by Neal Arbic
After a long silence, he looked at his granddaughter. The anger had flushed out of his system. She had turned away, tears in her eyes. Her face at that one exact angle looked just like her grandmother as a young woman. The light from the window gave a soft glow to those features Jack knew so well. It was an arresting vision. Jack’s wife was suddenly alive, and young again, like the first time he ever saw her. Every thought fell from his mind.
For a moment, Jack forgot where he was. Martha, fair and lovely, was by his side, their whole lives ahead of them, back in a world that made sense. He felt his dreams of youth, his hopes of being a good cop. Their wedding, the birth of their daughter, a whole life passed within his heart. How he longed for this, to see Martha again. And now, she was so close he could touch her. Unconsciously, his hand slid towards hers and he felt its warmth. He whispered, “Martha.”
The young girl pulled away. Their eyes met abruptly. She sneered at her grandfather, but then saw the softness, loneliness and sadness in his watery eyes. “I look like her, don’t I? Mom always tells me so. She showed me that picture of you and grandma on your honeymoon. You looked good in your uniform.”
Jack shook off the vision, embarrassed. This was his out of control granddaughter! And yet the vision of his wife gave rise to confusing emotions and a confession. “I’m just trying to understand this record. I got these murders and there’s an important clue in the lyrics. They were written in blood. I’m just trying to understand them. Then, I can bring these killers in.”
Suddenly, she realized why he had come, and because it had been in the headlines for weeks, guessed the case he was working on. She felt a momentary respect for him.
Emotions swirling, he walked to the door. Her hand caught his at the doorway. She handed him a small plastic bag. “Take this. It will help you understand.”
Jack barely glanced at the bag, hardly heard a word she said. He looked at his granddaughter and once again glimpsed a perfect reflection of his wife. And yet, he knew she was no longer among the living. Love and death tore at his heart. Bewildered, he stuffed the bag into his pocket and left.
***
Jack entered his house and collapsed into his faded club chair. He stared at the small blank screen of his old TV. Twelve hours of driving had almost killed him, leaving him no energy to even pour a scotch on the rocks. The small end table beside him was crowded with empty mickeys. Finding a near-empty one, he drank from the bottle.
He glanced at his pocket, remembering the bag his granddaughter gave him. Pulling it out, he held the clear plastic in front of him, staring. Inside were four sugar cubes. “Why the hell did she give me these?”
Jack closed his sore eyes and remembered the sugar cubes at the crimes scene, remembered Delware showing how they were blotted with LSD.
His eyes opened. Scowling, he tossed the bag across the room. “Fuckin’ hippies! Think drugs can solve everything.”
Sunday, August 25th, 1969, 2:14 AM
Jack muttered, asleep in his chair. The room was deathly quiet, but some nightmare haunted his head. A breeze wandered through the open front windows, the white transparent drapes now alive in a ghostly dance. He gasped. The old man’s eyes shot wide open.
Saturday, August 30th, 1969, 11:59 PM
The Detective Bureau was dark and empty, the halls quiet. The corners loomed with shadows. In Homicide, the only light fell from small desk lamps. The hands on the clock touched midnight: the witching hour, the graveyard shift. Working Joes with a hard week behind them were out on a Saturday night drinking and trying to make it pay. Another heat wave had temperatures rising all week and now they boiled, leaving dead bodies in tenements, streets and alleys.
A shadow darkened the doorway of Homicide Division and gave a good look around. It whispered, “See, kid, I told you I’d come up with a plan. I’ll stand guard.”
Another shadow appeared.
The first shadow pointed to Dirk’s desk. “Like I said, Saturday night clears the place out. It always does. And they won’t be back anytime soon. Now let’s see if that college education did you any good.”
The shadow slipped out the doorway.
The second shadow approached Dirk’s desk. Delware’s face slowly appeared in the gloom. He stared at the file laden desk like a mountain of treasure, a holy shrine of secret knowledge. Noiselessly, he slipped into Dirk’s chair. Everything he wanted to know about the Tate murders was now at his fingertips. His hands shifted through pages, his eyes darting as if trying to read them all at once.
Out in the hall, Jack killed the last few lights in the stairwell to slow down any returning detectives. He leaned against the wall, silhouetted by large windows overlooking the glimmering city. Somewhere in greater LA the murderers lurked. On the other side of the wall was a young man getting his first chance at finding them.
Jack pulled out his flask.
***
Jack’s legs sprawled on the marble floor. His head tilted back against the wall, mouth open. Dawn was close at hand. The empty halls whispered with his snores. The steps of returning detectives echoed up from the bottom of the stairs.
Inside Homicide, Delware had forgotten the dangers of trespassing. He was surrounded by files, his head spinning with evidence.
The footsteps on the stairs came closer. Jack’s head moved, but his eyes remained shut.
