Iceman

Buckhead Station

The morning was another pisser. The rain stopped around ten a.m. and Eichord didn't see anybody scrambling for their cars. The sky was slate-colored, with swollen, gunmetal clouds looking ready to open up again any minute. Everybody in the squad room was knee-deep in paperwork, and in truth, by the end of the second day Hoyt-Graham, the Iceman dossier, was citywide, then countrywide, and had mushroomed from three to some eighteen pages.

Eichord had the Ps. Palmer Med, Peek Equipment, Inc., Pioneer Home Care, Poole-Weintraub Associates, Puritan Hospital Consultants, Inc., and he added a possible from his homemade list, Parker's Pharmacy. It was times like this detectives felt the sting of cutbacks in the force, and what the reality of limited budgets meant when you had to hit the streets.

Hoyt-Graham was becoming a massive compilation of possibles, data-processors spewing out guys in their early forties, with some record of wheelchair usage, living within a 50 mile radius of the area served by the greater Buckhead Cross Index. The drawing had been a total strikeout. Eichord slid his chair back with a screech, murmured good-bye forever, and forced himself out into the wet streets.

Ten days later it had all added up to a mountain of maybes and nothing much solid. A week and a half of pounding pavement and making phone calls. Jack Eichord had learned more about wheelchair life than he'd really wanted to know: from the chair models that had the best riggings to the problems of decubitus to the unique environment of the chairbound individual; a world of disabled parking spaces and shopping-mall ramps and extrawide, elongated commode stalls that your average shuffler took for granted.

“Whatta we got, guys?"

“I got a woody,” Dana offered.

“Another first. What we got is about twenty-two men who look if not good at least possible."

“Bullshit,” fat Dana whined.

“Nu? Speak?"

“We got Jumping Jack shit and you know it."

“Possibles, he said, Moby, clean out cher blowhole,” Monroe Tucker suggested halfheartedly.

“Blow this."

“But there's a solid and I think rich area,” Eichord went on, unperturbed. “And that's in the parallel search. Let's keep combing the pawn shops, office-supply companies, schools who purchased new or used equipment recently, the local buy-sell-rent-trade ads for typewriters, newspaper classifieds, radio/bulletin-board sales, neighborhood word-of-mouth among the garage-sale addicts—let's see who our friend with the ‘hand of Christ’ turns out to be."

“You said it was garbage. You didn't like the one who typed the letter. How come you like it now?"

“Can't a girl change her mind, fer crissakes? Anyway, let's find the sucker. See who typed it. I mean, at least it would be a positive lead. Let him prove to us he or she IS a crank."

But what Jack believed in his secret heart was that the more he looked at the list of impossible-possibles, the three-foot-tall bilateral amputees and embittered (rightfully) Nam vets who couldn't get the government to pay for a chair it had caused them to be put into, the less faith he had in the Hoyt-Graham data.

The work was piling up in an intimidating paper mountain, and the more Jack looked at it, the more he liked the concept of an extremely intelligent killer who could set up a carefully concocted series of crimes that would APPEAR to look like copy-cat kills. And then, when the cops looked at the murders, the case would peel away like an onion, layer after layer, and suddenly the inside would be hollow. Hello? Surprise—nobody home.

Two weeks and change. The twenty-two name list had yielded little gold. Eichord hadn't a vibe worth reflecting on. He'd just finished with Sam Nagel, a pitiful old gent who broke his heart for half an hour, the oldest forty-two-year-old he'd ever met.

“Thanks again,” Jack said, trying to take his leave.

“It wasn't any bother. I was glad to talk to you."

“Okay. Well, take care” Eichord said, starting to turn.

“I don't mind helping out the police. You know, you all is about all there is that stands between us and the bad people. And we should support our law-enforcement officers."

“Right. Appreciate it."

“I see it all around. The collapse of the old moral codes. The old values are gone. The respect for law and order. Take your kids today: some of them don't seem to have any respect for anybody else's rights. And you know what I say? I say if you don't respect yourself first, you aren't going to be able to respect anybody else either."

“That's right,” Jack said.

