Slob

by Rex Miller

  At 175500 Eichord was drinking his ninth cup of cardboard-tasting coffee of the day and block-printing a huge letter U. It was printed or drawn to look like a letter carved out of stone, and it was the last letter of a twelve-letter two-word phrase that it had taken him nearly ten minutes to draw on a sheet of paper. Each large stone letter had its own shadow and he had carefully inked in the black shadows of the words that filled the page.

  ETAOIN SHRDLU

  He completed the artwork. Crumpled the paper up into a ball and arced it overhead to a large metal wastebasket to his left. A homicide cop behind him said, "Two points."

  "Foul," someone else said and the first unseen voice added:

  "Two free shots from the foul line. Keep your hands to yourself," in a mock W. C. Fields voice.

  181730. Edie and Sandi are coming out of a store and Edie tells her, "I sure appreciate you picking up Lee Anne."

  "No trouble. But I sure don't like you staying down here so late at night even if it is only one night a month."

  "I'll be fine, worrywart. I'll get Mr. Whatsisface from the center to walk me to my car if it's too late, or maybe Jack will pick me up. I'll be careful."

  "Okay. But call me later just to say hi, okay?"

  "Okay." She knew how Sandi worried. Sandi should worry about herself, she thought, in an uncharitable moment, considering the way she dresses and comes on to guys sometimes. She put the irritating thought out of her mind and click-clacked on her high-heeled long legs to the center. One night a month she did a stint of telephone answering on the Runaway Hotline. It was from six to ten P.M., and she would make sure to have someone walk with her to her car as the center was in a pretty bad neighborhood. Of course, the whole world was a bad neighborhood now at ten o'clock at night, she thought.

  At 181730 Bunkowski was parked in the parking lot of a convenience store having just used the pay telephone outside the store to place an "order to go" of forty dollars' worth of egg rolls. When the girl who took the order hung up the phone, she had relayed the message to the cook saying:

  "Somebody's having a big party tonight."

  The big party is still crammed behind the wheel of his uncomfortable stolen Cougar, and he is drawing in a large book that appears to be a bookkeeper's ledger of some kind. He is working on a diagram with the printed caption "#610," and he draws freehand but with perfect, sure strokes. At the moment he is designing a wooden ladder device. He is working on his book of Chicago escapes. He is about to use the book, the results of many hours of methodical preparation, for the first time.

  The ledger is a piece of genius. Evil genius to be sure, but true genius nonetheless. Bunkowski has no problem murdering. It is in him, his second nature. His only problem as a killer is how to escape the modern, sophisticated police technology. How does a man who weighs almost five hundred pounds and stands six feet seven inches, a man who looks like an insane cross between an enraged gorilla and the Pillsbury Dough Boy, how does someone like that achieve a low profile? Where can he go to hide?

  Bunkowski has prepared carefully. He emulates his former enemy, the VC, and so he prepares now to build and enter that other world, the world he will make for himself below the city. The Cong who hid by day, going down into the tunnels beneath Vietnam to sleep and nurse wounds, would come out at night. They would come out to resupply, to intimidate, to gather intel, to harass, and of course to hit and run. To kill. And so this is precisely what Chaingang will do.

  We exist in today's high-tech society by the infinitely complex interwoven web of utility services that run beneath the urban megaplex. We maintain our level of civilized societal convenience and comfort through our sophisticated telephone cables, our electrical hookups, our water supply lines, our sewage disposal pipes, our arterial service tubes, our transit modes, our pipelines to and from the urban masses of working humanity, the huge and generally unknown subworld that exists below the surface of the city streets.

  191800. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski is diagramming rung supports and listening to traffic. Edith Emaline Lynch is walking through a room that smells of cologne and stale popcorn, and listening to ringing telephones and subdued conversations, and Jack Eichord is walking down stairs and singing jumbled bits of half-recognizable songs.

  "Sinatra, you ain't." A voice from an open doorway above and footsteps behind him on the stairs. Jack turns with a smile in place as he sees Arlen.

