Captain Thunder

Baltimore Requiem

by Doc Quantum

On Halloween night, Captain Thunder discovers the reason Detective Bill Parker was at first so hostile toward him, when the young super-hero learns the horrifying history of Baltimore’s previous hero, Man-at-Arms!

***

Captain Thunder descended to the ground next to the old railroad tracks. It was late, and the sun had gone down over the city of Baltimore, but Detective Bill Parker had summoned him for a meet. The red flare in the night sky, unique among the many firecrackers set off all over the city this Halloween night, hadn’t even died out before the hero from a parallel Earth came in for a landing.

“Hello, Detective.”

“Call me Bill,” said the rotund, dark-skinned man, slurring his words and grinning as he sat on the hood of his car, wearing his now-wrinkled pinstripe suit.

Captain Thunder looked around and spotted three broken bottles. It was obvious, even to a hero with the soul of a child, that the man had already had a few drinks. “All right. I hope you’re not driving home tonight, Bill.”

“Naw, naw,” said the detective. “I’m fine. Can’t go home tonight, anyways. The missus threw me out. Found lipstick on my shirt. Give her a couple of days, and she’ll take me back. Women, huh?”

Captain Thunder merely smiled, but frowned at the same time.

“Ah, but you probably don’t know what I’m talkin’ about,” continued Parker. “No woman could make you settle down, not in those red long-johns of yours.” He began laughing and threw another empty beer bottle to the pavement.

“Bill… is there something you wanted?” asked the hero.

“Chill out, my man,” said the detective. “No need to stand on formalities. We’re on a first-name basis now, aren’t we? I just thought we could get to know each other, have a few beers, maybe chase a few skirts or somethin’.” At the hero’s questioning look, Bill quickly added, “Just kiddin’ about that last part, of course.”

Captain Thunder shrugged and said, “Sorry, Bill. I don’t drink anything heavier than milk.”

“Yeah, I thought so. You long-underwear brigade types always do play it like that, at least the really good ones do. I can respect that. Don’t understand it, but I respect it. Seriously, though, I did want to talk with you, set things straight.” He patted the hood of his car. “Here, Cap. Have a seat.”

Captain Thunder noticed that the detective’s voice was slurring a bit less, almost as if he was more sober than he’d first appeared to be. He moved forward and was about to sit down, when Bill grabbed his arm and stopped him.

“Now, don’t leave a dent or nothin’,” he said in a serious tone. “You don’t know your own strength sometimes.” A moment later, he was laughing again. “Just kidding you, man. Just kidding you. Sit down.”

Detective Bill Parker looked off at the full moon as he said, “I know we got off to a rough start. The way I treated you back in that interrogation room… man, when I think of how you just sat there and took it, not letting yourself get goaded into saying or doing anything stupid… Well, I really respect that. But I owe you my apologies.” (*)

[(*) Editor’s note: See Captain Thunder: Thunderstruck.]

“No need, Bill,” said the Captain. “That’s in the past.”

“I also owe you a bit of an explanation,” continued the detective. “There’s a reason I treated you so badly then, and it had nothing to do with you. Did you know I’m a twenty-five-year man in the force?”

Captain Thunder shook his head no.

“Yep. I’ve been a cop since way back in ’63,” said the detective. “I walked the beat far longer than I should’ve. It wasn’t until the ’70s that black officers really began to rise in the ranks of the police department. Saw a lot of things back then. Crime is crime, they say. But criminals were classier back then. Left fewer bodies on the street, for one thing. Drug dealers treated dope like a serious business and took care of problems without killing people, for the most part.

“But all of this is not to say that the past was better,” continued Bill. “There was a lot of crap that went down in those days that we wouldn’t put up with now. A lot more racism, for one thing. And a bunch of other isms. But I like to think that the people of Baltimore had a lot more respect for themselves back then — way more than they do now.”

Captain Thunder nodded and continued to listen.

