A Dark Matter (21 page)

Cooper folded his newspaper and trailed after them as they filtered through the crowd, paused for the gentleman to make a brief telephone call, then went out into the late afternoon sun. His plain blue sedan, dinged a bit on the driver’s side, sat a little way down the street. The young woman admitted Mr. Hayward into her green Volvo, and Cooper leaned on his hood and pretended to gaze in fascination at a welter of railway tracks extending halfway to infinity. When the Volvo drove off, he followed it through the downtown, then west to Sherman Boulevard and into a largely lower-middleclass neighborhood where the woman drew up in front of a two-story yellow-and-brown house on a short, patchy lawn. A worn-looking woman and a scrawny boy shot through the narrow front door and trotted down three concrete steps to greet the murderer. Cooper noted the address and, back at the station, found it in the battered reverse directory. Twenty more minutes of research told him that William Hayward, the resident of the brown-and-yellow house, worked at Continental Can and had two siblings, Margaret Frances and Tillman Brady. Margaret Frances, later known as Margot, had no criminal record whatsoever.

This could not be said of her youngest brother. For a time, Tillman Hayward had managed to skirt classification as a youthful offender despite the complaints of half a dozen neighbors that he had been engaged in suspicious activity. “That boy was up to no good,” went the general opinion, though the charges were never more specific. In Tillman Hayward’s sixteenth year, his luck changed.

A week after his birthday, young Till was caught shoplifting at a five and dime on Sherman Boulevard: oddly for a person his age, he had been trying to steal glue, nails, a box cutter, and a box of thumbtacks. When the officer dispatched to the scene inquired as to the purpose of these items, the boy alluded to a “homework project,” and the officer released him with a warning. Three months later, an absentee landlord spotted a wandering light in a basement window of an empty duplex on Auer Street. The landlord let himself in and managed to snag Tillman by his collar in his flight from the basement steps. This time, the boy was taken to the station, largely to impress him with the seriousness of trespass. Again, no charge was filed.

Further proof that Tillman Hayward knew how to disarm officers of the law came when an outraged homeowner on West 41st Street reported that her beloved marmalade cat, Louis, had just been stolen from her backyard by a teenaged boy she knew to be local. A few minutes later, two policemen got out of a patrol car and stopped a boy trotting down Sherman Boulevard with a squirming bag in his hands. Oh, the boy said, this cat
lived
in that house? He had been sure it had gone missing from a woman just off Sherman on West 44th, and he was in the process of returning it when the officers interrupted him. He knew about the missing cat from the posters taped to the lampposts, hadn’t the officers noticed? It was like a plague, all these missing pets.

It would have ended there, had not one of the officers involved, clearly a man of a hard and suspicious nature, inserted a note of warning:
Keep an eye on this kid
.

Before Tillman Hayward disappeared for good from the police records, he had been accused of two more crimes, attempted rape and the receipt of stolen goods. Alma Vestry, the young woman who had accused Hayward of trying to rape her, dropped the charge a day before the case went to trial. The two officers who charged the twenty-two-year-old Hayward with receiving a rack of hijacked mink coats destroyed their own case by proceeding improperly, and an angry judge dismissed the charges. Hayward must have known he had been lucky, for after that point he took care to avoid the attention of the authorities.

Detective Cooper may have been a little crazy. Certainly, he was obsessed, and had been since Tillman Hayward stepped off the train from Columbus. He had discovered nothing that would sway a judge, but Cooper began spending nearly half his working day and much of his off-duty life searching for anything that might incriminate his only suspect. Early in the case, Cooper plucked Hayward off the street and brought him in for questioning, but the man glided through every verbal trap the detective set for him. He smiled, he was gracious and patient, he wished to be helpful. The farcical interrogation lasted two hours and produced no results apart from informing Tillman that at least one Milwaukee detective greatly desired to slam him into a cell. Thereafter, Cooper contented himself with observation.

Both his chief of detectives and the police chief may have thought their star detective had slipped a gear, but they trusted his instincts and for a long time allowed him to focus his energies as narrowly as he wished. When Cooper’s fed-up partner requested reassignment, they paired him with another detective and let Cooper work alone. The Ladykiller was Homicide’s top priority, and if Cooper’s methods had a chance of bringing it to closure, his division and his department were willing to stand by and watch.

