The Sleeping and the Dead (20 page)

“Fock, there he is.” He pointed at the ghostly figure of a man standing behind some trees at the back of the amphitheater.

“There who is?”

“Your killer.”

I leaned over his shoulder for a closer look and got a good noseful of Deiter's unwashed body. He reverted the image to its original colors, and now that I knew a man was hiding there, I could easily see him among the trees. But there was something dark and bulky covering his face. “That's just a cameraman from the news,” I said. “He's holding a video camera.”

“Is that not rather small for a news camera?” Deiter asked.

Maybe so. Still, it made more sense that it was a cameraman. There were news people crawling all over the place trying to get a picture or a comment. The killer would have to be one frosty SOB to stand there in full view, filming the scene of his own crime while we worked it. Of course, he had apparently been ballsy enough to watch us at the Orpheum, hiding in the scenery not twenty feet from dozens of cops.

Deiter opened the other photos of the site, and in each, our voyeur's face was partially obscured by his video camera. So all we really had were a few more ill-defined photos virtually useless for making a positive identification. The question was, why hadn't I seen him when I was taking the pictures? I'd been looking right at him through the viewfinder.

Deiter seemed to read my mind. “This is no ghost, Jackie. I've seen pictures of ghosts and I tell you this is a man. The camera does not lie. Only the photographer lies.”

 

26

M
ONDAY AFTRERNOON
TRAFFIC WAS MASSIVE
and sluggish, with a gray drizzle coming down, burying the top of the Clark Tower in thick cloud. I could smell the greasy fumes coming from the KFC down the street. I sat at the stop sign for about five minutes waiting to turn right on Poplar until this POS powder-blue Camaro stopped traffic to let me out. I waved my thanks and drove west, then north on Perkins, headed for home. The stack of photos Deiter had printed out lay on the seat next to me. Every once in a while, I'd look down at them, at the hidden face of the man who had been murdering gay men across Memphis virtually unhindered for four years now. I knew I was going to have to show the photos to Adam. Eventually. I didn't know how I was going to do it. The more I thought about it, the more I thought the best thing would be just to drop them in his lap. Let him decide what they were worth.

I bottomed out turning into the parking lot behind my apartment and slid to a stop in the spot nearest the door. As I reached across the console for the camera and pictures, a pale blue Camaro eased into the lot behind me and stopped with its ass hanging out in the street. The fenders were beat all to hell, patched with rust and gray primer, and the hood was a darker shade of blue than the rest of the car, but the tires shined new and black and the windows were tinted dark as welder's glass. It was the same car that had let me out on Poplar over by Deiter's place.

When the driver saw me, he tried to back out but he had to stop because of cross traffic. I ran up to his car, grabbed the passenger-side door handle and tried to open it, but it was locked. I couldn't see the driver because of the tinting. I screamed, “Tell that motherfucker Reed if he has me followed again, I'll kill him! You hear me?
Entiendes?
” I kicked the side door, adding another dent. I looked around for a rock or brick and spotted a quart bottle of Miller half full of piss sitting on the curb. As I reached for it, dude backed his car out into traffic, tires squalling on the wet pavement, horn blaring. He T-boned a late model Toyota, spinning it 180 degrees into oncoming traffic. I ran back to my car and grabbed the Leica off the front seat, then followed him out into the stalled traffic, snapping away while he shook the cobwebs out behind the wheel. He finally came to his senses before I could get around in front of his car. He put it in drive and floored it, wheels smoking. I zoomed in on his license plate as he sped away. The old lady in the Toyota fell out of her bent car screaming, streamers of gray hair plastered to her face, blood pouring from her nose.

I walked back to my car and grabbed the killer photos off the front seat. It was just like Reed to have me followed, but I had the bastard this time. That old lady would sue his sorry ass for every dime he had. Other people had stopped and walked her over to the curb, gave her a handkerchief to cap the flow of blood from her crimped schnoz. I gave her a business card for the slimiest lawyer I knew and took a full set of photos of her wreck and injuries, which progressively worsened while she waited for the ambulance and her head filled with dreams of avarice and an easy retirement.

