The 56th Man (4 page)

"It has to be done. Cholera has broken out in
some districts."

"Then why aren't you out there with a
shovel?" Omar caught himself. "Ghaith, it's hard not to--"

"I understand." Ghaith glanced at the
policeman through the window, then back at Omar. "Is that why you
drove me thirty kilometers to the middle of nowhere? To tell me
this?"

"I told you, I want you to meet someone.”

"Your Imam.”

"He can be of enormous help...to all of
us."

"A
Twelver
?" The question was
rhetorical. Ghaith knew the Imam Omar referred to was
Shia.

“
Hojatolesam Abdollah—“ Omar
leaned forward suddenly, peering through the windshield. Both he
and Ghaith spotted headlights up the road at the same
moment.

"Is this him?" Ghaith asked.

Omar gripped the steering wheel, as though
bracing himself. After a moment, he said, "Naqib is on his way out.
They're bringing in Jabar."

Ghaith stared at him. "Since when were you so
familiar with the inner workings of the Ministry?"

"There will be changes. Changes bigger than
you can imagine."

"I can imagine," Ghaith said slowly.

"You understand, don't you?" said Omar, his
voice trailing into a flimsy rag of sound. In this heat, the sweat
patches merging from his armpits to his chest was understandable.
But the steering wheel had become slick from his hands. Noting his
own weak voice, he repeated, more sternly, “You understand?”

"Under the circumstances, in such friendly
surroundings, yes," Ghaith answered, reaching into his shirt pocket
for his cigarettes. "I'm going to die."

Omar raised his head. "No fear. You haven't
changed."

Ghaith did not speak.

“
I’ve changed my name,” Omar
said, clearing his throat. “It’s no longer Omar. It’s Abid
Ali.”

Ghaith got a good laugh out of that. His old
playmate was telling him he was no longer Sunni. Abid Ali-Omar
stared at him.

"You're the only man I've ever met who has no
faith. No god. No tribe. Truly none."

"I believe in God, Omar,” Ghaith said,
blowing smoke. “I just don't have a high opinion of Him."

It happened in the 3rd Precinct, Sector
312:

Jerry Riggins. Thirty-two. Artist. Found
slumped in an easy chair in the first floor living room. A single
gunshot to the side of the head. Thirty-eight caliber.

Moria Riggins. Thirty-one. Entrepreneur.
Part-owner of Moria's Notions. Found upstairs in bed, in the master
bedroom. A single gunshot to the side of the head. Thirty-eight
caliber.

Joshua Riggins. Seven. Found in bed, in his
bedroom down the hall from the master bedroom. Single gunshot.

William Riggins. Five. Found in bed, in his
bedroom one door down from Joshua's. Single gunshot.

This was the bare outline of the story that
Ari discovered in the local newspaper's internet archives. Munching
on a bag of Fritos, he tried to delve further into the crime--via
cyberspace.

There wasn't much. The police had been
alerted by an anonymous phone tip. When they arrived they found
that the back door had been forced. "Really smashed in," as one of
the officers put it. The accompanying picture attested to this,
with broken glass piled on the sill of a door half off its hinges
and large splinters from the jam leaning across the opening. It was
assumed that (Howie's protest notwithstanding) a neighbor had heard
the racket and called from an untraceable number. ("Really?" Ari
mused.) The motive appeared to be robbery. Although a complete
inventory was unavailable, the insurance company reported the
absence of some rings and necklaces. The killers must have
possessed some rare common sense: trace evidence was nonexistent.
There were no unaccountable fingerprints or footprints on the
premises. There were no ridges of evidence on which the DNA
profilers could toss their genetic grappling hooks: no saliva, no
mucous, no skin under the victims’ nails, no semen, no wayward
strands of hair. Speculation was that there was more than one
culprit, but there was no real reason why the reporters would
suggest this. The bullets had all come from the same gun.

The article made no mention of any signs of
resistance. Nor did it divulge any forensic details about the wound
ballistics. A 150-grain round nose bullet penetrated, a controlled
expansion 110-grain hollowpoint left a wider track and was more
prone to deform the target. Had the police encountered neat holes
or bloody messes? Ari thought the question important. The type of
ammunition used sometimes revealed the killer’s expertise and
premeditation.

