by Rex Miller
Around a quarter to four he tried for the second time to pick up the gist of some material Doug Geary had sent him. A weighty thesis with the lighthearted title Proximal Root-causes of Homicidal Violence, jointly published by a think tank of clinicians. For the second time he read, “frustration, threat, or jealousy, for example, which can be subdivided into responsive and/or reactive aggression, sexual/social aggression, predatory/destructive,” he rubbed his eyes. All the slashes were making him constantly reassess and redefine each phrase. What the hell was wrong with these academicians? Couldn't they write a simple fucking sentence? This/slash/that—the mad slasher strikes again. I am tired/slash/bored, he thought.
“The proximal causes are multidisciplinary,” he read, “societal, political, environmental, military, industrial/technological, religiostic, economic, organizational...” He skipped a paragraph, stifling a yawn. “...intellectualized value-judgments reached within the scholarly/academic communities and practical-solution-related theory generated experientially within...” Boring boring fucking boring. He closed his eyes and rubbed, yawning until his jaw cracked.
It wasn't even four and he felt guilty, so he picked up some of the reports and started wading through them, reading and making notes with his felt-tipped pen as he read, and by four-thirty he had completed an ornate set of printed notes that surrounded a huge legal-pad-size doodle of a stick figure in a wheelchair, titled in big printed cartoon letters ARTHUR SPODA? A stick figure of a man in a chair holding an icepick over the question mark. Enough, he said, round-filing it and getting up with a sigh. Nothing was more tiring than nothing.
Jonathan, as if he'd read Jack's mind somehow, was again on his all-time best behavior. He'd become particularly docile in Donna's hands, or so Jack thought, when she'd started using their videocassette recorder to tape an afternoon cartoon show that was a great fascination of the boy's. Two shows really, a kid-participation show of a man dressed as a fat clown, and a cartoon show of the most violent hero-villain antics imaginable. Eichord was especially grateful for it tonight, guaranteeing as it did a still and blissful after-dinner hour with their son hypnotized by his electronic baby-sitter.
Jack truly felt love for the boy even in the worst, most anxious moments. He'd never regretted their decision for a heartbeat. He adored the Foster Services people for having cut through the antediluvian codes and usual incogitant coldness of the faceless bureaucracy to make it possible for the Eichords to become instant parents. There'd never been a moment when he'd felt less than complete paternal love for the child—but in quiet moments he realized how much MORE he cherished what he thought of as a more or less normal domesticized home life.
“I love this time of the night,” she told him from across the room.
“Yeah.” What's not to love? The cartoons had the boy frozen, his arm around a flea-free Blackie. All was right in God's world.
“He loves this show,” she whispered reverently.
“Unn.” He smiled. Trying not to be too analytical about the business he'd seen a few moments ago. He came from the era of funny animal cartoons. The Fleischers’ Popeye and Terrytoons’ Mighty Mouse. They'd come a long way, baby, he thought, when the head of a barbarian was sliced off before wee Jack Eichord's rapt gaze.
He would no more let such thoughts intrude on their heavenly peace than he could run out screaming into the night. Goodwill to men. May the canoes of your people forever glide across still and tranquil seas, Jack Eichord. When the taped show ended, it would be nighty-night time and then we'd move right along to the touchy-feely portion of the evening's activities.
He looked over at Donna, turning the pages of a magazine, and he was struck by the innocence in her face. The skin he loved to touch, smooth as silk and baby soft.
Smooth as silk was, in fact, precisely Eichord's thought as he and Donna stretched out side by side, she reading, Jack noodling and schmoodling, the look of her in that lace-covered teddy, propped on a pillow, her back to him, suggesting the feel of just that fabric. So maybe it was machine-washable, tumble-dry nylon, or Lycra Spandex, or nylon tricot, or...
“You know,” she purred, “this looks like a great lawn mower for us. It's one hundred and twenty-five dollars. On sale.” She was reading hardware ads in the Buckhead paper. She turned slightly and the teddy tightened over a delightful-looking swell of beautiful breast.
“I like the way it's cut,” he said, admiring the way her recently bathed skin glistened in the high-cut leg opening.
“Um hmm. I think it would do a good job."
