Slob (19 page)

H
e told her the whole thing of course, screamed it at her, cursing, pacing up and down, she whispering and softly mellowing him out, cooling him off as he raged about the "fucking morons" downtown. But somehow she didn't really let it register. He could tell that by the way she kept talking about how the paper said this or the television said that. She liked it that he was a cop star, for right or wrong, it was hard for her to let go of it, so he finally shut up about it.

There were too many reporters around and she talked him into taking a somewhat extravagant suite in an outrageous but quite private "XXX-rated motor hotel" in a nearby suburb. And this is where she took him to lick, among other things, his wounds—both real and imagined.

And what wild fantasies of eroticism held him spellbound as he lay there on the satiny sheet, eyes closed on the sexy lighting and oblivious to the quietly insinuating background music? Two cops named Pat McTeague and Penny Butts. Pat and Penny. Sounded like two broads, he thought. I'm layin' here next to this fox thinking about two cops. I'm in trouble.

Penny Butts weighed 250 pounds and ate onions like they were ice cream cones, and Pat McTeague was equally attractive. He was a borderline alky with a face like a Rand McNally, topped off by this big Rudolph-colored honker of a hose-nose with veins so big they had their own little veins. His whole face looked like a huge, ugly busted capillary.

Eichord was thinking about them because it was them he sat with when the contingent from the squad room moved en masse to the cop bar the night before. Their conversation was mostly jokes, one of the less obscene was a particularly ornate thing with the following punch line:

"So the judge says, say what? And the lawyer says, your honor that's when the plaintiff took an alpha cyanoacrylate monomer and created anionic polymerization bonding my client's erectile member to the subjacent faying surface of the sleeping unit. And the guy yells,
Yeah, Judge, an the bitch glued my cock to the mattress too!"
Laughter.

They started ragging Jack about his heroism.

"Man that fuckin' McTuff can solve the tough ones, can't they, bro?"

"Damn straight, ace. I gotta' get on that team, man. Can you see my name when they do the TV series about me. 'McTeague of McTuff; has a fuckin' ring to it."

"I like 'McTuff Butts, Private Eye.' " Eichord laughed dutifully.

"Shit, man, I mean you fuckin' get
down
on them whodunits." And on and on. After a few minutes his smile muscles were starting to get that pinched-up feeling and he finally was able to con his way out the door and managed to ease out without looking like an asshole who couldn't take a joke. They were flakes. But the teasing was just their way of saying they knew it was out of his hands. They damn well realized it could easily happen to either of them, to anybody else in Homicide. Still, it rankled. He didn't like any of it.

The hero thing was serious business to him. He had come from a time that now seemed so remote as to be part of a lost world. He had come from the never-wuz yesteryear of a kid's dreams, back in the forgotten past of an America that believed in the mythologized hero. Larger than life. Pure of spirit. The good guy in the white hat.

Eichord had been a kid when the golden age of the heroic image tarnished in the onrushing high-tech era, disintegrating, the pieces of rust scattered by the fickle winds of time and evolution. But he still remembered the hero world that had formed his early years into something resembling a normal childhood. Jack recalled those giant-size images that his dad had taught him about. Stillwell! Damn. Salk, DiMaggio, Harry
Truman,
for Chrissakes—these were great, looming, awesome personalities like the six-sheets out in front of the Orpheum. And Eichord's generation had grown up with seriously revered heroes in sports, the military, science, and even—believe it or not—politics.

When Jack wasn't swimming or shooting baskets or climbing trees, he was reading about heroes. First the Hardy Boys and then the great autobiographies and then the military histories. He devoured
The Washing of the Spears
again and again. He read
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
twenty-eight times in two years, reading it night after night, reading paragraphs at a time, sight-reading great chunks of it over and over, letting it mold him, shape his self-image.

He was raised in the shadow of the Invincible Nord-Americano, the legend of the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Male Hero. The elitist spear-carrier; the warrior responsibilities of middle-class noblesse oblige shaping him into the only acceptable professions of career military man, policeman or fireman, paramedic, whatever. He had to be at least symbolically in uniform, and out there on the cutting edge.

