Iceman (16 page)

Good evening, friends and neighbors. I'm glad to be able to speak to you on this auspicious occasion on this suspicious Caucasian why do they always look so terrible when you find them dead the legs out like a discarded rag doll the head turned wrong the skin discolored the blood if there is blood the eyes the sexual the lacerations the penetration the asphyxiation the oh Christ the death of a red-haired fortyish Poke Salad Annie in the Possum Grape General Store, Hubcap City, he could feel the bile rising in his throat and he looked around and mentally noted that the woman sold cut glass for a living and then even that phrase had a frightening ring...

Cut glass.

But this rag doll's head was not turned wrong and her eyes still stared, unseeing, with that peculiar rigor-mortis hollowness. The woman was flat on her back, a pair of wounds to the left side of the skull like the incisor bite of a giant vampire bat, gray matter, coagulating blood, and God-knows-what-else circling her head like a grisly halo. And now Eichord felt certain that Arthur Spoda was alive and well and living very near.

Outside the door Eichord saw something in the dirt and said to the man making plaster casts of vehicle treads, “You get this?"

“Huh?"

“This one here.” He pointed to a small track beside the walkway.

“Yeah. I got it. In the van.” He gestured. “Lot of fucking good THIS is gonna do. Shit, they been walkin’ around all over this shit...” He mumbled off, cursing to himself in disgust.

It was the track of something small. It could have been the imprint of one of the wheels of a wheelchair.

T
hree hours later, the body tagged, flagged, and bagged, the scene peeled and sealed, Eichord sat reading the distillation of the initial footwork on Spoda:

AmeriMed Corporation

Browar's Pharmaceutical

Buckhead General

Buckhead Medical Park

Buckhead Memorial

Buckhead Surgical Supplies

Buckhead Therapy Center

Childs Institute

Everest & Jennings Wheelchairs

Fierstone-Laverty

Killian, Merriam and O'donnell Clinic

Moore Health Care

Palmer Medical Institute

Sears (health care department)

Eichord continued to scan the three-page list of possibilities. Where somebody might go locally to have a wheelchair maintained or repaired, where they might seek therapy, where a copper could look for a blood trail. Still cross-checking the voluminous printouts from the institutional records feeding Buckhead Station and the task-force computers. Less than a starting place so far. Not even a hunch. Just some makework while he sifted possibilities. No fingerprints, witnesses, clues, footprints, unless you count the vague wheel track outside the cut-glass emporium.

What he had was the bizarre M.O. that could indeed reflect a copy-cat killer who had read some twenty-year-old newspaper or magazine pieces, or seen ancient film footage in an obscure local documentary, or heard about a kill mode from a fellow con or patient, or, of course, it could be a man who had picked up his icepick after two decades.

What did he know? He now knew that Tina Hoyt and ... He glanced down at Poke Salad Annie's real name—June Graham. Two women had been taken down by the iceman. The labwork made them identical kills. Funny how fast the lab was when it was easy.

If it was Arthur Spoda—and Jack's vibes said yes—why had he not killed again for twenty years? If the man in Vega had been right, it was because Arthur had been confined to a chair. Now, suddenly, the murders begin anew. Did this mean Spoda was no longer wheelchair bound? Or had he figured a way to cause these victims to die from his chair, such as a surrogate killer whom he might manipulate. Eichord printed another word on his legal pad. The list now read:

Spoda.

Copycat.

Surrogate.

To which he added a fourth word:

Con.

And then he changed all the periods to question marks. By CON he meant as in confidence man, for it occurred to him this would be a hell of a clever setup that could theoretically be used as a smoke screen to cover up a killing with a far different motive. And he added the word:

Tontine.

Some insurance policy, he thought. But being an aficionado of ancient, creaking, sliding-bookcase-in-the-dark-house movies, he had seen his share of tontines, both real and imaginary. One of the most important cases of his career had been a tontine-related kill—a woman he'd finally tracked down in the Orient, thanks to his dear and now departed pal, Jimmie Lee.

How to cover up a killing with motive: somebody extremely clever might be willing to do a lot of homework and take some absurdly unnecessary chances, all in the hopes of constructing such a seamless homicide that the real motivation would never show through. The tontine had been a natural progression of the thought pattern. First he thought of the old movie plot where Joe and Tom each agree to kill the other's spouse, leaving both of them an air-tight alibi. They were STILL making that one! And then the tontine—the now-illegal pact where Tom and Dick and Harry agree that the last surviving signatory gets the bag of emeralds—a nice invitation to murder. Con or tontine?

