by Rex Miller
“That's how this thing got started as far as my name went. I'd gotten lucky a time or two and they could use the name for ‘public relations,’ I'd guess you would have to call it. I could be a plausible tool to tone down certain elements of the coverage of a story or to help minimize the terrorizing of a city that can take place when you're dealing with multiple homicides."
He told her about Atlanta, about Boston, and about San Francisco and the horror stories those great cities had become, once upon a time, when the phenomenal terror of a serial killer had held each of them in its immobilizing and frightening claws.
It seemed like a long drive before they reached the house but he felt like perhaps some of the ice between them had thawed. When they pulled up to the house, a rickety-looking, old frame house on South Mission, she looked at him and said, “Is this the one?” in a quiet voice.
“Yes.” He looked at her for a moment. “You okay?"
“Yeah.” She didn't look okay at all. Her face was very pale even through the rather heavy makeup.
“You know, this doesn't have to be done today,” he said, a question in his voice.
“Yes it does,” she whispered and opened the door for herself, so he quickly got out and came around the vehicle in time to close the door.
He had parked in back of a marked car so he knew the crime-scene-unit guys would be inside. They went in and said hello and they headed directly for the basement, Eichord holding her elbow but she went down first, slowly, holding on to the banister. It was smelly the way an old, closed-up home will get, and cold. He was right behind her, concentrating on the back of her Jacket and the ‘jeans’ and heels and the arm outstretched, very close in back of her in case she suddenly wilted as they sometimes did.
And then in a couple of seconds they were standing together in the room that had been her prison for over a month, and the look of the room hit her as hard as if she'd been slapped across the face, and she stood there clinging to the banister at the bottom of the stairs, breathing very deeply, and Jack wanted to touch her but knew he'd better not, and so he just let her stand there without speaking.
The frame house with its air of stale decay, the moist, overpowering decadence of the basement room papered in those torn, sad, airbrushed photos from sleaze mags, Spooky Ukie's clippings, all of it gave off a palpable dungeon effect, magnified by the chain-and-belt thing attached to one of the walls.
The house itself was something Eichord had been working on since Ukie had given it up to them. He claimed and all evidence backed him up—that someone had laid it on him as a gift. He'd been living in a fleabag downtown and he was broke. A typed note had been forwarded to him by one of the clubs where he had once appeared. The envelope contained a personal note to Ukie. On opening it a key and a fifty-dollar bill and a typed scrap of paper fell out. It said, so Ukie claimed, “Caught your act once and you were great! You deserve to change your luck. Paid six months rent in advance call it a loan.” And the address on South Mission. Ukie said he'd thought it was some kind of gag but for the real fifty.
He took a cab to the house. The key fit. He moved in immediately. The landlady still had the note to her in which Ukie had presumably rented the home by mad. The six months including a two-month deposit had been sent, she said, in cash, together with instructions where to mail the key (a Bellaire box number which a young boy had taken out in the name W. Hackabee). The bank where the money order had been paid for kept their own video surveillance tapes and Eichord saw the man who bought it. He was, although so far there was no proof either way, just somebody who'd been paid to buy the money order. The question was not so much was all of this a setup, but whose? Ukie's or somebody else's?
Meanwhile, in the basement of the house, Eichord still stood near Donna Scannapieco. Loud silence echoed in the basement. Soft, filtered conversations could be imagined from upstairs, but with the doors shut he doubted if even the loudest screams could penetrate inside the old stone walls. The house had been carefully selected, he felt. But again—by whom? Who had physically searched through a realtor's multiple listings, obtained a key, come down into the basement looking for a suitable torture chamber—Ukie? Then did he remove his disguise (he wouldn't have been dumb enough to chance a realtor identifying his mug shot) and pay people to rent a box and buy a money order and get a key, all the while wearing yet another disguise? Or was this a frame? If it was a frame why would anybody that clever (his frequent rule of thumb) construct a frame so easy to penetrate? Because that individual wanted it to look like it had been Ukie trying to make them believe it was a frame? Eichord didn't discount either possibility, as he'd seen enough homicides and complex dope burns where the patsy or the mule was tricked up “inside out” to prepare for the contingency of police intervention.
