Slob

Jack Eichord—reformed drunk

Even nine years later I could still taste the sharp and smoky bite of Tennessee sour-mash sippin' whiskey. I could remember just the way it looked all honey golden and amber there in the glass, the first Blackjack Rocks of the day, four fingers of Jack Daniel's black label sloshed into a big, serious drinking glass loaded with ice cubes. And the way that first sip tasted, the sharp kick of it as it burned down to warm your innards. God, how I loved to drink. And how I hated to stop.

I pulled my life together nine years ago. I remember it vividly even now. It was one of those suicidal Mondays when the pervasive mood was bleak, hopelessly dour, wintry, and downbeat. Another motel room. Another awful day full of depression, lots of scary surprises, hidden horror, coming confusion that would want to make you go back inside and pull the blinds shut. One of those cold, anxious, bone-chilling days you could still recall from the sixth grade, bundling up in a sweater and then some great, heavy coat topped with hat and muffler, on your way nowhere, facing the desolation of imponderable, countless weeks of nothingness before the next vacation when a kid could live again. It was like that and a hundred times worse. A killer hangover kicked on the door of my mind.

I was out east at the time, jobless and purposeless, a bust-out drunk about ten cases away from a relief mission. Getting close. I sat in this cockroach motel drinking Black Jack at 8:25 A.M. Aimless and helpless. I didn't know why I was awake this early. Why I was in this motel. What had happened the day before. Or where I was going. I went out and got in my car, the interior of which smelled like a distillery, and that's when it began.

I still recall the feel of those cold seat covers and the way my hot breath fogged up the windshield as I sat there with the DTs—I'd had the shakes before but never like that. I felt like my whole body was going to come apart. I could hear my own nerve ends screaming in pain. And that's where it hit me, right there in the front seat of that old Chevy, it hit me that I had become an alcoholic. Because in a frightening moment of icy reality, I realized that I had forgotten who I was. I actually wasn't sure of who was inside my skin. I could remember my own name but nothing else. It was so monstrously disorienting that it scared me sober.

I remember I cranked down the window, head throbbing like a set of drums at a rock concert, and I poured my booze out onto the parking lot. That was the last time I ever took a serious drink. I'll still have a cold beer or two. Even three. But the booze is just a memory now. Beginning that very day I started pulling my life back into shape. Within a year I was totally off the sauce, back on the force in the Midwest, and married, with a pregnant wife.

A lot of people have wondered how I quit "so easy." I couldn't explain it to anybody else. Think of it this way. Do you smoke cigarettes? If so, imagine a doctor you really trust coming to you and saying, "Okay, pal, if you smoke ONE MORE CIGARETTE you will die. Instantly. That's it. Goodbye." Unless you are the exception, even the five-pack-a-day folks will probably stop lighting up. Fear is an amazing thing. Imagine if the Surgeon General could put on a pack of weeds IF YOU SMOKE THESE IT WILL KILL YOU. It would probably work a bit more effectively than the current pussyfoot disclaimer. There was never any thought of drinking for me. I was through with it.

But I still loved the thought of the booze. I really liked to drink. I could still enjoy just thinking about walking into some dark, salty bar about two-thirty in the afternoon and watching the bartender pour my first double or triple shot. Maybe it's something a drunk never gets out of his system. Perhaps your body chemistry never goes into remission or readjusts to doing without. And I never doubted that inside my middle-aged skin I was still every inch a drunk. As the saying went, the only difference between being an alcoholic and being a drunk was that a drunk didn't have to go to meetings. I guess I'm a drunk and not an alcoholic. I'd like to say reformed drunk but I've read enough of the literature to know you don't press your luck.

For insurance I still had a real clear picture of that day sitting in that refrigerator of a car, gasping for air as the sledgehammer-anvil chorus worked out on my head, smelling that car's stink and trying to remember exactly who and what I was and where I was headed.

I woke up alone as I often did, not getting off on hookers and not being the type who gets lucky with strangers that often, and didn't waste any time getting ready for work. Work was my whole life now. I had been alone so long that I'd wiped most of the memories of Joan out of my mind. Joanie had been gorgeous, seductive, and a rich preppie to boot. I blew it with her. First with the job, then with the booze, and then with the job again. Looking back on it, which I no longer bothered to do, we probably didn't have that much going beyond a fierce physical compatibility. She hated The Job. It dominated our lives, of course, and quite rightly she viewed it as her competition.

