Over the course of the next week, two more women were murdered. True to his word, Lenny invited me to the crime scenes. We stood next to each other and examined the corpses of blue-eyed, blonde-haired women—women I looked like when I was twenty. Women with firm tits, tight asses, and abs like washboards. Except, these were women with their nipples removed, women inked with that damn tattoo.
Lenny invited me to the crime scenes, all right, but the son of a bitch never said a word about the night we spent together. He never sent flowers. He never sent a card. He didn’t even call drunk looking for a repeat. The motherfucker acted like nothing had happened.
The third time he summoned me, I was ready for him.
The woman was in her home in Wauwatosa, a cozy suburb near the West Side. Coworkers grew suspicious when she didn’t show or call in sick. A nosy neighbor broke in through the back door and found Whitney Beranek in the bedroom. Her eyes were still open. The skin on her breasts, near where her nipples should have been, was an ugly yellow and purple.
“Same old shit,” Lenny said. “The profiler figures our killer for a middle-aged white male. That’s about half of everyone left in Milwaukee.”
“We need to talk, Szerbiak.”
Outside, a group of neighbors gathered in the street. Snow three feet deep lay piled at the curb. The bitter January cold pinched my nostrils and made it difficult to breath.
“Why are you doing this, Lenny?”
“Doing what?”
“I think you know.”
“I told you I’d keep you in the loop.”
“That was before you fucked me. Why have our only dates since then been in the company of mutilated corpses?”
Lenny dug out his cigarettes and offered me one. This time, I declined.
“I didn’t think we hit it off all that well,” he said.
“Really? You seemed to like it well enough when you were grinding away on top of me.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, well.”
“I don’t go to bed with just anyone.” Well, at least not everyone.
“Whatever you say, counselor.”
I was so pissed I could’ve kicked him with my sharp-toed heels. “You know what, Szerbiak?”
“What’s that, counselor?”
“Fuck you.”
I was more convinced than ever that Armand Heimlich was an innocent man. Whoever was on this current killing spree was the same man who had killed the women Armand had been convicted of killing. The DNA didn’t lie, but neither did the ink. And neither did my gut. But it would take more than ink and my gut to get Armand out of jail.
I drove to Waupun Prison to see him. Waupun sat on the edge of Horicon Marsh. In the spring and fall, it was a stopover for Canadian Geese on their semi-annual migration. In the deep winter of late January in Wisconsin, there was something prehistoric, something Ice Age, about it. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see woolly mammoths wandering across the landscape.
If the marsh was bleak, the prison was utterly depressing—a castle of stone surrounded by a barbed wire fence set upon the frozen prairie. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, it was where the worst of Wisconsin’s worst paid their debt to society. Ed Gein, a farmer who haunted rest stops and picnic grounds on rural Wisconsin highways and applied his victim’s skin to lampshades and furniture, spent time here. So did Jeffrey Dahmer, the chocolate factory worker who turned young men into sexual zombies by injecting chemicals into their brains before feasting on their organs. On average, it took three convictions to earn your way into Waupun. Once there, the average stay was ten years. The recidivism rate was seventy percent. So much for prison as a vehicle for rehabilitation.
I knew the routine. I showed my ID at the gate and parked in the visitor’s lot. Once inside, I slipped off my shoes and gave up my belt to pass through security. I endured the pat down from a bulky female guard who looked like she was packing a strap-on in her pants.
I tried not to give it much thought.
When she was done, the woman punched numbers into a keypad to unlock double doors of glass and steel bars, and led me through a six-by-twelve containment chamber monitored by video cameras. If she were more bored, she couldn’t have shown it.
At the far end of the chamber, another set of double doors opened into a short, dark hallway. A male guard on the other side punched another keypad and the double doors slid open. When I stepped through, the doors locked behind me with a clunk and a hiss. I remembered the guard’s clipped, bristly hair and pointed fox-like ears from previous visits. He looked me over like I was a bratwurst and beer on a hot day at the ballpark.
