The German (27 page)

It was half past midnight when Muriel called with a report about another missing boy, and Tom shook his head with frustration and gripped his angry stomach, listening to the dispatcher give him the boy’s name and the situation.

Tim Randall’s mother had returned from a swing shift at the factory to find her son missing and the living room in disarray. The woman was panicked, and when Muriel read off the address, Tom’s gut twisted into a burning knot. The Randall house sat less than two blocks from where their John Doe had been snatched by the Cowboy. It didn’t take a lot of detective work to figure Tim Randall was the boy Tom had seen tossed out of the speeding Ford like a sack of garbage.

He drove the Packard across town, his mind wandering and his gaze sweeping, still on guard for the black Ford. He didn’t expect to see the car. They’d had about as close to luck as they were going to get he figured, but it didn’t stop him from braking frequently when the back end of a black car caught his eye.

At Dodd Street he parked at the curb in front of the address Muriel had read to him. All of the lights in the house were on, and he could see a slender woman with long brunette hair pacing frantically in front of the window with a cigarette to her lips. Climbing out of the car, he threw a glance at Ernst Lang’s house on the lot by the lakefront. Like the other houses, all except the Randall home, the lights were out. He took a few steps down the street to see that the man’s Buick remained parked in the carport, and there it was. Of course that didn’t mean the man was home. In fact, Tom didn’t understand exactly what he was trying to put together. Did he still believe Lang was involved?

Mrs. Randall met him at the door, frantic with wide green eyes covered in a pool of tears. She drew heavily on the cigarette pinched between her fingers, drawing the smoke into her lungs and holding it there. Tom observed an overturned table with one of the legs lying askew on the carpet and he winced at the sight, hoping Mrs. Randall hadn’t noticed his reaction.

The first thing he asked was to see a picture of Tim. Their conversation would be sorrowfully brief if it were the boy he’d left at the hospital. Mrs. Randall led him across the room to the fireplace mantel and lifted a wooden framed photograph. Handed it to him.

The boy in the picture wasn’t the boy in the hospital, Tom realized. He didn’t remotely resemble the kid Tom had tended on the street and in the ambulance. This discovery brought him no relief, however. It only added a new layer to his anxiety. If the boy in the hospital wasn’t Tim Randall, then who was he, and where was this woman’s son?

“When did you see your son last, Mrs. Randall?”

“Before I left for work. He was waiting for his friend Bum to come over, and I told him to mind the curfew. I had his grandmother staying here for a few weeks to keep an eye on him, but she couldn’t keep doing it, because Daddy needed her at home.”

Mrs. Randall began sobbing. She stubbed her cigarette out in a tray and wiped at her eyes and nose with a handkerchief, and then she grabbed the pack of cigarettes off the mantel to light another one.

“Who’s Bum?” Tom asked.

“His friend,” Mrs. Randall replied. “Bum Craddick. I don’t know what his parents were thinking when they named him. Such a shame to go through life with a name like that. He and his family live a few blocks over on Worth Street. The boys are joined at the hip like Mutt and Jeff.”

Tom questioned Mrs. Randall, asking for details about her son’s other friends and where he was most likely to have been playing earlier in the evening, and he asked what Tim had been wearing the last time she’d seen him and if Tim could have run away for any reason. It was all very familiar to him after investigating the thankfully false abduction of Little Lenny Elliot. But as he spoke and Mrs. Randall answered, he felt the pull of his car and the two-way radio. He had to get someone from the station to speak with Bum Craddick’s parents, or he had to do it himself. The various threads of his thoughts kept winding and unwinding and he missed much of Mrs. Randall’s information. Finally, with his notepad filled with his scrawled writing, Tom suggested that Mrs. Randall have her parents or a friend come stay with her while he began the investigation.

He excused himself to return to his car to radio in the information. Muriel Iverson interrupted him.

“A nurse at the hospital recognized Bum,” she said. “She called his parents straight away, so they’re already driving to the hospital. Don called in and said there had been no change. He hasn’t woken up yet.”

“Any word from the patrols?”

“No, sir. They haven’t found anything yet.”

“Well, you tell them that we’re looking for a second boy now. His name is Tim Randall.” Tom read off the description and explained the situation to Muriel who gasped at the news.

Tom turned the radio volume up so he would hear it from the street and then he walked to the end of the block, where Dodd intersected with Bennington. At the intersection he headed north and followed Bennington three blocks where it intersected with Cactus and he looked around.

If he had Regina’s story straight, the Craddick boy would have been running up the other side of the street, because she’d said that the driver had crossed the lane, aiming the nose of the car at the boy before getting out to grab him. He checked over his shoulder at the distant street sign for Dodd, then looked ahead. Worth Street was three blocks up. Tom crossed the street. The boy seemed to have been running home, which wasn’t a strange thing to do, except in this scenario it felt wrong. If he and Tim Randall were playing and Tim got snatched, wouldn’t Bum have run to the nearest lit-up house instead of tearing down the street?

And if this had happened in the Randall’s front yard or on the street, surely a neighbor would have heard the commotion out front and called it in. The Randall kid and his friend wouldn’t both go quietly. So that left the possibility that the Cowboy had parked to the north and walked down to Dodd Street, entered the home and snatched Tim Randall, breaking the table in the process and sending Bum Craddick fleeing, but then how had the Cowboy managed to get back to his car with the Randall kid, fire up the engine, and still intercept Bum?

It didn’t work in Tom’s mind. He returned to Dodd Street and his Packard and he lit a cigarette and thought the facts over, and the series of events made no sense, no matter how he put them together.

