The Holy Terror (7 page)

I wonder if people like Laurie Dann, who killed a kid in a Winnetka preschool in May, or this guy the newspapers call The American Dream, he runs around with a heating pad for a cape and stops people from littering—do people like this do the bad or do the good because their lives are filled with chronic pain and they only have one kind of release?

My journals are my release. Fate is cruel.

* * *

“I don’t know why Mom Winona wouldn’t let me put on Crime Story last night,” Wally Grogan was saying as he walked with Eddy Diedzek past the Baptist church on Clark Street. “I mean, so Torello’s always shooting people! I know it’s not real, Jeez Louise! Except for the parts where Luca hits a lady.”

“Maybe she won’t let you watch ‘cause she thinks you’re a little peenie-boy,” Eddy returned, ready to fend off his friend’s blows.

“No, you dork.” The two ten-year-olds stopped to wave hello to the Rev. Marvin, the pastor of the church. Mom Winona said it was always a good idea to talk to men of the church, unless they were sidewalk preachers. Marvin Melone—his full name was hand-painted on the sign above the door—gave out the best candy at Halloween; the boys would say hello to him every day for that reason alone.

“Stay bundled up, boys!” The reverend admonished, as he walked up the front steps. “Even though you’ve only got another block, it only takes a second to get sick!”

“Yessir.” Both boys made a show of pulling their red scarves closer around their collars when they passed the church.

“Hey, let’s do that song we learned at school,” Eddy suggested.

“Which song?”

“You know, ‘Skokie’s Got Rhythm’.”

“You start.” Wally kicked a rusted can from the sidewalk to the street.

“Skokie’s got rhythm, rhythm all over, boom, check it out, boom boom, check it out,” Eddy did a kiddie version bump-and-grind. The song they sung in class was done round robin style, with Skokie being substituted with each classmate’s name. “Wally’s got rhythm.”

Just then, Eddy stepped onto a square of sidewalk that had the cement company’s name on it. Wally caught it.

“STINKFISH!” He bellowed, startling Eddy into looking down to see the box that read YURKES AND SONS, 1965. And the pile of frozen vomit beside it.

Wally, capering with his shadow, bumped into Eddy.

“The hell, you say!” Frank Haid had given the matter some thought and decided to confront the man with honesty and sincerity. Robert Dolezal was going for none of it. ”What, you think I’ve got a deuce on me? Gonna roll me, are you?”

Haid had waited in the grey-white mist that was Chicago twilight for three separate nights that week. He couldn’t ask the strip joint owner about the suffering man; on the street, everybody looked out for the other guy. It wasn’t like this years ago. Father had told him that, once upon a time, when all the Old Style signs read
ZIMNE PIWO
and you could fall asleep on the El and actually wake up to tell the story, once upon a faraway time, you had as much on the guy next door as he had on you.

Haid didn’t have much to offer anybody, let alone the next guy. So he offered the black-bearded man in the chair honesty.

He had stayed a good distance behind the man, not wanting to draw attention. North Clark Street was no longer the Skid Row that it was during the seventies, but it was still deserted. Only diehards for the sexually perverse came down to the leather shops or to see the female impersonators at The Baton.

The man wheeled north to Ontario, then turned toward the lakefront. The guy had perseverance, that was for sure. And Haid was right about the guy being a vet; he had an olive-on-white sticker on the back of the chair’s headrest. MEKONG RIVER YACHT CLUB. Certainly he’d seen enough of all this world could show him. Had shown him.

“I have the power to heal you,” Haid said, having no intention of giving up. He had kept pace with the vet nine blocks, the cold digging into his bones like cancer. Finally making his move at the corner of Ohio and Wabash, in the neon wash of the Cass Hotel, Haid felt certain that the flophouse was where the guy lived.

“What, and take me to heaven?” The man smirked and the sound was that of a smoker’s hack. “I been to heaven and they stuck me back down here in Hell. So, go on. I ain’t got no money, but you’re welcome to take my food stamps if you have to, man.”

