The Subtle Art of Brutality
No, I did not know he intended to murder her.
No, we have not spoken since.
No, I do not know where he is now.
All technically true. The location one I lawyered a little bit. Sure, I know where we disappeared into, but I have no idea where in there we wound up at.
Yes, I do not know where he is now. In Hell.
Then the next question: would I mind coming down for an interview and polygraph? No, I don’t mind.
On the way I call Jeremiah on his personal cell. I ask him a question to which he answers: “Of course the patients here take blood pressure medicine. You name it: Metolazone, Metoprolol Succinate, Lisinopril, Felodipine. I got ’em all.”
“Toss me down some.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t care.”
Ten minutes from the station house I swallow a handful too many of the pills. I don’t check the quantity; I don’t check the medication itself. I’m sure it’s a cocktail of all of them.
Lying is easy. I did it to IA all the time. The polygraph: stare a single dot on the wall, breathe in and out in a measured pace, even voice, chemically assisted heart rate, chemically assisted vasodilators. Set your baseline readings by telling little white lies on simple questions. Creates wiggle room.
Four hours later they give me a pat on the back as I walk out the door. I get home, struggling to hold in the side-effect diarrhea. I finish with that mess right before I vomit from the pills. It’ll take days to realign my system.
Darla and Belinda were crushed. Small parts in both seemed to expect some kind of horrible ending. But to see it arrive on the wings of a family friend, to learn truths too ugly to contemplate...it scars. Darla couldn’t help but have that look in her eye when she saw me last. The this is your fault look. I don’t blame her. Some of it is.
In the wake of the murder, all hell broke loose. Clevenger leads the Saint Ansgar-end of Derne’s investigation. He tied it into Pierce White’s murder.
It didn’t take long.
Derne’s life was flayed open after Delilah’s murder and in Derne’s glove box Clevenger found a tiny receipt for a storage unit outside of town. Paid cash.
Warrant.
The place was small. Six by six. Two cardboard boxes and a wheelchair belonging to Derne’s frail wife. In one box were second-hand nonfiction books about the greatest arsonists of the twentieth century. Fire Science 101. Other evidence that lays all three torchings squarely on Derne’s back and must have sent Riggins, Volksman and Rudd through the roof. Good. Fuck all of them for not listening to a real investigator.
The other box contained self-help materials on things like incest, self-esteem, what one book’s title called “An All-Consuming Crush.” Pyschobabble label for obsession. Stalking. Things to help him temper himself with his feelings for Delilah.
Get out of your own way. Life coaching made easy. Three simple steps to overcoming what you can’t change. Take charge! When a parent’s love goes too far. Surviving the demons of incest.
And then, at the bottom of the box, were fiction books. Far more titles than the self-help books combined. Erotica fiction based on incest. Seedy shit printed in basement presses. Clevenger said the worst was when he leafed through the self-help books they were pristine. No bent corners, no book marks. No notes. But the erotica, they were scribbled to the point where some passages were unreadable.
The wife’s wheel chair: apparently a throne Derne had retro-fitted to put his new wife into. Nails hammered through it so the points would impale when she sat. The title LITTLE QUEEN scrawled across the back. He threatened my life. Said he’d do anything. I know he meant it. He called me his “little queen” and said he would put me in my throne one day. Through the back of the chair, right where her heart would be, the knife he used to carve up White. It was still caked in blood.
Maybe the chair was a fantasy; something he needed to build in order to get it out of his system like those letters people write telling off folks and then they never send them. Obviously Derne was far more disturbed than the world around him knew. I sniffed this guy hard and couldn’t scent this.
Either way, the throne was cast aside for the shoot-her-in-the-face-in-front-of-a-bunch-of-witnesses plan. Good for Delilah.
The dope, just a red herring. The men who ruined their lives for Delilah, a red herring. The drug dealers who took the dump truck load of shit Delilah brought with her when she their lives, red herring. Ben Boothe, red herring. It goes on.
Wrapped up now.
Not the way any fairy tale book would end it, but life chose this one.
I’m not okay with it. But I don’t get to decide.
A month goes by, each second lags like they were stills in the memory of dementia; just snapshots of life, disconnected, lazily passing by the mind’s feebling eye. Another month. More cases come and go. Then one day phone rings.