TKO ddm-2

by Tom Schreck

  “Hey, fellas,” I said, walking toward my seat just to the left of the taps.

  “Rocco’s all bound up,” TC said.

  “Bound up?” I made the mistake of asking.

  “What’s he seeing, some dominatrix with a fetish for ropes?” Jerry Number Two said.

  “I’m fuckin’ constipated again,” a very uncheerful Rocco said.

  “Again… or should we say still?” Jerry Number One said.

  “How about you’re an asshole again and still?” Rocco retorted.

  “Isn’t that the problem?” Jerry Number Two asked. “That your asshole is still again and again?”

  “Man, you did too many drugs…,” Rocco said through a grimace.

  “You should lay off the cheese,” TC said. “You eat a brick of that Cracker Barrel every fuckin’ day.”

  “Talk about shittin’ a brick… or not shittin’ a brick,” Jerry Number Two said, somewhat rhetorically.

  “You know, I read that when John Wayne died they found forty pounds of impacted fecal material in his colon,” TC said.

  “Fecal?” Jerry Number One asked.

  “You know… shit,” TC said.

  “What kind of shit?” Jerry Number One asked.

  “Shit shit, regular shit… you know, poo,” TC said.

  “No way the Duke had forty pounds of shit in him when he died.” Rocco sounded annoyed. “You’re full of shit,” Rocco said.

  “Not like the Duke,” said Jerry Number Two.

  “Fuck you, Jerry,” Rocco said.

  Kelley was in with his back turned away from the Foursome, drinking his Coors Light and watching Notre Dame run out the clock against Michigan State in 1966 on ESPN Classic.

  “Never understood Parseghian’s move here,” he said.

  “Probably impacted fecal material,” I said.

  “Please don’t… they’ve been on that for two hours. It’s making me sick.”

  “Howard called me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The other day, it was on the machine. All he said was he didn’t do it and hung up,” I said.

  “And you waited to tell me this because…”

  “I don’t know. I believe him and I think no one else does.”

  “You’re nuts, you know that, don’t you? A serial killer disappears after two murders and you get around to telling me the next day?” Kelley said. He looked disgusted, but then again Kelley always looked disgusted. “You’ve got to call the precinct ASAP. They’ll want to check your lines and see if they can trace it.”

  “That’s fine, I’ll take care of it. Relax,” I said.

  “Is there anything else you’re holding back?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  “You sure, or is there something I’ll find out tomorrow in between discussions of how much shit John Wayne was packing?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  “It’s all over the national news now, you know. It’s going to be a circus. MSNBC is going to do a live remote, and they got that asshole shrink on who used to be a forensic profiler doing commentary.”

  “Oh fun,” I said.

  I got off the topic and had a few Schlitzes before heading home. I told the fellas about the fight in the Garden and they congratulated me. On the drive home I listened to Elvis’s ’68 Comeback Special and gave some thought to Howard and why I felt strongly about protecting him. I didn’t know much about him, he didn’t know much about me, and he really only confided in me once. Elvis was singing “Where Could I Go But to the Lord” and segued into “I’m Saved” as I hit 9R. The one thing I was sure about with Howard was that he had no one else in the world who would vouch for him.

  Maybe I just answered my own question.

  Al kicked me in the nuts when I came to the door and he barked for five minutes straight. It wasn’t clear what point he was trying to make, but clearly he felt strong about it. I fixed him a dish of lamb and rice and topped it with half a can of sardines and he calmed down. My trailer smelled like the combination of hound, hound flatulence, and canned sardines-aromatherapy.

  I had two messages.

  “Duffy.” It was Marcia and she was sniffling. “I had a bad day. There’s too much sadness in the world. Call me,” she said.

  She was a barrel of laughs.

  I hit the button for the second message.

  “Duffy, you gotta help me.” It was Howard and that’s all he said.

  5

  The newspaper account of the McDonough High quarterback slaying used the words “gruesome,” “grim,” and “grisly” quite a bit. For nostalgic sickos it was quite a treat because he was found propped up against the same tree that Howard’s QB was, doing his Ichabod-Crane-meets-Johnny-Unitas pose. The cable news people were having a field day and ushering in a whole host of experts about serial killers. They also did profile after profile of Howard, discussed how he was missing, and went over and over his previous murders. This was getting scary weird.

