Winter of frozen dreams (2 page)

The assistant DA, Chris Spencer, did a set of jumping jacks to pound the blood through his system. He had been playing ice hockey when the call came to report downtown immediately. Underneath his parka bulged the heavy pads of a hockey uniform. Canvas sneakers covered his freez-

ing feet. Spencer sneezed and tugged his balaclava over his head.

"Okay," said the coroner, "lets get the rest of the body out."

After a minute of shoveling, everyone ceased his efforts to keep warm and stared in astonishment. The man in the snowbank was colder than any of them. A digital timepiece on the left wrist was all the clothing he sported. The bashing about the skull, which had been uncovered first, looked to be no more than bumps and scratches compared to what was next revealed. The genitals had been battered and were hideously swollen. The penis was huge—tumescent and bloodied—and the distended skin wore an ugly shade of purple. The testicles were bloated, like two shiny black tomatoes brimming to burst.

A camera shutter clicked. Wind kicked through the valley. Though it seemed impossible, the day got colder.

"Un-fucking-real," gasped a cop.

"A jury is going to love those glossies," someone muttered.

Lulling ignored the banter. He studied Jerry Davies, who was bent at the waist and vomiting into the pristine snow.

Coffee splashed out of the Styrofoam cup as Jerry Davies raised it to his mouth. His Adams apple bobbed as he sipped. The courage summoned to enter police headquarters in the morning had collapsed when he'd viewed the body. It was a morbid Christmas present, naked and battered and stuck in the snow, the arm extended like a ghoulish ribbon.

Davies paced the room. He wondered how long he could endure his own recollections of December 23rd, and when he considered Barbaras reaction he shuddered. She had secured a promise that he speak to no one regarding

their furtive errand. Now he had brought her unwarranted trouble, and that was not his intention. He simply wanted to be relieved of the memory.

While Detective Lulling probed the past two days, the frozen corpse pricked Daviess remembrance—a vivid Technicolor slide of the genitals flicked before his eyes, as lucid as if it had been beamed onto the wall, and abruptly Davies was hunched over a wastepaper basket. What tasted like dry, hard chips of wood spit out of his mouth and clattered against the metal.

Davies wiped the debris from his lips and forced down more coffee. In his work boots, leather and crepe-soled, he paced the room again. His clothes, which had not been changed in a day and a half, were as rumpled as his psyche. The khaki Haggar slacks and brown V-neck sweater were glued to his body by perspiration and fear. The wire-rimmed glasses slid down his nose, and instinctively he pushed them back.

According to his drivers license, Jerry Davies, age thirty-one, was 5'10", 160 pounds, yet he appeared bulkier. A loneliness nestled into the furrows of his face, a loneliness that had been collecting since early in life, a loneliness that had polished deep, sad scoops beneath his eyes. Fear and bewilderment had aged him a decade in two days. However, the eyes glassy with tears, the quiver in the voice as he tried to explain how things happened, the "sir" at the completion of every other statement indicated a naivete, a boyishness. Jerry Davies was a man who had seen little of the world, yet that small glimpse had wearied him immensely.

"When can I go home?"

"That depends, Jerry. We'd like to know who it was you helped bury," said Lulling.

Davies gripped his stomach. His complexion blanched. "I need to go to the bathroom again, please."

"Officer Cloutier is right outside the door."

As Davies was escorted down the hall, Lulling stirred his vending machine coffee with a wooden stick. There was nothing more to wring out of Davies, not on Christ-

mas Day, Lulling thought. Though Davies claimed not to know who the dead man was, the information already extracted was plentiful; the lieutenant wished only it hadn't been so agonizing to mine.

The interrogation was in its fourth hour. Davies had answered inquiries concerning his personal history and his relationship with a Barbara Hoffman tersely and with reluctance. Examining his connection to the body in the snowbank and its transportation from Hoffmans apartment to Tomahawk Ridge proved excruciating work. Davies had stammered, sobbed, hyperventilated as the recollection became too real. His fragility had alarmed Lulling, who had Davies taken to a local hospital for an examination. The doctor declared him to be suffering from extreme emotional trauma and lack of sleep but with no ostensible physical ailment.

