Frenzy (16 page)

" — understand what I'm telling you, here." Troxell's tone jolted him and he said, shaking his head in confusion, "All these
names
. . . Who
are
these people? Why didn't the police do something? Who's responsible?"

"In a general sense we all are. Anybody who buys a videocassette that contains pornography is feeding that business. But this was a special subbranch of that particular world. Child porn is a bigger industry than most of us think. It has a relatively small but intensely active production and distribution chain. It is obviously aimed at the underground. The home market and the illegal subculture — and it's within that distribution and manufacture that the industry is tied to organized crime. The men who killed your daughter — Morales the cameraman, and Belmonte the packager, and, if you want to call him that, the producer — were making a snuff film for an outfit that is run by a man named Kriegal. He controls production for much of the mid-western and southern states."

"If his identity is known, why don't the police arrest him?"

"It's not that easy. He's like most of the smart mob people now. He stays sufficiently insulated from the actual criminal acts that he remains just out of reach so far as the law goes."

"I just don't see how that can be. I mean, pornography and — torture — and murder —"

"It is the same as the narcotics business. It is protected. Protected not just by dirty cops or politicians but by the green curtain of money that gets pulled across the face of any business with a semilegitimate facade. The crime families are enormous now."

"This man — does he control the porn business for the Mafia here?"

"Yes, but he's just a soldier in an army of mob people, and the snuff movies and all of that are at the extreme outside of the circle of syndicate production. What is now sometimes called The Syrian Mafia, just a newspaper name, but it refers to the top men in the crime family here, two men named Rikla and Measure who control mixed ethnic factions of what is left of the old crime organizations."

"And they specialize in porn with children?"

"I doubt if those men even realize the extent of Kriegal's kiddie-porn operation. They are older men — both in their seventies, and technically they are called 'crew bosses' for the top capos. A man named Salvatore Dagatina, now elderly and in prison. A man named Tony Cypriot, his real name is Ciprioni, who more or less controls the underworld in the Midwest, but their so-called 'underbosses' " — he glanced at a piece of paper —"this James Russo and Lyie Venable, they take a part of Kriegal's profits, so presumably they, at least from a structural standpoint, oversee the operation for their higher-ups. It plays only the smallest part in the overall crime cartel."

"How do you get justice for something like this? The real murderers are as much these men you've just been talking about as they are the ones who actually did it."

Troxell saw what he thought might be the hint of total breakdown in the face of the man. His body suddenly had that brittle look a person sometimes gets before they come unglued. Spain let himself shake in an uncontrollable spasm. It didn't take much playacting on his part. Ever since he'd heard Ciprioni's name he'd been shaking visibly. That cocksucking scum. All the times he'd kissed that guinea ass. Yes sir, MISTER Ciprioni. The times he'd killed for him. Jesus CHRIST, it was too much.

He could hear himself telling the PI, "I just can't . . . I can't go through it. No more. I've lost my wife and now my KID!" His body felt like it was going to self-destruct right then and there. Additionally, there was the curious sensation of watching himself putting it on for Troxell. He wondered for just a fleeting instant as he tried to manifest the signs of a nervous breakdown if indeed he
was
having one. "The endless questions. Tiff's name smeared in filth." Going on as he shook apart, letting the words freeze his heart. Something about the legal system being what it is. Turnstile justice. The incompetence of the doo-dah and the law's doo-dah, and so forth and so on and vamp to the coda. "Years of agony and notoriety for my dead daughter and WHAT THE FUCK FOR? They'd never do a week in jail for it —" on and on.

Troxell just looked across at his client and mentally shrugged. He couldn't put this guy through it. Here was a man on the brink of total collapse. One look and you could see he was unwrapping.

Now he could see he'd read Spain all wrong. The facade he'd thought was icy strength was just a persona — the frozen mask of a man wound tight, a main-spring about to break under pressure, a bereaved father strung out to his limits and beyond. Frank Spain was somebody balanced on the lip of a deep nervous breakdown.

