The Brain Eaters

Chapter 4

For the first time in the memory of the present staff, there was the crackle of excitement in the musty halls and offices of the old Milwaukee Herald plant. Corey Macklin’s story on the bloody events at Vic’s Tavern had come on a slow news day, and with Jimbo Tattinger’s graphic photos, the street sales of the Saturday edition exceeded anything since the Brewers were in the World Series.

Telephones shrilled throughout the building. People moved through the halls with purposeful strides. Typewriters clacked like bursts of machine-gun fire. Even the lethargic maintenance crew went about their cleanup tasks with unaccustomed vigor.

Corey was thoroughly enjoying his spurt of fame. He had requests from three television stations — one network affiliate and two local channels — for interviews as an eyewitness. He turned them all down. This was his story, and he had no intention of sharing it. As a measure of Corey’s enhanced status, city editor Porter Uhlander had, for the first time in two years, called him by his first name.

The city editor was bald except for an uneven fringe of gray above the ears. His pale jowls hung over the collar of his starched white shirt. He had the early edition of Monday’s Herald spread out on the desk before him. Corey sat on the other side of the desk in a cracked leather chair, waiting for the editor to speak.

“You did a nice job on the Stransky story, Corey,” Uhlander said. “Good follow-up today on the victims.”

“Thanks, Porter.” Corey tried out a mixture of brashness and humility.

“Think any of them are going to die?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Corey said.

“Too bad. What have you got for tomorrow?”

“Interview with Pauline Stransky.”

“The widow? Hasn’t she already been on television?”

“Sure, ten seconds here, twenty seconds there. All those TV guys know is ‘How do you feel, Mrs. Stransky?’ Hell, how would she feel? I want to get a picture of the husband through her eyes.” Even as he spoke, Corey knew it might be wishful thinking. Widow stories did not usually sell a lot of papers unless the widow had a forty-inch chest. Still, it was a possibility.

“If you think you can get something readable, go ahead. I’d like to keep the story running through Wednesday if we can.”

“Can I have Jimbo?”

“Think you can use him?”

“He got some good stuff Friday,” Corey said.

“Bloody but good,” Uhlander agreed. “What can he do with the widow?”

“Character shots. Background stuff.”

“A little arty for us, isn’t it?”

“We can jazz it up with the right captions.”

“You mean like ‘From this ordinary-looking house came the ordinary man who Friday night spattered a Milwaukee neighborhood with blood’?”

“A tad lurid, but that’s the general idea.”

“Okay, take Jimbo.”

Corey got up and started to leave.

“By the way, Corey …”

“Yeah?”

“I had a call from Mr. Eichorn about you.”

“No kidding.” Nathan Eichorn was the seldom-seen publisher of the Herald who did most of his business from Palm Springs or somewhere in Switzerland.

“I think he has some ideas about boosting you to a daily column.”

Having his name and maybe his picture on a daily column would be a step up from city-beat reporter, but it sure as hell wouldn’t make him rich. Corey’s ambitions went beyond the rickety Milwaukee Herald. Still, he was not yet in a position to turn anything down.

He said. “Interesting. I’d like to hear more when I get back.”

He found Jimbo Tattinger in the shabby photographers’ lounge with a cup of coffee and a well-thumbed copy of Hustler. With a minimum of grumbling, Jimbo got his gear together and followed Corey out to the parking lot, where his Cutlass waited.

The neighborhood where Hank Stransky had lived was one of those west of Glendale that had sprung up in the boom following World War II. The house was a plain frame bungalo that had been enhanced with shrubbery, an add-on room, a new brick chimney, and a covered patio out in the back with a fishpond and built-in barbecue.

Pauline Stransky, wearing an outdated print dress and looking weary, answered the door. Jimbo glanced over, and Corey knew what he was thinking. No forty-inch chest.

Corey identified himself and the photographer. Mrs. Stransky led them inside with an air of resignation.

The living room — or front room, as Pauline Stransky called it — was crammed with fat, comfortable furniture, knickknack shelves, and framed photographs of people in stiff studio poses. Handwoven rag rugs were spaced strategically in spots where the carpet would get the most wear.

