by Rex Miller
Buckhead
The woman was hardly recognizable. As a woman, that is. She was bruised playdough. A lumpy, bloody, badly formed and grossly misshapen caricature of a human being. The face distorted, cruelly out of sync, as if an uncoordinated child had taken clay and tried to approximate the shape of a human head. Her name appeared below her face and it said, simply, VICTIM.
“Another victim of violent crime,” a woman's professional voice spoke from the speakers, “and the men who did this never served a night in jail."
The unrecognizable face dissolved with the audience reaction and a poorly lit sound bite of what appeared to be a group of paramedics and police carrying something into a waiting ambulance. Freeze frame on a cluster of hands shoving the body bag in.
“Another gangbanger rape-murder in the ghetto. The victim was a thirteen-year-old girl."
The next footage was familiar to everyone within a hundred-mile radius of Buckhead who owned a television set: the steep hillside at Buckhead Park in the early dawn. The place where some boys passing by on their bicycles had spotted the body of Tina Hoyt. The shot was too far away to show anything, even though the crew had tried for bloodstains. The Hoyt woman had already been moved by the time the Channel 4 people came on the scene, unfortunately. But in some ways it was even spookier NOT to have the shot of the body being carried off.
“The grisly scene of the park in early morning. The place where children discovered a woman's body and it proved to be that of Buckhead political activist Tina Hoyt. Abducted, Murdered. Stabbed with an icepick ... and then raped."
A switcher, two women, one of whom was the director, and an engineer all looked up at the on-air monitor as the graphic came up. It said sexual Attacks Continue, and the words moved on a crawl as Ginger narrated the voiceover, “Sexual attacks continue. Following an ongoing investigation by Detectives Marv Peletier and T.J. Fay of the Sex-Crimes Section of the Buckhead Police Department."
“That's wrong,” somebody said as they watched the blow-up of the news clipping from the Gazette.
“Three additional felony charges including one count of rape, one count of felonious restraint, and one count of sodomy have been issued against Wade Weiss of South Buckhead. The new charges involve sexual assault against a twenty-two-year-old Madison-burg woman in the four hundred block of Tower Lane.
“Weiss had been arrested last month following the sexual assault of a woman and her infant daughter, who were forced behind a building in South Buckhead. Weiss had been charged with rape, molestation, sodomy, and kidnapping in connection with the original case, but due to improper arrest procedures was able to obtain release by posting a reduced bail, police said."
The small studio audience made noises of disapproval.
“Wait. Wait. Listen."
The people in the booth watched the screen wipe the graphic bringing Ginger Stone's face to the screen in a medium close-up.
“Move in, two,” the woman's voice said into the floor headsets. “And three,” the switcher beside her.
“We've got lots more.” Ginger Stone said, continuing to read as the next graphic filled the screen.
“Vaughan Andrews, thirty-one, told investigating police that he tried to kill his wife, LaDonna, by putting infected specimens of diseased cadavers into her food and drink. Andrews admitted he had been attempting to murder his wife for the last six months, during which time he obtained serum with hepatitis virus, AIDS virus, and other toxic substances, which he used to infect his wife. Mrs. Andrews was subsequently hospitalized with a severe case of serum hepatitis, authorities said. Vaughan Andrews told investigators he had heard about copy-cat killers and it had given him the idea of using specimens he stole from the Buckhead Morgue, where he had been employed since last February. Andrews admitted that he was attempting to copy serial killer Donald Harvey, who was convicted of killing twenty-five persons in Ohio."
Murmurs from the studio audience.
“Well, we have one of the leading experts on serial murder in the United States right here in Buckhead, the famous Jack Eichord of Buckhead Station, who single-handedly solved the Dr. Demented, Lonely Hearts, and Gravedigger cases, among other infamous crimes. And perhaps he'll be able to help us understand this rash of violent crime,” Ginger said, shaking her head.
“Look at this,” she continued as the screen flashed a graphic. “Here's a nice little item for every Buckhead motorist. If somebody tailgates you or cuts in front of you, or you just don't like the color of their car, and you're driving down the boulevard, you just push this and strafe their car with simulated machine-gun fire.” Laughter. “Nice healthy way to get rid of those mounting hostilities."
