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Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d express in a zillion years: Mister Tweezers really makes my sinuses hurt.
I’m punching the speed limits—pantsing them, actually—en route to the latest crime scene. The gumball tells onlookers I’m privileged. Modern LED flashers are tarted up with adjectives like “tactical” this-or-that, but the light you stick on the dashboard of an unmarked, standard-issue patroller is still called a gumball, a reference that’s at least fifty years old, which places it comfortably within my realm of sociological irrelevance.
Go figure.
I know a shorter route to the target because I am wiser than the know-it-all GPS, which speaks to me in an Australian woman’s voice as though I’ve just groped her or something, a very schoolmarm-wielding, steel-ruler tone of disapproval, especially when I don’t follow her directions or perform as exactly ordered. This is another facet of my personality known well and understood by my several remaining friends and exes. No disrespect, but a machine can rarely tell me what to do, even when it’s right.
It would be more entertaining, though, if it bossed me around in the voice of the Wicked Witch of the West, or Morgan Freeman from Se7en, or the Goodfellas incarnation of Joe Pesci: “What the fuck did I just tell you? Turn LEFT, fucking asshole, LEFT! Are you fucking stupid, you fucking remedial cheeseball dickhead, turn fucking LEFT…fucker! Fuck you!”
Central knew to hail me once it was clear our star psycho had struck again. Our infamous nutbag-du-jour. This summons always comes between midnight and dawn, without fail, thus far on the hit parade. How I wound up with Mr. Tweezers on my plate is also the usual frustrating tale of personal involvement, emotional engagement, and outrage at the caliber of horror that so-called humans can inflict on other humans. Other lifeforms.
Under normal circumstances, the only aspect we share in common is that we are all Earthlings. Specifics of gender or color or creed or bias or nationality must be taken into account in any investigation, because not everyone is so generous when it comes to sizing up humanity.
Be practical, but never divorce yourself from compassion. That’s good, solid baseline thinking with which only an imbecile or a crazy person could disagree or find fault, right?
Or a killer that just plain wasn’t an Earthling. It would be like expecting compassion or empathy from a praying mantis…which only appears to be praying. For prey.
I thought we would catch a breather during August, the only month to feature no official national American holiday. Wrong; no respite. Mr. Tweezers simply invented his own goddamned new holiday—Cleavage Day, which turned out just about as wrong as you are imagining it to be, right now. For you fans of language, “cleave” is one of the few words in English that has two exactly opposite meanings; things can cleave together just as they can cleave apart…and by now you’ve pretty much got the whole, lurid picture, in a Giant Golden Book sense.
Not that anybody
remembers what Giant Golden Books were.
Mr. Tweezers quickly developed a knack for turning you against your favorite things. Do you like chocolate? Not so much, after the Easter Sunday killing—a reenactment of the Crucifixion using a morbidly obese black woman whose blood had been evacuated and replaced with chocolate syrup. Then he opened her up with a shotgun. I’ve heard that in the days of black and white film and TV, chocolate syrup was often used to simulate blood. That blood spiraling down the shower drain in Psycho? Hersheys or Bosco, choose your favorite…and then try not to think about that every time you see the product, thereafter, no matter how tasty it might have been. Vomited blood is not Technicolor red, usually, because your body has tried to digest it. It is more often a ruddy brown thanks to the dead blood cells, the bilirubin—the same stuff that makes feces a brown color instead of russet. Kind of chocolatey.
You get the idea.
Are you one of those people who consults that oh-so-precious, sensitive website to determine whether animals “die” in the movies? Animals in general, pets in particular, and especially…dogs. Does the Dog Die? Then Mr. Tweezers concocted a holiday special just for you, right after the Fourth of July. You would probably not wish to see your favorite household pet’s head mounted on a plaque like a hunting trophy, with bright, alert-looking glass eyes that are more horrible because they are human simulacra, not animal. The whole torture show was designed to mess your brain. Candy sprinkles, in red, white and blue. Another image I would never be able to un-see, every time a cute pet video flashed across my feed. Every time I looked at a cupcake, I would think: That poor, goddamned dog; I know it suffered.