He looked up and down the street, his gaze touching each darkened house. His attention fell on the last house – Lang’s house – and he decided that if he needed a place to start questioning folks that was as good a place as any.

I think I could have left anytime I’d wanted to, and many times I felt I should get out of the German’s house and away from the terrible groans and muffled screams coming from my neighbor’s bedroom, except I stayed. Ben Livingston didn’t seem to care what I did. He probably wouldn’t have said “Boo” if I’d stood from the sofa and walked to the front door and told him good night before crossing the street to my house. But I didn’t leave. Why didn’t I leave? What I’d seen was awful, and what I imagined Hugo doing to the German was even more so. Why did I stay?

My willingness to believe the German’s guilt outweighed my unease with what was being done to him. I had fitted myself into a terrible situation, and the only way to account for that decision was to wholeheartedly believe that the German’s punishment was deserved, his crimes unforgivable. He suffered because he deserved to suffer. If he wasn’t wrong, inexplicably wrong, then what we inflicted on him could never have been right.

The German’s tirades had stopped, leaving only the dreadful, animal grunts. Maybe they’d put the rolled-up socks in his mouth after all. I could hear Hugo and Austin, particularly when they were laughing, which was happening more and more frequently, though the walls muddled and made their talk incomprehensible. I kept wondering why Bum hadn’t sent help, and I figured it was because of the oath I’d made him take, and half the time I spent in the living room, I wished I’d run off with him. Except I hadn’t. I sat there on the sofa where the German had made a show for me only days before and cursed the man for being monstrous – so monstrous I was forced into the ugly business of capturing him. Ben remained in the room with me, often appearing bored and anxious. Sometimes he chuckled when he heard his friends laughing. Sometimes he muttered, “Fucking queer.”

It felt as if I’d been on the sofa all night but it couldn’t have been more than two or three hours. Austin emerged from the bedroom and said, “Get in here.”

“My turn?” Ben asked eagerly.

“Both of you,” Austin said, sounding good and puffed up with his accomplishment. “The prisoner’s got something to say to you.”

I looked nervously from Ben to Austin and realized that my chance to leave had passed. The fear that engulfed me in that moment was sick inducing, and I worried that I might vomit again. I didn’t want to see what had been done to the German. I had to believe it was justified, but I didn’t want to see it.

“I’ll drag your ass in there again,” Austin warned.

Standing from the sofa, I took a step forward and my stomach rolled and clenched. I swallowed hard against the gagging at the back of my throat and followed the boys to the room.

At first, I thought the German had been skinned alive. His head lolled, rolling lazily from side to side, but the mask of blood that had smeared his face seemed to have become a glistening crimson shawl, covering him from his chest to his scalp. Sweat covered his legs and forearms. Black burns – round like pernicious freckles – dotted his thigh. His cheek and brow were swollen badly as was his left hand, where Hugo had taken a second fingernail. A thick pool of blood had gathered under his arm where I could make out the lines of four deep gashes.

Hugo stood by the bed, holding a sock in his hand that appeared to be weighted down with a potato or a rock. He looked up at me, and then back to the German.

“Say it,” Hugo ordered.

“
Nein,
” the German muttered. His voice rumbled low, weak, and coarse. “Not him. Not with a child in the room.”

“He was old enough to stomp your ass.”

“
Nein,
” the German repeated.

Hugo swung the sock with a vicious windmill motion and slammed it across the German’s chest. It sounded like a steak hitting dirt. The German grunted in pain and launched into another bout of angry, incomprehensible dialogue, though he couldn’t muster the strength to shout.

“Say it,” Hugo said. “Confess to them.”

The German looked in my direction, but I didn’t believe he was seeing me. What little expression I could discern on his face, seemed too soft and kind for the situation – for me. It made his words all the harder to understand.

The German made a low growling sound like he was clearing his throat, and he shook his head slowly as if to get an annoying drop of water out of his ear. His eyes, so white against the crimson mask, found mine and the expression he offered was one of absolute pity. Hugo wound up and swung the sock with all of his might, whipping it hard against the German’s side. I heard something crack like a twig beneath the dull slap. The German gritted his teeth against a shrill squeal, which managed to escape through his nose with a spray of snot. He squeezed his eyes closed, sending tears to carve pale streams through the blood on his face.

“Tell it right,” Hugo whispered. “Then we’ll call the sheriff and he’ll take your ass to jail and maybe a doctor will fix you up before they send you to the chair.”

“I took Harold Ashton and kept him tied up in my attic so I could fuck him whenever I wanted to. He was a very pretty boy and I fucked him often, but he kept crying so I cut him open and scraped everything out so the sheriff wouldn’t know what I’d done. I kidnapped David Williams from his home but I only fucked him once because he was fat and ugly, and he smelled like old onions, so I hung him in the Ranger’s Lodge so all of you would see him and know that no place in your city was safe.” The German breathed raggedly. His eyes remained on me, but there was no pity left to color them. Instead, his fury burned as if I alone bore the weight of his loathing, and again I wondered if he was seeing me at all. “The last boy I stole from his bed, out from under the noses of his parents, and I fucked him in his backyard, on the grass after I put a rock in his mouth so he couldn’t scream, and I dragged him to the lake and fucked him again and then I cut his throat and threw his body into the water.”

A hard breath rattled from the German’s lips and he closed his eyes. Tried to swallow. Choked and took another rasping breath.

“Finish it,” Hugo said. “Finish your confession.”

Eyes closed, the German whispered. “I am a Nazi and a faggot and I killed those three boys after I fucked them because that’s what faggots do.”