by Robert White
Booth was not amused: “Don’t be a clown, Haftmann. Read the part I marked. Right there, number twenty-five.”
What I read was a mini-action narrative, a double homicide, if you will, but not a whodunit. A certain Phineas who felt himself inspired by God skewered an Israelite and then rammed the same bloody javelin into the man’s woman. It seems he disapproved of race-mixing, she being a Midianite woman. God chose to reward Phineas with the covenant of eternal priesthood.
Marcus’ last word before collapsing onto the park bench. Old Man O’Reilly’s caller, a priest: ‘. . . Annaliese safe from the pollution of this world.’
Booth, downing his third sloe gin fizz under the staccato whir of Tico’s broken ceiling fan, turned to me and said: “John Wilkes Booth, who by the way, is a distant kin to me, and Jesse James were members of the Phineas Priesthood.”
That’s why I’m an existentialist. Life surrounds you with so much absurdity that, half the time, you don’t know whether you’re on foot or horseback.
It didn’t surprise me that O’Reilly died intestate. I’d seen other busy men, well off like him, leave the little detail of passing on to the last minute because they assumed they’d be spending that last minute in a four-poster bed talking about stocks and bonds to their grandchildren. Let the state have it, I thought, since Annaliese wasn’t going to inherit anything beside the small space they had packed her remains in somewhere in downtown Boston. I on the other hand was beat out of my time and expenses by the Grim Reaper. I couldn’t afford to sit around brooding. Business has never been that good for me.
And thanks to those Wall Street sharks who brought us this long, drawn-out recession, I have been dwelling in the driest off season I’ve ever known. Money was scarce. So when I left Booth in Tico’s he was about three sheets to the wind and telling a very bored Tico the only proper way to make a White Lady. I knew our conversation was merely interrupted, not finished, but I also knew how Booth’s cagey mind worked, and I wasn’t at all surprised to be sitting in my office the next morning checking my messages and tossing a few missed opportunities into the circular file when the phone rang and he asked to meet me for lunch. “Pick the place, Haftmann,” he said, “this is your town, but nothing too squalid, please.” I told him fine, that I’d meet him at the Bavarian House at 1:00 p.m. sharp.
I don’t know why I picked the House because I had stopped going in there, even though Fat Augie DeDomenico wasn’t the owner. Augie used to be my bookie, and everyone else’s, for that matter, but he had been caught skimming. Two years ago somebody put two bullets in his head, thus severing for all time Augie’s connection to the Youngstown Mafia. My fracas with Augie during that violent summer of the serial killer hunt earned me a trimming from a couple of Augie’s goons in an alley outside the bar.
I was sitting at the bar when Booth came in on the trot and had a ginger ale ordered before he sat down.
“How do you young men do it?” I asked.
“Shut up, Haftmann. I know for a fact you used to hear the chimes at midnight on occasion.” Booth didn’t know all of it, of course, but he had seen enough of me, red-eyed, unshaven, and hung over in the mornings to know I once had a serious drinking problem. One big reason he wanted me cut me out of the last investigation.
I said, “I’ve heard those chimes at seven in the morning.”
“Being a problem drinker is nothing to brag about,” he said with that sanctimonious look.
“I never did have a problem drinking, Booth,” and hoisted a glass in his direction.
He ignored my cheap wit and started pulling out more papers from his inside pocket.
“Oh shit, no,” I said. “No more homework until you fill me in all the way, daddy-O.”
“Annaliese O’Reilly, or did you lose too many brain cells from that maniac’s clubbing to figure that out by now?”
I stared at him.
“Sorry,” Booth said. “That was crass.”
“Forget it.”
“They called me in on this because, as you know, I’ve got some experience organizing field investigations. This one was originally assigned to the head of the Boston bureau, but Washington co-opted me into the operation three weeks ago.”
“Pull my other leg. The one with bells on it.”
“OK, here’s the truth. One of our agents spotted you sitting on a park bench waiting for someone. That someone was being followed and that someone sat down next to you and that someone died a short while after. You piqued the interest of the surveillance team. You were investigated. Your file was retrieved. Thomas Haftmann, private investigator, ex-homicide detective, Cleveland, and, once upon a time, part-time special investigator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“You took away that I.D. card back before I was out of the hospital.”
“What did you expect? We had to extricate ourselves from possible embarrassment. ”
“Booth, kindly get to the point.” Bureaucrats. They should have their own gang slogan—We don’t die, we multiply.
“Ah, let me see. You were the subject of much animated discussion at the table, as I recall it. We discussed several options for, uh, dealing with you. The one we chose was, I feel, the right one. We aren’t going to pressure you as we did last time because I have seen how you react to pressure. I know how fast you can muddy the waters, so to speak.”
He took a long pause to eyeball me before saying: “This is a big investigation, Haftmann. It’s what you cops sometimes call a red-ball. We think the Phineas Priesthood is killing white girls who have involved themselves with blacks or Hispanics. Annaliese was killed by one member of this society in particular who is responsible for at least fourteen women.”
That sobered me fast. “So how can I help you?”
“Our VICAP profile says he’s a bona fide sociopath, dangerous, acting out fantasies, and too organized to be caught by stupid mistakes. He has eluded every trap we’ve set for him.”
