The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror Page 15

  “I think I’m in love with him.” She had said.

  “I know I believe him when he says he’s innocent.” She had said.

  I looked at her. No time had passed. It was still the moment the universe decided to lie down and die. And I said, “So if you’re certain this paragon of the virtues isn’t responsible for fifty-six murders – that we know about – and who the hell knows how many more we don’t know about, since he’s apparently been at it since he was twelve years old – remember the couple of nights we sat up and you told me all this shit about him, and you said it with your skin crawling, remember? – then if you’re so damned positive the guy you spent eleven weeks in court sending to the chair is innocent of butchering half the population of the planet – then why do you need me to go to Holman, drive all the way to Atmore, just to take a jaunt in this sweet peach of a guy?

  “Doesn’t your ‘woman’s intuition’ tell you he’s squeaky clean? Don’t ‘true love’ walk yo’ sweet young ass down the primrose path with sufficient surefootedness?”

  “Don’t be a smartass!” she said.

  “Say again?” I replied, with disfuckingbelief.

  “I said: don’t be such a high-verbal goddamned smart aleck!”

  Now I was steamed. “No, I shouldn’t be a smartass: I should be your pony, your show dog, your little trick bag mind-reader freak! Take a drive over to Holman, Pairis; go right on into Rednecks from Hell; sit your ass down on Death Row with the rest of the niggers and have a chat with the one white boy who’s been in a cell up there for the past three years or so; sit down nicely with the king of the fucking vampires, and slide inside his garbage dump of a brain – and what a joy that’s gonna be, I can’t believe you’d ask me to do this – and read whatever piece of boiled shit in there he calls a brain, and see if he’s jerking you around. That’s what I ought to do, am I correct? Instead of being a smartass. Have I got it right? Do I properly pierce your meaning, pal?”

  She stood up. She didn’t even say Screw you, Pairis!

  She just slapped me as hard as she could.

  She hit me a good one straight across the mouth.

  I felt my upper teeth bite my lower lip. I tasted the blood. My head rang like a church bell. I thought I’d fall off the goddam stool.

  When I could focus, she was just standing there, looking ashamed of herself, and disappointed, and mad as hell, and worried that she’d brained me. All of that, all at the same time. Plus, she looked as if I’d broken her choo-choo train.

  “Okay,” I said wearily, and ended the word with a sigh that reached all the way back into my hip pocket. “Okay, calm down. I’ll see him. I’ll do it. Take it easy.”

  She didn’t sit down. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No, of course not,” I said, unable to form the smile I was trying to put on my face. “How could you possibly hurt someone by knocking his brains into his lap?”

  She stood over me as I clung precariously to the counter, turned halfway around on the stool by the blow. Stood over me, the balled-up paper napkin in her fist, a look on her face that said she was nobody’s fool, that we’d known each other a long time, that she hadn’t asked this kind of favour before, that if we were buddies and I loved her, that I would see she was in deep pain, that she was conflicted, that she needed to know, really needed to know without a doubt, and in the name of God – in which she believed, though I didn’t, but either way what the hell – that I do this thing for her, that I just do it and not give her any more crap about it.

  So I shrugged, and spread my hands like a man with no place to go, and I said, “How’d you get into this?”

  She told me the first fifteen minutes of her tragic, heartwarming, never-to-be-ridiculed story still standing. After fifteen minutes I said, “Fer chrissakes, Ally, at least sit down! You look like a damned fool standing there with a greasy napkin in your mitt.”

  A couple of teenagers had come in. The four-star chef had finished his cigarette out back and was reassuringly in place, walking the duckboards and dishing up All-American arterial cloggage.

  She picked up her elegant attaché case and without a word, with only a nod that said let’s get as far from them as we can, she and I moved to a double against the window to resume our discussion of the varieties of social suicide available to an unwary and foolhardy gentleman of the coloured persuasion if he allowed himself to be swayed by a cagey and cogent, clever and concupiscent female of another colour entirely.

  See, what it is, is this:

  Look at that attaché case. You want to know what kind of an Ally this Allison Roche is? Pay heed, now.

