“Cops are cynical,” Mather said to Shustak. “And right now we’re dealing with a guy who is just too smart for us.”
Too smart for you, maybe, partner mine, Conover was thinking, wondering what Reve’s titties looked like under that t-shirt.
The newswoman had dazzling blond hair and cheekbones that would make both men and woman cringe.
Warmed by a tan parka of which the collar fur blended in with just the slightest different hue with her hair, she thus had created an image of self-proclaimed lioness that had called a local Chicago network her territory for five years running.
She didn’t need to rehearse her lines. For she has said basically the same things, uttered the same sad lines, for the last five Christmas broadcasts. It was all filler shit, anyways. Good will toward fellow man and the more you stir it the better it sticks to the sides of the bowl. Eat, Drink, and Be Merry stories instead of the usual Beat, Drink, and Eat Mary stories. The newswoman thought of the latter as all the times she’s had to play sympathetic woman reporter talking to the rape victim at County, mulling over the victims of a rapid transit killer, etc., etc., and don’t it make the world go ‘round?
At least the Painkiller wasn’t genderizing his victims. Now that’s a detached, indifferent way of saying “killing women.” The newswoman closed her blue contact-lensed eyes and sang softly to relieve the tension. Hushabye, hushabye, little darling don’t you cry...
* * *
What about decoys?” Shustak had asked, to which Conover replied, “Like in cops?” As if the thought was unheard of in this, day and age.
“Or escorts, even,” Reve added. “Like they have for the nursing students at Rush-Presbyterian.”
Oh, I’d like to escort your mouth to my cock, Conover thought lewdly. Mather felt uncomfortable. He cleared his throat.
“The detectives at Homicide are knocking their, well, knocking their butts off on this. But it’s not Police Story, guys. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s not a cop show.”
As if to prove the point, at that moment, the news crew outside was getting word that the, Painkiller may have struck again in the West Loop.
* * *
“This is Clarice Grimaldi for WHHL News Radio 69. The so-called Painkiller may have found another victim...”
“…here on South Wacker Driver, where...”
“…near the Civic Opera House, where an empty wheelchair...”
The city was eating it up on a normally slow news day.
* * *
“...Melinda Chancelade at Area Four Homicide, speaking with Detective Lt. Jackson Daves of the Violent Crimes Unit.” The dark-haired woman thrust the microphone into Daves’s face, the big ball of foam with the news station’s emblem all but eclipsing the detective’s facial expressions.
“First off,” Daves rubbed his eyes. “Miss. I don’t think it’s right to jump to conclusions on this. What we have here is an empty wheelchair—”
“On Christmas Night.”
“Yes, on Christmas night That’s right. And that’s all we have.”
“No body, just like the others.” The woman, pressing on.
“Well, yes.” Daves felt like he was being interrogated by Joe Friday on Dragnet, although, today, Jack Webb’s character would be saying “Just the facts, ma’am.”
“Actually,” the newswoman seized the chance, “the Painkiller has always left a gruesome reminder, a piece of his victim, behind...” Daves scratched at his neck like a man in a commercial for throat lozenges. “So do you think that the Painkiller will strike again before the New Year?” Daves rolled his eyes heavenward and the station had to edit out his response.
* * *
Mather picked up the call on his radio. Daves wanted to get together with each cop that caught a murder, and most were on duty that night.
“Wants some brainstorming on this,” Mather told them. “The Loot’s getting heat from higher up.”
“Finally,” Reve said. “No disrespect.”
“None taken, babe.” Conover answered for his partner.
The four of them had walked over to the squad near the Tooker Place address, Shustak explaining that the cul-de-sac was named after Dr. Robert Newton Tooker, a founder of the Chicago Homeopathic Medial College and a professor of childhood diseases, when the blond newswoman walked up. Shustak had already put on his wrist braces and ski mask with the American flag stitched on the back.
Without benefit of her mike, she still made with a fighter’s stance, like she was poised to thrust an innuendo or forgotten memo into an indicted alderman’s face, and she spoke directly to Shustak.
The two cops left it alone, getting into their squad got them out of any further discussion.
“Crippled and insane, I am the American Dream,” Shustak said. “We are now on the trail of the city’s worst killer since the dreaded Eighth Street Man.”
“Riiiight.” She waited for any other response, preferably one from the cops. Then she shrugged it off and went back to her crew. Shustak got in the back next to Reve.
“Got rid of that nosy bitch,” Conover said, glad that Mather had let him bring the two in the back along. Man, he could look at her crotch all night long.
Shustak was looking out the window, down Tooker Place. A man fumbling with the door latch in a basement apartment. Familiar, in a hulking way.
The man turned away from the door, then turned back. Maybe he had seen the squad.
In the moment after he again turned away from the door, Frank Haid’s eyes met Evan Shustak’s. It may be that they recognized one another.
Frank Haid thought it best, as well as polite, to eat his Christmas dinner with the rotting corpse in Father’s bedroom.
“I really don’t, like it when you call me Madsen,” he said, poking at his dinner plate. “That was my mother’s maiden name. My name is Haid.”
He shovelled a forkful of hamburger into his mouth. Hunt’s catsup dripped from one tine as he removed the fork, still talking while he chewed.
“Father?” Haid wished that he could look into... look Vince Janssen straight in the eye. This, of course, was now an impossibility. “You know the boy who lives in that big townhouse, the crippled boy? Well, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that his mother is going to be out partying on New Year’s Eve!”
Haid was talking about Devin Verbeerst who suffered from Lesch-Nyhan. The twenty-year old shared an apartment on Elm Street with his mother, who worked one block over as a waitress on Rush Street.