  "S'matter, Lou, you don't like music?"

  "Come on. We got another one," the lieutenant says as he rushes past him.

  "Christ." Eichord hurries to keep up with him as they run to a unit. It is a call that was first handled by a single patrolman in a roller who answered the call on what he thought would be another domestic dispute. It was a young boy. Teenager. Cauc. Sandy hair. Husky build. The heart gone. The MO appeared to be identical. Body mutilated. Burn marks. Looked like a torture-homicide. Only one thing different. This time there was an eyeball witness.

  "She's pretty shook up," the cop was telling them, "but she saw this dude clear when he got out of the van to dump the kid. Big mother. Sounds like our man."

  "Description?"

  "Better. A description and a fucking license number."

  213430. Edie is talking with a thirteen-year-old girl named Pam who is pregnant, alone in the Big City, and afraid to go home for what her father will do to her. Edie is begging the girl to stay on the line as she signals for a legit counselor to pick up the telephone. Eichord is on his way to a Chicago suburb with a convoy of vehicles closing in on a Ford Econoline which has been spotted by a state rod who is at this second in pursuit. The two-way sounds like World War IV. Bunkowski is in a field next to a construction site building a sturdy wooden ladder. He saws through a two-by like it was made of balsa wood.

  Garrett Aldrich, the director of the center, is busy on the Crisis Hotline and Edie decides to walk to the car by herself. No big deal. The street is still busy with traffic and brightly lit. She click-clacks out of the center and along the sidewalk. She has her key ready and unlocks the car door instantly, immediately locking the door after her. She sits behind the wheel thinking. For the first time today she really thinks about how fast everything is going. How deeply she and Jack are getting involved with each other's lives, and the implications on both herself and Lee Anne. This is what she is thinking when she looks across the street and chances to see him.

  It is a man. A huge man. He is running out into the street with a big ladder over his shoulder. He takes a kind of hook and lifts the manhole in the street, drops the ladder down into the hole, and begins squeezing himself down into the opening as Edie stares, transfixed. He happens to glance up by chance and sees a woman in a parked car sitting there looking at him as he squeezes his huge girth down through the manhole opening in the street. The time is 222030.

  Edie sees the big man look up at her and freeze. She feels intense fear and intuitively grinds the ignition key, jumping to discover she'd already started the car's engine. Without glancing back at the strange menace, she trods on the accelerator, dropping the transmission lever into drive, and shoots away from the curb. When she glances into the rearview mirror, it is too dark and her perspective has shifted enough that she fails to see that the man has come out of the manhole opening and has moved with deceptively quick strides toward where Edie had been parked.

  She sees none of this as she turns the corner, breathing more normally as the weighty presence of dread lifts from her like an invisible stone, and she puts the menacing weirdness of The Manhole Man out of her mind. She has much more interesting and rewarding things to concentrate on as she wonders if Jack will call her late tonight as they discussed, and when they will see each other again. But at 222030 Eichord's thoughts are far from romantic. He is all cop, standing with other men at the scene of an arrest. They have taken a suspect into custody and the air is electric with the possibility of these men having caught the Lonely Hearts killer.

  "So what's the problem, Jack?" one of th
em is asking Eichord.

  "It just isn't that tight."

  "Wrong-oh."

  "Say?"

  "Shit, man, it's absolutely dead bang. What more do you want here? We've got that sonofabitch."

  "I don't think so."

  "It's dead bang, Jack," another cop says.

  "No. I don't believe it's dead-bang sure at all."

  "We've got an eyeball witness. We've got a perp with a psycho package. We've got a blade man. A resisting arrest. We got a body. We got blades. He fits the whole MO. We got opportunity. We got motive. Dead-bang solid."

  "No." Eichord shakes his head.

  "Come on."

  "Huh-uh. He's not our man."

  "Eye-fuckin'-witness, Pops."

  "That's the dead boy. Okay. That's what we've got. He did the boy all right. But as far as Sylvia Kasikoff I gotta' tell you guys, I just don't like him for it at all."

