It's not hard-boiled noir, but I do write another kind of detective novel. A historical-detective featuring a pirate by the name of Geoffery Armitage Ffolkes. A loud-mouthed, opinonated rogue who has much too high opinion of himself and his intellectual accomplishments.
The book is coming out in January or February of this year (2010). Thought I'd post the first chapter for your reading pleasure.
One
Boston, Massachusetts
In the Year of Our Lord, 1690
In my youth I was such a pretty, pretty man.
Tall, flamboyant–with a flair for the outrageous and a love for the puerile. I wooed the wicked and flaunted with a rebel’s air the conventions of any and all authority. But no more. No more. Now I am old and wizened. I feel my old friend, Death, hovering near and I cannot deny him much longer. So I commit to posterity my life’s story. As meager and mundane as it may have been.
I, Geoffery Armitage Ffolkes, being of sound body but weak in the flesh, do hereby set to pen and paper my true confessions. I confess I have lived a wicked and dissolute life. I have lusted for beautiful women both far above and far below my station in life. I have posed as the imposter of royal lineage in several royal courts in Europe in the quest of acquiring titles and royal patronage. Patronage I truthfully was not entitled to have. I have swindled the rich, conned the clergy, and blatantly disregarded those who believed they were superior to me in any way. I stole the treasures of both kings and pontiffs with a casual disregard of one’s ownership. I wallowed in the sensual caresses of Gluttony and Sloth.
I have stalked the guilty in the dregs of the night when honest folk slept in warm beds and thought of only the next day’s labors. I have played the role of fool and court jester, pleasing those who wallowed in wealth and greed while I concocted elaborate plans to remove a sizeable portion of their ill-gotten wealth.
All of this I did freely and without any consideration of others.
I have been soldier, poet, diplomat, duelist, artist, and prosperous merchant in a city noted for its wicked predilections and larcenous soul. I have prostrated myself before the thrones of two dozen or so potentates from the northern fjords of Norway all the way to the slave pits of Calicut. I have sailed the seven seas and stood on five continents. I have navigated the Ganges and sailed down the Huang He in an ancient Chinese Junk in search for riches beyond imagination. I have cut through jungles thick with death and fever in long treks to find ancient Aztec or Mayan treasure. I have stood atop tall stone pyramids in cities overrun by the cruel jungle where no man had occupied for more than a hundred years. I have marveled at the wealth of the many rajas of India and admired the splendors of the royal courts of the Ming.
All this I enjoyed without the slightest suggestion of regret hampering my conscience.
Aye, I confess I was a pirate for lo all these many years in addition to the other identities I became. But not just the ordinary buccaneer who served on one ship or another and barely escaped with his life and a doubloon or two. Nay, not Geoffery Armitage Ffolkes! In every endeavor I chose to pursue I did so with a gusto, a panache, a lust for life few mortals could match! Meek and submissive I never lived nor endured. Life is but a short canvas given to an artist to paint on. Why live the life of the mundane? If one must endure the few years on this earth the good Lord has given him, why not be the bon vivant and expand one’s experiences? I did with a hearty gusto, with a throaty panache, and I regret none of it.
But the crowning glory of my illustrious career was that of being an assassin and agent provocateur for the English crown. I actively spied on both the Spanish and all the potential enemies of England even though, on many occasions, I disguised myself as a prosperous merchant and smuggler. In the Caribbean, even when the Spanish and English were at war, Spanish colonies depended on smugglers to bring them the goods they desired. Smuggling became an honest profession–one which became very profitable for me and my comrades.
The crown’s enemies abounded and there my credentials as a spy and provocateur became most valuable. With my mercantile operations I moved freely among the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish. But equally, I moved through the rank and file of the Brethren of the Coast–that loosely construed title which included most, if not all, of the pirates who roamed the green and blue waters of the Caribbean. Aye, piracy in my time was both a bane and a boon to the English. Our ships and crews kept the Spanish from seizing valuable colonies. English naval presence in this part of the world was abysmally lacking in those early days and if it were not for the brethren, Spain would have taken Jamaica and the other colonies with little effort.
But piracy posed an equal threat to the English. Some of my brethren were quite blood thirsty in their desire to acquire the wealth they desired. Ruthless in their tactics a number of these deranged buccaneers actually threatened to tip the balance between peace and war among nations. Something had to be done to remove such dangerous creatures from the high seas. Someone had to be found who had the talent, the bravado, the skill to hunt down these rogues and bring an end to their ravenous cruelties.
As to how I came to be in Caribbean is of no importance. Suffice to say that two years’ before my service to the King began, and on a bright summer’s Sunday morn of startling blue skies and with a fresh breeze filled with the aromas of Bougainvillea, I and an acquaintance of mine sailed into Port Royal harbor. For well over three weeks my friend and I sailed a small one-masted craft called a pinnace across the high seas before reaching safety of this English port. We had only the clothes on our backs, a canister of rain water and two sun-baked fish between us. We also had one very large treasure chest of freshly minted Spanish doubloons, recently and with some dispatch lifted from its rightful owners, setting on the ship’s single deck as well.
Aye, it is true the two of us astride the deck of the small craft brought many onto the city’s docks to stand and gawk at us. Our sails hung like limp rags from the single mast, shredded to nothing more than hanging slivers of cloth. Our tiny craft appeared battered and abused. But not from the wear and tear of the fierce tropical storms so prevalent in the summer months of the Caribbean. We looked like discarded flotsam from the effects of musket balls and round shot angrily hurled in our direction. Much of the ship’s round stern was bashed and abused. But suffice to say that we, that is my tiny Irish friend, a grizzled old one-eyed and pipe smoking seaman named Tobias O’Rourke, and I arrived in Port Royal with a large crowd giving us a standing ovation.
This pitting together our own special talents into an amicable and smooth running partnership did not end with our arrival into the city. We decided to become business partners in a number of different venues. We found ourselves soon the proprietors of one of the city’s largest inns. Say what you will about the many inns and dives an honest pirate or buccaneer might frequent in Port Royal. True, it was possible to find both the wicked and the faithful in such a wicked city. And it was equally true one could find an inn which might be nothing more than a din of inequity, where every vice and sin may be had for the price of a gold doubloon.
But it was also possible to find inns which were the finest in all of the Caribbean. Inns where one might find a bed with clean sheets, meals which were hearty and well prepared, and where genuine ale and fine wines might be had for a reasonable price. The inn Tobias and I owned, and where the little Irishman took a special interest in, was such an inn. We called it, The Inn of the Seven Sins, and it soon became the hostelry and drinking rendezvous for the famous and infamous of Port Royal.
We also branched out onto the high seas by purchasing a well built sloop of war and named it the Swift Flyer. From the colonial governor we purchased a Letter of Marque. This piece of parchment with its elegant calligraphy gave us official permission to prey upon the shipping of the many enemies of England. On the flush deck of our sloop of war we began hunting Spanish game. The Swift Flyer was a sturdy craft of 18 guns, swift and sure before the wind and against it. She could out sail almost any ship in the Caribbean, and certainly any ship of her class. On her deck I forged together a crew of hardy souls who had no love for neither the Spanish nor the French. And over a period of two years my crew and I took one prize after another.
Our small fleet increased with the acquisition of a two masted brigantine named the Santa Isabella, along with three Dutch flynts we renamed the Fourth of August, the Tenth of February and Sophia’s Dark Eyes. These we manned with good crews and began the very lucrative trade of being honest shippers and smugglers; supplying the needs for any client who wished to send forth goods from one Caribbean port to another with swift dispatch and little fanfare.
Aye lads, you would think that now, being the prosperous burger and shipping tycoon, my days a’pirating were but a fond memory. Memories to be told to children and grand children as they sat around my velvet cushioned rocking chair. But lo! The adventurous buccaneer’s life was but ready to begin. And more to the point, the surreptitious life of being the King’s assassin and spy suddenly, and unexpectedly, burst before my eyes with the noise and rattle of a hundred ship’s cannonade ripping the air with smoke and smoldering shot and shell!
