I nodded and neither of us said anything for a long while, just sat there in the psychic reverberations the recounting of such a traumatic experience had produced.
“I’m sorry I had to ask about it,” I said, “but the information will help us catch him.”
“You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” he said, his voice pleading.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
A touch of relief seemed to relax him a little.
“This helped,” he said. “Can I come talk to you again sometime if I need to?”
“Of course. Anytime.”
He stood and handed me all three Dalì books. “Just take these. Keep ’em as long as you need.”
I stood and took the books. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll bring them back soon.”
When I reached the door and was about to open it, he said, “Chaplain, you know all that stuff he made me do to myself?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I did everything he told me to.”
I nodded.
“And when I had done every last thing he told me to he raped me anyway.”
Chapter Eighteen
I
had the Dalí book on the desk in front of me, opened to the painting “Young Virgin Autosodomized by her Own Chastity” when DeLisa Lopez walked into my office.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Salvador Dalí painting,” I said. “What the rapist is doing reminded me of it.”
She leaned over the desk to study the painting. I turned the book toward her so she could see it better.
In the Surrealist painting of subconscious shapes juxtaposed with recognizable ones, a young woman with wavy blond hair, naked except for sheer seamed stockings and 1950s-style black patent ballerina shoes, is leaning out of a window-like box, holding herself up by a dancer’s bar. Several horn-shaped objects are floating around, two of them merging with her butt cheeks, one directly behind her upturned rear end ready for penetration.
The caption on the page next to the painting quotes Dalí saying, “The horn of the rhinoceros, at one time the uniceros, is in reality the horn of the legendary unicorn, the symbol of chastity. A young virgin can rely on it, or play moral games with it, as well as she would have done in the days of courtly love.”
“Bizarre,” Lisa said. “But most of his stuff is, isn’t it?”
“I like Dalí,” I said.
“You do?”
I nodded.
She looked back down at the painting. “I can see why it made you think of our sicko.”
“If you’re going to use psychological jargon I won’t be able to keep up,” I said.
She smiled.
“So what does it mean?” she asked, nodding toward the image.
I shrugged. “I’m not sure exactly.”
She gave me a wide-eyed expression beneath arching brows as she sat down in the chair across from me.
“You just gonna sit and stare at the picture until it comes to you?” she asked.
“It would have already if you hadn’t interrupted me.”
She smiled again. “Sorry.”
“Since you’re here,” I said, “how about answering a few more questions.”
“It’d make me feel better about interrupting such important investigative work,” she said. “Did you talk to Dil?”
I nodded.
“And?”
“And I have some more questions for you,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said. “Shoot.”
“How many men would you say have confided in you about this?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed and she looked up toward the ceiling. “I’m not sure exactly. Five maybe—but they’ve all told me there are others.”
“Why haven’t you reported it?” I asked, the surprise showing in my voice.
Like me, she was required by law to report all crimes or plans to commit crimes.
“Wasn’t sure I even believed the first couple,” she said. “They wouldn’t submit to a physical. I thought they might be lying—especially since it was the same story. Then the next couple made me swear I wouldn’t and their confidence in me is more important than me keeping my job. Besides, I told you and you’ll catch him.”
“And they all told pretty much the same story?”
She nodded.
“Did they all have a mark on their neck?”
She nodded again. “They call it the mark of the beast.”
“That would have been helpful to know,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said.
“After they did what he told them to,” I said, “to themselves, did he rape them anyway?”
She shook her head. “If he did they didn’t say so.”
“None of them?”
“None. I got the feeling the guy’s impotent.”
I thought about it.
“Why?” she asked.
“I talked to a victim who said he did everything the guy told him to and he still raped him.”
“Who talked to you?” she asked.
I frowned at her. “I can’t say.”
“Right,” she said. “Well, maybe he’s able to sometimes. And maybe some or all of the men I’m seeing are lying about that part of it.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Were your guys all attacked in the same place or various locations?”
She pursed her lips as she thought about it. “Different places.”
“The guy I talked to said it happened in the back hallway of Medical.”
“Well now, wait a minute,” she said.
“What?”
“Hold on,” she said. “I’m thinking.”
She narrowed her eyes in concentrated thought again, but looked down instead of up.
“They did all happen in or around or very close to the medical building,” she said. “One was the greenhouse, one was near Confinement—both of those are right behind Medical—two were in Classification—and that’s the other side of the same building. I think the other was in the infirmary.”
I nodded, thinking about what it meant.
“So it’s Medical, right?”
“It certainly sounds like the place to start,” I said. “What about the times it happened? Were they all at a similar time?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I can probably find out. Is it important?”
Chapter Nineteen
W
ith very few exceptions, African-Americans in Pottersville lived in one small part of town—one still referred to by many as the Quarters.
Poverty was part of life in a small town like Pottersville. There were very few good jobs, very few opportunities of any kind. But it was far worse for the small percentage of black men and women for whom inequality and disenfranchisement, living without in the land of plenty, was a way of life––and had been for generations.
Over the past few years, as despair had increased so had the abuse of alcohol and drugs. More and more meth labs were being found, more and more young men were going to prison. The senselessness and hopelessness, the raw futility, was overwhelming.
