I dropped the cup to the floor, bent forward, and ran my hands through my hair. Nicole. I thought about her in the darkness. In the theater. I didn’t want to think about Nicole. I couldn’t think about her. Ever again. That was over. This was beginning. That’s what I told myself. But it doesn’t work that way. At least not for me. So I let her in. Then I cried. Deep and quiet. In a way I hadn’t thought possible. I cried until I couldn’t anymore. The movie played on. I shook, I raged, I heaved. All barely above a whisper. And then there was no more. I waited, wondered. Whatever it was, however, was gone. I found a napkin on the floor of the theater and wiped my eyes. Tom was about to get blown up, shot, and kissed. All at the same time. I wished him well and left the theater.
The mall was quiet. No sign of the kid or his girl. I wanted to give him some money, offer to pay for medical expenses, something. Instead, I took the elevator down. It was empty, save for a spot of blood against the wall in one corner. I walked back down Diversey and found my car. No ticket. My lucky day. I got in and drove back to my apartment. Nicole was in the ground. Gone. And there was work to be done.
CHAPTER 42
Even a decade later, the street-mime killer was never far from a headline. The latest article I Googled on John William Grime was dated a week ago. A local businessman had bought some of his prison sketches and held a public bonfire. A week before that there was a piece in the Chicago Tribune about the house on Hutchinson. The split-level under which Grime had buried fifteen young women was being sold to a developer. A couple of dozen people dressed as mimes sat silently on the sidewalk as the house was bulldozed. Each held a picture of one of Grime’s victims. According to the reporter, plans called for a Kentucky Fried Chicken to replace the house. Everyone got a charge out of that, since Grime himself was once a KFC cook. That was only slightly before he murdered sixteen-year-old Tamara Kennedy, his first known victim.
I had fixed myself a cup of tea and was digging through the accounts of Grime’s arrest and trial when the phone rang. It was Diane.
“What are you doing?”
I checked my watch. It was twenty past six.
“Why aren’t you on the air?”
“I am. It’s a commercial break. Turn us on and I’ll lick my lips for you.”
“Funny. You coming over?”
“You want me there?”
“Yes.”
“How was your afternoon?”
“Fine.”
A pause.
“I’ll be over after the show.”
“Great. I got a question for you. Didn’t you guys do a retrospective on John William Grime last year?”
“John Donovan did it. Ten-year anniversary of the arrest. I think we brought a lot of the families together.”
“If you can, bring that tape over and anything else you can dig up.”
“Grime?”
I could hear a music cue in the background and her director’s voice.
“I’ll explain when you get here.”
I hung up and clicked on the TV. After the commercial break they went to a studio shot, and then there was Diane, up close, telling Chicagoland about Beluga whales at the Shedd Aquarium. There was no smile on her face and not even a hint of lasciviousness about the lips. In fact, she looked a bit distracted. I clicked off the set and returned to the serial killer.
A Time magazine piece from 1996 had photos from the crime scene itself, including the excavation. Best I could tell, Grime had stacked the bodies two deep in three long trenches. He accessed the graves through the floor of his bedroom closet. Fashioned a pulley system, tied the feet of his victim to the pulley, and lowered away headfirst. Not a lot of room, but the bodies were there, so I read on.
Grime hunted on the city’s strolls. Usually at night. He drowned or strangled most of his victims and raped all but three. Fifteen-year-old Eileen Hayes was found at the bottom of one of the graves. Her fingers were dug into the back of the corpse beside her. The medical examiner speculated Hayes was still alive when Grime buried her. According to the ME, Eileen Hayes could not have lasted more than a few minutes after regaining consciousness.
I stretched, walked to the window, and wondered how long would be short enough to be awake in your own grave. Across the street a CTA bus disgorged its passengers into a sudden, soft rain. A space cleared, and Diane stepped through it. She popped open an umbrella and cast her eyes toward my window. A minute after that there was a knock at the door.
“Hey, babe.”
She moved easily into my body. A couple of good moments later, we parted.
“How you doing?” she said.
“I’m doing fine.”
“Good. You hungry?”
“Not really,” I said. “But we should eat.”
I pulled a variety of take-out menus from a kitchen drawer.
“What do you feel like?” I said.
“Whatever.”
Diane had her back to me and drifted her fingers across an old bookcase I kept by the front door. Inside it were the collected works of Plato. I pulled a menu off the pile and dialed.
“What are you getting?” she said.
“Chinese.”
“I hate Chinese.”
Diane had one of the volumes open now and was reading. I hung up the phone and picked up another menu.
“Is this Greek?” she said.
“Ancient Greek. Fourth century B.C.”
“Looks hard.”
“Not if you lived in Greece.”
Diane turned with a smirk.
“You mean in the fourth century B.C.”
“Exactly,” I said. “You like pizza?”
“Who doesn’t?”
