Put Away - Gruberfest 2009 (268 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 2 on 8 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Hornet (View user info) at 2009-10-09 22:21:43 EDT
The young man stopped typing and looked up at me. His face was blue-white in the glow of the laptop in front of him. He opened an accordion file and took out a few sheets of paper. Some yellow newspaper clippings, what looked like old Thermo-Fax copies of department files and a few carbon copies of my own typewritten incident reports.
"What about the Holleman House Murder, Officer DeVries? That business about the remains found in the Tupperware bowl?"
And there it was. This little prick was going to bring all three of them up again. The Holleman House. The Busy Owl. Winter Field.
"The Holleman House?" I put on a frown, remembering the faded paint of the abandoned house on South Wend Street, and the clumps of yellow weeds on the lawn. A couple of sidewalk slabs were uneven after years of neglect and I remembered that as I had gotten out of the cruiser I'd thought that an old person or a little kid could trip and get a serious hurt on. "I don't recall that one."
The youngster was from Rallings Prepatory School on the far side of town. He was a typical west-ender. Expensive car, shiny new toys, lean, bright-eyed and healthy. He was taking an advanced placement course in journalism, and doing an article for the school paper. His name was Edward. Not Ed, or Eddie. Edward. Edward III, actually. And the paper? It was called The Pharos. The fucking Pharos.
Edward had knocked on my door already loaded with double aught bullshit. He was doing a piece, that was what he called it, a piece, on an old murder, one part of what he said was a series he was doing on the history of Corn Hollow and all the weird shit that's happened here. He looked old enough to drive and vote and drink and fuck but these days anyone under 40 is a kid to me.
The young man knew I was retired. He knew I had been exactly one half of the Corn Hollow police force from 1962 to 1977 when I was finally able to hire a few more officers and no longer had to rely on any one of a long series of fat-ass County Sheriffs for support. He knew I had put in my thirty years and then some and retired in '99, and that I was restless and looking into opening a PI and security agency to serve the counties to either side of our valley. He knew that I was trying to buy a split-level downtown and convert it into offices. He knew I was having trouble getting the right licensing with the zoning commission.
The little prick knew this because his father, Edward II and another prick, was the entire zoning commission, and I didn't have the spare cash to grease the wheels and get my paperwork going. 16 years old and this little prick was already throwing his weight around.
"I'll tell my dad how helpful you were when we're done here," Edward said. Meaning that if I told the kid to fuck off, the young man's father would hear about that as well.
I invited him in and offered him a seat on the couch. He looked at the cushions a bit too long before sitting down, probably looking for the piss stains of an incontinent old man. I sat across from him in my easy chair.
He started off with his pitch about the school and how he wanted to be a reporter some day. He told me what he knew about Corn Hollow and I realized he didn't know everything. The fact that the town's name was actually Cornicle Hollow, for instance, had been until just before the First World War. Edward the Third began asking about a few of Corn Hollow's more notorious events while I was on the job, reading from notes on his laptop.
The collapse of the Burny's Lakeside Roadhouse deck in the summer of '67, for instance. The deck was a real showpiece, an outdoor seating area that extended 40 feet over the deep end of Lake Shinnecock. Six people trapped in a tangle of awnings and aluminum poles went right to the bottom of the lake when the deck fell to pieces.
That day in June of 1970 when Tommy Ferris parked his VW bus right where the old B&O line cut across Fern Road, shut off the engine, and waited for a freight to come along with the radio tuned in to WKBW, his five kids lying on the plywood floor of the cargo area with their wrists and ankles bound by duct tape. Ferris had painted the bus with black primer and the freight engineer didn't see it until he was right on top of it. The young asshole didn't know this, but the engineer later told me that just before he hit the VW bus he swore he could hear two things; children screaming, and Ray Stevens singing Everything is Beautiful. Amanda Ferris hung herself in her laundry room about a week later, right about the time her new prescription for tranks was needing a refill.
