T here was a man standing at the foot of Julia’s bed. He wore dark clothes. She opened her eyes because she felt someone’s gaze. He moved to her bed, sat down on the edge.
‘Jiggles, you are the ugliest old thing to come down the pike in a long time,’ he said touching her forehead with a kiss.
It was like the whole goddamn dam burst. As she raised up, arms outstretched, she chilled, her stomach dropped, her throat tightened and she exploded in tears.
He hugged her. ‘Now, now baby,’ he said.
A moan came from inside her. She felt the wire cut into her mouth as she tried to catch her breath. No air could pass through her nostrils. They were filled and running on her father’s coat. Her body convulsed in sputtering sobs.
‘It’s all gonna be all right, I promise you.’ He held her to him, palm caressing the back of her neck.
‘Come back here you son of a bitch!’
Gratelli recognized McClellan’s voice. The sound came from the hall. He dropped the files and lurched awkwardly to his feet, reaching for his.38 in the same motion. In the hall, he pressed his ear to the door. He heard the thumping sounds of someone running. Gratelli, holding the gun straight up, close to his face, eased the door open, moved quickly into the hall, leveling his gun in the direction of the sound.
McClellan, his back to Gratelli, had dropped to his knees facing the wall. ‘You bastard,’ he said.
Gratelli’s eyes scanned the hall. He saw nothing. Then he saw a small furry burst of brown race away from the huddled body.
‘Son of a bitch,’ McClellan said, standing, out of breath. He turned back to Gratelli and seeing his partner holding his gun, ‘You’re not planning to shoot the little bastard are you?’
Gratelli laughed.
‘How the fuck was I supposed to know there was a cat in there?’ McClellan was red-faced.
Gratelli put his pistol away, walked down the hallway to the brown cat, who sat looking at him as if all of this had been a game.
‘Hey you,’ Gratelli said in a soft, gravelly whisper. Gratelli lowered himself to a squat. ‘How ’bout you and me going back home, partner?’
The cat seemed agreeable. Gratelli’s big hands scooped him up and the three of them went to Paul Chang’s apartment.
Having been snookered into McClellan’s breaking and entering, Gratelli decided he might as well look around.
Chang’s place had the same layout as Bateman’s, only reverse. Unlike Bateman’s, Chang’s didn’t so much double as an office as an artist’s studio.
The bed was in the middle of the room. On the wall opposite the bed was one huge bookcase with big, heavy books – Matisse, de Chirico, Ruscha, Rauchenberg, O’Keefe. Most of the names he recognized, though that was about all he knew about them. There were also books on photography. Some names Gratelli recognized. However, there were two books laying on top of the rows he didn’t recognize.
He pulled them out. One was called Teenage Lust and thumbing through it noticed they were all photographs of street kids, male and female, caught, it seemed candidly, in some mix of sex and violence.
McClellan came over to get an eyeful of the second book – photographs of some guy named Witkin who seemed to specialize in women with penises and snakes and rotting vegetables.
‘Christ,’ McClellan said. ‘We got a sick boy here.’
Gratelli shut the book and carefully put it back where he had found it.
‘He’s an artist.’
‘Yeah, well…’ he shook his head. ‘Our boy’s also got some leather threads in the closet. Some kind of harness, leather pants, jacket.’ McClellan examined the pants. ‘Buttless,’ McClellan said.
The alcove where Bateman had her bed in the other apartment, Chang had a large artist’s table. On it was a huge piece of cardboard, on which ripped photographs of body parts were being assembled into some larger, more abstract picture.
‘The kid’s kinda kinky, don’t you think?’ McClellan asked. ‘Maybe we got a candidate.’
‘Come on, she knows the guy.’
‘Gay boy too.’ McClellan pointed to a greeting card with a male nude smiling back. Inside were the handwritten words, ‘Keep your Wednesdays open, Bradley.’
‘That pretty much rules him out, don’t you think?’ Gratelli suggested.
‘It’s a question of how bent is bent. You been around long enough to know these things.’ McClellan picked up a book with no cover. There were sketches and some notes scribbled in pencil.
‘… to examine the edges of existence,’ McClellan read out loud. ‘How far one steps out, not knowing if you’ve gone too far, if there’s a way back, is the distinguishing characteristic that separates art from craft.’