Donna stood there and in her head she saw her own torture and abuse and ruination, and she heard the echoes of her own screams, sobbing, begging him for mercy, please, oh, please don't, she could fear it amplified inside her head full. of pain and anger and hatred and she began crying soundlessly, shoulders going up and down like silent cartoon animation, rubber-limbed Minnie Mouse going up and down, heaving, soundless sobs, and Eichord couldn't stop himself and he reached out and touched her gently and she began turning just as she collapsed, collapsing on him and sobbing, tears streaming onto his shoulder, the cries flowing from her in a torrent, all the filth and menace and frustration and loathing breaking loose in a flood of cathartic, convulsive weeping. Ana then hyperventilating as he held her in his and gently tried to reassure her, and slowly, some of the anger draining, the tears of pain abating, her breathing returning to normal, they each felt it.
Something so subtle had changed between them. It was no longer the cop and the rape victim standing there. In the gentle warmth and comfort of Jack Eichord's protective arms Donna Scannapieco, had for the first time looked at him as a human being and instinctively she relaxed and to Eichord it appeared she had let her body snuggle closer and of course he was stroking the back of a silken warm-up jacket, and holding a soft and very sexual woman, and nature began to slowly take its course.
At first neither of them admitted it to themselves. The horror of the surroundings, the inappropriateness in fact ridiculousness of it, the embarrassingly sophomoric out of-control biochemistry of this unlikely thing ... But nature is not to be ignored. And very, VERY circumspectly Jack was gathering her in closer to him and now the pressure of those large full breasts mashing up against his own chest, and suddenly it was all he could do not to move his hand around and cup one of those big womanly breasts and tilt that face back and see what she'd be like to kiss, and although he made no move she felt the threat of it communicated to her in just the subtle imperceptible increase of pressure against her and she recognized something—not desire, certainly—but something warm and affectionate in her and she recoiled from his half-imagined advances and the spell was broken.
The rest of the time between them was a mixture of business-as-usual debriefing and a suffered, mutual embarrassment of long silences. So much for shared intimacy with this little snow queen, he thought. In truth, however, he saw himself as absurdly out of control. It was an alien experience for him and it added nothing to his mounting discombobulation.
If the ride out had seemed long, the ride back had been a mini-eternity, but both of them had the consolation of their thoughts. The irony was that as Jack and Donna sat there on the bench seat while their wheeled enclosure made its way through the Big D traffic, they were subtly aware of the man or the woman sitting nearby, where before the relationship had been different. And if not consciously each of them now wondered about the other, and the age-old curiosity was there, subliminally, and it had changed everything, or perhaps nothing.
And nothing was what Eichord had come away from the day with, a stack of nothing notes, nothing observations, nothing scraps of random nothings, nothing non sequiturs, nothing squared and nothing microscoped. He bought a fifth and some dog food (what did the c
lerk think?) and finally made his way back to the motel room. The dog was excited at seeing him. That was something, anyway, and he gave it a pat on its scruffy head as it walked close beside him, shooting into the room as he unlocked it and leaping up into the sling chair by the door.
Jack had taken to letting him, Dog, come in the room against both the motel strictures and his own good judgment. And they'd become fast pals, thanks to Eichord now feeding him. Jack was oblivious to the dog's presence as he hung up his coat, put his piece away, and was now scattering scraps of paper and copious notes all over the bedspread. Jeez, he thought, looking at the yellow-lined sheets of scrawled, sometimes indecipherable shorthand, matchbooks, cocktail napkins, Kleenex, note pads, balls of equate cryptography, all of which would doubtless vagarious, capricions to the sum of the nothing day—I gotta get organized! Crumpled balls? You bet.
Jack sat on the edge of the bed, “his” dog curled up on the floor near the door, kicked off his shoes and started putting his random notes in some kind of order.
