The Language of Cannibals Read online

  It had been two weeks before, one week before he was scheduled to set up shop in Cairn in order to spy on the Community of Conciliation. His superior, Edward J. Hendricks, was deliberately trying to humiliate him, he’d said, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. I’d reluctantly agreed with him on both points. He hadn’t mentioned anything about visiting an old friend, and he certainly hadn’t seemed in any mood to set aside a soul-deep aversion to water in order to go paddling in a canoe on the Hudson River.

  The RestEasy Motel was a horseshoe-shaped affair, three building units trisected by two narrow promenades lined with vending machines. Only two of the units were being used, and the area around the third unit, including its adjacent promenade, was only dimly lighted. I had a room on the second floor of the middle unit, with the entrance at the rear, off the parking lot. To get to it I cut across the lawn and headed up the second, dim promenade. With my mind thrumming along at a fairly rapid pace, distracted by the questions raised by Dan Mosely, I had virtually dismissed Gregory Trex from my mind—failing, of course, to take into account the fact that he might feel he had further business to discuss with me, and that it wouldn’t take a lot of phone calls by a genius to find out where a certain dwarf was staying.

  Trex caught me completely by surprise, stepping out behind me from the shadow within a shadow between an ice maker and a soda machine near the end of the promenade, and delivering a whack to my left arm, just above the elbow, with something that felt like an iron rod. The blow knocked me sideways, off my feet. There was an explosion of white-hot pain, and the whole arm went numb virtually before I’d hit the ground and rolled on my right side. Immediately I rolled again, this time forward, over the curb and into the parking lot. I came up in a crouch, right arm and foot forward to protect my damaged left arm, which was hanging limp at my side.

  Gregory Trex, still dressed in his tank top, camouflage fatigues, and black sneakers, stepped down off the curb, stopped about five yards away. His too-bright jade-green eyes, the polished mahogany of the rock-hard nunchaku sticks he carried, and the foot-long steel chain connecting the sticks all gleamed in the light from a floodlamp set on the balcony of the second unit, just above my head. I backed up a step, tentatively shrugged my left shoulder; welcome pain stabbed through it. I could tell the arm wasn’t broken—but the triceps had received a severe banging, and it was going to be some time before the arm would condescend to do anything for me.

  Trex’s puffy lips curled back, revealing his small, gapped teeth. He took another step forward, whirling his nunchaku sticks over his head and at his sides, apparently to demonstrate his expertise, and not incidentally to put a good scare into me.

  What I had in me was a good mad, despite the fact that I had no one but myself to blame for Trex getting the drop on me. I had a mountain of paperwork to attend to, and, thanks to Gregory Trex, it was beginning to look like I was going to have to do it holding the pencil in my mouth. I glanced up and around. While there was no one in the darkened unit to my left, there were people in my unit and the one beyond that. Trex apparently wasn’t concerned about being seen, since he didn’t believe the police would do a damn thing. It occurred to me that in some dark corridor of his decidedly primitive mind he might prefer that there be witnesses, so that word would get around town that I’d gotten my comeuppance. He might even be satisfied now and walk away if somebody else arrived on the scene; he’d already accomplished what he’d come to do. I suspected that I might be able to rouse some attention if I started shouting, but I really wasn’t interested in attention or help. I was interested in putting a good hurt on Gregory Trex, who was proving to be a real pain in the ass; he’d seriously inconvenienced me and managed to make me very angry.

  How I was going to accomplish this particular feat of laying some serious hurt on the other man wasn’t dear to me at the moment, but I was damn well determined to find a way to do it.

  “How does that feel, dwarf?” Trex said in a piping voice that sounded surprisingly high-pitched for a man of his bulk.

  “Actually, Gregory, it’s kind of hard to tell,” I replied, keeping my gaze fixed on the nunchaku sticks he held. “Right now, my arm doesn’t have much feeling in it, but I suspect it’s going to smart like hell. What kind of a chickenshit war hero are you, anyway, ambushing me from behind? Did you ever see Chuck Norris pick on someone smaller than he was?”

