TKO (2 page)

“I want to feel someday that the world isn’t out to get me,” he said and then began to cry. He cried into his hands as intensely as I’ve ever seen anyone cry, and then he abruptly stopped and looked up at me. His eyes were red and his cheeks were stained, but he got himself completely under control almost instantly. A long stretch in prison will teach you how to hide how you feel. I can’t imagine the firestorm that brews inside of someone who can shut off emotion like that so quickly.

To me, Howard was a guy who had known a lifetime of pain and had no skills to deal with it. His mom abused him and the kids at school abused him. The killing spree was his way of standing up for himself. For me, it was a misguided, albeit extremely misguided, attempt to stand up for himself. It sounds twisted, but I respected the fact that he stood up for himself because, to me, that’s what makes a man a man. Standing up for yourself can mean saying you won’t allow yourself to be talked to in a certain way, it can mean defending yourself physically, or it can mean a certain inner peace that tells you that your own self-respect is worth protecting. In Howard’s case, it meant some extreme acting-out, but that had more to do with how screwed-up his life had been than any innate evil that lived within him. At least that’s how I saw it. He’d been to see Abadon twice, and the doctor’s assessment was far less sympathetic than mine. He classified Rheinhart as “a low-functioning, antisocial, and pathologically insecure individual.” It wasn’t a diagnosis with a lot of hope attached to it.

It was Monday and Howard was supposed to be in at ten. It was now ten fifteen and there was no sign of him. As usual, I was way behind in my paperwork, and a good use of my time would have been to take the opportunity to get going on it. But alas, a man has to eat, and I happened to know that at ten thirty the in-service on “Art Therapy with the Vietnam Vet” was scheduled. That meant that there had to be donuts.

I pilfered one powdered and one plain just as the social workers were filing in and picking up their finger paints. I grabbed a cup of the brownish liquid that passed for the clinic’s coffee and slid away from the oblivious social workers filing in. It isn’t difficult to get past social workers because as a group they are usually consumed with their own issues to the point that leaving the house in the morning already sets the bar pretty high for them. The clinic’s coffee tended to affect my digestive system like some sort of New Age cleansing high colonic, but I drank it anyway.

So far I’d been lucky enough to duck my boss. Claudia Michelin, a certified social worker who lived for rules and regulations, hated most folks and probably got into social work because it gave her power over weak people. The supermodel world had closed down for Claudia a while ago, as she had more chins than the Hong Kong phone book and sported a black curly perm just like Starsky used to have … or was it Hutch? Anyway, the Michelin Woman has been trying to fire me for years and came pretty close to being successful about a year ago.

I was busy dunking the second donut into the coffee and cursing at the amount of white powder that had gotten all over my shirt when the phone rang. It was my cop friend, Mike Kelley.

“Good morning, officer. Keeping the streets safe for us grateful citizens?” I said.

“Uh, Duff, you are the counselor who sees Hackin’ Howard, aren’t you?”

“We like to stay away from nicknames, but yes, I am.”

“You see him today?”

“You know I’m not supposed to divulge confidential information like that.”

“Uh-huh,” Kelley said.

“I certainly wouldn’t disclose to one of you heartless police officials that a client didn’t keep his ten a.m. appointment.”

“Hey, Duff?” Kelley sounded serious, which he always did, but a little more serious than usual.

“Yeah?”

“A girl from McDonough High was found this morning with her throat slit. Her name was Connie Carter.”

“Holy shi—,” I said.

“And Duff …” Kelley hesitated. “She was the captain of the cheerleaders.”

2

I agreed to meet
Kelley after work at our usual hangout, AJ’s Grill. The key to AJ’s is consistency. It’s consistently empty except for Kelley, the Fearsome Foursome, and AJ himself. The Schlitz, my adult beverage of choice, is consistently cold, AJ is consistently rude, and the Foursome are consistently arguing over the most inane of topics. Tonight was no different.

“I’m telling ya,” Rocco said. “Mr. Ed was really a zebra.”

