Hangman (21 page)

Zinc tossed the photo of Jayne Curry to one side.

He picked up the photo of Bart Busby hanging dead from the mast of his boat. He studied it and said, “Busby represents all jurors who break their oath to play out a hidden agenda in the jury room. He was a bully who liked to see people squirm. First he went to work on Mary, the holdout juror. Then, after Haddon was convicted through bully tactics—”

“Busby enjoyed the effect of what he accomplished for years. Peter was raped and castrated in a prison riot, and thanks to Bart’s hijacking the jury, was eventually hanged for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“Ugly,” Zinc said.

“It all fits,” said Maddy.

“And makes me doubt whether courts are fit to try death-penalty cases.”

“What happens now?” asked Maddy. “Is the Hangman’s crusade over? The two directly responsible for Haddon’s death are dead. The word game is solved. Everyone knows the answer. The lesson to learn from Peter’s hanging is abundantly clear: Fail in your duty as a juror and this could be you.”

“Do you think it’s over?”

“All except whodunit.”

“And who’s that?” Zinc asked. “Someone related to Haddon?”

“That would explain the
Scream
mask.”

“A primal scream?” said the Mountie.

“Or maybe it’s another juror on the Haddon case. Look at the effect guilt had on Mary Konrad. She grew into an obese woman. What if another juror broke down under the strain of having been on the jury that sent Peter to the gallows?”

“So he—”

“Or she—”

“Wants the world to know who’s to blame—”

“Or wants to get even with those who burdened him or her with guilt.”

“A mad juror?”

“Why not?”

“Going after bad jurors?”

“That’s how the Hangman knew what went on in the jury room. And why Mary—for her part—became the first victim.”

“You don’t have to be a juror to learn that in the States, do you? Canada has a law that makes it illegal for jurors to discuss their deliberations. From what I see on TV, however, American jurors are ready to blab a second after the verdict is in.”

“True,” said Maddy. “Which is too bad. If we had your law, it would narrow the suspects.”

“What about another defendant facing death? Would that not give someone a motive to spook the jury pool? He takes Washington’s only hanging to date and converts it into a scare tactic to save his own skin.”

“If he’s in jail, who does the hanging? A contract killer?”

“Or an accomplice. Or a lover on the outside.”

“Ironic,” said Maddy, “if the death penalty gave someone a motive to kill. It’s supposed to work the other way ’round.”

“What about a zealot against the death penalty?”

“Have you ever witnessed a hanging?”

“Indirectly,” said Zinc. “On Deadman’s Island, we suffered a lynching in the dark.”

“But not an execution?”

“No,” he said. “The death penalty was gone when I joined the Mounted.”

“I have.”

“What? Witnessed a hanging?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Peter Haddon.”

“Holy shit!”

“I was at Walla Walla in 1993.”

“How’d that come about?”

“Between you and me?”

“Whatever you tell me, Maddy, is in strict confidence.”

Beyond the door to the Regal Lounge, the sailor searching for Inspector Chandler climbed to the Crown Deck.

“A cop and a reporter. You know how it is? Justin and I occasionally help each other out.”

“Sure,” said Zinc. “Symbiosis. Sometimes it’s best to work hand in glove with the press.”

“Justin was looking into whether Peter was guilty. This was in the months before Haddon hanged. The appeal process had almost run its course. Peter’s last hope was for Justin to find something. What Justin required was some digging on the inside. I became a cop years after the Haddon trial. He asked me to check if the detectives who’d worked the case had influenced Anna’s dad into changing the time he said he got home to find her missing.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. That’s why I became a cop. To ensure that justice was done in an unjust world.”

“Any luck?”

“Nope. We
still
don’t know. Anna’s dad refused to waver from his testimony. The bulls who dealt with him maintain they did it by the book.”

“Why’d you go to the hanging?”

“Justin asked me to. By then, he was obsessed with Peter’s innocence. He feared Haddon was going to the gallows because
he
had fucked up.”

“Justin?”

“Yes. By not breaking the story.”

“You went as moral support?”

The detective nodded.

“How’d you get a seat in the gallows gallery?”

“Justin arranged for Peter to make me one of
his
witnesses.”

“Must have been grueling.”

“It was,” sighed Maddy. “The execution attracted a horde of pros and cons. Those For and those Against were caged outside, in the prison’s parking lot. Except for that surrounding abortion, there’s no hotter moral rift in America. Zealots against abortion have shot doctors who perform them. From the zeal I witnessed in the shouts of those against hanging Haddon, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Hangman was spawned among zealots violently opposed to capital—”

“Inspector Chandler?”

