The Holy Terror Read online

  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.

  * * *

  It surprised Mather that the body had been identified so quickly. He hadn’t expected what was left to be IDed at all. He had bet Conover he’d spring for the full tab—cover, drinks, all of it—when Koko Taylor played at Kingston Mines later that month. Conover went for it, saying on how they identified floaters pulled from the river in Stokes baskets with their faces and prints eroded by time, so, sure the corpse was going to be identified. He reminded Mather that Cleveland police had positive I.D.’ed two of the Torso Murderer’s victims. To which, Mather added that Cleveland Police still had eleven unidentified torso cases in their files, plus the torsos in Youngstown and Toledo during that same same period of the thirties.

  It looked at first that Mather might win the bet. An hour after the two uniforms had shown up at the scene, a dozen gapers stood beyond the yellow banners that were familiar to those who watched the nightly news in Chicago. The beat officers from Unit 1823 kept the crowd at bay.

  Conover and Mather had been joined in the breezeway by Det. Lt. Jake Daves of Area 3 Violent Crimes, a police photographer, a reporter for UPI, Shaün McCoppin, who happened to be grabbing a drink at Murdy’s, and assistant M.E. Frank Bervid. The junior medical examiner had arrived last, while the cops were standing around the corpse at different angles, speculating on the instrument of death.

  Conover suggested a blowtorch had done the job. McCoppin offered that it might have been a hatchet; but Lt. Daves still wouldn’t allow him copies of the Crime Scene shots. The remains consisted of a torso, a right forearm, and both legs from the knees down. Unless Desmond was juiced when he called 911, this was the guy from the Cass. The wheelchair, an old Everett-Jennings, lay on its side, between the cops and the corpse. Nothing could be touched until Forensics dusted, and the unit had yet to show.

  The man had been wearing a grey sweatshirt and jeans. The clothes had been partially burned. This was what made Conover think it was a blowtorch and not a hatchet. What scared all of the men was the fact that the position of the legs seemed to suggest that they, along with the torso, had rested in the chair before it tipped over.

  That whoever killed the man had done it while he was helpless in his chair. A very grim thought.

  After Bervid had pulled up in his Chevrolet Impala, with vanity plates that read AWTOP C, he took one look at what lay on the ground, pronounced him dead, and told everyone he was going back home to watch Insomniac Theater on Channel 7. No way he was going to be able to sleep without dreaming about what lay before them.

  The Crime Scene Unit dusted the chair, dumpster, and the surrounding concrete. A triangular path was chalked around the corpse and wheelchair.

  Mather and Conover stood over a steam vent, thawing out. What had struck the blond cop privately was the dead man’s collarbones. At the point where the dismemberment had been fused over, the collarbone poked through the reddish black skin. Conover had once dated a girl from Louisville, Kentucky. She had sent him into multiple paroxysms by licking the insides of his collarbones. Years ago, a world away. A time when he lived for nothing more than hanging out at the Vogue Theater every night.

  The corpse’s partly exposed collarbones looked like bleached chicken drumsticks.

  Lt. Daves talked with the man from UPI. The photographer and the techies packed it in. The meat wagon pulled up and the remains were bagged, to be taken to Cook County Morgue where he tentatively became John Doe #47-88.

  Chapter Eight

  Recalling the sticker from Nam adhering to the back of the victim’s wheelchair, Lt. Daves expected that the latents drawn from the chair would come through the military database. This was not to be the case, but when they put the prints through the Illinois Offender database, the following came out:

  LATENT SEARCH REQ ILL OFF TIE-IN DIRK FED BLD

  Robert Hodge Dolezal AKA HODGE AKA COUNTRY...Male Cauc DOB 4-11-47 Camden NJ...LKA Hotel Waldrop, 12 South Halsted...Priors: ‘74 week in County, misdemeanor...’79-’81 Joliet Correctional, assault with intent, crowbar weapon, dispute over drinks at After Hours, 112 West Van Buren. ‘84 six months prob false representation. Parole officer, Isadore Eugene...

  First, the detective said “Bingo.” Second, he cursed the fact that information logged into the database was rarely updated by the same person, and had no real sense of continuity when it came to which, if any, of the entries had “background” to the situation that might prove useful. Like the network for missing children.

  The Illinois combase was a headache and heartache for any Chicago detective. Even those who didn’t know how to work a computer. And there were many who didn’t.

  Daves half expected the head to show up in a waste container along the State Street Mall, a prize won by a bag lady’s grappling hook hand.

  He had said to the reporter, who would want to dismember a cripple? The wire services would pick up the line and an enterprising Rupert Murdoch type at the Sun-Times would coin the term “Painkiller.”

  The detective stood alone, his partner having gone into Murdy’s for a drink. Daves had been involved in the Andriot/Dolenz spree, the Gecht/Korkaralis ripper murders where the killers ate their victims’ severed breasts. He’d handled gang bangers and gay bashers, sixteen-year olds who fucked a med student while smashing a concrete block onto her head during their climaxes, and just last week there was a crack addict on Willard Court who had jammed her crack-addicted baby head first between the hot water heater and the roach-infested wall because she didn’t want to share her fix.

