“OK. Thanks, Al. When this is over, I’d love to have a talk with you about exactly what it is you do.”
“We can talk if you want, but I’ve been telling you the truth; this IS what I do. Good night, Bud.” And Al went off to catch the southbound El. He’d be sitting with Edith in his room in about thirty minutes. If she had any more information, maybe the two of them could add one plus one and come up with murder.
25
Karen Lane lived in a small two-bedroom, one-bath home in Gary, Indiana. It was only thirty-five miles to Chicago’s city center from her small house, but it seemed a world away. She acted in Chicago when she could get work. When she couldn’t get work in the city, she did a ton of regional and road work. As an actress who was pushing fifty years old, she worked when and where she could. The acting world was not kind to women as they aged. Men, on film more than on stage, got a much longer life playing regular people. Women tended to get shifted out of young ingénue roles at a pace that could only be described as manic.
Karen was between gigs. She’d just closed a production of Keely and Du the weekend before in Chicago and was gearing up for a tour of Anything Goes, with rehearsals starting on Monday. The tour was going to hit a bunch of small towns and would be a way to stockpile some money. Tours, especially children’s theatre tours, paid extremely well. The downside was you had to live in ratty hotels, you were away from home for long periods of time, and your career made no forward progress. She sometimes thought these small town tours were a bit like those pods science-fiction people got in for long voyages--except you weren’t in suspended animation, your career was.
She poured a Scotch and soda and sat in a beat up leather chair that had been her father’s. Her mom had died when Karen was young, and she was the only child. She lived here with her dad until he died from a long bout with complications due to emphysema. He’d been a stout fellow who had worked at the Amtrak switching station until, well, until he couldn’t. His disability was enough to keep him eating and paying the bills. It was tight. She made enough money as an actress to supplement his income, and they made it work. When he’d died two years ago, she found out he’d left a $250,000 insurance policy for her. He had a separate policy that paid for the funeral expenses. She didn’t want to touch the $250,000. That was retirement and emergency money. She was trying to decide on an exit strategy from acting, but didn’t know what that looked like. She was too old to start teaching college, and she didn’t have the resume to start her own studio.
She lit a cigarette. She was trying to quit. It was getting harder and harder to dance because of the fucking smokes. The extra weight she’d put on in the past couple of years didn’t help, either. She tended to gain weight in her boobs and butt, but it was still luggage she’d have to shuck from place to place on the stage. She’d gone on a diet of sorts. She’d cut carbs, switched to Scotch and soda, and was limiting herself to five ultra-light cigarettes a day. If it didn’t kill her, she was pretty sure she could survive the Anything Goes tour. She’d be done with it in four and a half months and she’d bank everything she made. She’d be put up in hotels and given a per diem for food. She’d eat cheap and bank most of her per diem as well. That would be about $9,000, when all was said and done. Not bad; not great, but not bad.
She started to smell something in her apartment. It smelled like a rotten egg. It was faint, but she smelled it. She’d go and check the kitchen. She thought she might have left a burner on, low enough to leak gas but not on high enough to ignite the electronic spark. She was just getting up when there was a knock at the front door. She went to the door and said through the inch and a half of oak, “Who is it?” Her neighborhood had not aged well, nor was it a particularly safe place.
“Citizen’s Gas, ma’am. We think we may have a line leak. Have you smelled any gas in your place? Sulfur or rotten egg is usually the way people describe how a gas leak smells.”
Karen’s door had a little iron door at eye level. It had a turn knob that opened the solid iron box on her side. On the outside, there was a scrolled ironwork rectangle the same size as the little iron door on her side. The scrollwork also had a knocker. It was antique. Karen often thought if she had to replace the front door, she’d have a carpenter install this little box in the new door. She opened the little door and saw a man in a hard hat. He was a normal looking guy with a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. “I don’t have Citizen’s Gas. I use Indiana Natural Gas Corporation.”
