Slob

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.

They all sat there quietly watching the bright screen there in the darkened room, the noises from the television set's speaker being the only audible sounds. Ted and Betty and Sean watched the show with unseeing eyes. And as Daniel listened to the pontificating about the serial murders and all the lies, he stared at the cop's image with his hard, little pig eyes and decided he would send some proof that the Lonely Hearts killer was still at large. He liked that phrase—at large.

He turned to the dead Volkers and beamed radiantly, and with a groan of effort lifted his great bulk from the armchair and went to work.

Eichord the hero

He told her the whole thing of course, screamed it at her, cursing, pacing up and down, she whispering and softly mellowing him out, cooling him off as he raged about the 'fucking morons' downtown. But somehow she didn't really let it register. He could tell that by the way she kept talking about how the paper said this or the television said that. She liked it that he was a cop star, for right or wrong, it was hard for her to let go of it, so he finally shut up about it.

There were too many reporters around and she talked him into taking a somewhat extravagant suite in an outrageous but quite private 'XXX-rated motor hotel' in a nearby suburb. And this is where she took him to lick, among other things, his wounds—both real and imagined.

And what wild fantasies of eroticism held him spellbound as he lay there on the satiny sheet, eyes closed on the sexy lighting and oblivious to the quietly insinuating background music? Two cops named Pat McTeague and Penny Butts. Pat and Penny. Sounded like two broads, he thought. I'm layin' here next to this fox thinking about two cops. I'm in trouble.

Penny Butts weighed 250 pounds and ate onions like they were ice cream cones, and Pat McTeague was equally attractive. He was a borderline alky with a face like a Rand McNally, topped off by this big Rudolph-colored honker of a hose-nose with veins so big they had their own little veins. His whole face looked like a huge, ugly busted capillary.

Eichord was thinking about them because it was them he sat with when the contingent from the squad room moved en masse to the cop bar the night before. Their conversation was mostly jokes, one of the less obscene was a particularly ornate thing with the following punch line:

'So the judge says, say what? And the lawyer says, your honor that's when the plaintiff took an alpha cyanoacrylate monomer and created anionic polymerization bonding my client's erectile member to the subjacent faying surface of the sleeping unit. And the guy yells, Yeah, Judge, an the bitch glued my cock to the mattress too!' Laughter.

They started ragging Jack about his heroism.

'Man that fuckin' McTuff can solve the tough ones, can't they, bro?'

'Damn straight, ace. I gotta' get on that team, man. Can you see my name when they do the TV series about me. 'McTeague of McTuff; has a fuckin' ring to it.'

'I like 'McTuff Butts, Private Eye.' ' Eichord laughed dutifully.

'Shit, man, I mean you fuckin' get down on them whodunits.' And on and on. After a few minutes his smile muscles were starting to get that pinched-up feeling and he finally was able to con his way out the door and managed to ease out without looking like an asshole who couldn't take a joke. They were flakes. But the teasing was just their way of saying they knew it was out of his hands. They damn well realized it could easily happen to either of them, to anybody else in Homicide. Still, it rankled. He didn't like any of it.

The hero thing was serious business to him. He had come from a time that now seemed so remote as to be part of a lost world. He had come from the never-wuz yesteryear of a kid's dreams, back in the forgotten past of an America that believed in the mythologized hero. Larger than life. Pure of spirit. The good guy in the white hat.

Eichord had been a kid when the golden age of the heroic image tarnished in the onrushing high-tech era, disintegrating, the pieces of rust scattered by the fickle winds of time and evolution. But he still remembered the hero world that had formed his early years into something resembling a normal childhood. Jack recalled those giant-size images that his dad had taught him about. Stillwell! Damn. Salk, DiMaggio, Harry Truman, for Chrissakes—these were great, looming, awesome personalities like the six- sheets out in front of the Orpheum. And Eichord's generation had grown up with seriously revered heroes in sports, the military, science, and even—believe it or not—politics.

When Jack wasn't swimming or shooting baskets or climbing trees, he was reading about heroes. First the Hardy Boys and then the great autobiographies and then the military histories. He devoured The Washing of the Spears again and again. He read Seven Pillars of Wisdom