Murder at Willow Slough

by Josh Thomas

  College practice would start next month; how would Purdue do this year? He remembered Coach Reed’s postgame interview on the radio after the ten-point loss at home to North Carolina, what, four years ago already? He said bluntly, “We’ve got to recruit us some guys who can play.” Then he went out and got himself a big dog.

  Ah, Carolina and the freezing rain at Christmastime. After the game and a forty-degree temperature drop, Jamie chased through unexpected sleet to get the car for Rick so he wouldn’t have to brave the ice in his wheelchair. Rick whispered, “Thanks, pops,” as Jamie helped him into their brand-new Acura, Thelma climbing into the back seat while Jamie, ice in his eyelashes, stashed the chair in the trunk.

  It took him 20 minutes of violent shivering to get warm, with the car heater blasting. Rick and Thelma, above all others, knew how Jamie hated to be cold.

  Funny how a basketball game could figure into one of his proudest moments. He could remember a thousand other scenes of minor sacrifice during Rick’s illness, but when Jamie put his own body on the line, they’d known love was real.

  His eyes misted, but no tears came; instead a never-forgotten word from French 101, tendresse.

  Next was a billboard for the fleabag motel he’d stayed in, the afternoon after his failed conference with the cops in Indianapolis two years ago, Jamie trying to set up a multi-agency task force himself, since the cops hadn’t done it; the police couldn’t even figure out who should organize it if one was needed. If one was needed!

  Reporters, the renowned forensic pathologist, the sociology professor who’d been on the Schmidgall task force, the Indianapolis P.D. detective, all were no-shows after giving their word they’d be there. Jamie was humiliated—and he cost Louie a ton of money; three hundred dollars anyway, and to Louie that was a ton. Jamie heard about it for months.

  The only attendees were Dr. Steve Helmreich, an ex-street cop turned serial murder expert from the University of Illinois, and the team from Quincy. Someone put the word out that Jamie’s conference was too hot. Those who attended went ahead and discussed what they could, as the hotel caterers wondered what to do with all the extra turkey croissants. Finally Jamie resorted to an emotional appeal: “The cases need more publicity. The mainstream media don’t care about long-dead faggots, but we can make them care.” Bulldog and Hickman looked doubtful, but they seemed to go along.

  Jamie got drunk that night, crashed at a hotel, and was still shaky the next day. As he drove back home he suffered his first anxiety attack, terrified he’d plunge himself into a bridge. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, he only knew he had to get off the highway. The town was called New Castle. He got a motel room and called Rick. “I’m sick, I have to go to bed. I didn’t mean to stay overnight and leave you without a car. I should have taken the Jag.” The Acura had Rick’s hand controls. “I fucked this whole weekend up, I’m sorry.” Then Jamie called a priest, that was how much of an emergency he was in. The priest brought a Charles Kuralt book, and Jamie read till he calmed down and went to sleep.

  Looking back, he realized he was emotionally exhausted that time, with serial killers and a seriously ill lover. He’d learned more about anxiety attacks once he’d had a few; they were a physical mental illness, and he had some control over them since he made decisions about his physical health. He seldom got drunk, and should never have done it that night. The fact that he did showed how distraught he was over that failed conference. What was “too hot” about assembling some homicide experts? Who stood to lose face?

  Not Bulldog and Hickman. Therefore it was the other departments, more concerned about their face than their citizens.

  He was glad to make it past New Castle today.

  Next was Hancock County. Seat: Greenfield, home of James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier Poet, “When the frost is on the punkin’.” No one read him anymore, probably not even here. But Jamie remembered when high school kids came to his grade school to recite Riley.

  Victim: Riley Jones…

  Jamie’s eyes sunk into their sockets. “Fuck!” he said, thumping the steering wheel again. “That bastard! How could I have missed that?” He scowled, grinding his teeth unconsciously till his dentist told him to stop it.

  …who disappeared over the Indy 500 weekend in Year 3, to be found near the Big Blue River. The deputy had talked to Jamie a good long time after all those years, but later Bulldog told him other officers considered the dude lazy for one, a bigot for another.

  Not that “bigot” was how Bulldog put it, but Jamie knew what he meant. How many other victims were shrugged off by homophobic cops?

