The Hundredth Man (23 page)

“It’s all right, Mom,” Jimmy replies, smiling. “It’s a …”

I slapped at my pockets for my notebook, opened it to a number just added, dialed.

“Huh?” the voice answered.

“Dale, it’s Detective Ryder. I was just there.”

“Uh-huh. I remember.”

“Tell me about Jimmy’s tattoo, Dale; was the swordfish real?”

Confusion. “The fish? It was, like, a drawing.”

“I know, Jimmy. But it wasn’t a real in-the-skin tattoo, was it?”

The seal awrk again. “Nah, man, not Jimmy. It was a temp-tat, like a decal. You put it on with water, rub it off with alcohol. You can tell they’re fake usually, the color’s so, like, intense.”

“Did Jimmy wear them much?”

A long pause. “Um, like, just when we’d hit a party. We’d get back and he’d wipe it off, worried his dad or mom’d drop in without calling they did that sometimes and he was afraid they’d flip out thinking he’d turned, like, biker or something.”

“Just a couple more questions, Dale. Jimmy probably sent out photographs of himself with some of his personals letters, right?”

Again the long pause as gears engaged. “Pictures. Yeah. I even took some at the beach last spring.”

“Was his shirt off?”

“He was just in swim trunks.”

“Think hard, Dale. Was he wearing a tat in the photo? He liked the swordfish. Was he wearing it?”

We drove three blocks. I said, “Dale, are you there?”

“I’m like, thinking.”

I apologized for disturbing him. Three more blocks passed. “I remembered now, man,” McFetters blurted. “He told me some chicks dug tats and some didn’t. He didn’t want to turn any of them off with the picture, y’know?”

No tattoo.

Not in the photos sent to News Beat Jimmy Farrier’s belly was as unmarked as a baby’s. But he’d pasted a temp-tat on for the rave, probably figuring it’d be cool there. I turned the phone off, dropped it in my pocket. Harry’s eyes studied me in the rear-view; he had questions, but knew I was working on the answers. I settled back down in the seat, closed my eyes.

Walk the scene, I told my mind. See the rave …

I stood in a watermelon field and watched the dancers, sweating appariations with glowing necklaces and water bottles in their hands. In the distance I saw a baby-faced kid bobbing his head to the music and sucking at a beer, self-conscious, not one with the crowd. Waiting for someone; at least that what he hopes. From the black pool of the woods a shadow glides to him. Something’s whispered or maybe shown: a beer, a blunt, a tab.

“Come on, brother, lighten up, it’s a party, be cool …”

Be cool, the piper’s incandescent call to the young. The pair stumble through the vines, step over a copulating couple, skirt a man whispering to a melon about God. In the whirling, grinding, music-blind mass, the pair are invisible. Then the trees brush their faces and the rave becomes a bonfire in the distance. A tap on Farrier’s shoulder and he turns into an explosion of pain and a dark, seeping taste far above his tongue. He’s on the ground in a tight copse at the edge of the field, on his side in a dry gully. The shadow has a flashlight, a pen, and somewhere a long sharp blade. Farrier’s pants are unzipped, prepared for the writing. His shirt is pulled up … Tattoo.

Out of nowhere; unexpected. Blue and red and green against the pink-brown flesh. It’s all wrong, all the work, all the stalking, all the chances. All desperately wrong. Enraged, the killer kicks Farrier twice and leaves him to die, head on, his damaged brain spilling memories until there’s nothing left but primal impulse; Farrier dies with his mouth in the dirt, trying to nurse.

Suddenly I was bolt upright, slapping Harry’s shoulder.

“The Farrier the killer wanted wasn’t the Farrier he got,” I said. “Pull over.”

He yanked the wheel and we skidded into a car wash lot. A half dozen black guys were toweling off a white Mercedes. Curious faces watched me exit the backseat to sit up front. They looked at Harry, saw the cop eyes, and turned back to serious towel action.

“Cutter selected Farrier from a photo the kid sent with his letter,” I said, closing the door. “Farrier wasn’t tattooed in the picture; he used fake tats, like decals. But he only wore them occasionally, like at the rave. Cutter culled Farrier out and killed him, but when he lifted the shirt to write …”

Harry nodded. “Surprise. It appears the boy’s got ink.”

“For some reason the tattoo kept him from decapitating Farrier.”

Harry held up his hand to slow me down, did devil’s advocate. “Maybe Cutter just got interrupted.”

