Hangman (15 page)

“Oh, no,” said Zinc.

“What do you see?” asked Maddy.

“A media shark named Sue Frye feasting on blood in the water.”

“Guess what happens next.”

“She shows what we don’t want seen.”

“The hold-back evidence is held back no more.”

As if on cue, the camera panned away from Sue Frye to close in on the butchered body hanging from the mast of the sloop. In a weak attempt at good taste, the remains were shot as a silhouette against the blazing bloodball of the rising sun. Both legs and one arm were shortened to dripping stumps, while the other arm was lashed to a deck stanchion with rope. The camera followed a drip of blood down to the cabin roof, then off that roof toward the deck beside the starboard gunwale, but stopped short to focus on a bloody hangman game scrawled on the cabin wall:

“Three
E’
s,” Zinc said.

“Another good guess.”

“So the Hangman won’t stop killing until we solve the whole puzzle.”

“If then,” said Maddy.

“Let’s hope,” said Zinc.

The camera dropped for a quick shot of the severed limbs on the bloody deck beneath the hangman game, then the focus returned to Frye.

“Here come the police,” Sue said as the cameraman swiveled around. The face of an angry uniformed officer filled the lens. “Take your hands off me,” shouted Sue. The image onscreen jumped all over the place while the sharks were repelled.

Zinc took the control from Alex and pressed the Mute button so he and Maddy could talk.

“Who’s Sue Frye?”

“Local legend. She’s been around a while. Made her name covering this state’s return to the noose back in 1993.”

“Now she’s got a scoop with another hanging, eh?” said Zinc.

“Broadcasting the hangman game to the public is a rough turn of events. We won’t be able to separate copycats from the real McCoy.”

“Look on the bright side. A viewer might solve the puzzle.”

“Does it mean anything to you?”

“No,” said Zinc.

The
whup
of the chopper drowned Maddy’s voice at the far end of the call, then she appeared as large as life on the silent screen. Maddy looked up and scowled at the telephoto lens, waving the helicopter away like a malarial mosquito.

“You just mouthed ‘Fuck off’ on live TV,” scolded Zinc.

“Another pass and I’ll empty my gun at the fucking pilot.”

“So this victim’s male.”

“Uh-huh,” said the detective.

“Anything else different from the Hangman’s female crimes?”

“Lots,” she replied. “The vic’s a traveling salesman named Bart Busby. It’s his boat. The Hangman didn’t use a noose this time. Strung the guy up with a harness instead. That meant he was alive and conscious for what followed. Unlike the previous killings, this vic’s guts were pulled out. Then his limbs were sawn off before he died. And finally, his jaw was slashed to ribbons after death.”

“Sounds personal.”

“Very,”
said Maddy.

“I didn’t see any guts on TV.”

“They shot the corpse in silhouette. The guts hang down in front of the mast.”

“How tasteful.”

“Trust Sue Frye.”

“What could be Bart’s connection to the Hangman’s female victims?”

“No idea.”

“Another blind?”

“If it was Dag Konrad or the Lady-Killer.”

“You’re checking Dag?”

“As we speak. And the good doctor?”

“We think Twist crossed into the States the night of the Vancouver killing.”

“Interesting.”

“He may still be there.”

“You’re coming down tonight?”

“Yes, by train.”

“If I can get free, I’ll join you for the cruise. I suspect we may spend all night comparing theories and notes.”

“What about the guess?”

“I hate to give it to Sue.”

“You can bet the Hangman’s watching her now.”

“The second word of the game is missing a vowel.”

“
A. E.
Let’s be consistent.”

“
I
it is,” said Maddy.

“Liar,” Alex said as Zinc punched off the speakerphone.

“What have I done now?”

“She doesn’t look like a shriveled-up prune.”

Lawyer’s Luck

Vancouver

Tonight

A minute before seven a.m. on November 10, six days before the climax that is going down tonight, the phone rang in my East End home as I was about to shower. Naked, I left the bathroom for the den, catching the call on its seventh ring.

