“You think we’ll really find reports of dead twins?” Sally asked.
“Or twins attacked,” Flip said with a shrug. “Or twins disappeared. Though, so far, our man hasn’t really tried to hide the bodies. I’d say he goes for the opposite. He goes for display.”
Sally pursed her mouth and nose, as though she smelled a bad smell.
“Anyhow, Bob Abbot, the editor; he and his team are sharp,” Flip continued. “They know me, and it’d be easy for them to find out what I’m sniffing for. Too easy. That’s why I want the two of you to go.”
“Us?” Sally and Tark said at the same time.
“Yes, and separately,” Flip told them. “You’ll cover more ground that way, and it will be harder for the newspapermen to guess your aim. Sally, if and when they inquire, you had a relative come up north and you’re looking to see if she might have put a notice in a back issue. Tark, you don’t say at first why you want to see the old issues. Then, if they press, you confide that another circus posted some ads a few months back—and you’re trying to track ’em down and see if they’re still hiring. Both of you, make up details as you see fit, but not too many. Go as your real selves. Give your real names. But whatever you do, don’t let on that you’re looking for anything about twins.”
“How far back do we look?” Sally asked.
“This is an all-day thing,” Flip stated. “I want you there early—arrive within an hour of one another—and stay until they kick you out.”
“Or ‘till we find something,” Tark said.
“Even then, keep looking,” Flip replied.
“What’re you gonna do tomorrow?” Tark said.
“Ride out to the state pen and have a talk with Claude Chalifour,” Flip said.
“Beef-Fist Chalifour!” Tark said brightly, to show he was familiar. “I won money on him. Lost money on him too.”
“Did you bet on his fights, or on the outcome of his trial?” Sally asked.
“Both, if you gotta know,” Tark told her.
Tark suddenly became thoughtful.
“But Flip. . . what you want with a crazy boxer kept people skinned-up in his basement?”
“Oh,” Flip replied. “All sorts of things.”
As they prepared to depart, it was grudgingly agreed that Tark—who still could not go home—would spend the evening at the Palmerton.
“I’m serious now,” Flip said, taking Sally by the shoulder. “You keep the girls away from him. Give him a cot in the kitchen with the cooks. Something like that. If he’s awake all night carrying on, doing tricks for the girls, he’s useless tomorrow.”
“No worries there,” Sally said in a confident whisper. “I can put something in his gin . . . make him fall to sleep immediately.”
Flip opened his mouth to object to this—perhaps reflexively—but then found he saw no drawback and nodded with a shrug.
The magician and the madam departed.
When they had been gone for some time, Flip retrieved the fireplace poker that he had taken from the home of Miss Heloise. He wondered what it would take to drive it—front to back—through an orphan girl, as the killer had apparently done. He wondered if he had the strength to do such a thing himself. He figured almost certainly not.
For some time, Flip held the fireplace poker, waiting for it to vibrate. Waiting for it to glow. Waiting for it to do something. To call to him, as things apparently called to Ursula Green. And yet the poker—near as he could tell—wished to do nothing at all.
Flip thought again of Ursula’s words.
The one you seek. Right here. In this very place.
But Flip knew—Ursula being Ursula—that that ‘place’ could be anywhere.
He went to bed with the poker under his pillow, hoping it might infect his dreams.
The next morning—early, as was his wont—Flip rose, bathed, made coffee, and headed to the precinct station. There he requested that two telephone calls be made—one to the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet, and the other to a car service.
As he waited for the car, Flip looked idly for the officers with whom he usually worked. Few passed through, and those who did weren’t angling for a conversation today. In fact, Flip noticed, they seemed to struggle just to meet his eyes. Flip worked for Big Bill Thompson now. That fact had become known, he realized. And it meant Flip existed in close proximity to a terrifying power. Now his colleagues were apparently nervous even to ask the details of the assignment. Better, they decided, simply not to poke the sleeping bear.
Inside of an hour, a green Hudson pulled up to the station. It had front and back seats, and a tan cloth roof blown ragged. Seeking to minimize any further awkwardness with the other officers, Flip bounded down the station steps and jumped into the back seat before the driver could kill the engine. The driver was a young man wearing aviator goggles and a long white scarf. The rear of the vehicle had been stocked with metal containers of gasoline.
Flip handed the driver ten dollars.
“State Pen?” the driver asked.
“Yes,” said Flip. “You know where that is? I can draw you a map if you want.”
The aviator tapped the side of his head with two fingers to say it was all up there.
The roads to Joliet were not good. Outside of cities, most thoroughfares were still not paved properly. They could be brick or cobblestone or simply dirt. Flip braced himself against the side of the car as the terrain under the wheels changed every few minutes.
The sky promised another bright morning with no risk of rain. At least they would not be pushing the car out from the mud. Flip could not say the same for ditches. The young man drove wildly, weaving in and out of traffic, swerving around carts carrying goods, scaring horses (purposefully, it sometimes seemed), and forcing pedestrians to jump back for safety.
Outside the Chicago city limits, the roar of the Hudson’s engine steadied and became almost pleasant. As they neared Joliet, they passed crews putting down new asphalt mixed with hot, pungent tar.