Interrupted, Zinc and Maddy turned. A
North Star
crewman was approaching their table.

“Yes?” said the Mountie.

“I was sent to find you. It’s urgent that you come with me. Captain’s orders.”

Bleeding Heart

Pacific Ocean

November 10

“Urgent?” said Zinc. “What’s the problem?”

The crewman glanced at Maddy.

“I’m a Seattle detective.”

The crewman hesitated.

“Out with it,” said the Mountie.

“There’s been a murder, sir. The captain needs you below.”

“A murder?”

“A hanging.”

“That’s in poor taste,” said Maddy.

Both cops knew from the invitations that there was to be an interactive murder mystery on the crime cruise sometime tonight. Those who wished to play the game for a magnum of champagne would be summoned to the scene of the crime. There, they would face a mess of clues about the “body” and, from the evidence left by the murderer, would try to guess whodunit and why. The closest answer would win the booze. That’s what Zinc and Maddy thought this was. A summons to play.

“Alex sent you?”

“No, sir. The captain.”

“Give us a moment.”

The crewman withdrew to the door.

“He’s good,” said Maddy.

“They use actors.”

“Are you game?”

“Are you?”

“Why not?” said Maddy.

“If we win, the champagne is yours.”

“Alex will be cross.”

“She’s behind this charade.”

They followed the crewman from the lounge and down the stairs to the Sun Deck. The scene of the murder was to be in the solarium around the indoor pool, under the crystal canopy of the deck above. Through the open door to the solarium, Maddy and Zinc could see a mannequin sprawled by the water. Those arranging the murder were fussing with clues in final preparation for the passenger sleuths’ arrival.

“This way,” said the crewman, holding the elevator door for them.

“Where are we going?”

“To ‘A’ Deck, sir.”

“‘A’ Deck?”

“Yes, sir. To one of the cabins.”

Five decks down, the elevator stopped outside the dining room. The door slid open on a shouting match. A lawyer-turned-author was regaling the diners who were too drunk to leave the room with tales of his research safari to Africa. The drunks were involved in deep conversations of their own, and it was hard to hear with this guy at the mike yakking. The author was angry that his pearls fell before swine, so he used the amplification system to drown out the drunks. The drunks were pissed at the nerve of this little Hitler, and they began chanting, “Shut the fuck up!” In effect, it was nothing more than your usual squabble of lawyers. My, how they love the sound of their own voices.

Zinc looked for Alex.

Alex was nowhere around.

The crewman told the drunk who tried to enter the elevator to take the next one.

The door closed.

The lift continued its drop.

Zinc put one and one together and began to wonder if they would all be embarrassed. Alex Hunt was a sexy trickster. Many were the times she had sexually shanghaied Zinc. The clues were there to indicate she might be up to that. The stateroom assigned to them was down on “A” Deck. He wouldn’t put it past Alex to leave the lawyers and Justin talking somewhere on the ship while she slipped away to their cabin. Dispatching a crewman to lure Zinc to the “murder” would be her kind of fun, and when he entered the stateroom, there she would be, in the nude with nothing but a blood red rose between her teeth.

“Take me,” Alex would say.

And usually he would. That being one of the reasons why Zinc loved Alex to death.

But if that was how this game played out tonight, there would be red faces when Maddy entered the cabin with him.

Maddy, too, was puzzled by what was going on. The “murder” was a hanging, the crewman had said. With the Hangman on the loose, that was in poor taste. Would those who had organized the festival make such a mistake? It wasn’t a faux pas befitting an arty crowd. Besides, if the mystery was planned for the solarium, why lead the Mountie and her down here?

It must be a prank.

But it wasn’t.

That was evident the instant the elevator stopped and the door slid open on “A” Deck.
North Star
crewmen were everywhere, corralling passengers who’d come down to their staterooms or barricading the entrance to the starboard passageway. The crewman sent to fetch Zinc ushered the Mountie and the detective around the cordon and along the almost-deserted corridor to where the captain stood by an open cabin door.

The captain was a lanky man uniformed in white. He had the bearing of ex-navy in his mastlike spine. Whatever perils he’d faced at sea were masked by the cut of his jib, but what he had witnessed in the cabin had rammed his even keel.

No introductions.

“The Hangman’s aboard,” he said.

The captain stepped aside so Zinc and Maddy could gaze in.

