by Robert Bloch
Sheriff Higgs recognized the girl clinging to Fuzz’s arm—Mamie Keefer, a sallow-faced little snip with stringy cornsilk hair. Worked in the mill off and on when she wasn’t riding shotgun on Fuzz’s motorcycle.
“Whaddya mean, weird?” she said. “Look at that built!”
“I am looking,” Fuzz told her. And he sniggered at the half-naked girl on the poster. “Some built, man! This I gotta see.”
Several of the older people standing nearby started to frown disapprovingly—mostly the wives, of course. Sheriff Higgs took note of it and so did Mr. Fall up on the platform. He moved along to a row of banners hanging before the entrance to the tent and gestured again with his cane.
“If you folks will kindly move in a little closer, I’d like to give you a glimpse of our more cultural attractions,” he announced.
“That must be the belly-dancers,” Clay Tolliver murmured. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”
Mr. Fall’s eyes narrowed slightly, just enough to indicate that he’d heard the remark, but his smile never wavered. “All that is strange or unusual in the world derives from two sources,” he continued. “The curiosities of nature originate in mystery, while the idiosyncrasies of mankind are found in history.”
“What’s he saying?” sniffed Mrs. Tudd.
Lawyer Tudd shrugged. “Double-talk,” he said. “Sounds like one of those smartass civil rights troublemakers to me.”
Mr. Fall didn’t miss a thing. He nodded down at the solid citizens in the front row. “I assure you there is nothing political about this spectacle. Naturally I cannot reproduce the actual events of a bygone era. These are merely representations, a few simple samples of man’s freakish pastimes in the past.” His cane stabbed out at one of the canvas panels behind him. “May I have your attention, please? Here, from long ago and far away—King Atahualpa and the Room of Gold!”
There must have been a light behind the banner, for now its colors blazed forth so brightly that the crowd gasped.
What they saw was a regal-looking man in flowing robes, standing with arms upraised in the center of a stone chamber.
“Awful dark-complected for a king,” Mrs. Fence whispered to her husband. “Looks like some kind of a nigra to me.”
Banker Fence just nodded but did not reply. He was staring at the gold heaped around the figure—the glittering glut of jewelry, ornaments, plate, goblets, coins and virgin ingots crammed into the chamber from wall to wall and rising halfway to the ceiling.
“I’m sure you all remember Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru,” Mr. Fall was saying. “In 1532 he captured the Inca, Atahualpa, and imprisoned him in Cajamarca. As a ransom for their king’s release his faithful followers promised to fill the prison chamber—measuring ten feet long and sixteen feet in width—with enough gold to reach the level of Atahualpa’s raised arms.”
“Do tell,” breathed banker Fence.
Mr. Fall nodded towards the panel. “Loyal followers came from all over the land bringing their most precious possessions to lay at the feet of the Inca, impoverishing themselves to secure the freedom of their living god. The task took many months, but at last it was completed. Never before and never since did men behold such an array of radiant riches—this roomful of glittering gold. Still, they kept their word and the bargain was fulfilled.”
“Great God in the morning,” banker Fence murmured. “What happened then?”
Mr. Fall shrugged. “The inevitable,” he said. “Pizarro had King Atahualpa strangled to death in the market-place. Not too long afterwards Pizarro himself was murdered.”
“Never mind the details,” said banker Fence. “What become of the gold?”
“No one knows,” Mr. Fall said. “Somewhere along the line it just disappeared.”
“Poor security,” banker Fence grunted to his wife. “Gold is a bad risk anyway. Now you know why I keep telling the kids to invest in comic books.”
“I’d still like to see that room,” said Mrs. Fence. “With that jewelry and all, it sounds real educational.”
But now the light was flickering up behind another banner and again the crowd gasped at what appeared—a gigantic bulldozer cutting a swath through a mountainous pile of naked, emaciated human corpses.
“For those who prefer something more contemporary,” Mr. Fall proclaimed. “Auschwitz—the Holocaust!”
