Hubcapville. Relics, perhaps, of the wheel-cover wars of the Frightening Nineties. What were these people doing with all these artifacts of Detroit mediocrity? Where did they come from? They came, probably, from all the vehicles parked in all these yards and fields. Millions of cars—junkers of every model and make. Some on blocks. Some on stilts. Some alone. Some in flattened stacks of hundreds. Some in pyramids of wrecks. The tomb of the modern Tutankhamen—a General Motors emblem the Michigan counterpart of a hieroglyphic—the last thing to rust away. Even down the side roads that were but a single mudded-out rut when the rains came, every dilapidated sharecropper's house had thirteen vehicles in the yard. Some unfit to run, some mere shells (bought for all one knew from the South Bronx—ten for a penny—a bargain?), and some without configuration. A truck cab without front or back, as if a mighty knife had sliced across the center third.
Eichord took a deep breath and went inside. There was a metal soft-drink sign out on the porch, but on the door itself the building's original name could be seen in faded letters. At one time this had been the Possum Grape General Store. Eichord tried to remember what possum grapes were. Had he ever eaten possum grapes, poke salad, collard greens, country soul food? Poke Salad Annie, he recalled from years back. But the only music he could hear inside his head was the ka-tunk-ka-tunk-to-kill-to-kill rhythm.
Poke Salad Annie was a woman of forty-two years. He tried to remember the way she would be described on the autopsy report later. What was that hideous phrase they always used in the beginning of the report? Poke Salad Annie is a well-developed female Caucasian. Something like that. He had autopsy videos where other people his age had X-rated porn hidden away in a special drawer. He had seen all the autopsy surgery he cared to see—enough to hold any man, he thought—and he imagined his own report. Jack Eichord would be a well-developed male Caucasian.
Good evening, friends and neighbors. I'm glad to be able to speak to you on this auspicious occasion on this suspicious Caucasian why do they always look so terrible when you find them dead the legs out like a discarded rag doll the head turned wrong the skin discolored the blood if there is blood the eyes the sexual the lacerations the penetration the asphyxiation the oh Christ the death of a red-haired fortyish Poke Salad Annie in the Possum Grape General Store, Hubcap City, he could feel the bile rising in his throat and he looked around and mentally noted that the woman sold cut glass for a living and then even that phrase had a frightening ring...
Cut glass.
But this rag doll's head was not turned wrong and her eyes still stared, unseeing, with that peculiar rigor-mortis hollowness. The woman was flat on her back, a pair of wounds to the left side of the skull like the incisor bite of a giant vampire bat, gray matter, coagulating blood, and God-knows-what-else circling her head like a grisly halo. And now Eichord felt certain that Arthur Spoda was alive and well and living very near.
Outside the door Eichord saw something in the dirt and said to the man making plaster casts of vehicle treads, “You get this?"
“Huh?"
“This one here.” He pointed to a small track beside the walkway.
“Yeah. I got it. In the van.” He gestured. “Lot of fucking good THIS is gonna do. Shit, they been walkin’ around all over this shit...” He mumbled off, cursing to himself in disgust.
It was the track of something small. It could have been the imprint of one of the wheels of a wheelchair.
Buckhead Station
Three hours later, the body tagged, flagged, and bagged, the scene peeled and sealed, Eichord sat reading the distillation of the initial footwork on Spoda:
AmeriMed Corporation
Browar's Pharmaceutical
Buckhead General
Buckhead Medical Park
Buckhead Memorial
Buckhead Surgical Supplies
Buckhead Therapy Center
Childs Institute
Everest & Jennings Wheelchairs
Fierstone-Laverty
Killian, Merriam and O'donnell Clinic
Moore Health Care
Palmer Medical Institute
Sears (health care department)
Eichord continued to scan the three-page list of possibilities. Where somebody might go locally to have a wheelchair maintained or repaired, where they might seek therapy, where a copper could look for a blood trail. Still cross-checking the voluminous printouts from the institutional records feeding Buckhead Station and the task-force computers. Less than a starting place so far. Not even a hunch. Just some makework while he sifted possibilities. No fingerprints, witnesses, clues, footprints, unless you count the vague wheel track outside the cut-glass emporium.
What he had was the bizarre M.O. that could indeed reflect a copy-cat killer who had read some twenty-year-old newspaper or magazine pieces, or seen ancient film footage in an obscure local documentary, or heard about a kill mode from a fellow con or patient, or, of course, it could be a man who had picked up his icepick after two decades.
What did he know? He now knew that Tina Hoyt and ... He glanced down at Poke Salad Annie's real name—June Graham. Two women had been taken down by the iceman. The labwork made them identical kills. Funny how fast the lab was when it was easy.
If it was Arthur Spoda—and Jack's vibes said yes—why had he not killed again for twenty years? If the man in Vega had been right, it was because Arthur had been confined to a chair. Now, suddenly, the murders begin anew. Did this mean Spoda was no longer wheelchair bound? Or had he figured a way to cause these victims to die from his chair, such as a surrogate killer whom he might manipulate. Eichord printed another word on his legal pad. The list now read:
Spoda.
Copycat.
Surrogate.
To which he added a fourth word:
Con.
And then he changed all the periods to question marks. By CON he meant as in confidence man, for it occurred to him this would be a hell of a clever setup that could theoretically be used as a smoke screen to cover up a killing with a far different motive. And he added the word:
Tontine.
Some insurance policy, he thought. But being an aficionado of ancient, creaking, sliding-bookcase-in-the-dark-house movies, he had seen his share of tontines, both real and imaginary. One of the most important cases of his career had been a tontine-related kill—a woman he'd finally tracked down in the Orient, thanks to his dear and now departed pal, Jimmie Lee.
How to cover up a killing with motive: somebody extremely clever might be willing to do a lot of homework and take some absurdly unnecessary chances, all in the hopes of constructing such a seamless homicide that the real motivation would never show through. The tontine had been a natural progression of the thought pattern. First he thought of the old movie plot where Joe and Tom each agree to kill the other's spouse, leaving both of them an air-tight alibi. They were STILL making that one! And then the tontine—the now-illegal pact where Tom and Dick and Harry agree that the last surviving signatory gets the bag of emeralds—a nice invitation to murder. Con or tontine?
I want to murder Joe. I wait until the Holmby Hills Strangle? strikes for the third time, killing his victim with a pair of knotted pantyhose. Thuggee-style. I do my homework. Then I invite Joe to Holmby Hills and strangle him with knotted pantyhose. It needs a little work, but still...
I'm Arthur Spoda. I move to Buckhead from Las Vegas, and after twenty years they find a cure for polio. I regain the use of my legs. After twenty years I get up and walk again! Eichord wrote, Scenario?