by Rex Miller
“Will you give me a goddamn break for five fucking seconds?” the other whore said, her hand over the phone mouthpiece. “Look for it yourself, you're in such a hurry."
“Eyeglasses case, wallet, pen, notebook, lipstick, knife, Jesus Aitch! Hair spray, compact, Esgic, deodorant tampons for a sweet-smelling pussy, powder blush, makeup bag, more lipstick, what a fuckin’ RAT'S NEST.” The whore named Jinx slammed the door—that is, she reached for the handle to slam the door but there wasn't any handle because there wasn't any door.
“This is Jinx.” She smiled into the phone. “Hidee. Any calls?” She waited. “Okay.” She said over her shoulder, “Brandi! Bring me my purse. Come on. Hurry.” The whore with the crooked fangs got up on her high-heeled boots and clacked over with the outstretched purse. The woman on the phone rummaged for her datebook. “Did you take my pen ou—"
She saw the pen. “Oh.” She handed the purse back. “Go ahead,” she said, speaking into the phone.
“Breath mints, Trojans, coin purse, rain scarf, hand lotion, gum, keys, a fucking rat's nest in here, I tell you. Aspirin, Kleenex, FINALLY the fucking Tums.” She popped a couple and removed something else from the depths of the purse with a smile.
When the whore named Jinx came back over to the table, she said, “Hidee, Heidie, any calls?” She stuck the beat-up joint in her mouth and posed.
“You dumb bitch, get that outta your mouth.” They both laughed. “You crazy fool."
The sleek car cruised the streets of Mount Olive's Strip, a notoriously high-crime-rate area populated by people who had almost anything that discretionary income could buy—the sort of goods not offered in your normal in-store product-and-service operations. But if it was a bit warm, chances are it would find its way to the Strip: dope, stolen merchandise, illicit flesh. These were the staples.
In this eight-block section of urban decadence you could seek out a variety of ways to rid yourself of surplus disposable income. As long as you were willing to pay for your thrills, there was very little that you couldn't buy—or at least order. Purloined laser discs. China white. Night people for sale in the full range of makes and models.
By the time the car pulled slowly past Cup's Bar, Jinx and Brandi were out in front, gossiping, giggling, and shaking tail for the cruising johns. He saw the one he liked and hung a right, quickly circling and making another pass. Stopping this time. He lowered the window and slid over where they could see his face.
“Hey, pretty girl,” he called, and they both came over anxiously.
“Hi. Wanna go out on a date?” the crooked teeth said. He ignored her and said to the girl beside her. “Hey, Blondie. How much to get down?"
“Wanna party?” the other girl said, sticking her face in the window suspiciously. Smile, you stupid cunt, he thought as he said, “Yeah, baby. How much?"
“What chew got in mind?"
“Let me think about it some and I'll let you know,” he said, quickly pulling back out as he changed his mind.
The other woman had been too interested in him. She'd seen his face. Even with the wig and the poor light he wasn't taking any chances. Too many people knew his face.
“Think about this, too,” the one named Jinx said, pulling up her short skirt and brazenly mooning him as he drove off. “Fucking cheesedick fag."
He liked the next one he saw alone. Walking fairly fast and young enough, but it was hard to tell. Very short and with the heels he figured yes but you got everything around here. Housewives tricking on weekends with hubby gone. College girls. One-night stands of any possible combination. Undercover cops. You name it. It was all out here. Even a boy or two.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” She had a nice smile with her mouth closed and from a distance.
“Listen. I'm kind of alone and ... you know."
“You want a date?"
He breathed a small sigh of relief. “Sure. How much?"
“What do you want to do?"
“We could go look at my stamp collection. But I think I'd rather go get between some clean sheets and do the horizontal mambo. You know, fuck, and suck, and do the hucklebuck."
The girl laughed and opened the door, looking him over in the car light.
He smiled warmly. “Get in."
She did, but left the door open.
“Sixty—for you to suck it?” He pulled out a roll and she shook her head.
“A hundred for that.” He didn't speak right away. “I'm worth it."
“Sure, beautiful. I don't doubt it.” He peeled the money off. When she spoke, he had seen her teeth and she'd reminded him of Fang a minute ago. Did all these cunts have fucked-up teeth?
