“That’s because my jaw’s wired shut.”
“No shit? Any particular reason you’d care to share with the group?”
“You filmed his dad dying on the rest room floor.” It was more than I should have said and I instantly regretted it.
“That fucking Grimm,” he said. Kevin had said the same thing. I wondered how many others referred to Lieutenant Grimm in the same fashion, and how many stories they had to tell.
I made no response.
“Fuck him,” Russell shrugged. “What do you think about jumping into my appeal, Mr. No Comment? Before the Appellate Defender fucks things up any worse? I heard you were good.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Now see, that’s exactly what’s wrong with the world today: everybody out for himself. Anybody ever tell you you sound just like a Chicago alderman with that attitude?”
“I got enough pro bono clients to last me.”
“Pro bono? Who’s talking pro bono? The old lady paid you for Beattie’s appeal, right? Who’s to say she won’t do the same for her loving son-in-law? Especially if he keeps his mouth shut. That ought to be worth something.”
I stood up to leave. Coming here had been a big mistake. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed our conversation, Mr. Russell.”
The thing about visiting inmates in penitentiaries, you can’t make your own exit on your own timing. You have to wait for a guard to escort you off stage left. As I stood there trying to get someone’s attention, Russell persisted. “You don’t like me; I can tell.”
“I don’t even know you, Mr. Russell. It’s what you’ve done I detest.”
“Put it in perspective. I am not the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
“Of course you are. It’s all part of you. It defines you.”
“That’s how they get you, isn’t it, holding the worst thing you’ve ever done over your head until you do whatever it is they want. It’s how they got me. They made me do it.”
“The common denominator of every last one of you guys behind bars: everything is somebody else’s fault.”
“Then put it this way: I wasn’t the only one doing it. I wasn’t even the main one doing it. What about you, man? I bet you believe in the forgiveness of sins, right?”
“What?”
“‘The communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins’? Yeah, sure you do. It’s written all over you. Haven’t you ever heard how you’re supposed to hate the sin and love the sinner?”
“I don’t talk religion with clients.”
“Aha! You said ‘clients.’ So there’s hope, right? Plus they wouldn’t have let you in here in the first place unless you’d signed in as my attorney. So let’s return serve over the net: what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
“Counterpunching won’t work with me, Mr. Russell.”
“How’s this for a counterpunch: I’ll bet you’re fucking the old lady.”
“This conversation is over.”
“Is it? Maybe I know a few more things about her than you do. Things that might interest you.”
“Such as?”
“For instance, she’s loaded. Rich as Croesus and talks to Jesus. She hand you that shit about living off a retired teacher’s pension and a small disability check every month?”
“Go on.”
“She’s worth millions. Correction: she ain’t worth a shit, but she’s got millions. Her and old Uncle Bo, direct-deposited in offshore accounts ‘til hell wouldn’t have any more.”
“Come on. I’ve seen where she lives.”
“I’ll bet you have, Mr. No Comment. I’ll just bet you have. She get you to pose for her yet?”
I looked away down the corridor searching for a guard. Russell took that for a yes. “Lemme guess: she said something like, ‘you have an enormous penis,’ in that affected way she has. Accent on the enormous, right?”
I sat down again. “Where did Ruth and Boaz come by all that money?”
“Let me put it this way: IP addresses can be changed if you know what you’re doing. Servers can be hidden and signals can be diverted. Credit card numbers can be pfished and subtle electronic impulses can be channeled to bank accounts in sunny climes, under circumstances where the credit card owners are highly reluctant to complain to the authorities.”
“You’re talking in riddles, Russell.”
“For guys with the same first and last names, addressing us by name can denote either informality or contempt.”
“I meant the latter.”
“Have it your way. I consider myself an artist first, a brilliant technician second. They needed a guy like me to produce a quality product, and quality they got. You saw Death of an Asshole? Sure you have; everybody has, one time or another. Slick and professional, right? For technical cinematic quality I’d hold it up to any network TV commercial on air today.”
“So why’d you take a wrong turn, rather than becoming the next Ingmar Bergman?”
“Who?”
“Swedish dude, very big with the artsy fartsy crowd back when I was in school.”
Russell shook his head. “How’d I get started? They knew I had a righteous gig teaching cinema at the junior college. There was this church picnic. Uncle Bo, Nana Bobble-head, the whole Bible-school crowd. Beattie and I were still dating at the time. Unbeknownst to me, they put me with this underage chick out in the woods, got the whole thing down on VHS hidden camera. The college’s camcorder as a matter of fact, checked out by yours truly for the weekend. When the moment comes—no pun intended—out pops Uncle Bo for the money shot while Nana Bobble-head stands off-camera and holds out that day’s newspaper in the foreground like it’s a clapboard and there I am, caught in the act of being myself. The bubs and the wool on that chick, if anybody could tell she was thirteen I’ll kiss your ass. But once the two of them yelled ‘Cut!’ they literally had me by the balls.”
“You could have hired a lawyer to defend you.”
“Ever try fighting a war with the authorities and your future in-laws, not to mention the woman of your every fantasy, whom I married soon after? Easier to go along with what they had in mind.”