I had to think for a moment when Edward mentioned the night Elgis Widman walked into the A&P with a shotgun and killed the three checkout girls before turning the gun on himself and blowing his head into bits that were scattered all over the store and stuck to the cobbled plastic covers of the fluorescent lights. I knew it happened on a Christmas Eve, but I wasn't sure if it was in '75 or '76.
"Seventy-six." The young man said.
He was wearing a smug little smile I didn't like much at all. He didn't have the names of the checkout girls in his fancy little computer. I remembered them. May O'Hara, Lisette Long and Frances Seguin. I still remember their names, and what was left of their faces.
"Tell me about Henry Maitland," Edward said. "Tell me about the Tupperware bowl found outside the Holleman House."
I went to the fridge and got a beer. The young man took a bottle of imported spring water from his spiffy backpack. I guess tap water wasn't up to his standards, but it would be a cold day in hell before I'd pay a dollar for a bottle of water when it came out of the tap at pennies a glass.
"You sure you want to hear about this?"
Edward shuffled a few of the pages from his file. "I have it all here. How I report these facts could look very bad for you, or very good for you, depending on what you say now."
"So be it," I said, taking a sip of cold beer.
####
It was April of 1964. Ethel Cartwright had called up to report a prowler at the end of South Wend Street near the Holleman House, which had been empty since the war. Ethel lived a few houses down and across the street. She was neighborhood watch before such a thing existed. Back then neighborhood watch was called nosy old bag. Every town has a few of them. Old ladies who watch soaps all day long and peek through their curtains all evening.
I got the call before nine o'clock and if I recall correctly I got there around nine or so.
"Nine-sixteen," Edward said.
It was raining. The rainfall wasn't heavy, but it was chilly. South Wend was dark because some half-wit kids had smashed the nearest street light. I nearly stepped in a big puddle on the sidewalk and walked around it, turning on my flashlight and moving across the yellowed lawn. Ethel was watching me from across the street, a scrawny woman in a big coat. The houses on that block had spacious yards. I figured if Ethel did see someone sneaking between the houses it would be the Gannett Avenue Peeper all over again, a vagrant looking in bedroom windows with his pecker in his hand. It was when I was in back of the Holleman House and trying to avoid getting a branch in the eye among all the overgrowth that I heard Ethel scream.
I ran out to the front of the house and saw Ethel on this side of the street. She was pointing at the sidewalk, at something near the big puddle.
I told her to get her ass back home and she shuffled off with a glare. She looked at the thing near the puddle again and made a soft, disgusted sound.
Half hidden by those overgrown weeds was a Tupperware bowl. It was about ten inches across, and had a white plastic lid. Rain was pattering down on the plastic lid and splashing into the puddle. The white lid was resting on the bowl. It hadn't been tightly sealed, you know, when you burp the air out of Tupperware so the lid clamps down. I turned my light on the side of the bowl. It was that cloudy plastic that you could sorta-kinda see through. I saw an eye looking back at me. I was thinking that maybe some neighborhood kids had killed a cat and stuffed it in the bowl when I turned my light on that puddle again, and realized I was looking at a whole lot of blood, and some other liquids, thick liquids, which the rain was already beginning to thin out and wash away.
"It's kind of funny that you would miss something like that," the young man said.
I explained that it was dark and I had other things on my mind just then, like a moving body, and I reminded him that I hadn't been a cop very long. Everyone makes mistakes, I said.
I went back to the cruiser and got on the radio. I called Captain Abbotsford, who I would replace after his ticker blew out in '71. I told him to call up the county Medical Examiner. It took Abbotsford and Doctor Tawkin, who we called him Tawkin-shit cause he liked throwing medical jargon at us, twenty minutes to get there. By that time the rain had washed away most of the blood. While waiting I had lifted the white plastic lid up just a little and looked in the Tupperware bowl. After that I had waited in the cruiser out of the rain, flashers on.
Young Edward didn't say anything. He was typing at a real fast rate.
