The Bricklayer of Albany Park

by Terry John Malik

  Two clicks and then a splash of light from a table lamp silhouetted Foster in his beat-up leather recliner. “Here,” he said, and with a faint smile, he looked up at me.

  The apartment was filled with the odor of cigar smoke. Foster had hardly aged since I first saw him stride into the NEIU classroom almost fourteen years earlier. He was still trim and fit, but now his salt-and-pepper hair was more salt than pepper, and he had taken to wearing reading glasses. Classical music filled the apartment. I didn’t recognize the score that was about to serve as background music to a discussion of murder and mutilation.

  “You got some time?” I asked.

  “Yes, but you don’t.”

  “What?”

  “You have a killer on your hands who mutilates his victims.” He saw that I was surprised. “Come now, Francis, I still have plenty of friends on the job. They keep me pretty well informed, but they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me all the details. I’ve been waiting for you to show up.” He pointed to the upholstered wingback chair opposite his. “Now, take a seat and tell me what you’ve got.”

  I dumped myself into the only other comfortable chair in his apartment and leaned back. “Well, I can tell you what we don’t have— we haven’t been able to identify the victim.”

  “Anonymity of the victim makes it harder to trace the murder back to the killer. That was intentional and typical of a serial killer.”

  “What makes you think it’s a serial killer?”

  “You know damn well it is, Francis. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. He took a souvenir, didn’t he?”

  “Two.”

  Foster nodded. “Body parts?”

  “A hand—the right one—and the genitals.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. “Do you know how he removed them?’”

  “Crudely. It looks like the hand was severed by some kind of power saw. He used bolt cutters on the genitals. And our victim was sodomized with a length of wood. The M.E. speculates it was some kind of old tool handle.”

  “Torture.”

  “That seems right, but all of that occurred postmortem.”

  “Then something must have gone wrong. What else?”

  “What else?”

  Foster sat forward in his chair. “Yes. There’s more. A guy like this always leaves something behind—a memento to impress the police or to send a message. What did he leave behind?”

  I surrendered the information that only four other people knew, including the killer. “He cracked open the victim’s rib cage on the left side and stuffed a set of genitals under the ribs, but the genitals didn’t belong to the victim.”

  Foster leaned back in his chair and momentarily stared past me into the darkness of a corner of his apartment. Without looking at me, he explained, “Some rape victims gain symbolic revenge by killing their attacker and stuffing the attacker’s genitals in his mouth. But, that’s not what your guy did. Francis, don’t focus on stuffing them under the ribs. He placed them on top of the heart, didn’t he? Your killer is telling you that he has internalized the pain of a homosexual rape.”

  “But why not just use the genitals of the victim? Why leave behind the genitals of an earlier victim?”

  “Oh, he’s just playing a game with you. He’s letting you know that this isn’t his first kill and that he is smarter than you. He’s saying, ‘I’ve done this before, but you stupid cops didn’t find the body, did you?’ He wants you to find the other bodies. What about the hand? Did he leave behind a severed hand?”

  “No. He must be taking them with him.”

  “Trophies. Your killer is a confused and complicated person.” He looked back over to me asking, “What are you holding back?”

  Now he was pushing me for more than I wanted to disclose, but to get his help, I had to tell him one more detail. “He wrote a message on the victim’s chest using the victim’s own blood. It took us some time to decipher it. It was written in a child-like printing style, and it smeared against the tarp.”

  I started to explain about the blue tarp, but he cut me off, “Yes, I know about the shroud—we’ll come back to that later. The message . . .”

  “We’re pretty sure it reads: ‘h-e-i-m.4.’ ”

  Foster raised his thick graying eyebrows, lifted his chin ever so slightly and, in a measured tone, said, “The word ‘heim’ is the German and Norwegian equivalent for the English word, ‘home,’ but I suppose you already figured that out.”

  Actually, I hadn’t figured that out. I was focused on the severed body parts.

