by Jeff Crook
It was the silent efficiency of the murder that had everybody freaked, even Adam. Michi had been savagely greased, his body dismembered and scattered like Easter eggs in the cellar of a house full of people, and as far as we could tell, no one had heard a thing. Not one cry, not one meaty thunk of cleaver through flesh. How did Endo kill that shrill old eunuch, who’d scream like a baby if he chipped a nail, without anyone hearing or seeing? That a man could die that way didn’t jibe with the normal order of the universe.
No one had seen Endo at the house that morning. They’d seen his car. They’d assumed he was lurking around somewhere, spying through the peepholes he’d drilled in nearly every wall and floor in the house. They were like mouse holes—everywhere you looked you’d find another one. Some had been stopped up with chewing gum or covered with pictures or lamps. But there was always another one close by, smaller and better hidden. In all the times I’d been in Michi’s house, I had never noticed them. It creeped me out wondering how many of my visits Endo had secretly watched, how much he knew about me and what he might do with that information, if anything.
Adam watched the tech dusting the handles on the china cabinet. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go home today,” he said without looking at me.
“Why not?”
“Because Endo’s still out there. Until we find him, I’d rather put you up in a hotel. How’s the Peabody sound? Billet will sign for it.”
“Endo doesn’t want me,” I said, trying to convince myself more than anything. “He kills fags. That’s his deal.” I had kept the pack of stale Winstons I’d found in Michi’s kitchen. I lit one and blew smoke at a spy hole in the ceiling above my head. It was no bigger than a BB. “He’d be stupid to stay in Memphis now. Besides, what could he possibly want from me?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t like not knowing. It doesn’t make sense that he was following you today. That’s what worries me.”
“I’ll lock the doors. Anybody who tries to come in will get a face full of baseball bat.” I was frosty. I was hard as nails standing there flicking ashes on the rug, dual cool, brassing it out, even though my guts were rolling around like a nest of fornicating rattlesnakes.
“Do you still have your piece?”
“Hell, no. Got rid of that after the accident.” I touched the old scar on my cheek where the bullet had gone through. I hadn’t sold it for moral reasons, though—I needed the money.
Adam left off watching the techs sweep the room and walked me to the door. Several uniformed cops were standing on the front porch dicking the dog and watching it rain. They shut up as soon as we stepped outside. Someone was coming up the driveway through the rain, walking slowly and looking at all the cop cars. He stopped about halfway up. Adam nodded and the cops along the porch rail unbuttoned their holsters.
He shouted, “Come on up.” Everybody was ready to give chase. I think they were looking forward to it. The guy in the driveway looked back the way he had come. “Don’t try to run!” Adam ordered.
The guy walked slowly toward us, his hands in the air. He was a she and she was a postal worker in a gray rain suit with a sack of mail on her back. “What the hell, people?” she said as he neared the porch.
“Sorry,” Adam said. The cops made room for her on the steps and she came up, shaking off the rain. Adam held out his hand. “Any mail for Michi Mori?”
“I can’t give you his mail,” the postal worker said.
“This is a police investigation. There’s been a crime here.”
“And the mail don’t leave my hand except under the direct order of a postal inspector.” She brushed by him, walked up to the mailbox hanging from the wall by the door, and stuffed in a handful of mail. She turned and glared at Adam. “What you do with it now is your business. I got my route.”
She left, vanishing into the rain. The cops on the porch stared at Adam, snickering and elbowing each other. Somebody said, “Sheee-yit.” He ignored them and removed the mail from the mailbox, shuffled through the letters, then pulled one out and tossed it to me.
It was a bill from a property-management company, addressed to Wayne Endo.
32
I RODE WITH ADAM. HE barely spoke on the way, but I could see the anticipation written on his sweaty face. He bit his lips and swore at the people driving too slowly. We drove without flashers or siren so we wouldn’t alert Endo to our arrival. There were two squad cars behind us, and five more converging on Endo’s apartment as we turned off Central onto Airways Boulevard and headed south. I tapped the bill from the property-management company against the dash, nearly as impatient as Adam.