“It certainly would,” he said. Her legs looked so long and smooth and there was a little opening that beckoned and he snuggled up beside her.
“Why do I get the feeling you're not really into lawn mowers at the moment?” She moved back against him.
“I can't imagine.” He sniffed her. Essence of Donna. She smelled of woman. “You sniff good."
“Bet I sniff like soap."
“Ah. Sorry. A wrong answer. You folks playing the game at home, you know that means, Mrs. Eichord must lose another piece of clothing. So...” He began helping her.
“Hey,” she protested.
“Sorry again, but rules are rules."
They made tender, romantic love together and Donna fell asleep immediately. They slept on their own sides of the big bed, but tonight Jack had stayed close to his wife. As close to her as he could without touching, letting himself slowly wind down as he listened to her breathing change and then deepen into sleep, and he felt like he might have been asleep for about five minutes when the phone made its jarring noise.
“Yaaaa,” he groaned into the telephone, nerves jangled by the rude awakening.
“What?” Donna said just as a Metro detective told him he was needed on the scene of a homicide.
“Huh? What time is it?” It was after five a.m., he was told. Woman in an antique shop. Custodial-service dude found the body. Bad jazz, the detective told him.
“What is it?” Donna said.
“Okay,” Eichord said, writing down the address. “Hold it. Shit.” He couldn't read what he'd just printed, still squinting through half-shut eyes.
“Wha—” Donna turned, waking up, seeing he was on the phone. Her head fell back into the soft pillow.
Eichord sat on the edge of the bed and took several deep breaths and then pretended that an electric charge was going to be sent through the bed and if he didn't stand up in three seconds he'd be electrocuted. An old technique from his hangover days. He lurched to his feet and stumbled into the bathroom, forcing himself to splash water onto his neck and face. He emptied his bladder and started throwing clothes on.
A few minutes later he was passing the early-risers, red ball on, shooting over a bridge that led to an impoverished Buckhead suburb he always thought of as Hubcap City. It reminded him instantly of Vega, Texas, this time.
Eichord's car clicked over the metal expansion covers that drew lines across the bridge in a percussive, foot-tapping metallic rhythm of fast rim shots. His mouth, bereft of toothpaste or even coffee, tasted foul.
“Tunk-ka-tunk-ka-tunk-ka-tunk-ka-tunk-ka-tunk,” paradiddle Joe, “ka-tunk-ka-tunk,” to-kill it suggested, “to-kill, to-kill, to-kill, to-kill, to-kill.” And the metronomic metal rim shots echoed the steady staccato of the drummers paradidles and “to-kill-to-kill-to-kill” played counterpoint to the ensemble as it swung into the reprise of an old dance number, “tunk-ka-tunk-ka-tunk-ka” hypnotic and unrelenting, and Eichord would be so glad when it stopped. He needed coffee. Badly.
A rickety, endangered lion glared at him from a pedestal as he pulled up by the Day-Glo crime-scene tape. A wobbly Lion gas pump on its last legs, and he eased on across the crunching gravel and parked.
It was next door to a strange-looking building surrounded by a pair of fences. First, inexplicably, wood, and then a chain link, and each fence embraced some junker's wet dream. A junk collector's paradise. El Paradiso of el Junko. Each fence was a silver blight and it had be
en the first thing he'd seen long before he spotted the crime tape. He had been mesmerized by it, in fact, miles back down the highway, and this happened to him every time he'd driven this way, but now it took on a frightening, paradoxical aspect that jabbed him like a shiny knife blade. Hubcaps. Every fence for miles had been covered in bright, shiny chrome hubcaps.
Without the Day-Glo tape this was just another yard full of junk. Some of it small, back-porch-size, yard-sale junk. Garage-sale junk. And more of it massive orange boxcars, great, rusting mastodons of junk, wholesale junk tonnage that stretched from one hubcapped fence to the next, and from one property line to the next. Junk of every imaginable description and origin as far as the eye cared to see. What statement were they making? he always wondered as he drove quickly through Hubcap City. What were they saying about themselves or about our car culture here? All these hubcaps. Were these the collectibles of the future? The Coke signs of the twenty-second century? Were they saving these errant hubcaps for the Big Hubcap Shortage of 2099? Waiting for hubcaps to become rarities like the deco hood ornaments of the 1920s? Waiting for somebody who just had their hubcaps stolen?
