“Because I was the one covered your trial. And I told the truth about you.”
“That’s your job. Can’t fault a woman for doing her job.”
She flopped back in her rolling chair and rubbed long fingers across her face. “My job,” she said. “Oh, Christ Almighty. Fuck my job. I wish you
would
kill me.”
She was about forty years old, and you could see that, once upon a time, she was quite pretty. Her eyes were Alaskan Husky blue, and the lines on her face formed a perfect frowning mask, like the one you see in posters for drama clubs.
“Maybe someday,” he said. “But today, I need your help.”
She said, “You need my help, and yet you won’t do me a simple favor and put a bullet in my head? Come on, Crowe. It’s what you do, right? What do I have to do to piss you off enough to kill me?”
She was joking, but there was a very real despair under her words. Lori Cole didn’t really want him to kill her, but if he
did
, she wouldn’t have minded too much.
“I want some background on a murder victim from two years ago.”
She said, “Patricia Welling?”
“How did you know that?”
She said, “Peter Murke is sprung while in transit to Jackson. Marco Vitower hates Murke’s guts. You, who used to run in the same circles as Vitower, show up out of nowhere. The only victim Murke was charged with killing was Patricia Welling. It doesn’t take a genius.”
Around them, the newsroom whirled and shook. Anyplace else, his bandaged face would’ve drawn attention, but here no one seemed to be interested. They had their own, more pressing agendas.
It was a large office, almost the entire third floor of the building, but the crush of mad activity and the desks all lined up with only narrow gaps between them made it feel close and claustrophobic. At the desk closest to Cole’s, a hard-looking girl was screaming at someone on the phone. A few desks away, a younger reporter with thinning hair and eyes lined with shadows had a phone pressed against his ear, nodding and saying, “Right, right, right” over and over again while jotting notes. The fluorescent lights flickered irritably.
The whole place was a seething, insane cauldron of noise and activity, and Crowe was already feeling edgy. Noise. He really can’t stand it.
But he smiled at Cole and said, “You never lose those reporter’s instincts.”
“I reckon not,” she said. “Also, the fact that you look like Claude Rains in
The Invisible Man
.”
“If he was invisible, how do you know what he looked like?”
She decided, wisely, that the question wasn’t worth answering, and said, “So what happened on that day? You wanna give me the scoop on Murke’s escape? Whatever it was, it looks like you didn’t exactly come out of it unscathed.”
“What happened to me doesn’t have anything to do with Peter Murke.”
“Yeah, okay. That’s what I figured. You just wanna know about Patricia Welling because you’re a concerned citizen.”
“Snag any files you have on the girl, and I’ll feed you some info on Vitower.”
She sighed. “Ah, Crowe. Honestly, man, I just don’t give a shit about Vitower anymore. This city has gone completely to Hell, and good goddamn riddance. Besides, you don’t need any files. I’ve got it all right
here
.” She tapped her temple with a long forefinger. “I’m a walking encyclopedia of all the nastiest information this city can offer.”
“Hell of a burden.”
“Tell you what. Get me the hell out of this office, buy me a drink, and I’ll spill my guts.”
Beale Street was only a couple of blocks from the
Clarion
offices. Natives didn’t often hit Beale—it was really a tourist thing—but it was off-season, the weather was bitterly cold, and some of the bars and clubs had half-price drinks mid-day.
They sat by the window in a joint where the walls were covered with glossies of famous and semi-famous blues musicians and rockabilly cats. A genuine Wurlitzer jukebox, retro-fitted for compact discs, grinded out re-mastered blues classics. A beat-up Stratocaster hung precariously over their table.
Cole was already on her second whiskey and soda. She said, “I picked the wrong job. All those years ago, thinking I wanted to be a goddamn journalist. A goddamn crusading reporter. Jesus. If I could go back and talk to that little bitch I used to be, oh, the things I’d say…”
“Naïve youth,” Crowe said.
“Amen to that. Say, you don’t think I could maybe get a job doing what you do, do you? That sounds like just the ticket. A hired killer.”
He sipped his vodka gimlet without enthusiasm. It was a bit early in the day for him. “I’m not a hired killer, Lori.”
