When you put down this letter. When you turn and look across this old room, your eyes sweeping it with relief or with joy or even with terror ...
Then I will move. Move, just a fraction. And, finally, you will see me.
<
~ * ~
PETER CROWTHER
Eater
“HE’S A WHAT?” Doc Bannerman slammed his locker door closed and turned to face Jimmy Mitulak.
“An eater.” The word hung in the air with the dying echo of the metal door as though it were a part of the sound. “He eats his victims,” Mitulak went on, hanging his black shirt on the back of his door. He shook his head and clunked his teeth together, growling.
Bannerman rolled his eyes in despair. “This fucking city, it gets to me sometimes. Gets so I think maybe I can’t take any more of it.”
“But still you turn in with each new shift.”
“Yeah.” He drew the word out lazily. “But maybe one day ...”
“Yeah, maybe one day you’ll win the lottery.” Mitulak smiled. “I’ll know it before you do, though, ‘cos that’ll be the day I drive down Sixth and all the lights’ll be in my favour.” He pulled a crumpled, brown, short-sleeved shirt from his locker and struggled into it. As Mitulak slid his holster over his head, Bannerman saw a cartoon drawing of a bowling ball with a lit fuse coming out of one of the finger-holes and the words BOWL PATROL - and, in smaller letters beneath, MITULAK - emblazoned on the back.
“Nice shirt.”
Mitulak turned around and squinted at him. “You serious?”
Bannerman shook his head. “No.”
“My sister, Rosie. She designed it.”
“I didn’t know she was a designer.”
Mitulak lifted his jacket off the peg and closed his locker. “She isn’t,” he said as he slapped Bannerman’s back and made a gun sign with his hand. “Keep an eye on him, okay?”
Bannerman nodded. “I’ll keep both of ‘em on him.”
“You’d better,” Mitulak shouted over his shoulder as he opened the locker-room door. “He ‘specially likes eyes.”
Bannerman sneered a smile. “Who’ve I got?”
Mitulak was already halfway out and he didn’t stop. His answer floated back through the gap between the door and the jamb, merging with the sound of footsteps already fading down the corridor to the parking lot. “Gershwin and Marty. See ya.”
Bannerman changed into his shirt and pants and strapped his holster on to his belt. Then he made a last call into the bathroom and walked out into the corridor, made a right away from the back door and started up the stairs.
The holding cell where they had the beast was on the first floor, tucked against the wall in an open-plan office where the uniforms could write up their collars. Just like in the movies. Above that was a flat roof, looking out on to the oily waters of the Hudson. Below was a walk-through main desk and seven small offices. Below that was the locker room and the showers.
The 17th Precinct building was in a derelict area two blocks west of the Port Authority terminal and one block south of the Lincoln Tunnel. It was surrounded by warehouses filled with containers of frozen fish and electrical goods. No people. Particularly at night.
It was three minutes past three a.m. when Denny “Doc” Bannerman signed in at the front desk and walked slowly up the corridor to the rec room.
His nickname came courtesy of a one-year spell doing medicine at NYU Medical Center. It was to there, the eighteen-storey hospital building, that Denny’s policeman father had taken a young punk spaced out of his bead on PCP. The punk had laughed and cried, both at the same time, and, in an all-too-brief second when nobody was paying him too much attention, he had pulled a two-handled telescopic wire out of his shoe, wrapped it around Jim Bannerman’s neck and, with a swing of his hands, severed the big man’s head and sent it scudding across the floor. Then the kid had leaped through a plate-glass window, dropped two floors smashing both legs, three ribs, both collarbones and the hood of a 1963 Studebaker, before trying to scurry away across 20th Street like the stocking-clad torso in Todd Browning’s Freaks. When the delivery van had hit the punk, witnesses said he was still laughing. Denny never went back to the hospital.
Bannerman pushed open the rec-room door and cleared his throat. “Officer Bannerman reporting for duty,” he said, clicking his heels to complement the officialese.
“Hey, how you doing, Bannerman?” It made a change from Marty Steinwitz’s usual greeting of “What’s up, Doc?” which he usually supplemented with a munching chuckle a la Bugs Bunny.
“Just fine.” Doc lifted the night’s call-sheet from the desk. Steinwitz returned his attention to a thick slab of coagulated pizza which he lifted from a Sbarro bag perched precariously in front of him on a maze of papers and forms alongside a polystyrene cup of milky coffee, its top edges pinched tight with teeth marks.
“What’s the pizza?” Bannerman asked without turning his attention from the papers in his hand.
Steinwitz held up the steaming mess and belched. “Pancreas and large intestine.”
Bannerman glanced up and grimaced. “Ho-fucking-ho.”
Steinwitz shrugged and continued to eat, getting the mess all over the lower part of his face.
