Murderabilia Read online

  Beside my “medicines” lay the strong-box. I opened it with a key and pulled out a bundle of photographs. His photographs. My talismans to ward off his evil. These were his secret sins, which I kept caged in that box and never looked at.

  I pulled out the photos and the old rubber band burst. His terrible images spilled over my desk. A familiar revulsion gripped my stomach. I hadn’t seen these pictures for years and yet each image was familiar.

  I found Leslie Miller. In the black-and-white photo, the long window above her kitchen counter framed the shot. Leslie Miller’s severed hands were clasped in prayer and jutted through the front wire supports of the dish drainer. Her head stared out from behind her hands. In mid-depth on the left sat an open can of Budweiser, its tab in the air. Above and behind the rack, on the windowsill, one naked foot pressed into a Tupperware container, the toenails painted a darkish color. Her other foot stood on the other side of the windowsill, to the right. Outside. The photo taped to my front door was identical—even the layering.

  Harvey Dean Kogan butchered Leslie Miller just before he was arrested. He’d decided she deserved to die because she’d lost her kids due to her alcoholism. After composing her picture, the Preying Hands slid her fingers, one by one, into a Trix cereal box and sent it to the Chicago Tribune. Trix are for kids, he wrote. Eighteen days later, police cars and FBI vans roared down the gravel road beside our double­wide trailer. I never saw my father again.

  Maybe something lighter than bourbon could take the edge off my dark thoughts. Walking would stop my legs from shaking. Gun in hand, I made my way to the kitchen and the bottle of Chablis in the fridge. Something stood in front of our dish drainer by the sink. It was an opened can of Budweiser.

  I hadn’t opened that beer can.

  We had no beer in our house.

  5

  I was a child when I last spoke with the police. The day my father was arrested they gave me a Coke at the station and called me Champ. “I’ll bet a husky guy like you likes football,” they said. I sat on a chair to face them, my feet dangling above the floor. A lady counselor sat beside me. All their smiles disappeared as soon as I spoke about Pop. The men’s big torsos—even their eyes—stiffened. “You didn’t hear or see anything?” they asked. “Nothing at all? Are you sure?” Even an eight-year-old could pick up the anger and suspicion behind those questions. There was a reason they’d separated me from Mama and Polly. To hurt Pop. To hurt our family.

  I go out of my way not to speak to the police.

  Now there was no choice. Not after that beer can appeared in our kitchen. But what would they say when I called in the middle of the night? “Your alarm was set?” “The only evidence is a beer can?” It would be best to wait until morning to tackle the police.

  I changed the house alarm code and stacked cans of food in pyramids against the front door and the side door into the garage. A half broomstick jammed the deck door closed. I checked twice that the windows were latched shut. Only then did I sit down on the couch, the revolver in my lap.

  At five a.m., I made coffee and stuck the food cans and broomstick back in a closet. I stared out our window and watched the sun burn through the morning coolness. Jill’s alarm blasted her awake at six fifteen. While she banged plates in the kitchen, I slipped into Garth’s room. Peeking through the blinds, I searched the front yard for footprints, displaced flowers, a wrapper or a piece of paper inadvertently discarded. I saw nothing.

  Garth watched me from bed. “Morning, big guy,” I said and gave him a hug. He wound his arms around me tightly. Too tightly? I stepped back. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded dreamily.

  “Did you have trouble sleeping last night?”

  He shook his head, crinkling his eyes in the way his mother did. I couldn’t discern any fright in his sleepy expression.

  Frieda lay in her bed with her stuffed bear. Above her a painted fairy princess and her pet dragon flew across the wall. I tried to sound the same as every other morning. “Did you and Micky Marvin sleep well?”

  She pointed to the window overlooking the front yard.

  I spun around.

  “El sol,” she said. The sun. It shone through her blinds.

  I wrapped my arms around her. She was so small compared to Garth. “I’ve got two bears who speak Spanish living in my house,” I said.