In October of 1661 a forty-gunned man ‘o war slipped into the harbor just as the hot tropical sun was beginning to sip the western waters. She was accompanied by two sloops of war flanking her port and starboard gun ports. All three ships had snapping in the growing wind white flags with the blood red image of the Cross of St. George proudly from their mizzen masts. No one paid attention to their arrival. One must remember Port Royal was an English colony. Jamaica was an English colony only recently wrested away from the Spanish grip. Port
Royal was the richest colony in the New World. Richer, in fact, than the American colonies of Massachusetts and New York. The city sat on the south eastern tip of the island and just across the bay from a small hamlet called Kingston. As port she had the best harbor in all of the Caribbean waters. Deep water and protected from storms, ships from all over the world littered her harbor and created a floating forests of masts one could only marvel at.
Of course a very large number of ships riding at anchor were buccaneers and pirates. Ah, well, to be precise–His Majesty frowned upon the unprincipled rape and pillage of the regular pirate, therefore those ships riding the calm waters of the harbor were buccaneers and corsairs all sailing under the authority of an English Letter of Marque. With such a document in one’s hand it became legal to go a’pirating. Legal pirating. As long as you preyed upon the King’s enemies. A boon for those of us who craved adventure or burned with a desire to rise above their stations in life by acquiring a fortune in gold. Enough gold, mind you, to buy a title or to set up and become a prosperous merchant.
English men of war arrived and departed on a regular basis from Port Royal. King and country were habitually at war with the Spanish, and in the year 1661 His Majesty’s fleet was spread thin across the world confronting the Spanish hegemony. And here, in the Caribbean, His Majesty’s presence was very thin indeed. Dangerously thin. Giving arise, interestingly enough, a reason why His Majesty so tolerated large congregations of cut throats and pirates in Port Royal.
In truth there were enough pirate ships in the city’s wide bay to constitute a rather impressive fleet of warships. Enough to thwart any sustained effort by the Spanish to reclaim the island it originally had settled some forty years earlier. In lacking an English naval presence we Brethren of the Coast provided the protection our fair city needed. Aye, occasionally there would be the threat of Spanish warships raiding the coastline. There was always the threat of a Spanish raid into the city itself. But in all the years I hailed from Port Royal no serious threat ever presented itself to its inhabitants.
Ah, but what can I say to describe Port Royal! The Jewel of the English Caribbean! A city who’s foul reputation for being the most sinful place on Earth richly earned! Yet a city filled with sturdy English merchants and even more sturdy and determined English plantations owners bent on making a fortune in the incessant demand for sugar and spices. An English city in both ambiance and architecture.
Everywhere one looked one saw stout Tudor architecture of wood, stone, and plaster. Cobble stone streets were commonplace. His Majesty’s royal tax collectors could be found in numbers whenever a ship, be it merchant or buccaneer, dropped anchor in the harbor. Red clad soldiers milled in the streets with the corsair and land lubber. From the battlements of the large forts which protected the city the Cross of St. George flew proudly.
But as a city it was a Jezebel standing in the midst of the righteous. A harlot residing in the congregation. A city filled with its own aroma of danger and intrigue. Whatever sin one wished to partake in could be found. More than eighty drinking establishments littered the narrow streets near the wharves. Whores and assassins could be hired for the price of a mere farthing. Every night some poor soul lay dead in the streets. Or was found floating face down in the bay. The end product of some petty dispute.
Both the honest yeoman and the most unrepentant sinner could be found in Port Royal. Yet a city equally awash with the sense of unrestricted freedom. Those who came to Port Royal came for many reasons. But many came because they yearned deep within their souls to break the chains and manacles of the Old World and the aristocracy of Europe. They sought their fortunes and fate in the boundless promise of the New World. It is the reason I came to Port Royal. It was the reason my sagacious old one-eyed Irish leprechaun of a partner tagged along with me.
But I stray from my original thought.
In the said October of 1661 three English ships of war slid into the harbor and dropped anchor. No sooner had their anchors chains rattled into the bay than a skiff was hurriedly deposited into the water and manned by stout seamen. With haste the slipped away from the large man of war and began pulling across the calm waters toward the nearest wharf. There was a sense of urgency in the way the long boat almost flew across the water with its eight oars rising and falling in precision.
In the middle of the long boat sat two figures. Odd creatures one would not have thought would be found on an English ship of war. One figure, dressed in fine cotton dyed as red as freshly spilt blood and cut in the traditional naval fashion, sat sitting bolt up right and rigid as any good naval officer ought to do. A large blue tri-cornered hat, made of fine silk and dyed a deep blue, sat upon a freshly white-powdered wig. The wig framed a rather young, rather angular face of a handsome young man. Haughty, confident, even perhaps somewhat arrogant, the young English naval officer sat quietly and confidently in the longboat, hands resting on the bass knob of a dark ebony cane.
Beside him sat a strangely hooded creature smaller in stature when compared to the officer setting beside her. A light cloak of emerald green satin hid her from the gaze of any curious onlooker. But there was no doubt the hooded figure was a woman and a woman of refinement and breeding. Equally evident was the obvious attention the young man showered on the creature beside him. Neither said a word as the longboat raced across the waters. None had to. It was evident the officer, and the common seamen manning the oars, all were keenly aware of the woman’s desire for great haste.
Ah! What strange machinations a man will do! For a brief smile, a whimsical nod, or a flash of dark alluring eyes, a man will throw away all caution and common sense and challenge the very gods themselves! Risk all, dare Fate itself, even defy Old Man Death for nothing more than to again enter the gentle embrace of a woman’s good will.
How terribly simple we men are.
The thoughts, writings, and rummaging's of a twisted and warped mind.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Friday, January 1, 2010
First three chapters of, 'Guilt of Innocence'
Here's the opening chapters of the Turner/Frank novel I am working on now entitled "Guilt of Innocence."
As usual, I follow a formula. The book starts out with a puzzler on how the victim was iced. Remember now, I'm always looking for commentary--so tell me what you think needs fixed, reduced, refitted, or ejected. Doesn't mean I'll take your advice--but at least I'll listen.
One
We had a problem.
Although it was just seven in the morning the sun was coming up and the heat was beginning to build. It was late July. July in this city meant only three things: wind, heat . . . and more damn heat. The wind was blowing a steady gait from out of the south. That meant it was going to be a very hot day. Hot enough to make Superman sweat. Hot enough to make a Bedouin think about wearing khaki shorts. Hot enough to make Turkish coffee taste like a frozen cherry slush. Hot enough to make Lucifer think of ski slopes in Aspen.
Hot enough to make perspiration perspire.
The blue shirt underneath my sport coat was damp. And the day was just beginning. By time nine o:clock rolled around I would have to change shirts and ditch the coat. By the time we finished our initial investigation I’d be nothing more than a piece of melted cheese dip. Already I could feel the heat radiating off the car beside me. The small Caddy convertible, black as coal with its top up, was going to turn into a boiler in about an hour. There’s nothing like a black car and leather seats which can absorb heat and somehow magnify it tenfold. Throw a dead body into the car, add in about three tons of humidity,and you can imagine the rest.
But that wasn’t the problem.
As I walked around the driver’s side of the black Cadillac XLR-V my eyes kept glancing at the front windshield. Punched through the glass, about six inches above the upper rim of the steering wheel, was a bullet hole. Striation lines radiated from the hole outward across the glass but the windshield itself was intact. A quick glance at the back window had the bullet’s exit point. About half the window was gone. The remaining glass was coated in blood and brain matter.
Slumped back across the tan leather seats of the car was the victim. The front part of his head was there. The back half wasn’t. The dead man looked to be in his 30's or early 40's. He had on a blue suit. Dark navy blue. Hand stitched. Tailor made.