I want to murder Joe. I wait until the Holmby Hills Strangle? strikes for the third time, killing his victim with a pair of knotted pantyhose. Thuggee-style. I do my homework. Then I invite Joe to Holmby Hills and strangle him with knotted pantyhose. It needs a little work, but still...

I'm Arthur Spoda. I move to Buckhead from Las Vegas, and after twenty years they find a cure for polio. I regain the use of my legs. After twenty years I get up and walk again! Eichord wrote,
Scenario?

But who says Arthur WAS in a chair for all that time. He's injured in Vega. Moves to Las Vegas, Nevada. Eventually his beautiful pony of a girlfriend nurses him back to health. He moves to Cleveland. He moves to Muncie. Fargo. Buckhead. Drives to the nearest metropolitan area where he wants to kill. What if the killer had been killing all along but not with an icepick? Bludgeonings. Strangulations.

Missing persons? What if he'd been killing with an icepick all along, sure enough, but he'd found a way to dispose of the bodies. He's in the construction business now. He pours concrete footings for parking garages. Acme Parking in Fargo is a mausoleum for 132 dead women. Maybe he just doesn't sign his name to the artwork.

“What are you doin’ here?” Brown's voice cuts through Jack's thoughts as the detective hangs up his coat, obviously a rhetorical question.

“Precisely my sentiments."

“That's a good question,” somebody said behind him. The guys on the eight-to-four tour were coming into the squad bay.

“Read it and weep, baby,” he said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the crime report on the morning's homicide.

“Jane Graham,” Eichord says aloud, the first time he'd spoken Poke Salad Annie's real name, “Iceman Murder Number Two.” He read his list to them. “Other possibilities?"

“What about that note?” Brown asked. Meaning the thing the paper had received. “What if it wasn't just a crank note? Suppose that's the killer. How do we know Jane Graham wasn't a feminist deal, a what-yacallem women's libber, or a dyke or whatever? Might be worth looking at?"

“Bullshit,” somebody said.

“We'll look. Sure. But, no, I don't think so. The women's movement in Buckhead, and in fact nationally, is anything but militant. All that remains of the cutting edge of it is a relatively small core of political activists who've paid their dues in the trenches. Only the fringe people still come on with the radical rhetoric—and where is there any evidence of serious hostility? No pattern of threats. No zoned-out cranks wanting to off the political piggies. None of that, man. What's the note say?” He glanced over at a dossier and opened it and thumbed through to find a photocopy.

“Women's lib whores must die,” Brown said.

“Here you go: dyke whores must die. women's lib cunts have destroyed the family and they will pay! i strike with the hand of christ.” He laid the dossier down and picked up a stack of Xeroxes. “I think it's garbage. Sorry. No way. Some dude wanted to get us a little crazy, some cop-hater, and fortunately he or she isn't hip enough to couch the thing in post-feminist phraseology. He probably saw ‘women's movement’ in a news story and decided to pull our bell rope a little. Maybe Tina Hoyt was a women's libber five or six years ago but she was too political to let herself aim that narrowly now. I've looked over a couple of her speeches and they're broad-based. Not the sort of thing to enrage anybody in the audience. No ‘chauvinist pig'-type vocabulary. Also, the note came a day late and a dollar short. On the other hand, we'll take it seriously. We're still working on the typewriter, and one thing and another. Read the operational memo. And speaking of which...” He started passing out pages. “June Graham we gotta keep buttoned down tight. Man, we let the press in on this baby, we'll never hear the end of it. We've got to stay chilly with it. No icepick stuff. No ‘Iceman Murder Victim,’ and I don't want anybody talking or writing about any ‘puncture wounds.’ Let's play this one real close. June Graham is a STABBING until you hear differently. Keep it all in-house with regard to Graham. Do we have a suspect? Yes. Is it related to the Hoyt homicide? No. What do WE know, right? We don't know nuttin'."

“You got that right."

“Um hmm. So much for media. The perpetrator: we'll call him Arthur Spoda Junior. The Iceman from Texas. Amarillo screws the pooch and Artie baby-walks. Or rolls, I should say, Mommy having caught him with Sis and done a J.O.B. on his spine. He rolls to Vegas."