The widow was a tall, spare woman with a strong-looking body. She wore her graying hair pulled back and knotted. Her manner was calm as she sat on the sofa facing Corey, but red rims around her eyes showed much recent crying. The Stransky boys, ages eight and nine, sat restlessly alongside their mother. They ignored Corey, concentrating on Jimbo Tattinger, who was putting on a show for them, hopping around and shooting up film as if he were from People magazine.

“You have a nice house here, Mrs. Stransky,” Corey said. “Comfortable.”

“Hank did a lot of the work himself.”

“I can see that.” Corey coughed and took out a ball-point pen. “Would you mind talking a little about your husband?”

“What do you want to know?”

“What kind of a man he was. What you liked to do together. How he was with the boys.”

Pauline Stransky began to talk. Slowly at first, then with more emotion as her eyes drifted away to memories. Hank Stransky was your good, solid, salt-of-the-earth guy next door. He worked hard, always provided for the wife and kids. Maybe he drank a little too much sometimes, but didn’t everybody? He never got abusive. He liked to watch sports on TV, he liked to hunt, and he liked building things. In short, Hank Stransky was the kind of a man who would put the Herald’s readers to sleep in a minute or send them running to the television set. As a story, he was a zero.

As soon as he decently could, Corey broke into the widow’s reminiscences. “Uh, Mrs. Stransky, would it bother you to talk about last Friday?”

It took her a moment to return to the present. “I guess not,” she said. “I’ve talked about it enough that it don’t hurt so much anymore.”

“I’ll try and make it short,” Corey said.

Mrs. Stransky turned to the two boys, who were squirming uncomfortably on the sofa. “You can go on out and play if you want to.”

They bounced up eagerly and hurried out the door. Jimbo shot them leaving, then sagged into a chair.

“There ain’t — isn’t — much I can tell you that I haven’t already told the others,” she said. “Hank went out Friday night after supper. Said he was going down by Vic’s. That’s the last time I saw him.”

“Did he often go out alone?”

“Sure. Sometimes I’d go with him, but mostly he liked to watch the sports on TV and kid around with the other guys at Vic’s. I didn’t mind. It gave me a chance to stay home and watch my own shows.”

“Did you notice anything … different about him when he went out last Friday?”

“He was same as always except he didn’t eat very good. Said he had some kind of headache. I guess I snoozed off watching TV, and the next thing I knew, the cops came to the door and told me Hank was dead.”

Corey scribbled on the folded copy paper. “You say he had a headache.”

“That’s right. He didn’t make much of it, but it wasn’t like Hank to complain. Last week I thought he might be coming down with the grippe, but he went to work, anyway, and I guess it wasn’t anything.”

“He worked for the highway department, didn’t he?” Corey said.

“That’s right. Construction. That was his business. Hank could’ve had inside work, but he always said he’d go crazy with a desk job.”

Her mouth twitched as the irony hit her. Corey went on quickly.

“Was there anything unusual about the job Mr. Stransky was working on at the time?”

She looked at him with a sad smile. “It sounds funny to hear you say ‘Mr. Stransky.’ I think he’d rather you called him Hank. Everybody did.”

Corey nodded. “Hank, then.”

“It was just a job like the rest. Down in South Milwaukee. Breaking up the old street, putting in a new one. At least that let him get home earlier than the week before. Then he was working up north of Appleton on the highway there. Didn’t get home till after seven sometimes. Thank goodness it only lasted a week.”

They talked for another fifteen minutes during which Corey’s spirits sagged steadily. There appeared to be nothing about Hank Stransky or his behavior prior to the violent end of his life that was in any way newsworthy. A little inside filler was all he would get out of this. Too bad Hank Stransky couldn’t have been a murderous maniac. Or at least a wife beater.

Corey seized the first opportunity to say good-bye to the widow. He woke up Jimbo, who had dozed off soon after the boys went outside, and left the house.

On the drive back to the Herald building Jimbo said, “Tell me again how we’re going to win the Pulitzer Prize with this story.”

“It’s not dead yet.”