  She pulled away from me. “We’re osos.”

  “Did Mommy teach you that word?”

  She shook her head and grinned. “School.” She pointed to her other two bears. “If Wanda has two babies and Beatrice has two babies and Micky Marvin has two babies …”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll have nine bears.”

  Threes fascinated her. I played the same game as a child. Then fours and fives. My love of nines lasted a whole year.

  I stroked her hair. Both my children were safe.

  As the kids ate breakfast, I motioned Jill into our bedroom. She closed the door. Before I could say a word, she said, “Garth’s teacher called.”

  Our son loved his make-believe worlds much more than he liked school. The other kids had started to tease him. “He’ll grow out of it,” I said. “I did.”

  Jill cocked her head. She knew something was wrong.

  “I have a hankering for beer tonight,” I said. “Do we have any?” It was a clumsy way to ask the question. She didn’t drink beer.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. I just want some beer.”

  My fruitless trip to the park now seemed idiotic. I looked at my watch. Jill had to leave for school. It was not the time to panic her. Better to tell her after I talked to the police, when I could assure her that they’d protect us.

  “It’s about my harasser,” I said. “But I’m taking care of it. We’ll talk tonight.” I wrote down the new alarm code and gave it to her.

  She stared at the piece of paper. “Now you’re scaring me.”

  “It’s good to change the alarm once in a while,” I said.

  6

  My father killed and photographed six women before I was born. To find him, the police set up a special unit that screened thousands of people. They picked up men recently released from mental hospitals and previously arrested for sex crimes. They visited photography studios and clubs, searching for anyone taking kinky photos. The city had to hire extra people to crosscheck the fifteen thousand tips. But no one got close to Harvey Dean Kogan. Except one. Me. The same huge hands that had cradled his victims’ heads cradled me.

  A year after I was born, the Preying Hands chloroformed a woman who regained consciousness. She escaped before he could steal her away. Fingerprints on live skin disappear quickly, but because she ran to the police, they managed to extract the image of an index finger from her cheek. It didn’t help. Harvey Dean Kogan had never been arrested and his prints weren’t on file. He’d never even registered for the draft. A strand of his hair had fallen onto her blouse collar, but DNA analysis didn’t exist then. When asked for a description, the woman said she was so panicked she never saw him. My father still lay low. He was a planner, what the experts call an “organized killer.”

  I’d often wondered how he controlled his urges, sometimes for years. I used to believe that his restraint came from more than just a fear of getting caught. Maybe he resisted his secret life because it would tear his family apart. Now such speculation seems like delusion, a delusion not unlike Mama’s willful blindness.

  After a few months, the Preying Hands killed again. Police teams fanned out across Chicago. Their twenty-five-thousand pages of interviews and statements could have formed a pile eight feet high. Thousands of hours of taped interviews sat stacked in lockers. By then, the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime had offered some theories. The killer suffered from a mother-hate complex. He murdered to repress his homosexuality. The killer was a woman
who’d experienced sex as a punishment. As if anyone could really think the Preying Hands was a woman. The FBI analyzed the timing of the slayings and deduced that the crimes weren’t influenced by the phases of the moon or the anniversary of some event. They were completely flummoxed.

  Eventually the FBI admitted the Preying Hands might be anyone in the community. Maybe a married man with a job and children. His profession must have enabled him to slip away to attack women in both the daytime and the night. Neither the FBI nor the police attempted a composite sketch or physical profile. No living person had seen him. Any medium-sized man could subdue a woman with chloroform. The police must have been desperate when they consulted a psychic. Leonora Delavito saw black hands pressing in on Chicago from the outside, but she never narrowed down the “outside” to a small town like Blue Meadow, Illinois.

