steel shanks. Empty shower stalls and guards who couldn’t hear the screams. Gang rape and prison bedsheets fashioned into a noose for a convenient suicide.
I heard the shuffle of footsteps and muffled voices. The turn of a key in one lock, then another. Finally, the footsteps were outside and a door opened. Bullet-head came in first. He had two officers with him. Each carried a pump-action shotgun. Bullet-head did the talking.
“All right, Kelly. Here’s the deal. The prisoner is in a cell across the hall. He is cuffed, hands and feet, with a belly chain. If you want, we can take off the handcuffs.”
I nodded. Bullet-head mumbled into a walkie-talkie clipped to his shoulder.
“Okay,” he continued. “You can shake his hand if you want but that’s it. No other physical contact. If you want to give him anything, give it to me now and I’ll clear it with the warden.”
“I got nothing for him.”
“Good. Just talk and keep your distance. Everything will be fine.”
I nodded again.
“He’s got cigarettes and a bottle of water in there. He brought down a shitload of paperwork and some of his paintings. Any idea about that?”
“No.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, what’s this all about?”
“You going to be in there while we talk?”
“My two friends here will be on either side of the prisoner. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Then you’ll hear it all anyway.”
“Fair enough. Don’t make a scene and get him riled up, or my orders are to cut off the interview. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
They were still taking the cuffs off as I came in. Grime was sitting in a folding metal chair, at a table stacked with material from a decade’s worth of appeals. More files lay on the floor at his feet. One of the guards unraveled the belly chain and stepped away.
“See this?”
Grime pulled a thick brown binder off the table. It had orange, green, and yellow tabs running down its side.
“This is information I pulled on all the victims. Private investigators I paid for. Good money to find out what they could about all these kids.”
Grime pulled open a tab to reveal the face of a young girl. I didn’t catch the name, but she was smiling.
“Complete workups on all of them, who they were, who they knew, how they got to Chicago. Most of these kids weren’t saints, you know.”
Grime dropped the binder to the floor and looked at me full on for the first time. He was like any other old guy gone to seed, except worse. Around sixty-five, white hair slicked back in a bad John Dillinger and thinning, with a serious case of dandruff. His skin was the color of wet gravel and his face hung off his cheekbones. His eyes were shoehorned into swollen pockets of flesh, and his mouth dripped down toward his chin. A decade on death row had not been good to Grime. Then again, it wasn’t supposed to be.
“Why all the investigation?” I said.
“To prove who killed them.”
I sat down in a chair opposite. The men with the guns were on either side, just as Bullet-head had promised. And Grime talked, just as he had promised.
“I brought some of my sketches down.”
Grime pulled a canvas off the table.
“This is a self-portrait of me working on Michigan Avenue. I call it Michigan Avenue Mime.”
Grime grinned a row of teeth, crooked and mossy, but they were all there.
“Want to see one of my routines?”
Before I could say no, Grime had drawn both of his hands close together over his head. He looked up through spread fingers, turned his palms flat, and fought against an invisible ceiling dropping from above. Then he slipped his hands to either side and pushed against the heaviness of his imaginary walls. Finally, Grime dropped his palms in front of his face, peered through his fingers at me, and mimed fear. I wondered if this was the last thing his victims saw in their short bit of life.
“Not bad, huh?” the killer said. “I had real talent. You want to see another sketch?”
He pulled a second self-portrait off the table. This time it was Grime the Mime entertaining a group of kids.
“This is me at Brody’s Ice Cream Emporium. Get it?”
Grime coughed up a laugh and took a look around. I didn’t get it. Neither did anyone else. It was a tough room, but Grime kept on.
“Brody’s. The company with fifteen favorite flavors. I worked as their mime. Fifteen flavors. Fifteen bodies. Get it?”
I smiled.
“Got it.”
“This is one of my Disney paintings.”
Grime pulled out a painting of the Seven Dwarfs. It was winter, and the misshapen Dwarfs were sitting around a campfire, shovels tossed aside, trying to stay warm. Grime provided running commentary.
“Walt Disney was a mentor of mine. I love the Dwarfs. Sleepy, Sneezy, Happy, Doc. Every year I do a different season. This is The Dwarfs in Winter.”
“You do these in your cell?”
“Yeah. I do forty or fifty of these every year. Next up is summer.”
“Same scene?”
“Always the woods.”
“Where’s Snow White?”
Grime smiled again. Everything except his eyes.
“Not there, is she? Why are you here?”
Grime put the painting away and took a sip of water.
“I mean, I read your letter. New information about my case. You knew that would get my interest.”
I nodded.
“So how can you help me?” he said.
“I don’t think you’re innocent, John.”
Grime’s face remained flat.
“I don’t really give a shit what you think, mister. How can you help my case?”
“I think you had an accomplice. Tell me about it, and maybe I can help.”
Grime took another hit on the water and leaned back in his chair. His belly strained against the buttons of his shirt. Prison-issue blue.
“You know I serve Mass in here? Ask the chaplain. Altar boy.”
Another pause.
“You have a lawyer, John?”
“A fucking fleet of them.”
“Ask them. An accomplice changes your case. Changes the evidence. Maybe gets you a new trial. Where you sit, that’s a good thing.”
“What makes you think I didn’t do them all myself?”
“Like I said, tell me about it, and maybe I can help.”
“No, fuck wad. You tell me about it. Or get the fuck out of my jail.”
I leaned forward. Grime didn’t move.
“I’m your best chance, John. Believe it or don’t, but I can prove you had help. Now tell me about it.”
“Why should I give it to you?”
“Why not?”
