John Crommodie

John Crommody woke with one of his usual hangovers; his usual lament: why in the hell did have to drink, and so alcoholically? In fact, why did he have to drink at all?

As ever, when the answers came, they only ever made him want to drink again, and NOW.  He rolled over and reached for the botte and found it, and found that it was empty, then threw it across the room. Another day with a pounding headache, but at least he had timed it, at least he didn’t have to go into work.

When next he opened his eyes, it was evening. The phone rang as though from some distant place. He reached for it, said, ‘yeah’, then heard the crackling, insistent, inevitable voice that he had so gotten used to. Crommody paused and took a deep breath.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ came the voice from the other end. Crommody struggled to bring his addled brain back from where it had gone, said, ‘Yeah, I heard.’

He looked at the phone and wanted to murder it, listened to it give one final instruction, then simply hung up. Crommody looked up at the ceiling. How much easier it would have been to just pull the covers over his head and hide under there for days until the whole thing went away.

Just then, that strange second wind came over him; always making him wonder where it came from, as though God, Himself, had lifted him up with giant invisible hands. Somehow, he hauled himself up and sat on the bed and looked around at the room. Forty years in police work and he had only ever been able to rent a flat. He stood and walked to the bathroom and stood under a hot shower and got his suit gear on, then picked up the gun and strapped it on. He took one last look in the mirror, cleaned his teeth, was tired of what he saw, looking back at him, then found his car-keys and wallet and left the tiny one-bedroom apartment, then got in the Aston martin and headed off to yet another crime scene.

By the time he made it to the crime scene, it was swarming with police. A dark, cold night. He parked the car and looked at it, and wondered, for the millionth time, how many more of these, he could take. Just then, a gigantic man stood next to him. Crommody didn’t bother to acknowledge the man and wasn’t moved when he heard the deep baritone voice rumble: ‘Five-foot eight blonde. Tattooed below the left ear. Another sex-kitten, murdered.’

‘Time of death?’ said Crommody.

‘Yet to be determined.’

‘Cause?’

‘It looks as though it might have been a knife.’

Crommody stepped forward and leaned into the body and took a closer look, which to some, might have appeared lude.

‘What do we know about her?’

‘Nothing, at this point. Except that she was apparently beautiful, and is now, apparently dead.’

Crommody took a step back and kept looking at the body and thought for the millionth time about retiring. They were standing in a sort of swamp.  A suburban football ground that backed into a creek. The perfect place to dispose of a body, really. And if it wasn’t for the kids, smoking cigarettes, illegally, behind it, it could have stayed undetected, for weeks. But then, why didn’t he just bury it?  He walked up to the mound and followed the trail, then knelt down and actually found the blood.

It was the third one in a series of demolitions, that were some of the most brutal assaults that he had seen in his whole time on the force. Three women, chopped to pieces, slain in cold blood.

Crommody stepped away from the body and felt his stomach do a somersault. People always said that you had to have a certain stomach for police work. But that wasn’t true. Every Police officer he had ever known, suffered in the same way as anyone ese did, only they just didn’t let on about it. How other people dealt with it was anyone’s guess; his was drinking, which he was not proud of, either. He took one last look at the woman, and couldn’t stand it any longer, then left the cigarette smoking, Wilson, and walked back to the car.

By the time that he made it out of suburbia and back on the expressway, the sun was coming up on the horizon. With nothing better to do and a rostered day off, he made his way into the city and took a tram and got off and visited his usual haunt.

Crommody walked through a small doorway where a gloomy light hung from the ceiling where two barristers stood underneath. Crommody pulled up his usual pew, ordered a coffee and sat and did the crossword and looked around the room and wondered about the other patrons. An old woman slouched over her cup and saucer, white petrified skin, like crumpled pastry, sat, reading a book. He looked out the window and thought about the murders. Who would do such a thing? Steam came off the sidewalk, rising from the wet cobblestone. He looked around at the figures, walking in the rain, then paid and left, and started walking the streets.

A tram bustled past, and he suddenly felt tired and hungry, then walked up to the stop and sat and was glad that he had avoided alcohol for the day, then realized that he needed to get to an AA meeting, then got on the tram and looked out the window, watched the light fade, looked up the nearest meeting on his phone, found one within earshot of where he lived, and was grateful for small mercies, then got off and started walking the two blocks to the church, where it was being held.