“I know my mother used to abandon me, as well. Damn it, I know she was your sister.” He felt like flinging the fork at the torso. “But you’ve called her ‘tramp’ your share of times, Father. How many slits have you called ‘cunt’?”
The room was dimly lit: candles in hues of pale blue and baby-puke yellow played with the shadows of silver crucifixes on the oaken dresser, and on the wall with peeling wallpaper in an obsolete design from an obsolete decade.
Shadows teased at the silverfish and other things that crawled over the nearly-headless body of Vince Janssen. Father.
The way it happened, back in September, the incident involving the decapitation which left Uncle Vince’s chin jutting out like Kirk Douglas’s and gore dropping down over his lower lip like evil clown makeup: Janssen had been drunk to the gills, “feeling his Cheerio’s,” sitting there in his chair in the promise of evening. His rheumy eyes vaguely comprehending the Cubs losing to the phillies, cheering anything at all, even a commercial for kitchen cleanser, with the stumps of his legs.
Because his hands were wrapped tight around the bottle.
Contrary to Haid’s recurring dream, Vince Janssen had been discharged from the hospital minus his legs. The limbs were amputated from gangrene. More than one doctor over the years had said that the booze would kill him.
That had been in June. In July, he had fallen out of his Maxwell Street wheelchair and his right ear went through the grate of a floor fan. The beige frame of the fan still bore some of the dried blood spatters.
In September, that blood was the same color as the leaves outside. The two of them had been talking all that afternoon. Janssen might have been bending over with the dry heaves, or maybe just to let the sweat tall away from his, face. With Frank facing him, close enough to be touched, what happened next was Vince Janssen’s head first fell against Haid’s chest at nipple level, rippling his Ocean Pacific shirt, and then the head itself rippled as it fell into Haid’s chest.
Staring down without comprehension, a strange memory of firemen and girls with smiling eyelids wavered in his distant past. Haid heard his father gurgle something in those last seconds, but he would never sure what it had been his Father was trying to say.
Something cold against Haid’s bare skin, beneath his cream-colored tee. With slow realization Haid understood it to be Father’s lower lip brushing against his nearly hairless chest.
In those first days, with summer waning, Janssen’s consciousness slowly regained its voice. He knew that Frank would do anything to please Father.
In November, Frank Haid became a savior. To please Him.
* * *
Now, with Christmas dinner over, he led Father, and all the souls within him as well, in prayer. The psalm he had chosen to recite—from a new book, he didn’t know where he had lost the old one—was one of Compline, the last of the seven canonical hours.
The last prayer of the night, to be recited, after sunset. It should have been read on a Thursday, but you had to give him credit for trying, you really did.
He spoke to the empty room. Perhaps the silverfish breeding in the cavity of Janssen’s jawbone paused to listen. All God’s creatures, great and small.
PAST MERCIES INSPIRE HOPE FOR THE FUTURE.
Haid cleared his throat, the sound that of the rattling little ball inside a can of spray paint. This part always made him nervous.
Let the adversaries of my life be confounded and fail;
let them be covered with, confusion and shame who seek my ruin.
But I will always hope and
daily contribute to all thy praise.
My mouth shall tell of thy
justice, of thy help all the day
long: for l know not their number.
Haid paused then to admire with childlike wonder an illustration of Christ strumming a lyre. Maggots climbed over each other inside Father’s cheek.
I will tell them of thy might of
God, O Lord,
I will proclaim thy justice,
thine alone.
O GOD, forsake me not...
Thou hast laid many grievous trials
upon me: thou will restore me again and raise me from the depths of the earth... mylipsshallrejoice…my tongueshallspeakofjustice
alldaylonnnnnrtnnng,gggggg…
The words blended together at the end, melding into the only true meaning that they could possibly have, and Haid held that last syllable until it was no more than a humming in his nose.
He looked up at one of the crucifixes before speaking again. The silver cross was situated just above Father’s bottle of Glover’s hair tonic.
Everything he had said made sense, as if the apostles or’ whoever had written the Bible expressly for him. He imagined his palms bleeding between the lines of the psalm book. Written for him.
He finished with the only Kyrie Eleison he was ever able to memorize, “Glory be to The Father, and To The Son, and To The Holy Ghost.”
Haid crossed himself as the maggots made rustling sounds.
“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”
* * *
And now the hardest part.
Haid moved forward, reaching for the ruins of the corpse before him. He had long ago gotten used to the stench. The lower teeth were still intact, the lower lip withered.
Something scuttled away from Haid’s line of vision.
As he had done before, he peeled a thin rind of grayish skin from the lower portion of Father’s right cheek.
Placed it on his tongue and again gave the sign of the cross. Within him, he heard the words:
This is my body, given up for you.
Reve Towne was familiar with brainstorming from her days at the University of Illinois’s Polk Street campus, sitting in a semicircle with Professor Simmons tossing out a verb—usually to the blue-lipped Colleen Kimetyk, who he had a crush on—and from there a noun and from such things the great stories from the class of Fiction Workshop 102 were born.
Evan Shustak was familiar with his comic heroes’ monthly adventures, of Half-Century Man and Vestal Virgin sitting high in a Power City townhouse, discussing with Rodeo Clown and Chickweed the best way to confront the Original Sinner.
Brainstorming was something the Violent Crimes Unit did on those occasions when all sense had left the city.
Mather and Conover pulled into the deserted lot behind United of America on Haddock Place. There were two beat cars from the First that had made it there ahead of them, and nearby, Detective Remy Petitt’s ‘71 Dodge Polara. They met in Petitt’s and Daves’s favorite hangout, Loudon’s Dog Days, which was flush against Nolan Void’s.