Iceman

Buckhead Station

The one flimsy semilead he'd turned up out west had flattened out on him. A former Vice guy, three years retired, had vague memories of this “spectacular pony” who lived with this wheelchair-bound gambler in one of the old plush joints—the Flamingo, he thought. The guy turned out to be hazy on the whole thing—some fuzzy recollection of the guy and his show-bizzy broad. He couldn't be sure of the drawing, he said. Bottom line: el zero.

Eichord heard a radio or television blaring as he descended into the sublevel of Buckhead Homicide. One of the guys had brought a TV set to work. Not a portable, but a twenty-one-inch set purloined from God-knows-where and squeezed into the back seat of an unmarked ride.

“Couldn't you get a big screen?"

“It's Dana's tummy tee vee,” Peletier said, and brought forth some snickers.

The detectives were watching a dog show for some reason.

“Peletier,” fat Dana Tuny growled, “you'd hafta pick up forty more IQ points to qualify as a fuckin moron, ya know that."

“I'm gonna be fuckin a moron inna minute. Jumbo, so gitcher pants down and reach for your ankles."

“This ain't mine,” Tuny said to Eichord, ignoring Marv Peletier, “the schvatza boosted it in Watts."

“Welcome back, Jack. Have a nice trip,” Eichord said to himself out loud. “Yes, thanks. A real bummer. Glad you missed me,” he told himself.

Peletier turned up the volume as the announcer's voice intoned out of the speaker “Ah! Here comes the giant schnauzer. What a gorgeous bitch.” And the entire squad room hooted with catcalls, a room full of twelve-year-olds.

“I was out wit’ a gorgeous bitch the other night had a giant schnauzer on her,” Tuny said.

“Ummmm,” Monroe Tucker hummed, walking into the room. Stomping, more than walking. The grunted, monosyllabic humming was a noise he would sometimes make when Dana Tuny did something he found particularly moronic. It meant “fuckin retards.” Monroe was the sort of two-fisted, bad-looking dude if you saw him coming toward you in a wild Afro and a dashiki you'd have to fight the impulse to cross the street.

Eichord got up and went into the john, regretting it immediately. Some visiting class act had penciled a bit of graffiti on the wall: nightcrawler was here. It set his teeth on edge. There was a night-crawler out there, to be sure.

Washing his hands and face, he looked up at the aging cop in the mirror and wondered why in the hell he felt so frightened or whatever it was all the time. Frightened wasn't it. Apprehensive?

When he came back into the squad room, the retards had grown tired of laughing at the dog show and the set was off.

“Hey,” one of the detectives said to Eichord, “you're the big sleuth around here"—winking as he said it—"so let's see how you do. Ready?"

Eichord smiled in response.

“I'll read about him and you tell me who it sounds like. Ready?"

“Okay.” It was a psychiatric manual.

“Listen—who am I describing? Bed-wetting, stammering, chronic masturbation, and thumb-sucking all typify immature personality disorders."

“Christ, that's fat Dana to a damn tee."

“Sheeeeit! Thass got him down cold, man. Bed-wetting, chronic masturbation, uh, immature cocksucker. Fuckin’ Tuny, man."

“Come on, gotta bad one,” Brown said, snatching his jacket off a hook, giving them an address as everybody got up in a screech of chairs, telling them the sketchy details as they took the stairs two at a time, all five men hurrying to the parking lot. Two persons down. Gunshot wounds.

“No big fuckin’ hurry,” Dana wheezed. “They'll stay dead, f'r crissakes."

Halfway to South Buckhead the call changed from a double homicide to a single homicide and then to a “man believed shot” in the clear.

“Is this gonna be a cluster fuck?” Dana whined as he drove, Eichord riding in the back seat with Tuny and Tucker. Tuny ‘n Tucker—TNT.

“Do flies like barbecue?"

They got on the scene, a fleabag in what was left of Buckhead's old Skid Row, and found a rookie uniform cop getting his ass chewed out by a couple of grizzled old bluebags out of Metro.

“Shit, I'm sorry.” He was just a kid. “I don't know—"

“Yeah. Tha's right. You don't know,” the older of the officers said sarcastically as he walked away in disgust.

“Shit—this is just some old wino,” one of the Buckhead guys said.

“No shit. Brilliant deduction."

“It was just ... I saw all the blood ... an’ I—” The kid looked like he was about to lose it. The Buckhead detectives were ragging him mercilessly.

“Hey, boy, if you feel like you're gonna faint, put your head down between your legs and breathe deeply."

“Yeah. If you feel faint, put your head down between my legs and suck deeply, okay."

“What happened?” Eichord said to the young cop as he moved away from the body. The ambulance guys were already bagging him.

“I fucked up,” he said, with a bad redness to his face. “Dude downstairs came runnin’ up an’ ... and shit, I couldn't make sense out of ... And then he says there was a shooting. He thought some ole dude didn't like this old boy got into it with him. Hell, I never even looked for the gunshot wounds ... He said shotgun, and I saw the one body and ... and the blood all over the walls an’ ... and I—"

“Let's go outside.” Eichord took the young guy out into the open air. “Hell, you'll get used to it. First time is a bitch,” he spoke softly to the rattled cop. “These winos take that last big swig and aspirate blood all over the walls. It looks like a gunshot death, all right. They drink themselves to death down here with depressing regularity,” Eichord said, with grim knowledge of his subject matter. These winos? We winos. Get it right.

In the car the three cops got trading horror stories. Eichord told them about the crime photos they'd showed him in Vegas. A homosexual murdered his lover. Took a week disposing of the body each time he left the house. Used chain saws, hacksaws, an ax, knives, everything but a damn blender. There wasn't a piece of the victim bigger than a breadbox.

Tucker spoke up, “You shoulda tole me you was goin to Vegas, man. I coulda got yo white ass STRAIGHT."

“I didn't know I was goin myself, Monroe."

“Shit. I RULED that town, bro. Vegas is my kinda town."

“Yeah?"

“I got so much white pussy las’ time I was in Vegas—and this ain't no jive—I hadda finally put a whatdya call them things in the store windows?"

“Vibrators?” Dana said, but they ignored him.

“MANNEQUINS,” Tucker said after a beat. “Yeah. What I finally did was I got this fuckin MANNEQUIN and put it in the car with me. You know, with a wig and shit on it, to keep them little horny white broads from hasslin’ me every time I pulled up to a stop sign.” He shook his fierce head. “I never saw anything like it."

“Hmm,” Eichord said, smiling as he watched Dana struggle. It was more than he could stand. He looked at his partner and said, “If you hadda mannequin in the car with you, that'd make TWO dummies in there."