The Holy Terror Read online

  Tremulis moved closer. The smell of Reve’s skin had him virtually hyperventilating. Her hair was his night; eyes twin globes of tranquility that calmed him, preventing him from running to the bathroom. When she spoke, he averted his gaze to a hanging plant. Then back to her face. All that face.

  “We’ll have to patrol together one night,” The American Dream said to him conversationally.

  “It’s great that you’ve been so kind to Mike,” Reve said. She sounded giddy, yet none of the younger people were drinking. The atmosphere was still a heady one, as so many indoor gatherings are in the winter of Chicago.

  Her voice was opening day at Wrigley Field, Tremulis thought, full of promise against inevitable odds. (Let’s not forget, the last time the Cubs won the National League pennant, the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Too long had he gone without seeing a single handicapped woman—permanently handicapped—and it was as if they hid themselves behind closed doors in quiet suburban settings.

  “Mike said you have a muscle problem,” she said.

  “I’ve... had a difficult time dealing with my disease,” he said, his head hung low like he had been brought before the principal for throwing snowballs. “My doctors won’t give me a complete diagnosis. Pain in my back, neck spasms, things like that. Like—”

  He stopped himself from saying like you have.

  “Most likely, your physicians were stumped by their inability and suggested you see a psychoanalyst to cover up for their own blundering,” The American Dream said from the end of the pool table. “Pretty much the same thing happened with me.”

  He was right on the button, but did he have to bring it up in a way that the two could be compared? The costumed man then scratched the skin underneath his left wrist brace in five quick strokes. The sound was that of a cheap comb being raked across a dead man’s scalp in a funeral home’s prep room.

  “A neurologist out in Berwyn gave me a CT scan back in 1984, told me to consider the fact that my symptoms were psychosomatic, and billed me for four hundred and eighty dollars.” Tremulis said this figuring, what the hell, he was in it this far. Didn’t matter how much dirty laundry Reve discovered anyways; he’d never have a chance with her.

  “I still see a psychiatrist,” The American Dream said. Tremulis wondered how he could stand wearing those wrist braces all the time. He also wondered where he got the money.

  “I get disability from the state,” he said and Tremulis wondered if he was psychic, as well. “He’s in the Garland Building over on Wabash, Kal-El Wagner, M.D.”

  Superman’s Kryptonian name, Tremulis thought. Figures. Well, at least the shrink’s name wasn’t Elvis!

  From Reve: “Vic, how does coping with this affect your interaction with people around you? Obviously, enough people before me have said that your disease isn’t as noticeable as Mike’s, or even Colin’s. I haven’t seen you pamper your weak side.”

  Wait until I get outside and grind my elbows into my rib cage, is what he wanted to say.

  “If you don’t mind my asking...”

  “I’m always feeling on edge,” he said. Imagining her spastic arm helped. “It’s like this, the best way to describe it is, ah, it’s like grabbing a jar of mayonnaise from the fridge and there’s this split second where you find yourself thinking that the lid is not screwed on tight, and that you will drop the jar, and then the sudden head rush of knowing that you really do have a safe grip. It won’t drop after all. No stain, no mess. Forever that split second.” He couldn’t believe he got that out without stuttering.

  “Jesus God, save my bod,” Reve exclaimed, eyes wide. “What a great analogy!”

  “It’s something I always think about,” he said. “Helps me get through situations, like being on a high wire.”

  “It would also greatly depend on the size of the mayonnaise jar,” The American Dream said, mixing Eastern religion with supermarket sense.

  “Nice analogy, Evan,” Reve replied, turning back to Tremulis. “Funny you should mention the high wire, I always seem to feel as if I’m falling head first from a tall building and can hear the wind whistling through my clothing, and as I get closer to impact, I focus on all these faces and hats running from my ‘flight corridor’ so that I won’t get my pulp and guts on them.”

  She made a face saying this, either from visualizing the scene again, or from regret at bringing it up in the first place. Tremulis couldn’t decide which.

  He was glad he didn’t have the balls to bring up how he truly felt: that God had a loaded .44 to his temple and he was forced into giving the world a blowjob. And when Earth—or maybe just Chicago—shuddered in orgasm, why, the good Lord would find no further use for him and simply blow out his cheap whore brains.