The man was so lonely for somebody to talk to. They made some more conversation and finally Eichord was able to make a friendly, graceful exit and wave farewell to the oldest forty-two-year-old man on Planet Earth, and he had to fight not to cross his name off. There were three names that he'd made check marks by:

ADAMS, Hayden

BOLEN, Willard (check)

BRITTEN, Morris

CARTER, Jerry

CUNNINGHAM, Harold

DENNENMUELLER, Mike (check)

FREIDRICHS, Keith (check)

GIBBAR, Robert

GILLESPIE, Jeff

HOWARD, Edwin

JAMES, Felix

JONES, Mark

MULLINS, Craig

NAGEL, Sam

ROSE, Louis

SCHUMWAY, Alan

SCHWAB, David

SMITH, Rick

TREPASSO, Phil

WHITE, Blake

WISEMAN, Eben

ZOFUTTO, Mario

Willard Bolen was a veteran who had an ax to grind against the United States government, Society in General, and the World. He had become embroiled in a wheelchair dispute that had never been totally resolved, beginning when he attempted to get Uncle Sam to pay for a fancier-model chair than was permitted, and snowballing into other areas. The odds that he was Spoda were so great as to be astronomical, but he got a check mark for murderous rage.

Mike Dennenmueller had records to prove he was a diabetic, and the fact that he was an amputee would have made him an impossible but there was no paper trail on him for fifteen of the last eighteen years. You could follow him back in time about three years and then he appeared to go up in smoke. If Dennenmueller was Spoda, was it possible he'd figured out a way to kill from the chair? Eichord filed it under science fiction, but he kept the check mark by his name. He also had mannerisms that bothered Jack. He wore his hostility carefully disguised under a mask of banter, but there was a lot more to him than met the eye.

If Eichord had to say, One guy looks good if not to be Spoda, then to be capable of homicide, he would have said Freidrichs was the man. He had total paralysis of his lower body and as vicious a personality as Jack could remember having encountered. The man was a seething, boiling volcano of potential violence. An attractive man of forty-one, Keith Freidrichs had a badly retarded brother and he ran a downtown arcade from his chair. It struck Eichord that if someone could manage to get hold of a badly retarded individual who could not be easily traced, they might make an impenetrable cover.

Freidrichs was supposedly paralyzed from a car wreck of long ago, but the records were sufficiently hazy. Eichord was continuing to look at the man very hard. One thing was certain: this individual appeared, at least, to be capable of all the things attributed to Arthur Spoda, and until the background checks proved otherwise, he was a prime suspect.

Louis Rose didn't remain on the list for long. “Sorry,” Eichord was told when he called to set up an appointment, “Louis passed away last August.” There were twenty-one names now. Alan Schumway. Jeezus! Talk about an unlikely candidate to be a suspect in a homicide investigation. Schumway, the well-known automobile dealer, an irritating fixture on local TV, was probably the third most famous person in a wheelchair living in the Buckhead area. Beat out only by a poster kid for a major charity and the Buckhead County tax collector. Eichord suspected he'd allowed Schumway's name to make the final cut only because he disliked the man so intensely.

That, and the fact that Schumway's initials were the same as Arthur Spoda's, and Eichord probably succumbed to the perverse temptation of keeping him on the list in the hopes of proving that not EVERY human being with an IQ of 70 or more knew that when you change your name, you first must change your initials.

Nobody would argue that Schumway was weird enough and misanthropic enough to be a murderer, but he'd have some trouble in the anonymity department. Buckhead's Cal Worthless, somebody had called him, with the added visibility of being in a chair. Schumway Buick commercials were, inarguably, the most abrasive and loathed, and—unfortunately—successful, on local television. Grudgingly, Eichord admitted he felt a good measure of respect for the man; like the aforesaid county politician, he had proved that what one might regard as a disabling handicap another might use for great personal advantage.

The first time, the only time, Eichord had actually met the man in the flesh had been on a rainy summer morning a year or so ago. Eichord had been coerced into taking up golf after many years’ hiatus and had forced himself out on the course for therapeutic reasons. His “rabbi” on the task force had browbeat him about his all-work-no-play dullness and he'd soon found himself chasing the stupid white ball all over Buckhead Springs, or Brook Haven, or Willowcrest—the public course and cheaper golf clubs.

That particular rainy morning he'd been invited to play on someone's membership in the toney Buckhead Country Club, and out of curiosity had gone out early to get nine in before work on a Friday morning.

