Iceman (27 page)

“Where's Schumway's file?"

The doctor pointed at a file.

“Get it,” Eichord said, and he immediately produced a thick folder bearing a number and Schumway's name.

“Are there tapes?” He acted like he'd gone numb and Eichord repeated it as he skimmed through the file. “Recordings?"

“No."

“Don't you automatically tape your sessions with your patients?"

“I've been Alan's doctor for a long time,” he said, as if that explained it.

Eichord read silently. Then he hit the last two pages, which were on a form marked SUMMARY. It began with a brief description of the patient, his vital statistics, Intelligence Quotient, other salient facts known about the individual called Schumway, Alan. Then came the good doctor's assessments.

OFFENSE RECORD: No offense recorded.

AGGRESSIVENESS: Uniformly belligerent and arrogant.

FREE ANXIETY AWARENESS: Uneasy. Fearful apprehensive. Paranoid.

FLIGHT IMPULSES: Escapist. Lives in make-believe world of contrived values. Artificially bolstered by indulgences. Alleges inability to use legs. Refuses to accept fact there is no medical reason for him to be confined to wheelchair.

CONVERSION TENDENCIES: Incapacitating conversion hysteria.

EMOTIONAL VOLATILITY: Manic.

OBSESSIVE/COMPULSIVE TENDENCIES: Obsession with visual stimuli (art-deco-style graphics), aural stimuli (dance band music of the 1930s—see Mother Fixation).

SCHIZOID CHARACTERISTICS: No friends. Calculated arrogance to counter sense of inability to achieve a heterosexual relationship under what he perceives to be “normal” conditions. (Hallucinated?)

PARANOID CHARACTERISTICS: Suspicious.

SEX VARIANCE: Reliance on oral sex, and insistence on sexual intercourse only with females exhibiting emphasized degree of what he perceives to be “vulnerability.” (Possible history of child molestation? Preoccupation with sex with the dead. Mother Fixation.) Strong latent homosexuality. Predisposition to sexual objects he perceives as “inferior” (transvestites, fetishists). Reliance on masturbatory fantasies and voyeurism.

ANTISOCIAL TENDENCIES: Violently critical. Openly supercilious.

EPILEPTOID CHARACTERISTICS: Rigidity. Explosive temperament.

MANIC TENDENCIES: Loathing. Destructive desires. Punishment fantasies.

SCHIZOPHRENIC TENDENCIES: Paranoia.

PHYSICAL DIAGNOSIS: Old spinal injury long-since healed and paralysis of legs psychosomatic (see
Conversion Hysteria
.) Subject could be ambulatory after sufficient (1 year-2 years?) rehabilitative therapy for atrophied musculature.

PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS: Undifferentiated psychosis.

ACTION POTENTIAL:
Extremely dangerous.

Aggressive, antisocial, with alarmingly high violence capability. Should seek institutionalization.

Eichord's hands were shaking.

“You fucking idiot. Why didn't you come forward with this?” The man just looked at him. “Don't you realize you're playing with a killer? You could be an accessory to multiple homicides? What the hell is the
matter
with you?"

“But I—I
cured
him,” the doctor said meekly.

“You WHAT?"

“Yes. Look at the damn dates.” He drew himself back up, regaining some of his bluster. “I cured him. I was finally able to bring him around. Make him realize that he could WALK. With time, he'll be out of that wheelchair and he'll have regained full use of his legs. Then, with continued therapy, I can restore his mental and emotional balance. Make him a full person again. He's a wonderful success story, don't you see?” The doctor rubbed his chest. “This man hurt me,” he said accusingly, but in a softer tone.

“Jeezus.” Eichord was fumbling with the calculator on the doctor's desk. Suddenly he realized the significance of the man's words, of what he was reading what he was HEARING.

“My God! 292 days. You fucking IDIOT. Don't you see what you did? All you did was help a killer get back up and walk again. He hadn't killed for over twenty years. You cured him all right. Maybe you can figure a way to bring Hitler back to life. I can't believe it. You've put a homicidal maniac back on the streets. Given him legs and the will to kill again. Nice going, asshole.” He detuned on the doctor's response saying, “Where's a DSM-II?” He turned pages. Asked questions. Began reading. Forgot to sit down. Forgot to breathe. Forgot Dana and Monroe were standing there. Forgot Dr. Lishness.

