Slob (18 page)

But the big surprise would not hit him for several minutes. The big and most definitely unpleasant surprise for Jack was in the person of one "Uncle George," the character who would act as his Grand Inquisitor before the grueling interview session was over. Uncle George was one of the strange, aberrant, bizarro improbabilities that somehow managed to surface on isolated major-market television stations across America. He was the backlash, perhaps, to all the cutesy, wimpy anchorpersons with their blow-dried hair and capped teeth and soulless on-cam personalities. Uncle George Kcscztska was a tough, ugly, sadistic, kick-ass old curmudgeon who had become one of Chicago's favorite television stars quite by semi-accident.

It all began when Channel 31 ran one of its Editorial Echo features about how far too much abuse was heaped on the IRS. It was written and voiced by the station manager, one Harlow Boggs, who actually hated the internal-revenue folk like most everyone else did, but who had designed the editorial to evoke a strong viewer response. He hadn't envisioned one George Kcscztska, pronounced Kicks-zitsca, who would come slinking out of the woodwork just quivering at the chance to get some free TV time under the FCC fairness doctrine.

Kcscztska did a pretape interview that met the standards-and-practices requirements, but then when it was time to tape his Editorial Echo something happened. A question, as always, of chemistry. Something lit up inside the old misanthrope. And when that red light blinked over the camera and he took his hand cue from the floor man, this television novice just knocked everybody out with his total poise, burning intensity, and searing intelligence.

He called his guest editorial rebuttal "An Open Letter from Uncle George to Uncle Sam," and by the end of sixty seconds airtime he had made both the United States government and Channel 31 look like the imbecilic institutions they truly were. And a certain segment of the viewers just went ape over it. The switchboard was flooded with calls, many of them wanting more of Uncle George. And so a TV star was born in the Windy City.

Back in the greenroom nobody had bothered to Warn Eichord that this old, ugly geezer who called himself Uncle George Kick-Ass-ka or whatever was about to do a "Bed-Sty Ninety Percenter" on Jack. A Bed-Sty Ninety-Percent stomping being the old-time gang vernacular for a little boot party where the stompee is left alive, but just barely. Uncle George was going to do such a J.O.B. on Jack he'd be a drenched, trembling sack of protoplasm by the end of the taping session. All they told him was that he was the guest reporter or interviewer who would come in with a few "follow-up questions and remarks" when Christa had finished with the main interview segment.

Eichord was a bit wet-palmed and dry-mouthed, but not too shaky. Then a tall, thin woman wearing jeans and high heels, with one of the truly sensational rears in all of Christendom, came and smiled at Jack and made a move with a long, Dragon Lady fingernail, indicating that he should follow her and she said:

"It's time," with that little tilt of the head and funny smile and odd tone of voice that people always use when they lead the little kid in to have the impacted molar cut out. That same tone when the secretary at the IRS tells you the auditor is ready for you. The little look you recall from childhood when the principal finishes talking to your folks and it's
your
turn. The little quasi-friendly tilting tone that never fails to engender a rapid palpitation or at least a stab of apprehension.

He expected to be a little warm under the lights but it was actually rather cool in the studio. As he shivered reflexively he felt himself suddenly bathed in fear sweat, stage fright, and an unexpected, massive, drenching paranoia from left field. And as he tried to pull his socks up, adjust his tie, and blot his forehead a monitor beside him came to life with a shot of him wiping perspiration and he could hear the loud bark of audio on the cameraman's earphone as a recorded announcement introduced:

"'Chicago Sunrise'! Starring Christa Summers—with her special guest, noted serial-murder expert Jack A-cord, who will talk about solving the Lonely Hearts Murders! And our guest interviewer for Hotseat Spotlight, the inimitable Uncle George! And now . . . for Lakefront Furniture City, he-e-e-e-e-r-r-r-r-r-r-r's Christa!"

Real original, thought Eichord as the red light on Christa's camera winked on and she was already asking him something and his mind kicked in just in time to catch, "Ay-cord or I-cord, so which is correct?" She was smiling with teeth that looked like they'd been carved from a single piece of white plastic.

"It's Eichord but—" "The German diphthong, I should have known." She had a sort of semi-breathless style, and she was quite attractive and show bizzy. And the combination gave her most mundane pronouncements an aura of discovery, and Eichord wished he could come back with some brilliant rejoinder but unfortunately he hadn't the vaguest notion of what a German diphthong was. And the only thing that came to mind was a dildo with a French tickler on it and he was sure that wasn't what she wanted to hear so he only smiled idiotically and perspired profusely as she continued talking.

Fortunately she didn't ask him any other questions, rounding up her introduction by saying, "More on the end of a horror story, the solving of the Lonely Hearts Murders with the modern—day Sherlock Holmes who brought the killer to justice, as 'Chicago Sunrise' continues—right after this!"

And suddenly the floor director made a cutting motion across his throat, which even Eichord could understand, and also relate to at this point. And people were running everywhere. The cameras were moving around in the sea of cables, twisted like a menacing nest of huge, black snakes that surrounded the riser where they sat, and several people attacked them, doing last-minute things to Christa Summers, two of them talking with her at the same time, which she seemed to find quite normal, and a woman blotted Eichord's perspiring head and someone did something to him, touched him with something he felt but couldn't identify, and he heard someone ask him if he would like a wet cloth and he almost laughed out loud at the insanity of the question. What in the hell would I want with a
wet cloth?
he thought, but he managed to shake his head and smile and he was just working up the nerve to ask if he could have a glass of water when the furniture commercial stopped and Christa calmly turned to him and said:

"I'm not going to bite, you know." And she gave a sexy, soft little mew of a laugh.

