Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  Mac prompted Olga, “What are you waiting for? Ask!”

  She huffed and puffed a few minutes, arranging some papers in her lap, then said, “Everything I read about serials like our boy says they operate on a lunar basis. So I figure that’s why you want to see the data. But Quantico has already done charts and charts and more charts and they don’t match jack shit on him. No full moons, no new moons. No quarter- or three-quarter moons. Nothing.”

  “In fact,” Det. Alvarez added, “he’s not on anything like a monthly or even a moon-based monthly schedule that we can see.”

  “What if the serial is on the Pill?” I asked.

  “What?”

  I’d gotten her attention. Mac smiled as though I was softening her up for him.

  “Bear with me,” I said. “A woman’s ovulations take place on a lunar-like schedule. But then she begins taking the pill, say, for a year. What happens to that schedule when she goes off the pill?”

  “It’s all over the place for the first few months.”

  Mac asked, “But wouldn’t it settle again into a pattern?”

  “Not if she quickly went on the pill again for another year and a half,” I argued.

  Olga: “And when she came off, then it would be way off again.”

  “And if she went on for two years, then went off again?” I asked.

  “Totally different again.” Olga then asked, “Are you saying this serial is a woman?” Because everything else reads male.”

  “What does your departmental profile say, Detective Alvarez?”

  “A guy. Sixteen to twenty-four years old. Under six feet, closer to five-six or smaller. Ambidextrous. White or Hispanic. Reads a lot. Meticulous. Questionable hand-eye coordination. Strong rage against middle-aged professional white men.”

  Mac asked the question she wanted to ask. “Why would a guy be on the pill? He wouldn’t, would he?” he answered himself.

  “And he wouldn’t be ovulating either,” she added.

  “Back to square one,” Mac declared.

  “Except he’s on a schedule of some kind,” I confirmed. “And when he goes off the schedule, as he must periodically, for some reason or other, then the other schedule takes over.”

  “By the other schedule taking over—you mean the serial schedule?” Mac said, understanding me.

  “And that’s when he becomes a serial?” Alvarez asked.

  “Not right away, I don’t think,” I said. “I’d guess it happens only at the very end of what I’d call his ‘being free of the pill’ period. Maybe just before he goes back on the pill schedule again.”

  “What if he knows he’s going on the pill schedule again?” Mac asked. “Like he knows he’ll be too sedated to kill. So he does it right away?”

  “My sentiments exactly,” I said.

  “What are the schedules you’ve noticed?” Det. Alvarez asked.

  “All of them I’ve noted are typical psychiatric calendarial standards for medication, off by maybe a day or two, nothing statistically important. Three months. Six months. Nine months. One was a year and three months. Another a year and nine months. One was even two years and six.”

  “Meaning?” Alvarez didn’t get it yet.

  “Meaning that’s how long the meds he’s taking work, before they stop working.”

  “Oh, shit! That’s why Quantico found no pattern,” Alvarez said.

  “Because it’s not a pattern of what’s happening?” Mac asked for all of us. “But instead a pattern of what’s not happening.”

  “Bingo!” I said. “It’s a pattern of the pills no longer working.”

  “That’s all that you’ve got?” Mac asked me.

  “That’s all so far, yeah. But I’m only fooling around a few days with all this.”

  “You’re saying he’s a recognized schiz,” Det. Alvarez said. “Or paranoid. Or something.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” I said. “What we suspect is, he’s out on the street and he’s usually medicated and so usually normal. But disturbed enough that he’s monitored and his meds are changed whenever they’re not obviously working. So he’s off them at least two weeks for them to fully wash out of his body before he begins to take new ones. And it’s in that period when he attacks.”

  “You saw this in the charts?” Det. Alvarez asked.

  “I actually saw Neptune and Saturn with Uranus and another point you don’t know, called Hades, all activated in some kind of close mambo at every murder he’s done. That reads to me like periodic meds and really ugly stuff linked closely.”

  “Also meaning he can afford to rapidly change meds,” Mac added.

