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Authors: Wayne Jones

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BOOK: The Killing Type
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Where was I? My room. These days there
is no one to threaten the controlled chaos, and I have to admit
that I have softened a little over the years anyway, in that I do
allow a mess at all, and in fact have grown used to being more
casual about such relatively unimportant things. I was a terror at
Toronto U., continually insisting that the staff lounge be
maintained at least at the barest minimal standards of order. What
teenagers they were, my former colleagues, cleaning up their room
only when the beleaguered adult finally enforced what one would
have expected to be done voluntarily. I chose various methods,
neither of which ever had an effect that lasted more than a couple
of days. I provided them with humorous distractions and incentives,
pathetic little didactic cartoons clipped from the magazines strewn
all over the place. One featured a man standing in the middle of
the square formed by four huge piles of paper. The punch lines all
escape me now, but this one was suitably witty without being so
esoteric as to defy the comprehension of some of the junior faculty
(notably that Austen specialist from Deer Lake). Something about
Babel or babble or the Bible, and then a tower of books and—well,
you get the idea.

Other times I strategically
placed index cards with quotations about order and neatness written
across the blue-lined furrows, and the keyword calligraphically,
boldly, but clearly on the red-line fence at the top. I was
teaching Swift during that time, and so most of the imprecations
were drawn from
Gulliver’s Travels
or the
Tale of a
Tub
or even from some of the more obscure
works. Several of them I wrote in boustrophedon style, and I took a
nasty delight one day in watching the department head puzzle over
the inscrutable reversals.

My least effective method,
as I desperately sank to the level of my adolescent cohorts, was to
lock the door and post a notice—using official stationery I had
filched from the supply room to which the departmental secretary
had granted me access when I interrupted her in the middle of a
phone conversation—a notice that the staff room would be closed
until everyone signed an agreement (conveniently posted right
below) to keep the lounge clean and neat. Nobody thought that was
very funny, especially after the fourth or fifth time, and I
generally returned to find both pieces of paper in shreds and
scattered in and around the garbage can (mostly
around
).

I was called to the department head’s
office after that routine started to get a little old.

“Jesus, Andrew, what are you trying to
prove?” he asked me.

“The place is a sty. I’m just trying
to encourage some basic hygiene.”

“Encourage? They’re livid now, and I’m
having a hard time mustering the energy to defend you.”

I never did it again after that, but I
don’t think it’s a coincidence that within nine months of that
final incident, I was gone from TU. That wasn’t the only problem,
but it didn’t help.

In my own room, the
continual internal debate is whether I should keep perfecting the
silos, or just get rid of a few things. Perhaps a
lot
of things, perhaps
even a silo or two. In any case, I realize with some tincture of
shame that the whole effort is for domestic control. Some drab
psychology textbook I was leafing through recently referred to the
desire for control as “stemming”—yes, that word exactly, as if any
part of the course of a ragged life could resemble the beauty of a
flower—
stemming
from the lack of control in childhood. A sister who wouldn’t
knock before entering a curious boy’s bedroom. A mother who
demonstrated no respect for my clothing suggestions. A father—well,
the less said the better. I hate to appear as the embodiment of a
psychological truism, but a fact is a fact: I crave control. At
Toronto University, even though the main impetus for my
leaving
stemmed from
the class of clowns that I found myself surrounded by, some
part of it (let’s say 10 percent for the mathematically inclined
reader) was because life was so frantic, so hectic, so
uncontrolled. I enjoyed having only the two classes (one Tuesday,
one Thursday), both finishing conveniently around lunch time, but
those were two glorious distinct points from which radiated a
blinding array of activity. Misspelled essays to correct. Exams,
tests, midterms, and other variations. Committee meetings whose
agendas indicated only an hour, but during which the chair
invariably droned on and ended up at one or other digression (“now
I’m not saying that my wife is a shoplifter!”), and at nearly two
hours there was more checking of watches than taking of notes.
Students dropping by my office at hours clearly not covered by
those posted in Times New Roman 16-point on my door. Evaluations,
promotions, letters of reference solicited by this incompetent
Nabokovian or that specialist in a 17th-century poet whom I frankly
had never heard of.

I shiver even recounting the
selected details. My leaving the university was not quite a boon to
my life or to my career, but it was not without several advantages
which I cherished even as I struggled with righteous anger,
rejection, fear. I felt relieved of a burden of unpredictable
demands on my time, people assailing me from all directions, always
asking me for something. Granted, it was my job to be there for
them, but I spent many hours holed up in my ratty little office
between assaults, fantasizing about some fresh-faced student
stopping me in the middle of an explication of
Rasselas
and saying, “And what is it
that I can do for
you
, Professor?”

But,
my room
! ... The important practical
fact, all aesthetic concerns aside, is that no matter what the
state of it, how it looks, I am able to find anything within
seconds. Tenants of sparer apartments and owners of well-appointed
beige mansions can generally not make such a claim. I am not
professionally trained in psychology—though I do consider myself a
lifelong student of human behaviour and interaction—but I have
wondered about the psychological trait which manifests itself in
this particular domestic habit, that is, to put it a little
crudely, what this “says about me.” I ascribe it to a latent desire
for order, for control as I’ve said, but in the context of an
acceptance of the fact that the overall environment is unordered
and uncontrollable. For the same reason I prefer public gardens and
parks over the static and angular organization of squares and
gridded streets. I do want the trees and the grounds to grow with a
certain degree of wantonness, but not to be allowed to overtake the
scene so much that a sense of order is lost.

