10
RUFFE IGNACE WAS WORKING LATE. Not much to do, feet up on his desk, waiting for the paper to be put to bed. His latest triumph, the serial-killer story, cut no ice with the other reporters when it came to picking a replacement for the regular night man, when the night man went on vacation.
That occasion always started a newsroom dogfight. Ignace had been peremptorily ordered to take the job: “You have,” his team leader said, “the requisite skills. What am I supposed to do, have the music critic write about fires on deadline? And you’re single and you’re not dating anyone.”
“Is that why you asked me yesterday if I was dating anyone?” Ignace asked.
A muscle twitched in the team leader’s jaw. “Well . . . yeah.”
“You treacherous f*ck.”
The “treacherous f*ck” line didn’t do him any good, so here he was, eleven o’clock at night, waiting. He was the “just in case” guy. Just in case the president was assassinated, just in case terrorists took out the Target Center, just in case one of the Vikings was busted on cocaine charges. Nobody really wanted to tear up the paper when it was this close to the press turn.
SO IGNACE HAD HIS FEET UP, reading the Idiot’s Guide to Etiquette, which he’d lifted off another reporter’s desk. When the phone rang, he assumed it was the desk asking for a rewrite.
A voice in a harsh, rustling whisper inquired, “Is this, I don’t know how you pronounce it, I apologize, Rough Ignacy?”
“That would be Roo-fay Ig-Nas,” Ignace said. “Who is this?”
“This is old Charlie Pope, calling to thank you for the write-up.”
Now Ignace sat up. “Who is this really? Is this Jack, you shithead?”
A whispery laugh: “Nope, it’s me, old Charlie Pope.”
Ignace had a notebook and a pencil out: “Okay, old Charlie Pope. Tell me something about the murders that wasn’t in the newspaper.”
A pause, then, “Wasn’t in the newspapers that I cut Adam Rice’s dick off.”
“What?”
“I cut his dick off,” the whisperer said. “You didn’t put that in the paper.”
“The cops haven’t said anything about that—I don’t believe it happened.”
“Believe it, Ruffe.” The whisper turned cold, ragged.
“We didn’t say what you killed the kid with. What’d you kill him with?”
“He come down the stairs in his pajamas. I didn’t even know he was up there until he started running. There was an aluminum baseball bat in the corner and when the kid went running into the kitchen, I picked up the bat and caught him right by the door and whacked him. Then I went back and finished with Daddy.”
The ring of truth pushed Ignace back in his chair. “With a baseball bat.”
“That’s right. When I got outside, I wiped it down with Adam Rice’s undershirt, so it wouldn’t have no fingerprints on it. That’s before I knew they were gonna pick up on me so fast. I threw it into that field of whatever-it-is off to the side of the farmhouse. Right by the driveway going up the hill.”
“I’m going to check that.”
“Check your ass off, Ruffe. By the way, you got something wrong in your story. I didn’t have a straight razor to cut their throats. I used a box cutter. But. As soon as you wrote about the straight razor, I got a hard-on. I said, I gotta get me one of those things. Now I got one. Got an old leather strop to sharpen it up, and I’m learning how to do that. Next guy I do, I’m gonna do with the razor.”
“Jesus Christ.” Ignace swallowed.
“He’s not here. It’s just me, old Charlie Pope.”
“You gotta . . . let me, Jesus Christ.” Ignace was flabbergasted. He’d never been at a loss for words, and now he floundering. “Are you . . . why did you . . . uh . . .”
“What do I want?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Mostly I just want to talk to somebody. I liked your story. And I tell you, I got this goddamn woman is driving me crazy. I don’t know what to do about her. I don’t want her to stop, but every time she starts to howl, I see blood. I want to take her, but . . . then she’d be gone. I like it when she starts to howl. I mean, she does me up like nothin’ I’ve ever felt before. You know what I mean?”
“Not exactly.” Ignace was scribbling like mad, taking it all down in shorthand. “Are you saying that you can’t decide what you’re going to do? I mean, Jesus Christ, don’t hurt her. I mean how can you . . .”