Ordinarily Lulling would have been contemptuous of such a performance. With Davies he felt pity. Lulling had talked sports with the distraught Davies to calm his nerves. Besides his fiancee, Barbara Hoffman, and his job, cataloging and shipping educational films for the University of Wisconsin, Department of Audio-Visual Instruction, sports was the single subject Davies knew much about. They had discussed the Packers 7 dismal season and the U.W. Badgers 7 football campaign and jawed as though farm boys on a lazy afternoon stroll. Of course the loathsome topic always returned, and the detective would drag his companion farther along the road, trying to keep his panic in check.

Had Davies seen Barbara since the night of December 23rd? Who decided to drive to Tomahawk Ridge? Was their relationship sexual? Barbara said she found the body in her bathroom; did she say how it got there?

Davies would fold and refold his fingers, and he 7 d spit an answer, never more than a few words, and they inched ahead, Davies trembling as though he were standing outside in the twenty-below-zero afternoon.

When the witness returned from the bathroom—Davies had passed from suspect to witness in the detectives

judgment—Lulling informed him that he would be arraigned for harboring and abetting a felon. In the morning he'd have to submit to a polygraph test to corroborate his story.

Davies neither smiled nor frowned. It was as if the words struck straw. Barbaras scorn would be infinitely harder to bear than arrest and a night in the county jail.

Davies shrugged. He wanted sleep. He hadn't slept for a day and a half, and he wanted the terrifying dream of his waking hours to end. Things had not happened as he had imagined. Regardless of his emphasis to the contrary, he saw Lullings suspicions gravitate toward Barbara.

Would she scuttle their wedding plans? For a second he feared he'd freeze numb. Then Jerry Davies did what had been the pattern of his life—he surrendered. He surrendered to the wheel of destiny set spinning, wobbling, careening when he'd met Barbara Hoffman at Jan's Health Spa in 1974.

Fingerprinted and booked, he was led to the building's seventh floor and locked alone in a cell in the county jail.

Feet propped on the desk, pipe drawing an easy fire, Chuck Lulling collected his thoughts on Jerry Davies and reviewed the bizarre tale that had interrupted his Christmas.

The data sheet said Gerald Davies had been born and reared in Spring Green, a rural community tucked into the prosaic Wisconsin River valley, forty-five miles west of Madison. He was the youngest of four children from the marriage of Leo and Ruth Davies, a union that had disintegrated when Jerry was still a kid. Davies had not seen or conversed with his father in sixteen years.

Ruth Davies raised the clan alone and in impoverished circumstances. She worked as a seamstress and took on odd jobs. As the children became of age they moved away.

One brother enlisted in the navy. His sister married. Jerry had followed his siblings' example, and upon graduation from high school he enrolled at the U.W.-Madison, more out of aimlessness than academic orientation. After three semesters he quit the university and got a job at a Goodyear Tire center in Madison. But he could not break away from the hold of his mother. Every weekend he returned to Spring Green to visit Ruth and attend the high schools football and basketball games.

In 1968 he was hired by the university's Department of Audio-Visual Instruction. The work suited him. He earned less than $10,000 a year. The most significant of Daviess dozen years in Madison was 1974, when he'd gathered the temerity to enter Jans Health Spa.

Lulling knew Jans. The establishment was the most notorious of the massage parlors in Madison. At Jans a person could get massaged, engage in oral sex or intercourse, watch two women make love, get tied up in leather and whipped, score a lid of dope, or buy a small-caliber weapon. For Madison, Jans was hard-core.

The sex business in Wisconsin's capital had burgeoned since the early seventies. What had been a small, clandestine network was thrust into public view during the era of progressive attitudes toward sexual behavior and city hall s liberal interpretation of the vice codes.

Massage parlors thrived within the shadow of the state capitol. An adult bookstore opened next to a dentists office. A nude photography studio rented retail space adjacent to a whole-foods store. Escort services advertised in the yellow pages. The public presence of the skin trade in Madison—a place Life magazine had once characterized as the ideal city in America in which to live and raise a family—outraged conservative members of the community. Zoning ordinances and city council resolutions were used as weapons to curtail the spread of the prosperous blue businesses. Civil libertarians forged an uneasy alliance with massage parlor owners to battle these tactics.

