They entered the park.
“Who’s this a statue of, anyway?” she asked.
“Jesse Owens,” he said.
He was lying again. The only statue in the park was an equestrian statue of an obscure colonel who, according to the bronze plaque at its base, had fought bravely in the Battle of Gettysburg.
“Really? Here? I thought he was from Cleveland.”
“You know the name, do you?”
“Well, sure. He ran the socks off everybody in the world... when was it?”
“1936. The Berlin Olympics.”
“Made a fool of Hitler and all his Aryan theories.”
“Ten-six for the hundred meter,” he said, nodding. “Broke the world record at twenty-point-seven for the two-hundred, and also won the four-hundred meter relay.”
“Not to mention the broad jump,” Darcy said.
“You do know him then,” he said, smiling, pleased.
“Of course I know him, I’m a runner,” she said, and that was when he made his move.
He intended to do this as swiftly and as easily as he had with the other two. A modified arm drag, designed neither to take her down nor to bend her over at the waist but instead to force her body weight over to her left foot, exposing her side. With her left arm extended, he would move up under her armpit, and before she could turn her head, would clamp his hand at the back of her neck in a half nelson. Swinging around behind her, he would move his other hand up under her right armpit and clasp it at the back of her neck to complete a full nelson. Then he would press her head straight downward, forcing her chin onto her chest and, by exerting pressure, cracking her spine.
The full nelson, because it was so dangerous, could be used by wrestlers only in international competition, and then provided that it was applied at a ninety-degree angle to the spinal column. Once the hands were locked behind an opponent’s head, a body shift to the right or left was mandatory to create the legal angle before applying pressure. He was not concerned with legal angles. He was concerned only with dispatching her effectively, soundlessly, and as quickly as possible. His experience with the other two had taught him that he could apply the hold and the necessary pressure to break her neck in twenty seconds. But this time, the girl wasn’t having any of it.
The instant he locked his hand around her wrist, she shouted, “Hey!” and immediately took a step away from him, trying to free herself. Pulling her into him again, he tried to maneuver his arm up under hers to apply the first half of the nelson, but she jabbed her free elbow into his ribs and then, her back still partially to him, stamped on the insole of his foot with her high-heeled shoe.
The pain in his foot was excruciating, but he would not release his hold on her wrist. They struggled fiercely and soundlessly, their dancing feet rasping over the light cover of fallen leaves underfoot, their bodies intercepting light from the lamppost ahead and casting fitful shadows on the path. She would not allow him to get under her arm. She kept trying to free her wrist, pulling away, attacking whenever he tried to get under that arm to apply his hold. As she came at him again, her right hand clawing at his face, he punched her. His closed left fist caught her in the center of her chest, between her compact athlete’s breasts, knocking the wind out of her. He hit her again, in the face this time, and he kept punching her in anger at the difficulty she was causing, her refusal to cooperate in her own demise. A short sharp jab broke her nose. Blood spilled onto his fist and stained the front of her red dress a darker crimson. She was gasping for breath now, her blue eyes wide in fright. He punched her in the mouth, shattering her front teeth, and as she started to fall toward him, he quickly maneuvered his arm up under hers, applied the hold at the back of her neck, and then moved completely behind her, his groin tight against her buttocks. Supporting her, looping his free arm under her armpit, and over the back of her head, he locked the fingers of both hands behind her neck, spread his legs wide to distribute his weight, and swiftly applied pressure.
He heard the cracking snap of her spine.
It sounded like a rifle shot on the still October air.
The girl collapsed against him.
He looked swiftly ahead on the path, and then picked her up in his arms and turned toward the park entrance.
A man was standing in the opening flanked by the shattered light globes. Illumination from the lamppost up the street cast his angled shadow between the two stone pillars.
The man took one look and ran like hell.
8
Detective First/Grade Oliver Weeks said, “Well, well.”
It was very rare that you saw a white person up here. The white people up here in Diamondback were either cops or mailmen or garbage collectors or somebody come uptown to get his ashes hauled by a hooker. It was also rare to see a white person up here who was also a white woman. The neighborhood had a lot of what Ollie called “high yeller girls,” but they weren’t white, of course. If you had the teensiest drop of black blood in you, you weren’t white, not the way Ollie Weeks figured it, anyway. So it was rare to see a white girl up here at eight o’clock on a Thursday morning, and it was even more rare to see her hanging from a lamppost. The Homicide dicks thought it was rare, too. They were all commenting how rare it was when the man from the Medical Examiner’s Office arrived.
The M.E. told them it wasn’t so rare at all, the girl hanging from the lamppost. He asked them didn’t they read the newspapers or watch television? Didn’t they know two other girls had been found in similarly compromising situations within the past two weeks, hanging up there on lampposts where everybody could look up under their dresses? The assembled crowd of policemen all looked up under the dead girl’s dress. She was wearing red panties under her red dress.
“Still,” Ollie said, “it’s rare up here in the Eight-Three you find anybody dead but a nigger.”
One of the patrolmen setting up the barricades and the Crime Scene signs was black. He made no comment about Ollie’s derogatory remark because Ollie outranked him in spades (the patrolman actually thought this, without recognizing the Freudian association) and besides Fat Ollie Weeks didn’t know that the word “nigger” was derogatory. If Fat Ollie Weeks had been Secretary of the Interior, the now-famous line would have read, “I got a nigger, a broad, two kikes, and a crip.” That was simply the way Fat Ollie Weeks talked. He meant no harm. He was always telling people he meant no harm, that was just the way he talked. “Some of my best friends are niggers,” Fat Ollie Weeks was fond of proclaiming. In fact, Ollie thought the best detective on the Eighty-third — other than himself, of course — was a nigger. He was always telling anyone who’d listen that Parsons was one of the best fuckin’ nigger cops in this city.
When they cut the girl down some ten minutes later, the detectives and the M.E. gathered around her as if they were in a floating crap game.
“Did a nice number on her beforehand, didn’t he?” one of the Homicide dicks said. His name was Matson.
“Knocked half her teeth out,” the other one said. His name was Manson. This was a bad name for a cop, and he was always getting ribbed about it.
“Broke her nose, looks like.”
“Not to mention her neck,” the M.E. said. “Whose case is this?”
“Mine,” Ollie said. “Lucky me.”
“Your cause of death is fracture of the cervical vertebrae.”
“That blood on her dress?” Matson asked.
“No, it’s gravy,” Ollie said. “What the fuck you think it is?”
“Where?” Manson asked.