But he refused to allow this gloomy horizon to bum him out. He might just take that four hundred and get straight. Do himself a thing, you know. And it all fell together so beautiful for him, see, there he is bopping down the street when he sees this dude put a move on this other dude.
He was just about to phone The Man with a kind of bullshit thing about some fags who were into some B & E that he'd heard about, just a nothing little thing to lay some groundwork for the Possession number until he could come up with something for real, and he sees this shit. BeBop goes, "Oh, WOW!" and "Check it OUT!" when he eyeballs this one dude grab this other dude and kind of like shove him into the EGA theater. The EGA has been closed since the Last Supper, but like he sees them bop right on in there and he figures he'll see what's goin' down. Who ever knows, right?
And he pushes on in there and he can see the dudes have taken a bolt cutter or something to the big, thick chain that holds padlocks on the doors on each side of the EGA box office. And it's darker than the inside of Bessie Mae's pussy but he eases on in real quiet. Where the fuck is everybody? And he hears this mumbling shit coming from inside, and he moves on ahead, just about pissing his britches he's so scared.
The EGA — which was called the REGAL but over a period of time it lost its R and its L, and so everybody just called it EGA — it was gonna be torn down to put in another fucking condo or whatever, and it had been just this little ma-and-pa theater about a hundred years ago, and it held tops maybe 150 dudes in there go in see a fucking cowboy double feature. Lash Larue Whips It Out, one of them pictures, and BeBop eases on around so he can see the naps.
Two dudes down frost in the dark, like they got good seats you know, right in the middle, and he can barely see 'em from a little EXIT light thing over on the side, and the one dude says something and this other guy he goes, "I want you to meet Mary Pat Gardner" — I think the name he said was, or maybe Mary Pat Garner. Something like that.
"Say hello Mary Pat," he tells this other dude. And the other one goes. Yeah, cool, "Hello, Mary Pat AAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHHH!" And he screams like he just got a tit in the wringer, you know.
And it's quiet then and the first dude says, "The bitch was real thirsty," or some shit like mat, and he raises something that looked like a knife and sticks the other one again but there's no sound and, man, I just about shit my pants, BeBop tells The Man.
"That's when I phoned you, man. You better get out here right away. And bring a fucking ambulance, man. This ain't no wet dream either, my man. I'm givin' you a fuckin' MURDER ONE here." And he was just starting in about the bogus Possession thing and how Her Honor U.S. Magistrate Wilma Fucking Smith was planning to put his stones in her pliers again and send him away to Springfield or somewhere and he'd come out in a couple of years with an asshole like a cannonball when the ungrateful fuckin' cop hangs up on him.
Which is how BeBop Rutledge of East Alton, Illinois, and parts unkown, got to make the acquaintance of a cop named Jack Eichord. And which is how BeBop had his day ruined, and his four-hundred-dollar scam fucked over, but which is also how he got his main man to promise he'd talk to Magistrate Smith, which was worth four hundred except for the fact that he probably wouldn't be able to sleep for a week.
Eichord played the tape and BeBop said. Yeah, that's the dude that knifed the other one. Same voice for sure. And he asked was this guy twenty-five, thirty years old? And BeBop told him. No, this is an old guy. About your age, he said. Endearing himself to Jack in the process.
And after the evidence crew and the ME and everybody cleared out and the inside of the EGA was back in the black, Eichord sat in one of the ratty seats (special this week, kids, free gum under every seat) and looked up at the darkened screen letting it all wash over him.
He sat there for along time, free-associating, thinking about the madman who was killing, trying to make it take a shape, his mind taking great leaps, suddenly refocusing without logical connectives, making wild ellipses, meaningless non sequiturs, random ramblings. And he began talking quietly to himself as he waited for Weyland the artist to finish with the snitch who might have seen enough to give them something, but he wasn't counting on it.
He mumbled to himself in a whisper, maundering like some nutbasket who'd lived alone too long, which in fact he probably had. Testing, theorizing, probing, bullshitting, trying to get some kind of a handle on all the sudden deaths.
Sitting there in the pitch black of the musty, crumbling dream factory where another innocent victim's blood had just stained one of the faded seats a sickening incarnadine. Another human being murdered by a madman, and he looked for the commonality that wasn't there, and chewed it all over again.
He'd go back and take a look at the backgrounds of the doorman in the Schindler Building and this latest victim, an agency art director who was getting a tag tied around his toe. Another innocent man dead. One more piece of a puzzle that wouldn't fit. But now, at least, he had a lone watcher at the Russo house, and a lone killer here.
It was one man. A madman. Acting alone.
* * *
He was still talking to himself the next morning in the squad room but soundlessly, running it all over in his head as he doodled aimlessly, letting the swirl of the cop-shop talk eddy and flow over him as he doodled and meditated and chewed his cud.
"No, ma'am," he could hear T. J. Monahan telling some woman on the phone. "You gotta go to the District of Occurrence on that. You need to call the LAPD or if that's in the county it might be like the East L.A. substation, okay?" L.A. Christ! He couldn't get away from the fucking place.
" — had 'em by six points but I wouldn't give you a nickel for that worthless, no good —"
" — know those projects out there and I guarantee there's a bunch of hypes living out there who don't do anything but steal credit cards for —"
" — just as soon go to Vegas and drop it all on Red and let 'er fly, if —"
" — fruit hustler working Tower Grove we think he tailed the boy in Carondelet Park last —"
"Jack," Lt. Springer said, snapping Eichord out of his reverie, "can you come on in my office?" And they head toward the end of the hall. Springer picking up bodies as they went. He had Glass, Leech, Skully, Monahan, a couple of the others from the unit in there with them.
"Look," Springer said to him, "none of us can find our ass with both hands on this thing. We've got the lab report on the weapon that did Mr. Cooper yesterday. We got a dorky eyewitness jammed up on a dope bust. We got a half-assed Identikit sketch that could be my brother-in-law. Jack, you're the serial-murder expert here. What the hell are we lookin' at?"
"I wish I could tell you something." Eichord shrugged. "But I'm in the dark with this too. I can't make a connection between the two civilian stab-bings and the gang murders — but you know how it is with hunches, I think they're connected."
"You can't make a connection," Richard Glass said, "because there isn't any, Jack. Bet on it. Two different perps. Apples and oranges."