At some point, or as the Watergate-era co-conspirators would say, at some point in time the lines of lives destined to come together will come so close the interstices narrow to nothingness and the vectors almost cross. It was that way with Edie and a monster, whose lives would nearly touch. And yet, amazingly, neither would realize it. Nor would the cop Jack Eichord, whose own vector had already crossed one of the lives and was reaching toward the other to complete this overlapping triangle as diagrammed by destiny.
At 151130 Central, Mrs. Edith Lynch was registering a complaint with a rather unresponsive and tired employee of a major department store and was saying: '—that it wouldn't be any problem to return it.'
'It isn't any problem,' the woman was saying, 'but I have to get the number to put in the computer, and if you put the invoice in with it when you sent it back to the catalog center, then how can I help you?'
'But I have the number right here, as I just told you, the thing is that the two numbers don't— '
And at 151130 Central, Daniel Bunkowski was squeezed behind the wheel of a stolen Mercury Cougar, window down on the passenger side, tape deck blasting. He was on the outskirts of Chicago, trying to negotiate the heavy Chicago traffic in the uncomfortable Merc, black vinyl over silver, license X-Ray Tango Romeo-1969 belonging to one Olin Neidorf of Mount Vernon, Illinois, now deceased. Mel Torme was emoting from the car speakers.
He heard something about writing the words again, as Bunkowski ejected the tape savagely and twisted the radio dial to a teenybopper hard-rock station, blinking his reddened pig eyes and concentrating on his driving. Just an hour or so now and he'd dump this piece of crap.
And at precisely 151130 Jack Eichord was sitting in the squad room at his borrowed desk doodling on a yellow legal pad. He had just finished a doodle, what looked like a doodle in any event, based on the commonalities of medical records of certain individuals and he was beginning what someone might have termed his E doodle. He sometimes just sat and drew the letter
He would sit, sometimes for hours on end, a felt-tipped pen making neat, precise marks on a legal pad or whatever paper was available as he allowed his ability to free-associate time and space to analyze. He would throw his brain into neutral, just sit there doodling, let it all come naturally, thinking quietly and as organically as he could let himself, eliciting all manner of arcane lore, evoking any number of trivial facts, educing commonality and pattern where there often would be none.
The E doodle had many variations, and was worth zilch as police work goes but for some reason it often preoccupied him during these reflective times and so he invariably gave rein to it. Here was the way his latest E doodle looked on paper:
SylvEEya (phon.)
AvEry Johnson
Kasikoff
CharlEs Maitland
Edna Porter GiavinEllo
VErnon ArlEn
Edward William Lynch
Richard SchEigE
Edie Lynch middle name EmalinE
Eichord
Bill JoycE
LEE AnnE Lynch
At 175500 Edie was drinking a cup of coffee with her friend Sandi who was saying, '—so glad you are.'
'Me too, you know? I mean even if this doesn't last—'
'It will; don't say that. Think positive.'
'I can't think at all, that's the problem.'
'Oh, I'd love to feel that way again. It's been so long since I went love crazy.' They both giggled.
'That's what I thought too, but now I'm so head over heels that I— '
At 175500 Daniel Bunkowski was pulling into the area known as Oldtown, looking at the odd human landscapes of hippies, winos, coke snorters, and antique dealers, and listening to a completely insincere resonance extol the highly dubious virtues of a chain of waterbed stores. He smashed at the radio dial with a vicious backfist. He was ravenously hungry. What do I want? he thought. Chinese, he told himself. A big sack of egg rolls with lots of sweet and sour to go with it. And a quart of Wild Turkey to wash it down. And later maybe play with one of these bums.
At 175500 Eichord was drinking his ninth cup of cardboard-tasting coffee of the day and block-printing a huge letter U. It was printed or drawn to look like a letter carved out of stone, and it was the last letter of a twelve-letter two-word phrase that it had taken him nearly ten minutes to draw on a sheet of paper. Each large stone letter had its own shadow and he had carefully inked in the black shadows of the words that filled the page.
ETAOIN SHRDLU
He completed the artwork. Crumpled the paper up into a ball and arced it overhead to a large metal wastebasket to his left. A homicide cop behind him said, 'Two points.'
'Foul,' someone else said and the first unseen voice added:
'Two free shots from the foul line. Keep your hands to yourself,' in a mock W. C. Fields voice.
181730. Edie and Sandi are coming out of a store and Edie tells her, 'I sure appreciate you picking up Lee Anne.'
'No trouble. But I sure don't like you staying down here so late at night even if it is only one night a month.'
'I'll be fine, worrywart. I'll get Mr. Whatsisface from the center to walk me to my car if it's too late, or maybe Jack will pick me up. I'll be careful.'
'Okay. But call me later just to say hi, okay?'
'Okay.' She knew how Sandi worried. Sandi should worry about herself, she thought, in an uncharitable moment, considering the way she dresses and comes on to guys sometimes. She put the irritating thought out of her mind and click-clacked on her high-heeled long legs to the center. One night a month she did a stint of telephone answering on the Runaway Hotline. It was from six to ten P.M., and she would make sure to have someone walk with her to her car as the center was in a pretty bad neighborhood. Of course, the whole world was a bad neighborhood now at ten o'clock at night, she thought.
At 181730 Bunkowski was parked in the parking lot of a convenience store having just used the pay telephone outside the store to place an 'order to go' of forty dollars' worth of egg rolls. When the girl who took the order hung up the phone, she had relayed the message to the cook saying:
'Somebody's having a big party tonight.'