The words came in alien phrases. So many questions. So much information to digest so quickly. Trying to sift through the conversion symptoms of Schumway's disorder. The words like “pseudoneurological” and “hypochondriasis” accessible to a word buff like Eichord, but the clinical jargon insulating the facts under a thick coating of astasia-abasia and akinesia-dyskinesia, pathophysiological and psychogenic conceptualization. Even the academic usage of such words as “temporal” or “etiological” pushed him further away from a clear understanding.

With a final round of warnings to the psychotherapist, the men returned to the car and headed back to the station house.

“Shit. Wasn't nothing to that, was there?” Monroe said. “That white boy sure didn't take much leanin', did he?” He laughed softly.

“I think what did it was that hair,” Dana said, “all those little patches of baaaaad, black Rastafarian hair clumps stickin outta Monroe's cheeks. Very scary to your basic white person. We don't HAVE that shit."

“Yo gonna have a bad, black Rastafarian FOOT stickin’ outta the cheeks of yo fat ASS in a goddamn minute, blubber tub."

“Mon-roe,” fat Dana said. “Can I AX you som'-pin?” But the big detective ignored him.

“Smart ass car dealer lookin’ pretty good, eh?” he said to Eichord.

“Yep."

“Need to knock his fuckin’ dick inna dirt."

Eichord said nothing. His mind was ice-cold, like a meat locker, and he drove silently, framing the proper response inside his head.

A
round 1400 he confirmed that he was going to be late and made certain Donna had arranged to take the boy to a girlfriend's house, where she planned to have their evening meal. By 1430 he was in the Buckhead Public Library making a nuisance of himself on the third floor, then vanishing into the bowels of the reference room on the second floor, where he reached over behind a spine-worn Psycopathia Sexualis feeling in between the solid rows of old books on the top shelf. The library books he'd dropped were still there. He pulled them out.

These were the books that had been used as cross references in the report he'd had Doc Tulare lash together for him, but it was the sort of report a layman could research if he wanted to spend three or four hours in the dusty bookshelves. All the titles were appropriately dog-eared and he had a nice checkable bibliography. Unlike prints, which generally paid off only in the movies, the first step was still Alibi Ike. It helped if in backtracking your trail the other guy found you were otherwise occupied at the time of a crime, especially if you could arrange it so he thought it was HIS idea.

The beautiful thing about the multilayered library was all the nooks, crannies, spiraling stairs, alcoves, hidden recesses where you could sit quietly at an out-of-the-way desk. Eichord still loved the library just as he had as a kid. But he needed it another way this one time, and he had the books in his jacket and was out through the basement without being seen and on his way to Schumway's house.

By 1500 a rather ordinary-looking middle-aged man in dark, thrift-shop coveralls and workman's cap, carrying something, was climbing the hill in back of Alan Schumway's. He looked like a repairman of some kind with his toolbox, an ordinary-people guy walking down the street. Unexceptional.

It was the end of the line, at last. Had to be. And Eichord hoped it would be resolved now. Too many things could collapse for him to try to wrap this up with good, solid police work. Too many lives hung in the balance to play with it. The system could no longer be trusted, in this instance. A killer had proved himself, or rather they had proven THEMselves, to be too clever. Then there was the matter of the typewriter with the Hand of Christ. Pure Jell-O. The circuit attorney wouldn't even go through the motions. Lishness, for crissakes, he'd have a fucking FIELD DAY if this went in front of a jury.

These were the thoughts in his meat locker as he penetrated the residence yet a final time. (surreptitious entry—possible occupancy by armed suspect #11—quantico training program for major crimes task force agents.)

B & E dialogue: “What are you in?"

A: “Tool and die."

Q: “Oh, well, we all gotta go sometime."

(surreptitious entry—countersurveillance checklist) pins, hair, matchsticks, tape, doorwedges, sensors, sound wave generators, autographed picture of Sean Connery. Inside now and listening to the strange and quiet home again. There's no place like home.
GOT
to get my own key—eh?—he thinks, light in heart and pure in spirit.