The audience hooted as the noise of the toy machine gun punctuated her comments.
For more times than he cared to admit to himself Jack Eichord was being manipulated. By his fearless leader at Buckhead Station, that bastion of law enforcement the captain, by MacTuff and all who sailed aboard, and by the fickle middle finger of unruly fate.
Channel 4 and the taping of one of “those” talk shows. Ginger Stone all coiffed and propped and prompted, ready for the winking red-eyed monster that bestows fame, fortune, or any number of negatives from calumniation to sudden death. Fucking TV. McLuhan's cool medium of the eyeball massage. The tribal communicator.
Somebody high up in the task force had fixed it in their head that Jack was a perfect buffer between The Press and the blues. On too many occasions he'd found himself gliding across the screen in his television tapdance. A circumlocution of bullshit designed to keep the lid on potentially volatile situations.
But the lid was off. Violence was a bloodthreat that had finally pounded on the door of even the swankiest suburban homes. People were scared. Gangs from the eastern and western inner cities, fueled by dope and hyped by the promise of virgin sales markets, had pushed inward toward the soft American heartland and its vulnerable underbelly.
Somebody, to top it all off, had abducted the famous feminist Tina Hoyt right out in front of Buckhead Christian. Taken her out to the park, maybe played with her awhile, then shoved an icepick through her ear and into her brain. He'd then submitted her lifeless body to one final degradation, according to the sperm traces in the victim's mouth.
“We had to promise Mr. Eichord we wouldn't ask about any ongoing investigations,” the attractive redhead said with a flashing smile, “so we can't ask you about progress in the so-called Icepick Murder can we?"
“'Fraid not,” he said, his mouth tightening.
“That's a shame, you know. Because the subject is the one thing that's on everybody's mind right now, and all of us feel so helpless in the grip of the violence we see around us more and more. I mean, we can't understand how a respected civic leader like Tina Hoyt could be abducted right there in front of a crowded CHURCH and the police not have a single clue.” He didn't respond. “I mean that's what we're all thinking. We don't feel safe anymore."
The small studio audience clapped loudly.
“I can sympathize with that feeling."
“You can sympathize with it, you can empathize with it, you just can't do much about it. Can't you even comment to say whether or not you've made any progress in the Hoyt slaying, or if you even have a suspect.” After a moment's pause an abrasive voice spoke off to Eichord's left.
“Let ME answer that one for you.” It was Councilman Bissell, the bitter enemy of the Police Department. “I think we know how much progress the cops are making in the Hoyt killing. And for that matter, how much progress they're making in stopping the flood of violent crime. ZERO is the answer. They've failed miserably in their sworn duty to serve and protect the honest, law-abiding public paying their salaries. The man on the street is no longer safe from the animals."
More applause.
“Jack ... is what Mr. Bissell says true? Are we no longer safe?"
“How do I answer that? Are we safe? The police do everything humanly possible to protect law-abiding citizens. But we aren'
t a fascist state. We cannot arrest a person whom we suspect MIGHT commit a crime. We can only be a presence until a crime is committed, and because that's the nature of our function in society, when crime increases the ball gets dropped in our court. Councilman Bissell's comment that we have failed in our responsibility to the public is inaccurate."
“Isn't it true that we have more violent crime now than at any point in our history, even with respect to the population explosion?"
“In some geographical communities there is a higher crime incidence, in some it's lower. Nobody denies there is violent crime."
“But are the measures the police take sufficient to match the higher crime rate? It would seem not."
“We sometimes succeed. We sometimes fail. Overall the police do a good job, in my opinion. Everything's relative. We're in a society where a few underpaid, overworked law-enforcement officers stand between the good guys and the bad guys. As the population increases and the criminal population increases with it, the job becomes more difficult to do. Sometimes the law itself is on the side of the criminal."
“How do you mean?"