  South of here was Shelby County. Victim: Mike Cardinal, Year 8. Dumped near Flynnville, a town so small Casey could only approximate it on their push-pin map on the newsroom wall. For months, the Shelby deputy delayed the FBI conference Jamie’d been pushing after the earlier failure, before the cop finally broke down and admitted he’d lost his crime scene photos. It was the lowest blow of the entire sordid mess. A man was murdered and the cops couldn’t figure out a file folder.

  Indianapolis P.D. later made new prints for Shelby, and the FBI conference finally went on in Greenfield, a year late and without Jamie. Didn’t accomplish a thing, as nearly as he could make out. Not a single headline in any point size, though there was a serial killer profile circulated. Jamie had never gotten his hands on it. It was the FBI’s own report, but the FBI told him that releasing it was up to the locals, then Bulldog wouldn’t release it, it might piss off other cops; and the other cops wouldn’t release it, it might piss off Quincy.

  Nobody worried about pissing off Jamie. That was a mistake. He was the one with the power to tell the world about the missing file folder, and tell the world he did.

  Indianapolis suburbs were next. The speed limit went down to 55, marked by red flags, Speedway-style. I-465 would intersect in two miles. Lt. Phil Blaney of Indianapolis homicide reopened the cases four years ago on his own initiative, and was working with Quincy County. He showed Jamie some of his photos and interview notes, and Jamie wrote it up big, trying to reassure Indianapolis Gays that IPD did care, wasn’t to be feared, at least not entirely, so please if you know anything just call… The story didn’t coax out a clue, not even a single phone call.

  He turned north onto I-465, past Fort Benjamin Harrison, where Arnie bought discount groceries and cigarettes for Thelma in his retirement. South of Connor Prairie, a restored pioneer farm village and tourist trap, the interstate cut through Hamilton County, with the first three victims: Wayne Allen Wilson, Year 1, a 15-year-old high school hustler. Nobody knew nothin’. Poor kid. Cute, too. A lot of them were.

  Hustling at 15 years old. What was he thinking?

  He wasn’t thinking. He knew he could have mowed yards, detassled corn. He didn’t want to do that.

  Dead at 15.

  Also John-Mark Barnett, Year 3, in Weasel Creek, who went unidentified for eight months because his mom, the only one who ever missed him, was in the nuthouse when he checked out; and Kelvin Farmer the same year. Three cases, two different jurisdictions; the state police got to Barnett first, so they owned him, couldn’t do a thing with him. The county mounties had the others, with the same result.

  But Kelvin was different, everyone agreed about that. Different enough was the question.

  In the opposite lane, a tractor-trailer barreled past, for a chain of local appliance stores. Jamie swore, “Not here, you son of a bitch! Not here!”

  He could never forget the photos of Kelvin’s body. Smooth, naked, 14-year-old Blackboy skin gleaming in the sun by the side of the road, sleeping in the weeds. Easy to spot, quickly recovered and ID’d. The only African-American, the youngest of the bunch. Hyoid bone crushed in his tender teenaged neck, a sign of particular violence, the killer probably male.

  There’d been a suspect: middle-aged, unmarried son of a wealthy appliance dealer. He got off with bigtime lawyers, thanks to an incompetent prosecutor who got a conviction only for prostitution with Kelvi
n in a hotel room the day of the murder. Even that took a Supreme Court case.

  Some cops said Kelvin didn’t belong on the list. Maybe he was a copycat case; no one supected Maytag Man in the other murders. But Jamie kept Kelvin on his list anyway till someone could prove otherwise. Kelvin ranked with Aaron Haney in Jamie’s mental hierarchy, and the cops had been wrong before about their list—witness the Doe in Defiance, Ohio. For three years Doe went unidentified, while the sheriff insisted to Jamie that Doe wasn’t part of the chain. Jamie always included Doe in his reporting, and when Defiance finally came up with his name last year— Barry Lynn Turner of guess where, Indianapolis—he went from “possible” to “police have confirmed” in The Ohio Gay Times.

  How many other Does were out there? That was the hardest thought of all.

  It took forever for him to get around the city to the I-65/Chicago turnoff. Traffic instantly thinned out, urban to rural. This was the road home.

  He passed the WIBC tower, tuned in the station for news, but quickly shut off the box and its homophobia-for-ratings squawkers. From here on would be Mom’s time.