“Sorry I don’t have anything for you to drink,” said the detective, popping open another bottle of beer. “Next time I’ll bring a six-pack of Pepsi or somethin’. Anyway, back in 1967, I was still walking the beat here in West Baltimore, when out of the blue, in our fair city appeared an honest-to-God super-hero.”

“Really?” said the Captain, his interest suddenly piqued. Having come from a world where he was the only super-hero there had ever been, he was fascinated by the sheer diversity of heroes on this world, at least as far as powers, abilities, and costumes went. “I thought you told me Baltimore didn’t have any heroes.”

“It didn’t,” said Bill. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back in the Spring of 1967, a man wearing a bright costume and a cape appeared in the skies over Baltimore. For days people were talking about this guy, wondering who he could be, and whether he’d made Baltimore his home. This was a long way from Metropolis, which Superman protected, or Gotham City, where Batman, Green Lantern, and the JSA were based, or even Chicago, where a really obscure group called the Seven Shadows used to live. This was Baltimore. Nobody ever expected a real, live super-hero to set up shop here. Needless to say, he was welcomed with open arms.

“After being seen flying overhead for several days, he finally made an official public appearance. He’d met in private with the mayor, the chief of police, and a few other bigwigs, and told them he vowed to clean up crime in this city. The mayor was so happy, he immediately declared a day in his honour.”

“What was his name?” asked Captain Thunder.

“Oh, didn’t I mention that yet?” said the detective. “He called himself Man-at-Arms, and he wore a green suit with purple shorts, gloves, boots, hood, and cape. It reminded me a bit of Doctor Mid-Nite’s costume, except for the colors. It was maybe a little like Robin’s original costume, too. Anyway, Man-at-Arms had ESP powers. I guess you’d say telekinesis or TK nowadays. Those powers allowed him to fly and to move objects around with his mind. I’m really not sure why he called himself Man-at-Arms, since he didn’t have any military motif or anything like that, and didn’t carry any armaments, either. Truth is, some heroes back then just didn’t seem all that well thought out.” He chuckled.

“Anyway, we were all feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves for a couple of months — all of Baltimore was. We had our own super-hero, dammit, and no one could take that away from us.”

“Something happened, didn’t it?” asked the Captain.

“Yeah,” said the detective, taking another swig from the bottle. “Something happened, all right. After about two or three months of working alone, one June day there were two figures flying over Baltimore.”

“Two?” said Captain Thunder. “Did he get a partner?”

“You could say that. The only problem was that this partner of his was an eleven-year-old boy with no special powers of his own — Man-at-Arms just kept him in the air next to him using his own ESP powers. And while Man-at-Arms was dressed in a green and purple costume, the boy was dressed in a bright yellow and red, short-sleeved, bare-legged costume. We all remembered how Robin the former Boy Wonder got his start, so we were willing to give the man some slack, but this wasn’t Gotham City, with all its craziness and queer characters. This was Baltimore. And that just seemed weird.

“We never learned that first kid’s name until later on. I don’t think Man-at-Arms even bothered giving him a nickname, except for Boy. Well, Boy was gone after about two weeks, and then Man-at-Arms was flying around with another kid, this time in a bright orange costume with a flame motif. We knew it wasn’t the same kid in a different costume, because this time the kid was black. Man-at-Arms called the second kid Fireball, and he lasted about a month.”

“What do you mean by… ‘lasted’?” asked Captain Thunder, looking concerned.

“I’m getting to that,” sighed the detective. “Well, by the time Man-at-Arms was seen flying around with a third kid called Greenbeans, who was shorter and skinnier than the first two, blond, and wearing a green and white costume, people began asking some hard questions. What had happened to the first two kids? That was when I got involved.

“I wasn’t a detective back then, but I aimed to be one someday, and something about Man-at-Arms just rubbed me the wrong way. I wish I could have said I’d seen through him from day one, but I was just as enthralled as everyone else that we finally had our own city hero. But after he got a kid involved, I started looking at him a bit more closely.