Detective Cooper developed an instinct for when Tillman Hayward was going to turn up at his brother’s house. Sometimes this intuition compelled him toward the brown-and-yellow house to spot, at ease in pleated suit trousers and a wife beater T-shirt, a furtive, behatted form moving past a window or drifting through the backyard. To Cooper’s profound regret, glimpses were nearly all the observation he was permitted. Hayward had excellent instincts of his own. He knew when to hide out in an inner room his brother let him use, he knew when to stay at home. After commandeering an attic room across the alley, Cooper passed twelve-hour, fifteen-hour days peering down at the barren backyard and rear windows in which his target declined to appear.

The old cop felt certain that Hayward used the back door and the narrow alley. From time to time, the detective managed to glimpse a swiftly moving form gliding through the kitchen door and melting into the darkness blanketing the yard. But where was he going, and what were his haunts? George Cooper had visited every bar, tavern, saloon, and cocktail lounge within a mile’s radius, had shown Hayward’s photo to 150 bartenders. Some of them had said, That guy, sure, see him now and then, comes in like three times a week, then stays away for months. Or: This guy? He likes the ladies, and they like him back.

On a busy night at a Brady Street gin mill called the Open Hand, a bartender glanced deep into the crowd and spotted a familiar nose jutting from beneath a familiar hat. He remembered the detective’s request, dug his card out of a drawer, and called to report that the man Cooper was looking for was now in his bar. As this took place in the era before mobile phones, the bartender dialed the number on the card, that of the homicide division at the central station. When he was informed of the call, Cooper happened to be in his dented blue sedan, traveling from his apartment to the attic room, even grumpier than usual.

He swore at the steering wheel, the windshield, and the stunned dispatcher. Still ripping out curses, he wrenched his car into a U-turn and hurtled through four lanes of protesting vehicles. Fifteen minutes before he jerked to a stop in front of the Open Hand, his suspect had escorted an intoxicated young lady to an unknown destination. Fortunately, the bartender knew the young woman’s name, Lisa Gruen. Miss Gruen could, of course, not be found at the nearby apartment she shared with another graduate student at UW-Milwaukee, nor did her roommate have any idea where she might be. A few of the patrons had glimpsed Lisa’s new friend pouring her into a car, but none of them could remember anything about the vehicle except its color, which was dark blue, black, or British racing green. Flummoxed, fearful that in a day or two Lisa Gruen’s corpse would be found dumped on the steps of the Central Library, Detective Cooper spent hours grilling the Open Hand’s increasingly irritated patrons. Some of them remembered meeting “Till,” “Tilly,” cute name for a guy, a little older and more sophisticated than the bar’s usual patrons, but a little rough around the edges.

Late the next morning, Lisa Gruen called the station. What was the big deal? All her friends were pissed off—she had ruined their evening. When Detective Cooper turned up at her apartment, he shook her up. Cooper knew that his size, also his distance from any system of value she understood, made her feel uncomfortable. This was fine with him: Cooper enjoyed the creation of discomfort.

No, maybe she had never met Tilly before, but he was obviously a nice guy anyhow. After the gin had unstrung her, he volunteered to drive her home. Okay, he didn’t bring her
straight
home, but so what? He didn’t do anything creepy, she was sure of that.

Eleven hours were missing from this young woman’s life, and their loss caused her not a moment’s concern. What had he done with her: where had he taken her? It was a mystery.

Of course she could not describe his car. It had a steering wheel and a backseat. Around three or four in the morning, whenever, the pain in her head, the dryness in her mouth, and the burning in her guts had awakened her. She sat up and looked out the window. Everything spun and swayed. Then came the really embarrassing part. Her escort opened the rear door, helped her out, and held her waist while she doubled over and vomited. Still drunk, she demanded a few more hours of sleep, and he obligingly assisted her back onto her padded bench. When next she surfaced, it was ten o’clock on Sunday morning. He was asking her if she wanted to go home. She said: Aren’t you at least going to offer me breakfast? What a gentleman, he drove to a diner that was way out there somewhere, way west, maybe in Butler—who ever thought Butler had diners?—and bought scrambled eggs, whole-wheat toast, bacon, and strong coffee.