“Oh, right. You’re a handyman, aren’t you? Not a killer. A killer just
kills
, but a handyman, well… a handyman does what needs to be
done
. Still… set your own hours, no boss breathing down your neck all the time. Sounds ideal.”
“It takes years of training, and the certification’s a bitch.”
She laughed. “I always did like you, Crowe. You’re not very smart, but you’re clever enough to know that if you don’t talk much people will think you’re a genius.”
“Tell me about Patricia Welling.”
She let out a deep breath, glanced around the bar warily. She said, “Thirteen years old. Family has a home in Bartlett, but since Patricia was killed they spend most of their time away from it, out in some place they have on the other side of the state. The papers never mentioned this, but she wasn’t really the sweet little angel she seemed to be. Kind of a wild kid. At that tender age she was already into drugs—nothing major, weed, maybe a little pill-popping—and was in and out of trouble in school. She ran away, had been missing from home for almost a week before they found her body in a vacant lot in the Cooper-Young area.
“I was one of the first reporters on the scene, lucky bitch that I am. And let me tell you, I’ve seen some screwed-up shit in my life, but nothing really compared to the way that girl was butchered. Equal parts Black Dahlia Murderer and Jack the Ripper. It’s hard to explain, but my first impression when I saw the scene… my first thought was
religious
. That there was something religious about it.”
Crowe frowned, and she looked embarrassed. Gulping down her drink, she motioned to the bar girl for another, and without looking at him she said, “I mean, her organs. They weren’t, you know, where they were supposed to be, right? But the way they were laid out, all around her? It almost looked as if the killer had been sort of
reverent
about it, if you know what I mean.”
“No, Cole, I don’t.”
She scowled. “Oh, fuck you then.”
“Sounds like that old sensational journalist chromosome of yours.”
“I don’t have a journalist chromosome, sensational or otherwise. I’m just telling you the impression I got. And if nothing else, my impressions are always good.”
“Okay. So her body was found. How did they link Murke to it?”
“The usual stuff. Just like with Jezzie Vitower, someone saw him hanging around the area shortly before the body was discovered. Mostly, though, it was that new-fangled DNA evidence what you hear tell about.” She said that last bit with an exaggerated hick accent; the booze was going to her head a little. Like a lot of people, Cole couldn’t talk about ugly things without adopting a distantly humorous tone. If the crime had been much worse, she would’ve turned into a stand-up comedian. “Sweet little Patricia managed to claw him along his neck at some point, and they got some of him from under her fingernails. Perfect match. It’s just too bad, I reckon, they weren’t able to link him to any of the other victims.”
Crowe said, “It probably wouldn’t have made much difference.”
She shrugged. “Probably not. But maybe if Jezzie Vitower had some… I don’t know… personal justice? Maybe old Marco wouldn’t have such a mad-on and you wouldn’t be here talking to me right now.”
“Maybe.”
The bar girl brought her third drink. She looked at Crowe’s, still barely touched, and sashayed away back to the bar, where a line of young German tourists with rockabilly pompadours drank beer that must’ve tasted like watered-down piss to them.
Crowe said, “Was there anything at all that might have connected Murke to her? Or was it totally random?”
“Murke’s a serial killer, Crowe. By their very nature, they choose their victims for a reason. You know that, right? I mean, there’s often something the victims will have in common, like, I don’t know, blonde hair, or thin faces, or one leg shorter than the other, whatever. Like that. But not always. With Murke, none of his victims seemed to have anything at all in common. And they almost certainly weren’t affiliated with him at all.”
“Almost certainly?”
“I don’t like speaking in absolutes, sue me. Unofficially, the cops have lain something like sixteen murders at Murke’s doorstep, that’s including Jezzie Vitower. See, everyone knows he did them, and the thing is, the only thing the victims have in common is that they’re women.”
“Well, what about the families of the victims? Anything there?”
Cole drank and said, “What do you think, Crowe? Look at the victims you’re familiar with. One of them the wife of our fair city’s most notorious gangster, the other the daughter of a modestly prosperous engineer, church alderman, and All-American.”
“I don’t know anything about Patricia Welling’s family.”
