Where, walking aimlessly through its environs, I met Rheinhardt. I was coming out of a convenience store with a container of milk when he spotted me and dropped the first of his many memorable one-liners: “What’s a subversive like you doing in a dull neighborhood like mine?”
Warming to the flattery and the geezer’s crusty style, I said, “Looking for victims.”
Laughing, the old man said, “You’ll find them. Is that a Colt or a Smith and Wesson in your pants?”
I looked at my waistband and saw that the grip of my .38 was exposed. Correcting the matter, I said, “S. and W. Detective’s Special.”
“With a long barrel like that?”
I hesitated, then said, “Silencer.”
“You make it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You a tool and die man?”
“No.”
“Traveling man?”
“Yes.”
“I’m a tool and die man. Come to my house, we’ll drink and talk.”
I hesitated again. But when the old man said, “I’m not afraid of you, so don’t be afraid of me,” I followed him down the block to his musty old house of memories.
And I stayed.
Years before, “Uncle” Walt Borchard had bored me with his stories. Now, “Grandpa” Rheinhardt Wildebrand enthralled me with his, and the telling/listening hinged on a simple dynamic: Borchard’s need for an audience was indiscriminate, Rheinhardt’s specific — he was slowly dying of congestive heart disease, and he wanted someone as solitary and idiosyncratic as himself to know what he had done.
So I became his nephew, allegedly motivated by Rheinhardt’s oblique references to leaving me his wealth. In reality, that dynamic was shelter. As long as I slept in the gingerbread house and listened, I endured no nightmares.
Rheinhardt Wildebrand had been a Prohibition bootlegger, hauling whiskey down the Great Lakes on a barge; he had sold die-making devices to Canada-based agents of Hitler’s regime, pocketing the payment, then selling the same equipment to the U.S. Army. He had harbored Dillinger in the gingerbread house after the public enemy’s shoot-out at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Minnesota, and the mint-condition 1953 Packard Caribbean sitting chaste in his driveway was a present from the late Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, given in appreciation of Rheinhardt’s blueprints for jail-bar construction and placement, the car driven up from Miami by Meyer Lansky himself.
I believed the stories absolutely, and Rheinhardt believed mine — that I was an armed robber on the run from a parole violation and a botched payroll job in Wisconsin. That was why I shared his hermit life-style so willingly; that was why I endured my patchy beard and kept my face averted from prying neighbor eyes when we talked on the front porch. My only other lie was in response to a direct question, Rheinhardt knocking back a shot of Canadian Club and asking, “Have you ever killed a man?”
“No,” I answered.
After two weeks in the gingerbread house, I knew the old man’s habits and that I was going to murder him for the advantage I could gain by exploiting them. He kept a cache of several thousand dollars in his basement — I would steal it. He purchased all his clothing, household utensils and books from mail-order catalogs, paying for them with high-limit Visa, American Express Gold and Diner’s Club cards, sending in one check a year, with the 19.80 % annual interest the credit-card companies loved. Since those companies were used to his eccentricities, I would destroy his checking account by sending in big forged checks for a year of future card transactions, accompanied by forged notes stating in Rheinhardt’s inimitable style that he was “Taking my act on the road until I kick the bucket, and this check is to cover all my possible charges, so you won’t have to dun me.” I would wipe the house free of my fingerprints, slip Rheinhardt a sedative, drive him out to Lake Michigan, shoot him and dump him in the water, appropriately weighted down. He would not be missed for weeks, and by then I would be long gone.
The plan was brilliant, but formulating it destroyed my love of Rheinhardt’s stories, and the nightmares came back.
Now it was the old man’s neighbors who attacked me, wig-wearing monsters informed with telepathic powers. They knew I was going to murder Rheinhardt, and they told me they would let me escape from the deed only if I gave them the old pirate’s money. When I refused, they took on the faces of my Aspen victims, taunting me with the refrain from an old big band tune — “I’ve Got a Kraut in Kalamazoo! Kalamazoo! Kalamazoo! Kala-ma-zoo-zoo-zoo!”
Nine straight mornings I woke up shrieking and kicking and flailing. On my feet but still in my dreams, I lashed out at the furniture in my bedroom, knocking over night-stands and chairs. The first time, Rheinhardt rushed in, concerned. Then, day by day, he grew more and more worried. As the nightmare mornings continued, they eclipsed our storytelling hours, and I saw the old man’s worry turn to disgust. I was not the hard case he had thought; Lansky and Dillinger would have considered me a sissy; he was a sissy himself for sharing his secrets with someone so weak.
Now Rheinhardt’s tales were told in a desultory tone, and Ross took over the many faces of his characters. I knew it was time to kill the old man or get out.
Knowing that one more screaming/stumbling/lashing episode would push Rheinhardt into ordering me to leave, I foiled potential nightmares by staying awake to scheme. After one sleepless night I had the old man’s handwriting down pat; after two I had notes written to Visa, Diner’s Club and American Express. My third night was a trip to Kalamazoo’s South Side, where I scored a half-dozen 1½-grain Seconal. Night four — dingy, zorched, whacked-out and fried from 108 hours of continuous consciousness — was when I struck.
First I emptied the Seconals into Rheinhardt’s nightcap of Canadian Club and milk. He chugged the drink down as he usually did, and half an hour later I saw him asleep on his bedroom floor, half in and half out of his pajamas. Leaving him there, I tore through the house with a wet washcloth, wiping every wall and furniture surface in every room I had been in. With that elementary track-covering accomplished, I raided Rheinhardt’s basement money cache, stuffed huge wads of bills into my pockets and ran the uphill mile to the Kalamazoo Bus Depot, catching the late bus to Benton Heights with only seconds to spare. An hour later and eight hundred Wildebrand dollars poorer, I was behind the wheel of the now velvet-running Deathmobile II heading back to the gingerbread house.
Reentering it, my nerve ends felt as though they were being ground with sandpaper, and my heart beat so hard that I knew it would have to burst before I completed the kill. My throat was constricted and my hands shook, and sweat buzzed on my skin as if I were a live wire. Only concentrating on not touching anything extraneous kept me from imploding, and I bolted the stairs up to Rheinhardt’s bedroom.
He was still on the floor, and a small pulsing vein in his neck told me he was still alive. Again leaving him there, I ran to my bedroom and picked up the three credit-card letters, then ran back to search the desk and dresser for checkbooks. My hands were closing on a pile of them when I heard “Imposter!” and turned around to see Rheinhardt leveling a double-barreled shotgun at me.
“IMPOSTER!”
We drew down on each other. I snagged the muzzle of my .38 as I pulled it out of my pants; Rheinhardt jerked both triggers. They hit empty chambers, and the old man smiled at me, then fell dead at my feet. Another hour later, on a shelf of rock overlooking Lake Michigan, I gave him a formal execution befitting his dignity — two shots in the head and an overhand hurl into the deep six. With his grandfatherly bequests in my glove compartment, I then took off at a law-abiding 35, all my exhaustion evaporated. Thinking of Ross, I said, “Look, Dad, no fear,” and went cruising for someone with appropriate ID to kill.