  Mike Surfer was looking his way, and he thought, this is it, this is definitely it, when the others all turned and he realized that they were staring at the two cops that had entered through the front doors. “Lake Shore Drive” by Aliotta, Haynes & Jeremiah was playing on the cassette recorder: the song had covered up the familiar shoop shoop of the doors.

  The most tragic thing about the scene was that everybody present thought that the policeman were there because someone had called to complain about the noise.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Patrolmen Rizzi and Morisette had taken the call from Henry Jerrickson. Grandma’s nephew had not seen her outside the Theater and assumed the weather was too harsh for her. He went home to his apartment on Monticello, watched the T.G.I.F. comedies on ABC, drank three bottles of Amstel Light, started feeling guilty about not checking further into his auntie’s absence, and decided to call the rooming house.

  He found that, after all the small talk she’d made about her living quarters, and all the pretense he’d given towards actually listening, he could not for the life of him recall the name of the place. The Ameritech phone operator did not have a listing for Mackey or MacLachlan Rooming House on Randolph. He took a cursory glance through the Yellow Pages, long enough to see that he could be wasting a hell of a lot of time scanning through the lists of rooming houses, boarding houses, and hotels. Besides, “Lady Beware” was on Home Box Office at 9:45 and he had heard that Diane Lane showed her breasts in the film.

  He called the Community Services number at Eleventh and State, thinking it wouldn’t hurt to tell them that his auntie was in a wheelchair, considering that Painkiller guy in the news lately, and he would like the beat patrolmen on Randolph Street to please check in on her. Then he opened another bottle of Amstel Light and watched the film about yet another obsessed woman-stalker.

  And so it was that the two cops showed up at the Marchinn at just past ten o’clock. Rizzi did most of the talking, as Morisette had the better handwriting of the two.

  Lester Rizzi had thinning grey hair that looked as if it had been trimmed at the Black and Decker store on North Avenue. A cleft chin on an otherwise square head. His lips thin, pursed they resembled a puncture wound. He kept his right hand in his leather jacket pncket while he talked, gesticulating with his free hand at the end of each question as would a neurotic comedian.

  Al Morisette, whose hair was still black and smelled of Brylcreem, was the older of the two. If you’ve ever been around a Chicago cop, you could compare his age with others you’ve seen, and hair color has nothing to do with it. Nor the stories they told, or the amounts of doughnuts and coffee they consumed. It’s in the eyes. In the department, the job went for the eyes first, bypassing the jugular. Those same eyes would all too often stare down the barrel of a shot glass before he drank it. And down the barrel of his department issued before he ate it.

  The elder cop had sallow skin and a hint of five o’clock shadow; if he were a character drawn in a comic book, the lower half of his face would have been washed with a generous amount of Zip-A-Tone. Black, haunted eyes that followed everyone while he wrote in his ringed notebook with impeccable penmanship. Tremulis thought that if the Morisette had lost the badge that was pinned chest level onto his
right pocket, and maybe put on a white silk ascot over his collar, he would look like Lon Chaney in any of his Universal films of the thirties.

  Afraid to sleep. Afraid of the full moon, because it made the city around him that much more lunatic.

  Tremulis also pinned Rizzi’s grey hair on the fact that the cop had seen more things in this city, events that had made so little sense, that he was somehow trying to age himself into retirement.

  “Do you happen to have a Wilma Jerrickson in residence here?” Rizzi asked

  Most of the men had walked or wheeled closer to the cops. If it had been a race, Mike Surfer would have come in a close third, with Lucas Winter shambling just in front of him. He stopped pushing his wheels at the cop’s question and his hand went up to his shunt like it was a magnet.

  “Mercy, somethin’s happen to Granma!”

  “Give it up, man,” Cohn Nutman said from the front desk. “What’s this about?”

  Tremuhis, Reve Towne, and The American Dream moved in closer. Reve touched the hand grips on Mike’s chair. Rizzi gave the girl the once over, then asked the American Dream:

  “Who are you supposed to be dressed as?”

  “Officer, I am what this city is built on,” he answered like he was singing the National Anthem at Wrigley Field.