  I turned off the TV and called the Crawford police to let them know Howard rang me up. I was put on hold and then spoke to two different very official-sounding cops, and they both told me to not touch anything and that they’d be over right away. Within fifteen minutes, three police cars, all with their lights flashing, and a so-called unmarked car with three detectives pulled up. It was unmarked but unmistakably a cop car, with its six-foot antenna, drab blue color, and lack of hubcaps. I never understood making unmarked cars so obvious because I didn’t know anybody who couldn’t pick out a cop car from a mile away.

  They all decided to come into the Moody Blue, which made for a tight squeeze. The Blue had been modified and customized, but it was still a trailer. I don’t know if it was the extra bodies inside the metal tube I call home or the intensity they all brought with them, but the Blue was getting warm.

  Al wasn’t pleased with the company. As a former member of the Nation of Islam, I’m sure he had experienced his share of harassment, and he was letting the eight police representatives witness his own brand of nonviolent uncivil disobedience. He wouldn’t shut up.

  “I’m Detective Morris, would you mind…” The cop who appeared to be the highest-ranking guy tried to introduce himself. He was a short guy with a thick neck and a wicked five o’clock shadow.

  “WOOF, WOOF, WOOF,” Al said.

  “Al, shut up!” I said.

  “WOOF, WOOF, WOOF,” Al said.

  “Uh, sir… ” Morris tried to start again.

  “WOOF WOOF, WOOF WOOF.” Al switched to a kind of staccato beat using two barks then a slight pause followed by two more. It had kind of a Rasta feel. The hair on Al’s back was standing up.

  “Sorry,” I shouted. “The last time I had an unexpected visitor Al got hurt.”

  “WOOF, WOOF, WOOF, WOOF, WOOF.” Al returned to the rapid-tempo single barks.

  “Do you think you could possibly…”

  “WOOF, WOOF, WOOF, AHOOOOOOOO.” Al started to bay.

  The cops all wrinkled their brows and rolled their eyes and did their best to look impatient. That seemed to piss Al off more.

  “AHOOOOOOO… WOOF, WOOF, AHOOOOOOO,” Al said.

  “Let me try to put him in the bathroom,” I said.

  I went to grab Al by the collar, but before I could get my hands on it he turned and ran. Al has a long frame, and doing a 360 for him is like an eighteen-wheeler doing a three-point turn. Just the same, he was surprisingly agile.

  He started to run all crazy around the Moody Blue and just when I thought I had him, he’d run right under the coffee table. He was so low to the ground that I couldn’t get at him under there, and he knew it. Al ran circles around the cops, who really didn’t seem to have much appreciation for the wonderment of nature, and then ducked under the table. The last time through, he faked me left, went right, and ran for the table. It was like trying to get Walter Payton, and Al’s change of direction screwed me up.

  He went under the table and I ran head on into it, cracking my s
hin in the process. The table flipped over and I was hopping on one foot repeating the word “Fuck!” about twenty times, which Al found funny, and that got him baying again. The cops didn’t find it funny and didn’t bay. In fact, they just glared at me as if they were way too important to spend their time watching a dog play with his man.

  “AHOOOOOOOOOO,” Al said as I grabbed him.

  I scooted Al by his collar and closed him off in the bathroom. This made him bark more, though it was muffled.

  “Thank you, sir, we’re sorry for the trouble. Would you mind giving us the details of the phone calls you’ve been receiving?” Morris said. The other guys stood around trying to look intense and not bored or unimportant. When Al was barking at them, they mostly looked annoyed.

  I explained what I knew, which was that I had two messages and didn’t know anything more than that.

  “Tell us about what this guy Howard was talking about in his therapy session,” the guy next to Morris said. He was tall and blond with a blond Larry Bird kind of mustache. He had a crew cut and it looked like he tried extra hard to look tough to somehow compensate for his fair complexion.

  “I can’t do that,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Larry Bird said.

  “C’mon, you know the rules.”