And then something went wrong. And the weight of all the input and the information mixed with the liquid realities, and it all combined to take him under like an anchor, and he dropped into the impenetrable depths of Jack Daniels' Lake, sinking down to the cold, muddy bottom, another victim of the Black Water Fever. Another muddy thinker trapped in a hero's rusting, one-man sub down in the Land of Lost Souls. A booze-battered casualty of the heroic era.

So now, Eichord thought, here I am next to the soft and warm lady of my choosing, on exquisite sheets in a room of erotic mirrors and sexy lighting, basking in adoration and tenderness, drenched in musky aromas, hearing the soft, whispered phrases of love, and all I can think about are two ugly cops and their bad jokes, and all I can feel is the chill of the land of the lost.

And underneath all that, hiding down there in the dark substrata, I sense the foul presence of a human thing who kills for pleasure, taking hearts for God only knows what reasons. Ripping bloody hearts out of freshly killed corpses. And this thing is still out there, no matter what the newspapers would have you believe. And the cloud of menace hangs over the bed like a frightening shadow and I detumesce without dying the little demise, Jack thinks.

But Edie is here and the nearness now is what matters. So he opens his eyes and ignores the mirrors, and blocks out the thoughts of blond silicone twins and French maids and all the other silly, childish fantasy stuff that goes with a bed like this, and he relaxes and breathes her in. And in his new state of grace he feels his humanity slowly ebbing, then shifting current and flowing back into him, and the softly fluttering eyelashes, and the hot fingertips begin to work their electric magic on him again.

And his hands catch in that dark pillow of long hair and he pulls her near so that he can see nothing but the closeness of her, a mesh of flesh and bone and warmth and delightful mewings, and mouths and limbs and organs and souls rock and explode together and they go down into that hot pit of flame again, and let go in an achingly sweet and perfect, bubbling, delicious honey pot. And not caring then.

Now he only wants this moment to freeze. This second. This timeless, detumesce, textbook-perfect, classic, heartthrobbing, madly exhilarating love explosion between them. Suddenly this is the only thing, the only important thing, the only thing that matters to him, and he prays that he can make the world stop and hold on to this, this joyous, shouting, lovely, love-drenched instant of full-tilt, kissy-face, huggy-bear, jailhouse tango blues.

T
ed Volker was one of those fortunate people who had a great mother-in-law, a pleasant woman who was close to her daughter and son-in-law, whom she treated like her own son, and especially her grandson, and who visited them almost every day. It was she who found the family the next day. And it completely destroyed her mind.

A mail carrier was first to hear the screams but thought it was coming from the television set. A delivery man was probably the second to hear her and phoned the Chicago police emergency number. After several minutes the call-in was routed to the dispatcher, and a few minutes later a two-man car responded. What they found was a scene straight out of hell.

They heard the awful, tortured, animal screams before they reached the door of the Volker household and the men looked at each other and one whispered:

"Holy Jesus," and they entered carefully, with their pieces drawn. The blinds were all shut and the small amount of available sunlight barely penetrated the gloom. A woman could be heard literally screaming her lungs out back in the family room and when they came around the corner the overpowering stench caused them both to gag.

Sudden, unexpected, surprising, overpowering, and terrorizing shock affects each individual differently. It all depends on the circumstances, the state of preparedness, the individual's predisposition to trauma, personal physiological thresholds; the thousand and one factors that either soften or amplify those shocks that human flesh is heir to.

There were three bodies on the couch, taped nude to the sofa and each other with silver duct tape like plumbers use, and each with the eyelids taped open—the silver tape pulled grotesquely over the hair and the faces, the eyes of the dead rolled up in unseeing sockets which gaped like holes in a silver death mask.