The Wilson administration had undertaken a program to pave a single mile of road in each major American town. The thinking went that if the locals saw firsthand how much better paved roads were than dirt, they would swallow a local tax increase to pay for the rest themselves, sparing the federal government the expense.
“Another Seedling Mile?” Flip asked the driver, pointing at the giant black tar-dispenser they had narrowly missed.
“That was last year,” the wild driver called with a grin. “It took! They done seeded!”
The Illinois State Penitentiary was a massive structure dating from before the Civil War. It looked shat out of limestone by workers who didn’t particularly care what they were building. The architect, for his part, seemed to have been ambivalent about whether he was designing a castle or a mental asylum, and so had settled on the least-attractive elements of both. The facility had tall walls with medieval-looking tower houses at the corners, and a stern administration building rising immediately within. It held over a thousand inmates, all men.
The Hudson pulled into the gravel lot beside the entrance. Flip told the driver to wait, and got out. He took his badge from of his coat and held it up as he approached. The guard at the door looked on doubtfully, but let him pass with a forced a smile. Most guards at the state pen wanted to be police one day. Being nice to an officer from the city was as good a place as any to start.
Claude Chalifour—known as Beef-Fist or CeeCee behind his back—was, like the first man to settle in Chicago, a Negro from the Caribbean. But unlike Jean Baptiste Point du Sable—who had only ever wanted to sell meat and whiskey and possibly opium to the area’s peripatetic trappers—Claude Chalifour had killed three people, removed their bones, and kept their skins hanging as mementoes inside his garden apartment on the South Side of the city. Claude had arrived in Chicago in 1902, eventually finding employment as a beef boner in the stockyards during the day, and as a boxer nights and weekends. (Nobody in Claude’s neighborhood had found i
t odd that such a man should be seen with shoes or hands occasionally caked in blood.) Claude was large, but not a heavyweight. And when he opened his mouth, it became clear to any observer that his mind was childlike.
A deft lawyer had argued that Claude had not murdered the people whose skins had been found hanging in his apartment, but had merely found the bodies. (Claude’s neighborhood was rough, and corpses were known to turn up.) Because of Claude’s simple-mindedness—the lawyer further insisted—he had been unable to restrain himself from carrying out the same grisly procedures he practiced—all day, every day—in the stockyards upon animals. A judge had found this argument at least somewhat compelling, and Claude been given life without parole instead of execution.
The Joliet jailers took Flip to a bare concrete room with two wooden stools. On one stool sat Claude Chalifour. He wore manacles and leg irons connected to a steel ring in the center of the floor, adjacent to a dirty drain. Seeing the drain gave Flip renewed purpose; he thought about why he was there.
The jailers closed the metal door behind Flip, locking the two men inside together. There was natural light from the barred windows set into the wall, but no electricity. Claude smiled like a dog hoping for a treat—or at least hoping not to be kicked.
Flip reached into his coat and pulled out a red handkerchief.
“This is called cherry clafoutis,” Flip said. “Some nuns gave it to me. Not but a day old. Still soft. You want to smell it?”
“I can smell it from here, mister sir,” Claude said, beginning to rock back and forth on his stool.
They sat ten feet apart. Their voices reverberated in the cavernous stone room. The ceiling was curved and white, like the roof of a sewer.
“This is all yours if you talk to me,” Flip said. “They tell you who I am?”
Claude shook his head no, shrugging off the question more than answering it. His eyes were now focused quite completely on the red handkerchief. His nostrils sucked up the cake-smell.
“You understand that whatever you tell me today, it don’t change your sentence,” Flip said. “I can’t get you out, but I can’t add to your time neither. Suppose you tell me you slit up a whole school full of children they don’t know about? Well, it doesn’t add a day to your sentence. It don’t get you hanged. Understand?”
“I don’t have the death sentence, but I am here forever,” Claude said in what seemed a practiced recitation.
“Mm hmm,” agreed Flip.
Claude’s focus was like a magnet. A vein in his forehead began to bulge. It was as though he were willing the handkerchief and its contents to float across the room into his lap.
Flip understood the killer might not be able to concentrate with the treat still in sight. He placed it back inside his coat. Immediately, it was as though a blinding light had been extinguished. Claude blinked and refocused his eyes. He stared hard at Flip. Stared angrily. That was when Flip saw it. Infantile mind or no, this man had the eyes of a killer. These were eyes that had seen unspeakable things.
“Claude, you’re the only person I can think of in the city of Chicago who drained a body like you did,” Flip began. “Your apartment. . . It didn’t have any special equipment. Just a tiny sink. A tiny sink that backed up easy. But you did it. You drained the bodies without spilling blood everywhere. There were only a few drops on your floor when the police came. Drops that could have come from your work in the stockyards.”
Claude, for just a moment, scanned the corners of the room. Then he looked over to the locked metal door. Then he looked back at Flip. His expression wondered if this was some kind of put-on. He did not appear uneasy precisely, but rather baffled that a visitor should bring up such mundane, pedestrian details.
He inclined his head cautiously.
“You want to know. . . about the drainin’?”
“Yes I do,” Flip said.
“And that get me the cake?”
