Lake of Darkness Read online

  “I still ain’t clear on this,” Flip said. “What are we doing?”

  “It’s better if he tells you,” Crespo replied mysteriously. “He’ll like to. No matter how big you get in the world, there’s still some things you like to do yourself.”

  Halfway down the dark alley was a metal door with a brass handle. Before it loitered a lone uniformed police officer, smoking. There was a crushed straw hat at his feet. The officer regarded Crespo, who then indicated Flip. The uniformed officer squinted and screwed up his face as though trying to make himself believe that this skinny Negro was the special guest they had been awaiting.

  The uniformed officer opened the door. The hinges needed oil and yelped like a sickly cat, kicked hard. It made Flip jump a little, but only a little.

  “Last door at the-”

  “I know where to go,” Crespo said, brushing past the officer.

  Flip followed.

  They proceeded down a narrow wood-paneled hallway—dimly lit, but lit—which Crespo navigated without hesitation.

  At the end of the hall was a single door, painted dark red, or so it seemed in the scant electric light. The mullions had been carved into long-tailed lizards. One of the stiles had been damaged by a blow, probably from a cane or gun butt. From beneath, cigar smoke poured, regular and thick. There was the sound of muffled conversation.

  Crespo leaned over to Flip and spoke softly.

  “I can only tell you two things about how to deal with the man. The first is that he can tell when you lie, so don’t lie to him. The other thing is . . .”

  Crespo’s voice fell further, practically to a whisper.

  “He, himself, will almost always lie. But you won’t know it ’till-”

  Before Crespo could finish, the red door was opened by a banker. Or so it might have been. Ironed shirt. Bright necktie. Diamond stickpin. White shoes. Expensive cigar. Soft, gloved hands.

  The banker looked at Crespo and Flip, then smiled a smile of genial contempt. A smile that said the two policemen were parade animals in some kind of show for children or imbeciles. Then he folded forward obsequiously—very unlike a banker, but now like a server at a private club—and beckoned them enter the smoky room.

  Past the banker was a round wooden poker table with a green felt top. At the table sat a figure in a dark suit. He was hunched forward and wore a voluminous, almost flowing jacket and vest, making it difficult for an onlooker to tell exactly how large he really was. The seated figure faced away from the door, and did not turn as his guests were bid enter. His fleshy neck was exposed. Had Flip and Crespo intended him harm—to rush forward and slit his throat, for example—no one could have intervened to save his life.

  Perhaps, thought Flip, offering up a naked, upturned neck was the ultimate sign of power. Or of madness.

  A light bulb dangled from a thin cord above the table. It moved ever so slightly in the breeze from the door. When it swayed, it took the shadows with it. The seated figure seemed to shrink or grow with each sway.

  Then the figure—slowly—stood. And turned. And in the shaky light of the small room, it seemed to Flip, and possibly also to Crespo, that, in some strange way, the city itself had stood and acknowledged their presence. And now prepared to address them.

  Three hundred pounds in a day when the average man weighed half that, Big Bill Thompson—the Mayor of Chicago—was not made porcine or roundfaced by his size. Instead, he managed only a genteel waddle beneath his prominent, quarterback’s chin. His belt thrust far forward, as though a globe were concealed in his trousers. He was tall, but not taller than Flip. He had a small mouth that looked ready to make careful, pertinent statements. He was not yet fifty, but had the stately bearing of a much older public servant.

  The mayor’s most striking trait, however, was that he managed to be both handsome and repellent at the same time. Handsome from a distance, but repellent—that was the only word for it—when you got up close. When you took a second look. And Flip did.

  The folds of the mayor’s powerful athlete’s neck concealed infected pocks and acne scars. His teeth were generally straight, but beset by rot from cigar and pipe smoke. Regarding Big Bill Thompson was like regarding a gourmet meal that had been left in an alley for a day or two. Cover the patch with the wriggling cockroaches and worms, and maybe the rest still looked good enough to eat. Maybe. But also, maybe not. And then you still knew about the worms.

  “Mister Mayor,” Crespo said.

  Flip found that his own throat had gone completely dry. He had not expected this encounter. Nonetheless, he managed a slight bow in the mayor’s direction.