Quade, this murder victim,
was evidently a loner in the city. The police have identified no
family members at all, not just in Knosting but anywhere in the
vicinity, and not even any friends have stepped forward to express
grief or provide information. The rumours and half-truths as
reported in the various media are contradictory: on television he
is a mentally ill eccentric with a small fortune in the bank, on
the radio he lives in squalour and earns a subsistence income by
collecting bottles on recycling nights in various neighbourhoods,
and in the beloved
Gazette
he has never worked, has no home, and is “a
complete mystery to the authorities.” I myself have not been able
to glean much more than these, or to confirm one or the other, and
the greyness and undependability of the supposed facts confirm the
necessity of my research project and make me even more determined
than I have been to find out—as grand as this might sound—the
truth.

 

I set out the next morning
on the first foray of my investigation, like a little boy with a
butterfly net. I have absolutely no idea what I am doing, what to
look for, how to proceed, what I might do if I found anything
relevant. At the intersection where the murder took place, I stand
and try to compose myself: there is something about the scene which
makes me wholly uncomfortable. I hear drumming in my head,
A man was killed here
,
like a piped-in mantra. I try to picture the whole sordid messy
business, one human doing away with another, and my lack of success
with that particular subtraction reminds me of my poorly developed
math skills. Turning slightly, I stare up the street to where the
body ended up, and that journey is even more of a strain on my poor
head. I have a flash of negativity, a sudden lack of
self-confidence that I will never be able to make it through this
damn thing if I can’t force myself to stare hard at a few
facts.

A car horn goes off, though I am not
sure if it is directed at me. Perhaps in my reverie I was tending
to wander into the street and rechristen it with another death. I
sit on a bench and feel better almost immediately as I am provided
with a solidity that I couldn’t seem to achieve on my own wobbly
legs. My confidence, volatile ever since my youth, returns and I
take out a notebook and begin writing a few things down. No system,
none of the careful composition that my academic writings used to
require: just rough notes as they come to me. I fill a few pages
which in the end don’t seem to amount to anything substantive, but
I am happy to have broken through the block.

I try to piece together the logistics,
how a body could be killed, dragged, and mutilated, and my first
conclusion is that it didn’t quite happen the way it seems. Those
rough notes offer up only “possible self-mutilation” and “dragged
by someone else,” both of which on reflection suggest logistics
even more unbelievable than the obvious. With only the slightest
turn of my body I can see the exact spot where the actual murder
took place (the police were very forthcoming to the reporters).
Something is shiny there and I immediately get up from what has
been a comfortable perch and walk over. I bend down and extract
from a slight indentation in the pavement a small triangle of
metal, not more than a couple of millimetres on each side. It
glints like a forbidden jewel when I place it on the tip of my
right index finger. I squeeze my thumb on top of it to keep it
safely in place as I return to the bench.

On closer examination I can see that
one of the sides is slightly longer and more ragged than the other
two. I twirl it between my fingers, accidentally drop it on the
ground, retrieve and then wrap it in a tissue before putting the
whole thing carefully into my trouser pocket. I take my booty back
to my apartment and I am panting as I fumble with the key and then
spend almost a full minute trying to get it into the lock. I take
the tissue out of my pocket, confirm that I haven’t lost the
triangle, and then set it delicately down on my kitchen table.
First I have to verify what I think I have half-remembered from one
of the newspaper reports in the last couple of days. I consult my
clipping file (immaculately organized) and read through until I
discover: “Police confirmed that they recovered a knife at the
scene of the crime, but with its tip missing.” I file the clipping
back in its trove and return to the table.

I shudder a bit now as I open up the
tissue to expose this shard of metal which less than a week ago was
used to mutilate a body. Revulsion strikes me first and I shake the
tip from my hand like it is one of those spiders that I have been
telling the landlady about to no avail. Fascination follows and I
gingerly retrieve it from under the table and hold it in the palm
of my hand. It has done a rough business and has wound up in my
possession through an obvious police oversight, but I do feel that
it deserves the kind of reverence due to all artifacts.

I sit down again and puzzle over how
this tip might have gotten broken off. The possibilities remind me
of my relative forensic ignorance (must remedy that with some
intensive research at the library), as I am not even sure whether
it is possible, say, to break off the tip of a knife on the bone of
a human body. Is the sternum hard enough to do that? The only other
possibility seems to be that perhaps in the thrashing the killer
inadvertently dragged the knife point along the pavement and broke
the tip off that way. I make a mental note—no, determined to be a
better investigator, I actually write it down: “check pavement at
crime scene for knife scrape.”

It does occur to me that I have
evidence here and that the civic-minded thing to do would be to
contact the police and give it up. Perhaps, civic-mindedness aside,
that is also a legal requirement. I consider for a moment doing
this, mostly because I don’t want to end up in prison nor to
attract any attention that would steal my research and writing
time. My other reasoning, admittedly specious on the surface, is
that a piece of so-called evidence such as this will do nothing to
move forward the search for the killer or help in his prosecution
when he is eventually caught. The police already have the knife:
what use is the tip?

I pack up my treasure and put it in
the eyeglass case that I keep in the sock drawer of my dresser. I
have odd feelings that I can’t quite identify or put a name
to.

 

Chapter 3

 

W is for Winton, as Ms Grafton might
put it if she ever gets that far in the alphabet and starts
substituting proper names for the generic crime-related words she
has favoured up till now.

BOOK: The Killing Type
11.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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