Flip shrugged as though it might.
Claude smiled. His demeanor changed. He leaned back a bit on his stool and relaxed like a man at the bar about to tell a good story.
“I don’t know if you done a steer before,” Claude said. “Seen one slaughtered and de-boned, start to finish? But once you done a cow, a steer. . . Doing a man ain’t nothing.”
“Tell me,” said Flip. “You want that cake, you’ll tell me all about it.”
Claude explained how a steer’s throat was cut directly after it was stunned or shot in the head with a gun. He said that its legs would kick even after it was dead, and that this could result in a mess or injury, but not if you knew to anticipate it. The cries of pain would cease quickly. The breathing would cease too, but the legs were always the last thing to go.
Claude said if your goal was to avoid making a mess, slaughtering on the ground outdoors was always preferred—if it was a summer day and you had a grassy spot that would soak up the blood, or if you could do it in a river or lake, that was fine—but if you had the means to hang your subject by its feet over a drain, that was also acceptable. Claude told Flip about a hook he had positioned inside his apartment, just above his own modest sink. And how a subject knocked unconscious could be placed upon it with relative ease.
“So how did you. . .?” Flip interjected.
Claude laughed a horrible laugh and clapped his hands. He explained that he had killed his victims outdoors, always. Behind his building, in the darkness, over grass. Then he had moved the bodies inside. But he waited until they had been secured above his sink before properly opening the throats.
“You didn’t cut off the heads off of your victims,” Flip pointed out. It was a statement, not a question.
Claude spun his eyes in a circle, searching the dingy room for an explanation.
“The heads,” Flip said.
“I heard you,” Claude said. “I took out the skulls. Yes, I did that.”
“But. . .” Flip pressed.
“No, you right,” the killer allowed. “I didn’t properly cut the heads off. With a beast in the slaughterhouse, you got to cut off the head right away. And if it’s a steer, the dick and balls. They got to go immediate. Meat gets tainted otherwise, and it don’t taste right. I heard a dead man can come. You heard that? I heard a dead man can get a stiff cock. I ain’t know if that’s true, but a dead steer’s dick sure as hell can do some things.”
“Let’s stay on heads,” Flip said. “You ever meet anybody who wanted to cut off heads—heads of people—for fun? Maybe switch around heads of two people as a joke? Put the head from one on another’s body?”
“Why would anybody do that?” Claude wondered. “That’s strange. Wouldn’t work neither. You take off a head, it ain’t gonna work on another body. Strange, strange.”
It was hard for Flip to resist pointing out to Claude that he had kept the whole, dried skins of three humans inside his home—something most people might find ‘strange’ if anything was.
Instead, Flip said: “You ever hear of Doctor Frankenstein and his monster?”
Claude shrank back in his seat.
“No doctors!” he called. “I don’t need one! I feel just fine.”
“I only wondered if you knew him.”
“Well, I don’t,” Claude snapped. “Why? What’d he do?”
“He did something very bad,” Flip said absently. “Now how about this: You ever hear of a man who had a divot taken out of his head? Like had dent in his head, up by his temples?”
“No,” Claude said. “Is that what Dr. Frankenstein look like?”
Flip shrugged to say it was possible.
A few moments passed while Flip thought.
“What else you want to know, then?” the killer said impatiently. “I want that cake.”
Flip stared at him hard.
“You’re certain you never heard of anybody who wanted to cut off a person’s head and switch it with another body?” Flip pressed. “Maybe even with a twin brother or sister? Keep it in the family?”
“No,” Clau
de said. “Like I told you, that’s strange.”
“I see . . .” Flip said.
“So now give it to me,” Claude said. “Give me that cake. I done what you asked.”
“One more answer first,” Flip said.
The killer motioned with his hand to say Flip should bring it on.
“Did the people you. . . the people you drained. Did they ever . . . cooperate?”
“Did they what?” said Claude.
“You know,” Flip said. “Did they agree to let you kill them? Maybe they walked outside with you, so you could stab them before you hung them over your sink? Help you not make such a mess?”
Claude’s demeanor changed. He looked Flip up and down disbelievingly. Then he shook his head with a violent series of jerks. Flip realized, astonishingly, that the killer was registering disgust.
“What kind of a man would agree to it?” Claude asked.
Flip turned up his palm to say ‘You tell me.’
“Naw,” Claude said. “They ain’t agree to nothin’. They fought me every inch of the way. Fought the whole damn time. That’s what made me smile. That’s what gave me the hardness in my nether parts. Not so much the killing itself, y’see. Not the draining afterwards, if I’m honest. Nor even the breaking down of the body. But the fighting. Watching ’em fight me. Feeling it. Better than boxing by tenfold. I think about it every night in my cell. And that’s the one thing they can’t take from me. Even though I’m stuck here, in my mind I get to be there every night and make them fight for it. And they always lose and I always win. Get to keep that in my head forever.”
Flip stood up from the stool. He brushed himself off, arranged his coat, and headed toward the door.
The stark betrayal registered full on Claude’s face.
“You gonna give me that cake!” he commanded. “I can smell it! You gonna give it to me!”
Lake of Darkness Page 10