The stateroom was an oblong with two portholes in the far wall. The portholes were over twin beds with a floor space between. The flowered quilts on the beds matched a curtain that could be drawn across the cabin as a privacy screen. The curtain was pushed back to bare the curtain rod.

Tough as she was from all the death she had seen in her life, Maddy was shaken to her core by the sight of the hanging corpse. The body was hoisted a foot off the floor by a rope looped over the curtain rod and tied to the leg of one bed. The head in the hangman’s noose was crooked to one side. The face was blue from asphyxia. The bulging eyes were bloodshot from burst vessels. Strangulation had forced out the tongue, which the killer had slit with a slash across the gaping mouth. Blood gushing from that wound had poured down the torso, soaking the victim’s formal dress red. Both arms and both legs were slashed as well. The blood from those cuts had pooled on the floor, where it oozed around the body of a man crumpled unconscious at the feet of the corpse.

In the blood that crept from him toward the cabin door lay a knife with its blade pointing at the side wall.

On that wall, scrawled in blood, was a hangman game:

“What in hell …” said Maddy.

She turned to face Zinc.

And found herself face to face with a likeness she knew well.

Shock had tightened Zinc’s flesh hard against his skull.

Disbelief had shot his eyelids wide.

Outrage had twitched one pupil to the side.

His mouth was frozen open in the elliptic O of a silent shriek.

He was Munch’s
The Scream.

The victim hanging from the rod was Alex Hunt.

The Brig

Vancouver

Tonight

The practice of criminal law consists of fighting courtroom battles and recounting legendary war stories. How successful a lawyer is can be gauged by whether the battles making news are being fought by
him
, and whether the war stories he tells make up
his
reputation. If both focus on gunslingers other than him, then he’s no more than a wannabe yearning for his mirage in the desert. That was me, six days ago on that fatal cruise, full of battles and war stories that other lawyers had fought and earned.

But all that was going to change.

I was talking death with a couple of American gunslingers from Seattle when Det. Maddy Thorne found me in a bar called the Brig. The
North Star
seemed to have more bars than passengers, no doubt to ward off the titanic chill of all those Alaskan icebergs that played chicken with the ship on its northern cruises. The Yank with the handlebar mustache—his trademark, I’ll bet—was a slippery snake in the grass named Josh Hand. He referred to himself as “the Learned Hand,” an attorneys’ in-joke about a famous U.S. judge. Sporting a bolo tie with a steer’s-head clasp, his sidekick was an urban cowboy named Russ Russell. He referred to himself as “the Rustler,” but I fixed him in my mind through alliteration. Russ Russell was the
sound
of a snake in the grass.

“Do you gamble, Jeff?”

The question came from Josh.

“All lawyers are gamblers,” I replied.

Russ took a twenty from his wallet and slapped it on the bar.

The snake and the slither gave each other the eye. I felt like a mouse being sized up as a meal.

“As sentence stories go, Kinky’s not bad. But when it comes to gallows humor and the bench, twenty dollars says I can better that.”

“Better Mrs. Mudge going ballistic when the judge slammed her son?”

“Yep.”

“With whom?” I asked.

“José Gonzales.”

“A client of yours?”

“Nah,” said Josh. “A bit before my time. Gonzales was sentenced back in 1881. In U.S. District Court. New Mexico Territory Sessions.”

I glanced at the twenty.

It would buy a round.

I picked up the gauntlet Josh had thrown down.

“So let’s hear it.”

“Whoa,” said Russ. “To coin a phrase, show me the money, pal.”

I pulled a Canadian twenty from my wallet and put it down.

The Yanks stared at the colorful bill as if it should be hanging on a roll beside the toilet.

“We’re not playing Monopoly.”

“Place a bet,” said Russ.

“With legal tender.”

“Which I can take to the bank.”

“See that?” I said, pointing out the window. “It’s Vancouver Island. We’re in Canadian waters. So my money
is
legal tender here.”

“It should be thirty.”

“With exchange.”

“Hey, big spender. Don’t be cheap,” I said. “That twenty’s worth as much to me as yours is to you. Why should I gamble one and a half times your bet?”

“Whatever,” said Josh. He stroked his mustache.

“It’s only money,” Russ said. He tugged his bolo tie.

“So,” I said, “tell me a story that’s better than Kinky and Mudge.”

From the inside pocket of his rumpled brown suit, Josh pulled a folded photocopied sheet and said, “Read it and laugh, Jeff.”

