by Robert White
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Haftmann.”
Well, fuck it, I thought. No more Mr. Nice Guy.
“You goddam well know what I mean,” I said. “I saw your ex-wife, remember? Your daughter didn’t disappear. She left. She got the hell out of an intolerable situation. You have any idea how much of my business is finding kids who don’t want to be found?”
He tried to interject but I bored on. “You were beating her mother to a pulp and you treated Annaliese like a leper because of something she was completely innocent of. Don’t tell me any more shit about cruel courts, O’Reilly.”
Long, baleful stare. He drew a checkbook from his inside coat pocket. Then: “How much do I owe you?”
I shrugged and reached for my calculator. So be it.
“Wait. Wait, Haftmann. Let me explain.” He wiped his hand around his mouth as if there were some kind of stain he had to remove.
I laced my fingers together before me and waited. “Yes?”
“It’s—It’s hard to explain how it was. Years of it, the knowledge that the woman you loved, slept with, provided for—everything, everything! Do you know what it’s like to suddenly realize that your wife is a whore?’
Micah’s name roared in my ears, but I gave him the cop’s blank look. Another rule of mine is to let them talk once they start. He broke down into sobs, but I wasn’t going to let a bout of self-pity distract him.
“Don’t sit there whining and puling at me, O’Reilly. If we still have business, let’s get on with it.” A little goad to the hindquarters was all he needed to transmogrify back into bully.
“I’m paying you, Haftmann. I mean, I’m the one putting money in your pocket, right?”
“Yes, Mister O’Reilly, you are paying me, but I can’t help you find Annaliese if you aren’t straight with me. Just tell me about it. Please continue.”
I’ve grown so used to the dreary phoniness of my own voice I believe that one of these days I will have to forfeit my card in the Existentialists Union.
“She-she was screwing a nig—a black man!”
“I’ve had enough of your racist claptrap,” I said. “This isn’t nineteen-fifty—”
“You ever been in the service, Haftmann? The barracks are no place for secrets. You got a weakness, a stutter, any kind of handicap, whatever, and they’ll torture you with it. I never had any real friends over there. To this day I can’t stand to hear that language. Everybody sounds like Adolf Hitler. I hate Germans. I hate every one of them.”
“Except her,” I said. “Your wife.”
He looked broken.
“She was so unbelievably pretty . . . and for a long time,” he said, “there were guys betting on who’d be the first to—to, you know. She was young and pretty. I never even spoke to her much—that is, besides ordering beer or food. She treated me like everyone else but the ones who used to flirt with her, put their arms around her, well, they got the smiles, she was all white teeth and blonde legs and that get-up she wore—you know? Big milkfed tits tumbling out every time one of them bends over.” His mouth wrinkled in distaste.
“Your wife said the marriage was good at first—”
He ignored that. I could see him getting worked up.
“Christ, they were so eager to get to America they’d suck off men behind the chalet, right on their knees. You could catch them in the headlights. Blacks standing there with their hands on these blonde heads. Christ, I could puke! It used to make me crazy thinking of it, that she might have been one of them. You see, she was so lovely then, so—so innocent. Sweet! Then she started to talk to me. I thought I was the luckiest man in the world. I thought the guys were all jealous of me. I never understood until years later what all those winks and sneers were all about. I still hear them laughing at me every night in my sleep.”
It was time to get down to business. “You knew your wife had been sleeping with another man. A black man, at that. You couldn’t take it, so you started to beat her a little. Not much at first, but then it got easier and the anger just wouldn’t go away. You had to make her pay for all that ridicule. Finally, you couldn’t bear to look at Annaliese without your stomach turning into knots. She was beautiful, too, fair like her mother, but she had black blood in her veins—never enough that anyone wouldn’t think she was Caucasian, but it must have rubbed you raw.”
“I just could . . . not . . . tolerate it,” he said with a grimace of pain and maybe disgust. “She was just like her mother, and the older she got, the more she brought it all back to me.”
“So you threw her out of your home,” I said.
“No! I never threw her out. I never wanted her to leave. Ingrid turned her against me. When Annaliese came home from Pittsburgh, she had a wild look in her eyes. I knew her mother had told her the truth.”
