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Three Kinds of Monster

James Howerton

    Sometimes you have everything and the bastard still walks.
    That was my big worry with the Amy Torres murder: that Dane Lowenstein would walk away again with that sad, innocent look on his movie-star mask, as if he couldn’t understand how anyone would ever accuse him of such a crime.
    I practically lived at Homicide, making myself a trembling, coffee-stealing pain in the ass; and despite Anthony Payne’s frequent pats on the back and therapeutic assurances that “We got him, Jack”, I didn’t trust the system to work.
    Dane Lowenstein had murdered before, in exactly the same way, and he had walked. Anthony Payne was a good detective; he was a black man, tall and imposing and forged in the world of assumptions, where women clutch their purses when they pass him and unfamiliar cops study him in his crisp suit and tie. Anthony had been around long enough to see through the blond Nordic charm of a creature like Dane Lowenstein. But a jury had not been able to before—could they now?
    Most of the detectives hated but tolerated me. A private investigator (they called us Creepers), was a mere step away from criminal in their code. They hated my hanging around and my sarcastic interference and my doubting of their abilities. I was the creeper who had put them on the trail of Dane Lowenstein, and so they naturally thought I was trying to steal their thunder on this case; and as I said before, I really was making myself a pain in the ass. I tried to make them see that I only wanted justice, but most of them had been around long enough to roll their eyes at the word.
    “Justice is revenge with a married name, Jack,” Anthony said to me; his wood-colored eyes reminded me of alcohol and cigarettes and sleepless nights. “You’ve been obsessed with this toad too many years, Brother. Now pat yourself on the back and relax. Go home, watch porn or something. You’ll get your revenge, Jack, I promise. We got this boy. Don’t worry; he’s going away for good.”
    “I don’t care if it’s justice or revenge, Anthony. I don’t care about credit. I don’t even care what your colleagues think of me. All I want is for this bastard to pay. Tell me he’s going to pay--Brother.”
    “My colleagues are pissed because you nailed the guy and they didn’t.” Anthony laughed, but there wasn’t much humor there. “I can’t tell you what we got, Jack. But believe me, it’s enough. He’s in the cage downtown, he ain’t going anywhere.”

     Anthony didn’t have to tell me what they’d found, I already knew: fingerprints from a glass in Amy’s apartment, a hair fiber on her couch that matched Lowenstein’s DNA.
     But it only proved that he was there in her place. That alone didn’t prove he was the killer. I had seen a jury turn away from hard evidence before and sigh at Lowenstein’s angelic face and decide that He couldn’t have done such a thing.
    “You need to let it go now,” Anthony said to me. “Let the system work, Jack.”
    “What, are you all at once a champion of the system? Do I have to tell you, Ant, about the system?”
    Anthony sighed and stared out the windows at the city, an orderly grey and green promise of civilization: “We got this pretty-boy, Jack. You were right all along. He can smile and charm any jury in the world, but he ain’t walking this time; too much evidence, I don’t care how many women are sitting in those chairs.”
    “With Dane Lowenstein, there’s never too much evidence,” I reminded him.
    “Go home, Jack. Celebrate in your own—way.” Anthony rubbed my shoulder with his gentle paw. “Leave it be for awhile.”

    I walked into the bright day, stepping down the granite steps of the City-County building, where prosecuting attorneys and defense attorneys marched past like carefully-dressed machines—home to what?

    I stopped at Walmart on the way to get a quart of whiskey, the cheapest, Canadian Club. I wondered what club I was joining. I suppose it wasn’t a true quart, because the Canadians used the metric system, didn’t they? But it would work.
     I unlocked the cheap brass bolt to my apartment and shoved open the plywood door. The sun was still blazing across a mild spring sky, and I twisted shut the plastic curtains, gaining some darkness, some promise of oblivion.
    I mixed the cheap whiskey with cheaper Coke and settled down in my daily ritual to the gods of oblivion. Pot would help, it would make me feel better; but I was out, and it seemed too much of a chore to call Stacey and get more. I had plenty of cigarettes and enough booze; that should be enough for today.
    I stared at the plastic curtains that covered the windows of my smelly apartment. The sun wanted to get in, to maybe penetrate darkness with light—God wanting to get in. I sipped the whiskey and coke and waited for oblivion. God could wait until He finally gave me justice.
    After all, it was God who had created the 10 year old boy who skillfully shot the eyes out of birds with his bee-bee gun; who tied kittens onto his mother’s clothesline so that he could douse them with gasoline from the five gallon plastic jug his dad kept in the garage for the lawnmower; who at age 15 had been caught by a neighbor feeding baby rabbits into his dad’s wood-chipper, laughing his joy at the squeals and frantic cries of the little things, nodding his handsome, ash-blond head at the crunched bones, the bloody-hairy red spittle that vomited out of the roaring machine.