Lawyer Tudd nodded. “Concentration camp,” he told his wife. “Read about it in law school. Some monkey-business of a trial over in Nuremberg, as I recall.”
“Oh, how horrible!” his wife murmured. “Look at those poor people!”
“Now don’t go getting so uptight. Like he says, it’s only history.”
“Well, in that case I suppose it’s not so awful.” Mrs. Tudd stared intently at the bodies, and her tongue flicked over her parted lips as her breathing quickened. “You know, I always wondered just how they did such things, all those tortures and such. I hear tell they used to make lampshades out of the skins, stuff like that.”
“Legal points involved,” said lawyer Tudd. “Might be kind of interesting at that.”
He turned to seek Mayor Stooldrayer’s opinion, but that dignitary and his wife were both gaping at another blazing banner directly over the entrance to the tent.
Mr. Fall was already pointing up at the familiar figure, bearded and nude except for a loincloth, hanging impaled upon a cross.
“No monstrosity spawned by nature, no man-made marvel, can possibly compare to the fantastic reality of divine inspiration,” he said. “Ecce Homo—the Passion Play!”
Mrs. Stooldrayer turned and whispered to her husband. “Icky homo? Does he mean Jesus was some kind of morphodite, like? And what’s all this stuff about passion?”
“It’s just a play,” the mayor told her.
“Well I’m not sure I want to see it,” Mrs. Stooldrayer mused. “After all, I’m working with the PTA and we’re supposed to be against violence, to say nothing of gays.” She hesitated. “On the other hand, we don’t get a chance to see a real live play around here very often.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Mayor Stooldrayer. “Way I figure, we’re entitled to a little entertainment.”
Mr. Fall must have been listening, because now he tapped his cane on the platform and nodded.
“Entertainment!” he cried. “It’s all waiting for you here on the inside. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen—the show is about to begin!”
Mr. Fall jumped down from the platform and parted the curtain-flaps before the entrance as the crowd began to surge forward.
“What about tickets?” Sheriff Higgs called out to him.
“Law always gets a free pass,” Mr. Fall murmured. Then he raised his voice. “As you folks can see, I’m a little short-handed here and there’s no one operating the ticket booth. So just keep moving, go right ahead—you can pay on the inside.”
“Didn’t say how much,” banker Fence muttered to lawyer Tudd. “Think we ought to take a chance?”
Lawyer Tudd nodded. “No problem.” He grinned. “Law says you got to establish a price in advance. We don’t have to pay him a red cent if we don’t want to.”
Chuckling, he moved into the tent, holding his wife’s arm tightly to keep from being separated from her in the jostling throng. Behind him came the banker and the mayor with their spouses, Mr. and Mrs. Crouch, Junior Dorkin, Mamie Keefer and all the rest.
The assorted effluvia of Fuzz Foskins and Clay Tolliver mingled in the darkness of the tent’s interior as the rest of the crowd pushed on inside until the tent was packed solid, wall-to-wall.
For a moment everyone stood silent, and then little indications of irritation began to arise.
“Hey, what gives?” somebody grumbled. “I can’t see.”
“Lights!” yelled Clay Tolliver.
Sheriff Higgs was always prepared for such emergencies and he responded now, pulling forth a flashlight from his pocket.
The beam played over the sea of faces scowling ac
ross the confines of the tent, then came to rest on the rear wall.
The wall was blank. Below it stood the sole object of furnishing—a bare platform.
The crowd stared and its murmurs rose to a roar.
“Hell!” someone shouted angrily. “What kind of a show you call this? They ain’t no freaks in here!”
“There are now,” murmured Mr. Fall as he finished sewing the entrance flaps together from outside and poured the kerosene.
Then, smiling, he lit the match.
Horror Scope
When I came into the bedroom I found her sitting at the vanity, before the mirror. I don’t know why she bothered, because she didn’t have any head.