Surely not. Every vehicle owner in New York City could park in the worst block of the South Bronx or wherever, come back in an hour to find it stripped down to the frame, and they could all get their hubcaps replaced here. There were enough hubcaps to cover the world's cars here. Mind-boggling walls of hubcaps shining in the hot sun. An endless row of chrome glinting like strange omens to ward off evil, and obviously, here at least, failing.
Hubcapville. Relics, perhaps, of the wheel-cover wars of the Frightening Nineties. What were these people doing with all these artifacts of Detroit mediocrity? Where did they come from? They came, probably, from all the vehicles parked in all these yards and fields. Millions of cars—junkers of every model and make. Some on blocks. Some on stilts. Some alone. Some in flattened stacks of hundreds. Some in pyramids of wrecks. The tomb of the modern Tutankhamen—a General Motors emblem the Michigan counterpart of a hieroglyphic—the last thing to rust away. Even down the side roads that were but a single mudded-out rut when the rains came, every dilapidated sharecropper's house had thirteen vehicles in the yard. Some unfit to run, some mere shells (bought for all one knew from the South Bronx—ten for a penny—a bargain?), and some without configuration. A truck cab without front or back, as if a mighty knife had sliced across the center third.
Eichord took a deep breath and went inside. There was a metal soft-drink sign out on the porch, but on the door itself the building's original name could be seen in faded letters. At one time this had been the Possum Grape General Store. Eichord tried to remember what possum grapes were. Had he ever eaten possum grapes, poke salad, collard greens, country soul food? Poke Salad Annie, he recalled from years back. But the only music he could hear inside his head was the ka-tunk-ka-tunk-to-kill-to-kill rhythm.
Poke Salad Annie was a woman of forty-two years. He tried to remember the way she would be described on the autopsy report later. What was that hideous phrase they always used in the beginning of the report? Poke Salad Annie is a well-developed female Caucasian. Something like that. He had autopsy videos where other people his age had X-rated porn hidden away in a special drawer. He had seen all the autopsy surgery he cared to see—enough to hold any man, he thought—and he imagined his own report. Jack Eichord would be a well-developed male Caucasian.
Good evening, friends and neighbors. I'm glad to be able to speak to you on this auspicious occasion on this suspicious Caucasian why do they always look so terrible when you find them dead the legs out like a discarded rag doll the head turned wrong the skin discolored the blood if there is blood the eyes the sexual the lacerations the penetration the asphyxiation the oh Christ the death of a red-haired fortyish Poke Salad Annie in the Possum Grape General Store, Hubcap City, he could feel the bile rising in his throat and he looked around and mentally noted that the woman sold cut glass for a living and then even that phrase had a frightening ring...
Cut glass.
But this rag doll's head was not turned wrong and her eyes still stared, unseeing, with that peculiar rigor-mortis hollowness. The woman was flat on her back, a pair of wounds to the left side of the skull like the incisor bite of a giant vampire bat, gray matter, coagulating blood, and God-knows-what-else circling her head like a grisly halo. And now Eichord felt certain that Arthur Spoda was alive and well and living very near.
Outside the door Eichord saw something in the dirt and said to the man making plaster casts of vehicle treads, “You get this?"
“Huh?"
“This one here.” He pointed to a small track beside the walkway.
“Yeah. I got it. In the van.” He gestured. “Lot of fucking good THIS is gonna do. Shit, they been walkin’ around all over this shit...” He mumbled off, cursing to himself in disgust.
It was the track of something small. It could have been the imprint of one of the wheels of a wheelchair.