"Oh," he replied wittily, not having any idea what she meant. It was like the wet cloth. Why would he think she was going to bite him? Did these people around here speak only gibberish?

"You seem nervous," she was explaining to him, as you'd explain calculus to a third-grader. "So just relax or you'll make
me
nervous, and if I get nervous, and we're
both
nervous, I'll have to get the director down here out of the booth and he'll have to finish the show. And we don't want that do we, Don?"

And she giggled as Don said, "Speak for yourself," on the intercom, and everybody broke up.

And she was pretty good. Within a couple of minutes she'd calmed him down and the worst of the stage fright had begun to recede into the wings or wherever TV jitters go. Eichord was beginning to respond to her questions in actual sentences, and before long he was feeling somewhat at ease in front of the lights and the cameras.

He tried at first to really tell her about the phenomenon of serial murders but she already knew all the answers to the questions she was asking or at least she knew what she wanted to hear. That was the impression she gave Eichord asking things like:

"There's really no profile of a serial murderer, is there?" very confidently, and when he answered:

"Actually there are profiles. In fact one of the courses the agents teach at Quantico is called Logical Profiles of Serial Murderers and—"

"But what I'm saying, is that—" and leading him down another path altogether, in a way that an uncharitable person might think was designed to make herself look as infallible as possible.

She was very good. Slick. Facile. Quick with the teeth and sparkling cokey eyes and little hair toss. And she was no dummy. But she didn't seem to want to learn anything in the interview, which was fine with Jack. As soon as he figured out what she wanted he started giving nice, long-winded, winding answers to keep her on the safe stuff. And when she got on to dangerous ground he'd try to get her off of it entirely, leading the questioning away from the Sylvia Kasikoff thing as much as he could without appearing evasive.

She was experienced enough to catch what he was doing immediately but as long as it played she went with the flow of it. He was making her look as if she'd done her homework, even though she didn't like the way he kept steering her off the specific case-solving stuff and going into lengthy explanations when they were talking generalities. She knew how to get numbers and she kept him firmly on the killings. He had done a good job, he thought, of fielding the questions, bringing the conversational ball back to safer turf where he could talk about the serial specter in general. And then Uncle George took his turn at bat and the whole thing fell apart at the seams.

George sat down and didn't speak or even look at him. He looked at the floor until the standby cue came and then those eyes opened wide and he looked directly into the upper center of the camera lens as it blinked red and began speaking very fast looking into the camera eye but speaking
to
Jack Eichord, and in the first long, prolix, recondite question he used the phrase
meromorphic function
and Jack's eyes clouded over and he replied:

"I'm sorry but I don't know what you mean."

"What?" Uncle George demanded.

"I'm not familiar with the phrase
mar-uh-morphic function,
so how can I answer a question if I don't understand it?"

"Well, let me explain it to you then," George said sternly, becoming quite agitated. "The dictionary defines
meromorphic function
as a function of a complex variable that is regular in a region except for a finite number of points at which it has a limitless infinity as its terminus, from the Greek prefix
meros,
and am I going too fast for you and do you understand all the words like function and complex and variable and regular and region and finite and number and points and limitless and infinity and terminus and prefix, or should I go back and define
them,
which would take up most of my time and we wouldn't have to see you squirm trying to explain how the modus operandi of last night's murder was significantly different than that of the previous mutilation murders in the Chicagoland area, would we?"

And his face was bright red and Eichord thought he looked like a Type-A heart attack/hypertensive/apoplectic candidate for early hardening of the arteries who was about to have a stroke right here, folks, live and in color, and he said, "I'm sorry but I've forgotten the question," definitely getting off on the wrong foot.

So this was the brass's idea of a nice, upscale interview, upbeat, no hatchet jobs or anything—eh? And how did this old fart know the MO was different? From that moment on it was all downhill for Jack, who was no great shakes as a liar anyway.

After four or five minutes of this relentless diatribe they gave Uncle George the wrap-up sign and he looked at Eichord for the first time and said, "You've got nobody fooled, and frankly I find the police's playacting, public posture, premise, position, and presentation mendacious, specious, meretricious, and highly odious. And if you find that an impenetrable logograph, Special Agent Eichord, I'm saying it's a lying, stinking mess." Eichord thought of several witty come backs but luckily managed to refrain from trying any of them and in a second or two the light blinked out and it was mercifully over.

Five minutes of this in private would be bad enough. But for Jack Eichord, hoisted as it were on his Smith and Wesson and left to twist slowly, slowly in the Windy, there in the white-hot glare of television, there in the hog butcher of the world, city of big shoulders, it was five hours of hell.

And when Uncle George had finished with him the whole deal was fairly precarious
in re
who would believe what. Clearly George Kick-ass-ka's fans, if no one else, would think this had been a ruse on the part of the authorities to placate a nervous (and naive) public. And one would have to conclude Jack had done little or nothing to convince a skeptical viewer. But one such viewer sat watching Eichord's performance in a quiet and deadly rage.

He was watching a twenty-three-inch RCA inside a small home out in Oak Park in which three members of the Volker family sat beside him. Ted Volker, and his wife Betty, and their nine-year-old son Sean, all sat on a sofa beside Daniel Bunkowski, who had pulled his chair next to them.

They all sat there quietly watching the bright screen there in the darkened room, the noises from the television set's speaker being the only audible sounds. Ted and Betty and Sean watched the show with unseeing eyes. And as Daniel listened to the pontificating about the serial murders and all the lies, he stared at the cop's image with his hard, little pig eyes and decided he would send some proof that the Lonely Hearts killer was still at large. He liked that phrase—at
large.

He turned to the dead Volkers and beamed radiantly, and with a groan of effort lifted his great bulk from the armchair and went to work.