by Ed Gorman
I had worked with innumerable police departments, innumerable private investigators, two soldiers of fortune, and a psychic over the past eleven years in an effort to find the man who killed my daughter.
That cold, bright January day seven months ago, and as something of a last resort, I had turned to a man whose occupation sounded far too romantic to be any good to me: Slocum was a bounty hunter.
“Maybe you should wait here.”
“Why?” I said.
“You know why.”
“Because I don’t like guns? Because I don’t want to arrange it so we have to kill him?”
“It could be dangerous.”
“You really think I care about that?”
He studied my face. “No, I guess you don’t.”
“I just want to see him when he gets caught. I just want to see his expression when he realizes he’s going to go to prison for the rest of his life.”
He grinned at me with his stained teeth. “I’d rather see him when he’s been gut-shot. Still afraid to die but at the same time wanting to. You know? I gut-shot a gook in Nam once and watched him the whole time. It took him an hour. It was one long hour, believe me.”
Staring at the three-story apartment house, I sighed. “Eleven years.”
“I’m sorry for all you’ve gone through.”
“I know you are, Slocum. That’s one of the things a good liberal like me can’t figure out about a man like you.”
“What’s that?”
“How you can enjoy killing people and still feel so much compassion for the human race in general.”
He shrugged. “I’m not killing humanity in general, Robert. I’m killing animals.” He took out the Cobra, grim gray metal almost glowing in the late June sunlight, checked it, and put it back. His eyes scanned the upper part of the red brick apartment house. Many of the screens were torn and a few shattered windows had been taped up. The lawn needed mowing and a tiny black baby walked around wearing a filthy too-small t-shirt and nothing else. Twenty years ago this had probably been a very nice middle-class place. Now it had the feel of an inner-city housing project.
“One thing,” he said, as I started to open the door. He put a meaty hand on my shoulder for emphasis.
“Yes?”
“When this is all over—however it turns out—you’re going to feel let down.”
“You maybe; not me. All I’ve wanted for the past eleven years was finding Dexter. Now we have found him. Now I can start my life again.”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “That’s what you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“This has changed you, Robert. You start hunting people—even when you’ve got a personal stake in it—and it changes you.”
I laughed. “Right. I think this afternoon I’ll go down to my friendly neighborhood recruiting office and sign up for Green Beret school.”
Occasionally, he got irritated with me. Now seemed to be one of those times. “I’m just some big dumb redneck, right, Robert? What would I know about the subtleties of human psychology, right?”
“Look, Slocum, I’m sorry if—”
He patted his Cobra. “Let’s go.”
2
They found her in a grave that was really more of a wide hole up in High Ridge forest where the scrub pines run heavy down to the river. My daughter Debbie. The coroner estimated she had been there at least thirty days. At the time of her death she’d been seventeen.
This is the way the official version ran: Debbie, leaving her job at the Baskin-Robbins, was dragged into a car, taken into the forest, raped, and killed. Only when I pressed him on the subject did the coroner tell me the extent to which she had been mutilated, the mutilation coming, so far as could be determined, after she had died. At the funeral the coffin was closed.
At the time I had a wife—small, tanned, intelligent in a hard sensible way I often envied, quick to laugh, equally quick to cry—and a son. Jeff was twelve the year his sister died. He was seventeen when he died five years later.
When you’re sitting home watching the sullen parade of faceless murders flicker and die on your screen—the weeping mother of the victim, the carefully spoken detective in charge, the sexless doll-like face of the reporter signing off on the story—you don’t take into account the impact that the violent death of a loved one has on a family. I do; after Debbie’s death, I made a study of the subject. Like so many things I’ve studied in my life, I ended up with facts that neither enlightened nor comforted. They were just facts.
My family’s loss was measured in two ways—my wife’s depression (she came from a family that suffered mental illness the way some families suffered freckles) and my son’s wildness.
Not that I was aware of either of these problems as they began to play out. When it became apparent to me that the local police were never going to solve the murder—their entire investigation centered on an elusive 1986 red Chevrolet—I virtually left home. Using a generous inheritance left to me by an uncle, I began—in tandem with the private eyes and soldiers of fortune and psychics I’ve already mentioned—to pursue my daughter’s killer. I have no doubt that my pursuit was obsessive, and clinically so. Nights I would lie on the strange, cold, lonely bed of a strange, cold, lonely motel room thinking of tomorrow, always tomorrow, and how we were only hours away from a man we now knew to be one William K. Dexter, age thirty-seven, twice incarcerated for violent crimes, unduly attached to a very aged mother, perhaps guilty of two similar killings in two other Midwestern states. I thought of nothing else—so much so that some-times, lying there in the motel room, I wanted to take a butcher knife and cut into my brain until I found the place where memory dwelt— and cut it away. William K. Dexter was my only thought.
During this time, me gone, my wife began a series of affairs (I learned all this later) that only served to increase the senseless rage she felt (she seemed to resent the men because they could not give her peace)—she still woke up screaming Debbie’s name. Her drinking increased also and she began shopping around for new shrinks the way you might shop around for a new car. A few times during her last two months we made love when I came home on the weekend from pursuing Dexter in one fashion or another—but afterward it was always the same. “You weren’t a good father to her, Robert.” “I know.” “And I wasn’t a good mother. We’re such goddamned selfish people.” And then the sobbing, sobbing to the point of passing out (always drunk of course) in a little-girl pile in the bathroom or the center of the hardwood bedroom floor.