Endo’s place was a little one-room hellhole at the corner of Airways and Fairbanks, across the street from the Mississippi Lounge. I’d driven by the place a hundred times and never seen it—four apartments, two up and two down, with boarded windows and gang symbols spray painted on the bricks. It looked derelict, but people still lived there. Some of them were outside, standing on the balcony as we parked by the curb. Endo lived in the bottom apartment on the far end. The door was open. A cop stepped out and lit a cigarette, then dropped it when he saw Adam.
“Y’all were supposed to wait the fuck outside,” Adam barked.
“Door was open, Sergeant. We was afraid the locals would get inside. A couple of boys was nosing around. They booked it when we pulled up.”
“Anybody in there?”
“There’s no there there,” the cop said like some kind of mystic.
Adam stared at him for a moment, then entered. I switched on my Leica and followed him.
Endo’s apartment was a single room about six feet by six feet, walls painted sky blue, red carpet twined with golden arabesques. A ticket booth with bulletproof glass stood out from the wall just across from the door. A hand-lettered sign hung crookedly in the window. It read, “Closed Monday.”
“See what I mean?” the cop said behind me.
Gold curtains at the back of the booth might have hidden a door. Other than the door we entered, there were no other exits. A pair of paintings hung on the left wall. One was David’s The Death of Marat, the other was of the same scene showing the dead man hanging out of his bathtub, but from a different angle, with a woman in a blue-striped dress standing in a corner by the window.
The right wall held a different pair of paintings: one a crude clown, the other a simplistic portrait of an overweight man with startled eyes, painted in four flat colors—mauve, white, yellow and black. The signature was J. W. Gacy.
“Do you hear that?” Adam said. I heard music playing, something operatic, but distant and tinny. It was coming from behind the clown painting. As I touched my ear to the wall, my head brushed the picture frame. It tilted and a hidden door swung open about the width of a hand. The music grew louder.
Adam and the other cop drew their pieces. I stepped back to give them room. Adam kicked the door open and entered low, covering the room while the other cop followed him. They turned immediately to their left and disappeared.
Endo had torn out all the interior walls, leaving an open, warehouse space, like an artist’s studio. He had painted the remaining walls black. The windows were boarded from the outside, the glass painted as black as the walls. Bare lightbulbs hung from wires stapled to the naked rafters. The floor was swept clean, but there was a raw smell of sawdust, paint and mineral spirits to go with the stacked scraps of lumber and pyramids of empty paint cans in the corners. The back door was nailed shut and braced with two-by-fours.
He had built a low stage behind the box office, like the one in Michi’s basement. On it stood a small table and atop that sat an old Monkees record player from which the music came, scratchy and weak through the tiny mono speaker. I turned off the record player and looked at the faded RCA Victor Red Seal label—Puccini’s opera Turandot. The song was “Nessun Dorma”—“None Shall Sleep.”
“He must have been here within the last twenty minutes,” Adam said. He sent the cop outside to get stat
ements from the neighbors, find out if anyone had seen Endo leave. In this neighborhood, people made it a habit not to see anything. I started shooting pictures. I wondered if Endo had killed any of his victims here. It seemed like the perfect place, a nice, cozy, private little corner of hell for him to build his fantasy world.
The three large metal cabinets against one wall drew our attention. Adam opened the first one and found Endo’s carpentry tools, boxes of nails and screws, more cans of paint, paintbrushes and paint thinner, rolls of plastic sheeting and folded drop cloths spattered with paint. The next one held hundreds of videotapes in black plastic boxes. On the bottom shelf were a video camera and a couple of Nikons, one of them missing its lens. Everything was covered with a thin layer of dust.
