The German (19 page)

“Excuse me?”

“To defuse the situation,” the doctor said. “This is purely hypothetical, of course, but let’s say you brought in one of the less desirable German citizens on suspicion of these crimes. You don’t actually charge him. There’s no need to add busywork for yourself. More than likely you’re going to have a mob of some kind form, which is perfectly natural. Even if they don’t actually intend to murder this man, they will want to see him, so as to have a face for their hatred. You give them that. Let them see him, but make a stand against the vigilantes and warn them of severe repercussions should they attempt any action against him. Then, in the middle of the night, your suspect tries to escape and is subdued and killed in the process.”

“Are you off your rocker?” Tom asked, appalled at the doctor’s suggestion.

“Merely speculating,” Doc Randolph said as if he were predicting the winner of a horse race and not plotting the murder of an innocent man. “Though it will be assumed by the mob, you’ve made no claim as to this man’s guilt, so when the Cowboy again strikes, you cannot be held accountable. But you have brought a period of peace to the city, and you have kept additional attacks against your German constituency to a minimum, which at this point is likely to save a number of lives.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“Indeed not,” Doc Randolph agreed. “But again, this is all hypothetical. I am in no way suggesting what should be done, merely examining what could be done. After all, how much of your time is currently wasted on false or petty information? Half of your day is spent on the phone or reading ledger sheets. It’s ridiculous. How can they expect you to focus on the important elements of these murders when they have you chasing all of their private geese for them?”

“What you’re forgetting is that people are on guard right now. They’re keeping their eyes open. We give them a dead guy, and they go back to their normal routine and suddenly the Cowboy has an easier time of it. At least people are scared enough now to protect themselves.”

“For all of the good it did the Elliot boy.”

Tom ground his teeth together and turned his attention toward the window. The urge to punch the smug doctor in the mouth flared, but Tom bit down on it. Half the time the son of a bitch infuriated him and the other half he intimidated him, so why Tom constantly allowed the man in his presence was a mystery.

“Okay, you’ve speculated,” Tom said. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. The doctor’s idea was far too simple and too tempting, and Tom wanted it out of his head. “We’re not going to haul in a scapegoat.”

“Sacrificial lamb is a more appropriate description.”

“Call it what you like,” Tom told the doctor. “If you don’t have anything practical for me, I imagine you can head on back to your office.”

Doc Randolph didn’t move. In fact he smiled and relit his pipe as if Tom were being ridiculous. Tom was about to reiterate his desire for the old sawbones to hit the road when Rex poked his head into the office.

“Someone wants to talk to you,” Rex said.

“Who’s that?” Tom asked.

In reply Burl Jones pushed his way past the deputy and stomped up to Tom’s desk where he glared down on the sheriff with a look of arrogance so sharp he might have learned the expression from Doc Randolph.

“A what?” Tom asked. He knew the term from church, but only in a particular context, and he didn’t understand what ancient cities had to do with the German.

“I believe Burl is saying that this Lang is a homosexual,” Doc Randolph interjected.

“I’m going to need me a dictionary,” Tom said.

“It’s a pathology,” Doc Randolph explained, “a sickness that makes a man sexually obsessed with other men. I’ve read a number of interesting studies on the condition.”

“He didn’t have to see
that
,” Burl roared. “He saw the scarred bastard mounting another man as clear as day. You need me to draw a picture for you?”

“Scarred bastard?” Tom said. He traced a line beneath his eyes with a finger, remembering the man he had seen at the city’s Fourth of July celebration.

“That’s the one, and I’m warning you, Tom Rabbit, if you don’t do the job you get paid good money to do, I’ll do it myself.”

“You’ll do no such thing, Jones. And I don’t want you shooting your mouth off about this. Unless your boy saw Lang with Elliot, you’ve got nothing but manure to spread.”

“Hold on, Tom,” Doc Randolph said. “I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this. He may have actually stumbled on the best lead you’ve yet had.”

“That’s right,” Burl said triumphantly.

Doc Randolph sneered at Jones and shook his head. “It might be best if we spoke alone. I’m sure Mr. Jones wouldn’t mind waiting with your men until we’ve gone over a few things.”

“I got rights,” Jones said.

“Of course you do,” Doc Randolph said, placing his hand on Jones’s shoulder. Gently he turned the man to the door and walked him toward it. “You go on out and talk to Rex and Don and Gil about them.” Once he had Jones out of the office, the doctor closed the door and then spun on Tom, and said, “I hate that man.”

But the truth was Tom didn’t, not exactly. He knew about pansies and queers from schoolyard talk – kids who spoke funny or acted a bit sissy – and the other kids had made quite a bit of sport with them, sometimes going so far as to target them for fist fights after school, but every one of the kids Tom could remember who had gotten saddled with the name had grown up to lead perfectly normal lives – lives not so different from his own. Besides, the German he’d seen looked anything but sissy, so while Tom understood the unpleasant implications of Burl’s accusation, he couldn’t for the life of him fathom the connection Doc Randolph was making, and he said so.

