Mucho Mojo

35.

When we got back and I was out of the van telling Hiram ’bye, apologizing for going in the first place and letting things escalate the way they did, I began to feel a strange sensation.

It was partially due to the fact that Hanson’s car was parked at the curb along with a pickup I didn’t recognize, and of course, I knew what that meant. But there was something else, and I didn’t understand it until I was on Uncle Chester’s porch about to open the door. Then it hit me.

The sensation was fear. Because now I knew what I thought I’d known all along. Fitzgerald was a killer.

I had been with him and his giant brother, and I had been unconscious on the floor of Fitzgerald’s gym. I had pushed certain buttons inside Fitzgerald and inside myself, and it was possible I had fucked things up. I had let the Reverend know I knew something was going on with him and the kids.

Perhaps all that had saved me and Hiram was the fact that Fitzgerald assumed someone, like MeMaw, knew where we were going. Then again, had he been inclined, he could have taken his chances, put us unconscious in Hiram’s van and taken us for a little drive that ended at the bottom of some pond somewhere – an exit like Illium’s. Maybe kiddie porn would be found in our possession. And when the good Reverend was questioned, all he had to say was we never arrived. Or that we came and went.

Then again, that might have been too complicated in broad daylight, or Fitzgerald may have figured me for nothing more than a belligerent sinner and not worthy of action.

I felt like a fool attempting to beard the lion in his own den, but I felt another thing now. An absolute certainty Fitzgerald, with the help of his poor brother, was our killer. It all fit together too damn neat to be otherwise.

I was trembling by the time I discovered the front door was locked. I realized Leonard and the others had gone on up to the Hampstead place.

I got a shovel off the back porch and went up there too, along the creek bed and through the woods.

When I arrived at the Hampstead place, Hanson was there, along with his crew. Unexpectedly, the retired coroner from Houston had brought his own crew. They were dressed in white paper suits and gas masks with charcoal filters. The front steps had been removed and a number of boards had been taken off the porch. White suits were crawling under there, busy as grubs in shit.

Inside the house, down in the open trapdoor, Leonard and Charlie, wearing paper suits and gas masks, were bringing out buckets containing dirt and worms and dirty lard. The worms were long and red and very busy. Leonard put his flashlight on the bucket, and I watched them squirm, like dancers under spotlights. The odor that came from the bucket and from the dank dark below was stronger than sun-hot road-kill.

“Where you been?” Leonard said through his mask. He sounded like Darth Vader.

“Visiting a friend.”

“Good time for it, asshole.”

“Sorry.”

“Hi, Hap,” Charlie said.

“Hi, Charlie. See you’re wearing those Kmart shoes.”

“Won’t leave home without ’em.”

“You see Mohawk… Melton, tell him Hap says hey, will you?”

“Absolutely.”

Hanson introduced me to the retired coroner, Doc Warren, an old wizened white-haired guy who looked as if he might have been dug up himself. He had on a paper suit and gloves. He was sitting on the floor by the trapdoor taking a rest. He was sweaty and tired looking. His filtered mask was in his lap. There were fragments of bone on a plastic drop-cloth beside him. Very small bones. He didn’t bother to get up or shake my hand.

He said, “You and your friend have found quite a mess.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

Turned out they had located four bodies. One of them, the one that smelled, the one I had first discovered, had been there about a year. As I had suspected, something in the soil down there, the way the water flooded in, had caused it to decay slowly, in spite of the East Texas heat. That lard in the bucket was not lard at all. It had once been flesh. It was now the result of decay and putrefaction. With the lard were bones. A child’s bones.

The rest of the bodies were not bodies at all, but bones, skeletal remains. Warren estimated the other bones had been there some time. They were all the bones of children. There was enough evidence to suggest the bodies had been cut up and wrapped in cloth and put in cardboard boxes and wrapped in chicken wire, then buried carefully.

“I believe you’ll find enough bones to make up for the missing kids from the East Side,” I said. “Maybe more.”

“I believe you’re right,” Doc Warren said.

Leonard popped out of the hole. He said, “Hey, Hap, you gonna supervise, or what?”

“Is the job open?”

“Ha,” Leonard said, and disappeared back into the trapdoor hole.

