Stone Shadow

Dallas Lockup

Inside his head there is the feeling and it soaks him in terror. Before he can resist he is there. He hates himself for his weakness but the second he feels the chill of the cold place a whimpered “PLEASE” escapes involuntarily.

So still and cold and his voice is loud inside his head. The place always frightens him so terribly. Corridors of stone. Gray stone. Featureless.

The tall shadow beckons him forward and he knows better than to resist.

He knows as he moves into the depths of the dark and merciless place that he will be forced to look and he tries to steel himself but there is never time and he always forgets that he has no secrets now and this time it is one of the worst yet and he screams, seeing it, and the tall shadowy figure laughs.

Dallas

Guy builds up a few priors for flashing folks, shooting his dingus out ladies in the drugstore, you get an image of a fellow—you just can't help it. Weird-looking, wimpy dude with zits and glasses. Sort of gray-complected and vaguely moist, the kind of guy you'd never want to touch in a million years. Then you take a dude gets his rocks off burying corpses, you expect to see those buggy Manson eyes staring out at you going boogah-boogah. Even Eichord, who had seen enough of these folks to know you can't judge a book by its cover, had his preconceptions when he walked into the room where Ukie Hackabee was being interrogated. Those preconceptions were immediately shattered.

First off, when you imagine someone named Ukie Hackabee who kills people, you picture a toothpick in the mouth, a rough-and-ready “good ole boy,” or at least Eichord had. Ukie Hackabee was six-foot-one or -two, with styled hair, a Cary Grant chin, and only about twenty pounds on the heavy side of being able to pose for Jockey shorts ads. Ukie was a good-looking dude. And he looked up with a big preconception-shattering, sardonic smile and said, “Oh, goodie. You must be the GOOD cop. Because that gentleman'—he nodded toward the policeman shoveling papers back into a valise, who looked up to catch Ukie mouthing “asshole” to Eichord—'is most assuredly the BAD cop.” He broke himself up and laughed in a pleasantly loopy tenor giggle. This was a mass murderer and a pecker-shaker?

“He's all yours,” the other cop murmured, shaking his head in exasperation as he left.

“Come back and see us—hear?” Ukie called to his back, flipping him a bird. “What an asshole. Get that on the tape okay?” He spoke to the ceiling lights. “Do you need a level? Are you getting this okay?'

Eichord laughed easily and said, “Boy, we're not going to put anything over on you, are we? You got the good-cop/bad-cop ploy down cold. You even know where the mikes are. You and I must have seen the same movies.'

“Yeah.” Ukie laughed, a flicker of recognition in his eyes. “You're the good cop. I can see that. Well, hell's bells, why not stay with whatever works? I mean take TV. Did you ever just sit and listen to those laugh tracks they put behind the shows? Even the funny shows that don't need it. They say they do it because it works, meaning the shows won't get as high ratings if they don't play the electronic laughs. Those same laughs were taped back when the first studio audiences were listening and watching Amos ‘n’ Andy, f'r heaven's sake. That was, what—forty years ago? And the laughs are so phony. You can hear the way they just roll in the ha-ha-has on every would-be joke line. The laughs have an electronic sound that isn't quite the same as a real crowd laughing. You listen some time.” He was very animated and enthusiastic.

Eichord had the feeling that if he hadn't been cuffed to the steel table he'd be up and pacing back and forth, gesturing wildly as he talked.

“But they're pigs. They being the network assholes. They're greedy. They want ALL the lines to be funny. The worst show I think I ever saw was that old show with Ozzie and Harriet. Ricky would come in and say, ‘Hi, Mom,’ and the laugh track would explode, and the screen door would slam and the laugh track would get hysterical. I saw where that kid Ricky died not long ago. He seemed like a nice young man. I remember pictures of Ozzie and Harriet back when I was a kid. My mom and pop—foster parents but I called ‘em Mom and Pop—they thought Harriet was so beautiful. She was cool-looking back in the thirties. I saw a—'

“Mr. Hackabee?'

“—picture of her. Gee, must have been when she was in her twenties. Absolute knockout. Huh?'

“I wonder if we could just—'

“If only I had my uke in here. Man, I could play some good old jam, you know?'

“Mister Hackabee?'

“Mister Hackabee,” Ukie parroted, saying the words as Eichord said them.

“You mind if we talk a little about the—'

“little about the—'

“case?'

“—case,” he said brightly.

And Eichord just looked at him with a big smile. Letting the man see he was enjoying it too. “Very good.'

“Very good,” Ukie repeated, exactly with Jack's words.

Eichord laughed and Hackabee just watched him to see if he had zinged him a little. He decided he hadn't and took a breath and relaxed. “Ukie, my name's Jack Eichord, and I'd like to—'

“EICHORD Wow!” Hackabee appeared genuinely animated by the information. “The cat in MODERN CRIMINOLOGY. We've got a celebrity cop. That was a marvelous spread on you. Simply mah-velous. I was impressed. Really. I've read about you in the papers too. You solved that Demented Dentist thing and the one with the huge killer—what was his name—Cosnowski? Something like that? The Lonely Hearts murders? That was bigger than the Boston Strangler. You know one that always fascinated me was the Zodiac thing. They never got me, you know. Oh, woopsy-daisy. That was just a Freudian slip. I meant they never got HIM. But that was out in San Francisco or somewhere. I love the town. Everyone there is so happy and gay. Laugh it up, these are the jokes, folks. Eichord. Are you Jewish by any chance? No, of course not. German, I'll bet. Achtung. I used to like to eat in this restaurant that was half-German-half-Chinese. They had great food but an hour later you were hungry for power. BaROOOM-boom. Little rim job. Er-rim shot. Anyway, I saw the big story on you and really scoped up on that investigative genius. How come they brought you in to this? There's nothing left to solve. I've told them everything. I was the second gun at Dealey Plaza. I was the guy shot McKinley. I go way back. I'm so old I was a waiter at the Last Supper.” He took a breath and Jack spoke in the pause.

“Is this for the mikes, Ukie, or do you just like an audience or what?” Ukie's eyebrows raised in question. “All the commentary. I mean, it's very interesting but what's the point?'

“Point? Oh, I get it. This is going to be a thing where you challenge me on everything I say so that I have to say everything two different ways and in the dual narrative so to speak you hope to compromise me, catch me in falsehoods, trip me up in the fallacies and dialectic pitfalls of the Socratic dialogue, the snares laid by Platonic logic, the mental mine fields of Hegelian conceptualization, the technique of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, speaking of which—'

“Whoa. Please. Ukie. Give it a rest a minute.” Jack's brain was beginning to feel like it had been lying in the sun too long. His mouth had that dry, cottony feeling. “Are you laying groundwork for an insanity plea, because it's wasted on me, Ukie. Can we just talk in the normal way? Please?” Eichord staring at the enigmatic grin, speaking very softly. Calmly.

“I don't think so, Special Investigator Eichord of Modern Criminology Magazine and late of Chicago Sunrise, The American, and the New York Daily News. I think I prefer good-cop/bad-cop. One to threaten and berate. One to coax, cajole, flatter. One to pontificate and command. One to offer blandishments and hope of official friendship. Have I just about got that one down right? An investigative laugh track. Speaking of laugh tracks, did you know that in—'

“Hold it. HEY! Ukie'—the dark eyes leveled on him—'tell me this. Why would a nice-looking fellow like yourself have to get his rocks off by wagging his wienie at little girls from his car? I mean, that's something a slime-ball