“How can I do it?” The whispery laugh again, like a ripple of paper: “Because it feels good. I just ain’t right, Ruffe. My head is f*cked up. I know that. Everybody knows that. But what everybody doesn’t know is how good it feels . . .”
“Jeez . . .”
“Hey, you ever see any of those terrorist guys on TV? Cuttin’ somebody’s head off or something? Everybody says it’s because they’re Moslems or something. I know better—I can tell by looking at them. They like it. They’re having a good old time. That’s what gets their rocks off—it ain’t Mohammed. They like killing people. They’re like me. They’re like lots of us. And if you look at it that way, how many people are like us, it’s really pretty normal.”
Ignace was calculating now. Didn’t Jimmy Breslin have something to do with the .44-caliber killer, the Son of Sam? Didn’t he get more famous because of it? “Look: if you come in, I can cut a deal for you. I could cut a deal that would get you nothing but treatment . . .”
“Uh-uh. I ain’t coming in, Ruffe. Never. I had treatment, remember? That f*ckin’ treatment . . . anyway, ain’t you gonna ask me what I’m gonna do next?”
“Okay. What’re you gonna do next?” Ignace was taking it all down in Gregg, word for word, trying to get it precisely right, every ain’t and nothin’ with a dropped g.
“I’m gonna hunt somebody down. Gonna take her out someplace, I’m gonna give her a head start, and then I’m gonna hunt her down. A woman this time. Take her out to the Boundary Waters, strip her out of her clothes, then turn her loose and watch her run. Give her a hope. A forlorn hope.”
Ignace could feel the skin tighten at the back of his neck: there was no longer a question in his mind—he was talking to Charlie Pope.
“But what’s all this bulls . . . What’s all this stuff about hunting people? I mean, I’m sorry, but . . .”
“That’s nuts.” The whispery laugh again: “Of course it is. I am nuts. You seem to have a hard time getting over that. Write it down: N-U-T-S. The state says I’m nuts, and I’m nuts. What’d they think I was gonna do, lift garbage cans all the rest of my life? F*ck ’em.” He laughed then, his ragged voice sounding as though a piece of paper were being torn through.
Ignace was writing frantically. “How did this get started? You never . . . I mean, your reputation wasn’t for this kind of thing.”
“There were some Gods Down the Hall from me, at St. John’s. They made me see how much like God you can get to be, if you got the balls to go out and do it. I talked to them and they talked to me, and I can still hear their voices. They were right: it’s just like being God.”
“How are you staying ahead of the police?” A woman from the desk walked up, a piece of paper in her hand, and Ignace waved her away. She said, “We need . . .”
Ignace said into the phone, “Hang on just a second,” turned to the woman and barked, “Go away. Go away.”
She persisted. “We need . . .”
“Go the f*ck away,” he shouted and, as she stepped backward, he went to the phone again. “I’m back.”
“Little trouble there, Ruffe?”
“I’m the night guy; they want me to do some horseshit. Listen, how’d you know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t. I just kept calling your line every couple hours, until you answered.”
“I can’t hear you very well . . .”
Louder: “I said, I kept calling your line every couple of hours . . . that damn Rice tried to kick me, caught me one in the throat, I think he f*cked me up. I can’t hardly eat nothin’.”
“You’re hurt?”
“Yeah, I’m hurt. Nobody said this was gonna be easy,” the whisperer said. “You can’t believe the shit I go through. I gotta plan, I gotta find the right person. I’m already watching two or three of these chicks, now I gotta decide which one to take. There are a lot of angles to figure out. You know, how much will they fight, will there be anybody around who might jump in to help them, maybe they got a gun, there’s all kinds of shit to figure out. Makes my head hurt. Hard work. But I’m gonna do it soon. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day.”
“What do you . . .”
“I gotta go. I can see a cop car on the next street. I don’t want him looking at me. Maybe I’ll call again, after I do the next one.”
“Wait, wait. If you’d like to talk to a doctor, or a lawyer . . .”
