The Holy Terror (17 page)

“One of the reasons we came by here,” Rizzi said, not listening. “Find out what she might have been wearing today.”

While they continued talking, the doors opened and Blackstone Shatner, a man of low regard in the Loop, mumbled something as he stumbled in. The wind flapped newspaper pages along the lobby floor. “Saw her, saw her!” He was talking about Screaming Mimi, another toothless stewbum, but the cops thought he meant Jerrickson.

“Where and when was this?” Rizzi asked.

“Why, out there.” Shatner was spooked because he hadn’t expected to see the coppers in there.

“What time was this, you dirty bird?” From Rizzi.

Shatner, all eyes upon him, grinned to show everyone how far back his gums had receded. “Lemme think, it was half-past Ed’s ass and quarter to his balls!” He burst into a riddle of laughter.

“Lucky we don’t beat on you, cock-knocker,” Rizzi snapped at him. Morisette had written in his neat script what the woman had been wearing, they thought it best to leave with Shatner falling over his feet to get out ahead of them.

“What do you think we should do?” Reve said after they’d gone.

“They’re right, you know,” The American Dream said.

“What, that we think we’re special because we live here?” Slappy Vander Putten said to him.

“No.” The Dream took a moment to look back at all of them. “That we think by living here that the Painkiller won’t come for us. Each and every one of us.”

“Amen,” someone whispered. It could have been Tremulis.

* * *

Ten minutes hater, the three of them were in the alley, each with four sets of interconnecting shadows. Tremulis had offered to hold Reve’s hand as they trudged through the slush, and he was surprised when she let him do just that.

“Nothing,” The American Dream said, hands cupped to his mouth. “What do you think, Vic?”

“I ... didn’t know her hardly at all.” Christ, couldn’t he think of something better to say in front of Reve?

“Hey, Ev.” Reve pointed down the alleyway toward Randolph. The entrance to the Trailways bus terminal flashed red and blue neon. “Maybe she was cold, and went into the terminal.”

Minutes later, the three found Wilma Jerrickson’s wheelchair. Later still, Rizzi and Morisette would shake their heads when they were told that, of the dozen people waiting for their buses to Bellair or Louisville, no one could recall how the chair had come to be vacant.

It was the next morning that the garbage collectors, lifting the cans behind the Deadline Business Services storefront, found the burned and severed foot of the woman everyone knew as Granma.

Weeks passed, as they tend to do when the most mediocre of lives are involved. A new county officer is elected, and Mrs. A sees Mrs. B at the polling place, the one near the Knights of Columbus on Kingsbury, for the first time since, oh god, it must have been the Mavros wedding. Paul sees Jim again, thinking his old commuting crony must have landed that clerking job at the Dirsken Building, but is surprised to find that, instead, Jim was recovering from salmonella poisoning after a skiing trip at Tallow Lake, Wisconsin. And hey, did Jim know that Fred Gingrus had an epileptic seizure while driving down the Edens and died after running off the Fallon Ridge offramp? Sure enough.

It was decided that Chicago would have a special mayoral election in March of 1989, an event that had been disputed since Harold Washington had died of a heart attack at his desk the previous Thanksgiving Eve. A famous evangelist sent letters to a Dr. Michael Surles, a Dr. D. Etchison, and other esteemed professionals at the Marchinn House—the “medical” status somehow ensuring a cheaper postage rate—asking that the kind surgeons, or whatever they were expected to be, send a donation to defray the costs of Oliver North’s upcoming trial involving monies given to Iran. Wilma Jerrickson, who for some reason had no doctoral surname on her self-sticking computer label, posthumously received the same request. Colin Nutman unceremoniously tossed it in the trash.

On the fourteenth of, December, Erwin “Smooth Tee” Truvilhion was arrested for selling stolen goods. He pleaded not guilty, said the coppers dissed him into claiming what it be like things weren’t really what they seem an’ ‘sides, the one cop, Conover be his name, Conover up an’ pimp slapped him. Listening to the Tee talk, Judge Earl Straylock thought at first that he was having a temporal lobe seizure. Tee was out of County later that night, the Reverend Latimore finding it in his soul to help the man out.

