by Brian Hodge
Lays it out just the way the call came in.
First time, the guy's maybe not sure it's the right number. Makes sense, Agar got himself a new listing a few days previous. Same old song, can't pay a bill, but can dish out extra for a non-published number, plus caller ID. Which doesn't do a damn bit of good when the call's coming from a blind number.
Guy said his name was Mr. Modine, Agar played innocent when he saw the blank screen on the caller ID, grunted wrong number and hung upon him. Patient, the caller waited an hour. Must've known Agar's routine for leaving for Selena's at three. Caught him ten minutes before, caller ID now reading Mitch's Barber Shop, from just down Division Street. He picks up, thinking it's a drinking buddy, saying he'd be late.
Feature: "Yeah, Mikey, that you?"
Response: "Mr. Agar, this is Mr. Modine. Please do not deny who you are. It has been verified with Snap-On Tools in Chattanooga, Tennessee. You mailed them a check for thirty-seven dollars last week. We were also able to verify, through separate means, that you are living in the basement apartment of Ginger Graddy, and I can have a man there in five minutes to verify this. Also, we saw no reason to bring up your little fuck-honey's love affair with buying crack and moxies in Oz Park."
Rizzi: "Can a bill collector swear on the phone like that?"
Leland: "Hell with that, how the hell does this caller ID work, the way Agar describes it..."
Riggins: "Ask the Lieutenant, but he'll probably say that City Hall could set up something like that in a minute," to which Leland replied that he'd only been seeing commercials for caller ID in the past week.
On the screen, Agar was re-enacting with real Oscar material that he wanted to know just who the fuck he was talking to. The caller responding calmly, "Then you admit you are Andrew Horace Agar, currently residing at..."
And it got even stranger from there.
Ileane Cantu came back into the room all pissed off, her D.D. 20 report, in triplicate never mind this being the computer age and all, torn in half and crumpled in her right hand. The male cops had just finished mulling over the last of Agar's story. The upshot was, the agency that had called him— the "skull carpenters" was the phrase he'd used before— told him it was all very simple.
Agar could avoid paying on the delinquent bank loan, plus also dodge the agency's dropping the dime on his girlfriend's drug habits, if he were to do, as they put it, something quite simple.
Steal a kidney.
This was where Agar's world and that of the coppers working Augusta Boulevard deviated immensely. Riggins and Rizzi finding Agar to be a stone psycho; Leland and Wimberger suspecting that their perp was leaving something out. Or at least being vague about his total belief that organ-stealing was a lucrative exchange rate for "payment adjustment," as Modine had called it.
"Uh oh," Wimberger pointed at Cantu. "Her eyes are flaring more than usual. What's up, Ile?"
"I'll tell you what's up." Her gaze narrowed; Rizzi could smell the mixture of sweat and perfume on the Cuban-born cop, knew that she had been typing furiously, but he'd be a fool to tell her that it was times like these she smelled exotic. "Some fed took custody away from me." Bringing Rizzi back from cloud nine.
What sucked the blue balls was not that a particular collar had been taken away from the rightful owners, that bitch could have been pitched if a murder suspect had been involved. This was more a case of superior suits playing like it was pages out of a William Caunitz novel and everyone here were rummies from an Ed McBain 87th Precinct whodunit.
The guy who pulled Agar from them flashed an officious looking badge and stated he was in from the Dirksen Federal Building downtown. Said that Agar's story was unadulterated bull from the get-go and he was to be extradited to Chattanooga to face drug charges. That didn't necessarily make him F.B.I., and Leland always thought of John Belushi in "The Blues Brothers" — a movie that had Chicago pegged for the rest of the nation to understand all the better — flashing a crumpled pack of Chesterfields so quickly it might've looked like an officious looking badge. And the guy cleared through Pasdar, the watch commander. So all that was left was the speculation.
It was the better part of a week before Seckar in Prisoner Property found Agar's envelope with personal belongings. He rang up the Detective Division on the status, as the envelope was dated five days previous, the seventeenth of August. No one was held at August Boulevard longer than four days; they'd have been transported to 26th and California in the IDOC bus.