  In a few miles, he felt safer. Thought about what he would cook for her this weekend, some last good meals before she went into the hospital. He spent that last hour making himself cheerful. Then his face lit up as he saw the giant billboard. He tooted at it, WELCOME TO TIPPECANOE COUNTY,HOME OF PURDUE UNIVERSITY.

  Soon he crossed the Wabash, exited on River Road and pulled into her driveway in the little subdivision outside West Lafayette. He was ready for fun; so was she. They hugged and chattered happily.

  Later, he baked a big pan of lasagna so there would be leftovers to freeze for her. Lasagna was a family liturgy. Good-Bro Danny had brought home the recipe back in the ’80s while he was on leave from the Air Force. The family had never eaten Eye-talian before—God, we were such rubes—and Danny’s version was scrumptious. Now lasagna was a way to have Danny back there when they needed him.

  The next afternoon, Jamie drove Thelma to Hoosier Hospital, stayed and gabbed for an hour and a half until he’d exhausted every topic he could think of. His mother smiled and told him to go home.

  The minute he left the building he felt lonely. Its being a Sunday, the town’s only Gay bar was closed.

  5

  Breathing

  They finally let him see her, after he’d chased from intensive care to recovery and back again, frustrated with a hospital that lost track of its patients.

  He entered ICU and started at how awful she looked. Her pretty face, tanned all summer from golf, had no color; her cheekbones looked crushed from the inside. He couldn’t show his fear. But how had an operation in her gut ravaged her face?

  Her eyelids fluttered open.“Don’t leave me,”she gasped,trying feebly to brush aside a clot of plastic tubing on her neck.

  “I won’t, Mom,” he said with all the steadiness he could muster. He got the plastic away from her neck. Behind her, a small screen monitored vital signs and who knew what. Yellow-green squiggles purported to trace the shape of her heart. Whenever she moved, numbers jumped, blinked, threatened to screech alarm. His hand found hers. “I’m here.”

  He peered into her pale blue eyes with love and grounding and assurance. He smiled and held her with practiced eyes, hoping she could take in his strength.

  But who could say? He held her small, cold, freckled hand, and his eyes were drawn to the red light of a sensor taped to her middle finger. “E.T.,”she whispered, “call home.”She smiled weakly,wiggled her magic digit up and down.

  That heartened him a little. “E.T. was sick, but then he got well and went home.” When Rick managed a little joke after one of his amputations, Jamie knew the worst was over.

  But he couldn’t think about Rick now. She blinked a time or two, then lapsed out of consciousness again.

  The computer box began to beep, low but insistently. A lavender-clad nurse, peroxide and 35, swept quietly in. “My, you have beautiful hair,” she told him. He gaped at her. She stood at the little screen and pushed unseen buttons on the glass. The beeps stopped. The screen changed to reveal more detail, and she pressed here and there on it, squinting as it changed again. A number dropped from 90 to 87.

  She adjusted twin tubes stuck up his mother’s nose. “You must have a great hairdresser.” Eighty-five percent now. Eighty-two percent. She frowned.

  “I’m your patient’s son.” Think we could worry about her, not my hair?

  “I’m not surprised. You two look a lot alike. She’s a lovely lady.”

  “Thank you. She’s a former Indiana’s Junior Miss.”

  He released his mother’s hand, laid it on her hip, stepped away to allow Peggy to work. She reached up to finger a plastic bag of clear IV fluid dripping into a tube. “Is your father blond too?”

  “Um, yes, actually, he was.”

  Peggy adjusted another bag. Eighty-eight percent of whatever it was. Then ninety. The screen stopped blinking. “I see you’re wearing a wedding ring.”

  The original screen reappeared, quantifying the human being imprisoned in intensive care. “It helps fend off unwanted advances.”

  She twisted a valve on another tube. Checking her watch, she picked up a catheter bag, measured urine output, recorded it on a chart on the pull-table. “Is your wife blonde too?”

  “I don’t have a wife, and he wasn’t blond.”

  She didn’t react to the news. “We’re stabilizing her. She’s a fighter. Try not to worry. Are you all right?”

  No, bitch, I’m scared for my mother while you cruise my hair. “I’m okay. Thanks for taking care of her.”