“Yes, ma’am. We always check adjacent buildings when we get a gas complaint. The neighbors over your back fence said they smelled gas. My partner is checking them out, and I’m checking the adjacent houses. You can wait for INGC if you want, but I’m required by law to tell you about the potential danger. If you want to see my badge…” He held up a laminated badge with his picture and the Citizen’s Gas logo. “…it’s right here. Have you smelled anything?”
“Actually, I just started to smell something when you knocked. Can you check it out there, or do you need to come in?”
He held up a little digital box with a tube coming out of it. “This is a gas sniffer. I can run it around in your kitchen if you want. It’ll at least tell you if you should clear out for a while or if it’s safe. My guess is, it’s probably not bad in your kitchen. You wouldn’t just smell it a little if there was something to smell. That stuff is scented so you don’t asphyxiate. I think the smell’s enough to gag a maggot.” He smiled a winning smile.
The Scotch on her mostly empty stomach was starting to work its magic. Besides, this guy was cute and had a badge and a “sniffer,” whatever that was. The sniffer thought made her giggle. “Just a sec.” She closed the little iron door, latched it, then opened the door. He strode in. He was well built. A thought flashed through her head. She’d seen a couple of porn movies in college with some of her girlfriends. There was one with a pool guy who fixed a woman’s pool. She said, “Thanks, Pool Man, how can I ever repay you?” The porn music started then, and she figured out a way to repay him. They’d started this joke after that. Whenever they’d see a professional guy, like the gas man, one of them would say, “Thanks, Mr. Gas Man, for fixing my gas; how can I ever repay you?” Then they’d all say, “Bow chicka wow wow!” imitating porn music, then they’d all crack up. As he passed her into the kitchen with his little sniffer, she was thinking about this. She giggled again.
He turned. “Did I miss something funny?” He asked this while smiling.
“No. Just being silly. Is your sniffer finding anything?”
“It says no, but I definitely smell it. Let me try something else.” He knelt down and opened his tool chest. It was in front of him, so she couldn’t see what he was doing. Suddenly, he turned around and clamped a rag over her mouth and nose, holding to her tightly until she passed out.
Eric Bannerman put her in the leather chair. He then went to the back door and opened it. He’d placed a small propane tank on the back step, put a tube on it and placed the tube in the crack between the door and the door jam. Then he’d turned on the valve and walked around to the front of the house.
He went to the dining room and grabbed a wooden chair that had arms. He lifted her easily and placed her on the wooden chair. He tied her to the chair with soft leather straps, placed a soft gag in her mouth, and tied one arm, wrist up, on the arm of the chair. He tied her feet to the legs of the chair as well. He went back to his tool kit and got an IV bag, a needle, and a piece of rubber. The IV bag had a little saline in it. It was enough to do a 10 minute drip into her arm. He wouldn’t need that much time, but better safe than sorry. The line had a little “Y” in it for injecting drugs into the vein.
He started an IV in the joint of her elbow. While he was waiting for her to wake up, he took off his fake goatee and mustache. After a couple of minutes, she woke up. She was groggy at first, but when she realized her predicament, her eyes widened, and she started making muffled screaming sounds.
“Shhhhhh. Let’s not make this un
pleasant. I want to remove your gag, but let’s give you a little something to make you relax. What can we use? Hmmm, let’s see.” He pretended to look around then said, “Aha!” and grabbed the bottle of her cheap Scotch off the table behind her. “We could give you some of this to start the party. What do you think? Oh, yeah. You’re gagged. I’ve never done this before, so why don’t we try about 3 CCs of this…Old Crofter? Never even heard of it. Then again. I don’t drink. I had a really bad experience one time.” He’d loaded a syringe and put it in the piggyback part of the IV line. He pushed in the Scotch and waited for some sort of reaction. Her eyes got a little more glazed. He could tell that she’d already had one or two drinks before he’d arrived. “OK. I’m taking this gag out. If you scream, I’m going to gag you then start cutting parts off of you with these.” He dropped a pair of crook-neck hand pruning shears on the floor next to her. She winced. He removed the gag.