  “The dumpsite—did it reflect any remorse?” “That’s a tough one. The way the body was wrapped suggests remorse, but I don’t think this guy is capable.”

  “Nor do I.”

  For a moment or two he lowered his head and closed his eyes. To anyone else, he may have appeared to be dozing off, but I had seen it before—he was visualizing the murder. He opened his eyes and reached over to his Dunhill crystal ashtray, retrieved a half-finished cigar, and relit it. He sat back in his chair, took a long draw on his cigar, and let a cloud of smoke slowly escape from his mouth. Finally, leaning forward and pointing his cigar toward me, accentuating each word, he said, “You do realize that he isn’t finished killing?”

  “You mean because he wouldn’t have taken the genitals from this victim unless he was going to—”

  “Yes—make a gift of them to someone else. Like I said when you walked in, you don’t have time. This guy is going to kill again—and soon. You have to think of this as if you walked into the middle of a movie. You’re viewing just a few scenes. You didn’t see the beginning, and you don’t know how the movie will end, but you can anticipate the ending. Visualize, Francis, visualize.”

  I stood to leave. Foster reached out and put his hand on my arm. “Francis, you knew all this before you got here.”

  “Yes. Except for the significance of the placement of the genitals. I missed that. I failed to recognize that he placed them on top of the heart. And, I need to look closer at the message on the torso. About your movie—I have visualized the ending and I don’t like what I see.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Detective Frank Vincenti

  I buried my father two weeks before Christmas. With three inches of snow on the ground, the day was bright and sunny, albeit bitterly cold. I stared at traces of steam that rose from the hole into which my father was about to be lowered. There was no priest. The funeral home provided an assistant director who hurried through a reading of the Twenty-third Psalm and quickly mumbled an Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be.

  Three days before, I had been awakened by an early morning call from the desk sergeant at the 25th District. “Detective Vincenti, I’m sorry that I have to advise you of this, but a patrolman has found your father deceased. The officer is still on the scene and hasn’t disturbed anything pending your notification and instructions.”

  I later learned that one of my father’s neighbors, a middle-aged woman who apparently had befriended him, had alerted the police. The neighbor’s phone had rung around midnight. The caller ID displayed ‘F. Vincenti’ and my father’s phone number. She answered, heard incoherent mumbling, then nothing. She called back several times, but the line was busy each time, and after several failed attempts at the front door, she finally called 911. The police found him dead on his bathroom floor wearing only his stained boxer shorts. The first-on-the-scene patrolman recognized his name and realized that he was my father. He then went through channels to make sure notification was courteous. He’d thoughtfully covered the body with a sheet he found in the linen closet.

  I pulled the sheet back and stood over him. He appeared to have lost a lot of weight, and his face was drawn and sunken. His eyes were still open, staring at the ceiling. I bent over to close his eyes. I was about to place my out-stretched fingers on his eyelids, but changed my mind. Let him enter eternity with his eyes wide open so he could see what awaits him. I felt neither remorse nor satisfaction that he was out of my life. W
hat was it Foster taught me about emotional detachment?

  On the kitchen table, I found an empty pill bottle of Avinza, a prescription-only form of morphine used for severe pain. Out of curiosity more than anything else, I called the doctor whose name and phone number appeared on the pharmacy label. He told me with a degree of distress in his voice that in May my father had been diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. It was untreatable, and much to the doctor’s disappointment, my father had refused palliative treatments until this past October when the pain had become debilitating and caused him to be confined to his home.

  I did not arrange for a wake. Nor could I muster the hypocrisy of asking the local parish priest at St. William’s to say a funeral Mass for him. Sean’s brother, Father Patrick William, offered to perform the ceremony, but I was too embarrassed to accept. No, I ushered my father from the nearby funeral home’s embalmer’s table straight to the St. Joseph Cemetery plot next to my mother. As the assistant funeral director concluded the service with the usual “May perpetual light shine upon him” drivel, I looked at her gravestone and then back to my father’s coffin suspended above the freshly dug hole. I hadn’t known my mother, and wished I had never known my father. I realized I’d been an orphan all along.