  "Talk," Arlen says.

  "You're gonna find out that it isn't the same blade. He took the heart out with a scalpel. A little—what the hell was it?—a Benson and Hedges—uh, some name like that—the little blade?"

  "Brookstone and Jensen surgeon's scalpel."

  "Right. He did the boy with it, bet money."

  "So he used a scalpel this time. We've got the big hunting knife that he used on all the others. Maybe it was getting dull. Whatever. So he used a scalpel. Same difference."

  "When the lab tells us the hunting knife was the blade, then it's dead bang. No. I don't think we got the main heart man here at all. I think we got a copycat."

  "Jack."

  "Lou?"

  "What throws you off on this guy . . . I mean, how come you don't like a guy who takes a heart for Sylvia Kasikoff all of a sudden?"

  "The burns. I dunno. Something about the fact that he tortured the boy. It's like he was playing with him and then did the heart number to throw us off the other. Make it into a Lonely Hearts. And he just cut the heart out of the chest cavity and pitched it. The other times somebody took the heart and did something with it, disposed of it elsewhere or used it someway, like in a ritual thing—whatever. I just don't think we've got him at all." But it wasn't the burns. It wasn't that at all.

  "Jack. I think you're going to be very, very surprised with the lab work on this. That hunting knife has got a big blade. I think we'll make it for the others. You want to put a big steak dinner on it?"

  "You got it." Eichord laughed. "And let's pray you're right."

  The cops are in a good mood in spite of Jack's dissenting opinions, and everybody is heading for the cop bar and a big celebration. Eichord is going too, never a wave maker, letting the comaraderie and self-congratulatory fever take him against his better judgment.

  It is 222600 and against his better judgment Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski decides to ignore the woman who saw him and, tired and ravenous, has gone down into his nightworld. At 222600 he is nineteen feet south of Chicago Submain K-138C-10, in a tiny submerged room that hangs beneath the manhole next to K-138C-10's valve-box cover, where he sits quietly, staring into the shadows of a lantern, oblivious to the overpowering stench as he consumes forty-dollars' worth of cold egg rolls, and thinks about his dark future.

  As his conscious mind thinks his horrifying and disgusting Chaingang thoughts of rape and murder and mutilation, on another level his subconscious registers the recent events in his computer and a tiny voice whispers to him, "Well, you've done it again. You've made another mistake." And subliminally he feels himself sinking deeper into the quicksand of retribution that continues to tug at his massive body so relentlessly.

  He mashes another cold egg roll into the sweet-and-sour sauce and inhales it in a gulp, staring into the black shadows with tiny eyes like hard, dark marbles set in a face of dough. The coal-black pig eyes of sudden death. Evil . . . safe now, down in the sewers.

  And Edie Emaline Lynch is rolling northbound. Her vector has crossed that of the monster. She is humming along with a love song on the radio, thinking about an almost-stranger she is nuts about, this Jack Eichord, who is at this moment laughing on the outside, gritting his teeth on the inside, and about to succumb to his personal demons.

  Eichord in the spotlight

  "What?"

  W H A T ?

  The word explodes into the stillness of the room, shocking him awake like a pitcher of ice water thrown on the naked body of a sleeping human. He is jarred awake physically but remains deep inside the clinging and impenetrable covers of one of those unbearably realistic-to-the-last-detail nightmares that some people seem to visit in lieu of confessionals.

  Jack Eichord was an ardent and longtime fan of the movie genre known as film noir; dated, dark, night time guided tours of forties and fifties urban underworlds. He loved the old black-and-white late-show procedurals, full of seedy PIs in search of elusive Maltese falcons. One of the early ones was a thing with Victor Mature and Betty Grable called I Wake Up Screaming and he thought the title to himself as he woke up screaming the word what.

  W H A T ?

  He is screaming the world WHAT? at the top of his brain's lungs, just as the room explodes in noise and he penetrates the curtain of the bad dream enough to snatch the ringing telephone off the cradle and whisper through a sleep-parched mouth the hoarse, cracked greeting:

  "Wha'?"

