Stone Shadow

Dallas

Eichord had a bad night. He was staying at a place way out the expressway from downtown, nice enough as motels go but the people next door were partying it sounded like, and he lay there half-clothed, listening to the noisy voices through the wall in back of the headboard, finally switching on his own TV to drown it out. He had not had a drink in two days. Not abstaining consciously, just busy. Now he became aware of it.

The noise was still bothersome and he turned up the volume on the battered RCA set, some mindless talk show blathering away, and suddenly there's no noise next door so he figures it must have been a television set or somebody left, but door slams sound like howitzers usually and he hadn't heard anything. Whatever. At least the noise abated. He went over and turned his own set off and killed the lights. Threw his pants over the back of a chair and crashed. He was tired but he still couldn't sleep. The case was bothering him a lot. It was rife with inconsistencies and craziness. He had no handle on Ukie Hackabee whatsoever.

It seemed like two hours before he finally dropped off. Lying there with those eyes open in the darkness, trying to reach back through all of the gobbledegook and the posing and the mind-fucking, reaching for kernels of fact, nuggets of insight, little fragments of ore glittering in the cow plop. He didn't buy it and that was too bad because the facts were incontrovertible. William Hackabee had told a woman whom he'd abducted where lots of bodies had been buried. Freshly buried. It looked like old Ukie was it. But with the exception of a moment or two, the “pulverizing” bit had been so real he was beginning to think he'd hallucinated Ukie saying it, Ukie was just jerking everybody's chain.

He'd seen a hundred guys like Hackabee over the years. They seemed to be hothouse flowers that only grew in certain types of soil. The dirty funky ground of sex perversion was fertile for them. Sprinkle that with the moisture of attention and celebrity and their tales of bizarre sex crimes would suddenly grow into larger-than-life comic-strip adventures. They were rather pathetic and Mittyesque under-achievers, mostly, who would confess to almost anything to get attention. One more way to say, “Hey—look at me!"

Then there was the nature of these killings. They weren't the crimes of a sex offender. These were the crimes of an extreme sociopathic persona who was flipping the bird with one hand and waving for help with the other. The lack of apparent connectives, the absence of motive, the diversity of kill modes, and the unlikeliness of the would-be perpetrator were more than Eichord could reconcile.

So two hours later, two long Dallas hours of staring into the empty and unrewarding darkness of his room, “the pulverizing stage” taking on the rhythm of a personal mantra, exhausted and disturbed and alone, Jack Eichord gave himself over to sleep. And approximately nine minutes later a horrible hammering jerked him awake, propelling him onto his feet, reaching for his pants and untangling blankets as he shouted through his cotton-filled mouth, “Just a minute,” and lurched over to open the door and find nobody there. No movement outside. All the rooms quiet and dark. He took a last look up and down the row of accommodations, let out a lungful of air, and closed the door on it. Some nightmare.

He was almost back inside the folds of sleep when the banging hit again—a loud hammering, wham wham wham three times on the door—and this time he was there quicker but still not quickly enough because the gremlin was gone. I mean, nobody. He slipped on his shoes, no socks, eased his Smith out, and shut the door, standing quietly and waiting.

The guy had a neat sense of timing. It was all of ten minutes before he came back. Two minutes more and even Jack would have given up and gone back to bed but he had hung in there and he was there with his hand on the door by the second bang and the door was open in a half second and SHIT missed him again what the hell but then he just caught the door to the left closing silently and he kept the Smith in his pocket and walked over and banged on the door with a back fist like a sledgehammer, and he kept it up until the door finally opened.

It was a pitiful, wimpy little dude of approximately Eichord's age. About five-foot-seven. Balding. A gut on him. Watery eyes and a big red proboscis.

“Hi,” the man said sweetly. “Want to come to a party?” He was holding a nearly empty water glass of booze. “Care for one?"

“I think I'll pass, but thanks. Question, though. How did you get back inside your room so fast?"

“That's a secret,” he hissed with a smile. “I'll tell you if you come over and have a drink with me.” He had a slight lisp.

“Yes. And you'll tell me if I don't come over and have a drink with you, too"—Jack showed him a glimpse of gold shield—"or the night will end badly for you."

Then the man got all blubbery, he thought he was about to fall on a vice bust again, and Jack had to straighten that out, and then he was so pitiful Eichord decided what the hell and he did go over and they had a drink, two old drunks in a lonely Dallas motel, and even the man's whiskey was pitiful.

His name was Phil Something from a state that began with a vowel, some tale about being in aches, Eichord thought he'd said, finally figured out he'd told him, “I'm in eggs,” and was in the wholesale food business, nowhere guy with a bad marriage, a job that hated him, a boss that hated him, a wife that hated him, not really gay just a sad and lonely old coot. How depressing.

But when you're in the murder business every nasty cloud may have a revealing lining. He'd banged on the door with a long stick. So simple. Right under Eichord's nose, so to speak. And it reminded him of one of the forgotten basics: the easiest way to hide something is to leave it right out in the open. Sometimes nobody thinks to look there. He wasn't sure if it applied to the Hackabee thing but it was worth filing away. He finally got some sleep about three in the morning. He went to sleep thinking how he and old Phil next door had a lot in common. Both of them in aches, that was for sure.

There was screaming coming from the plush conference room on the richly appointed second floor of the building that Fidelity Mutual shared with Jones, Seleska, Foy, Biegelman, and Guthrie, known in the Texas legal profession as Jones-Seleska. The screaming was coming from a breathtakingly beautiful woman who was bent over a very expensive conference table. She was finally able to stop screaming with laughter and when she came up for air the somber-looking man sitting across the table from her, the one who had been responsible for her current agonies, said, “You gotta learn to lighten up a little, you take things too seriously,” at which she doubled over again.

“Not again with screaming. They'll think you're raping me in here,” he told her and she pounded on the table.

“Please ... no...” She gasped. “Please ... stop."

“You knucklehead. Get outta here,” he said, which sent her off again. Finally when she composed herself enough—the laughter diminished to the point where she could hear him—he said, “Do you know the official Jewish stand on abortion?"

“Ohhhh,” she groaned as she held herself in mock pain.

“It's still a fetus until it graduates from Harvard Law.” She giggled, grateful that it hadn't been another killer.

Her secretary opened the door. “It's that policeman again, Miss Collier. Second time he's called. Mister"—she glanced at the pink slip—"Icort, about the Hackabee case, I believe."

Still chuckling, the beautiful woman gestured no with her hand. “I'm not in.” And let herself slide back in the chair with a groan.