38. SUSPECT 1: C.H.U.D.

Here we go...

Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers

Chud was angry. Angry-looking. It was the head and face he was born with. Quietly aggressive, the way he’d look at you, cranium first, his eyes dank with ugly intentions. He was goblinized, orc-like, and with so many piercings Moses used to joke to Vardaman they always changed place, from ears to nose to lip to eyebrow, and for a while he even had a chain going from ear to nose like a Hindu bride. Vardaman liked him, or at least found something in him he could connect with. Moses didn’t like him, repelled probably by the same force that sucked Vardaman in. So if Moses were to say CHud should be on the list of suspects for Aaron, Vardaman would be dismissive and he’d say something like ah you never liked him anyway you’re a fucking snob of somesuch and Moses would say back he could never figure what Vardaman saw in him anyway. Chud was charmless, aggressive, everything knotted up in that ugly stop of his and the shoulder-driven swagger of the way he’d go about the place. But that’s not enough to accuse someone of murder, of course. The reason, just as Moses had said to Waingard, was a woman. Chud, until recently, was rarely seen without his younger girlfriend, a metalhead with neon red hair and a rubied loop in her septum. She had dark eyes and a bump in the bridge of her nose. Her name was Sally-Anne and Chud never abbreviated her name, which seemed uncharacteristically proper of him. He doted on her, he was protective, but this also meant she rarely spoke and he stood a pace in front of her at all times. Sally-Anne was easily ten years his junior and there had been an odd occasion when Moses had seen her from afar in Red’s cafe with some girls her own age, laughing, prodding shoulders, eating burgers and drinking long glasses of coke. Next to Chud she looked like some sinister familiar, a spirit occupying a body. But in Red’s that time she looked like a girl. She was having fun, being a human. Okay, so she was different in different company, then, but who isn’t? The reason why Chud made it onto Moses’s list, is because Sally-Anne had recently - a month ago? - broken up with Chud, and he had flipped out, had a breakdown, become a disruptive ghost around town. Moses wanted nothing to do with it, but Vardaman had been one of Chud’s many drinking confidants during his downward spiral. This would involve long afternoons nursing pints in a back booth up at the Park Tavern, smoking Marlboro Lights, Chud with his feet up on the bench being asked every fifteen minutes to take them down by Big Wendy Windmill from the behind the bar. Vardaman was good at being there for people, he had a comforting way about him, he knew how to get people away from the hot touch of their current problem. If it was his day to keep Chud unscolded, he’d to get the conversation onto top five Crass tracks or something like that, top five American hardcore bands, and it would work for a while, but Chud would always bring it back to Sally-Anne. The expertise of Vardaman the counsellor was tested to its limited by CHud. Eventually a working theory emerged, one that Vardaman was to blame for. “Sometimes people just move on,” Vardaman said at the end of a more testing afternoon. “How’s that now?” Chud snapped. Vardaman was tiring, his guard was down, but Chud read a nod to the natural way of things, to personal development and all that stuff that meant girls dumped their boyfriends and moved on to brighter lives than the ones that boyfriend had afforded them, and that dumped boyfriends went on week-long benders to get over being dumped and they raged and Hulk-smashed and cried and generally did shitty things. But Chud had been given something here to latch onto. Or at least he’d perceived something wrangled in the tired musings of Vardaman, out on a limb to try and help Chud see sense in the places he simply wanted to rage at injustice. “You think she cheated on me?” Chud said. Vardaman immediately recognised his lazy error, an error made more dangerous for who he made it with. Moses had witnessed the rage that came in the wake of his error. Chud charging through the Pips, interrogating anyone he knew, gathering his evidence of a thing that never happened. Moses wondered if Chud might have landed on Aaron as the straw man. But why not land on someone less dangerous? Who are we to reason why? But Moses wasn’t going to get anywhere by bringing this up with Vardaman. Vardaman was always defending Chud, even when Moses wasn’t asking. “He’s a good guy. Funny. He has lines. He said he and Sally Anne used to fight all the time but only about the big things never about the small things.” Whether this was a great line or not, Moses wasn’t so sure, but Vardaman protested Chud’s innocence even though Moses wasn’t pushing on it at any point because as far as Moses was concerned any conversation without Chud’s name in it was better for it, which was just as well, because Vardaman didn’t want to have to bail Chud out of this one by admitting it was he, Vardaman, who had been having the affair with Sally-Anne. Well, hardly an affair. They had had sex a couple of times. The first, some of the most awkwardly dismal sex of Vardaman’s life. He had come across Sally Anne in a taxi rank alone and upset, if indeed her sullen looks were anything different to how she normally carried herself around town that time of night (and when having much more fun with friends her own age in Red’s). Vardaman did the right thing and offered to make sure she got home okay. He vaguely remembered she lived out his way, so they shared a cab. In the cab, Sally-Anne asked if Vardaman would like to come in the house and drink some more with her. She lived with her parents, but they’d be fast asleep by now. Big house, she led him to the conservatory, where they could smoke, and she reclined on the swing chair and pulled Vardaman on top of her. The whole time he was thinking Chud was going to kill him. Actually kill him. Smash his fucking skull in like that monkey man at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arms flailing. Blood spraying. Grunting. Salivating. Thoughts like that are many things and a mood killer is one of those things. At one point Sally-Anne pushed Vardaman on his back and dry humped him jeans to jeans for what felt like half an hour until Vardaman was wondering if she was some kind of weirdo, but it turned out she was also worried about Chud and this was like revving the engine before committing to stealing the car. Anyway, steal the car she did - they did. She seemed to enjoy the change, exploring Vardaman at various intervals as they moved from one cold frilly piece of conservatory furniture to the next as if she was browsing in a charity shop. To Vardaman, of course, bad weird sex was infinitely better than no sex, and probably worth his own murder. And after all was said and done, she rolled a joint and put the White Album on the cassette player in the corner of the room and lay half-dressed on the swing chair. This was the defining image Vardaman carried with him whenever he thought of this encounter: an attractive young woman with mussed up neon red hair, her breasts partially exposed by the unbuttoned shirt she’d flung around her, sunk back on a swing chair smoking a joint with Blackbird playing on the player. So, they did it a few more times over the next few weeks in more traditional surroundings (Vardaman’s place), and the sex was good, but Sally-Anne was obviously more into sex with someone other than Chud than she was into Vardaman, and so quite quickly they just drifted into each other’s background. But Vardaman knew, when Chud broke in front of him and told him Sally-Anne had dumped him, that Vardaman had been a part of that story, maybe less of a gateway drug, but more likely a permission slip. Sally-Anne was out there somewhere now having much better sex with someone she really liked. She would have been doing this secretly, as Chud was on the prowl and at one point during a particularly hard binge the police were called to take him away from her parents’ driveway. This was a night she was riding Vardaman. God, what a mess. Vardaman recognised it as a 101 mess, nothing too serious and very common, the infidelity of the young, but this was a mess because Chud was a maniac, not because Vardaman was shagging his friend’s missus. In his defence. Vardaman had been considering bringing this up to Chud for a time, confronting him, apologising, and saying that it was nothing and a mistake and was over and the blood of drinking brothers is thicker than anything a woman can piss over them. But now Aaron is dead and people are asking who killed him, and for all of his defending of Chud to Moses, nah, Vardaman wasn’t coming clean. Chud might have done it, after all.