The worst was the baby. Right after Thanksgiving. Eviscerated, laid out on a pizza crust like so much mixed meat, and cooked, head intact.
Pizza. Mr. Tweezers has made me and many others hate the sight of pizza.
I mean, how much longer would it take you to become enraged?
One afternoon I realized the index card box on my desk had been sitting there for over six months, since I had first opened it and stocked it with a supply of vari-colored blank cards, and then begun to fill the cards with notes and information. I dislike computer organizers. A PowerPoint presentation flattens the data to a bland sameness which,
to me, seems to dishonor the lives lost, to under-serve the gravity of what is being investigated. People and animals with lives, taken. Their suffering needed to be recorded by hand, methodically, to honor the gravity. The time it took to write information down longhand, to thumb through the cards until the top edges became smudged and furry—all that time is needed to assist the process of concentration. I don’t need short-cuts. I need fewer distractions.
Neither the holiday playbook nor the pitch-black humor of the food references were dependable, either. Mr. Tweezers had no fixed victim profile. Like Peter Kurten, the Dusseldorf Vampire of late-1920s Germany, he struck at men, women, children, animals…and this suggested two things. First, perhaps like Kurten, Mr. Tweezers was one of those ordinary-looking individuals who could inspire rapid trust in total strangers; second, also perhaps like Kurten, maybe Mr. Tweezers missed as many as he hit. Many of Kurten’s victims—the ones who survived—never reported the attacks because they survived. Humiliation, embarrassment, social status all contributed. Once Kurten was in the docket, the adjudicators seemed surprised at the sheer number of victims who then came forth. Kurten merely smiled and advised the court that his last wish, upon being beheaded, was to retain consciousness long enough to hear the sound of his own blood dripping into the basket.
Maybe Mr. Tweezers had a few survivors walking around, keeping mum.
Maybe he had terrorized them so badly that they would never step up—that is, those collateral people not required for his extravagant murder displays.
And over time, he became my quest. I wanted to fist up his throat and get close enough so my spit went into his eyes. I’m on to you, you fucking subhuman. I figured you out.
The day after Christmas, he did a whole group working at a pop-up discount store. These days, people frequently dismiss “Exmas” as a consumer nightmare. Well, Mr. Tweezers made the nightmare flesh, so to speak: heads and limbs, eyes and hands, torsos on tripods revolving under multicolored gels, tinseled viscera, big bulb ornament earrings. Mouths stuffed with cookies; blood mixed with milk; those little scored, six-way disintegrating price tags stuck to still-oily human flesh to alert the browser to discounts and mark-downs. From now on, every time I saw the tchotchke rack change seasons in a local drugstore or big-box circus, I’d remember.
People had died so I would remember.
Which was a strange thought; almost too logical, for this guy. Or gal. Or group. It was a motive that normal folk could understand and sympathize with—a protest, of sorts. Don’t commercialize the holidays. It upset little Bunky and he became a serial killer. That made sense, common sense, and caused us to recognize a diversion when we saw one. The public, and especially the authorities, needed Mr. Tweezers to remain a super-villain with motives comprehensible only to the insane.
Not “common,” not ever, not by a long shot.
I had not invented the “Mister Tweezers” moniker; that had been Forensic Donny Frakes. Our perp, apparently, never left hair or fibers. It was as though he had gone over his own crime scene not with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, but with tweezers, picking away every last micro-bit of incriminata. We could forget about fingerprints altogether. DNA, too, for that matter.
I blew a stoplight on the way in; not the first time. That’s my sad privilege, as I hurry to readjust my own limits for fright and disgust.
