Slob

The Jack and Queen of Hearts

He sat in Edie's kitchen drinking strong, black Yuban and running it all through the tangle of his head again, over and over, sorting the pieces. Rearranging. Trying to get some kind of a fix on this Bunkowski. He had the dossier memorized. He'd look at the photographs till his eyes burned from them. Now he was chewing it over. Sifting. Looking for the hidden common denominators. Mistakes. Feeling for the weird rhythms of the killer.

True to his word, Sonny had slammed all the doors down tight. The commissioner was about to tack somebody's chestnuts to a door over this thing. The brass couldn't believe that neither the top cops in Chicago nor the heavies on the Major Crimes hook-up could blast loose more background on a plague of heinous murders that had picked up this much national ink.

But that was because they didn't know from MAC-VSAUCOG and the tight, little band of hardcore headhunters who'd discovered Daniel Bunkowski in the beginning. It was a burned bridge. Tantalizing. Maddening. But staring down into the chasm couldn't accomplish much beyond giving one a migraine.

He had made sex with his lover. He couldn't think of it as making love because it didn't deserve that appellation. Once he'd heard two hillbilly types back home who had a memorable predilection for crudity of speech talking about getting laid. One of them turned to the other and mouthed the ultimate redneck phrase for fornication, a turn of phrase so gross that it had seared itself into Eichord's brain.

"Ah shore 'nuff dumped a fuck inner," he'd said.

Jack shuddered as he thought to himself that was precisely what he'd done and nothing more. A kind of physical catharsis unrelated to love beyond the sense of desire. It was only a momentary cleansing and restorative to the nervous system. The kind of sex one had after death in the family. A defense mechanism. A release. A life-affirming knee-jerk response to pressure.

My God in Heaven, this woman could do it to him. Edie could take him and turn him around no matter where his mind was. He could be immersed in the bloodiest carnage of the Kasikoff homicides, his brain working overtime as he fought to tie into the wavelengths of this strange and horrible killer, strained to feel the nuances of the city's pulsebeats, concentrated on the subtle rhythms of the dark world that was his professional environment.

And inside the shadows of this world, deep inside where nothing human lived, the thought of her could light up his innards like a shaft of the purest, golden light. She was goodness to him. And her sweet and unexpected sexy ways could set him afire in the most unusual settings, and at unpredictable moments.

She stood with her back to him, stirring herbs into something, her hair as she turned swirling just as it had that day Chicago Lifestyles had taken the picture and he flashed on the experience of seeing the real and the photographed Edie simultaneously, the picture having been thumbtacked to a paper on their cork bulletin board, the photo trimmed and pasted with about a pound of mucilage to a neatly crayoned frame with the caption MOMMY AND JACK. Lee Anne's work, meticulously and lovingly rendered.

But it was a picture that had caused him to nearly go insane with rage when he saw it and the story that had gone with it. He'd said nothing to Edie about it, but he wondered if she suspected how he'd reacted when he saw the story. He wanted to guard Edie and Lee Anne. Shelter them, and keep this thing they had private. A clever woman reporter for Lifestyles had put two and two together and run the photo into a semileering piece about the supersleuth and the widow of the victim. There'd been a brief exchange with a woman named Vicki Duff whose name appeared as the byline. She had said he was overheated, he recalled.

"You're going to think I'm getting overheated when you find out what is legal to print and what is not. You're going to find yourself in a caldron of some extremely hot water, and you're not going to like it." He was getting even more torqued as he heard her wise tone of voice.

"So you're implying that I broke the law by running that piece?"

"I'll let you know what I want to say to you in clear, understandable English. I think this is the height of irresponsibility for a journalist to run that sort of an unthinking, carelessly researched, insensitive piece of tabloid gossip in the middle of an investigation of this seriousness."

"It wasn't carelessly researched and you know it. You're a public figure, Jack, and you might as well get used to it. The First Amendment gives me the right."