  Although Beth initially resisted attending the funeral, she finally acquiesced. She understood the anguish I suffered because of my father and questioned why I even bothered with a graveside ceremony. She was right. I had no good answer. Beth carried her large Prada handbag, and under her quilted winter coat, wore a St. John black knit dress—signals to me that she intended to go directly to the office at the conclusion of the ceremony. Foster and Sean attended the funeral, but no one else. I preferred it that way.

  As the four of us walked back to our cars, Foster looked over to me and said, “Francis, let your pain be buried with him.”

  I stopped. Foster took a few more steps before he realized I wasn’t beside him. He stopped and turned to face me. The sun was bright behind him, just over his left shoulder. I was looking almost directly into it and was forced to squint. My eyes didn’t quickly adjust, and darkness covered Foster’s face. I stepped closer to him, gently placed my hand on his shoulder and said, “Many years ago, you told me that my father never understood that he was a victim of his father’s shame and bitterness and that he would carry both to his grave. I’m sure you were right, but you may have been wrong about my father’s legacy of anger and bitterness. I fear his legacy is mine after all.”

  Foster looked down at the snow, now trampled with footprints. His shadow reached across the snow to me, and, after a long moment, he looked up at me with a sadness I had not seen on his face before. For the first time in years, I let my guard down: “I don’t know how I’ll ever let go of all of the pain he caused—I’ve tried, believe me, I’ve tried. His death changes nothing for me.”

  Foster stepped forward, embraced me, and whispered in my ear: “God is just. He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you.” He stepped back and looked me in the eye. “I’m counting on it Francis, and so should you.” Without waiting for me to react, he turned and walked away.

  CHAPTER 35

  Detective Frank Vincenti

  The snow crunched under our feet as we walked from the gravesite to our cars. Sean stopped and walked over to me. “Frank, in my neighborhood, after we put a family member in the ground, we have a final drink while we sit and reminisce. Let’s head over to Annie’s Bar and have a Bushmills or two and drink to the future instead.”

  I glanced back at Foster. Sean added, “He’s agreed to come.” I wasn’t sure I wanted his company.

  I looked to Beth for a reaction. She was reading emails on her iPhone. Without looking up, she muttered, “You go with Sean. I’m taking the car to the office.” Then she turned and walked away without saying another word.

  Once we were ensconced in a booth at Annie’s, Foster asked me about Beth. He waited until Sean had stepped outside to take a call. As was Foster’s custom, he questioned me about deeply personal issues when I was most vulnerable—and after I had a couple of Bushmills.

  “Beth’s attitude today had more to do with you than with the death of your father, and Sean tells me that ever since Thanksgiving you’ve been withdrawn and distracted—your head is not in the game. What’s going on?”

  Like me, Foster loathed sports bars and always insisted on sitting at a booth or table, never at the bar. We took a small booth away from the crowd and out of earshot of cheesy Christmas carols. I looked down at my drink. “You’re about to give me some unsolicited advice, aren’t you?”

  “The only advice worth listening to is unsolicited.”

  Foster had never been in favor of the marriage. When I had visited him late one night six years ago to tell him that Beth and I were to be married, he puffed away on his cigar and poured drinks for the two of us.

  “Don’t be confused, Francis,” he’d said then, “this isn’t a congratulatory drink. It will help me digest your news and perhaps help bring you to your senses.”

  “Foster, she said that she loves me and I—” “You don’t love her. Sometimes I’m not sure you even know what love is.”

  I’d taken a long drink from his Lismore tumbler, tired of his amateurish psychoanalysis and meddling.

  “I’ll take your silence as agreement. You’re making a mistake, Francis. This won’t end well.”

  And now, years later, he was at it again. I tried to deflect his question about Beth’s latest slight.

