The Superlawyer and The Monster

“Actually, yes, I knew him,” I replied to my eldest cousin, probably with a wry expression.

“I’d met him in Highland Park, years ago when we both used to live there.  Highland Park is – or was – one of the most upscale, exclusive, suburbs in the country let alone Chicago; implicitly ‘Whites Only’.”  

“The South Side?  No!  Never went there – one didn’t!” I replied to another cousin, taken aback by her naive query. 

I was chatting with several of my many cousins at a family reunion in my, ahem, honour.  It was only a few days since I had returned to my little corner of England, having spent twenty-five years in the United States and fleeing after large swaths of the country had spiralled into an unstoppable descent, with much of the urban seaboard virtually one big South Side of Chicago.  Looking back at it, the tipping point had probably occurred during the Obama Presidencies, before I’d even migrated to the States.

“Well?” cued my eldest cousin.

“I had got to know him in passing as we were members of the same club.  He would often brag about his exploits as a defence lawyer.  Especially about repeatedly winning acquittals for the city’s most notorious felon – ‘got him off again,’ he would crow with a smile.  Only the best of the best could get such a man ‘off’.  And I don’t know how he was paid by that, that . . . subhuman.  Some misguided do-gooder NGO, I suppose.

“That felon had a nickname – ‘The Monster of the South Side.’  He – I mean my lawyer friend – had told me that that criminal – a serial rapist and killer – was, uh, obsessed with . . . pardon the language, but I’m quoting . . . obsessed with ‘white ho’s and bitches’.”  My tone was matter of fact.

The two female cousins visibly started; the two male cousins’ faces became expressionless.  “Why did he do it? I mean, if you know,” the younger one asked.

“Why did he do it?  Well, I don’t know which one you mean but . . . no, hang on— the answer is the same I suppose, the same for each one.  The . . . um, sick thrill; the perverse kick.”  I shrugged. “The . . . the, well, accomplishing something that – that would totally revolt a normal person, like, be impossible for a normal person to do?”  How could one explain it, really?

“The last time I met that superlawyer, he was a wreck of a man; destroyed. Actually ran into him raving and drinking in the street. He didn’t even recognize me. Couldn’t speak a coherent sentence.

“Pieced it together later. One night the ‘Monster’ somehow broke into a house; he . . . he . . . .”  I swallowed and continued, “Well, security was triggered, police cars arrived, and, uh, he was wounded and c-captured in the home itself, b-but . . .”  

I swallowed, and looked at my cousins.  One of my female cousins raised her eyebrows; the other stared at me, quite impassively.  The elder male cousin simply said, “Well?”  

They wanted to hear it through. 

“But by then he had raped . . . brutally raped and beaten to death both . . . uhm, both occupants in a bedroom—”  

I had to steady my tremulous voice before I could continue.  “It was the superlawyer’s home and the women . . . the w-women had been his, uhm . . . wife and twenty-year-old d-dau-daughter.  He had been away at a criminal defence lawyers convention.

“That was less than a year back,” I finished, lips pursed and gaze downward, where my eyes fell on the newspaper on the coffee-table, and the headline that had triggered the conversation: Superlawyer Commits Suicide Bombing in Chicago Prison; 60 Killed.