Leland went back to get the envelope; Rizzi now thinking that the suit who nabbed Agar probably was a fed, as they'd be stupid enough to not take the guy's wallet and keys, etc.
The envelope looked and felt as if it were empty, though. No wallet and keys, etc. The two men couldn't break their curiosity and opened the seal on the manila 11x14 near the coffee pot.
Inside was a single news clipping. Not from the Chicago papers, nor was it from Chattanooga, Tennessee, if there was any connection with that city whatsoever. Reading the article, both cops knew that there was something to Agar's story, at least.
It was front page, the second section of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Only part of the newspaper's name was visible, but the cops didn't need eidetic memories for detail retention. A guy on Western and Iowa sold out-of-town newspapers from his kiosk, was all. Although Leland didn't know it, Rizzi had been buying copies of the Dziennik Chicagoski for months now, brushing up on his Polish so that he could understand the `hood as well as his Division Street-born partner.
The only thing they couldn't find was a date, but the paper was very crisp and had not yellowed or curled. A stain near the corner might have been from Agar's sweaty thumbprint.
GRISLY DEATH REMAINS MYSTERY
Police are still without clues in the apparent disembowelment of a thirty-six year old Ballard man on Friday night. Frank Kiger, who had worked at Boeing Aircraft as a maintenance engineer for eight years, was found on the front lawn of his woodframe, two-story house in the 7200 block of Dibble Ave NW. He had been dressed casually, and passersby had called the Seattle Police Department after seeing the body.
"We suspected the victim to be drunk, at worst, a knifing," Shane Doolittle said, who made the call after being prodded by his companion, Jessica Vashon, to contact the police.
Kiger had been disemboweled, according to the King County Medical Examiner's office. One of Kiger's kidneys was surgically removed, according to the Chief M.E., Talbert Stanislaus. Patterns of contortion within the muscle and skeletal structure suggests that the victim was tortured before being murdered.
Kiger had been in contact with police in the weeks before the murder, which has led to speculations into his business and private life. "It was very strange," Det. 2nd Grade Scott Wiatte said. "He was quite agitated when he called, and I thought his story was borderline paranoia...
Leland looked up at Rizzi. Coffee percolated in the silence. Both cops wondered exactly which delinquent bill Frank Kiger had failed to adjust on his own.
Chicago, Atlanta:
March, 1995
The Dennis Cassady Trilogy
Rapid Transit
Waiting for the Douglas El on the final day of Indian summer, Dennis Cassady saw the woman slowly and relentlessly knifed to death in the field below the platform. He had been standing, unaware, for several minutes, thinking about whether he should take the weekend off and boogie up to Fallon Ridge to catch the remainder of the World Series on big screen TV (since, let's not kid ourselves, if he lived to be frigging ninety, the chances of seeing the games at Wrigley Field... hell, the Cubs will always be looking at a sweep of the playoffs like a fourteen-year-old pimply-necked kid with one hand buried deep in his pants drooling over the Playmate of The Month), and not until he looked down the tracks for the elevated train did he notice her. She had not made a sound. He was standing behind a billboard that advertised a brand of cigarettes. The billboard showed a woman with beautiful red lips and matching fingernail polish looking through a pair of b
inoculars at a package of cigarettes. The legend below the ad read: True. You found it. He realized with a sudden twinge of morbid fascination, which went sliding down his back like an ice cube on a hot day, that he had a perfect view.
The woman's jeans — he was sure that she had to be in her mid-twenties — her jeans were pulled down to her knees, and blood was running in fine rivulets down one thigh. The Western Avenue sodium vapor lamps cast a violet haze on the field, the kind of haze you see at dusk during the summer if rain is on the way, and it made the blood appear livid and oily.
Her breasts were large, but he could not tell if she were attractive: her face was twisted in fear, eyes widened, nostrils flared, blond hair matted with dirt. All of this surrounded a black pit of a mouth from which no sound came. Cassady's eyes drifted back to her spread legs and perfect thighs, they really were perfect, except for that ugly stream of blood that largely resembled a doctor's El Marko outline of some old bag's varicose vein.
