“Some people can take an amazing amount of guilt before they crack,” Gurpreet said. “Be sure and try the curry. It’s almost hot enough for me.”
“And others don’t feel any guilt at all,” Geordie said. “Your garden variety psychopath, the best they can muster is usually annoyance. Or maybe regret – but then it’ll be regret for something they missed taking, or some act of spite that never occurred to them at the time.”
“So true,” Gurpreet said. “You going up again?” He nodded at the buffet table.
“Might as well,” Geordie said. “I’ll run longer tomorrow to pay for it.”
“Will you really?” Gurpreet asked.
“Not bloody likely,” Whispers grinned. “I might actually try to sleep in though, instead.”
“You mean, get up later than six am?” Gurpreet asked.
“If I can. If I can,” said Whispers. “Look, they’re bringing out some fresh naan bread.”
They were celebrating, sort of celebrating, the closing of a difficult case. It wasn’t solved, but it was closed. And that was the difference.
***
The case had begun with a man beaten to death. The deceased, one Jono Dickman, had been found in his own front hall, but blood spatter evidence found by the forensics team had shed new light.
“First blow was struck on the front porch,” the ident officer said. “You can see the splatter on the door frame. It wasn’t that hard, perhaps, but enough to stun him, surely. The killer kept going and forced his way inside. The rest of the program, you know.”
Once inside, the killer had slapped some duct tape across Dickman’s mouth, and then beat him savagely and systematically until Dickman died. Every limb had sustained multiple fractures, the hands were smashed, ribs caved in and splintered, perforating lungs – but no head injuries at all, after the first stunning blow. At some point, presumably after the kneecaps and forearms, when the victim, who was a large man, could no longer defend himself – at some point the killer had taken out a hammer and railroad spikes, and nailed Dickman to the floor. Even had he wanted to, Dickman could not escape the rest of that violent campaign: he’d been crucified. The medical examiner’s conclusion was that the hammer and nails bit had fallen relatively early in the sequence of events.
“Whoever it is,” the examiner said, “wanted the deceased to suffer. A lot.”
So much malice, thought Whispers, at the time. So much rage. But why? Robbery was ruled out as a primary motive – it was hard to say how much cash, if there had been any, that had gone missing. But the house still had enough high-end stuff, that a serious thief would have needed a U-haul truck to make a dent in it. And much of what was left behind could have been easily fenced; both Gurpreet and Geordie had concluded, early on, that robbery as a motive seemed most unlikely.
“Well, I might have a date with Elizabeth Hurley,” said Gurpreet, “but as long as we’re talking about the extremely unlikely, I’d say robbery was on that list.”
“Like hell freezing over?” said Geordie.
“Exactly like that.”
“Which leaves us with?”
“Why?” said Gurpreet.
“Exactly,” said Geordie. “Why? Why? Why?”
With all that violence, all the pain inflicted, why had seemed like the ultimate question.
“So, what do we know about this guy?” Geordie had asked, at the time. Jono Dickman turned out to be a somewhat-but-not-extremely successful salesman, and an occasional night-school professor.
“He did a fair bit of industrial editing,” said Geordie, “but he certainly doesn’t seem to have been a star in that cosmos, either. I’ll bet he expected the MA in English would open more doors than it did,” Geordie said.
“Well, it certainly wasn’t opportunity that knocked, in the end,” said Gurpreet. “It was somebody with a much different agenda.”
***
Time passed, though, without uncovering much in the way of a major motive. After extensive interviewing around Dickman’s many colleagues and acquaintances, the team sat down to evaluate. It was a small group – Gurpreet leading, Geordie Whispers, and a recent addition to the homicide team, Sallance (Sally) Gamble. It was Sally who had done a lot of the grunt work in going out to conduct so many interviews; this was, in part, just a normal dues-paying in a new unit, but it was also due to Geordie having to spend a fair amount of time in two separate trials, testifying and being cross-examined. Geordie made up for it by spending an hour or more every night, going over the day’s interviews with Sally. At the briefing, Geordie was smiling as he urged Sally to speak up.
“Tell Gurpreet what you told me, Sally,” Geordie said.
“It was just,” she said, “it was just that, everybody I talked to was like, really horrified at the fact that he died that way. But I noticed, there was nobody who seemed all that broken up about Jono, you know? I mean about him, personally. It was like, all he had were acquaintances, and no real friends at all.”