“Hello.”

“Jeff, it’s Ethan. Turn on KVOT.”

“Hey, I’m naked and it’s cold in here.”

“Overnight, the Hangman struck again in Seattle. A camera crew beat the cops to the scene. They got a shot of the hangman game and the word puzzle drawn in blood. You’ve got thirty seconds to catch it broadcast on KVOT news.”

“You at home?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call you back.”

The TV was in the tiny box I call my living room, and since I’m the last person on Earth without a phone that moves, I had to abandon Ethan if I was to turn it on in time.

Ten minutes later, a blanket wrapped around me, I phoned him back.

“What a case,” I said. “A gunslinger’s dream. What I wouldn’t give to land a client like that.”

“You in the office this morning?”

“Later, around noon. Got to finish research at the library first.”

“There’s something I want to discuss.”

“I’m listening, Eth.”

“Face to face. Not on the phone.”

“Will it wait until noon?”

“Yes, I want to drop by my mom’s on the way in to work.”

“More plumbing problems?”

“Family problems, Jeff.”

“Okay, noon at the office.”

“See you then.”

As I put down the phone, I studied the palm of my hand. Before running to catch the news I had grabbed a pen from my desk, and finding myself without paper when the puzzle appeared on the tube, I had used my skin to record the Hangman’s word game.

Written on my hand was:

_E_E_  _ _ _ _E  _A_ _ _ _

What the hell did that mean?

*    *    *

Having quickly showered, shaved and gulped down a breakfast of Eggo waffles, I drove directly to the law courts through a sunny haze, then parked my car in the cheaper lot toward False Creek.

I rode the elevator up to the law library with a pair of big-firm, paper-pushing fat cats. Their ruddy cheeks had cracked veins from too many liquid lunches. The one with two chins was telling the one with three chins a joke.

“This lawyer parks his BMW on the street, Sid.”

“How gauche,” Sid replied.

“As he opens the driver’s door to climb out onto the road, a car wheels around the corner and takes off the door.”

“Ouch,” winced Sid, as if bodily hurt.

“‘My Beamer! My Beamer!’ shouts the lawyer while a passing cop car screeches to a halt.”

“The cop didn’t chase the hit and run?”

“It’s a joke, Sid. The cop gets out and runs over to the shouting driver. The vanity plate on the Beamer flaunts ‘Lawsuit.’ ‘You lawyers are so materialistic,’ sneers the cop. ‘Your arm’s been torn off, but all you can think about is your car.’

“A look of horror crosses the lawyer’s face.

“‘My Rolex! My Rolex!’ cries the poor fellow.”

The fat cats laughed.

I laughed too.

Especially when both pushed back their sleeves to check the time on Rolexes.

I wore a cheap Timex.

So the joke wasn’t on me.

*    *    *

“Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else’s luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.”

That’s William S. Burroughs.

I can’t put it better.

That, in a nutshell, captures my profession.

The way I saw things that Friday morning, Jeffrey Kline was a lawyer down on his luck, and if he was ever to climb to the top of his profession, he—
me
—would have to make his own luck.

The Lord helps those who help themselves.

Is that how it goes?

*    *    *

The library was bustling at that time of morning. Harried counsel, robes flapping like gospel singers in full throat, gathered last-minute case authorities for court. Sunbeams shone through the windows along Hornby Street, dubbed “Horny Street” in disco days because it was lined with clubs. The last tenacious autumn leaves clung to trees along the sidewalk.

I sat where I had worked on Wednesday and emptied my briefcase.

The Hangman had caught me by surprise by striking again so soon. On a pad of legal-size paper I jotted a rough timetable:

What distracted me on Thursday from finishing my self-promoting newspaper piece on hangmen was a chickenshit domestic-assault trial in provincial court. No matter, since I thought I had a week to bait the hook, but now it seemed the Hangman was on an accelerating schedule.

