The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards

  “Then you’d be him, Pete.”

  He shook his head, spraying the windshield with sweat, and he pounded the steering wheel again. “Will you stop being such a fucking hippie?”

  “Fuck you,” I said. I put my head between my knees, and Peter punched the accelerator.

  June 2019

  Before the excavation was scheduled to take place, I returned home to find Leif outside my apartment yet again. He grinned when he saw me and offered up a cooler full of beer and cheese and a large beach blanket. I wanted desperately to be able to see what he saw when he looked at me. I wanted more than anything to be out of my body and looking at both of us from a distance. From very, very far away. Maybe I even wanted to be in his body, or any body other than my own.

  “For old times’ sake, yeah?” he said. He gestured at the cooler. Together we drove to Bradford Beach, where we used to spend hot, lazy afternoons reading in the sun and cooling off in Michigan’s phosphorescently blue waves.

  “So what happened with the psychic?” he asked me in the cab of his truck. I tried not to look too closely at anything: fraying USB cords tangled in balls on the floor, fast food garbage shoved into the doors, kids’ artwork taped to the dash. The array depressed me. I stared out the window.

  “He said he found her,” I told him.

  He nodded. “What do you think?”

  “I think I believe him.” I caught his face falling out of the corner of my eye. It didn’t hurt me. That much, I guess, had changed.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “He . . . I don’t know . . . He knew you were coming back. He knew about the photo. I mean, I know it sounds crazy.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re not crazy.”

  “I didn’t say I was crazy.”

  We were quiet. Seagulls cried.

  “But what about Erik?” he asked me. “You don’t think he did this, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I don’t know why the psychic said that. You know I’ve been building a case against Frank? I’m feeling certain I’ll get him this time. Once we have her body.” Though as I said it, it occurred to me that nothing was for certain, and so little was known, and we both knew that.

  At Bradford Beach, we sat in the manicured sand side by side. Our hips touched. Behind us, newly built tiki huts offered faux-tropical drinks and beer in boots. Leif shook his head. A few miles away, the new trolley was offering free rides back and forth from the casino in the valley to the restaurants in the Third Ward. At the lakeshore, two new skyscrapers pitched unevenly toward the sun, and on either side of the freeways, belly scrapers leveled lots for more high-rise condominiums.

  “This place,” Leif said. “I never thought it would be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “So shiny.”

  I nodded.

  “I mean, they just built right over all of it.”

  I thought of the empty lot at 924 North Twenty-fifth Street and I thought of the empty lot where our apartment used to be. The history of cities, it seems to me, is ultimately one of erasure disguised as innovation.

  “Do you have anyone? Is there . . .” I didn’t know for sure what I was asking.

  He eyed me. “You my ma now?”

  “I’m just asking if you have family. You still married?”

  A pair of teenage girls walked by in shorts and sports bras, despite the early-summer chill, holding a couple of drinks. My mouth turned to acid. Leif followed their bodies with his whole head, and then when he became aware he was doing so, looked away fast. He reddened just slightly. Then he glanced back at me. “There wasn’t ever anybody but you, baby,” he said. “Why? You wanna come on the road with me?”

  I punched him hard in the shoulder. He reached into his pants pocket, shuffled through his wallet, and produced a school photo of a handsome boy, just on the precipice of puberty, with dark red hair and green eyes. He looked so much like Erik that I felt confused for a moment: untethered from time and place. I felt as if at any moment Dee and Erik would walk up to us, holding each other around the waist and sharing some private joke Leif and I wouldn’t get. I squinted out into Lake Michigan’s glassy surface, where algae bloomed and bloomed. Despite local business investment into the School of Freshwater Sciences, they couldn’t keep the damn place clean. In Indiana, BP dumped thousands of pounds of raw sludge into the lake every day. Was the bottom of the lake made up entirely of layer upon layer of this thick sludge? Would it rise up to the surface one day and make the lake once and for all inhospitable and poisonous?