  But this...

  He made a mental note to have Forensics check for acid on the chair.

  The El rumbled by like distant thunder under State Street. Somewhere on the platform below, a saxophone player blew out how notes to “The Lover’s Concerto” again and again.

  * * *

  The newspapers handled the dismemberment murder on Wabash Avenue each in their own way. The conservative Tribune ran the story in 26 point Century Bold Roman on the first page of the Chicagoland section the next morning:

  Grisly killing near Hancock has police stymied

  The Sun-Times, still as sensationalistic as the New York Post even though Rupert Murdoch had sold the paper eighteen months before to start the Fox television network, devoted the entire front page to the murder:

  VAGRANT DISMEMBERED

  NEAR GOLD COAST

  Much the same way a reporter coined the phrase “flying saucer” after interviewing Kenneth Arnold regarding the disks he saw over Mount Rainier in June of 1947, Sun-Ti
mes reporter Nora Chvatal rephrased a comment by Det. Lt. Jake Daves of Harrison District Violent Crimes as “Does Chicago have a Pain Killer stalking its streets?” The article was continued inside the tabloid-size paper, a note at the bottom of page one read See DISMEMBER, pg. 7.

  PHASES, an alternative weekly newspaper catering for the most part to the clubs scene on the north side, somehow came into possession of an on the scene photograph, and the editor ran it above the fold on the November 18th issue, borrowing from the Sun-Times in the process.

  In blinding white Baskerville type over a stark scene of blacks and greys, the story was told:

  PAINKILLER:

  Chicago’s got a live one again.

  The Tribune did not pick up on the catchphrase until the next known disappearance, five days later. Someone at the news desk evidently knew that the papers in Gotham sold better when David Berkowitz was referred to as Son of Sam as opposed to the dull-sounding .44 Killer.

  * * *

  Painkiller didn’t sound like there was a psycho out there in the streets. As with moon-faced Berkowitz, or even Jack the Ripper a century ago, the public was mystified and curious at a name like that. Painkiller. A few people were even known to let the word roll off their tongue, see how it sounded aloud.

  Chapter Nine

  The words and the pictures and the cold city reality were digested by many that day after the first known murder.

  Victor Tremulis took time out from writing in his journal about what it would feel like if he first masturbated, then slit his wrist, and then drained his blood into the recently emptied shaft, and read what the indifferent print writers and editors had to say about the killer. Or, as Tremulis thought of him, the new kid on the butcher’s block.

  He sat in front of the Wendy’s on Quincy Court, letting the Sports and Business pages scatter like scared pests in the November wind as he concentrated on the story, fascinated.

  He was as curious about murder as he was mutilation.

  * * *

  Mike Surfer and Wilma Jerrickson sat near the back of the Marclinn lobby because Mike was involved in one of the three-times-a-day cleaning of his neck shunt.

  The Impact brand portable aspirator box lay on the man’s lap, and at this point, Surfer was doing no more than fiddling with the contents, doing a mock inventory. At times like these, Wilma Jerrickson, known as Grandmother or Gramma to most of the Marclinn’s residents and visitors, thought that Mike Surfer acted like a stubborn child who did not want to clean his room.

  When he had tired of fiddling with the plastic-wrapped aspirator tubing, Mike brought up the subject of the man in the wheelchair killed up by the Cass Hotel. The story in the Sun-Times had said the man’s name was Robert Dolezal. Surfer usually read The Defender, Chicago’s black daily, but the somewhat propagandist, even to blacks, tabloid ignored the Wabash Avenue killing in favor of a front page tirade against President-elect Bush. But if the victim had been black...

  Mike Surfer avoided thinking that Reggie Givens hadn’t been back to the Marclinn in a few days. He told himself upon waking that morning, before seeing the newspaper, that he would wheel on up to the Hard Times tavern later.

  “Somepin about that man getting hisseif kilt in that chair.” Wilma knew that Surfer started most of his conversations with a simple statement.

  “It is hard to believe the detail the papers will have in this day and age,” she said, pushing at the aspirator with a bent finger, prodding Surfer into getting the cleaning over with.

  “I stopped watching the news, on the television, you know.”

  “I know, Gramma.”

  Wilma, who had for all true purposes except for the mail system had given up her last name in the late seventies, was a white seventy-five year old with hair the color of the haze you sometimes see around a winter’s moon. She had never told anyone, confided in anyone, why she was confined to a wheelchair. She was one of only two women currently living at the Marclinn. Katrina “call me Cat” Townsend was also white and about twenty years Wilma’s junior. Cat still wore black toreador pants most every day of the week, her white (with a milky transparency) shin braces clamped over them just below the knees.