Still, Mel Troxell tried to argue for the prosecution of the guilty as much as the system would allow. He gently tried to convince Spain that he was too far gone to handle this properly, which brought out all the stops. Spain went into a screaming rage about how he was the client paying the bills, he was the father who had lost a daughter, and he did such a job of portraying a mind about to snap that Troxell finally just shrugged one last time and left. The irony was that it was only an act in Spain's mind. The reason he'd been so convincing with Troxell was that he was in fact going insane. And this beckoning insanity was what the PI saw and what allowed that door to be closed.

The moment the man left, Spain shut off the flow of emotion the way you'd close a faucet. He sat very quietly reading the report again, although he didn't need to do so. Every name, every phrase, every comma, every sentence, was burned into his forebrain, blasted into the cortex forever. Yet he read the report again. And yet a third time. Reading between the lines with the years of insider knowledge that led him down new streets not covered on the pages. He made new, more informed assumptions. Conjecture and theory gave way to the beginnings of his plan. Again, a fourth rereading, this time making notes on a yellow legal pad as he reread the story of his daughter's seduction, abuse, addiction, torture, and degradation. And then, her horror-filled death.

Once again he reads of the fourteen-year-old stranger — this child of his — and the utter and absolute monstrousness of the crimes and inhuman acts committed against her. And once again he follows her trail down to Florida and to Texas, and across the border and into Mexico for her last, screaming, blood-flecked moment of "stardom" in the blinding, white-hot lights. And as he reads the hand of death touches a burning match to a slow fuse.

He begins his own list. It begins
    GAETANO CIPRIONI
and then
    SALVATORE DAGATINA.

And the list has many, many names. The list becomes sacred to him. It is his holy quest. Names. An endless list of what he now thinks of as numbers. Numbers he will do. All of them, each as responsible as the next for the death and horrors of his beloved Tiff as surely as if they were the physical perpetrator.

He makes a little shrine of the film canister and it sits on a shelf there in the study, resting like an urn of ashes from the crematorium, tugging at him and spearing his heart and tearing at his mind until he feels himself burst inside.

And Spain sits there feeling himself disintegrate and the pieces going off the deep end, and he carefully draws a line through the name second from the bottom,

ROGER NUNNALY

He will study the thick dossier until his reddened eyes sting with exhaustion. There are other names he will want to add to his holy list, his private shit list of numbers. Others who will now have to pay with the dearest possible currency, as he has. All of them connected into the network of terror and degradation that conspired to take his family from him, and then to make his daughter's dying a hellish nightmare.

He sees an immediate twist to his plan that will make the joy of what he is about to do all the more rich and delicious. How he savors his taste for the names. And this, the way he will play them against one another, knowing their great weaknesses as he does, this is frosting on the poisonous cake. He must pull himself together, he thinks.

The tears have long dried. But as he reads and makes his notes, his body continues to shake with fury and despair. And he prays for madness to take him now.

"So there I am in my red Santa Claus suit and I got the fake beard on and, shit, an' this little girl comes up with this fox of a mother and I go, Climb up on Santa's lap an' tell him what you want for Christmas. An' when you're done, MOMMY can climb up on Santa's face an' tell him what she wants."

"Bullshit," Eichord could hear James Lee telling his partner. "You ain't got a fuckin' lap. You got a couple of lower fat rolls you might push together — that'd be about it." Eichord held the phone closer to his ear but then he heard the recorded music again and pulled it away again as he heard Tuny say, "Might push YOU together and make a fuckin' gook accordion," and he changed ears with the receiver just as a voice came back on the telephone and gave him the answer to his question.