“Which was?”
“Russell R. Russell Productions, my eponymous dream factory. I’d finally achieved my life’s grand ambition: a movie studio of my very own. Except that it wasn’t my own.”
“Whose was it?”
“See if you can take a hint,” Russell said. He began a spastic bobbing of his head, rolling his eyes around in their sockets like a spooked horse.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - DEAD SERIOUS
Big Muddy River Correctional Center is the main industry of Ina, Illinois. It was quite a drive in the opposite direction, but imitating Heart’s driving, I made it before visiting hours were over. Although they usually require two days’ notice, I’d prevailed on the helpful staff at the guard house at Menard to forward a request for a quick visit with one Clark Killarney. Don’t ask me why. Idle curiosity about my girlfriend’s ex-spouses, or maybe I wanted him to explain that counterclockwise thing.
Because it came from within the correctional system, I was able to bypass enough institutional red tape to arrange the interview. Killarney seemed surprised and pleased to see me.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this meeting?” he inquired affably.
“Call me a fan.”
“For an as yet unpublished author, a rare encounter indeed.”
“I hear there’s some buzz over your latest.”
“I am encouraged by the prospect of an auction and a potential seven-figure advance. I’m joking,” he added. He covered his mouth with two fingers and may have batted his eyes at me, tittering behind his invisible pink lace hankie.
“Writers have been known to do some of their best work behind bars.”
“Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” he acknowledged. “The Marquis de Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. Fine art borne out of idleness.”
“H
eart, your former wife, works for me,” I said. It didn’t do a thing to him. “She told me all about you,” I added.
“All that seems a lifetime ago.” He gazed into the middle distance as though the eyes of his imagination could penetrate the wall behind me. “And how is Scotty?”
“Don’t you know? He, his half-brother Ernie and cousin Little Eve are living with Ruth Holstein.”
“That dreadful woman,” he shuddered.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Well I do. She is a singularly vile creature. I can think of only one individual I would less rather have caring for my son. No, two.”
“Would one of those by any slim chance be Uncle Bo?”
“How did you know?”
“Lucky guess. Who’s the other?”
“You tell me; she’s your employee. And the most brilliant student I ever had.”
“She’s also their mother. Once she matures—”
“She’s really quite mad, you know.”
“What are you talking about?”
His eyes held mine for a count of fifteen. The steady bemused expression on his face taunted me.
“Fascinating, in a cruel way, to observe first-hand the legacy of abuse and neglect visited on a child of tender years. Take a normal healthy seven-year-old, for example, subject that child to a continual course of neglect punctuated by horrific bouts of sexual molestation, park the child in front of the television set alone for hours on end where the main viewing fare consists of appallingly bad black-and-white motion pictures from a bygone era, and what do you get?”
“I don’t know; you’re the professor.”
“You get Heart Holstein, tragically damaged child, resurrected from the ashes like the Firebird of legend—she still drives that Firebird?”
“Right.”
“Heart Holstein, whose childhood reality is too horrendous to endure, and who therefore withdraws into nothingness until, voila! She becomes the movies she knows so well. Box-office bombs become her balm—isn’t that a lovely pun? She recasts herself in the flickering images she regards as her friends and only confidants. She envisions herself in a wide-brimmed hat and a trench coat, a chain-smoking beauty with a gat in one hand and a Lucky Strike green pack in the other. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for her man. Nothing.”
“I guess that makes me the lucky one.”
“Does it?” Another ironic stare that seemed to go on forever.
“I think so.” In the confined concrete block room I didn’t sound so sure.
“I remember first suspecting the depths and dimensions of her psychosis when I presented her with a pearl necklace for an anniversary gift. She referred to the pearls as ‘oyster fruit.’”
“She was joking.”
“Was she? Has Heart even once shown you the merest glimmer of humor when in the thrall of her film noir identity?”
“Hard to say.”
“No it isn’t. She’s serious. One may say dead serious.”
When I didn’t respond he went on, “Have you ever asked yourself whether there might be any particular significance in the fact that her first husband’s name was Robin and her current husband’s name is Robbins?”
“I never noticed. What’s the connection?”
“There was a movie serial back in the forties based on the famously costumed crime-fighting duo from the comics. If I’m not mistaken the juvenile sidekick was portrayed by an actor named Johnny something. Tell me, has she ever addressed you as Johnny?”
“So why Clark?”
“She cast me in the role of a certain mild-mannered reporter, I should guess. A bespectacled journalist hiding a secret life. Another Saturday afternoon movie serial from the nineteen-forties in some forgotten rerun on daytime television.”
I stood to leave, signaling a nearby guard. “Good luck with your book,” I told Killarney.
Killarney crossed his legs and winked at me. “The schtuff that dreamsh are made of,” he said.
All day I had been unaccountably sweating as though I had a fever. Back in Heart’s car I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. As I drove the dog-leg from Ina back to the Interstate I checked and found bars on my Blackberry, so I made a call to directory assistance for the office number of Dr. Keith Nancy, neurologist. Claiming to be his patient with an emergency, I managed to con his receptionist out of his cell phone number and called that. He sounded perturbed when I identified myself.