  “Sad thing when anybody dies,” she said, looking down at the glass on the table beside them -- a twelve-ounce tumbler with Walter Payton grinning on the front. The back of the glass listed ten achievements or records that the running back had set while on the Chicago Bears.

  She took a sip of the ginand tonic—her “eye opener”—within, and the level of the drink dropped to 4. Most 100-yard games—77.

  Mike Surfer looked up, perhaps still thinking about Givens.

  “Never met the man, though it be say in the paper that he was some kinda crook once,” he said, absently running a heavily-calloused hand over the right wheel of his chair. His skin was almost a greyish-brown in the area below his little finger, from years of gripping the wheel. “I ax you though, Gramma, it not right for that to happen to a guy.”

  The two could have been lovers on a park bench; Wilma’s’ chair nearly touching Surfer’s, the wheels turned slightly to accommodate the fact. There was a sticker of the Honky Tonk Man, a character in one of her beloved wrestling programs, on the arm of her chair. She had gotten the sticker from a box of Crispy Critters, which she still ate even though the wheaty animal crackers got caught in her dentures. Her son Herbert had loved the cereal as a kid on Monticello, back before the Puerto Ricans moved in.

  “I think it would be quite simple for someone to come along and put a blowtorch to anyone of us!” The harshness of her words were not the by-product of her morning drink. “And clean out your windpipe now, young man!” She waved a hand at him as if he were a waiter who had brought food that was distasteful to her, table at The Drake.

  Surfer uncapped the shunt, it popped free of his throat, and he plugged in the plastic tube to a cylinder in the box. He looked over at Wilma, hoping for gratification, and saw that her stare had gone blank. She was thinking about the bad things again.

  In fact, Wilma Jerrickson’s mind was, at this moment, a rush of images. A whirlwind of defeat that she’d always seemed to stay several running steps ahead of. But she couldn’t run these days, these years. She hid in the shadow of pale hope here at the Marclinn, with visits to her nephew every month.

  Surfer, and the others—Etch, Karl, Willie, Slappy—all of them, even Cat, kept her from thinking about a son none of them knew about, a son stabbed in the neck on the Ravenswood El in 1974. From years of bed sores and food that always tasted of Dentu-Grip and Feen-A-Mint laxative, from sick minds and sick hearts and really very little love at all. No love at all except for the kinship of those like her at the Rainey Marclinn Home for the Physically Disabled.

  Actually, those almost like her. For, the reason she had self-exiled herself into confinement in this wheelchair since 1974 was frightening in its simplicity; a clinical reason, though one not having anything to do with disease.

  By staying in the wheelchair, bundled up in her bright red and orange afghan, it became that much harder to string up a noose and hang herself from whatever light fixture was handy. Balance the photo albums under her feet, kick them away, and follow them into the dervish oblivion.

  She was out of it, back to the present. It was that quick with her. Mood swings a manic-depressive would kill for.

  “I’m serious, Michael. I know I couldn’t get my poor hands to wheel me away from the flame!” Would she really try? She held her hand to her breast, as if she had just been offered sex. .

  Surfer had run the aspirator tube through the slit in his throat a dozen times, like the ultimate in flossing. He popped the shunt back into place, keeping his finger over it like it was the trigger on a squirt gun or something equally non-threatening.

  “Sad world.” His mouth a minimalist charcoal sketch. The words less garbled after the aspirator cleaning. “I want to be with you when you go sunnin’, this be keepin’ up.”

  Wilma dismissed it with
a wave. “Don’t be silly, Michael, the farthest I go is in front of the Theater, you know that.” She was referring to the recently renovated Chicago Theater. At the northeast corner of State and Lake, it was within sight of the Marclinn.

  “But still.” Michael tried to sound desperate about it.

  “Michael, I sit out there, you can see me around more people going by after work than I could ever meet in my life!” She said she never had to go all the way to the beach, because the waters of Lake Michigan had the same smell as came from out of tile subway grates along Washington Street. Dank, but yet somehow fresh, the year round. She had told this to Karl, an aging biker who had ALS. His reply was the same he gave most anything: Fuckin’ A. That is, right on the money.

  “Michael, you are a gentleman and a scholar.” She drank the last of her morning constitutional. You could read now how Payton had run 16,726 yards in his career. 9.5 miles.

  “Now it’s time for this old gal to get her butt into gear. I told Colin I’d watch the Lotto machine this morning, and I promised Cat that I would help her go through the Sears catalog this afternoon.”

  “I read that cop book you gave me,” he said, to keep her near him just a few heartbeats longer. “The one by that Ed McBain guy.” He pronounced the last name Mac Bain.

  “Oh, which one was it now? I forget, there are so many...”

  “Tricks it was. With them little people on Hall’ween dressed as boogens an’ haints, robbin’ groceries.”

  Wilma had started to wheel away, but her face brightened and she placed a hand on Surfer’s knee. “You know, my nephew Henry is going to give me a copy of the new one for Christmas. Lullaby, I think it’s called.”