“According to Sergeant Tate, Cutter could have done anything he wanted.”

Harry thought a moment. “Jerry-boy had a tattoo, Carson, the dragon; he still lost his head. How you explain that?”

My spine started tingling with the feeling of another sense coming on. It happens when I think there’s an invisible line nearby, and we have to walk blindly with our hands out until we touch it. I saw the morgue photos in my mind and rifled though them. Posterior stains on Deschamps and Nelson, two backs dark as bruises. But the anterior bodies were lighter, almost natural, free of settled blood.

“Livor mortis,” I whispered. “Deschamps and Nelson were on their backs, Harry. The blood wouldn’t pool on their anterior bodies, discolor them. He doesn’t just want them on their back so he can write on them the appearance of the front of the bodies is crucial.”

Harry’s thumbs drummed the steering wheel. “Farrier was on his side because it didn’t matter?”

“Exactly. Once Cutter saw the tattoo, figured it was real, Farrier became useless.”

“Appearance,” Harry mused. “Body art, the body as art. Could that be his thing? His treasure? Something as simple as a photo of the perfect body? The perfect corpse to deliver his perfect message to whoever?”

“The perfect messenger. Damn, Harry, what if he’s sending avatars?”

“Copies of himself?” Harry asked.

“More like stand-ins,” I said.

“Where do we go from here, Carson? Your call.”

I felt something glide over my palm, a strand of web. I closed my hand but it was gone. I told Harry about the scheduling records at the morgue and that I’d finesse them from Will Lindy. We turned our attention to Farrier and his connection to the News Beat I looked at my copy of Farrier’s responses.

“I have dates Farrier responded to ads, but no ads to cross-check against.”

Harry frowned. “Just the ads, that’s all you need? The ones in the paper itself?”

“The records are smoke, but we’d know which ads Farrier responded to by the numbers; each ad has a code number. It’s straws in the wind, but …”

Harry thought for a moment. He said, “Remember that guy up by Flomaton? Lived in a house full of every kind of map he could get his hands on? It was in the newspaper last year.”

I remembered; too strange to forget. I’d snipped the article and filed it in my Weird World folder. “Maps from everywhere that would send him one. Tokyo. Murmansk. Ulan Bator. Satellite maps, topo maps, maps of geologic faults, population density, dogs per square acre.”

“Collecting maps. What’s your take on that?”

I searched my jargon file. “Obsessive-compulsive behavior. Maybe even delusional depending on what purpose he ascribed to the maps.”

Harry jammed the car into drive and we squealed from the lot just ahead of a pack of vehicles released from a red light. Irritated horn blasts followed us down the street.

“Talk about purpose,” Harry said, oblivious to the cacophony. “I want you to see a place and tell me if it really exists.”

CHAPTER 23

T
he two-story clapboard house sat on a deep lot overrun by kudzu, the broad leaves shrouding trees, utility poles, most of the back and side yards. We parked on the crumbling macadam street and walked past two battered bicycles leaned against a pecan tree, a Radio Flyer wagon clothes-roped behind one. An old Checker sedan sat in the gravel drive, its paint so faded it seemed to have evaporated. A car buff once told me whenever Yellow Cab’s Checkers reached five hundred thousand miles they were sold to the Mexican Army to be fitted with ordnance and used as tanks. I never knew when he was kidding.

We heard cranes from a nearby scrap-metal yard dropping metal into boxcars. The air smelled of rust and salt water. A full minute after Harry knocked I heard dead bolts snap free. The door opened to a wizened and bald black man wearing a faded blue jumpsuit over a frayed white shirt and black bow tie. He might have been sixty years old, he might have been three hundred. Bowing at the waist, he said, “The Nautilus has surfaced.” He repeated it three times, an incantation.

We entered a large paint-peeling foyer. There was a desk and an ironing board in a room to the right. Several newspapers were stacked on the board and a vintage iron drizzled steam toward the high ceiling. I looked into three adjoining rooms. Newspapers to the ceiling. The old man studied me warily, as if I might represent a biting species.

“Have you brought uncertainty?” he asked softly. “Challenges from the State?”

I searched my memory for a quote from a long-ago poli-sci class and replied, ‘“Given the choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, I would not hesitate a moment to support the latter.””

The old man studied my face as if memorizing it. He reached out and cradled my fingers, then bent at the waist, and touched his forehead to my hand. “I know the same songs as Thomas Jefferson,” he whispered.

