“You look like somebody I used to know."
“God. Really? A lot of people tell me I look like—you know—the one on that TV show. Donna Mills?"
“Yeah. You look exactly like Donna Mills. She's the one I was thinking of.” You look like GENERAL Mills, maybe. Stupid cunt.
“There's a nice place just a couple blocks from here,” Tanya said. She had a slight malocclusion that actually enhanced her smile, made it sexier, like Cher's before she had her teeth fixed. As if the woman's mouth was sexier for being flawed, figuratively or metaphorically more open, penetrable, accessible. More vulnerable.
“Negative.” He peeled off another twenty. Her whore eyes fastened on the roll of greenery. “I live six blocks away. Let's go there. We can shower or whatever—get nice and clean, you know?” She shook her head. She didn't think much of the idea.
“I know a nice dark street. Pull around the corner up there.” She reached for the money. He let her take it and she reached over and pulled the car door shut. He started the car and moved out.
“My place, babe."
“I don't go to private houses, R.G. Come on, hon, you just pull around the corner and I'll show you a great time. Okay, handsome?"
He kept driving straight ahead, talking to her gently, smiling his good-looking salesman's smile. She had a very short micro of a denim mini and a low, scoop-neck T-shirt. He reached his right hand over and put his fingers on the inside of her left thigh.
“Hey!” Her voice was grating when it was loud in his ear like that. “I toldja pull around the corner. Come on, now. Pull up there in the shadows and I'll really make you feel good, lover.” Without asking him, she pushed the power button on the radio/tape deck and one of his tapes began to play as the antenna slid up.
“Fuck THAT,” she said, punching the music off and twisting the dial to rock radio. “Lemme hear some JAM!” Loud formula rock blasted from the speakers and she immediately started moving in the seat. “Pull over up there."
He was so enraged he didn't even wait. He just turned in the seat and hammered her with his fist. A fast reflexive blow to the head. Hammered her again. POW. Reached over and pulled her closer, the powerful muscles of his upper body rippling as he took the metal object from its case and stabbed it down into her skull, rubbing himself with his other hand, mashing down on the brake light—having forgotten he hadn't even turned the engine off—ejaculating over Tanya's dying form.
“—fucking slut CUNT WHORE BITCH FUCKING SHIT—” Coming, the front of his trousers soaked, his hot splatter of ejaculate all over the car interior. He was still hot. He would take this one home and improvise with her for a long time before he threw her away.
Buckhead Station
Eichord's round-the-clock on Schumway had been smothered in the crush of the numbers—man-hours, pounds of computer printout, phone logs, faxes, real time, cop time, time since the last Iceman murder. Also, the joker had a way of getting out of Schumway Buick without being seen. Closed maintenance bays, a constant flow of traffic onto the big lot, two large entrance/exit ramps on either side of the vast Parts Department, which ran the full length of the dealership, which was housed on four and a half acres of Buckhead business district.
He had access to too many cars, trucks, and rvs, not to mention the possibility of disguises, and ruses no more complex than lying down in the back of somebody else's car when they left. He would do that for spite first time he spotted police watchers. They were his employees, too, and the likelihood of complete cooperation, considering the weight of a paycheck in the balance, was less than slim. Schumway was now in the habit of routinely disappearing two or three times a week, sometime between the early afternoon and closing. So, by the end of the fourth week when nobody else had turned up dead or missing, spoda-schumway was just a grimy box full of paper in the still-open investigation on which Jack Eichord spent his working days.
When he got the telephone call that morning, he'd been across the street. He still felt numbness in his left arm and shoulder from what he believed was something that had been sent down the phone cord to get him. A guy on the duty desk in Mt. Olive on the other end, pouring poisons into the phone, the stuff burning down the line somehow, pouring through AT&T and working its way into his fingertips, the hand touching the phone, a foul, smoking thing that shot up his hand and arm and into his shoulder like a hundred icepicks.
“Some boys found a box in Mt. Olive Park,” the man told him. “Just a head in it. Female Cauc with multiple wounds. Looks like an icepick again."
He'd had plenty of time to go look at it. Come back. He was waiting for Dana and Monroe to return to the station. Sitting at his desk going through options. Don't go off half-cocked, he told himself. Go slow. He'd had plenty of slow.
His desk was the physical center of hoyt-graham-lennon, which was now a major-crimes priority case. To the left of his desk rested the main body of hoyt-graham-lennon, which was a well-developed female file standing 34 1/2 inches, weighing thirty-nine pounds, brown boxes in configuration, ruddy complexion labeled TDK T-120HS, running from Amarillo through Nicki Dodd ("a well developed male ... “), the suicide, now there would be more.
The rest of the regional investigation that “Special Agent Jack Eichord was coordinating” for the task force covered the walls of the Homicide squad bay and the surface of Jack's desk, overflowing into a chair. Brown-skinned accordion-fold expanding files held secondary suspects and spoda, norway and nevada, las vegas metro and diane taluvera, primary suspects, and hand of christ.
On top of all this was his beat-up attaché case, open, crammed with papers, and the base for his tangibles/intangibles. This was a display he'd pasted to white shirt cardboard and it sat there taunting him, unfolded like a diorama of man complete with geneological chart. Some of the headings were:
sensory alive/motor dead? (see nerves)
bicycle? (Wheelchair lab check track at Graham crime scene made by tread of a foreign bicycle.)
hazy records (ancient car wreck, Norway cover, move to UK, no Inland Revenue trace, no Interpol, no Scotland Yard, see voiceprinting/fingerprinting)
betty baylos (32—dresses like child—sexually? See KSP file)
retarded-brother ploy (relatives, medical)
Another note simply said:
could anybody be that clever? (sperm)
He vaguely remembered the day he'd got off the phone with the circuit attorney's guy, realizing now on the supraliminal level what he'd been going for as he tried to force through his wild and crazy fake-DNA-trace hypothesis.
“If they can trace blood, sperm, tissue—okay, you got the AIDS thing—we pay a prostitute to obtain a sample of this guy's sperm, or we—” He remembered the scenario. What if he found out that Betty Baylos, this thirty-two-year-old sexpot who dressed like somebody's teenybopper sister, had just happened to work at the place where—say—Freidrichs just happened to give blood? Wouldn't that be an interesting coincidence?
“Get what I'm saying?” Wink wink, nudge nudge, he'd tried to bait the guy.
“No. I don't understand where you're going at all.” He was going back to Keith Freidrich's mean stare. A good-looking cripple. A real hater. New City Arcade would be the kind of business a gambler might invest in. And the retarded brother ... Oh, baby, what a sweet touch for somebody cunning enough to plan a scene that was seamless, airtight, waterproof, and cop-proof. What if he was smart enough to move to a city where a wheelchair-bound guy with Arthur Spoda's initials was living with a beautiful woman? Oh, man. You could get so lost in these.