  In New York, when some wannabe junior ad exec has smooched enough butt to get tossed a bone account, and he wants to walk his colours, has a need to signify, has got to demonstrate to everyone that he’s got the juice, first thing he does, he hies his ass downtown to Barney’s, West 17th and Seventh, buys hisself a Burberry, loops the belt casually behind, leaving the coat open to suhwing, and he circumnavigates the office.

  In Dallas, when the wife of the CEO has those six or eight upper-management husbands and wives over for an intime, faux-casual dinner, sans placecards, sans entrée fork, sans cérémonie, and we’re talking the kind of woman who flies Virgin Air instead of the Concorde, she’s so in charge she don’t got to use the Orrefors, she can put out the Kosta Boda and say give a fuck.

  What it is, kind of person so in charge, so easy with they own self, they don’t have to laugh at your poor dumb struttin’ Armani suit, or your bedroom done in Laura Ashley, or that you got a gig writing articles for TV Guide. You see what I’m sayin’ here? The sort of person Ally Roche is, you take a look at that attaché case, and it’ll tell you everything you need to know about how strong she is, because it’s an Atlas. Not a Hartmann. Understand: she could afford a Hartmann, that gorgeous imported Canadian belting leather, top of the line, somewhere around nine hundred and fifty bucks maybe, equivalent of Orrefors, a Burberry, breast of guinea hen and Mouton Rothschild 1492 or 1066 or whatever year is the most expensive, drive a Rolls instead of a Bentley and the only difference is the grille . . . but she doesn’t need to signify, doesn’t need to suhwing, so she gets herself this Atlas. Not some dumb chickenshit Louis Vuitton or Mark Cross all the divorcée real estate ladies carry, but an Atlas. Irish hand leather. Custom tanned cowhide. Hand tanned in Ireland by out of work IRA bombers. Very classy. Just a state understated. See that attaché case? That tell you why I said I’d do it?

  She picked it up from where she’d stashed it, right up against the counter wall by her feet, and we went to the double over by the window, away from the chef and the teenagers, and she stared at me till she was sure I was in a right frame of mind, and she picked up where she’d left off.

  The next twenty-three minutes by the big greasy clock on the wall she related from a sitting position. Actually, a series of sitting positions. She kept shifting in her chair like someone who didn’t appreciate the view of the world from that window, someone hoping for a sweeter horizon. The story started with a gang-rape at the age of thirteen, and moved right along: two broken foster-home families, a little casual fondling by surrogate poppas, intense studying for perfect school grades as a substitute for happiness, working her way through John Jay College of Law, a truncated attempt at wedded bliss in her late twenties, and the long miserable road of legal success that had brought her to Alabama. There could have been worse places.

  I’d known Ally for a long time, and we’d spent totals of weeks and months in each other’s company. Not to mention the New Year’s Eve of the Marx Brothers. But I hadn’t heard much of this. Not much at all.

  Funny how that goes. Eleven years. You’d think I’d’ve guessed or suspected or something. What the hell makes us think we’re friends with anybody, when we don’t know the first thing about them, not really?

  What are we, walking around in a dream? That is to say: what the fuck are we thinking!?!

  And there might never have been a reason to h
ear any of it, all this Ally that was the real Ally, but now she was asking me to go somewhere I didn’t want to go, to do something that scared the shit out of me; and she wanted me to be as fully informed as possible.

  It dawned on me that those same eleven years between us hadn’t really given her a full, laser-clean insight into the why and wherefore of Rudy Pairis, either. I hated myself for it. The concealing, the holding-back, the giving up only fragments, the evil misuse of charm when honesty would have hurt. I was facile, and a very quick study; and I had buried all the equivalents to Ally’s pains and travails. I could’ve matched her, in spades; or blacks, or just plain nigras. But I remained frightened of losing her friendship. I’ve never been able to believe in the myth of unqualified friendship. To o much like standing hip-high in a fast-running, freezing river. Standing on slippery stones.