“What are you talking about?” Haid was baffled: Did he... ?

“Do you think that I’m here to rob you?”

“Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do,” the vet said. “I killed a lot of innocent people when I was in-country, so...”

Both men stopped talking to watch the street corner’s only other sign of life: a Yellow cab sped to the south and careened around the Medina Temple.

“I’m not here to judge you,”Haid took a chance to move closer. Though the man’s size could be disproportionate because of the chair, he still seemed muscular enough to grab Haid and squeeze the shit out of him.

“That what they’re calling robbery these days? Sorry, I musta been sleeping when they put out the revised edition of Modern Slang and Euphemisms.”

“It’s what Father calls it.” The man’s denial so flustered Haid that he forgot about his book of psalms. He regained most of his composure by taking on his childhood persona. Bully. Intimidator.

Holy terror.

“Oh, I’ll save you, all right.” Haid said through clenched teeth.

He reached down swiftly, plunging his fist up against the vet’s chest. The man’s eyes bulged. Haid’s fist simmered and glowed, his thumb and fingers sinking through the layers of clothing first, and layers of skin second.

Haid clamped his other hand down over the crippled man’s mouth, to keep him from screaming. There was no telling about someone who had so little faith in God.

In a few seconds, both hands had disappeared into the sitting man’s body, and Haid was able to lift the entire body like a marionette and draw it to his own chest. The sizzling and the glowing started anew.

* * *

Several pieces of the body had fallen to the ground, but Haid was afraid to stay around and look for them. Father was prodding him to move on.

He didn’t notice the lake wind anymore, because his chest and arms were warm and tingling. The vet is reveling in his entrance to Heaven.

He walked over to State to catch a Chicago Avenue bus, hoping the route was 24 hour Owl Service. The healing process had taken much longer this time. Through the grates in the sidewalk, he could hear the coming of the State Street subway, running endlessly beneath an elevated hell.

“So here I am, I’m thinking,” Dean Conover glanced over at Aaron Mather, who was driving the unit tonight. “Like, why the hell is Division crawling up our asses over the bulletproof vests again? Three cops dusted this year, and because that last one, Doyle out of Wentworth, he only gets it once in the chest. Ba-bing! Time to talk about the vests again...”

He shook his head in disgust. Neither cop had to mention that Willett and Selfridge, partners out of Grand Crossing on the Far Southside, were shot in the head. Every Chicago cop had mixed emotions about the Kevlar vests. Aside from being uncomfortable in any season, constant wear caused the velcro straps to curl and not hold. Any subsequent vests had to be purchased by the individual cop.

The ultimate logic of the overall effectiveness of the vest was this: every gangbanger and street psycho, by the Chicago evolutionary scale, had long since learned to shoot for the head and/or armpit. And parents marveled when their sons and daughters figured out The Legend Of Zelda on the home Nintendo.

“And remember that detective out of Area 1, I forget his name, hit the S-curve on the Drive during a narcotics chase?” Mather had only been on the force for seven years, and knew as much about what went down in every alley as his partner. Every alley between Goose Island and Seneca Park.

“Right,” Conover hadn’t thought of that one. “A damn vest sure as hell isn’t going to keep you from dropping to the bottom of Lake Michigan!”

The blond cop, a ten-year veteran, turned south of Wabash. The call had come over the radio for their unit, 1844, to answer a possible assaultin-progress outside of the Cass Hotel. They could see the dull pink neon in the distance.

“Sure enough, the ‘C’ is burned out.” Mather gave a cursory nod to the right.

“Maybe it’s a subliminal thing to keep the straights out.”

“Yea, sure thing, Dean.”

“I’m selling the Orleans Street Bridge, too, did you know that?” While they talked, Conover’s ice-blue stare never left the street. Some of the people at the 18th District, blues and perps alike, swore that Conover never blinked, that his eyes simply narrowed to slits.

It turned out that it wasn’t the night desk at the Cass that had called 911, but a bartender at Murdy’s -- a bar of mixed clientele next door. A short alley ran between the two four-story brick buildings. A tall, blond man came out of the bar; the squadrol’s cherry flashed blue and red across his face.