Jeff found her. Just home from school, calling her name, not really expecting her to be there, he went upstairs to the TV room for the afternoon ritual of a dance show and there he found her. The last images of a soap opera flickering on the screen. A drink of bourbon in the Smurf glass she always found so inexplicably amusing. A cigarette guttering out in the ashtray. Dressed in one of Jeff ‘s T-shirts with the rock-and-roll slogan on its front and a pair of designer jeans that pointed up the teenage sleekness of her body. Dead. Heart attack.
On the day of her funeral, up in the TV room where she’d died, I was having drinks of my own, wishing I had some facts to tell me what I should be feeling now…when Jeff came in and sat down next to me and put his arm around my neck the way he used to when he was three or four. “You can’t cry, can you, Dad?” All I could do was sigh. He’d been watching me. “You should cry, Dad. You really should. You didn’t even cry when Debbie was killed. Mom told me.” He said all this in the young man’s voice I still couldn’t quite get used to—the voice he used so successfully with ninth-grade girls on the phone. He wasn’t quite a man yet but he wasn’t a kid, either. In a moment of panic I felt he was an imposter, that this was a joke; where was my little boy? “That’s all I do, Dad. Is cry, I mean. I think it helps me. I really do.”
So I’d tried, first there with Jeff in the TV room, later alone in my bedroom. But there were just dry choking sounds and no tears at all. At all. I would
think of Debbie, her sweet soft radiance; and of my wife, the years when it had been good for us, her so tender and kind in the shadows of our hours together; and I wanted to cry for the loss I felt. But all I could see was the face of William K. Dexter. In some way, he had become more important to me even than the two people he’d taken from me.
Jeff died three years later, wrapped around a light pole on the edge of a country park, drugs and vodka found in the front seat of the car I’d bought him six months earlier.
Left alone at the wake, kneeling before his waxen corpse, an Our Father faint on my lips, I’d felt certain I could cry. It would be a tribute to Jeff; one he’d understand; some part of the process by which he’d forgive me for being gone so much, for pursuing William K. Dexter while Jeff was discovering drugs and alcohol and girls too young to know about nurturing. I put out my hand and touched his cheek, his cold waxen cheek, and I felt something die in me. It was the opposite of crying, of bursting forth with poisons that needed to be purged. Something was dead in me and would never be reborn.
It was not too long after this that I met Frank Slocum and it was not long after Slocum took the case that we began to close inexorably in on William K. Dexter.
And soon enough we were here, at the apartment house just outside Des Moines.
Eleven years, two months, and five days later.
3
The name on the hallway mailbox said Severn, George Severn. We knew better, of course.
Up carpeted stairs threadbare and stained, down a hallway thick with dusty sunlight, to a door marked 4-A.
“Behind me,” Slocum whispered, waving me to the wall.
For a moment, the only noises belonged to the apartment building; the thrum of electricity snaking through the walls; the creak of roof in summer wind; a toilet exploding somewhere on the floor below us.
Slocum put a hefty finger to his thick mouth, stabbing through a thistle of beard to do so. Sssh.
Slocum stood back from the door himself. His Cobra was in his hand, ready. He reached around the long way and set big knuckles against the cheap faded pine of the door.
On the other side of the door, I heard chair legs scrape against tile.
Somebody in there.
William K. Dexter.
Chair legs scraped again; footsteps. They did not come all the way to the door, however, rather stopped at what I imagined was probably the center of the living room.
“Yeah?”
Slocum put his finger to his lips again. Reached around once more and knocked.
“I said ‘Yeah’. Who the hell is it?”
He was curious about who was in the hall, this George Severn was, but not curious enough to open the door and find out.
One more knock. Quick rap really; nothing more.
Inside, you could sense Severn’s aggravation.
“Goddammit,” he said and took a few loud steps toward the door but then stopped.
Creak of floor; flutter of robin wings as bird settled on hallway window; creak of floor again from inside the apartment.
Slocum held up a halting hand. Then he pantomimed Don’t Move with his lips. He waited for my reaction. I nodded.
He looked funny, a man as big as he was, doing a very broad, cartoon version of a man walking away. Huge noisy steps so that it sounded as if he were very quickly retreating. But he did all this in place. He did it for thirty seconds and then he eased himself flat back against the wall. He took his Cobra and put it man-high on the edge of the door frame.
Severn didn’t come out in thirty seconds but he did come out in about a minute.
For eleven years I’d wondered what he’d look like. Photos deceive. I always pictured him as formidable. He would have to be, I’d reasoned; the savage way he’d mutilated her…He was a skinny fortyish man in a stained white T-shirt and Levis that looked a little too big. He wore the wide sideburns of a hillbilly trucker and the scowl of a mean drunk. He stank of sleep and whiskey. He carried a butcher knife that appeared to be new. It still had the lime-green price sticker on the black handle.