I angled the hand-off toward the light behind the bar:

José Manuel Miguel Xaviar Gonzales … in a few short weeks it will be spring. The snows of winter will flee away. The ice will vanish. The air will become soft and balmy. In short, José Manuel Miguel Xaviar Gonzales, the annual miracle of the years will awaken and come to pass. But you won’t be there.

The rivulet will run its soaring course to the sea. The timid desert flowers will put forth their tender shoots. The glorious valleys of this domain will blossom as the rose. Still, José Manuel Miguel Xaviar Gonzales, you won’t be here to see.

From every treetop some wild woods songster will carol his mating song. Butterflies will sport in the sunshine. The busy bee will hum happily as it pursues its accustomed vocation. The gentle breeze will tease the tassels of the wildgrasses … and all nature … José Manuel Miguel Xaviar Gonzales … will be glad … but you.

You won’t be here to enjoy it because I now command the sheriff or some other officers of the county to lead you out to some remote spot … swing you by the neck from a knotting bough of some sturdy oak … and let you hang until you are dead.

And then, José Manuel Miguel Xaviar Gonzales … I further command that such officer … or officers retire quickly from your dangling corpse … that vultures may descend from the heavens upon your filthy body until nothing shall remain but bare … bleached bones of a cold-blooded, copper-colored, bloodthirsty, throat-cutting, chili-eating, sheep-herding, murdering son of a bitch.

 

I laughed out loud.

“Is that for real?” I asked.

“As real as this twenty you just lost,” said Josh as he reached for my money.

I clamped the Learned Hand. “Not so fast,” I said. “Mickey Spillane, I assume, is your favorite author?”

“Huh?” grunted Josh.

“He should be,” I replied. “Judging from your way of judging,
I, the Jury
is right up your alley. As for me, I prefer a more objective judge.”

He grinned slyly.

I grinned back.

The snake and the mongoose.

The mongoose and the snake.

“Point made,” Josh said.

“Fitting,” said Russ. “A Mexican standoff over a guy named José Gonzales.”

Josh winked slyly.

I winked back.

“Are you a gambler, Jeff?”

“All lawyers are gamblers, Josh.”

“Then why don’t you and I gamble on a judge? Next person through the door settles the issue. You tell him the tale of Kinky. I tell him the tale of Gonzales. And we let the luck of the draw decide.”

“You’re on,” I said.

“Good. Release my hand.”

The three of us turned our bar stools to face the entrance of the Brig.

“A buck says it’s a man.”

“You’re on,” I repeated.

“It must gall you,” Russ said, “to no longer have hanging in Canada to bet against. A death-penalty case is the ultimate gamble. Just you and the state playing craps in court for your client’s life. Betting cash is child’s play compared to that. You gotta be one of us to know the execution thrill. Sex won’t get your rocks off with half the blast that gambling with losing your client to the noose or the needle will.”

“We still play,” I said.

“How, without a gallows?”

“We use
your
gallows and our Extradition Act. As long as life hangs in the balance, the thrill is there to enjoy.”

“Welshers,” Josh scoffed.

“Cowards,” Russ sneered.

“If there’s one thing we hold in contempt, it’s a killer without balls. The way I see it, if you want to kill someone in the States and beat our justice system at trial, that’s your God-given right under the Constitution. But if you play, be prepared to pay. It’s only a welsher who gambles in America, then flees to Canada to avoid the cost of losing.”

“That’s harsh,” I said. “
You
set up the game.”

“What game?” they asked in unison.

“Cheat the hangman, fellows.”

The snake and the slither exchanged glances. They were silently trying to decide which one would ask the ignorant question.

“How’s that?” said Josh.

“Let’s go back to 1972. In
Furman
v.
Georgia
, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty in America. That was the ultra-liberal era of the Warren court in the United States, so the outcome of the
Furman
case was no surprise. The current extradition treaty between the U.S. and Canada had been signed the year before, in 1971. Foreseeing
Furman
, U.S. negotiators feared that capital punishment would be abolished in the States while Canada still had the gallows as the lawful sentence for murder. That’s why the provision you think so unfair was put in the treaty. So
you
could demand
we
guarantee not to execute fugitives extradited
from
the States
to
Canada.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Russ.

“You gotta love the irony in that twist of fate,” I said. “The treaty was ratified and came into force in March 1976. In late June of that same year, Canada’s law makers voted to abolish hanging. A few days later, in early July, your Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in
Gregg
v.
Georgia.

“What goes around, comes around, as they say. Your chickens have come home to roost, as they say. You made your bed, now lie in it, as they say. You reap what you sow, as they say.