“You’ll need to slip on one of these paper suits, get a gas mask,” Hanson said.

“You got to watch infection,” Warren said, “case there’s any more bodies with meat on them. Streptococci likes to get in your lungs and into cuts. It can fuck you up big time.”

I put on a paper suit and gas mask and went to work. It’s not a day I’ll forget. Sometimes, even now, I awake from a dream where I’m crawling on my belly beneath that old, rotten house, turning my shovel awkwardly in the dirt, and the smell of that child, the one that was lard and bone, still seems strong in my nostrils.

By nightfall we’d found the remains of nine children. And one large skeleton – well, what was left of a large skeleton. Warren said it was a woman. He estimated she had been there a long time. Thirty years or longer. Warren concluded her skull had been cracked, and she had most likely been cut up the same way as the kids. There were no immediate signs of cloth, but around her remains was a coil of chicken wire.

Later, paper suits disposed of, back at Uncle Chester’s, we sat around and drank coffee. The crew that had come along with Doc Warren had parked on the far side of the woods, and when they finished for the day, they left that way. I never saw them again. Hanson’s crew, a black man and woman who worked for the fire department, departed in the pickup in the yard. I never saw them again either. That left me and Leonard, Hanson, Warren, and Charlie.

We were sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee, and I was thinking about those big fat red worms, wondering how long it would take them to work their way into my coffin when I was dead, and trying to tell myself it didn’t matter, when Hanson said, “Something licks the bag here. That woman’s body being that old, the killer would have to have started when he was a kid. Unless he’s a geriatric fucker.”

“Watch your mouth,” Warren said.

“No offense,” Hanson said.

“Yeah, well,” Warren said, “I get my feelings hurt easy.”

“But that’s right, ain’t it?” Hanson said. “Same M.O.”

“It’s passed down,” Warren said. “Just a fucking minute.” Warren put his fingers in his mouth and plucked out his false teeth and put them on the table by his coffee cup. “Sonofabitches are a bad fit,” he said, and his lips flapped like flags in the wind.

“Goddamn,” Leonard said, “put ’em back. I’m trying to drink my coffee here.”

Warren ignored him. When he talked, he could be understood, but it sounded as if he had a rag in his mouth.

“You see, I think the original murder, the woman, was done by someone who had a child helping. Took him up there, showed him how to do it. Sanctified it somehow in the child’s mind-”

“And he’s repeating it,” Hanson said.

“Yep,” Warren said. “Good ole Freudian stuff. ’Course, nothing says the murderer has to be a man, or that it was a boy that saw him do it, but I’d bet you money. I’d say too, whoever did this is some kind of religious nut, and he’s got that and this ritual, this murder he saw take place as a child, all twisted up in his head. That water stain up there looking like it does, and his first impression of it coming to him as a child, well, it could have had quite an impact.”

“I think I understood all that,” Hanson said. “But… Christ, I’m with Leonard, put your teeth back in.”

Doc Warren ignored him, sipped his coffee. He sounded like a pig at the trough, way his loose lips flopped.

“Hap gets an A in Psychology 101,” Charlie said, “but so what?”

“Yeah, well,” Warren said, “lots of folks think Freud was full of shit. Not everyone who’s seen bad stuff as a child responds by becoming bad. Maybe this psychology stuff is all horseshit, and whoever is doing this just likes doing it. Which brings us to the fearful question that there may in fact be real evil in the world. No one likes that idea. Everything has to have cause and effect, and maybe it does. But why do some people respond to evil with evil, while others do not?”

“Personally,” Leonard said, “I don’t give a shit. I’ve always believed in evil, and I don’t need religion to believe it. I just want this guy. And I want you to put your fuckin’ teeth in, Doc.”

Warren sipped more coffee.

Hanson looked at Leonard, said, “I’m with you. On the teeth and this guy too. You say you want him, so isn’t it about time you tell the rest of it? I know there’s more. I’ve stood for all the dicking around I’m gonna take.”

“Yeah,” Leonard said, “there’s more.”

I said, “Allow me, Leonard. I got something to add you don’t know about.”

“This have to do with where you were this morning?” Leonard said.