“I’m the bartender, Mick Desmond.” When the cops didn’t respond, he swallowed. Both Conover and Mather had already noticed that there seemed to be no sign of an assault, and the bar was so quiet, there wasn’t any brawl going down in there, unless the bar catered to mimes.

“I know it’s awful quiet out here; guess I should of told the operator it was in the alley here.” He pointed over his right shoulder at an angle of darkness. Mather took a step in that direction; Conover took a moment to size up Desmond. He made six feet easy, hair that looked bottle blond hung shoulder-length and curled around ears that resembled mutant cantaloupes. Dressed in black slicks and a T-shirt that depicted a “Lounge Lizard,” he didn’t look too … weird. Conover wondered why the hell he was gay. Had to be the funky ears.

“See, I was out the service door, dumping empty boxes of Perrier. I heard voices, glanced up front and saw them in the light of the hotel.”

“Them? You knew these...?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that, no.” The bartender folded his arms over his chest. “I meant that, well, there was one guy threatening this other guy in a wheelchair, and...”

“Wait,” Conover interrupted. Mather was approaching the lip of the alley. “Maybe the guy was pissed because the guy in the chair was a dead beat.”

“Oh, no, you got that wrong. Respectfully, the guy in the chair lived at the Cass. He wasn’t a bum, no.”

“Yea, yea. Go on.” Shit, he thought. No gunshots, this guy’s long gone. With one guy in a chair, we know it wasn’t a lover’s quarrel. He whipped out a black Mead notebook to take a few notes, for the sake of keeping the force looking competent. He motioned for Desmond to keep talking.

“I didn’t see that he had a knife, it was just like he was threatening the crippled guy. I think his name was Dole, Dolby, something...”

Conover had already effectively tuned the guy out. He concentrated on his pencilled notes:

15 Nov, 88 11:07PM. Resp. to report of poss. assault., 642 N. Wabash. Spoke w. Mick Desmond, bartender at same ad.

“The guy standing looked more like your partner. I mean he had darker hair, maybe a little white, kind of a husky voice.”

“That all you can give me, Des?”

“Hey, I had to get back inside, man! Murdy’s out on a shoot in Milwaukee, but that don’t mean one of his spies isn’t around!”

Ben Murdy was a local celebrity who had made dozens of commercials in the last ten years; some, for Lite beer and Church’s Fried Chicken, were national. He ran three bars in the city and knew quite a bit about the human flotsam that drifted by his establishments. Mather had read several articles on Murdy in the Trib and in an alternative weekly, The Reader. He was on location at the Milwaukee Penal Institute in Wauwatosa doing a pilot for the Fox network.

Mather was about to go back to the squad when he heard something down the alley. Probably a rat, but still. He drew his piece and stepped forward cautiously. Conover followed, a beat behind.

Later, Mather would tell Area 5 Homicide that he didn’t know why serial killer surfaced in his brain. Two dead logs in the stream of Mather’s involvement in two “thrill killer” cases. He’d put in several hundred man hours on the Dennis Cassady “Rapid Transit” murders in the fall of ‘85 and nearly the same amount on the Tylenol-cyanide murders in June of ‘82. The latter still unsolved.

He would also tell the dicks that the smell of the charred flesh took him totally unawares. He’d thought that the Cassady murders were brutal, but....

Calling for his partner to come closer, Mather took a step forward and saw the silhouette of a large, spoked wheel.

“I heard the bartender saying that the guy in the wheelchair lived in the hotel.”

“Uh-huh.” Conover had closed the gap between them.

“Did he say he saw the guy go back into the hotel?”

“Not that he could tell, he was moaning about his boss catching him loafing. Get this, the guy’s doing a pilot for a bunch of gays at Stateville, they’re calling it ‘A Romeo in Joliet.’ And...”

Mather had pulled his flashlight several steps back and now flashed it on the wheel.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said in a breathless whisper when he saw the dead man, and what little remained of him.