The third cabinet contained Endo’s shrine to himself. It looked like a theatrical makeup table. It was wired with a bank of lightbulbs at the back surrounding a large mirror. The lights came on by themselves, and an open laptop on the makeup table flickered to life, playing film of Endo on his stage silently pantomiming a scene. He was naked and covered in green paint. He stopped frequently to touch himself.
Adam opened all the drawers. In the first one we found a scrapbook. The book contained hundreds of loose newspaper clippings, mostly reviews of various plays around town, going back almost ten years. I guessed these were productions he had worked on. Among the clippings of reviews were several stories about Michi Mori—fundraisers, art openings, that sort of thing.
Toward the back, I found the article about the Richard Buntyn murder in which Endo was first called the Playhouse Killer. I also found several stories about the Simon twins, then the Krews murder, and finally a small article identifying Patsy Concorde’s body near Elmwood Cemetery.
“You were right,” I said to Adam and showed him the clipping.
He barely looked at it. “Look at this. This drawer was locked.” He pried it open, finding a butcher knife and an old bottle of Williams Pride barbecue sauce. At the bottom of the deep drawer lay a loud yellow sports coat, neatly folded.
“I think you’ll find that coat belonged to Chris Hendricks.” I had seen him wearing it the day he died.
“Trophies?” Adam asked. A menu from the Blue Monkey fell out.
“Maybe.”
I leaned over and shot a picture of the inside of the drawer. There was an old house key lying at the bottom, but something at the back caught my eye. I reached inside and pulled out a human skull. It was missing the lower jaw and several upper teeth, and there was a small hole over the left eye.
“Who do you suppose this belonged to?”
Adam took the skull and returned everything to the drawer. “We probably shouldn’t touch anything else until Wiley gets here,” he said. I resumed shooting photographs.
I walked slowly around the room. Something seemed out of place, or perhaps missing. It looked like Endo had been living here for years, building his sets, putting on his one-man productions. Other than the hint of trophies in that drawer, this didn’t seem like the lair of a ruthless serial killer. I don’t know what I had expected. The place was meticulously organized, every tool in its place, every videotape labeled and arranged by date. No human remains rotted in the bathtub, no lampshades decorated with human fingernails. No empty pizza boxes, no dirty towels or piles of underwear. There were no towels or underwear at all, or any lamps or lampshades or bathtubs, or even a kitchen or a bathroom.
“Where did he sleep?” I asked.
Adam looked at me, then sketched a quick turn around.
“Endo doesn’t live here,” Adam said, his shoulders slumping.
33
VAN HELSING AND I DIDN’T know yet where Dracula hid the coffin. We had only found his workshop. With Michi’s money, Endo could afford dozens of apartments, spread out all over the city. It might take weeks to track them all down.
Adam secured the scene and waited for Wiley and his forensic team to arrive. He asked a female cop to drive me home. Her name was Cyntheria Waters. I said goodbye to Adam and tried not to let it show that it might be the last time he would see me as a friend. Wiley was bound to find the photos I sold to Michi. He may have been an ass, but he was a thorough ass. I’d be lucky to get away without having charges filed against me by the DA.
Officer Waters and I ran through the rain to her car. She let me sit in the front seat so I wouldn’t look like a perp. It had been a long time since I sat in the front of a squad car. Her cruiser still had that new-cop-car smell.
“Where to?” she asked. I gave her my address. She looked at me like I was an actual human being, not a washed-out junkie. It felt kind of good, but I knew it wouldn’t last. I was her friend for the moment because I was Adam’s friend.
“Adam, that is, Sergeant McPeake said you used to be a cop.” She pulled out and headed east.
“Yeah.” As we drove away, the last car in the line parked along the curb flicked on its headlights. I watched it make a U-turn behind us.
“Glad you got out?”
“Sometimes.” She stopped for traffic, then turned north. The car—a black Nissan Murano—followed. As we neared the fairgrounds, I watched the Murano make a left turn onto Cooper. Waters glanced at me, then eyeballed the rearview mirror. I didn’t tell her what I had seen.