"The First Amendment doesn't give you the right to put someone in a life-threatening situation by exposing them to unnecessary media attention just to sell papers. And not only is it irresponsible as hell, it may even be actionable. You have a right to put a fist in the air, but if it hits my nose, Vicki, that's battery. You also can't use the First Amendment as a shield for malicious gossip-mongering, defamatory misrepresentations of relationships done to hypo circulation, or— "

"If you've been slandered, you have the same recourse as any other citizen under the law, you can—"

"I know what I can do, and you know what you can do. I can see how very interested you are in being a conscientious reporter. But I want you to know you're skating on some thin and extremely hazardous ice. The bottom line is that— "

"I'm sorry, I don't have the time to listen to this, Jack. If you think I've misspoken in print, I'm sorry, but I didn't do anything other than report what I saw. Thanks for calling, and have a good day."

And the line was buzzing in his ear. What was done was done. He shut it all out as he looked at her silky, lustrous hair. Downtown that day the wind had caught her lovely hair and swirled the tendrils around her face and he'd felt such an unabashed and deep pride that it had filled him like wine, making him drunk with her availability and sweetness and caring. He had never quite become accustomed to the fact that she was his. And as Edie stood there on those long, slim legs of hers, still in high heels, cooking, her back to him, those sleek legs—the backs of those beautiful knees so tantalizing below the short skirt (thank the Lord those were coming back in fashion again) and the little apron tied so demurely around her tiny waist—it was over-powering and wonderfully exciting. He wanted her again now as he sat there drinking her in, and he thought of this lady as so very beautiful indeed.

She turned and looked at him, saw him watching her in that way he had, with what she had called his smoldering eyes, so darkly attractive and serious and sexy, and she read his mind.

"Not before supper," she teased, "you'll have to wait and get your dessert at the end of the meal just like the rest of us."

"Scandinavian peoples sometimes eat their dessert before the meal."

"Well, we're not in Scandanavia at the moment."

"Always quibbling about something."

"Ummmm." Some of the tendrils had worked loose again and it was getting to him. He stood up and walked over, moving up close behind her, snuggling up against this woman he cared so much for now, and encircled her small waist from behind, holding her against him.

She smelled so great, like—what was the fragrance? A combination of musk, fresh bread, and the sexiest perfume imaginable. He nuzzled against her neck and pressed himself into her.

"Oh, Jack."

"Dessert, you say."

"Ummmmm."

"You're something else; you know that?"

"Jack." She wasn't having any more of it right now. Something on her mind. And he watched her eyes harden with a question as she turned.

"Yeah. What?"

"The man."

"Huh?"

"The man."

"What man?"

"You know—who—who he is and everything."

"Umm. More or less."

"Do you, uh, have a picture of him?"

"Ung." He nodded halfheartedly.

"Do you think—" She let the question hang there in the air. The kitchen and the dining room, just a small open space with table and chairs, were empty of Lee. He was suddenly aware that she was over at her friend's house, and he thought it was odd that when Edie had asked about the picture of the killer he'd thought instinctively of Lee Anne, wanting her isolated from this.

"What?" he said.

"Could I see it?" she asked in a tiny, very soft voice.

"Oh. Well . . . yeah. I—uh . . . I guess you-uh, are you sure that's a good idea, babe?"

"I want to see, what he looks like," she whispered in her quietest voice. If he hadn't been watching her lips move, even as close as they were standing he wouldn't have been sure what she said.

"Okay," he replied. He just kept standing there beside her, not moving, reluctant to let the mood disintegrate. Reluctant to show her the man. The thing had taken her husband and Lee's father away from them. This monster of a man. It seemed somehow a dirty, immoral act to show her his image.

"If—you think it's okay. I'd like to see it."

"Sure," he said. But he didn't at all. There was nothing okay about it. But he went over to his attache case and popped the latches and took out a slim manila folder and opened it to the thing she wanted to see.

"Oh" was the sound he thought she made. A pair of coal-black, diamond-hard pig eyes stared out from the cruel, yet somehow childish, jowly face that confronted her. Even the two photographs, harsh and grainy and devoid of all attempt at reproducing the look of a naturally posed human being, even these identity mug shots from Marion Federal Prison failed to convey any instant sense of menace.

