Fortunately she didn't ask him any other questions, rounding up her introduction by saying, "More on the end of a horror story, the solving of the Lonely Hearts Murders with the modern—day Sherlock Holmes who brought the killer to justice, as 'Chicago Sunrise' continues—right after this!"
And suddenly the floor director made a cutting motion across his throat, which even Eichord could understand, and also relate to at this point. And people were running everywhere. The cameras were moving around in the sea of cables, twisted like a menacing nest of huge, black snakes that surrounded the riser where they sat, and several people attacked them, doing last-minute things to Christa Summers, two of them talking with her at the same time, which she seemed to find quite normal, and a woman blotted Eichord's perspiring head and someone did something to him, touched him with something he felt but couldn't identify, and he heard someone ask him if he would like a wet cloth and he almost laughed out loud at the insanity of the question. What in the hell would I want with a wet cloth? he thought, but he managed to shake his head and smile and he was just working up the nerve to ask if he could have a glass of water when the furniture commercial stopped and Christa calmly turned to him and said:
"I'm not going to bite, you know." And she gave a sexy, soft little mew of a laugh.
"Oh," he replied wittily, not having any idea what she meant. It was like the wet cloth. Why would he think she was going to bite him? Did these people around here speak only gibberish?
"You seem nervous," she was explaining to him, as you'd explain calculus to a third-grader. "So just relax or you'll make me nervous, and if I get nervous, and we're both nervous, I'll have to get the director down here out of the booth and he'll have to finish the show. And we don't want that do we, Don?"
And she giggled as Don said, "Speak for yourself," on the intercom, and everybody broke up.
And she was pretty good. Within a couple of minutes she'd calmed him down and the worst of the stage fright had begun to recede into the wings or wherever TV jitters go. Eichord was beginning to respond to her questions in actual sentences, and before long he was feeling somewhat at ease in front of the lights and the cameras.
He tried at first to really tell her about the phenomenon of serial murders but she already knew all the answers to the questions she was asking or at least she knew what she wanted to hear. That was the impression she gave Eichord asking things like:
"There's really no profile of a serial murderer, is there?" very confidently, and when he answered:
"Actually there are profiles. In fact one of the courses the agents teach at Quantico is called Logical Profiles of Serial Murderers and—"
"But what I'm saying, is that—" and leading him down another path altogether, in a way that an uncharitable person might think was designed to make herself look as infallible as possible.
She was very good. Slick. Facile. Quick with the teeth and sparkling cokey eyes and little hair toss. And she was no dummy. But she didn't seem to want to learn anything in the interview, which was fine with Jack. As soon as he figured out what she wanted he started giving nice, long-winded, winding answers to keep her on the safe stuff. And when she got on to dangerous ground he'd try to get her off of it entirely, leading the questioning away from the Sylvia Kasikoff thing as much as he could without appearing evasive.
She was experienced enough to catch what he was doing immediately but as long as it played she went with the flow of it. He was making her look as if she'd done her homework, even though she didn't like the way he kept steering her off the specific case-solving stuff and going into lengthy explanations when they were talking generalities. She knew how to get numbers and she kept him firmly on the killings. He had done a good job, he thought, of fielding the questions, bringing the conversational ball back to safer turf where he could talk about the serial specter in general. And then Uncle George took his turn at bat and the whole thing fell apart at the seams.
George sat down and didn't speak or even look at him. He looked at the floor until the standby cue came and then those eyes opened wide and he looked directly into the upper center of the camera lens as it blinked red and began speaking very fast looking into the camera eye but speaking to Jack Eichord, and in the first long, prolix, recondite question he used the phrase meromorphic function and Jack's eyes clouded over and he replied:
"I'm sorry but I don't know what you mean."
"What?" Uncle George demanded.
"I'm not familiar with the phrase mar-uh-morphic function, so how can I answer a question if I don't understand it?"
"Well, let me explain it to you then," George said sternly, becoming quite agitated. "The dictionary defines meromorphic function as a function of a complex variable that is regular in a region except for a finite number of points at which it has a limitless infinity as its terminus, from the Greek prefix meros, and am I going too fast for you and do you understand all the words like function and complex and variable and regular and region and finite and number and points and limitless and infinity and terminus and prefix, or should I go back and define them, which would take up most of my time and we wouldn't have to see you squirm trying to explain how the modus operandi of last night's murder was significantly different than that of the previous mutilation murders in the Chicagoland area, would we?"
And his face was bright red and Eichord thought he looked like a Type-A heart attack/hypertensive/apoplectic candidate for early hardening of the arteries who was about to have a stroke right here, folks, live and in color, and he said, "I'm sorry but I've forgotten the question," definitely getting off on the wrong foot.
So this was the brass's idea of a nice, upscale interview, upbeat, no hatchet jobs or anything—eh? And how did this old fart know the MO was different? From that moment on it was all downhill for Jack, who was no great shakes as a liar anyway.
After four or five minutes of this relentless diatribe they gave Uncle George the wrap-up sign and he looked at Eichord for the first time and said, "You've got nobody fooled, and frankly I find the police's playacting, public posture, premise, position, and presentation mendacious, specious, meretricious, and highly odious. And if you find that an impenetrable logograph, Special Agent Eichord, I'm saying it's a lying, stinking mess." Eichord thought of several witty come backs but luckily managed to refrain from trying any of them and in a second or two the light blinked out and it was mercifully over.
Five minutes of this in private would be bad enough. But for Jack Eichord, hoisted as it were on his Smith and Wesson and left to twist slowly, slowly in the Windy, there in the white-hot glare of television, there in the hog butcher of the world, city of big shoulders, it was five hours of hell.
And when Uncle George had finished with him the whole deal was fairly precarious in re who would believe what. Clearly George Kick-ass-ka's fans, if no one else, would think this had been a ruse on the part of the authorities to placate a nervous (and naive) public. And one would have to conclude Jack had done little or nothing to convince a skeptical viewer. But one such viewer sat watching Eichord's performance in a quiet and deadly rage.
He was watching a twenty-three-inch RCA inside a small home out in Oak Park in which three members of the Volker family sat beside him. Ted Volker, and his wife Betty, and their nine-year-old son Sean, all sat on a sofa beside Daniel Bunkowski, who had pulled his chair next to them.