DIRTBAG CHAPTER 32

    It was getting late and Elaine kept checking her car clock, thinking she was almost out of time.  Visiting hours at the hospital where Moore lay unconscious were almost over.  Adorned in fine jewelry, necklaces, bracelets and a gold watch, dressed in an expensive long flowing gown, Elaine had her pearl ear rings and designer shoes, looking lavish, maybe a little too lavish.
    Driving her silver convertible Mercedes Benz, with the top down, the wind blowing her hair back, like it was the night before, when she was almost thrown over the rocky cliff into the crashing waves far below.  She hated Victor Weiss for what he was about to make her do.
    She parked the car and went into the hospital.
    The nurse behind the counter was looking at her, as she went into Moore’s room.
    Elaine moved slowly, dreading this moment, a moment she thought she would never come to in her life, the moment she became a murderer.
    At the door, she could see Moore was still out.
    Elaine stood by his bed side for a long time, then looked around to see if anyone was coming.  The coast was clear.  She closed the curtain and took a syringe out of her pocket and removed the cap.  She held the vile of Noctec up to the light and inserted the needle, then drew back the plunger.  Holding the syringe, her hand was shaking, she was so nervous.  As she was about to administer the shot in the tube receptor, she took one last look at the sleeping man, a cold creepy feeling came over her.  She was really doing this, crossing this line, becoming a murderer.  She told herself she had to and just as she was about to do so, Stuart flung back the curtain and rushed to grab the hand that held the needle, with Lan right behind her.
    “I’ll take that.”  Stuart said forcefully, taking the needle out of Elaine’s shaking hands.
    “How did you…”  Shocked, she couldn’t finish her thought, with her eyes wide open and her mouth agape.
    Lan finished it for her, “How did we get on to you?  Elaine, it was obvious.  Look     at how you’re dressed and what you drive?  That’s when we started to get suspicious.  We asked around, and the nurse reported you were acting strange in Moore’s hospital room; then we began to follow you.  We saw you with Victor Weiss and we were suspicious you would try something on Moore.  They only question is: did he have something on you.”
    Elaine nodded in disbelief, she said, “One second later, Moore would have been…”
    “A dead man?  We would have been here sooner,” Stuart said, as she put on the handcuffs.  “But Lan had to do his Ti Chi first.”

    After many pleas to be seen by his wife, Blair’s request was finally answered and she showed up at the visitor center to tell him what a worthless man he turned out to be.
    “Please?”  He asked her to believe him, that he loved her and regretted what he did before he met her.
    “I should have known,” she said, “when you wanted to get married in Whitechapel and go touring the Jack the Ripper murder sights on our honeymoon.”
    “Honey,” he cooed.
    “Don’t call me, ‘honey.’ ”
    He nestled up next to her and spoke softly in her ear, “Remember, when I first informed you Freemasons were responsible for the Jack the Ripper murders?”
    “You and your conspiracy theories…”  She moved away from him and faced him.
    He threw his arms around her waist and moved in for the kiss, but she turned her face away.   He spoke lasciviously in her ear, “Remember when I told you all the similarities between the way the victims Jack the Ripper killed and ritual Masonic practices, such as slitting the victims throat and pulling their intestines out, for revealing Masonic secrets?”  She moved away from him, “At one time, you thought that was the most fascinating thing you ever heard.”
    “I don’t care!  I don’t want to hear it now!”  She thought he was out of his mind and couldn’t believe she didn’t see it before. 
    “Honey, please…?”
    “All you do is go on about Jack the Ripper?  I’m sick of hearing about Jack the Ripper.  Really, you have no clue what I’m about, what I care about and you ruined it!  You ruined everything!”  She yelled and left.
    The following day, Blair found himself in restraints on a plane bound for California.