“Yeah,” I said. “OK, Doc. I think you see it the way it is. Let me run over your territory and fill it in some more. Say there’s this preacher, a real do-gooder in some ways, but you see, he comes from a background where his father was a religious nut too. Say the father wasn’t actually the father, but a stepfather. The stepfather married this woman with a child, and this woman’s child was a bastard. She was a prostitute, or at least a loose woman. The preacher, the stepfather, he thinks he can do right by her, show her the way of God. And perhaps, down deep, a whore is exactly what he’s looking for. With me so far?”

“We’re with you,” Hanson said.

“So he marries the woman, but he can’t reconcile the shame. He treats her badly. He treats the boy badly. He never lets them forget that she’s a slut and the boy’s a bastard, and that he’s doing them special as the right hand of the Lord. The woman gets pregnant again. The child is retarded. The preacher can’t stand it. He can’t accept his seed would produce such a child. Now he has two bastards, and one of them has the sense of a cement block. He gets it in his mind the woman’s gone back to her old ways, that she’d been with another man. Maybe she has, maybe she hasn’t. It doesn’t matter. The preacher broods, and one night something sets him off, and in a moment of anger he strikes and kills the woman.”

“And the stepson sees it,” Doc Warren said.

“Yeah. And let’s say the preacher knows the boy saw it, but instead of killing the boy, who’s already warped enough to think his father is God incarnate, he forces the child, or the child is willing, psychologically browbeat, however you want to put it… But say the boy goes along with the father to help get rid of the body. The father makes a religious ritual out of it. Perhaps to cover his guilt to the boy, to himself, both, or maybe he really believes that he’s done the righteous will of the Lord.

“Out of brutality, or convenience, the preacher cuts the woman up to fit in a cardboard box, wraps her body parts in a cloth and takes her to this abandoned house he knows about, wraps the body in chicken wire, to keep the animals out of it, probably in cloth too, like the others, buries her under the house. Later, she comes up missing, he says she ran off. She’s got a reputation to go with this possibility. What he was ashamed of before, now protects him. She was just a whore. She used a good man. She ran off and left him with two sons to raise, one of them retarded. See where I’m going?”

“This is guesswork, right?” Hanson said.

“Some of it,” I said. “And now it takes up where you left off, Doc. The boy is continuing to do that work in his own way, copying his stepfather’s pattern.”

“Why isn’t he killing women then?” Hanson said. “Me and Doc here, we dealt with a guy in Houston once, called himself the Houston Hacker. He had a thing against women, and women were all he killed, ’less someone got in the way. This kid sees his father kill a woman, why’s he killing kids? Wouldn’t he have a thing against women because his stepfather did, even if it was his mother?”

“That’s easy,” Doc Warren said. “He’s killing himself. He’s killing the nine- or ten-year-old fatherless, unwanted child that he was. Killing him in the righteous manner his stepfather killed his mother. He’s not associating the crime with women, he’s associating it with the evil of what she produced. A bastard. Himself. And somewhere, deep inside, he’s maybe killing himself because his existence is what turned the stepfather against the woman in the first place.”

“It has a nice ring to it,” Charlie said. “It sounds like bullshit to me, but it rings nicely. It’d sound better you had them teeth in, though, Doc.”

“What about the page of Psalms in the kid porn mags?” Doc Warren said. “You’re suggesting this isn’t a sex crime, but one of religious psychosis, so what’s with that?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the whole thing has turned sexual for him. Somehow he’s cleansing himself of that sinful preoccupation by getting rid of his magazines and destroying their power with a page of the Psalms. Like a cross in a vampire’s grave. I really don’t know. But here’s another piece of the puzzle. The retarded child grew up to be only slightly smaller than the Empire State Building. He does what his brother tells him. He helps him do this thing he does. And they do it every summer, last week of August. Which is, probably, about the same time of year the first murder occurred, the mother’s murder, and coincidently it’s a great time of opportunity for our man. It’s the week the East Side carnival comes to town, something our man helps sponsor.”

“I’ll be damned,” Leonard said.

“Now for the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Hanson said. “Who the hell is it?”

“A fella I went to visit this morning,” I said. “The guy who killed Illium Moon, and would have tried to kill Chester Pine if Chester hadn’t died first. A preacher’s son. The preacher’s son. A preacher himself. Reverend Fitzgerald of the First Primitive Baptist Church.”