Skinner’s rats. Pavlov’s dog. And me—performing as expected, racing too late to the next atrocity, all for the apparent amusement of a killer who watched all the CSI shows, who read all the crime books, and who decided to be the latest contestant to one-up everybody else in the sweepstakes for what was socially unacceptable and morally outrageous. This being—the he / she / it-or-them—was trying hardest not to be a fellow Earthling. Doing its damnedest to be superior and untouchable and unfathomable to the likes of me.
I especially wanted him when he made me dance, like this. But wait…
Had I split? Was my psyche cleaved right down the middle into the most dreaded, Norman Bates territory of multiples? Believe me, I began to fear that possibility six killings ago, catching my own gaze in the rearview, wondering whether I had concocted Mr. Tweezers out of my own frustration as a do-gooder cop, lumbering myself with the ultimate challenge: I had to get into the skin of a psychopath in order to recognize and apprehend him. It fucks with your head. But it’s also a convenience of thrilling fiction, that salon of what-if where people must make wrong choices and embrace the worst possibilities in order to drive a plot-twist that hopes to snare some reader or viewer unawares. Surprise! The fiend is actually the cop obsessed with catching the fiend!
Except that, too, was a cliché on the order of how amnesia functions, in stories. Or the blow on the head that knocks a character conveniently unconscious on TV. (After being cold-cocked fifty or more times, don’t you think Our Hero would suffer permanent brain damage and be retired to stud?)
Plus…too easy.
Plus…my sinuses were throbbing now. Like having expanding, toxic bread dough trying to push your eyes out. Sixty milligrams of one red pill, thirty of another yellow pill, and still the voice taunted: If your brain had nerves, this is what an aneurysm would feel like, sucker. How much longer before I came to a full stop? How many headaches and odd little inexplicable pains; when did they total up to a surprise sum? Was this the stew of botched memory, ghost pain and weird smells that signaled the starting flag for dementia?
Yeah, Mr. Tweezers made my sinuses hurt, all right.
The Marine he murdered for Veteran’s Day had drowned in urine. His lungs were distended with piss, like water balloons. At first we thought it was simple contempt for humanity, again—a humiliating desecration. Or a kind of dog-in-the-manger statement: piss on it so no one else will want it, either. Urine doesn’t reveal DNA unless it contains blood, or epithelial cells. The urine that soaked and bloated the late Master Gunnery Sergeant Steven Ian Church had revealed ninety-three DNA trails.
Mr. Tweezers had harvested urine from over a hundred sources.
No wonder my head was throbbing.
Yeah, I wanted him. I wanted him to know that, yeah, I really had gone that far just to put my hands around his throat. I really had gone the distance of checking out his piss trail, when everyone else just shrugged and thought, oh great, another psycho loon, who knows why they do what they do?
Who knew why people pretended to be completely different people on social media? The pretend celebrity, the fake artist, the influencing name-dropper. Make-believe versions of an inadequate self, with Photoshopped eyes and filtered complexions. Curated exposure…just so long as they didn’t expose their real personalities, or lack thereof, which could hit a dozen times worse because most people are predictable, ignorant, frightened, hostile, broke and dull.
Whining in public was never attractive. Yet here I was, toasting my own pity party
You already know the run-up. Two cruisers, flashbars painting the exterior of a dry goods warehouse—yet another cliché, a dusty storage facility about the size of a city block, full of pallets and forklifts, and probably teeming with rats. A uniform admits me through the yellow cordon tape. Another officer with a special coffee lid to keep latte foam off his mustache directs me to the detective who was first-on-scene, the guy who had known I needed a heads-up. His name was Fleck; I’d never met him before. Sandy hair, mid-to-late thirties, married, glasses that looked to be bifocals in stylishly squared-off aluminum frames, blue eyes, straight white teeth, about 160 pounds. Still took pride in his wardrobe; still eager. He was packing a beefy .357 revolver in a nylon belt holster—a fast, quiet draw and dependable loads (probably wadcutters). Most modern cops had gone to nine-mil semi-autos; this guy didn’t want to risk a jam in case there was a misfire. I appreciated his choice of sidearm.