“That’s horseshit,” TC countered.

“Or zebra shit,” Jerry Number Two said.

“If Ed was a zebra, how did they hide his stripes?” Jerry Number One asked.

“In black and white TV, the stripes all came out the same, which is why the football players were always running into the refs,” Rocco explained.

“Huh?” TC said.

“How come Wilbur wasn’t always running into Ed the zebra?” Jerry Number One asked.

“Hold it.” TC wanted to slow things down. “Why were the football players running into the refs? Were they watching the games on TV while they played?”

“Remember the horse in the Wizard of Oz?” Jerry Number Two chimed in. “Was he a zebra too?”

Kelley was in his seat, which was one removed from the Foursome, half turned away from them, watching the television. I decided to forgo the resolution of the Ed the zebra/horse discussion, and I sat next to Kel. AJ opened a longneck of Schlitz and slid it in front of me.

“They can’t find him,” Kelley said.

“Rheinhart?”

“No, Ed the fucking invisible zebra.”

“A little tense tonight, huh?”

“What’s to be tense about? It’s not like there’s a serial killer on the loose.”

“I don’t know, Kel, he didn’t seem like he was capable of it,” I said.

“C’mon, Duff, history would point in the other direction,” he said.

“It’s been thirty years, and the whole time in prison they didn’t have any trouble with him.”

“How much trouble is a 140-pound redhead going to cause at Green Haven? He probably never left his cell,” Kelley said.

Kelley sipped his Coors Light and watched the TV. I say “watched the TV,” but even though his eyes were pointed in that direction, Kelley faced the TV to avoid getting drawn into the Foursome’s discussions. ESPN Classic was showing the Johnny Unitas story. It seemed like you could see the referees very clearly in the black and white footage.

“Look, Kel, what do I know? Talk to the shrinks,” I said.

“I’m sure the detectives will. I was hoping you could give me some insight,” Kelley said.

“Sorry—I don’t know a whole lot about Howard. The last time I met with him, he broke down and said he wanted a life where people weren’t out to get him.”

“Heartwarming from a guy who murdered four people.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, the guy’s never had a chance in life. What he did back in high school was his only way of standing up for himself.”

“Wouldn’t you say that he might have gone a tad overboard?”

“Of course—but this guy had nothin’ his whole life in terms of a family. He had nothin’ normal to base his actions on. He spent his whole life getting his ass kicked, and this was the time he said ‘enough,’” I said.

“Uh-huh. That’s great. You’ve been hanging around that clinic too much. You’re starting to sound like the rest of the social workers,” Kelley said.

Maybe Kelley was right, but something told me that Howard’s life and motivations weren’t that simple. Talking about it didn’t help me figure it out, so I let it go and joined Kelley in watching the Unitas story.

Meanwhile, the Foursome had moved on. Jerry Number One was confused about Canadian Football rules.

“Why do they only get three downs?”

“Because the field is wider,” Rocco said.

“What?” TC said.

“The field is so wide they don’t need a fourth down,” Rocco explained.

“Don’t they all have an extra player?” Jerry Number One asked.

“Yeah, so?” said Rocco.

“They’re Canadian, what do you expect?” said TC.

I didn’t want to kick around the plight of the gridiron ballers to our north, so I got in my Eldorado and headed home. I recently had the burnt orange ’76 Cadillac tuned up, and it still didn’t exactly purr like a kitten—maybe like a kitten with a hairball issue. I headed out of the industrial part of town where AJ’s was located to Route 9R where I lived in my somewhat-customized Airstream trailer, the Moody Blue. It’s named after Elvis’s last hit, at least while he was alive. I only listen to Elvis, and most of the time it’s on eight-track tapes because in ’76, eight-track players were what the cool Eldorados came with. I take a lot of shit for being an Elvis fan, but it’s just another one of those cases where I believe I’m right and the people who don’t like Elvis are wrong. Actually, it’s deeper than that. If someone doesn’t like Elvis, at least a little bit, I feel there’s something wrong with their character or their spirit or something. Tonight, on the way home, he was singing his Dylan medley, “I Shall Be Released” and “Don’t Think Twice.”
I never heard Dylan’s versions.

