Dying in the Post-War World

20

The cellar was lit by a single hanging bulb. There were laundry tubs and storage lockers, just like the basement where JoAnn Keenan was dismembered.

But this was not that basement. This was a slightly smaller one in a building near the “murder cellar,” a tidy one with tools and cleaning implements neatly lining the walls, like well-behaved prisoners.

This was janitor Otto Bergstrum’s domain.

“Why you want meet with me?” the thick-necked, white-haired Bergstrum asked.

Outside, it was rainy and dark. Close to midnight. I was in a drenched trenchcoat, getting Bergstrum’s tidy cellar damp. I left my hat on and it was dripping, too.

“I told you on the phone,” I said. “Business. A matter of money.”

As before, the husky old fellow was in coveralls, his biceps tight against the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel shirt; his legs were planted well apart and firmly. His hands were fists and the fists were heavily veined.

“You come about reward money,” he said. His eyes were blue and unblinking and cold under unruly salt-and-pepper eyebrows. “You try talk me out of claim my share.”

“That’s not it exactly. You see, there’s going to be several people put in claims.”

“Cops not eligible.”

“Just city cops. I’m eligible.”

“But they not.”

“Right. But I have to kick back a few bucks to a couple of ’em, out of what I haul to shore.”

“So, what? You think I should help you pay them?”

“No. I think you should kick your share back to me.”

His eyes flared; he took a step forward. We were still a number of paces apart, though. Christ, his arms and shoulders were massive.

“Why should I do this?”

“Because I think you kidnapped the Keenan girl,” I said.

He took a step back. His mouth dropped open. His eyes widened.

“I’m in clear,” he said.

That was less than a denial, wasn’t it?

“Otto,” I said, “I checked up on you, this afternoon. Discreetly. You’re a veteran, like me — only you served in the first war. On the other side.”

He jutted his jaw. “I am proud to be German.”

“But you were an American immigrant at the time. You’d been in this country since you were a kid. But still you went back home, to fight for the fatherland... then after they lost their asses, you had the nerve to come back.”

“I was not alone in doing such.”

He wasn’t, either: on the North Side, there was a whole organization of these German World War One vets who got together. They even had dinners with American vets.

“The Butcher’s Union knew about you,” I said, “but you were never a member.”

“Communists,” he said.

“You worked as a butcher in a shop on the West Side, for years — till meat shortages during the war... this last war... got you laid off. You were nonunion, couldn’t find another butcher job... with your background, anything defense-related was out. You wound up here. A janitor. It’s your sister’s building, isn’t it?”

“You go to hell, mister.”

“You know what I think, Otto? I think you blamed the New Deal for your bad deal. I think you got real mad at the government. I think you in particular blamed the OPA.”

“Socialists,” he said.

“Bob Keenan wasn’t even in Chicago when you got laid off, you stupid old fart. But he was in the OPA now, and he was in the neighborhood. He had money, and he had a pretty little daughter. He was as good a place as any for Otto Bergstrum to get even.”

“There is no proof of any of this. It is all air. Wind. You are the fart.”

“What, did you get drunk, was it spur of the moment, or did you plan it? The kidnapping I can see. What I don’t understand is killing the little girl. Did she start to make noise in bed, and you strangled her? Were you just too strong, and maybe drunk, and it was an accident of sorts?”

Now his face was an expressionless mask. His hands weren’t fists any more. His eyes were hooded; his head was slack.

“What I really don’t get, Otto, is the rape. Trying to rape a little girl. Was she already dead? You sick fucker.”

He raised his head. “You have filthy mouth. Maybe I wash it out with lye.”

“I’m going to give you a choice, old man. You can come with me, and come clean at Summerdale station. Or I can kill you right here.”

“You have gun in your coat pocket?”

“I have gun in my coat pocket, yeah.”

“Ah. But my friend has knife.”

I hadn’t heard him. I have no idea where he came from; coal bin, maybe. He was as quiet as nobody there. He was just suddenly behind me and he did have a knife, a long, sharp butcher knife that caught the single bulb’s glow and reflected it, like the glint of a madman’s eyes. Like the glint of this madman’s eyes, as I stepped quickly to one side, the knife slashing down, cutting through the arm of my raincoat, cutting cloth and ripping a wound along my shoulder. My hand involuntarily released the gun, and even though both it and my hand were in the same coat pocket, I was fumbling for it, the gun caught in the cloth, my fingers searching for the grip...

I recognized this rail-thin, short-haired, sunken-cheeked young man as James Watson — but only from the papers. I’d never met him. He was the handyman at the nursery from which the kidnap ladder had been “stolen”; an Army vet and an accused child molester and, with Otto, a suspect in this case till I hauled Jerome Lapps onstage.

He was wearing a rain slicker, yellow, and one of those floppy yellow wide-brimmed rain hats; but he didn’t look like he’d been outside. Maybe his raincoat was to keep the blood off.

He had the knife raised in such a corny fashion; raised in one fist, level with his head, and walking mummy-slow. His dark blue eyes were wide and his grin glazed and he looked silly, like a scarecrow with a knife, a caricature of a fiend. I could have laughed at how hokey this asshole looked, only Otto had grabbed me from behind as Watson advanced.

With my arms pulled back, one of them bleeding and burning from the slash of a knife that was even now red with my blood, I struggled but with little success. The old German janitor had me locked in his thick hands.

Watson stabbed savagely with the knife and I moved to the left and the blade, about half of it, went into Otto’s neck and blood spurted. Otto went down, clutching his throat, his life oozing through his fingers, and I was free of him, and while Watson still had the knife in his hand — he’d withdrawn the blade almost as quickly as he’d accidentally sunk it into his cohort’s throat — the handyman was stunned by the turn of events, his mouth hanging open, as if awaiting a dentist’s drill. I grabbed his wrist with my two hands and swung his hand and his knife in a sudden arc down into his stomach.

The sound was like sticking your foot in thick mud.

He stood there, doing the oddest little dance, for several seconds, his hand gripped around the handle of the butcher knife, which I had driven in almost to the hilt. He looked down at himself with a look of infinite stupidity and danced some more.

I pushed his stupid face with the heel of my hand and he went ass-over-teakettle. He lay on his back twitching. He’d released the knife handle. I yanked the knife out of his stomach; there was a little hole in the rain slicker where the knife went in.

And the sound was like pulling your foot out of thick mud.

“You’re the one who tried to rape that little girl, aren’t you, Jim?”

He was blinking and twitching; a thin geyser of blood was coming from the hole in the yellow rain slicker.

“Poor old Otto just wanted to get even. Pull a little kidnap, make a little money off those socialist sons of bitches who cost him his job. But he picked a bad assistant in you, Jim. Had to play butcher on that dead little girl, trying to clean up after you.”

There was still life in Watson’s eyes. Otto was over near the laundry tubs, gurgling. Alive, barely.

I had the knife in one hand, and my blood was soaking my shirt under the raincoat, though I felt little if any pain. I gave some serious thought to waling away on Watson with the butcher knife; just carving the fucker up. But I couldn’t quite cross the line.

I had George Morello’s pack of Camels in my suit coat pocket. I dug them out and smoked while I watched both men die.

Better part of two cigarettes, it took.

Then I wiped off anything I’d touched, dropped the butcher knife near Watson, and left that charnel house behind; went out into a dark, warm summer night and a warm, cleansing summer rain, which put out the second cigarette.

It was down to the butt, anyway. I tossed it in a sewer.