Florida climbed up on the hood of the car and stretched her legs and scratched at the knots the mosquitoes had made. On her, even the knots looked good. Hanson seemed to be taking note of that himself.
Hanson said, “I’m waiting. And not patiently.”
“Once upon a time,” Leonard said, “me and Hap found a dead guy in a pond.”
“Yeah,” I said, “in a bookmobile.”
“Come again,” Hanson said.
We explained about Illium but didn’t give his name or say where his body was. We didn’t tell him any more than we needed to. When we finished, Leonard said: “It’s gonna look bad for the ole boy, things you’re gonna find on his couch. A box of kid’s clothes and some kiddie fuck books. But it’s bullshit. He isn’t guilty of anything. Neither’s my uncle. You see, all this is connected to those missing kids, but it’s not connected the way it looks.”
“Another thing,” I said, “me and Leonard got to talking last night, thinking about what we’d seen, and we came up with something else. In this guy’s house—”
“The drowned guy?” Hanson said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You’ll find a dirty bathtub with pieces of hay in it. We figure he’d just finished mowing his field, was grabbed by whoever while he was in the bath, and drowned in his own tub. Then they put him in the van and ran it off in the pond. An autopsy will probably show the water in his lungs isn’t the pond water.”
We didn’t say anything else. We leaned against the car and waited. Hanson looked at us for a while. “That’s it?” he said. “You’re not telling me any more than that?”
“We’ll tell,” Leonard said, “but we want something.”
“You’re not in any position to want shit,” Hanson said. “It’s best you talk your asses off.”
“You know we haven’t done anything,” Leonard said. “We want to solve this crime, bad as you, but we want the deal you didn’t give my uncle. You help us solve the case, but we lead.”
“I can’t do that,” Hanson said. “Department wouldn’t stand for it, a couple of amateurs. Why do you think they didn’t let your uncle do it?”
“He was nuts?” Leonard said.
“Well,” Hanson said, “that was part of it.”
“We already got more leads than you on this missing child business,” I said. “You might be amazed what we got.”
Hanson studied the lake in the distance. A soft hot wind brought the smell of it to us. It stunk faintly of dead fish and stagnation. A large bird’s shadow fell over us and coasted away.
Hanson said, “If I wanted to do it, I couldn’t. I tell my superiors, they’ll laugh their asses off, me suggesting you guys run an investigation. They’d be on you assholes like rash on a baby’s butt. They got through with you, you wouldn’t know if you wanted to shit or go blind. And they’d stick me writing parking tickets.”
“We don’t want you to ask them anything,” I said. “Not yet. What we want is you to join up with us, and cheat a little. Show us the stuff you got on the case, we’ll show you something. We think we know what’s going on, but we want to set everything up, and the more we all know, the better. We see the files, we might recognize something there goes with what we already know.”
“I’ve read those files,” Hanson said. “There’s not a whole lot of help there.”
“Something that’ll jump out at us,” Leonard said, “won’t necessarily jump at you ’cause you don’t have the information we got.”
“Sounds like some shit talk to me,” Hanson said.
“This way,” I said, “when we turn it over to you, and nod out like we never existed, no one’s going to know we did anything, unless you want them to.”
“Of course, we’ll know,” Leonard said, “and that’s all that matters.”
“You had all your ducks in a row on this,” I said, “you could make those jackasses at the station stand up and notice, and you’d get the respect you deserve.”
“Not to mention solving an important crime,” Florida said.
Hanson turned and looked at her. “I thought you weren’t in on this.”
“Just a wee bit,” she said. They held each other’s eyes longer than made me comfortable.
“We’re deadly serious,” I said, drawing Hanson back to me. “We’ve got the guy that’s been murdering these kids by the ying-yang, and now we’re gonna put it in the wringer, crank it up a couple notches. You don’t help us, we’ll find some other way to get it done.”
“I could just run your asses in for obstructing justice,” Hanson said. “And ought to.”
“You could,” Leonard said, “but you don’t want to.”
“Say I don’t?”
“You want this murderer bad as we do,” I said, “and we can make things happen a lot quicker if you do it our way. You help us, we get the benefit of your experience, and you get to look like Supercop. Hell, aren’t you tired of being neglected? You solve this, on your own, with our help, you might end up chief.”
“And most important,” Leonard said, “those kids will have justice. Well, some kind of justice.”
“I don’t know,” Hanson said.
“We start with the body in the pond,” I said. “Telling you who it is and where it is. It’s not like we say, then to hell with it. It is, you play that one any way you want, then we feed you some more. Tell you what we know and how we know it and what we think it means. Then we’ll stick the killer’s dick in the wringer and put your hand on the crank.”
Hanson crossed his arms, furrowed his brow, and looked into the distance. A minute ticked by like it was an hour on holiday.
“What’ya say?” Leonard said.
“I’m thinking,” Hanson said. “Give me a minute to breathe here, will you? I’m thinking.”
27.
Some mornings the beautiful face of my ex-wife, Trudy, hangs over me like a moon, but when I open my eyes there’s only the sunlight as seen through tears. Some mornings the light itself is the color of her hair, and the smell of summer flowers is the smell of her skin.