The fairways looked like the greens where he'd become used to playing. He had no idea where the pins were, and when no one had materialized near the first tee, he smacked one out optimistically into the expanse of bright green and set off to find it.

He was on the fourth hole, a long, intimidating dogleg leading away from the clubhouse, when the summer sky turned menacingly dark and one of those sudden rainstorms began pelting him as he grabbed his clubs and ran in the direction of two other golfers playing an adjacent hole. Their destination appeared to be a small caddy shack behind one of the beautifully manicured greens. The two men, Eichord hot in pursuit, splashed into the confines of the dark shack to find it full of wet guys listening to a man in a wheelchair who greeted them with,

“New arrivals. More idiots!” Laughter. Eichord saw the car dealer from TV sitting in his wheelchair, totally out of place here. “I know full well you're wondering why I called this meeting and brought you together this morning,” he boomed in that voice so familiar from the television spots. There were a couple of damp snickers as the words “FULL WELL” boomed through the small dark shack.

“I'm going to take this opportunity,” Alan Schumway said, rolling his eyes skyward and wiping water from his dark head of hair, “to share some important secrets of life with you.” One of the strangers dripping water in the darkened and somewhat chilly shack pulled a half-pint from his golf bag, and a murmur of approval welled up among the impromptu audience. Nothing except the presence of a woman being as welcome in a tightly confined group of men as a bottle of booze.

“The smoking lamp is not lit, but feel free to imbibe.” The men just looked at him sitting there. Someone standing beside the wheelchair let out a nervous laugh. “Gentlemen and ladies—if any are secretly present, and you know who you are—I'm Al Schumway, your temporary host.” He gestured. “My home is your home. Please don't treat it like a pigsty."

Eichord declined the whiskey with thanks and passed it back to the owner, who killed it.

“I'm going to share some secrets with you that will change your barren and obviously drab lives,” the crippled man boomed, cheerfully putting everybody on. Eichord suddenly realized what had made the deep ruts leading into the shack. He'd assumed them to be from a golf cart of some type but now realized this man had made them from his chair. What the hell was a man in a WHEELCHAIR doing playing golf—in the rain? For that matter, what were any of them doing playing golf in the rain?

“I'm a closet Democrat. I pull off those little tags that say do not remove under penalty of law.” He stared at Eichord with hard, unblinking eyes. “Are there any pigs here? Any flatfoots? Narcs? Stoolies? Rats? Food-mooching, donut-sucking cops?” Eichord smiled by way of response. “Well, not to worry. This cowering toadie,"—he gestured at the sheepish man beside him—"is my attorney, and he will remain present during any interrogation.

“As well as having dubious political affiliations and a marked disregard for tags on furniture, I confess to other sins of the flesh. I have never paid for a book-club offer. I send for the books, you know. Where you get five great new books for a dollar? And then you're supposed to send them $3 .99 for your next selection? I keep the books and never send them shit. Also I once lived for two years by putting signs saying this machine is out of order & owes me 50 cents on vending machines all over the Atlantic seaboard. I lived quite handsomely. As you can see I'm quite handsome, so I always live that way, but my vending-machine scam was extremely successful.” The deep voice and the tone of the jivey conversation was just like he favored in his obnoxious TV spots.

“But before I continue, lest someone of a thin-skinned ethnic persuasion be offended, are there any non-Aryans present? Any Rosicrucians or members of any other off-the-wall or what we might consider freak-o religious orders such as Scientologists, Holy Rollers, Jehova's Witlesses, Baptists, Cat-lickers, Masons, Jews, Protestants, Lutherans? Epissypalians? Demonologists? Press-butt-terians? Reptile-kissers? Mackerel-snappers? Knights of Columbus? Campfire Girls? Lesbian Save-the-Whalers? Speak right up. I wouldn't want to offend any persons of, shall we say, suspect lineage? Are there any Negroid or mulah-toe types among us? Spies? Micks? Pollocks? Slopes? Dinks? Gooks? Fruits? Fags? Queens? Messicans? Beaners? Greasers? Wops? Guineas? Dagos? Shines? Spades? Jungle Bunnies? Krauts? Huns? Darkies? Shanties? Couch-'tators? Rednecks? Crackers? Greco-Romans? Serbo-Croats? Sheenies? Moravians? Frogs? Wogs? Kikes? Hebes? Bagel Beaks? Muff-divers? Beaver Cleavers? Poontang punishers? Snatch Gobblers...?"

