Distemper Page 6

We were in the Citizen Kane, our favorite spot for bringing journalistic stereotypes to boozy life. It was around nine on Friday night, and the place was just beginning to fill up. Lately, our turf has been invaded by students from Bessler College, which is located on the opposite side of town from the behemoth that is Benson. Bessler is a small liberal arts school that has amazing theater and music departments; too bad the rest of its student body is a bunch of beer-swilling numbskulls. Every once in a while one of them manages to drink himself right into a coma and the college president has to go to the funeral and try to keep a straight face. Mad calls it “natural selection.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll be quiet,” he said. “So what the hell happened?”

  “I told you. Mr. Hunky Cop was standing in the doorway, and when he saw the pattern the dog collar made on my hand, he got all hepped up and split. Bat out of hell. Back to the cop shop, I assume.”

  “And it was the same pattern as on the girl’s neck?”

  “I’m pretty sure. It’s kind of weird. I didn’t think I remembered that much detail; I was scared shitless. But when I saw the marks on my hand it just sort of flashed back. I could see her lying there with these bruises around her neck.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Diamond-shaped, evenly spaced but with sort of a groove at the front. And deep. Angry.”

  “Angry?”

  “Really vicious. Cut in really deep. Bloody.”

  “Why do all the cool things happen to you?”

  “Shut up, Mad. It was awful.”

  “It’s a guy thing. We love this blood-and-guts shit. I’m thirty-four years old and I’ve never even gotten a peek at a really interesting corpse.”

  “Mad…”

  “I know. I’m an asshole.”

  “Clearly.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  “You seem to be taking this pretty well, Bernier. You find the stiff, you run for your life, and none the worse for wear.”

  “Yeah, right. Two cracked ribs, one sprained wrist…”

  “Besides that. You don’t seem any too freaked out.”

  “Are you nuts? Of course I’m freaked out. I’m plenty freaked out. It’s just… I don’t know. Nothing could be as bad as last year.”

  “I get your drift.”

  “You see the man you love in a body bag six hours after he’s out of your bed, everything’s pretty much a cake walk from there.”

  “No shit.”

  We sat there for a while, Mad drinking his Molson and me swirling the limes around my gin and tonic. Mad loves to talk, but he’s also one of the only people I can just sit with and not feel weird. “Oh, fuck, Mad. I still really miss him.”

  “I know you do. But it’s okay.”

  “How is it okay?”

  “It’s okay to miss him, because he was worth missing. That means missing him is the right thing to do.”

  “Wow. Mad, that was positively poetic.”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “You going to start singing Carpenters songs now?”

  “Hey, I’m a sensitive new age guy, baby. Don’t you forget it.”

  “Rainy days and Mondays always get you down.”

  “I’m serious, Alex. Okay, mostly serious. But you know Adam wouldn’t want you to live in the dumps for the rest of your life. It’s almost been a year. You’ve got to deal.”

  “I’m dealing. At least now I’ve got something to take my mind off it. Awfully nice of that guy to start strangling women with dog collars and making me feel better.”

  “What would scumbags like us do if everybody started being nice to each other all of a sudden?”

  “We’d be out of business. Cops too.”

  “Speaking of cops, what was Cody doing at your place last night anyway? That detail seems to have been overlooked, eh, foxy?”

  “Do you ever listen? I told you, he was doing a security check. For Marci.”

  “A likely story. He couldn’t send a uniform?”

  I shrugged. “He wanted to talk to her himself.”

  “So did he make the moves on you?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Did he get lucky?”

  “You mutant.”

  “Did he get to play sink the salami? Take Mister One Eye to the optometrist? Make you smoke the bone?”

  “Mad, I swear if you don’t shut up I’m going to hurt you. I don’t know how, but I’m going to do it.”

  He stood up, neatly avoiding the feet that were trying to kick him under the table. “And now to drain the snake. I shall return.”

