Peaceable Kingdom by Jack Ketchum
“Yes.”
The toady in Dugas could easily have said, yes and you’ve brought them ’round to that. Career-wise it was the intelligent thing to do. It would even have been true. But shop-talk with this old magistrate was boring him. His career was fine as it stood. He wasn’t even sure he cared about a career anymore. He had other interests. He said nothing.
Insolent or not, at least Woolbourne was efficient. He brought their drinks. Sherry for Morgan, another single-malt for Dugas.
Morgan raised his glass.
“To the law,” he said smiling.
“To the law.”
They touched glasses. Then the old bird was off again.
“I’ve had a case culminate just recently,” he said. “An interesting one, actually. An excellent problem in . . . appropriateness. The accused was a young adoptive mother who had murdered her three-and-a-half-year-old son, whom she had adopted when he was only one year old. Somehow her systematic abuse of the child had gotten by the welfare people for over two years.”
“It happens.”
“Yes, unfortunately it does. Her explanation was that the child had fallen down a flight of stairs. Said he was generally a clumsy child. But that was patently false. For one thing, the bruises, some of them, were months old. For another, there were burn marks all over him.”
He held up a cigarette.
“These, no doubt. There was evidence of severe malnutrition. Neighbors reported that she had, on at least one occasion, fed the child his own feces. Finally, the rectal passage was severely scarred and lacerated and abnormally distended.
“As usual, we accepted her explanation and then investigated, charged her and convicted her of murder. Her husband, by the way, was also charged and convicted—of negligent homicide. We had no evidence he’d ever touched the boy. And probably he hadn’t. But he’d watched.
“For two years the wife was burned, beaten, neglected, starved, and upon occasion, fed her own bodily wastes, and abused with the broomstick from her own home—I believe they found it in the basement—while the husband, of course, was forced to watch. I’m told he’s quite insane now, by the way.
“Then only last week she was pushed down the stairs. She died, as did the child, of a broken neck. We were really quite pleased with it. Rarely, in my experience, has a punishment so closely fit the crime. Nearly a duplication of it.”
Dugas smiled. “Ah,” he said. “But the boy was just a child. An innocent, so to speak. What about that?”
Morgan shrugged. “After a few months or so of deprivation and abuse, so was the woman. For all practical purposes.”
Dugas thought about it, then nodded.
“Elegant,” he said. “Quite elegant.”
“We thought so,” said Morgan. “The only thing missing,” he added, “was possibly some of the element of surprise.”
“Surprise?”
The workmen by the window had unfolded their plastic tarp and were taking a break, standing there smoking, occasionally glancing in their direction. Dugas thought it typical of the lower classes these days. From secretaries to waiters to craftsmen.
“Of course,” said Morgan. “Go back to our boy on the bike, run down by a drunken driver. Well, he’s surprised, isn’t he? Shocked! One moment he’s fine, riding along, and the very next moment is filed with some sudden blinding agony. Or the two young girls I mentioned, sitting in their dormitory, chatting over boyfriends or schoolmates or family or whatnot, when, suddenly, life becomes an utter horror, a nightmare, all pain and death and helplessness. Unthinkable. Unimaginable. And quite surprising.”
Morgan saw he had Dugas’ full attention now. Better late than never.
He sipped his sherry.
“The element of surprise. It’s the entire reason we investigate, try, and sentence completely out of the public eye these days. Why those early experiments in televised and print-medium reporting, and even with juries and open courtrooms, are over. Because most, if not all, violent crimes definitely include that element. The sudden shock. So, to be fair to the victim, to come as closely as possible to the experience of the victim, any punishment which hopes to suit the nature of the crime must come as a shock to its perpetrator, as it did to his or her victim at the time.
“And here this last case, on the surface, falls slightly short of our ideal. Since her punishment lasted over such an extended time—two years—one must assume that this woman realized, at some point, how it all would end. But look deeper and it’s really not so far off the mark. Her initial arrest surprises her. The nature of the punishment—so closely mirroring her adopted son’s—that must have surprised her, and on an absolutely fundamental level. That it can hurt, for instance, to be forced to eat your own shit.”
Morgan’s use of the word “shit” was enough surprise for Dugas so that he choked on his single-malt whiskey.
“Sorry,” Morgan said. And then went on.
“Then look at the end. Isn’t death always something of a surprise? Doesn’t it always come as something of a shock? Maybe not the how—but certainly the when? Heart patients, cancer patients, even patients in daily, agonizing pain who pray for death, must finally be somewhat surprised when it actually comes. Even if it comes . . . as relief.