Some mornings I awake and the bed is too huge and I cannot remember how I’ve come to where I am, cannot believe what happened to Trudy, or imagine that beautiful body and face of hers in the ground, withering, feeding the bugs and worms. I won’t allow myself to look straight on at the memory of violence that took her and wounded me and Leonard. She went wrong and I went after her, pulling my best friend behind. Gunpowder and bloodshed, sulfur and death were Trudy’s final perfume. And me and Leonard, we’ve got the scars.
I awoke the next morning having dreamed that way about poor, pretty Trudy, awoke feeling old and blue and not much for coffee. All this the consequence of Florida not being in my bed. She had not invited herself to stay and I hadn’t the guts to push it.
Her absence between the sheets had been part of why the old dreams of Trudy came back; part of the feeling behind my bones and viscera that violence was oncoming direct in my path, like bright lights on my side of the highway on a dark, wet night; the feeling I was about to meet wet grillwork head-on, followed by two hot tons of speeding steel.
I got dressed and went outside without waking Leonard and sat on the porch steps in the cool of the morning and watched the sunlight brighten. Long about the time you could call the morning golden, Hanson pulled up at the curb in a car I had not seen before, a beige Buick with a dent in the rear fender. He got out of the car with something under his arm and looked at me. He managed his cigar out of the inside of his coat and put it in his mouth and came up to the porch and sat on the step beside me. He looked tired. He rolled the cigar with his tongue and put what was under his arm on the steps between us. It was a thick manila folder.
“Glad you’re up,” Hanson said. “I was gonna wake you.”
“Thanks for giving Florida a ride home last night,” I said.
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
“That was damn nice of you.”
“No problem.”
“I li
ke the idea of an officer of the law seeing her home safe.”
“Part of the job.”
We sat in silence for a while. Hanson shifted on the step so that he could pick up the folder and open it. He looked at the contents for a few moments, then put the folder on the porch. He said, “All right. We got a deal. I want you to know, ’cause of you and Leonard, I almost lit this damn cigar last night. Haven’t smoked in years, just sucked on it now and then, but I almost lit it.”
“Thanks for the folder,” I said, and meant it. “And the world thanks you for not lighting that damn cigar.”
“I photocopied all this shit last night, on the sly, and it gets out, well, my job is gone, and I just might be sleeping behind bars. And you and Leonard will be there too. You can bet on that. Here’s how it’s gonna work. I’m gonna leave you this, you give me the name of this guy in the pond, tell me where the pond is. I got some lies ready to use for leads. I find him there, we’re in business. I don’t, you are not only gonna give me this stuff back, I’m gonna punch both of you in the mouth and see to it you’re out of town.”
“Before sundown?”
“Just as quick as the toe of my shoe in your asses will move you.”
I told him Illium’s name and where to find him. I didn’t tell him any more than that.
“OK, son. Let’s see how we play the game.”
He got up, leaving the folder on the porch. He started down the walk. About halfway to his car I said, “Marvin.”
He turned.
“I really like Florida,” I said. “A lot.”
“I know, son, but sometimes things don’t work out the way a man wants them to. Ask me about that sometime.”
He finished off the distance to his car. He drove away.
* * *
I fixed coffee and breakfast and woke Leonard and showed him the folder. We ate and cleared the dishes and spread the contents of the folder on the table. There were a couple of photocopied snapshots of missing kids. Just a couple. Both boys, and both staring at the camera, the way young kids do, like startled deer.
One of them had his head shaved close and had ears that if he could have moved them would have given him lift-off. He was the first reported to disappear. It occurred to me that had he lived, he’d be a young man now.
The other boy was a nice-looking kid with a couple of front teeth missing. I looked at those photographs hard. I wanted those kids to be real, not just reflections on colored paper. I thought about the other kids. No photographs available. While they were living, no one had bothered. It was as if their existence was of no importance, no need for a matter of record.
We studied the material for a while. There was a lot of it, but it didn’t say much. There were notes from the cops and detectives. Hanson had a few notes of his own. The obvious thing was that one child a year had come up missing from the East Side for the past eight years and had not been accounted for.
I said, “See any patterns?”
“All boys,” Leonard said. “All about nine or ten. All of them noted as not having the best of home life, and in some cases, not being reported missing until some time after their initial disappearance. Part of that might have been the parents, and part of it may have been the sorry attitude of the police force.”
“What about when they were killed?”
Leonard studied the contents of the folder. After a while he said, “I’ll be damned. Every one but one came up missing in August. Corey Williams was reported last September.”
“Before you woke up, I did some figuring on that,” I said. “Taking in the fact a lot of the reports came in late, they were probably all kidnapped sometime in the early part of the last week of August. Personally, I think that’s a little too big a coincidence.”
“This is August,” Leonard said.
“Yep. And week after next is the last week of the month.”
“So what’s with the last week of August?”
“I don’t know. It sounds like a pattern, but I also got to thinking about the smell that was in that grave. That’s fresh, or seems to be. So maybe all this late-August stuff is just coincidence and he got started a little early this year, but I don’t think so. Stink could be due to slow disintegration. Soil like that, sometimes it happens, something gets buried just right.