  “This is the one I told you about, Mister Mayor,” Crespo continued. “The one I thought could help.”

  The mayor’s small mouth stretched into a grin.

  “Yes,” the mayor said. “That’s fine. Does he talk?”

  Crespo glanced hard at Flip from the corner of his eye.

  “Yes I do, Mister Mayor,” Flip said through a scratchy throat. “I certainly do.”

  “Well that’s fine indeed,” the mayor said.

  “Joseph Flippity,” Crespo said. “Just about everyone calls him Flip. Everyone on the force, that is.”

  The mayor nodded, deigning that this might be acceptable.

  Flip had seen the mayor before, but only from a great distance. This giant. This titan. This planet.

  Thompson was a Republican, from the party of Lincoln—and Lincoln and Thompson were both names known along South State Street. Thompson had been the first mayor in the city’s history to actively court the vote of black folks, and to speak of his mission as including furthering their interests. A scion of important local families, he had nonetheless killed a man with his bare hands in 1893. A career in Chicago politics had followed swiftly thereafter. His rise had been quick and straightforward. Thompson was well-liked and effective. He was plainspoken. He was not afraid to go anywhere or meet with anybody. Many already had their eyes on him as a contender for the highest office in the land. (Woodrow Wilson was an effete, East Coast college professor who had not killed anybody with his bare hands. When the political winds decided to shift back in the other direction, many felt they might shift to Big Bill Thompson.)

  The mayor slicked back a loose strand of hair, then carefully tented his fingers. He opened his mouth and smiled, but for a moment did not speak. Flip had encountered precisely this kind of hesitation in the course of enforcing the law. The normally garrulous clergyman searching for the words to explain how the young girl, or boy, had come to be half-naked on his office couch. The storekeep caught with his hand in the till. The grandmother seeking to account for the stolen goods stashed in her attic or basement.

  Flip knew that when a person hesitated like this, you must never speak first. You must always stay absolutely silent. Accordingly, Flip waited patiently for Big Bill Thompson to find the right words.

  “Since the first settlers came here—to this river inlet beside Lake Michigan that smelled like wild onions—certain men have been asked to go, let us say, above and beyond, for the sake of the city. They have been asked to do more. To give more. The soldiers who manned the crude fort that grew here, beside the frozen Chicago River—how I shudder to imagine their miserable existences—were called upon to do things that were never spoken of. While starving and waiting to be killed by Redskins, they defended this honored soil. Soil they would sanctify with their own blood. They defended it against unspoken things. Things that would never be fully understood. Or known. Things the average Chicagoan need never concern themselves with, thanks be to God. And thanks to those men. Do you understand?”

  “Yessir,” said Flip.

  The mayor flashed a lightning-quick smile with only the corners of his mouth. It was the most insincere thing Flip had ever seen. He realized, in a trice, that he had already failed one test.

  “You do not understand,” the mayor affirmed. “You do not. But you will.”

  The mayor turned his thick neck toward
the shadows and cried: “Bring them out!”

  The shadows began to move.

  As a working policeman, Flip had developed some acumen for noticing when very large men might be concealing themselves behind curtains or in the dark corners of a room. But Flip was not accustomed to being so near the all-but-blinding presence of the mayor. And so his senses had been dulled, and he was utterly surprised when a strange man of tremendous musculature stepped out of the nearby darkness. The man’s arms and back strained his suit almost to the point of bursting. The fedora on his head looked like a small, novelty hat placed on a bull. The man carried a fine white envelope, very large. From it, he carefully produced several photographs. He held them daintily, with the tips of his powerful fingers, gripping only the edges. He placed them face-up on the green felt table. Then he lifted his ox-like head and made eye contact with the mayor, asking if he had done this correctly. The mayor nodded, and the giant retreated back into the shadows.

  Flip looked down at the table.

  Immediately, he saw that the photographs showed bodies. Dead bodies. All black, and all, somehow, destroyed.

  “Things are . . . happening . . . once again in our city,” Big Bill Thompson said carefully. “And once more our humble prairie settlement calls for stalwart men willing to stand against the idiot hand of murder that comes in the night.”