Little scraps of paper pulled from eight, ten different pockets and notebooks. Graffiti: the back of a receipt with the word “illusory” but no other comment. Something had struck him but he hadn't had time to finish the note. He wadded it up and filed it. A matchbook with a doctor's home phone number in Chester, Illinois. He transferred it to his telephone book. Graffiti half of a torn Kleenex tissue, the words OZ/Wizard in cryptic blue ballpoint. He thought of the death of Ray Bolger at first then remembered that he'd scrawled on the Kleenex to remind himself to look into something.
Legible and surprisingly coherent, he found the following memory of a viewed surveillance video:
WALLY SAYS DON DUNCAN SAW SURV OF TWINS. REUNION JOE/U. LOOKING AT EACH OTHER. NO AUDIO. JOE LAUGHS. DUNCAN SAYS “MIRTHLESSILY” AS IF F.U., BOTHER SLIDES CHAIR BACK, LEAVES, NO GOOD-BYE. And a the tape and even on the giant monitor the shot was not sufficiently close-up to reveal any details, only the noted silence and the abrupt bark of laughter. He made a note in a dossier and threw the other note in the round file.
Eichord found a crumpled scrap with the words “WHO SAYS?” which didn't ring any bells. He let the note sit beside him on the bedspread while he poured four fingers of Daniel's into a coffeecup full of ice and took a sip.
“What's to it, pal?” he asked the dog.
The dog flipped its tail a couple of times in response.
On a single piece of paper were abbreviations and numbers and letters which comprised Eichord's shorthand code summarizing the rigorous testing of Ukie Hackabee with respect to disorientation, perception of respiratory, circulatory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, neuromuscular, and genitourinary functions and dysfunctions. Illusions, distorted perceptions, hallucinations. Taste, smell, auditory, sight, and tactile sensory systems. The range and depth of moods: rage, fear, jealousy, paranoia. The extent of Ukie's emotional control or the lack of it, his subconscious and expressed anxieties, the kinesiological match-ups.
Was he impulsive, sulk evasive, hyper, belligerent, pugnacious, self-pitying, obstreperous, unpredictable, incoherent? (He had told Wally Michaels he was “tired. tuckerd out, fucked over and worthless as a Chinese private in the Peoples’ Army two days before payday.” Mandel he expressed the worry that his “red corpse-suckles” were devouring his “white cop-suckles” faster than he could manufacture their replacements. All of this in jest, but reflective of the new Ukie.) He was being clocked for nail-biting, speech defects, swings of self-effacing fake humility or wild brags, shyness and boisterousness, placidity, and hyperactivity.
His every move, mood, motion, mannerism, was scrutinized. His constant pleas, posturing, negativism, suggestibility, resistance to authority—every sign of perspiration, irritation, indignation, was sought observed, labeled, filed, catalogued, measured, reviewed, assessed, and collated.
Ukie got the Babinski plantar test and Hoffman finger test, the Bender-Gestalt. A Rorschach. A Szondi test. Ideational concept tests and a Thematic Apperception—and it was all poured into the big blender at MCTF.
Tomorrow or the next day, soon as he could, he'd see if the guy named Sue was willing to commit himself professionally—or even off the record—to some sort of premature findings. Insofar as the “new Ukie” went Mandel's only comment about the tests was inconclusive. He'd even like some inconclusive conclusions, he thought, and took a very large swallow of straight Jack, holding it in his mouth and feeling the minute slivers in it, the melting fragments of ice, and looking at the micomprehensible page of shorthand as he swallowed the whole mouthful.
He glanced at some stuff on twins that he'd photocopied. He started to read it and later he would wish he had. But he kept hitting words like “follicle” and “ova” and polyovular’ and ‘homologous” and he scanned a page or two of it, half-assed speed-reading it, until the phrase “Multiple pregnancy monstrosities” hooked him for a secon. He read:
“Double-ovum twins are biologically not twins at all” (Noel would be crushed to hear it) “but are due to the fertilization of two ova in a single period of ovulation. Single-ovum twins represent twinning in the precise definition of the word, dividing an individual into two. This twinning can also be produced experimentally in animals and fish, but is fundamentally associated with the production of monstrosities, these being imperfect forms of the divisional process.” Eichord had no way of knowing that the book he had photocopied had been written years before the famous experimentation that resulted in the cloning breakthroughs.