  Her story came forward to the point at which she had prosecuted Spanning; had amassed and winnowed and categorized the evidence so thoroughly, so deliberately, so flawlessly; had orchestrated the case so brilliantly; that the jury had come in with guilty on all twenty-nine, soon – in the penalty phase – fifty-six. Murder in the first. Premeditated murder in the first. Premeditated murder with special ugly circumstances in the first. On each and every of the twenty-nine. Less than an hour it took them. There wasn’t even time for a lunch break. Fifty-one minutes it took them to come back with the verdict guilty on all charges. Less than a minute per killing. Ally had done that.

  His attorney had argued that no direct link had been established between the fifty-sixth killing (actually, only his 29th in Alabama) and Henry Lake Spanning. No, they had not caught him down on his knees eviscerating the shredded body of his final victim – ten-year-old Gunilla Ascher, a parochial school girl who had missed her bus and been picked up by Spanning just about a mile from her home in Decatur – no, not down on his knees with the can opener still in his sticky red hands, but the m.o. was the same, and he was there in Decatur, on the run from what he had done in Huntsville, what they had caught him doing in Huntsville, in that dumpster, to that old woman. So they couldn’t place him with his smooth, slim hands inside dead Gunilla Ascher’s still-steaming body. So what? They could not have been surer he was the serial killer, the monster, the ravaging nightmare whose methods were so vile the newspapers hadn’t even tried to cobble up some smart-aleck name for him like The Strangler or The Backyard Butcher. The jury had come back in fifty-one minutes, looking sick, looking as if they’d try and try to get everything they’d seen and heard out of their minds, but knew they never would, and wishing to God they could’ve managed to get out of their civic duty on this one.

  They came shuffling back in and told the numbed court: hey, put this slimy excuse for a maggot in the chair and cook his ass till he’s fit only to be served for breakfast on cinnamon toast. This was the guy my friend Ally told me she had fallen in love with. The guy she now believed to be innocent.

  This was seriously crazy stuff.

  “So how did you get, er, uh, how did you . . .?”

  “How did I fall in love with him?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and pursed her lips as if she had lost a flock of wayward words and didn’t know where to find them. I’d always known she was a private person, kept the really important history to herself – hell, until now I’d never known about the rape, the ice mountain between her mother and father, the specifics of the seven-month marriage – I’d known there’d been a husband briefly; but not what had happened; and I’d known about the foster homes; but again, not how lousy it had been for her – even so, getting this slice of steaming craziness out of her was like using your teeth to pry the spikes out of Jesus’s wrists.

  Finally, she said, “I took over the case when Charlie Whilborg had his stroke . . .”

  “I remember.”

  ‘He was the best litigator in the office, and if he hadn’t gone down two days before they caught . . .” she paused, had trouble with the name, went on, “. . . before they caught Spanning in Decatur, and if Morgan County hadn’t been so worried about a case this size, and bound Spanning over to us in Birmingham . . . all of it so fast nobody really had a chance to talk to him . . . I was the first one even got near him, everyone was so damned scared of him, of what they thought he was . . .”

  “Hallucinating, were they?” I said, being a smartass.

  “Shut up.

  “The office did most of the donkeywork after that first interview I had with him. It was a big break for me in the office; and I got obsessed by it. So after the first interview, I never spent much actual time with Spanky, never got too close, to see what kind of a man he really . . .”

  I said: “Spanky? Who the hell’s ‘Spanky’?”

  She blushed. It started from the sides of her nostrils and went out both ways toward her ears, then climbed to the hairline. I’d seen that happen only a couple of times in eleven years, and one of those times had been when she’d farted at the opera. Lucia di Lammermoor.

  I said it again: “Spanky? You’re putting me on, right? You call him Spanky?” The blush deepened. “Like the fat kid in The Little Rascals . . . c’mon, I don’t fuckin’ believe this!”

  She just glared at me.

  I felt the laughter coming.

  My face started twitching.