“Did you hit her too?”
His hands covered his face. “God help me, yes. Yes, yes. I hit her. Once. Hard. Across the face. She smirked at me and I could see her mother in her face, defying me, lying to me.”
Micah never had much respect for my intellect. I think “simian” was a typical description of my mental prowess in her estimation, but she said I used to creep her out with these flashes of insight I used to come up with at times. I had one now.
“You had sex with your daughter.”
His face went as gray as putty. I waited for the spluttering, the outrage, the denial. It was all there in his face. But he said nothing and that said everything. Before he had time to muster some kind of self-justification that would have had me out from behind my desk with my fist balled, he said the words, none of them cathartic or ones that would seek forgiveness, if even from a hostile stranger like me.
“I wanted them to suffer like me.”
A volcano of bile churned in my stomach. Some men cross Rubicons you can’t return from, I thought.
My instincts aren’t as good anymore. He stood up and extended his hand to me. I thought about refusing to shake it, but before I had made a decision, he curled his hand into a fist and hit me under the jaw with it.
It wasn’t much of a blow. I wasn’t even stunned—just surprised I hadn’t seen it coming. I had the distance measured and so I hit him, just once, squarely in the chin—the way Tico had shown me years ago, two knuckles hard and straight right to the point of the chin.
Lights out. I didn’t hit him hard enough to hurt him, but he slumped back in his seat and his head lolled back. His eyes had a sheen to them. I got up, fetched some water, and thought about giving Reg a call before the cops and lawyers were summoned. I saw my p.i.’s license sprout wings and fly magically through my plate glass window.
I opened my bottom drawer for the Johnny Walker Red. He came around, sucked in some air, wheezed, shook his head and moaned. I poured him the drink and held it out to him. He tried to bat it away and then he tried to stand but his legs wouldn’t work.
“Sit, sit, Mister O’Reilly. You’ll be OK in a minute.”
“Mister O’Reilly, huh? After you just tried to take my head off . . . ”
“Nothing’s happened. You overreacted a little bit.” I responded. “Here, drink.”
Calmer but still dazed, he took the drink and wrapped a hand around it. He sipped and coughed. It took about ten minutes of silence and then he opened up like a pustule and all the filth came oozing out. Blubbering his way through the sordid tale, he told me what I had guessed. Panicking after slapping her, which knocked her to the floor, he tried to get her up. She was limp in his arms. He dragged her under the arms to her bedroom. Here, he paused to recollect how each of her shoes had slipped off, one after the other.
Inside her bedroom, he gently slapped her face to revive her. Then he began caressing her face. She came to and began to cry. He cried with her. He lay next to her holding her in his arms and soon he was stroking her. Her moans aroused him. He didn’t know why, he said. Though he had been impotent with Ingrid for months (discount the forced blow jobs she had told me about), he experienced the most incr
edible erection, and it was as if every tongue-lolling, hate-filled erotic impulse thrummed through his body at once. Annaliese was doe-eyed with fear, her silence became acquiescence—even participation. When he shoved it inside her, he thought he had kicked himself loose from the universe and his heart would burst from emotion.
He looked at me a long time. His face held an expression for a moment that made me think of Satan wearing a human mask and allowing it to slip a little. See, everyone, it’s me, Father of Lies. When he awoke, he said, Annaliese was gone. He never saw her again.
He snuffled into a Kleenex he brought out of his pocket, a ragged dirty-white ball. I watched, waited for the rest of it. There wasn’t much left to tell as he choked out the last part in the catastrophe that was the life of Annaliese Marie O’Reilly.
“It wasn’t actually incest, I think because she wasn’t—”
“Shut up,” I said. “Don’t say another word.”
“Help me find her, Haftmann. Please, I beg you. I must make her see how sorry I am. I must have her forgiveness. I’ll go to jail if I have to, but I’ll kill myself if I don’t get this chance to see her once more. It’s all I have to live for now. Help me, help, help me . . .”
He wept like a man whose suffering had no bottom to it.