“Why Annaliese?” I asked. “There must be hundreds of girls to choose from in every big city. Race-mixing isn’t even an issue today.”
“Don’t bet on it. The people I’m talking about dislike—how shall I put it—that kind of Social Darwinism more than ever. We want to know everything from the time you sat on the bench waiting for your dope-dealer friend to the moment you boarded your flight back.”
“Why didn’t you take me in for questioning in Boston?”
I’ll give Booth credit. He doesn’t flinch from delivering bad news.
“We were hoping you would lead us to him.”
Here it comes, I thought. “Exactly how . . .”
“We think he’s watching you, Haftmann.”
“Uh, who?”
“Don’t know yet.”
I didn’t hear another word. Was this some kind of cosmic joke? Booth was nattering on but I didn’t hear much of what he was saying just then. I felt like the world’s biggest fool. Micah and her books and her quotes—but I could hear her voice in my head as clear as crystal: A man may smile and smile and still be a villain . . .
I tuned back into Booth:
“. . . we have the record of the phone call to you at the hotel. It’s the same phone from which a call was made to the motel where Annaliese and Marcus Gordon were staying. The phone is in the lobby of major publishing house on Beacon Hill.”
Cooney telling me the call was made from the book publisher . . .
“Booth, why didn’t you guys bring Boston homicide into this?”
“We decided against it. Two reasons. First, the publicity would hurt us more than help us right now. You remember the Strangler panic? Second, gangs and drugs are preoccupying homicide. Besides, we know there’s a big problem with information leakage in the Boston police department. One of our informants tells us that he paid off several cops over the drug murders going on right now. Charming young man with the street name ‘Bones.’”
“He has a brother, ‘Psycho,’” I said. “They call themselves Best Fri
ends. I met one.”
“I already know that from the file on you. I was right to bring you in.”
“Why? Because I’m a magnet for drawing bad people?”
“Just do your part and stay within the guidelines—”
“What guidelines exactly? The FBI guidelines for stalking horses?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
His mug hanging out over his drink was so deadpan I wasn’t sure if he were kidding me.
“I don’t want to get back into this,” I said. “I had one go-round and that was enough for me. I’ll tell you what I know, Booth, but that’s all I want. Understand me?”
“OK, fair enough. Now tell me everything. Tell me how you got involved with her. Tell me everything you can remember from the day her father approached you . . . ”
Booth never did believe in sharing information, so I had to pick and prod and piece things together afterward. I managed to get one big concession from him, however, and only because I said my life might be in danger: he agreed to let me read the VICAP profile on Annaliese’s killer.
I remembered the one they did on my serial killer five years ago.
What they didn’t know about his motives and habits wouldn’t fit inside the circumference of a shot glass. The only time they came up short was in underestimating the scope of his fantasy. The fucker actually made it into the bowels of a nuclear power plant where he planned to blow the pipes in the water coolant system and trigger a meltdown. Kill everybody in the northeastern part of the Ohio from Toledo to Erie, Pennsylvania. Before he beat me into unconsciousness, I remember the look in his crazy eyes as he shook me like a rag doll. Gibberish was spewing out of his mouth, but I heard two words distinctly: power and light.
I had another phone call that day. O’Reilly’s ex-wife in Pittsburgh called me to say she was coming in for his funeral. She knew that his body wasn’t going to be released because I had explained to Ingrid what the state does in uncleared homicide cases when I told her about her daughter’s remains. She nonetheless spent her own money to have a memorial plaque made up for him out in Kingsville and arranged for a simple service that would be performed above an empty grave. I promised to meet her flight in Erie and drive her in that evening. I went home to a TV dinner.
I couldn’t remember the last time I played Russian Roulette on a Sunday. The black dog of depression was off howling in the distance instead of nipping at my heels. I met Annaliese’s mother and we drove in silence except for the sounds she made into wadded balls of kleenexes. She wore a navy blue outfit that reminded me of the photo of her daughter fresh out of high school and on her way to work at the county courthouse. The air was humid, the night still muggy from the eighty degrees, and she had a line of perspiration above her lip. I put her up at the local Holiday Inn, and then went home to shower and shave (my habit of many years was to shave at night). I lay awake for hours, also a habit of years, and waited for the bad thoughts to stop.
I had no reason to expect that night’s dreams to be less fearful than any other, but I wanted, for some reason, to think about Annaliese. It had been a long while since I’d cared about another human being, or thought of anyone except Micah, and I wanted to get to the bottom of this feeling. Why her? Why now? Something in me wanted me to get into this investigation. Why, I wondered, had this dead girl suddenly become so important to me? I tried very hard to think of her as I had glimpsed her before I saw her stretched out on the stainless steel autopsy slab with the constant dripping noises and the hoses washing away the blood and gore. I had the vaguest flashback of her on top of the bar, a freeze frame of a dark-haired young woman with a pretty oval face. Her breasts and groin obscured from view by the heads of the men at the bar. I did not look at her when I confronted Marcus in the street later, and I regretted that, because her voice was easy to recall—clear and soft in the chilly night air. Then the dark drew me into its vortex, and I was as good as dead.
