The Kill Jar Read online

  The crime started in an office located on the second floor of McKinney’s gallery. The scene there indicated a struggle followed by the aforementioned beating. The bathroom where he washed his own blood away was one floor down, at street level. Close to the bathroom, near a rear exit door, McKinney was shot to death. It is unknown if he was leaving with the killer or attempting to escape when he was shot.

  Nothing of great value was taken from McKinney’s gallery, although he catered to high-dollar clients and there was much to abscond with if robbery was the motivation for his death sentence. The single item taken was what artists call a “soft sculpture”—in this instance, a three-by-five-foot series of ropes formed into a sort of web on the wall. Priced at $800, the rope sculpture was cheap compared to most of the pieces in McKinney’s gallery.

  At his funeral, according to one local news article, the pastor was overheard saying, “What we knew of John McKinney, he should be in heaven. But from what we have heard, he is probably in hell.” It’s safe to say that there were many parts of McKinney’s life that were a secret until after his death.

  In the Birmingham Eccentric newspaper article about the area’s biggest stories of the year, Tim King and John McKinney have the side-by-side photos, John McKinney to the right. Tim looks like a sweetheart. McKinney looks like Jack Nicholson in The Shining but with a little more hair. The two photos, aesthetically, shouldn’t be next to one another.

  They just look wrong to me like that, at first.

  But after a while I think they look absolutely right.

  That photo spread wasn’t the only venue where Timothy King and John McKinney crossed paths. Across the street and a few houses down from the King residence were some of McKinney’s closest friends, the Coffey family, who were consummate art collectors and had business ties to McKinney’s gallery in Birmingham. John McKinney was at the Coffey house frequently, had dinners with the family, and generally mingled with them in a variety of social situations. As did Timothy King during those same years, visiting with the Coffey children.

  This single degree of separation between Tim King and John McKinney, whether known by the police or not, was not discovered by the families of the victims until 2010, around the time that Cathy Broad, Tim’s sister, tells me about it via email. She says that she and Pat Coffey, one of the sons, have been backtracking through their personal understanding of the OCCK case and discovered that John’s younger brother had previously worked for McKinney at the art gallery as well. So McKinney can be linked to Timothy King and also to the brother of the suspect John, who can be linked to Busch. Cathy later tells me that another of the Coffey children, sixteen years old at the time, used to babysit for Jill Robinson, victim #2. McKinney was also a patron of the Cass, placing him in proximity to Richard Lawson.

  Jill Robinson, Timothy King, John McKinney, John, Christopher Busch, and Richard Lawson appear to have, at most, only one degree of separation from each other, through McKinney.

  WHEN I GOOGLE John McKinney’s murder, nothing immediately comes up. But I find another John McKinney, and he’s the cofounder and president of something called the Fox Island Lighthouse Association. I look at his picture. This other John McKinney looks to be in his mid-fifties, wears a parka, and has curly hair that sweeps in the wind.

  I blow the picture up and print it. I tack it to my wall next to that of the art gallery owner. This new photo is John McKinney’s son.

  FIGHTERS

  I park a few blocks from the river when I get off the Lodge again, which I seem to be driving on pretty frequently, just to get down into the heart of the city and wander. I eventually make my way on foot over to the Cass. The walking clears my head but also makes me feel close to the streets, where the murders seem to rise from the concrete like heat waves sometimes, the story surrounding me as I pass through it, only now there’s a slight drizzle and I pull my sweatshirt against the wetness and walk across a vacant parking lot. The attendant, a black guy in his twenties, is smoking a cigarette in his booth, and I’m the closest he’s come to action all day. He must work on commission, because nobody in this city would pay him to watch these empty two hundred spaces.

  I frog through traffic to the Joe Louis fist sculpture; I’m jaywalking, and a traffic cop whistles at me but I don’t look. There’s really no authority in a traffic cop’s presence down here. They know this, blowing their whistles out of boredom only, it seems. The police down here are for life-and-death emergencies, if that. If you stop at a red light in the evening hours, you’re an idiot. You slow down, you roll through the light when the traffic is clear. You will not get a ticket, since the cops expect nothing less of you. They would prefer that you roll through reds rather than getting yourself jacked at a dead stop. All that paperwork for them to take care of. All your fucking brains on the ground.

