Pain Killers (8 page)

My future ex-wife murdered her husband, but me bitch-slapping a Sunday driver was too much. She told me that she’d learned to vomit soundlessly, without even needing a finger.
Look, Ma, no hands!
She could have given bulimia lessons. But she thought I had the problem. We used to fight about my negativity. My catastrophizing. Tina would tell me what her father used to say: “Worrying is just praying for what you don’t want.” I’d dread things so much I actually made them happen. And all this time, she had a secret.

Eating disorders are brutal. But let me confess: beyond knowing how much pain she’d caused herself, what hurt was knowing how much she had concealed from me all those years. Any cop could tell you—if a perp was hiding one thing, they were usually hiding something else. Or maybe it was just my ego. When things got bad she gave me an Al-Anon schedule. “Codependent” sounded like something you wore with an adult diaper.

As Tina was leaving, I grabbed her arm at the door and spun her around. Tried to pull her close, feeling weirdly like John Huston cuddling his daughter-slash-granddaughter after shooting her sister-slash-mother at the end of
Chinatown.

I pleaded with her. “Just tell me, before you go.”

“Tell you what?”

“If I made you come,” I blurted, serving up a slice of my secure and romantic inner life.

“Buckets,” she replied, “and now you’re making me go.”

Once you saw how your wife killed her husband, you lived with a certain back-of-the-head hum. You knew what could happen. You’d seen the evidence. But still…You didn’t think about it. Not all the time. Just on special occasions.

Had anyone asked, I’d have explained it like this: If you were fucking a beautiful woman on the edge of a cliff, would you look down the whole time? Or would you look at her? By definition, if a woman is beautiful enough for you to fuck on a cliff, she’s beautiful enough to make you forget to look down. Except when she wants to remind you how close you are to the edge. What would happen if you rolled off. Or she pushed you. The problem was, the beverage I’d found under the snailback sink had skewed my perception. Not one part of me believed Tina could have feelings for the inked-up skeek I’d glimpsed out the trailer window. Wedding an ALS brother seemed like a long way around just to make a point. But maybe there was something else going on. What did I know? The box wine left me pining for something more full-bodied, like Listerine.

I did not even realize I had passed out until I picked the leech off my eye. It turned out to be a waterlogged Band-Aid. I tried to sit up and banged my head off the bottom of the trailer. Facedown, if the variety of floor-flora stuck to my mouth was any indication. I’d thrown my jacket on and found the lighter. I flicked it, illuminating a pit of moldering magazines, old-fashioned brogans and dental molds, metal cabinet drawers stuffed with carbon and typewritten files. A flaky
Time,
wedged under a brick, showed J. Edgar Hoover on the cover, staring down Commies. Underneath the
Time,
a rusted Red Cross lockbox jutted from the ranks of other antiquated but seemingly freshly dumped items.

I didn’t care about the garbage. I remembered the first time I arrested a junkie Dumpster-diving behind a hospital. He had four bottles of expired resperidine, an antipsychotic favored by families who needed to shut up senile screamers, and a gross of tongue depressors jammed in his army jacket. Hospitals could be gold mines. (The only better pickings, drugwise, were the trans cans outside airport customs. Many an international traveler with pills in their pockets lost their nerve and dumped them. But the airport janitorial staff had the trash can action sewn up.)

Grabbing two Red Cross boxes, I headed back inside and scraped the side of my face on something that turned out to be the missing light switch. Thus illuminated, I pulled down the bed. I spread a
San Francisco Chronicle
on top and dumped the boxes on it. Then I re-hit the files. I needed to distract myself from rerunning the Tina highlight reel in my head. Thankfully, the love-hut lights had gone off. If I focused, I could pretend I’d hallucinated everything and go back to work.

DAVID “DAVEY” ZELOVSKY
Caucasian, 21 months for parole violation. Weapons possession.

This one was bad. This one was
wrong.

The face just stopped above a nubby bottom lip, which barely covered his gums and left his teeth exposed, giving him the look of some feral hillbilly insect.

Five years, domestic abuse.

