“Hello,” I said to the officer, shading my eyes so I wouldn’t turn to stone.Reluctantly the officer put the paper down. He stole a last look at the comics page in a final, futile effort to get the joke in Little Lulu. “Yeah?” he said.“Detective Weisfoygl. Detective Second. Ninth Precinct,” I said.He gave me a ‘so what’ glare. “Through the door,” he said, pointing with his nose.There were two doors. His nose was so crooked I couldn’t tell which one he meant.“Detective Weisfoygl?” came a voice from the back, followed by a woman’s face peering around the door to which the left branch of the officer’s nose was pointing. The face was pleasingly oval, with pale cheeks heightened by a ruddy blush, framed by dark hair cut short, like Prince Valiant. The eyes were a rich violet, and magnified by the lenses of square tortoise-shell glasses. She was about 5'-4", nicely chunky in her green lab coat, which protruded strategically to accentuate her full breasts, on the left of which was pinned a Chicago Police ID tag. She was very pretty. Of course, compared with Officer Alley Oop at the desk, an iguana would outshine Brenda Starr. “Good morning,” she smiled, her voice sweet, but touched with just a hint of huskiness. “Would you come this way please?”I followed her into a huge back room, well-lit by rows of hanging fluorescent fixtures. All four walls were lined with tall grey metal boxes the size of commercial freezers. Across the faces of the boxes manic lights in dozens of wild colors flashed helter-skelter, like the scoreboard at Comiskey Park does on the all-too-infrequent occasions a White Sox player hits a home run; all that was missing was the fireworks display. Behind little windows in the boxes reels of tape were spooling—some quickly, some slowly, some jerkily back and forth. The machines chattered happily, excitedly, like a million monkeys in rutting season.The room had the sharp bite of ozone on its buzzing air.The woman led me to a far corner and paused at a table where a machine that looked like a combination typewriter and toaster oven clacked, unreeling foot after foot of blue paper on which was printed hundreds of lines of numbers and letters. For a long, concentrated moment, the woman studied the numbers as they printed; then she turned to me and offered her hand. “I’m Hilda Van Smoot. CPD Division of Electronic Records.”“Ben Weisfoygl,” I said. “Ninth Precinct.”“Glad to meet you, Ben,” Miss Van Smoot said. As I shook her hand I could feel rough, strangely sexy keyboard callouses on the pads of her fingers.I looked around the room. The best I could come up with to say was: “Wow…”Miss Van Smoot smiled appreciatively. “For the past two years we have been working to transfer all the Department’s files since 1863 onto computer.”“Well…” I said. “Sounds like a pretty difficult job.”“Less difficult than time-consuming,” Miss Van Smoot said. “But once we get the program fully operational and the transfer of data complete, any officer will be able to call up any amount of data on any suspect or crime committed in Chicago in the last eighty years.”“That’s impressive,” I said.“Research that once took days…” Miss Van Smoot went on. “…will now take minutes—even seconds! Just think how any investigation will be facilitated by this system.”“I…can see that,” I said, beginning to go into the patented stupid nod that I traditionally affect when confronted by anything more technical than a sponge mop.“So!” Miss Van Smoot said brightly. “You’re wondering what this has to do with your present investigation, am I right?”“Well…yes…”She turned to the roll of paper exuding in clattery spews from the toaster oven. “There!” she pointed with a pretty red-nailed finger.“Uh…”“In…” She turned a slender wrist, and looked at her watch. “…four to six minutes we should have a printout of all crimes ever committed in Chicago Police Department jurisdiction using an MO similar to the one in your three cases.”Boing! went a spring in my brain. “Uh…three?” I said, as blankly as I could manage.She blinked. “Yes. C.W. Mothrington, Willie R. Jackson, and the as-yet unidentified panhandler found strangled last night in Grant Park.”“Uh… I haven’t checked in this morning,” I said. “I didn’t know…”She wrinkled her nose. “The story didn’t make the papers,” she said. “But the scenario’s the same. Strangulation. No robbery. In fact, the victim’s hat was still full of nickels and dimes. No physical evidence…” She looked up at me. “It seems that we have a definite pattern of crimes developing.”“Maybe,” I said. I hate it when administrative personnel come to conclusions that should be left to trained investigators (the fact that she was absolutely right notwithstanding). “So you believe that this equipment can help make sense of this case?”“I’m certain of it,” she said. “Computers are the Future of Law Enforcement.”—Where have I heard that before? I thought, as I looked at the machines, the tapes, the blinking lights, the seemingly endless stream of printout. I glanced back to Miss Van Smoot, and was suddenly very aware how much I missed Fortuna.The toaster oven suddenly stopped clacking. Miss Van Smoot jumped to it, and ripped off a four-foot length of blue paper. She ran her finger down the column of numbers with lightning speed. She nearly knocked me down jumping into her seat at her desk. She referred to the paper, then began typing frantically. Her small hands were a blur—she’d have put the best executive secretary in the world to shame.She pressed a button on the toaster oven, jumped out of her chair, and ran to a low, boxy, silver and white machine—it looked like a dishwasher—in the middle of the room. She waited a second with a kinetic, professional impatience. Suddenly the machine schpritzed out a pinochle hand of punch cards faster than the best dealer at any Old Soldiers’ Home in this or any other Universe. Miss Van Smoot gathered up the cards, fed them into a slot in one of the big machines, then