Even more disconcerting was where the killer had struck. By returning to Seattle for the third hanging, the Hangman had slipped from my grasp if he got caught. Arrest him north of the border and his lawyer could be me. Arrest him south of the line, in American jurisdiction, and the client I hoped to attract would go to a Seattle gun.

Time was of the essence.

I had to lure him back.

So again I fetched
Dance with the Hangman
from the Lawyers’ Leisure shelf.

*    *    *

“Calcraft
hanged
them. I
execute
them.”

That telling distinction was voiced by the man who succeeded Calcraft as Britain’s public executioner from 1879 to 1883. Before William Marwood, hanging was a process of slow strangulation. The condemned was hauled up or “turned off” a ladder or cart to dance the Tyburn jig until the noose eventually throttled him to death. What Marwood recognized was the fundamental importance of weight plunging through distance as a means to cause “instantaneous” death by snapping a hanged man’s spine. On demonstrating his “long drop” to British officials, he was offered the job of hangman over a horde of other applicants.

Marwood turned hanging into a science. A deep pit was dug beneath the scaffold so he could give those he hanged a drop of between seven and ten feet, according to each convict’s height and weight. Because of how a rope is made, he learned to position the noose knot beneath the left ear. That way, his client’s head would be suddenly jerked back when his body reached the full extent of its plunge. If the noose knot was placed on the right side, the head would be jerked forward, resulting in strangulation instead of a broken spine. And so the condemned could not raise his hands to grab hold of the rope, Marwood devised a belt that pinioned his wrists to his waist.

A thought occurred to me.

I scribbled notes.

“Why does the Hangman strangle instead of snapping spines?

“So his victims suffer?

“For something they did wrong?”

So proud was Marwood of his occupation that he had business cards printed:

WILLIAM MARWOOD

PUBLIC EXECUTIONER

HORNCASTLE, LINCOLNSHIRE

So pious was Marwood that he would kneel down and pray for the soul of the convict he was about to hang. “I am doing God’s work according to the Divine command and the law of the British Crown,” he told one and all. “I do it simply as a matter of duty and as a Christian. I sleep as soundly as a child and am never disturbed by phantoms. Where there is guilt there is bad sleeping. I live a blameless life. Detesting idleness, I pass my vacant time in business. It would have been better for those I executed if they, too, had preferred industry to idleness.”

“Hangman” was a term Marwood detested. He referred to himself as “the public executioner.” Before long, his name was known in every household. Children playing in the streets had a riddle:

“If Pa killed Ma, who would kill Pa?”

The answer?

“Mar-wood.”

Except when performing a hanging, this hangman was an inveterate joker. Once, at a jail with steps leading up to the gallows, Marwood slipped as he was climbing to prepare the noose. He quipped to gathering officials: “Somebody will be killed coming up these steps, if they don’t mind.”

“Gallows humor?” I wrote.

“The Hangman’s hangman game?”

*    *    *

Marwood made hanging a science.

Berry made hanging an art.

A former cop who sought the job after he was hurt in a pub fight, James Berry hanged 134 convicts between 1884 and 1892. He was the first executioner to work out a regular scale of drops according to the weight of the person being hanged. The lighter the build, the longer the drop. In his memoirs, Berry wrote:

The rope I use is thirteen feet long and has a one-inch brass ring worked into one end, through which the other end of the rope is passed to form a noose. I always adjust it with the ring just behind the left ear. This is best calculated to cause instantaneous and painless death, because it acts in three different ways towards the same end. In the first place, it will cause death by strangulation, which was really the only cause of death in the old method of hanging, before the long drop was introduced. Secondly, it dislocates the vertebrae, which is now the actual cause of death. And thirdly, if a third factor were necessary, it has a tendency to internally rupture the jugular vein, which in itself is sufficient to cause practically instantaneous death.

 

“What effect does hanging have on the hangman?” I wrote.

“Does it warp his psyche?

“Can it drive him insane?”