Me? For all my love of old things and forgotten rituals, I was a fast-forward futurist when it came to firepower. Forty-five auto, extended mag, hollow points. It was overcompensation, sad and predictable, but I had never yet killed anyone I had been compelled to shoot.
I note that because I saw Fleck glancing inside my jacket. He was assessing me, too.
“Chesley? I’m proud to meet you but not happy about the circumstance.”
We shook. He explained that he was Robbery Homicide out of Hollenbeck Division; he had arrived first because his turf was right on the border to mine. The LAPD’s restructured Homicide Special Section didn’t have to fret about jurisdiction.
“Let’s see it.”
Fleck gave the nod to another officer, who made way. The warehouse was in Boyle Heights, birthplace of Mickey Cohen, Anthony Quinn, and Jack Chick, the guy who used to do all those annoying (but inadvertently hilarious) religious comic tracts; nearly everybody still has one stashed somewhere.
The front office was abandoned but had been opened after-hours. The fluorescents made everything seem a dim green. Another uniform stepped back and muttered “sir” as we passed.
“Look at this,” Fleck said, directing his light toward the floor.
It was a pastel-blue 3x5 index card.
It was one of my pastel-blue 3x5 index cards. I knew it even before I flipped it over.
Vets. Veterinarians I consulted back in July. Several entries, different pens. Dr. Julie Montrose. The Hollywood Cat & Dog Hospital. Dr. Steven Martineaux. Dr. Jessie Bernstein, circled. All recorded in my hand.
Fleck nudged my arm. About seven feet along the office corridor to the main warehouse space was another card, this one pinkish. Also mine. I had bought the cards in a packet that offered red, blue, green, yellow in softer shades, plus the inevitable white. He held the card up so I could read it, but just from the header I knew what it listed.
Mr. T.
Compare to Kurten, Holmes, Bundy—charming—trustworthy—ordinary-looking—victims don’t suspect him (her?)—not attractive or noteworthy but not hostile either…
“Chesley? What is this? Fill me in?”
“These are my case notes. Right off my desk, downtown.”
“You’re shittin me.”
I sniffed hard, my heart already pounding. Nope.
“Total red meat flag.”
I felt my sinuses spike again. “Translation, please.” I didn’t have the time for cute jargon, not now, nothing special or woke, thanks.
My request actually screwed up his stride; I’d caught him in half-step and he had to look back at me. “Oh, red meat flag. It was a health thing, I mean, that’s how it started. Flagging the dangers of red meat. Trans fat, cholesterol, E. coli in processed beef, high blood pressure, low sperm count…”
“Frying is bad, chicken is better, that sort of thing?”
“That sort of thing.”
“You said that’s how it started. Then what?”
He actually stopped and turned back to make his point. “C’mon, Inspector. Follow the red flags. Beef has always been a shortform metaphor for American manliness—red meat, blood-rare, shredding T-bones with your teeth.”
“Macho carnivores.”
“You have it exactly. You know a manly crime from a wimpy crime when you smell it. And Mr. Tweezers is a total red meat flag.”
Fleck was filling the air up with jabber because he knew he did not want to see
what came next. I’d already been on that carousel—eleven times.
High-profile, sensational murders seem impossible because they are magic tricks. Sleight of hand to direct our attention away from what we should be looking at in the moment. Just the way Fleck deflected me with razzle-dazzle about…meat.
It was all meat, so far, and would continue to be meat.
“You know what they say about people who eat rare meat,” said Fleck. “They’re better tippers.”
Was he pushing some kind of paleo diet agenda?
I should have paid more attention to my senses. I said it right upfront: Mister Tweezers really makes my sinuses hurt.
There before us on the floor was a third card, sure enough. Part of a breadcrumb trail we were supposed to follow. Fleck already had his gun up.