“So, hey, guys. We’re all lawyers here. Isn’t the name of the game to get our clients off however we can? And if America made a mistake by giving Canada a way to cheat
your
hangman—by demanding that
you
guarantee not to execute a fugitive killer extradited
from
Canada
to
the States—do you not think it just good counsel work to ram that mistake up your ass?”

“Whoa,” said Russ. “Here come de judge.”

All eyes locked on the door to the bar, for there stood the woman I had seen talking with the Mountie in the dining room after Ethan, Justin, and Alex came over to join me for dessert.

She looked tough.

I like ballsy women.

“Hey, Detective,” called the Learned Hand. “Would you resolve a bet for us?”

The cop came over.

“I’m busy, Josh.” She eyed me. “Are you Jeff Kline?”

“The one and only,” I said.

“Then it’s your lucky day. Have I got a client for you.”

I looked around.

“Where?”

“In the brig.”

“We’re in the Brig.”

“The
real
brig. The ship’s holding cell.”

“Who?” I said.

“Come with me and you’ll see.”

I stood up and grabbed my twenty off the bar.

“You owe me a buck,” I said to Josh. “First person in was a woman.”

“In your dreams,” he said.

“Welsher,’ I replied.

*    *    *

Every ship has a brig of one sort or another. In the good old days of rum, sodomy, and the lash, it was a rat-infested hole where prisoners languished until they were dragged out to be flogged, keel-hauled, or hanged from the yardarm. On a ship as upscale as the
North Star
, the brig was a windowless cabin on the lowest deck, occasionally used to confine belligerent drunks or compulsive bottom-pinchers harassing women on the dance floor. What made it a brig was the bolt was on the
outside
of the door.

“Mind if I frisk you?” the detective asked.

“No,” I said, holding out my arms.

Maddy ran her hands over and under my barrister’s robes.

“My turn,” I said as she finished patting me down.

“Touch me and I’ll break your arm.”

“I do believe you could.”

“And would,” she said, pulling back the bolt to unlock the door.

“Who’s in there?”

“A surprise. Knock when you’re through.”

She opened the door, let me in, then shut the door behind me and engaged the bolt.

“Christ, am I glad to see you!”

Ethan made a wobbly attempt to stand, but his legs refused to support him.

“What have you done, Eth?” I said. “You look like a refugee from a slaughterhouse.”

My office partner was covered with blood. Spatters dotted his face like terminal smallpox. His black robes were soaked with blood, as if he had been sleeping in a pool of gore. A bruise darkened his forehead around the temple, and his bleary eyes had the terrified look of a fox being hunted by hounds. Ethan sat slumped on one of the beds several feet from me, but the smell of alcohol off him reached the door. Light a match in here and the room might explode.

“I didn’t kill her, Jeff.”

“Kill who?” I asked.

“Alex Hunt.”

“What!” I exclaimed.

“They think I’m the Hangman. She was
hanged
, Jeff. They found me passed out on the floor by her feet. Near a hangman game on the wall.”

“Where?” I asked.

“In my cabin.”

“In your
cabin?
”

Ethan nodded.

“Is this a joke? Are you putting me on?”

“Does it look like a fucking joke?” he exploded.

“Eth, you’re drunk.”

“I was drunk, Jeff. This nightmare is sobering me up fast.”

“Why was Alex Hunt in your cabin?”

“I don’t know. Wait … Yes, I do. We went out on deck for air. I felt better, but it was cold. She said we needed coats to walk the jogging track. We both had cabins on ‘A’ Deck, so we went down to bundle up. Alex helped me enter mine, then suddenly I felt the urge to puke.”

I waited.

“Think, Eth.”

“I’m trying, Jeff. It’s a haze from all the booze I drank.”

“You were in the john?”

“Puking up my guts.”

“Where was Alex?”

“She was in the cabin.”

“Waiting for you?”

“I suppose. Then … then …”

I waited.

“There was a knock on the door.”

“Alex answered it?”

“I don’t know, Jeff. She must have.”

“Why?”

“Because she was on the floor.”

“Dead?”

“Don’t know.”

“When was that?”

“When I came out from puking in the john.”

“Then what?”

“That’s all. I don’t remember. Someone must have whacked me on the head.”

“Your temple’s bruised.”

“My head feels scrambled. Any chance we could get a pot of coffee?”

“In a moment. First things first. Did you say anything to the cops?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s a poor answer.”

“I was drunk. I was stunned. I was scared, Jeff. I don’t think I said anything.”

“Eth, you’re a lawyer. You know rule number one is never talk to the cops.”