“What's your name, darlin'? Mine's Tanya.” He thought of an outcall ad. Tanya is young, long-legged, and busty. Dominant Wendi is slim and very pretty. We will fulfill your fantasies.
“Tanya. What a sexy name,” he said. “Mine's R.G."
“Hi, R.G."
Hi, you stupid bitch. The mouth. He finally realized who all these whores were reminding him of, these cunts with the fucked-up teeth, these fang-mouthed sluts—they were reminding him of Nicki when he'd first met her. I'll make em PAY for what they did to you, baby, he thought.
“You look like somebody I used to know."
“God. Really? A lot of people tell me I look like—you know—the one on that TV show. Donna Mills?"
“Yeah. You look exactly like Donna Mills. She's the one I was thinking of.” You look like GENERAL Mills, maybe. Stupid cunt.
“There's a nice place just a couple blocks from here,” Tanya said. She had a slight malocclusion that actually enhanced her smile, made it sexier, like Cher's before she had her teeth fixed. As if the woman's mouth was sexier for being flawed, figuratively or metaphorically more open, penetrable, accessible. More vulnerable.
“Negative.” He peeled off another twenty. Her whore eyes fastened on the roll of greenery. “I live six blocks away. Let's go there. We can shower or whatever—get nice and clean, you know?” She shook her head. She didn't think much of the idea.
“I know a nice dark street. Pull around the corner up there.” She reached for the money. He let her take it and she reached over and pulled the car door shut. He started the car and moved out.
“My place, babe."
“I don't go to private houses, R.G. Come on, hon, you just pull around the corner and I'll show you a great time. Okay, handsome?"
He kept driving straight ahead, talking to her gently, smiling his good-looking salesman's smile. She had a very short micro of a denim mini and a low, scoop-neck T-shirt. He reached his right hand over and put his fingers on the inside of her left thigh.
“Hey!” Her voice was grating when it was loud in his ear like that. “I toldja pull around the corner. Come on, now. Pull up there in the shadows and I'll really make you feel good, lover.” Without asking him, she pushed the power button on the radio/tape deck and one of his tapes began to play as the antenna slid up.
“Fuck THAT,” she said, punching the music off and twisting the dial to rock radio. “Lemme hear some JAM!” Loud formula rock blasted from the speakers and she immediately started moving in the seat. “Pull over up there."
He was so enraged he didn't even wait. He just turned in the seat and hammered her with his fist. A fast reflexive blow to the head. Hammered her again. POW. Reached over and pulled her closer, the powerful muscles of his upper body rippling as he took the metal object from its case and stabbed it down into her skull, rubbing himself with his other hand, mashing down on the brake light—having forgotten he hadn't even turned the engine off—ejaculating over Tanya's dying form.
“—fucking slut CUNT WHORE BITCH FUCKING SHIT—” Coming, the front of his trousers soaked, his hot splatter of ejaculate all over the car interior. He was still hot. He would take this one home and improvise with her for a long time before he threw her away.
Buckhead Station
Eichord's round-the-clock on Schumway had been smothered i
n the crush of the numbers—man-hours, pounds of computer printout, phone logs, faxes, real time, cop time, time since the last Iceman murder. Also, the joker had a way of getting out of Schumway Buick without being seen. Closed maintenance bays, a constant flow of traffic onto the big lot, two large entrance/exit ramps on either side of the vast Parts Department, which ran the full length of the dealership, which was housed on four and a half acres of Buckhead business district.
He had access to too many cars, trucks, and rvs, not to mention the possibility of disguises, and ruses no more complex than lying down in the back of somebody else's car when they left. He would do that for spite first time he spotted police watchers. They were his employees, too, and the likelihood of complete cooperation, considering the weight of a paycheck in the balance, was less than slim. Schumway was now in the habit of routinely disappearing two or three times a week, sometime between the early afternoon and closing. So, by the end of the fourth week when nobody else had turned up dead or missing, spoda-schumway was just a grimy box full of paper in the still-open investigation on which Jack Eichord spent his working days.