“Nothing to know. The Wellings are about as ‘average citizen’ as you can get without morphing into parody. Active in their little community in Bartlett, well-respected as the guy in the Kinks song. It was little Patricia that was trouble, like I said. No one wants to talk about it now, but she was sort of an embarrassment. Running the streets, taking off from home, doing drugs. My colleagues in the media want to whitewash all that now—and I don’t blame them, mind you—but before she died Patricia caused nothing but trouble for her parents.”
Crowe drummed his fingers on the scarred wooden table and took a drink. Cole watched him, apparently amused at his efforts. Chuckling, she said, “Don’t tell me, Crowe. Dead end already? What is it you’re trying to do anyway? Track down Peter Murke and bring him back to justice?”
“Where was Murke living when they arrested him?”
“Oh, great idea. What you should do, Crowe, is go over to Murke’s house and look around. You know, for clues. Because you’re certain to find something the cops missed.”
“Just tell me, Cole.”
She told him—an address off Martin Luther King.
“Good luck with that, Crowe,” she said when he started to slide out of the booth. “And thanks for the drinks.”
He nodded, tossed a few bills on the table. She watched him with bemused interest as he buttoned up his coat. When he was about to walk away, she said, “Say. There is one thing you may want to look into. One thing that’s kinda weird. I mean, it probably won’t amount to anything, and I’m sure the cops have already examined it, but it’s something.”
He looked at her, waiting, and she said, “The Wellings are members of an exclusive little church social thing. In fact, Fletcher Welling, Patricia’s pa, is sort of the… chairman, I reckon. The Society of Christ the Fisher, they call themselves, you know, after the idea of Jesus as a fisher of men’s souls? Sort of a Christian charity group, except very limited membership. Really secretive about their membership roster, but always doing benign things like raising money for kids with cancer or organizing canned food drives or care packages for our boys in Iraq. That sort of thing.”
“A charitable Christian group, Cole? Thanks for the hot lead.”
She laughed. “That’s the kind of folks you’re dealing with, Crowe. Not my fault. When Patricia got killed, I was gonna scoot down to Holly Springs and talk to this writer guy I know, sort of an American theological historian, name of Arley Hampton. When I say he’s a theological historian, what I really mean is that he’s a nutcase. He knows his stuff, but he’s got this idea that the history of the world, the history of religious movements especially, is the history of a vast conspiracy to… I don’t know, shackle humanity or something. Subjugate us all. You know the type, right?”
“Yeah, and I know who he is. He wrote a novel, didn’t he? Back in the early ‘70’s, I think.”
“Late ‘60’s.
All the Flesh
, it was called. Real cult item. One print run, goes for a fortune on EBay. You read it?”
“No, but I heard of him.”
“Any case, he said he would give me the lowdown on the Society. Had plans to visit him again, but my editor put the ki-bosh on it.”
“Why?”
“Said I was wasting the paper’s money. Said the story didn’t have shit to do with some innocuous little church group. But I don’t know. I still think, if I’d been able to talk to him, he might’ve given me some insight into things.”
“Maybe you should’ve done it anyway, on your own dime.”
“To hell with that. I’m not that curious about anything anymore. I was relieved, if you want to know the truth.” She looked at the table and drank, and he knew she was lying. She was still curious, but she didn’t want to be.
She told him where he could find Arley Hampton, if he wanted to, and he left her there with her third drink, and headed back out into the icy cold afternoon.
At a pay phone at the corner of Beale and Second Street, he called Vitower’s home number. His man answered, and kept Crowe waiting with the bitter cold seeping into his bones while he went and fetched. The cold didn’t do anything to help Crowe’s wounds. His shoulder was getting stiff and painful again, and the hole in his back screamed at him. He put the receiver down long enough to toss a couple of pain pills down his throat, and picked it up again just in time to hear Vitower say, “Crowe? That you? Where the fuck are you, you piece of shit?”
Crowe told him he was on the job, and the voice that came back over the phone lines sounded like a vengeful ghost. “Good,” he said. “We’ll get that bastard. You need anything? Money?”
“I’m set on funds, but I need a car. This taxi-cab shit is getting old.”
“Where you at?”
He told him, and Vitower said, “Right. Hang tight there, and I’ll have someone bring some wheels around. What else?”