I wondered what idiot my soon-to-be ex-husband had sent to follow me. From the look of the car, I guessed one of the illegals he hired to mow lawns and keep up his vacant properties. I hoped so, anyway. I hoped Reed would get nailed for a few immigration violations as well as liability for the reckless driving of his employee. I heard a pack of sirens coming from the other side of the overpass. It wasn't long before Adam's unmarked cruiser rolled up, followed by a traffic cop and a fire truck. He climbed out of his car as though aching in every bone. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I heard the call on the radio and recognized the address. You know I don't believe in coincidences.”

I described the accident to Adam and the traffic cop. The latter seemed inclined to assign at least part of the responsibility to me, since I had threatened the driver with a bottle of piss. I showed them the pictures I had taken. He left to run the plates and report the hit-and-run.

“You're not going to believe this,” I said to Adam. Now seemed as good a time as any.

“Try me.”

“I've got pictures of the Playhouse Killer.”

“Bullshit.” I let him dangle for a few seconds without saying a thing. I just held the bundle of 8x10 glossies to my chest. “You'd better not be bullshitting me, Jackie.”

“I'm not kidding. I've got the pictures right here.” I put them in his hands.

He flipped through them, frowning. “I don't believe it.”

“I told you. Of course, you can't see his face very clearly.”

“I'll want the original image files.”

“Of course.”

“Why didn't you tell me before now?”

“I only found out just now,” I lied.

I invited him inside. An ambulance drove up as we climbed the stairs. Mrs. Kim stuck her head into the hall, looked at us and slammed her door. We entered my apartment.

“This is a nice place,” Adam said. He walked around, staring up at the ceilings while he pretended not to be scoping the place for drug paraphernalia. “Better than it looks from the outside. Did you go to a meeting yesterday?”

“Yep.”

“Sorry I had to skip out on you. This case is eating every free minute.” It was the first time I could remember that he didn't question me about my activities in more detail. Maybe he believed me because he had checked—as my sponsor, all it took was one phone call to find out if I had been going. Or maybe he believed me because I didn't have to lie about it.

I turned on my laptop and plugged in my Leica. Adam examined the photo printouts I had spread on the kitchen table. I offered him a drink, but all I had was beer and tap water. “They got sodas and stuff downstairs,” I suggested.

“I'm OK.” He flicked the pictures aside. “These are useless. You can't see the guy's face at all.”

I lit a cigarette and offered him one, and to my surprise he took it. He lit up and sat back in the cheap creaking dinette chair, blew a cloud of gray smoke into the air over his head. God he was good-looking. I wondered if he had a girlfriend. He'd never talked about anybody romantically.

“Think about what these photos mean.” I leaned over the table and laid my hands on top of the pictures. “Our boy was there, watching us the whole time. Maybe watching us every time, for all we know.”

“He's got balls,” Adam agreed. Then he asked me for a beer. He was falling apart in front of me. This case, especially the last week of it, was killing him. He was weakening to temptation before my very eyes, and I was the source of that temptation. But I wasn't going to say no to him.

I grabbed a beer from the fridge and opened it. He pulled two prints out of the stack, one from the Orpheum and one from the Shell, laid them side by side and studied them while he sipped his beer. “If these two are even the same guy.”

“It would be a hell of a coincidence,” I said. I opened my photo files from the serial killer's previous murders.

The first file I pulled up was the Simon twins folder. I clicked through the images without seeing anything unusual. Next I tried the Richard Buntyn scene from the Playhouse, where the killer had earned his infamous moniker. I opened each file and inverted the colors the way Deiter had shown me, hoping I would get a glimpse of the killer hiding backstage like he had at the Orpheum. But there was nothing there. Just cops and more cops, Adam looking a good deal younger than he did now, though it had only been two years ago.

That left the Jim Krews murder—the killer's first, as far as we knew. It had been four years ago. This killing had always seemed the most personal, the most tragic. The Simon twins had been younger, but something about the scenes I had photographed that day in midtown suggested a brutality unrivaled by any of his subsequent murders. Maybe he thought the same thing and had spent the last four years trying to recapture the magic of that first murder.