Dad was campaigning this afternoon, courting the black vote, and had asked me to meet him near Merrill’s mom’s house. By the time I arrived, I was depressed and disgusted.
I was driving a tricked-out black 1985 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS with T-tops, red pinstriping, a V-8 engine with a four-speed automatic transmission, a six-inch lift kit with twenty-six-inch chrome rims, a trunk full of speakers, illegally dark tinted windows, and a loud dual exhaust system.
It had been seized in a large drug bust and would soon be auctioned off by the sheriff’s department, but until then it was on loan to me. Dad’s justification was that I was consulting on the case and that I had destroyed my vehicle while attempting to stop an inmate escape. It still seemed like a dangerous thing to do during an election year but he assured me it wouldn’t be an issue. And at the moment I didn’t have a lot of options.
He had the screen door open and was stepping off her front porch when I pulled up behind his car, and met me by the time I got out.
“You look like a drug dealer,” he said.
“Already been pulled over three times,” I said. “You ought to see the looks on their faces when they see a white man in a clerical collar.”
He smiled.
We were quiet a moment, already beginning to sweat.
“We got the prelim back today,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows, inviting him to continue.
“Our vic wasn’t lynched,” he said.
“Well, yes he was,” I said.
“I mean that’s not what killed him,” he said. “He was dead long before he was hanged.”
I nodded, thinking about it.
Unlike most of the dilapidated clapboard houses and faded single-wide trailers with multiple satellite dishes on them, Ma Monroe had a red brick home with freshly painted trim. In contrast to the trash, discarded appliances, and shiny pimped-out luxury cars in many of the other yards, hers was clean and neatly manicured with a modest mid-sized Ford—all of which Merrill was responsible for.
“Cause of death?” I asked.
“He was beaten to death,” he said. “He had massive blunt force trauma. His liver was lacerated, his spleen ruptured, and he had an acute subdural hematoma.”
I thought about it some more.
“I think whoever killed him wanted it to look like something other than what it was,” he said. “Hang a black man from a tree and everybody automatically assumes it’s racially motivated, that it’s a mob or the Klan. Be a smart thing to do no matter who the killer is. Be brilliant if he’s black.”
I nodded.
As we stood there near the street, Dad waved to every vehicle that passed by—whether log truck or gold-trimmed SUV with spinning rims. Not his usual understated wave, but his big I’m-your-best-friend politician wave. I felt self-conscious and embarrassed, and I questioned why he had asked me to meet him here, which added guilt to the other experiences I was having.
From an early age, I had been as comfortable around black people as white, and I was sensitive to and angered by the rampant racism in Pottersville. It was probably due in part to the fact that the woman who cared for me during my most formative years was black, partly because of my relationship with Merrill, and perhaps partly because of an innate and intense hatred of injustice, but it had separated and at times even alienated me from my family.
My parents were of the “you can work with them, even be casual friends with them, but shouldn’t get too close to or even think about dating or marrying them” generation. Their formative years were prior to the Civil Rights movement. They were in school at the time of integration. Much of the conflict Dad and I had during my teenage years was related to my anger at his subtle and not so subtle racism. He was different now, having rid himself of much of the residual racism still present in Jake, but he still wasn’t as accepted or as comfortable as I was among the people of color of Pottersville, and I wondered if he had asked me to meet him out here because he wanted to remind them that I was his son.
“We should have a more complete autopsy in a day or two.”
He could have told me all of this on the phone. Maybe I was right about why he had asked me here.
“Still no ID?” I asked.
He shook his head. “If he’s in the system we’ll have it in a few days. If he’s not … I don’t know what we’ll do.”
I looked over at the old white wooden AME church on the other side of Ma Monroe’s house. It was small and leaning, and needed to be painted, its tiny steeple spotted gray and black with mildew. I shivered slightly when I looked at the woods beyond it and thought of the horror it held for Merrill.
“Do you know anything about a preacher from Marianna being killed back in those woods?” I asked.
His eyes narrowed, his expression one of alarm. “What? When?”
“Ever,” I said. “But specifically twenty-nine or thirty years ago.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Why?”
“Merrill saw him get killed when he was little.”
He shook his head. “I was a deputy back then. I would’ve known about it.”
“Not if it was never reported.”
“True. He would’ve been, what, three or four? He sure?”
I nodded.
“I’ll check into it,” he said, “but I can’t imagine it hasn’t come out by now if there was anything to it.”
“If Merrill says he saw it … ”
“I’ll look into and let you know,” he said. “Speaking of Merrill … I need your help.”
My eyebrows shot up.
“I need you and him to help me with the black vote,” he said. “Would you talk to him?”
I hesitated. He was putting me in an awkward position. I hated politics and I felt uncomfortable even asking Merrill for his own vote, much less to work on Dad’s behalf, but there was no way I could refuse this man who had done so much for me for so long, no way I could not do all I could to help him in any way I could.
“If you don’t,” he said, “I’m going to lose the election.”
Chapter Twenty
O
rdinarily Carla and I had Rudy’s to ourselves late at night, but with rotating teams of officers and deputies searching for the escaped inmate around the clock, the cowbell above the door kept clanging, the jukebox kept playing, and the coffee pot kept emptying.