Buckhead Station
Three hours later, the body tagged, flagged, and bagged, the scene peeled and sealed, Eichord sat reading the distillation of the initial footwork on Spoda:
AmeriMed Corporation
Browar's Pharmaceutical
Buckhead General
Buckhead Medical Park
Buckhead Memorial
Buckhead Surgical Supplies
Buckhead Therapy Center
Childs Institute
Everest & Jennings Wheelchairs
Fierstone-Laverty
Killian, Merriam and O'donnell Clinic
Moore Health Care
Palmer Medical Institute
Sears (health care department)
Eichord continued to scan the three-page list of possibilities. Where somebody might go locally to have a wheelchair maintained or repaired, where they might seek therapy, where a copper could look for a blood trail. Still cross-checking the voluminous printouts from the institutional records feeding Buckhead Station and the task-force computers. Less than a starting place so far. Not even a hunch. Just some makework while he sifted possibilities. No fingerprints, witnesses, clues, footprints, unless you count the vague wheel track outside the cut-glass emporium.
What he had was the bizarre M.O. that could indeed reflect a copy-cat killer who had read some twenty-year-old newspaper or magazine pieces, or seen ancient film footage in an obscure local documentary, or heard about a kill mode from a fellow con or patient, or, of course, it could be a man who had picked up his icepick after two decades.
What did he know? He now knew that Tina Hoyt and ... He glanced down at Poke Salad Annie's real name—June Graham. Two women had been taken down by the iceman. The labwork made them identical kills. Funny how fast the lab was when it was easy.
If it was Arthur Spoda—and Jack's vibes said yes—why had he not killed again for twenty years? If the man in Vega had been right, it was because Arthur had been confined to a chair. Now, suddenly, the murders begin anew. Did this mean Spoda was no longer wheelchair bound? Or had he figured a way to cause these victims to die from his chair, such as a surrogate killer whom he might manipulate. Eichord printed another word on his legal pad. The list now read:
Spoda.
Copycat.
Surrogate.
To which he added a fourth word:
Con.
And then he changed all the periods to question marks. By CON he meant as in confidence man, for it occurred to him this would be a hell of a clever setup that could theoretically be used as a smoke screen to cover up a killing with a far different motive. And he added the word:
Tontine.
Some insurance policy, he thought. But being an aficionado of ancient, creaking, sliding-bookcase-in-the-dark-house movies, he had seen his share of tontines, both real and imaginary. One of the most important cases of his career had been a tontine-related kill—a woman he'd finally tracked down in the Orient, thanks to his dear and now departed pal, Jimmie Lee.
How
to cover up a killing with motive: somebody extremely clever might be willing to do a lot of homework and take some absurdly unnecessary chances, all in the hopes of constructing such a seamless homicide that the real motivation would never show through. The tontine had been a natural progression of the thought pattern. First he thought of the old movie plot where Joe and Tom each agree to kill the other's spouse, leaving both of them an air-tight alibi. They were STILL making that one! And then the tontine—the now-illegal pact where Tom and Dick and Harry agree that the last surviving signatory gets the bag of emeralds—a nice invitation to murder. Con or tontine?
I want to murder Joe. I wait until the Holmby Hills Strangle? strikes for the third time, killing his victim with a pair of knotted pantyhose. Thuggee-style. I do my homework. Then I invite Joe to Holmby Hills and strangle him with knotted pantyhose. It needs a little work, but still...
I'm Arthur Spoda. I move to Buckhead from Las Vegas, and after twenty years they find a cure for polio. I regain the use of my legs. After twenty years I get up and walk again! Eichord wrote, Scenario?
But who says Arthur WAS in a chair for all that time. He's injured in Vega. Moves to Las Vegas, Nevada. Eventually his beautiful pony of a girlfriend nurses him back to health. He moves to Cleveland. He moves to Muncie. Fargo. Buckhead. Drives to the nearest metropolitan area where he wants to kill. What if the killer had been killing all along but not with an icepick? Bludgeonings. Strangulations.
Missing persons? What if he'd been killing with an icepick all along, sure enough, but he'd found a way to dispose of the bodies. He's in the construction business now. He pours concrete footings for parking garages. Acme Parking in Fargo is a mausoleum for 132 dead women. Maybe he just doesn't sign his name to the artwork.
“What are you doin’ here?” Brown's voice cuts through Jack's thoughts as the detective hangs up his coat, obviously a rhetorical question.
“Precisely my sentiments."
“That's a good question,” somebody said behind him. The guys on the eight-to-four tour were coming into the squad bay.