  “This is my son,” Leif said. (I knew this.) “Whip-smart.”

  I wanted him to put the photo away. “Congratulations.” The word came out like exhaust from a broken tailpipe.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. He put a hand on my leg. I moved away from him. “You asked.”

  “I mean it,” I said. “He’s beautiful.”

  I can’t explain it now. The reason this photo crushed me. I suppose I felt then the tragedy of this beautiful boy’s life stretching out for eons in front of me. Even the happiest of stories, it seems to me now, contain the extraordinarily fruitful seeds of tragedy, of lifelong suffering.

  Leif pocketed the photo and we stared into Milwaukee’s nascent summer. The pair of girls who’d walked by us returned to their group, and one of them said something that made all the kids turn to stare at us and laugh. I had an image of Dee taunting sailors at the lakefront—too old.

  “How about you?” he asked me.

  “Henry.” I offered up the name like Leif would know it. “He was . . . That was my last shot. I think.”

  “I’m sorry,” Leif said. He paused. “What happened?”

  “He wasn’t you.” I had meant it as a joke, but the delivery was off, and Leif frowned at me. He shook his head.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “He wanted the whole thing, you know—the house and the kids, the Christmas-card pictures,” I told him.

  “Sounds nice.”

  I shrugged, finished my beer, and reached in Leif’s cooler for another. “No,” I told him. “I wasn’t capable.”

  August 1991

  It was golden hour when we got back from Frank’s place. The wide faces of Ma’s sunflowers were turned up high but seemed about to tip with the weight of all that ripe light. When we pulled up, Ma was sitting on the porch painting her toenails. The banality of her movements pained me to see. For a moment I thought the flowers might topple on her, and I had the urge to shield her with my own body.

  Instead, I brushed by her with a quiet hi and closed the door behind me. Outside, I heard Ma’s voice rising with a question, and I could almost hear Peter’s stupid shrug; that was how hard I assumed he threw his shoulders into the gesture.

  I climbed the stairs to our bedroom. The room was filled with rusty light, which charged the dust in the air with frantic energy. There was a thin layer of dust on most of the furniture, our dressers, our sleigh beds, our white wooden desks, which were covered with little poems of angst, and the names of first loves, with nail polish and makeup spills. My father had made these desks for us, and we’d loved them, but their impracticality depressed me now. By the time we were teenagers, they were already much too small for us. There was something beautiful but also eerie about the white, miniature furniture in the room. My parents had never been good at giving up on things, insisting that what we’d had as small girls would work for us well into adulthood. I wondered if we’d inherited this doggedness from them. I wondered if it had produced a kind of arrested development in us.

  Since I’d been back at Ma’s, I’d resisted the urge to stay in our little white room on the second floor. I’d spent most of my nights on the couch or pacing the hallway between the kitchen and the living room, picking at the pies so my fingers were sticky in the morning. I sat down on Dee’s bed, and the dust from her comforter rose in clouds around me. The window near my old bed was open, and I could hear Peter and Ma’s voices in a
sad tangle on the porch.

  I felt the night coming down around me. Sunlight always lingered in unlikely places in that house: pooling in carpeted corners where the ghosts lived, sliding down the pineapple wallpaper, electrifying the dust.

  I breathed deep in an effort to swallow as much of the dust in the room as possible; I imagined it clogging my throat and choking me to death. The house phone rang, and I went into the master bedroom, where there was a landline.

  This is a collect call from an inmate at the Milwaukee County Jail. Press one to accept.

  Leif. I heaved my body onto my parents’ old four-poster bed.

  “Hello?” Leif’s voice was muddy with static. “Peg?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”

  “You’ve got to help me.”

  “We’re trying.”

  “No. I mean. I told them I had something to do with it.”

  “Wolski showed you the photo?”

  “I’m sorry, Peg.”

  “You have an alibi. Jesus. I mean—you didn’t do it. What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “They tricked me.”

