Boneland Page 3

  “It was an Assassin,” Board announced softly, more to himself than to the two patrolmen. He thumbed the plunger again. There was no flash, no click, no sounds from his camera but its legs were fluttering excitedly atop the platform it was bolted to.

  “Say what, Board?” Mattock replied. “An Assassin? Not…not this one. It was a crime of passion.”

  “It always is. But not by her husband. He’s telling the truth.”

  “Just shut your pie hole and do your work,” Crate chuckled, only half joking.

  “You’ll be sending the wrong man to the gallows,” Board argued quietly.

  “You’re just upset ‘cause you won’t get to photograph that, too.”

  “Now the ghoul’s a detective,” Mattock laughed.

  Finished with the photographs taken from the side, Board now moved in closer, for a direct downward angle. He splayed the tripod’s legs around the dead woman as if his camera were the gloating murderer, gazing down at his handiwork. He extended the skeletal legs to their full length, the top of the camera nearly touching the low ceiling. Later, when these shots were developed, he would curse himself to find that one of the legs of the tripod was positioned in such a way that it obscured half of the woman’s face. It wouldn’t matter to Detective Shoe, because there were no wounds on her face to be recorded, and it didn’t obscure the throat wound, but it bothered Board. Even though his intention was not to create art, it was a bit of artlessness, a bit of unprofessionalism—a more than usual intrusion of himself into the scene.

  As he finished up, shortening the length of the tripod’s legs, he muttered, “Whoever did this should be skinned alive and have his eyeballs burned with cigarettes.”

  “Whoa, Board, such barbarism!” laughed Officer Mattock. “You’re starting to frighten me! Maybe you’re the one who tore her all up!”

  “What do you mean, whoever did it?” Crate said. “We’ve already told you who did it. Don’t start on that again.”

  Board tucked the tripod under his arm. “Sure there was nothing in here?” he asked, peeking his head into the adjoining bedroom for the first time. There were only these two rooms in the shotgun shack.

  “Nothing,” Crate snapped. “Do you think we don’t know our jobs? Get your vulture ass out of here…you and your friend. Your dirty work is finished.”

  “Dirty work?” Board looked at the man. “I’m just doing a job.”

  “Yeah, you and the Assassins.”

  “Hey, I’m not like them. My relationship with the Bugs is not like theirs.”

  “No? It’s all part of the same process, though, isn’t it? The Assassins do the painting, so to speak, and you frame the picture, so to speak.”

  “I help you guys catch the Assassins!” Not that they usually were caught. That was a risk the Assassins took, when they went to work for the distant Bugs. If they were caught, they had to be punished like any common enraged husband or demented fiend.

  “You don’t help us catch them, Board. You keep the Bugs’ peckers hard, is all you do. Don’t make it sound like you’re one of us.” Crate was really steaming now. “You probably get as excited as they do. Fucking voyeur.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  “Do I?” Crate gestured at the rough plank door. “Get out, vulture…your work is done.”

  Board carried his camera outside, where scraps of curious spectators had gathered…a few dirty children, a few faces propped like jack-o’-lanterns in windows. A red-haired man with rolled up shirt sleeves leaned in the mouth of one of the alleys between the shacks, smoking a cigarette. A thin dog, maybe the one that had been barking earlier, maybe the one whose smell filled the shack, scampered past.

  Peripherally, Board saw the eye of his camera swivel ever so slightly. He looked down at it and decided it was looking up at his face. That irritated him. He tossed his equipment a little too roughly into the back of his Dodge.

  Something made him look up again abruptly at the man in the alley.

  The man had bright red hair. But this was the Italian neighborhood of Scapula Street, on the border of the Phalanges, the Italian ghetto.

  The redheaded man smiled at Board and tossed his half-smoked cigarette to the ground. He then turned and walked further into the little alley, out of Board’s angle of view.

  -4-

  With their straw hats tilted back on their heads and mugs of beer in their hands, these purchased by John Board, he and Tom Brick wandered into the saloon’s adjacent billiards room. The ceiling was high, the walls paneled with dark wood half the way up. The one billiards table had a decorative fringe all the way around it. There was a layer of laughter in the atmosphere like the cloud cover of cigar smoke. A pill-bug radio on a shelf was playing “I Don’t Want to Get Well” by Van and Schenck.

  Tom Brick was the police photographer for Precinct 4, which encompassed the Phalanges. Detective Shoe, Board had recalled, was now lending aid to Precinct 4 in capturing the murderer of several Italian children because of that neighborhood’s demand for increased action.

  “How’s your wife?” Board asked, leaning his back against the tall baseboard to watch the game in progress. Brick told him that Grace was doing well, after having had a long bout with influenza. “And the kids? You have two, right?” Brick said he had four, in fact, and one of them had nearly died over the winter, again from influenza, but thank God had recovered. Board echoed the sentiment. This plague of influenza had taken many lives. An invasion of small living organisms, implacably bent on destruction.

