The Comfort of Monsters

by Willa C. Richards

  Suze: What did you do on the Fourth?

  Peg: The day before, Dee called me to say that Frank was cheating on her and she was going to confront him. I convinced her to wait on it and to come spend the Fourth with me and Leif. But before that, we went down to the lake for the fireworks. Just me and her. Smoked some joints. Nothing crazy.

  Suze: And what happened on the Fourth? When did she leave? Did she say where she was going?

  Peg: Leif and I dropped acid. We thought Dee did it too, but now . . . I’m not sure. I don’t think she did. She walked in on me and Leif having sex. She had my camera. She took a picture . . . while we were . . .

  Suze: She took a picture of you having sex?

  Peg: Worse than that.

  Suze: Worse how?

  Peg: We were being rough. With each other.

  Suze: He was hitting you?

  Peg: She didn’t see what she thought she saw.

  Suze: What do you think she saw?

  Peg: Leif beating me up.

  Suze: What did she see?

  Peg: I told you. We were messing around. But rough.

  Suze: He hit you?

  Peg: He didn’t mean to.

  Suze: But Dee didn’t know that, right?

  Peg: I mean. No. That’s why I said she . . . she didn’t know what she saw.

  Suze: Was she upset?

  Peg: I don’t know.

  Suze: You didn’t see her face? Her reaction?

  Peg: I . . . I don’t know. I don’t remember. I can’t remember.

  Suze: Okay, it’s okay. So she saw . . . this. And she took a picture. And she left after that? Did she say where she was going? Did she say if she was going to find Frank?

  Peg: She said . . . she said . . . I can’t remember.

  Suze: Do you remember if she said anything at all before she left? Do you remember what time it was when she left?

  Peg: Oh my God, I can’t remember, Suze. I can’t remember.

  I was embarrassed that my niece had read this. Dana had highlighted the last part and drawn a green star next to it: Oh my God, I can’t remember, Suze. I can’t remember, as if it were the key to the case, as if it explained something crucial about me, about what had happened. Maybe it did. The scariest part about the interview was that I had absolutely no memory of it at all. I couldn’t even drum up a picture of it in my mind—where Suze and I might have sat, what time of day it was, if we were drinking coffee or wine, if there was light in the kitchen left over from the day, or if it was dark and we’d lit the kerosene lamps Ma had always loved because they reminded her of her childhood. I couldn’t recollect a single detail.

  February 1992

  The serial killer’s trial was the first of its kind televised live. Seventy different news organizations attended, and it was shown on national cable news networks and broadcast live on WDJT, our local radio station. This station obtained record ratings. These legal proceedings would eventually cost the city of Milwaukee more than any other court case in the city’s history. The serial killer’s lawyer, an infamous prosecutor turned defense attorney named Gerald Boyle, had appeared in a highly publicized case during the 1980s. Dee and I were only girls at the time, but since that case made the national news and the lawyer was on TV and in the newspapers, I recognized him. He had previously defended two cops who murdered a Black man named Ernest R. Lacy they’d falsely accused of rape. They were acquitted. He had also defended the serial killer once before, when he’d stood trial for molesting a thirteen-year-old boy. Boyle told the judge, We don’t have a multiple offender here.

  This time, though, no one wanted to hear the defense Gerry Boyle had cooked up for his client. Even then I knew we couldn’t have it both ways. We wanted the serial killer to be sick, an inhuman aberration, because this was an explanation we could live with, one that meant we were sound and healthy. This explanation, however, allowed him to skirt responsibility for his crimes. We could not live with this. People in Milwaukee wanted the serial killer to, as one family member put it, “stand up and take his justice like a man.” So we were caught; on the one hand, we wanted to hear what those experts had to say—This is a sick man, a defective man, a man who cannot control his sick impulses, a man who is himself a victim of terrible diseases. And yet this allowed him to escape culpability, and we needed him to be completely, unequivocally guilty. And so we were forced to admit that his behavior existed on the terrifying human spectrum of that which we are capable of doing to one another. And listen—everywhere in the country, people were reading the details of his crimes, and listening to his interviews from prison, and watching the trial, and consuming his story with such appetite that, really, it was not hard for me to believe his behavior was human. We are a terrifying bunch.