    Hey, God, thanks so very much for Dane Lowenstein.
    Anthony Payne, a seasoned detective, had suspicion in his eyes whenever he talked to me about this case, why it was driving me so crazy to see Dane Lowenstein caged forever. But I couldn’t tell Anthony the truth. I’m not obsessed with justice; I’m a simple loser who makes his living spying on people, putting the final period to divorce papers, showing folks the ugly truth for money—that’s all I am.
    Don’t get me wrong; I’m good at what I do. I abuse pot and alcohol when I can (which is always), I smoke way too many cigarettes and maybe hope some day my vices will kill me. But I’m good at what I do. And now I’m at the pathetic point where I only want my life to mean something. I only want to remove from the world a monster, so that he can never again destroy another innocent human life. I tell myself this as I sip at the whiskey and stare at the glowing plastic window. I can die with a smile if I know I’ve saved some innocent in the future from the horror of that monster. So there, God.
    (A lie, maybe).
    Amy Torres wasn’t innocent, not in the Christian sense. She had her problems, her demons. She had drug problems, that’s how I—met her; and she had performed sex for money. I knew this when I spied on her years ago, and gave her husband cause for divorce. This was before I fell in love with her.
    Well, that was years ago, and my delusions about the monster Dane Lowenstein wanting revenge against me were just that, paranoid delusions. It was a coincidence that he targeted her because—or was it?

    I had tried to nail him for a similar murder two years ago, the bloody butchery of a young college girl; and he had walked, giving me a brilliant and knowing wink outside the courthouse as he passed into the sunlight. How could he have ever found out that I was in love with Amy Torres? No, I was giving this creature too much credit.
    Or was I? Things like him never forget. Things like him find an arch-enemy and discover secrets somehow. They delve into their foes, making a study, finding secrets. Things like him do not forget enemies, and I knew Dane Lowenstein was smart—brilliant even. Could he have known that I once loved Amy? I couldn’t underestimate something like him, an evil energy. Every morning I would stare at my ragged face in the mirror and remind myself that he was smarter than I was.
    They say that only once in your life do your eyes see the one you will truly love forever. It was like that with Amy. And I ruined her life, leaving her in wretched misery while her relieved husband wrote me the check.
    I loved her and she hated me, and I went on knowing I would never get her face out of my mind. It was like the tragic scene where you see your destiny in the face of another, where you see redemption and hope and promise, even some magic; when God gives you the one chance to take the right path; and then you walk away from her down the wrong path because you destroyed her and she hates you; and then you simply get drunk. And then your drunken mind knows suddenly that you have missed happiness, you have missed everything, and it will never return. That was what it was like with Amy Torres. Now she was as dead as we all will be, dead under the ground, skeletonizing like the eyeless birds Dane Lowenstein had once brought to ground. I could only have revenge now, I could never have redemption. If Dane Lowenstein tortured and murdered her to get revenge against me—or not—if it was a cruel coincidence or not, my only reason to exist came down to revenge. If I met Dane Lowenstein in Hell I would at least have that. I would never have Amy. Jack Smith goes on with his work because he’s a born Creeper, nothing more.
    Now that I’m fairly drunk, let me tell you about Dane Lowenstein and what I know of creatures like him: In the old days it was simply said that some people were good and some were evil. But our modern world began to take a closer look at subjects like Dane Lowenstein, and they questioned such knee-jerk assumptions about good and evil. Psychiatry in the 20th Century made many studies of these strange individuals—walking, breathing demons—and they came up with a name: Psychopath.
    The term felt right, because it explained away so many fears: it was not evil or the devil at work inside these individuals; it was a traumatic childhood that had made them so deviant, so sadistic.
    A tormented childhood was what created evil people. This explanation felt good, because it gave the promise that things could be reversed, that proper treatment could cure these unfortunate folks and mold them into good human beings.
    Babies are all born innocent, psychiatry assured the fearful public. Childhood trauma was to blame. This was not far from the religious view, except religion blamed Satan and not trauma. No one ever believed that a child could simply have been born evil, religion and psychiatry be damned.
    Who can say what is true?
     Psychiatry eventually decided that it was counter-productive to label these unfortunate individuals psychopaths, the term was too scary, too judgmental, too—Alfred Hitchcock. A better term was sociopath, more buttered-up and acceptable: a class of suffering people who had no concept of right and wrong, of conscience. If they made others suffer, it was only because they themselves were suffering—childhood trauma, low self-esteem, that sort of thing. Evil never butted into their theories, and that was a good turn for evil. It is always content to sit and wait when academic folly gives it what it wants. Yes! We only need to be treated, to be understood—then we’ll be good.
    Following his arrest for the murder of Carla Houseman two years ago (a student at the university), I was determined to interview Dane Lowenstein: At the time I was considering—shamelessly--researching a book on sociopaths; and while he was in custody I depended on Anthony to let that happen. Dane had to agree, of course. I knew he would—I knew sociopaths that well; their need to encounter “experts” who really didn’t know shit. Anyway, two years ago I sat with the beast in a bolted-down yellow-and-green steel cage at the state mental hospital and gazed into his shark-blue eyes. I had to prepare myself for the possibility that this guy might actually walk away free from the horror he had done, he was that convincing. And I saw in his eyes that he recognized me as his greatest enemy. He was delighted that I wasn’t a true badge; only a private investigator with a license you could get from a magazine.
    Such a dimpled, charming smile he gave to me—any girl would quickly melt. He could have been a model, a movie star:
     “Glad to meet you, Jack,” he said, not bothering to extend a hand. “So you’re the knight on the horse.”
     “I’m the knight on the horse, Dane.”
     He studied me, and I felt weak, feeling a cold power beyond mine.
    “You get paid for window-peeking, Jack. Who paid you to look into me?”
     “Nobody. It’s pro bono for the world, to get you locked away.”
     “I won’t be locked away, Jack,” Dane said calmly. “I’m innocent.”
    “You’re innocent. Let’s see....you know, I’ve heard that before.”
    He let out a charming laugh: “That’s right.” His handsome face studied me. A bright Nazi power bloomed in his eyes, a god certainty. I was a bug he was having fun with. “I’ve never killed anybody, Jack. My apologies, but that’s the truth. I don’t kill people. I’m not a murderer.”
    “I can read lies,” I warned him.
    Dane Lowenstein nodded and studied me, his blue eyes blinking with thought. “You’re not a badge--sorry. You always wanted to be, but you had to settle for Pretend Cop.”
    “That’s right; I’m one of those irritating little private investigators who dig where the cops don’t. I’m not ashamed of that .”

