Hangman (13 page)

“What’s the original worth?”

“Fifty to sixty million dollars. It was stolen from Oslo’s National Gallery in 1994, on the first day of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics. Ransoming it was a foolish crime. How do you sell history’s second most famous painting?”

“The thieves were caught?”

“Yes, when they tried to collect the ransom.”

“Was Munch insane?”

“That,” said Phelps, “is for you to decide. He was raised in a dysfunctional Norwegian home. His mother died of tuberculosis when Munch was five. His father was a religious fanatic who raved about the Bible. When the boy got tuberculosis, the fever brought visions of hell. Munch was fourteen when his beloved sister, Sophie, died of the same disease. An obsession with death was the only constant in Munch. When his father was on his deathbed, he bequeathed Munch his Bible to save his son’s doomed soul.”

“A healthy life,” said Alex.

“His images say it all. A pathological sense of isolation broods at the heart of his art. What Munch shows in
The Scream
isn’t an expression of his state of mind, but proof of it. ‘Could only have been painted by a madman,’ he scrawled on one version of
The Scream.
The picture is autobiography raised to the level of universal pain. Munch suffered a nervous breakdown and went to a Danish clinic, where the cure was electric shocks.”

“Hmmm,” said Alex.

“The lithograph is part of a series titled
The Mirror.
When the Hangman looks in this mirror, what does he see?”

“I wonder,” said Alex.

“I hope I’ve helped,” said Phelps.

Clues …

Clues …

Clues …

Always watch for the clues.

The Echo

Seattle

November 8

Jeffrey Kline, barrister-at-law, was mistaken when he thought, In choosing America for the first lynching, the Hangman embarked upon a self-defeating course of action. The hangman never became a national icon down there. The hangman as a named and feared executioner, hanging cons around the country and the commonwealth, was a
British
horror.

Not so.

It’s true that America has no pantheon of hangmen to rival Ketch, Calcraft, Marwood, Berry, Billington, Ellis, and Pierrepoint. But that’s because America prefers to focus on the condemned as the celebrity of the gallows. The Last Meal—the best on the prison menu—is basically an American tradition, and in the early days of the Wild West it was followed by the local madame sending the best of her brothel in to satisfy the doomed man’s other appetite. Whether by their own or society’s desire, American hangmen went to great trouble to stay out of the public eye.

Can Britain boast that a future head of state hanged a ne’er-do-well? America can. When Grover Cleveland was the sheriff of New York’s Erie County, the soon-to-be twenty-second and twenty-fourth president of the United States personally sprang the trap for the killer Patrick Morrissey.

As for the act of hanging itself, Yankee ingenuity developed the “jerk-’em-up” gallows. The invention had neither a drop nor a trapdoor, replacing them with a heavy weight attached to the end of a noosed rope looped up over a horizontal beam. When the elevated weight was released to plunge to the ground, the con was yanked high into the air so all could see him die. The jerk-’em-up gallows was ideal for the paying spectacle of a “sheriff’s ball.” Like the ball on Bedloe’s Island in 1860.

Albert E. Hicks—Hicksie to his friends—was tried and convicted of piracy on the high seas. Hicksie was a notorious Manhattan underworld thug who murdered three men on an oyster boat bound for Deep Creek, Virginia, before it reached port. Because piracy was a federal rap, it was thought he couldn’t be hanged in the city of New York, so the execution was set for an island in the outer harbor. Because access to Bedloe’s Island was restricted to those with boats, the hanging was perfectly placed to charge admission. The “sheriff’s ball” earned the federal marshal more than a thousand dollars.

As for the hanging, it was quite an affair. Two hundred marines surrounded the scaffold on three sides with a hollow square. Ten thousand customers anchored within sight of the gallows. A man named Isaacs placed the noose around Hicksie’s neck; then, from the privacy of his booth beside the scaffold, the hangman cut the rope that held up the weight. Down it plummeted and up jerked Hicksie, hanged high in the sky for all to see, where it took the strangled man eleven minutes to die. Such a good location did Bedloe’s Island prove to be that a quarter-century later it was selected as the site for the Statue of Liberty.

In America, you can say the foundation of Liberty is hanging.

