with her sad and sullied whiteness exposed to the black, unforgiving lens of a crime photographer's soulless camera all he could see was the man in Kowloon.

  All the more horrific afterward as he stood there so stony, resolute, squinting, focused, shaking with concentration and energy and power and will, a proud and unblinking conqueror, oblivious to any loss or a mouth filling with blood, single-minded beyond any worldly suffering of wounds or tombs, eyes seeing beyond reality, penetrating through to his acutely personal mental vision, some ethereal discernment, some perspicacious vista of Bushido-samurai-kamikaze-ninja heaven where only the relentlessly tou
gh will go.

  And Eichord thought how easy it would be, with a mixture of irritation and wistfulness, how easy it would be to drink away the remainder of the day. Hum away the rest of the afternoon and evening. He'd hummed more than his share. He'd had plenty of hummers. How nice it would be to just fold his tents now and succumb to the lure of the bottle's promise and just slip right on in there with the melting cubes. Grab all the gusto you can get because too much of a good thing ... And he got through the day but it was close. It was waiting. Hovering. Waiting to take him down.

  Driving back to the motel that night he learned it was getting closer to King's birthday and in Texas it looked like it might be a biggie. A thirty-five-year-old maintenance man was charged with ninety-six counts of murder in the terrible Puerto Rican hotel fire. A woman in Ft. Worth had thrown her infant son out of a fourth-floor window because voices had kept whispering in her ear to do it. Back in the shop two state guys from the attorney general's office were trying to turn the Grave-digger case into a racially related series of crimes. By tomorrow they'd be color-coding graphics for a presentation. Somebody somewhere was working up a monograph filled with facts like both the names Lee Harvey Oswald and William Hackabee each contain fifteen letters—that kind of goofy shit.

  Jack switched the radio off and tried to get into his ultimate cheerleader fantasy. He pictured Noel down in her spa and she calls to him and he goes downstairs and there she is standing with her back to him, wearing a little short skirt and cowgirl boots, and slowly she eases the skirt up on those great legs and ... “Mister,” she tells him, “I ain't wearin’ nothin'."

  But he couldn't get into it at all. January 13 had been that kind of a bad mammer-jammer.

  Garland

  “You know,” Noel Collier told Ukie's brother rather breathlessly, “I was so surprised. I probably acted like an imbecile.” He shook his head no, smiling warmly, and she had the oddest feeling—as if he was understanding and anticipating everything she said, not just being polite. “I guess you're used to that."