The whispery laughter, then, “Too late for that. But I do got one more thing for you, a message for the cops. I ain’t gonna quit. I’m gonna do twenty or thirty of them if I can. If they catch me, they better be ready for a fight, because I got me some guns and I know how to use them. They f*cked with me all my life. Now I’m gonna f*ck with everybody. I’m not going back to St. John’s. I’m not coming in alive.”
Click.
IGNACE PUSHED BACK from his desk, staring at the phone and his steno pad. A guy from the desk was coming his way, trying to assemble some authority, trailed by the woman Ignace had chased off: “Holy shit,” Ignace said. “Holy shit!”
SLOAN AND HIS WIFE were in bed. Sloan had come down with a bug, and his sinuses felt like overinflated basketballs; his wife was asleep, but Sloan was rolling around restlessly, fighting to breathe, when the phone rang. His wife said, “What?” and groaned. The phone never rang at that time of night unless it was trouble: Sloan rolled over and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Sloan, this is Ruffe Ignace. Charlie Pope just called me.”
“What?” Cobwebs.
“Charlie Pope just called me. I need you to call Davenport and have him call me back—I assume you don’t have jurisdiction in the Mankato kill.”
Sloan recognized Ignace’s voice. “Is this a joke?”
“This is no f*ckin’ joke.” Ignace was shouting into the phone. “I need to talk to Davenport right now or we’re just gonna put this story in the paper raw and you can read it tomorrow morning when you get up.”
SLOAN WOKE UP LUCAS. “Give him my number,” Lucas said. Then he lay facedown on Weather’s side of the bed, in the faint lingering odor of her perfume, until the phone rang again: “This is Davenport.”
“Did the killer cut off Adam Rice’s penis?” Ignace asked without preamble.
“What?”
“The guy who called me—I assume Sloan told you I was called by a guy who said he was Charlie Pope—the guy said he cut off Adam Rice’s penis,” Ignace said.
“Ah, man, are you going to use that?”
“That’s negotiable—but did he? ’Cause if he did and if this was really Pope, I have some other information.”
“What information?”
“Did he cut off Adam Rice’s penis?”
Lucas thought for a moment, then said, “If you use that specific information, I will find some way to f*ck you up. That’s not fair to any of the survivors.”
“So I was talking to Charlie Pope.”
“I don’t know, but that information is accurate,” Lucas said.
“All right. He said he killed the kid with an aluminum baseball bat, wiped it with Adam Rice’s undershirt, and then threw the bat into a field next to the house. Is that possible?”
“I don’t know. Of course, it’s possible,” Lucas said. “We’ll look tomorrow morning . . . Listen, I need to know exactly what this guy told you.”
“Then you can either come over here and I can give you a transcript, or I can read it to you . . . Hang on, hang on.”
Lucas could hear the phone being fumbled, then a woman’s voice said, “Lucas, this is Sharon White.”
“Hey, Sharon.”
“You better come over here. We don’t want to use anything that would mess anybody up or interfere with the investigation, but we’re going to run something, and I would like to discuss it with you. And Ruffe. If you can get here in like, fifteen or twenty minutes?”
“I’ll meet somebody at your door in fifteen,” Lucas said.
WHEN LUCAS TURNED the corner in downtown Minneapolis, Sloan was already standing in the street outside the Star-Trib building. Thin, gray, unshaven, with hair sticking sideways out over his ears, he looked like a bum; and his nose seemed to be swollen. Lucas dumped the Porsche behind Sloan’s Chevy, put a cop-on-duty sign on the dashboard—they were both parked in a no-parking zone—and got out.
“Gotta be the guy,” Sloan said. He held a handkerchief to his face and coughed into it. “Man. I’m sick.”
“What happened?” Lucas leaned away from him.
“I don’t know. I was fine at dinner, and now I’m all f*cked up. I took four green Nyquils, and my nose keeps getting bigger.”
“Well, Jesus Christ, don’t sneeze on me.”
