Buried Dreams (35 page)

John said, “Yeah.”

Even though he was over an hour late to his meeting in Glenview, John began walking up and down the aisles, measuring shelving, examining the construction. “I thought I might work a deal with Torf,” John explained. “He could do the work, I’d supervise. He’d save some, I’d still make some.”

John figured he might be able to help Torf bring the job in cheaper if they used some of the leftover shelving from the last job. That’s what John said he was looking for in the back of the store at about eight-thirty. There was a door open and John could see the new kid, the one who was pissed off about his pay, kneeling in the snow and folding boxes. They were alone back there, and John asked the kid about the shelving. The boy didn’t know anything, and John swore with God as his witness that was the only time he talked to the kid. Just asked him about some shelving.

About ten minutes later, sometime around eight-forty, John Gacy left Nisson Drugs. He was almost two hours late for the Rafco meeting, but he sat out in the parking lot, by the liquor store, for at least ten minutes. John couldn’t recall “what the hell I was doing. I must have been writing down figures, which is a standard thing to do after you leave a client.”

While John Gacy was sitting in his truck, “writing down figures,” Elizabeth Piest arrived at Nisson Drugs to pick up her son. It was eight-fifty. Rob was on the register at the front counter and had ten more minutes to work. Elizabeth Piest began browsing to pass the time.

Just before nine, Rob asked Kim Byers if she could take the register for the rest of the night. He said he wanted to go “talk to that contractor guy about a job.”

Rob was now wearing his blue parka. Kim had entirely forgotten that her photo receipt was in the pocket.

A moment or two later, Rob found his mother walking down one of the aisles and said he would be a few more minutes. “Some contractor wants to talk to me about a summer job,” he said.

“No problem,” Mrs. Piest said, “I’ll browse around the store and I’ll wait for you.”

Elizabeth Piest noticed that Rob was wearing his parka.

The cops and prosecutors wanted to make it look like John talked to the kid in private, offered him a job, then waited for him outside in his truck. The truth was, John said, that he was writing down figures. Why would you sit there waiting for a kid you talked to once about some goddamn shelving?

John snapped his notebook closed and was about to pull out onto Touhy when Piest came running out and banged on the hood of the truck. Or maybe it was the window. John wanted to be totally accurate, not make anything up. He knows he rolled down the window. The kid asked if there was a summer job available. Some shit like that.

Ten seconds later, John would have been gone. But the kid came out to talk to him on his own initiative. Was that John Gacy’s fault?

“I ain’t got time to talk about it,” John said.

Still, the kid seemed ambitious and he looked so eager about the job you could almost feel sorry for him. “Well, hell,” John said, “get in the truck. I gotta pick up something at my house. Then I got a meeting in Glenview. I’ll drop you off on my way.”

It must have been John Gacy who picked up Piest, because John remembers the conversation pretty clearly. He told Piest that he couldn’t hire a fifteen-year-old, and the kid started getting “pushy.” Greedy. He kept after John, talking about what a good worker he was and shit. John finally said, “You need money that bad, you ought to hustle your body, make money that way.”

The Piest kid just let that one whiz right on by him. Didn’t even respond to it. He kept “pushing” about a job. But John had planted the seed, and the kid hadn’t actually said no, so maybe he was receptive. He could be one of the sneaky ones who had to be convinced with money. Or with tricks.

“John Gacy was with the Piest kid twenty minutes,” John told the docs. Then—and this was “supposition"—the Other Guy came out and “fucked over the kid.” But why did he come out so early, at nine-thirty in the evening, and when John was almost dead sober? It sure was hard to figure. Maybe it was “because Carol had remarried,” John said. “I think I felt torn apart by that, like I had nothing to live for anymore. And when we got to the house, I cleared the phone machine and learned that my uncle had died. I was upset about that.”

Even so, the Other Guy wouldn’t have come out unless Piest gave some indication that the seed was growing inside his mind, and John could see “he was into it.” That would bring out one of the three Jacks: either the guy who “just wanted to get his rocks off,” or the one “who tracked them down and tricked them,” or the one “who felt sorry for them.” There had to be a trigger somewhere: money, sex, something.