On the sixteenth, a partly decomposed body was found on the Salt Street underpass. Assistant M.E. Bervid decided that the probable cause of death was exposure. Limbs that had hooked partially severed were most likely eaten by dogs before the corpse froze to the ground.

A wheelchair was found by the Our Lady of The Lake rectory on Sheridan that same week, but Area 4 Homicide felt fairly certain that their killer was only hunting in the Loop. The chair at the church showed no sign of recent use.

The temperatures would drop to thirty below, a harbinger for the days to come. And though everyone involved, the street cops and Detectives Daves and Petitt included, knew to whom the severed leg found in the Benton Place alleyway on the tenth belonged to, the chief Medical Examiner for Cook County flew in an anthropologist from Indianapolis to run tests at the Harrison Street morgue.

The Mardinn residents held a makeshift ceremony and Mike Surfer lit a votive candle to the statue of St. Dymphna, near St. Sixtus’s west wall, that entire week.

In what was perhaps the unkindest cut of all, because of its impersonality, on December 20th, the city paid a $24.4 million subsidy to three wealthy developers that they might build an office complex where the Spaniel block of buildings, including the Mardinn, stood. It was the largest urban renewal incentive in Chicago history. Designed by architect Helmut Jahn, the base structure of the office-over-retail building included a glassy structure that would connect, in a visual sense, the Marshall Field department store with the Picasso structure in Daley Plaza. The developers, PG Anderson Ventures, guaranteed relocation of all the tenants of what the city planning department referred to as Block 37. Initial plans had been authorized by the Washington administration, way back in 1983.

This was too much for Mike Surfer. First Gramma, now the entire Mardinn. The city wasn’t even going to wait for the Painkiller to get them all. He stopped cleaning his shunt three times a day, and didn’t have Evan Shustak buy him new cleansing straws at the Walgreens.

Three days before Christmas, a body was found frozen solid into a wheelchair next to the Lincoln statue in Grant Park. The corpse was completely intact, although one of the fingers snapped off when the Crime Scene Unit photographer dropped his flash bar on the hand of the dead body. Life went on as it does, whether you want it to or not.

* * *

On Christmas Eve, Victor Tremulis (which was still his name on Honore Street, you) watched
Tour of Duty
and
Hunter
, drank several cans of Pepsi, and argued with his mother, who ended every sentence the same way. “When are you going to find a job that pays real money, you ?”

On the ten o’clock news that night, another elderly man in a wheelchair was reported missing near the Hotel Leland on South Wabash and 14th. He would show up later, after an all day holiday toot, drunk and meandering, but his initial disappearance prompted a local news anchor to again plead with The Painkiller to please stop killing the crippled citizens of the Loop.

Her constant wringing of the string of pearls around her neck was as much for ratings as it was for her own conscience. Tremulis often watched this woman with the bleached blond hair, and others like her. The ones who told the city what was happening to it each and every day and even finding time to joke about it.

Maybe helping to catch this Painkiller was his ticket out. He was in his mid-thirties and still living with his parents in their safe little rent-controlled building. A domineering mother and a hard-working, hard-drinking father. In his best case fantasy, he’d move into an apartment with Reve. In the second best scenario, the Painkiller would kill him.

What he was living now was the type of family scene that was the favorite of psychological profiles on unknowns like the Zodiac Killer or the guy in today’s back pages of the Trib whose claim to fame is killing prostitutes in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Sons killing their time until dear old dad buys the farm and Every Mother’s Son can then blame it on the bitch goddess mommy when he gets caught Ted Bundying the co-ed population of middle America. Or so the paperbacks in the current events section at Kroch’s and Brentano’s would advertise. Or the decomposing corpses along the interstate would say, if they could speak of their ultimate knowledge.

The Dziennik Chicagoski from the day after the Surf City party sit on the bottom tray of the coffee table, he could read it through the glass.