Made from imported Egyptian cotton. Maybe worth a grand or more. Minimum.
Underneath the suit was an off white linen shirt. Not something found in a typical Wal-Mart. Around his neck was a signature red silk tie. Again, maybe one or two C-notes for a price tag. Expensive Italian leather for shoes and wrap-around shades still setting perfectly on the bridge of his nose completed the picture.
Whoever the sonofabitch was he wasn’t worried about balancing his check book like the rest of us. Me, I thought twice about it every time I wanted to buy a Daffy Duck tie off the racks at K-Mart even though, in reality, I didn’t have to anymore. Not this guy. Hell. His car alone–new–was three and a half years my salary. Give or take a couple of nickels. The guy, when he was breathing, was awash in cash. Very rich. And that meant very powerful. He would have powerful friends. Powerful friends usually expected quick results whenever one of their kind checked out unexpectedly.
But that wasn’t the problem.
No.
The problem was the dead man and how he died. Specifically, in the place where he died. Hearing steps behind me I turned and watched my partner, a red headed Neanderthal wannabe with the IQ of an Einstein approaching. Glancing at me the guy meshed his thick eyebrows together and whistled softly.
“This doesn’t look good.”
“Yeah. I was thinking the same thing.”
He turned and looked out over the railing of the parking garage slot the Caddy was parked in. The fourth floor of a five floor parking garage. The Caddy was facing to the south up against the southern cement retainer wall. In front of him was nothing. Nothing for twenty square miles. Just an empty wheat field which stretched out forever.
“You know what the problem is, right?” Frank grunted, shoving hands into his wrinkled gray slacks as we faced the wheat field and stared off into nothingness.
“Let me guess. The trajectory of the bullet doesn’t come up from the wheat field. It’s coming from slightly above the parking garage.”
“Yep, that’s the ticket,” nodded Frank, grinning maliciously, “And there’s more.”
“Uh huh,” I nodded, turning to look to the north. To the direction the bullet was heading after it had passed through the victim’s cranium and the back window. Another goddamn wheat field, “The bullet can’t be found. So we have no evidence, other than a dead man and a couple of bullet holes, to start from.”
The parking garage, with the attached five story office building of black glass and black granite beside it, set in an industrial park on the city’s south edge. A quarter of a mile to the west was I-475 sweeping around the city. The six lanes of the cement ribbon were filled with morning traffic. You could hear the constant hum clear out here. The one paved street leading to the crime scene sliced through mostly farm country. But there were a couple of new office complexes around and a third in the process of being constructed. Downtown was ten miles to the north and east. In between was nothing but farm country and a few brand new housing developments.
“There you go. On the money. That’s why they made you the youngest detective sergeant on the force. Brilliant, my friend. Brilliant!”
I turned and looked at my partner and grinned.
Smart-ass.
Did I tell you Frank has no neck? No? Well, he doesn’t. Just a head built like a block of steel reinforced cement setting on a set of shoulders wide enough to make flood gates at Hoover dam jealous over. His hair is a light colored carrot red, stringing and always blowing around unruly in the slightest breeze. Somehow the thinning hair complimented his square head nicely. If you like to look at nightmares.
He’s got hands the size of dinner plates. When he rolls his hands up into fists they look like those giant wrecking balls cranes throw around to knock down buildings. No. He’s not much to look at. Actually he’s like sushi. He’s an acquired taste. You either like him or you don’t. There’s no in-between. I like him. We’ve been on the force together for over twelve years. Partners in the South Side Division for ten. You can’t ask for a better man. They don’t make’em better. And there is a plus to this guy. His looks make him look like a dumb mug straight out of a mental ward. But he’s just the opposite. He knows every detail about every thing. You can’t stump him.
I know. I’ve been trying to do it for twelve years.
“Wanna give me an idea on the murder weapon, genius?” I asked, grinning.
“Nine millimeter. Hard nose. Maybe from, say, at an elevation of about fifty feet off the ground.”
“Out there,” I said, waving a hand toward the wheat, “Fifty feet above the ground.”
Frank nodded, grinning that evil little grin of his I was all too familiar with.
“Oh no,” I said, shaking my head firmly and lifting a hand up, palm outward, toward him, “I had the last Sherlock. Remember the Levant Case? That was a Sherlock. It’s your turn. You are the lead investigator on this one, buddy!”
A ‘Sherlock’ was our little way of telling each other a particular case was not going to fit the typical run-of-the-mill murder we police-types are so fond of. This one had all the marking of something that was going to be tough to figure out. Most homicide cases are relatively simple. Nine times out of ten the victim knew his killer. Six out of ten times the murder is a spur of the moment affair with all kinds of witnesses and evidence lying about to finger the perpetrator. (The Perp. . . jeez, I hate that word. Too many cop shows on TV.) So, most of the time, cops simply follow the leads, like a good machinist follows his blue prints, and eventually you wind up with the guilty party.
But . . . .
Sometimes there’s a monkey-wrench thrown into a cop’s normal routine. A case comes drifting in from out of the blue which doesn’t follow the rules. The evidence is usually little, or nonexistent, and typically there is a multitude of possible suspects, each with several reasons on why they would pull the trigger. To solve this kind of case meant you had to work like Sherlock Holmes. Deductive reasoning. Ruling out the all the possibilities until you came onto the one possibility, no matter how absurd it might be, which answered all the questions. Frank, for all of his fabulous smarts, hated these cases. Hated them so much he became very creative in throwing them to me.
“Naw, I had the last Sherlock. The Hutch case.”
“The Hutch case? Jesus. That was a pimp shooting one of his girls in broad daylight in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts. Sixteen witnesses saw the shooting. The trick lived long enough to tell us her pimp did it. The pimp confessed, for chrissakes! How could that be a Sherlock?”
“But we couldn’t find the gun, Turn. It took me . . .oh . . . a couple of hours to figure out where the murder weapon was. That’s what made it a Sherlock. So it’s your turn. Quit squawking.”
I grinned.
Oh, what the hell. I don’t mind taking these cases. Frank hates’em. I find them stimulating. But I enjoy the banter the two of us go through every time one of them comes up. Work with a guy long enough and you either begin to enjoy his company or you hate his guts. I liked Frank. We worked well together.
Maybe I should introduce myself. I’m Turner Hahn. Detective sergeant Turner Hahn, South Side. I’ve been a cop for fifteen, going on sixteen, years now; ten with the gold badge of a detective. I’m a little over six feet three, with black hair and gray-blue eyes. I used to be a football player. I played linebacker in college. Played for a college in the Big 12 conference. And I had thoughts of playing in the NFL. But this kid from Syracuse, built like the back side of Mt. Everest, decided to use my legs for bowling pens. He threw a rolling block on me, caught my right leg under his fat ass, and that was that. So long NFL.
Yeah, I was married once. Childhood sweetheart from high school. But then one day I came home and found a note on the table informing me she decided to run off with an accountant by the name of Rodney. At least he would be home at night. So now I call myself a confirmed bachelor. I live in a run down building down on Floyd street about two blocks from the Brown river. Floyd street is down in the industrial section of town. The place I have is a red brick mass of badly constructed masonry. But cheap enough for me to afford on a detective sergeant’s pay. No. I couldn’t afford to buy a building. Not on my pay scale. I can afford it because my grandfather gave the building to me. The old coot claims to be a farmer living upstate. He does own a big ass farm and a good portion of the year he can be found living in the main house up there. But the old man has secrets. Secrets he doesn’t share–secrets I don’t want to know about, frankly. And he’s rich. Rich with a capital “R” in front of it. Rich enough to make the legendary King Midas look like a shyster. He and I are much alike. He’s an old widower who loves cars. He refuses to marry and likes to tinker with his toys when he’s not planting wheat or irrigating corn. And he likes to come to the city and share a case or two of beer with me and talk about cars.