The same old dreary room, full of other alcoholics, spilling their souls to others. As ever, he enjoyed it and vowed to get back on the wagon, said hello to some regulars, then rejuvenated, walked out into the night.

Crommody’s flat was nestled in a block. He walked through a number of passageways, unlocking and relocking doors, until he came to his flat, nestled on the first floor of the old apartment complex.

He opened up the fridge and looked inside, spied a half-eaten pie and vegetables, got them out and put them in the microwave, took a knife and fork from the draw, got a small stable table out from one of the cupboards, cracked some pepper over it, and poured some salt, then sat back down on the recliner and dug it up with a knife and fork. The meat was good, tangy and salty, and the pastry was good, too. Crommody ate, then, turned the news on, watched the usual horror, then fell asleep on the chair. It was in the middle of the night before he woke up again. He turned the lamp on and stood and made his way to the bedroom and landed on the bad and was asleep in seconds.

 

*

 

People often said that Anne Thompson wasn’t all that much to look at. An androgynous sort of a face, with short, parted hair, in the style of a man. Her blonde hair would, though, catch people’s attention, that and she had a powerful pair of legs, owing to repeated palates classes.

Even at 50, her body had retained a suppleness, though, she didn’t enjoy showing it off, and her dowdy dress sense kept her firmly in the category of wallflower. Her life, to her, was suitably boring, and without incident, except that she had the problem that people feared: she was in love, and had been, all her life.

At times, she hated him, for doing it to her: the years gone by still, and nothing ever doing on the horizon. Like a great long downhill ride on a rapid, hanging onto a tire and waited for some sort of rock to rise up and collapse the thing, but to no avail. She hated him and loved him at the same time. He had stolen the best years of her life from her, without even trying, and this was one of the things that made him so exasperating: his ignorance. In a temper, she would often go out to bars and clubs on her own and drink too much and fall into other men’s arms, but it never got her anywhere. For, in the end, she would only end up comparing them, to him, and inevitably, they would come up short.

She would often tell her friends about his little mannerisms, much to their annoyance, that, and the latest case that he had cracked. By now, after years, they’d all had enough of it, and had reverted to simply rolling their eyes. And so, here she was, fifty years old, and feeling spent, having watched him go through two divorces, and pump out a small swag of kids, which, like a myriad of other things, she was eternally jealous of.

She woke, with one of her usual headaches, and unable to lie in bed any longer, she threw the doona off and sat up, and swiveled her big body around, so that it faced perpendicular to the bed. Another day on the force. Another day, hanging out with Crommody. Well, not entirely; she was in dispatch, and he was, well, he was him. Sometimes, she thought that they had invented a position for Crommody. For, he had worn the mantle of detective for so long, that he had virtually worn it out, like an old stool that was nearly broken. Nearly, but not quite.

She had seen him slow down over the years. At first, the dashing young recruit with stars in his eyes; getting over his head, and being bullied by superiors; to the cop that people started to admire, to the guy that would always show up, rain, hail or shine; to the lieutenant that people started to fear, for his beady eyes that never missed a damn thing, well, nearly everything. And all the while, she had kept her dispatch job, sometimes winding back to part-time, and then into the casual position that she had now found herself in.

Every morning, she would watch him blunder in, in his attire, that generally matched and smelt good, then breeze on through the vestibule of the building, wandering past the small garret, where she worked, and into his office, where he would take his meetings, and set his appointments.

There came a time when she actually got the chance to meet him, and she never forgot it, but couldn’t figure out a way to build on it. At the end of shifts, she would often sneak into the filing room, and rifle through the latest case that he had completed or abandoned, often photographing it, so that she could pour over the work that he had put in; work that she admired so much. And she wasn’t the only one: Crommody had been awarded a whole swag of medals, in the force; not that there was any sign of that. But she had seen and attended every ceremony, just the same.

The last one was for valiance in undercover work, and for that, she shuddered to think what the poor b*****d had been through: two years spent undercover in a drug cartel, dealing narcotics, and getting involved with some of the most hardened criminals the city had ever seen.

Once he was complaining about a case file that had gone missing and requested some of the other staff to go through the files and track it down. She had signed up and had spent six hours alongside of him. Crommody had barely uttered two words but merely grunted his way through the process. She could have sworn, though, that he had gotten a look at her. After all, how could he have failed? For, nothing got past the eye of the great John Crommody.

