A Winsome Murder by James DeVita

CEOs got tired of whacking their johnnies off to the twenty-four-hour porn stations, provided at their all-expense-paid hotels, they’d turn to the local escort services, just a computer click away, major credit cards accepted. Scum like Lachlan were all over Chicago, and Mangan couldn’t do very much about them. If the girls were of age and consenting, he and his men left the tricks and pimps alone or turned them over to vice. But under-agers, or girls forced into the business, well, that was a very different story with Mangan. He’d seen girls beaten unconscious, arms broken, faces pounded into walls, skulls crushed. It angered him irrationally and brought out the worst in him as a cop, or perhaps the best—the distinction was always a little hazy.
    Early in his career, he and his team had busted up a strip joint in west Chicago called the Blue Throat. Up on a second floor they’d broken down the door of a room called the Dessert Bar and found about a half dozen girls inside, mostly naked, slumped in wooden chairs. The girls barely moved when they crashed through the door. They didn’t lookscared or even surprised that the room was suddenly crowded with police. They looked dead. On a filthy mattress, on the floor, was a girl lying on her side, naked from the waist down. Blood stained her thighs and the mattress beneath her. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old, maybe ninety pounds.
    Not a man easily moved, Mangan had always prided himself on being inured to the things that would make most other officers lose their lunch. He’d seen horrific murders, mutilations, decaying corpses, mob slayings—things done to human bodies which no person should ever have to see or think about. Habit, the great deadener , had numbed him. But on the second floor of the Blue Throat that day, looking down at a listless blood-soaked little girl, a strange pressure pushed upward in his chest and throat. He felt nauseous and sweaty. He reached for the wall to steady himself. He was going to pass out, he knew the feeling, he was going to faint right in front of all of these other cops. He struggled to hold on—
    And for the first time, he heard the words.
    He didn’t know why they had come to him, but when he listened to them they seemed to steady him. They stopped his mind and heart from shutting down. They helped him to somehow express the inexpressible. His nausea passed, and under his breath he actually spoke some of the words aloud.
    I was not angry until this instant.
    And then he nearly beat the club owner to death.
    He had felt nothing but heat, a kind of heat in his stomach and balls as he sprinted down the stairs. He grabbed a liquor bottle off the bar and took it to the club owner’s head. There wasn’t much of the guy’s face left when he was done—bottles don’t break like in the movies. If Coose and another officer, Willie Palmer, hadn’t stopped him, Mangan would have killed the man. That thing, that darker thing inside Mangan had a tricky on-off switch, and it didn’t always work right. It was the same thing that helped keep him alive as a kid growing up on the streets of Chicago. It was the same thing that, when kept in check, made him a good cop. It was also the thing that would probably get him killed one day. It was a nasty line to walk, given his kind of work. Not a thin blue line, but a thick fat fucking black one. He’d waded through the shit of it all his life.
    This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.
    After the episode at the Blue Throat, Mangan was suspended for six months and put on paid leave, then brought up on charges. He lied on the stand. Cusumano and Palmer swore to it. What had happened, they’d said, was that the club owner had rushed at Detective Mangan with a bottle of Slivovitz, which Mangan barely had time to grapple out of his hands. He was then forced to beat the man senseless with it in self-defense. Mangan was