The old man gave me the place because I needed a place to work on and store my babies. The building used to be a garage. And the babies I collect are Muscle cars. You know, the Detroit iron of the 50's, 60's and 70's which had enough horsepower to pull the Queen Mary through the Panama Canal. Or maybe bruise kidneys against your spine if you hit the accelerator too hard. I own a ‘69 Z-28 IROC with a 302 cu.in Chevy small block; green with white strips and white vinyl interior. There’s also a sweet ‘71 Plymouth Road Runner with the 383 engine in it. And I use a ‘68 Shelby Cobra Mustang 350 G.T. with the small block 289 cu. in. as my personal transportation.
Oh, I guess I’m a collector of books as well. First edition, autographed books. Mostly detective fiction and novels; but anything actually which has been signed by the author. The second floor of the garage I remolded and converted into a loft. More like a giant library really. With a kitchen and a bathroom added as necessities. Just one giant room with an entire wall filled with nothing but books and a few rather expensively framed water colors scattered about. And yeah, amazingly enough, I’ve been known to sit in a chair with a good book and a glass of wine and listen to Mozart as I read. What the hell is wrong with that? Hard to think a cop who likes to get his hands greasy digging in the innards of an engine block can actually read as well, huh?
Well forget about it. It doesn’t matter. I know I’m an odd duck.
And . . .oh, one other thing; I have a flaw. Or, at least, I think it is a flaw although Frank thinks it’s The Gift of the Gods. Some people think I look like a famous dead actor. My curly black hair, my eyes, the dimples . . . make a lot of people think I look like the ‘30's matinee idol Clarke Gable. Believe me, brother, it’s not a ‘gift.’ I’m not Clarke Gable! I’m Turner Hahn. Cop. Bachelor. Someone who, although he admires and likes the cut and shape of a fine looking woman, nevertheless want’s no part of’em.
Frank thinks I’m an idiot. With my looks, he tells me, I could have women hanging all over me. Not that I sometimes don’t think about it, I’ll admit. But I’m not that interested. The failed marriage, a few badly ending affairs, and I’ve come to an obvious conclusion. Life is a lot sweeter messing around with cars, reading a good book, and going home to an empty house. At least it’s safer that way.
So that’s it. Color in the lines with the crayon labeled , “Cop.”
Grinning, I looked back at the kid in the white smock walking up to me chewing a big wad of gum loudly and with the wind blowing his unruly dirty brown hair around. Joe Wieser was the kid’s name and he worked with the County Medical Office. It was Joe who usually came out on homicide cases. And for all of his looking like a geeky teenager hardly able to walk and chew gum at the same time he was very good at his job.
“Jesus, you got nothing here, boys. Have a fine day and see you later,” he said, lifting a hand and waving as he grinned and turning to walk away.
“Joey, get your lily-white ass over here and stop playing around,” Frank growled, a grin spreading across his block of head fondly.
“What do you have?” I asked.
“Our victim has been dead roughly twelve hours, judging from the way the blood has coagulated and the amount of rigor mortis setting in. Victim’s name is Stewart. David R. Stewart, attorney. Now ain’t that a kick. A dead attorney. And hey, it’ll come as no surprise to you two the man died of a gunshot wound to the head.”
Joe grinned, his jaw working on the wad of gum in his mouth, pushing the clip board in his right hand up and underneath one armpit. We grinned. Or, at least, I grinned. Frank sort of pulled his lips back in a snarl and rolled his right hand up into a fist, cracking knuckles in the process, before unraveling the fist. The noise of his knuckles barking sounded like car doors being ripped open by a hydraulic jack. Joey got the message. The grin left his smirking lips. So did the color in his face.
“Uh . . sorry. That’s all I have for now. Give me five, six hours and I’ll have more for you.”
“We’ll give you a call,” I said, nodding.
With a quick, nervous wave of the hand and Joy split the scene. Frank chuckled quietly as he watched the little geek leaving. That’s what so loveable about Frank. He scares the hell out of a lot of people. Especially when he flexes his fists.
“Who were the first black and whites on the scene?” he asked, turning to look behind the Caddy at the two patrol units parked on either side, “And who found the stiff in the first place?”
“Jones and Bradley got the first squawk. Got here about a half hour ago. Found a Linda Edwards setting in that Honda over there almost in hysterics. She used her cell phone and called it in.”
“Where’s the caller?”
I pointed to the second ambulance behind one of the black and whites. Medics were working on a young woman who was setting on a guernsey. She had an oxygen mask on, holding it there with both hands, but even from this distance she didn’t look too steady. Her complexion looked like it was freshly knead bread dough. Odds were she was going to faint. And soon. Medics stood on either side of her waiting for her to pitch forward and take a header toward the pavement.
“I’ll talk to her. Maybe she can give us something more than just a name.”
“I’ll find out what Mick and Gabe know,” I said, turning to find the first officers to arrive.
It just goes to show you. In this line of business you can get trapped in doing the usual routine. Police work, for the most part, is nothing more than a routine. Ask questions, investigate the clues, ask more questions, follow up the leads; ask more questions. In the end, you nab your crook. The routine is a safety net to get the job done. But it is also a trap. A trap which suspends the brain from actually ticking over. Routine work does not ask you to think. Just stay between the lines and color in the dots. The trap springs when a case comes along which nixes the standard police routine.
Sometimes Harry Houdini comes back to life and commits a crime. Not literally. Figuratively. A crime is committed which defies explanation. A crime filled with smoke and mirrors and sublime slight-of-hand trickery. This case was an act of deception worthy of Houdini.
Two
Our dead lawyer was a corporate schmooz whose firm had maybe two hundred clients in the local Fortune 500 companies in this town. He was the senior partner in a law firm consisting of five partners and a stable of conscripts. All expensive and all extremely intelligent, coming from the best law schools in the country.
The firm of Stewart, Pierce, Hoskins, Alberts & Benedict occupied the entire fifth floor of the office building the garage was attached to. Spacious to the point of opulence, so new the paint smelled fresh and the carpet was still springy to step on. Daniel Stewart’s office was the biggest office on the floor. Windows, the entire north wall, had a magnificent view of the immediate farm fields surrounding the building and the distance sky line of the city’s downtown just a few miles away. On the light oak paneled walls, real wood and not the normal four by eight sheets of paneling one buy’s at the local lumber yard, were seven or eight original oil paintings. Each painting had an individual spot light to accentuate the canvas. And each was of someone whose name I actually recognized.
Impressive.
A quick glance of the dead man’s office told me several things about our victim. The man’s desk was spotless. A big desk set close to the windows, with black onyx top, and not a paper or folder seemed out of place. Pencils were aligned in perfect formation on the left hand side of the desk’s center; black and red ink pens on the right. Three thick folders were stacked one atop the other on the left inner corner. On the right inner corner was the phone/intercom.
The furniture in the office was black leather. Expensive black leather.
Our victim liked his life to be lived in an orderly, planned, and concise fashion. And he liked to flash his money around.
“The boy was a stickler for precision,” Frank grunted, unimpressed, as we eyed the place.
“You know what I say about an organized mind.”
“Yeah,” Frank nodded, grinning. “‘An organized mind is the sign of a sick puppy.’ If that’s the case, then the chump outside was very, very sick.”
“We need to find one of the partners and take him out to the garage to identify the body. Any one here yet?”
“One. A Franklin L. Pierce. Apparently he and our victim started the firm ten years ago. Came out of law school together and went immediately straight up the corporate ladder.”
Funny thing about high-priced corporate lawyers. They know their way around a law suit and the courtroom. They can smooth talk their way through the front doors of a convent if they had to. But they are not used to seeing a dead body. Especially a messy one.
Franklin Pierce became physically sick when we asked him to identify the body. We had to shuffle him over to one side and allow him to hurl up his Starbucks and rolls over the hand railing two or three times before he caught his breath. Eventually, standing up straight and wiping his lips with a silk handkerchief, and as pale as fresh alabaster, he nodded and turned to face us.