The room in which the Hangman sat thinking about Hicksie and the jerk-’em-up gallows was dark except for a beam of light focused on a print of
The Scream
hanging on the wall. The shriek of the screamer echoed in the killer’s mind, for Munch’s icon of angst captured the pain and outrage the Hangman felt tonight, an outrage screaming for such eye-for-an-eye revenge that death would come as a blessing to tomorrow night’s victim.

The jerk-’em-up gallows.

What should I use? the Hangman wondered.

The boom?

The anchor?

The halyard winch?

I’m coming for you, fucker.

The Yardarm

Seattle

Thursday, November 9 (Seven days ago)

Bart Busby was a bully.

Always had been.

Always would be.

Bart knew that bullies were created, not born, and that he was the Frankenstein monster of a brutal family. His earliest memory was of his Ma screaming at him that she hated his guts. She made it clear from then on that she had never wanted a child, and that his birth had stolen opportunity from her. She could have been a movie star, or a game-show queen, or any number of other glittering celebrities. But instead, she had ended up a Cinderella drudge, struggling to manage a waitress job, housework, and him, while her precious youth was going, going, and then gone. That’s why Ma spent money on herself and not on Bart. Because he owed her everything for ruining her life.

Bart’s relationship with his Pa was even rougher. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was Pa’s favorite motto. Pa worked for Boeing as a riveter, one of those guys who fastened sheets of metal together, a line of work he despised as being beneath him. But if he had to labor at such a shitty job all day to feed his family, then by God, he expected Bart to toe the line. If Pa came home from work to find Bart hadn’t done something Pa expected should be done, he’d whip off his belt and thrash the boy until his buttocks bled. Bart still had the scars to prove it.

Whenever Bart was thrashed with Pa’s belt or Ma’s tongue, the next day he would take it out on someone weak at school. Bart had several whipping boys he liked to pick on. Bottle Bottoms was a runt who wore thick glasses. Bart would seize them from his face to taunt the little wimp, then push him back repeatedly with a series of chest shoves, telling him he should be in a school for the blind. Nicknamed after Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasy was a humped kid burdened with a deformed spine. Bart would follow him at school and kick his behind, asking if being a cripple made it easy for Dad to bugger him standing up.

Bart knew he was a bully, and he was proud of the fact. Pushing others around gave him satisfaction. The experience of watching someone else writhe in pain or feeding off their fear of him built Bart up. If they sniveled and cried, so much the better, for it felt good to see their blotchy faces, streaming tears, and snotty noses. Mix in a bit of blood, and that was best of all.

There were other benefits too. Extorting things of value allowed him to replace the allowance denied by Ma. Because his victims were all outcasts and geeks, the approval of the in-crowd was guaranteed. He sensed the support of like-minded kids, and their silent approbation was thunderous applause to his ears.

So positively reinforcing was being a bully that Bart continued being one into his adult life. He was adept at selecting those who made the best victims, for Bart was an expert at picking up the signs. Those who were sensitive, quiet, and cautious; those who were anxious, isolated, and alone; those who habitually withdrew from confrontation; those so depressed they found no joy in happy occasions … all were easy pickin’s for Bart to bully. He had a macho distaste for weakness of any kind.

Take, for instance, the wuss he encountered earlier today, on the final leg of a two-week selling trip to Oregon. A skinny, bespectacled, asthmatic Jew, the wuss was the proprietor of a family bookstore in Astoria. Bart, on the other hand, was a large, intimidating ex-football player, currently marketing office machines with the hard sell. The Jew’s wife was behind the till, so Bart made a point of telling him what a nice set of tits she had. The guy cringed. He was a bookish nerd. So in a false, convivial style, Bart proceeded to tell him in explicit detail how he would fuck a woman like her. All the while he had his eyes locked on her titties, a trick that invariably made a weak bitch squirm, and he ended by wiggling his tongue in a most suggestive way before giving the wuss a little wink of male conspiracy.

“Bet that’s how you fuck her, huh? And who’s that over there? Not your daughter?”

The wuss, like all true victims, fumbled the play. He tried to switch Bart off by laughing and making
himself
an object of fun, but Bart already had his eyes on the girl’s budding boobs. Finally, the wuss got rid of him the only way he could: by buying a new copy machine he didn’t need.

God, that felt good.