  “They tricked you.” I put my hands over my mouth because I was suddenly afraid of saying something awful.

  “What did you say?”

  “I . . . I don’t remember.”

  “Fuck.”

  The line was quiet.

  “I wanted it to stop.”

  I understood how shortsighted we all were—Leif, and me, and Dee, and Peter, and Ma, and Wolski too. Maybe Frank was playing some kind of long game. Maybe he was the only one. I pictured Dee at the picnic table in Lake Park. The wood of the table cutting into her rib cage. She said Frank had a driver’s license from Ohio. I was spinning wheels, and Leif coughed on the other end of the phone.

  “I don’t have a lot of time. You’ve got to help.”

  “Peter’s sending a buddy of his from Marquette. I don’t know if he can help anymore. They should have appointed you a lawyer already if you’ve been . . .” I hesitated, holding the word charged in my mouth.

  “How’d we end up in some fucking detective novel?”

  “The photo.”

  “I never meant it. What I did.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  “I think about it all the time, Peg.”

  “Don’t,” I warned him.

  “I love you.”

  “Yeah.”

  We all lived time out of mind for the rest of that summer. I didn’t notice any time passing. Peter and Ma were consumed with tasks they hoped would provide some kind of answer: manning the hotlines, methodically going through Dee’s things in her dorm room, reviewing her phone records, tracking the transactions on her debit card, typing and filing interviews with her friends, employers, teachers, colleagues. Ma made sure the list of tasks never ended. I couldn’t believe they were doing all of the police work. Wolski was in and out of communication. We weren’t always sure where he was or what he was working on. Once they had Leif in custody, Wolski stopped trying to find Frank for a while, and it seemed like he quit investigating other leads too.

  I helped with some of the tasks, although looking back, I think it’s safe to say Ma and Peter and Suze resented my level of effort. The problem for me was by that point, I believed I knew who’d done it. I suppose those efforts could have proved Frank’s guilt in some way, but it was like searching for a needle in a haystack, and anyway, the police had decided he’d had nothing to do with it. They, meaning Wolski mostly, didn’t even seem convinced Frank had known her. Instead, I focused my energy on trying, again, to harness the power of the press. But, given the circumstances, and their obsession with the serial killer, this was almost impossible.

  I went to the courthouse often because I knew the street outside was always full of reporters. Usually, there was also a group of protestors who gave speeches about their attempts to notify the MPD of loved ones’ disappearances. They relayed accounts of cops repeatedly telling them there was nothing they could do, especially when people chose high-risk lifestyles.

  The recent coverage of the serial killer’s case reflected very poorly on the police. For starters, the Journal and several national news outlets ran front-page stories about the police officers who had been called to the scene of fourteen-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone’s brief escape from the killer’s apartment back in May. One report published the transcripts of the radio call, in which the officers had joked about the domestic dispute, saying the lovers had been reunited, and the officers needed to come back to the station to get deloused. Another outlet published the transcripts of a phone call between an officer and a Black woman named Glenda Cleveland who called asking after the boy. The officer was dismissive and short-tempered with the woman as she repeatedly asked if Konerak was really an adult. (Back at his apartment, the serial killer had shown the officers pictures of Konerak in his underwear to prove the boy was his lover. Behind the closed bedroom door, the decomposing body of his previous victim lay on the bed.)

  In some bizarre twist, reporters later discovered Konerak was the brother of a young man whom the serial killer had lured back to his apartment several years prior. This boy had escaped from the apartment after he was drugged, and his family had pressed charges. The serial killer was charged with sexual assault. The DA wanted him in prison for at least eight years. But the serial killer’s lawyer argued that he needed mental health attention for his alcohol abuse and sexual orientation issues, and that he would not receive this kind of attention in prison. At the trial, the serial killer had pleaded with the judge not to send him to prison. Don’t ruin my life. Don’t ruin my life. Unbeknownst to the DA, the killer’s lawyer, the judge, or his parole officer, he’d already murdered four men at the time of that sentencing. The judge sentenced him to one year in prison, during which he was allowed to keep his job at the chocolate factory.