In a blackout, Davey jammed his wife’s hand in a waffle iron in front of his twin son and daughter. Under occupation, he had put “catalogue model.” He had also had a small part in a soap opera. He was that kind of handsome.

Reading details of his “weapons possession,” I marveled at the immense variety of fate. Davey’s crime: he botched a suicide attempt and got violated for having a gun. Hard luck. But the law’s the law. That’s what’s wrong with it.

A sketchy psych eval shed no light but added details.

Perp’s wife had taken their twins with instructions to relatives not to tell him where she went. He visited her father to plead. Father-in-law rejected him.

I studied his sideshow grill. The drama of the nongifted criminal. Can’t stalk her if you can’t find her, huh, buddy? Who hasn’t been
there
?

Perp purchased gun from Mex. (unknown) gardener who kept the .45 in a case of hose nozzles. Seepage may have warped the barrel.

“Andre Duquesne” was handwritten on the next file. Possibly the classiest name I had ever heard. But the file was empty.

BERNARD ROOKS, 21, African-American, possession with intent to distribute 100 grams of crack cocaine, 15 years.

As opposed to the one and a half he’d have gotten if it had been powder. The photo showed a burly, sad-faced youngster. There was a CDC memo paper-clipped to the file cover. Now that the U.S. Sentencing Commission had issued retroactive sentence reductions to balance the crack versus powder disparity, offenders could appeal to the original judge who sentenced them. Nothing said willingness to a sentencing board more than completion of a drug program. Someone else with real motivation.

And finally, his file yellow—“Fritz Ullman, 97, Caucasian” stared up from his mug shot with the same mocking, outraged eyes, trim mustache, and Jack Lemmon–esque features I’d seen the day I stumbled onto Sun Myung, Clarence Thomas, and Jerry Falwell on my bedroom dresser. The face had another five decades on it. The hair was white. Gone was the smart SS uniform.

The original file was almost completely blacked out, leaving only a few “of”s and “the”s. Along with this information-free document, someone had inserted a single folded sheet of legal paper. I unfolded it and read, in pencil:

Arrested for attempted vehicular manslaughter, perp convicted of hit-and-run and fleeing the scene of an accident. Three years.

…More intriguing, a search turned up evidence of “lab equipment—probably drug-related—in his van, which belonged to the Department of Animal Control. A public defender got the van search thrown out, so “Fritz” did not have narcotic charges added to his vehicular manslaughter…. A supplemental psych eval revealed:

Inmate C-899923 exhibited delusional behavior, possibly methamphetamine psychosis. (The court noted defendant’s “angry affect” and “explosive outbursts.”) Inmate claims to be “Dr. Josef Mingola” (sic) a “high-ranking SS man and ‘race scientist,’” and demanded to speak with the head of the FDA. …Asked if he heard voices, perp responded in affirmative—“but none of them speak German.” Believed to be highly intelligent. Prescribed Depakote for bipolar disorder, Effexor for depression, a senior multivitamin supplement, and a weekly enema.

Maybe he was enjoying himself.

I sat back to ponder my quarry.

He seemed, on the face of it, an unremarkable old man. Who was possibly a mass murderer. He wanted the world to know. Which was either a strong indication he was lying or evidence of his veracity. Assuming he wasn’t simply schizophrenic, possessed of a peculiar sense of humor or paid to impersonate Josef Mengele…My guess was poor Number Four: senility.

Zell wanted my opinion. I needed the work. I didn’t tell him the dirty little secret: the least-effective method of finding out if someone over eighty is telling the truth is by talking to them. Everybody told stories. But, unlike younger liars, sometimes our senior prevaricators did not know they were telling them.

I’d known Alzheimer’s victims who took on the identity of TV characters and historical figures. They forgot details of their own past but superimposed, like senior idiot savants, facts and details from the lives of others. Back in Upper Marilyn, the small town where I cut my cop teeth, I’d rounded up two wandering octogenarian men who thought they were famous, one Lincoln and one Lee Marvin, and a great-grandmother who claimed to be Lady Bird Johnson and kept taking her clothes off in mall fountains. If you were old enough, nobody called you a liar. They didn’t even call you lewd. They’d say you had dementia and blame the behavior on declining faculties.