Bannerman read on. Pinned to the back of the call-sheet was the eater’s record details. The guy was a bona-fide head-case. No doubt about it. The record itemized the contents of his freezer -various entrails and intestines contained in see-through bags - a wardrobe of custom-made “clothes” and several items of undeniably avant-garde “furniture”, which included an occasional lamp fashioned out of a mouldering leg stump, two torsos bound together with garden twine and used, or so it would appear, as a footstool, and three arms, suitably bent at the elbow and attached to the living-room walls in a grim parody of exotic boomerangs or headless geese flying to sunnier climes.
He wanted to feel revulsion but couldn’t. That was the worst part of the job right there: the way it shaved off a person’s ability to shake his head at the weird and the absurd. Here, nothing was weird any more. Nothing was absurd. Things just were, that was all. He settled back into his chair, removed the gun from his holster for comfort and propped his feet on his desk. “There any coffee?” He opened a drawer and dropped the gun inside.
“I was just gonna make a fresh pot.”
“Sure could use it.”
Steinwitz nodded and bit into his pizza. “Just let me finish up my supper, and I’ll get right on to it,” he said through a full mouth.
Bannerman returned his attention to the call-sheet as he shook a cigarette out of a crumpled crumple-proof pack. “You seen him yet?”
“The eater?”The word came with a thick half-chewed wedge of what looked like cheese and anchovies that landed with a thud on the open file in front of him on the desk-top.
Bannerman lit the cigarette and threw the burning match into a full ashtray next to his arm. “Yeah.” He blew out smoke. “His name’s Mellor.”
“I know,” Steinwitz said as he gathered the expelled food between two fat fingers and slid it into his mouth. Just for a second it looked to Bannerman as though it were alive, like a long, stringy worm, folded in on itself time after time and hanging with thin bubbly veils of cheese, twisting in his grip. “What’s he like?”
“What’s he like? You mean, does he like have horns and a tail or something?”
“No, I mean what’s he like? How does he talk? How—”
“Kind of deep.” Steinwitz spoke in a throaty baritone, his ample chin resting on his shirt collar. “How the fuck do I know what he talks like? Go talk to him yourself, you’re so interested.” He lifted the glop to his mouth again and then stopped. “Hey, that’s an idea. You like cooking ... go compare some recipes.” He sniggered and pulled off a piece of anchovy that looked like a wriggling worm and slurped it up into his mouth.
The call-sheet said they had found the remains of thirty-two b
odies. It had to be some kind of record. The sheet also said that some of the bodies seemed to date back a long ways, but that the condition might have something to do with the lime content of the ground in which they had been buried. Basically, not a lot could either be done or determined until they had the forensic results back. Then they might be able to pin a few names to the remains.
Bannerman shook his head and blew out smoke. “Thirty-two bodies. Jesus Christ.”
Steinwitz burped and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “He almost certainly wasn’t one of them.”
“Who wasn’t - oh, right: Jesus Christ. Hey, that’s funny, you know that? You ever think of going into vaudeville?”
Steinwitz stopped eating for a second and looked straight at Bannerman. “That’s what this is, isn’t it?” He waved a greasy hand in a wide arc, taking in the room, the station and maybe even more beyond that. “A routine? A stand-up routine?” He seemed to produce another piece of food from the side of his mouth and started to chew again.
Bannerman shook his head and stared at Steinwitz. “I swear I don’t know what’s gotten into—”
“And, anyways, there’s more than thirty-two.”
For a second, it seemed mightily oppressive in the small room. Bannerman watched Steinwitz eat his pizza. It sure had a lot of tomato on there - the stuff was all over Steinwitz’s hands.
“How d’you mean, more than thirty-two?”
“Bodies. More than thirty-two bodies. I mean, what are we talking about here?”
“I know bodies, okay? I mean what makes you say there are more than thirty-two?”
“Because—” He paused for maximum effect. “That’s the way it is. There are more.”
“Says who?”
Steinwitz smiled, his mouth a thick smear of pizza topping, and jabbed a runny finger against his chest. “Me says, that’s who.”
“And who are you?”
Steinwitz chewed, swallowed and stared. He smiled and said, “What about all the stuff in the freezer? Where’d that come from?”
Bannerman’s shoulders relaxed. “Oh,” he said, “yeah. Forgot about that.”
Steinwitz wiped his mouth on a napkin and waved a finger. “Shouldn’t forget about stuff like that,” he said. “Gotta think about the promotions. Gotta think like Sherlock Holmes.”
Bannerman threw the call-sheet on to the desk. “Yeah, right. Sherlock Steinwitz.”
Steinwitz laughed and stood up.
Bannerman laughed along with him, suddenly realizing that it sounded forced, unnatural.
Steinwitz said, “Coffee?”
“Yeah—” Bannerman stood up and followed Steinwitz out of the room, watched him walk to the front desk. “Hey, where’s Gershwin?”
Steinwitz reached across for the coffee-pot and switched it on. He shrugged without turning around. “Gershwin? Oh, he went to check on the prisoner.”