It was the childishness of the man's face, the dimpled baby-fat face that made him look so unthreatening. She felt a cold tremor as she realized this was the thing that had . . . killed and mutilated Ed. And then it had killed again and kept killing, taking more lives without rhyme or reason.

"Jack?" She started to say something and he was taking the photograph out of her shaking hands as the torrent of stinging tears began to flow from her eyes and she collapsed in her lover's arms and he held her for what seemed to be a long time as she shook with violent, bitter sobs of loss and anger. And as he held her whatever thought she had been thinking left her like a wispy, blackened, and charred fragment of a half-remembered dream.

"Come here."

"Nnnnnn." It was a keening, a pitiful, wordless cry. But she'd cried enough now, and he led her over to a chair.

"Come on, hon. Sit down."

"Huuunnnnggg, hunnnnngggghhhh," a sound like she was still trying to make tears come but the well was dry. He sat her down at the kitchen table and stared at the dossier, not so much reading as remembering word groups, and then busied himself finding the bottle that he knew she had in the kitchen someplace. He found it up in one of the cabinets with the crackers and breakfast cereal, a nearly full fifth of Seagram's, and he sloshed a little into a coffee cup, pleased that it wasn't for him but sorry for this sweet lady of his. He ran some tap water in over the booze.

"Take a little sip." He put it in front of her. It was all she could do to get the cup up with both hands and she tried a bird swallow and went "Wwwwaaaaauuuu-gh," shuddering and pushing it away from her as she shook her head and he took it from her shaking hands and emptied the contents into the sink. And he took the dossier again and with eyes unfocused let the phrases and word blocks commingle in his mind, staring at the face that perhaps not even a mother could completely love, a smile like the grillwork of a 1949 Roadmaster, teeth meant to tear meat, huge, misshapen teeth—never a cavity in the strange head—perfect, perfectly awful teeth rendered obsolete by civilized society, teeth meant to wrest the crimped top from bottles now made to unscrew. A human shark's teeth. All business.

A face like piles of dough, massive and oddly featureless. A soft face dimpled like a fat baby's butt, repulsive and kissable at the same time, free from facial hair or scars of combat. But there were scars and then there were scars. And Eichord knew that some people wore their scars the way Yakuza wear their dragons, discreetly. His scars, aside from broken belly veins that encircled his girth like pregnancy stretch marks, his scars would be borne like ostracized triad tattoos, old and fading pachuco gang cruciforms, worn secretly and surreptitiously. Socially unacceptable stains on civilized skin, his worst marks deeply subcutaneous—living reminders of unforgettable nightmares, burned down into the core of his twisted soul with the torturer's cruel branding iron. Twenty-year-old scars that would rankle and hurt like half-forgotten shrapnel working its way to the surface of this uniquely malevolent human being.

There was something here, though, and he stared at the word groups and data patterns, letting the mass of fact and surmise free-associate and interconnect. Letting the life and times of Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski lap against his brain, sometimes not touching, sometimes in actual contact, contiguous and sequential and chronological, and sometimes without propinquity or connective. And he knew it was no good trying to force it and he closed the dossier not long afterward, going to her again and taking her in his arms.

He told her for the first time that he loved her without speaking the words, making his first commitment to her and to the little child that now ran across the next-door neighbor's backyard, pulling a kite against the light breeze as a young, female hunting dog of dubious lineage bayed excitedly at her heels, committing himself to them wholeheartedly now. Wanting "to dump his love inner," he thought, smiling, to himself.

So close. Forty-seven minutes away, driving the speed limit and hitting all the lights just right, only forty-seven minutes away by vehicle, sitting in a cramped framework of two-bys some nine feet below the city streets, the killer sat watching them. Looking at Jack and Edie. Then dropping remnants of a beef-and-cheese burrito onto their likeness in the grainy photograph as he continued to scan the somewhat lurid, breathless, and largely inaccurate account of the special homicide investigator and the widow of one of the first victims of the Lonely Hearts killings.

