by Robert White
He grabbed the middle pile of papers from the bed and handed them to me.
“Look at this, Haftmann. Check the statistics.”
I looked at the statistics: Tampa 20% higher rate of homicide for women with black men, Baltimore 26%, Washington, DC 23%, New York 19%, Chicago 11%, Detroit 17%, Boston 67%. Every big city, but Boston was off the charts.
“This Phineas Priesthood is responsible?”
“The Christian Identity movement is being revitalized and we’ve either infiltrated or have informers on every skinhead, white supremacist, Klan outfit in the nation. We know what the lowlifes in the movements are doing almost before they know themselves. But two years ago, something happened. It was as if these wackos were deliberately lying low. The Southern Poverty Law Center discovered hate crimes dropped momentarily.”
“You think somebody made a difference?”
“We think that somebody new was taking over the Phineas Priesthood and that somebody was giving it a new direction. You did your homework last night, I trust.”
“I did,” I lied. “Not the most fascinating biography I’ve read.”
It was Byron de la Beckwith’s sanctioned biography and it was called Glory in Conflict. The page Booth had marked had two yellow highlighted passages. Beckwith, under a thin veneer of humility, declined to lead an unnamed group with “roots traceable to antiquity” because he felt that he was not qualified “intellectually or spiritually.” It was gibberish and I closed the book after twenty pages. Booth was staring at the closed drapes as if he were scrutinizing the weave pattern.
“Here is a man who has been a busy little chatterbox his whole life,” he said. “Bragged everywhere, even in print, of murdering a civil rights leader, threatened people in and out of prison, written hundreds of letters professing every word or deed he has done—a defense attorney’s worst nightmare. Yet now, for the first time in his life, this racist cretin is conspicuously silent. We think he knows what’s going on:
“Oh, he’s become in death some kind of Saint Paul to the racist movement?”
Booth ignored the sarcasm. “We infiltrated a Seattle skinhead group last year and obtained copies of some private correspondence of one of their troubleshooters. This man hinted at a ‘priesthood’ in the vanguard of the coming race war that was going to make der Führer’s four-point genocidal program against the Jews look like amateur hour.”
“So bring him in and shake him down,” I said.
“He was shot in the back of the head and dumped in the desert. April, last year. Unsolved homicide. No leads.”
“What convinces the FBI this is for real now?”
“One segment of it is highly organized. We keep hearing whispers of this secret society gearing up to make its move. We don’t know who the real brains behind it is, but we keep coming back to Boston and the killing of these women is a prelude to a larger plan.”
It didn’t make sense to me how white women sleeping with blacks fit into Armageddon.
“All we know for sure is,” Booth went on, breaking his own curtain reverie, “that some very prominent people are being attracted to racism in one form or another.”
“Booth, I think there’s something—maybe a lot you’re not telling me,” I said.
Booth sighed theatrically, an old habit of his. I had the one functioning eye but he regarded himself as the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
“The cities are teeming with poverty and drugs,” he said. “There are no jobs. Washington politics is mired in gridlock. The Nation of Islam grows more followers by the day. Whites are flocking to the extremist groups. Who’s going to stop it from boiling over?”
“There’s fear in the streets,” I countered, “but things will never be that bad we can’t fix it.”
“When did you turn optimist?” Booth snapped.
“I don’t know, Booth. There’s just too much even for diehard conspiracy buffs.”
“Then consider this. One of those think tanks did a prediction study two years ago that was quietly buried in some DC warehouse. They do war-games scenarios, only they use data on the demographics, technological and social factors instead of missiles. They forecast the lid is going to come off the top because we have put such strains on the economy—hell, the middle class is already convinced the woods are burning.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m telling you that the top people in this country are scared witless of that report. Five years, they give it. Society is fractured along lines of race like never before, Muslims around the world are openly preaching anti-Semitism, anti-Crusaderism and if this recession does-n’t abate or, worst case, teeter into a depression—well, the biggest predictor of imminent disintegration is the rise of white supremacy. This isn’t a Mississippi phenomenon anymore.”
Not here, not here. Having a German surname made me a target for young toughs in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood. Nobody believed a runt with a funny-looking moustache could rise to power but he did with the help of politicians, patricians, and bankers.
Despite my cynicism, I knew Booth wasn’t blowing smoke and I was no longer convinced he was trying to make himself important to headquarters. I threw religion and God away a long time ago, and I never understood people’s obsession with explaining why there is or is no God. Although my own existentialist fervor was cooled the day I bumped into a Sartre essay about the difference between en-soi and pour-soi, I don’t need Sartre or Nietzsche to know the world is a shitbucket. I just can’t explain it in words of more than two syllables. Booth was still talking, droning like a pesky mosquito in my ear.
“ . . . half the conditions have already been met. Rand and Carnegie did their own and corroborated the original study. It can happen here.”
“C’mon, Booth. Those pinheads are jerking you off!”
“How can you tell?”