  His expression changed slightly, and something that actually looked like hurt passed over his thick features; I’d bruised his feelings by bringing up the subject of our disproportionate sizes. It occurred to me then that Gregory Trex, in addition to being a murderous young thug, might be more than moderately retarded.

  “You made a fool out of me,” he said in a whiny tone. “You hit me from behind, so I hit you from behind.”

  “I goosed you, Gregory, for Christ’s sake. You tried to take off my head back there, and you could’ve broken my arm here.”

  “I could have killed you,” he said in the same whiny tone. “You suckered me. I can’t let anybody get away with that.”

  I tested my left arm again, found that feeling was continuing to return. It hurt like hell, but I suspected I would at least be able to wag it in Trex’s face in a pinch. I also suspected that Gregory Trex, who hadn’t even been able to make it in the army, was totally ineffectual at virtually everything in life except beating up people, and I found I was actually beginning to feel a little sorry for the dunce standing in front of me. I overcame it.

  “Now, now, Gregory. Don’t you know that nunchaku sticks are illegal?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me, dwarf. People saw what you did to me; I got a right to pay you back. Maybe I’ll get chewed out real good, but that’s all. People will figure you got what you deserve, the same as they figure I was giving them fucking communists outside the art gallery what they deserve. Somebody’s gotta stand up for this country and show the communists we’re not all weirdos and fags.”

  “Still, Gregory, nunchaku sticks are provocative. You know what I mean? A man could get into trouble just by carrying them around.”

  “I told you, dwarf: the cops won’t do anything but chew me out.”

  “Ooh, dear boy, I think you miss my point.”

  Now it was Trex who was looking around, apparently disappointed that nobody had come around to witness my left arm dangling at my side, his handiwork. I decided that if I was going to make a move, it had better be quick, before anybody arrived on the scene and gave Trex an excuse to walk away, or before he decided it was safe to take another whack at me. So I started to run, just to see what he would do.

  Naturally he ran after me.

  I’d already seen that Trex was quick, which is not the same as fast. He was not exactly fleet of foot, and, despite the fact that I was clutching my left arm to keep it from flopping and being further aggravated, I found that I had to slow down as I approached the end of the darkened third unit so that I wouldn’t get too far ahead of him. I glanced back to make certain he wasn’t becoming discouraged in his chase, then rounded the corner and sprinted on the grass in the gloom surrounding the third unit. I ran around the front, glancing back once more to assure myself that Gregory Trex was chugging along, then rounded the third corner and headed up the promenade. I sprinted to the end before Trex could catch sight of me again, ducked into the same space between the ice maker and soda machine where Trex had waited to ambush me.

  The poor dunce never slowed as he came lumbering up the promenade. I stuck my foot out as he passed; he went flying through the air and landed flat on his face and stomach on the concrete, narrowly avoiding smashing his skull against a steel support post near the curb. His nunchaku sticks flew out of his grasp and skittered over the concrete into the parking lot, ending up next to a large green dumpster.

  With Trex dazed and virtually helpless for the moment, I had a number of options open to me. The quickest and easiest thing to do, of course, would be to kill him, but that seemed a bi
t extreme. Mulling over other measures proved to be time-consuming, and before I knew it he had managed to get up on his hands and knees. Not wanting to delay things further, I walked around to his right side and smashed my knee into his ear. Down he went again, this time with me on his back. There was no hair to grab, so I raised his head with my left hand on his forehead, planted my right hand on the back of his head, and slammed his face into the sidewalk. That worked quite nicely. He twitched a couple of times, then lay still.

  A car pulled into the parking lot of the first unit. Fearing that any sudden move would attract attention, I kept my perch on top of Gregory Trex, waited and watched as a couple and their three young children got out and walked into a room on the ground floor. Nobody glanced in my direction.