  Leif was in prison but on work release, and I was spending my days watching the clock until I had to pick him up at prison, drive him to Ambrosia, and then drop him back off at prison. Leif tried to carry himself more stoically than ever, a performance for my benefit, perhaps, but a performance nonetheless. He spoke in fragments. Monosyllables. And he seemed to grow thinner and more wiry every day.

  We listened to the serial killer’s verdict on the radio during one of the drives. Though Gerald Boyle had argued vigorously that the serial killer needed mental health care, not prison time, the judge and the jury did not agree. He was found guilty and sane on all fifteen counts of murder. He was sentenced to fifteen life terms. Three months later, he was extradited to Ohio, where he was found guilty of a sixteenth murder and sentenced to sixteen consecutive life terms in prison: sixteen hundred years behind bars.

  Leif was loudly chewing a cheeseburger I’d bought him. He rolled the window down and tossed out two pickles. “Peg,” he said. “You know I hate these.” He motioned at the car radio and shook his head. “That guy will not last in there.”

  He was certainly right about that.

  Before they took the serial killer away, the judge allowed the victims’ families to give what he called “Victim Impact Statements.” Some of the families spoke directly to the serial killer. Others spoke about or to their loved ones. Reporters said Shirly Hughes, Anthony Hughes’s mother, held up the sign language symbol for I love you.

  After the trial ended, the national news outlets packed up and left. They’d begun their slow exodus from the city back in September when national interest in the serial killer’s case sharply declined. After the trial ended, when they were all finally gone, it was clear that they’d done a lot of damage: They’d tampered with and harassed witnesses and their families, they’d stolen privileged court documents, and perhaps worst of all, they’d made a celebrity out of the serial killer. Everyone in America now knew his name.

  After they left, the city felt empty of people but full of quietly boiling fear. The news had done that to us, although we were complicit. Outside the courthouse, the trash cans overflowed with weeks of reporters’ garbage, and no one seemed in a hurry to tidy the street. Instead, they held a candlelight vigil to heal the community, but no one was impressed. I stood at the end of North Avenue, where the street spilled over the bluff and ended above Lake Michigan, and watched the sidewalks flicker awake with white light as people came out of homes and restaurants and bars and coffee shops and lit candles. They weren’t lighting them to honor the men and boys whom the serial killer had murdered. They were lighting them as a weapon against their own fear of one another.

  Some days while Leif was in prison, if we had extra time before I had to take him back, we’d find an empty spot off the highway or behind an abandoned gas station, and I’d give him a blow job. I liked to make him beg when he asked for head. This was never as satisfying as I thought it would be.

  During those days when he was in prison, and Dee was gone, and Ma was complacent, and we were all setting ourselves up for the long wait of the rest of our lives, which we knew was coming, I didn’t feel much of anything at all. Some days I could tell how bad he wanted it, but he couldn’t seem to get hard no matter
what I did. I knew all his favorite spots. I knew what he liked and how he liked me to act, and still, he’d be limp in my mouth. I got the sense that he wanted badly to get rough with me, maybe even hit me, because I knew how this turned him on, but he stayed restrained. He’d lift my chin up and away from his crotch and kiss me so soft and sweet, the length of his tongue brushing against my open lips. It was like a threat.

  Other days I drove aimlessly around Milwaukee’s sprawl. I had an overwhelmingly painful rush of nostalgia for the beginning of last summer—before Walker’s Point, before Erik was hurt, before Dee got serious about Frank, when Leif and I would walk for hours around the city, not concerned with the next shifts we had to work, talking about poems and writers we admired, about our childhoods, about our favorite foods. I drove under the sweeping highway overpasses and saw the homeless camps—people living their lives in the places the city hadn’t yet figured out what to do with. There were a dozen tentlike structures and the smell of burning plastic. During the brutal Wisconsin winters, homeless people congregated around the massive steam tunnels for warmth. Sometimes the city sent police on horses to clear out these camps.

