Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 53, No. 12, December 2008

Comes Around by Chris Rogers

He had the face of a murderer. Nothing else could account for my instant certainty, and I was dead certain. Jake McGrew had killed a fellow being in cold blood.

After twenty years on the job — eight with Homicide before I took retirement — I can get the scent of trouble up my nose like a bloodhound. Finding out who McGrew had killed shouldn’t be impossible. I took it as my personal challenge.

He comes around on our poker nights, supposedly doing a story called “Games People Play.” Claims he’s an essayist, whatever that means, and we let him watch. Came around last night, drew up a chair right beside me, watching how I played my hand.

Around our table, I can sum up each player in a word. Ed Colliard — he’s a joker. Can’t go five minutes without cracking a line. Guess every table has one. Betty Grable — yeah, that’s her real name, and yeah, we don’t mind that she’s female — Betty’s a thinker. Doesn’t talk much, but ask her a question about anything, doesn’t matter — railroads, baked hams, French poodles — she can tell you more than you want to know and pose philosophical suppositions that will numb your mind.

Then there’s Boots Reyes. He’s young, loudmouthed, foulmouthed, smart-mouthed — in a word, callow. That boy has lots to learn. Kevin Locke, he’s reverent. I don’t mean he’s a man of the cloth, although it wouldn’t surprise me to learn he’d been a preacher sometime in his past. What I mean is Kevin has an “oh, wow” attitude about life. He can be awestruck by a blade of Johnson grass.

And now there’s Jake McGrew, killer.

“Boots!” Ed interrupted the kid, who was rambling on and on about a new video game, “would you deal sometime this century? I swear, boy, you could talk your head off and never miss it.”

Boots dealt the cards. “I’m not taking your crap tonight, Ed. So leave off, already.” He cursed a blue streak under his breath.

“How long have you guys been playing poker together?” McGrew asked, smiling as he looked around the table at all of us.

Nobody jumped in to answer him. Finally, Kevin spoke up.

“I had to think a minute there, and now I’m wondering if it can be right. Has it really been nine years, Bradshaw?”

That’s me, by the way, Ford Bradshaw.

“Going on ten,” I said, “for you, me, and Ed.”

“Yeahhhh.” Kevin nodded. “You were still on the force, I had my vet practice, Ed owned the supermarket on Tenth Street—”

“I still own the store,” Ed said. “I just have a menagerie now.”

“Menagerie?” McGrew asked. Only a newcomer would ask.

“General manager, produce manager, meat manager — menagerie.”

Like I said, Ed can’t let a straight line just lie there. McGrew laughed politely. Most people do until they’ve been around Ed for a while. I’d give McGrew an hour.

“So you three are all retired,” he said, taking a small stack of note cards and a pen from his shirt pocket. He scribbled a few words on the top card and slipped it back into his shirt. “What about you, Boots?”

“Do I look like I’m retired?”

“I mean, how long have you been playing with the group?”

“A couple months is all. Somebody moved out of state—”

“Paulie Cade,” Betty said. “Moved to Florida, just as four out of every five retirees do who move out of state when they quit working. What draws them, I wonder? The hurricanes? The drugs? Swamps and alligators? The Disney World tourists? Why not retire to Georgia or Mississippi, where the living is easy?”

She dropped two cards face down on the table and wiggled a finger for Boots to give her two more.

“When did you join the group, Ms. Grable?”

“Just Betty.” Picking up her soda glass, she raised it toward McGrew. “I’m celebrating my paper anniversary with our poker club this very night.”

Maybe McGrew knew what “paper anniversary” meant. I didn’t, and nobody asked.

I drew three cards to a pair of sevens — no help — as I watched McGrew’s hands. How a person uses his hands can reveal plenty, if you think about it. Look at a diagram of the brain sometime, one that shows the parts of the body each area controls. You’ll see about the same amount of brain matter allotted for hand movement as for vocalization. In other words, your hands can say as much as your mouth. The first thing I noticed about McGrew, he’s left handed. Sinister, to use the old terminology. The Boston Strangler was a lefty. So was Jack the Ripper. The American Zuni Indians consider the left hand the hand of judgment.

Ed slid a five-dollar chip into the pot, raising it. Boots and Kevin folded.

“Most people these days who retire before they turn sixty,” McGrew said, “keep busy through consulting or ownership, like Mr. Collins, or go into another line of work.”

Kevin’s eyes grew round like Orphan Annie’s in the comic strip.

“Hey, that’s right! All three of us. I sold the practice, but the young fellow pays me a consulting fee just to keep my name on the door and drop by once a week. And Bradshaw, you’re still a cop, right? Just not on the force.”

McGrew looked at me. “Security guard? Private detective?”