  It would have been a nice touch to drop Trex into the dumpster, but my right wrist and left arm hurt too much to even drag him over to it, much less perform the Herculean task of lifting him up over the edge. I settled for retrieving the nunchaku sticks from beside the dumpster and draping them neatly over the back of his neck. Then I took a bucket of ice from the ice maker, went up to my room on the second floor of the second unit, and made an anonymous call to the Cairn Volunteer Ambulance Service to report an unconscious man in the parking lot of the RestEasy Motel.

  I poured myself a generous drink from a bottle of Scotch I’d brought with me, then dumped the ice into the bathroom sink in order to soak my badly bruised left upper arm. The ambulance service was in the parking lot in less than four minutes. I took my drink out onto the balcony and stood back in the shadows, watching the commotion below me and to my right; attendants loaded the still-unconscious Trex into a waiting ambulance, and two police officers who’d arrived on the scene began interviewing guests who had emerged from their rooms in response to the sirens and flashing lights. It seemed no one had witnessed a dwarf perpetrator; I didn’t get any visitors. After the ambulance and police cars pulled away, I went back into my room to soak my arm some more in the ice water and then to take a hot shower. I had another drink, took two aspirin, then went to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.

  Chapter Three

  My right wrist was much better in the morning, but my left arm throbbed painfully and was stiff as a board. A hot shower helped some, but I still couldn’t lift my arm past shoulder height without pain shooting through the upper arm, shoulder, and across my back. I dressed, then checked the local phone directory and my illustrated Chamber of Commerce map of Cairn. The donated mansion housing the Community of Conciliation was about two and a half miles from the motel, on Pave Avenue, a main thoroughfare running north from the center of town. Judging from the pictures on the map, Pave Avenue was lined on both sides by very old houses and mansions; the road ended to the north in a Y, with one arm leading down to a small state park on the banks of the Hudson, and the second arm leading up to the abandoned stone quarry that had, according to a sidebar on the map, given Cairn its name.

  Thinking that a walk might be therapeutic for my arm, I again left Beloved Too in the parking lot of the RestEasy Motel and headed down into town. Mistake. I’d gone less than a half mile when I started to limp; I’d bruised my right knee banging it on Gregory Trex’s stone-hard head. I bought a container of coffee in an Irish delicatessen, of all things, then called a taxi for the relatively short ride out Pave Avenue.

  The world headquarters of the Community of Conciliation announced itself with a wooden sign bearing its name in English, Spanish, French, and German. I hobbled up the long gravel driveway past three simple wooden grave markers, which a small sign identified as the gravesites of the founders of the pacifist organization, an American and two Swedes. I climbed the steps up onto the porch of the old Colonial-style mansion, announced my presence with an anchor-shaped brass door knocker that must have weighed twenty pounds.

  Mary Tree herself answered the door. She was dressed in a paint-spattered man’s work shirt that fell to her knees, worn jeans, and sneakers. She carried a large paintbrush in her left hand, and there were spots of cream-colored paint at the end of her nose and in the center of her forehead. Her waist-length, light blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail that cascaded down her neck like a gold and gray waterfall. Her sky-colored eyes mirrored warmth and not a little bemusement as she peered down at me over the rims of her glasses, which I could now see were bifocals. She abruptly broke into a grin that revealed even, white teeth and a dimple in her chin that nicely complemented her finely sculpted features.

  “My hero,” she intoned in a sexy voice that was as dulcet clear as her singing voice.

  I grinned back, shrugged. “I really didn’t have any choice but to ride to your rescue, Miss Tree, since I knew I was eventually going to have to report the incident to my brother.”

  “‘Miss Tree’ sounds like a character in a fairy tale. My name is Mary. And what does your brother have to do with what you did for me?”

  “My brother, Garth, is the world’s most ardent Mary Tree fan, and he’s been madly in love with you for twenty years. He has all your albums and close to a half-dozen bootleg tapes of concerts that he paid a small fortune for; a framed poster of you, an advertisement for one of your concerts in the late sixties, hangs over the fireplace in his living room. If he ever found out that you were being pushed around and I hadn’t tried to stop it, he might actually do me physical harm.” I stuck out my hand. “My name is Robert Frederickson.”