  The Joe Louis fist sits in a median on Jefferson Avenue, so it’s seen from automobiles driving both east and west through downtown. In the summertime, pedestrians jam the crosswalk taking pictures of it. Right now, I’m alone and I stand there looking up at the sculpture for a while. It’s so big.

  The sculpture of world champion boxer Joe Louis’s fist and forearm is twenty-four feet long, weighs eight thousand pounds, and is cast in bronze. It hangs twenty-four feet above the ground, suspended sidelong from cables like it’s punching outward, but at what?

  The artists named the sculpture Fist of a Champion, and for decent reason. Joe Louis and his family had come to Detroit from the South in the 1920s, escaping the Ku Klux Klan. He’d lived in the Detroit ghetto area called Black Bottom. He used to hide his boxing gloves in a violin case so his mom wouldn’t suspect him of trouble. Later, in 1937, Joe Louis defeated the Cinderella Man, James Braddock, to become world champion.

  What would Joe Louis think of Detroit now, in 2010, I wonder, all this time later and still in an era that finds blacks and whites segregated? An era in which I, supposedly a “man of letters,” still see Black Man in Booth, White Man in Car, Hispanic Man on Corner . . . ? Maybe I am just describing people, the way I grew up doing, but have my descriptions been whitewashed? Who paid for this fist to be erected, and with whose million dollars? And why put the fist of a big black boxer in the center of a city that seems to have abandoned that boxer’s very people, if it were not conceptualized from a vantage of privilege, from those outside the circle of poverty, throwing a few crumbs of culture to the people at the center?

  I imagine the Joe Louis fist turning clockwise, its middle finger pointing up, turning inward at the city that built it, and that may have betrayed its promise and glory as well.

  COMPACT CARS

  I’m in my hotel room and it’s late. I’ve just come from meeting with Ellie at a diner, where we sat and had ice cream and coffee. We didn’t talk about my wife, and Ellie didn’t ask me about the bandage on my hand, either, just placed her small hand over my own while we talked quietly.

  This is something I remembered about Ellie, always: the way hurtful things—the laceration on my hand from where I’d smashed the telephone in my hotel room against it, just to feel that pain again for a second, or the breaking apart of my heart from failing at marriage, at perfection for my kids—seemed to drift away when she touched me, and Ellie knew this. When my pain wasn’t caused by Ellie, Ellie soothed it.

  I can’t sleep after the coffee, and I mute my television and spend the next hour sitting on my hotel bed, sorting through my documents until I, by happenstance, find a hastily photocopied column from a local newspaper, circa 1977.

  In it there’s a description of an abduction attempt, in which a young boy was in the candy aisle of a pharmacy. He looked down the aisle and saw a middle-aged man in a rust-colored blazer staring at him. The man wore a shirt and tie under his blazer. The man’s eye contact was creepy. When the boy left the store, the man was in the parking lot, where he attempted to get the boy into his car.

  I lean back against my headboard and can feel the little synapses firing off under my skin
. I know why people claw themselves when they’re detoxing. It’s been maybe a year since I’ve had a drink but it feels like fucking forever, a lifetime ago, since I nearly wrapped my car around a tree almost every weekend for six months straight, had largely immoral encounters outside of my marriage, said horrible things to people I actually liked. I read over the article again. It describes the man who tried to abduct me when I was a boy, the same candy aisle scenario, the same blazer, the same look on his face. He’s driving the same type of car that followed me away from the shopping center, the compact that rolled up beside me a few blocks away.

  That’s the man that I’ve been thinking about all these years, but there’s no way to know if he’s related to the killings. There’s no way to even track him. The cops didn’t even have computers then. The police were still keeping notes on cocktail napkins.

  I know that this part of the story is important, as much as any, but from whose eyes do I tell it, the seven-year-old boy walking home from the pharmacy he’d nearly shoplifted candy at, his pockets holding on to the idea of the stolen candies that are merely symptomatic of the darker urges inside him?