  Rizzi, who’d encountered the American Dream months before while on the beat with Ben Christopher, gave his partner a patented city copper dig-this glance, his tongue busy mapping his lower gum line.

  “I am The American Dream.” They all expected him to say it. Behind the costumed man, Reve Towne glanced first at Tremulis, then at Mike. Vic was caught up in Evan’s speech. Mike was shaking, because he knew.

  Just as she knew. ”You are here because you are thinking of The Painkiller,” The American Dream said. Morisette’s pen was poised, but he wrote nothing down.

  “Do you have to talk like you’re in a play or something?” From Rizzi as he glanced around the room, and Tremulis thought that the guy might believe that, just maybe, someone there at the Marclinn had something to do with all of this.

  Tremulis glanced around, as well, and saw Mike Surfer starting to shut down. He’d tried to escape into an alternate reality enough times to know how it was done. The man who had talked down to him earlier, Chuso, spoke in his usual tactful way: “We was spec’latin’ on the Pain guy awhiles ago...”

  “I guess,” Rizzi began, looking sideways at his partner, “that our little reception here means that the woman was in residence.”

  “Is, partner,” Morisette admonished, but not quickly enough. “We don’t know that—”

  “Lordy, she’s not...” Surfer’s harsh whisper was slightly more audible than that of a repentant on his deathbed. Lucas Winter was first to put a hand on his shoulder Nutman let go with a deep sigh.

  “It’s like... like a heart attack or a fall and she’s—”

  “Well, maybe it is, and...” Morisette tried to reassure the crippled black man, feeling crappy because rationalizing a woman is maybe dead of a heart attack was supposed to make all of them feel better.

  “—and she’s got a pin in her hip and we can go on up to Henrotin and be seem’ oh jesus oh mercy.” He could say no more. Spittle was coming out of his shunt and the corners of his mouth.

  “Well, let’s just start at square one, okay?” Rizzi looked back at Morisette as if his partner was a court stenographer and he was chief prosecutor for the state. He also knows in his gut that The Painkiller was out hunting, he liked these brutal nights, as if he was punishing the brave ones.

  “We caught the call, talked to this guy, claims Jerrickson wa—is his auntie or something.” He pronounced the word to rhyme with Dante.

  “Her nephew—” Surfer’s mouth moved hike he had just recently tried gluing it shut.

  “Yea, yea, yea.” Rizzi barked it out like he was carrying a box of “Yea’s” down a stairwell and dropped them. At least, that was what Tremulis thought. “Let me get on with it, please.”

  “Heartless l’il bugger, entya?” Nutman put his two cents in.

  “You have to understand,” Morisette said. “There’s a damn serial killer out there...”

  “And I can understand your need to feel independent,” Rizzi finished, as he had wanted to. “But did any of you think to stand outside with her until her nephew showed up? That’s what this is all about, he thought maybe she had called it off because of the weather and then got to feeling he should check up on her.”

  “She wasn’t out by the Theater?”Nutman said, thinking about the psalm book the preacher had brought in.

  “We checked before coming here, no chair, nothing.” Morisette said. “The girl who runs Deadline Business Services told us where Jerrickson lives.”

  Reve cracked open a can of Miller High Life from one of the coolers, startling everybody. Tremulis thought it was meant for Mike, but Reve took three quick swigs for herself. Why wasn’t anybody saying anything? Letting Mike do all the talking. . . why didn’t he have anything to say?

  “She never wanted anyone out there, it was her quiet time,” Mike said. “Lord, officers, it was rush hour an’ she was right there onna corner!”

  “Is that right?” Rizzi countered; as if this was the first they had heard of that.

  “Don’t … let me ask you all,” Morisette said. “Don’t you people get out at all?” He hooked in particular at Tremulis and Evan and Reve as he said this. Tremulis felt fatigued. They were criminal because they had no physical deformities...

  “Anybody think to look and see if maybe she’s tooling around State?” It was Etch speaking, rare for him, usually so quiet. “Maybe she got caught up in her Christmas shopping, lost track of the time...”

  “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.

  PART TWO

  Late Winter 1988 – Early Spring 1989

  Chapter Twenty-five

  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.