The kid didn’t say anything about how it was his mother’s birthday. That would have been a whole different trigger. It was “speculation,” of course, but “because of my respect for mothers and motherhood,” John figured, “I probably would have given him a present for her and taken him home.”

But the kid just wanted to talk about a job, and John figured Piest pulled the trigger on Jack during the conversation they had about money in the house. John recalls that they both had a drink. The kid drank 7-Up—wouldn’t touch liquor—and he sat at the bar. John had a Scotch.

He asked the kid if there was anything he wouldn’t do for the right price and Rob Piest said he didn’t mind hard work, that he’d do just about anything for money.

That sounded like a hint, and John planted a few more sex seeds, but Piest was “totally unreceptive.” The kid just sloughed off the sex talk and kept pushing about a job even after John told him PDM didn’t have any openings right then.

“You want to earn money, there’s good money in hustling,” John reminded the kid. Piest ignored that one, too. “He never responded to anything that involved sex.”

Piest asked about the clown pictures on the wall, as if he were trying to change the subject and get friendly all at the same time. The handcuffs were on the bar, near where the
kid was sitting, and “he picked them up and started fiddling around with them.”

“What are these for?” Piest asked.

That was the question, John figured, that probably triggered the second Jack, Smart Jack, the guy who outsmarted boys for animal sex. Because, okay, you’ve just been talking about hustling, about making money that way, and now the kid wants to know about the handcuffs. One of the sly ones, pretending he doesn’t have a clue. A kid, you could tell by is build, by the color of his hair, what was going on in his mind. Acting naїve so he could earn more money. A trick mind behind the baby face. The Voorhees look about him.

That must have been the way it happened, John figured, because the next thing he knew, Smart Jack was showing Rob Piest a trick with the cuffs, telling him to put them on behind his back.

“Why,” John asked the docs, “if you had just been talking about sex, would you let a stranger talk you into putting on a pair of handcuffs? If you weren’t into it?” The docs and the cops and the newspapers could say that Piest was some kind of superstraight-arrow kid until “they’re blue in the face,” but John wouldn’t believe it. Not after the kid put the cuffs on himself.

“I’m going to rape you,” John heard Jack tell the kid, “and you can’t do nothing about it.” It wouldn’t really be rape, though, because there was no force involved and the kid put the cuffs on himself, which showed consent.

John would have gone with it that way—one of those consensual rapes engineered by Smart Jack—but there was a mist now, swirling in wispy shards around the images moving through his memory. He does recall unzipping the kid’s pants. “And I seen he wasn’t into it at all. He was scared at this point. He had tears in his eyes, and you can’t get no erection like that. Well, I had the meeting in Glenview and I had to go to the hospital about my uncle, so I thought, might as well take this kid back. We had just been horsing around with the cuffs, and if the kid told anybody, it would have been my word against his.”

John led the handcuffed boy into the bedroom, but he really didn’t know why they went in there, and the mist had thickened into a fog that was beginning to obscure his recollection. “Why would I take him into the bedroom if I was going to let him go?” John wondered. “The only reason: I
think the key for the cuffs must have been in there because I always kept it in the top drawer of the chest by the bed.” John—he figured the boy’s tears switched on the character John knew as the third Jack, the guy who felt sorry for them, the compassion cop—went into the bedroom with the full intention of taking the cuffs off Rob Piest. That’s what he told the docs.

The bedroom was dark, but light from the barroom streamed through the open doorway. In the darkening fog, Piest looked like one of those black cardboard silhouettes. Not even a human being. It was too dark to see if the cardboard boy still had tears in his eyes. The last thing John recalled before the fog filled the room with darkness, he was reaching around inside the drawer, looking for the key.

Then there was, John said, a sense of some time lost to the darkness—only a few minutes—and he must have snapped right out of it because the next thing he recalled, the phone was ringing insistently.

John Gacy was three hours late for the seven-o’clock meeting. Rapheal called Gacy so many times he doesn’t actually recall who placed the final call, but he does remember a phone conversation with John Gacy at about ten that evening.