    “Did you get your license from one of those cereal boxes?”
    “I got my license from your mother’s ass,” I told him. “Don’t try to con a con, Dane. That’ll be good advice where you’re going.”
    “I’m going home, Jack,” he said, smiling at me. “And then what?”
    I took a long breath. How much did he know about me? How could he know anything about me?
    “I am a con,” he said at last. “I’m a good con, so? I do my research. But I’m not a murderer. I can’t stand the smell of blood. You’re the P.I. who dug up all this evidence against me, aren’t you?”
    “Yes, Dane, I am.”
    “Ah. Well, you dug up the wrong guy, Jack, because I never killed Carla Houseman or anybody else.”
    “Is that why you’re under psychiatric evaluation, to see if you’re sane enough to stand trial?”
    “I’m sane enough to stand trial—and I’ll be found not guilty, Jack.”
    “How so?”
    His blue eyes fondled mine. He brushed a strand of Hitler blond hair from his face. “Two reasons, Jack,” he said. “One; I’m a con, a better one than you. And I know from experience that the easiest person in the world to con is a psychiatrist. I’ve been evaluated by a lot of psychiatrists, and they’re all educated to the point of being morons. It’s no big trick to con a psychiatrist; they’re all desperate to prove that they’re real doctors. And two: I’ll walk because I’m innocent. I’ve committed crimes, and so have you, Jack. But I’ve never murdered anybody.”
    And he did walk.
    I poured another 80/20 whiskey and coke into my plastic glass, trying to snip the past from my memory. I’ve come up with the theory that there are three kinds of human monsters. The first is the most harmless: he’s the one who has no conscience but also fears violence. This sneaky and cowardly human will take from the innocent what he needs and feel no remorse; a scared worm who makes sadness for a living but goes no further, because violence and death are too far. These creatures can’t make you believe much.
    The Second ones are those who take and feel no remorse; who create pain and suffering not because they want to, but because it is necessary at a certain moment. They will kill you if you get in the way of their evil, their bank robbery or whatever, but they will not kill you if you stand aside. If you let them do evil they will spare your life—if you try and stop them they will kill you. These creatures don’t care if you believe in them or not.
    Dane Lowenstein was the third kind of evil: That is evil that wants evil; that demands it. These are creatures that kill not because it is necessary but because it is fun. Evil is not the price of doing business, it is the reward. For these things evil is crack cocaine, and everything that exists does so in order to give to them the greatest thrill of all, the pain and suffering of living things. These are the ones who can make you trust anything.
    I don’t believe in vampires, or even monsters. I use the name not in any supernatural sense. I don’t believe anything supernatural exists. However, I’ve been in this business long enough to know that evil suffocates our planet. I wish it were not so, but it is. And my drunken, loser existence only hangs onto the hope that I can somehow fight against evil. Call it revenge, call it a last gift to Amy Torres, the love of my wretched life--I don’t care what you call it.
    I stared at the floor. A great sociopath like Dane Lowenstein, with so many physical powers and sexual powers....you women who are reading this would believe what he told you, he would make you believe. Call me a sexist, but you would believe. His power is to make you believe.
    Let’s call them sociopaths if that watered-down term pleases you. I can tell you this; and it all has to do with our sick television society: the ugly ones, brilliant or not, are sitting on prison bunks; the beautiful ones, but stupid, wind up girl-boys on the same prison bunks. However, the beautiful and brilliant ones can go on and on torturing and destroying, and society will forgive them, because we never see beyond their beauty, their charm. It is as if our television brains want them to go free.
    These are the true monsters. They can lie to you all day, and all day you will believe them.
    A monster tortured and destroyed the only woman I have ever loved. I know who the monster is, and I used every skill I have to bring him to you, the good public, although none of you will ever know it. You the jury will see Dane Lowenstein, and you’ll be captivated by his beauty and bewildered, dimpled face. You’ll never in your life believe that this blond cherub could have torn apart another human being, a young girl who wanted love, in who’s eyes I finally saw love.

