on her right ankle said Daddy, and the gold waist chain said Nicki.
“What?” she said again.
“Pay attention to me, bitch,” he joked with her, but cruelly taking hold of her long hair and pulling it back like a handle.
“Don't, Daddy,” she whispered sexily, “don't hurt your baby. What are the names of three actresses with five-letter first names who've been nominated for Academy ?'
“Susan Saranwrap, Molly Ringworm, and Merry Steamengine,” he offered, without a beat.
“Mary is four letters.'
“Yeah,” he grunted as he ripped the top of her bikini off, pulling her up to him. He was naked, propped up in the big bed on a mound of pillows, his hairy, muscular upper torso encircling her as he fed on her hungrily for a few moments.
“Hey,” he said, pushing her away and looking at her in a serious manner, “I just thought of something.'
“What?'
“Bonnie.'
“Who?'
“You know. Your friend Princess Di of the wrinkled toes. Her buddy Bonnie she was always blabbering about.'
“So?'
“So she's a kind of loose end, ya know?'
“Huh uh. She's covered. Remember—I got that postcard. It already went out to the nigger girl I told you about in California,'—she shook her head—'so, like no problemo. In a couple of weeks she gets the first card from sunny Cal. Remember?'
“I know. That was soooooooo clever. I do like it. In fact, I love it.” He kissed her. “But she's a loose end. I think we should handle her.'
“What do you mean ‘handle'?'
“Okay. If I was legitimately Funny Toes’ heartthrob, I'd be sick about Princess Di being gone. And ole Bonnie is going to think that her idiot bitch friend ran off with me to California. Who the fuck knows if she might get crazy and put the cops on me? True, she probably doesn't know much. But it seems to me the smartest thing we could do is eliminate the possibility of a problem. Go ahead and send the card blah-blah, and so on and so forth, and then I get in touch with Bonnie. I wonder whatever happened to Diane. We get together and I dispose of this little loose end.'
“No fucking way. No, Daddy. That's a serious mistake. You should never have any contact with Bonnie at all. She doesn't know you. You're clear of it.'
“Yeah. But dig it, YOU could get her for us.'
“No, don't make me do it. I don't like it. It's risky.'
“There, there, now,” he said, a hand closing on one of her breasts, “we'll work it out all neat. Don't worry your sweet tits about it.” He pulled her to him.
The morning was another pisser. The rain stopped around ten a.m. and Eichord didn't see anybody scrambling for their cars. The sky was slate-colored, with swollen, gunmetal clouds looking ready to open up again any minute. Everybody in the squad room was knee-deep in paperwork, and in truth, by the end of the second day Hoyt-Graham, the Iceman dossier, was citywide, then countrywide, and had mushroomed from three to some eighteen pages.
Eichord had the Ps. Palmer Med, Peek Equipment, Inc., Pioneer Home Care, Poole-Weintraub Associates, Puritan Hospital Consultants, Inc., and he added a possible from his homemade list, Parker's Pharmacy. It was times like this detectives felt the sting of cutbacks in the force, and what the reality of limited budgets meant when you had to hit the streets.
Hoyt-Graham was becoming a massive compilation of possibles, data-processors spewing out guys in their early forties, with some record of wheelchair usage, living within a 50 mile radius of the area served by the greater Buckhead Cross Index. The drawing had been a total strikeout. Eichord slid his chair back with a screech, murmured good-bye forever, and forced himself out into the wet streets.
Ten days later it had all added up to a mountain of maybes and nothing much solid. A week and a half of pounding pavement and making phone calls. Jack Eichord had learned more about wheelchair life than he'd really wanted to know: from the chair models that had the best riggings to the problems of decubitus to the unique environment of the chairbound individual; a world of disabled parking spaces and shopping-mall ramps and extrawide, elongated commode stalls that your average shuffler took for granted.
“Whatta we got, guys?'
“I got a woody,” Dana offered.
“Another first. What we got is about twenty-two men who look if not good at least possible.'
“Bullshit,” fat Dana whined.
“Nu? Speak?'
“We got Jumping Jack shit and you know it.'
“Possibles, he said, Moby, clean out cher blowhole,” Monroe Tucker suggested halfheartedly.
“Blow this.'
“But there's a solid and I think rich area,” Eichord went on, unperturbed. “And that's in the parallel search. Let's keep combing the pawn shops, office-supply companies, schools who purchased new or used equipment recently, the local buy-sell-rent-trade ads for typewriters, newspaper classifieds, radio/bulletin-board sales, neighborhood word-of-mouth among the garage-sale addicts—let's see who our friend with the ‘hand of Christ’ turns out to be.'
“You said it was garbage. You didn't like the one who typed the letter. How come you like it now?'
“Can't a girl change her mind, fer crissakes? Anyway, let's find the sucker. See who typed it. I mean, at least it would be a positive lead. Let him prove to us he or she IS a crank.'
But what Jack believed in his secret heart was that the more he looked at the list of impossible-possibles, the three-foot-tall bilateral amputees and embittered (rightfully) Nam vets who couldn't get the government to pay for a chair it had caused them to be put into, the less faith he had in the Hoyt-Graham data.
The work was piling up in an intimidating paper mountain, and the more Jack looked at it, the more he liked the concept of an extremely intelligent killer who could set up a carefully concocted series of crimes that would APPEAR to look like copy-cat kills. And then, when the cops looked at the murders, the case would peel away like an onion, layer after layer, and suddenly the inside would be hollow. Hello? Surprise—nobody home.
Two weeks and change. The twenty-two name list had yielded little gold. Eichord hadn't a vibe worth reflecting on. He'd just finished with Sam Nagel, a pitiful old gent who broke his heart for half an hour, the oldest forty-two-year-old he'd ever met.
“Thanks again,” Jack said, trying to take his leave.
“It wasn't any bother. I was glad to talk to you.'
“Okay. Well, take care” Eichord said, starting to turn.
“I don't mind helping out the police. You know, you all is about all there is that stands between us and the bad people. And we should support our law-enforcement officers.'
“Right. Appreciate it.'
“I see it all around. The collapse of the old moral codes. The old values are gone. The respect for law and order. Take your kids today: some of them don't seem to have any respect for anybody else's rights. And you know what I say? I say if you don't respect yourself first, you aren't going to be able to respect anybody else either.'
“That's right,” Jack said.
The man was so lonely for somebody to talk to. They made some more conversation and finally Eichord was able to make a friendly, graceful exit and wave farewell to the oldest forty-two-year-old man on Planet Earth, and he had to fight not to cross his name off. There were three names that he'd made check marks by:
ADAMS, Hayden
BOLEN, Willard (check)