He took a breath and somebody went “Jeezus,” and he said, “Jesus! Wonderful! Brethern, HE is with us today. So we will ask him for divine guidance before I continue. Let us bow our heads in a moment of silent prayer.” It was an uncomfortable moment. The mocking voice had turned serious, and nobody knew quite what to make of this nut. Was he for real? Nobody bowed their heads and he looked up at the men and said in a quiet but authoritarian whisper, “I'm not kidding now, guys. Let's do bow our heads just for a second and give thanks for our blessings—okay?” So sincere, this crazy guy in the wheelchair. And everybody bowed their heads like idiots and he shouted, “AMEN, brothers and sisters."

The men looked up. One or two nervous guffaaws. “I never said nothin’ about no LONG prayer.” They laughed in spite of themselves. “Now, dearly beloved, let us, and tomato, but first, consider the odds of us being thrown together like this, drawn by the weather's ferocity, granted that there are worse things than wind and rain, namely thunder, lightning, cyclone, hurricane, tornado, tidal wave, cataclysm, mushroom cloud, a fart after a large Hungarian dinner. Surely some higher BEING, some greater FORCE, some guiding DESTINY, a God or gods above, or below, has preordained this moment. How many of you really BELIEVE?” he boomed in his preacher's oratorical resonance.

And one of the men had just about had his fill of it and said, “I don't hold with joking about a man's religion,” spoken in a very quiet voice.

And, not missing a beat, Schumway turned his eyes on the man standing about three feet above him in stature and cut him down to size in a deadly, perfect, withering, incredible Gunsmoke voice, “How djew lak to step outside and take your shirt off, big boy?"

Everybody broke up, and he turned to the lawyer, unsmiling, and said, “Go over to the Long Branch and fetch Doc and Fester and all the boys. Tell ‘em this here GALOOT has gone and called ole Matt a dirty name an’ we're fixin to step outside and SETTLE THIS.” Turning back to the man who'd spoken, he said in his best James Arness, “I don't HOLD with hittin’ cripples, mister, now go for your HOGLEG."

Everybody roared, including the man who'd been so offended a moment ago. He smiled and said, “No offense, man. I just don't like to joke about some things, ya know?"

“Hey"—the man in the chair was so immediately and genuinely sincere, so apologetic, in a soft voice full of gentleness and caring—"I know. I'm the one who should apologize to YOU, friend. After all, consider what the good Lord above has equipped you with: your level of intellect is such that knowing to come in out of the rain may well be your high-water mark, so to speak. Let me ask you, my religiostic, do you comprehend the true implications of what these other heathen might erroneously delineate as theopneustic inspiration? Ahhhh, I see your eyes glazing over. Who's handicapped here, anyway? But never mind. Ignore my persiflage.” He waved an arm dramatically.

“I was only trying to lighten the tension and make us all forget that there's a flash flood taking our cars down Country Club boulevard right now ... that we're trapped in here together, sans electroluminescence and maid service, that Miss Kitty here is the only female and SHE has an unmentionable sex-related virus, that the bank foreclosed on the ranch, that the IRS is tapping our phones and the feds have a snitch among us"—he glanced over at Eichord—"that a madman in a daggone WHEELCHAIR is monopolizin the conversation and jes ruinin ever't-hang, Matthew.” This last sentence in a dead-bang perfect Dennis Weaver. The laughter was so gleefully surprised it almost sounded like theater applause.

Not long after that, mercifully, the rain abated and the golfers dispersed. Eichord's one chance meeting with the commercial Cosell of Buckhead had nonetheless remained vivid in memory. He had always realized that among his own faults was an excessively low tolerance for the pseudo-elitist who looked down on others, one who used his or her intelligence to skewer those considered to be inferior, and the fact that Schumway was in a chair did nothing to make him less contemptible. This was the emotion Jack identified as predominant in the thoroughness behind his background check on the controversial star of the commercials that invariably ended, “NOBODY beats a Schumway Buick deal! NO ... BOD ... EEEEEEE."

