by Brian Hodge
What I've been doing. What I had done. Already thinking about cruising the highways again.
I've lived in Chicago all my thirty-three years. Born in a Potomac Street two-flat because my father didn't have medical coverage at the tavern where he worked, I lived on the South side for my early years, finally moving back north after I was old enough to do as I pleased. Potomac Street had changed, but so had I.
Field a variety of jobs: glorified law-firm gopher, groundskeeper to the sculpture garden at the city library, other meaningless career moves. Finally settled on what amounted to freelancing my time as a skip-tracer, out of a temporary agency on Ohio Street.
Gave me enough time to do as I pleased. Even tried my hand going back to college at that time. Law enforcement classes at the U. of I.'s Polk Street campus. Most of the students there were from Chicago — Circle Campus, as it is still called, is the armpit of Midwestern educational opportunities — but I occasionally made acquaintances with guys and girls from the sister campus at Champaign-Urbana. Even before the dorms along Halsted Street were built a few years back, Circle was known for killer parties. Weekend: trainloads of young testosterone and jiggling breasts taking Amtrak's Illini Special from as far south as Mount Vernon.
Chanyn Kimble was one of those sets of breasts, on one of those never-ending trains.
Back in Champaign, young and nubile Chanyn Kimble was attending journalism classes, and one of her upcoming papers was on people with interesting careers. McClellan told her about my skip-tracing abilities. Hunting them down is like police work.
Hunting deadbeats and debtors, I mean.
She did the interview with me on the tail end of spring that year. We had our choice of ethnic backgrounds to conduct our business: Greektown was north along Halsted past the rapid transit line, to the south were pizza joints on Taylor and all kinds of shit in the Maxwell Street market. Chanyn had never seen the market; a bustling, hectic place since before the turn of the century. Just west of Halsted stands the old 7th District station house, used for the exterior shots in Hill Street Blues.
There is a large amount of poetry in the faces of the ancient men and women wizened by the sadness of inevitability. I had trouble conveying this to Chanyn; even then, I knew she would be a hell of a reporter, all she saw was hopeless people exploiting other people with even less hope.
The American Dream. We were looking at it.
Looking, staring. Watching. She asked me how I was able to walk so effortlessly past some of the seedier alleyways, where winos drank Richard's Wild Irish Rose next to open garbage cans. Flames from within lit their faces, staring over the shared bottles at us. The cold, the really brutal weather was long gone, the flames in the can kept away the flies and, more importantly, the sweat bees. Leaving the bums the relief of being able to drink without the added stress of batting away things that were real.
Watching, surveying. Scrutinizing.
We walked farther south, past the hubcap sellers and the hot dog stands. I told her that I learned a long time ago that if you knew what was going on around you, what faces were where, then no one would bother you.
Only two kinds of people eyefuck other people, psychos and policemen.
And what I did was kind of like police work.
We ended up at a deli on Canalport; Chanyn, fascinated by the way I remembered things that we had passed blocks north. I was similarly intrigued by her auburn hair and flaring nostrils, the animation of her expressions. I was intoxicated by her innocence.
I did not realize how much she was going to screw me over. Innocence, my left nut. If she was ever going to become any kind of a reporter, it was going to be for one of those celebrity exploitation shows that come on right before prime-time television.
And I never intend to become a celebrity. Someone infamous, most certainly. But not anyone you'd see on the news, whether making a pathetic attempt at covering my face with my leather jacket or standing stoically in front of the arresting officers, offering no resistance.
See, either scene would mean that I'd been caught. I do not intend to get caught at anything I do. But with Chanyn Kimble's interview, well...
I came close to giving away too many secrets. Shortcuts.
Something that, one day, though I'd probably have to be held without sufficient evidence, I'd get Murder One because Chanyn Kimble would have popped out of wherever she had been gestating and give the cops from Cook County her wonderful interview from days gone by.
The interview that made me out to be some kind of disassociated schizophrenic. When all I really am is the boy next door.
Every Mother's Son.
I'm more careful these days. With my early victims, I had never bothered with gloves, my way of thinking was that I had no prior convictions or military records for the Chicago Police MAPADS units to draw a match from on their database.
I was much more talkative with Chanyn than I should have been. But it still wouldn't have been bad if her article hadn't been so slanted and bizarre. I should have realized that she was going for the grade, the recognition. All part of the paper chase.
Now, she was a loose end. My nerves are tightly woven these days, I took out all my stress on the women whose husbands fought in the Gulf War. I killed only the ones who were spending their husbands' combat pay — remember, skip-tracing is the vestigial twin to bill collecting — but that is another story. Part of my memoirs.
I'm a serial killer with a conscience. I do not kill just anybody in order to get my rocks off. I kill people who deserve it. Father, Son, & the Holy Ghost. Judge, jury, and executioner. Every Mother's Son.
In the course of my being interviewed, we eventually ended up eating at the Silver Lounge on Depot Street. I mentioned my skip-tracing tactics, alluding to several of the towns where I later performed my killings. I spoke about the different ways to get information from complete strangers on the phone.