  All of Chicago was spooked. One woman shot a boy who knocked on her door for directions. Another said she killed her husband because she was sure he was “the one.” Investigators soon learned that “the one” also owned a large life insurance policy and was having an affair. As the paranoia increased, late night talk show hosts and magazine writers made jokes that men discreetly passed along to other men: “Don’t just pray—give God a hand.” “Be careful when you go to your photographer for a headshot.” Outraged women condemned the “typical male coarseness” in long newspaper editorials.

  My father watched it all, never giving us a hint of his secret hobby. When he emerged from his photo shed, his enormous hands only clutched color shots of Mama, Polly, and me. As I remember that period in my early childhood, his moods stand out. Some days he could barely speak and didn’t stir from the couch. On others, he’d pick flowers for Mama, and Polly and Mama would bake cookies. The smells of butter and chocolate filled the doublewide. He’d wrestle with me and we’d throw rocks at monsters in the creek. During those happy times, Polly and I wanted to spend every moment with him. It turned out that those days were the ones after he’d killed someone.

  7

  I’d never told anyone at work about my father. In our bank, gossip was a currency and my father’s identity would be gold. One casual announcement from me, and in minutes most of my colleagues would be whispering into their phones. By morning the reporters would ring our doorbell at home and show up at the bank. Soon my clients would complain to Vanessa, our CEO. Where were the discreet financial services they’d been promised? Of course it wasn’t right, they’d say, but negotiating a loan with the son of a serial killer made them uneasy.

  Now was not the time for the great reveal at the bank. The best course, until Jill and I figured out what to do, was to go to work as if nothing had happened.

  I shut myself in the smallest conference room. With its antique moldings, Victorian lamps, and fold-down mahogany card table, it looked like the den in a dowager’s house. For five minutes, I closed my eyes and tried to focus.

  I called Polly and told her about the emailed link and the trip to the park, not mentioning the beer can I’d found in our kitchen. Polly would have exploded if she suspected that someone had broken into our house, and I was too exhausted to deal with one of my sister’s outbursts. Predictably, her first shouted question was whether I had a gun. She had two. She’d also studied kickboxing and karate. But even after a feast, my sister didn’t reach a hundred pounds. “You be careful too,” I said, knowing my warning was pointless. Polly wasn’t about to let some man scare her into changing her routines.

  After I hung up, I stared at the bronze angel clock and relived the night before. The light from the window burned my face, as if the small room were a tastefully decorated oven. By the time I picked up the phone again, I was so angry I had to stand.

  The police transferred me to someone in the crime squad. When I divulged who my father was, he said, “The Harvey Dean Kogan? No wonder you changed your name.”

  I couldn’t tell him that someone had broken into our home. Not when the only evidence was a beer can. Instead I described the copy of Harvey Dean Kogan’s photo taped to our door.

  “Some people might call that a threat,” he said. “But I’m not sure a court would agree.”

  “We need protection,” I said.

  He actually chuckled. “Haven’t done that for years. No budget.”

  How could the police not even consider protection? I glared at the striped-cloth chair and the fold-up antique table. I imagined flinging them against the wall. We couldn’t afford private security. And what would this man do to my family the next time he broke into our house?

  “I’ll tell you what we can do,” he said. “Send someone out to talk to you.”

  As if talking with a policeman would stop this man. But what choice did I have? I gave him my address at the bank.

  The next call went to our alarm monitoring company. Jill had refused motion detectors and cameras in our home, but that was before last night. The man at the company said the earliest anyone could upgrade our system was the next afternoon. No extra alarm would protect our house that night. Except me.

  My head felt full of wadded-up Kleenex. I left the conference room and strode down the main hallway, veering through the French doors toward my office. Bob, our rainmaker, stood inside the office across from mine. He leaned over his desk, one arm resting on a stack of tax returns. A light blue handkerchief peeked out of the pocket of his pinstripe. Even he called himself “Bullshit Bob.” Bob could sell you something you didn’t even know you wanted. The only person better at it was the man I didn’t like to think about. My father.