    But listen to this: These creatures have the ability to beguile you, to force you to see that what is not true is true. I’m now getting drunk and falling into oblivion. Goodbye for now. But listen: There are real creatures stepping over this earth that can make you believe that evil is good. I’ve met so many of them that my stomach burns and wants to puke up. Call them psychopaths or sociopaths or whatever you want. But don’t be fooled.
     I prayed that the jury would be wise enough to see this. Then I fell into oblivion.
    Thank you, God. Beyond all hopes and prayers, Dane Lowenstein and his attorney made the biggest mistake of their lives at his trial:
    My biggest fear—and Ant’s, I knew—was that Lowenstein would admit that he knew Amy Torres, that he had been to her apartment, yes, but that was all. He knew her, he had touched a glass there and left a hair sample—but he had not killed her, he could never do a thing like that.
    The jury might have believed his solemn, beautiful face when he demanded to testify on his own behalf.
    Instead, he performed the stupidest act he could have—and it left me stunned. He denied ever knowing Amy Torres. He denied ever being in her apartment. He accused the police of planting the finger-printed glass and hair sample. He denied having ever met the victim.
    His lawyer made a lame attempt to convince the jury that the water glass with his client’s fingerprints all over it was not consistent with the other drinking glasses in Amy’s apartment (as if that carried any weight). And regarding the hair fiber—well, DNA was a questionable science at best....
    After so many nights of misery and worry, I finally glimpsed hope. I smelled the impossible blood of victory. When the word uttered from the jury foreman “Guilty” splashed over me like a warm ocean wave, I slumped in my chair, shuddering with relief—I welcomed God again.
    Dane Lowenstein stood now, finally, like one of the frightened baby rabbits in front of the judge, in front of God and humanity, all of his power suddenly gone. The demon would be caged, and another monster would be deprived of its feeding ground. I dared not believe that I had won.
    I had not saved Amy, so the verdict was bitter at best; I would take flowers to her lonely grave and say how much I loved her, and I was sorry, sorry, sorry....that was all I could do now.

    “It’s over!” I slapped hands with Anthony when he came up to me. We watched Dane Lowenstein shuffle away, handcuffed, into oblivion. “I love you, Brother. We finally saw justice this day.”
     Anthony looked at me, his eyes sad. “You got your thing, Brother,” he replied.
    “We need to celebrate, Ant. Let’s go have a drink.”
    “Naw. I’m not in the mood for celebrating, Jack.”
    I saw that something in his eyes. But it didn’t worry me. The great monster of my life, Dane Lowenstein, was gone, shuffling away in steel chains, his blue Nordic eyes stunned with disbelief. I would drink tonight to his downfall, to Amy’s beautiful face, to the justice that I never believed I would ever see. I would drink to God tonight, and thank Him for what I never thought I’d see—justice.

    A sociopath has unique abilities to make you believe that a lie is the truth. Anyone can fall prey, even the smartest juror. No one is immune to these creatures—I know that from bitter experience. Thank God these were jurors who actually read the evidence.
    But enough of that for now: The world was suddenly wonderful again. Ant had his suspicions, as I knew he would. But I had planted seeds and covered bases that I knew would stay covered.
    I had killed for love, and I promised myself that I would never kill again—but you never know about love.

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