  “She’s just having a tough time at the firm. She’s under a lot of pressure, works all hours, and is frustrated. She hates being relegated to mundane assignments, craves recognition, and gets upset when I get immersed in these macabre cases. I’m sure she’s depressed, but it’s situational. She’ll feel better when she’s assured she’s on the firm’s partner track.”

  Foster stared down at his glass momentarily, shook his head, and in a tone reminiscent of a reprimand from my father said, “No, she’ll remain depressed, Francis. Lawyers as a group suffer from depression at a rate three times the national average and have a drug addiction twice as high. There’s a lot going on with her that you refuse to acknowledge. Don’t kid yourself about her problem.”

  He was right, but I wasn’t ready to admit it. I took a long, slow swallow, draining the glass except for a few half-melted ice cubes. I was in no rush to explain. Foster sensed I was stalling.

  “I warned you. You came from two different cultures and two vastly different economic backgrounds. Blue bloods don’t marry cops. You married the first woman who told you that she loved you.”

  I stared down at the melting ice. I knew now he had been right all along. I just didn’t want to face facts. I surrendered the information he was fishing for. “Thanksgiving morning she called me from Santa Barbara and issued an ultimatum: either I get off the force or she’ll leave me.” There was no sense hiding it from him any longer.

  Foster finished his drink and pushed the empty glass to the side. “Well, she finally got around to it. I knew she would. It was just a matter of time before she made you choose between her and me.”

  “What?”

  “It has little to do with your job or with you. She resents me—sees me as competition.”

  “I don’t buy that for a second. She’s forcing me to make a career choice I don’t want to make. That’s all.”

  “You’re wrong. She’s the one making a choice—actually, she’s already made it. So let her live with it and move on.”

  Jealously? Was that it? Was she jealous of the time I spent with Foster or was Foster jealous of her? Was he, after everything, a clinging father who wouldn’t let go of his only child?

  I signaled the waitress for another round.

  Sean got me home safe, but late. I cracked our bedroom door and saw that Beth was already asleep. She had been working fourteen-hour days at the firm and was likely exhausted again. I had trouble understanding how she could complain about the shif
ts I worked and my late nights when her hours at the firm were usually longer and just as unpredictable. I stood quietly and stared at her. She appeared content and peaceful, but I knew she was filled with contempt for my world. I hoped it was fleeting and that, when she was confident that she was on the track to partnership at the firm, she would return to being the woman I had married.

  I closed the door, made a bed on the couch, and thought about how much I missed the warm comfort of a dog curled up at my feet. We’d said goodbye to our mutt at the beginning of December. We both knew it was coming. The good folks at the Anti-Cruelty Society had warned us when we adopted him that he had a heart defect. It’s probably why I convinced Beth to take him home with us. I used to believe in lost causes. I reached up to flip out the light. My dad and my dog had died within weeks of each other. I’d only cried once.

  CHAPTER 36

  Detective Frank Vincenti

  “We got a hit,” Sean announced from his end of the cubicle.

  “A hit on what?”

  “Our friend in the morgue. His name is Henry S. Edwards. His landlord recognized the artist’s rough sketch that went out on the BOLO. He rents an apartment in a rooming house at 8213 North Summerdale. The landlord said that on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving he got a call from Edwards’s boss at an auto repair shop in the city. Apparently, Edwards gave the landlord’s phone number as his emergency contact information.”

  I interrupted. “No family.”

  “Right. Anyway, Edwards’s boss told the landlord that Edwards hadn’t shown up for work or called for three days. The landlord pleaded ignorance and hung up. Then he let himself into Edwards’s flat. Everything looked normal, so he left and didn’t give it another thought. A week later, the landlord found a post office notice taped to the outside of Edwards’s mailbox; the post office had suspended delivery because his mailbox was full. So the officious proprietor reported a missing person. The desk sergeant was sharp enough to show the guy BOLOs from the past few weeks, and the landlord ID’d him.”