A YOUNG MAN WAS STANDING behind the Strib’s front doors. When Lucas and Sloan walked up, he lifted an eyebrow, and Sloan held up a badge case. The young man pushed the door open and said, “They’re waiting.”
They followed him into an elevator, then down through the cluttered newsroom to a cluster of people standing and sitting around a desk where Ruffe Ignace sat behind a computer, typing.
Lucas recognized Sharon White, the executive editor, and Phil Stone, the paper’s attorney. White nodded and said, “It’s a problem,” and Stone said, “You guys look like I feel.”
“I was sleeping like a baby,” Lucas said. “What’re we doing?”
“Ruffe is putting together the maximum story that we have,” White said. “You have no approval over it at all. We decide what goes in and what stays out. We’re telling you what we have in advance so we don’t . . . mmm . . . step on some aspect of the investigation.”
Lucas looked at Stone, who smiled the way an attorney smiles: with his lips.
“Good of you,” Lucas said. “Could we get Ruffe to give us a couple of printouts of what he has?”
Ignace looked at White, who nodded, and he hit a button on his keyboard. A printer started humming in the quiet background, and Ignace said, “Fifteen seconds.” The young man who’d brought them up said, “I’ll get them.” He headed for the printer.
Lucas asked Ignace, “What time did the call come in?”
Ignace, pitching up his voice: “I think there’s a real question of how much cooperation we owe you guys . . .”
Lucas put his hands in his pants pockets, sighed, and said, “Ruffe, I’ve sat around with newspaper guys for years having philosophical discussions about this kind of thing, and I’d be happy to talk to you, but we, all of us . . .” Lucas gestured to White and Stone “. . . have sort of worked out an understanding. You don’t help me investigate, so you stay pure, but you don’t fight me on what might help catch a criminal, if I’m going to get the information anyway. If I have to, I can take you in for questioning, we can get lawyers and judges working on it, we can get the paper all kinds of bad publicity and maybe sued by some future victim, and I’ll get the information anyway and all you’ll have done is delay things in favor of the a*shole who’s killing these people. Is that what you want to talk about?”
“He’s not talking about that,” Stone said genially.
“Yes, I was,” Ignace said.
“No, you’re not,” Stone said. The young man came back with copies of the story printout, and Lucas and Sloan took them. Lucas scanned it, then said, “What time did the call come in?”
“A few minutes before eleven o’clock,” White said. “We don’t know the exact minute.”
Lucas to Ignace: “Was it direct-dial or did it come in through the switchboard?”
“Probably switchboard,” Ignace said, with a show of reluctance. “We’re not listed individually.”
Sloan said to Lucas, “I’ll get it.” He stepped away and took a cell phone out of his jacket pocket.
Stone frowned and asked, “What’s wrong with Sloan?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t shake hands,” Lucas said. To Ignace: “He said he might call back?”
“That’s what he said.” Ignace had gotten past his pro-forma objections and was enjoying himself now. He said to White, “I think we should get something for all this cooperation. Some kind of access.”
White lifted an eyebrow, and Lucas said, “We’ll take care of you, one way or another. You know.”
She nodded, and Lucas asked Ignace, “How did he sound? He’s supposed to be sort of a shit kicker . . .”
“His voice was weird. He says Rice kicked him in the throat, he didn’t say when or how . . . so he whispered. It all sounded like . . . something you’d see in a movie. Hoarse whisper.”
“How about his language?”
“I took it down verbatim,” Ignace said. He took his notebook off his desk, and Lucas saw that it was covered with shorthand. Despite himself, he was impressed—the kid had some tools. “You want me to read it, word for word?”
“We don’t have much time here,” White said, looking at her watch. “You got a problem with the story?”
“If you want to print the penis thing, that’s up to you,” Lucas said. “I think it’s in bad taste. The usual formula is ‘mutilated,’ but I don’t see why you’d want to put this in so Rice’s mother can read it, after she has lost both her son and her grandson.”
White said to Ignace, “Change it.”
“Man . . .”