dashed back to her desk.She typed in a long line of numbers, then sat back, arms folded, her eyes dewy with excitement.Behind me the big machine that had accepted the cards whirred and purred, louder and louder, lights blinking like a hopped-up Christmas tree.The toaster oven started tapping. Blue paper came chunking out. Miss Van Smoot watched, her hands tented before her eyes, her face as excitedly serene as that of a young village girl witnessing an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The machine stopped. She ripped about a foot and a half of paper off and held it up to me in triumph. “There! Six names! Six crimes committed using the same MO as your present case! Six excellent suspects!”I looked at the paper. It listed names, addresses, descriptions, aliases, results of trials. It all looked very neat and scientific.All very impressive.All—I took a closer look.“Uh…” I said. “Miss…uh…”“Call me Hilda, please!” she smiled.“Uh…Hilda, I don’t want to be a killjoy or anything, and I sure don’t want to sound ungrateful after all the work you and, uh, your machines have done, but…” I scanned the paper ruefully. “Of the six…suspects…that are listed here…only one of them is still with us, and he’s serving six consecutive life terms in Joliet.”And had been, I read, since 1934. Hell, the most recent of all the cases was 1943!“It’s a good start, though!” Hilda bubbled.—Good start? I suddenly found myself hoping Animal Control had captured Sergeant Clarence. Even that stupid mutt seemed a better hope for solving this case than this rigmarole. “Well…” I said. “I’m sure this will be of some help…”Hilda nodded. Then she looked around the room, and, as if the machines might be eavesdropping, she tip-toed up and whispered in my ear. “It’s horseshit,” she said.“Pardon me?” I said.She stood back, her nose wrinkling, her lustily magnified eyes regarding me as analytically as any of the computers might. “Have you had breakfast?” she said.“No…”“There’s a diner down the block. I’ll buy.”She got her coat. The cop at the desk, now impossibly stymied by L’il Abner, but very obviously fascinated by Daisy Mae’s attire, didn’t look up as we passed. We took the elevator down.
In a booth at the diner, the noisy breakfast crowd the soundtrack to the show of bustling pedestrians just beyond the plate-glass window, Hilda gulped gratefully from her cup of coffee regular. A darkness, bitter as the black in my cup, appeared in her eyes, and when she spoke, her tone was not mellowed by cream and sugar. “So what do you think of my filing cabinet?”“Uh…huh?” I said.“Two and a half million dollars, bill footed by the taxpayers of Chicago. A fucking two-and-a-half-million-dollar state-of-the-fucking-art filing cabinet!” She sipped and pursed her lips angrily. “The powers that be in this city have got to be the most stubborn, short-sighted assholes that have ever walked this earth!”Years of experience have taught me that at some point in every conversation, one is safer just to sit back and listen. Even if I’d had the remotest idea of what she meant, or the slightest notion what to say even if I did, she wouldn’t have heard. She was so worked up I could hear the blood thumping through her ears.“Two and a half million dollars wasted!” she gritted. “For what? To preserve the criminal records of Civil War draft-dodgers? People arrested for looting after the Great Chicago Fire? People who were gangsters thirty years before Prohibition! People so long gone even their families don’t remember them. Cases so old half the offenses aren’t even crimes anymore! Damn them!”She slammed her coffee cup down so hard it chipped the saucer, sending a sharp shard of porcelain shrapnel in a zinging arc, glinting in the morning sun, pinging off the plate glass, and plopping in my cup. She sucked her anger deep, and concentrated it into a low, spooky whisper. “But… That two and a half million could have been used in a way that would really help the Department.”I nodded.“I’ve told them how we can do it!” Hilda went on. “Many times. But the pig-headed mental midgets that run this city just laughed me off. Told me I was a dreamer—that I’d spent too much time with my machines. That if I have any other bright ideas why don’t I take them to Mr. Wizard or Buck Rogers and stop bothering them!”Somewhere between ‘help the Department’ and ‘Buck Rogers,’ I lost her. It must have been at ‘midgets,’ which, mental or otherwise, trigger all sorts of bad images for me. “Huh?” I said, sagely.She laid a hand on mine, glanced around, and leaned close. “Tonight,” she said. “Meet me at 9:30. Loading dock of the HQ cafeteria.” She leaned back and smiled with wicked triumph. “Then… I’ll show you what two and a half million can do!”“Well…all right…” I said.Her violet eyes became very dark and serious. “Tell no one,” she intoned.Since I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, that would be easy.Then suddenly all the aura of bitterness vanished. “So!” she said. “You think the White Sox have a chance this year?”Our breakfasts came, and while we ate, we talked about the weather, the Sox, the Cubs, politics, the war in Vietnam—everything under the sun but computers. We parted outside. “9:30,” she said, with a last pat on my hand.
Having been disappointed by the computer, and afraid to go to the Precinct to break the news to Cap, I went to visit Stash instead. He was at home, lying on his stomach on his sofa, with his ass bandaged, eating walnuts, drinking sparkling burgundy, and watching ‘The Price Is Right’ on TV. I decided even going to the Precinct was better than that.
Cap looked like an Irish zombie, just risen up out of the potato fields to wander around and make life miserable for detectives. “HQ is shivering,” he said, dully. “Even though the last two murders were of low-lifes, they think it’s a serial killer.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Maybe there’s a pattern, but where’s the motive?”