The name Edith E. Lynch and her suburban Chicago address typed themselves on his mental word processor and filed themselves neatly away for retrieval. And each word of the report and every word spoken by the arrogant cop on the television program struck at Daniel like the sharp stings of a rattler, taunting him, biting at him until he stomped down on the filthy paper with a vicious, 15EEEEE heel obliterating the images that enraged him. And he imagined he could hear the cry of the snake man again. It was taking him around the bend. The kind of purple, swollen rage that made him do the awful thing to the Volkers that day. It was going to make him take the cop and the cop's bitch and create a special and mouth-watering feast.

And just at that moment, when the killer's grotesquely brilliant mind began to get the first glimmer of his next move, Jack heard the hound baying out in back and an almost-ignored fact popped a red signal up amid the flood of trivia awash in his brain, and he knew then—as he always knew—without a moment's indecision, he knew exactly how he would take this man down.

It was not until the phone call late the following night, Edie calling him at eleven-thirty, after a day that included another long interrogation of the biker punk and a series of fruitless and frustrating attempts to pry more information loose from the people at Marion Fed, Edie calling him just as he was hitting the sack, not until then that the whole thing began to come together and his own plan started to assert itself.

"Hey, babe!"

"Umm, yeah?" A voice like a mouth full of cotton.

"I'm sorry, honey. Had you just fallen asleep?"

"No. Just got back. What's up, love?"

"Ohhhh," she sighed audibly, breathing into the phone. "The man. The man's face you showed me last night. I've seen him, I think."

"Say again?" He was wide awake.

"Jack, I know how this is going to sound but I have to tell you. I don't know—I almost didn't say anything, but—I mean, something was so familiar about that face when I looked at it, but—I just . . ."

"Huh?"

"I just couldn't put it into the right pigeonhole, but then I remembered when I was talking to Sandi about going to the center it came to me where I'd seen him before."

"You talking about the killer?"

"Yes. The man's photographs you showed me from prison. What's his name?"

"Bunkowski."

"I think I've seen him. I know that face. I saw him down by the center the other night."

"What center. What are you talking about?"

"The Crisis Center where I do volunteer work." She gave him an address in downtown Chicago. "I saw that face; I know I did."

"You—uh, you're really sure about this? I mean, look—"

"No, Jack. I know what this must sound like to you, but yes, I think—I am sure. I'd remember that face. I know it looked different, he'd look older now, wouldn't he?" She wasn't asking him. "But even so, the face is the same. Heavier maybe. I saw him in lots of light. It was a dark night but there was plenty of light to see his face and it scared me. He was huge. I was just getting in my car and I saw this—I saw him going down to work in a manhole. He was dressed like a whadyacallit? A sanitation worker. Those guys who work in manholes?"

"You saw Bunkowski, you think, across from the Crisis Center going down into a manhole?" He was beginning to think he had hallucinated the phone call.

"I swear I'm not kidding, honey. He had on like—this pair of coveralls or something and this big—uh, ladder thing, and a sack. And naturally I just thought it was a workman. And it struck me as kind of odd he'd be going to work down in a manhole that late at night. It was like maybe ten, ten-thirty, something like that. And you know, I was tired and all. But I think that was him. I mean his size. He was huge. There can't be that many guys that big that look like that. Can there? I—"

"Edie. You're sure about all this now?"

"Jack, I'm not playing games. I almost didn't say anything but I had to tell you. I think that was him. Really. I bet it was him. Honey?" No response. "Is it possible?" A long pause. She could hear him breathing. Thinking.

"Hell, I don't know."

But he was pulling his pants back on as he told her he'd talk to her first thing in the morning. And at 011500 Eichord and three other armed detectives, plus two backup units of uniformed cops, plus a chief inspector, plus Lieutenant Arlen himself, were standing with their weapons drawn and staring down into the eery shadows of a submain, looking at the remnants of the killer's last feast, feeling icy fingers of dread reach up toward them in the flickering lantern light and flashlight beams and spotlights as they looked down into the den where the beast lived.

Eichord felt two things. A thrill, not exactly elation, but that sort of an energy spritz—and fear. He was afraid. A nervous tic was pulling at his right eye like a Bell's palsy attack, and he could feel the side of his face twitch as he stood in the middle of the street staring down into this vista of another world. And he wanted a real drink.