ones. It took a supreme effort of will on his part to concentrate on the exchange of words.
Joe genuinely thought Ukie was innocent. It was sufficiently clear and sincere that Eichord was sure of it. There's no faking a certain type of sincerity. But the Hackabee brothers were not easy to question. In Joe's case he had a way of turning all the questions back in your court. Not in evasion. He'd answer what you said but point the responses back, often as not, toward you. He'd compliment Eichord, in the way he answered, for his masterful intuition or whatever, and do it in such a way that it kept a soft, fuzzy-sided interrogation, the overall effect being a lulling, soporific one on Jack. When the afternoon reached its shank Jack Eichord had learned nothing, was exhausted, wanted a drink, and couldn't wait to get to a telephone.
He struck out at Jones-Seleska. He didn't just want to hear his dream girl breathe into the phone at him. He wanted to hear somebody else's reaction, other than a cop's, to the shock of gentleman Joe Hackabee. But Noel Collier was not to be found.
Cops don't talk much about paperwork but it is the ultimate bugaboo. The voluminous pile of paper trails that had been stacking up in the wake of the homicides now accumulating as the caseload even the cops called Grave- digger threatened to mire Eichord in pulp. Lab reports and forensics on so many bodies eventually take on a life of their own. Identifications made, confirmed, disputed, denied, changed, revised. Notifications. Probes. Summaries. False leads. It all took time, talent, manpower, hours and space and patience and wear-and-tear on the collective cop psyche. The legal aspects alone were becoming a nightmare. The case had attracted international attention.
The problem with pontificating to people about your abilities and your work and your life was that sometimes you ended up ruining things for yourself. Putting your mouth all over your own self-esteem didn't do much for positive thinking. His comments of late to the guys in Buckhead had returned to haunt him. For the rest of the day he sat there, alternately clock-watching and sorting through Grave-digger nastiness, remembering things said and thought that would have been better left untouched. A hundred percent of zero is zero, was one that came back around again on him.
When you were deep into a murder case as sordid and confusing as this one it dirtied you, if you had much humanity about you at all. It took real compartmentalization of one's life not to let the personal life and the pro life intermix and commingle to the point where you could never completely shake loose from the dark shadows. That was one of the things that made it so easy for cops to reach for crutches like booze. One of the reasons why so many copper marriages went down the pipes.
The desktop was strewn with crime-scene photos and nothing could be more depressing than shots of lifeless murdered humans such as these. Only the starving skeletons of the camps could compete as a visual downer. Some were mutilation murders, others—like the old lady—were even more horrible. The random, wasteful, mean, sad evil of acts like these. How could someone do this?
He couldn't take his eyes off the old woman. What was her age? He had the data somewhere on the desk. She was somebody's mother. Grandma to a couple of kids, no doubt. And Ukie and his accomplice or Ukie alone had clubbed her to death for no reason. Maybe because like the mountain—because she was there. How? WHY would you take lives like that? Madness. Insane horror without purpose.
Sorry, lady, he thought, looking at the woman sprawled like a rag doll tossed into a corner, skirt hiked up indecorously in death. Talk to me, Mom. Who did it? How many were they? What is the secret? And he went back to where the beginning was, where he was sure it had already begun, the random killing, and he concentrated with all his might on the names, life-styles, demographics, biographical commonalities.
And he squinted his eyes and tried to see a pattern somewhere. But look as hard as he might he saw only dead bodies. Corpses without connectives that could link them in death to perp-or-perps-unknown. He saw no telltale footprints in the cottage cheese. Only mystery and the aftermath of madness and murder.
Come on, Grandma. Show me something I've overlooked? Tell me why they did it. Was it the Way of the Viper? Some mystical Oriental thing? Some secret of the Five Triads? Hypno-assassins sent to do the bidding of Dr. Fu? Lobotomized Dacoits on a mission of vengeance? I've seen this movie, he thought, and I walked out on it.