“I asked him where he was,” Rapheal later testified. “I was perturbed because I had two other people sitting there. He elaborated on a number of excuses. He said he had a flat tire, then he had something about an uncle dying, and then he said he was tired and he was sleeping. . . .”

Rapheal later testified that John Gacy was entirely coherent and that he spoke in a normal tone of voice. The two men agreed to meet the next morning, at the house on Summerdale.

“When I came back into the bedroom after answering the phone call,” John said, “I found Piest lying on the floor with the rope around his neck.” The boy’s body was wedged between the bed and the wall, where he’d fallen, and John said he had “a hell of a time getting it out of there.” He put the body up on the bed, careful to “roll it over on the back because he’d already urinated his pants.”

The boy was dead, and there was a moment, John said, just a moment, when he felt a shaft of pure anger that seemed to come from outside his rational mind. He was disgusted with the kid. Because Rob Piest didn’t have to die.

It was the same knot: crossover, hammer handle, crossover. John figured what happened, he must have been looking for the key in the drawer, ready to let the boy go, when his searching hand fell on the rope and hammer handle. That must have been what switched on the Other Guy and brought the fog down on him, John said.

Looking at the rope around the boy’s neck, he could see that it had been twisted only twice. The hammer handle was turned a bit so that it rested behind the boy’s head. All Piest had to do, he could have ducked his head and lowered his shoulder. The hammer handle would have spun loose. It looked like Bad Jack had only just started with Rob Piest—two minutes lost in the fog—when the phone rang. It was like he escaped.

The docs kept pushing about the Piest kid, and John tried to help, but he couldn’t really explain it himself. Some doc’d have to get Bad Jack out, talk to him, before John himself really knew what the hell had happened in the bedroom. Otherwise, talking about how the Piest kid died was just a matter of “rationalization.”

As the trial date finally approached and the pressure to find Bad Jack mounted, John motormouthed through his speculations on what must have happened, in an effort to bring back the moment of the rope. Sometimes, during a long session with one of the docs, he’d say something—a sentence or two—and the words that came out of his mouth would have no meaning.

“I don’t know why the fuck I should feel sorry for them. It’s just a weakness, feeling sorry. They don’t deserve to live, so you don’t let them live. You fix ‘em. You fix ‘em good. What the hell’s to explain? You can outsmart somebody and fix him good. Make him trust you. They trust you, you can trick ‘em into doing anything. Anything you want. All you do is, you put the rope around their neck. Tell ‘em it’s just a trick, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

John would hear himself saying something like that, and it wouldn’t make any sense. He told the docs he didn’t understand what the fuck was going on. “I was just talking, but I don’t know what I said. It sounds crazy, talk like that.” Words with no meanings. Except that with John, the words would seem to have meaning when he said them; then they’d drift off into the mist.

When he first came to Cermak, John almost laughed in their faces when the docs asked him if he thought he had a dual personality. He told them they were full of shit. But then, when he broke his personality down and discovered the four Jacks, he began to sense a familiar hostility kicking at the weak parts of John Gacy’s mind. Jack in there. Fighting with John again. So the docs had been right all along. And maybe Jack was beginning to surface because the trial was coming up hard on him now, and John was nervous and frightened about it. Jack came out when John was “weak.” So it was John’s fear, his weakness, that allowed Jack to surface in short, garbled bursts.

He never stayed out for more than a few sentences, though. Nobody could really interview Jack. It was like he was experimenting with the docs, playing a game of hide-and-seek in there. Bad Jack, acting like some neighbor’s three-year-old boy visiting with his parents. First thing, the little kid ducks behind the sofa. He peeks out, you wave at him, and, bang, he ducks out of sight, giggling. About ten seconds later, there he is, peeking at you again: a little bolder this time. You know he really wants to come out and play, but the kid’s shy and you have to coax him.

That’s what Bad Jack was doing: He was peeking out every once in a while, experimenting with the docs. Bad Jack was looking for a doc who wanted him to come out and play. That’s the way John figured it. Why else would he hear himself say:

“They’re scared and they can’t get no erection. You just tell them that when the rope goes tight, they’ll get hard. Nothing wrong with it, unless you make it wrong in your own mind. No struggle. They put the ropes on themselves. They get excited: they kill themselves.”