The Bricklayer of Albany Park

by Terry John Malik

  “Hey, look who’s awake!”

  Sean stopped mid-step and spun around to face me. “Foster! Welcome back!”

  It took a few moments to find my voice. “I don’t remember—”

  Eddie tried to comfort me. “No need to talk right now. Save your voice. It will all come back soon enough.”

  “Francis?” I asked.

  Eddie and Sean exchanged glances.

  “Francis?” I asked again.

  Eddie stood next to my bed, took my free hand in his, and said, “He’s gone, Tommy.”

  I closed my eyes and willed myself back to sleep.

  It was dark when I woke again. Eddie was there. I smelled food even before I opened my eyes, and saw that a food tray sat on a swivel table next to my bed. My throat was not quite as sore as it had been. In a gravely voice, I announced I was hungry. As I tried to sit up, Sean appeared at the door with Micah beside him.

  Micah greeted me. “It’s always a good sign when a patient’s appetite returns.”

  I looked around the room and motioned to Eddie that I wanted to sit in the armchair next to the bed. Jostling with the IV pole and the tubes that ran from the pole’s hooks to my wrist and the back of my hand, Eddie helped me out of bed and into the chair. He lowered the over-bed table and arranged my tray for me. As I drained the container of its weak chicken broth, I looked over to Micah. “Based on what I saw in that garage, I would say your diagnosis was accurate: Francis was indeed Anthony, and Anthony was Francis.”

  Eddie looked from me to Micah. “What? You two need to tell me everything you know, or even think you know.”

  I looked to Eddie and nodded at Micah. “When I met with Dr. Feldman … was that yesterday or two days ago?” Not waiting for an answer, I continued. “Dr. Feldman speculated that Francis was suffering from dissociative identity disorder—the existence of two or more distinct personalities sharing the same body.”

  Eddie, puzzled, looked to Micah. “Isn’t that something fringe psychiatrists diagnosed on the basis of easily hypnotized patients?”

  “It’s no longer as misunderstood as it once was. Its source is usually traced to childhood sexual abuse and a general ambivalence in the child’s household—the lack of a loving influence. The other night, Detective Vincenti revealed to Tommy that when he was seven years old, he had been raped—violently sodomized—by his father. Without the nurturing influence of a mother, he displaced the memory in order to cope. Francis had to move that memory and other memories of abuse to a separate compartment of his consciousness where they slowly seeped into his subconscious, eventually taking the form of an alter ego.”

  Sean was confused. “This ‘Anthony’ we encountered in Frank’s garage looked different and spoke differently than Frank.”

  “As strange as it may seem, it’s not unusual for an alter ego to take on differences in speech, affect, and, in some rare instances, even the demeanor of a different gender. During my two sessions with Detective Vincenti, he seemed to speak with a rural twang that almost sounded like a southern accent, and spoke of himself in the third person—that’s what started me down the path of considering the identity disorder. Looking back, it may have been that the two identities had begun to unravel.”

  Now I interrupted. “Think back, gentlemen. There were many occasions when Francis could not account for blocks of time. He experienced blackouts and sometimes he went missing, for which he always seemed to have a hazy recollection. He may have invented credible cover stories for you, but he confided in me that these gaps in his recollection occurred regularly and frightened him. And although he always maintained that he had overcome chronic depression, his bouts of depression were obvious to all of us. All symptoms Dr. Feldman listed for me when he shared his diagnosis.”

  “During these gaps, his alter ego surfaced and took control,” Micah added. “You need to understand that his primary identity, or personality, was, of course, Francis, the man you all admired and worked with. The brilliant detective. His alter ego was the person who identified himself as ‘Anthony’ to Tommy and Sean in the garage. Francis transferred his painful memories so deeply into his alter ego that he had no idea his alter ego even existed. Most likely, his alter ego assumed the persona of this Tony fellow, his childhood protector, thus the name ‘Anthony’.”