Cap shrugged. “Hurhhhh…” he said sadly. “I hope to God we find one—I’m too old to go around chasing random psychos… What about that computer stuff you did this morning?”
“Uh…it was…very interesting,” I said.
“Yeah?” Cap said, his mood brightening a trace. “Any help?”
“Well, uh…I’d have a suspect cuffed, booked, and in the interrogation room waiting for the Public Defender right now…if this were 1906,” I said.
“Urgh,” Cap said, rubbing his chin roughly. “Lord God, what did I ever do to deserve this shit?”
—Well, I thought. Some twenty years ago you got the bright idea to take the Civil Service Exam.
“Bloog…” Cap moaned, and looked around for a pencil to eat.
“I wouldn’t give up hope, Cap,” I said. “They got some pretty fancy equipment up there. Two and a half million dollars’ worth, I believe I was told. Lots of clatter. Lights flashing like a Vegas casino. You never know… Something might develop.”
“Moom…” Cap said. A tired spark of disinterested recollection touched the twisted red veins of his eyes. “Oh, yeah…that Musha-Mousey wog called again. Wants to go to the Museum of Science and Industry this afternoon. Two o’clock.”
“Great,” I said. “Maybe I can lose him in the Coal Mine exhibit…”
“You do that,” Cap said. He laid his head in his hands and seemed to nod off.
I went home to get a few hours’ sleep myself.
The wonderful thing about the Museum of Science and Industry down by the Lakefront is that they have lots of neat stuff to play with. Buttons to push, pedals to stomp, and levers to yank that make all sorts of gizmos and doodads do things to help you learn about…well—stuff that’s scientific and industrial.
The awful thing about the Museum of Science and Industry is that sometimes you go there with somebody who wants to push all the buttons, stomp all the pedals, and yank every last lever. Usually that somebody is a nine-year-old kid…
Every one of the hundreds of exhibits grabbed the Maharashi’s rapt attention. His deep brown eyes sparkled as balls whirred along the shiny metal tracks of a gee-gaw; he chuckled with merriment as thingamabobs swung on silver chains; he whistled in awe as gimcracks, whiz-bangs, and whatchamacallits whirred hypnotically, rattled impressively, and clanked magisterially.
He spent more time studying a meteorite than the geologists who had found it, meticulously examined more circuit-boards and vacuum tubes than a veteran TV repairman, and lingered so long over the hissings and pumpings of a steam engine that he had to have come away from it more an expert than James Watt.
He sat making whooshing noises in a real Mercury space capsule pretending to fly to the outer reaches of this and who knows how many other Universes for so long the nine-year-old who was next in line started bawling and screaming that it was his turn.
We took the elevator down to the Coal Mine exhibit. My vague plans to slip away and let him wander the dark corridors forever never materialized. He marched his way through the exhibit with such confident aplomb that I found it hard to believe he had been born in the craggy mountains of the Punjab rather than the foggy hill hollows of West Virginia.
The Maharashi’s favorite exhibit of all was that big steel ball that generates static electricity. The Maharashi didn’t touch the ball himself, of course. Radjib did it for him, while the Maharashi stood aside laughing like the runt of a hyena litter as a zillion volts of static electricity made Radjib jigger around like a hambone dancer while his hair sparked out like Larry of the Three Stooges. “Hoo!” The Maharashi squealed. “Quite amusing!”
The Maharashi clapped his little hands while Radjib smiled sweetly and flexed his fingers trying to get the feeling back.
Our circuit of the Museum continued at the pace of a slothful glacier. Tourists were everywhere. Solitary Englishmen in tweeds looking from the exhibits to their guide-books then back again trying to figure out if they were in the right place. Small groups of French people turning up their noses at both Science and Industry. Gaggles of Japanese and Chinese who understood each exhibit down to the last nut, bolt, transistor and condenser; and Americans of every race, creed, and color who, like me, didn’t have a clue as to what any of this stuff was even after they had pulled, stomped, and yanked. The incessant flashes of a thousand Instamatic cameras lit up screaming hoards of elementary school children being herded around by teachers whose faces looked like those of beleaguered border collies. The heavy-set guy with the middle-parted hair was there—this time using his bird finger to explain how the giant round brass doo-flotchit that hangs on a chain from the ceiling supposedly proves that the earth rotates (or revolves—I always get those two mixed up). The three teenage girls were quiet, still deferential, but looked on with the obvious air that they’d much rather be elsewhere, and—in ascending order of their ages—smooching, heavy petting, or screwing their boyfriends.
Around four o’clock we went to see the submarine.
The most popular exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry is a German U-Boat the Navy managed to capture toward the end of the War. It’s out behind the building—a whole Nazi submarine, up on blocks, like rednecks do with ’46 Fords. You walk up a ramp into a hole cut in the side, duck your way through the insides where the Nazi assholes worked, ate, slept, and fired torpedoes at ships full of innocent people, then go out another hole in the front. The area is real cramped, so full of pipes and wires and gauges and handles that if you’re any taller than a nine-year-old—or a guru—you have to Groucho-walk from stem to stern.
I hate the place.
Not only do I always crack my head or shins on some pipe or wheel or periscope, the fucking thing still smells like Nazi piss.