I could only nod, Of course.

Harry explained what we were looking for. The old man led us through a maze of rooms, often sidestepping through particularly narrow passages, noses to yellowing newspapers. He had a curious way of walking, part skating, part jumping rock-to-rock across a stream. We stepped quickly to keep him in sight. The stacks we passed were in perfect alignment, folded papers stacked to alternate thinner edge and thicker fold. Had I a level, I suspect the top paper in any given stack would have centered the bubble.

On the papers I saw names of Alabama papers from cities big and towns small: Mobile Register, Dothan Bugle, Jackson Daily News, Huntsville Times, Cullman Times.

“New York Times?” I asked. “Washington Post?”

He shook his head. “Not my responsibility.”

We sidled up creaking stairs holding step-stacked copies of the Montgomery Advertiser dating back years. A brittle and yellow Richard Nixon leered from a front page. Light flicked on in a dark room and the old man led us to a foot-high newspaper stack in a corner.

“Mobile News Beat he recited from a perfectly typed card in his head. “Published weekly on Thursday. First date of publication was May eleventh, 1996. Suspended publication on August seventeenth, 2002, due to financial difficulties. Purchased by a new owner last October and resumed publication.”

Harry nodded. “We’d like to borrow the recent ones if possible.”

The old man bowed again. “For you, Harry Nautilus, anything.”

Harry bent to the papers and the old man whispered to me. “Five years ago I kept my work in Mobile. The city called it a public nuisance and a fire hazard and was going to take it to the dump. Harry Nautilus found this place and helped us move.” He snuck a speculative eye at Harry, then whispered, “He can be meaner than the devil, but sometimes he grows wings, this Harry Nautilus.”

We retraced our haphazard passage, Harry carrying the short stack of News Beats flat across two upturned arms like a crown on a velvet pillow. The old man followed, nodding approvingly. We passed a short stack of papers that caught my eye and I picked up the top one. Turning to the man, I displayed the fresh copy of Le Monde and gave him a What’s this? eyebrow.

“A guilty pleasure,” he said, smiling like the Mona Lisa.

We returned to the office and evicted two pinochle-playing janitors from the small meeting room. I called Christell Olivet-Toliver for the codes on the personals ads. She was delighted when I told her we could lend her copies of Mobile News Beat going back to November, and didn’t question it when I asked if she’d iron them before returning them. I explained Christell’s alphanumeric coding to Harry and we began reviewing ads, starting with the most recent of Farrier’s responses.

Harry stretched his arms out until the small print focused. “Two inches before I need glasses,” he said, and read the ad. ““Need a Friend. SWF, twenty-four, sks friendship first then maybe LTR w attractive fun-loving, honest man twenty-one to twenty-eight. Enjoys walks in park, dancing, snuggling, and I love the beach.” What’s LTR?”

“Long-term relationship.”

Harry grunted. “I figured it was short for ‘litter.” A singles way of saying they want to get married, settle down, and drop some pups.”

“Farrier was a beach boy. He was probably responding to the beach reference in the ad.”

Harry riffled through another paper, read. ‘“Soulmate Wanted. Active, Outgoing SWF twenty-seven w/blnde hair and brn eyes sks sweet soulmate for dinner, movies, moonlight hikes on the beach. Should be fit and enjoy working out. Friendship first, then … ?””

“Beach again. Fitness aspect. Nothing stands out.”

We went through the next four ads quickly. They were all basic clones of the first two in tone and interests, and I began to feel bricks smacking my forehead again. Harry picked up the last News Beat He snapped the paper open and let his finger drift down the page, reading silently. His finger stopped, retraced.

“Sheeeee-it,” he whispered, and spun the paper 180 degrees, finger tapping the ad. I read it, and I knew that nightmares, like prayers, could be answered.

New in Town and Looking for Someone Special SWF seeks SWM. I have an absolute crazy craving for a man 6’-6‘2”, 175-185pounds, 20-30years old. I love a smooth, clean, almost hairless chest, noticeable biceps, and hard round shoulders. No appendectomies or other scars. I love flat abs. I’m a SWF executive, 5’?”, 120 pounds, blond hair, long legs, and full breasted with lots of secret and special needs. If you’re in a relationship, I can be very discreet. If the above description fits you to a T, send letter, photo (nude or swimsuit please face doesn’t have to be in photograph if you’re shy), and phone please. All replies answered if received within a week.