“I find skips and runaways.” My hands remained still as I said it. Most liars, their hands give it away. Like Henry Kissinger, tapping his nose, thumbing his chin. Anybody could see he was pushing the truth around the way his hands were pushing at his face.

“Is that profitable?” McGrew scribbled on another card and slid it into his pocket.

“It’s satisfying.” This time the truth came easy. On the job, the satisfaction of jailing a perpetrator ended when I saw them right back on the street, thanks to an overburdened legal system. Privately, I don’t have to involve jails, lawyers, or judges.

I looked at McGrew’s hands and wondered what weapon he used. He raised his pen and pointed it at Ed the way some men would point a knife for an upward thrust, all four fingers wrapped around the shaft, thumb on top for leverage.

A jolt of excitement whipped through me like an electrical shock. It’s always like that when I close in on a case, but with McGrew I had only a hunch.

“You must know one another pretty well after ten years,” he said.

Ed shrugged. “I know Kevin can’t resist drawing to an inside straight and Bradshaw will bluff with a pair of deuces.” He laid down three sixes and raked in the chips. “That doesn’t tell me if they sleep with their socks on or what they do alone in the shower.”

McGrew smiled. He had a hustler’s smile, the kind of smile that convinces an old woman to part with her life’s savings, or a young one her virginity. Ted Bundy had a smile like that. So did Tom Parker, before I shot him through the right eye.

Parker, from a family with both money and power, had started his life of crime with several occasions of date rape and never served a day in jail. That gave him the brass to push the envelope. He kidnapped a young woman, kept her three days for fun and games, then dumped her in the Gulf of Mexico, which wiped away all evidence. The cops knew, the court knew, I knew, and only one of us had the mettle to give Parker what he deserved.

After the game tonight I drove home thinking about McGrew. He looked familiar. Could mean he already had a sheet. But he didn’t strike me as street tough, and judging by his speech, he’d spent at least a couple years in college. Maybe the Feds had tagged him. Before morning I intended to know everything about McGrew down to the color of his underwear, and somewhere along the way I’d figure out who he’d killed.

The same year I retired from the job my wife Connie died on a dark highway, in a sudden thunderstorm. Wind had knocked a dead tree across the road. Connie must’ve spotted the tree in her headlights about the same time she saw an eighteen-wheeler coming the other way. Nothing makes a cop feel more helpless than acts of God.

It had been Connie’s idea to move out to the country, me grumbling all the way, but now I’m glad for it. Cuts down on visitors, and I like the privacy of having my nearest neighbors a mile away, where they never complain, no matter how loud I play old-time rock and roll. I have the original vinyl, but I’ve also converted them all to CDs. The country has its drawbacks, though, like frequent power outages and deer and rabbits ravaging the yard. Until last year I had to use a dial-up modem. Now I can get files faster at my home office than if I were still on the job. Can’t say it’s all strictly legal, but that’s another advantage of being private.

At home, I sat in the semidarkness, a single lamp shining in the corner, and watched my computer sort through information while my mind did its own sorting. Since Connie’s death I’d burned more garbage than in my entire career as a police officer, and the faces filed through my brain like a slide show. Murderers mostly, but also child molesters, rapists, and stupid, unintentional killers, who were sometimes the worst of the bunch. “Oh, Judge, I never meant to drink a fifth of Johnnie Walker and drive through that school zone.” This disposal work is another reason for keeping a low profile. I can just imagine Kevin’s gee-wow-gosh surprise if he found out what I do on the side.

It’s interesting how the public tends to demonize, or at best ignore, the people who do their dirty work. When hanging a killer was a noontime town event, with sodas and confections sold among a titillated audience, the hangman often wore a black hood to protect his identity. Now our executions are conducted at midnight behind layers of prosecutorial protection, the condemned gently put to death while already anesthetized by drugs. As always, the warden gives the nod, a doctor stands by to pronounce the death, but it’s a nonentity who actually releases potassium chloride into the condemned’s vein. Think about it — executioners, undertakers, garbage collectors — we need them but we don’t want to know them.

I once burned a piece of garbage who was barely fifteen years old, and I’ll admit it took every ounce of intestinal fortitude I could summon to pull that trigger. This boy, Mason, liked to beat things to a bloody pulp with his baseball bat. First, it was birds and rodents, then the neighbors’ pets. He’d bash them until there was nothing identifiable left and bury them in a field behind his parents’ garage. When a child in the neighborhood went missing, homicide eventually found Mason’s animal burial ground and evidence of the child having been there. Officers on the job believed that Mason’s parents had discovered the body and dumped it elsewhere, but nothing was ever proved. The bat was never found, either, which meant Mason wasn’t even slated for juvie lockup. So I staked him out. For three months I lurked around the neighborhood, and finally I caught him at his new killing ground, behind a clump of yaupon bushes, cat in one hand and his new method of torture in the other, a flathead screwdriver. A quick bullet to the back of Mason’s head made certain he wouldn’t hurt another child, but I didn’t arrive in time to save the cat.