In 1885, Berry journeyed to Exeter to execute John Lee. A wealthy matron named Emma Keyse had employed Lee as a footman. When she reduced his wages, he gave her a beating and cut her throat, then tried to burn her body to cover up. Berry’s attempt to hang Lee is undoubtedly the most puzzling event that ever occurred on a British scaffold.

The gallows at Exeter Prison was built in a coach house by convicts. Three times Berry positioned Lee on the drop, pinioned his legs, tugged the white cap over his head and cinched the noose. Three times he stepped back to pull the lever, and three times the trapdoors failed to open. After each attempt, Berry retested the gallows and found that the drop worked properly without Lee on it. When Berry was unable to carry out the sentence within half an hour, unnerved officials postponed the execution until advice could be sought from the Home Office. Because of the ordeal Lee underwent, his death warrant was commuted to life imprisonment. Freed from jail in 1905, he went on tour as “The Man They Couldn’t Hang.”

Why the gallows refused to work remains a puzzle. Some say the wood was wet and expanded to jam against the frame when Lee stood on it. Years later, a convict confessed to sabotage. Prisoners, he said, had raised the gallows, and prisoners maintained it. According to him, he inserted a wedge so the trap wouldn’t drop, and then removed it when he was summoned to help Berry with the tests.

Whatever the cause, the hangman was shaken. Like Marwood, Berry prayed for those he hanged, and he thought this was the hand of God intervening to stop him from killing an innocent man.

He suffered a nervous breakdown.

He became a lay preacher.

He toured the country to advocate the abolition of hanging.

At his funeral, Berry was said to be an “evangelist.”

Another thought.

Another note.

“Is the Hangman preaching?”

*    *    *

The man who succeeded Berry was James Billington. Before his death in 1901, Billington hanged 147 people. Fascinated by hanging by the time he was a boy of ten, little Jimmy experimented with dummies and a model gallows in his backyard. Later, when he got to perform the real thing, James let the greatest mystery in the history of crime “drop” through his fingers.

Dr. Neill Cream, the compulsive Lambeth Poisoner, fed strychnine to London prostitutes a few years after Jack the Ripper’s autumn of terror. The Ripper’s identity remains unsolved. Billington had the noose around Cream’s neck, and was in the process of pulling the trapdoor lever, when the doctor cried out through the hood, “I am Jack the—”

Bang!

Drop!

Snap!

“If I had only known he was going to speak,” said the hangman later, “I should have waited for the end of the sentence.”

“Hanging is so final!” I wrote.

Like Marwood, Billington was known for his gallows humor. On finding the chamber of horrors in a waxworks empty of customers, he took a place among the lifelike effigies of notorious killers. Minutes later, in came other patrons. Perplexed by the fact that one figure wasn’t listed in the catalogue, a woman stared at the unknown exhibit until it winked at her. “This one’s alive!” she cried, drawing others. When her husband tried to soothe her with “Nay, lass, it’s a dummy,” Billington pointed at him and shrieked in his face. Patrons fled in horror as the owner rushed in, but all he found was a mild-mannered gent viewing the exhibits.

*    *    *

If ever there was a man ill-suited for the job of hangman, it was John Ellis. So fond of animals was he that if he liked a chicken he’d raised, he wouldn’t eat it for dinner. Ellis became hangman because of a dare. “I think what first suggested such a profession to me was when some friends and I were reading about an execution, and one of them said to me, ‘You would never have the nerve to hang a man.’

“I said I would—and did.”

Ellis hanged some of the most famous murderers of the twentieth century. Crippen in 1910. Drinking later in a pub, Ellis said he could have sold the rope for five pounds an inch! Smith in 1915. This “Brides in the Bath” killer seized each successive wife by her feet to drown her for her money. One murder saw Smith buy a cheap tin bath and return it later, asking for his money back as it was of no further use. Major Armstrong in 1922. He poisoned his wife with arsenic weed killer. As Ellis pulled the lever, the major cried, “I’m coming, Katie,” the name of his murdered wife.