“We’ve got no time,” White said. “Change it.”
Ignace’s hand rattled across the keyboard, then he asked Lucas, “Do you have an official comment?”
“You can say, ‘Davenport said authorities will immediately begin investigating the Star-Tribune report and indicated that there are aspects of inside information in the phone call that make it possible or even likely that the caller was Charles Pope.’ That work for you?”
“That works for me,” Ignace said, taking it all down.
“You can add this,” Lucas said. He dictated: “Davenport added that any woman who feels that she is under surveillance, or might have been, or who has seen anyone who resembles Charlie Pope, should call her local police department and report it. Even a weak feeling—it’s better to be wrong than to be dead.”
Ignace’s keyboard rattled along, keeping pace with the statement. “Good,” he muttered. “That’s great.”
Sloan called, “Lucas,” and Lucas stepped over to him. “Rochester pay phone.”
“Call the Rochester cops. Get them out on the street, make stops on any single males, on foot or in cars. Give them a description. Tell them to be careful, he’s probably got a gun. Tell them right now. Right now.”
“I better put that in,” Ignace said.
SLOAN WALKED OFF, working the cell phone, and Lucas asked Ignace to read his shorthand notes, and Ignace did. Lucas stopped him once or twice: “You say he said, ‘He come down the stairs . . .’ He didn’t say, ’He came down the stairs . . .’ ”
“Just like I’ve got it,” Ignace said. He trailed his finger farther down the page of Gregg script. “And here he says, ‘wouldn’t have no fingerprints.’ ”
“Not grammatical,” Lucas said.
“No, he wasn’t. I picked it up a couple of times.”
Then, a few seconds later, with Ignace reading, Lucas interrupted again, “He said he threw it into a field of ‘whatever-it-is’?”
“That’s what he said.” Ignace nodded. “That’s what verbatim means. It’s exactly what he said.”
One of the junior editors said, “He’s gotta push the button on the story . . .”
White said to Lucas, “Do you have any other suggestions?”
Lucas shook his head: “You’re gonna run it, so run it. I notice you shaded over the fact that he went out and bought a razor because of Ruffe’s earlier story.”
“I don’t think that’s essential to the thrust of the story,” White said. “It confuses the issue.”
“Besides, it’s embarrassing,” said Sloan, stepping up, wiping his nose. To Lucas: “Rochester’s working it; and they’re bringing in an on-duty Highway Patrol guy and the Sheriff’s Department.”
IGNACE PUSHED THE BUTTON on the story, sending it on its way, and said to Lucas and Sloan, “You guys owe me big.”
“Bullshit. You’re about one inch from being busted as a material witness,” Sloan said. He sounded defensive.
Ignace smiled, calling the bluff: “So bust me. I might enjoy it.”
“You wouldn’t enjoy it,” Sloan said.
“What, you’d put me in some cell with some big faggot?”
Sloan shook his head. “No, we’d put you in a locked room by yourself with a toilet and a sink and let you sit there. It’d be like taking a Northwest flight from Minneapolis to Duluth for three straight weeks. Except that the food would be better.”
“F*ck you,” Ignace said, linking his fingers together over his soft gut. “You owe me, and you know it. When you get this guy, I want a phone call. If you get him.”
“We’ll get him,” Lucas said. “Maybe we’ll call, maybe we won’t.”
THEY TALKED FOR ANOTHER ten minutes, going over the story. Ignace gave Lucas a shortened transcript of the conversation, only the material covered in the story. Lucas told Stone that the state would subpoena Ignace’s shorthand notes. “Keep them safe.”
“We’ll probably fight the subpoena,” Stone said.
“Probably—but don’t lose the notes.”
OUT ON THE STREET, Sloan said, “Ruffe is a noxious little motherf*cker,” and then, “Stand back, I’m gonna sneeze.”
Lucas stepped away, Sloan sneezed, and Lucas said, “One good thing—Pope’s staying in his home territory. He’s not off in some goddamn weird place where nobody’s seen the stories about him. He’s hiding out. That means somebody has seen him, whether or not they know it, and all we have to do is find the connection.”