  “Sir, two teenagers have been slaughtered and you are going to interfere with an investigation?” Bird said.

  “Hey look.” I was starting to get pissed. “I called you guys here to do the right thing. Don’t ask me to do something I can’t.”

  Larry Bird took a step toward me and puffed out his chest.

  “Fuckin’ social worker…,” Larry said.

  I didn’t back up, I didn’t look down, I let Larry Bird feel the discomfort of moving in on someone who didn’t back up. I’m sure he was accustomed to people wetting their pants when he did this, but his act just didn’t have that kind of impact. He stood there for a second and then backed up like he was confused.

  “All right, all right, that will probably be enough,” Morris said, lightly nudging Bird with his arm. “I think we got what we need, thanks for your help. Would you mind if we check your phone lines for your recent calls?”

  “Sure, no problem,” I said. They all started to file out and Larry Bird gave me a menacing look. I felt less than menaced.

  “So, Duff, this Polack catches his wife in bed with another guy,” Sam said.

  “Mornin’, Sam,” I said.

  “So he goes and gets his revolver, kicks in the door to the bedroom, and holds the gun to his head while the two of them screw. Finally, the wife looks up at him and laughs, and you know what he says?”

  I tried not to encourage Sam with a response.

  “C’mon, Duff, you know what he says?”

  “What, Sam?” I didn’t have the energy to ignore him.

  “The Polack says to his wife, ‘Don’t laugh-you’re next!’” Sam laughed his way back to his business office cubicle.

  I’ve been at this job for over five years, and every day Sam stops by with a Polack joke. Like a chronic pain in the testicle, I’ve just learned to live with it.

  I had a lot on my mind. Howard was MIA and had made me his Labrador. Son of Sam believed he got all his messages from his next door neighbor’s dog, and I guess that’s how I felt. Not like Berkowitz but more like the dog, because here I was, getting weird messages from a guy I only knew a little bit and because of that, I was suddenly the center of attention. Sam the Lab was just being a regular old dog when suddenly his life got spun around all crazy and it wasn’t even anything he did. I’m not sure what happened to him, but I’m betting he wound up on medication.

  It didn’t make much sense to me that Howard would use me as a confidant. I didn’t feel like Howard and I had this super-tight bond. Then again, Howard probably didn’t have a lot of friends. You lop off a head or two in your youth and people never let you live it down.

  I also had this fight in the Garden coming up. In my boxing career I’ve gotten used to being a short-notice fighter and I welcomed it. In the fight game there were always guys pulling out of fights for one reason or other. Sometimes it was injuries, sometimes it was contracts, and many times, despite what fighters will admit, it was fear. Sure, no one says, “Hey, I’m pulling out of this bout because I’m tired of shittin’ my pants all week and I don’t want to get punched in the head.” I was nervous enough to drop a pantload and I didn’t feel like getting my ass kicked by some million-dollar prospect, but for the chance to fight in the Garden-it was worth it.

  I’ve had a difficult time concentrating lately, but with a full day of sessions I had to try to focus a bit. I say “a bit” because despite what some counselors will tell you, talking, or, more accurately, listening to someone for forty-five minutes isn’t exactly rocket science. My first session of the day was with Freddie Gleason, or, as everyone called him, Suda-Fred. Suda-Fred got his name from his drug of choice-Sudafed, the over-the-counter decongestant that has a stimulant effect upon the central nervous system, especially if you took ten at a time with a quart of coffee, which was what Suda-Fred would do. I didn’t need any fancy urinalysis tests to figure out if Fred had had a relapse. All I had to do was observe and listen as I greeted him in the waiting room.

  “Hey Duff good to see you how’s everything? How’s the fight game? Man I love boxing-great game, great game, man I love boxing. How you doin’? You look good, any fights coming up? You like these sneakers? They’re new. You know what, you know what? Um, uh what was I just sayin’?” Suda-Fred exhaled all at once.

  “Fred, have you-,” I tried to say.

  “Have I what? Uh Duff, that really hurts, you think I’m back on that shit, wow that hurts Duff, man, man the Yanks win last night? Man, Duff, where’s the trust? Isn’t that what this is all about? Wow, heavy man. Those Yanks, man, it’s warm.”