" 'Preciate it. Thanks. Yep," he told the phone, "I will. Thanks again." So that was it. The last dead end on the paper trail of one Floyd Streicher. Somebody jetting out of LAX just plain didn't exist. He'd run the whole nine yards through MCTF. Everything from motor vehicles to telephone records. He'd run it out for a hundred-mile radius around Metro St. Louis. No such animal. Floyd, he of the hooded eyes — Eichord felt sure — did not exist. So Floyd boarded the TWA flight, but some other wise guy deplaned in St. Louis. So what? Now what?

The killing came from mysterious and dark energies stockpiled during the long weeks of hibernation and doldrum, at first an expulsion of high-energy flow resulting from a prolonged gestation period and then a shaking of the carbonation in its vacuum-sealed, hermetic skin sack of bubbling, exploding pressures.

At first he could never fully wake up and he slept fourteen sometimes sixteen hours a day. A deep, drugged sleep-coma that hammered him senseless over and over, and he'd crawl back into his nest of dirty bed linens scarcely rumpled from the last sleepathon and with eyes already stinging seek the dark, forgetting comfort of slumber. He slept hard. Mind on hold. His subconscious floating along in the black, timeless oblivion of perpetual night.

Sometimes his bladder would poke him awake and he'd lurch out of his mummy wrappings to pee, eyes half-closed in his prune face as he splashed carelessly over the sides of the commode, staggering back to his unknowing stupor, sound asleep even as his sheet-scarred, wrinkled countenance slammed back down into his beloved, warm nest of covers and unclean bedclothes. Soreness was his alarm clock and discomfort was all that kept him on his feet for seven or eight hours a day.

He never fully awoke. Minimal activity, meals, the mandatory rituals of existence, a sedentary period of staring off into space, then the great weight of it all returning to settle over him like a wet and heavy cloak, weighing him down and forcing him back into his snug, fetal curl within the womb of darkness and collapse.

He sat very still for nearly two days and a night staring with intense concentration at the small can of film as he watched the disaster of his life unfold again and again on the instant replay of his merciless memory. He got up from the chair a few times when his body ached from the motionlessness or from a need to relieve itself, and back in the same seated position to stare some more.

He forgot to drink water for a time and after nearly twenty-four hours his throat had become so raw it was all he could do to swallow.

By the next day he had begun to hear strange things. The noises of the house had become unbearably loud and annoying. He could hear the blood coursing through his veins, and he imagined he could detect arteries beginning to clot and harden. Cells beginning to die. Synapses misfiring. Relays failing. He imagined the machine of his body beginning to self-destruct.

He imagined that the cauliflower of his cerebellum was rotting. His olfactory sense detected the smell of rotting vegetable, and neurons, millions of nerve cells in the hippocampus, attempted to feed the atrophied terminals of the brain's computer. The computer, red-lining on dangerous overload, short-circuited, back-fired, and blew the lights out in his mind.

He fell into a deep, brain-dead sleep. Inert. Torpid. Comatose. Spain no longer dreamed.

When I awake, he thinks, I awaken all atingle. The plan has asserted itself. He awakens remembering all the words to "Lonely Teardrops" as sung by Jackie Wilson. He is fairly certain he could bench-press 350 pounds. He knows his brain has been totally rewired, and he smells burning leaves, toast with ham and eggs, chocolate cupcakes and cold milk, steak tartare with blood running on the platter, freshly baked bread, Tuborg, a German wine he cannot pronounce, Chanel, newly mown spring bermuda, all of these disparate smells sensed simultaneously as his brain screws its olfactory bulb back into the socket.

He knows he could mentally run the hundred in 9.9, memorize the A-through-C section of Webster's unabridged (AARDVARK: of its genus,
Orycteropus,
it is sole representative of an order, Tubulidentata), climb tirelessly and never fall, fully understand the implications of the theory of noctivating flora, remember a joke about a man named Wolfshlegelsteinhausenber-gerdorf, knows he could now play "Willow Weep for Me" on a B-flat alto, and awash in the diluvial sea of information flooding into his brain, he showers, shits, shaves, brushes, flosses, medicates, deodorizes, and begins to pack.