by Rex Miller
“Read it and weep, baby,” he said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the crime report on the morning's homicide.
“Jane Graham,” Eichord says aloud, the first time he'd spoken Poke Salad Annie's real name, “Iceman Murder Number Two.” He read his list to them. “Other possibilities?"
“What about that note?” Brown asked. Meaning the thing the paper had received. “What if it wasn't just a crank note? Suppose that's the killer. How do we know Jane Graham wasn't a feminist deal, a what-yacallem women's libber, or a dyke or whatever? Might be worth looking at?"
“Bullshit,” somebody said.
“We'll look. Sure. But, no, I don't think so. The women's movement in Buckhead, and in fact nationally, is anything but militant. All that remains of the cutting edge of it is a relatively small core of political activists who've paid their dues in the trenches. Only the fringe people still come on with the radical rhetoric—and where is there any evidence of serious hostility? No pattern of threats. No zoned-out cranks wanting to off the political piggies. None of that, man. What's the note say?” He glanced over at a dossier and opened it and thumbed through to find a photocopy.
“Women's lib whores must die,” Brown said.
“Here you go: dyke whores must die. women's lib cunts have destroyed the family and they will pay! i strike with the hand of christ.” He laid the dossier down and picked up a stack of Xeroxes. “I think it's garbage. Sorry. No way. Some dude wanted to get us a little crazy, some cop-hater, and fortunately he or she isn't hip enough to couch the thing in post-feminist phraseology. He probably saw ‘women's movement’ in a news story and decided to pull our bell rope a little. Maybe Tina Hoyt was a women's libber five or six years ago but she was too political to let herself aim that narrowly now. I've looked over a couple of her speeches and they're broad-based. Not the sort of thing to enrage anybody in the audience. No ‘chauvinist pig'-type vocabulary. Also, the note came a day late and a dollar short. On the other hand, we'll take it seriously. We're still working on the typewriter, and one thing and another. Read the operational memo. And speaking of which...” He started passing out pages. “June Graham we gotta keep buttoned down tight. Man, we let the press in on this baby, we'll never hear the end of it. We've got to stay chilly with it. No icepick stuff. No ‘Iceman Murder Victim,’ and I don't want anybody talking or writing about any ‘puncture wounds.’ Let's play this one real close. June Graham is a STABBING until you hear differently. Keep it all in-house with regard to Graham. Do we have a suspect? Yes. Is it related to the Hoyt homicide? No. What do WE know, right? We don't know nuttin'."
“You got that right."
“Um hmm. So much for media. The perpetrator: we'll call him Arthur Spoda Junior. The Iceman from Texas. Amarillo screws the pooch and Artie baby-walks. Or rolls, I should say, Mommy having caught him with Sis and done a J.O.B. on his spine. He rolls to Vegas."
“He's a high-roller,” somebody says.
“Yeah. Blends in with all the other nutbaskets out there. Gets a couple dollahs. Goes to Dallas. Des Moines. Dubuque, Paducah, whatever. Then he comes here. He's born again. Something something something. Lightning strikes his wheelchair and he gets up and walks after twenty years. Mad as hell, and he's right back where he left off. Whacking out middle-aged women."
“Tina Hoyt wasn't that old."
“So maybe he got lucky. What can I tell ya? Hoyt pisses him off and-bang! Down she goes. How do we find him?” Eichord push-pins one of the drawings to the wood frame around the cork bulletin board.
“We go all the places somebody might have had therapy in recent years, chair-bound PROBABLY—maybe not. Forty—forty-two-year-old white male who looks anything remotely like the composite. This guy got better in the LAST YEAR OR SO. No longer handicapped. That's one.
“Two is our copy-cat. Three, remember the surrogate. Our man is still in the chair but he's got a friend or lover who will do the deed for him. He's the doc. He plans ‘em, his buddy does ‘em. Or it's all a scam. Somebody tied to Hoyt or Graham looking for camouflage. Don't dismiss anything. Even if he just...” Eichord trailed off into space. “You know. Looks weird."
He could hear Brown giggle and say a rude word.
“Whatever."
