apparently being offered representation by the famous Noel Collier, arguably the most famous woman defense counsel in the country and second only to Racehorse in the ranks of famed Texas criminal lawyers. Jack had been trying to get hold of her for two days and she hadn't returned his calls. He finally got her on the line and made an appointment to come see her. One of Eichord's techniques involved catering to egos, and clearly Ms. Collier would be a formidable challenge in that department. He hoped to do a little homework on her today with Hackabee. What would anybody that big hope to gain from defending a dead-bang murder one headed for death row? It would be different if she'd been some court-appointed pee-dee, but this was THE Noel Collier of Jones-Seleska. Why would they touch a loser like Ukie?
There was a lot of ink flowing over this, on the other hand. Every paper had Grave-digger headlines. Was a movie deal in the works? Had Swifty called with a book offer? There had to be something sweet and Jack would check it out. Meanwhile he'd go around with Ukie again. He took a couple of aspirin and wished for something to wash them down but he decided he'd better settle for that clear stuff that you get out of a water fountain. He took another deep breath, tried to shake the cobwebs loose, and opened the door that led to interrogation.
Martin Scorsese it ain't, but each tape begins with a pro slate like a TV commercial or something. And this one says:
A/N SURVEILLANCE
VCR V-3102-H WH/14
PROPERTY: HOMICIDE
And in a different handwriting:
Hackabee #14
The shot is from over Eichord's right shoulder. The resolution—grainy.
“Hi, Jack. No pun intended. Suppose I start by saying hello in a perfectly normal fashion. No tricks. No logorhumbano horizontal bopping of the cerebellum,” it sounded like he said, and Eichord interjected, “'Scuse me. I don't know the word logorhumbano. Define please?'
“Whoops.” He smiled. “Clarity is in order. I said, no LOGO-RHUMBA no word dancing, a coined word, no lofo- rhumbas, no horizontal bop, dig?'
“Okay.'
“I begin with ordinary speech. Relating, say, to the weather. I say, ‘Nice day, Officer.’ You go, ‘Nice day,’ in reply. I tell you how it looks like it's too cold to snow but snow is predicted. Or I tell you how I love the smell of rain. Or whatever mundane weather fact. Or I say, ‘Didja’ see those Giants? How's about that playoff game, eh? Kicked the stuff outta the Redskins. Who do you like in the Super Bowl?’ And you think, Hey, gee, this is a regular person, after all. And we begin fresh. See where I'm coming from?'
“Uh huh,” Eichord said.
“Idea here is that we reestablish my credibility as a human being. Because I want to talk to you, Jack. I want to tell you how I did it. I want to lay it all out for you and try my damnedest not to go off on one of my goofy word- flights, because it's important somebody understands what they've got in Ukie Hackabee. So first I've got to build up a little credibility and you might say belief insurance—so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you some dead people. A whole bunch of them. Isn't that exciting? So you're taking notes, the tapes are rolling, I assume, and let's just pitch right in to the nasty business at hand. I'd like to begin with a cute little number who I picked up in fact not too many miles from this very spot. She's in a nice deep grave waiting for you right now, even as we speak. Do you know where the reservoir is?” And he began a nonstop tirade of talk that ran for twenty-two minutes. In twenty-two minutes he gave up another grave every two and a half minutes roughly. In twenty-two minutes of wild and crazed conversation and rambling reminiscing he told Eichord and the men and women at the monitors where they could disinter nine more victims. Exact almost pinpoint locations. He'd obviously rehearsed this in his mind overnight.
“Can you think of any more?” Eichord prodded gently when Ukie had apparently run out of steam.
“I can think hundreds more, my friend. Thing is, I have to have something for something. I want my uke and I want an adequate channel of communication for legal representation assured me. I want confidentiality for my new attorney. I want—I want to be treated with respect. I don't want that weinie-wagger shit in my file. I want...” He trailed off with a pleasant expression on his face. “So. Are you ready to hear how I did it, or would you prefer to wait until the bodies are dug up so you know I'm for real?'
“No, Ukie. Go ahead. I believe you.'
“Right,” he said, expelling a huge stream of air, breathing in deeply and beginning, “I asked you when last we chatted about your familiarity with palingenetic phylogeny, and sacerdotalism, syncretism, things of a decidedly mystical and paradoxical nature but nonetheless important to your comprehension of the god-and-icons thing but you detuned and I went off the wall and that's why today I thought it was so important to prove to you I was real on this thing. Look, Jack. I just gave you more bodies. You know those bodies didn't just go into those graves and jump in and cover themselves with earth, right?'
“Right.'
“So now that I'm on that kind of footing with you and you find out for yourself that Ukie is the king of killers of ALL TIME, just like the Champ,” he said in a Muhammad Ali voice that made Eichord smile unexpectedly, “well, then, please keep an open mind and let me try and explain it all to you.'
“Fair enough,” Jack said, shaking his head a little.
“But you GOTTA know the territory, like the song says. Don't rule anything out just ‘cause it sounds weird, folks. Okay. This is so ... Oh, jeez, I just can't get into it all it's so spooky and vast and wonderful and awesome. Like where to start. Okay. Okay. I know if I start taking you back through all this you're going to tune out on me again but you have to understand the background or everything is meaningless. It is power, Jack. Such as you can't and never will be able to fathom and it doesn't just spring from nowhere.'
“Power.'
“The power of ... Before I tell you. I know you said you believe in God. No doubt you also believe in the devil. But for just a second put the thoughts of good and evil out of your head and look at this objectively. Forget the fallacies of Pythagorean and Plutarchean quasimoralities, the metaphysics of the Orphic and anthropo-morphic deities, the dubious disciplines of the gnostic and Nichomachean, the orgiastic and cathartic, the Shinto and Shugendo, the Taoistic, Maoistic, Confuscian, and confusing dialects and analects and sects and sex of the spastics and the flagellants and the secular and the ecclesiastical and the Mikkyo and the Ogolala shaman and the Hellenistic beliefs and spiritual suckering that forms the thick crust of so-called religious thought from asceticism to Zoroaster.'
“You're losing me.'
“Yeah. Okay. Start over. How do you know you believe in God? HE didn't just part the clouds one day and in a booming, thunderous voice proclaim to Moses Eichord the way it was gonna be. You learned from Mom and Pop. The Church. Sunday school. Relatives. Friends. Friends and relations on weekend vacations. Half-remembered tribal prayers, incantations passed from generation to generation, inscriptions in the stone memories of proud and noble ruins, monoliths carved by illiterates yet meant to be seen from the sky, dusty dogma and rotting ritual, surviving mysteries on crumbling papyrus, fragments of ancient urns from long-disintegrated cities, holy places gone to dust, stagnant sacraments and vestigial words of worship found in sunken cities of the dead, and it was ever thus from the blue waters of the Aegean Sea to the muddy Miss, we learned from the Word. God does not assert himself/herself, nor does Satan. Sitting at the knee of Isis, Serapis, Attis, Sabazios, Hecate, Medea, Persephone, Earth Mother Mary, basking in the katachthonian subworld's revenge and the cultist muck of Steve Holland deification, some cunt—excuse my French—passed along the marvelous, mystical, magical, mixed-up mystery of good and evil. But what if indeed there is no moral wrong or right but only superimposed force that we will refer to as phantasmagoria. It, asexual and omnisexual, neither he nor she, It upper-case, is to the existence of thought what a constantly shifting, complex sucession of optical effects and fluctuating scenes, seen or imagined, is to the
