by Peter Straub
Eventually, the garage door at the Hayward house floated up, and a pale blue station wagon rolled out. In the backseat, three small girls babbled away, with gestures, all at the same time. The driver, presumably Mrs. Tillman Hayward, was a Hitchcock blonde with smooth golden hair and a neat, symmetrical face. As she drove past Cooper, her icy blue eyes flicked disgust and suspicion at him. Christ, he thought, no wonder homicide was such a booming trade.
Soon after his return to Milwaukee and the barren room where he gazed through binoculars at the Haywards’ glum backyard, Cooper observed an apparently insignificant event that in a short while seemed as significant as the discovery of a new disease. A stringy boy of eleven or twelve with dark, muddy eyes and a narrow forehead, Bill Hayward’s son, Keith, was sitting in a disconsolate manner, as only a boy of eleven or twelve can be disconsolate, on the battered old dining room chair they moved out onto the patchy grass in the summer. To Detective Cooper, Keith had suggested a kind of displacement, a sense that he was making do within an odd emotional poverty. Cooper had taken in only glimpses, but the glimpses insinuated a life of constant performance, as if Keith were always acting the role of a boy instead of actually being one. Cooper did not know why he felt this way, nor did he entirely trust this feeling. It simmered away on a mental back burner, always present but generally ignored.
Here it was again, though, the feeling within the old detective that although this child was genuinely annoyed about something, he was also engaged in a performance. The performance, it came to George Cooper, had all to do with hurt feelings and injured innocence. He displayed his sense of having been misunderstood as if on a stage. For whom could he have been performing, if not his mother? Keith sighed, flung himself backward on the chair so that his spine bent, his head lolled, and his arms hung like pale sticks; then he threw himself theatrically forward until he sat folded over his knees, with his arms dangling nearly to the ground. In a fine display of resentment, he straightened up and squirmed around until he cupped his cheek in one hand and his elbow in the other.
The back door opened, and everything changed.
The act fell away, and the boy became both warier and more open, beneath the thin top layer of his performance visibly curious about what was about to happen. The person who had emerged from the kitchen of the brown-and-yellow house was not Margaret Hayward, but her brother-in-law and object of George Cooper’s closest attentions, Tilly. Cooper’s initial response to what he was watching was a tightness in his throat and a constriction of his chest. A true cop, he knew instantly that this scene was wrong.
Then he had it: in front of his uncle, Keith allowed his true self to come to the surface.
In his T-shirt and hat, his pants held up by ropy leather suspenders, Till crouched down next to his nephew and squatted on his heels. Smiling, he knitted his hands together, the picture of a devoted uncle. And that, too, troubled the detective. Hayward still carried with him the gleaming mockery that had spoken so clearly in the train station, but at this moment he seemed more genuine than Cooper had ever seen him. These two people were communicating. The way they moved their bodies, the look of their eyes, the subtlety of their gestures toward each other, told him that the boy had done something that, although fine with him, had put him in bad odor with his family. Till was giving the boy advice, and his advice contained an element of subterfuge, of camouflage or fakery. The shine in his eyes, his latent smile made this clear. Also clear was the boy’s response. He was practically in transports.
All of this was dreadful, even to Detective Cooper. Or perhaps especially to Detective Cooper. He understood that what he was seeing was not the corruption drama for which it could easily be mistaken, but something worse, a moment of recognition that proceeded naturally and on its own terms to a kind of mentorship. The worst of the worst was an actual moment of mentoring, of advice given and received, involving a great ball of keys that Tillman drew from his pocket and offered to his nephew as, the detective thought, some kind of solution. A key opened an enclosure, and within a large ball of keys could be hidden those that opened the most secret and hidden of enclosures—like flags that said Here! Here!, the bits of colored string, bright as flames in the lenses of Cooper’s binoculars. Tillman Hayward was telling his nephew about the satisfactions of what could be called a private room.