Whispers nodded, encouragingly.
“And …” he said. “Drop the other shoe.”
“And …” Sally said, hesitantly. “It was also like, nobody was all that surprised, either. About the way he went, I mean.”
“Like, maybe, he’d had it coming?” said Gurpreet.
“Like that, yeah,” Sally said.
“Conclusion?” asked Gurpreet.
“The guy was a douche,” Sally said. “Probably, also, a psychopath. The longer people knew him, the less they trusted him. It’s fucking uncanny.”
“That’s the thing about psychopaths,” Gurpreet said. “Sooner or later, everybody else is a candidate to get thrown under a bus. And regret doesn’t come into it, just profit and loss.”
“And people get to sense that,” Geordie said, “even if they’d have trouble putting it into words, or conscious thought. They’d just know, over time, the only way this guy has your back is as a convenient target, some little treachery or betrayal.”
“And maybe,” Gurpreet said, “given what happened, not always such a little treachery.”
“So, what next?” Sally asked.
“Interview again,” Geordie said. “Start with the oldest acquaintances, ask them precisely why you ended up with that perception. I don’t doubt your perceptions at all – I think you’re spot on with that. But I also think that, somewhere in that circle, somebody who isn’t a psychopath may be feeling, after the fact, just a tiny measure of guilt. Either because they did it, or because they know something that we don’t yet know about Jono Dickman, dead douchebag. So, let’s go find it, whatever it is. I’ll be done with my cases by Tuesday, and more available to pitch in after that.”
***
Finding a back history for Dickman’s so-called friends turned out to be a tedious exercise. The “oldest” of those acquaintances were able to confirm that their dealings with Jono had been civil, and superficial.
“He could be charming as hell,” said one woman, “but it was like, he was made of Teflon. He was well-dressed – always wore these nice tweed jackets – but it was like, that was how he figured a sales guy or an English professor ought to dress. He was urbane, witty, in a way, and he had about as much soul as a dressmaker’s judy.”
“A what?” asked Sally.
“You know – those frame things they use to hang dresses on, in a shop window?” said the woman. “It’s like, some kind of mannequin. And that’s what he was – just a tweed-covered mannequin. He’d give you the skin off your own back, ya know what I mean?”
“Not just a guy thing?” asked Sally.
“No, no,” said the woman. “He was mean about a lot of little things. He never picked up the tab on anything, long as I knew him. He might have paid his own way, most of the time, if he had to, but he was just mean about it. He had no human impulses to help anyone but himself.”
“Well did he ever stiff anybody, that you know of?” Sally asked.
“Sorry, no,” said the woman. “He had that in him, you could see it, once you got to know him, but he never did that to me or anyone I knew.”
“Oh.”
“But I’ll tell yeh one thing,” the woman had said. “If you’re looking among us as knew him best, or longest, you’d be fishing in a dead lake. Your best bet, find someone who was only just getting to meet him, before the truth sinks in. He might have burned somebody by then.”
***
“So, where are we then?” Gurpreet asked. “With this Jono Dickhead case?” He grinned. “Sorry. Dickman.”
“Re-interviewing the older acquaintances, to see if they can remember a grudge or anything,” said Geordie. “That, plus we’re going over his financial records, looking at his invoices, his debts, credit cards, and so on. Looking at emails, too, whatever we can find. Drudgery at this point, but we’ll stick at it.”
“Not promising, then,” Gurpreet said.
“Not at all,” Geordie replied. “It’s just – all we can think of right now, working harder. I’d like to say working smarter, only it’s been a long while since I felt so stupid, working a case. Sally has one last contact on her list to meet this afternoon, and she’s not expecting much. Some guy, he and Jono were working on a project of some kind, twenty years ago. They spent about six months on the preparation of whatever it was, but no sale resulted. Empty hands all round, apparently. The project team disbanded and went on to other things, more profitable. If Sally gets nothing from him, we’re at a dead end. Oh … there she is. Back already.”
Geordie waved at Sally, who was already heading their way. She walked into Gurpreet’s office, and they could tell she was pleased.
“I think we’ve got something,” Sally said.
“So, tell us,” Gordie said, “before the suspense kills us and you have to investigate that.”