In my haste to get through this tunnel of claustrophobic anti-Semitism, I nearly knocked over the guy with the hair parted in the middle, who was bent over using his famous finger to read the writing on a big red faucet handle. I was surprised to see that the three girls weren’t with him. As he read patiently to himself (coming much too close to turning the faucet handle, I feared) I wondered if he knew he was the only one left on the grand tour.
When we came out and I was gulping in huge breaths of Lake air almost to the point of hyperventilation, I spotted the three girls. They were sneaking cigarettes behind one of the big concrete blocks the submarine sits on.
“Well!” the Maharashi said brightly, as he came up beside me. He nodded solemnly at the massive grey flanks of the submarine. “One must feel very much sympathy for the poor men who had to work in such a place!”
Once again my diplomatic reserve (and the exquisite pain of a toe stubbed on a diabolically placed hatch cover) kept me from telling His Wisdom off.
Driving back to the hotel the Maharashi was very quiet. I assumed that he was contemplating the marvels of science and industry he’d just seen, and was formulating some words of wisdom to lay on the Faithful Disciples claiming that even the grandest of these wonders wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss compared to a life of meditation, celibacy, and writing big checks to His Wisdom’s Swiss account.
I escorted him and Radjib back up to their rooms, and the Maharashi put his hand lightly on my arm. “Detective Weisfoygl!” he said. “The aura of tension that surrounds you is quite palpable! Hoo!”
“It’s been a rough couple of days,” I said.
“Hoo indeed! Perhaps you would let me help?”
“Well, Your Wisdom, like I said, the Department—”
“No no!” the Maharashi smiled. “I was not speaking of assistance for your investigation. It is you, your personal well-being that concerns me! Please! You have been so kind to me, let me repay you by helping you to relieve yourself of the tension that buzzes about you like a malevolent cloud!”
—Yeah? I thought. Could he recommend a good blonde Scandinavian masseuse— preferably one with breasts the size of Mount Storskardhøa?
“All I require is fifteen minutes,” the Maharashi said. “What is a mere quarter of an hour if in that infinitesimal snatch of Eternal Time I can reveal secrets to maintaining your spiritual and physical soundness that you would not in your wildest dreams believe! Hoo!”
“Well…”
“His Wisdom speaks wisely,” Radjib said. “Countless Disciples have benefitted from His Wisdom’s regimen.”
The Maharashi smiled at my skeptically squinted eyes. “It is quite painless Detective Weisfoygl, and you will find that it opens Worlds upon Worlds of Blissful Comfort to you! Will you?”
—What the hell, I thought. I was so sick of how lousy my case had been going, and my neck and shoulders ached so much from scrunching up in that goddam submarine, that fifteen minutes of listening to this guy fill me with stupid platitudes might give me time to tune out and think. Get my bearings. Put some facts together in my mind. Maybe even take a quick nap. “Sure,” I said.
“Hoo! Excellent!” the Maharashi said. “So! Step inside please! Then we may begin!”
Inside the room the Maharashi directed Radjib to spread two little rugs on the floor. He sat down on one of them. “Please sit,” he said to me. “I shall explain to you the process of Discovery of Eternal Light Through Short Dark Journeys, yes?”
I sat down. The little rug smelled like a goat.
“To begin, my son…” the Maharashi said. “You must put your mind into a State of Total Peace. Bundle up all of your thoughts, bind them tight with cords of Resolve, and send them away to the Farthest Reaches of the Farthest of Universes. Then, when Total Peace is attained, one at a time your thoughts will be recalled. And, since the mind is in the State of Total Peace, each thought then may be dealt with without the interference of Other Thoughts, treating each Thought as a Short Dark Journey to Eternal Light.”
—Huh? I thought, my face registering my perplexion.
“Each time a Thought is dealt with, and resolved,” the Maharashi said patiently, “another thought will arrive from the Ether, then another, and another, and so forth and so on until you reach Inner Peace!”
—Easy enough to say when someone’s not terrified of Infinity, I thought.
“Hoo!” the Maharashi said. “You will be quite astounded at how easy it is!”
“Okay,” I said, cautiously.
“Excellent!” the Maharashi bubbled.
—But, I thought, the instant this process comes within spitting distance of Nothing, I’m bailing out faster than a war-loving paratrooper!
“So, friend Ben! Are you prepared to set out on your first Short Dark Journey?”
“I…guess…” I said decisively.
“Excellent indeed!” the Maharashi said. “Now! To begin, it is essential that you assume Optimal Lotus.”
—Come again? I thought.
“Witness!” the Maharashi said. Then, with the dismayingly relaxed flexibility of a squid on downers, he folded his legs under, up, and around himself.
—Ooh! I thought.
The Maharashi looked at me through a ring of his own legs. He smiled. “As you see,” the Maharashi said. “Half of Optimal Lotus has been assumed!”
—Half? I thought.
“The rest is just as simple!” the Maharshi chirped, and promptly stuck out his arms, crossed them behind his back, raised them, then clasped his hands together over his head!
—My God! I thought. He looked like a grinning little Buddha who’d just been spit out the back end of a threshing machine! “Ohhhh…” I stammered. “I don’t know about—”
“Hoo! So simple!” the Maharashi said. “Believe me. Once you…how is it you Americans say it—‘get the bang of it’—it is no chore at all! Radjib! Assist Detective Weisfoygl with Optimal Lotus!”