  “I’ve been thinking about his speech patterns,” I said. “His alter ego probably assimilated the rural twang of his uncle and aunt—farmers in western Illinois. People he hadn’t seen in years, but who represented some modicum of safety and protection.”

  “Doctor,” Eddie interjected, “Sean tells me that this ‘Anthony’ knew of Frank. He spoke of keeping him safe, talked about how everyone treated Frank or took advantage of him. So Anthony knew about Frank, but not the other way around?”

  Micah nodded. “Correct. Francis’s subconscious created Anthony in the first place as a repository for the painful memories. Anthony existed because Francis needed him, but Francis didn’t need or want to know of Anthony’s existence. Later, Anthony acted on the memories he inherited from Francis to protect him from further attacks.”

  “And to seek revenge,” I added.

  Micah continued. “Yes, and the occurrence of certain disturbing episodes in his daily life triggered the reappearance of Anthony. For example, Tommy tells me that the killing of Monsignor Anderson closely followed the death of Francis’s father. Dealing with his abuser’s death is the kind of incident that could have given rise to voices or hallucinations that compelled Anthony to kill. There were likely other traumas—some significant, others of little consequence for a normal person—that triggered his other kills.”

  “The hole in Francis’s soul created by his father’s abuse might have been healed by a loving and caring influence,” I said. “But he never had that. Look, Francis had only three women in his life. The mother he never knew; Aunt Anna, his surrogate mother who walked out on him when he was fifteen; and Beth, whose love for him was shallow and who married Francis to spite her mother. I’m sure that if you go back and create a timeline of the killings, they probably correspond to blow-ups he had with Beth. Consider this: Beth issued an ultimatum about his job Thanksgiving morning—two days later you found Edwards’s body.”

  Sean exhaled. “Then Frank’s alter ego, Anthony, was The Bricklayer?”

  “Sadly, yes,” I answered. “To seek retribution for Francis’s childhood sexual assaults, Anthony undertook a mission to punish and kill Francis’s father—over and over again. His victims were ‘father surrogates’, for lack of a better term. If you study each one, you’ll see that they resemble Francis’s father, both physically and by temperament. Each of Anthony’s kills was for Francis—‘for him’, the message in blood on each victim’s chest.”

  Sean looked over at me. “And you knew all this when we went to his garage. That’s why you weren’t surprised at what we found?”

  “More or less. I didn’t brief you because I had trouble believing it, and I hoped it wasn’t true. I was wrong. I should have told you. I should have.”

  The room went quiet, broken by Micah’s final piece of analysis. “Francis was a good cop, a detective intent on apprehending The Bricklayer. He was chasing himself—but never knew it.”

  Sean shot a quick glance over at Eddie.

  “What? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Eddie gave Sean a nod. “Go ahead.”

  “Foster, after I got you in the ambulance and you were on your way here, I cleared the immediate scene in the garage, and I found the freezer that this ‘Anthony’ person used to store the body parts he took from his victims.”

  Sean looked back at Eddie, obviously holding back.

  I snapped at him.“Continue, Detective!”

  “When I opened the freezer, I found plastic bags containing severed hands.”

  “His trophies.” I leaned my head back and drew in a breath, waiting.

  Sean hesitated.

  I looked up at him.

  “Th
ere were eleven of them.”

  Sunday Morning, May 31

  I wanted to go home. I wanted to sleep in my own bed again. Around nine o’clock Saturday night, the charge night nurse chased Micah, Eddie, and Sean out of my room. Eddie protested, but Micah confirmed the nurse’s admonition that I had enough activity for the day. I must have been exhausted because I couldn’t recall how I got from the reclining armchair to my bed or when I fell asleep. It was the first good night’s sleep since Francis had shown up at my door after the shooting of Tony Protettore. In the morning when I rolled over and opened my eyes, I thought I was in the middle of a bad dream.

  “Well, you old son of a bitch, you’re still alive. I’m disappointed.”

  Beth sat in the guest chair next to my bed having made herself at home and apparently waiting anxiously for me to wake.

  I struggled to sit up. “What do you want, Beth?” I had no intention of being polite. She had tormented Francis. I wasn’t about to let her torment me.