McClellan’s face twisted into a caricature, mocking sophistication. ‘Some pretty highbrow words. Just an excuse to be kinky. The boy is bent. Bent enough?’
‘Can’t see him breaking a girl’s neck.’
‘I can.’ McClellan said, going through the bureau drawers next to the alcove. ‘Pretty stuff.’ McClellan said it with disgust, holding up a pair of leather shorts. Then he extracted a book from loose underwear and socks.
He opened it to the first page. ‘Chapbook #23,’ it said.
McClellan flipped through it. There were ragged and torn pieces of photos and incomplete sketches, some as innocuous as a photo of Barbie and Ken dolls. Others were naked bodies and body parts. There were words inscribed at random it seemed. Some were in poetry form. Some were narratives.
McClellan started to read from the top of a left-hand page.
‘Get this,’ McClellan said, reading a sentence. “Just as pain is less desirable than joy, pain is more desirable than numbness. Feeling something – anything – is better than the anesthesia, a state of nonexistence.” The guy’s into some serious shit.’
McClellan flipped a few more pages.
‘Clippings,’ he said. ‘Dahmer. And here’s some on that guy who cut off his son’s head on the highway in New Mexico. The kid in the alley off Polk. Christ, this guy is…’
He didn’t finish the sentence. Then he picked it up again.
‘Listen to this: “Dahmer had been left alone too long. Absent a world in which to belong, he created his own and was unable to escape it. He juggled two worlds. Successfully for a while. Then they collided.” What the hell does that mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ Gratelli said. ‘You are pondering the imponderable.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘OK, you tell me what this means. He’s still writing about Dahmer,’ McClellan said, reading another page, ‘“the sickness in our hearts comes from hate and the hate from fear. And when the fear becomes too much, we are left with our sickness, alone with our sickness. We feel powerless. We feel we are dying. We seek whatever it is that will make us feel alive again. If necessary we create new worlds, one in which we become God, if necessary, to make sense of it.”’
Gratelli waited for another comment from McClellan. But he grew silent. He turned away. Then, as if he’d decided something he came back and began to look at the book.
Gratelli didn’t say anything.
McClellan continued leafing through the little book.
‘This collection of body parts Chang has and lots of tattoos in his photos and this killer’s engraving of flowers on girls’ legs… I mean, maybe this is all connected.’
‘These are his thoughts, McClellan. You see anything in there that resembles a rose tattoo?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You can’t arrest a man for his thoughts. You don’t even know what he means by it all. Maybe he’s writing a story.’
‘What do the lawyers say on TV? Goes to state of mind.’
‘Can’t use anything in here anyhow. No warrant.’
‘No, but we’ll have a warrant next time and we’ll know just where to look if I need one.’ He carefully put the book where he found it. ‘That was Chapbook number twenty-three,’ McClellan said. ‘Where’s the other twenty-two? Or number twenty-four? Maybe we got a rose tattoo in there somewhere.’
They went back to Julia’s apartment. Gratelli noticed the curtain across the alley shift again.
McClellan followed Gratelli back down the stairs, then out through the first floor garage and on to Ivy Street. Gratelli looked up at the back of the apartment house where he’d seen the drapery move, trying to make sure he could get the right place once he was inside. There was no way through though. The two cops went to Franklin, then to the front of the apartment.
A woman was leaving as they hit the front door, allowing them entry without having to talk to the super. It was a frame building. The hallways were dark, narrow and musty.
‘Who is it?’ came a voice after McClellan pounded his big fist against the door.
‘Police.’
‘Just a minute.’
‘Now!’ McClellan bellowed.
There was a click. The door opened, caught itself on a chain. A relatively young black face peered through the narrow divide.
‘What is it?’
‘We’d like to talk to you,’ Gratelli said.
‘What about?’ the face replied.
‘May we come in?’
‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ the voice said.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Anthony.’
‘Anthony, I suppose you got a last name,’ McClellan said.
‘Jones.’
‘Jones?’
‘Jones,’ Anthony responded.
‘Mr Jones, Inspector Gratelli and I would like to talk to you and we’d like to talk to you inside.’
‘Why can’t we talk like this. What’s this about?’
‘It’s about somebody across the alley over there who nearly died,’ McClellan said.
