A Dark Matter: A Novel

by Peter Straub

  “Let me guess. We vote for option one, don’t we, since we are humanists, and liberal humanists to boot?”

  “Maybe you are,” I said. “Lately, I’ve been a bit ambivalent. However, with your friend Hayward, yes, it’s option one all the way. And not only that, Hayward seems to present a case of evil by genetic transmission. Tremendous psychic disorder gets passed from one generation to the next, along with blue eyes or red hair. Here you are, this is mine, and now you have it, too, welcome to the family. That is, as long as George Cooper got things right, which I think he did.”

  I used my chopsticks to tweeze from the raised black rectangular surface before me a little delicacy so fresh it almost squirmed.

  “Now, George Cooper was who, exactly? A cop, right?”

  “Milwaukee homicide detective, twenty-six years on the job. Cooper had the whole Ladykiller thing figured out, only he could never prove anything, and he never had the slightest bit of evidence. Imagine the frustration.”

  Don’s eyebrows knitted, creating three separate furrows in his forehead. “And you know this how?”

  “From Cooper himself.”

  “You talked to this guy?”

  “I wish. He died about nine, ten years ago. But I did the next best thing. Because I thought I might be able to use it in a new project, I read his book. Cooper had to do something with his frustration, so he wrote it all down—everything he saw, everything he could put together, all the hypotheticals he’d never be able to prove.”

  “A frustrated cop wrote a book claiming that Hayward had some kind of family involvement with the Ladykiller? Was it through his father?”

  “His father’s brother, Tillman. That was really Cooper’s focus. He went to his grave without ever having been able to prove that Tillman Hayward was the Ladykiller.”

  “How come I never heard of this book?”

  “Cooper didn’t write well enough to get published. He wrote sentences like ‘Pursuant to my investigation, the Milwaukee Police Department was always getting in my way as a matter of policy.’ Outside of his family, no one but me ever heard of his book. I don’t think he even tried to get it published. He just wanted to write it—he wanted there to be a record. His daughter found the manuscript while she was cleaning out his apartment after his death.”

  “You talked to his daughter?”

  “No, we did everything by e-mail.”

  “Excuse me, but how the hell did you ever find out about this book that was never published and no one ever knew existed?”

  “About five years ago, I was trolling around on eBay, and there it was. Searching for the Ladykiller, an unpublished typescript by Detective George Cooper, retired, of the Milwaukee Police Department. Sharon Cooper, his only child, thought somebody might want to use it for research, so she put it up for sale the only way she knew how. I was the only bidder. Twenty-seven bucks, a bargain. This was a time I wasn’t too sure what I should do next, and my agent said something about trying nonfiction. So, the old Ladykiller business came back to me, all those murders in Milwaukee that no one ever solved. I happened to see this listing on eBay, perfect, right? It never occurred to me that the Ladykiller murders could have any connection with Spencer Mallon. After I read it, I got in touch with Sharon, but she couldn’t answer most of my questions. Her father not only never talked about what he was writing, he didn’t talk about his work at all.

  “Cooper was old school, a hardnosed, suspicious, tough old bastard. He used his fists a lot, I bet. Whatever the methods, the guy closed a lot of cases, but this one kept getting away from him. Drove him crazy. He thought about it all the time.”

  “But he knew that Tillman Hayward was guilty of the murders.”

  “As much as you could know without actually seeing him do one.”

  “What made him so sure?”

  “It was a gut feeling deal, but Cooper had a great gut. He got on to Hayward by cross-referencing train and airplane arrivals and departures from Milwaukee with the dates of the Ladykiller’s homicides. Tedious work, but he wasn’t getting anywhere with the local suspects. Turns out, this guy Hayward came in from Columbus, Ohio, by train and plane two days before three of the murders, and left by the same means a day or two after. That still left three murders, but Cooper thought that the guy had probably paid cash for the bus, or hitchhiked, or borrowed a car for those visits.”

  “It sounds a lot like guesswork,” Don said.