I rent the Blue from Dr. Rudy, my buddy, my cutman, and an all-around good guy. Rudy has done me more than a few favors over the years and I try to pay him back, but I know I’m deeply in arrears when it comes to favors.

Al, my roommate, greeted me at the door with his customary kick to the nuts. He’s a basset hound, his full Muslim name being Allah-King. He used to belong to a client of mine named Walanda who used to be in the Nation of Islam. Walanda went off to jail and I promised to take care of Al for thirty days, but then Walanda got murdered. Al never does anything he’s told, he’s eaten a couch, and he’s never quite mastered the whole housebreaking thing. The thing is, Al saved my life a couple of times a while back and he has a patch of reddish-brown hair on top of his mostly black head from where a bullet grazed him to prove it. Like it or not, we’re stuck with each other.

Al did a couple of 360s, grabbed an old running shoe, and jumped up on our new couch. The arms of the couch lost their upholstery within seventy-two hours of its delivery because when Al writes in his day planner “Ruin expensive item” and puts A-1 next to it, he makes sure the project gets done. He is committed to his time-management system.

I was wondering if I’d hear from Marcia, my latest nutcase of a girlfriend. Like many of the women I’ve dated over the last few years, Marcia has turned out to be crazy. She seemed okay at first, but lately she’s been weirding out on me. Last Friday she started crying in the middle of a movie we were watching and we had to leave the theater.

It was a Jim Carrey movie.

She said that it was difficult for her to laugh when life was full of so much suffering. I agreed, drove her home, and got drunk at AJ’s. Our sex life has been suffering a bit lately as well, and I believe the condition is known as
basset interruptus
. The other night it went something like this:

Marcia and I got back to the Blue after a night out for dinner and drinks. She wasn’t too maladjusted that night, so I proceeded to lower the lights, pour some Riunite for her, and, because I was going for that whole James Bond feel, I drank my Schlitz out of a fancy pilsner glass. While Elvis started crooning through “Love Letters” and “Young and Beautiful,” I turned up the Duff love-tron for some steamy action.

Marcia’s breathing quickened, she pulled me down on top of her and we rolled off the sofa and onto the carpeted floor. She leaned her head back and let out a sigh while she undid the buttons on her white blouse and reached for the snap on the top of her Levis. As she shimmied out of them in that sexy but awkward way that women get out of jeans while in the horizontal position, I saw Al standing about ten feet away in the threshold that led to the dining area.

I gave him a dirty look and tried to move my head in a way to point him out of the room and away from us. He just looked me up and down. Not knowing what else to do, I decided to proceed with the matter at hand and pretend Al wasn’t there. I got lost in it and Marcia and I were grooving. During a certain phase of this while Marcia was executing a certain act, I made the mistake of moaning. I don’t like to admit it, but I do occasionally express myself during such activity.

Well, Al didn’t care for the moaning at all. I heard a growl, then successive barks, and then the rough scratching sounds of basset feet and nails. Then came the squealing from Marcia who was knocked back toward the coach with a flying shoulder block from Al the middle linebacker. I sat my naked ass up, looked at my girlfriend rolling over onto her side, and peered down at Al, who was snarling and growling on the carpet in front of me. You may find this hard to relate to, but it felt strange being naked with my naked girlfriend and having an eighty-five-pound long-snouted, short-legged hound between us.

Little things like that would kill the mood for Marcia.

The last three would-be sexual episodes have had similar outcomes, and even when I locked Al in the bathroom, he howled and slammed into the door so much it had about the same effect. Looking on the bright side of the situation, Al kept me free of sexually transmitted diseases and I had few birth-control issues.

I checked the machine and it looked like I had two calls. The first was indeed from Marcia.