  She stood up again. “Forget it. Just forget it, okay?” She took two steps away from the table, toward the street exit. I grabbed her hand and pulled her back, trying not to fall apart with laughter, and I said, “Okay okay okay . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m really and truly, honest to goodness, may I be struck by a falling space lab no kidding 100 per cent absolutely sorry . . . but you gotta admit . . . catching me unawares like that . . . I mean, come on, Ally . . . Spanky!?! You call this guy who murdered at least fifty-six people Spanky? Why not Mickey, or Froggy, or Alfalfa . . .? I can understand not calling him Buckwheat, you can save that one for me, but Spanky???”

  And in a moment her face started to twitch; and in another moment she was starting to smile, fighting it every micron of the way; and in another moment she was laughing and swatting at me with her free hand; and then she pulled her hand loose and stood there falling apart with laughter; and in about a minute she was sitting down again. She threw the balled-up napkin at me.

  “It’s from when he was a kid,” she said. “He was a fat kid, and they made fun of him. You know the way kids are . . . they corrupted Spanning into ‘Spanky’ because The Little Rascals were on television and . . . oh, shut up, Rudy!”

  I finally quieted down, and made conciliatory gestures.

  She watched me with an exasperated wariness till she was sure I wasn’t going to run any more dumb gags on her, and then she resumed. “After Judge Fay sentenced him, I handled Spa . . . Henry’s case from our office, all the way up to the appeals stage. I was the one who did the pleading against clemency when Henry’s lawyers took their appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta.

  “When he was denied a stay by the appellate, three-to-nothing, I helped prepare the brief when Henry’s counsel went to the Alabama Supreme Court; then when the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal, I thought it was all over. I knew they’d run out of moves for him, except maybe the Governor; but that wasn’t ever going to happen. So I thought: that’s that.

  “When the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear it three weeks ago, I got a letter from him. He’d been set for execution next Saturday, and I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to see me.”

  I asked, “The letter . . . it got to you how?”

  “One of his attorneys.”

  “I thought they’d given up on him.”

  “So did I. The evidence was so overwhelming; half a dozen counselors found ways to get themselves excused; it wasn’t the kind of case that would bring any litigator good publicity. Just the number of eyewitnesses in the parking lot of that Winn-Dixie in Huntsville . . . must have been fifty of them, Rudy. And they all saw the same thing, and
they all identified Henry in lineup after lineup, twenty, thirty, could have been fifty of them if we’d needed that long a parade. And all the rest of it . . .”

  I held up a hand. I know, the flat hand against the air said. She had told me all of this. Every grisly detail, till I wanted to puke. It was as if I’d done it all myself, she was so vivid in her telling. Made my jaunting nausea pleasurable by comparison. Made me so sick I couldn’t even think about it. Not even in a moment of human weakness.

  “So the letter comes to you from the attorney . . .”

  “I think you know this lawyer. Larry Borlan; used to be with the ACLU; before that he was senior counsel for the Alabama Legislature down to Montgomery; stood up, what was it, twice, three times, before the Supreme Court? Excellent guy. And not easily fooled.”

  “And what’s he think about all this?”

  “He thinks Henry’s absolutely innocent.”

  “Of all of it?”

  “Of everything.”

  “But there were fifty disinterested random eyewitnesses at one of those slaughters. Fifty, you just said it. Fifty, you could’ve had a parade. All of them nailed him cold, without a doubt. Same kind of kill as all the other fifty-five, including that schoolkid in Decatur when they finally got him. And Larry Borlan thinks he’s not the guy, right?”

  She nodded. Made one of those sort of comic pursings of the lips, shrugged, and nodded. “Not the guy.”

  “So the killer’s still out there?”

  “That’s what Borlan thinks.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I agree with him.”

  “Oh, jeezus, Ally, my aching boots and saddle! You got to be workin’ some kind of off-time! The killer is still out here in the mix, but there hasn’t been a killing like those Spanning slaughters for the three years that he’s been in the joint. Now what do that say to you?”

  “It says whoever the guy is, the one who killed all those people, he’s days smarter than all the rest of us, and he set up the perfect freefloater to take the fall for him, and he’s either long far gone in some other state, working his way, or he’s sitting quietly right here in Alabama, waiting and watching. And smiling.” Her face seemed to sag with misery. She started to tear up, and said, “In four days he can stop smiling.”