  I put my head down on the tabletop, which proved to be mercifully free of beer. I wasn’t all that tired, since Bill had given me the day off and I’d spent most of it in bed with Shakespeare. But I could feel another headache coming on, and I was starting to wonder if I’d really messed up my noggin with that trip over the handlebars. Closing my eyes turned out to be a bad idea, though, because all I could see was the dead girl. She had those marks around her neck, and her palms and knees were bloody just like the girl before her. I tried to picture her alive, and couldn’t.

  What had he done to her? He’d strung that collar around her neck, and at some point she’d had to crawl around on her hands and knees. Was she trying to get away? Or did he force her to crawl around like a dog, just to humiliate her?

  Like a dog. Jesus. Could that be it?

  No way. The thought was just too creepy. But frankly, nothing seemed too creepy to match what I’d found in the woods and what the other guy had found on the mountain. If you’re going to abduct a girl and torture and kill her, does it really matter why? Does anybody care about your inner dialogue? Does your personal history dictate whether you wring her neck or slit her throat?

  “Hey, you know, you got really big tits.”

  I looked up to find two college guys, each just slightly smaller than the new Volkswagen Beetle. They were bleary-eyed and standing close together, like they were holding each other up.

  “Didn’t ya hear me?” said lout number one. “I said, ‘Man, you got really nice tits.’ We saw ya through the window here.” He gestured with his beer mug and I felt a splash go down my neck.

  “Yeah,” said his companion. “He said, like, ‘Look at that girl with that great rack,’ and I said, like, ‘Dude, it’s your duty to go in there and tell her how you feel.’ And he said, ‘Dude, you are so right.’ And… here we are.” He said it like he was Lindbergh describing his trip across the Atlantic. I didn’t know whether to laugh at them or reach for my Mace. Oh, hell. If you live in a college town, sometimes you have to suffer for all the good coffee and reasonably priced drugs.

  “So whaddaya say?” said the first guy.

  “Yeah,” said the other. “Whaddaya say?”

  “Is there a question? Because if there is, I believe I may have missed it.”

  They looked at each other. “Huh?” said lout number two. “My friend here just wanted to express himself, that’s all.”

  Where do these guys come from? Failed government experiments?

  “Yeah,” said his buddy. “I expressed myself.”

  “I see.”

  “ ’Cause we were sorta wondering,” said the first one, “if maybe you wanted to…”

  “No. No thank you.”

  “Ya sure?” said the second. “We got a whole case of Mad Dog back at the…”

  “It’s a charming offer, really. But you boys have a lovely night.”

  They looked at each other, seemed to come to some manly understanding, and turned to go. Just as they were walking down the steps to the main part of the bar they encountered Mad, who’d finally reappeared. “Dude,” the second guy said to him. “That girl is deep.”

  “You have no idea,” Mad said, and the two undergrads toddled off toward the pinball machines.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “You might have rescued me.”
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  “And validate the dominant male paradigm? I’d never.”

  “This bar is going to hell.”

  “Right. All those horny nineteen-year-old girls with fake IDs. It’s a tragedy.”

  “Why doesn’t somebody start picking these guys off for a change? They wouldn’t be missed. Who can even tell them apart?”

  “You’re suggesting a serial killer who preys on dumb jocks?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Their parents might mind.”

  “They might just as soon save the tuition.”

  “Good point. Oh, hey. I forgot to tell you. O’Shaunessey won the pool. Junior packed it in today.”

  “No kidding? Melissa’s gotta be pissed. Five more days and she was in the money. But I guess one night down in the morgue was enough for him.”

  “Yeah. Plus, he got a little push.”

  I gave him the fish eye. “Push?”

  “O’Shaunessey told him if there was another murder, he was going to have to go cover the autopsy. Said he’d have to go to the real morgue, not just the newspaper kind.”

  “And he fell for it? As if they’d ever let a reporter within a mile of the place. What a dope.”

  “See what happens when you go to journalism school? They take out all your brain cells.”

  “You mean he just took O’Shaunessey’s word for it?”