‘We’d like to talk to you about that,’ Gratelli said, keeping his voice calm. ‘We’d like to be able to see what you can see from your window. You know what I mean?’
‘Can you come back please?’
‘All this just makes us want to come in and talk with you all the more.’
The face backed away. The two cops could hear the kid take a deep breath. The chain dropped and the door opened.
The guy was maybe twenty, wiry and wearing a towel around his waist. The shine on his body suggested it had been oiled. In the small bay window, there was a chair facing out – though the draperies had been pulled and the room dark, there was a strange sacredness about it. Perhaps a dark and evil one. On the floor by the chair was a pool of clothing. On the table beside the chair were a pair of binoculars and a bottle of almond oil.
McClellan went to the window, peeked through the part. In a few moments, he turned back. Shrugged. ‘Come take a look… second floor, to the left.’
Gratelli looked. There was a man lying naked on a bed and a woman dressed in leather doing the deed.
Gratelli looked back. Anthony Jones stared at the floor.
‘So fucking early in the morning,’ McClellan said. ‘And we got ourselves a little peeping Anthony.’
‘Am I under arrest?’
‘Who the fuck knows?’ McClellan said, shaking his head. ‘She could pull the goddamn blinds.’
Gratelli laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Yeah nothing. Hey, Jones, you shouldn’t be looking at that crap.’
‘They look back. They watch me,’ he said defensively.
‘I didn’t want to know that,’ McClellan said.
‘They want me to look,’ Jones pleaded.
‘OK, OK,’ McClellan said. ‘Give it a break. You’re only issued one of those. You wear it out, you go without.’
Gratelli pulled McClellan into the kitchen. ‘Go run our Mr Jones. I’ll ask a few questions.’
Back in the car, heading toward the hospital, they rode in their usual silence. Gratelli was surprised that McClellan hadn’t gotten a little physical with the peeping Tom. He usually liked to push these guys around, scare them and vent some of his own anger. Instead, McClellan went a little soft.
The information on Jones wasn’t much. There had been some previous complaints about him exposing himself in the window of a previous residence, but nothing else. What Gratelli discovered was that the Jones boy had plane ticket stubs that showed he’d been in East Chicago during several of the murders. They’d verify it, of course. They’d put him on the list. It almost wasn’t worth it. But he did have a view of Julia Bateman’s studio apartment, though not much of one. If they put everybody who had some sort of sex kink on their list, they might as well just substitute the San Francisco phone book, the lieutenant told them. Still, who knows what a quiet little guy like the Jones kid would do in the middle of the night?
Just as they pulled into park, McClellan said. ‘You know you never think of homosexual slants you know? I mean, I know there is. I seen ’em. Used to be a place called the Rendezvous downtown some years ago. But it don’t seem natural. None of it seems natural. Gay Vietnamese. Gay Mexicans. Isn’t there one fuckin’ country that don’t have homos? You think there’s gotta be. Yet there’s a whole fuckin’ city full of homos, all sizes, all colors speaking ninety-seven different languages.’ He shook his head. ‘How you suppose it happens? What turns a guy?’
Gratelli shrugged.
‘I mean, fuck, you ever think about that shit?’
‘I don’t know,’ Gratelli said. ‘You being a good Irish Catholic boy, you probably messed around…’
‘You’re ass, Gratelli.’ McClellan pulled into the hospital lot, and pulled into the space in front of the fire hydrant.
‘When I was a kid, maybe thirteen, me and my cousin Joey sat in back of Uncle Frank’s black Buick looking at magazines…’
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ McClellan said.
Gratelli shrugged, repressed a smile that would have been rare in any event and got out of the car and followed McClellan into the big old building.
The humor of McClellan’s sudden priggishness slipped away quickly as he thought about Julia Bateman. Few people besides other cops would understand how he felt about questioning a rape victim – especially one as brutalized as Bateman. He would have rather have spent an afternoon on a bed of nails than cause her the agony of reliving any part of that experience.
Julia saw the two men come in. She didn’t recognize either of them until Gratelli spoke.
‘Ms Bateman, I’m Inspector Gratelli, San Francisco police.’
Her father got up from the edge of the bed.
‘I’m Royal Bateman.’
‘Her father?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘This is Inspector McClellan.’