ZNALEZIONO ZWLOKI KOBIETY

it read. Woman found slain, simply said.

Did Wilma Jerrickson have any children? Her body was even identified positively. No funeral.

His father wasn’t an out-of-the-closet-finally gay, or an in-the-children’s-bedroom abuser. Mother Diedre and Father weren’t yuppies or yippies or dope heads or deadheads.

They were for the most part loving individuals who made do with what God tossed their way. A traditional second generation Polish family who couldn’t understand their prodigal son.

He thought back, during a commercial for the new Michelob Dry, about the newswoman finishing her plaintive request in the appropriately sober tone, as good as any recovering and/or born again fill in the blank on Oprah or Geraldo might. He was thinking about her still when the next commercial for Lucky Dog dog food came on.

Tremulis reflected on his life at home, his too few nights working at the Hard Rock Cafe for people who gave a shit about him. He thought about how someone could go through the hardships Mike Surfer had and still smile every goddamn day. The others at the Marclinn, as well.

Szasz had lost his legs in the Amtrak wreck in 1974, O’Neil his arms in Lebanon, when the US Embassy was bombed. Or so he had heard. He wondered if the new generation of cripples were any prouder. The armless men with glasses never wore artificial limbs. Maybe it was a military upbringing. Semper Fi and all that.

Colin Nutman’s story was an odd one. His father was stationed at USAF Bentwaters in 1956 and was exposed to some weird radiation from an unidentified object his Venom night fighter chased over Suffolk. He didn’t know about the poisoning until after Mable Nutman was three months pregnant.

And what of the people who hadn’t found refuge at the Mardinn? Where did Blackstone Shatner fall? Or Reggie Givens, who couldn’t stay at the Mardinn three days in a row without needing to hustle? Mike had mentioned him several times, and Colin had told him that most everybody thought the Painkiller had gotten him.

He wondered what kind of childhood Reve had that she would hang out with freaks. That’s what they all were. And Evan Shustak, what the hell had happened to him to make him hide behind the mock display of The American Dream?

Most of all, he wondered what kind of father could call the Painkiller his son.

Patrol Log of The American Dream

Sat Dec 24 1988

AS I HAVE BEEN DOING SINCE THE TRAGADYTHE TENTH PRIMARILEY SET ON FINDING THE PAINKILLER.

8:15AM called 16th District (Chicago Aye). Nothing from night shift on Painkiller. Spoke w/ Officer Ileana Cantu. Recall the name, poss. from murder investigation of lawyer murdered on Lake Street El over summer months)?)

8:20AM Heard incredible story from Lynch about subway murder the night before. Had head the story from O’Malley the precinct captain. Even with ALL THAT’S BEEN GOING ON this is still hard to believe.

* * *

“…. they found some guy he actually exploded or somethin’ down round Roosevelt Street.”

“You’re shittin’,” Lynch said. Something to tell The American Dream, for sure! Maybe the guy would give him a few bucks toward blow. “Exploded.”

 
“Exactly.”

“Exploded,” Lynch repeated.

“Got shit in your ears, Addict? He fucking exploded.”

“Shit, don’t that beat all.” Lynch then told O’Malley that he would vote for the proper candidate in the mayoral election coming up, and the precinct captain left.

Minutes later, the American Dream walked up, making his rounds of Connors Park. Behind where the two of them stood in conversation was a row of abandoned buildings that once housed expensive strip joints. In those days, the late seventies, The American Dream could not do much to help the police deter such crime. He was not of drinking age. He listened to Lynch talk, and while the black man gesticulated with long, delicate fingers, he recalled the gaudy neon of The Candy Store and Selina’s KitKat Club. The street had smelled of a different kind of desperation back then.

“It was on the news this morning, didn’t make the papers,” Lynch said. “Kepp sayin’ you should get yourself a Walkman.”

“We’ve been through this, friend,” The American Dream replied. “It would hinder my crime fighting tactics.”