A Dark Matter (20 page)

Don canted back his chair until his shoulders met the wall. “What’s up with this Ladykiller business? Why do you care about it, anyhow?”

I took a good-sized swig of my wine. “Do you really want to know?”

“Just guessing here, but does the reason have something to do with the Eel?”

“No!”
(Though it did, in a weird way I did not want to think about. This, however, was why I had suggested Hayward.)

My shout did not cause every head to swivel in our direction. All conversation did not freeze. Some heads turned our way, and the noise level did drop off for a moment. Then everyone swung back into their conversations and their drinks. I took another, smaller, swallow of mediocre wine.

“Sorry. No, it’s not about Lee, although she’s involved, like all the rest of you. What it is, is—just before you showed up—I realized I wasn’t going anywhere with my novel—and I saw a guy in my local breakfast place that reminded me of Hootie—and I was thinking about this cop named Cooper, and I realized I had to,
had to
finally figure out what happened to all of you out in that meadow.”

“You mean … you think you should be trying to write another novel? Because, I gotta say, that’s just what I was—”

“NO!”

Heads, more of them, turned our way once again, and the room fell more nearly silent than previously. The bartender leaned forward to peer through the crowd and give me a look divided between concern and interrogation. I made hush-hush movements with my hands. “That thing out there in the meadow is mysterious, it’s violent, it’s life-changing, it’s about a huge, astonishing breakthrough … isn’t it?”

“Not according to Mallon.”

“Because he wanted even more! Mallon was a creature of the sixties. He had a kind of spiritual greediness. He actually wanted to change the world, and in a way, Don, can’t you see, he actually did! Only no one noticed, and it lasted no more than a couple of seconds. He did it, though. At least it looks like that to me.”

Olson looked away, and his eyes went out of focus. He grinned. “I like your point of view, though. Mallon changed the world, but only for a couple of seconds. That’s cute. But don’t forget that the only people Mallon managed to persuade were four high-school students, two assholes, and one girl who fell in love with him.”

“Afterwards, all of you were different. And one of the assholes was dead.”

“Brett Milstrap was worse than dead.”

“How?”

“I’ll try to explain it to you later. If I can, which I doubt. Anyhow, what’s this business about Hayward? And who’s Cooper?”

“With Hayward, you guys had no idea what you were dealing with. Even my wife and Hootie didn’t really know what he was like.”

“Is this connected in any way with what I was telling you about—that shed? I didn’t say this at the time, it seemed too crazy, but when I was standing there, I had this strong, strong feeling … that he had strapped some naked kid to a chair. And the kid was why he brought out his knife.”

“Amazing,” I said.

I had shocked Don more than he wished to reveal. “You’re not saying I was right, are you?”

“You were absolutely right,” I said. “The boy’s name was Tomek Miller. Only he wasn’t in the little room on Henry Street, because by then he was dead. His corpse, what was left of it, was discovered in the ruins of a burned building in Milwaukee. December 1961. Miller was probably Keith Hayward’s first victim.”

Olson blinked several times and tilted a portion of the margarita into his mouth. After swallowing, he appeared to track the progress of the alcohol down his throat. His body relaxed into his chair, and one arm dropped straight to his side. When he turned back to me, he seemed almost to be smiling. “No kidding.”

“I said it was amazing.”

He shook his head, as if at a particularly satisfying magic trick. “Man, I wanted to make myself invisible and slip right inside that awful place—because it
was
awful. That’s what I wanted to get across to Mallon, how twisted Hayward actually was. I heard him singing to his knife!”

“That knife, I guess from what you told me, was a present from his uncle. Tillman Hayward. Once you know a few things about Tillman, it makes a lot of sense.”

“So what do you know about Hayward?”

“During dinner,” I said.

“Maybe there’s a gene for what we call evil,” I said. “Some variation on the normal pattern that pops up a lot less frequently than the marker for cystic fibrosis, say, or Tay-Sachs, and most other diseases. Hitler could have been born with it, and Stalin and Pol Pot, and every other dictatorial ruler who set about imprisoning and killing his own subjects, but so would plenty of everyday citizens. Every big city would have about three of these guys, every small city maybe one, and every fourth or fifth little town would have one—people who think other people are lesser beings and like to kill, hurt, injure, at the very least dominate and humiliate them. A bunch of other people would have been twisted into similar shapes by their lousy, abusive childhoods, but we’re talking about people who are born that way. They carry that gene, and unluckily for everyone around them, it gets activated. It wakes up. Whatever. That’s what you ran into when you met Keith Hayward.”

“The Bad Seed,” Don said.

“Exactly. The other point of view, which lots of religious people believe, is that from birth every single human being is corrupt and sinful, but that true
evil
, the real sulfurous Satanic
thing
, is timeless, comes from outside, and exists independently from human beings. To me, this always seemed a primitive way to think. It absolves you from responsibility for your actions. A devout Christian would say that I had it all wrong.”

We were sitting at a corner table in Muramoto, just off Capital Square on King Street. The bartender at the Governor’s Club had recommended the place. He had also suggested that we try the Asian slaw salad, which resembled a haystack. It had been delicious, and so had everything else. Although by this time we had both drunk a good deal of first-class sake, I had taken in more than had my companion.

“Are you a little drunk?”

“Um. Hootie’s freakout kind of threw me. Anyhow, I wanted these options to be clear. Is evil innate, and a human quality, or is it an external entity, and inhuman in nature?”

“Let me guess. We vote for option one, don’t we, since we are humanists, and liberal humanists to boot?”