  Flip swallowed hard.

  The mayor’s fat fingers began to search among the photographs like puffy white grubs, twitching toward a rotting morsel. Flip glanced up at the mayor’s face and saw that a perverse smile had crossed the public servant’s lips. The mayor inspected the images with a look of wistfulness, as if the photos spawned fond remembrances. With each reacquaintance, the mayor’s strange, horrible smile grew.

  “This photograph tells you how it began,” the mayor pronounced as the grubs found their first feeding place. “The start of the summer. Just a day or two into June. An alley along 71st Street, right where it stops being Jew and starts being Negro. The Washington children. Did you hear about this incident, officer?”

  Flip had not. He said so.

  “A brother and sister,” the mayor told him. “Both ten or thereabouts. Twins. Practically identical—except for the plumbing, of course. They’d come up from Louisiana a month before. Staying with relatives in the neighborhood—or looking for relatives who were supposed to have been in the neighborhood—it was never clear. Witnesses at the scene claimed no knowledge of any parents. Certainly, nobody came forward to claim the bodies. But look closely, officer! The children have been completely decapitated! You can see that, I’m sure. Yet the image is imperfect. I fear our photographer may have lost his nerve. He could not bring himself to move any nearer the corpses. So what you may fail to detect, initially, is that the heads have been switched.”

  Flip looked hard into the flat square image and winced. The grubs seemed to sense his discomfort and wriggled happily. The photograph showed a young black boy and girl with their heads cut cleanly off. Yet the boy’s head was positioned above the body wearing the dirty white dress, and the girl’s pigtailed pate had been placed upon the torso in the grimy overalls.

  “They were not joined surgically,” the mayor clarified. “Merely placed where the other ought to have been. No, it was one week later, as I understand, that the first proper reattachment occurred—crude though it may have been. Done with spikes from a rail fence. Here. The toppermost two photos. Look!”

  The tapping grubs indicated Flip should observe a pair of photographs at the head of the table. The first displayed a pair of black boys, perhaps fifteen years old. They were supine, and had been posed beside one another. Their necks had been cut. The first picture was a close shot, but the second was even closer. That one showed the heads pulled back slightly from the necks, displaying metal spikes extending out from each of the windpipes and up into the heads.

  A few paces away, Crespo puffed air from the corner of his mouth in bewilderment.

  “These boys were found near the Calumet,” the mayor said. “They were also siblings, and also twins—in this case, the perfectly identical kind. Hailed from Arkansas. Family name of Horner. They’d been living with a relative and looking for work on the crew digging the Calumet- Saganashkee Channel. That was the story from the work crew, at any rate. We have been unable to locate a blood relative. They say perhaps it was a long-lost uncle with whom the boys had stayed. But he has not come forward. Now . . . the next scene, Mr. Flippity, shows something that happened over one month later.”

  The fat grubs moved to a large photograph in the center of the table. It showed a modest living room with a fireplace, rugs, and wooden floorboards. Paintings hung on the walls and cheap heirlooms stood upon a mantle. Below, a set of fireplace tools had been disarranged haphazardly across the floor. In the center of the room were two girls, about ten years old, covered in blood . . . and perfectly identical. Their heads had been severed and crudely reattached with what looked like twine or wire. There was also a third girl in the picture, about the same age. She seemed to stand beside the fireplace, but only because she had been impaled there with a fireplace poker through her sternum.

  “An informal home for orphan Negro girls,” said the mayor. “Nice Christian woman runs the place. Miss Heloise, or somesuch. She came home one afternoon to find this scene, just as you see it here. The two girls on the ground with the switched heads . . . they had come to our fair city from . . . from. . .”

  As if on cue, the bull of a man again stepped out. He patted his tight suit until he found a paper in his breast pocket. He removed it and handed it over. The mayor unfolded it carefully.

  “Ah yes,” the mayor said. “Doreen and Netty were their names. They had come from South Carolina. Nothing more is known. Miss Heloise appears to have taken them in with no questions asked. They were—as you can plainly see—also identical twins.”

  The photograph was grainy, but Flip could tell that the mayor was correct on this point.