Radjib grabbed me before I could get up and run.
“Remember!” the Maharashi said. “Relax all your limbs. It goes much easier that way!”
Radjib knelt down and took me by my penny loafers, and quicker than I could say ‘Jawaharlal Nehru’ my entire lower half had been turned into one of those huge soft pretzels you get at hockey games.
“See!” the Maharashi grinned. “Simple!”
“Mmmp,” I nodded.
Radjib took my arms and with similar aplomb bound me up with myself. All I could think was that this guy could have made a damn fortune if he’d freelanced for the Spanish Inquisition. “Mpf!” I said. I felt like a purebred idiot! I knew I looked like one! My only consolation was that I couldn’t see myself in this humiliating attitude.
“Hoo! Glorious!” the Maharashi said. “Now! We shall begin our Short Dark Journeys to—”
The telephone rang.
Radjib answered, said a few words, and turned to me. “The call is for you.”
“Mgluh…” I said. I tried to untwine my hands. No dice. I tried to unyoke my legs. Ditto. “Mgg…”
Radjib looked at me, then at the telephone.
—If, I thought, he tells whoever that is, ‘He’s tied up right now,’ I’ll shoot him with my service revolver. If I’m ever able to reach my holster again…
Radjib brought the phone over and held the receiver up to my face. I gave him a dirty—and rather pained—look. “Hellwoof?” I said.
“Weisfoygl!”
I was never so glad to hear that nasty Celtic baritone. “Yeaf Cap? Whoofs oop?”
“I need you! Another stiff’s turned up!”
“Umf…I muy be a whoolf. The Moohurus—”
“The hell with the Mushy-Wushy!” Cap bellowed. “Meet me at Carlyle and Moss!”
“Muhh…”
Cap hung up. Radjib looked at the receiver, then replaced it in its cradle.
“Yrr Woofdom, I…” I started trying to get myself loose, but, like a shoelace when you’re in a hurry, I only got wound tighter. I tried butt-walking along, but couldn’t get any traction; the little rug kept sliding. I tried to stand, but started wobbling, like one of those rubber clown things you blow up and then beat the shit out of and it keeps bobbing back for more.
“Hoo!” the Maharashi said, just now sizing up the situation. “Remain calm, Detective! As with all Journeys, the Outward must be taken with the same Harmony as Inward!”
—Some help, I thought.
Methodically—but with a little less haste than I would have appreciated—Radjib unwound me. Carefully, making certain that most of my connective tissue was reasonably intact, I stood up. I was thankful that I didn’t creak too much.
“Well…I’ve got to go,” I said. “Police Business.”
“A true pity,” the Maharashi said. “You were doing so well! Perhaps next time we can continue, then?”
“That sounds good,” I said, rubbing my elbows. —Right, I thought. The day you catch me strolling through Tel Aviv whistling the Horst Wessel song.
My shoulders had begun to stiffen by the time I met Cap at the crime scene. (And, thanks to Reichsadmiral Raeder, my toe was throbbing like it had a schnapps hangover.) I parked next to the ambulance, by the support stanchion of the El track. A train sped intown above me, making so much noise that I couldn’t understand what my red-faced captain was screaming at me as I walked up, hunched over and limping like some B-Western sidekick. As the train passed, Cap’s words became clear: “Fucking Fucking Fucking God-Damned Fucking…” He stopped screaming and shook his head. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to the sheet-covered body on the pavement.
A lab guy lifted the sheet. It was a girl of maybe eighteen wearing bellbottom jeans with a bright flower embroidered on one pocket, a peace symbol on the other. Her hair was long and brown hair, her eyes green.
She had the unmistakable mark of a ‘rope-like object’ on her neck. “Christ!” I said.
“Fuck!” Cap said.
“Any ID?” I said.
“Tonya Kerrigan,” Cap said. “From Highland Park.”
“What’s a suburban kid doing in this part of town?” I said.
“Probably stealing,” Cap said.
“Huh?”
“Her pockets and purse are full of dime-store jewellery and makeup, all with the price-tags still on. No sales slip…” Cap scrunched up his nose, hunching his shoulders as if against a frigid wind. “We ran her name downtown. She’s been busted sixteen times for petty larceny. Served six months’ probation for one of the counts. Seems her hobby is shoplifting. I guess ripping off Woolworth’s must how suburban kids get their kicks. Better than drugs, I guess. Not that it matters now… I guess…”
I usually don’t look for longer than I have to at murder victims; the novelty of it wore off way back in my rookie year on the force. This time I couldn’t help but stare. The girl was so pretty. She looked so…so young. The only reason she should be downtown now is to get fitted for her dress for the Graduation Dance.
“Ben?”
“Yeah, Cap?”
Cap put his arm on my shoulder. He hadn’t done that in nine years. “You okay?”
“You think you get used to it…” I said.
“I know,” Cap said gently.
I turned away. The lab guy covered her face.
Cap shrugged. “No robbery. No sexual assault, which, since this is the first female victim, is damned significant. It’s gotta be the same scumbag.”
“Damn!” I said, and pounded my fist into my palm. “We got to get him!”
“Ben!” Cap said firmly, then softened his tone. “You’ve gotta calm down or we’ll never nail the asshole! Come on. You gotta relax.”