“They’re just dipping their snouts in the public trough at taxpayers’ expense,” I said. Playing devil’s advocate to Booth wasn’t my idea of a fun afternoon, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of agreeing with him. I know what’s going on in the world is sickening. I’ve seen Bosnia on the news too. I was drunk all through Vietnam. Everywhere today is Bosnia. Or a Rwanda waiting to happen. Shitholes like Haiti are metaphors of the human condition of the future— a world of tribes eager to stick a tire of gasoline around your neck or hack you to pieces with a machete.
“So why me?”
“Because you happened to take a stroll in a park one day in Boston. We had Marcus Gordon all staked out because we finally had a lead on one of these Phineas Priests. We figured their Boston man was an out-and-out psychopath. He isn’t killing for a race war. He’s killing because he enjoys it so well.”
“I don’t know, Booth. It’s just too fantastic.”
“What’s fantastic, Haftmann, is your naiveté. Study history. You yourself know from your police experience that there are too many jurisdictional problems in police work. You don’t know what the homicide bureau in the next precinct is working on unless you run into another detective and he tells you. State computers can’t quantify data with as much sophistication as we can at Behavioral Sciences—”
“Jesus, Booth. Just tell me why you’re so sure of all this. Tell me why the killer is taking a calculated risk.”
“We think he’s simulating a serial killer by leaving us disorganized crime scenes one time and organized the next. If these are meant to be religious executions, the killer has so far been flawless. Now it’s as if he’s trying to leave us clues at the crime scene that point in all directions.”
“So this Phineas Priesthood is responsible for him?”
“We think he was initiated somewhere at one of these survivalist camps in the Southwest. They usually recruit from those places. They’re using the Priesthood to enforce order among all these supremacist groups. Someone is putting together a machine in anticipation of bigger things.”
“Bigger things being the collapse of moral order?”
“Haftmann, you dope, organized fundamentalist Christianity is a hair’s breadth from organizing train rides to Auschwitz.” He snorted contempt. “Do you really think Joe Sixpack is any more enlightened than a citizen of Germany seventy years ago? Do you think these idiot teenagers give a hoot about anything besides facebooking for five hours a day? School shootings, bullyings, a culture drenched in sleaze.”
I couldn’t argue with him there. We were just twenty-five miles from Kirtland where that Mormon psycho slaughtered a family of followers.
“The problem with a conspiracy theory,” I said, “is too many people would have to know.”
“Not if these think tanks are right,” Booth said. “People mobilize fast these days with social networking. Look at Tunisia, Egypt. It’s easy to imagine the entire Caucasian race united against crime when it’s an ethnic minority doing tattoos on white skulls. It’s happening in Great Britain.”
“So what’s their plan? Get the entire US media under their control?”
“It may be easier than you think. The country runs on dollars, not good will. Insert a few prominent people into high office here and there until the time is right. Converting the masses can be left until the end. They’re already there. Most people are convinced that Mexico and illegals have reconquered the American Southwest without firing a shot. You can run for President on that plank alone today. Get them to swallow the big lie. Television has been doing a wonderful job at exploiting our worst fears and stereotypes. Hollywood has only just stopped demonizing the black man. Even so, the polls show the average white Caucasian male believes that African-Americans comprise forty percent of the population, not the actual thirteen.”
“Stop lecturing me, Booth. I had a wife who was good at that. Perception is truth, blah-blah—and so what? I still don’t understand why he chose Annaliese.”
“Nothing gets into a racist’s craw more deeply than miscegenation. Homophobia is nothing to it. You told me that Annaliese was half-black. Maybe that attracted him to her. That’s where I need your help. He’s so good at avoiding patterns. We thought at first he was choosing them indiscriminately. It could be there is a pattern and we just can’t see it. We’ve checked as many names as we’ve been able to gather on white supremacist and skinhead groups from all over the country, especially in the Northeast. Run them all through the computer. Nothing so far. Every possibility we had checks out. Not exactly your average citizen but nobody who looks good for these killings. Take these files with you and study them.”
“OK, Booth. I’ve been around the block before with you. I know these files are the sugarcoating to make the pill go down easier. But what’s the pill?”
“I thought you guessed. We want you to go back to Boston. Pick up where you left off. We’ve cleared it with Cooney so that you can work with him on the O’Reilly cases.”
“You said ‘cases,’ plural.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. Yesterday morning Cuyahoga forensics called me with the autopsy results. O’Reilly’s alcohol content was point-oh-two but there was a trace of succinic acid in his bloodstream. High levels of ammonia, lactic acid and histamines. A dangerous drug family, they tell me. I’m having them send it on to Quantico for a full spectrum analysis.”
“Just tell me what it means.”
“It means he probably ingested the drug with the whiskey. He was doped, incapable of movement, but fully conscious, and able to feel pain. He knew what was being done the whole time. He was bagged and suffocated. They found lint fibers when they scraped his throat. The killer used a cellophane bag at the bottom of one of his drawers. The fibers match one of the shirts in the drawer. He should have left it on his head, but he must have thought it wasn’t necessary. The death certificate would have said heart attack.”
“So who did him?”