“This is East Coast pizza. Thin crust and round.”
“Sounds great. You got beer?”
I pointed in the general direction of the refrigerator and ordered. Diane got us a couple of beers, green glass and cold. She sat down in the same chair Annie had sat in, tipped the bottle back, and then wiped her upper lip.
“How and why?”
“What?”
She had put down Plato and held up a copy of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.
“How and why?”
I moved back into my mind and shrugged.
“Something I got into early in life. Studied in high school, college.”
“I was a history major in college,” Diane said. “I don’t have my apartment stuffed with American history books.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Interesting,” she said.
“You think so?”
I grabbed the volume of Aeschylus and opened it.
“What do you know about this guy?” I said.
“Aeschylus?”
“Aeschylus.”
She shrugged.
“What everyone else knows. Didn’t he kill himself? Drink some hemlock?”
“That was Socrates.”
I copied out a line for Diane to read.
“This is ancient Greek,” I said.
“Cool.”
“It’s from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, part of a trilogy of plays called The Oresteia. This line translates ‘There is the sea, now who will drain it dry?’ Clytemnestra says it to Agamemnon just before she sets him up to be killed.”
“Messing around, was Agamemnon?”
“Not really. But the point is, when you say this line in the original Greek, it comes out like a hiss. A lot of soft sss’s. Aeschylus wanted Clytemnestra to actually sound like the snake she was. Here, try this line.”
I copied out another line of Greek text.
“This was on the wall of the oracle at Delphi,” I said. “It means ‘Know thyself.’ According to Plato, this was the key to true wisdom, true happiness.”
“Know thyself,” Diane said. “Sounds great.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. Until you learn too much.”
“Speaking from experience?” I said.
“Common sense. Ask enough questions of yourself, you
might find out some things you don’t like.”
I didn’t tell Diane how close she had struck to Sophocles’ Oedipus. Figured I’d save that chestnut for another day.
“Anyway,” I said, “that’s what I get out of it. A way to look at life, a way to live life. Something that stays with you. So I like it. Now let’s talk about Grime.”
Diane returned Agamemnon to the bookshelf and turned on my VCR.
“Bulldog is our expert on Grime,” she said. “You realize he covered the actual trial.”
“Of course.”
John “Bulldog” Donovan was a throwback, not to mention a legend. A guy who wore a soft hat, carried a notebook, and licked his pencil before he wrote.
“Bulldog’s the best reporter in the city,” I continued. “Gets it right the first time.”
Diane popped in a tape. Donovan’s deep baritone rolled over footage of the house on Hutchinson and then the only shot anyone ever got of Grime, twenty seconds of footage as police led the serial killer into the station for booking. He looked pudgy, sort of dazed.
“What do you think?” I said.
Diane tilted her head to one side.
“Looks like a million other guys. Guess that’s the trick, huh?”
“Serial Killer 101,” I said. “Gotta look like the guy next door.”
“In Grime’s case, the loser next door.”
I paused the tape on a photo of Grime, his face turned away from the lens and half-hidden in his hands.
“Did you know he performed a mime for every one of his victims?”
Diane shook her head. I continued.
“He’d cover his face and body in white pancake and do his mime. You’d be handcuffed in his tub. Screaming until you couldn’t breathe. Promising anything for another moment to live. And meaning every word. He’d finish his show, scrape the makeup off, and look at you. Not evil. Not mad. Just look. Then he’d slip your shoulders and head under the water. Slow. You’d hold your breath for a minute or so. Then you’d release, go down easy. To the bottom of the tub and into your grave. Meanwhile, he’d just watch. That’s the Grime way.”
Diane got up, switched off the TV, and pulled her chair close.
“I got it. Bad guy. Good thing he’s on death row. Now why are we talking about him?”
She was leaning forward, mouth slightly open, hard white teeth smeared with delicate bits of red lipstick. For the first time I noticed an overbite. Delicate, but an overbite nevertheless. Made her look like a very pretty wolf.
“I tracked down a piece of evidence from the rape Gibbons was looking at.”
“Elaine Remington’s?”
“Don’t ask me how. Just chalk it up to luck.”
“What do you have?”
“The victim’s shirt.”
“Lost bit of evidence?”
“Something like that. We ran some tests, found some semen, and got a profile. No ID yet.”
“Have you told Elaine?”
“No.”
Diane leaned back and considered. Then she picked up her beer and took a sip.
“She might appreciate the progress report.”
“I’m going to give it a couple of days,” I said. “See if I can come up with a name.”
“And where does our friend the serial killer come in?”
“Getting there.”
I pulled out Nicole’s report.
“Nicole was running the profile through the state’s DNA databank on the morning she was killed.”
Diane put down her beer and picked up the report.
“Nicole worked on this?”
“Yeah. This is where it gets tricky.”
Diane flipped through the pages, searching for a clue, finding nothing but science.