“Sound familiar?” I said. “Keith obviously took his uncle’s advice to heart. And long before he set up his table and his knives behind the locked door of that shed you saw in Madison, he almost certainly took possession of the basement of an abandoned building on Sherman Avenue in Milwaukee, about five blocks from his house. He would have been eleven or twelve, and he had begun to kill and dismember small animals, mainly cats, that he captured in his neighborhood.”
With a pang that felt oddly like heartburn, Cooper remembered both Sonia Hillery, whose body for days had been beaten, abused, punctured, and abraded, and poor clueless, unattractive Lisa Gruen, who had been given breakfast in Butler’s Sunshine Diner, and understood that below him, marked by a colorful bit of yarn, lay the key that opened a clinical private hell in Brookfield or Menomonee Falls, in Sussex or Lannon, one of those little towns. If that boy, Keith, didn’t know it yet, soon he would be standing before that terrible fact, gazing in as if in preparation for his own ghastly adult life.
“And, remember,” I said, “this Cooper was an old-fashioned bruiser, the kind of cop that used to be called a ‘bull.’ He’d seen everything, he’d seen and done so much, he barely had recognizable emotions any longer. But what he saw happening between Tillman and Keith Hayward really chilled him. He used the word evil.”
“But he never managed to put the uncle away. What finally happened?”
“On one of his trips back to Milwaukee, Tillman Hayward was shot and killed behind the Open Hand—that bar where he picked up his beard, that girl Lisa Gruen. For Cooper, Hayward’s death was a real blow. He insisted on taking the case, and officially he never solved it, never even came close. It was a disaster for him. He knew exactly who had done it.”
“He did?”
“The father of Laurie Terry, one of Hayward’s victims, a retired crossing guard named Max Terry. Cooper had shown him Hayward’s picture, and the old guy thought he’d seen him somewhere, but he couldn’t really place him. Later, Terry remembered that he’d seen Hayward when he dropped into the joint on Water Street where his daughter tended bar. It was a couple of days before she died. This guy with the hat and the long nose was sitting down at the end of the bar, flirting with her, like a million guys did every week. As soon as he remembered, he knew. If this guy wasn’t the murderer, the Ladykiller, why did the cop show him his picture? At the very least, he was a suspect. So the old guy pulled out Cooper’s card, called the station house, asked for Detective Cooper. Detective, he said, maybe I’d like to see that Polaroid picture again, the one of the guy in the hat. Cooper went over to his place, showed him the picture again. Now I’m not so sure, Terry said. What’s his name, anyhow? Tillman Hayward, Cooper said. A first-class son of a bitch. Don’t you go and do something stupid, now.
“It turned out, Max Terry didn’t give a damn what kind of advice he got from homicide cops who hadn’t solved his daughter’s murder. He began going around to one joint after another, waiting to run into Hayward, and he carried a gun in his coat pocket. Through spectacularly good luck or spectacularly bad, Terry walked into the Open Hand just about a week later and spotted Hayward hanging out at the bar, talking to a couple of girls. Terry didn’t think twice. He went right up to his target and said, Hey, this guy I know lost a bet, and now he owes you money. You got the wrong guy, buddy. Ain’t you Tillman Hayward? Okay, come out back with me, we’ll get everything settled.”
In his manuscript, Cooper speculated that Hayward might have been amused by this situation: a little old man trying to run some transparent con on him. He must have smiled, Cooper wrote; he may have been smiling right up until the old man pulled the revolver from his poc
ket and, without even pausing to take aim, fired a bullet first through his Adam’s apple; then, taking a quick step forward as Tilly’s hands flew to his throat, up through his genitals and into his guts; and finally, as Hayward slumped down the alley’s concrete wall, directly through his right eye, putting an end to all the activity within that busy mind.
“Terry confessed it all to George Cooper,” I said. “He told him everything he did, just like I told it to you. Step by step. And all Cooper did was write it down. He certainly wasn’t going to arrest the old man. He took his gun away and ordered him to go home and keep his mouth shut. Then he drove to the Cherry Street bridge and threw the gun in the Milwaukee River, figuring it might not be the only one down there. What, is that a high-crime area, or something?”
