GRACE NOTES
Journal Entry #435
I’ve been reading all the news articles I can find about the original Lovelorn Killer investigation, and what I love are the man-on-the-street interviews. People talk about keeping their shades drawn and their kids locked up at night, or sleeping with a baseball bat next to their bed. These people flooded the tip lines with their fear. By the third murder, the cops got thousands of calls per day from people reporting a suspicious car rolling down the street at low speed (always the paper carrier, as it turned out) or gunshots in the neighborhood (usually thunder, firecrackers, or in one spectacular boom, an electrical generator explosion). One lady turned in her landlord because he’d hung a rope out back. The cops came to check it out and found he’d put up a clothesline. Another guy reported his clergyman half brother for a bunch of BDSM paraphernalia he’d uncovered in the closet. Bet that made for a fun Thanksgiving dinner a few weeks later.
The thing is, you can hardly blame people for being so paranoid. The cops carped in the media about all the false leads coming in, but they gave people nothing to work with. The killer could be anyone, so everyone had to be a suspect. Your neighbor. Your dog walker. The guy on the corner who keeps a tarp over his shed at all times—what’s he really hiding in there? The killer lives in our neighborhoods, shops at our grocery stores, buys his gas at the same station, and drives down the same streets. The whole time you’re squeezing cantaloupes or trying to figure out if $2.73 is the lowest price per gallon for unleaded, he’s right behind you, imagining you with a rope around your neck. No wonder the city was on edge.
The Grave Diggers read the profile the FBI put together, and there’s one thing we agree on: the guy is white. Oliver put it best when he said that the killer had to move undetected in predominately white neighborhoods, so bland and unassuming that no one would ever remember seeing him even if they passed right by him on the sidewalk. That makes him white as Wonder Bread. Not that it mattered back twenty years ago. Oliver pointed out that people were still turning in nonwhite suspects by the truckload even after the profilers had stressed that they were looking for a white dude. “He’s so white he’s invisible,” Oliver said.
“Like Casper the ghost,” Molly agreed.
I decided to go ghost hunting. I went down to O’Malley’s Bar last Thursday night, me and my digital recorder. I didn’t tell anyone else about my little expedition because Oliver has enough to worry about right now, Molly would just drag Travis along, and Barnes doesn’t agree with me that there’s anything to be learned there, especially after all this time. He might be right, but I wanted to check it out for myself. My gut tells me the Lovelorn Killer has been in that bar, and since I can’t see him yet, the closest I can get is to look through his eyes.
I discovered that Barnes was right about how a stranger sticks out in a neighborhood bar. I walked in and everyone turned to look at me, like I was personally interrupting their conversation or baseball watching. I felt a flush go up the back of my neck, but I just acted like I belonged there anyway and went up to the bar to order a beer. The place wasn’t crowded, maybe half full, mostly older guys but also a few couples and a pair of middle-aged women with tattoos playing pool in the back. I’d been a little concerned that I might get hit on, being a woman out in the bar alone, but I needn’t have worried. After they gawked at me for daring to cross the threshold, the clientele of O’Malley’s ignored me like I was just part of the decor—old, faded, and creaky. The bar itself was clean, but it needed refinishing because the varnish had rubbed off in front of every stool.
The only guy to chat me up was the bartender, a short, round white guy with thinning gray hair. He wore a vintage Walter Payton jersey and an apron with stains on it, but he was friendly enough, talking about the spring storms that had been through lately and the hot start for the Cubs. Turns out, he was the owner. I had to order a second beer and a plate of nachos before I got the courage to bring up the Lovelorn Killer. Hoo boy, he had some words about Lora Fitz! “What a waste, eh? Pretty little thing, a decent brain in her head, but high as a kite half the time. It’s the pupils. You can always tell by the pupils.”
He peered in to give mine a good look-see, and I guess I passed muster because he kept talking. I asked if maybe Lora’s story about how she’d served the killer in his bar could be true. “Utter bullshit,” he said. “I did twenty years on the job before taking over this place back in 1984. You see that guy over there? He’s a former captain. Them two at the table watching the game, they were on the job for thirty-five years between them. Probably still packing heat right now.”
“What about you?” I asked him.
He took out a revolver from behind the bar. “No one’s going to hold me up, I can tell you that. As for that Lovelorn guy, he’s a coward, going after women who are home alone and then writing prissy letters to the papers for attention. Why? Because his mommy didn’t love him enough? Gimme a break.”
“It could be exciting for him, coming in here where all the cops are.”