Doctor Tawkin had a great old time with that Tupperware bowl. The old man poked around in there with a wooden tongue depressor and told us he saw an eye, hair, muscle tissue, fragments of bone... hell, everything that makes a human being. It was all stuffed in there like it had gone through a trash compactor, and the Doc was really amazed that the eye was intact. He spent some time stirring what remained of the puddle with another tongue depressor. He sealed the bowl, pulled on some rubber gloves and tried to lift the bowl. Then he asked for help. We thought he was joking. I carried that heavy bowl into the back of his van.
Tawkin weighed the contents of the bowl later. Then he examined them under a microscope. And then he burned them.
Abbortsford and I heard about this the next day.
The Doctor met us at the Sleeping Dog. It's long gone now but it was a bar near the Municipal Building downtown, and in those days the Corn Hollow PD was housed in an office in that building, with a two cell lockup down in the basement.
The Doc said that everything that made up a human body was stuffed into that Tupperware bowl, minus about ninety-nine percent of the liquids. The bowl weight eighty-seven pounds. It held pulverized, almost powdered bones and dried out things that looked like strings and purses that were internal organs. It held hair and teeth and skin. He suggested that the thick puddle washed away by the rain was all those missing liquids. Blood and bile and spit and jizz and everything else.
Tawkin handed what I first took to be five postage stamps to Abbotsford. In case you want to run the prints, he said.
Abbotsford asked him why he didn't just mount the prints he pulled onto a piece of paper.
Tawkins sucked down a shot of gin, never my drink, and said that those five paper-thin scraps were the victim's actual goddamned fingertips.
"Wow." Edward said. "That's some serious shit."
I nodded. The prints belonged to Henry Maitland. He was a part-time security guard who had gotten bonded years before, and a full-time drunk. Even then I'd lost count of the number of times I'd been called out by the neighbors because Henry was beating the shit out of his wife Julia. And in '64 that was a hard thing to put a stop to.
"And?"
I looked at the young man, his eager face glowing in the light of that slender computer screen.
And nothing, I said. Case closed. Henry was considered MIA. His wife got a job at the A&P. Twelve years later she was the night manager and working in the back office when Elgis Widman came a calling and lit the place up. Abbotsford and I filled out our incident reports and then buried them. Whatever happened that night in '64, there was no way we could explain it, and we weren't going to turn the town into a laughing stock fit for the front page of some gory rag like the National Enquirer. I asked the kid if he'd ever seen any old issues of that shit wipe excuse for a paper. Edward shook his head. It was pretty damned grim once upon a time, I said. As for the Holleman House case, we closed it down.
I was silent for a moment. Edward stopped typing and looked at me, expecting more. He reached out and shook his accordion file. "You didn't bury that stuff deep enough, old man."
He sat back and flexed his fingers. I got another beer. When he was ready to write again and I was settled, he said, "Now tell me about the murder at the Busy Owl. And the body in the coffee jar."
####
In 1968 parts of this country were just coming apart. Anti-war protests, inner-city riots, the whole fifty-seven varieties of shit. I grinned when I said that. Edward just started at me. I guess he was two fancy to use anything from Heinz's on a burger or a steak. Here in Corn Hollow life moved on at an easy pace. Sure, about once a year we had a flare-up, but otherwise life was good.
A negro, at that Edward glared at me, sorry, I said. A black man named Charlie McCole who everyone called McCool was the late night clerk at the Busy Owl. The Owl was an all-night operation, a gas pump and a little store selling booze and cigarettes and snacks, sort of like the 7-Elevens they have on every damn corner these days.
A guy who looked like a hopped-up student came into the store around midnight, August third. The guy was wearing a green army coat, long hair, scruffy beard. You know the look if you're old enough. The guy pulled a gun and came around the counter and demanded all the cash in the till.
McCool was an old hand at this. He raised his hands and told the guy it was cool, he'd hand over the cash and step back from the phone, no problem here brother, and then the guy cracked McCool on the skull with the gun.
Turns out that the gunman must have been feeling good right about then, because we found out later, or we suspected later based on descriptions of the man that he was responsible for a string of small-beans robberies across the state, and most times he shot first and grabbed the cash later.