At the end of my alcoholic tether, when I was plummeting into the abyss of my fullest self-loathing, I used to have the craziest dreams. Intense, eclectic, and erotic, I wallowed like a demented satyr in nightly romps with mature women, willowy girls neither innocent nor debauched. These Lolitas were my sole joy, the end of my psychic tether and my last connection to humanity in any way. I had plumbed depths in my crusade to find the most notorious serial killer in the state’s history—the one the tabloids called the Jack-in-the-Box killer because of his ghastly propensity for leaving severed heads in boxes in his wake; my dream life upped itself a notch as it must have fed on this grisly matter stewing inside my psyche. In these fever dreams of blood and sex, I had varied carnal relations with women and girls in a tangled heap of sweaty flesh, pumping at any and every hole offered. Sometimes my exhausted but liberated libido made me a fish in strange waters for my nightly fare, but I awoke from them all the same way: sheets clammy with nightsweats and a terror in my heart that I was losing my sanity in my sleep. I am no repressed product of the fifties, but I am no unreconstructed flower child of Haight-Ashbury either. I had absolutely no control over what my dreams did to me; in fact, I awoke every day or afternoon or whenever I opened my eyes to the light with self-loathing and a terror about my latest night romp.
I have never considered myself, my real self, to be the dreaming partner; it was that vile essence of my hidden self that dreamed to me. One, above all, sent me retching to the toilet. My despair over the loss of Micah was keenest at that time, and I indulged myself with sportfucking wherever available. Here on the Strip, where teenaged misfits and blonde farm girls from Minnesota sometimes take a wrong turn on their way to LA, the available flesh is out of proportion to the local population—that is, until I met Sheila, the dispatcher at the station house. No sooner had I felt myself becoming a human being again than I became impotent with the one woman I cared deeply for.
But the dreams did not last and as my body readjusted to a metabolism that for the first time in twenty years was not being driven by alcohol, I had found an interlude of nondreaming—the sweet blankness of oblivion. That too in time became a terrible thing to anticipate nightly. I felt as if I were dragging myself by inches across a wasteland deserted of life except for rattlesnakes and scorpions.
The night after my last interview with O’Reilly brought back the dreams of my serial killer-hunting days. I was staggering up an impossibly high hill with others, all of us in drab colors. It was a road that seemed to lead straight up, but there were unpainted shanties along the side from the windows of which distrustful and suspicious eyes would peer out. Queen Anne’s lace fringed the roadside, but there was nothing to be seen beyond these few shacks. At last, as I scaled the top and was about to seek whatever freedom lay beyond, I turned back to see a young woman, isolated from a pocket of travelers, cry out in fear. There was a baby-faced youth in olive green colors clutching her arm and leading her off to the edge of the road; he was holding a Mac 10 machine pistol with a barrel silencer.
I knew them well, and like every street cop at that time, dreaded with a bowel-twisting fear the very thought of confronting one some lonely night in the hands of a gangbanger on angel dust. Six slugs per second, 158-gram round nose—Jesus Christ, it didn’t bear thinking about too long, and no one who’s ever been shot wants to see one of those ugly guns on the street.
I once worked a case with the feds and ATF on a Mafia contract killer who manufactured those silencers in his garage. In the crazy logic of dreams, the boy with the MAC 10 had one, and as he stepped away from the young woman, I knew she was going to get blasted from that awful weapon. I froze near the top, not knowing what to do. There was nothing before me, but I was sure there was horror and death where I had been. On impulse I ran back to the girl—stupid, really, because he ought to have been the one I threw myself at—but I got there in time to see her body explode from a burst of .9 mm rounds. She dropped into the road like a puppet whose strings had just been scissored.