I met Armand in the Lawyer’s Room, a six-by-nine cell with a metal table and two uncomfortable chairs. Armand was cuffed to the table and two armed guards waited outside the door. There was a panic button underneath on my side of the table.
“Hey, Armand,” I said.
“Hey, Miss Bartkowski.”
Armand wasn’t a bad guy compared to some of my clients. White and middle-aged with flaxen hair and pale blue eyes, he fit Szerbiak’s profile like a glove. Still unmarried at age forty-five, he’d lived with his mother, working days at a brewery and nights at a tattoo parlor, before being fingered for the Nipplelicious murders.
At trial, he’d offered an alibi witness and his pastor had described for the jury Armand’s good works in the community. His record was clean as a whistle. Except for the DNA he’d apparently left behind under Shana Hellwig’s fingernails, the jury would never have convicted him. Lenny Szerbiak had originally focused on Armand because he lived in Shana’s neighborhood and worked as an ink artist. Lenny and his partner got Armand to agree to a polygraph and a blood test “to clear his name.” He passed the polygraph, but his DNA matched what they’d found at the crime scene.
Bingo! Lenny had his man.
“How goes it, Armand?”
“Not bad, I guess.”
Compared to what, I wondered. “Well, I just needed to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Is this about my appeal?”
“Not really.” Cons are always thinking about their appeals. I didn’t tell him that, although I’d filed as a matter of course, our chances of winning were about as good as a fart in a snow storm.
“Okay. Ask away.”
“Armand, had you ever met or seen Detective Szerbiak before he arrested you?”
There was a dullness to Armand’s responses that made him seem like he could be a serial killer. I was never quite sure what was going on behind the flat expression.
“I seen him in the neighborhood bars. He’d come to the Friday Night Fish Fries at the church.”
“The church?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was a Milwaukee tradition.
“Yeah, my church sold fish fries, all you could eat, on Friday nights. I volunteered on the serving line and I remembered seeing him after he arrested me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, a lot of cops are from the Southside. A lot of cops come to fish fries. It wasn’t that big of a deal.”
“But you remembered him from the fish fry after he arrested you? You remembered him from the serving line?”
“Well, yeah, but I’d seen him at conferences, and such, before that. I knew he was a cop before he ever arrested me.”
“Conferences?”
“Yeah, tattoo conventions and conferences, you know. He used to be in the business. I thought it was kinda funny for a cop, but what the hey?”
“Szerbiak was into tattoos?”
“Yeah, they said he moonlighted at a shop in Kenosha.”
“No shit.”
“That’s what they said.”
I’m pushing fifty and there are only a couple of things I’ve ever been good at in life. One of them is police work. The other, well . . .
The remembered words settled on me like an icy wet blanket.
“Why didn’t you ever say anything about this, Armand?”
“You never asked.”
It’s always the most obviou
s questions that don’t get asked. “I think that’s all I really needed, Armand.”
“You drove all the way up here just to ask me that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
I had to hold on to the chair when I stood, my legs were so weak.
It took three weeks of hard work to lure Lenny Szerbiak back to my place for dinner. I called to apologize for telling him to fuck off. He said he understood. I told him I thought we deserved another chance. He said he wasn’t sure. I whispered into the cell phone that I couldn’t think of anything but his slick dick between my breasts. He agreed to meet for coffee. I wore a low-cut V-neck sweater and a push-up bra, and squeezed him under the table. From there, we progressed to online chatting and a round of phone sex. I knew I had him when I e-mailed a pic of my nipples pinched by clothespins and he followed up with a shot of a woman’s wrist cuffed to a bedpost.