So, now, all she could do was mark the time and his activities, and hope that one day, these things would finally collide, like fireworks going off on an oval. She stood and walked to the bathroom and urinated, and wondered for the millionth time, what she saw in a sixty-year-old man. The old codger could possibly be doing the same, at this moment in time: pissing in the toilet bowel and getting ready for work.

She stood and flushed and took one final glance at herself in the mirror. Anne Thompson: lover, fighter, but not really. And then she realized that the time was nigh, that if she didn’t do something about this situation, she never would, and therefore, it could ultimately kill her.

She cleaned her teeth and took her shower and prayed for some sort of a resolution, and then, like a flash of lightening, it came.

She had never considered herself to be a visual person, but slow-moving films came into her field of vision, dreams that she had had about him, come to life, except that she was now in them: the old fool, sitting on a chair, alfresco, sipping a coffee, and her joining him. And then, it hit her like a tone of bricks: after all, what the hell was she so afraid of?

It wasn’t as if he was going to attack her. And was it so out of the ordinary that she should just turn up?

She suddenly chided herself on her own stupidity and suddenly understood all the years that she had wasted over her timidity. Years that could have been spent with him.

She knew enough about him to know that he wasn’t exactly a ladies’ man. Women would sometimes pay attention, but the fact was, that, in the main, he was too damn ugly to attract virtually anyone.

He had a face that looked like a bulldog: a version of Winston Churchill, but worse. Skin folded over itself in a myriad of places; a mouth that was turned down into a perpetual grimace. Anne Thompson got dressed, and resolved to meet the love of her life, and, in that moment, for her, the world suddenly seemed to change, and for the better.

 

*

 

Mike Buttrose woke with his usual shock; the shock of where he was, where he lived, but mostly the shock of what he had done.

The killings, to him, almost seemed to have been done by someone else, and he was aware of how likely that sounded. But no matter how likely it was, it was true.

Now, he understood that serial killers who confessed that some other presence was guiding them and their actions, weren’t actually lying.

He looked around at the macabre hell hole that he had created. Only the artist truly understood their own art, and his was something that he had, at the same time, always dreamed of, and now, had nightmares about.

Do we become what we detest? He certainly had, or had he? Even now, he couldn’t tell.

The opposing forces within himself were so diabolical and complete that, at times, he had trouble discerning reality, for what it all meant to him. But, always, the overriding principle: the beauty. For what could be more beautiful that an actual human head?

He looked around at the specimens that he had acquired, and couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride, but also, wonder. Being a former medical student, he knew the gloriousness of his museum, and the monumental detail laying within his exhibits. And this was the main aspect that he got off on: the skin, perfectly preserved forever, in formaldehyde, just before decay, the exquisite beauty of the eyes, half closed, yet half open, staring out at a horizon, that for them, didn’t exist. The lumps in the skin, and the texture and colour, a slight pinky green, vibrant, yet dead.  He would stare at these things for hours, on occasion, admiring the details, particularly the eyelashes, that for some reason, he had a particular fetish for.

Often times, he lamented that he couldn’t just present them, these, his beautiful sculptures, that the world simply wasn’t ready for him and his art. Now, Mike sat on his easy chair and pondered these things, and his next victim. Who would it be? Would it be a man or a woman? He would have to begin a new file; discover a new victim; get a new craze, but for who? Who? He checked his gold-plated watch and realized that he was running late for work, and so, stripped off his clothes and got in the shower, eyed, as always by his victims, then got dressed and looked around the house for his keys, then found them, opened the door and locked it and made his way out into the sunlit hallway and looked out at the city through the giant glass windows. Realizing, that, for him, for once, everything was right with the world.

 

*

 

Crommody made his way through the rainy streets not bothering about the rain that was falling on his face and lapels. People walking past. He thought more about the case. What possessed a man to chop up a woman with a machete, and take her head?

The rain was fading on the horizon in gold bands of light and clouds like soggy, moldy giant cotton wool swabs. He got on the tram as it was staring to get dark and gently muscled his way through the crowd, looked at the faces of the other workers and marveled at how much things had changed and how he had watched them change. A woman standing opposite with white make-up painted on her face, dripping in patches, for the water. High school kids in dark uniforms, milling about, and making nuisances of themselves, though, standing like pillars; workers in suits, men and women, standing, looking out the window, at the trees and the buildings and the night. Crommody looked at them and tried to take his mind off of the killer. But the bodies stuck in his brain like a nightmare that just wouldn’t go away.