Shires and his jolly crew were all over the place, snapping pictures, taking tape-measurements, gathering carpet-lint, spreading dusting-powder over furniture and woodwork, drawing diagrams, making notes. All this, of course, is standard operating procedure in a criminal investigation and these people like to think of themselves as experts, using modern techniques. But whenever I see them on the scene of a homicide I can’t help but be reminded of the way vultures always gather and descend on a carcass brought down by the king of beasts.
In our society, of course, the king of beasts is outlawed as a predator, and all this activity—like my own presence here—is directed towards finding the lion who killed the lamb.
Not a bad comparison, really, and in this case it was particularly apt, for the headless victim was a lamb—a Mrs. Jennifer Lamb, to be exact.
Shires greeted me with his usual scowl of welcome. “Glad you’re here,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”
I nodded, but the warning was unnecessary. There was nothing here I really wanted to touch. Certainly not the body lolling grotesquely in the chair before the vanity, nor the stained and spattered negligee in which it was clad. I had no desire to run my fingers over the stump on which a head once rested—truth to tell, my stomach churned at the sight.
Shires turned, calling in the direction of the bathroom doorway. “You guys finished yet?”
Two of the vultures emerged from the opening and the one in the lead opened his beak. “Yeah, we’re done.”
“Good.” Shires nodded at me. “Come on. I’ll show you where it happened.”
There was a long, long trail awinding across the bedroom floor to the bathroom doorway—a trail of blood. Shires paced beside it and as I joined him an idiotic refrain popped into my head. Follow the yellow-brick road—
But this road was red, and it didn’t lead to the Emerald City.
The bathroom was small, its white-tiled walls covered with flecks of congealed crimson at their base. I’m not a professional vulture myself, at least I don’t like to think I am, but it required no expertise to reconstruct what had taken place here.
A wide-open window offered mute testimony as to how the killer gained entrance to the first-floor apartment. There was nothing to show where the victim had been at the time. She could have been in the bathroom with her back turned, or else walked into it after the murderer entered.
My offhand guess inclined towards the second explanation. If Mrs. Lamb was present during the actual entry she would have heard sounds and had time to see the intruder and do the sensible thing—run like hell out of the room. I favored another scenario: she came in later, after the interloper took up a position behind the open door.
In either case I doubted that she ever saw her murderer, unless perhaps she caught a single fleeting glimpse in the bathroom mirror as the presence loomed up behind her and the weapon came down.
Since there were no signs of a struggle, nothing knocked over or broken on the washstand, no marks of clawing hands or fingers on the white-tiled walls, it was fair to assume she’d been attacked from the rear; swiftly, savagely—and from the killer’s point of view—successfully.
I said as much to Shires, and he agreed. Possibly two weapons had been used: a knife that severed the jugular and/or carotid artery, followed by a saw or hatchet that actually removed her head once the body had slumped to the floor. That determination would have to be made by the pathologist, since no weapon or weapons were found on the scene, and so far none had been located by the crew searching the alleyway beyond the window. But from the angle of entry and impact evident on the neck, the head had been severed from back to front, after which the decapitated corpse had been dragged across the bedroom floor and deposited in the chair before the mirror in all its gory glory.
“What do you think?” I asked Shires. “Could she have been molested before she died?”
“Molested?” For the first time he favored me with a smile. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant one, and frankly I preferred his scowl. “You mean raped?” He shook his head. “No signs of it—either before or after death.”
I hadn’t thought about the latter possibility and didn’t want to. I concealed my reaction by hurrying on.
“Forensics can give us the answer on that,” I said. “And probably identify the missing weapon or weapons by examining the wounds in the victim’s head.”
“Not likely.” Shires gestured through the doorway towards the figure sprawled in the chair before the vanity. “All they’re going to get is a headache. We can’t find the head.”
Forensic experts weren’t the only ones stuck with a headache. I had my own.
In the days that followed, the reports came into the office and were duly dumped on my desk. Pathologists’ findings, inquest transcripts, investigative data—all pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t fit together.