He knew something about these things.

The murders had taken place near midnight, on
December 23. Jerry Riggins' last sight had been of the Christmas
tree in the corner of his living room.

Nearly all of other online articles dealt
with the communal sense of loss and sorrow. The Riggins family had
been well-beloved. A host of friends and acquaintances left
testaments on their websites (one that displayed some of Jerry's
art and announced upcoming shows, another for Moria's Notions) and
on a blog provided by the newspaper. Ari scanned through them. Most
seemed heartfelt.

"We will miss you at church, Moria. Your
dedication to the Lord and your public service will be missed. Your
children were so dear, so wonderful. And while we didn't see much
of Jerry, he too will be missed."

So Jerry wasn't much of a churchgoer. Ari
could sympathize with that.

“
What can I say? I will miss you. All
the old Rebels of ‘92 will miss you. Remember the pyramid? My ankle
still hurts when it rains! Oh please, Moria, come back. Come back.
KS.”

Alongside the sadness lay fear. This
neighborhood was sequestered from the hot crime spots of the city,
the Riggins house even more so--tucked far away from the main road
in a snug cul-de-sac, with the wide and innocent James protecting
the front door. For something like this to happen in a place like
this brought home the rawbone uncertainty of life. Nobody was safe,
and with the killer or killers still at large, unpleasant
possibilities lurked in every dark corner. While common consensus
was that the perpetrators must be far away by now, there loomed the
risk that they were known to their victims. That they could even be
neighbors.

It was not a good time for a stranger to be
taking up residence, Ari thought, especially when that stranger was
replacing a family so popular, and so gruesomely displaced.
Especially when that stranger was undeniably foreign, bearing a
striking resemblance to the late Gamal Abdel Nasser, dark
complexion, pencil moustache and all.

More to the point was the time of murder. The
coroner placed it in the wee hours, a little before or after
midnight. But Howie had told Ari it had happened in broad
daylight.

Of course, it could have been an
exaggeration. Ari's English was excellent, but he occasionally
misinterpreted figures of speech. Perhaps 'broad daylight' could be
interpreted as 'in a safe and friendly neighborhood like this.'

The keyboard became greasy from Ari's Fritos.
The snack had been inside one of the five shopping bags on the
kitchen counter. Most everything else looked inedible to him. Even
the milk in the refrigerator seemed bland.

He plugged his charger into the same
electrical strip used by the computer and slid his cell phone into
the cradle.

After a night spent on the bare wood floor,
Ari set out next morning in search of real food. Fortunately, he
found an Indo-Pak grocery on Hull Street that was heavy on the
cuisine of Northern India which he often favored. Unfortunately,
the store did not take credit cards. A small container of paneer
cubes, some roti wrapped in cellophane, a box of chick peas, a
variety of chaats, and an overabundance of sticky-sweet gulab jamun
all but wiped out his ready cash.

He next stopped at a Food Lion and
hunted for anything that could be concocted into French cuisine,
for which he had also acquired a taste. But while all the necessary
ingredients were present, he really had no idea how to prepare a
proper
coq au vin
. He resigned
himself to buying a roaster chicken, some tea bags and a few more
bags of Fritos, which tasted similar to the roasted corn he had
wolfed down as a child, then as a teen, then as an
adult.

He stopped at a Goodwill and used his credit
card to buy a thin mattress, a thick blanket and a pillow.

He drove around his new neighborhood a little
bit, investigating the streets, thinking about his new job,
brooding on what Howie had told him about the Riggins family. There
was a harsh separateness about these suburban houses that made the
discreet death of an entire family all too plausible. Sought-for
privacy incurred an unsought isolation. While most of the homes
peppering the south shore were not screened off by thick skirts of
trees and hedgerows, like those of Beach Court, the sense of
inviolable territory was unmistakable—as was emphasized by the
Neighborhood Watch signs that festooned nearly every block and
conceivable entrance. Ari cooked up an inferred greeting for each
door he passed: "Hello! How are you doing? Why are you here? What
do you want? Welcome! Go away!"

