The Shakespeare Slayer - 1. The Shakespeare Slayer

The Shakespeare Slayer:

There was another body on the news, the 12th one this month murdered in the same way. Of course they couldn’t show it on the news with the graphic nature of the killings, but I knew all the gory details because I had been lucky enough to discover the first victim. Her name was Victoria Bolton, a budding socialite that had recently shown interest in the art world, specifically with the gallery adjacent to my office building. The two buildings shared a parking garage and she had coincidentally parked her brand new Maserati next to me, her car easily identified by the “5O VA1N” vanity license plate. I found her in her car, propped up in the driver’s seat as if she had been set to speed off to the next charity runway show, but her face had been gruesomely cut. The left side of her mouth was cut at an upward angle, the right side going down in a macabre representation of the famous masks of drama. I immediately called the police who discovered a heavily jeweled dagger buried to the hilt in her abdomen and a note clutched in her hand that read “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” in delicate script and a bright pink lip print both of which were determined to be Victoria’s.

The murder had at first been marked down as a bizarre and gruesome suicide until another victim, Jonathon Hargrove was found, his face similarly disfigured, his throat slit with a scrap of paper in his lap that read “The eagle suffers little birds to sing.”, once again written in the victim’s handwriting. This led to whispers of a serial killer, even though two murders weren’t enough to officially classify the suspect as such and the pseudonym The Shakespeare Slayer eventually appeared in the media following several more deaths with overstated Shakespearian themes getting more creative as they progressed, without so much as a strand of hair left behind to give detectives any leads to the killer’s identity. There was a massive tremor through the social elite, charity balls were cancelled and even casual brunches slowly became a thing of the past, blue bloods all over the city preferring to stay home with at least some semblance of safety from becoming another reenactment.

My mother was a renowned matron of the theatre, sponsoring many venues that put on performances of many of the Shakespeare plays that had been emulated in the recent murders and so based on the plays being the only common element the police had to go on, she became a person of interest in the murder. Purportedly as a potential target to protect but it often seemed that she was also a maybe in the suspect column as well. The almost constant police presence had quickly escalated from necessary nuisance to “wretchedly boring” as my mother so tactfully put it. It also made me nervous being surrounded by law enforcement and their questions considering I knew things about several of the known victims that made their deaths a sort of dark poetic justice. Victoria’s sister had gotten pregnant by a so-called undesirable and promptly sent away to a boarding school for troubled young girls, Victoria took it upon herself to put on an Oscar worthy performance telling the boy that her sister had lost the baby and killed herself. The boy was found a month later in his shabby apartment dead from an extravagant overdose. Making Victoria die in a mockery of Juliet’s death was extreme but in the twisted mind of a moral vigilante, I suppose it would make sense. A young potential investment broker had a brother that disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving him a clear path to take charge of the family business. He had been found with an ear full of acid, lying next to a hastily scrawled quote from Hamlet. Again, gruesome, but a dose of theatrical justice. I knew all of these things because even in the face of mortal danger, the gossip mill never grew weary and news travels fast in the Hamptonite proverbial covens.

Hearing the dirty secrets of these victims and realizing how they related to their respective deaths through a lens tinted in classical theater I came to the conclusion that the murderer was someone who resided in the same social circles as the victims and had a profound, although probably closeted, love for the theater. These characteristics of course would put me in the top 10 suspects and that was the last thing I needed, more attention from law enforcement in these troubled times. Sure, I didn’t always approve of many underhanded deeds the privileged few committed with little or no consequences, but I was no killer. Despite my mother’s desperate pleas I continued to conduct work at the office as usual. I hadn’t come this far in the business, taking over the firm after my father had proven himself useless and too busy brokering bribes to carry on legitimately and found himself ousted in a boardroom coup that I had proudly orchestrated. Profits had gone down for a while as the doctored books were rectified, but we had been doing well and I wasn’t going to let some morality Nazi scare me out of conducting my work, I had nothing to fear from the Shakespeare Slayer as far as I was concerned.

I stayed late on Friday night, getting a presentation ready for Monday hoping to impress a potential client. I hadn’t locked up at all so was surprised to hear a knock at my propped open office door, to see the chief of police standing there with a strange expression on his face that I couldn’t quite make out. “Sorry, don’t mean to bother you this late son but something has been bugging me about this slayer case and I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions. Your mother hasn’t been very cooperative and after all this I can’t say that I exactly blame her.” He chuckled as he stepped in my office, kicking the door stop out as he entered. I thought that was strange considering there wasn’t anyone else in the building so it wasn’t as if privacy was an issue for this little interview. “Well sure officer, anything I can help to bring this whole mess to an end.” I hoped I appeared more earnest than I felt. The chief, officer Rivers, propped himself up on my desk, raising one leg to sit right next to my arm, he was attractive for sure but the constant scent of strong coffee and stale cigarette smoke that hung around him really put me off. “We have another potential victim of this Slayer, as of now he’s fine we’ve got a team on him, but I just wanted to run it past you, my instincts are usually spot on and I think you know a little more about all of this than you’ve let on, and certainly more than has made it to the media.” He was leaning forward perched right above me and I’ll admit I did feel a little intimidated.

I pushed my chair back a couple of inches “What makes you think I know anything?” I didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. Rivers laughed “You’re smart kid, but you’ve got a bad poker face when we approach your family with theories.” He winked and leaned back, giving me more room to breathe comfortably. “As I’m sure you know by now, all of the previous victims haven’t been just the innocent bright young stars the public makes them out to be. Everybody’s got secrets, but these were a little darker than others am I right?” I swallowed “Well…I guess so but like you said we’ve all done things we’re not exactly proud of.” I looked up locking eyes with him as he nodded his agreement. “True, but some are just really fucked up you know? And these kids have just been doing whatever they want, and not so much as a slap on the wrist afterward, makes the common folk pretty indignant when they find out that kind of stuff, and we think we have a possibility on who the culprit might be, if we can catch him in the act with this new potential victim. This kid is like most of the others a rising star, groomed to be a heavy hitter in the corporate world, everything going for him and looks real good on paper. But, we recently found out that his road to success had a few stepping stones along the way, namely his old man who after getting thrown on his ass out of his own company resigned to a life of alcoholism and wasted away to nothing two years after Junior staged his take over.”

I froze in my chair, looking up at Rivers, not knowing how I should react. I was certain that bad poker face Rivers mentioned was in full swing as I heard him recount my own story. “We were thinking if the Slayer got wind of this family betrayal he might decide to enact that Oedipus play. Young man destroys his father, becomes his mother’s sole comfort; maybe minus the incest angle but we figured that could be enough to inspire the Slayer to act.” I almost audibly released the breath I had been holding, there was a shine of hope, “You could be right, but Shakespeare didn’t write Oedipus, that was Sophocles and that wouldn’t fit the Slayer’s pattern.” I saw Rivers’ eyes tighten as he smiled, his hand clenched my wrist pinning my arm to the desk as he whispered “Gold star, but we don’t have many Shakespeare plays left to draw from do we?”