“Or something,” Olson said. “Cooper must have been at least as racist as most cops his age at that time.”
“Apart from that one comment, you wouldn’t know it from his book. The subject of race never comes up. What does come up, on the other hand, is your old friend Keith.”
“Our friend,” Don said. “Hardly.”
“Just as well, since his actual friends don’t seem to end up all that happily. Brett Milstrap vanishes into some limbo I can’t figure out …”
“Not surprisingly.”
“Anyhow, the first and best friend Keith Hayward ever had in his life, probably the only real one, this kid named Tomek Miller, wound up tortured and killed in that basement on Sherman Boulevard—that’s how we know about the basement. Cooper had nothing but suspicions, but he had plenty of those. Keith’s friend Miller probably went through hell before he was killed, and his body was badly burned in a fire. However, the autopsy revealed a lot of recent damage, fresh damage, to the remaining tissue and to his bones. Cooper was certain that Till and Keith killed the boy, or Tillman by himself with Keith coming in for the coup de grâce, or whatever, and they burned down the building to destroy the evidence. And almost succeeded.
“Cooper had spotted the boy in that area a couple of times, but he never witnessed anything that could tie him to the building. Which wasn’t for the lack of trying. Until the building burned down, Cooper had no idea where Keith had set up his secret place. It could have been in any of twenty to thirty buildings on or near Sherman Boulevard. What really got him was, he had followed Keith and Miller over to that area lots and lots of times, only they always managed to slip away from him before they went to ground. He was pretty sure that Miller was something like Keith’s slave. This Miller was a funny-looking kid, small, very pale, with big eyes, a big nose, and hands too large for his body. Cooper said he looked like Pinocchio. A natural target, a kid who would expect to be bullied and mistreated. Around Keith, he acted totally deferential, almost servile. He thought Keith had accepted slavery as payment for being protected. Other kids never messed with Keith Hayward.
“In case you were wondering, Cooper questioned Keith twice. Got nowhere. The kid claimed that he and his uncle bonded over baseball. They both loved the third baseman for the Braves, Eddie Matthews. A great guy, according to the kid. All this drove Cooper up the wall. He looked at Keith, and he saw a junior version of Till. It made him sick.”
“No wonder,” Olson said.
“The kid said he had no idea what Miller was doing in that basement. Sure, they were friends, kind of, but Miller was basically a nonentity, and nobody missed him much. And the parents! No help at all. They were Polish immigrants who had their name changed for them, basically afraid of everything. Cooper scared the shit out of them. Their son knew Keith Hayward, they’d heard his name, but that was about it. Here are these two shrunken, terrified people, he works in a Polish bakery, she cleans houses, no money, suffering the inexplicable loss of their only child, sitting on the edge of a cheap sofa, scared out of their minds, paralyzed … they want him to explain what happened, because they sure can’t. Nothing makes sense to them, America doesn’t make sense to them, it took their kid and turned him into a spare rib.”
I raised my shoulders and made a what-can-you-do gesture, then returned to my meal. After a couple of bites, I realized that I wanted to ask Olson a certain question.
“Don, do you think Keith Hayward deserved to die?”
“Probably. Hootie and your wife thought he did.”
I nodded. “I asked Lee about it once, and she said that Hayward wasn’t all bad.”
“The Eel said that?”
“She also said that she didn’t think anyone, if you looked inside them, was ever really all bad. But she added that she still thought Keith Hayward deserved to die. I think so, too … Look. If Cooper was right about that kid, Hayward’s death probably saved the lives of a lot of young women.”
Olson nodded. “I’ve thought about that.”
“So this force comes out of nowhere, out of another dimension, or out of the ground, I don’t know, and rips this guy to pieces. Can that force be evil? I’d say it was neutral.”
“Neutral.”
