The Best American Noir of the Century

I was with him, there in that landscape within his mind, as he ran and ran and dodged and dodged. Until they caught him in Decatur, seven miles from the body of Gunilla Ascher. But they had him, and they had positive identification, from the dumpster in Huntsville; and all the rest of it was circumstantial, gussied up by bedridden, recovering Charlie Whilborg and the staff in Ally’s office. It looked good on paper—so good that Ally had brought him down on twenty-nine-cum-fifty-six counts of murder in the vilest extreme.

But it was all bullshit.

The killer was still out there.

Henry Lake Spanning, who looked like a nice, decent guy, was exactly that. A nice, decent, goodhearted, but most of all innocent guy.

You could fool juries and polygraphs and judges and social workers and psychiatrists and your mommy and your daddy, but you could not fool Rudy Pairis, who travels regularly to the place of dark where you can go but not return.

They were going to burn an innocent man in three days.

I had to do something about it.

Not just for Ally, though that was reason enough; but for this man who thought he was doomed, and was frightened, but didn’t have to take no shit from a wiseguy like me.

“Mr. Spanning,” I called after him.

He didn’t stop.

“Please,” I said. He stopped shuffling, the chains making their little charm bracelet sounds, but he didn’t turn around.

“I believe Ally is right, sir,” I said. “I believe they caught the wrong man; and I believe all the time you’ve served is wrong; and I believe you ought not die.”

Then he turned slowly, and stared at me with the look of a dog that has been taunted with a bone. His voice was barely a whisper. “And why is that, Mr. Pairis? Why is it that you believe me when nobody else but Ally and my attorney believed me?”

I didn’t say what I was thinking. What I was thinking was that I’d been in there, and I knew he was innocent. And more than that, I knew that he truly loved my pal Allison Roche.

And there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for Ally.

So what I said was: “I know you’re innocent, because I know who’s guilty.”

His lips parted. It wasn’t one of those big moves where someone’s mouth flops open in astonishment; it was just a parting of the lips. But he was startled; I knew that as I knew the poor sonofabitch had suffered too long already.

He came shuffling back to me, and sat down.

“Don’t make fun, Mr. Pairis. Please. I’m what you said, I’m scared. I don’t want to die, and I surely don’t want to die with the world thinking I did those…those things.”

“Makin’ no fun, captain. I know who ought to burn for all those murders. Not six states, but eleven. Not fifty-six dead, but an even seventy. Three of them little girls in a day nursery, and the woman watching them, too.”

He stared at me. There was horror on his face. I know that look real good. I’ve seen it at least seventy times.

“I know you’re innocent, cap’n because I’m the man they want. I’m the guy who put your ass in here.”

In a moment of human weakness. I saw it all. What I had packed off to live in that place of dark where you can go but not return. The wall-safe in my drawing-room. The four-foot-thick walled crypt encased in concrete and sunk a mile deep into solid granite. The vault whose composite laminate walls of judiciously sloped extremely thick blends of steel and plastic, the equivalent of six hundred to seven hundred mm of homogenous depth protection approached the maximum toughness and hardness of crystaliron, that iron grown with perfect crystal structure and carefully controlled quantities of impurities that in a modern combat tank can shrug off a hollow charge warhead like a spaniel shaking himself dry. The Chinese puzzle box. The hidden chamber. The labyrinth. The maze of the mind where I’d sent all seventy to die, over and over and over, so I wouldn’t hear their screams, or see the ropes of bloody tendon, or stare into the pulped sockets where their pleading eyes had been.

When I had walked into that prison, I’d been buttoned up totally. I was safe and secure, I knew nothing, remembered nothing, suspected nothing.

But when I walked into Henry Lake Spanning’s landscape, and I could not lie to myself that he was the one, I felt the earth crack. I felt the tremors and the upheavals, and the fissures started at my feet and ran to the horizon; and the lava boiled up and began to flow. And the steel walls melted, and the concrete turned to dust, and the barriers dissolved; and I looked at the face of the monster.

No wonder I had such nausea when Ally had told me about this or that slaughter ostensibly perpetrated by Henry Lake Spanning, the man she was prosecuting on twenty-nine counts of murders I had committed. No wonder I could picture all the details when she would talk to me about the barest description of the murder site. No wonder I fought so hard against coming to Holman.

In there, in his mind, his landscape open to me, I saw the love he had for Allison Roche, for my pal and buddy with whom I had once, just once…