“What does that have to do with Little Lenny Elliot, or David Williams, or Harold Ashton?”

“Quite simply, the man in question exhibits a debased morality, and this known deviance may be a single facet in a far more complex disturbance in his psyche.”

“When all of this began, I told you about that killer, Albert Fish, and we discussed Jack the Ripper as well. In those cases, there was a sexual component to the crimes. Fish was a pedophile, a deviant against children, and his crimes included sexual molestation of the children he killed. One can extrapolate from the nature of Jack the Ripper’s crimes, the violence against the female reproductive system, all the victims in the profession of sexual gratification, that he too was fulfilling an unwholesome sexual need. So if we use these as models, we might project that our murderer is likewise destroying that of which he is desirous. Homosexuality is not a common affliction, and though I did not discover any sexual interference of the victims that does not mean it didn’t occur.”

“You seem awfully confident,” Tom said.

“You should talk to this man,” Doc Randolph said.

~ ~ ~

Tom didn’t consider himself a worldly man, and generally he didn’t lament his ignorance of the more cosmopolitan notions Doc Randolph threw around, but when it came to Ernst Lang – the man he drove across town to question – and the man’s alleged sexual tastes, unusual as they were, Tom wished he had more information. He could rationalize Burl Jones’s accusation against the German, but he felt nothing about it. Beyond schoolyard name calling and bullying, which all seemed to be based on some pale derivation of the actual sickness that had supposedly stricken Lang, Tom had no experience with the idea of homosexuality. Such things had never been discussed in his family’s home or at the sheriff’s office, and they didn’t run stories about it in the
Barnard Register
or discuss it on the radio. So how was he supposed to feel about a subject that intellectually perplexed him and emotionally left him absolutely indifferent?

Parking the car across the street from Lang’s house, Tom was reminded of a brief scene from Hemingway’s
To Have and Have Not
, which he’d read a number of times in the last few years. Titles by Hemingway and Zane Grey made up the bulk of his home library, which consisted of less than twenty books occupying two whitewashed planks suspended by brackets on his living room wall. In the Hemingway novel two men had sat on a yacht, listening to Bach on a phonograph and bickering, and Tom had found their squabbling familiar, because he and Glynis had engaged in plenty of rows over the years. Further, he’d been amused by the way the author had written those two men the way he might write about a married couple, albeit a genuinely unhappy one, and he remembered finding the scene depressing because one of the men had seemed so trapped and forlorn and was contemplating suicide by scene’s end.

He crossed the street thinking about this passage and wondered if Hemingway had been describing diseased men like the one he was about to meet. Then Tom wondered what possible difference it could make unless he decided to start a conversation about the book, which he didn’t.

Tom knocked on the door and stepped away. He stood with his back straight and hands at his sides.

Remembering his first impression of Lang – the day he’d seen the man at the Fourth of July celebration – Tom recalled a powerful and cold thug who might very easily take the life of a boy. He’d felt intimidated by the blunt, scarred face and the German’s unwavering stare, and standing on the man’s porch, Tom felt a flutter of butterflies in anticipation of facing him again.

Lang opened the door, wearing a pair of gray slacks and no shirt. He was a short man, maybe five foot seven, if that. He carried an extra bit of weight on his frame, but the soft layer of flesh fell over the kind of muscle it took a lifetime of exertion to build. The man was badly scarred, and though Tom had seen worse in his day, these instances had been few. The scars on Lang’s chest were small and round, and the sheriff suspected they were the souvenirs of bullet wounds. He counted three in all, then doubted his certainty of their cause when he noted their placement. No man could survive that kind of wounding he reasoned, not even this man with his bull build. Lang looked at Tom suspiciously and checked the street to the sheriff’s back, as if expecting to see a posse on his heels.

“Nuh,” Lang called with no further explanation as he turned from the open door and walked to the hall on the far side of the living room.

The German had furnished his house sparsely with a small sofa covered in a rough green cotton fabric. A simple wooden rocking chair sat beside it and a lamp stood in the corner. There was a Montgomery Ward radio, but the walls were bare. No photographs. No pictures at all. The house was uncluttered and spotless, but the room’s absolute lack of personal affects, of additional comforts beyond those of the barest minimum struck him as unnatural.

Lang reappeared wearing a short-sleeved white shirt that stretched tightly over his barreled chest. Shadows accentuated the deep scars on his cheeks and nose. He stood perfectly straight with his arms behind his back, looking like he was facing a firing squad, proud to give his life for a cause.