“What do you want? I don’t really have anything, but you can have everything here. I have some jewelry in my room and some cash in my wallet. I even have some food and stuff you can take with you.” She felt her head beginning to buzz more. Not unpleasantly, but if she’d been at a party, she’d give someone her keys and stop drinking for the night. She had a feeling last call was a long way off.
“Too bad about Dirk. How long were you guys together, anyway?” he sat across from her.
“Dirk? Jesus. He’s dead. I didn’t feel shit about that. The guy was a dick. I was pretty fucked up when I was with him. He brought out the worst in me.”
Eric was filling up another syringe with cheap Scotch. “Yeah. Dirk was like that, wasn’t he? I just don’t get why you all had to go to such extremes to humiliate me. The job was done by the end of the workshop. I think by the time you were calling me Cyclopes, the damage would have been sufficient.” He slammed the alcohol into her IV line.
“Oh, my God. Eric Bannerman. Holy shit.”
“Ding, ding, ding. You get first prize!”
“But you were a little shit.” She was slurring slightly now. “What happened to you?”
“You mean my sentence, in prison, or my body?” He was smiling and rummaging in his tool box again.
“All of it.” This came out as “Alluvit,” but he understood.
“Well, when you guys played your little trick on me, I had just turned seventeen. The men in my family are late bloomers. We grow late. I didn’t reach my full height until I was twenty-one. I’d been in the joint four years by then. That’s how long it takes to get a bachelor’s degree. It’s a year more than it takes to get an MFA. And it’s three years and three hundred sixty days longer than it takes someone to make you their bitch. Did you know that? Yeah. You guys played a little trick, and all kinds of shit happened.”
“I wanted to go to the cops, but Dirk said he would make a big deal out of it. It would be a conspiracy deal, and we’d all go to jail. It was his idea! No one was supposed to get hurt. We just thought you’d pass out.”
He had pulled out a bottle of Everclear. The bottle had two ears of corn on it and said it was one hundred ninety proof. “I didn’t pass out, though. Gill came down to my car with me. Did you know that?”
“Yeah. We wuz supposed to make sure ya got to the car ok…”
“Stay with me, Karen!” He slapped her a couple of times to get her attention. They weren’t hard slaps, just little wake-up taps. “When we got to my car, he had me chug some stuff called Goldschläger. It’s a high-proof schnapps--at least it was. I understand they dropped the alcohol level. Any way you slice it, I don’t remember much for the two days after I left the party.”
“I told them getting you drunk then moving the party when you were gone was a really shitty thing to do, even if you were a horse’s ass.” She was getting very drunk now.
Eric acted as if he’d been hit with a brick. He’d never been told this little factoid. He thought they just got him drunk and sent him off to succeed or fail at his errand. He’d often wondered what would have happened if he came back. He imagined there would be further indignities, but to learn after all of this time that he’d have gone back to an empty building was the ultimate humiliation.
“So I killed a pregnant woman and her kid who were doing nothing but walking across the street. I dragged them under my van for almost a whole city block. All of that, and you fuckers couldn’t even hold your ground?” Eric was starting to lose his temper and control. “Let’s play a game. I was just going to flood you with alcohol until you died, but now I think I’m changing the game plan.” He went to his tool box. “I’m going to see how alcohol works as a pain killer. They used to get people drunk before performing amputations in the Civil War. That always intrigued me. So we’ve given you some of the weak stuff to prime the pump. Now…” He took out a bag of zip ties and put one around her left wrist. He cinched it down so tightly that her hand would be turning blue in no time.
“Don’t do this. Please.”
“Oh, Karen. You were dead when I walked in. Now it’s just going to be a little more horrifying. Don’t worry. It won’t be any more horrifying than waking up and finding out you’ve killed an innocent woman, her two-year-old child, and her unborn kid. Did you know her husband killed himself? Yup. They were immigrants. Legal. Busted their asses to get here legally, and this was their reward. The American dream as interpreted by Dirk and his merry band of assholes.” He grabbed a throw pillow and his pruning shears.