North Buckhead
“You know what, love?” he told the beautiful woman who was facedown on the king-size bed beside him, her head down at the foot of the bed, thinking that lots of “real” women in their twenties would love to look like Nicki did.
“What?"
“Hmm,” he told her in reply, rubbing the back of her slick right thigh. Taking hold of the leg high up, his huge hand spanning the slim leg and squeezing, not trying to hurt her but not being particularly gentle either as he squeezed and slid his hand up a little higher, cupping her upper thigh right under the cheek of her buttocks.
“Hmm?” She was working a puzzle and a little preoccupied, and he let the hand pinch her a little as it moved up.
“Mmm.” She had on a string bikini and gold-colored sandals with extremely high heels. A tiny gold leg chain on her right ankle said Daddy, and the gold waist chain said Nicki.
“What?” she said again.
“Pay attention to me, bitch,” he joked with her, but cruelly taking hold of her long hair and pulling it back like a handle.
“Don't, Daddy,” she whispered sexily, “don't hurt your baby. What are the names of three actresses with five-letter first names who've been nominated for Academy ?"
“Susan Saranwrap, Molly Ringworm, and Merry Steamengine,” he offered, without a beat.
“Mary is four letters."
“Yeah,” he grunted as he ripped the top of her bikini off, pulling her up to him. He was naked, propped up in the big bed on a mound of pillows, his hairy, muscular upper torso encircling her as he fed on her hungrily for a few moments.
“Hey,” he said, pushing her away and looking at her in a serious manner, “I just thought of something."
“What?"
“Bonnie."
“Who?"
“You know. Your friend Princess Di of the wrinkled toes. Her buddy Bonnie she was always blabbering about."
“So?"
“So she's a kind of loose end, ya know?"
“Huh uh. She's covered. Remember—I got that postcard. It already went out to the nigger girl I told you about in California,"—she shook her head—"so, like no problemo. In a couple of weeks she gets the first card from sunny Cal. Remember?"
“I know. That was soooooooo clever. I do like it. In fact, I love it.” He kissed her. “But she's a loose end. I think we should handle her."
“What do you mean ‘handle'?"
“Okay. If I was legitimately Funny Toes’ heartthrob, I'd be sick about Princess Di being gone. And ole Bonnie is going to think that her idiot bitch friend ran off with me to California. Who the fuck knows if she might get crazy and put the cops on me? True, she probably doesn't know much. But it seems to me the smartest thing we could do is eliminate the possibility of a problem. Go ahead and send the card blah-blah, and so on and so forth, and then I get in touch with Bonnie. I wonder whatever happened to Diane. We get together and I dispose of this little loose end."
“No fucking way. No, Daddy. That's a serious mistake. You should never have any contact with Bonnie at all. She doesn't know you. You're clear of it."
“Yeah. But dig it, YOU could get her for us."
“No, don't make me do it. I don't like it. It's risky."
“There, there, now,” he said, a hand closing on one of her breasts, “we'll work it out all neat. Don't worry your sweet tits about it.” He pulled her to him.
Buckhead Station
The morning was another pisser. The rain stopped around ten a.m. and Eichord didn't see anybody scrambling for their cars. The sky was slate-colored, with swollen, gunmetal clouds looking ready to open up again any minute. Everybody in the squad room was knee-deep in paperwork, and in truth, by the end of the second day Hoyt-Graham, the Iceman dos
sier, was citywide, then countrywide, and had mushroomed from three to some eighteen pages.
Eichord had the Ps. Palmer Med, Peek Equipment, Inc., Pioneer Home Care, Poole-Weintraub Associates, Puritan Hospital Consultants, Inc., and he added a possible from his homemade list, Parker's Pharmacy. It was times like this detectives felt the sting of cutbacks in the force, and what the reality of limited budgets meant when you had to hit the streets.
Hoyt-Graham was becoming a massive compilation of possibles, data-processors spewing out guys in their early forties, with some record of wheelchair usage, living within a 50 mile radius of the area served by the greater Buckhead Cross Index. The drawing had been a total strikeout. Eichord slid his chair back with a screech, murmured good-bye forever, and forced himself out into the wet streets.