“So now what?”
Lucas yawned and said, “I’m going over to the office to work the phones. I’ll put together a meeting in Rochester, tomorrow morning. Everybody I can find.”
Sloan looked at his watch: “It’s way late.”
“So I jerk a few people out of bed. Big deal. Uh—you personally might want to take some more pills.”
“No kiddin’. My face is coming off. What about the baseball bat?”
“We can run down to Mankato early, check on the bat, then over to Rochester. We gotta find this woman he’s looking at. That’s the thing: if he’s telling us the truth, we might not have a lot of time.”
“I hope to hell he doesn’t have anybody. I couldn’t deal with another woman like Larson.”
“Just . . . hold on, man,” Lucas said. “You’re going through a tough spot.”
“It’s all been tough,” Sloan said. “Now, it’s breaking me up.”
THE MAN WITH THE throaty whisper felt better after talking with Ignace; more complete. Talking about what he was doing actually helped him to think through it, to appreciate it. Though . . . what a weird f*ckin’ name the guy had. Ruffe Ignace. Who’d name their kid something like that? Why not something decent, like Bob, or Roy? With a name like Ruffe, you were bound to grow up queer.
And it was nice to talk about Millie, even if just a little.
ONE THING MILLIE found out early was that sex in the shower sounded good in books but was less fun in real life. First of all, you were standing up, and you had to concentrate on not falling down. The way you did that was, you hung on the water faucet handles, and then just about the time you got a rhythm going, you pushed too hard on the cold handle and Mihovil got a shot of icy water down his back and his dick retracted like a snail in a shell. That wasn’t good.
Then there was the drowning issue. Oral sex always seemed like a possibility in a shower, but that meant you had to rely on nose breathing to keep you alive, and with water pouring down on you, that wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
They tried it in Mihovil’s bathtub, but in a modern bathtub, there just wasn’t enough room, and Mihovil cracked his head so hard on the water faucet that he actually bled from the cut.
In either the shower or the tub, soap was a problem in a number of ways . . .
They tried it standing up in the bedroom, but that was almost as awkward as the shower—something usually went wrong at exactly the wrong time. The pumping action would produce rude noises, or Mihovil would fall out and they’d lose the rhythm, and once he ejaculated on the shag carpet in Millie’s bedroom, which had been amess. . .
There were issues.
THERE WERE ISSUES, but they also made a lot of progress. She found that she could actually learn to have an orgasm. She could link a little fantasy with a little reality, she could get Mihovil to behave in certain ways to increase the sense of fantasy, get the physical part to match the mental stuff, and Pop! It worked almost every time, after she learned how to do it.
Like this. They were doing it doggie style, had just gotten started, and Mihovil asked, “How often do you masturbate?”
She was embarrassed by the question. That seemed a little private, and if she said something like “Every night,” it might even seem to reflect on Mihovil’s own sexual efficacy (in her case) so she temporized and said, “Well, I guess, you know . . .”
“No, tell me,” he said. “You must (uh) do it all the time when you have no boyfriend.”
“I do it (grunt) sometimes,” she said. “I think it’s (um) natural . . . I guess.”
“Yes. It’s natural. I do it all the time. Sometimes (ah) when I’m watching football. Okay?”
“Okay.” But she was a little doubtful. Where was this going?
He cleared up that question right away: “Now. When we do it this way, it would work much better if you would just reach up and rub yourself a little, because I can hardly reach in there with my hands, and I know my cock doesn’t rub you the right way . . . so just reach up there . . .”
So she did.
THE BEST THING, they discovered, with research, was to start in the shower, and then get toweled off, and then race into the playroom and do all the stuff in the bed that you imagined doing in the shower, but you let the bed hold you up. Since you were squeaky clean, there really were no limitations. The icky factor essentially vanished. And you didn’t drown. And they only fell out of bed twice, which was actually, when you thought about it, pretty neat.
Falling out of bed, it felt so good . . .