Two days later, one possible answer to the missing hours was suggested by a grim discovery in the parking lot of a Prospect Avenue insurance company. Two foraging homeless men investigated a dusty, rolled-up carpet alongside a Dumpster and found within it the nude body of the Ladykiller’s fifth victim. She had been a thirty-one-year-old hotel executive named Sonia Hillery, and photographs later supplied by her husband and parents made it clear that, when alive, she had been competent, intelligent, stylish, and attractive. The Ladykiller had spent hours, perhaps days, working on her corpse, and nothing of what had once defined her remained.

George Cooper wondered: had Tilly Hayward stretched out unconscious Lisa Gruen across his backseat before he snatched Sonia Hillery off the streets? If so, what then? After he overpowered Hillery, he would need to stash her body somewhere while he established his alibi by caring for Lisa Gruen. And if Lisa fed her hangover out in Butler the next morning, Hayward was probably renting some little hideaway in the western burbs, or the small towns west of them—Marcy, Lannon, Menomonee Falls, Waukesha, little Butler itself. He drove west to Butler and showed Hayward’s photo in the diner—the waiters remembered him and the hungover, slightly pig-faced blond girl he had been with, but none had noticed his car or anything else of interest. Cooper drove slowly up and down its main street, around its old hotel, and through its few alleyways. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Cooper seethed. It burned a hole in his stomach, that while Tilly Hayward had been stuffing a hungover girl with bacon and eggs, a dead woman on a slab, on a table, maybe a basement floor, had waited for his return.

Cooper’s rage pushed him down the highways to Columbus, Ohio, far out of his jurisdiction, where his skills and obsessions served no purpose but his own. An uncooperative homicide chief informed him that everything he had to know about Tillman Hayward, he could have learned on the phone. I had to see it for myself, Cooper told him. See what? What his life is like here. Well, said the Ohio cop, you must have a great appetite for boredom. Mr. Hayward is a good citizen. He led Cooper through the records: married, three daughters, not so much as a speeding ticket on his record, not even a
parking
ticket, and co-owner with his wife of four sturdy apartment buildings. And if you need to know anything more about the man, this fine resident of Westerville, one of Columbus’s finest suburbs, was also an exemplary contributor to police charities. Detective Cooper, you would be well advised to turn right around and go home, because there ain’t squat for you in Columbus.

Cooper could no more obey this advice than he could dance back to Milwaukee on a moonbeam. After promising to go home soon, he picked up a map at an information booth and drove eleven miles to Westerville, where he made his way to the address he had memorized. He parked across the street and two houses down. It was exactly the kind of house, the kind of street, and the kind of community he most disliked. Everything around him said,
We are richer and more refined than you will ever be
. The windows sparkled; the front lawns gleamed. Borders of flowers brightened every substantial, yet not showy, edifice. Knowing what he thought he knew, the neighborhood made him want to shoot holes in the oversized mailboxes, hand painted with images of barns and dogs and ducks, lining the street.

Eventually, the garage door at the Hayward house floated up, and a pale blue station wagon rolled out. In the backseat, three small girls babbled away, with gestures, all at the same time. The driver, presumably Mrs. Tillman Hayward, was a Hitchcock blonde with smooth golden hair and a neat, symmetrical face. As she drove past Cooper, her icy blue eyes flicked disgust and suspicion at him. Christ, he thought, no wonder homicide was such a booming trade.

Soon after his return to Milwaukee and the barren room where he gazed through binoculars at the Haywards’ glum backyard, Cooper observed an apparently insignificant event that in a short while seemed as significant as the discovery of a new disease. A stringy boy of eleven or twelve with dark, muddy eyes and a narrow forehead, Bill Hayward’s son, Keith, was sitting in a disconsolate manner, as only a boy of eleven or twelve can be disconsolate, on the battered old dining room chair they moved out onto the patchy grass in the summer. To Detective Cooper, Keith had suggested a kind of displacement, a sense that he was making do within an odd emotional poverty. Cooper had taken in only glimpses, but the glimpses insinuated a life of constant performance, as if Keith were always acting the role of a boy instead of actually being one. Cooper did not know why he felt this way, nor did he entirely trust this feeling. It simmered away on a mental back burner, always present but generally ignored.