  “Or someone else can afford it for him,” I added.

  “That’s a million people,” Det. Alvarez scoffed. “We got nothing.”

  “Much less than that. A few thousand or less, locally,” Mac said, then agreed. “But it’s still too many. We’ve got practically nothing.”

  They got up to leave, disheartened.

  “You’ve got a pattern,” I reminded them when they reached the door. “Which twenty guys in an office working for months with computers couldn’t find for you. Your first pattern in the case. And you’ve now got a specific sliver of the population. Not everyone. Which you also didn’t have before.”

  “He’s right,” Olga agreed, shrugging at Mac. “It’s a break.”

  “And he’s on stronger meds. So I’d hazard that you’re safe for a minimum of six months and a week. Oh, and my invoice is in the mail,” I added.

  “Invoice, maybe. Birthday dinner, no way!” Mac assured me.

  *

  They were safe for six months and one week and five days, it turned out, before they found Dr. Sharik Deming. But this time, they’d at least mollified the Powers That Be at One Police Plaza by predicting when the next vic would be found, if not who he would be or by whose hand he would be done in. It was a little, but it was something.

  Like the others, Dr. Deming had been genitally mutilated and something very particular done with the spare body parts. This was the serial’s signature.

  Unlike the seven other cases, I happened to be out playing pinochle with Det. McGraghiu when he was called to the scene, and he dragged me along. I protested mightily.

  He relied, “You’re on the goddamn payroll with all the other kooks and wackos! You’re coming along. Who knows what kind of shit you’ll uncover.”

  “I use computers. Slide rules. I’m not a psychic.”

  He pushed me into the passenger seat of his Crown Vic, slammed the door, which self-locked, and off we went. The apartment building was one of the big old beauties just after Vine becomes Rossmore Avenue, and where working-class, nuts-and-bolts Hollywood segues dramatically into Hancock Park. Twenties or thirties vintage. Big rooms with high ceilings and triple crown moldings. Amazing views. A lobby the size and décor of your average older cinema: classic-era movie star ateliers. Dr. Deming’s office was a secondary one, clearly, for at home, maybe even emergency, consultations. Lots of diplomas on the wall. Specializations in Surgery and Ob-Gyn were prominent among them.

  Very few medical instruments were around, although whatever was present had been utilized and/or purposely left by Our Favorite Serial. Who had apparently brought his own hypodermic setup—showing his usual careful selection of the vic, then preparation and preplanning. The needle, as usual, was left for the LAPD to find and was seen to contain a milky fluid, which several people sniffed and guessed at from previous scenes and which Toxicology would later confirm to be just enough of a very strong animal tranquilizer to not knock him out but instead strongly stun him, make him fuzzy as hell, and probably also paralyze him.

  “And?” I added, “Also dull the pain?”

  “He probably wouldn’t have felt that much pain,” the on-the-spot M.E. said, “once it kicked in, which looks early on in the evening,” reporting this to us as we arrived. The examiner proceeded to give the time and other elements of the death to Det. McGraghiu.

&n
bsp; “What?” Mac asked, looking at me.

  “You said the serial has rage. Why does he stun them so they don’t feel pain?” I asked. “If it was rage, he’d make sure they’d feel every iota of pain! No?”

  Det. Alvarez: “I kinda wondered about that myself.”

  “Take a look at what he does, and you tell me it isn’t rage?” Mac said, and dragged me inside.

  Now to be honest, up till then, I’d seen maybe three dead bodies in my life, and never on purpose. Two of them old people when I was a kid. And one firefighter I knew. And all of them freaked me out. So you can guess how not eager I was to view this particular “scene.”

  Meanwhile the place was filled with people, and I found myself thinking that one of the worst aspects of being murdered is the indignity of it: all these folks stomping through your privacy and looking at your privates.

  In this case looking was right. It was hard to miss them.