She never let me see the interview — four pages, double-spaced — saying that, if this was, like, a career thing, she could be fired showing someone an unaired or unpublished interview.
The numb cunt.
All I know was that it had been well received by the professor, who ran off copies for the entire class, and that Chanyn had included quotes from several of my current friends and past co-workers.
Even my closest friends don't have an inkling about some of the things I've done. I spend some Friday nights at my friend Joe Verve's place on Roscoe; I've known him for over a decade now. 1981, we were working at a record shop in the Brickyard Mall. One night, staying over at the two-flat, I brought home a girl from The Reptile Room, this single's place on Augusta Boulevard. All of us were drunk. Myself, the least.
When Joey woke up the next afternoon, I was watching a Japanese monster film on Channel 50 and told him that the girl had left an hour before.
She had gone into the bathroom to puke her guts out about five a.m. Selling Buicks, I call it. Beeeuuuucccckkkk. I don't sleep much, particularly when I'm mixing my Moxodram with antihistamines.
I stopped her from flushing, and held her head as far down into the bowl as it would go. I kept it pressed down for exactly eight minutes, until the blue digits on Joey's Mr. Coffee read 5:43.
A novel way of choking on your own vomit, I must say.
I put her in a garbage bag and stuffed her into a crevice underneath the Ravenswood El, about a quarter of a block away. The Streets & San people found her about three weeks later. Joey never made the connection, shit happens in Chicago all the time.
The girl's name was Michelle Tensil and she was twenty-three and lived in Rogers Park. She was my fifth victim. If you don't remember their names and faces, where they lived, then their lives were meaningless. I'm conscientious, like I said: I killed her because she was a married woman pretending to be single. Now she's dead.
Like with centerfolds, going back to this name thing. Or stewardesses, on the occasional time I fly somewhere, like during the Gulf War killings. I always remember their
names, and, if they have it written in the text, where they were from. Otherwise, I'm masturbating or daydreaming over a waste of flesh.
I never masturbate or violate any of my victims. What I do with them is much more intimate.
It was a surprise, as I said, that she was calling me up for, in effect, a date. She lived in Champaign and worked at one of the local network affiliates. Entertainment reporter, just as I figured. Talked with our mutual friend and got my beeper number, I told you all that. I had spoken to her several times of places I had intended to live. Detroit, Denver. Seattle. New Orleans, before it got too hot — in more ways than the obvious — and then moving on. At our last conversation, back in the Silver Lounge, the farthest I had been from Chicago was Nashville.
Nancie Beloit, age twenty-six, waitressed at a bar overlooking the Cumberland River. I was never able to find out where she lived, but I understood the wrongs she'd done.
I told Chanyn Kimble that I would be driving down to Champaign that weekend; I recalled she was big into country and western, Patty Loveless was kicking off her '92 tour near there. She told me how to get to her apartment complex on Florida and Busey. After I talked with her, I looked it up in my Sunset Atlas. There the intersection was, right near Mount Hope Cemetery.
That looked promising.
I read over a copy of the interview that she had written those long months before, having had to make some promises to someone to actually see a copy of the damn thing, months after her personal damage had been done.
Jesus Las Vegas, she played me for a lunatic. Even misquoted my friends.
She picked up on what I had been saying about remembering names. This kind of thing had always impressed my friend Joey. Only the way she started the paragraph was with her own phrase: "Another way that Dvorak seems odd to others, according to his close friend Joe Verve, is `the way he remembers names and faces. I'd hate to think he'd ever hold a grudge against someone.’"
Joey laughed as I told him that over a couple of Rolling Rocks at the Reptile Room. But then, he doesn't know where the bodies are buried.
Another line read something like,
James Dvorak gets a personal enjoyment out of what he calls "screwing people royally." He uses a variety of different names when he skip-traces and says that it never ceases to amaze him how easy it is to get the most personal information from a given person.
I had continued on, in that portion of the interview, to say that I was conducting asset searches for a reputable law firm in Evanston, but she made me seem more ominous; putting it another way, like I was some chain-smoking bail bondsman. I'm glad I didn't tell her what kind of information you could get when you volunteered to work for the local precinct captain.
People actually let you into their homes, then.
Funny thing, though. She still flirts over the phone. Everyone she interviewed back then said how they almost felt obligated to confess everything to her on the basis of her phone voice. That's another reason I never doubted her success. But Champaign? Maybe it was a stepping stone for her.
I didn't give purple piss, either way.
We saw the concert, then went back to her place. She still had the same fresh looks, the dimples improved by television exposure, no doubt. We talked about our particular successes. After graduation, she had started out working as meteorologist for a station in Streator. Chanyn eventually graduated on to entertainment reporter, and still believed that she would move on to New York or some other east coast city, the way she talked. I knew that she had found herself in a comfortable position — you didn't have expenses in an Illinois college town the way you would in Manhattan — and she might have never left the town.
I can never allow the luxury of becoming comfortable. And so I left out a few of my, ah, accomplishments and things that I'd done since last I saw her.
I told Chanyn that I'd gone independent a few months back, which wasn't really lying, when all was considered. I even went as far to say that I was making a nice chunk of change.