When he came out of his apartment, he made the mistake of looking straight ahead.
Slocum did two things at the same time: slammed the Cobra’s nose hard against Severn’s temple and yanked a handful of hair so hard, Severn’s knees buckled. “You’re dead, man, in case you haven’t figured it out already,” Slocum said. He seemed enraged; he was a little frightening to watch.
He grabbed some more hair and then he pushed Severn all the way back into his apartment.
4
Slocum got him on a straight-backed chair, hit him so hard in the mouth that you could hear teeth go, and then handcuffed him, still in the chair, to the aged Formica dining-room table.
Slocum then cocked his foot back and kicked Severn clean and hard in the ribs. Almost immediately, Severn’s mouth started boiling with red mucus that didn’t seem quite thick enough to be blood.
Slocum next went over to Severn and ripped his T-shirt away from his shoulder. Without a word, Slocum motioned me over.
With his Cobra, Slocum pointed to a faded tattoo on Severn’s right shoulder. It read: Mindy with a rose next to it. Not many men had such a tattoo on their right shoulder. It was identical to the one listed in all of Severn’s police records.
Slocum slapped him with stunning ferocity directly across the mouth, so hard that both Severn and his chair were lifted from the floor.
For the first time, I moved. Not to hit Severn myself but to put a halting hand on Slocum’s arm. “That’s enough.”
“We’ve got the right guy!” It was easy to see he was crazed in some profound animal way I’d never seen in anybody before.
“I know we do.”
“The guy who killed your daughter!”
“I know,” I said, “but—”
“But what?”
I sighed. “But I don’t want to be like him and if we sat here and beat him, that’s exactly what we’d be. Animals—just like him.”
Slocum’s expression was a mixture of contempt and disbelief. I could see whatever respect he’d had for me—or perhaps it had been nothing more than mere pity—was gone now. He looked at me the same way I looked at him—as some alien species.
“Please, Slocum,” I said.
He got one more in, a good solid right hand to the left side of Severn’s head. Severn’s eyes rolled and he went out. From the smell, you could tell he’d wet his pants.
I kept calling him Severn. But of course he wasn’t Severn. He was William K. Dexter.
Slocum went over to the ancient Kelvinator, took out a can of Hamms and opened it with a great deal of violence, and then slammed the refrigerator door.
“You think he’s all right?” I said.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means did you kill him?”
“Kill him?” He laughed. The contempt was back in his voice. “Kill him? No, but I should have. I keep thinking of your daughter, man. All the things you’ve told me about her. Not a perfect kid—no kid is— but a real gentle little girl. A girl you supposedly loved. Your frigging daughter, man.” He sloshed his beer in the general direction of Dexter. “I should get out my hunting knife and cut his balls off. That’s what I should do. And that’s just for openers. Just for openers.”
He started pacing around, then, Slocum did, and I could gauge his rage. I suppose at that moment he wanted to kill us both—Dexter for being an animal, me for being a weakling—neither of us the type of person Slocum wanted in his universe.
The apartment was small and crammed with threadbare and wobbly furniture. Everything had been burned with cigarettes and disfigured with beer-can rings. The sour smell of bad cooking lay on the air; sunlight poured through filthy windows; and even from here you could smell the rancid odors of the bathroom. On the bureau lay two photographs, one of a plump woman in a shabby housedress standing with her arm around Dexter, obviously his mother; and a much younger Dexter squinting into
the sun outside a gray metal barracks where he had served briefly as an army private before being pushed out on a mental.
Peeking into the bedroom, I found the centerfolds he’d pinned up. They weren’t the centerfolds of the quality men’s magazines where the women were beautiful to begin with and made even more so with careful lighting and gauzy effects; no, these were the women of the street, hard-eyed, flabby-bodied, some even tattooed like Dexter himself. They covered the walls on either side of his sad little cot where he slept in a room littered with empty beer cans and hard-crusted pizza boxes. Many of the centerfolds he’d defaced, drawing penises in black ballpoint aimed at their vaginas or their mouths, or putting huge blood-dripping knives into their breasts or eyes or even their vaginas. All I could think of was Debbie and what he’d done to her that long ago night…
A terrible, oppressive nausea filled me as I backed out of the bedroom and groped for the couch so I could sit down.
“What’s the matter?” Slocum said.
“Shut up.”
“What?”
“Shut the fuck up!”
I sank to the couch—the sunlight through the greasy window making me ever warmer—and cupped my hands in my face and swallowed again and again until I felt the vomit in my throat and esophagus and stomach recede.
I was shaking, chilled now with sweat.
“Can you wake him up?”
“What?”
“Can you wake him up?”
“Sure,” Slocum said, “Why?”
“Because I want to talk to him.”
Slocum gulped the last of his beer, tossed the can into a garbage sack overflowing with coffee grounds and tomato rinds, and then went over to the sink. He took down a big glass with the Flintstones on it and filled it with water, then took the glass over to where he had Dexter handcuffed. With a certain degree of obvious pleasure, he threw the water across Dexter’s head. He threw the glass—as if it were now contaminated—into the corner where it shattered into three large jagged pieces.