  “When I heard the news of the shooting I had expected—no, I had hoped—to see you in the morgue, white as a sheet, all cut open, blood drained and lying next to your beloved Francis.”

  “You’re not welcome here, Beth.”

  Beth was usually impeccably dressed and perfectly groomed. Not today. She probably did no more than run a comb through her hair; her expensive pantsuit looked like she had slept in it; and she wore no makeup. I studied her face. Her eyes were bloodshot, pupils dilated, and her nostrils were red and inflamed. Cocaine.

  “You’re not well, Beth.” My emergency call button was on the TV remote under my pillow. I slowly reached behind me as I talked and squeezed the button.

  “You know, Foster, you did everything you could to turn Frank against me. I always thought that sooner or later, he’d come to his senses and go back to school—become a lawyer or something more than just a cop. But, you didn’t let him, did you? You kept pulling him back into your world. You convinced him—”

  “No, Beth. Your marriage was doomed the moment you said ‘I do.’ He thought you loved him. I tried to tell him that you only loved what he might become and—”

  “Oh, that’s right. The high and mighty Thomas Aquinas Foster disapproved of the marriage, or was it just me you disapproved of?”

  “Is this something you really want to talk about right now?”

  “I’ll talk about whatever I damn well please. Right now it’s you and Frank.” She stood and began pacing at the foot of my bed, head hung low and looking only at the floor. “You always thought I had an ulterior motive in marrying Frank. Oh yeah, Frank told me! ‘She married you to get even with her bitch of a mother.’ Regular Sigmund fucking Freud, aren’t you? Must’ve been the only time Frank didn’t take your advice.”

  “Beth, you need help. The cocaine is only making it worse.” I depressed the call button several more times like someone who thinks an elevator car will come sooner if you keep pressing the button.

  “I once told Frank that I wished the damn Bricklayer would cut off his dick. Now, Commander Dunbar tells me that Frank was actually The Bricklayer, some theoretical psychiatric gibberish. Doesn’t really matter now, but isn’t that a kick in the head! Turns out I was wishing that he’d cut off his own dick. Now that’s irony, Thomas Aquinas Foster, that’s irony.”

  She abruptly stopped pacing and turned to face me. “I should have cut it off. It never did me any good.”

  “Beth, listen to me. Francis was sick—a product of his father’s sexual abuse. He couldn’t have helped himself even if he wanted.”

  “Sick? Bullshit! I had my own problems when I was a kid, and I turned out—” She began pacing again without finishing the statement she knew wasn’t true.

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Sense? I lived with a homicidal monster all that time. I slept with him, ate meals with him, and—”

  The floor nurse finally arrived. “Your door shouldn’t be closed Mr. Foster. You buzzed and . . .” She looked over to Beth. “Ma’am, you’re not suppose to be here now. Visiting hours don’t start until one o’clock.”

  “She’s not a visitor. She’s an intruder.”

  The nurse’s affable demeanor changed immediately. She took two steps toward Beth. “You’ll have to leave. You’ll have to leave now.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Very well.” The nurse walked over to the side of bed, picked up the phone, and punched a series of numbers. “I’ll call security and have you physically removed—if that’s what you want.”

  She glared at the nurse. “Don’t bother. I’ve said what I came to say.” Looking back at me, she added, “I hope you burn in hell!”

  She didn’t know it, but I had already earned my place in hell several times over.

  With that, Beth turned on her heels and headed out of the room without saying another word. But she was right. My warning about the perils of marrying her was the only piece of advice Francis failed to heed.

  Back Home

  While I was still hospitalized, Beth claimed Francis’s body. She had gone from a bitter petitioner in a divorce proceeding to a vindictive widow. She instructed the funeral director to conduct a direct burial— no visitation, no funeral, and no graveside service; and, as a final act of contempt, she arranged for his remains to be buried next to his father. She had a private viewing of the body. I was told she spent almost a half-hour alone with Francis and then closed the casket herself, as if by doing so she closed the book on a bad business deal.