  How, the media wondered, had this man slipped through the cracks so many times? This phrase seemed to be on repeat that summer. But what exactly does it mean to slip through the cracks? What if what it really meant was that the system had worked perfectly for him? Why hadn’t the officers entered the man’s information into their computers on the night they found Konerak? If they had, they would have discovered he was a convicted child molester on probation. The Milwaukee police chief, Philip Arreola, released a statement saying that criminal background checks were discretionary; officers didn’t do them every time they were called to the scene of an altercation. The Black community was outraged; their criminal records were referenced during routine traffic stops. The serial killer’s record hadn’t seemed important to those officers because he was white, even though a naked, bleeding boy had run from his apartment into the street.

  For cops in the city of Milwaukee, including Wolski, it seemed that almost overnight, the serial killer case had turned into a “race issue.” But for the families of the victims, those who’d asked the PD repeatedly to look into the disappearance of their sons and brothers and friends, it had always been a race issue. The police began to be heckled on the street; it was not a proud time to be a Milwaukee police officer. Often Wolski would say things to Pete and me like “Jesus H. Christ, it’s like these people forget who the actual criminal was. Dahmer killed those men, not the police.”

  The sister of one of the victims was very vocal about her contempt for the Milwaukee PD and the Journal. She often protested with a large group outside the Milwaukee Police Department and outside the Milwaukee County Courthouse. She was part of a coalition of victims’ families who were demanding, among other things, that the police officers be fired. On the steps once, I listened to her as she ignored a reporter’s questions altogether and gave a speech about the police department’s inability to protect her brother during his life, and after his death too.

  “I went to the PD six times over the last two months, and I asked them to figure out what happened to my brother. You know what they told me? They said get in line. I don’t even know if he had a
missing-persons report. They said lots of people with his lifestyle go missing. They aren’t responsible for those people. That’s what they said. Lifestyle. They were careless. They were worse than careless. They were malicious, and now my brother’s dead, and they’ve splashed his dead body across the national news too. What about respect for my family? We’ve gotten no respect from the police, or the media, or the community. Candlelight vigil doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. I want these men removed.”

  After she had finished her speech, and as she was turning to leave, without thinking, I tugged at her arm. She ripped her arm away and turned to me with angry eyes, clearly figuring me for a particularly aggressive journalist. But then she took me in: ripped jeans, dirty fingernails, muddy sneakers, messy bun, sunken eyes, and I realized, with a sharp pang of regret, the scars on my cheekbones. What did they mean to her? She took pity on me, maybe. A reaction I was learning to get used to.

  “What?” she asked.

  I hadn’t prepared anything to say. I couldn’t remember why I’d wanted to talk with this woman. I was embarrassed to be bothering her the way I saw the journalists on TV often did. I guess now I think I wanted to be her, not only because she knew what had happened to her brother but because she was so composed in the face of it all.

  “I need help.”

  “Well, you’re at the damn police station,” she said, like it was a joke. Which I understood.

  “Do you know Wolski?”

  “Are you asking me to get a drink?”

  “The detective, not the bars, up in the missing-persons unit.”

  Her face softened, and she looked fifteen years older than she had seconds before. “Never heard of him,” she said softly. “Are you okay?”

  The question had a bad effect on me. I couldn’t remember anyone asking me this since Dee’s disappearance: not Peter, or Leif, or Ma, or even Suze. I startled her with a sob that I tried to disguise as a cough. She stepped away from me. Humans think many social conditions are contagious. Wasn’t that our greatest fear, that the serial killer’s “condition” was contagious? They said he was controlled by his fantasies. We are all, each one of us, terrified of losing control, or terrified that the person sitting next to us on the bus will lose control. The district attorney himself would ask later, at the serial killer’s trial in February, “Wouldn’t we all be in trouble if we followed all our sexual desires, regardless of what those desires were?”