“That’s the second time today someone’s told me that,” I said. “And it’s not going to work this time either.”
“We’ll get him,” Cap said, blankly, bleakly watching the ambulance guys load the gurney and slam the doors. “Damn…” Cap went on, hardly more than a whisper. “You know… If I had a daughter, she might be exactly that girl’s age.”
I had to smile inwardly, just a little. Despite how moronically dull St. Patrick’s Day parades are, how arrogant the Notre Dame football program is, and how ear-splitting even a good rendition of ‘Danny Boy’ can be, you can’t help but love the Irish. They will go to the farthest extremes to come up with a poignant cliché.
The only people more skilled in such contrived pathos are us Jews.
I helped Cap with the paperwork; we didn’t say much to each other as we filled impersonal blanks with grim, intimate realities. I was damned glad he didn’t ask me to drive up to Highland Park to see the parents, who probably had been thankful that the shoplifting scrapes were the most trouble their daughter could get into. And now the city was about to hit them in the face with a shovel. Hell, they’d probably lived in town once, in some Near North or Old Towne studio apartment where they laughed about the water pressure and considered the clanky radiators ‘romantic,’ but moved away when they had kids to escape just this sort of thing.
What I needed badly now was a few beers, a couple of aspirin, and maybe a shot or two to chase it all, then a nap. That would give me more Inner Peace than anything the Maharashi and his thug Radjib could do for me.
I went home and fell asleep before I could pop the top of my first Old Style.
At nine-fifteen that night I stood in the shadows on the loading dock of the cafeteria at Police Headquarters. My sleep had been stabbed by bright dreams of the girl under the El, and of that strange, lost, helpless look Cap had as he watched the ambulance drive slowly away. I had gotten out of bed at 8:30 and driven uptown. I wasn’t totally sure why I was there. I sure didn’t expect whatever it was Hilda Van Smoot had been so excited to show me would be of any use in the case. But…the face of that girl under the sheet under the El was impossible to shake. Anything that I could grasp to, even hopelessly, to crack this case and get this psycho with the ‘rope-like object’ was worth at least a little of my time; even an uncomfortable interval spent here engulfed in a cloud of unpleasant kitchen smells.
There was a soft rustle behind me that I first took to be a rat with lousy taste.
“Ben?” came a voice from the dark.
The loading dock door opened a crack, sending a shaft of light across several chock-full dumpsters.
“Hilda?”
“Wonderful! You’re early!” she said, the light from behind silhouetting her as her lab coat billowed in the fresh spring breeze. “Let’s go up!”
We took a service elevator to the third floor. The reception area of Room 308 was empty; the ugly cop at the desk had obviously slipped under some wet rock somewhere.
We went into the back room, and Hilda snapped on a goose-neck lamp near her keyboard. “No overhead lights,” she said with a hush. The gleam in her eyes took care of illuminating the rest of the room. “Now I’ll show you what two and a half million dollars can do if they’re handled correctly!” She went around throwing switches on computers. A low hum rose like springtime tree-frogs. The computer lights came on; the place took on the look of that hotel room in the old movies where the neon sign blinks outside all night.
Hilda folded her arms across her chest and exhaled sharply. “Simply put…” she said. “I have programmed the computers, utilizing their full capacity—a capacity the higher-ups in the Department don’t know exists—not just to consolidate lists of suspects, but to actually solve crimes.”
She paused to let that sink in.
It didn’t go too deep.
“Uh…come again?” I said.
“We haven’t time for me to explain all the technical details of the process,” Hilda said. “But to reduce it to layman’s terms, what we do is feed in every bit of relevant data available—and I mean every bit—and let the computers do what I’ve taught them to do. And, in time, they will process that data, and give us a complete profile of the murderer.”
“Oh?” I said, quite like the layman.
“Yes,” she breathed, remarkably like a quiet, satisfying orgasm.
“Uh…all the data?” I said.
“Everything,” she said. “Every last scrap.”
“Well…” I said. “We don’t have that many scraps of hard evidence…”
She looked at me, the ring of light from the goose-neck reflecting off the huge lenses of her glasses with an atomic brightness. “Who said anything about hard evidence?” she said.
—Well, I thought. It has been shown to be remarkably helpful in making arrests and getting convictions.
Hilda glanced dewily at her thrumming machines. “First, Ben…we go with the obvious. Names and addresses of the victims. Physical descriptions such as height, weight, color of eyes and hair. Ethnic origin. Then we feed in their occupations and places of business past and present…”
I had to admit, even given my knowledge of computers (which is limited about as much as an earthworm’s ability to play the piano) that what Hilda was saying, backed up by her obvious expertise, had at least the possibility of making some sense.
“Then we insert every bit of data pertaining to the crime scene,” Hilda continued. “Location. Description of surroundings. The composition of the medium on which the victim was found—”
“Composition of medium?” I said.
“In layman’s terms,” Hilda said, “was the victim lying on the ground, for instance. And if so, was it on grass, cement, asphalt, gravel… And if, say, grass, then what kind of grass? Rye? Bermuda? Fescue? Poa annua? Kentucky Blue Grass? Or if it’s gravel? What type of stone. Granite? Quartz? Gneiss?”
“Uhhuh?” I said, a little frightened by the almost religious ringing rising in Hilda’s voice.