“Man-at-Arms had been fighting street crime for about five months by then. We had a pretty good record in the police files of where he had stopped crimes in progress, and we had seen him on his daily patrols. It wasn’t hard for even a rookie cop to put pins on a map showing all the places he’d been. That was easy enough. What was a bit more difficult was finding out if there was any pattern to it at all.

“After banging my head against the wall for a while, not seeing anything, I started checking times of day against the locations on the map in the hopes of finding out from which direction Man-at-Arms began his daily patrol. Then I began talking to the witnesses, just asking people who’d seen Man-at-Arms on his patrols some casual questions, without tipping them off that the police was after their hero. I don’t wanna bore you with all the details, but I began putting together a pretty good case for who I suspected the hero to be. And I brought all my evidence to the police chief.

“The chief patiently listened to all I had to say, nodded his head and smiled, then showed me the door, promising me he’d look into it. I knew then that even the chief of police was willing to look the other way if it meant that crime was down, thanks to the city’s flashy super-hero. That only left me with one option — to investigate the man himself.

“The man I believed to be Man-at-Arms was a fellow by the name of Wally Bukowski. He’d been living in Chicago during the times that Man-at-Arms was a member of the Seven Shadows — the second group of heroes by that name, I should mention, who operated in the Windy City in the early ’60s for a short time. (*) He came from a good family. His father had a lot of sway with the unions and the Polish community, while his mother had come from the wealthy Barbicane family of Baltimore, founder of the Gun Club. Jules Verne even featured one of Wally’s ancestors, Impey Barbicane, as a character in a fictionalized version of true events from a hundred years earlier. Called it From the Earth to the Moon. The French made a movie version of it back in the early silent film era, I’ve heard.

[(*) Editor’s note: See Dragon Knight: History Lesson: The Jinx.]

“Anyway, Bukowski had powerful family and friends, and as Man-at-Arms he was a beloved hero. If he was really up to something, I knew I’d damn well have the evidence to back it up. Only thing was, I didn’t know what he really was up to. I just had this feeling about him.

“With the help of a friend, an old Irish cop by the name of Muldoon, I began asking his neighbors a few probing questions, like if they’d ever seen him with kids he wasn’t related to… things like that. They had. Wally was well known in the neighborhood for coaching little leagues and such, as well as working with orphanages. But everyone we talked to had nothing bad to say about him. Nothing at all. Every word they spoke about Wally Bukowski was a glowing recommendation of the man. Even the crankiest old hags brightened up when they spoke of him. Everybody has some complaints against them, such as playing music too loud or forgetting to pick up after their dog. But Bukowski had none. We couldn’t understand it.

“I was just about to call it a day and let the man be when I thought of something. Man-at-Arms told us he had ESP, and he told us how that enabled him to fly, move objects with his mind, and such. He never really elaborated on his powers beyond that. But even those who had once been his detractors suddenly changed their tune upon talking with him. Everyone who had ever met him ended up joining the ranks of his fans.

“It got me wondering. Did Wally’s ESP powers allow him to do other things? It was too crazy to suggest that he was brainwashing everyone, but mind-control and emotional manipulation had been done. The Psycho-Pirate — both men called by that name — was proof enough of that. That was confirmation enough for me that something wasn’t on the up-and-up with this guy. But I knew I couldn’t confront him about it, or I’d end up being one of his cheerleaders, too.

“I decided to continue on with my investigation, still under the radar, still on my own time. I looked into the coaching angle, and then the orphanages. And what I found floored me. There was a string of disappearances of young boys from those orphanages following each one of Wally’s appearances. No one had ever suspected any foul play, of course, because Wally hadn’t wanted them to.

“But under the auspices of looking for the missing boys, who were all considered to be runaways, I found that a few of them matched photos of Man-at-Arms’ kid sidekicks, each of whom had disappeared after a short time.”

Detective Bill Parker paused for a long moment, just staring at the ground, until Captain Thunder began to wonder if he’d just nodded off. Then he continued.

“That was when someone found the bodies.”