Delware opened the last file. The electric fans whirled overhead. Among the swirling facts in his head, an idea was forming, a picture just on the horizon, a map that would put all these facts in order.
A harsh cough from the stairwell startled Jack. The clack of hard soles on cold marble made him jump.
Catching the echo of the cough, Delware rushed to put the files back into order. The coughing came again.
Jack fumbled to his feet and gave a soft warning whistle.
Delware stood ready to bolt away from the desk, but his hands were still feverishly working to put a night’s worth of work back in place.
Jack had only made it down a single flight of stairs before he intercepted two weary detectives. He tried to delay them with inane chatter, but they rolled their eyes and moved passed him.
Suddenly, all three men were looking up. The sound of rushing footsteps was headed their way.
Out of breath, Delware appeared at the top of the stairs, feigning surprise. “Jack, there you are! I was wondering where you-”
Jack shouted impatiently, “Yeah, yeah! Shut up, will ya.” He motioned Delware to join him. He turned to the detectives, “Well, gotta go.”
Relieved to be rescued from the old man’s ramblings, the detectives smiled, but eyed Delware suspiciously as he passed. They stopped and gave the pair a second look, watching Delware and Jack descend the steps.
Jack whispered, “Well, how did it go, kid?”
Delware looked like a man in some exalted dream. “I had something. It was right in the back of my mind. I was grasping for it. In another minute, I would have had it.”
Jack gave the young man a knowing glance. That’s how it starts.
Delware shook the reverie from his eyes and his face turned practical again. “Jack, I think Dirk has a lot right, at the very least, has some good points.”
Jack shrugged. “Well, you were sitting at his desk. He’d have the evidence arranged in a way that makes sense with his theory.”
“His biker-drug-deal-gone-wrong has weight. Multiple weapons, means multiple killers - bikers move in groups.”
Jack nodded. “I agree it was a tight-knit group.”
Delware’s face showed a man reasoning his way through many thoughts. “Bikers on parole can’t carry guns ‘cause it would violate them right back to prison, so many carry knives.”
“True, but why wouldn’t they use their knives? Why would they go to the kitchen to get other knives?”
Delware stopped on the stairs and thought. “The people at the party were high; it’s within reason bikers sold them those drugs.”
Jack considered the the
ory. “True.”
Delware played his hand. “Things got out of hand, maybe they didn’t pay the bikers up front, the bikers stuck around, got high, got frustrated, and suddenly, a fight breaks out.”
“In a crime of passion, people tend to kill with their hands or whatever’s in reach.”
“It’s just a short walk to the kitchen.”
Jack shook his head. “I can’t see angry bikers walking to the kitchen when they got knives on them. That’s why bikers don’t work for me. And the telephone wires were cut. That shows premeditation.”
Delware shook his head. “Yeah, but that could have been done afterwards, the whole idea is that the bloody messages on the walls, all of that, was staged to throw us off.”
Jack was silent. The first rays of the sun broke in through the windows. He shook his head. “That’s a lot of maybes and it still sounds out of whack: no bodies were moved. Staged murder scenes, after a fit of rage, are sloppy. The crime scene doesn’t make sense - it tells conflicting stories. I told you before, kid, I don’t see that. It still feels like Dirk trying to put square pegs into round holes.” Jack tried to lead his young partner. “The reason no one wants to read the evidence as it is, is ‘cause the story it tells is too incredible - a group of hippie killers.”
Delware shook his head and that vague hunch came back to him. “That feeling I had…it had something to do with that. Why aren’t there some other cases that bear some resemblance?”
Jack watched Delware’s face, hoping the light in his eyes would see the missing piece.
Delware shook his head. The hunch slipped away. He felt it evaporate. Delware frowned; frustrated with himself and the fact Jack was so insistent on his far-fetched scenario when a simpler one seemed just in reach. He decided to come at Jack another way. “OK. Let’s say the bikers had a long term grudge - maybe it was all premeditated, even the misleading evidence.”
Jack frowned. “Calculated murders have an almost business-like MO. The number of stab wounds was excessive. Over eighty stabs per person, that’s a long time to be killing one person. That allows time for others to escape. If it was planned, the overkill doesn’t make sense. Why risk someone getting away?”
Delware rolled his eyes. “So Jack, if you’re saying it wasn’t an act of passion and it wasn’t premeditated…then what is it?”
“Just what it looks like: an act of madness.” Jack’s eyes met Delware’s. “The only way to put the premeditated cutting of the phone lines and excessive violence together is to boil it down: they were predators.”
Delware gave Jack a doubtful look and then dropped his head. The last serial killing he could recall in LA was the Black Dahlia back in ’43, before he was even born.