  “Well”—Mad smirked into his mug—“I kind of backed him up. Told him all about what it was like to cover my first autopsy. I thought the kid was gonna hurl.” He reached into his shirt pocket and threw five twenties on the table. “My percentage.”

  “Wait until Melissa hears about this. She’ll demand a recount.”

  “Nothing she can do about it. Fair is fair. Nobody ever said you couldn’t help things along. Besides, he’ll be much happier back in Iowa covering the corn beat.”

  “He was from Wisconsin.”

  “Dairy. Whatever.”

  “So what’s Bill going to do? We need a cop reporter, especially now.” Mad wiggled his eyebrows at me and I got a sinking feeling in the gut area. “No way. You do not mean me. Who’s going to cover the city?”

  “Relax. Don’t get your crotchless panties in a twist. You’re not covering cops. I’m covering cops. You’re ghosting.”

  “Oh, fuck. You mean on top of covering my own beat, I also get to be your slave? Do your dirty work? Be your girl Friday?”

  “That about sums it up. But only on the murder case. Bill just wants you to keep your eyes and ears open. I told him you were uniquely qualified for the job.”

  “Mad, I am uniquely unquely unqualified for the job. I found the second body. I’m not what you’d call involved.”

  “You broke the story about Patricia Marx.”

  “Under Junior’s byline.”

  “And now you can break the rest under mine.”

  “What a treat.”

  “What’s the problem? I thought you were all hot for this story. You went charging off after Cody, got him to ID the victim for you. I thought you’d be psyched. Come on, it’ll be a hoot. How often are we going to get to cover a genuine psycho in this stinking town? And besides, now you’re all chummy with the investigating officer. It’s a reporter’s dream come true.”

  “Is that what you told Bill? That I was ‘chummy’ with Cody?”

  “More or less.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said to use a condom. I’m kidding. Lighten up, will you?”

  “Sorry. I’m in a bitch of a mood all of a sudden. Maybe I’d better remove myself from society.”

  “What’s your damage? A couple of frat boys put you off your gin?”

  “Nah. It’s what I was thinking about before they showed up.”

  “What?”

  “It’s probably nuts. But I was thinking about the whole dog collar thing, and how the girls’ hands and knees were all fucked up. And I just got this image of what they might have gone through. I mean, what if he didn’t just strangle them with that thing? What if he dragged them around like that, made them crawl?”

  “You mean he made them, what, act like dogs?”

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  “I’d say he’s one sick motherfucker.”

  “You got that right. Jesus, Mad. How could this happen?”

  “We’re a nasty species. Been preying on each other for a long time.”

  “I mean, how could this happen here? Seems like a lot of evil for a small town.”

  “Yeah, but this is no ordinary town. You know that. We attract nuts from all over the place, and not just the good kind.”

  “That’s not very comforting.”

  “Is that what has you so upset? The end of your little fantasy that Gabriel equals paradise?”

  “That, and… I was picturing what happened to that girl, and I guess it got to me. It seemed so… well, like you said, psycho. And then I started thinking what difference did it make, since the guy is obviously a monster to begin with. What do the details matter?”

  “The devil’s in the details, and you know it. But, Alex, keep in mind that we don’t really know what the physical evidence is. All we know is what the cops have released, what a few lame-ass witnesses have said, and what you’ve managed to charm out of the local goons. We don’t know squat. It was only a fluke we found out about the dog collar. None of the other news guys have it.”

  “That’s just what I mean. What are we supposed to do with that? We can’t run with it.”

  “The hell we can’t.”

  “Who’s the source?”

  “You are.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “So it’s unattributed. ‘Police refused to comment on whether the victim may have been offed like a pooch.’ I love that shit.”

  “But what if it queers the investigation?”

  “I can’t believe you’re talking like this.”

  “Okay, neither can I. But it seems out of bounds somehow. Cody just happened to be in my house when he figured it out.”

  “Too bad for him.”

  “Do we really want to piss him off beyond all reason?”

  He sighed, eyeing me with the pity he reserves for teetotalers and the overweight. “You win. But what if I get it on the record from somebody else? Will that satisfy your newfound…” He cast about for the right word, and it came out in a growl. “Scruples?”