But nothing would ever feel as fine as convicting that kiddy-diddler of murder punishable by death. Bart had never had respect for any of his peers, so was it not ironic that he was chosen as a juror to give that scumbag trial by
his
peers? Pa had been a vicious asshole at home, but people outside the family thought he was some kind of saint. To them, Pa was a hard-working, charitable man, and from that Bart had learned how to put on a front. The front he presented to the court got him on the jury, and as a juror he was free to exert another lesson learned from Pa: Make sure no one ever gets the better of you. And in that jury room, Bart made sure no one did.

Peter Bryce Haddon was Bart’s kind of victim. The defendant was slight, wide-eyed, and scared. Knowing it would jitter Haddon and make him look guilty, Bart made a point of staring hard at the accused throughout his trial. The case had dragged on interminably, and my, how Bart had enjoyed watching the jumpy diddler squirm.

After the verdict, and after the sentence, he read in the
Seattle Star
that Haddon was raped and castrated in a prison riot. As far as Bart was concerned, that was
real
justice. The diddler had raped and taken the cherry of that little girl, so tit-for-tat, the same was done to him. Besides, what use did a wuss have for balls?

That incident had inspired the name of the boat Bart owned before the boat he was boarding now. In days of old, when sailors set out to sea, they took with them a clutch of cabin boys to bugger for sport and relief. Because the boys were virgins in the ways of nautical love, they spent the first day at sea stripped of their pants, sitting on greased pegs jutting up from the flat of a bench. After a day of rocking back and forth with the waves, the “peg boys” who would serve the crew were loosened up.

Prison made Haddon a peg boy, so to speak, and in homage to what happened to that wuss in the riot, Bart had named his last boat
The Peg Boy.

After that, he thought being a prison warden would be the ideal job for him. How Bart would enjoy bullying the scumbags who got banged up for doing stupid things that he was too smart to get caught doing. It would be like tormenting rats in a cage. He would make them do
very
hard time.

When he later read in the
Seattle Star
that Haddon had hanged, Bart was proud of himself. As far as he was concerned, that was ultimate justice. The diddler had strangled the girl he had raped, so tit-for-tat, the same was done to him. Besides, what use did a wuss have for life?

Not only did the hanging give Bart another fantasy—for years after, he thought being the state’s hangman would be the ideal job for him—but the execution also inspired the name of the sailboat he was now boarding. In days of yore, the British navy used to hang pirates from the yardarm, the horizontal spar at the head of a mast to which the top edge of a square sail was rigged. Bart’s boat was a thirty-nine-foot center-cockpit sloop with triangular sails, so it didn’t have a yardarm topping its mast. That didn’t matter. The name had meaning for Bart. In homage to what that wuss had suffered on the gallows, Bart had named his current boat
The Yardarm.

The Yardarm
was moored on the west shore of Lake Washington. Seattle sits between the Pacific waterway of Puget Sound and the inland lake. The glacier-gouged basin is nineteen and a half miles long and generally one and three-quarters miles wide. Lake Washington is overlooked by towering, snow-capped Mount Rainier. Its more than fifty miles of shoreline are fairly smooth, and only a few bays indent it here and there. Its beaches are narrow and the shore drops off quickly, plunging to the lake bottom at two hundred feet. Two pontoon bridges cross it in the middle, one of which joins southern Mercer Island to both shores. Seattle owns the west shore, but not the east. That belongs to Bellevue, Renton, and numerous small towns. The northern reaches of Lake Washington offer fine sailing, so here is where Bart moored the sloop that he called home.

When Bart returned from a selling trip he liked to go for a sail. There was something about venturing out on the lake at night that satisfied the bully’s insatiable need for control. At night, Lake Washington was his alone. Wuss sailors, who took their boats out only in daylight, were safely tucked in bed with their teddy bears.

Having parked his car onshore behind the long-term moorage, Bart lugged his suitcase down the ramp and out onto the deserted dock under a moonless, starlit sky. The clouds of the last storm were scudding away, clearing the air for the next storm, which was already brewing at sea. At ten to fifteen knots, the chill night wind rippled the black depths of the beckoning lake sparkling with reflected city lights. As Bart hoofed along the finger to which
The Yardarm
was tied, halyards slapping her mast and waves lapping her hull welcomed the skipper aboard.

Aye-aye, Captain, thought Bart.