The guy emptied the register and went down one of the short grocery aisles. Looking for a back door I suppose. That was when things got weird.
McCool was down but not out. He told me later that night that he saw the guy turn down the aisle where he was hidden from sight, heard the guy curse and scuffle with someone, and then, as McCool said, "It looked like Mr. Whack and Grab stepped on a motherfucking land mine cause I seen a lot of blood fly up and splash the ceiling. A lot of blood. But there was no noise. No bang. Just the blood."
I'll never forget him saying that. And it was true. When I got to the Busy Owl there was half an aisle just soaked down with blood like somebody tossed it around by the bucket. And then I saw the jar.
Edward paused again, and leaned forward. It looked like he was almost getting off on this and that made me feel sick and angry.
There was a coffee jar on the floor in the middle of all that sticky, congealing blood, and that's something you never see in movies, how tacky that stuff becomes in no time flat and if you step in it it's like stepping in molasses.
It was a Maxwell House jar. Instant coffee. The jar was glass and the screw on lid was red plastic.
Tawkin shit arrived an hour and a half later. He was past due for retirement by then and showing it, moving slow, complaining the way old men always do. The way I do now.
Doc Tawkin put on his rubber gloves and unscrewed the red lid from the jar. In a mulch of pink and red and white we saw three teeth and a thumbnail.
"Fuck," the Medical Examiner said. That was the first and only time I ever heard the man swear.
That jar weighed ninety-two pounds. I carried it out to the ME's van and the next day, after I heard that Tawkin had announced his retirement, I read his autopsy report and filed it away because it said that coffee jar held most of a grown man compressed to hell and back, minus a lot of body fluids.
"Man," Edward said. He looked absolutely ghoulish in the light of his little computer. "Reading it on paper is one thing, you have your doubts, but hearing someone tell it... Man. This a great stuff."
I muffled a belch with the back of one hand. There's nothing finer than a beer belch, but this one was sour.
Edward eased back the cuff of his shirt, a tailored shirt, I bet, and looked at his watch, a big expensive monstrosity. "I think we've got time for one more." He tapped his accordion file. "The last one in your files."
#####
Winter Field, which is on the edge of Winter Woods, sees the most action in the spring. The county fair sets up there every year, and that's where Corn Hollow has their modest fireworks displays.
A group of teenagers were screwing around out there one night in early October, maybe parking and making out. Maybe smoking pot. This was 1972. Seems like everyone was smoking pot but me. Maybe they were doing both.
At some point one of the teens saw a Coke can, and kicked it, and broke his big toe. Before they went to Corn Hollow Hospital the kid took a look in the Coke can to see what was in it. The pull tab was gone, and in that little teardrop shaped opening he could see a white scalp and sparse hairs. He realized he was looking down on the top of someone's head.
Later on I was able to convince the kid that he was imagining things. Doctor Tawkins replacement, a fellow from Chicago named Meyer, started drinking the night after he opened that can and examined the eighty-odd pounds of compressed human being inside it.
Turns out the Coke can held the remains of Oscar Levant. All of Oscar's liquids had soaked into the ground of Winter Field.
"Levant," Edward said. "He was a pedophile, right?"
I nodded. Yes, he was. We called them perverts and chickenhawks back then, but yeah, Levant had been caught diddling little kids and busted three times and somehow walked on technicalities every time. I wasn't too upset when I found out he was in that Coke can.
I leaned forward in my chair and put my hands in the small of my back. There was a soft crack.
"We done here? You got your little gore stories."
Edward gave me the same superior smile I'd seen from his father. "Not quite," he said. He took three more sheets of paper from his accordion file.
####
Edward began to read like he was presenting evidence in court. "Between 1963 and April of 1964, you logged nine calls to the Maitland house. Neighbors complained about the noise that was probably Henry beating the hell out of his wife."
I shrugged.
"I bet that left you frustrated."
I didn't say anything.