  It’s a nicer story than some: that of an eight-year-old girl whose cage allows only glimpses of her parents as they push the saltines, her daily meal, to her, or that of a boy hustled from hand to hand at an airport in London, or the story told from inside the trunk of a car, the wheel wells ticking off the first three hours of uncertainty.

  Why is my story thirty-five years ago any different than that of any other kid ten feet from a car with a man in a blazer and the presumption of power inside it?

  From what vantage do I tell the clearest truth: that when a man swings open the passenger-side door and reaches out to you, it is more like an extension of the hand you already feel at home, clutching at the back of your hairline? How when you run full tilt afterward it is more like a stone leaping across water, that lightness in your head, that dark-tendriled play of hiding and seeking but with an urgency you don’t have language for yet?

  Is this how the story is told after decades?

  I spend hours digging through old newspaper articles at the public library the next night in Southfield until they kick me out and I drive around my old neighborhood with my headlamps lighting lawns I used to walk across. I drive back to my hotel and collapse on the bed to a Cold Case episode about Richard Lawson and the taxicab murder he’d gone to prison for. Cory Williams, the Detroit-area cop who’d traveled to Atlanta to conduct the John interview, is himself interviewed in the episode. He seems smart and he seems to like the attention. I can hear the ice machine down the hall from me while I’m sleeping, and at three a.m. I sit up startled and can’t fall back asleep until two hours later.

  These experiences don’t feel real somehow, as if I’ve made up a journey in order to follow it, purposefully away from my home and the relationship with my wife, toward something closer to what I’d felt as a boy, maybe. And in the blue of the television lighting across my bed, my heart pounding with sadness, there’s the wish to be held by my father one time, to hold my own son, to beg of my daughter forgiveness for being a man in a world that would strip her of power, as Kristine had been stripped, and redress her to make nice, just because it can.

  This is what wakes me up every night: It’s not the ice machine, it’s how seldom I feel I’ve loved my children right, with everything I have, and how little time is left for me to do so.

  GILL ROAD

  I’m eating a Coney dog with my dad in Southfield, the first time I’ve seen him since my uncle, his younger brother, died a few years back. My dad still has the dark features, high cheekbones, and piercing blue eyes of his youth. He’s hard not to notice in a room.

  Even though my dad and I don’t have a good relationship, we don’t let this get in the way of meeting. I’m in town and have pledged to see him. After a few years of radio silence, I feel refreshed by the idea.

  I USED TO go to the American Coney in high school and to the Lafayette Coney at maybe midnight or one o’clock on a Saturday, order two or three dogs smothered in chili, onions, and mustard. The lines to order would be deep and you screamed out what you wanted over other teenagers’ heads. You didn’t park more than a block away or you got jumped.

  There’s a great picture of me in a red and white varsity jacket sitting alone at the counter in American, at midday, sometime around 1987. My hair is in a front poof, I’m clean-shaven, and there’s pudge in my cheeks. I was having sex all the time with my girlfriend back then. I wore a gold pinky ring with my initials on it, and my career goal at the time was to own shopping malls. I used to look at that picture years later, in my twenties, and think, Who the fuck is that?

  When I look at that picture now sometimes, nearing forty, I feel hollow inside.

  While the older waitress writes him out a bill, my dad bullshits with her to a point where she doesn’t even understand him anymore, then she gets rude in return.

  “What’s her fucking problem?” he says to me when she walks away. He smiles, grinds on a toothpick with his molars.

  He’s wearing a sidearm, a .38 revolver, under his Michigan State University sweatshirt; Michigan State is my alma mater, so he must be wearing the sweatshirt on my account. When I tell my dad how I went to an AA meeting with my sister in the past week—one of the things we sometimes do to stay healthy, like therapy, only free—he says, “She cry over her fucking beer the whole time?”—which is odd to me, not only because I don’t understand his approach to relationship building but because I’ve never seen my sister have a beer before; everyone in our family drinks vodka when we drink.