Starboard to the finger, his sailboat was moored stern in. Unhooking the lifeline to climb aboard, Bart heaved his suitcase over the gunwale and stepped down into the sunken cockpit. “Center cockpit” meant the steering area of the sloop was between two cabins, the main cabin forward and a private cabin aft. With his sea legs compensating for the rocking hull, Bart unlocked the companionway doors to the forward cabin, sliding open the overhead hatch before he entered. Inside, he flipped a switch to ALL to juice both batteries so he could fire up the diesel engine.

Climbing back out to the open cockpit between the cabins, Bart raised the cover of a hatch built into the floor and reached in to turn on the light in the engine compartment. First, he checked the oil with a dipstick; then he unscrewed the cap on the heat exchanger to confirm the coolant level; and finally, he opened the seacock so brine could flood the cooling system. Satisfied with the engine, Bart switched off the light and closed the hatch.

In the center of the cockpit stood the binnacle, a vertical mount with the steering wheel on its aft side, a black transmission lever on its port side, a red throttle lever on its starboard side, and a glowing compass on top. After removing the canvas cover protecting it, Bart inserted a key into the instrument panel. He checked the transmission with one hand to make sure it was in neutral, pumped the throttle several times with his other hand, then cranked the key in the binnacle to fire up the engine.

Like a newborn babe whacked on its bottom, the thirteen-horsepower Volvo diesel coughed itself into life. As it
chug-chug-chugged
in the dock slip, again Bart swung down into the main cabin to turn on the running lights and the autopilot. From a recess in the cabin wall, he withdrew a flashlight and the winch handle, then, jack-in-the-box that a single crewman was, he popped back up to
The Yardarm’
s cockpit.

Dropping the winch handle into a side pocket on the binnacle, Bart flicked the flashlight on to see if the batteries were still strong, and that’s when the sudden beam caught the clue.

Illuminated by the torch was a fresh scratch on the lock of the aft cabin.

*    *    *

Bart unlocked the aft cabin and shone the beam of the flashlight in. Like a spotlight on a theater stage, the beam plucked details out of the dark. It caught the rudderpost angling up dead center from the cabin floor to the ceiling, the metal tube wrapped with manila hemp rope for a nautical look. It caught the maritime junk on the shelf across the transom, a clutter of shackles, stainless-steel bolts, bungee cords, a whistle, and an empty wine glass. It caught the twenty-dollar bill Bart had dropped on the quarter-berth when, before the selling trip, he had searched his wallet for a business card.

Had Bart been an Alex Hunt when it came to clues, he might have searched further in his response to the scratch. The money, however, was enough for him, because surely a thief would have stolen it had someone broken in. Convinced the scratch on the lock resulted from a
thwarted
theft, Bart extinguished the flashlight beam and locked the aft cabin.

The Hangman was left in the dark.

*    *    *

Barnacle Bart was ready to sail.

From the cockpit, he sprang back onto the dock to untie the fore, aft, and spring lines; then, after shoving the boat away from the finger and slightly ahead, he leaped back on and put her in gear by pushing the transmission lever from NEUTRAL to FORWARD. His other hand advanced the throttle, and slowly
The Yardarm
chugged out of the dock slip toward the open expanse of Seattle’s largest lake.

Once the sloop was clear of the west shore marina, Bart crabbed along the starboard side to gather in the fenders, clipping the lifeline back in place before he returned to the wheel. More throttle and Bart left the big city behind.

Waves made the wheel kick, and wind tossed Bart’s thinning hair. Headlights crossing the Evergreen Point Bridge to the south were a noose of pearls around the neck of the dark lake. Venus glimmered bright between galleon clouds sailing the black beyond of outer space, and a shooting star streaked green as it burned itself to death. Seen through the tracery of rigging overhead, the stars seemed to swing in time with the swells buffeting the boat. Glittering with pinpricks of reflected light, the bow wave pitched and splashed as the stem rose and fell, biting the fathomless water so a billion bubbles streamed by to join the wake that frothed astern. Hoist the sail and its silhouette against the starry sky would stand aloft like a monstrous shark’s fin.

Time for a bracer, thought Bart.

*    *    *

A quarter-berth is a much-needed space-saver on a boat. The aft cabin of
The Yardarm
had less depth than the height of an average man, which meant such a guest would have to sleep curled up in a berth shorter than he was if the cabin ended at the companionway doors. What a quarter-berth did was add length to a cabin’s depth by extending itself as a cubbyhole past the doors and under the cockpit floor. With head to the transom and feet in the hole, a man could sleep full-length in quarters shorter than he was.