“Don’t worry,” I said (uselessly, but it felt good saying it). “It’s already happened.”
“Fuck. I’m sweating like a pig.” He mopped his eyes.
When I bent to pick up the third card, that’s when he hit me.
When he snapped an ampoule under my nose, that’s when I woke up.
“How analog,” he noted of the index cards, which were sitting on a table, in the box from my desk. “You know, you can find out a lot more about people by just hacking their phones, nowadays. But there’s something to be said for the old-school approach. You’ve got my respect.”
Apparently, contrary to convention, I had been knocked out cold. Air touched fresh blood somewhere on the back of my head. I couldn’t focus my eyes; everything in the room was doubled. I had a migraine of Rammstein concert intensity dragging out an encore in my skull. I was bound to a chair with my own cuffs. No latitude for wiggle; the chair had been secured to the floor by somebody who knew how to do it right.
Plus, my sinuses were trying to kill me now.
Yellow card:
Very likely male Caucasian…eclectic education…possibly a degree in a field like psychology or social science disciplines…average-looking (circled twice)…very likely knows firearms, mantrapping procedures, takedowns or restraint…maybe ex-military? Knows internet structures and burner phones—knows how
to stay invisible amidst increasingly digital transparency. Probably has zero online footprint or a variety of pseudos (encryption?).
I tried to speak. The sentence came out mushy. Blurred.
“I know, Chez. You’re trying to remind me of the police presence here. Let me chop that one off at the knees. Those guys you saw outside? The uniforms? They’re actors. They’ve checked out and gone home. They thought they were bit-parting for a reality show; I set it up with fake contracts and day rates—yeah, they all got paid. You see them nod at me? That was the signal that they were released for the day. I signed them out while you were napping. There’s nobody outside now, and they wouldn’t hang around because there’s no craft service table to pillage. The cop cars are movie rentals. You didn’t bother to look closely enough. Four hundred bucks per day from Reel Wheels.”
Another yellow:
No DNA (scribbled out). No hair. No prints. No fibers. Very cautious about spoor—obsessive? Maybe ADHD? Clean freak? Feet that don’t leave footprints—how hard is that to do?
“I even know your buddies in Hollywood Division call you ‘Chez.’ Yours is the older desk, the one that used to belong to a junior high school vice-principal. You fought the longest before you’d let them put a computer screen on your desk. It was just you and your filebox, and all that hard-copy, ancient paper data to sift. How analog.”
I could no longer feel my legs. Fleck had jammed me with something.
Mister Fleck. Today’s pseudonym.
“You’re not the crimestopper on the brink of retirement, running one last case to ground, DeeTee. You’re done, and you know it. You wonder whether you have presenile dementia, like your mother did. Or diabetes, like your father. Your cock hasn’t worked correctly in three years; it’s one of the reasons Amy dumped you. Have you heard the one where half a hard-on is called a ‘Hollywood Loaf?’ No? This isn’t Holmes versus Moriarty. This is me, running rings around your bureaucracy and common sense for ordinary people and Us versus Them.
“Slick, am I right?”
I wanted a
psychotic. I got the opposite.
At least I could acknowledge that no more of my life would be wasted in coping with child-proof packaging on the sinus pills.
You want the reason, the rationale, the explanation, the punchline…and there isn’t one. Without Google you don’t even know the difference between a Dirty Sanchez and a Hot Carl.
“I only have one thing to say to you,” he said in conclusion. “Happy New Year.”
“BLAME HERMES”As Chris Vognar wrote in 2018—amidst a review of Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, a social history of the infamous 1986 Los Angeles Library fire—“to read is to live, and to lose that option is to lose a vital piece of ourselves.”
I certainly felt that way, when first considering the whole concept of perhaps becoming a writer, in response to persistent dunning, dull, unimaginative inquiries into what I wanted to be when I “grew up.”
