Bitter Business

“What the hell,” I said, getting up to grab my coat.
     
    Leon Walczak worked in the filthy kitchen of the coffee shop in the Liberty Building. It was still the tail end of the lunch hour, so Elliott was careful to slip twenty dollars to the Greek behind the cash register who owned the place. He accepted the bill with a cynical shrug and pointed the way to the back of the restaurant.
    We found Walczak hunched over a basin of dishwater, dipping greasy plates into the suds and then loading them into a plastic rack. He was a big man turned to fat, with greasy hair escaping from under a paper cap, a pasty face splattered with acne, and a grimy T-shirt showing beneath his dingy apron. His jaw was slack as he worked, his small eyes squinting through the steam. I felt sorry for Peaches. Walczak was a low-life creep. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being the focus of his obsession.
    When Elliott introduced himself Leon’s face was so flooded with fear that for a moment I half expected him to bolt and run. But Elliott, speaking firmly, managed to steer him out the back door into the alley behind the restaurant. Even so, it took several minutes for Leon to calm down. The police, it seems, had come to see him earlier in the day and his panic at all the sudden interest in him was palpable.
    Still, he was eager to convince us of his innocence, at least of trying to harm Peaches.
    “I would never hurt my Peaches! Never!” he insisted in a juvenile whine. “She’s my wife, you know. A man never does nothin’ to hurt his wife!”
    “She’s not married to you, Leon,” Elliott said in the tone of someone breaking bad news. “She’s married to some guy named Jack Cavanaugh who owns a big factory in Bridgeport.”
    “She just says that on account of the aliens,” Leon explained. “They’re trying to confuse her, sending those beams through the TV. They’re tricking her into thinking she’s married to somebody else.” He moved a step closer. “She doesn’t really love him,” he confided. “Her heart belongs to me. To me. She told me that at our wedding. She was a beautiful, beautiful bride.”
    “I heard the cops caught you hanging around her house a couple weeks back,” Elliott scolded him. “I thought the judge told you what would happen if he caught you near her again. You don’t want to go back to jail, do you, Leon?”
    “She never came to see me in jail,” Leon whined. “Not once. Other guys, their wives came. Wrote letters. Not Peaches. I used to be able to see her at least, see her on the news. But now that man made her stop. He made her quit to keep her from me. He’s very jealous. I know that about him.”
    “What were you doing near her house, Leon?” Elliott demanded.
    “I didn’t do nothin’,” Leon protested sullenly.
    “The police think that someone might have sent her poison in the mail, someone who might want to hurt her.”
    “I’d never hurt her! Never!” Leon shrieked.
    “What were you doing at her house, Leon? You know what the police think? They think it was you!”
    “No, no, no!” Leon shrieked, clamping his hands over his ears as if to blot out the horror of Elliott’s words. “I would never hurt her. I was just watching. Just w-w-w-watching over her.”
     
    I bought Elliott a cappuccino at the Starbucks on the comer of Monroe and LaSalle. We sat side by side on a low brick wall surrounding a tiny patch of public grass at the foot of the El station.
    “So what do you think of Leon?” he asked, carefully prying the white plastic lid from his cup.
    “Nothing in my background has given me any insights into evaluating psychopaths,” I confessed, taking a sip of coffee. “But I’ll say one thing, aside from being seriously nuts, he doesn’t strike me as being particularly bright.”
    “Joe went back to the files and pulled the original arrest jacket and let me read the psychiatric evaluation last night. According to the shrink who wrote the report on him, Leon is a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from delusional psychosis in the form of the belief that Peaches Parkenhurst is his wife and that space aliens are interfering with her memory. According to Leon, he and Peaches are pawns in a secret war being waged between the aliens and NASA.”
    “He mustn’t be as dumb as he looks. That sounds like a pretty sophisticated delusion.”
    “Don’t be impressed. It’s actually the plot of an old episode of the Twilight Zone.”
    “He seemed very upset