Ten days later it had all added up to a mountain of maybes and nothing much solid. A week and a half of pounding pavement and making phone calls. Jack Eichord had learned more about wheelchair life than he'd really wanted to know: from the chair models that had the best riggings to the problems of decubitus to the unique environment of the chairbound individual; a world of disabled parking spaces and shopping-mall ramps and extrawide, elongated commode stalls that your average shuffler took for granted.
“Whatta we got, guys?"
“I got a woody,” Dana offered.
“Another first. What we got is about twenty-two men who look if not good at least possible."
“Bullshit,” fat Dana whined.
“Nu? Speak?"
“We got Jumping Jack shit and you know it."
“Possibles, he said, Moby, clean out cher blowhole,” Monroe Tucker suggested halfheartedly.
“Blow this."
“But there's a solid and I think rich area,” Eichord went on, unperturbed. “And that's in the parallel search. Let's keep combing the pawn shops, office-supply companies, schools who purchased new or used equipment recently, the local buy-sell-rent-trade ads for typewriters, newspaper classifieds, radio/bulletin-board sales, neighborhood word-of-mouth among the garage-sale addicts—let's see who our friend with the ‘hand of Christ’ turns out to be."
“You said it was garbage. You didn't like the one who typed the letter. How come you like it now?"
“Can't a girl change her mind, fer crissakes? Anyway, let's find the sucker. See who typed it. I mean, at least it would be a positive lead. Let him prove to us he or she IS a crank."
But what Jack believed in his secret heart was that the more he looked at the list of impossible-possibles, the three-foot-tall bilateral amputees and embittered (rightfully) Nam vets who couldn't get the government to pay for a chair it had caused them to be put into, the less faith he had in the Hoyt-Graham data.
The work was piling up in an intimidating paper mountain, and the more Jack looked at it, the more he liked the concept of an extremely intelligent killer who could set up a carefully concocted series of crimes that would APPEAR to look like copy-cat kills. And then, when the cops looked at the murders, the case would peel away like an onion, layer after layer, and suddenly the inside would be hollow. Hello? Surprise—nobody home.
Two weeks and change. The twenty-two name list had yielded little gold. Eichord hadn't a vibe worth reflecting on. He'd just finished with Sam Nagel, a pitiful old gent who broke his heart for half an hour, the oldest forty-two-year-old he'd ever met.
“Thanks again,” Jack said, trying to take his leave.
“It wasn't any bother. I was glad to talk to you."
“Okay. Well, take care” Eichord said, starting to turn.
“I don't mind helping out the police. You know, you all is about all there is that stands between us and the bad people. And we should support our law-enforcement officers."
“Right. Appreciate it."
“I see it all around. The collapse of the old moral codes. The old values are gone. The respect for law and order. Take your kids today: some of them don't seem to have any respect for anybody else's rights. And you know what I say? I say if you don't respect yourself first, you aren't going to be able to respect anybody else either."
“That's right,” Jack said.
The man was so lonely for somebody to talk to. They made some more conversation and finally Eichord was able to make a friendly, graceful exit and wave farewell to the oldest forty-two-year-old man on Planet Earth, and he had to fight not to cross his name off. There were three names that he'd made check marks by:
ADAMS, Hayden
BOLEN, Willard (check)
BRITTEN, Morris
CARTER, Jerry
CUNNINGHAM, Harold
DENNENMUELLER, Mike (check)
FREIDRICHS, Keith (check)
GIBBAR, Robert
GILLESPIE, Jeff
HOWARD, Edwin
JAMES, Felix
JONES, Mark
MULLINS, Craig
NAGEL, Sam
ROSE, Louis
SCHUMWAY, Alan
SCHWAB, David
SMITH, Rick
TREPASSO, Phil
WHITE, Blake
WISEMAN, Eben
ZOFUTTO, Mario
Willard Bolen was a veteran who had an ax to grind against the United States government, Society in General, and the World. He had become embroiled in a wheelchair dispute that had never been totally resolved, beginning when he attempted to get Uncle Sam to pay for a fancier-model chair than was permitted, and snowballing into other areas. The odds that he was Spoda were so great as to be astronomical, but he got a check mark for murderous rage.