The twinge he had initially experienced became stronger, he felt as if his entire body were starting to fall asleep. It ran across him in waves, like that time he had gotten hypnotized at Massie's and his friend Frank had sat by and laughed. The mesmerist extraordinaire (he called himself that; the guy was really just a two-bit showoff in a bouffant toupee) had said to Cassady: "You are getting sleepy. You feel a tingling in your fingers, a tingling in your toes..." and shit like that. He sounded like a queer, and Cassady ended up hypnotized into "becoming" Neil Diamond, kissing old women and running the microphone cord up and down his crotch.
But he wasn't falling asleep. He felt both excitement and curiosity at what was happening below him; how things were going to turn out. He felt the same way people who lead boring lives slow their cars down at the scene of an auto wreck, or mill about the aftermath of a Haddon Street grocery store robbery, to see how many times the fifty-year-old Polish immigrant had been shot after his till had been emptied, and to maybe get their faces on the five o'clock news.
He didn't need his face on the news; not at all.
Cassady thought about that Don McLean song that he and Sarah had listened to in high school. I feel the trembling tingle of a sleepless night...
Only the girl in the song had chestnut-colored hair that fell across her pillowcase.
The field below was in the process of becoming the early stages of a project of which Cassady knew nothing about. A lime green construction shack with Myers and Sons, Winnetka printed in three-dimensional blue on its side stood at the far end of the field. Beyond that, the monolithic overpass of the Burlington Northern's railroad tracks ran beneath the El about twenty feet west; the two sets of ties cut the field off effectively and almost completely. He heard the man below him grunt. The sound of a car with a dead battery being turned over.
Maybe the woman will be lucky and the guy would have a dead battery, Cassady thought, then she wouldn't end up in some Division Street abortion clinic telling the doctor: "Yes, it was my boyfriend, and, yes, I know I should have come sooner, but—" "—you were embarrassed," the doctor would finish. "Right? Well, now, don't worry, just rest your feet in these stirrups. The hose won't hurt too much..."
The people who worked at the building from nine until six-thirty made picture frames. Moonlight splashed across several third-floor windows, he could vaguely make out a small bottle of Jergens hand lotion, a miniature sentry that seemed to stare at him from the window sill. All the windows seemed to stare at him.
A nearly deserted CTA bus advertising Nobody Does It Better: Channel Two News at 5, 6, & 10 split the night, droning by within ten feet of the two figures in the field. The driver's eyes mirrored the unblinking darkness of the building's windows, as they stared straight ahead towards the north side and better neighborhoods.
The man—Christ! Cassady had paid hardly any attention to him at all — looked up as the bus hissed on. He had a full and unshaven face, white hairs spotted his beard. Broad shoulders pushed out from a checkered shirt, and his soiled shirttails were dangling out of the open fly of his Wrangler jeans. The man was wearing a pair of red Keds basketball sneakers that made squishing noises as he shifted his weight in the muddy tire tracks on the ground. His teeth were crooked.
Cassady was captivated at the clarity of which he saw things. It was as if he were sitting in the sixth-row aisle seat in the Hub theater, secure in the darkness, stuffing popcorn into his mouth as some B-movie starlet is hacked at by some B-movie slasher with Spanish subtitles.
The woman kicked at the man, who was still looking towards the street. He stumbled backwards, howling. More out of surprise than anger. The woman staggered to her feet, her jeans still bunched at the knees. The two moved in a drunken pavane, the man trying to regain his balance, his arms flapping at the air; the woman attempting to turn away, her mouth now resembling a gaping wound.
Later, Cassady would remember everything that followed as happening with a cruel slowness, as if the field had been invisibly flooded with glycerin. Everything that followed, everything, ripple of muscle, ripping of flesh, blinking of eyes, expanding and contracting of lungs as air was inhaled and scream was expelled, it all happened in slow motion, separate frames in a great motion picture. He could almost see himself breathing in slow motion.