“Time of day of the crime,” Hilda barrelled on. “Air temperature! Wind direction! Barometric pressure!”
“Uh…yeah?”
“Then we go deeper,” Hilda went on, lowering her voice, casting its tone just on the edge of spooky. “More specific personal data. Names of spouse and children, and respective ages thereof. Names and occupations of relatives and friends. Educational history—schools attended and grade levels completed. Names of teachers, professors, principals, and guidance counselors. Roommates, dorm mates, lab partners—”
“Uh…Hilda?” I said.
“Yes Ben?”
“Uh…” I said. I had the feeling that we were getting close to overkill here, but—
“You’re thinking this might be overkill, aren’t you, Ben?” Hilda said, smiling slightly.
“Well…”
She grabbed my hand, and squeezed with the pressure of a affable stevedore. Her eyes were very bright behind her owl glasses. “Ben, the incredible reality about my computers is that the more facts you give them, the better they do. They’re programmed to handle literally billions of pieces of data, and to put all that data into comprehensible, useful order. And from that order, they are able to make comparisons against other pieces of data, and blocks of data, billions of pieces of data interacting with incredible speed, thus—”
I guess Hilda must have gotten a good look at my face, which was just about as blank as that of an earthworm’s at being confronted with a Steinway grand.
“In layman’s terms…” she went on, still not at all patronizingly, “…my computers can make logical calculations and comparisons at a speed and accuracy that Mr. Spock couldn’t even dream of.”
“Uhhuh…” I nodded.
“They can make perfect sense out of what seems like total chaos.”
“I see,” I said blindly. “So, then…from all this data—”
“Oh, we don’t stop there!” Hilda said. “We must take advantage of the capacities of my machines. There are millions, billions, indeed an almost…”
—Ohoh! I cringed. Here it comes…
“…infinite number of bits of data they can make use of, both physical and…” She smiled, seriously. “…metaphysical.”
—Metaphysical? I thought. “Uh…” I said.
Hilda nodded slowly. “What were the victim’s religious beliefs? If he was Catholic did he go to mass every day or only on Holy Days of Obligation? How often did he go to Confession?”
“Uh, Hilda, I—”
“If Jewish,” Hilda continued, “was he Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform? If Muslim—Shiite, Sunni—”
“Hilda?”
“And we won’t stop with religion,” Hilda continued. “The Secular data is every bit—if not more—important. What were his cultural tastes? His likes and dislikes in books, music, movies. His favorite foods!”
“Uh—”
“Sexual preferences!” Hilda trumpeted. “Erogenous zones!”
“Well, uh—”
“Makes and models of cars he owns or has owned! Pets owned present and past! Cat? Dog? Hamster? Rabbit?”
“Well—”
“Sense from Chaos!” she exulted. “You see, Ben? The stupendous, colossal possibilities of my machines are totally unlike anything that police science has ever known!”
—That’s what they said about the Evidence Retrieval Dog Program, I thought.
I regarded Hilda with an analytical eye. Glowing, shimmering, triumphant, she was beginning to tremble like a willow in a Lake Michigan wind.
I have always thought that scientists are, well…a little bit, uh… Just say they have to put aside some of that which we laymen consider ‘normal’ to have enough room in their brains for all the heavy ‘scientific’ stuff. Unfortunately, my knowledge of the intricacies of science is about equal to a howler monkey’s concept of the nuances of the plays of Eugene O’Neill; I couldn’t quite decide whether Hilda Van Smoot belonged in the Pantheon with Einstein, Oppenheimer, Newton, and Fermi—or sharing an Airstream with Daffy Duck in a trailer park on the outskirts of Dementoville.
“So…” I said, as cautiously as I’ve ever spoken. “All we have to do is shovel all that into these machines and…they’ll just spit out a punch card with the name of our psychotic serial murderer?”
“In layman’s terms, yes,” she beamed.
I was beginning to think that ‘layman’ might just be another term for ‘sucker.’
Hilda’s eyebrows knitted. “Ben…” she said seriously. “This process will work. I’m certain of it. But not one iota of it has been authorized by HQ. You have to swear you’ll tell no one.” She smiled. “Until, of course, we name the killer! Then we’ll march straight into the Commissioner’s office and fling it in the fat smug faces of those fucking pigs! Swear?”
“I promise,” I said solemnly. Hell, as if I’d tell anybody anyway. That, I didn’t need. Nine years after the fact I’m still getting ribbed for shooting that stinking dwarf. Imagine the kind of stupid jokes I’d be the butt of if wind of this foolishness ever got back to my jerkoff colleagues at the Precinct.
“Thank you, Ben,” Hilda said. She tiptoed up to kiss me on the cheek. “Now! I’ve already assembled a great amount of data, and I’m in the process of entering it all into the computer. There’s a lot of work to do, and, since you have no training, I might as well burn the midnight oil by myself. But first, I’d like you to fuck me.”
The scientific detachment with which she said that caught me off guard. As did the fact that when she opened her green lab coat, I could see she was wearing nothing but a black garter-belt and stockings. Her breasts thumped out at me, ample and globular. Her nipples stood tall and big. “So?” she purred. “You want to file a little hot data in me?”
“Glick!” I said.
“What do you say?” She rubbed her crotch. “Down below? Or…” She pooched her lips. “Up top?”