    Holding Nigel hostage against the wall, while Mary’s friend came looking for her in the dark shadows of the basement, Dan continued to recount the events of that night, while Cecil and John, the ADA listened with rapt attention.
     “Dorothy… descended the steps cautiously, straining her eyes, unaccustomed to the light, looking around…  Nigel started to make some sounds.  I kept my hand tight over his mouth and poked him with the knife, just to remind him.  However, Dorothy heard something and turned to have a look and I swear, she was looking right at us; I saw her eyes move on, when she saw the figure of someone lying on the floor and moved in for a closer look, while Blair quietly took up the shovel and came up behind her and she turned just in time to see him bring the shovel down on the head, cracking her… skull, dropping her instantly, landing across Mary’s corpse.  Hitting her repeatedly, he made sure she was dead.  Then he collapsed… fell to his knees, panting, almost out of breath.
    “Everyone was too stunned to speak.  I removed my hand from Nigel’s mouth, but he didn’t say anything.  I held the knife loose in a state of shock.  Nigel was in agony, his back sliding down the wall.
     Blair stood and turned on the light.  The basement was a bloody mess and he peered down at his handiwork, then took off all her clothes, looking at her once more and going, “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” and Nigel started yelling, ‘you're a sick fuck, Blair!  A sick fuck!’
    “ ‘The sick fuck’ needed Nigel’s fingerprints on the bloody shovel, getting closer to Nigel was a warning to him and he stood, facing Blair, screaming and pointing.  I was holding him back with one arm, playing interference with the other arm, before the Englishman got any closer.
    “ ‘I’m not going down for this,” Nigel yelled, “you are, and so are you Dan!’ ”
    “ ‘No,’ I yelled, ‘none of us are going down for this, we’re all walking away from this.  All we have to do is keep our wits together.’ ”
    “ ‘You think it’s that easy?’  Blair asked, ‘You think the authorities will ever stop looking for you?  Somebody has to go to prison for this and it isn’t going to be me.’
    “ ‘Yes, it is,’ Nigel yelled, kicking me, ‘if I have my way, you’re never getting out of prison!’
    “ ‘No, one’s going to prison!’  I yelled, ready to punch Nigel.
    “ ‘Maybe you would like to go back to prison, Dan,’ Blair suggested, ‘maybe for the rest of your life, and for what, for Nigel?  What did he ever do for you?  Ran away from you the first chance he had… while you fought off his aggressors.  He’s a deserter!  You owe this man nothing.’
    “Nonetheless, I couldn’t let him frame Nigel.  He wasn’t a bad man, just… lost.
    “About this time we had a surprise visit from the men in black, only Blair didn’t look too surprised.   4 or 5 of them, all dressed in black, even their shirts looked in the basement and drew their weapons, pointing them at Nigel, who was gesturing for a fight.
    “They told him to step outside.  He didn’t care about life or death in that moment and dared them to shoot.  They weren’t about to go down into the basement and get blood on their nice shoes, so they told me and Blair to bring Nigel outside.  ‘Take him by the arms,’ a black suit said, ‘and carry him if you have to.’
    “At that point I had it with this bullshit and I decided to leave.  ‘Come on Nigel, we’re out of here,’ but he wasn’t going anywhere with me, that’s what he said, so I left on my own and I got as far as the backyard; the black suits pointed their weapons at me.
    “ ‘Where do you think you’re going?’  A tall dark suit said.
    “ ‘As a Freemason, I come and go as I please.’
    “ ‘Not this time,’ he said, ‘Stay where you are.’
    “So I was hostage of my own order as well as Nigel.  Neither of us had any choice.  Blair stuck him in the side and he cried out in pain and the Englishman told him to move.  That got him outside.”
    “The men in black put Nigel in restraints and carried him to the trunk of their car.  I grabbed one of them, but he pushed me to the ground.  When I got up, they were hauling Nigel away, one of them aiming a gun at me.
    “They left his car in the driveway.  I remember thinking that was going to seem suspicious, and I found myself hoping the police would find it.  I knew Nigel was a dead man, and I helped Blair frame him for murder and we got rid of the body.”
    He was nodding in regret, hating himself for what he did to his friend, took the woman of his dreams away, helped frame Nigel for murder, practically killed the poor guy himself.  He hoped that in some small way, telling the truth made up for his transgressions.