  "Jack? Are you awake?" she asked.

  "Huh?"

  "Is this Jack?"

  "Huh? Yeah. Yeah. Edie?"

  "Were you still asleep? It's after ten. I'm sorry. You got in late, I shouldn't have called. I'm sorry."

  "'S okay."

  "Jack! Congratulations!"

  "Huh?" What, he thinks, I wonder what time it is? He is totally befuddled.

  "It's all over the television and newspapers this morning. You're a celebrity. Except the one paper got your name as John Eichord instead of Jack, but on TV they didn't have your name on the one channel; they referred to you as 'the famous expert on serial murders' or something like that and— "

  "What?"

  "Huh? Pardon?"

  "Edie, can you hear me all right?"

  "Yes, honey. You sound like you've got a cold or something. Have you got a bad connection? Can you hear me?"

  "Yes, I think so. Listen, what are you talking about? What's in the papers and on TV? What are you saying?"

  "You, my darling. You're a big cop star now." She laughed happily. "Oh, Jack, was he the one,"—her voice took on a cold edge—"you know, responsible for Ed? Or is it too soon to know that yet?"

  "Edie, I just don't have the faintest notion of what you're talking about. Start from the beginning."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Yeah. What is it?"

  "You solved the Lonely Hearts killings."

  "I'm not believing this. What in the hell are you talking about?"

  "Well . . . didn't you?" She is confused now. "They said the man you arrested last night was the one who did all those . . . crimes. The Lonely Hearts murders. What are you telling me? Are you saying you don't know what any of this is about?"

  "Edie, listen, this is very important. Who, exactly now, who says I solved the murders?"

  "Channel Four, the American, ABC-TV had it on their—uh—"

  "No. I mean who—what official—name the names. What . . . Where did the TV and newspaper reporters get the story? Was it from Lieutenant Arlen or who?"

  "The police commissioner, I don't know. It's all in the papers, Jack. Didn't you arrest someone last night in the killings?"

  "Yes. A suspect. But he didn't do the other murders. This was an isolated homicide. Who said it was the Lonely Hearts? Did the commissioner actually say it? Can you find it there in a paper and read it to me?"

  "Hold on." He could hear the phone make a noise. "'The announcement of the arrest was made by Chicago Deputy Chief Samuel F. X. O'Herin, who attributued the quick capture of the killer to the fine police work of the Chicago police force and to the outstanding direction of Special Investigator John E
ichord, a consultant from the national Major Crimes Task Force. Deputy Chief O'Herin announced the arrest at a special news conference during which— ' "

  "Oh, those dumb bastards."

  "What is it, Jack?"

  "Those stupid sonsofbitches. What in God's name do they think they're doing? They're not going to be able to put this over on the public. The next time he kills they'll know it was all so much bullshit." But even as he said it he knew that wasn't necessarily true. No one had clout like law enforcement. And in certain localities—like Cook County, Illinois, Tarrant County, Texas, isolated pockets of California, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri—the clout was unreal. There was one notorious area of New Jersey where a badge was an absolute license to kill, and the truth was . . . Hell, the truth was he was beginning to wonder if he knew what the truth was. He finally got the squad room on his second attempt to dial, so sleep-befuddled he was.

  He'd almost gone all the way down into it last night, standing there in that smoky cop bar with those fucking flake homicide dicks and those worn-out groupie retreads, laughing loud, plastic laughs at cruel cop wit, almost falling off the edge of his glass down into that sweet, bitter, stinging, intoxicating piss-colored liquid world he loved so much. Almost let it take him. No special reason. Just the power of the moment. A juicer never needs an excuse,- you just go with the flow. It had been close. He'd pushed his tolerance right to the wall. Very stupid.

  His hand was shaking a little as he waited for Arlen.

  "We tried to phone you,- you were either asleep or out," they said to him.

  "I was right here, Lou," he told the lieutenant.