“Glunk!” I expostulated.
She spun around, bent way over, and cocked her hip saucily. “And I love it in the butt!”
“Ork!” extended my vocabulary.
She looked back over her shoulder and batted her eyes. “I’m just a horny little punch card,” she said. “Holes everywhere!”
I couldn’t make even the oddest of sounds now. My throat was parched, scorched, desiccated—all the drys your thesaurus could imagine.
“Well,” Hilda said. “Gotta choose one…unless I’m the luckiest horny bitch in Chicago, and you’re some sort of anatomical freak!” She gave me a smile that was part brainy schoolgirl, part ten-dollar whore.
Now I could hardly think. My brain was dry.
“Am I going to have to make the choice?” Hilda said.
All I could do was stare, and wish for a 55-gallon drum of Murine to bathe in.
“Okay…” she said, and started toward me. “I think…up top first.” She knelt before my totally stationary body (all my muscles had gone dry) and slowly pulled down my zipper. “Only not too much…” she went on. “Just enough to get you real hard and wet and slick for—”
Some hidden resource of propriety managed to struggle up from within me. “Fortuna!” I croaked.
“Silly!” she said, reaching in and fooling playfully with the vent in my boxers. “You’re with Hilda now.”
“No!” I said, despite her touch. “She’s my girlfriend! Fortuna Torelli! We’ve been going together two months! We love each other! We—”
“Ooh!” Hilda said, her grip tightening on my not altogether reluctant muscle. “Why don’t you call her? Three’s a kick, too. In any combination!”
“You don’t understand! She’s in Newark! Visiting aunts!”
“Love the one you’re with,” Hilda cooed. “Isn’t that the law now?”
“No! I mean…you see…Fortuna, she—”
“Ben,” Hilda cooed. “Any girl who knows you obviously can’t go a day without it. Bet right now Fortuna’s got her slippery cunt wrapped around some big Italian’s cock, riding him like he was Man o’War and she was National Velvet.”
My mind pounded.
National Velvet.
Elizabeth Taylor was in that picture.
Elizabeth Taylor had given me a lot of hard-ons as a kid.
Mickey Rooney was also in that picture.
Mickey Rooney is almost a dwarf.
I once shot a dwarf, and it nearly ruined my life.
Dwarves scare me more than Infinity.
Ghastly memories came flooding back, eroding my reason, my will, my devotion to Fortuna—sapping everything but the blood throbbing through my pubic regions. Hilda’s mouth was all over my cock, sucking me hard. She yanked down my Sansabelts, peeling me like a kosher banana.
I was powerless.
She sucked me right to the point where I was about to come, then backed suddenly off. She smiled wetly, stepped forward, and pushed me roughly down on top of the punch card machine. I could feel its hum on my back. She climbed on top of me. “Okay,” she purred. “It’s time for you to spindle, fold, and— What was that?”
“Gungh?” I said, her breasts flopping across the bridge of my nose like 16-pound boxing gloves as she looked up, a light of yellow surprise flashing behind her big spectacles.
“That noise!” she hissed.
—Please, please let it be just the wind, I thought.
“Somebody’s here!” she said, getting off of me quicker than she had mounted. “Ben! You’ve got to get out of here!” She snatched up her lab coat. “Get dressed!”
I rolled off the punch-card machine, my now quite inflexible third arm whacking the floor audibly. “Googh!” I said.
Hilda was wiggling into her lab coat. I got up to find that my clothes were scattered to all corners of the room.
“There it is again!” Hilda said fearfully. “Oh Ben! If we get caught here my whole project will be canceled!”
I was so turned on I wasn’t registering anything but erotic stimuli. I still didn’t hear anything.
I managed to pull my pants up and get my loafers on. Hilda draped my sports jacket over my shoulders and stuffed my boxer shorts into a pocket. “The back way!” she whispered. “Go! Go!” She pushed me toward a back door.
“What about you?” I said.
“I’m authorized! Nobody will ask questions! Go, dammit! I’ll call you!”
I went. The door slammed behind me leaving me in a black space that was either a closet or an airplane hangar. I put my hand out and moved cautiously.
Crunch! My fingers hit something. I felt around and found what I thought might be a doorknob. In turned it. A crack of pale light appeared. I peeked out.
It was a hallway, lined with about a hundred office doors. Cautiously, I stepped out. I didn’t know where I was, nor how to get out of the building. But I was a police detective, and I put all my deductive experience and training to use. I spotted an EXIT sign, and headed toward it. There I encountered an ELEVATOR sign. I found the elevator and punched the DOWN button. I waited. With any luck, there wouldn’t be anybody on the elevator.
The elevator arrived. The doors opened. Inspector Kleinmetz grinned out at me.
“Weisfoygl!” he said. “What? Burning the midnight oil?”
“Uh…yeah…” I said, stepping in beside him.
He clapped me on the shoulder. “I like to see that in a cop! Dedication! Tells me I picked the right man for the Maharashi detail, yes sir!”
“Thank you, Inspector…”
We parted in the parking lot. He gave me a firm nod and another clap on the shoulder. “Keep up the good work,” he said.
“I will,” I promised.
I drove home.
It was only when I was in my living room that I realized that I was wearing no shirt, and that I’d pulled my slacks on backward.
And inside-out.