Booth is nothing if not persistent. I thumbed off the connection three times already and the day wasn’t over yet. I told him not to surveille me, and I told him if I saw any of his buttoned-down boys within a mile of my office on the Strip, I’d go over his head and complain. Like any government servant with at least a GS-12 rating, Booth dreaded the official reprimand. I’d burned him once before, and there was no love lost.
The only problem was that neither of us had a plan to catch the killer. The assumption that I was followed to Ohio was, I told Booth, ludicrous. We both let that hang in the air awhile because we both knew that the Jack-in-the-Box killer had done precisely that—moved into and out of the county despite every law-enforcement agency in the state on his trail. Even added to his body count with a woman in Canton and a young couple down in Tuscarawas County; he had pulverized their infant child’s head against a wall as an afterthought and tossed its headless body in the river.
Trouble is, I began to get nightmares all over again. I’d feel my palms sweating just like the old days when my body’s refrigeration system had to work overtime to get rid of all the booze. It was fear. I had that sick feeling a woman must get when she knows there’s a deranged, obsessed male waiting out there for her, watching her every move.
I called Booth at the motel on Erieview. “All right,” I said. “Let’s finish it. I want to know the rest.”
We met later that afternoon in his room. He pointed to three stacks of papers, each about eight inches deep, on his bed. I read the top page of the first stack. Technical mumbo-jumbo.
I sighed. “Booth, just give me the short version.”
He did. I let him talk.
“Annaliese O’Reilly, we think, was killed by a man who is killing women associated with black males. She’s the fourteenth woman between fifteen and thirty-seven years of age to lose her life in the Boston area between 1991 and 2009. We’re talking about Boston metro mostly, but one professional woman, Marcine Windham, lived in Wollaston Beach and was killed in the parking lot of the Squantum Yacht Club. One body was dumped in Franklin Park, one apiece in Winthrop, Chelsea, and Somerville. There’s no classic pattern of organized killing, no fantasy fulfillment. He’s taking no trophies, no body parts missing, no articles of clothing. The bodies are not being positioned or touched after death. We’ve dusted eyeballs to be sure. The breast slashing appears to be of a piece with a victim’s defensive wounds in the stabbing deaths.”
“And Boston PD doesn’t have any idea these murders are connected?”
“They asked us for a profile fifteen weeks ago,” Booth noted, “so they are beginning to suspect a serial killer. Nobody’s organized a task force or given out anything to the media.”
“Why the one exception, that yacht club woman?”
“So far she’s the only one not covered by the similarity of the victims’ low socioeconomic status. The one exception. A professional woman, a book editor, stabbed in a parking lot. We’re not sure about her. She had mace in her purse, so it could have been a random mugging.”
“She had a black male companion, I assume?”
“Correct. Her husband is a graduate of Howard University, supervises underwriting in the John Hancock Building. Makes ninety thousand, married right out of college, two kids, no marital problems.”
“How does she fit?”
“She doesn’t—except for the biracial marriage. All the rest had black boyfriends, lovers, husbands too. But they were expendable types. Twelve had police records ranging from prostitution to petty drug charges, child endangering—that kind of thing. None of the families had clout or, like your girl, were drifters or runaways far from home. The killer or killers may have known that and it could be a calculated and acceptable risk.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because these are throwaway people, not real victims. She stood out. A gratuitous killing, we think. He wanted her, even though he had plenty of other potential victims who could have been disguised by virtue of their being nobodies.”
“No, I meant why did you say
‘calculated’? How do you know?”
“Crunch the numbers, probabilities say the common factor of these fourteen killings is the single fact of their being associated with black men.”
The locals called them ‘coalburners’ and worse names.
“If there aren’t obvious data linking the crimes,” Booth added, “we tend to exclude them unless there’s methodology pointing toward deliberate randomness, a kind of X factor we program in to keep the clever ones from hiding their personalities too deeply. The thing is, as you know from our common experience, true psychotics must reveal themselves. They have to leave something at a crime scene to satisfy the inner compulsions driving them.”
“So he’s a serial killer without a fantasy life?”
“He has a fantasy life, all right. We just don’t know what it is yet.”
“But you’re thinking he’s a member of this Phineas Priesthood?”
“If that is the case, and if he’s disguising his dementia under the ritualized killing of women guilty of miscegenation, then it’s troublesome.”
Troublesome—another coy Boothian term for Shit, meet Fan.
“So he could be killing for his own reasons,” I said, trying to understand what Booth was telling me, “not so much for those ideological reasons you told me about?”
“Yes. It’s possible. Right now, we know that killings of white women are increasing in all major cities—this blends with traditional white flight, so it’s not a glaring statistic at the Department of Justice. But it’s working toward that perfect storm of civil disorder and chaos I spoke of.”
“I’m guessing here, Booth, but isn’t the incidence of murdered white women associated with black males high anyway?”
Booth said, “About five times. There are social reasons for that. We’re trying to find the proverbial needle in the haystack in a nation where domestic killings and murder by stalking are making it possible for great numbers of women to be killed without the public suspecting that racially motivated murders are being carried out all over the US.”