He sat before the computer, staring at a
floor plan of this very house, posted by the newspaper several days
after the killings. Employing miniature body outlines similar to
those used at crime scenes, it pinpointed the location of the
bodies as they had been found by the police. Ari clicked on the
image to enlarge it, then printed it out. Hefting the Fritos in the
crook of his arm, he took up the two pages (main and upper
floors--the basement wasn't included) and embarked on a more
informed tour of his house.

The lead article did not speculate as to whom
had been shot first, but logic would suggest that would be the
chief protector of the household. Ari was culturally inclined to
assume that would be the male. He went downstairs into the living
room. After studying the printout, he stood next to a phantom easy
chair, facing the ghost of a Christmas tree. He folded the
printout, stuck it into his pocket, and munched on some corn chips.
Each bite sent an inordinately loud echo through the room. Of
course, there was no furniture or carpeting to absorb the
sound--but it still didn't fit. The stairs leading up to the second
floor were scarcely ten feet away. He shook his head at the ghost
in the phantom chair.

"You didn't do your job," he
admonished--although only a portion of his disgust was directed at
Jerry Riggins. His original assumption was discarded within the
same few minutes it had been formulated.

"Not even with a silencer," he murmured. In a
confined space like this it would have made a loud and distinctive
'pop'.

He went upstairs to the master bedroom.
Judging from the diagram, Mrs. Riggins had been sitting up in bed
when she died, her legs over the side. The headboard was against
the outside wall; the side of the bed was about a three feet from a
window. Ari stared out at the river. Whistling Jupiters? Could
Moria have mistaken the gunshot downstairs for a firecracker? It
didn't seem feasible. The small, tree-dotted island was halfway to
the north shore. On the other hand, coming out of a deep sleep, the
shot could have seemed like part of a dream.

"Were you dreaming, Moria?" he asked, looking
at the phantom bed. "Or were you deaf?" He stared hard at the
invisible woman, then added, "Did you take a sleeping pill before
going to bed?"

He stopped before each boy's room--rooms he
had freely roamed the day before, but which had become (now that he
had seen the diagram) tainted by history. This was the belly of the
crime, and his stomach knotted painfully. He would study the rooms
more closely, later. He had plenty of time.

Downstairs, he went into the kitchen and
poked a wooden spoon through his soaking chick peas. Then he went
to the back door, set off in a small alcove adjacent to the
kitchen, across from the basement door. He stood outside on the
small stoup. To the right the yard sloped down to the patio. To the
left some boxwoods hid a central air unit and blocked the road from
view. Howie's house was barely visible through the trees. Turning,
he leaned in to study the frame. The wood was crisp, unmarked,
obviously new. He closed the door and tapped it with his knuckles.
Very solid. Of course, it too was new, but Ari thought the real
estate people would have replaced the damaged door with one similar
or identical to the old one. Again, the problem of noise. Breaking
through here would have created a tremendous racket.

He tried to re-enter and found he had locked
himself out. None of keys on his ring worked. He drew back a
little, frowning at the door knob.

Probably a minor slip-up on the real estate
agent's part. He had had the old keys hanging from his office
pegboard, perhaps, and had simply forgotten to slip the new one
onto the ring after the door was installed. Or....

Ari smiled. He went down to the patio and let
himself in through the basement door.

Once again at the computer, he returned to
the newspaper archives and pulled up a picture of the Riggins
family hiking in the mountains. Hunched under backpacks, they were
beaming at the camera as though the weight on their backs and the
high trail they had just ascended (a section of the Appalachian
Trail, the caption advised readers) were of no consequence to their
good spirits. Jerry appeared to be of average height, slender but
fit, glowing with health and optimism. Standing by his side was
Moria, her grin so broad it practically cracked her cheekbones. Her
short bangs were plastered by sweat to her forehead. Beneath them
her eyes glowed brilliantly, almost ecstatically, as though she was
a novitiate who had discovered the temple of Nature. Her olive
T-shirt was pinched by the backpack straps and sagged at the front,
exposing the sharp line of her collarbone. The boys, looking a
little blown from their hike up the hill, stood at the
forefront--displayed like trophies, each one held by the shoulders
as though being thrust toward the lens. They had matching,
child-sized backpacks. The eldest looked highly pleased, the
youngest looked relieved--perhaps he had just been told that the
hike was over and that they were now going home.