“I’d like to see him try it. I really would.” He stroked that gun with more affection than I’ve seen since my high school boyfriend. I decided to try out my big theory as long as I had his attention.
“Maybe it would be a way for him to keep tabs on the case—you know, find out what the cops were talking about after a few beers.”
He scowled at me like I’d just come out as a Cardinals fan. “You must think we’re a bunch of idiots if you imagine we sit around telling tales out of school where anyone might hear ’em. Besides, the big boys on that case didn’t come ’round these parts. Don Harrigan probably drank at some chichi place downtown. The FBI? Those pricks are wound so tight they probably don’t drink at all.”
“They didn’t come to check out Lora’s story?” I found this hard to believe. The papers made it sound like the cops had chased every lead.
“Sure, they sent the local boys, Vega and Brewster. Vega had to retire when he got sick, but Brewster’s still on the job. He’s sitting over there right now, as a matter of fact.” He pointed to a burly guy with a ’70s mustache and glasses to match. “Hey, Brewster, this lady’s interested in the Lovelorn case. You wanna impress her with your fifteen minutes of fame?”
I’d rather he didn’t, not from the way he was looking at me, like I was a punk from the street he’d like to pound into dust on the pavement. He took his draft beer and came to sit on the stool next to mine, his elbow practically in my ribs. “Who’s asking?”
“This lady’s part of some wannabe crime-solving group on the ‘World Wide Web.’ What’d you say your name was again, honey?”
“Grace,” I said, declining to offer my last name.
“She’s after the Lovelorn Killer,” the bar owner said with exaggerated condescension, as though I was a kindergartner who’d announced her desire to fly to the moon.
“That’s serious business,” the cop, Brewster, told me. “He killed a half-dozen women just like you.”
“And then he disappeared,” I said. Neither one liked that fact very much, I could tell. “Mr.…” I looked to the bar owner to fill in the blanks on his name.
“Stan. Stan McGuinty.”
“Mr. McGuinty said you’d interviewed Lora Fitz about her encounter with the Lovelorn Killer.”
Brewster snorted derisively. “She had an encounter, all right. With a pocket full of Vicodin and a little weed on the side. She might as well’ve said she’d seen a pink elephant in a tutu doing a hula on the bar here.” He rapped it with his knuckles for emphasis.
“But she didn’t say that. She said she was raped in a red pickup truck and then saw it on the street near Katie Duffy’s house right before she was murdered.”
“You know how many red pickup trucks there are on the streets? We looked into her story. No one in here remembered that guy she called Ace. No one else remembered any red truck. Maybe she was telling the truth that some guy passing through got rough with her, but we didn’t find anything to suggest he was the Lovelorn Killer. And believe me, we looked. We interviewed everyone in a six-block radius of the Duffy house. That’s real, serious police work—not a bunch of guessing games on the internet. You think you can do better? Go ahead, I say. Bring it on.” He waggled his fingers at me in aggressive fashion.
“We aren’t out to criticize.”
“Ha! You’d be the first, then.” He tapped the bar in front of him. “Another one, please, Stan.”
McGuinty complied, but he also said something interesting. “I was always surprised that the interviews on Katie Duffy never made it down this way.”
Brewster froze with his hand around the beer glass. “What do you mean?”
“I mean Katie herself was in here on and off that summer, and not with Owen. You remember. I know you took her home at least once.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Mmm. It was a long time ago, but I remember. She seemed restless to me. I don’t want to say looking for trouble, but…”
“She wouldn’t find it in here,” Brewster shot back. “No one would go messing around with Owen’s wife. Come on, Stan. What the hell are you saying?”
“Not saying anything, other than Katie seemed lonely. Maybe bored. Her kid would’ve been all but grown-up by then. Owen was on the job, then fiddling around with his computers. What’s she got to do all day?”
“You’re saying she came in during the daytime?” I asked. I regretted butting in because both men seemed to clam up when reminded there was an outsider listening.
“Stan, if you’ve got something you want to report, you can go down to the station and say so on the record. Otherwise, this is just nasty gossip.”
McGuinty had a challenging look in his eye, one that suggested cases sometimes got solved with nasty gossip, but he shrugged and didn’t argue. “Maybe you ought to settle up,” he said, and Brewster pulled out a twenty.
He slapped it down and got off his stool. Standing up over me, he seemed eight feet tall. I could smell the beer on his breath. “And you better leave the investigating to us. Amateurs don’t know what the hell they’re dealing with, and criminals are unpredictable. You don’t want to end up hurt.”
The funny thing is, when he said it, it sounded like a threat.