“And who is to say that even a three-and-a-half-year-old cannot realize his own mortality, his growing frailty, his own approaching death?”
He settled back slowly and finished his wine.
“Your mirror may have been a very good one, then,” said Dugas.
“Yes,” said Morgan, smiling. “I think we’ve all been doing our jobs quite adequately. Even on that one.”
My God. You are a smug sonovabitch, thought Dugas.
“Even on you,” said Morgan. He stood up, straightening his dinner jacket.
Dugas saw that it was a signal. The two burly workmen approached from the corner of the room and stood close by. Woolbourne appeared in the mahogany paneled doorway, blocking his exit.
“Emil Dugas,” said Morgan. “You stand accused, tried, and convicted by this Court of the murder of Lynette Janice Hoffman, aged 23 years old, your one-time lover and onetime secretary, on January 23rd of the year 2021, one year, one month and three days previous. Your sentence to be carried out immediately, and your punishment to suit the crime.”
Dugas’ brain reeled. It was impossible. Literally impossible. All this talk. All this hypocrisy. All this crap about punishment to “suit the crime,” this tedious prefatory lecture, when in fact they were going to kill him in some fucking phony novel way and that was all they could possibly do. Because the rest was impossible.
He almost laughed. Instead he exploded.
“You’re a fool, Morgan! A buffoon! Or a goddamn lying hypocrite. Or all three. How are you going to make this punishment ‘suit the crime?’ You know damn well you can’t begin to. If you know what I did to that girl, then you must know how I did it. It is not something you can mirror. So what am I going to get here? Some approximation?”
He spat the word out in disgust.
Morgan smiled. Dugas still didn’t understand. Well, he expected that he wouldn’t.
He nodded to the workmen. They took Dugas’ arms and led him to the plastic dropcloth. Dugas struggled, but it was like struggling with someone three times as strong as he was and three times his size. Which, he guessed, these two were. Exactly as he’d been three times as strong and nearly three times as heavy as Lynette when he’d. . . .
And now he was laughing, hysterically, as they stripped off his clothes. Laughter mixed with fury.
“You can’t do it!” he screamed. “You can’t fucking do it because I’ve got no hole there! You see? No fucking orifice you dumb goddamn asshole! She saw me when I did it to her, do you understand that? You know what that means? You see the goddamn difference? To see the face of your murderer? To see his pleasure? What are you going to do, stick it up my ass, you goddamn hypocrite? You fucking loser! You can’t even begin to know what I made that litt
“We understand that,” said Morgan. “Perfectly.”
He nodded again and one of the workmen dew an object out of his clean white overalls. To Dugas it looked like a combination garden trowel and apple-corer. Made of surgical steel. With a two-inch diameter. And a sharp serrated edge.
When the man applied it to his groin, sunk it deep and twisted, and then withdrew, Dugas screamed and screamed.
“Will my face do?” Woolbourne asked politely.
Through blinding pain, Dugas watched the waiter’s trousers fall down around his ankles.
Almost as Dugas’ own had been, Woolbourne’s was quite an erection.
Lines: or Like Franco, Elvis Is Still Dead
It was the greatest opening line I’d heard in years. I was on my way back from the juke and the first song I’d played, “Suspicious Minds,” was already on when I passed her at the bar. Elvis singing and this good-looking woman sitting all alone.
She turned and gave me a glance and said, “so, seen him lately?”
I laughed and walked on past her to where my scotch was and got it and then came back to her and said, “I think I saw him on the beach today. It could have been a whale though. Hard to say.”
Not nearly as good as hers but enough to get us talking. She had a low husky voice which I always like in a woman and big brown eyes and long curly hair. She was slim and pretty. Wore jeans and workshirt. Nothing fancy.
I found out right away she was not all that crazy about Cape May. Personally I thought it was a welcome change from New York. But she was a local while I was only in for the weekend. What did I know. It was possible to see where after a while maybe the quiet would get to you. Where all the painted gabled corniced bay windowed turn-of-the-century Victoriana might get to you. Where you could get pretty tired of the tourists and their beach-gear and the quaint little shops.
I could see my friends Liam and Kate were amused with me down at the other end of the bar. Liam and Kate were married and always seemed to be amused when I picked up a woman. Or, as in this case, when a woman picked up me. I think they thought I got a whole lot more action than I did and they liked the notion of having this lounge lizard as a drinking buddy. Plus it was Sunday, the last night of my stay here with them and they knew that Tess—that was her name—had the potential to make my weekend.
Which in a weird way, she did.