  7

  ANOTHER JOY OF LIVING IN A COLLEGE TOWN IS ALL THE free entertainment. And I’m not just talking about the various paeans to wretched excess, like the annual rite of spring in which the architecture students build an enormous papier-mâché gopher and drag it through campus while the engineers sing songs and pelt them with beer bottles. No, I’m fond of the more impromptu, entirely unsanctioned outbreaks of mirth: the arcane fraternity rituals performed in drag, the couches that are routinely pelted from third-floor balconies, and, of course, the streaking.

  Benson also offers near-constant opportunities to observe the current state of campus protest. Last year, the hot topic was gay rights, after a couple of freshmen got bashed within an inch of their lives and activists took to the streets in droves. All the agitating worked—the university gave in to most of the demands—but that was pretty much the exception that proves the rule. When it comes to activism, there’s an awful ache about the place; call it the agony of having missed the party by several decades. Sure, they dress like the sixties are still upon us, with their braids and their tie-dye and their anklets made out of hemp. But there’s a certain desperation to it all, and it isn’t pretty.

  In the more than two years I’ve been at the Monitor, I’ve covered rallies, marches, and sit-ins (sits-in?) on the following issues: gender equity in sports, nasty labor practices at the company that makes Benson T-shirts (from what I hear, “sweatshop” would be too nice a word), the university’s investment in tobacco companies, a teaching assistants’ union, disabled access to the football stadium (there isn’t any, unless you sit on
the field), a pomology professor accused of sexual harassment, and the crappy food in the dining hall. I always seem to get good quotes out of the protesters, which is either proof of my journalistic acumen or their willingness to mouth off to anybody with a notebook. One of them once told me that they trust me because I’m quote, “too young to be the man.” (And I thought I was just too girlie.)

  I mention all this because in what turned out to be a brief lull between the discovery of the second body and the third, I got caught up covering the latest social action up on the hill. This time, the hot topic was animal rights, and the protest forces were hitting it from all angles. They’d stormed a trustee meeting, demanding that Benson divest from companies that do animal testing. They’d raided a mink farm forty miles away. They’d trashed a bunch of labs up at the vet school and, over at the Ag school, liberated some cows from the experimental dairy herd. So far, nobody had been arrested, and the talk was that the group had some friends on the inside who helped them get into the buildings and avoid security. It wasn’t much and it certainly wasn’t violent, but it was enough to have anybody even remotely involved in animal experiments feeling itchy. An entomologist I knew even put triple locks on her office because she was terrified the “loonies” (her word) would try to free her tarantula collection. And, she lamented, only half of them were poisonous.

  But unlike most campus causes, this one seemed to have a fair number of opponents among the student body itself. Benson has world-class animal science departments, and their grants pay a lot of people’s salaries. Plus, there are plenty of grad students (and undergrads too) up there for the sole purpose of doing the very things that the so-called Benson Animal Anarchists object to, whether it’s dissecting frogs or twiddling with equine DNA. It didn’t help that of the five hundred animals they’d freed from the shackles of the mink farm, almost all of them died (either run over by cars or eaten by their closest friends) and one of the liberated cows wandered into the road and caused a near-fatal accident.

  Maybe because their profile wasn’t what they might have wanted—or because graduation was coming up and most of the group was off to law school—they decided it was time for something more dramatic. So there I was, hauled out of bed at seven on a Wednesday morning a week and a half before Memorial Day, watching the campus police try to unlock the front doors of the biology building. Gabriel is an eight-to-four town, and there was already a crowd of office workers, professors, and early-bird students waiting to get inside. Through the glass doors, I could see four beleaguered-looking people in lab coats who’d apparently been trapped there overnight, and it didn’t look like they were going anywhere soon. The handles of the back doors had been chained together with titanium bike locks, and in front the door locks had been glued shut with the industrial-strength stuff abortion protesters use to close down clinics. From what I could tell, there was no opening them without a battering ram. It was going to be a long day.