“The only way it runs another day is if Hank Stransky gets up out of the coffin and takes a bite out of somebody.”

“You’re a million laughs.”

Jimbo hefted the camera, which was filled with exposed film. “What do you want me to do with these?”

“Don’t feed me a straight line like that,” Corey said.

“Seriously. I got a boxful of pictures of nice people in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Make a nice family album, but you couldn’t sell ‘em to a Thursday throwaway.”

“You’ve got no complaint. I got you a wire-service pickup on one of the tavern shots, didn’t I?”

“True. But Tri-State News Service ain’t exactly the AP.”

“Jimbo, in this world you take what you can get.”

The photographer made his eyes go very wide. “Words to live by. Thank you, sire.”

“Stuff it,” Corey said. He drove the rest of the way in silence while Jimbo grinned happily beside him.

Back at his desk Corey attacked the typewriter nonstop for twenty minutes. When he had finished, he ripped out the last sheet, scanned the story he had written on Hank Stransky’s widow, and crumpled it into a ball. After a moment he smoothed out all three pages, cut it to three paragraphs, and dropped it into the Print basket.

Corey leaned back, making the old wooden swivel chair creak. Good-bye, Pulitzer, he thought with a thin-lipped grin. At least he had given it his best shot. He had followed up the story of Stransky’s flip-out with features on each of the eight people who had gotten cut up at the tavern. Not exactly a gold mine. They were all blue-collar types you could find at any tavern in town any night of the week. The widow and the kids added up to a yawn. Stransky’s funeral might be worth a few lines; then it would be old news. The Big Story still eluded him.

On a table behind Corey’s desk was a stack of dailies from across the country that had been mailed to the Herald. He flipped through them idly. Los Angeles had an earthquake reading four point something on the Richter scale. Cuban refugees staged a mini-riot in Miami. There was a bribery scandal in the Texas legislature. A New York cabbie drove into a crowd of pedestrians.

Just another typical day in the land of opportunity, Corey thought. Natural disasters, ethnic unrest, venality, violence.

Wait a minute.

He returned to the New York tabloid that carried the cabdriver story. DuBois Williamson, a hackie in the city for more than twenty years, considered by everybody who knew him to be a gentle, sober, peaceable man, had unaccountably slammed his cab into a crowd of pedestrians on Fifty-ninth Street, after which he had run from the cab and attacked bystanders until he fell and was run over by a truck. According to his widow, Williamson was in generally good health up to and including the day he died. That was the previous Friday.

Corey reread the story, making notes as he went along. Coincidence, probably. Sure it was. But maybe … just maybe …

He took out a fresh sheet of copy paper and drew a vertical line down the center. He headed one column Stransky, the other Williamson. Down the left margin he wrote Age, Location, Job, Family. Using the New York story, he filled in the information on DuBois Williamson, matching it against what he knew of Hank Stransky. Both were middle-aged: forty-five and fifty-four. Both lived in a metropolitan area: Milwaukee, Brooklyn. Both were steady blue-collar types who had been on their jobs a long time. Both were married — Stransky with two sons; Williamson, one serving in the navy.

Then he ran out of similarities and sat for a minute tapping the pen against his teeth. Finally, at the bottom of the page, he wrote FIND LINK in caps and underlined it several times.

Oscar Yates, a onetime hotshot reporter who drank himself off the Chicago Sun-Times, sauntered over. He carried a torn-off sheet of wire copy.

“Hey, Macklin, you the freak-out editor this week?”

Corey looked up without bothering to answer.

“You might be interested in this.” Yates let the copy sheet float down on top of the papers on Corey’s desk. The AP story read:

The body of Andrea Olson Keith, 20, was returned to the Wisconsin home of her grandparents after her bizarre death in Seattle Friday. Authorities there are still speculating over what caused the bride of one day to go berserk in a restaurant atop Seattle’s famed Space Needle. Four victims of the woman’s knife attack were recovering. Her husband, Justin Keith, 22, was pronounced dead at the scene from stab wounds to the throat.

Corey dug through the stack of dailies for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Then he took out a fresh sheet of paper. On this one he made three vertical columns.