One night he called me here at the motel. He sounded funny. He said he had to see me right away. So I said come on over. I thought he was drunk, but it wasn’t that—he was scared. Know why?
TC: Santa Claus had sent him a present.
JAKE: Uh-huh. But you see, he didn’t know what it was. What it meant. The coffin, and its possible connection to the rattlesnake murders, had never been made public. We were keeping that a secret. I had never mentioned the matter to Clem.
So when he arrived in this very room, and showed me a coffin that was an exact replica of the one the Robertses had received, I knew my friend was in great danger. It had been mailed to him in a box wrapped in brown paper; his name and address were printed in an anonymous style. Black ink.
TC: And was there a picture of him?
JAKE: Yes. And I’ll describe it carefully because it is very relevant to the manner of Clem’s death. Actually, I think the murderer meant it as a little joke, a sly hint as to how Clem was going to die.
In the picture, Clem is seated in a kind of jeep. An eccentric vehicle of his own invention. It had no top and it had no windshield, nothing to protect the driver at all. It was just an engine with four wheels. He said he’d never seen the picture before, and had no idea who had taken it or when.
Now I had a difficult decision. Should I confide in him, admit that the Roberts family had received a similar coffin before their deaths, and that the Baxters probably had as well? In some ways it might be better not to inform him: that way, if we kept close surveillance, he might lead us to the killer, and do it more easily by not being aware of his danger.
TC: But you decided to tell him.
JAKE: I did. Because, with this second coffin in hand, I was certain the murders were connected. And I felt that Clem must know the answer. He must.
But after I explained the significance of the coffin, he went into shock. I had to slap his face. And then he was like a child; he lay down on the bed and began to cry: “Somebody’s going to kill me. Why? Why?” I told him: “Nobody’s going to kill you. I can promise you that. But think, Clem! What do you have in common with these people who did die? There must be something.
Maybe something very trivial.” But all he could say was: “I don’t know. I don’t know.” I forced him to drink until he was drunk enough to fall asleep. He spent the night here. In the morning he was calmer. But he still could not think of anything that connected him with the crimes, see how he in any way fitted into a pattern. I told him not to discuss the coffin with anyone, not even his wife; and I told him not to worry—I was importing an extra two agents just to keep an eye on him.
TC: And how long was it before the coffin-maker kept his promise?
JAKE: Oh, I think he must have been enjoying it. He teased it along like a fisherman with a trout trapped in a bowl. The Bureau recalled the extra agents, and finally even Clem seemed to shrug it off. Six months went by. Amy called and invited me out to dinner. A warm summer night. The air was full of fireflies. Some of the children chased about catching them and putting them into jars.
As I was leaving, Clem walked me out to my car. A narrow river ran along the path where it was parked, and Clem said: “About that connection business. The other day I suddenly thought of something. The river.” I said what river; and he said that river, the one flowing past us. “It’s kind of a complicated story. And probably silly. But I’ll tell you the next time I see you.”
Of course I never saw him again. At least, not alive.
TC: It’s almost as though he must have overheard you.
JAKE: Who?
TC: Santa Claus. I mean, isn’t it curious that after all those months Clem Anderson mentions the river, and the very next day, before he can tell you why he suddenly remembered the river, the murderer kept his promise?
JAKE: How’s your stomach?
TC: Okay.
JAKE: I’ll show you some photographs. But better pour yourself a stiff one. You’ll need it.
(The pictures, three of them, were glossy black-and-whites made at night with a flash camera. The first was of Clem Anderson’s homemade jeep on a narrow ranch road, where it had overturned and was lying on its side, headlights still shining. The second photograph was of a headless torso sprawled across the same road: a headless man wearing boots and Levis and a sheepskin jacket. The last picture was of the victim’s head. It could not have been more cleanly severed by a guillotine or a master surgeon.
It lay alone among some leaves, as though a prankster had tossed it there. Clem Anderson’s eyes were open, but they did not look dead, merely serene, and except for a jagged gash along the forehead, his face seemed as calm, as unmarked by violence as his innocent, pale Norwegian eyes. As I examined the photographs, Jake leaned over my shoulder, looking at them with me.)
JAKE: It was around dusk. Amy was expecting Clem home for supper. She sent one of their boys down to the main road to meet him. It was the boy who found him.
First he saw the overturned car. Then, a hundred yards farther on, he found the body. He ran back home, and his mother called me. I cursed myself up one row and down the other. But when we drove out there, it was one of my agents who discovered the head. It was quite a distance from the body. In fact, it was still lying where the wire had hit him.
TC: The wire, yes. I never have understood about the wire. It’s so—
JAKE: Clever?
TC: More than clever. Preposterous.
JAKE: Nothing preposterous about it. Our friend had simply figured out a nice neat way to decapitate Clem Anderson. Kill him without any possibility of witnesses.
TC: I suppose it’s the mathematical element. I’m always bewildered by anything involving mathematics.
JAKE: Well, the gentleman responsible for this certainly has a mathematical mind. At least he had a lot of very accurate measuring to do.
TC: He strung a wire between two trees?
JAKE: A tree and a telephone pole. A strong steel wire sharpened thin as a razor. Virtually invisible, even in broad daylight. But at dusk, when Clem turned off the highway and was driving in that crazy little wagon along that narrow road, he couldn’t possibly have glimpsed it. It caught him exactly where it was supposed to: just under the chin. And, as you can see, sliced off his head as easily as a girl picking petals off a daisy.
TC: So many things could have gone wrong.
JAKE: What if they had? What’s one failure? He would have tried again. And continued till he succeeded.
TC: That’s what’s so preposterous. He always does succeed.
JAKE: Yes and no. But we’ll come back to that later.
(Jake slipped the pictures in a manila envelope. He sucked on his pipe and combed his fingers through his cowlicked hair. I was silent, for I felt a sadness had overtaken him. Finally I asked if he was tired, would he rather I left him? He said no, it was only nine o’clock, he never went to bed before midnight.)
TC: Are you here all alone now?
JAKE: No, Christ, I’d go crazy. I take turns with two other agents. But I’m still the principal guy on the case. And I want it that way. I’ve got a real investment here. And I’m going to nail our chum if it’s the last thing I ever do. He’ll make a mistake. In fact, he’s already made some. Though I can’t say that the manner in which he disposed of Dr. Parsons was one of them.
TC: The coroner?
JAKE: The coroner. The skinny itsy-bitsy hunchbacked little coroner.
TC: Let’s see, now. At first you thought that was a suicide?
JAKE: If you’d known Dr. Parsons, you’d have thought it was a suicide, too. There was a man who had every reason to kill himself. Or get himself killed. His wife’s a beautiful woman, and he had her hooked on morphine; that’s how he got her to marry him. He was a loan shark. An abortionist. At least a dozen dotty old women left him everything in their wills. A true-blue scoundrel, Dr. Parsons.
TC: So you didn’t like him?
JAKE: Nobody did. But what I said before was wrong. I said Parsons was a guy who had every reason to kill himself. Actually, he had no reason at all. God was in His heaven, and the sun was shining on Ed Parsons right around the clock. The only thing bothering him was he had ulcers. And a kind of permanent indigestion. He always carried around these big bottles of Maalox. Polished off a couple of those a day.
TC: All the same, everyone was surprised when they heard Dr. Parsons had killed himself?
JAKE: Well, no. Because nobody thought he had killed himself. Not at first.
TC: Sorry, Jake. But I’m getting confused again.
(Jake’s pipe had gone out; he dumped it in an ashtray and unwrapped a cigar, which he did not light; it was an
