The Wind Chime
“We think it was a suicide.”
I was absolutely stunned. The scene was bizarre, macabre, almost cultish. How could a person do that to himself?
“S-suicide?” I stuttered, glancing at the detective. His meaty hands flipped through a small, very wrinkled notebook that he obviously kept in his back pocket at all times–its contour was unmistakably that of a very large posterior.
“Yeah,” he grunted, scratching below his eye and leaving a faint ink smudge, “damnedest thing. Those ropes up there all have piano wire on them a few feet above the uh, other bits.”
I glanced at the kid’s head, perfectly impaled on a wrought iron fence post, the spike having broken open the top of his skull like a pop can lid. He was smiling, eyes wide. I shuddered.
“Seven ropes, each of different lengths between 60 feet and 90 feet in increments of 5 feet,” he began monotonously, somehow reading a seemingly random assortment of blobs and scratches. “He tied a length of piano wire 2 feet from a noose on the end of each rope, then tied it all to himself: piano wire at his armpit, noose on his elbow; piano wire at the top of his thigh, noose around the knee, and so on. As he dropped the piano wire sliced through a limb or his neck–the removed part would catch on the noose and dangle–at each 5-foot increment. Christ,” he muttered, scratching his cheek again, “what a nut-job.”
I sat down on the cold, still-damp curb, feeling bile in my throat. I took a few measured breaths while I let my gaze travel down from the top of the building, the whole thing resembling a psychopath’s wind chime. The worst was the torso, swaying slightly in the night’s breeze, thudding gently against the building. You could tell the back had broken when the noose caught.
I pulled out a cigarette and lit it, the burning in my lungs reassuring me about the reality of the situation. After a moment I stood, stretched, and flicked the rest of it into the gutter. Turning, I glanced once more at the awful head.
He was winking at me.