The talk was nothing unusual. She seemed to like the fact that I was a writer who had once actually spoken on the phone to Stephen King and that Liam was a painter and cover artist and that Kate was a teacher at the Professional Children’s School back in New York. I avoided talking about my ex-wife and the two kids. It wasn’t hard. It was clear to me that she was a little bored with herself, with her own life here, and it was easy to sympathize. Here she was, thirty—she looked a lot younger, mid-twenties I thought—back home living with her parents and helping to manage their Bed-and-Breakfast and that was about it.
“A glorified maid,” she said. “Sometimes not even a fucking glorified maid.”
She was kind of vague about how it got that way. She said she’d been living in Boston for a while. Going for a Masters in business at B.U. and waitressing to make ends meet. It was obvious she’d much rather still be doing that. What wasn’t obvious was why she quit. She volunteered the fact that there was a guy in the picture. Somebody she was no longer with but who was somehow involved in the retreat back home to Cape May.
What she didn’t say was who or how or why.
I figured she’d give it up when she wanted to. I wasn’t going to pry.
Meanwhile I liked the scent of her. I liked the crinkle around the soft brown eyes when she smiled. I liked the boyish body and the long tangle of hair.
I wanted to get her out of there.
It was late. The bar was going to close soon anyway. People had begun to drift away. I could see Liam and Kate showing signs of wear.
“Let’s take the drinks outside,” I said. “I’d like to get some air. That okay?”
“Okay.”
We were barely out the door when the bartender, name of Phil, appeared in the doorway.
“Can’t do that,” he said. “The drinks. It’s against New Jersey law.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.” It was just as against the law in New York City but I suppose I figured this being a vacation town they might be looser here. I wondered why Tess hadn’t stopped me. She was local. I guessed she didn’t mind breaking a law or two once in a while.
Neither did I. My child-support was two months behind.
The bartender was okay about the drinks though.
“No problem,” he said, “Just give ’em here and I’ll take them back to the bar for you.”
We handed them over. My scotch and her Stoli cranberry juice. Phil went back inside.
There was nothing to do then except what I’d been wanting to do all along.
“Mind if we try something?” I said.
That was a line too. I’d used it before. But it usually worked to get this part of it out of the way one way or another.
I leaned over and kissed her.
She hesitated and then she kissed me back and then she pulled away.
“Hell. You don’t even remember my name,” she said.
“Sure I do. Tess.”
“After tonight I’ll probably never see you again.”
“I’m coming back here the end of next month, in July. Maybe for a week this time.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
It was true. Or half true. Liam and Kate and I had already talked about my returning. They were here for the entire summer and I was welcome pretty much whenever I wanted. But it depended on the work, how much time I’d have.
I kissed her again. This time she didn’t pull away.
And the kiss was just what you always want a kiss to be.
And usually isn’t.
“Let’s walk,” I said.
I slipped my arm around her waist. I didn’t know where we were exactly or where we were going. But it was hard to get lost in a town as small as Cape May. I’d find my way home or else if I was lucky Tess would find it for me.
It was well after two in the morning and the streets were quiet. Nobody walking but Tess and me. No cars at all.
We talked some more and every so often I’d turn and kiss her, hugging her tight, still walking, hardly even slowing down. I felt that intense sense of well-being that you get when the woman on your arm is the woman you want on your arm and she’s new and you’ve both had just enough to drink but not too much and you have no idea where all this is leading but so far it’s fine and dandy.
“How about the beach?” I said.
She laughed. Like I’d said something really funny.
“The beach!” she said.
I thought it was a good idea. It wasn’t too cold. In fact the night was warmer than the day had been.
Probably I was showing her what a tourist I was, I thought. To her the beach was probably a cliche.
I still liked it. I thought about lying on the sand. Nobody around but the two of us. Moon on the water. Booming surf and big sky. It was a cliche but I liked it anyway. It’s not something you get to do in Manhattan, lying on the beach and necking with a pretty woman.
I smiled. Like I was in on the joke but so what. “Why not?” I said.
She kissed me and then her voice went low again.
“Sure. Why not,” she said.
I don’t think we were there ten minutes before we heard the gunshot.
I’d thought we were alone. But then I’d been concentrating on her, on the soft warmth of her mouth on mine and the warmer breasts beneath the denim shirt and the way the nipples rose silky smooth under my fingers.
I looked up and I could see this dark heavy figure the equivalent of maybe
I expected sirens, police pulling up, people rushing out from inside the hotels across the street. But we sat there while the man ran the last few steps up the ramp off the beach onto the high concrete walkway and then started strolling down the opposite ramp toward a car parked just off the walkway—we could only see the top of the car—and then got in and drove away.