  The much-drugged victim had been belted down to his consulting table fully clothed, about a dozen or more times. His trousers and underpants had been carefully pulled down around his ankles, and he was placed upon his back, with his knees up, so his legs were bent up in the middle. None of his other clothing was disturbed, and his hair remained unmussed or might have even been rebrushed; his shirt and tie looked straightened out. This was eerie enough, especially given what had happened to his lower torso. His genitals had been carefully severed, and where they’d been taken out, the area had been sewn up again with surgical thread. It wasn’t that neat, but not that messy either, and of course, blood had seeped through the stitching, although that was not the cause of death.

  Beneath what would have been the scrotum, a hole had been carved out and sewn around the edges to resemble labia. Again it wasn’t that neat, but all of it was clearly enough indicated. And the doctor’s genitals, the penis artificially strengthened by some kind of plastic rods the serial had brought along and thrust through its length, along with the loosely tied together testicles, had been placed inside the false labia as in the act of coital penetration. In fact, based on what the M.E. said was traumatic bruising, and what looked very possible, the penis had been used to perform sexual intercourse with the new “vulva”—“Most probably while the victim was still alive.”

  “And,” according to Mac, “given the specific placement of these adjustable consulting table mirrors, all of this would have been purposely visible to the doctor himself, while it was happening.”

  This last was aimed at me, to prove “rage.”

  I suppose it was the neatness of the rest of it, the office so spick-and-span, the doctor so unassaulted looking, except for this, of course, wildly awry part of his anatomy, that was so fascinating to me, so that I didn’t for a second feel the enormous repulsion and nausea I’d been expecting.

  “M.E. says, for sure, he was alive during the rape by his own penis,” Mac said. “Isn’t that rage enough for you? He was forced to watch it.”

  “Literally, go fuck yourself,” someone else muttered.

  I turned to the new voice and guessed it was the new guy in the unit. He was medium sized but athletic, boyishly handsome, with curly brown hair and what women call “smoldering” olive green eyes. I guessed he was an Aquarius Ascendant. So his Scorpio Sun was either 9th or 10th house: very public. That meant his sexuality wouldn’t be secret for very long, but instead quite opened up. I remembered that Dennis Fisher was his name.

  “And not, Detective Fisher,” I added, “‘Fuck you!’ Right? But instead ‘Go fuck yourself!’ Right?”

  “That’s what it looks like to me,” Det. Fisher agreed.

  “People, can I have your opinion of this scene?” I asked, and polled them all about the difference. All of them except Mac, who said nothing, agreed with us. So I asked, “Mac, everyone says it’s ‘go fuck yourself.’”

  Warily, he answered, “Okay. Maybe? What exactly are you getting at here, Mike?”

  “Were they all like this?” I asked. “This neat and clean except for down there?”

  “I’ll show you the photos. But more or less. Sure. The serial’s gotten better with suturing as he’s moved along. Why?”

  “I don’t know. But even though we think he’s on meds and really disturbed, this just doesn’t feel to me like a generalized rage against the medical profession. It’s too…” I searched for the word.

  “Too specific. Too particular. Too contained,” Det. Fisher tried.

  “Exactly,” I said. “You all feel it? The pathology of it? The downright creepiness of it? This serial is making a point here. A bizarre one. And he has been all the while. He’s got an axe to grind with some members of the medical professional, and it’s all about genitals!”

  “Sex reassignment,” Dennis Fisher said in a soft voice.

  “What are you talking about?” Mac scoffed.

  “That’s it.” I immediately explained, “He’s taking a genital male and turning him into a genital female.”

  “And then showing him what’s it’s like to be a genital female,” Dennis added. “By performing sex on him, so he can see it.”

  “Why doesn’t he use his own genitals?” Mac asked.

  “Because he’s not a male,” Det. Alvarez said for all of us.

  “Not exactly. Because…he’s not a male…anymore,” I said.

  “He doesn’t have a penis anymore,” Det. Fisher said. “Like I said. It’s all about sex reassignment.”

  “I learned those same stitches he used on that fake labia in Home Economics in public school junior high,” Det. Alvarez said. “They’re basic to hemming, called double-back stitches.”