Jack turned and looked out the stairwell window. “One Christmas, my dad brought home a radio. We were the first family on the street to own one. It had all these dials and tiny incandescent bulbs glowing inside. We loved The Sherlock Holmes Show. Holmes had this precept: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Delware looked at the old man staring out over LA.
Jack’s eyes were distant and deep. “Once you eliminate the impossible, all you have left is: they planned the murders.” Jack turned to his partner. “So they could enjoy them.”
Monday, September 3rd, 1969, 11:26 AM
Two sweaty, delivery men placed the heavy wood console down. The brand-new stereo made everything else in Jack’s living room look older and dustier. Delware nodded approvingly, but Jack frowned in his chair like the mustached delivery men were moving in.
Delware walked up and patted the stereo. “Welcome to 1969, Jack!” He un-sleeved a black vinyl disc from the White Album, lifted the lid of the console and placed the glossy disc on the turntable. “This is the way modern people listen to music.”
He lifted the arm of the record player and dropped the needle on the spinning disc. The needle popped and hissed in the groove and then the room filled with Martha My Dear.
Jack was amazed, but hid it well. The music was all around him.
Delware spoke over Paul McCartney. “This is Hi-Fidelity!”
Jack gave a deadpan, “Charming.”
Like a salesman, Delware waved his hands before the two built-in speakers on either end of the console. “What you’re listening to is a stereophonic LP. Long Playing. More songs, better sound. It’s not like your old mono record player with one speaker. In stereo, the music is spread across two speakers so it’s like the band is right in the room with you.”
Lifting the needle, he put on the next song. Blackbird gently pulsed from the console. Delware motioned to the inside of the long cabinet. “It even has a space to store your LPs in.”
Jack squirmed in his seat. He hated lectures, especially from some punk black kid. “OK. OK. Just turn it off.”
Delware lifted the needle and placed the arm back on its stand. The record automatically stopped spinning.
Jack shook his head at the stereo. “Goddamn thing.”
Delware grinned at the old man’s sour mug. “Well, now you can listen to the White Album at home.”
Jack pushed himself up from his chair with an expressionless, “I’m thrilled.”
He closed the door behind the delivery men and turned to Delware. “OK, kid, been studying the lyrics you typed up.”
Jack walked to the center of the room. “Now what did we find at the crime scene?”
Delware took off his red windbreak. “The Bible.”
“Now what’s the significance? What is the Bible?
Delware knew the answers - they had gone over this ground again and again. “A message.”
Jack corrected, “A message from God, a series of messages.”
Jack paced in front of Delware. “And the pages torn from The Book of Revelations, The Apocalypse, to write the messages on the wall. What is the Apocalypse?”
Delware rolled his eyes, reciting his pat reply. “Helter skelter.”
Jack nodded. “Yes. And no Bible quotes in blood, only lyrics from the White Album - what does that mean?”
Delware took a moment. “He believes they’re related?”
Jack increased his pace. “Exactly, now what type of message is the Apocalypse of Saint John?”
Delware leaned back on the stereo. “Prophecy.”
“Right! A prophecy of destruction. That’s what the White Album is to him: a warning of things to come.”
Delware sat back and looked doubtfully at Jack.
Jack was silent for a moment, his eyes somewhere else, as if he was searching, sniffing at the trail he had found.
Delware interrupted the old man’s reverie. “So the messages in blood, we’re now going to look for…a secret code? In the White Album?”
Jack glanced at Delware. “That’s it, kid.”
Delware shook his head. “I got to say it again…are we really going to find this guy - looking at lyrics?”
Jack’s eyes focused on Delware. “So what you worried about, your career?”
“Everyone thinks we’re crazy.”
“You want that gold shield, kid?”
Delware rolled his eyes, the old man knew the answer.
Jack scratched his unshaven face. “Tin shields are for those who follow police procedure, an admirable quality, but gold shields are for those with the balls to investigate a long shot. If you’re not willing, kid, if you can’t play the odds, you don’t deserve to be called detective and you shouldn’t be hunting killers.”
“But what happens if you’re just following an elaborate ruse?”
“Then Dirk catches the guy.”
Delware looked away, watching that gold shield vanish into thin air.
“Kid, there’s no magic in what Dirk’s doing. Procedure you can learn from anyone. I’m showing you how to hunt. We’re going into the wilderness. We’re looking for maniacs.”
Jack approached. “You ever heard of James Brussel?”
; Delware shook his head.
“Early 50s, he came up with this idea. It may not be accepted procedure, but I’ll tell you, the man’s onto something: Criminal Profiling - a way to detect sickos who kill for fun. You don’t hunt these guys by usual methods, ‘cause there’s no personal connection with their victims. So you study the killer’s MO. You build a picture of him - his habits. You narrow down who you’re looking for. A case like that slipped through my fingers once, ‘cause I was looking in all the wrong places. I’ve been waiting, waiting for years to get a crack at another one. And this is it.”