“Violent, repetitive offenders need to be imprisoned. Often that doesn't happen. Judges are too lenient. Turnstile justice and plea-bargaining and overcrowded prisons all contribute to this atmosphere. It's an atmosphere that lets dangerous offenders back on the street too soon, it contributes to premature paroles, it contributes to suspended sentences that should never—"
“The prison system is worthless as it is right now.” Bissell again. “Do you know my wife and I can go stay at the fanciest hotel in Buckhead and order three meals a day from room service and we STILL can't run up a bill of eighty-four dollars a day, which is what it costs to house one of these felons. See, that's the cops’ answer to crime. Build more prisons. Like the taxpayer has a bottomless pocketbook. Prisons are no answer."
Eichord just looked at him. He realized the camera was back on him, so he spoke.
“It's true enough that prisons aren't an answer in themselves, but what are the alternatives? Work programs? Mental institutions? Psychiatric counseling? Violent, dangerous offenders must be put in prisons. We need more prison space to house these criminals. Right now we have severe problems in allocating the finite source of prison space. Only so many beds, so many cells. When we—the penal system—are forced to make decisions about confinement based on available space we're in a very dangerous area. Antisocial individuals are going to be back out on the street in that sort of environment. So the reality is, we need more places to lock offenders up. But nobody wants to build more prisons and nobody wants to spend more tax dollars on them, yet everybody wants a better criminal justice system, better police protection, and a better correctional system. But we want it without a price tag. It's sort of like all of us here in this studio, Ginger.” He looked at the interviewer.
“How so?” she said.
“Well, we all want to go to heaven, right? But nobody wants to die."
Buckhead Station
“You need to talk to the special counsel over there,” Eichord told the person on the other end of the telephone. “Huh-uh. No, I don't,” he said, after a pause. “Okay. Will do. Talk to you later.” And he hung up just in time, just as the booming tones of fat Dana rang down the stairs.
“Fuckin’ dumb shit,” Monroe Tucker muttered to no one in particular at the sound of his partner's loud voice.
“They were outta that other crap so I got a bear-claw.” He started passing foul coffee around. The coffee from across the street was hideous, and the cardboard cups made it worse, but it was still better than the poisonous slime they brewed in the squad bay.
“What's that 202 number I gave ya yesterday?” Eichord said to Dana's back as he handed out goodies from the sack.
“Black through and through,” he told his partner as he handed him the cardboard cup.
Tucker nodded and said, “So is this,” cupping his load.
“Dana?"
“Say what?"
“Gimme the Privacy Act Unit number already."
“What do I look like, a fuckin phone book?"
“You look like the Macy's Dumbo float but gimme the 202 number I gave you yesterday."
“Okay. Hang on.” He ignored Eichord and sat down at his desk with a thump, his broken chair tilting dangerously to one side as he unwrapped food.
“Sometime this year if possible,” Eichord said patiently.
“Shit, gimme a fuckin second,” he whined, stuffing a huge sugary donut into his face.
Buckhead Station was a workplace in transit. It seemed to be going downhill, like The Job itself, and Eichord felt powerless to do anything about it. Chink and Chunk, James Lee and Dana Tuny, had been partners for about a century, Eichord's friends, guys who'd stayed with him through his booze years, and both Dana and Jack had been devastated by Jimmie's death.
Fat Dana had become absurdly protective of Jack in the ensuing months. Additionally, his rotund pal seemed to feel that he had failed his buddies in some way. His detective work grew sloppy, and when he'd been assigned a new partner, he had started doing everything he could to get kicked off the force. Eichord had traveled that road, too.
Monroe Tucker, a massive, two-fisted black man, had not been the ideal choice for a partner to Dana. The captain couldn't seem to grasp the fact that just because Tuny had partnered with an Oriental for years did not make him an expert in biracial relations. In fact, both Tucker and Tuny were bigoted, hard-nosed guys used to doing it their own way. The partnership had been a volatile one, but at least Dana was more or less back to his old self, and doing some semblance of competent police work. Yet the overall efficiency of the unit had continued to decline.
“Unnnnng,” Dana said through a mouthful of food, handing a sticky piece of paper to Eichord.