While we did our little dance, three more women died. Since our tiff in Wauwatosa, Lenny no longer invited me to the crime scenes, so I read about it in the paper. Carol Slovinsky they found in an apartment in Brown Deer, Debbie Nieman in a townhouse in Glenview, and Sheila Muesenhoffer tied to a La-Z-Boy in her suite at the Pfister Hotel. The pressure was growing on Lenny and his dedicated team to nail the killer—dubbed, logically enough, the Nipplelicious Copycat by the local media. The mayor held a press conference and said there would be no vacations until the “heartless fiend was brought to justice.”
In most places, the end of February signaled the end of winter. But in Milwaukee, the end of February was only the beginning of the last three months of winter. The Friday night Lenny appeared at my door with a bouquet of roses and a haircut, snow was falling wet and heavy. By morning, it would be a slushy mess or a frozen wasteland, depending on the temps.
“I can’t stay,” he said. “I’ve only got a few hours off with this killer on the loose.”
“I’m just glad you’re here.”
I poured us cabernet and asked him to take a seat at the bar while I finished prepping dinner. My knife chopped and diced. I wore a tight-fitting black wool sweater, a gray mini-skirt, and five-inch hooker heels. Underneath, I’d skipped the bra and panties, opting instead for fishnet thigh-highs.
“So, how’s that investigation going?”
“Same old, same old.”
“You still convinced it’s a copycat?”
“Not a doubt in my mind, counselor.”
I seasoned a couple of juicy T-bones and assembled a potato gratin dish my grandma taught me how to make.
“It’s a funny thing, though,” I said without looking up.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve got family in Chicago. My brother’s an ex-cop. He does PI work these days.”
“Yeah?”
“He told me that while Armand’s trial was going on and the murders stopped here, they had a couple of murders down there. Same titty play, same tattoo. Then once Armand’s locked up, the murders stop there, but start again here.”
“We’re aware of the murders in Chi-town.”
I refilled his wine glass. “I figured you were.”
My brother told me a few other things. His investigation into Lenny Szerbiak revealed a man with a troubled youth and a marginal adulthood. He grew up in the rough, working-class south side of Milwaukee. Lenny’s teachers remembered a pudgy boy who the children teased for having breasts like a girl. On the one hand, a teenage Lenny sang in the church choir. On the other, he spent time in reform school for vandalism and fighting. After high school, he joined the Marines, appeared to clean up his act, and made the police force. But there were rumors of heavy drinking. There was more than the one divorce he told me about. And there were troubling complaints from female officers about a detective who could be overly friendly in tight places.
Lenny sipped his wine and I worked in silence for several minutes. I could feel his eyes all over me and hear the whistle of his breath through his nostrils. When I looked up, Lenny leaned across the bar and kissed me. His face was flushed when he pulled away.
“I gotta have some of you, Cindy. You got me so worked up I can hardly stand it.”
I gave him a wicked smile and came around to the other side of the bar. I raised myself up and sat in front of him. My nipples were at eye level. I spread my knees and my skirt slid higher than my thigh-highs. I leaned in and nipped at his ear, pushing my nipples into his face. He lifted the sweater so he could feel skin on skin. I yelped and pulled away when he bit me. Then I whisked off the sweater and sat topless before him.
“You’re a titty man, aren’t you, Lenny?”
His breathing was quick and shallow, his eyes wide. He swallowed hard. “Always have been.”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
He lunged and buried his face in my bosom. He slurped and sucked.
“Ooooh, baby,” I cooed.
I leaned over and reached into his lap. It felt like he had a tire iron in his pants. I came down off the bar and knelt on the floor. I unzipped him and drizzled saliva on the length of his shaft. I pressed him into the valley between my breasts. I squeezed while he pumped.
“Goddamn,” he moaned.
“Fuck my titties, Lenny. That’s it, give it to me.”
It only took a few strokes to bring him off. It was like a river of goo.
“Shit,” he said. “You’re something, girl.”
Those were his last words before the Rohypnol kicked in. Lenny’s eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled off the bar stool, just missing the corner of my coffee table as he fell.
I took my time. I used a syringe to collect his semen and squirted it into a plastic vial. I ran hot water over a dishtowel and cleaned myself. I used Lenny’s own cuffs to secure him to my sofa and removed his .38 revolver from his shoulder holster.