So Joanie would try a little harder to be sexier, and she started taking courses in gourmet cooking, and reading these self-improvement books, and every conversation started to be a kind of verbal duel. She'd wake up each morning trying to see who was ahead, and it would be The Job 31, Joan 14, and so she'd seduce me before I could get my first cup of coffee down, and even that wasn't such bad duty at first. It was only when she couldn't compete against the "other woman," the bitch that took me away in the night, that our thing started wearing thin. A call was enough to send her right up the wall. And one night the damn phone rang as she was serving up the latest in her great culinary experiments and she overheard me saying I was on my way—and that tore it.

It was kind of funny looking back on it. She picked up a piece of her mother's Havilland and walked up to me and broke it over my head, called me a sonofabitch, and stomped into the bedroom in a symphony of slammed doors. It doesn't sound like much. It didn't hurt much. I have a thick skull as many of my colleagues will readily testify. But our relationship shattered like the china from that moment. It just sort of shrugged its shoulders and disintegrated.

Now when I woke up I'd try to get out of my small apartment as soon as I could, and I was very seldom there before bedtime. I'd gone from alcoholic to workaholic and I was thriving on the regimen. And it hadn't hurt the career. I'd been lucky a couple of times and developed a reputation, partially undeserved, for being one of the nouveau experts in certain types of homicides, the so-called serial murders.

When Jack Eichord poured out his last Daniel's and threw himself into the business of crime solving he became something of a textbook classic. In a city where the way of life on The Job is the "pad" or "arm," a kind of acceptable blue-suit payola that evolved from stolen apples and freebie doughnuts up through complete wardrobes and home entertainment centers, and then into the natural progression of dope and dope money—Eichord was a glaring anachronism.

The police in his midwestern city had excused corruption and stealing for so many years that it was regarded as simply the way to play catch-up for the short salaries and the absence of hazard pay. Nobody talked about it. It was just the way things were done. It started at the top level and worked its way down through the deputy chiefs and the rest of the top brass and filtered down through the street-beat cops, traffic cops, and flat-footed detectives.

But Eichord kept his principles because he didn't care about anyone else's corruption, he was only interested in solving murders. And if there were as many thieves on the force as off it, that wasn't his worry. He didn't like it much but he knew he couldn't do anything about it and it didn't keep him awake nights. He'd take the little stuff so as not to call undue attention, the free cop meals that went with the territory, but the rest of the goodies he passed on. And nobody else cared. He wasn't a boat rocker. He was just a little weird.

He had what even the worst cops had to admit was a basic good Cop Attitude. He never saw himself as a white knight or a big-shot crime crusher. There was no elitist attitude, even after Jack got tagged for the elite squad McTuff, and he actually didn't feel that he was any better a cop than his co-workers so they all got along okay. That kind of an ego thing can be sensed intuitively by even the most desensitized and stupid police officer. And it wasn't there. He was just interested in getting the job done. He loved solving murders.

McTuff, as it was pronounced, was the force's work name for the commissioner's Major Crimes Task Force, MCTF, which had been formed to handle unusual major crimes of violence. The unit had special funding that took the whole thing somewhat out of the realm of local law enforcement, plugging the machine into a small but highly sophisticated network of similarly focused agencies around the nation. McTuff as symbolized by their version of the take-a-bite-out-of-crime dog in the trenchcoat, was partly theatrics, part image tap dance, and part computerized anticrime think tank. It would let somebody in, say Pittsburgh, tap in to areas like Threat Assessment and Counterterrorism, formerly sole domain of the feds, or plug the boys in Oklahoma City directly into the latest serial murders in Los Angeles. And all of these capabilities gave the unit at least the surface trappings of an elite squad.

But Eichord was no elitist. He was just another cop. He saw himself as one more cog in the big machine. And he lived for the work. He had an ego like anybody else, and a healthy ego is mandatory in The Job, but it got its strokes from accomplishment as opposed to accolades or honors. He could have cared less what somebody else thought about him. He wanted to be liked to a certain extent, but beyond an ordinary human desire to have his fellow man think well of him, he was into the work for its own rewards. And that made him something of an overachiever, when coupled with its proclivity for six-teen-hour workdays.

McTuff and its counterparts on the West Coast, out east, and across the country, had no century-old traditions of police work to enrich its heritage. Serial murders had seemed to spring out of the sixties like some kind of wartime anomaly or mutation caused by the poisonous karma of the Vietnam era. The Zodiac killings, the Manson Family kills; like all fads, the serial murders had swept the country from California eastward, leaving a wake of characters whose names would soon be a part of legend. Twenty-six bodies in Florida. Thirty-five more in Chicago. Two hundred here. Three to four hundred there. The serial murders got more and more bizarre. And the more raw, new data emerged, the greater the horror stories. Like the specter of terrorism itself, the concept of mass murderers was taking on a kind of spiritual glow. And we tried to understand the horrors of "Reverend" Jones and his mass suicide, and a clown killer of boys whose first two names were John Wayne. The whole thing was beginning to blur.