“Thanks,” Jack said, making a show of holding it by the tip and shaking off the residue.
“I'm the only one in this whole fuckin place knows what he's about,” Dana said, taking a noisy sip of coffee and wiping at the front of his shirt absent-mindedly, like somebody who was used to having crumbs all over him.
Eichord remembered the time it had all come to a head. The first homicide they'd been on after Tucker had been transferred from Metro. Woman and a dude both dead of gunshot wounds. One of the scenes that was so unreal everybody figures it has to be apocraphyl when the coppers trade stories later.
Jack could see the building as if it was yesterday, a run-down duplex with the orange tape around the exterior. A crime scene sealed off by the upside-down legend DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. And if you kind of squinted and let it run together it said CROSS POLICE LINE DONUT. And he can see them all going in and the blood and the bodies there.
Each man was a different-style detective. Eichord into vibes, the feel of a scene, the aura. Dana, when he wasn't being sloppy, was a plodder. Meticulous. A detail man as good as any evidence tech. Tucker was a steamroller type. His method of getting from point A to point B was to run full speed until he crashed into a wall.
“In here,” Dana had said, and Eichord had gone in the room where the man was.
“That the shotgun?” It was rhetorical. It looked like a murder/suicide. One of the bad domestic things you'll catch when the moon is right. For the first few minutes everybody was conducting the business at hand. So far so good. It appeared the man had killed his woman, blowing her apart with three or maybe four up-close blasts. You had to be sorely steamed at somebody to keep shooting them like that. Racking those spent shells out and letting another hot load of lead pellets perforate what had been a human being. Then, with the last shell up the spout and ready, the man had apparently killed himself.
“He did her in there. Then he comes in and sits down on the bed and gets all comfy and puts the gun up to the side of his head and pulls the trigger. BANG!"
“Yeah."
“And he's all over the walls."
The gun had pulled slightly and the scatter of s
hot had completely blown off the front of the man's face. Until you've seen a person with their face shot off, you can't imagine what it looks like.
They were in the bedroom, with Tucker and Brown in the room with the woman and the other cops, and Tuny whispered to Eichord, “Look,” in his most frightening, hushed tone of voice.
And Jack came over and saw what it was. It was plastered to the mirror like it had been glued there. The man's mustache, complete with a flap from his upper lip, perfectly peeled as if it had been shaved off with a knife, and Tuny got behind Jack and moved him over slightly and it looked like Jack was wearing the man's mustache in the mirror, and in spite of all the blood and the smell and the awful horror, the two of them giggled and it was all Dana needed to do something that you just didn't do on murder investigation—you don't touch the evidence.
He reached over and peeled the mustache and lip off the mirror and held it at his side, an evil glare in his eyes.
“Hey, Mon-ROOOOOE, come ‘ere, man."
“—tryin’ to burn some coffee grounds but we couldn't find any, so we found some cloves out there in the kitchen and put ‘em in a pan—"
“Somethin’ I, er, uh, want to ax you,” Dana said, “Monnnnn—roooe,” exaggerating the accent. “How come you don't have no mustache?"
“Say WHAT?"
“You know, all you black dudes got them little pussy ticklers. Little pencil-line jobs. How come you don't have one?"
“Bullshit,” he said, turning to Eichord, “this fat boy here gone gunny-fruit or what?” One thing Monroe Tucker didn't like was fat, white, bigoted, honkie chuck wise-ass jokers. And one thing he especially didn't like was practical jokes played on him. Which is when and why and how and who and what and where fat Dana slapped something up on the black cop's face saying, “Well, NOW you got one. Check it out,” holding the cop's arms as he spun him toward the blood-flecked mirror so that he could see himself wearing the man's mustache, surgically removed by double-O buck, complete with lip remnant, and Eichord could still hear his howl of rage, his scream of grossed-out horror, his primal yell of shock and anger, and his frantic slapping at himself, and then his attack, which nearly put Dana in the hospital, Eichord pulling them apart, gentling Tucker down, all the while laughing to himself at the unbelievable madness of the work he did.