Despite high-speed access, my research on Jake McGrew turned up squat. Lots of hits on the name, including some recent articles written by the “essayist” who came around to our poker games. Otherwise, nothing. No birth certificate, social, or driver’s license that fit. Before six months ago—

“I don’t exist.”

The voice behind me froze my hand on the mouse and my thoughts on the holstered.9 mm hanging on the back of my chair.

Then he moved and I caught his reflection in the window clear enough to see the revolver pointed at my head.

“Fancy yourself some kind of equalizer, is that it, Bradshaw? Making up for the inadequacies of the failing justice system?”

“I knew you were wrong, McGrew. You reek of it.”

“Uh-huh. Only I think it’s your own life you’re smelling. Stand up.”

As close as he was, even a lame shooter could spatter my brains all over my laptop. I stood up slowly.

“Step away from your chair.”

I did, and two seconds later he had my nine in his other hand.

“You must be hiding something pretty big,” I said, “to be worried about having me on your back.”

Flashing that same cheesy smile I’d seen at the poker game, he said, “I’m not the one with reason to be worried here.” He dropped the nine into his pocket. “Have you figured it out yet? Who I am?”

I didn’t answer, but the question had been eating at me the whole time he was talking, and I knew it showed in the curl of my hands.

“Face down on the floor.”

By his tone, he might have been telling me to have a nice day. The Taurus.44 mag put an uglier spin on it. Still, I hesitated.

“You’re going to die tonight, Bradshaw. The only choice you have is whether we start at your ankles and work our way up or make it an easy headshot.”

I got down, first on my knees then to the floor, but I wanted to distract him from my left hand — my dominant hand, fortunately — and the floor lamp just beyond it.

“So who did you kill, sport?” I said, aiming my right index finger and cocking it like a pistol. “A girlfriend? A partner? Another essayist?”

“Sandra Louise Westin.”

When his heel came down on my fingers, I knew he’d noticed the lamp, but the name threw me. Sandra Westin? The pieces didn’t fit.

“Westin was a hit-and-run,” I said, clenching my teeth against the pain. Then it clicked. “He was your father.”

“Yes, he was.” McGrew leaned his full weight into the shoe that was crushing my hand. I grunted and blinked sweat out of my eyes.

Sandra Westin had been killed by a fifty-two-year-old department store manager, Harold Belk, divorced twelve years. His son went to school at Texas A&M. Sandra Westin’s Toyota sedan had been hit at a high-speed intersection. Afterward, it spun off the road and into a concrete post. A witness who missed seeing the actual impact but saw a car leaving the scene provided a description of the vehicle as well as four digits of the six-digit license number. Belk was picked up an hour later at a company Christmas party. He claimed he’d been at the party all evening, that someone must have hiked his car from the parking garage. But several people said he’d left the party for a while right after dinner. Although the officers working the case knew Belk was lying, Belk’s lawyer made a convincing plea and the jury acquitted.

“It was an accident,” McGrew said.

Or rather, Jake Belk said.

The reason I hadn’t placed his face before was because I’d never seen Harold’s kid. He had his father’s eyes, mouth, and chin, but Harold Belk was dead. Another piece of garbage disposed of.

“Your father lied. He went back to the party to establish an alibi—”

“He lied to protect me. I dropped him at his party that night and used the car to go to my own party. It was raining. This Toyota pushed through a red light and I couldn’t stop in time. When I checked and saw she was dead, I panicked. I drove straight back to the parking garage and called my dad. He came out and I told him everything. He made me take a bus back to school, and even after his arrest, Dad wouldn’t let me come forward. Said my age was against me, plus the fact that I’d left the scene. Said no one could prove he was driving the car, because he hadn’t been, and anyway, it was an accident and ruining my whole life wouldn’t bring Sandra Westin back.

“Dad was certain a jury would find him not guilty. And he was right. But then you come around. You convicted, sentenced, and executed a man who never hurt anyone in his life.”

Belk was squatting beside me now, down on one knee. The mag, steady in his hand, its muzzle at my right temple, would leave nothing but a bloody stump above my neck.

“Maybe you were a good cop once. Maybe you even eliminated a few monsters from the world when you first started playing Divine Reaper.” He bumped the cold muzzle against my skin. “Look at me.”

I looked up into the face of a murderer and knew that I was his first kill.

“What goes around...” he said, and pulled the trigger.

Copyright ©2008 Chris Rogers