When he got the telephone call that morning, he'd been across the street. He still felt numbness in his left arm and shoulder from what he believed was something that had been sent down the phone cord to get him. A guy on the duty desk in Mt. Olive on the other end, pouring poisons into the phone, the stuff burning down the line somehow, pouring through AT&T and working its way into his fingertips, the hand touching the phone, a foul, smoking thing that shot up his hand and arm and into his shoulder like a hundred icepicks.
“Some boys found a box in Mt. Olive Park,” the man told him. “Just a head in it. Female Cauc with multiple wounds. Looks like an icepick again."
He'd had plenty of time to go look at it. Come back. He was waiting for Dana and Monroe to return to the station. Sitting at his desk going through options. Don't go off half-cocked, he told himself. Go slow. He'd had plenty of slow.
His desk was the physical center of hoyt-graham-lennon, which was now a major-crimes priority case. To the left of his desk rested the main body of hoyt-graham-lennon, which was a well-developed female file standing 34 1/2 inches, weighing thirty-nine pounds, brown boxes in configuration, ruddy complexion labeled TDK T-120HS, running from Amarillo through Nicki Dodd ("a well developed male ... “), the suicide, now there would be more.
The rest of the regional investigation that “Special Agent Jack Eichord was coordinating” for the task force covered the walls of the Homicide squad bay and the surface of Jack's desk, overflowing into a chair. Brown-skinned accordion-fold expanding files held secondary suspects and spoda, norway and nevada, las vegas metro and diane taluvera, primary suspects, and hand of christ.
On top of all this was his beat-up attaché case, open, crammed with papers, and the base for his tangibles/intangibles. This was a display he'd pasted to white shirt cardboard and it sat there taunting him, unfolded like a diorama of man complete with geneological chart. Some of the headings were:
sensory alive/motor dead? (see nerves)
bicycle? (Wheelchair lab check track at Graham crime scene made by tread of a foreign bicycle.)
hazy records (ancient car wreck, Norway cover, move to UK, no Inland Revenue trace, no Interpol, no Scotland Yard, see voiceprinting/fingerprinting)
betty baylos (32—dresses like child—sexually? See KSP file)
retarded-brother ploy (relatives, medical)
Another note simply said:
could anybody be that clever? (sperm)
He vaguely remembered the day he'd got off the phone with the circuit attorney's guy, realizing now on the supraliminal level what he'd been going for as he tried to force through his wild and crazy fake-DNA-trace hypothesis.
“If they can trace blood, sperm, tissue—okay, you got the AIDS thing—we pay a prostitute to obtain a sample of this guy's sperm, or we—” He remembered the scenario. What if he found out that Betty Baylos, this thirty-two-year-old sexpot who dressed like somebody's teenybopper sister, had just happened to work at the place where—say—Freidrichs just happened to give blood? Wouldn't that be an interesting coincidence?
“Get what I'm saying?” Wink wink, nudge nudge, he'd tried to bait the guy.
“No. I don't understand where you're going at all.” He was going back to Keith Freidrich's mean stare. A good-looking cripple. A real hater. New City Arcade would be the kind of business a gambler might invest in. And the retarded brother ... Oh, baby, what a sweet touch for somebody cunning enough to plan a scene that was seamless, airtight, waterproof, and cop-proof. What if he was smart enough to move to a city where a wheelchair-bound guy with Arthur Spoda's initials was living with a beautiful woman? Oh, man. You could get so lost in these.
A woman in the church saw a tall woman “leaving with Tina Hoyt.” Nicki had set up Diane Taluvera and Nicki was Schumway's private stock, but the wheelchair was a bicycle, so how much wood could a woodchuck chuck? And why was Elvis’ name misspelled on his tombstone, and when alien spacecraft land on the planet, why do they only allow imbeciles to see them? You know how it is with inquiring minds, baby.
All of that by the wayside as the other calls came into his ear, the telephone ringing and Eichord assuming it was Dana telling him they got tied up or whatever, or maybe the doc from St. Louis returning his call, and he picks it up and hears only a buzz. Then, faintly, “Jack? Can you hear me?"
“Doc?” Eichord called all doctors Doc if he liked them.