  After lunch, we’re in my dad’s Monte Carlo with a racing stripe up the middle and leather seats that smell brand-new even after five years. I’ve recruited him to drive me out to Gill Road in Livonia, where Timothy King’s body had been found. He drives fast, showing off the Monte Carlo’s horsepower while I tap at the GPS on my iPhone.

  Ellie’s address is in the phone, too, and I feel like talking about her but I don’t. That’s going to be the hard part about seeing Ellie while I’m here: feeling like I can’t tell anybody about our reconnecting. Even though Ellie and I haven’t slept together, I am obviously betraying my marriage, and I am worried about what that says about me. Also, I am worried about ruining what Ellie and I have started, because right now it feels good, and good is something I need in my life.

  Gill Road was mostly wooded and spotty with small-acre farmland in 1977, the year Timothy King was found here. I have a worn photocopy of an old newspaper article about the discovery of Tim’s body. There’s a man in the photo pointing to the ditch where Tim was found. The man, maybe sixty, is standing near a grove of hardwoods thinned by winter. There’s snow, and a house in the background.

  Gill Road has been developed since then. Green signs mark the side streets. What used to be a dirt road is groomed pavement now. It’s the grove of hardwoods, somehow preserved, that my dad recognizes before I do.

  He parks, and we get out.

  “Right fucking there,” he says, pointing with his index finger almost like the man in the photo points, only my dad is hustling. He’s excited. This is my dad making up for lost time, connecting with me, and I don’t begrudge him it. This is what I wished he had done for years: come along for the ride.

  I hold my Flip cam out and walk along the shoulder of the road. I hold the photo from the newspaper in front of my lens: the grove of trees, the house in the background, the indentation where a ditch had been top-dressed with snow.

  When I pan to my right, it’s all there, only the trees haven’t thinned yet and the snow is still a couple of months away.

  But I’m standing in the exact spot where Tim’s body had been dumped, and it’s an interesting feeling being with my dad right now to witness this. In some ways I feel like I died alongside Tim in ’77, the last year my dad was beating the shit out of anybody in our home, only I’m somehow still standing. I don’t know if my dad feels
any of this, but he’s quiet for most of the ride back to my hotel, where we sit in the car for a few minutes.

  It’s started to rain outside, and he runs his wipers in one clean streak before clicking them off. Then he tells me he’s proud of me, but I don’t know what for and I don’t ask.

  “I’m almost forty,” I tell him.

  “I know that,” he says.

  I take a shower later in my hotel room and then I get into my bed and don’t leave it for the rest of the day. I watch cable, and at some point I’m just staring at the plasma screen with my eyes watering and the sound of rain outside.

  FOX ISLAND

  Lake Michigan is enormous. It moves like the sea when its waves hit the shore. Bordering the entire western side of Michigan, it’s hundreds of miles long and a hundred miles wide. You can’t see across it except on very clear nights and for about a week during the summer, when you can faintly recognize the Chicago skyline a five-hour drive away.

  But Chicago’s in the south, across a huge divide. Far to the north along Lake Michigan, off the Leelanau Peninsula, the Fox Islands are wooded and desolate, adrift in this would-be ocean. You can get to the islands only by boat or plane. In the winter, when the snow falls heavy month after month, boats will not traverse to it.

  During the 1970s, a late-middle-aged man named Frank Shelden, narrow-faced and smarmy with intellect, owned the 835-acre North Fox Island privately. During summers Shelden ran a boys’ camp on the island, marketed as a safe haven for reconnecting troubled and at-risk youth with the splendor of nature.

  But the island had become more of a snake pit those summers than a peak-season getaway. Children would arrive anticipating an iconic experience meant to instill a love of the wilderness, increase one’s self-reliance, connect one to a higher power, and socially enlighten one to the joys of team building. Instead of that, they were routinely molested on camera, both in still and moving pictures, by Frank Shelden and other adult men on sex jaunts, either in from the suburbs of Detroit or on fuck-and-duck missions on the proverbial Cessna from other areas around the country.