  Beads of sweat built up on Suda-Fred’s lip between his nose and the thin mustache. He was rail thin and his face was way more wrinkled than it should’ve been for a thirty-eight-year-old man. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he wore a red velour running suit.

  “Fred, uh-”

  “All right, all right Duff get off my ass will ya? It’s fuckin’ allergy season you know. Sorry, sorry, sorry for the bad language. I took a little today because of the snotty nose deal, really Duff, it was the snot, disgustin’ man, disgustin’ man. I took the blue ones, you know the 418s, they got that expectors in ’em or somethin’. Helps you get that snot out of your throat, disgustin’ man, disgustin’ man, sorry for the language, man,” Fred said.

  “Coffee?” I asked.

  “No I’m good, I’m good, don’t need no coffee Duff.”

  “No, Fred. Have you had coffee?”

  “C’mon, Duff, off my ass, geez, off my ass will ya? Uh, geez again with the language, sorry man, sorry. Sure, sure a little, you know that expressive kind at the Starbucks, the dark kind-is it warm? — shit I’m warm. Man, maybe it’s the velour, shit. Who the Yanks got tonight? Yeah Duff, expressive.”

  “Espresso?” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably made me hot-I’m not in trouble, am I? Duff you look in shape, you gotta fight comin’ up or something? I love boxing, love it, love the fight game. Shit it’s hot.”

  Actually, you really can’t get in trouble for loading up on Sudafed and “expressive”-not legal trouble anyway. Suda-Fred had a little anxiety trouble, which often led him to less than a placid existence. So for the next forty minutes or so, it was my job to find out what I could about what had brought Fred to the Sudafed. Fred’s snot issues seemed to have been the trigger that brought on today’s relapse, but perhaps there was a deeper emotional antecedent that together we could uncover. It was up to me, skilled clinician that I was, to deconstruct the behaviors that led up to Fred’s use of the dreaded 418s.

  Turns out all we could come up with was the snot, man, it was all about the snot. Fred and I spent the next forty-five minutes talking about congestion
, alertness, and the Yanks-a lot about alertness.

  After Suda-Fred, a session with Stanley Stillman was a welcome change of pace. Stanley was referred to the clinic by his employer’s employee assistance plan for an Internet addiction. Actually, they caught Stanley surfing porn on his company computer, and when they went through his computer logs it was pretty clear that he spent about seven out of eight hours a day on the boner sites. They tried to fire him but the union prevented it, got a doctor to give him an obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis, and now he’s getting paid time off to “recover.” I guess in his position as safety officer for the power company, his “recovery” was pretty important.

  Anyway, he was a welcome relief because he barely said anything at all. I think the guy’s real diagnosis should have been something along the lines of “chronic traumatic embarrassment related to masturbatory activity.” The guys at the power company weren’t real sensitive to Stan’s plight, and not too far behind his back they referred to him as “the stroke-a-matic.” I wouldn’t feel like talking much either.

  While Stan and I put up with the awkward silences, I thought about Howard. I racked my brain trying to think about how I could find out more about him. He didn’t have any family contacts and the counselors at the halfway house said he kept to himself. There was a ninety-page summary from his prison shrink that I hadn’t read all the way through yet. I’d read the first twenty pages and it didn’t say much of anything, so I’d skipped to the end where they had come to the conclusion that Howard was of very little danger to society, that his actions were the result of an abused adolescent mind processing extreme abusive stress, and unless those types of stressors were repeated, Howard was not a danger. They went on to say that even if Howard was placed under stress, he was unlikely to repeat the same violent activity.

  Dr. Abadon read the report and he indicated that it was within the realm of possibility that Howard was in a way relapsing to his old compulsions and that if he was experiencing stress-which a release from prison to his old neighborhood would evoke-he could revert to old ways. That was a fair analysis, but I was afraid that one opinion might be enough for the police to assume Howard was the one and only suspect. With assholes like Larry “the Cop” Bird itching to do something dramatic, I was afraid Howard didn’t have a chance.