“The most secret of all the combat ryus...” And an all-vanquishing force...” He knew Ukie's mumbo-jumbo could be largely discounted. But still there might be something. Ukie might even believe some of that garbage himself, he bore that sort of a psychogenic profile—at least superficially. The congenital liar who has created so many lies to becloud his real activities, nature, motivation, purpose, past, the haze of pseudepigrapha becoming murky pseudoreality. Ukie might not be able to differentiate between the imagined and the real.
But Jack knew enough not to discount the possibility of otherworldly forces, whether or not they might be connected to the martial arts and sciences. He would never NEVER forget the lesson learned from seeing the man in Kowloon. He had witnessed something, no matter how much he'd like to erase it, that would stay forever pressed between the crevices of the brain. The man in Kowloon had been a practitioner of what might be called a ninjitsu life. Jack could still see his image as vividly as if he carried the man's photo in his wallet.
His philosophical antecedents included such luminaries as Sun-tse, Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kai-shek, with a little help from their friends at Run-Run's fantasy factory. But this was a serious oh mighty Buddha yes
And for reasons that were explained to him but his Western mind could never grasp, the man took a very sharp-edged ceremonial sword, and in a chanting, shouting throng of Triad brethren he took his hand like so—the fingers forming a claw—to snag the wet and slippery tongue in his mouth and pulling it out to its fullest extension the man from Kowloon proceded to ... Oh, Jesus, he could see it even now, the sawing action of the blade, the tongue bloodying as the sword bit in but no leverage and it seemed impossible to sever completely and yet the man's whole life was resting on this his life of dedication his stature not on earth not in the secret brotherhood but the honor or lack of it that would go with him to the grave and beyond and so it was that with the fiercest human determination Eichord had ever seen the man's adrenals sluicing out the hyped adrenaline, sending the signal to SAW HARDER to his tunnel-visioned brain cells, he was able to saw through the thick blood-squirting pinkness and sever his own oh God even now he tried to wrench his mind off it and look at the old woman with her sad and sullied whiteness exposed to the black, unforgiving lens of a crime photographer's soulless camera all he could see was the man in Kowloon.
All the more horrific afterward as he stood there so stony, resolute, squinting, focused, shaking with concentration and energy and power and will, a proud and unblinking conqueror, oblivious to any loss or a mouth filling with blood, single-minded beyond any worldly suffering of wounds or tombs, eyes seeing beyond reality, penetrating through to his acutely personal mental vision, some ethereal discernment, some perspicacious vista of Bushido-samurai-kamikaze-ninja heaven where only the relentlessly tough will go.
And Eichord thought how easy it would be, with a mixture of irritation and wistfulness, how easy it would be to drink away the remainder of the day. Hum away the rest of the afternoon and evening. He'd hummed more than his share. He'd had plenty of hummers. How nice it would be to just fold his tents now and succumb to the lure of the bottle's promise and just slip right on in there with the melting cubes. Grab all the gusto you can get because too much of a good thing ... And he got through the day but it was close. It was waiting. Hovering. Waiting to take him down.
Driving back to the motel that night he learned it was getting closer to King's birthday and in Texas it looked like it might be a biggie. A thirty-five-year-old maintenance man was charged with ninety-six counts of murder in the terrible Puerto Rican hotel fire. A woman in Ft. Worth had thrown her infant son out of a fourth-floor window because voices had kept whispering in her ear to do it. Back in the shop two state guys from the attorney general's office were trying to turn the Grave-digger case into a racially related series of crimes. By tomorrow they'd be color-coding graphics for a presentation. Somebody somewhere was working up a monograph filled with facts like both the names Lee Harvey Oswald and William Hackabee each contain fifteen letters—that kind of goofy shit.
Jack switched the radio off and tried to get into his ultimate cheerleader fantasy. He pictured Noel down in her spa and she calls to him and he goes downstairs and there she is standing with her back to him, wearing a little short skirt and cowgirl boots, and slowly she eases the skirt up on those great legs and ... “Mister,” she tells him, “I ain't wearin’ nothin'.'
But he couldn't get into it at all. January 13 had been that kind of a bad mammer-jammer.