Apparently my hasty conclusions about the actual murder method were tentatively confirmed, though there was no additional evidence, no eyewitness testimony, no dramatic clues issuing from lab tests. Fibres of carpet different from those in the bedroom had turned up, fibres deposited by the killer’s shoes, but clues to their origin were lacking. No fingerprints were found anywhere in the apartment, or on the window-sash and sill. The lion that struck down Mrs. Lamb was a crafty beast.
But I’m not a Great White Hunter, any more than I’m a vulture. My role is strictly unofficial; as a retired professor of criminology I’m called in to assess evidence and review theory on special occasions.
Some homicide bureaus work with psychics, though they try not to publicize the fact. A few prefer someone like myself working behind the scenes. It doesn’t always produce results, but at least it’s better than following usual police procedure—which is to wait for a phone-call from an informant that solves the case.
This time there was no call. And lacking a crystal ball, I had problems.
Department head Romberg barged into my little makeshift office on the second day after the crime to demand a progress report.
“I can give you a report, yes,” I told him. “But not very much by way of progress.”
He lit a cigarette, the quick flick of his lighter betraying his impatience. “Okay, so you haven’t found any new leads. Just what did you come up with?”
I shrugged. “Pretty much the same thing that you found, I imagine. I made a few notes here.” Rummaging through the litter on my desk-top I located the typescript from which I read.
“Jennifer Lamb was fifty-eight years old. Widowed three years ago, no children, no immediate family. Husband Eric, eight years her senior, died of a heart attack; she lived on his pension plus social security payments. Far as we know she had no close friends, male or female, no live-in, no indication of casual sexual involvements—”
Romberg interrupted me with a gesture from the hand holding his cigarette. “You’re right, we got all that. Neighbors say she was a loner, tended to keep pretty much to herself. Went shopping two or three times a week, attended First Baptist Church, over on Elm Street, every Sunday. Didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs. Didn’t seem to have any hobbies—there weren’t even any books in the apartment, just a TV and a transistor radio. Drove a blue 1985 Toyota, had her hair done every two weeks, kept a checking-account at First National. Trouble is, all this mean
s nothing.”
I shook my head. “Sometimes nothing means something.”
“Like what, Professor?”
“The very emptiness of her life is a clue. No family, close friends or romantic attachments—their lack indicates there was no personal motive for her murder. And since her purse, jewelry-box and dresser-drawers hadn’t been touched, we can rule out robbery. Which leaves us with the assumption that whoever killed her could be sociopathic.”
“So what else is new? We figured all along we’re dealing with a crazy.”
“Sociopaths are not legally insane,” I reminded him. “And crawling through an open window and selecting a victim at random is not in itself a sure indication of psychosis.”
“But what about the way she was killed? Cutting off her head and propping the body up in a chair—only a loony would do a thing like that.”
“Definitions of mental disturbances aren’t important,” I said. “The big question is whether the murder was committed on impulse or as the result of a deep-rooted compulsion.”
“What difference does that make?”
“All the difference in the world. Because if the murder was compulsive, we must expect the possibility of further killings.”
Romberg grimaced. “That’s all we need—another serial murderer!” He shook his head. “I’m not buying that. You got no facts to go on, so don’t tell me—”
I didn’t have to.
At that moment a uniformed officer hustled into the office unannounced and uninvited. “Just got word on the squawk,” he said. “Supermarket over on Pine and Seventh. Clerk went out to throw some cartons in the trash-bin. Found a body-bag dumped there, and it wasn’t empty.”
Romberg grimaced again. “Man or a woman?”
“A man. Or most of him, that is.”
“Most of him?”
“That’s right. His left hand’s missing.”
The man’s name was Rufus Tate. Black, aged thirty-four, married, two children. Steel-worker, presently unemployed, last seen leaving a neighborhood bar half a mile from where his body was discovered—but there’s no need to go into further details.
