Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [7]
Listen we’ve got a dead body outside.
What!
Yeah. Nora’s mum. Strangled. We brought her in. Other cops looked round. Webb took his feet off the desk and stood up.
Listen if you murdered her you should get rid of the body, you should’ve buried her, don’t try to bluff it out.
Hell Webb, we didn’t kill her, I liked the old lady, but it looks suspicious, she has a lot of cash we’re gonna get, so how would it look if we buried her?
Right, and you can’t claim the money without the body, so you’d have to bluff it.
We didn’t do it you bastard.
Ok Ok I believe you, where’s the body?
In the back seat. Under the tarp.
Ok go with Belddax here and bring it in.
Minutes later Belddax rushed in. Webb asked where Bolden was.
He’s running down the road, sir.
What!
Someone stole the car.
This crisis deflated with investigation. Search parties went out looking for the car as well as a strangler in the Hill district. After two weeks nothing had been found. The Boldens who would have been reasonably wealthy had no chance of a will until the body was located. Advertisements were placed in The Cricket and the Pontchartrain papers for a lost Envictor and the goods therein. A year later Bolden got a letter from Webb.
Buddy —
I’ve solved the murder if not the disappearance. Not everyone agrees with me, and I wouldn’t have thought of it if not for last week’s newspaper. Enclosed.
St Tropez. France
The flamboyant and controversial ‘dancer’ Isadora Duncan died yesterday in another one of those dramatic situations that seemed to follow her all her life. Riding with a friend in his Bugatti, her silk scarf caught in the back wheel of the moving car and strangled her before the driver realised what was happening. The British Automobile Association has given out frequent warnings that this is a common danger to motorists. Miss Duncan was 49. For more of her life see ‘SCARF’ page 17.
You see what I’m getting at don’t you. The old lady’s pet snake is near her, taking in the breeze. Its tail somehow gets caught in a rear wheel. It quickly hangs onto the one thing close to it, her neck, this strangles her. After the car comes to a halt the snake who has been stretched badly but not killed uncoils and slides away. No trace of a weapon. If the snake was human it wouldn’t get much more than manslaughter … Sometimes Bolden I think I am a genius.
Webb
There were his dreams of his children dying.
The other kid came in with the news he’s dead, sobbing, and he jumped and ran in one movement and caught the boy’s shoulders WHO IS he heard himself weep out loud and being told floated into the kitchen picked up the wood handled knife with the serrated edge and pushed it again and again into his left wrist, then the open hand which was numb already, through the door and the police amazed at him his white shirt bloody looking at the cops who brought the news he’d always imagined each night—hit by a car, god. After the boy’s words he hadn’t heard a thing but his own screaming, went past the cop and leaned over the hot metal of the hood of the police truck, his face and his wet arm on it.
Crawley was losing weight and looking pale. He was fasting and the lines in his face were exaggerated. He sat in his chair drinking distilled water from a large bottle while Webb sat on the edge of the bed trying to get information. Now 10 A.M. He had got to him just before he started practising.
Give me half an hour. I’ll be out by 10.30.
Who you?
I’ve just come from Nora. We’re trying to find Buddy.
He tried offering Crawley a banana.
Banana, hell, I’m dieting. Just this special water.
Go on, take one, you look sick.
I can’t. Jesus I’d like to. Do you know I haven’t had a shit for a week?
How’s your energy?
Slow … this time I’m aiming for the tail of shit.
The tail of shit.
Yeah … got to it once before. If you don’t eat you see you finally stop shitting, naturally. And then about two weeks after that you have this fantastic shit, it comes out like a tornado. It’s all the