“My god! Poor Dan. Who could do something so horrible as this?”
“Apparently someone who had a major time disagreement with him,” Frank answered, his big frame dwarfing the small frame of the lawyer in front of us. “Got any ideas who that might be?”
“We had our share of those who disliked our successes, detective. But in the business world you can’t become as successful as rapidly as we did without stepping one someone’s toes. Our reputation as a firm is our intense aggressiveness in defending our clients. But we do no criminal litigation. We don’t represent organized crime. Or, at least, not to our knowledge. Admittedly a number of firms would like to see terrible things happen to us. I can’t deny that. But not this. Not murder. This is unbelievable. Insane.”
I saw it. And glancing at Frank I knew he saw it as well. The way Pierce used his hands as he spoke; the dark gray silk suit. The dark gray button down shirt and the black silk tie. The once perfectly folded white silk handkerchief placed just so in the suit’s breast pocket. And finally, Franklin L. Pierce himself.
The lawyer was a small man. Smaller than even a normal sized woman. Dark curly blond hair, thinning up front, with dark brown eyes made the small man visually impressive. In an effeminate sort of way. Glancing at my troglodyte friend and partner I read his unreadable face and said nothing.
“So you think none of your associates or competitors are capable of murder.”
A brief hesitation, a narrowing of the eyelids and a shift in his stance told me there was something. But Pierce shook his head and shrugged elegantly.
“For the life of me I can’t think of a soul, officer. I’m at a loss for words.”
Yeah. Sure.
No matter. We’ll get back to that little part he forgot to mention. All in due time. I nodded and half turned to look at the office.
“When did you see your partner last?” Frank asked, picking up something off the dead man’s precision-lined desk and in the process forging a look of disapproval from the man standing beside me.
“Last night. Here, in the office, around seven or eight o:clock. At the end of the day the partners usually get together for a twenty or thirty minute confab to touch base with everyone. We’ve decided to go away from formal staff meetings during the day. Too stressful. In this work there is more than enough stress to work through. So we’ve become more casual in our approach.”
“How did he act last night? Was he tense? Was he relaxed? Did anything strike you as being different?” I chipped in turning to look at the little man again.
“Tired. I would say he was very tired. The last couple of months he has
been working on a rather large piece of litigation involving patent rights. A smaller company is suing one of our clients over who owns the patent. Such cases involves lots of detail work and reams of reading pertinent decisions. They are time consuming and can sap the strength from you.”
“What about his home life?” Frank grunted, putting an expensive pen down on the desk not exactly like he found it. Causing the look of irritation on Franklin Pierce’s face to increase in severity. “Was our victim married?”
“Oh, indeed. Old college sweet. Became engaged when Dan was in his last year at law school. Married the day after he graduated. A beauty. Or so they tell me.”
I tried not to smile.
The last statement sounded like something pushing awfully hard toward jealousy. Was Franklin Pierce jealous of our victim’s wife? Could that mean more than a business relationship between Pierce and the deceased? Jealousy was one of the oldest reasons to murder someone. Especially someone who had been as good looking as our dead man out in the parking garage. I glanced at Frank and saw him nod slightly. We agreed. It was a string in the investigation we would have to follow up on.
“What’s the wife’s name?” Frank grunted, folding his arms across the massive span of his chest and frowning as he looked down on Pierce.
Frank, when frowning, and as big as he is, could make a canonized saint fidget nervously with his prayer beads. It wasn’t that Frank was just taller than Pierce. It was like looking at Mt. Everest hovering over an anthill. It was about mass. Density. Strength. Oblique intimidation.
Intimidation.
A gravely misunderstood tool. When used in the hands of a craftsman intimidation can open up entirely new lines of investigation. It can reveal clues which otherwise would have remained hidden.
“Margaret. Margaret Ellaine.”
“We’ll need to ask some questions to everyone in the office. And the deceased has a personal secretary?”
“Certainly. Two, actually. Vivian Spears is Dan’s personal assistant. If you’re interested in Dan’s itinerary she would be the one to talk to. Deborah Charles is Dan’s records assistant. She keeps track on all of Dan’s legal briefs, documents. Things like that.”
We nodded and said we needed to talk to them.
Two hours later we had nothing.
Nothing suspicious. Nothing to point to a possible motive for murder. Nothing for a suspect.
Nothing.
And as usual, when we had nothing, something always came along to break up the monotony.
Riding the elevator down from the law officers Frank’s cell phone began singing “Take this Job and Shove It.” A country/western tune I really disliked in general, and certainly despised as a ringtone for a phone. But it was his phone. Not mine. Sighing, but keeping my mouth closed, I eyed the big grunt beside me and waited until he flipped his phone closed and drop it in his sport coat.
“That was Yankovich. Apparently we’re getting a new case handed to us. A new old case, to be precise.”
“Huh?”
“Just wait, you’ll see what I mean. We’re gonna meet Yank at the morgue in a half hour.”
Demitri Yankovich was our shift commander at South Side. Generally Frank and I pulled the four to midnight shift in the detective division at South Side. Yank was the looey in charge of the eight detectives assigned to this shift. He was also second in command of the precinct–which basically met he kept an eye on everyone–uniformed officers and detectives–who worked with us on that shift. Frank and I and one other set of detectives worked the homicide desks. A third team worked Narcotics while the fourth team of detectives worked Robbery/Larceny cases.
Yeah, business was that good down on our side of town.
Walking out of the office building and into the sunlight walkway which would take us over to the adjacent parking building I slipped a pair of aviator’s sunglasses on and glanced at my watch. It was almost nine in the morning. We had been on duty for almost seventeen hours. Tired, brother, wasn’t even close to describing how we felt. If I didn’t get a hot shower soon and about nine hours in the sack I knew I was going to go to do something stupid. Really stupid.
Three
Lieutenant Yankovich stood facing us a frown on his lips. Nothing unusual there. Yank’s usual expression was a frown on his lips and a somber resignation in the rest of his face. The resignation of a man who had fought the wars and seen way too much crime and corruption in his life before eventually coming to the conclusion he could do very damn little to stop it. The tall, slightly stooping shift commander had hands in his slacks while underneath his left arm was a thick folder. A very thick folder.
A blue folder. A cold case file.
Which seemed odd to me. Discussing a cold case file standing in the semi-empty morgue seemed odd. Between us a white sheet covering a body lay on the steel top of an examination table. Obviously it was no longer a cold case. Glancing at the white sheet, noting the contours of a woman, I suspected it was a very active case now. The question still–why here? Why drive across town to come to the morgue and personally hand the file over to us? Why not just drop the file on our desk, as he usually did, mumble something and walk away.
The lieutenant nodded as we stepped up to the metal table and handed me the folder. There was no greeting–no small talk. He acknowledged us with a nod of the head and went right into his speech.
“Fifteen years ago a fourteen year old girl by the name of Yasmine Hollender disappeared from her home in the dead of night. While the parents slept in their bedroom down the hall from her room, someone came in through the kitchen door, walked through the kitchen and dining room, went up the staircase and walked down the hall to Yasmine’s bedroom and kidnapped her.
In the back yard they found the threadbare old teddy bear she liked to sleep with lying in the grass by the gate in a wooden picket fence. In the alley behind the house was a set of tire tracks. Also the tracks of a man wearing a size twelve set of shoes. And her tracks. Yasmine’s.”
He didn’t look at the white sheet covering the body. His voice was calm and soft. Casual. Sounding like he was giving a lecture to a group of police academy rookies. But there was something else here. This wasn’t the lieutenant we were used to. Usually there was more animation in the man’s voice. Something was here which was of real interest to the lieutenant. There was this sense of secrecy–of conspiracy–I couldn’t shake off.
“There was no evidence of the kitchen door being forced open. Someone had key and let themselves in. He left no evidence behind him. How he got up those creaky old stairs and not make a sound is a puzzle. The Hollender’s had a dog, a German Shepard, which usually slept at the foot of the Hollender’s bed. If it was a stranger entering the house the dog would have alerted everyone.”