Chuck Lulling wasn't concerned with political issues or with sexual mores. What he needed to understand was

the relationship between a timid country kid and a woman who had persuaded him to bury a dead man in a snowbank.

Daviess initial visit to Jan's was profound in two respects: it took three days and a six-pack of Old Style beer for him to gather the courage to enter the premises, and it was the first time a woman had ever touched his penis. Otherwise his first couple of samplings of what the massage world offered were strictly routine. On his third visit he was introduced to Barbara Hoffman.

Barbara was different. She didn't linger about the lobby in peekaboo negligees and black lace panties. She didn't toss seductive glances, didn't paint her face to resemble a Kewpie doll. A natural beauty emanated from her. Brown hair fell past her shoulders and framed a delicate face. The skin was smooth and pale. Her eyes were flecked brown and held a gentleness he hadn't expected to see. Her lips were not splashed red and were tilted almost pensively. Davies was immediately entranced. Barbara didn't smile coyly; she looked straight into his eyes. When she unbuttoned her blouse, Barbara didn't fondle her breasts and feign an excitement she didn't feel. She acted as shy as he felt. She went slowly. She coaxed him into conversation. When his cock stiffened, she didn't yank it in a hurry to finish, but played with it, coddled the erection between her fingers as if it were something special.

In the beginning Davies visited Jan's approximately once a month, always requesting Barbara and often sitting for an hour before his turn because she was occupied with other customers. Soon the frequency of his visits increased. He became impatient for her, longed for her touch, desired her presence. It was not the sexual release but the physical and emotional contact that Davies yearned for. Some sessions he didn't even climax. Barbara rubbed his belly and talked or encouraged his talk, and though his penis lay limp, Davies was satisfied simply by her attention. The 35-minute sessions expired in what seemed a dozen heartbeats.

It was Barbara who suggested they extend the relationship beyond the confines of the massage parlor. Da-vies was surprised and elated. That they dated only irregularly was irrelevant. Barbara was the first woman Davies had dated, the first woman he had ever kissed. Davies confessed to a friend that he was in love.

In May 1976 Barbara Hoffman quit working in the massage parlors. A clerical position at EDS Federal, a large firm that processed medical insurance claims, was available, and Barbara took the job and returned to school part-time.

Because Barbara didn't have a car, Davies volunteered transportation to work. Every morning he arrived at her State Street apartment and drove her out to Madison's south side to work, then drove back to the U.W. campus and his job at the audiovisual department.

It was not a normal relationship, Davies admitted to Lulling, yet he had little reference for comparison. Their moments together didn't match the real depth of his feeling. Barbara wouldn't allow him more than one or two dates a week. Indeed Barbara had difficulty reciprocating his love. Their sexual contact was limited, and they had refrained altogether from intercourse. Barbara experienced grave problems expressing physical love, Davies reported, and she attended a therapy group at the U.W. Hospital & Clinics to help conquer her fear of intimacy.

The irony of this statement was not lost on Chuck Lulling. Davies had met the woman in a massage parlor, where she performed sexual favors for whoever might amble through the door, but she refused to engage in premarital sex because of a psychological block. And the smitten lover accepted the arrangement. Barbara was fragile, Davies said. He trusted her.

It was too absurd and too ludicrous not to be true, Lulling decided. The interview with Davies had been taped, and Lulling jabbed the rewind button and spliced Daviess clipped, hesitant answers into a coherent statement.

For Jerry Davies December 23rd started inauspiciously. The alarm clamored, and after a minute of resistance he hauled his sleepy frame out of bed. Though he didn't have to report to work until 8:30, Davies rose at 7:00 a.m. so he could drive Barbara to her job. He scratched his belly and pushed open the window for a breath of air. Despite his years in Madison he still expected Spring Green and the ripe smells of cow manure and chemical fertilizer and fresh-cut alfalfa. What entered was a faint whiff of diesel fuel and the hydraulic growl of a garbage truck as it emptied the trash bins behind K mart. Davies zippered his green parka. He lumbered out of the apartment on South Park Street, scraped the frost from the windshield of his Chevy Caprice, and drove to the curbside at 638 State Street.