‘Nice to meet you both. Is there any news?’
‘No,’ Gratelli said. ‘Too early. We need to get some information from your daughter. You might want to grab a cup of coffee or something, stretch your legs. We might be a while.’
‘I’d like to stay.’
Royal Bateman said it in a way that wasn’t a request.
Gratelli looked at Julia. She nodded.
‘All right. As long as you understand we might be getting pretty graphic here.’
The senior Bateman stepped aside, moving toward the window as Gratelli pulled a chair beside Julia’s bed. McClellan hung back by the door.
‘Ms Bateman, I’m going to try to ask questions in such a way that you can answer yes or no. Don’t try to speak, OK?’
She nodded.
‘Did you know your assailant?’
She shook her head no.
Early in the questioning, Julia Bateman didn’t feel the strain. Perhaps, she thought, she had vented everything crying in her father’s arms. She felt little emotion. The events seemed so distant, so unconnected to her, she felt as if she were remembering some movie she had seen or book she had read.
But eventually the darkness seemed to be creeping back. As she nodded to one question and shook her head at another, her thoughts became more vivid.
‘Were his hands coarse, rough?’
She shook her head ‘no,’ but could feel them now, wet, slippery hands. Julia could smell him.
‘Did he say anything…?’
She shook her head ‘no.’ But she could hear him breathing as if he were next to her. Now.
She could no longer understand the questions.
‘Ms Bateman?’ It was the gravelly voice.
She put her hands over her eyes, but it did no good. What she saw was inside her head. There was a sweaty body over her.
‘You got any ideas about lunch?’ McClellan asked as the red Taurus pulled out of the hospital parking lot.
‘I’m not hungry.’ Gratelli was exhausted and his stomach churned like he’d just gulped down a cup or two of sulfuric acid.
‘You’ll be hungry. You need to eat.’
‘Why is it I always need to eat when you’re hungry?’
McClellan laughed. ‘You’re skinny.’
‘I’m healthy.’
‘You look dead.’
Gratelli knew he did. He looked like his father, dark hair, pale skin, bony features. Couldn’t gain weight if he tried. His brother Marcello got the mother’s genes. Those were the fat genes. Marcello looked more alive than Vincente for the entire forty-eight years of his life, before he died of a heart attack.
‘My brother looked very healthy when he died,’ Gratelli said. ‘Better just to look dead than be dead.’
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ McClellan said. ‘You upset about what we talked about earlier?’
‘What?’
‘About messin’ ’round in the back seat of your Uncle Frank’s Buick?’
‘Mickey, listen…’
‘Shut your fuckin’ trap a minute, will ya? I’m trying’ to tell you something. Kids do it. Curiosity. OK?’ McClellan took a deep breath, let it out. What he was about to say wasn’t easy. ‘Once. I was fuckin’ twelve years old, ragin’ hormones, and all that, you know,’ McClellan said, gritting his teeth and staring straight ahead. ‘We went skinny dippin’ and were just laying there dryin’ out and hell the sun and the hormones and talking about things… hell we were just showing each other what we had, you know, and how big it could get. And well things got outta hand.’
‘You played with his…’
‘Don’t make a federal case out of it, all right? I just figured to set the record straight. We’re even now. You messed around. I messed around. Once. End of story.’
‘I never messed around,’ Gratelli said.
‘What do you mean?’ McClellan blurted, turning toward Gratelli.
‘I mean I never messed around.’
‘No, no, no. You and what’s his name with the magazines in the back seat of the Buick, right?’
‘Joey. My cousin. We didn’t mess around.’
‘You said…’
‘I said the two of us were in the back seat of my Uncle Frank’s black Buick looking through some magazines. You didn’t let me finish. He was telling me about looking in the window of this apartment house and seeing two guys going at it. That’s all. First I knew about that sort of thing.’
‘You never…’
‘Not me,’ Gratelli said. ‘I don’t mind you like guys, though.’
‘That was thirty fuckin’ years ago!’
‘All right, I don’t mind that you used to like guys. Listen, this is San Francisco. We got gays on the force.’
‘Cut it out, Gratelli.’
‘You’re right. It’s none of my business. But you brought it up, remember. And I think that’s great, healthy, you know. Developing a little sensitivity.’