“Wally Tulare in St. Louis. Can you hear me?” always with the fucking phones. And for five minutes Jack lets more poisons seep into his hand and arm and this time into the ear. Tulare told him more about Spoda than he wanted to know, but by the time they hung up, he was more convinced than ever that Al Schumway and Arthur Spoda were the same man. He just couldn't fucking PROVE it.
Shortly after that another call—somebody motioned at a winking hold line, and he picked it up and a woman said, “Jack Eichord?"
“Speaking?"
“Jack, this is Amy (mumble) in Las Vegas.” Was this a lady pit boss he'd interviewed?
“Sorry. I didn't catch your name.” She repeated it, but he still couldn't understand and he just said, “Oh, yes?"
“Jack, can you hold on for just a second? I'm trying to reach your party for you and they are prepaid. Can you hold?"
“Sure.” Click. Whirring noise. Click. Touch tones. Cross talk. “Jack? Still there?"
“Yes."
“One moment.” Could be anybody. Something on the Vegas sheets. He had his fingers crossed.
“Hello. Is this Jack Eichord speaking?"
“Yes."
“Good day, Jack. I'm calling for Super Tech Industries in Las Vegas. Congratulations! You've just won a prize that could be worth thousands of dollars. I need to validate your prize number, Jack. Could you read me the expiration date on your credit card, please?"
“You've called a police officer. I'm not interested in any boiler-room scams."
“But this promotion is—” He hung up. If he hadn't been so busy, he would have traced it and given it to the MLVPD guys. Not that there was much anybody could do with the annoying things. It was all getting too big. Too insulated. You could never do anything about anything. What a melluva hess.
“Another call,” somebody said, “on three."
“Eichord.” Bring me the head of Alexander Graham Bell.
“I'm at X-L Office Equipment.” It was Dana. “I think I got something. The sheet with the primary-suspect mug shots—guy owns the arcade, the VA dude, the Schumway Buick guy. He says Schumway came in and priced typewriters. Was considering replacing all the office machines and what not. He typed on a machine that he liked. This guy remembers him in the wheelchair and all. He said it's fairly normal that people type samples and take them home for consideration of what to buy. Okay. So I ask him, Did Schumway take his sample home? Yeah, he says. He typed on a piece of paper and he thinks he put it back in his p
ocket. What he remembered about the deal was he thinks Schumway made some remark about the typeface on the machine. Could it do this or that? Could you put in a certain element that would give you another option or whatever? Guy goes, Yeah. He puts another paper back in and types some more. The man remembers thinking it was odd that he didn't type on the same piece of paper. He thinks it was an envelope. He isn't sure. He THINKS the second time it was an envelope and it stayed in his head. Anyway, I ask him. Have you changed the ribbon or the cartridge since the machine has been on display? No, he says. I got it as is. Didn't take it off the machine. Nothing. So I go to the lab with it?"
“Bet your ass, Dana. You done great, man. Stay with it."
“You got it.” It was 11:10 a.m. At thirteen hundred hours Jack Eichord knew where the Hand of Christ letter had been typed. It appeared on the used section of the X-L Office Equipment's machine's one-time cartridge. Cheek by jowl in between quickbrownfox and nowisthetimeforallgoodmen. Right there in Executive Bold: Dyke Whores Must Die...
He fumed as he imagined what the circuit attorney would tell him.
“Lock that case down tight. Jack. Don't bring me this iffy typewriter shit.” The fucker left him a head.
He took it personally. Enough with the typewriters and the fags dressed up like women and the rest of the fucking BULLSHIT. That's it. You play, you pay, asshole.
Buckhead Medical Park
Threatening was not Eichord's style. He was a firm believer in the soft sell, but this case had turned Eichord into something else—something he wasn't meant to be. He had killed to stop the killings. And he'd failed. So a little push and shove scarcely caused him a second's hesitation. Another woman was dead. Beheaded by a madman who had put himself beyond anyone's touch.
As they rolled toward Medical Park, Jack Eichord thought that at that moment he loathed Dr. Niles Lishness almost as much as the hated killer Schumway/Spoda. As he tried to visualize them together, doctor and patient, he had no trouble visualizing Schumway holding court, the wimpy, pedantic shrink in rapt, scholarly attention.