“So the abductor was well known by the family,” Frank grunted, nodding. “That sound’s like a very close family friend. Or a close relative. Who became the prime suspect?”
Yankovich eyed Frank for a long time. What little color was in his already pale face left it. In seconds he looked a white as the corpse under the white cloth. But, slowly, color returned. Clearing something out of his voice he glanced down at the cloth and then back up to Frank.
“Me,” he said quietly.
Damn.
We expected a lot of possible answers. An uncle, maybe a brother. . . possibly a cousin. But this was totally out beyond the center field fence line. This was like getting hit in the back of the head with a cement block. We stood there eyeing the lieutenant not knowing what to say.
“Yasmine’s father was Franklin Hollander. City commissioner Franklin Hollander from the Tenth District. An honest politician, if you can believe that. He was the man who told me the police force needed honest cops. More honest cops. So he got me this job. He was my mentor, if you will, who kinda helped me along in my career. Behind the scenes he worked tirelessly to get me promoted. And I was. Went up the ranks far faster than most cops. Too fast, way too fast for a lot of men. You two know the score. Promotions are not that common. One man goes up another rank, ten are bypassed. Hell, Turner, I’ve been asking you for years to take the lieutenant’s test and go before the promotions board. The same with you, Frank. Both of you should be lieutenants by now. But neither of you are interested.”
It was true. Frank and I were held the rank of Detective Sergeants, First Class. A gold badge. If we wanted to, and if there were openings, the two of us could go after a lieutenant’s badge. But getting that badge meant giving up working Homicide. Our promotions could shove us in some supervisory’s job anywhere in the department. But it guaranteed it wouldn’t be in Homicide. Rookie officers didn’t get that promotion. Didn’t matter how many years in Homicide you may have spent.
“Why you, Yank?”
The lieutenant looked at me and smiled weakly, shaking his head.
“The Hollanders had be over their house two, three times a week. Yasmine was their only child and she developed a kinda hero’s worship for me. I was the only one over at their house so many times a week. The neighbors knew me. Everyone. Suspicion fell on my shoulders almost immediately. Especially when, in the investigation, they found the silly diary of hers where she constantly talked of me in a girlish romantic way.”
“You were interrogated?”
He looked at Frank and nodded.
“Who were the lead investigators on the case?”
“Iggie Johannson and Mickey Mulligan.”
Jesus Christ.
Hit up the side of the head twice with a cement block. I blinked a couple of times and tried to put it together. But the way I felt inside you could have knocked me down waving an ostrich feather in front of me. The same could be said with Frank.
Iggie Johannson and Mickey Mulligan.
If there were any two pieces of low life shit it had to be these two. They were two homicide dicks working out of the Downtown Divison. And to say that Frank and I despised these two creeps would be a vast understatement. They were two slick numbers who worked both sides of the street. On one hand they were good at their jobs when it came to finding the common criminals. They were Downtown’s top performers. Which made sense, if you asked me, since they were criminals themselves. They could smell a crook a mile away.
But they also were the prime muscle for a crime boss and professional gambler by the named Nathan Brinkley. Brinkly was into local politics. He liked sticking his fingers in the city’s bidding on construction jobs. He liked buying off commissioners. Many said he liked friends in the police department. Friends like Iggie Johannsson and Mickey Mulligan.
For years Frank and I had been looking for a way to tie Brinkley with come kind of corruption and or murder rap. The word on the street was Brinkley wouldn’t hesitate to rub someone out if they become too much of an obstacle. The word also was his two best men knew how to do it and never leave a clue behind. They were in the system.
Who would be more in the system than two homicide detectives like Iggie and Mickey?
“It was their first case as detectives. And they latched on the fact Yasmine had a crush for me and I was already well known. We had had our run-ins before. We didn’t like each. Still don’t like each other. So they tried every way they could think of to pin the rap on me. But there was nothing which would stick. Yasmine Hollander simply disappeared. She didn’t leave a trace anywhere. Iggie and Mickey hounded me on this case for over a year. They cost me a couple of promotions early on. And then I put a stop to it. I got Internal Affairs to step in and clear my name. When they seemed reluctant to do so I found a lawyer. A ruthless lawyer who had no love for the top brass. He rattled some cages. Made some threats. The case became a cold case file. Staid that way for fifteen years. But as you can see, it ain’t a cold case anymore.”
I glanced down at the body. She would be about twenty-nine now. Frowning, I found myself wondering. What had happened in that fifteen lost years? How was she abducted? Why did she return? And how did she die?
The last question I looked up and studied the lieutenant’s face. It was as if he was reading my mind.
“Found her in the river night before last. Drowned. No indication of any foul play. But I’m not buying it. Something happened. Something made her come back. I’ve got this ugly feeling her return forced others to act and act quickly. And leave no clues behind.”
“So we’re back to Iggie and Mickey,” Frank grunted, glancing at the body and nodding. “You think this has something to do with Nathan Brinkley?”
The lieutenant nodded.
“Like I said, Franklin Hollander was an honest man. Too honest, many would tell you. But he was charismatic. He had a way in persuading a crowd and make them believe in him. He promised to clean up crime and corruption in the Tenth. He was working hard to make good on his promises. Which meant he became a direct threat to Nathan Brinkley. But six months after Yasmine disappeared Franklin Hollander was killed by a drunk driver. A head on collision while he was coming home from a political rally. Both Hollander and the drunk died instantly. Two months after that Linda Hollander, Franklin’s wife, committed herself to an asylum. She had a nervous breakdown. A year later she died from a drug overdose.
It was Iggie and Mickey who investigated Hollander’s death. They were the ones who said a drunk swerved across his lane, jumped a median strip while driving a Chevy pickup, and slammed into Franklin Hollander’s Lincoln. It didn’t sound right. It just didn’t fit.”
“So you suspect Iggie and Mickey?”
“Yes,” the lieutenant–and friend–nodded quietly, his eyes darting behind us to see if anyone was within hearing distance. “But no proof. Those two clowns have been getting away with murder for years. Along with their boss. It’s time we closed the case on this. That’s why I’ve asked you two to come down here. I want you two to wrap it up. Pen something on the three of them. Bring them in cuffs and let’s send them to the chair. These three thugs have gotten away with murder for years. Ruined people’s lives. Destroyed reputations. Enough is enough.”
The two of us nodded at the same. It would be our pleasure to take out these three. All we had to do was prove they were guilty. Something we had been trying to do on other cases for years.
As usual, I follow a formula. The book starts out with a puzzler on how the victim was iced. Remember now, I'm always looking for commentary--so tell me what you think needs fixed, reduced, refitted, or ejected. Doesn't mean I'll take your advice--but at least I'll listen.
One
We had a problem.
Although it was just seven in the morning the sun was coming up and the heat was beginning to build. It was late July. July in this city meant only three things: wind, heat . . . and more damn heat. The wind was blowing a steady gait from out of the south. That meant it was going to be a very hot day. Hot enough to make Superman sweat. Hot enough to make a Bedouin think about wearing khaki shorts. Hot enough to make Turkish coffee taste like a frozen cherry slush. Hot enough to make Lucifer think of ski slopes in Aspen.
Hot enough to make perspiration perspire.
The blue shirt underneath my sport coat was damp. And the day was just beginning. By time nine o:clock rolled around I would have to change shirts and ditch the coat. By the time we finished our initial investigation I’d be nothing more than a piece of melted cheese dip. Already I could feel the heat radiating off the car beside me. The small Caddy convertible, black as coal with its top up, was going to turn into a boiler in about an hour. There’s nothing like a black car and leather seats which can absorb heat and somehow magnify it tenfold. Throw a dead body into the car, add in about three tons of humidity,and you can imagine the rest.
But that wasn’t the problem.