  It did, I knew, and to counter that impression I tried to get across the powerful sense of sheer obduracy communicated by Cooper’s manuscript. George Cooper was not a man to be lightly swayed, he did not yield to whims, he had no fancies or daydreams. His version of guesswork rode upon endless slogging and a cop’s finely tuned instinct. After he had noticed the correlation between Hayward’s arrivals and the series of murders, he called upon a network of informers to hear whenever his suspect bought a ticket of any sort to Milwaukee. The call came; he opened a newspaper on a bench in the downtown train station; and when forty people got off the train from Columbus, one of them, a slim fellow in a hat and a pin striped suit, sent out an electrical current that seared over the top of the Journal and sizzled directly into Cooper’s waiting brainpan. A pure, mocking lawlessness spoke from the man’s very being. This, the detective was certain, was Mr. Hayward. He was the kind of man who liked to look cops in the eye and give them a silvery little gleam. Such men made Cooper’s hands clench.

  Of medium height, in his mid-to late thirties, handsome but for the salient nose looming beneath the brim of his fedora, Hayward left the train in joking conversation with a square-faced, bespectacled young woman who, Cooper could see, barely knew him. Her limp brown hair hung past her ears like overgrown bangs.

  Hayward’s new acquaintance, so easily amused, had no reason to fear him. The Ladykiller would never threaten this girl: the truth was, he would probably avoid touching her, unless touching her would help him get what he wanted. The Ladykiller took an attitude toward his victims: if they weren’t pretty, they weren’t worth the trouble. (Unfortunately, if they were pretty, they were worth all the trouble he could concoct.) Hayward wanted something from this typist, this substitute teacher, whatever she was, and it was probably a ride somewhere.

  Cooper folded his newspaper and trailed after them as they filtered through the crowd, paused for the gentleman to make a brief telephone call, then went out into the late afternoon sun. His plain blue sedan, dinged a bit on the driver’s side, sat a little way down the street. The young woman admitted Mr. Hayward into her green Volvo, and Cooper leaned on his hood and pretended to gaze in fascination at a welter of railway tracks extending halfway to infinity. When the Volvo drove off, he followed it through the downtown, then west to Sherman Boulevard and into a largely lower-middleclass neighborhood where the woman drew up in front of a two-story yellow-and-brown house on a short, patchy lawn. A worn-looking woman and a scrawny boy shot through the narrow front door and trotted down three concrete steps to greet the murderer. Cooper noted the address and, back at the station, found it in the battered reverse directory. Twenty more minutes of research told him that William Hayward, the resident of the brown-and-yellow house, worked at Continental Can and had two siblings, Margaret Frances and Tillman Brady. Margaret Frances, later known as Margot, had no criminal record whatsoever.

  This could not be said of her youngest brother. For a time, Tillman Hayward had managed to skirt classification as a youthful offender despite the complaints of half a dozen neighbors that he had been engaged in suspicious activity. “That boy was up to no good,” went the general opinion, though the charges were never more specific. In Tillman Hayward’s sixteenth year, his luck changed.

  A week after his birthday, young Till was caught shoplifting at a five and dime on Sherman Boulevard: oddly for a person his age, he had been trying to steal glue, nails, a box cutter, and a box of thumbtacks. When the officer dispatched to the scene inquired as to the purpose of these items, the boy alluded to a “home
work project,” and the officer released him with a warning. Three months later, an absentee landlord spotted a wandering light in a basement window of an empty duplex on Auer Street. The landlord let himself in and managed to snag Tillman by his collar in his flight from the basement steps. This time, the boy was taken to the station, largely to impress him with the seriousness of trespass. Again, no charge was filed.

  Further proof that Tillman Hayward knew how to disarm officers of the law came when an outraged homeowner on West 41st Street reported that her beloved marmalade cat, Louis, had just been stolen from her backyard by a teenaged boy she knew to be local. A few minutes later, two policemen got out of a patrol car and stopped a boy trotting down Sherman Boulevard with a squirming bag in his hands. Oh, the boy said, this cat lived in that house? He had been sure it had gone missing from a woman just off Sherman on West 44th, and he was in the process of returning it when the officers interrupted him. He knew about the missing cat from the posters taped to the lampposts, hadn’t the officers noticed? It was like a plague, all these missing pets.