Chanyn Kimble was a loose end, and you have to do your best to impress loose ends. I had been waiting awhile for tying this one up.
Who'd have thought she'd never left the state? I know, you're thinking, why didn't I run one of my infamous credit checks on her? For one, I never knew her social security number. For two, she used a different last name on the TV, and all her credit cards were listed under Chanyn Fleshette.
I'm guessing that's the name that will show up in the obituary. Probably depends on which paper in which state does it, I think she was from Iowa or Kansas originally. I'm stupid for not remembering, but if you ever heard her voice, you'd drift off in your own reverie. And I have never done that since.
The last thing we talked about before I left for that penultimate night of her life, was the next day's plans. I mapped out an itinerary of wining and dining, the whole nine yards.
"I think you're trying to spoil me," she giggled, and I again thought of her manipulations.
What I was thinking to myself then was that the only way that I was going to let her spoil would be if I left her corpse in a place where it would be in the sun too long before the cops found it.
Chicago:
15 March 1992
Matchmaker
I had been on my way to a weekend job, taking the bus to avoid the expected gridlock on the Kennedy; people heading out for their three-day holiday.
Myself, I had nothing going for Easter. My family is up in Milwaukee. My lover and I had just split up. I thought that working the site where the new DePaul garage was going up would take my mind off lost and misplaced loves.
Not that Easter was ever anything romantic between me and Ronnie. But digging and slapping cement on the bricks down State Street would alleviate the tension. I had no yearnings to be loved, as long as I could avoid seeing the displays in Carson's and Field's. God, but I'm a sentimentalist.
It was a good day to work up a sweat. I was standing on the Clark Street bus not to assume a macho stance, as is expected of us, but because I was loaded down by my tool belt. That in itself is not macho, considering the fact that it took my hardest grip to keep from tumbling in to a Hispanic woman from the weight around my waist. The woman's breasts were like loaves of bread, and I was amazed at her control, physically speaking.
The air-conditioning felt good on my arms, unencumbered in a sleeveless white mesh shirt. I had yet to tan well. Still, sweat formed a light sheen on my forehead and there were occasional droplets in my mustache, which I licked away.
I was feeling pretty good about myself. My auntie, who I was living with since moving back to the city, had come to slowly accept my lifestyle. Also, I had just fixed up two guys I know and they seemed to be hitting it off well. My job paid well, and I was able to spend a lot of time in the open air. Best of all, I wasn't working a job where I was expected to be a team player. I doubt that there were many places outside of Halsted Street bistros where I could be a team player.
One thing I particularly found rewarding about the ride was the fact that the bus driver was being very kind and polite to this one fellow who sat in the very first seat. This guy had a slur to his voice, but was too young to have been, say, a stroke victim. I'm sure you've seen people like him, and by that I don't mean handicapped or different. They might be older, whatever, they just want to talk to somebody and even a transit driver will do. Well, the driver was even making jokes with him. Being patient with the slowness in the passenger's voice, showing big white teeth in a coal black face in return. The guy was enjoying himself. I felt good about the human race in general.
It was a good day. Until the three assholes got on the bus at Diversey. It's not even worth my while to describe them; they were simply the usual muscle-bound dumb shits who had nothing better to do than ridicule anyone they saw to be different. I have seen jerks like them countless times, most of them too cowardly to be gay bashers, the kind of which you may see in other cities like Seattle and New York. I moved back here from D
enver after my jail sentence was commuted because of people like them.
I was going to make them look differently — at themselves — in just a few minutes.
They bullied their way past the front of the bus, making note of the guy with the slur in his voice but giving me not a second glance, before sitting down noisily in the back. One of them, wearing a heavy metal T-shirt, sat with his legs spread apart like his cock was the size of an eggplant, taking up three seats.
They started making fun of the guy up front immediately. Heavy metal doing most of it. I will not even dignify their existence by repeating the way they sounded; although, they were doing it loudly enough that even the bus driver must have heard. But that wasn't enough for them, no.
There was also an elderly woman in the middle of the bus wearing wraparound sunglasses, the kind people wear because of glaucoma or a retina disease. One fellow I know, a yuppie who works for the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant chain, has the latter but chooses to wear an eye patch, alternating each day. I think his attempts at cosmetic acceptance, for lack of a better phrase, fail and I think of him as a forgetful pirate.
But, see, I would never say that to his face.
Back to the lady with the black sunglasses. Heavy metal and the others were making like she was the Terminator's grandmother. They should have been on The Tonight Show. Better yet, Arsenio. What bothered me most about this particular verbal attack is that the lady knew that they were talking about her — she turned in their direction, I had been hoping that she might have been mercifully hard of hearing — but there was no way that she would know about the Schwarzenegger movie.
My blood pressure was rising, my hand unconsciously moving towards my tool belt, and I tried hard not to think about Denver. About the bashers in Chessman Park. But then the three assholes made me see red.
The guy who slurred got off the bus at Surf Street. Nearby, on a private street called California Terrace, was a neurological clinic. I silently wished him the best and made a mental note to thank the bus driver when I got off at State and Jackson.