    Something Victor Weiss said, was going through his mind.  “Cecil, I knew your father, he was a friend of mine.”   That was news to the detective and he decided to see his father about it; his parents were both alive and living south of Santa Cruz, along the coast highway.
    His mother met him at the door, brought him into the kitchen/dining area, calling downstairs, “Your son is here,” explaining to Cecil.  “He’s in the basement, cleaning his gun.”
    Sipping a cup of tea, at the dining room table, she felt awkward, waiting for her husband in silence.  Two, three minutes went by, then she said, “He’s hard of hearing.  I’ll go get him.”
    She brought him upstairs.  Cecil shook hands with his father, who seemed distant, a real hard liner. “Um, the reason I wanted to speak with you today… concerns that tattoo I got as a child.”
    Immediately, his father turned and went back downstairs, to clean his gun in the basement.  His mother, Irene threw her cup of tea in the sink.  She knew something and Cecil asked her what she knew.  “Talk to your father,” she said.
    Desperate to hear what she knew, he said, “I have, but he won’t tell me the whole story.  Won’t you please tell me.”  He gently made her face him and took her hands in his.
    “These secrets I can’t discuss.”  She said, pulling her hands free.
    “Please mom, it’s very important for a case I’m working on, involving Victor Weiss.”
    The name sent a shiver up her spine.  She turned and faced her son.  Then she nodded and sat down across from him.  “You think he’s behind your abduction?”
    “I think he wanted that black patch of skin on my chest for some reason.”
    She began to tremble, her hand to shake and Cecil calmed them with his own two hands on the table.  She pulled away and looked at the ceiling then said, “Your father was once good friends with Victor Weiss and he was very rich, even back then and used to getting everything he wanted and one of the things he wanted was 30 or 40 boys just like you, who were showing early signs of high intelligence and he wanted to mold you into something resembling a human being, but indoctrinated into a new belief system he called the Super Thinker Program: S. T. P.”
    “And what did my father get out of the deal,” Cecil felt betrayed.
    “You have to understand, we were very poor back then; we needed the money desperately.”
    “How much?”  He pounded the table and raised his voice.
    Fearful, she backed away from him, then hid her face in her hands, weeping.
    He felt bad he brought his mother to tears, but he had to know, “Tell me.”  He demanded gently.
    “Sixty-million,” she eventually said, her eyes cast down, a glance at him; he regretted treating his mother harshly.  “We didn’t go through with it,” she said.
    Cecil’s  tone was softer now.  “What happened?  Why would Weiss be so interested in this tattoo?”
    “As part of the deal, you were to have a Masonic tattoo on your chest, as well as the numbers of the bank account.  When I saw that number on your chest, I was very upset, and your father stubbornly resisted changing his mind, but eventually, he told Weiss the deal was off and left the money in the bank and covered up the tattoo with black ink, and the billionaire asked him to return the money.  Your dad didn’t have the bank account information any longer and he couldn’t help him.  Weiss said the only way to find out that information was to remove that blackened piece of skin on your chest and look at it from the other side.  If the light hit it just right, you would be able to make out those numbers for the bank account.  Thankfully, your father wasn’t going to allow that.”

    By the end of the week, Blair was standing in a line up, on the wrong side of the one way mirror, along with five other guys of his approximate size and color.
    In the room behind the mirror, Dan was leaning on a crutch, a wide bandage around his forehead.  For a man who took his oaths seriously, it wasn’t easy to turn against a brother, who he was supposed to forgive anything, even the worst act of cowardice and murder.  The ADA was standing tall next to him, and his lawyer was standing on the other side of him.  Cecil was standing behind them.
    Dan was looking at Blair through the one way mirror and the ADA said, “Do you need more time?”  Dan turned to meet his eyes.  John said, “You have to point him out, if you want the deal; ten years off your sentence is my final offer.”
    Dan looked at his mouth piece, who nodded his approval.  Returning his gaze to the ADA, Dan was feeling like a trapped animal in a small cage, when he turned to see Blair once again and said, “Yeah, that’s him: number five.”
    John left the room happy and Cecil stopped him briefly, to say, “I hope we can put our past disagreements behind us and move on.”
    The ADA laughed, “Yeah,” he said, “when you tell me who leaked that story to the press.”
    Cecil said, “Why worry about that, when we have a common enemy to defeat now.”
    “Yeah, who?”
    “Victor Weiss.”


 Copyright 2016  William Leslie