“You’d have a better shot with Plato,” I said.
“Funny guy. Where’s the tricky?”
“I’ll tell you, but it’s got some news value.”
“How much news value?”
“That’s for you to decide. What I need is for you to hold the story. Not forever. Just until I tell you.”
“You changing our deal?”
“No. This is part of the deal. You just need to trust me.”
Diane put the report down and offered up a measured sigh.
“And you need to trust me. Fill me in and I’ll hold up my end.”
I took a final look around and jumped.
“Last year the state’s crime lab found a second source of semen in the Grime murders.”
Diane pulled out a notebook and started writing. That made me nervous, but I continued.
“They decided it was a coincidence,” I said.
“ ‘They’ being the DA?”
I nodded.
“It makes sense,” I said. “A lot of Grime’s victims were prostitutes, so you might expect to find other sources of semen. Problem is, the same DNA profile was found on two different victims.”
“Big coincidence.”
“That’s not the end of it. That profile is also a match to the one pulled off my client’s shirt.”
“Elaine’s shirt?”
“Yeah.”
“So whoever raped your client is tied in to the Grime murders.”
“You should be writing headlines,” I said.
“Wow.”
I wasn’t ready to tell Diane about Grime’s own semen showing up at a crime scene while the killer himself sat on death row. The reporter had more than enough to chew on.
“You know Gerald O’Leary made headlines with Grime,” Diane said.
“So I’ve heard.”
“Have you talked to Bennett Davis about this?”
“No,” I said. “A little too close to home. For right now, we do Bennett a favor and leave him out.”
“Fine.”
“There’s another thing,” I said. “When they checked Nicole’s lab, everything she was working on was gone. The shirt, her reports, everything. I got the match off a set of backup files she kept.”
“So you think her murder was tied in to this, too?”
“I do.”
Diane’s eyes touched mine and steadied.
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
“How do you figure?”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“That’s right. I couldn’t have known, didn’t know a goddamn thing, which is why I should have left her out.”
“She was a big girl, Kelly. She knew what she wanted to do in life. At that moment in time, she wanted to help you.”
I didn’t buy any of that and told Diane as much. Instead of backing off, she drew us in deeper.
“I know a little bit about Nicole. Maybe a little bit more than you think.”
I felt a pulse beat at my temple.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I mean she told me about her rape.”
“Let me ask you something. Did you get it on tape?”
“She was twelve years old, Kelly. She needed to talk about it to someone.”
“Did you get it on tape?”
“Yes.”
“Fucking great. Play it back at one of your luncheons. Make for a fun afternoon.”
I broke away and reached for my bottle of beer. Diane brushed her fingers against the back of my hand and lingered.
“She also told me about you, Michael. Off camera.”
I pulled away again, tried to shrug off the topic. A woman once told me that was my way with the big things. Move around it. Pretend it doesn’t exist, and it will go away. Some topics, however, just don’t seem to cooperate.
“What did she tell you?” I said.
My voice sounded thin and strange. The voice of someone I was neither familiar, nor entirely comfortable with.
“She talked about the rail yards, about a man. Showed up in your neighborhood one day. A white man, big, with shoulders.”
Diane’s words jump-started the images that slept somewhere inside. The movie reel danced, flickered, and began t
o turn. Silent all these years, the man was back, grinning at the boy, now grown. Mocking the passage of time. As if that had changed anything.
“The rail yards are at Grand and Central,” I said.
Inside the boy was still kicking and screaming. But I moved forward. No real choice in the matter.
“In the middle of my old neighborhood. Some older kids had boosted a Good Humor truck and dumped it there. Free ice cream, you know. Nirvana for a pedophile. Anyway, that’s where he took her.”
I shook my head, but the movie continued to play.
“The back of his skull was shaved. Heavy forehead, pale white skin, small eyes like black raisins. Face was pitted, covered on one side with a birthmark. Sounds scary, huh?”
Diane nodded.
“Thing was, he had a bag full of string licorice. Remember that stuff? I loved the red kind. So did Nicole. That was how he took her, I think. Trolled around the ice-cream truck and then used the licorice.”
“You found them?”
“I was a couple of years older. Fourteen, maybe. I guess I knew the basics of sex, but I had never seen it. Didn’t think it would be like that.”
“It isn’t, Michael.”
“At the end of the rail yards is a place we used to call ‘the swamp.’ Pretty much what it was. Ran right under the tracks. He had her sitting on a rock, head down, his hand in her hair, forcing her mouth onto him. I remember seeing him turn first toward me, then her face followed. She was crying, but there was a freight train rolling overhead so there was no sound. Well, there was plenty of sound, just nothing from her.”
I took a pull on the beer, but it had no taste. The movie played, the train rolled. No sound but plenty of pictures. Diane inched closer, knees touching mine, took up both my hands, and held them close. I didn’t pull away anymore.
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