 

27

O
NE
M
AY MORNING FOUR YEARS
ago, Jim Krews's parents had come home from vacation in Europe to find their son's partially eaten corpse spitted, whole hog, over a brick barbecue pit in their backyard, warm coals still glowing beneath him. His killer had carved off his penis and portions of his buttocks. These relics were nowhere to be found and the investigators on the scene assumed they had been eaten, maybe with fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti. I had several photos of the picnic table and the words scrawled across it, in barbecue sauce—
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Cause of death was blunt-force trauma. He'd been beaten to death with a brick. During the autopsy, Dr. Wiley found a decorative glass unicorn in the victim's rectum. He was a poetry major at Rhodes College, the campus not far from his home. After the barbecue-sauce poetry was identified by a brand-new homicide detective as a quote from Shakespeare's Sonnet CXLVII, they briefly took the victim's Shakespeare professor into custody. That new detective had been Adam McPeake.

Then the Warren Academy auditorium burned down and in the ruins they found two seniors, Roger and Loeb Simon, twin brothers, and both noted homosexuals. They were naked and cooked in their own juices inside an antique iron bathtub that was part of the set for a production of Thornton Wilder's
Our Town
. They had been trussed up with twine and left in the tub with a heavy piece of carpet covering them while the auditorium burned down around them.

Because all three victims were young homosexual men, the police began to suspect the killings might be related. But as there were no similar murders for almost a year after the Simon boys, the possibility of a serial killer faded as a working theory. All other trails led to dead ends and the investigation stalled.

That ended on a Tuesday morning a little over two years ago. On the Monday night before Thanksgiving, the body of an art historian named Richard Buntyn was discovered on the stage at Playhouse on the Square. My photos of the scene showed a naked man stuffed headfirst into a wine barrel. Imagine everyone's surprise when the body was removed and a severed pig head floated to the top. Adam McPeake immediately recognized the scene as a staging of the death of the Duke of Clarence from Shakespeare's
Richard III
, in which the Duke is stabbed and drowned in a malmsey-butt. Dr. Wiley later determined the victim had been raped with a butcher knife.

Adam was the first to connect the dots between the Buntyn, Krews and Simon murders. The Simons, he observed, had been trussed up and baked in a pie, like the characters Chiron and Demetrius in
Titus Adronicus
, again Shakespeare. But Adam's most remarkable detective coup came when he identified the Krews backyard as the same place where Tennessee Williams's first (now lost) play
Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!
was performed. That's something you won't learn from the Chamber of Commerce. The glass unicorn discovered in the victim's rectum pointed to Williams's
The Glass Menagerie
. That the victim had been cannibalized suggested
Suddenly, Last Summer
, also Tennessee Williams, in which Sebastian, a frustrated young homosexual, is killed and eaten while on vacation in Europe.

Because of the pig's head, the police suspected the killer might be a local butcher or pig farmer. Under normal circumstances, a pig's head isn't particularly easy to get hold of, but this was Memphis, where you can pick up a pig head for a song at the barbecue festival. Krews had been barbecued, pointing to someone into the competitive barbecue scene. That all four victims were known homosexuals suggested hate as a motive. They thought he might be a repressed homosexual with religious delusions. The FBI sent in a profiler who suggested a white male, late twenties or early thirties, who had held a variety of menial jobs, socially inept and pathologically shy, a creature of the social shadows, a wallflower who probably grew up with a domineering father figure who sexually abused him. His victims likely were people he encountered on a daily basis, thus the extremely personal nature of the crimes. But they never found a solid connection between the four victims other than the theatrical nature of their deaths. They shared no mutual friends or relatives. With the Buntyn crime referred to as the Murder at the Playhouse by the press, it wasn't long before a local theater critic dubbed him the Playhouse Killer. He became Memphis's most famous serial murderer since George Howard Putt. The police were certain he would strike again, sooner rather than later, now that he had captured the media's attention.