Page 35 of Hanging and Burning

“Hebrew?”

“No, Yiddish—the Jewish dialects that developed in Europe over a thousand years.”

“And he’s studying sayings?”

“When he was a boy, his mother used to use wise and angry terms that he’d forgotten. He wanted to remember her before he died.”

“Like what kind of terms?”

“We discussed quite a few. The last one was a curse that she used only when she really hated someone.”

The librarian said something then in a tongue that was only a little familiar.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“You should be like a chandelier—hanging and burning.”

8.

SHELLY TOOMES SENT me the electronic image of the photo of Twyla and a thirty-something Black man. The scrawl in the bottom margin of the photograph identified the man as Randolph David Blass, and the photograph was more recent, taken within the last few years. He was handsome, of a good build, with short-cropped hair and skin reminiscent of dark maple syrup. Though they were probably close to the same age, the man appeared to be years younger. Twyla’s maturity came from a life of deep experience; that’s what I believed. Even though she was smiling happily, there was an underlying bearing of dramatic proportions.

After I’d done some looking around, the Internet told me that, probably, the Randolph David Blass I was looking for lived on the left side of a two-story duplex on Carnegie Lane in Redondo Beach. I found him among sixteen other possible candidates. RDB had an Instagram account where he exhibited roughhewn silver jewelry for men. There were half a dozen videos of him melting and casting the silver rings, links, and medallions. On Facebook he expounded on his belief that Americans had forgotten their immigrant roots. He tried to explain why every new race that had come to this country had made us somehow better, stronger. His reasoning left much to be desired, but, as far as I was concerned, his heart was in the right place.

Of his half a dozen website accounts, one was mostly photographs. One of those pictures was of a woman who looked a lot like Twyla. She wore an aqua-colored gown that came down to her red and sparkly high heels. She was smiling at the camera but still seemed a bit sad.

For those who wanted to buy his masculine jewelry, there was an address associated with his Instagram account.

The doors to the two apartments that made up the duplex faced each other. RDB’s unit was on the left. The right-side apartment had mail and newspapers overflowing the box. I knocked on RDB’s door, rang the bell, waited, then walked around the property looking for an unshaded window but found none.

Finally, I jimmied the lock on the back door, hoping that no one had seen me.

The kitchen was a cluttered mess. Dirty dishes sat in and around the sink, and a whole silverwork workshop occupied the dining table.

In the living room there was a corpse that might have been David Blass tied to a kitchen chair. Might have been. He fit the general dimensions of the hale Black man in the various photographs, but that’s where the similarities took a left turn. He’d been so soundly beaten, cut, and in other ways tortured that he really wasn’t recognizable.

I’d seen quite a few dead men, women, and children during my tenure as a New York City policeman. Not one of them had suffered more than the man lashed to the chromium and vinyl kitchen chair. He’d been tortured for hours. It would have taken that long to inflict the amount of damage his body had endured. He’d been expertly gagged. I supposed all they needed from him was to write the answers to their questions—maybe in his own blood.

Or maybe they didn’t want any answers. Maybe they just wanted him to suffer.

I was wearing rubber gloves, so there was little chance of being identified from my human residue. The tormentors had gouged out the man’s left eye and hacked off the tip of his nose.

I studied the body for a dozen minutes, but it felt like a much longer time. Then I looked around for anything that might lead me to Twyla. The upstairs bedroom was another mess. I noticed that I was tracking blood through the house and so dug around in a closet that had been searched for a pair of the dead man’s shoes, sans blood. From there I took out a pair of medium brown loafers that were only about a size and a half smaller than my feet. I found nothing else to help with my job, so I took a plastic trash bag from the cabinet under the kitchen sink and went out on the internal back porch, where I took off my shoes and put them in the bag, wedged my big feet into Randy’s shoes, walked out the back door, and returned to my car, carrying my bloody shoes in the protective bag. From there I drove back to the Royal Palace.

After having the valet park my car near the entrance to the lobby, I went up to my room and deposited the bag containing the blood-soaked shoes in my suitcase. The concierge provided the address of a nearby craft store. There I bought a pair of heavy-duty shears. On the way back I stopped at a drugstore to purchase four bottles of bleach.

Back in my room, for the next few hours I cut my blood-soaked shoes and Randy’s footwear into small pieces. These shards of leather and plastic I soaked in bleach and then flushed down the toilet, one by one. Not long after I finished this grim task, there was a knock at the door.

I was dazed. Blood and death have that effect on me sometimes. Because of this state of mind, the sound of knocking took on a preternatural quality, as if some otherworldly harbinger was announcing the crime that I had tried so hard to wash away.

Gun in hand, I walked out to the foyer of the suite and called out, “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” she said.

I opened the door on a squat, muscular woman I knew by the name Oliya Ruez, a mercenary-bodyguard who had left her job at the International Operatives Agency for a life of self-employment in New York. She’d been betrayed by the worldwide multinational security corporation and fallen in love with the madman Melquarth Frost.

Our friendship was of a complementary nature; she knew the value of acting without thought and I knew when to stay one’s hand.

“Come in,” I said, and then led her to the seat where Bob had reclined.