“Maybe you are,” I said. “Lately, I’ve been a bit ambivalent. However, with your friend Hayward, yes, it’s option one all the way. And not only that, Hayward seems to present a case of evil by genetic transmission. Tremendous psychic disorder gets passed from one generation to the next, along with blue eyes or red hair. Here you are, this is mine, and now you have it, too, welcome to the family. That is, as long as George Cooper got things right, which I think he did.”

I used my chopsticks to tweeze from the raised black rectangular surface before me a little delicacy so fresh it almost squirmed.

“Now, George Cooper was who, exactly? A cop, right?”

“Milwaukee homicide detective, twenty-six years on the job. Cooper had the whole Ladykiller thing figured out, only he could never prove anything, and he never had the slightest bit of evidence. Imagine the frustration.”

Don’s eyebrows knitted, creating three separate furrows in his forehead. “And you know this how?”

“From Cooper himself.”

“You talked to this guy?”

“I wish. He died about nine, ten years ago. But I did the next best thing. Because I thought I might be able to use it in a new project, I read his book. Cooper had to do something with his frustration, so he wrote it all down—everything he saw, everything he could put together, all the hypotheticals he’d never be able to prove.”

“A frustrated cop wrote a book claiming that Hayward had some kind of family involvement with the Ladykiller? Was it through his father?”

“His father’s brother, Tillman. That was really Cooper’s focus. He went to his grave without ever having been able to prove that Tillman Hayward was the Ladykiller.”

“How come I never heard of this book?”

“Cooper didn’t write well enough to get published. He wrote sentences like ‘Pursuant to my investigation, the Milwaukee Police Department was always getting in my way as a matter of policy.’ Outside of his family, no one but me ever heard of his book. I don’t think he even
tried
to get it published. He just wanted to write it—he wanted there to be a record. His daughter found the manuscript while she was cleaning out his apartment after his death.”

“You talked to his daughter?”

“No, we did everything by e-mail.”

“Excuse me, but how the hell did you ever find out about this book that was never published and no one ever knew existed?”

“About five years ago, I was trolling around on eBay, and there it was.
Searching for the Ladykiller
, an unpublished typescript by Detective George Cooper, retired, of the Milwaukee Police Department. Sharon Cooper, his only child, thought somebody might want to use it for research, so she put it up for sale the only way she knew how. I was the only bidder. Twenty-seven bucks, a bargain. This was a time I wasn’t too sure what I should do next, and my agent said something about trying nonfiction. So, the old Ladykiller business came back to me, all those murders in Milwaukee that no one ever solved. I happened to see this listing on eBay, perfect, right? It never occurred to me that the Ladykiller murders could have any connection with Spencer Mallon. After I read it, I got in touch with Sharon, but she couldn’t answer most of my questions. Her father not only never talked about what he was writing, he didn’t talk about his work at all.

“Cooper was old school, a hardnosed, suspicious, tough old bastard. He used his fists a lot, I bet. Whatever the methods, the guy closed a lot of cases, but this one kept getting away from him. Drove him crazy. He thought about it all the time.”

“But he knew that Tillman Hayward was guilty of the murders.”

“As much as you could know without actually seeing him do one.”

“What made him so sure?”

“It was a gut feeling deal, but Cooper had a
great
gut. He got on to Hayward by cross-referencing train and airplane arrivals and departures from Milwaukee with the dates of the Ladykiller’s homicides. Tedious work, but he wasn’t getting anywhere with the local suspects. Turns out, this guy Hayward came in from Columbus, Ohio, by train and plane two days before three of the murders, and left by the same means a day or two after. That still left three murders, but Cooper thought that the guy had probably paid cash for the bus, or hitchhiked, or borrowed a car for those visits.”

“It sounds a lot like guesswork,” Don said.

It did, I knew, and to counter that impression I tried to get across the powerful sense of sheer obduracy communicated by Cooper’s manuscript. George Cooper was not a man to be lightly swayed, he did not yield to whims, he had no fancies or daydreams. His version of guesswork rode upon endless slogging and a cop’s finely tuned instinct. After he had noticed the correlation between Hayward’s arrivals and the series of murders, he called upon a network of informers to hear whenever his suspect bought a ticket of any sort to Milwaukee. The call came; he opened a newspaper on a bench in the downtown train station; and when forty people got off the train from Columbus, one of them, a slim fellow in a hat and a pin striped suit, sent out an electrical current that seared over the top of the
Journal
and sizzled directly into Cooper’s waiting brainpan. A pure, mocking lawlessness spoke from the man’s very being. This, the detective was certain, was Mr. Hayward. He was the kind of man who liked to look cops in the eye and give them a silvery little gleam. Such men made Cooper’s hands clench.

Of medium height, in his mid-to late thirties, handsome but for the salient nose looming beneath the brim of his fedora, Hayward left the train in joking conversation with a square-faced, bespectacled young woman who, Cooper could see, barely knew him. Her limp brown hair hung past her ears like overgrown bangs.

Hayward’s new acquaintance, so easily amused, had no reason to fear him. The Ladykiller would never threaten this girl: the truth was, he would probably avoid touching her, unless touching her would help him get what he wanted. The Ladykiller took an attitude toward his victims: if they weren’t pretty, they weren’t worth the trouble. (Unfortunately, if they were pretty, they were worth all the trouble he could concoct.) Hayward wanted something from this typist, this substitute teacher, whatever she was, and it was probably a ride somewhere.