He continued to read about the births of double-headed and four-legged monsters, and then he started hitting those words again: “teratomas” and “blastoderms” an-"placentation.” When he got to “fission of the bilateral halves of a single embryonic axis” he let tile paper slide to the floor where Dog sniffed over it for a moment and also found it of no interest.
The next page had the goodies on it but he hit the word “telegony” and let it slip through his fingers. The next page caught his eye and for a moment he read about how the pair of Siamese twins, born with a single vagina but separate uteri and cervices, had given birth to a child. It boggled his mind so badly that he just sat there trying to recreate the possible relationship out of which the event had occurred, but he made himself snap out of it, turned the page, and then poured another glass of the golden glow juice.
He read and drank and read some more. Found the page where he'd marked a yellow fluorescent hi-liner rectangle around a paragraph explaining that twins may find themselves “in aggressive or hostile situations in which sibling rivalry, jealousy, and the desire to dominate may be strongly manifested, and, the necessity to coexist causes each partnership to adjust to the separate personality traits of the other, in this way the two beings interlock in the closes bond that can exist between two persons. In extreme cases this bond can become pathological and destructive.” The word “pathway” came and superimposed itself on “pathological."
And Jack kept reading and drinking finally he fell asleep snoring like a dockhand of what it would be like to bed down with. Identical twins. Knockouts like the two on TV—in his dream he couldn't recall their names, but he dressed them up like cheerleaders. It was his “I know you can see my panties when I jump up, that's why they match my skirt” fantasy. And the girls were warm. And wonderful. And when he woke up in the morning, head full of pounding drums and ocean's roar, he is fully dressed, on the bedspread of the bed in the motel, his arms around an extremely contented dog, and he knows that—at the very least—he has fleas. Fleas will be the least of it, he thinks, shaking his head in disgust, which he immediately regrets.
Now if only my heart will start again, he thinks, throwing open the door and evicting his sleeping partner.
Downtown Dallas and Highland Park
Eichord hated the telephone yet he recognized that it was one of the great tools in his profession, like the MCTF computers, and he made as much use of it as he could in spite of his loathing for the hunk of plastic. It was fun
ny about “solving” homicides. You could cover the streets with a phalangeal army of detectives, bring in the feds and the technicians with their sophisticated gear, keep a half-dozen lab people up all night working with the most expensive equipment money could buy, and end up pulling the case out of the ashes with a hype who couldn't remember how old he was or by lucking out with that loathsome piece of plastic.
“I gotta pull my chestnuts outta the fire,” he said for no particular reason as Wally Michaels walked past his desk.
“Damn straight, sir. Nobody wants to burn their nuts.” I'll drink to that, Jack thought. And he got up and went in the men's room and took a big pull off the pocket flask he was now carrying with him. He shuddered it down, loving the way it burned inside him. In his pants pocket he'd taken to carrying a tiny tinfoil square with a bit of toothpaste in it. He opened the foil and put the toothpaste in his mouth, rinsing it around with tap water. He smiled at the thought of someone coming in and seeing him dab around in the little piece of Reynolds Wrap with his finger, see a bit of something white, and figure him for doing toot on the job. Same difference, he’ supposed, returning to the desk without a trace of guilt. That'll clear your fucking sinuses. He glanced at the stack of abstracts.
He was doodling an elaborate thing around the word “symbiosis” which was followed by the printed definition “the living together more or less intimate association or close union of two dissimilar organisms.” He capped his felt-tipped pen, reached over and dialed a familiar number.
“Public safety,” a bored woman's voice intoned.
“Police department, please,” Eichord said. He waited for a good sixty seconds while the ancient switchboard system rerouted his long-distance call.
“—lice department,” a male officer answered.
“Homicide, please.” Another long wait. He wondered how many times some poor slob being threatened, some wife about to be murdered, some terrorized kid, whatever, had phoned the police and waited two minutes to have the call put through.