“You remember they were on a project together? This guy, Clarence Bob, and they never got anywhere with it?”
Gurpreet and Gordie nodded.
“Yeah, yeah. Tell us more.”
“Clarence was always a little bit … annoyed … you might say, about Dickman’s work as a sales guy. Said that order-taking, just waiting for a phone to ring, that was all Jono was doing, and it wasn’t nearly enough to justify everyone else’s investment in developing the project, never mind what they were paying him.”
“Well, it isn’t,” said Gurpreet. “Takes a lot more than that to call oneself a professional salesman.” Gurpreet came from a long line of successful merchants (and salesmen), growing up in a family whose businesses thrived in India, Uganda, London (England) and Toronto. (It was a family mystery, in fact, why Gurpreet had chosen life as a police officer, back in India, then England, then Canada, over increasing riches with the family firms.)
“Well, there was something more,” Sally said. “Mr. Bob lost his wife, last year, and she was an extremely talented graphic designer, in her day. She’d met Dickman through Clarence, and she’d designed a graphic identity for Dickman’s company. Only, once she’d delivered, Dickman complained about the work and refused to pay. He never paid her bill.”
“Well, you don’t pay for unacceptable work,” said Gurpreet.
“Only, it wasn’t.” Sally said. “Wasn’t unacceptable, I mean. Dickman used the same identity in all of his business dealings for the next 20 years, unchanged from the way she designed it. He just never paid her for it.”
“But … that’s stealing,” said Gurpreet.
“How much was it for?” asked Geordie.
“A few thousand. Celia – that was her name – she’d already given Jono a sweetheart price because he was working with her husband. It should have been much more. And when she complained, Dickbreath just said, Sue me.”
“Did she?” asked Whispers.
“Never her style, apparently,” said Sally. “She wrote it off. But Clarence Bob was furious about it, still, 20 years later, and mad as hell, I suspect, that Celia wouldn’t let him go after Jono through the courts. But that pretty much finished Jono on the project with her husband, too. It was kind of winding down already, but Clarence cut ties with Jono after that. Called him “a tweed-covered sack of shit,” actually.
“Twenty years ago, and he’s still angry?” Gordie said.
“Well after Celia died, it was too late, forever, to find some other way of getting Jono to pay up, even on principle.”
“Not with money,” said Gurpreet. “But maybe … maybe, with a little pain?”
“Did Clarence admit to attacking Jono?” asked Gordie.
“No,” said Sally. “But he was just … sad about it. Guilty-like, because he’d failed to stand up for Celia, when she needed it. And even though she’d always forbidden him to do so. He felt guilty about that. He said so.”
“Maybe,” Geordie said, “he found out that revenge served cold, it still doesn’t fix the problem of missing his wife, or even the guilt of introducing her to some psychopathic shit who later stole from her.”
“Maybe, after he did all that to Dickman, he still feels guilty, only it’s worse, because he did all those things, and got no satisfaction from it, and still no relief from feeling guilty about introducing them in the first place,” Gurpreet said.
“Well maybe not, no satisfaction,” Geordie said. “But I’ll bet you both a dinner it wasn’t enough satisfaction. Cause I’m just putting myself in his shoes, and I’d say Clarence had some grounds to feel satisfied. But if it was me, I’d have wanted Jono to live longer than he did and suffer more. If it was me, that’s what I’d have wanted. And I might have held her picture up in front of his face, while I waited for him to die.”
As it turned out, when they went back to interview Clarence for some follow-up details, some additional questioning, he’d actually written it all down. What he did, when, why, how, and for whom. Chapter and verse. It was a long note, but there was nothing any earthly court could prosecute.
So, they’d closed the case, and the team went out for an Indian buffet, but Sally went home early, to help her youngest daughter with some homework.
“Anyway,” she said, “I just don’t feel right, celebrating. I know we closed the case, but I’m not satisfied. It’s the strangest feeling. It’s like nothing was actually solved. And the thing I approved of most, that was the crime we were investigating, when Dickhead finally got what was coming to him.”
So, Sally left, while Geordie and Gurpreet stayed late with a cold beer and a hot curry, discussing the larger problems of a confusing universe. And solved nothing.
[Image Credit : Photo by ÇAĞIN KARGI on Unsplash]
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