“Maybe one of the women Hayward would have killed, had he lived, would have done a great thing someday. Maybe she, or her daughter, or her son, would have made some great medical or scientific breakthrough, or been a great poet. Maybe it’s more remote than that. What if one of the women Hayward would have murdered, or one of her descendants, however far in the future, was going to do something apparently insignificant that would eventually have a huge ripple effect? Killing Hayward would be the means to protect whatever that effect might be.”
“So these creatures are protecting us?”
I considered that for a second. “Maybe they’re protecting our ignorance. Or maybe we’re both completely wrong, and something else altogether killed Hayward, some demonic creature Mallon managed to call up.”
“I didn’t see any demonic creature,” Olson grumped. “And I don’t think there was one. What happened to your detective, this Cooper? Seems to me like he dug himself a big hole and jumped in.”
I laughed. “Yeah, not that there was anything funny about it. He broke the law, destroyed evidence, and interfered with the entire process. All that was left for him to do was keep an eye on Keith Hayward, which he did, and he let the kid know he was watching him, but he knew he had wrecked his own life. He had come to the end. He couldn’t keep an eye on Keith Hayward twenty-four hours a day, and he’d never live long enough to watch the kid’s children. That twisted gene, or whatever, was out of reach. He couldn’t put an end to it. All his skills had failed him.”
“What did he do? Eat his gun?”
“Drank himself to death. Resigned from the department, of course. Turned his weapon back in with his badge. He had another one, a pistol he took off a bad guy, but he never carried it around, never used it. He just liked the idea that it was there. Cooper lived in a neighborhood off Vliet Street, and there were bars at both ends of his block. For a couple of years, he basically went back and forth between them.”
“He put that in his book?”
“For him, that was the end of the Ladykiller case, with the detective who carried the whole thing around in his head going back and forth between these joints named The Angler’s Lounge and Ted & Maggie’s. He wanted to write about that. And he had some pretty interesting things to say about it. Sort of totally bleak. It was like living in absolute darkness. If he’d been anything like a good writer, it could have been amazing.”
“Why? What did he say?”
“The only way to approach some of that stuff is to realize that he was drunk when he wrote it.”
“Can you remember some of it?”
“I’m no Hootie, but some of it stuck, yeah.”
“Lay it on me.”
“Okay. He wrote, It has taken me nearly sixty years to learn that in this life, if it ain’t shit, it ain’t nothing at all.”
I managed to summon up another of the old detective’s darkness arrows. “In another place, he wrote, What isn’t pain is just a wire hanger. I prefer the pain.”
I smiled at
the ceiling, remembering something, then turned the smile toward Olson. “Toward the end, he said, Who was I working for, all those years? Was my real boss a wire hanger? The way I live wears reality down.”
“What was he talking about, wire hangers?”
“All I can think of, there isn’t much to a wire hanger. It’s more like an outline than a real thing.”
Our check had come. I surrendered a credit card and signed the slip, and at long last it was time to walk back around the square and return to the hotel. We stood up, waved thanks to the waiter, nodded at the grinning sushi chefs, and began to move toward the door.
We went out into the night’s warm darkness, pierced above by millions of stars, and on sloping King Street by the lights in the windows of bars and the illuminated prow of a theater marquee.
Chips of mica glittered in the sidewalk. I waited for Don to come up beside me, then almost sighed.
“I think the lounge is still open,” Olson said.
“We’ll see.” I glanced at my companion. “After all that, I hope I never have to hear another word about Keith Hayward or his god-awful uncle. I’m glad they’re dead.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
By this time, Don had lost most of his prison swagger. The crude assertiveness that must have protected him in Menard but made him an annoyance on Cedar Street had faded so thoroughly that I felt I had spent the previous ninety minutes doing nothing more complicated than gabbing with a friend. Olson was even walking almost normally now, with only a trace of the old menacing swerve-and-dip. How, I wondered, had he managed to shake five thousand dollars out of people he barely knew anymore?
11:00 p.m.–3:30 a.m.
A door chosen; a door unchosen and untouched; a question unanswered. These matters, along with others like them, floated through my mind as I undressed and hung up my clothes and brushed my teeth and washed my hands and face and slid into my comfortable hotel-room bed.