  After the reporters left, the police strutted around the city with their chins a millimeter higher, but their shoulders sagged. They felt as if they’d been dragged through the mud. If they had, I didn’t think much of that mud had stuck. In the fall, more demonstrators marched on the Journal’s offices and the MPD to protest the way the city had handled the serial killer. They said this case was proof that the police had never been concerned with the safety of minorities in Milwaukee and that the media cared more about glamorizing the serial killer than respecting his victims.

  People said their sons’ disappearances would have been taken seriously if they’d been pretty white women, not gay men of color. I wholeheartedly agreed. I only wanted to add two words—pretty, rich, and good white women. I knew my family was at an advantage—at least we’d gotten a report filed for Dee, at least we had Wolski, for whatever he was worth. I knew it was more than some families ever got. But it turns out you often have to be a lot of things to make the news care about you and to make you worthy of search and rescue. This is why you’ve heard about that woman who got kidnapped in Utah, but you can’t name a single man the serial killer murdered. Or why you’ve probably never heard of Alexis Patterson.

  I think Frank hoped to doom Dee’s case immediately, and in many ways, when he cooked up his story about her “night job,” he succeeded. The shoe fit, even if our family knew it was ridiculous. I knew Dee wouldn’t have kept that a secret from me, if only because she would have loved to lord it over me: Look at how dangerous I am now. No, she wouldn’t have been able to keep that a secret. From our perspective, it was a lie. But I saw how the lie answered a lot of questions, especially for Wolski, whose efforts to find Dee began to flag significantly after his conversation with Frank. Not that his effort level before was impressive, but it had been somewhat steady. Maybe, in his eyes, Dee became a little less worthy of finding. Or maybe he just felt like it explained, to his satisfaction, why she had disappeared. The media had done something similar to the people murdered by the serial killer—they said these men and boys were criminals, they were prostitutes, they were drinkers and drug addicts, they willingly posed for nude photographs—as if this helped people to make sense of the cruelty of their deaths. No one wanted to admit that nothing could help us make sense of that.

  November 2019

  The night the serial killer special aired, someone nailed an effigy of Thomas Alexander to an old post in the middle of the empty lot at 924 North Twenty-fifth Street and set him on fire. TMJ4 sent a reporter down there to film the burning Thomas Alexander, and the video went viral.

  The national popularity of this video also subsumed the story that followed in Milwaukee. The effigy eventually started a fire in the apartment building adjacent to the lot where the serial killer’s building had been. It became difficult to get everyone out and to contain the fire. TMJ4 captured an image of two toddlers in pink footed pajamas standing in the middle of the street. This was the same street where once, decades ago, a child had escaped from the serial killer’s apartment, bleeding and confused, and the police had returned him to the killer’s apartment. The death toll of the fire, officially, was seven. The news anchor interviewed one woman, a resident, who stared into the camera and said only, “My life is over.”

  Leif left while we were waiting on the lab results. He said he hadn’t intended to stay as long as he had, and he needed to get back on the road. I wanted to be snarky and short with him, but I couldn’t muster the strength. He asked if he could take a box of my files with him—something he’d found pertaining to Erik—but when he noticed my discomfort, he said he’d scan them and leave the originals. I called him a week or so after we got the results. Maybe I thought he had a right to know. Maybe I just wanted to hear his voice one last time.

  “I’m sorry, Peg,” he said. “I really am.”

  I heard some relief in his voice. Had he worried that if the bones were Dee’s, Erik might have been named as her killer? Did he believe his brother capable? Do we, any of us, know anything about one another at all? It’s impossible, I thought, to say what we know. I hated him.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You still think Frank did it?”