Edward read from another page. "Before you became the Chief of Police of our quaint little town you worked the night shift. It was common knowledge at the time that if nothing was going on you stopped in at the Busy Owl for a coffee or a corn dog around nine in the evening, around midnight, and again around three in the morning. This was your routine in 1968 when McCool got robbed."
I was getting annoyed. "Is there a point to this?"
"In 1971 some kids got drunk and started a fire in Winter Field, right on the edge of Winter Woods. Winter Field became part of your patrol area."
"And?"
Edward leaned forward as well. Our faces were very close.
"And isn't it a coincidence that your job placed you right in the area where three unsolved crimes occurred?"
And there it was. It was time for Edward to go away.
"You think you know everything about Corn Hollow," I said. "Did you know that the original name of this cozy little town was Cornicle Hollow?"
"No," Edward said. He seemed a little upset that he wasn't the font of all wisdom. "And who cares? What's it got to do with this?"
"You got the internet on that computer, kid?" I opened a wooden box on the little table beside me and took out a cigar, the freshness sealed in a metal tube.
Edward gave me a smug nod.
"Why don't you doodle something for me?"
"I'm sure you mean Google," he replied.
I shrugged. "Google cornicle. And not some dumb-ass dictionary definition, but the meaning of the word based on the original Latin."
He did. I waited.
"Cornicle," he read aloud. "From the Latin corniculum. It means... Little horn. So what?"
"It's an archaic name for Satan. He passed through here once and made sure some of us can keep out little valley safe and snug. You blew it, you dumb shit."
The kid stared at me, shocked that someone of my social class would talk to him that way. Then he grunted as the first pains kicked in.
I didn't say anything. I got up from my chair and grabbed the kid by the arm just as he started to bleed from the eyes. Something snapped inside his chest and he let out a surprised yell as I led him into my garage. By the time I was shaking out one of those thick heavy-duty garbage bags for yard work the kid was on the floor of the garage, curling into a ball in excruciating pain.
I pushed him into the bag just in time. A second later I could hear liquids pouring out of him. His face was still clean so that meant the ugliness was working from the bottom up and fluids were gushing out of his asshole. I took the cigar out of the tube and lit it.
"Sorry kid, but every once in a while I got to put away a nuisance. You go now, your pain in the ass father goes later."
The kid was looking up at me. His mouth was open wide. Tears and sweat were streaming down his face. He was in so much pain he couldn't even scream. He saw that I was holding the aluminum cigar tube in one hand, the screw on cap of the tube in the other. The tube was six inches long and had a three inch diameter.
"I think I can fit you in here," I said, and then I tied the bag shut over Edward's face to catch that last violent burst of fluids.
...
(((Sorry this is so long! I think i hurt myself writing it and I'm pooped!!!)))
User Reviews
Submitted by ridiculous (user info) at 2009-10-15 03:12:10 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
"Edward had knocked on my door already loaded with double aught bullshit." all i have to say is HAHAHAHAHA and I will give credit when I quote you on that. Great story well told, I knew early on whatever killer, supernatural being or whathaveyou would be making an appearance at the end of the story I am glad that when it reared its gnarled grin it took the annoying little shit rather than the good 'ole boy.
Submitted by monkeyswithguns (user info) at 2009-10-14 08:39:33 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by shitfuck (user info) at 2009-10-13 22:13:45 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
+2 TALENT/CONTENT
Submitted by RoadSong (user info) at 2009-10-12 14:21:37 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
eeeek
Submitted by JoeyG (user info) at 2009-10-10 14:07:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Finally found the time to sit and read this one properly (with a cold beer and a cigarette) and I'm glad I did.
Submitted by skrapmetal (user info) at 2009-10-10 09:57:30 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Well done, and thanks for posting.
Submitted by AshK (user info) at 2009-10-10 09:41:34 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
great concept, nicely told
Submitted by HateMudkips (user info) at 2009-10-09 23:10:26 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
some of the grammatical and spelling errors irked me, but it is a good story.