The man came forward again, a knife suddenly in his left hand — Cassady thought of a stiletto his father, a retired Monroe Street cop, had shown him once; when he flicked the release button a six-inch blade jumped out uncaringly, capable of slicing flesh and bone alike, press it into somebody's back snnikt! and their spinal cord is severed like so much butter — and he heard the slow whirring of the Hub movie projector again.
The woman took three steps backwards before falling to the ground with a wet thud. A street lamp near the corner flickered twice and went out. The man's arm descended in jagged flashes, as if a piece of film were being slowed down and then speeded up spasmodically, or maybe the scene below had been poorly edited and hastily shipped out for viewing to reap whatever profits could be made. The huge knife ripped twice into the woman's right breast.
Blood, a rich purple color in the streetlamp's haze, flowered across her blouse. A third thrust, this one accompanied by a miserable sucking sound (as if the knife had entered the exact same entry hole as the previous stab), and the purplish blood sprayed out in all directions; it had the effect of a water hose being turned on with a thumb over its nozzle. The man was drenched, his pants and shirt streaked shiny in places, and the ejaculation of blood drove him into an even greater frenzy.
Then, only then, did the woman scream. It was the sound of something trapped, a child camping with his parents wanders into a foxtrap, which snaps around his tiny leg, crushing tiny bones. The rabbit staring into the muzzle of the shotgun. The mother who answers the phone angrily at two in the morning, starting to say "Can't you at least call if—" and being interrupted by the police officer.
Her arms wrapped frantically around her chest, clamping her life back in.
As her scream skittered down the empty streets into the gutters and alleys, the man punched her below the right eye, and Cassady heard her nose break. It was muffled, like the sound of a pretzel being bit in half inside your mouth. Her skin began to swell, darkening her mascara, which had already begun to run, minutes before. Not from tears, but from the man's spittle.
He pulled her hair and her head snapped brutally forward, and then he casually let it drop back with a dull crack. All of this of course happening in slow motion, the moonlight washed through the woman's blond hair as her head fell back, and Cassady thought of a line from a Richard Lovelace poem: Shake your head and scatter day... What an absurd—
The woman screamed again.
The sound slapped Cassady's awareness with the same intensity of his radio alarm going off to WBBM's Hot Hits each morning. After the initial onslaught of the Go-Gos or Toni Basil singing about Mickey, whatever dream-thoughts still slumbered in his head disappeared when he dipped his soft contacts in icy tap wate
r before putting them in, and he was left staring at reality: reflected in the bathroom mirror of a shabby two-room flat, the face of a twenty-seven-year-old man who looked older than he really was.
Cassady looked in the mirror in front of him and saw the knife high in the air. This is really happening! He thought. I can still save her! As he moved backwards, quickly and quietly, past the Creepshow billboard that some half-assed Rembrandt had retouched in marker so that the cockroach coming out of E.G. Marshall's mouth was instead a giant black penis, past the small blue sign that gave the hours of arrival and departure for the Douglas trains, and he was finally at the phone and the man wasn't coming after him and the phone felt cold in his hand and there were initials carved into the wood of the bench next to him that said Juice L's LaVon and Latin Kings Rule and he dialed 911 and
All of this happened in little over three seconds in Dennis Cassady's mind. He was rooted where he stood like a corpse to its grave. He badly wanted to urinate.
The man dropped the knife straight into the woman's mouth.
It fell
o God it fell
ever so
slowly.
Straight down, like the swan dive of an Olympic swimmer. It fell, and Cassady saw the veins sticking out in the man's wrists, he held the knife so tightly. Knuckles white. Like her eyes. White and huge, the one that had been beaten purple looked as if it had been painted into its socket.
And the knife fell, and there were images of that 60 Minutes show on slow motion filming and that shot of the drop of milk falling with the camera recording every 1/100th of a second with the drop so gracefully falling into the dish and the splattering milk formed a tiny crown and one tiny globe stood balanced in dead center with a thin tongue of white reaching to pull it back down.