I heard a talk show doctor say they’d found an Alzheimer’s gene. If Mengele had it, he was hanging tough. Or maybe he’d spotted the senility gene in full bloom in his own ninety-seven-year-old DNA and somehow deleted it, breeding it off the Master Race roster altogether.

To me it was pretty clear: Mengele was demented. But he didn’t have dementia.

In a perfect world, I would have gone back to the crime scene. (The hit-and-run in L.A., not the death camp in Poland.) Interviewed witnesses. Unearthed the facts about the woman he ran down, seen if perpetrator and perpetrated had a connection; found out where Ullman/Mengele lived and who he’d spoken to after the bumper party.

Any crackpot with TiVo, Google skills or a library card could dig enough death-camp trivia to pass himself off as an OG from Auschwitz.

I dove into the rest of Zell’s Mengele info pack. A dozen smudged carbon copies detailed the doctor’s varied and disturbing intended-to-save-the-race procedures. At Auschwitz-Birkenau he had sewn twins together. He reasoned that if they were fused, the resulting megatwin could do twice the work for half the feed. He experimented with hydrochloric acid douches and scrotal radiation by way of low-cost sterilization.

Zell had unearthed a handful of Mengele diary pages. The random sample I picked reeked with stilted self-regard. Mengele wrote like a man giving himself medals.
“There are two ways to save the race: by eliminating lesser races, and enhancing the superior one. This is the duty of a scientist of the Reich—a duty that I, Mengele, fulfilled!”

Searching for ways to build a better Aryan, he got big into eyeball transplants: replacing lowly brown eyes with blue ones. Unable to connect optic nerves, the doctor left his victims bleeding and blind.

Of his eye transplant techniques:
“Had the wretches been able to see, for but one moment, they would have thanked me for the glorious cerulean blue gracing their faces.”
He tried dyes after that, but the end result was that they remained brown and blind.

These notes went on and on. His biggest passion was twins. Twins held the secrets of fertility and genetic control. His next loves, after
die Zwillinge,
were the deformed, and then dwarves. In his capacity as Selektor, he procured specimens from the trains. Had the Nazis won, this was the Mengele who would appear on his own stamp: the dapper
Hauptsturmführer
standing on the ramp, deciding who lives and who dies. Tallies varied. Mengele ordered the death of either a hundred thousand or half a million. The horror, for the Jews, was that it was Jews who were being exterminated. The rest of the world—including America—was more or less okay with it. Until the very end. In 1939, the United States turned away the SS
Louisa,
full of Jewish refugees. President Roosevelt was concerned about the political fallout from helping Jews. (
“New Deal—not Jew Deal!”
) The ship returned to Hamburg, where passengers were promptly dispatched to the camps. The State Department set up a Jewish settlement in Sosua, in the Dominican Republic. The DR’s president, Trujillo, believed his countrymen were too black. He wanted some whites to move in and improve the racial ratio. I wouldn’t say I was a history buff, but I was an insomniac, and Nazis were a perennial fave on the late-night Discovery, History, Biography and Military Channel menu. Arcane details just lodge in the mind.

The possible presence of the man himself infused the facts (selections, experiments, perfumed scarves) with new juice. I kept reading.

His twin prose degenerated from grandiose to floral: “With what luster doth the womb of a single woman bloom forth with two, three, four identical flowers?” Other times he sounded like a transcribed infomercial: “My goal was to increase the good, eliminate the bad. Say yes to Nordic Splendor. Say no to cripples, Jews, Gypsies, harelips and the rest of the germs that pollute the gene pool!”

Much of Mengele’s “fertility research” work involved genital dissection. He claimed more accurate results when the girls were alive. His ongoing, secondary experiment was the study of how much pain a human could endure. Lessons learned on vermin could extend the life of the Master Race. Why experiment on mice?

I needed air. I stuck my head out of the reeking trailer door. Pretended it wasn’t to scope out my ex-wife—frolicking in the night with her incarcerated hubby—or find out if I’d hallucinated her in the first place. What did that make me—succumbing to personal torments, evidence of the violation of an entire people spread out before me like tarot cards?