  “So you want to know about this thing with the murdered children,” Brick said.

  “Yeah. Shoe told me he was going to help in the investigation. I read a little about them in the papers when they happened, but I don’t remember much…”

  “Well, about a month and a half ago they found an eight year old girl dead in a tenement cellar. She’d been sexually assaulted and strangled. It was horrible, John. Her fingers were still curled in the cord around her neck. I have two daughters, was all I could think. It made me want to cry. All the horrible things I see, after a while I start to not think twice about it…and then suddenly seeing this was like the first body I’d ever seen.”

  “And then a few weeks later, wasn’t it, another one just like it?”

  “Yes. A seven year old. Same thing, except she was found in a back lot where she’d probably been dragged, whereas they think the first one was actually killed where she was found. This one had been dead a few days and was starting to decompose. I tell you, John, I really started seriously thinking about quitting…”

  “And there’s been a third…”

  “Again, same thing. Strangulation, dress pulled up around the waist. This one’s eyes open like she was surprised, like she was going to start bursting into tears at any second even though she was already dead. They found her on a tenement rooftop, where they think it took place. This was last week.”

  “Sounds like a sex fiend,” Board mused, staring into the rising bubbles of his beer, “more so than an Assassin. Unless it’s an Assassin trying to look like a sex fiend.”

  “Well, think about it, John. If I were a sex fiend, wouldn’t I want to become an Assassin? Get paid for it? Have some small measure of protection, even at the risk of being caught, because I’d be risking that, anyway? It’s not like men like you and me go volunteering to be Assassins, is it?”

  Board nodded thoughtfully, gaze still submerged in the fizzing depths of his beer. Through it, he could see the finger that had been shortened by one of his former cameras. He thought of the Irving Kaufman war song “Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds You.” He asked Brick, “Have there been any witnesses? Any suspicious characters around? A man with red hair, maybe?”

  “They’ve looked into a few local people, but I haven’t heard anything about any real witness, or a man with red hair. Why do you ask?”

  “Yesterday I shot a crime scene on Scapula Street…one street over from your territory…looks like a husband car
ved up his wife. But it seems too neat. And the husband was drunker than an Irishman. And when I went outside, I saw a redheaded man who smiled at me.”

  “So?”

  “I guess I didn’t like the way he smiled at me.”

  “Remind me never to smile at you.”

  “He was a redhead. On Scapula Street.”

  “It can happen. An Italian family lives on my street, for instance.”

  “I suppose,” Board murmured.

  “We need to get out of this work, you and I. Go to work for the newspapers instead.”

  “Not much difference there,” Board said, then taking a long swallow of his beer.

  As if afraid that Brick might look disapprovingly upon it, Board waited for the man to go home to his family before he switched from beer to bourbon. From bourbon he graduated to a woman named Grace (or maybe that was Brick’s wife’s name; he forgot) who had a room upstairs from the saloon. Grace was older than his thirty-five years and no doubt weighed more than him, too, but she had a pretty enough face, or so it seemed at the present. Board moaned and sweated more from effort than from pleasure.

  Grace turned her face away on her greasy pillow. “You smell,” she said.

  “So do you,” Board grunted. “We all do.”

  She didn’t say anything to that, but he still felt like apologizing. He kept his eyes off her face, afraid to see revulsion or boredom there, and looked down at her breasts instead. But doing so, he imagined her nipples missing. Indented, open dark hollows there instead.

  He rolled off her. Lay on his back panting, sweat trickling down from his armpits, his heart galloping blindly like a horse on a treadmill inside him.

  “Not my fault if you can’t do it, mister,” grumbled Grace. “I still need my money.”

  “You’ll get it,” he said. And he’d get his own paycheck tomorrow. But he didn’t know if he were a pimp, procuring pleasure for his clients, or a prostitute, the means to that pleasure himself.

  Board stared at the woman’s radio, on a table by the bed. Its feelers did not waver as it played the Peerless Quartet’s “Somebody’s Waiting for Someone”, but a twittering static drifted in and out.

  -5-

  “There is No Death” by Lambert Murphy played on the radio as John Board sat in Sam Nail’s barber chair, having his hair trimmed. He had just unfolded the morning newspaper in front of him. On the front page were war stories and on the second page he saw a photograph of a familiar location. The plank door, the patch of dirt for a front yard. The thin dog, looking at the camera. It was the outside of the shotgun shack in which he had photographed that murdered wife, two days ago. The headline read: “WIFE SLAIN, DRUNKEN HUSBAND HELD.” Then, in a sub-heading of smaller type before the article itself began: “Investigating Officers Appalled By Killer’s Savagery.”

  After reading the article quickly, Board returned his attention to the photograph. Not only was the dog there, but also he remembered several of the equally thin children who appeared at the edge of the frame, also staring glumly at the camera. But there was one feature missing. Included in the shot was the alley mouth where he had seen the red-haired man smoking his cigarette—but the alley was empty, in this photograph.