“Are you doing all right?” she asked in a sisterly voice.
“Everything is essence.” I opened the camera case and took out the Leica, remembering that I still owed James five hundred bucks for it. The camera was on, even though I had turned it off after finishing up at Endo’s workshop. There was a message on the screen—Memory Card Is Full, Do You Want to Switch to Internal Memory? I clicked yes and a second message appeared—Internal Memory Is Full. I turned the thing off.
“Can I see?” Waters asked.
“See what?”
“Your pictures.”
I looked at her for the first time. I mean really looked. I was surprised by how young she was, even though I’d been about her age when I joined the force. Mid-twenties, good skin the color of expensive dark chocolate, short-cropped curly hair, small in the chest but big in the caboose. If she was taller than me, it wasn’t by much.
“Why do you want to see it?” I already knew the answer. Everybody is a rubbernecker, even the best ones. People can’t help it.
“I’ve never…” she began, then realized how rookie she sounded. She wasn’t a rookie. She may have looked soft, but I could see the nails in her eyes.
“I’ll show you when we get to my place.”
“Thanks.” She smiled and drove on.
* * *
Waters sat behind the wheel while the engine idled and rain slid in wrinkled sheets down the windshield. She scrolled through the tiny LCD images of Michi Mori’s remains, the pooled blood, the spatters on the wall and ceiling, his dismembered parts scattered like garbage in an empty lot. Every once in a while, her breath would catch and she would call on Jesus in a small voice.
“That’s pretty intense.”
She started on Endo’s workshop, clicking through quickly, only stopping once to examine the photo of the skull. She was close enough for me to smell her deodorant, something that was supposed to smell like a tropical breeze or morning rain. Her nails were buffed and there was an apple in the cup holder. She was trying to take care of herself, not rot behind the wheel like some cops.
“I guess you get used to it, huh?” she asked.
“If you do, you end up just as bad as they are.”
“What happened here?” She showed me a blank black image on the camera.
“I don’t know.”
She passed the camera back to me. Her hand was steady but she didn’t look me in the eye. The last photo at Endo’s apartment was followed by about two hundred blank images that had eaten up the space on the memory card. I turned the camera off and tucked it back inside its leather case.
“I’d better go,” I said, and opened the door.
“You gonna be OK?” she asked before I
could close it.
“Sure. Why?”
“I heard that old man was a friend of yours.”
My back was already soaked and I could feel the cold rain running down my thighs. “Just a perv I busted once, a long time ago.”
“Oh,” she said, and turned her head away, already moving on. Smart. I wished I could do that.
The stairs were slick from people going in and out of the rain—a lawsuit waiting to happen. A garbage can in the corner was overflowing, something inside moving around, scratching. I hadn’t checked my mail since I moved in, so I opened my box and found a single letter inside addressed to me. The return address was from Reed’s new office in Collierville. I tore it open:
Dear Bitch,
I think the hardest thing for me to come to terms with was the realization that after I worked so hard and so long to suppress my perfectly natural male desire to sleep with as many women as would have me, and instead devoted myself to the ideal of monogamy for your sake, it should be you who broke our sacred covenant before God. While I suffered and denied myself like a fucking monk sitting in the snow waiting for you to get in the fucking mood for our once a month, you’d been out there fucking all my friends all along, doing God knows what with them and leaving me alone on my side of the bed while another man’s tadpoles wriggled through the swamp of your rotting uterus. I thank God every day now that you are barren. I thank God I’m not stuck raising a child not of my blood. When I think of all the women I could have had and all the times I prided myself on staying true to you, even though I could never tell you about those opportunities, though I could never celebrate those personal victories for Glorious Monogamy and reap the just rewards in the form of a good raunchy fuck, and instead settled for a lifeless, loveless hump, or worse, a quick, silent, sickening toss in the bathroom after you passed out on the couch. I honestly just want to throw you down a flight of stairs. But who knows. Maybe you saved me from a case of the incurable clap.