  Mary Tree extended her right hand and enveloped mine in her long, powerful fingers. “Can’t I call you Mongo? I understand all your friends call you that, and I hope we’re going to be friends.”

  “I’d say we’re already friends, and famous, beautiful folksingers are allowed to call me anything they like.”

  The woman released my hand, raised her fine eyebrows slightly. “Dr. Robert Frederickson, Mongo the Magnificent—the show business name you carried when you were a headliner with the Statler Brothers Circus; Circus Hall of Fame, criminology professor, now apparently retired, private investigator extraordinaire.” She paused, then again favored me with one of her radiant smiles, at once worldly and oddly childlike. “Human being extraordinaire. Oh, I’ve heard and read about you, Mongo—and what I don’t, or didn’t, know, my brothers and sisters filled me in on. Thank you for what you did last night.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  “I’m so glad you stopped around to say hello.”

  “Mary, this isn’t exactly a social visit.”

  Her smile faded slightly, and curiosity filmed her pale blue eyes. “How can we help you, Mongo?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about a friend of mine who drowned near here after supposedly taking one of your members’ canoes out for a joyride.”

  Mary Tree’s smile faded completely, and the curiosity in her incredibly expressive eyes was replaced by sadness. “Michael was a friend of yours?”

  “A good one. We went back a lot of years. Our paths first crossed on a case I was working on.”

  “Please come in, Mongo,” she said quietly, moving aside, gently putting her right hand on my shoulder and ushering me into a marble foyer decorated with marble statues in various states of disrepair and cracked, antique paintings.

  She led me out of the foyer, down a narrow corridor, then through a large archway into a huge chamber that looked as if it had once been a ballroom. The room, which smelled of fresh paint, was bare except for a couch and three folding chairs set against one wall. The couch was covered with a plastic tarpaulin, as was the floor beneath a wall that was partially covered with cream-colored paint that matched the samples on Mary Tree’s brush and face. The entire east wall of the room consisted of a bank of windows that offered a breathtaking view over a neatly manicured lawn that sloped down to the river. She dropped her paintbrush into a coffee can filled with turpentine, then led me over to the couch. She stripped off the plastic cover and motioned for me to sit down.

  “Everyone else in the house will very much want to meet you, Mongo,�
�� she continued quietly, “but I know you want to talk first. We’ll have some privacy in here. Would you like some coffee?”

  “I’d love some, but not if it’s any trouble.”

  “It’s not any trouble, Mongo; it’s already been brewed.” She smiled again, but her smile had become wistful. “I’ll be right back.”

  She went out through the archway, and I gazed out the bank of windows. As the rising sun passed behind the luxuriant green crown of a large elm tree, I could see a floating dock at the shoreline and a small sailboat anchored about thirty yards out. There were a number of dinghies tied to the dock, and nearby was a boat rack containing two canoes and a kayak, each intricately decorated with what appeared to be American Indian symbols, each exuding the almost sensual, palpable beauty that only lovingly handcrafted objects possess. One space in the rack was empty, and I wondered if it had held the canoe Michael had supposedly been using when he drowned.

  Mary returned five minutes later with a wooden tray on which were arrayed a thermos jug, two coffee mugs, packets of sugar and a carton of Half and Half, and a plateful of bran muffins. She set the tray down on the seat of one of the folding chairs, which she placed in front of the couch. She poured me a mug of coffee, then sat down next to me on the couch. I declined milk and sugar, but did take one of the bran muffins; it was succulent, still warm from the oven.

  “Good,” I said as I finished off my muffin. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Mongo,” she replied, her tone matching her sad smile.

  “Mary, I understand Michael was living here at the time of his death.”

  “Yes,” she answered simply.

  “How long had he been living here before he died?”

  “About a week; six days, to be exact.”