  As usual, Bob’s deep voice boomed out over the phone. In the office next to him, Ambrose stood and closed her door, not even pausing as she spieled her client.

  Bob hung up and his phone rang again. “Thanks, Kathy. I’ll be right there.” His eyes widened when he saw me. He hung up and moved to intercept me. “We have to talk,” he said. “Massy’s here. He asked to see me. I didn’t call him.”

  Lawrence Massy was a well-known La Jolla ophthalmologist whose business I’d almost won before I left my previous bank.

  Bob sped by me and opened the French doors. Massy stood in the main hallway. His hair shone dark black against his cherry-red eyeglass frames.

  Perhaps something had changed at the bank. Was Bob stealing my prospect?

  8

  Two hours later and still no word from the police. At least Jill and our kids were safe at school. I had to take a meeting.

  This conference room was called the “living room” because of its faux antique wainscoting and green and rose floral couches. Vanessa Barksdale, my boss, sat opposite Jim Poderovsky at the pearl-inlaid table. She was barely five feet tall and, as usual, draped in pearls. Maybe it was Jim’s husky body, or the fake Louis XIV chair, but that morning she reminded me of a blonde child queen. A queen who was the best schmoozer I’d ever worked with. She remembered the names of every client, their children and their grandchildren. She knew what schools they attended, what they liked to do for entertainment, and who had decorated their houses. I’m sure she also knew about Jim’s father and his reputed mob connections. But Jim didn’t let his family tarnish him. He never even brought up their names. And I wasn’t about to hold his father against him.

  I sat next to her and tried to smile away the night before. “So nice to see you again,” I said to Jim.

  Jim’s big body seemed taut, even as he rested his loafers on the table’s paw legs. He wore a suit rather than his usual khakis and polo shirt. Even his smile looked strained. As he rambled on about his latest safari, Vanessa’s eyes widened and narrowed. Her face crinkled as her voice bubbled into a laugh. She was reeling him in. I wondered what the prize was.

  She poured coffee from the silver tea set. “So how’s Cheryl?” she said.

  Jim examined his coffee cup as if evaluating the bone china. He sipped and slowly set the cup in the saucer. “She’s in Hawaii with Megan.” Megan
was his young daughter.

  “I’m so jealous,” Vanessa said.

  That was misdirection. Vanessa knew as well as I did that Jim’s pause before answering hinted at something. Four weeks earlier he’d brought his new estate planning attorney to the bank—without Cheryl, his wife of six years. She’d always joined the meetings. Then Jim wanted to sell some nicely performing apartment buildings, despite having no apparent need for cash. I thought about the Four Ds that made our chief credit officer twitch: drugs, dementia, death, and divorce.

  Jim jerked forward and the wooden chair groaned. “You know, I think you shouldn’t need Cheryl to sign on the loans anymore. I mean, look at my track record.”

  He was getting divorced. I was sure of it. Jim must have just found out that Cheryl wouldn’t guarantee any more of his business loans. The issue was how, after the carnage from the settlement, he’d repay our line of credit. Cheryl would hire a pit bull lawyer and Jim might no longer own any assets that he could sell to repay us. That’s why we had to keep her on the hook for the loan.

  I should have spewed out some vague words about lending principles and fanatical banking regulators. But I was so frazzled I couldn’t muster the energy. I had to get back to my office to be available for the police.

  Vanessa picked up a coaster. Apparently deep in thought, she fondled our gold-pillared emblem. “Well, maybe we could manage something.”

  Heat crept up my cheeks. There were lots of financial numbers I could massage—debt ratios, historical income, recurring cash flow, even what we count as liquidity. But releasing a wife from a loan guarantee? I forced myself to take a deep breath. There are few things that will cut short a career faster than publicly contradicting your boss. Now was not the time to get fired.

  Vanessa sculpted her hair, as if further pondering Jim’s request, and said, “William, why don’t you talk with Chad about this?”