It was Annaliese and she opened her haunted eyes just once to take me in, and then she started to say something but a gout of blood stopped her words. As I lay her in the roadway, I felt my hand sticky with her blood. An oily puddle was oozing behind her black hair in the dust and pooling in a viscous red halo. Some killshots don’t bleed and some head wounds look worse than they are despite profuse bleeding, but the very worst are the distortions and bulbous eyes from the skull’s ballooning under great pressure caused by a slug to the brain. I had my fingers working her the way I used to do victims at crime scenes. Desperately wanting to save her, and all the while I’m kneading her flesh looking for the bullets under the skin, as if locating them would save her life. None of the others streaming past like the marching dead even looked at her—no one even stopped walking in that gait of town locals participating in one of those zombie movies. The killer was nowhere in sight but I ran down to one of the shacks and banged on the door for help. No one came. Then I ran back, crazed with fear that the killer should return for me, and I scooped her up from the road despite the fact of her staring eyes and matted hair and ran right for the top of the hill. It was one of those dreams where your legs are cement as you try to flee danger, so of course, I never reached help: at the very moment of cresting the hill, I beheld a massive slave labor camp below, teeming with the naked and the walking dead, soldiers, barking dogs, barracks, and coils of barbed wire. I knew my fate was beyond hope.
Every existentialist in good standing must own a gun, and every week the existentialist rulebook says that gun ought to be inserted barrel first into the mouth. Then you make a choice. Is life worth the trouble it takes to live it? I have used Sundays as my day of choice for the last several years because it is fitting to make this choice on the Sabbath. The world begins anew or one takes it into oblivion, demolishes it all in a flurry of exploding brain matter. I have had one emotion left to me since my career and my marriage ended: jealousy. I cannot erase the image of Micah from my mind. I see her locked in coitus, sweat-coiled in lustful exertion, fat drops trickling down her backside to the crack of her ass. I know that I perversely cling to this, embittered, as I wade through the cesspit of human misery that washes up to my office door. Maybe I like to suffer rather than to think. Except for serial killers and saints who imitate human emotion, it seems to me that suffering is all there really is to know of life.
On the morning after my dream, I knew I had been condemned to find this missing girl. For what good or purpose, I didn’t know. It wasn’t as if I had the leisure or the money to waste either. Much as I hate them, I’ll take a messy divorce case for the money; but mostly nowadays I just find people and try to bring them back to the people who
want them found.
There’s an axiom in cop work that goes: if you don’t have a suspect in the first 10 to 12 hours after the crime, the trail grows cold fast. Too much time for people to hide evidence, get their stories straight, flatten out the corners of tales that don’t mesh. It’s similar in my line: if you can’t get a lead on someone via the telephone in the first 24 hours, that person is almost certain not to be found. I feared a stranger crime because it opens up chaos in any investigation. You walk into any Crimes Against Persons bureau in America and eyeball what cops call the board, you’ll see the “dunkers” are all cleared in black because the husband is standing right with a smoking gun in his fist still spitting curses at the bitch he just aired out. But a whodunit is always in red until cleared and that’s an investigation that may never be solved. Three out of ten murders in every big city never get cleared year after year. If you happen to be a citizen of Oakland, California these days, that figure is thirty-five percent.
Annaliese had been missing for three years. I felt like a man standing behind a large rock at the bottom of a very steep hill about to commit his strength and sinews to the first inertia-breaking shove.
Chapter 2
Every investigator I know has a special case: one that keeps you up when you need to be sleeping, one that obsesses you through the years and does not let you ever forget it. You’ll track every lead and follow a trail to the ends of the Earth to solve it. It’s called being on a mission, and like zealots talking about God, there’s something sacred in it. Other cops understand this obsession, and they’ll leave you alone when you’re wasting your time, missing your rotation, doing half-assed investigations and irritating superiors. You’ll review the case file dozens of times until every lead or clue is a shifting mirage in your imagination because nothing must be overlooked; you’ll drive 300 miles to the state pen to interview some deadass just because scuttlebutt has it that a cell mate overheard him say something about the case to someone who told it to some cop up there, and this cop passes it along to you, knowing full well you’ll do anything to keep the investigation alive, read chicken entrails, grasp at any straw, however flimsy—and thank him for it because you just can’t let it go. So you drive the 300 miles the next day to waste your time talking to the con, a liar and probably a snitch looking for good time, knowing in your guts that it isn’t going to pan out, but there’s nowhere else to go, no explaining your mission to anyone else. It’s your sanity and it’s what makes you crazy until you solve it or you walk away from it, burned and scarred for life. One red ball case like that, one mission, and you go from rookie to veteran overnight. I’ve seen it happen. It happened to me.