  I was discharged from the hospital after a four-day stay. Eddie Dunbar drove me home and helped me settle back into my basement apartment, where I spent peaceful days, but restless nights regaining my health. During that time, I found it therapeutic to expand my journal notations to prepare this narrative. As summer turned into autumn, I finally learned to be at peace with Francis’s fate.

  For years I had guarded the family secret of the true ownership of the building on West Fullerton Parkway where I had occupied the basement apartment. Only a few of the family’s closest friends knew the entire history of the building. Fewer still knew of the Galt Family Trust Fund, of which I had become the sole beneficiary. In 1994, my father had persuaded her to use trust fund monies to purchase and restore the 100-year-old, three-story brownstone, and he had used his influence to have the building designated a Chicago Landmark by the City Council Commission on Landmarks. It took him more than a year to complete the restoration of the once-celebrated residence of a British aristocrat.

  Within a few short weeks after I was released from the hospital, I had no choice but to move my father into a nearby skilled nursing facility. His health had declined rapidly, and I was in no position to be his caregiver. His first-floor apartment had remained unoccupied. Just as autumn began, I invited volunteers from the Margaret Ann Galt Foundation for the Homeless—a charitable foundation my father established to honor my mother—to remove most of the furnishings from my father’s spacious three-bedroom apartment, and instructed that they be sold, with the proceeds to be donated to the Foundation’s shelters. The same volunteers, at my request, moved my simple furnishings upstairs as I finally felt comfortable taking my father’s place.

  Sean called on New Year’s Day expressing his hope that the new year would be better than the last. He told me that Beth had taken a leave from her firm and had again retreated to Santa Barbara where her brother checked her into a drug rehab center after a cocaine overdose.

  Over the months that followed, Sean and Keisha paid frequent visits, initially on a social basis, during which they disclosed that they had been seeing each other. I was not surprised. Even before Francis’s death, I had suspected that they had become romantically involved. Sean and I became close and collaborated on a couple of homicide cases, each of which Sean would have solved on his own anyway. I never asked him why he rushed Tony that night behind Wrigley, and we never talked about his shooting Francis. I figured that if he wanted to talk about it, he woul
d tell me. That is a lesson I learned from Francis.

  On a bright but cold Saturday afternoon in February, Sean and Keisha visited me and brought along seven-year-old James, Sean’s son. James explored the apartment and found, on the nightstand next to my bed, a photograph in a simple black frame. Running from the room with the picture in his hands, he held it up for me to see and asked, “Is this your son, Mr. Foster?”

  As I stood, I looked over at Sean and Keisha. They exchanged glances. They both recognized the black and white photograph. They knew too that the small holes in the corners of the picture were from the pushpins that had held it in place on the wall of Francis’s cubicle.

  “No, James . . .” I paused, looking at the black and white photo, repeating, “No, James.” I took the photo from the child’s small hands, walked slowly to my bedroom, and closed the door.

  EPILOGUE

  Thomas Aquinas Foster

  A year after the death of Detective Francis Vincenti, Dr. Micah Feldman published a scholarly paper on his diagnosis of Detective Vincenti’s dissociative identity disorder, commonly referred to as DID. His paper sparked anew the controversy regarding the disorder. Many psychiatrists continue to question whether the disorder actually exits, notwithstanding that DID is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, the reference guide that clinicians and researchers use to diagnose and classify mental disorders. That widely accepted reference manual states, on pages 294-295, in part, as follows:

  Interpersonal physical and sexual abuse is associated with an increased risk of dissociative identity disorder. Prevalence of child abuse and neglect in the United States, Canada and Europe among those with the disorder is about 90 percent.1

  Dr. Feldman’s paper attributed Detective Vincenti’s disorder, and the related violence, solely to the developmental influences of early childhood sexual abuse and absence of a nurturing influence in the home. The paper dismissed any biological basis for the disorder although there had been a number of scientific studies employing neuroimaging that had found a connection between DID and certain segments of the human brain.