  She left. He sat in a high swivel chair, quickly floated six inches lower. Hello, gravity. The chairs are crazy too?

  He maneuvered clumsily over to the bed, found four free fingers and an E.T. one. Eyelids fluttered again; his mother breathed hard. “You’re still. Here.”

  “Back home again, in Indiana,” he softly sang. She blinked acknowledgment, then passed out.

  She stayed unconscious awhile, so he decided to get some fresh air. He circled around the hospital complex, refamiliarizing himself with streets, the way people lived, how things hummed or didn’t in the town. He hadn’t lived there in 13 years. Finally he went back inside, checked on his mother, still sleeping. He found the chapel, plain and uninspiring, and sat there, not praying, hoping that just sitting was some kind of prayer; that there was a God on the other end to receive it.

  A little later he went back to her room and heard voices. Some woman came out in street clothes, followed by his brother Stone, three years older. Jamie said, “Hi, you came! Thanks.”

  Stone eyed him, grabbed the woman’s arm and hustled her toward the elevator. Jamie stared at their backs, hurt, angry—then he hurried inside to do his job, to take care of his mother. ***

  Peggy said he should go home, and at 2 a.m. he and his hair agreed. But he got outside and felt lost; he knew West Lafayette but not its larger twin Lafayette, separated by the Wabash River. West Lafayette had the big university; Lafayette had the hospitals and factories. There was an easy way to get from hospital to highway, but he couldn’t remember it, so he drove through town the way he knew.

  Still, his heart started pounding; maybe that was just worry and lack of sleep. He crossed the river into his side of town, past fraternity houses high on the bluff, the apartment complex they’d settled into when Thelma finally divorced his terminally blond father; past steep DeHart Street, which Jamie climbed every day of that first semester before Ronald came menacingly back; to the waterworks substation with its flowerbeds, where at 13 Jamie stole three tulips to take to his mother.

  He never forgot that theft, the guilt or pleasure of it. For years he believed it was as criminal an act as a Hoosier was capable of—until the Strangler, Hoosier like he was, invaded his life.

  Still, he took comfort in the old familiar sights. He climbed to the top of the hill, where Happy Hollow Road dumped out onto the fearsome Bypas
s.

  A car sped towards him. Christ! He let it pass, eased out onto the highway, picked up speed. He tried not to think that every other car would crash into him. He tried to forgive stupid acts by other drivers.

  He safely pulled his mother’s car into the garage on Tad Lincoln Drive, cut the engine and was instantly overcome with an impulse to call Rick. Does heaven have phones? If so, no angel had given him the area code.

  He opened the car door and swung his legs out, taking care to avoid racking his knee on the hand controls. There were no hand controls on this car, he noticed. But his body swung low and left just the same.

  Rick is dead. Mom is in intensive care. When I get back home I’m going to have the hand controls taken out.

  His eyes adjusted to the dark family room, found the lamp between the twin, pale blue recliners she kept for herself and Arnie. He headed into her Astroturfed kitchen. His fancy Bunn coffeemaker sat inert on the counter. It could brew a pot in fifteen seconds from its reservoir of hot water, but she decided it jacked up her electric bill too much—what, five bucks a month?—so she kept it unplugged. It might as well be a Mr. Coffee now. Mothers are ridiculous.

  He flipped the kitchen light, was greeted by gruesome fluorescents, oh-so-’70s green/yellow/brown carpet, ragged remnants of which she’d placed in front of the stove and the sink; and cabinet doors she’d re-covered in yellow wallpaper to lighten the room with its northern exposure. Do all Gay guys critique their mother’s décor?

  Under the sink a Jack Daniels bottle sat next to the no-name vodka she used in her martinis. He found an amber rocks glass he remembered from Morocco, a village 75 miles north that was their original hometown. He filled the glass with half-moons of automatic ice. A cloud of freezing air shoved past him like a convict fleeing prison.

  He made a weak drink and claimed one of the La-Z-Boys. He found a remote control; her 19-inch non-stereo TV bounced three times before finally settling down. He found Headline News. The familiar, nasal sound of Tonya Tilley, a former colleague from Cincinnati, greeted him as she narrated footage from Yugoslavia. He muted the words; what did they mean anymore? Just inevitably bad news of ethnic cleansing while the world let the Serbs exterminate everyone in sight.