  It would have ended there, had not one of the officers involved, clearly a man of a hard and suspicious nature, inserted a note of warning: Keep an eye on this kid.

  Before Tillman Hayward disappeared for good from the police records, he had been accused of two more crimes, attempted rape and the receipt of stolen goods. Alma Vestry, the young woman who had accused Hayward of trying to rape her, dropped the charge a day before the case went to trial. The two officers who charged the twenty-two-year-old Hayward with receiving a rack of hijacked mink coats destroyed their own case by proceeding improperly, and an angry judge dismissed the charges. Hayward must have known he had been lucky, for after that point he took care to avoid the attention of the authorities.

  Detective Cooper may have been a little crazy. Certainly, he was obsessed, and had been since Tillman Hayward stepped off the train from Columbus. He had discovered nothing that would sway a judge, but Cooper began spending nearly half his working day and much of his off-duty life searching for anything that might incriminate his only suspect. Early in the case, Cooper plucked Hayward off the street and brought him in for questioning, but the man glided through every verbal trap the detective set for him. He smiled, he was gracious and patient, he wished to be helpful. The farcical interrogation lasted two hours and produced no results apart from informing Tillman that at least one Milwaukee detective greatly desired to slam him into a cell. Thereafter, Cooper contented himself with observation.

  Both his chief of detectives and the police chief may have thought their star detective had slipped a gear, but they trusted his instincts and for a long time allowed him to focus his energies as narrowly as he wished. When Cooper’s fed-up partner requested reassignment, they paired him with another detective and let Cooper work alone. The Ladykiller was Homicide’s top priority, and if Cooper’s methods had a chance of bringing it to closure, his division and his department were willing to stand by and watch.

  Detective Cooper developed an instinct for when Tillman Hayward was going to turn up at his brother’s house. Sometimes this intuition compelled him toward the brown-and-yellow house to spot, at ease in pleated suit trousers and a wife beater T-shirt, a furtive, behatted form moving past a window or drifting through the backyard. To Cooper’s profound regret, glimpses were nearly all the observation he was permitted. Hayward had excellent instincts of his own. He knew when to hide out in an inner room his brother let him use, he knew when to stay at home. After commandeering an attic room across the alley, Cooper passed twelve-hour, fifteen-hour days peering down at the barren backyard and rear windows in which his target declined to appear.

  The old cop felt certain that Hayward used the back door and the narrow alley. From time to time, the detective managed to glimpse a swiftly moving form gliding through the kitchen door and melting into the darkness blanketing the yard. But where was he going, and what were his haunts? George Cooper had visited every bar, tavern, saloon, and cocktail lounge within a mile’s radius, had shown Hayward’s photo to 150 bartenders. Some of them had said, That guy, sure, see him now and then, comes in like three times a week, then stays away for months. Or: This guy? He likes the ladies, and they like him back.

  On a busy night at a Brady Street gin mill called the Open Hand, a bartender glanced deep into the crowd and spotted a familiar nose jutting from beneath a familiar hat. He remembered the detective’s request, dug his card out of a drawer, and called to report that the man Cooper was looking for was now in his bar. As this took place in the era before mobile phones, the bartender dialed the number on the card, that of the homicide division at the central station. When he was informed of the call, Cooper happened to be in his dented blue sedan, traveling from his apartment to the attic room, even grumpier than usual.

  He swore at the steering wheel, the windshield, and the stunned dispatcher. Still ripping out curses, he wrenched his car into a U-turn and hurtled through four lanes of protesting vehicles. Fifteen minutes before he jerked to a stop in front of the Open Hand, his suspect had escorted an intoxicated young lady to an unknown destination. Fortunately, the bartender knew the young woman’s name, Lisa Gruen. Miss Gruen could, of course, not be found at the nearby apartment she shared with another graduate student at UW-Milwaukee, nor did her roommate have any idea where she might be. A few of the patrons had glimpsed Lisa’s new friend pouring her into a car, but none of them could remember anything about the vehicle except its color, which was dark blue, black, or British racing green. Flummoxed, fearful that in a day or two Lisa Gruen’s corpse would be found dumped on the steps of the Central Library, Detective Cooper spent hours grilling the Open Hand’s increasingly irritated patrons. Some of them remembered meeting “Till,” “Tilly,” cute name for a guy, a little older and more sophisticated than the bar’s usual patrons, but a little rough around the edges.