Then, I broiled my steak, poured a glass of wine from an untainted bottle, and enjoyed my dinner while Lenny slept it off.
It took him two hours to come around. By the time he did, I’d cleaned up from dinner and changed into jeans and a U of W sweatshirt.
“What the fuck?” he said.
“Over here, Szerbiak.”
It took a few moments for his eyes to focus. I sat across from him in my favorite chair.
He broke into a silly grin. “You play rough.”
I crawled over to him on my hands and knees. I laid the blade of my chef’s knife against his cheek. “Feel cold steel, asshole.”
“Jesus Christ, Cindy.”
I retreated to my chair. “We can make this easy or hard, Lenny.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Your secret’s out. I know you’re the Nipplelicious Murderer.”
“What?”
“You killed the women Armand was convicted of killing. You’re a tattoo artist and you left your mark. You thought you might get caught after Shana Hellwig fought you and you were forced to flee the crime scene before you had a chance to clean up. And you were right. It was your skin under her fingernails. But you framed Armand by switching out your DNA for his. It wouldn’t have been that hard for the lead detective on the case to gain access to the evidence. Maybe you intended to stop after Armand was arrested, maybe not. But you couldn’t. You couldn’t even stop while he was on trial. That’s why you went down to Chicago. Except you made a mistake down there.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“You left a trace of DNA behind. It must’ve leaked from your condom, Lenny.” I held up my vial. “I’m betting the DNA from Marla Winkelhammer’s murder matches this.”
The blood drained from his face. He shook his head, started to deny it, then let go. An expression of relief settled over him, but he looked ten years older. “Okay, counselor. What do you want from me?”
“First, I want to know why you didn’t kill me.”
“Kill you? I never wanted to kill you. I just wanted to tease you.”
It made sense. For a serial killer on a power trip, the ultimate
trip was teasing the lawyer who’d defended the guy he’d framed for his murders. “That’s why you invited me to the crime scenes?”
“It wasn’t for your company.”
“You really are an asshole, Lenny.”
He smiled. “Admit it, counselor, I may be an asshole, but I gave you what you wanted.”
For a long moment, I considered shoving my blade into his left eye. Instead, I flipped the switch on the voice recorder I usually used for dictating memos and motions. “Tell me about all those other women, Lenny. The ones that didn’t survive.”
“You really want to hear.”
“Tell it, Lenny. Come to Momma.”
That long, cold winter eventually melted into a cool, wet spring. It took that long for the wheels of justice to turn in Lenny’s case.
After I got his confession, I gave the tape and the vial to the DA. A genuine prick if there ever was one, Marty Weimereiner refused to stipulate to Armand’s innocence at first. It was only when they found the Mason jars on a shelf in a walled-off section of Lenny’s basement that Marty came around. Each jar of formaldehyde held a pair of matching nipples. Each jar was labeled with the victim’s name.
Lenny hired a friend of mine, Suze Manski, to defend him. He claimed the confession was forced and argued that my method of collecting his DNA violated his civil rights. The judge denied bail and scheduled the trial for late summer.
In the meantime, the killings stopped. That was proof enough of Lenny’s guilt for most folks in Milwaukee. That and the Mason jars.
It was late April when I returned to Waupun to meet Armand at the gate, a free man at last. Shoots of green showed through the ice on the marsh. Geese on their way north passed overhead, festooned against the sky in the shape of a boomerang, wings flapping furiously, potbellies sagging, necks extended as they made loud, chaotic honks. Just like in the movies, the sun broke through the clouds and set the puddles of melting snow aglitter as Armand strode to my car.
He waited until he’d settled in the bucket seat next to me to speak. “Miss Bartkowski, I ain’t got the words.”
I patted his hand. “Don’t worry, Armand. I got a favor you can do for me.”
Tight Women in Hard Places Page 16