“He's a high-roller,” somebody says.

“Yeah. Blends in with all the other nutbaskets out there. Gets a couple dollahs. Goes to Dallas. Des Moines. Dubuque, Paducah, whatever. Then he comes here. He's born again. Something something something. Lightning strikes his wheelchair and he gets up and walks after twenty years. Mad as hell, and he's right back where he left off. Whacking out middle-aged women."

“Tina Hoyt wasn't that old."

“So maybe he got lucky. What can I tell ya? Hoyt pisses him off and-bang! Down she goes. How do we find him?” Eichord push-pins one of the drawings to the wood frame around the cork bulletin board.

“We go all the places somebody might have had therapy in recent years, chair-bound PROBABLY—maybe not. Forty—forty-two-year-old white male who looks anything remotely like the composite. This guy got better in the LAST YEAR OR SO. No longer handicapped. That's one.

“Two is our copy-cat. Three, remember the surrogate. Our man is still in the chair but he's got a friend or lover who will do the deed for him. He's the doc. He plans ‘em, his buddy does ‘em. Or it's all a scam. Somebody tied to Hoyt or Graham looking for camouflage. Don't dismiss anything. Even if he just...” Eichord trailed off into space. “You know. Looks weird."

He could hear Brown giggle and say a rude word.

“Whatever."

“
Y
ou know what, love?” he told the beautiful woman who was facedown on the king-size bed beside him, her head down at the foot of the bed, thinking that lots of “real” women in their twenties would love to look like Nicki did.

“What?"

“Hmm,” he told her in reply, rubbing the back of her slick right thigh. Taking hold of the leg high up, his huge hand spanning the slim leg and squeezing, not trying to hurt her but not being particularly gentle either as he squeezed and slid his hand up a little higher, cupping her upper thigh right under the cheek of her buttocks.

“Hmm?” She was working a puzzle and a little preoccupied, and he let the hand pinch her a little as it moved up.

“Mmm.” She had on a string bikini and gold-colored sandals with extremely high heels. A tiny gold leg chain on her right ankle said Daddy, and the gold waist chain said Nicki.

“What?” she said again.

“Pay attention to me, bitch,” he joked with her, but cruelly taking hold of her long hair and pulling it back like a handle.

“Don't, Daddy,” she whispered sexily, “don't hurt your baby. What are the names of three actresses with five-letter first names who've been nominated for Academy ?"

“Susan Saranwrap, Molly Ringworm, and Merry Steamengine,” he offered, without a beat.

“Mary is four letters."

“Yeah,” he grunted as he ripped the top of her bikini off, pulling her up to him. He was naked, propped up in the big bed on a mound of pillows, his hairy, muscular upper torso encircling her as he fed on her hungrily for a few moments.

“Hey,” he said, pushing her away and looking at her in a serious manner, “I just thought of something."

“What?"

“Bonnie."

“Who?"

“You know. Your friend Princess Di of the wrinkled toes. Her buddy Bonnie she was always blabbering about."

“So?"

“So she's a kind of loose end, ya know?"

“Huh uh. She's covered. Remember—I got that postcard. It already went out to the nigger girl I told you about in California,"—she shook her head—"so, like no problemo. In a couple of weeks she gets the first card from sunny Cal. Remember?"

“I know. That was soooooooo clever. I do like it. In fact, I love it.” He kissed her. “But she's a loose end. I think we should handle her."

“What do you mean ‘handle'?"

“Okay. If I was legitimately Funny Toes’ heartthrob, I'd be sick about Princess Di being gone. And ole Bonnie is going to think that her idiot bitch friend ran off with me to California. Who the fuck knows if she might get crazy and put the cops on me? True, she probably doesn't know much. But it seems to me the smartest thing we could do is eliminate the possibility of a problem. Go ahead and send the card blah-blah, and so on and so forth, and then I get in touch with Bonnie. I wonder whatever happened to Diane. We get together and I dispose of this little loose end."

“No fucking way. No, Daddy. That's a serious mistake. You should never have any contact with Bonnie at all. She doesn't know you. You're clear of it."

“Yeah. But dig it, YOU could get her for us."

“No, don't make me do it. I don't like it. It's risky."