“I’m hoping you’ll help me find that out, Thomas. I really am. I don’t have much time because there’s a plane ticket back to South Dakota with my name on it, if I don’t get this one right.” He looked tired and old, suddenly, not the dapper man whose worst problem before he met me was how to keep a Glock from snagging the silk lining of his imported jackets. “You know anything about Pine Hills?”
I remembered AIM, a place called the Running Bull Compound where two FBI agents were shot to death, and a name: Leonard Peltier, still in prison. Tribal warfare, Native American style. Government-friendly Indians backed by gun thugs who killed dozens of traditional Indians, usually full bloods.
“Except for a mix of Kiowas and Lacota Sioux, there are twenty-five thousand Oglala Sioux on that godforsaken reservation, Haftmann. You’ve never seen poverty and misery in this country like this. I don’t want you to cock this one up the way you did the last time, because I know for a fact that not one of those Indians in the Pine Woods casino can make a decent sloe gin fizz.”
I read the homicide reports, the supplemental reports, the VICAP profile, and a stack of other papers that had to do with the k.a.’s of prominent racists in the United States. Booth had xeroxed portions of the history of the Phineas Priesthood for my “edification and amusement.” It was an international society, secret like the Masons, and probably as old. They believed it necessary to kill anyone guilty of race-mixing. They also believed, as Byron De La Beckwith and the Christian Identity movement so often professed in the tumultuous days of the civil rights era, that Caucasians alone comprise the Lost Tribes of Israel. God’s word was to them, and He had given them charge over the mud races who occupied the same spiritual plane as animals and, like animals, lacked souls.
I drove to the Holiday Inn and picked up Ingrid, who was standing in the carport with her hands crossed in front of her. I thought of apologizing for my car, but changed my mind.
We drove to Kingsville, about six miles from there, and made small talk the while. I learned that her husband in Pittsburgh had left her and that she and he had never actually been married in a civil ceremony. It turned out that he had a wife in Joplin, Missouri.
“What was she going to do?” I asked. She replied that, for the time being, she wanted to stay around Jefferson, see those places where her daughter had lived before going back to Pittsburgh to settle affairs. I asked her about her ex-husband and whether he had ever evinced a taste for bondage. Her translucent skin flushed, and I could see the white outline of her nose in the contrast. But she answered my question by denying that he had ever been given to “that sort of thing.” I described how he was found, the leather paraphernalia and the bondage magazines under the bed, but I left out the part that it was I who had discovered the body.
She turned full face to drill me with her eyes. “Mister Haftmann, I would prefer not to speak of my former husband.” I said I understood but that the investigation of her husband’s death might assist in the case of her daughter. “How?” she asked. Eyes brighter, cheeks still flushed. “OK,” I said, free-wheeling it, “it’s possible they may be connected to each other.”
“How so?”
“First, I’d like to ask a favor of you.”
“All right.”
“Now, as I understand it from the police, your husband—”
“We were not married.”
“Yes, forgive me. Your ex-husband. He was—”
“Mister Haftmann, please.”
“Yes?”
“Is it considered routine for private investigators to assist in police investigations?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“Then I would prefer not to discuss my former husband’s death with you.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“I see.”
That was pretty much it for conversation until we arrived at the Greenlawn Cemetery in Kingsville. The man she spoke with on the phone was there to greet us at the chapel, and explain things to us. Some business associates of O’Reilly showed up for the services. A photo of him was placed on a small oak table, one of his company’s own products, we were told, and the s
ervices commenced. I looked around but no one seemed out of place, and I recognized a face or two among the mourners. Chamber of Commerce types, a local politico who came to work the crowd and gladhand for a few minutes after the service. I watched him shoot his cuffs and depart. I wondered if the stained glass in the chapel was real. The upkeep of the place couldn’t be much, I figured, because there was only the chapel to maintain—no tombstones to work around. A brush hog in late spring could do the whole area without expensive manual labor involved in trimming or cutting around edges because the burial plaques were depressed in the ground.
At last the proprietor ushered us all into the late afternoon sunlight. I heard small talk begin around me, someone mentioned a blowout at Progressive Field last night, and then I felt the slight pressure of Ingrid’s hand on my bicep. It seemed strangely quaint to walk across this green landscape of the newly with her hanging on my arm.
As we walked to the car, she told me that my distance from people was evident, even when I was looking into their faces and smiling or nodding. I hadn’t realized it, but I knew she was right.
I’d always had a gift for tuning people out. I remembered my grandmother saying much the same thing in her broken English, that peculiar Berlin accent she brought with her to America, when I was a boy just entering my teenager years. The prison shrink told me it was one of the best symptoms of incipient schizophrenia, this kind of detachment. I remembered that summer of the hunt when I had nailed a murder map to my ceiling and stuck brightly colored pins on it so I could lie on an old velour couch and stare at it. Fix all those places the Jack-in-the-Box killer had been in my mind so that it would be the last thing I would see before sleep. I remember how the edges of furniture had started to blur, and it was becoming difficult to see people’s faces without their noses or mouths shifting right under my gaze. I also remembered telling the prison psychiatrist to get fucked.
I said to Ingrid, “You’re very observant, yourself. Most people don’t care enough to notice whether others are listening or not.”