Not a grownup, that’s for sure, because the grownups I had observed didn’t seem very pleased, fulfilled, happy or engaged in much of anything, as though the real purpose of breathing was to serve your time and escape of this messy business of life with as few scars as possible. Except scars are earned. As Richard Christian Matheson wrote, “scars are the record.”
What else is record, canon, account, way-back-when motivation? To write things other people might want to read. That seemed noble, honorable. As Oscar Wilde told us, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Question, from the back: “What advice do you have for aspiring writers?”
Answer:
I’m the wrong person to ask, because I am nobody’s sage, mentor, daddy or sponsor. I’m not here to coddle you into some sort of specious, glitzy, imaginary career or show you shortcuts to avoid actual work. Because if people were honest, they’d tell you to quit. Get out while you’re still wearing skin. The world doesn’t need more writers. This world in which we are currently trapped needs doctors and plumbers, builders and mechanics, professionals skilled in the repair and maintenance of things. This doomscape doesn’t want more writers, or poets of any stripe, or artists in general.
Oh, and one more thing: If you can be talked out of writing by the black frontier presented in those few lines above, then you’ve made my point for me. Begone.
Above all, the world needs the arts, because without nourishing your soul, you’re living in a universe that’s already dead. Eat, sleep, work, reproduce, point-and-click, consume, repeat, die. There’s a difference between killing time and murdering it.
Dean Koontz once wrote: “I’m not sure that most readers realize how few novelists have lengthy careers. The average career in the music business is three to five years. Novelists who go ten years have triumphed; those who go twenty or longer, still writing and regularly finding a market, are heroic war horses. This is an unforgiving industry that moves on continually to the next hot thing.”
I’ll tell you a fundamental fact about Mr. Koontz, whom I know not at all: Every morsel of his success was painstakingly earned. He knocked it out of the rock for himself. He built it and owned it, and never gave up. He did not flee when somebody looked askance him and said “begone.”
I would refer his quotation above to anyone courting instant success. In an age where every social media surfer prefers to paint themselves as a
creator of some sort, in a time when there are abundant affirmations and gold stars for all, in a corner where clutching an iPhone somehow makes you a film director…heed the words.
Besides, there’s a revelation tucked into that cry of doom, above. Writers are builders. And doctors. And bricklayers, and architects, and wizards.
But, advice for aspiring writers? “Get used to a world with no health insurance, and hope to Zeus you never become seriously ill or impaired.”
Despite that, and because youth is immortal, determinedly non-grownup me thought that writing for a living sounded like the best of all possible scenarios. One could be sustained simply by making shit up. All you needed was pen and paper, or a handy keyboard. That seemed impossible to better, and at the same time it was a gauntlet thrown down. Go forth, young candidate, and convince total strangers to give you money. That put me right in the company of panhandlers, land grabbers, robber barons, Ponzi schemers and all the other outlaws that made America great. The charter was the same: Beguile people into paying you.
If you think this is con artistry, you’re right. So is stage magic. So is organized religion. We are professional liars. We have to convince you we know what we’re talking about.
Blame the library. Blame the bookstore. Blame generations of fantasists, fictioneers and yarn-spinners. Most of all, blame Hermes.
No, not the Greek son of Zeus and Maia, although he’s a wonderful avatar—fleet-footed messenger of the gods, conductor of the dead to Hades, hung out a lot with Pan and the nymphs. Eloquent, a dream warrior, used “Mercury” as a pseudonym when in Rome (although his sensitivities were more closely expressed by Apollo, and that’s not a typo—Apollo was the only god shared by Greeks and Romans alike). He had the bewitching gift of “treasure casually found.”
The Hermes of which I speak was a machine made by human beings, godlike enough sitting there all by itself. Specifically, the Hermes 3000 portable typewriter, first manufactured by Paillard-Bolex in Switzerland in 1958 (a scant three years after I myself was manufactured). ...