As I walked around the driver’s side of the black Cadillac XLR-V my eyes kept glancing at the front windshield. Punched through the glass, about six inches above the upper rim of the steering wheel, was a bullet hole. Striation lines radiated from the hole outward across the glass but the windshield itself was intact. A quick glance at the back window had the bullet’s exit point. About half the window was gone. The remaining glass was coated in blood and brain matter.
Slumped back across the tan leather seats of the car was the victim. The front part of his head was there. The back half wasn’t. The dead man looked to be in his 30's or early 40's. He had on a blue suit. Dark navy blue. Hand stitched. Tailor made.
Made from imported Egyptian cotton. Maybe worth a grand or more. Minimum.
Underneath the suit was an off white linen shirt. Not something found in a typical Wal-Mart. Around his neck was a signature red silk tie. Again, maybe one or two C-notes for a price tag. Expensive Italian leather for shoes and wrap-around shades still setting perfectly on the bridge of his nose completed the picture.
Whoever the sonofabitch was he wasn’t worried about balancing his check book like the rest of us. Me, I thought twice about it every time I wanted to buy a Daffy Duck tie off the racks at K-Mart even though, in reality, I didn’t have to anymore. Not this guy. Hell. His car alone–new–was three and a half years my salary. Give or take a couple of nickels. The guy, when he was breathing, was awash in cash. Very rich. And that meant very powerful. He would have powerful friends. Powerful friends usually expected quick results whenever one of their kind checked out unexpectedly.
But that wasn’t the problem.
No.
The problem was the dead man and how he died. Specifically, in the place where he died. Hearing steps behind me I turned and watched my partner, a red headed Neanderthal wannabe with the IQ of an Einstein approaching. Glancing at me the guy meshed his thick eyebrows together and whistled softly.
“This doesn’t look good.”
“Yeah. I was thinking the same thing.”
He turned and looked out over the railing of the parking garage slot the Caddy was parked in. The fourth floor of a five floor parking garage. The Caddy was facing to the south up against the southern cement retainer wall. In front of him was nothing. Nothing for twenty square miles. Just an empty wheat field which stretched out forever.
“You know what the problem is, right?” Frank grunted, shoving hands into his wrinkled gray slacks as we faced the wheat field and stared off into nothingness.
“Let me guess. The trajectory of the bullet doesn’t come up from the wheat field. It’s coming from slightly above the parking garage.”
“Yep, that’s the ticket,” nodded Frank, grinning maliciously, “And there’s more.”
“Uh huh,” I nodded, turning to look to the north. To the direction the bullet was heading after it had passed through the victim’s cranium and the back window. Another goddamn wheat field, “The bullet can’t be found. So we have no evidence, other than a dead man and a couple of bullet holes, to start from.”
The parking garage, with the attached five story office building of black glass and black granite beside it, set in an industrial park on the city’s south edge. A quarter of a mile to the west was I-475 sweeping around the city. The six lanes of the cement ribbon were filled with morning traffic. You could hear the constant hum clear out here. The one paved street leading to the crime scene sliced through mostly farm country. But there were a couple of new office complexes around and a third in the process of being constructed. Downtown was ten miles to the north and east. In between was nothing but farm country and a few brand new housing developments.
“There you go. On the money. That’s why they made you the youngest detective sergeant on the force. Brilliant, my friend. Brilliant!”
I turned and looked at my partner and grinned.
Smart-ass.
Did I tell you Frank has no neck? No? Well, he doesn’t. Just a head built like a block of steel reinforced cement setting on a set of shoulders wide enough to make flood gates at Hoover dam jealous over. His hair is a light colored carrot red, stringing and always blowing around unruly in the slightest breeze. Somehow the thinning hair complimented his square head nicely. If you like to look at nightmares.
He’s got hands the size of dinner plates. When he rolls his hands up into fists they look like those giant wrecking balls cranes throw around to knock down buildings. No. He’s not much to look at. Actually he’s like sushi. He’s an acquired taste. You either like him or you don’t. There’s no in-between. I like him. We’ve been on the force together for over twelve years. Partners in the South Side Division for ten. You can’t ask for a better man. They don’t make’em better. And there is a plus to this guy. His looks make him look like a dumb mug straight out of a mental ward. But he’s just the opposite. He knows every detail about every thing. You can’t stump him.
I know. I’ve been trying to do it for twelve years.
“Wanna give me an idea on the murder weapon, genius?” I asked, grinning.
“Nine millimeter. Hard nose. Maybe from, say, at an elevation of about fifty feet off the ground.”
“Out there,” I said, waving a hand toward the wheat, “Fifty feet above the ground.”
Frank nodded, grinning that evil little grin of his I was all too familiar with.
“Oh no,” I said, shaking my head firmly and lifting a hand up, palm outward, toward him, “I had the last Sherlock. Remember the Levant Case? That was a Sherlock. It’s your turn. You are the lead investigator on this one, buddy!”
A ‘Sherlock’ was our little way of telling each other a particular case was not going to fit the typical run-of-the-mill murder we police-types are so fond of. This one had all the marking of something that was going to be tough to figure out. Most homicide cases are relatively simple. Nine times out of ten the victim knew his killer. Six out of ten times the murder is a spur of the moment affair with all kinds of witnesses and evidence lying about to finger the perpetrator. (The Perp. . . jeez, I hate that word. Too many cop shows on TV.) So, most of the time, cops simply follow the leads, like a good machinist follows his blue prints, and eventually you wind up with the guilty party.
But . . . .
Sometimes there’s a monkey-wrench thrown into a cop’s normal routine. A case comes drifting in from out of the blue which doesn’t follow the rules. The evidence is usually little, or nonexistent, and typically there is a multitude of possible suspects, each with several reasons on why they would pull the trigger. To solve this kind of case meant you had to work like Sherlock Holmes. Deductive reasoning. Ruling out the all the possibilities until you came onto the one possibility, no matter how absurd it might be, which answered all the questions. Frank, for all of his fabulous smarts, hated these cases. Hated them so much he became very creative in throwing them to me.
“Naw, I had the last Sherlock. The Hutch case.”
“The Hutch case? Jesus. That was a pimp shooting one of his girls in broad daylight in front of a Dunkin’ Donuts. Sixteen witnesses saw the shooting. The trick lived long enough to tell us her pimp did it. The pimp confessed, for chrissakes! How could that be a Sherlock?”
“But we couldn’t find the gun, Turn. It took me . . .oh . . . a couple of hours to figure out where the murder weapon was. That’s what made it a Sherlock. So it’s your turn. Quit squawking.”
I grinned.
Oh, what the hell. I don’t mind taking these cases. Frank hates’em. I find them stimulating. But I enjoy the banter the two of us go through every time one of them comes up. Work with a guy long enough and you either begin to enjoy his company or you hate his guts. I liked Frank. We worked well together.
Maybe I should introduce myself. I’m Turner Hahn. Detective sergeant Turner Hahn, South Side. I’ve been a cop for fifteen, going on sixteen, years now; ten with the gold badge of a detective. I’m a little over six feet three, with black hair and gray-blue eyes. I used to be a football player. I played linebacker in college. Played for a college in the Big 12 conference. And I had thoughts of playing in the NFL. But this kid from Syracuse, built like the back side of Mt. Everest, decided to use my legs for bowling pens. He threw a rolling block on me, caught my right leg under his fat ass, and that was that. So long NFL.
Yeah, I was married once. Childhood sweetheart from high school. But then one day I came home and found a note on the table informing me she decided to run off with an accountant by the name of Rodney. At least he would be home at night. So now I call myself a confirmed bachelor. I live in a run down building down on Floyd street about two blocks from the Brown river. Floyd street is down in the industrial section of town. The place I have is a red brick mass of badly constructed masonry. But cheap enough for me to afford on a detective sergeant’s pay. No. I couldn’t afford to buy a building. Not on my pay scale. I can afford it because my grandfather gave the building to me. The old coot claims to be a farmer living upstate. He does own a big ass farm and a good portion of the year he can be found living in the main house up there. But the old man has secrets. Secrets he doesn’t share–secrets I don’t want to know about, frankly. And he’s rich. Rich with a capital “R” in front of it. Rich enough to make the legendary King Midas look like a shyster. He and I are much alike. He’s an old widower who loves cars. He refuses to marry and likes to tinker with his toys when he’s not planting wheat or irrigating corn. And he likes to come to the city and share a case or two of beer with me and talk about cars.