  Did it. I hated this construction. Because we’d never had an it—done what, exactly? Had he murdered her himself and burned her body in his parents’ crematorium? Had he had someone else murder her for him so his hands would be clean and he could climb the ladder in the MFD? Had he tortured her? Had she suffered for a short time? A long time? Every question mark like a lash. I rarely let myself ask so many at once because it could easily induce vomiting. Paralysis.

  “Of course,” I said. “But I blame myself more and more too now.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For everything,” I admitted. “I failed her. I failed my family. Even you. In a way.”

  “Don’t say that. I was the one who fucked up. You know? Sometimes I wish I hadn’t left. When I did, I mean. Or how I did. I’m sorry,” he said. “I still loved you. But I was scared.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “I mean it. I shouldn’t have left like that.”

  “We wouldn’t have ever worked again. We couldn’t.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”

  There was a long pause in which I thought he would hang up, but instead he said, “I’ve told you about my book, yeah?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Well, I’d love if you’d read it when I’m done.”

  What did he think I still owed him? “Goodbye, Leif,” I said. A wave of regret washed over me. Briefly, I could see a whole other life, not this wasted, warped march of days ahead of me. Then it was gone.

  May 1992

  The Ambrosia chocolate factory did shut down, about a year after the Journal broke the news that the serial killer had worked there. People had begun to look at those deep drums of chocolate with newfound horror. During his confession, the serial killer revealed that he sometimes brought his victims’ body parts to work with him. Many people, including Leif, were now out of work. It was just like Erik had said. Before the factory closed, they sold hundreds of tons of cocoa bean shells to the city on the cheap; Milwaukee used the husks as mulch around their city trees, so even after the factory closed, the sidewalks smelled of chocolate.

  The day Leif got out of prison, we didn’t go to the apartment. We hadn’t paid rent in months, and we were definitely in breach of contract. I hadn’t worked consistent hours at the library in so long, and Leif and I had been pooling our money to pay for his work release program, so we were beyond broke. (I’d never understood that part of the program—you pay to be able to go to work.) I didn’t know what we would do. Leif always said the same thing when I was dropping him back off at the prison: We’ll figure it out. I knew enough by then to
know no one ever figures it out.

  When I picked him up, he threw himself into the Spitfire like the thing was a coffin. I wasn’t sure he’d ever move again. He was skinny, and his body was limp in the bucket seat. He had always been quiet, but he was quieter than ever now. I drove us to a tiny spot of beach north of the city. We walked down a steep, winding path to the rocky beach. There was an old cement pier crumbling into the lake, rainbows of beach glass glinting in the sand, whole tree trunks’ worth of driftwood washed up on shore. The lake was seven different hues of blue. Some people said you could see part of an old shipwreck from this beach, and fragments of the ship still washed up here after storms. The lake was glass that day, though. Leif sat down on a log and cried. I did not hold him even though I could tell it was what he wanted. I went to the lake and skipped stones. I wished there were loud waves so I couldn’t hear him cry. He should have been alone to do that. When it sounded like he’d calmed down, I went to sit with him on the log.

  “We’re never going to find Dee,” I told him. “I know Frank killed her.”

  He shook his head. He picked up a piece of smooth brown glass and rubbed it between his fingers. “You don’t know that,” he said.

  “What happened to you?” I asked him.

  “You happened.”

  I allowed this. “What are we going to do?”

  He turned to me and held my chin. I closed my eyes and wished we could be living in any other time except now. I knew this was delusional. If you think about the cumulative coincidences too often, it will ruin your mind. Maybe I wanted him to keep holding my chin. Maybe he wanted me to hug him. Maybe I liked it.

  “When I’m off parole, I’ve got a buddy who’s gonna set me up with a truck-driving gig. It’s good pay, you get regular time off, and the best part—I’ll get the fuck out of this city.” It was far enough away from the smokestacks to the south, and the ambulances wailing in the north, and the constant whirl of traffic, to feel as if we were out of the city.