Eichord gave his name to a girl in a punky do who told him to have a seat, and he looked at the Schumway file as bored but hungry car salesmen milled around the showroom of Schumway Buick.

Soon the man himself rolled out of his office, a professional greeter's smile in place as he boomed across the showroom at Eichord, “it's Fearless Fuzzdick, the famous flatfoot. As they said when the first black astronaut left the launching pad at Cape, the jig is up!"

Eichord smiled and flashed some shield surreptitiously.

The man in the chair said, “Hold it now, let's get a look-see. That thing could have chicken inspector on it, for all I know.” Eichord, the smile still firmly on his face, opened the ID case and held it as Schumway read in a booming voice, “Jack Eichord, Secret Agent."

Everybody in the showroom was staring at them.

“Mr. Schumway.” He held out his hand, forcing the man to touch him, watching the eyes very closely to see how much of the animosity was real and how much was an act. “Appreciate you seeing me."

“Come on, hoss. When the Major Crimes Task Force's headhunter calls. Big Al listens. What can I do ya out of? Wanna deal on a used Fiero?"

“We're working on an investigation of the recent homicides and—"

“Well, I can account for my actions every minute of the time between the end of the Korean conflict and now. I have the perfect alibi. I was at a poker game the whole time. Ask any of these men. They're the finest witnesses money can buy. They all saw me. Right, boys?"

“Maybe we can talk in private?"

“Sure, Jack. My pleasure.” He spun the chair and rolled off toward his office, saying over his shoulder, “Sorta makes you feel like R2D2, doesn't it?"

Eichord looked back over at the car parked across the width of the showroom and motioned, turning after he saw Monroe Tucker get out of the vehicle.

“Have a seat. Inspector,” Schumway said. “Now, you want to know where I was on February the thirty-first?"

“Something like that,” Eichord said patiently. “We're checking on individuals in wheelchairs. Persons about your age—"

“Ahh-hah! Now, that is a serious crime. I thought you guys were nothing but donut-scarfing, do-nothing, chicken-coopers, but here you spring serious police work on me. Jayzus! I'd forgotten that it's a federal crime to be a middle-aged motha in a chair. Punishable by whipping, isn't it? Tongue-whipping by a young girl? All right. I surrender, Officer. Send her in and give me a couple dozen lashes. Tell her to lay it on. Show no mercy. Give me a real licking."

Eichord went on as if he'd been uninterrupted. “—and there was some relation to another investigation some years back"—he threw this part away—"and we had noticed some small discrepancies in your background. I was wondering if you could fill me in on where you were before"—he glanced at the dossier—"Atlantic City?"

“Norway,” he said, looking up as a huge black man's shadow filled the doorway. “You know what Mayor Dorf said when he introduced the then-presidential contender, Jesse Jackson?” Monroe stared at him like he was something he'd stepped into in a cow pasture. “What this country needs is a spear-chucker.” Schumway laughed as if Tucker wasn't there.

“Mr. Schumway, my partner—Detective Tucker."

“Lo.” The huge man nodded.

“Could you get my ball off the roof?” Nothing in Monroe's face changed.

Eichord began questioning Schumway about the past, watching the way he responded as much as he digested the man's words. There was no hesitation. No unnaturalness in his responses. Schumway was the anglicization of a name filled with umlauts and diacritical marks. He was, in fact, from Norway's “biggest fjord” and spelled the name for Eichord. His family was all deceased; however, the last he'd heard he had cousins still living in Oslo. His records had been lost when they were transferred from Atlantic City to Buckhead. He told the detectives the details of the auto accident that had put him in a wheelchair. He did an awful joke about opening up a Fjord-Buick dealership. An absolutely hideous wheelchair joke.

And Jack thanked him for his time. Getting into the car he said to Monroe, “What did you think about him?” He'd brought Tucker along to see if Schumway would overreact to him. He was curious if he was all the bigot he appeared to be or if it was some kind of pretense. He remembered thinking the day of the meeting on the course that the man's facade appeared to be calculated. Theatrical in an odd way.

“Say what?"

“How did you read him?"

“Sheeeeit."

“Meaning?"

“Just one mo’ fucked-up whitey."