Cops around the country were staying up late burning lots of midnight and three A.M. oil trying to plug into it all. Working with the shrinks and the self-styled prognostics, fakes, clairvoyants, psychics, frauds, show-biz folk, anybody who might help them get a handle on this strange phenomenon that had the whole country terrorized. Was there a profile of a serial murderer? Who was he? Where did he come from? How could he be spotted early on? Computers whirred, and clicked, and billions of facts and opinions were stored, retrieved, and stored again. It was out of this milieu that Jack Eichord, professional crime solver, emerged as something of a new eighties celebrity. A genuine, dyed-in-the-wool semi-expert on that scary, hairy thing called the serial murderer.

It would be inaccurate to say that relatively few murders are solved. Relatively few difficult murders are solved. A surprisingly large number of killings go into the files to remain theoretically "open" but with the assailants running high-and-dry free. Most or at least many of the tough crimes go unsolved. Ma stabs Pa in the neighborhood bar fight. That one gets wrapped real fast. Bubba shoots Tyrone in front of eight witnesses. That one's off the books lickety-split. The unknown John Doe in the trunk of the abandoned car over on South Twenty-eighth—that one may end up in the files to gather cobwebs. Whatever else you want to say about a cop's balls, they're not crystal. And the old "run those fingerprints down to the lab" bit works on TV but not often in real life.

Eichord knew how you solved murders. Tough, long, boring hours of leg-work and homework. A web of carefully cultivated, secret informants. Logic. The willingness to put in an eight-hour day. Take twenty minutes for a hamburger and coffee and back for the rest of the night. Waiting. Waiting by telephones that never rang or never stopped ringing. Waiting in cold, lonely plants, eyes burning from smoke or lack of sleep, trying to concentrate and not miss the subject under surveillance. Questions. A thousand questions asked over and over and over to 999 people who either didn't know, thought they knew and didn't, or knew and were stonewalling. And then maybe—just maybe—you got lucky at a quarter to ten and one of the questions got answered and put you back on the path. Homicide.

It clearly wasn't for everybody. But Jack Eichord thrived on good, solid detective work. He loved it. It filled all the empty places inside him and he let it engulf him in the job and he breathed it and lived it every waking hour. He'd been in clothes for nine years. Half of that on the McTuff thing. He'd caught a homicide of a teenage girl a few years back and run with it. It was the third death in a run of what could be serial murders. He wallowed in it. Got down in the filth of it. Let it take him down. And when the next body was found he'd already exhausted a few of his theories and he was right on top of it. He got lucky. He was there in the office when the special phone number rang and it was a sick junkie informant looking to get well. He knew not to call with garbage. He had something. He'd worked to get something. He gave Eichord the killer.

It was a big thing locally. The murderer was a dentist. Young, good-looking guy. Turned out to be bisexual and into the leather scene. A real sicko who liked to hurt the girls when he took them off. It got miles of ink, Dr. Demented Captured!—film at eleven. Jack Eichord found out that he didn't like being a celebrity. He wouldn't give interviews. An absolute clam. That made it worse. You don't tell the press no on a hot story. They'll just make stuff up and you end up looking even weirder. They're still trying to interview Garbo for heaven's sake. He learned about the press the hard way.

The Lonely Hearts Murders in Chicago came to him because of all that undue ink and media spoonfeed. Chicago came reaching out for him through the McTuff chain of command, and one day his chief sent him packing off to the Windy, his old stamping grounds, My Kinda Town, Chicago Is. He felt like an idiot, winging in on a first class ticket from the CPD as Mr. Crime Crusher to the rescue. Too ridiculous. He was just another flatfoot. Why me, Lord, he asked silently, as the big jet dropped down over the luckless folks who had bought real estate dead bang in the O'Hare flight path.

Chicago, in the hands of a lesser cop, could have been a horror story all its own. In the hands, that is to say, of a less-controlled ego the first day on could have been a disaster of a downhill slide. He came in the way he always did, all self-effacing and colorless, just friendly enough and sincere enough to win over the ones that hadn't decided, and oblivious enough to the others that his coming was an easy transition. Inside the first week they were asking him to their homes for dinner and the honcho in charge of the Lonely Hearts cop shop had Jack calling him by his nickname "Lou."

Eichord was on the street most of the time. Renewing old acquaintances, making new ones everywhere he went, asking questions, and listening hard to those answers. He was a helluva listener. All the time letting Chicagoland come back to him like a lake where you swam as a youngster. Letting the current move him like the wind on the lakefront. Listening. Moving into the guts of the city. Getting to know her again. Hearing her pulse beat. Waiting.