1600. 1630. 1655. 1700. Will it be a big production? Scumwad will come in and Eichord will see him get up out of the wheelchair and cross the foyer to the elevator. Freeze, he imagines he'll say. Up with your hands, mother sticker, this is a fuck-up. 1705. 1710. Wet palms now. Upstairs and in the first bedroom to the left of the office with the hallway a clear shot in the reflection of a picture frame. He can move back an inch or two and he's out of the picture both ways. Waiting. 1711. 171130 171135 171136, when you start clockwatching you take some deep breaths and clear your mind. Change positions. Sit if you're standing. Stand if you're sitting. Don't get spooked. There's nothing quite like the sounds of a darkening house as you wait hidden in the gathering shadows. The house comes alive in a way you would never dream and you can begin to believe in all kinds of things like ghosts and poltergeists and spirits as the house begins to breathe around you. She takes on sex, like an old ship will, and she sighs, moans, stretches, cries out, creaking and coughing and snarling with all manner of noises real and imagined. Motors hum and joists contract with the pitch and yaw of her decks. She is coming alive in the darkness, and your skin chills as she whispers her warning.

1738 vehicle noise, exterior, wait, then sounds on eggshell gravel rolling crunching daddy coming home wheelchair on the ramp, key noises at door and a last deep, shaky breath and the palms are dry now like the throat and someone is in down there and then the elevator purrs as he comes for you now. The doors are very quiet, like the stroking of a blade against oiled whetstone only a light vip-vip you have to listen for, feather edge steel in warm oil noise, and then nothing. Long pause. No—nothing—dead
S I L E N C E—
Eichord is frozen in position. Wanting to tilt forward another two inches to see in the frame reflection and finally paper sounds the son of a gun was reading his mail and he loudly rolls by in the chair. He is not walking. He is N O T repeat NOT AMBULATORY he is a cripple in a wheelchair the man is in a fucking chair and then he speaks and his voice in the dead quiet house where Nicki and Alan lived is louder than a shotgun.

“Companeeeeeeeee. Oh, lucky me. It's Dickless Tracy again."

Eichord says nothing. Motionless.

“Come on, man. You are fucking
PATHETIC!
I mean, is this how you shot Nicki, you came in and waited for her to come back from getting groceries. You cocksucker."

“Talking to me?” Eichord said as he watched the man seated in the chair. He was not holding a weapon.

“Well, eat my grits and get the shits if it ain't my fav-o-rite flatfoot. Sher-luck Homo, of the Major Task Force."

“That's me. Just out of professional curiosity—how-djew make me?"

“Jeezus, fucking pathetic.” He was already rolling down the hall. “Come on, you might as well come in and have a buzz or whatever. Take the load off your brain. You do drink, don't you? I hear you almost qualify for silent-partner status down there at Jack Daniel's distillery—izzat true? Like the old demon rum, do you, Jackson?"

“I've tossed back some."

“Uh huh."

“So how did you know? I thought the door looked clean."

“It's that pathetic stuff you splash all over yourself, Dickless. What is that crap—Three Nights in a Garbage Can? WHEW! I just about died of cologne poisoning when I walked in the door.” He laughed loudly.

“I'm not wearing any cologne, Alan. Or should I say Arthur?"

“Hey, booby, you can say Myron Lipshitz if it'll get you off."

“You think you smell cologne on me? I'm serious."

“I'm Roebuck, how do you do?” He reached for a bottle and Eichord tensed a little. “I went to perfume U when I was in Paris. The Sorbonne it ain't, but you learn to identify about five hundred different fragrances by memorized olfactory response. Everything from essence of cat shit to the most expensive scents on earth. Eau d'Eichord is down there at the low end of the odor spectrum, Dickless."

“Is that Paris, TEXAS, you're talking about? Did you kill some woman there, too?"

“Killing women is what
you're
hung up on, Dickie bird. You murdered my lady, you slimy nothing no-dick shit-for-brains cop."

“Your LADY?” Eichord allowed himself a slight smile, keeping his voice as soft as he could. “You mean Nicki? I don't know anything about her suicide, except—wouldn't you agree he's better-off? Oh, sorry. I mean, I don't know anything about HIS suicide. Wouldn't you agree IT'S better off."

“Good try, asshole. You'd like to get me provoked. You want to blow me away too—right? No witnesses. Do you have MY suicide note all typed?"

“Let's see if I have all this right before I take you in, Arthur. You repeatedly rape your stepsister in the foster home. The rapes and abuse leave her insane.

“You're killing surrogate mommies. I guess you and your mommy have something going. But she catches you with Sis and beats you so badly you end up a cripple—in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. We cut to Nevada. You make enough money gambling to start your own business. You and your, uh, boyfriend move to Buckhead. You're in therapy. Your doctor convinces you that you suffered from conversion hysteria all these years—the only thing that kept you in this chair for twenty years is your own sick mind. You and your LADY start killing again. Eh?"