  “I never learned that in school,” Mac said.

  “Only girls are taught sewing in city schools,” Fisher said. “Let’s say he was a male,” he went on, “at birth. Something was wrong or went wrong and he was sex reassigned as a woman. A girl, rather. A very young girl. By some doctor. Probably when he was an toddler. That’s when it happens. But deep down he knew he was a male. And now he’s showing all of us and the entire world too!”

  “You’re sure about this?” Mac looked directly at Det. Fisher.

  “That’s what it feels like to me, sir.”

  “Because that will really narrow it down. We’ll find records. We’ll find out which sex reassignments are on psych meds. We’ll match the periods of drug use. After that, it won’t be too hard to locate this perp.”

  “That’s what it feels like to me, sir,” Det. Fisher repeated.

  And in the silence that enused, he was saying so much that Det. Alvarez piped up, “Now that Detective Fisher said it, it feels like that to me too, sir.”

  I added my own two cents of support to their words.

  “Okay. So then we all know what to do,” Mac said, and was once again totally in charge. “Alvarez, Fisher. You’ve got the leads. You know where to go. Now run with them.”

  Everyone scrambled into motion.

  *

  “See!” Mac said as we all left the apartment building an hour later. “My instincts were right. As usual, I knew you had to be here.”

  “I didn’t do a thing,” I protested.

  “Sure you did…See, Mike, it’s because you’re so goddamn naïve. You opened our eyes to the obvious. And then because you’re so fucking hocus pocus, you allowed us to say what we needed to say…To ourselves…and then to each other.”

  “Hey, I always told you I was hot shit. And now the invoice really is in the mail,” I commented. “And for this, I’ll expect a medal too,” I added, since both of our birthdays were long past.

  He muttered obscenities, of course, and when we got back down to his Crown Vic on the street, we had to call our wives and tell them when we’d be home—so they wouldn’t worry.

  The Gospel According to Miriam, Daughter of Jebu and Anna, Wife to Johosephat, Mother of Joshua

  And it came to pass during the second decade of the reign of Caesar Augustus, that a strange new star appeared in the northwest, a
bove the pastures of Gibreon at the edge of the bright new Roman city just begun abuilding near Madgala, at the edge of the Sea called Galilee. After dawn, the star appeared to move toward the village of Nagadar and to stop and hover in the vineyards of Jebu, the virtuous wine maker.

  His daughter, the maiden Miriam, outdoors among the morning fields gathering sweet greens and bitter greens for luncheon, was not surprised by the star’s appearance, only by its great brightness, flashing light from all its edges as though imitating the noonday sun.

  Her mother Anna had spoken of such a sky-crossing star many times before, hushed by her husband should he be near, and thus usually spoken in whispers to her two remaining daughters at home, plain Martha and fair Miriam. Such a star had come to Anna herself once, she told them, near her birth hamlet not far away, many years before.

  She told it so: As the girl Anna had watched lo many decades ago, alone in a field, the star had seemed to stop and from within the star’s luminescence had stepped two radiant creatures, rainbow colored, smelling like nard and clover, with voices like early June rain, and eyes lucent as with the gibbous moon. They had spoken to Anna then, words she remembered but unclearly, but she was certain that they had sounded like harps, like zithers at their most dulcet.

  And now, as she too stood and stared among the frolicking goat kids, Miriam saw this star drop near the stacked ricks of barley and open itself to the air and knew it for what it was. Out of the star stepped two creatures who wafted slowly downward toward her, luminescently dressed, graceful and heavenly, just as her mother had often described.

  “Hail, Miriam!” the first one said. “Daughter of Jebu and Anna. Sister of Simione and Tebru and Martha. Graceful are you, as foretold by our Lord, and it is not surprising therefore that many will speak your name with great love in years to come.” His tones were dulcimer and honey, as her mother had said.

  “Hail, strangers,” Miriam replied, versed and well trained and courteous in the ways of hospitality. “Who be you and what may I do to fulfill your wishes?”