“Doctor, I may have been bitten by a rabid dog.”
“May have been bitten?” he replied. “Either you’ve been bitten or you haven’t been. I should think you’d be able to remember whether you’ve been bitten by a rabid dog or not.”
“Dr. Nancy—”
“You should know the answer to that better than anyone. Has your memory been affected?”
“Doctor, I know I was bitten. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Was it yesterday?”
“Actually it was longer ago than that. It’s just that I’m not actually sure the dog was rabid.”
Dr. Nancy paused. “What do you notice about yourself?” he asked. It was the same question I’d posed to innumerable personal injury clients on the stand. In a sense, it’s the ultimate question, crossing the lines between professions, transcending law and medicine.
“I feel like I’m running a fever. I’m sweating. Oh, and there’s a kind of a throbbing, biting pain in my leg.”
“At the site of the dog bite?” Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I could sense Dr. Nancy becoming alarmed.
“Yes.”
“Is it a lancinating pain? Do you know what I mean by the term ‘lancinating’?”
“I do, and it is, at least the last day or two.”
Dr. Nancy sighed. It was as though the disease had become our common enemy, his and mine, bonding us doctor to patient. “You must be seen at once. Hours count. If it is rabies, once the disease takes hold there is no cure.”
“What’s the prognosis?”
“Untreated rabies is invariably fatal in humans.”
I rewound my memory. No blue hospital signs along the interstate. No hospital exit up ahead. The closest hospital I trusted was the one in Belleville where I’d first encountered Dr. Nancy.
On the way there I placed a long-delayed call to intercept the recorded messages at the office. Nine calls, every one from either Drey or Tyranno. It was as though they were double-teaming me. The ascending urgency of Drey’s frantic tone of voice seemed to mirror the escalating menace conveyed by Tyranno’s messages. All were focused on one thing: I’d better pay up fast if I knew what was good for me.
Then there was the final call: Tyranno this time. “Mistah Lawyer Ricky Galeer. [A pause.] I know you receivin’ these messages, man. Them videos be fire. America’s funniest. Want everybody you ever met seein’ what a funny muthafucka you is? ‘Cause if you don’t, you best be fittin’ to—”
A percussive sound like dank on the recorded message, then another. A woman screamed bloody murder. Dank, dank and she was silent. A click and the line went dead.
Shots fired. Frantic, I pulled onto the shoulder, gasping for breath. My heart was racing. I punched in all but the last three numbers of Drey’s home phone and then stopped.
The police would probably call out the Major Case Squad on this one. Grimm was a member. They’d routinely check land line message unit details as well as cell phone records for any suspicious parties. Calling Drey now would automatically make me a suspect. And if what I feared had actually happened, Drey wouldn’t be picking up any phones ever again. I pulled back onto Interstate 57 and raced toward 64 and Belleville. It was already after two; I made it in just over an hour. The hospital would have to wait.
Other than the sound of Pepper whimpering mournfully from the back yard, Drey’s trailer was quiet as a tomb when I parked Heart’s car outside and cut the engine. People in this neighborhood were probably used to the sounds of gunshots and the warble of glass packs; no nosy witne
sses showed their faces at any windows nearby. The front door gave easily; whoever had been there last had not bothered to pull it shut tight. Pepper began barking wildly. Man bites dog: if I bit him now, would he get rabies?
Inside I was immediately greeted with a lit-match smell like kids playing cap pistols. Down the hall to the bedroom that smell mixed with the stink of butcher shop and burning hair. I swept the hanging beads aside and entered Drey’s bedroom.
Tyranno was still in her, but the act no longer gave either one pleasure. His face bore a lazy, pre-orgasm expression. Somebody was running around snapping pictures too soon. The first shot had not been fatal. Tyranno’s braids were drenched with a dark waterfall of congealing gore. It must have been the second head shot that had shut off his lights for good.
What was left of Drey’s face was still visible behind Tyranno’s right shoulder where he had collapsed against her. She wore the violated expression of someone who has suffered the indignity of having been shot in the mouth. Her cheeks, forehead and chin were decorated with Tyranno’s blood in a final humiliating facial to end all facials.
I truly did not know what to do. Nothing would ever bring either of them back, and nothing in my life would ever seem as real as this stark moment. And I was the cause of it all in a way, my mere existence and what I represented to these two poor deluded fools. To them I had been the promise of a quick score, a free ticket to easy wealth. The immortal Nelson Algren once wrote, “Never sleep with a woman whose problems are worse than your own.” My failure to heed his sage advice had led, in some inexorable way, to two senseless murders.
Not knowing what else to do, I fell to my knees bedside and began reciting the Orthodox prayer for the dead. Speaking softly, I had just reached the part about a place of brightness, a place of verdure, a place of refreshment, where all sickness, sorrow and sighing have fled away, when I heard Grimm’s sneering voice interrupt behind me.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” he said. “You know what you are, asshole? You’re a walking, talking cliché—the criminal who returns to the scene of the crime. It was my idea to tow Tyranno’s Jimmy to the storage lot so’s you wouldn’t get hinky if you saw it parked outside in the street. Now let me see those hands.”
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