Captain Thunder audibly gasped, not having guessed where this was ultimately going.

“Yeah,” continued the detective, “Wally had been using them up and killing them when he was done, then burying them out in Leakin Park. In his own half-assed way, he made it look like they’d just died from exposure or foul play at the hands of street gangs or something. But the fact that there were twelve young corpses out there, all in the same area, was pretty damning.

“The city went on a witch-hunt. The mayor was screaming at the police commissioner to bring in the man responsible for killing these kids, and possibly others we didn’t know about, immediately. It was October in an election year, so it was our number-one priority. Man-at-Arms even publicly declared that he would bring the perpetrator to justice, though he said so without one of his kid sidekicks next to him.

“I couldn’t sit on my evidence any longer. If Bukowski was responsible for abusing and killing all those kids, then I had to make it known, one way or another. But the police chief wouldn’t even give me an audience this time, and no one else in my chain of command was willing to listen, either. So I decided to go to the papers with the evidence.

“One young reporter by the name of Lee Hutchinson was brave enough — and desperate enough — to write the story that sent shockwaves across the city. With the evidence I’d anonymously supplied him, Lee laid out a case for Wally Bukowski being behind the disappearances of the children at the orphanages — the same children who’d been found dead in Leakin Park.

“He never outright accused him of murder, but merely questioned why so much of the evidence pointed to Bukowski. He was even smart enough not to reveal that Man-at-Arms and Bukowski were possibly the same man, since revealing the identity of a costumed crime-fighter licensed by the city was against the law. The paper, originally hesitant to publish the story, decided to provide him with full legal backing if he needed it, since the publisher had his own reasons for disliking the Bukowskis and the Barbicanes.

“Wally Bukowski denied everything, of course, and demanded that he be allowed to face his detractors. Lee merely defended his article through a letter to the editor and refused to meet Bukowski in person. Man-at-Arms stopped making public appearances as Bukowski found himself in a legal battle, since the police department couldn’t deny the evidence. He was arrested but released on bail, and the mayor was praised for his bringing in the suspect in all those murders, despite the political turmoil the Barbicane family brought on City Hall.

“And then, suddenly, it was over. Wally Bukowski was found dead on the grounds of his large estate on the last day of October — Halloween night. He’d been struck in the head by a blunt object, then stabbed numerous times, and he’d bled out. With the suspect dead, the case was over, and the city elected a new mayor. Man-at-Arms disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared earlier that year, with few people ever knowing who he really was. No suspects were ever found for Wally’s murder, but there were always rumors that the Poles did him in themselves, rather than let him bring shame to the Polish community through a prolonged trial. But those are just rumors.

“Even now, two decades later, Bukowski and Man-at-Arms are never mentioned in the same sentence. Baltimore’s only hero became just another man in a costume from a blurry old photograph, his crimes just as forgotten as those poor orphans he’d killed. But I’ll never forget, Captain. On this night, the night that Wally Bukowski died, I’ll never forget what he did to those kids.”

Detective Bill Parker looked at the last bottle of beer in his hand, still half-full after the whole time he’d been talking, and poured the rest of it on the ground.

“Well, I’ve had enough,” he said. “Time to call it a night.”

Captain Thunder had remained mostly quiet during the story, too horrified by what one supposed hero had done to innocents to say much at all. But it did help explain a lot to him, such as Detective Parker’s hostility toward him when they’d first met, and the detective’s excessive drinking this evening. Having not walked in his shoes, he realized he couldn’t judge the man for his choices.

“Let me give you a lift home,” said the Captain.

“No, don’t worry about it,” said the detective. “I’m not going to drive. I’ll just walk it off — sleep at a hotel or something.”

“I mean it, Bill,” said Captain Thunder. “Get in the car. I’ll drop you off at a hotel.”

Detective Bill Parker shrugged and got into the driver’s seat. A moment later, he was soaring through the air, car and all, with the city of Baltimore far below him.

Maybe it’s not so bad to have my own pet super-hero, he thought to himself.

The End

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