“Another thing that jumps out at me is all the children were illegitimate. No fathers. The mothers were all teenagers. Couple of the kids had been shuffled around to foster homes, had been in some kind of trouble almost before they were out of diapers. Little robberies. Drugs. Stuff kids ought not to even be thinking about. See the pattern?”
“I don’t know that’s a pattern,” Leonard said. “Not the way you mean, anyway. Just shows they’re the type of kids to be at risk.”
“Well, we’ve already got our good Reverend in mind here, due to the church connections, coupons, recycling—which explains all those goddamn newspapers Uncle Chester had. And if you remember, Fitzgerald really had a hard-on for illegitimate children. Do you recall anything he said that stuck with you?”
“It all stuck with me. . . . Yeah, when he was talking about the mothers of illegitimate children, he said the mothers had produced baby boys. He didn’t say girls, or children. He said baby boys without fathers. Something like that.”
“It didn’t mean anything to me then,” I said, “not really, but I caught it. What I think is, we got a religious nut serial killer. He’s somehow tied his religion in with his sex and power urges. I don’t know, maybe something that happened to him in his childhood.”
“Shit, Hap, I don’t give a damn what happened to him in his childhood. I mean, he got fucked by his next-door neighbor who was a scout leader, I’m sorry for the kid he was, but for the man he is, I don’t give a shit. He made his own choice.”
“I don’t know some people have a choice, if certain things happen to them.”
“Cancer does what it does because it’s got no choice, but I get a cancer, I’m not going to psychoanalyze the little bastard. I want it cut out. This guy’s a cancer.”
“Even so, if we understand what drives him, we got a better chance of nailing his ass. Obviously, he doesn’t care for illegitimacy. Gets him worked up.”
“OK, Hap, I’ll play. He’s got a thing for boys, so he was maybe nine, ten, when he was raped by a man. Good guess?”
“Probably a person of authority.”
“A preacher like himself? That what you’re driving at? Something that links God, religion, sex, and abuse together.”
“If Fitzgerald was illegitimate, I wonder if he knew who his father was and what his father did for a living? Preach, maybe? And think about the position Fitzgerald’s in. It’s perfect. He’s trusted. He has access to children. He has all these youth programs. Kids like the ones in this file, neglected, probably not wanted, they’d be raw meat for this wolf. And I think this guy’s a psychotic, not a sociopath. Or he’s both. He gets off on the power of controlling the kids, and he thinks he’s doing God’s will. He controls them to some extent through positive services. Baseball, soccer, what have you, but—”
“It’s not enough.”
“For certain illegitimate children, it isn’t enough. The ones that maybe remind him of himself at that age. If he can control them, destroy them, he can control his past, destroy it. At least for a year at a time.”
“But why a year? We’re talking a pretty perfect pattern here.”
“I don’t know.”
“OK, Hap. When he was nine or ten, he was raped by a man, his father maybe, who was a preacher. Or he was raped by a preacher. If not a preacher, someone in authority he trusted. It warped him. And he’s a religious nut. That your track?”
“Yep.”
“OK. He’s tied fanaticism in with his deviance. That’s why there’s a page of Psalms stuck in each of the porno mags we found. The two are linked with him. Or maybe a part of him knows what he’s doing is evil, and somehow the Psalms consecrate it in his mind. Say he’s a psy
chotic. That he’s killing for God. Any of that’s true, it doesn’t take us one whit closer to nailing the bastard. Let’s just try and put together the hard evidence, and you can play Freud on your own time. Come on. What have we got?”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t know it’s such hard evidence. But here’s what I think we’ve got, and what I speculate. Your Uncle Chester and Illium were friends, Illium worked with the church. That’s why Uncle Chester’s poor addled mind thought the coupons were important. He was trying to point a finger at the church. The painting led us to the Hampstead place, and what’s under it. We’ve already established what the book’s connection was.”
“Illium,” Leonard said. “And maybe with the title of the book, he was trying to give us the nature of our criminal. Dracula ain’t nothing compared to this guy.”
“I think your uncle and Illium, probably because of something Illium saw at the church, got onto Fitzgerald. Perhaps the way he dealt with the boys in the programs there, the illegitimate ones especially. And somehow Chester and Illium connected him to the Hampstead place. Could be the good Reverend makes a pilgrimage up there to worship the water stain or something, Illium followed, watched from hiding. Fitzgerald went home to memorize his sermon, and Uncle Chester and Illium poked around and found the bodies. Six of them anyway. I bet the other two are up there.”
“So my uncle took one of the bodies and hid it here while he and Illium did their own investigation. Probably in case the old boy moved the remains.”
“That’s where they screwed up. They should have gone to the cops.”
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “and by not going, the body being found here, it just helped give the Reverend a way out.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Your uncle loses his memory, dies, so he’s out of the picture. Add Illium into the equation, dead at the bottom of his pond with porno mags and kid’s clothes on the couch, and the Reverend isn’t going to look as ripe for the part as he might have back then. So we have a lot of circumstantial evidence. Is it enough?”