“No. No, no, no…”
“Yes.” He cut off the tip of her index finger and stifled her screams in the pillow. There was a little pump of blood but the zip tie tourniquet was doing a fine job. “Thirteen more cuts till I run out of digits on this side. Every time I cut one off, I’ll pump in two ml of Everclear. Come on Karen, let’s party.”
He made ten cuts. He left the segments of her fingers on the floor. He had to shake and slap her to keep her awake. Finally, she was getting almost completely non-responsive. She just moaned. She wasn’t even screaming anymore. He grew tired. He dragged over the old fashioned coat rack from its location by the front door and hung the IV bag on it. He made a cut in the top and poured the rest of the fifth of grain alcohol into the bag. She was getting an almost pure alcohol drip.
He’d worn gloves the whole time he’d been inside and hadn’t been seen going in or coming out. He had gotten a sense of satisfaction from the other people he’d terminated, but this new information had really upset him. As he got in the van, he was crying without even being aware of it. The humiliation he had suffered had been complete, or so he’d thought. What she had told him made him realize he’d missed the punchline of their sick joke.
He fired up the van and drove off toward Chicago. He was in the endgame. This unexpected development had thrown him for a loop, but it didn’t change anything. There were four little Indians left. Soon there would be three. He would keep going until they were all dead. He’d thought his last move would be to kill Gill, but now he thought he might take out that hard-ass they’d brought in from California. He was beginning to doubt the guy was a decent actor at all. Just some hard-ass they’d hired to make everyone feel safe.
He was lost in thought as he drove off and didn’t notice the old black woman across the street watching him climbing in his van and driving off. She wrote down the license plate number and got a good description of the guy driving and the van itself. She didn’t know if she’d talk to the cops. Maybe if a reward was offered. She’d never really liked the girl across the street, but she thought she might be in trouble. She put the pad of paper next to her phone. If the police came by asking about trouble, she’d give them the plate number. It was probably just some guy she was having sex with. The girl had always been a tramp.
26
Al got back to his hotel at 6:30 with ingredients to make a White Russian. Because he was slightly early, he decided to take a shower and change into some sweats and a t-shirt. He had just started the water running when his phone rang. It wasn’t the burner
phone. He recognized the ringtone. It was “Tumbling Tumble Weeds.” Al had picked it for his friend, Special Operations Group US Deputy Marshal Ted McAdams. Ted looked like Sam Elliott. Al had chosen it because of Sam Elliott’s work in The Big Lebowski. The reasoning was a bit elliptical, but it made Al chuckle.
He picked up the phone, “Hello, Ted. They keeping you busy?”
“Your fuckin’ A. We’ve recovered a bunch of the girls from that multiple missing-persons case. A lot of girls were never found. We haven’t quit, but I think there’s definitely a mortality factor at play. After the main asshole got toppled, we picked up some other assholes, and stuff quieted down.”
“That’s good, Ted, but you’ve told me this part already.”
“I know.” He paused for a few seconds. He was obviously trying to ford some mental stream. “Nature hates a vacuum, Al.”
“Abhors.”
“Yeah, that. Abhors. Good word. Well, lots of new players have come in to fill the void. I’m busy. I blame you for that, but I give you credit every time I take another missing girl picture off the wall of the Hattiesburg office.” Al had helped dismantle a huge human trafficking ring in the southern states. It wasn’t a very neat and tidy operation. People got hurt, but people also got saved.
“Is there something I can help you with? Honestly, Ted, anything you need.”
“I got a call from a Detective Smythe the other day. It was a voucher call. Seems like you’re spreading your particular brand of joy in Chicago. I told him you were OK, but his work-load might increase.” Ted laughed dryly. It sounded like someone burning a green pine bough.
“Thanks. Sorry to have bothered you…again.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. What are you doing tomorrow?”
“I have rehearsal until noon then I’m free until Monday. Why?”
“I’d like to buy you some coffee.”
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