  “The other unfortunate,” the mayor continued, pointing to the impaled girl. “I am told the responding officers do not believe she was a target. She may have walked into the room and surprised whoever—or whatever—did this. The wrong place at the wrong time, as they say. And for it, she was killed as surely as the others.”

  Flip looked again at the photograph. The impaled girl’s eyes were open wide. She looked bewildered and overcome, but sentient. If Flip had seen the photo of her face out of context, he would have sworn she was alive.

  “Then . . . finally . . . we come to it!” cried the portly mayor.

  The grubs grew spastic now, as if electricity had been made to course through them. They scrambled down the green felt to the final photo resting at the bottom of the table. Momentarily, the mayor’s great, equatorial belly obscured the image in shadow. Flip squinted, struggling to see. The mayor noticed this, grinned evilly, and stepped away. All was revealed in a sudden rush.

  The photo showed a wooden plank floor with three figures reclining upon it. They had been placed equidistant, with the crowns of their heads nearly touching. Three Negro boys, obviously dead. Perhaps twelve or thirteen years of age. They showed what appeared to be results of the crudest surgery—as though deep wounds stretching all around their necks had been sewn up with tailor’s thread. Flip understood instantly that the heads had been severed, rotated, and sewn back on.

  “The Whitcomb boys,” said the mayor, consulting his notes. “Discovered last Tuesday in a house on Egan Street. They . . . well, you see what has been done. This is exactly the manner in which they were found.”

  “Triplets . . .” Flip said softly.

  “Pardon?” the mayor said.

  “The Whitcomb boys were identical triplets,” Flip clarified. “Couldn’t they mama tell them apart.”

  “You knew of them?” the mayor asked, intrigued.

  “A little,” Flip said. “Saw them around. The family moved here from Texas a year ago.”

  The mayor nodd
ed sagely.

  “Good. They say you are a man with his ear to the ground, so to speak. That is why we have summoned you.”

  Flip did not look the mayor in the face. Instead, his eyes stayed fixed on the photographs.

  “All children,” Flip said. “All Negro. . . all from somewhere else . . . and every one of them a twin.”

  “Indeed,” the mayor said with a solemn nod. “You grasp the essentials.”

  “I heard the Whitcomb boys died,” Flip continued. “I ain’t hear any details though. Nothing like this. And someone told me something about the girls at the orphanage—but again, the specifics were . . .”

  “Were concealed intentionally, on my orders,” the mayor confirmed. “Even within the police department, as much as was practicable.”

  Here, Flip arched his eyebrows and shrugged, as if to say such a goal was far from unobtainable.

  “What we need now is to discover who is doing this, and to stop them just as quietly,” the mayor asserted.

  “No suspects?” Flip asked.

  “Not a man,” said the mayor. “And I use that word advisedly. For it is a man. No woman could have done such horrible things as these. But please, be assured . . . all that we know, all that we have—every resource—will be put at your disposal.”

  Silence.

  Stillness.

  Nothing moved.

  Flip leaned closer as though he had misheard a very elderly person.

  “My disposal, Mister Mayor?”

  “Why do you think I have sent for you?” the mayor inquired rhetorically, turning his attention to the typed page in his hand. “You are, apparently, an officer of some talents. The Bruford Case. The First West Bank Robbery. The rescue of the Towson girl. They tell me there is not a more decorated Negro officer in my entire police department.”

  Flip did not immediately respond.

  “Have I been misinformed?” the mayor pressed.

  “No . . . I . . .I expect you’ve been informed just fine,” Flip managed.

  The mayor smiled.

  “The city learned many lessons with the Black Hand Squad,” the mayor said, his eyes flitting over to Crespo. “We learned that those inside certain communities will always have special advantages when it comes to enforcing the law in those communities. Yet—pleased as we were that squad’s results—we were not pleased that knowledge of the case dispersed itself so widely. People as far away as New York now associate our city with organized crime! Can you imagine it? Chicago and organized crime?! That serves nobody. Not our citizens. Not our businesses. Nobody! So, officer, do you understand what I am asking? Do you understand what is at stake?”