Bannerman shook his head. “Five’ll get you ten he’s on the goddamn telephone again. Who’s he call at this time of night, anyway?”
“Beats me.”
“I’ll go and get him down here.”
‘“kay.”
“You got the phones geared to come in down here?”
“The phones are fine.”
Bannerman turned and walked along the corridor, away from the front desk. He pushed open the swing doors and started up the stairs. A half a minute later he walked into the squad room and paused, looking around the main office.
The desks were strewn with piles of papers, cardboard cups partly filled with cold coffee, and greaseproof paper packages of unfinished deli feasts. He figured that the Marie Celeste had probably looked a lot like this. Round-backed chairs sat at angles to desks, a television set picture glowed in the corner - Lee Marvin smashing a new car into thick concrete pillars, each impact making no sound at all - while a radio across the office advertised second-hand cars at knockdown prices. Bannerman smiled at the timing and looked across at the far wall. At the cage. It was empty.
He stepped into the squad room - suddenly wishing he hadn’t removed his gun - and walked slowly between the desks, keeping his eyes wide. Then he saw the figure, lying on the bunk at the back of the cage, wrapped in a thick blanket, his face turned to the wall. He hated the relief he felt. He just hadn’t been able to see Mellor because of the surrounding desks. That was all. What the hell was wrong with him?
He turned around to face the office. “Hey, Gershwin?” he shouted. “You on the goddamn’ telephone again?”
There was no answer. He turned back. What seemed somehow even worse was the fact that Mellor hadn’t moved.
Bannerman turned his full attention to the figure and called again, louder, directing the words over his shoulder. “Gershwin?”
Still nothing.
He walked over to the cage and stared at the prisoner. Was he moving? Could he see the faint traces of the man’s back rising and falling? Maybe he was in a deep sleep. After all, it must have been one hell of a day for him.
On the radio, a woman with a come-to-bed voice started talking about McCain’s pizzas like they were sex aids.
Pizzas. Sbarro closed at midnight. And yet the pizza that Marty had been eating had looked hot, or warm at least. Bannerman remembered seeing it steaming. He frowned. The microwave. That was how Marty had done it. The frown disappeared. What was wrong with him?
He turned off the radio and the television set and lifted a plastic mug from a nearby desk, rattling it across the bars of the cage, like he had seen Jimmy Cagney do a thousand times. “Hey, Mellor - you want anything?”
“How about a plate of liver ‘n’ eyeball risotto?” said a voice behind him.
Bannerman spun around to see Marty Steinwitz holding out a steaming mug of coffee.
“I brought it up to you in case you’d gotten involved with the prisoner. Here.”
Bannerman took the coffee and nodded thanks. He took a sip. It tasted good and strong, though there was a faint metallic undertaste.
Steinwitz sat down heavily and rested his feet against an open desk-drawer. “That good?” he asked.
“Mm, hits the spot.” He smacked his lips a couple times. “Tastes a little metally, though.”
“Metally?”
Bannerman shrugged and waved a hand dismissively.
“New blend,” Steinwitz said. “Chicory and soya.”
“Ah.” Bannerman nodded, feeling inexplicably easier.
“You seen Gershwin?”
Bannerman shook his head.
Steinwitz made a clicking noise with his mouth and then thrust a finger between his teeth and his cheek. “Maybe he’s out in the storeroom,” he said around the finger.
“Yeah.” Bannerman took another sip of coffee, swallowed and noticed a piece of grit on his lip. The coffee was more metally than he thought. He picked it off and studied it, then threw it into a nearby basket. “Guy’s out like a light,” he said, looking across at Mellor. The figure had not moved during their entire conversation, he was sure of it.
“You ever wonder what makes them do it?”
“Kill people?”
Steinwitz nodded and clasped his hands on his stomach. “And eat them. That’s the thing. Eating people.”
Bannerman shrugged. “Maybe he gets a charge out of it.”
“A charge?”
“Yeah, you know - a thrill, kind of. Some kind of sexual turn-on.” Bannerman drained the coffee and put the mug on the desk. “I can’t figure it.”
Steinwitz sighed and moved his hands behind his head, cradling it. “You ever wonder what it tasted like? Human meat?”
“Same as any other meat, I guess.” Bannerman walked across to the cage and held on to the bars, rattling them, making sure they were securely locked.
“I think it’s power.”
“Huh?”
“The reason he does it. Maybe it gives him some kind of power, an edge. Maybe—” He stopped talki
ng and turned his head sharply.
Bannerman followed the other man’s gaze and looked at the door.”What? Whatisit?”
Steinwitz sat up on his chair. “Thought I heard something.”
“Like what?”
“Dunno. Wait here a minute.” Steinwitz stood up and walked across the room. When he reached the door, he opened it slowly and looked out. He turned back, shrugged, and mouthed,”Wait.” Then he stepped out and closed the door behind him.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 51