The standing woman continued to scream until just before the doctor started to sedate her when she passed out from exhaustion. She had lost her mind, and would never make another sound beyond those final anguished screams. Parenthetically, the police had no way of knowing, but her hair, gray before, had bleached absolutely white during the dehumanizing hours of unrelieved horror.

The living room, the dying room that is, was covered in what had been a lake of human blood. The blood had coagulated and congealed into a hideous crust of insect-covered filth and drying slime and the smell was the smell of the busiest killing room of a nineteenth-century stockyards slaughterhouse. The cops had never smelled anything like the smell of that room in the Volker house.

The beast that had done this thing had tromped through the grisly blood-pond leaving brazen, red 15EEEEE pawprints of massive, naked feet as he walked to the bathroom at the end of his work. Tromp, tromp, clomping along down the hall that still echoed with the awful silence after a family's muffled screams. The creature hearing nothing, feeling nothing beyond simple pleasure at the destruction process, a postcoital kind of feeling as he clomped along leaving big, nasty, sticky stains on the lime-colored shag. Huge, scarlet paw marks where his weight smashed down on those size fifteen flat, splayed feet.

He had clomped into the master bedroom, turning the shower on, urinating for some reason into the sink at some point, then taking a hot shower. He had masturbated again after the shower, while standing there with the water drying on his enormous body, this having been determined by semen residue found in the tub trap, then he dried off on a missing towel which he presumably used to wipe off all the hand-touched knobs and other printable surfaces. They picked up a fairly good left thumb off a mirror that it seemed he might have touched before he put his gloves on. They had run it out to the feds along with the other forensics. It didn't happen much but you never knew when you'd get lucky.

A mail carrier leaving a priority first-class package in the lobby of the division out of which Jack Eichord was working added his set of prints to the case. The other prints were also postal employees. The label on the package was hand addressed by someone who had used a felt-tipped pen, writing with hard, firm, angry lines that mushed the tip down, making broad and precisely squared-off letters as he carefully printed out JACK ICORD [sic] which he had heard over the television set while in the Volker house.

He had then wrapped the items in three individual plastic bags, then put those bags inside another container which he sealed using a heat-seal cooking device he'd found in the Volker kitchen. Seal-A-Meal had been the brand name.

When he had sealed up his items he'd wiped the outside of the plastic again, wiped off the heat-sealer, and put everything in the sack with the towel he'd used to clean up with, along with other miscellaneous things he wanted to dispose of. But there was a marked difference in his attitude and comportment. He was hanging. He was no longer as concerned with perfection or professionalism. He was well aware that as he cleaned up after himself he was going through the motions. That extreme teeth-gritting focus of concentration had lightened up. It was beyond his ability to analyze. Perhaps he was going into some sort of an I-Want-to-Be-Punished phase, he thought to himself. No. But what? What indeed.

The swaggering, cranked little man was five feet, three inches tall and he was extremely tough. He had fought all of his life. His name was Tree. It was his street name. Little Tree, or Tree, they called him. Mr. Tree. He truly did not remember his own name. It was a name like Tree. His first name, his real name, was Buddy but nobody called him that. He had not been Buddy since he lived at home.

He had run away from home when he was fourteen. After being confronted by his father about his frequent sexual attacks on his new stepmother he had beaten his father unconscious and left home. He was a sometimes-member of an outlaw biker gang called the Flames that was currently trying to muscle in on the Chicago Warlords for a piece of the lucrative market in crank, or crystal meth.

"Fuckin' Deuce is lame, man." Deuce was the current president of the Flames and Tree was telling this to his only friend, another very short man who was known on the street as Leaping Lester. Lester was a cringing sort of a wimp who was always seen scurrying around the fringes of the outlaw gang members and groupies and hangers-on, turning up in the leather bars and redneck roadhouses and dope joints, trying to suck up to the Flames or anybody flying colors (wearing a biker-club jacket) and smelling rank. He was a biker buff. He was also frightened to death of Tree, and because Tree liked this attitude he allowed him to hang around. "Fuckin' Deuce had any balls he'd . . . we'd be dealing, goddammit."