  Late the next morning, Lisa Gruen called the station. What was the big deal? All her friends were pissed off—she had ruined their evening. When Detective Cooper turned up at her apartment, he shook her up. Cooper knew that his size, also his distance from any system of value she understood, made her feel uncomfortable. This was fine with him: Cooper enjoyed the creation of discomfort.

  No, maybe she had never met Tilly before, but he was obviously a nice guy anyhow. After the gin had unstrung her, he volunteered to drive her home. Okay, he didn’t bring her straight home, but so what? He didn’t do anything creepy, she was sure of that.

  Eleven hours were missing from this young woman’s life, and their loss caused her not a moment’s concern. What had he done with her: where had he taken her? It was a mystery.

  Of course she could not describe his car. It had a steering wheel and a backseat. Around three or four in the morning, whenever, the pain in her head, the dryness in her mouth, and the burning in her guts had awakened her. She sat up and looked out the window. Everything spun and swayed. Then came the really embarrassing part. Her escort opened the rear door, helped her out, and held her waist while she doubled over and vomited. Still drunk, she demanded a few more hours of sleep, and he obligingly assisted her back onto her padded bench. When next she surfaced, it was ten o’clock on Sunday morning. He was asking her if she wanted to go home. She said: Aren’t you at least going to offer me breakfast? What a gentleman, he drove to a diner that was way out there somewhere, way west, maybe in Butler—who ever thought Butler had diners?—and bought scrambled eggs, whole-wheat toast, bacon, and strong coffee.

  Two days later, one possible answer to the missing hours was suggested by a grim discovery in the parking lot of a Prospect Avenue insurance company. Two foraging homeless men investigated a dusty, rolled-up carpet alongside a Dumpster and found within it the nude body of the Ladykiller’s fifth victim. She had been a thirty-one-year-old hotel executive named Sonia Hillery, and photographs later supplied by her husband and parents made it clear that, when alive, she had been competent, intelligent, stylish, and attrac
tive. The Ladykiller had spent hours, perhaps days, working on her corpse, and nothing of what had once defined her remained.

  George Cooper wondered: had Tilly Hayward stretched out unconscious Lisa Gruen across his backseat before he snatched Sonia Hillery off the streets? If so, what then? After he overpowered Hillery, he would need to stash her body somewhere while he established his alibi by caring for Lisa Gruen. And if Lisa fed her hangover out in Butler the next morning, Hayward was probably renting some little hideaway in the western burbs, or the small towns west of them—Marcy, Lannon, Menomonee Falls, Waukesha, little Butler itself. He drove west to Butler and showed Hayward’s photo in the diner—the waiters remembered him and the hungover, slightly pig-faced blond girl he had been with, but none had noticed his car or anything else of interest. Cooper drove slowly up and down its main street, around its old hotel, and through its few alleyways. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Cooper seethed. It burned a hole in his stomach, that while Tilly Hayward had been stuffing a hungover girl with bacon and eggs, a dead woman on a slab, on a table, maybe a basement floor, had waited for his return.

  Cooper’s rage pushed him down the highways to Columbus, Ohio, far out of his jurisdiction, where his skills and obsessions served no purpose but his own. An uncooperative homicide chief informed him that everything he had to know about Tillman Hayward, he could have learned on the phone. I had to see it for myself, Cooper told him. See what? What his life is like here. Well, said the Ohio cop, you must have a great appetite for boredom. Mr. Hayward is a good citizen. He led Cooper through the records: married, three daughters, not so much as a speeding ticket on his record, not even a parking ticket, and co-owner with his wife of four sturdy apartment buildings. And if you need to know anything more about the man, this fine resident of Westerville, one of Columbus’s finest suburbs, was also an exemplary contributor to police charities. Detective Cooper, you would be well advised to turn right around and go home, because there ain’t squat for you in Columbus.