Mike Dennenmueller had records to prove he was a diabetic, and the fact that he was an amputee would have made him an impossible but there was no paper trail on him for fifteen of the last eighteen years. You could follow him back in time about three years and then he appeared to go up in smoke. If Dennenmueller was Spoda, was it possible he'd figured out a way to kill from the chair? Eichord filed it under science fiction, but he kept the check mark by his name. He also had mannerisms that bothered Jack. He wore his hostility carefully disguised under a mask of banter, but there was a lot more to him than met the eye.
If Eichord had to say, One guy looks good if not to be Spoda, then to be capable of homicide, he would have said Freidrichs was the man. He had total paralysis of his lower body and as vicious a personality as Jack could remember having encountered. The man was a seething, boiling volcano of potential violence. An attractive man of forty-one, Keith Freidrichs had a badly retarded brother and he ran a downtown arcade from his chair. It struck Eichord that if someone could manage to get hold of a badly retarded individual who could not be easily traced, they might make an impenetrable cover.
Freidrichs was supposedly paralyzed from a car wreck of long ago, but the records were sufficiently hazy. Eichord was continuing to look at the man very hard. One thing was certain: this individual appeared, at least, to be capable of all the things attributed to Arthur Spoda, and until the background checks proved otherwise, he was a prime suspect.
Louis Rose didn't remain on the list for long. “Sorry,” Eichord was told when he called to set up an appointment, “Louis passed away last August.” There were twenty-one names now. Alan Schumway. Jeezus! Talk about an unlikely candidate to be a suspect in a homicide investigation. Schumway, the well-known automobile dealer, an irritating fixture on local TV, was probably the third most famous person in a wheelchair living in the Buckhead area. Beat out only by a poster kid for a major charity and the Buckhead County tax collector. Eichord suspected he'd allowed Schumway's name to make the final cut only because he disliked the man so intensely.
That, and the fact that Schumway's initials were the same as Arthur Spoda's, and Eichord probably succumbed to the perverse temptation of keeping him on the list in the hopes of proving that not EVERY human being with an IQ of 70 or more knew that when you change your name, you first must change your initials.
Nobody would argue that Schumway was weird enough and misanthropic enough to be a murderer, but h
e'd have some trouble in the anonymity department. Buckhead's Cal Worthless, somebody had called him, with the added visibility of being in a chair. Schumway Buick commercials were, inarguably, the most abrasive and loathed, and—unfortunately—successful, on local television. Grudgingly, Eichord admitted he felt a good measure of respect for the man; like the aforesaid county politician, he had proved that what one might regard as a disabling handicap another might use for great personal advantage.
The first time, the only time, Eichord had actually met the man in the flesh had been on a rainy summer morning a year or so ago. Eichord had been coerced into taking up golf after many years’ hiatus and had forced himself out on the course for therapeutic reasons. His “rabbi” on the task force had browbeat him about his all-work-no-play dullness and he'd soon found himself chasing the stupid white ball all over Buckhead Springs, or Brook Haven, or Willowcrest—the public course and cheaper golf clubs.
That particular rainy morning he'd been invited to play on someone's membership in the toney Buckhead Country Club, and out of curiosity had gone out early to get nine in before work on a Friday morning.
The fairways looked like the greens where he'd become used to playing. He had no idea where the pins were, and when no one had materialized near the first tee, he smacked one out optimistically into the expanse of bright green and set off to find it.
He was on the fourth hole, a long, intimidating dogleg leading away from the clubhouse, when the summer sky turned menacingly dark and one of those sudden rainstorms began pelting him as he grabbed his clubs and ran in the direction of two other golfers playing an adjacent hole. Their destination appeared to be a small caddy shack behind one of the beautifully manicured greens. The two men, Eichord hot in pursuit, splashed into the confines of the dark shack to find it full of wet guys listening to a man in a wheelchair who greeted them with,
“New arrivals. More idiots!” Laughter. Eichord saw the car dealer from TV sitting in his wheelchair, totally out of place here. “I know full well you're wondering why I called this meeting and brought you together this morning,” he boomed in that voice so familiar from the television spots. There were a couple of damp snickers as the words “FULL WELL” boomed through the small dark shack.