  And who had taken the photograph, anyway?

  The offices for the Metacarpus Times were just a few blocks over from Nail’s barbershop. Board said to him, “Sam, you get some of the Times boys in here, don’t you?”

  “Oh, sure. Pete Spoon…Ronny Shingle. Two of their top writers.”

  “What about photographers?”

  “Oh…ah…yeah. Mick O’Tool…Jacky Glass…”

  “Mick O’Tool. He Irish? A redhead?”

  “Oh, that he is. You can always tell when Mick’s been here…his hair stands out in this carpet.” Nail shuffled one foot through the layer of mostly dark hair that covered the floor around the chair Board sat in. “You know Mick?”

  “Maybe,” Board said. “Any idea where he lives?”

  “Mick? Oh, no…not off hand. Quiet, is Mick. Friendly, though. Want me to tell him you was asking about him, the next time he’s in?”

  “No thanks, Sam. Maybe I’ll run into him someday. It isn’t important,” Board said.

  Well, that would explain the redheaded man he had seen, wouldn’t it? After all, why would an Assassin chance hanging about a crime scene, even to gloat? It might also explain the strange, unpleasant little smile the man had given him. A newspaper photographer, smugly looking down his nose at the ghoul with his tripod under his arm. Since there was no corpse in the newspaper shot to have engaged the interest of a living camera, Board figured that O’Tool must use a mechanical camera instead. (Board himself had used a mechanical camera for most of his career, until five years ago when his superiors had given him his first live camera and insisted that he use it.) Usually when one took photos of inorganic subject matter with a live camera, the shots didn’t develop. Then again, maybe the poverty-stricken children and bedraggled dog had been sufficient to arouse a living camera.

  Board had not seen a camera in the man’s hand at the time. If he were indeed this Mick O’Tool, he had either already put it away, or hadn’t yet taken it out.

  Perhaps Officers Crate and Mattock had been right; he was reading too much into the killing, which might very well be as cut and dry as the murder/suicide case he had recorded before that.

  And yet Board kept seeing that smile on the face of the red-haired man. And the vague, vacant frown on the face of that woman—her nakedness not enough of an intimacy or enough of a revelation to have satisfied her attacker—gutted like a fish on the floor of her sad little casket of a home.

  -6-

  Tom Brick draped his coat over Board’s brassiere-wearing dressmaker’s dummy, at Board’s invitation. “Cover yourself, madam!” Brick chided. “John, I didn’t know you were married. Looks like the ideal wife…not too talkative.”

  “That’s not kind, Tom.” Board handed him a glass of beer. “I’m sure your Grace is a fine woman.”

  “Oh she is, John, she really is.”

  “You’re a lucky man.” Board slurped the foam off his barely cool beer. The block of ice in his icebox was nearly melted away. “Thanks for coming, Tom.”

  “Oh, I’ve always wanted to drop in for a visit, old man!” Brick said brightly. “Let’s have a look at your gear.” He followed his nose past his colleague. “Must be in here, eh?”

  Board watched Brick as he peered into the tank of milky fluid in which the immature camera was growing. Board rolled up his sleeve and plucked it out for him to have a clear look at it. The thing’s fringe of legs swam in the air, and the mouth underneath the front end worked languidly as if it wanted a finger to chew on. The single ocellus rotated slightly.

  “Coming along nicely, pal!” Brick complimented him. “I only have my one camera at present…I really should get a larva to grow a new one, in case I find myself empty-handed unexpectedly.”

  “Tom, do you know any newspaper photographers personally? From the Times, for instance? A man named Mick O’Tool, in particular?”

  “Ahh…the name doesn’t ring a bell, John. But I have seen a few at crime scenes, now and again, as I’m sure you have. There was more than one at the scene of that last little girl’s murder, because of the increased public interest. It’s a top story, as you know.”

  “Yes. The public eats it up, I’m sure,” Board said, wiping the white fluid off his hand with the rag of an old undershirt. “Have any of the photographers you’ve seen been a redhead?”

  “A redhead? Ohh…you’re thinking of that fella whose smile didn’t sit well with you, the other day.” Brick gave a chuckle. “Well, come to think of it, I guess I did see a redheaded photographer on the rooftop, at that last scene. Maybe it was that one. Or maybe it was the one before, in the back lot.” Brick pursed his lips thoughtfully against the rim of his glass. “Or maybe it was at both.”

  Board didn’t say anything for a few minutes. He had set down h
is glass of beer to sprinkle bone chips in the tank housing the immature camera. There was a streaking dark blur as the camera shot itself forward to feed, but as the thick fluid settled there was again no sign of the aquarium’s sole occupant.

  “How do the Bugs recruit the Assassins, Tom? I’ve never seen an Assassin who was host to a parasite, like a Medium is. An Assassin like that would stand out too much. So how do the Bugs communicate with them?”