The old man gave me the place because I needed a place to work on and store my babies. The building used to be a garage. And the babies I collect are Muscle cars. You know, the Detroit iron of the 50's, 60's and 70's which had enough horsepower to pull the Queen Mary through the Panama Canal. Or maybe bruise kidneys against your spine if you hit the accelerator too hard. I own a ‘69 Z-28 IROC with a 302 cu.in Chevy small block; green with white strips and white vinyl interior. There’s also a sweet ‘71 Plymouth Road Runner with the 383 engine in it. And I use a ‘68 Shelby Cobra Mustang 350 G.T. with the small block 289 cu. in. as my personal transportation.
Oh, I guess I’m a collector of books as well. First edition, autographed books. Mostly detective fiction and novels; but anything actually which has been signed by the author. The second floor of the garage I remolded and converted into a loft. More like a giant library really. With a kitchen and a bathroom added as necessities. Just one giant room with an entire wall filled with nothing but books and a few rather expensively framed water colors scattered about. And yeah, amazingly enough, I’ve been known to sit in a chair with a good book and a glass of wine and listen to Mozart as I read. What the hell is wrong with that? Hard to think a cop who likes to get his hands greasy digging in the innards of an engine block can actually read as well, huh?
Well forget about it. It doesn’t matter. I know I’m an odd duck.
And . . .oh, one other thing; I have a flaw. Or, at least, I think it is a flaw although Frank thinks it’s The Gift of the Gods. Some people think I look like a famous dead actor. My curly black hair, my eyes, the dimples . . . make a lot of people think I look like the ‘30's matinee idol Clarke Gable. Believe me, brother, it’s not a ‘gift.’ I’m not Clarke Gable! I’m Turner Hahn. Cop. Bachelor. Someone who, although he admires and likes the cut and shape of a fine looking woman, nevertheless want’s no part of’em.
Frank thinks I’m an idiot. With my looks, he tells me, I could have women hanging all over me. Not that I sometimes don’t think about it, I’ll admit. But I’m not that interested. The failed marriage, a few badly ending affairs, and I’ve come to an obvious conclusion. Life is a lot sweeter messing around with cars, reading a good book, and going home to an empty house. At least it’s safer that way.
So that’s it. Color in the lines with the crayon labeled , “Cop.”
Grinning, I looked back at the kid in the white smock walking up to me chewing a big wad of gum loudly and with the wind blowing his unruly dirty brown hair around. Joe Wieser was the kid’s name and he worked with the County Medical Office. It was Joe who usually came out on homicide cases. And for all of his looking like a geeky teenager hardly able to walk and chew gum at the same time he was very good at his job.
“Jesus, you got nothing here, boys. Have a fine day and see you later,” he said, lifting a hand and waving as he grinned and turning to walk away.
“Joey, get your lily-white ass over here and stop playing around,” Frank growled, a grin spreading across his block of head fondly.
“What do you have?” I asked.
“Our victim has been dead roughly twelve hours, judging from the way the blood has coagulated and the amount of rigor mortis setting in. Victim’s name is Stewart. David R. Stewart, attorney. Now ain’t that a kick. A dead attorney. And hey, it’ll come as no surprise to you two the man died of a gunshot wound to the head.”
Joe grinned, his jaw working on the wad of gum in his mouth, pushing the clip board in his right hand up and underneath one armpit. We grinned. Or, at least, I grinned. Frank sort of pulled his lips back in a snarl and rolled his right hand up into a fist, cracking knuckles in the process, before unraveling the fist. The noise of his knuckles barking sounded like car doors being ripped open by a hydraulic jack. Joey got the message. The grin left his smirking lips. So did the color in his face.
“Uh . . sorry. That’s all I have for now. Give me five, six hours and I’ll have more for you.”
“We’ll give you a call,” I said, nodding.
With a quick, nervous wave of the hand and Joy split the scene. Frank chuckled quietly as he watched the little geek leaving. That’s what so loveable about Frank. He scares the hell out of a lot of people. Especially when he flexes his fists.
“Who were the first black and whites on the scene?” he asked, turning to look behind the Caddy at the two patrol units parked on either side, “And who found the stiff in the first place?”
“Jones and Bradley got the first squawk. Got here about a half hour ago. Found a Linda Edwards setting in that Honda over there almost in hysterics. She used her cell phone and called it in.”
“Where’s the caller?”
I pointed to the second ambulance behind one of the black and whites. Medics were working on a young woman who was setting on a guernsey. She had an oxygen mask on, holding it there with both hands, but even from this distance she didn’t look too steady. Her complexion looked like it was freshly knead bread dough. Odds were she was going to faint. And soon. Medics stood on either side of her waiting for her to pitch forward and take a header toward the pavement.
“I’ll talk to her. Maybe she can give us something more than just a name.”
“I’ll find out what Mick and Gabe know,” I said, turning to find the first officers to arrive.
It just goes to show you. In this line of business you can get trapped in doing the usual routine. Police work, for the most part, is nothing more than a routine. Ask questions, investigate the clues, ask more questions, follow up the leads; ask more questions. In the end, you nab your crook. The routine is a safety net to get the job done. But it is also a trap. A trap which suspends the brain from actually ticking over. Routine work does not ask you to think. Just stay between the lines and color in the dots. The trap springs when a case comes along which nixes the standard police routine.
Sometimes Harry Houdini comes back to life and commits a crime. Not literally. Figuratively. A crime is committed which defies explanation. A crime filled with smoke and mirrors and sublime slight-of-hand trickery. This case was an act of deception worthy of Houdini.
Two
Our dead lawyer was a corporate schmooz whose firm had maybe two hundred clients in the local Fortune 500 companies in this town. He was the senior partner in a law firm consisting of five partners and a stable of conscripts. All expensive and all extremely intelligent, coming from the best law schools in the country.
The firm of Stewart, Pierce, Hoskins, Alberts & Benedict occupied the entire fifth floor of the office building the garage was attached to. Spacious to the point of opulence, so new the paint smelled fresh and the carpet was still springy to step on. Daniel Stewart’s office was the biggest office on the floor. Windows, the entire north wall, had a magnificent view of the immediate farm fields surrounding the building and the distance sky line of the city’s downtown just a few miles away. On the light oak paneled walls, real wood and not the normal four by eight sheets of paneling one buy’s at the local lumber yard, were seven or eight original oil paintings. Each painting had an individual spot light to accentuate the canvas. And each was of someone whose name I actually recognized.
Impressive.
A quick glance of the dead man’s office told me several things about our victim. The man’s desk was spotless. A big desk set close to the windows, with black onyx top, and not a paper or folder seemed out of place. Pencils were aligned in perfect formation on the left hand side of the desk’s center; black and red ink pens on the right. Three thick folders were stacked one atop the other on the left inner corner. On the right inner corner was the phone/intercom.
The furniture in the office was black leather. Expensive black leather.
Our victim liked his life to be lived in an orderly, planned, and concise fashion. And he liked to flash his money around.
“The boy was a stickler for precision,” Frank grunted, unimpressed, as we eyed the place.
“You know what I say about an organized mind.”
“Yeah,” Frank nodded, grinning. “‘An organized mind is the sign of a sick puppy.’ If that’s the case, then the chump outside was very, very sick.”
“We need to find one of the partners and take him out to the garage to identify the body. Any one here yet?”
“One. A Franklin L. Pierce. Apparently he and our victim started the firm ten years ago. Came out of law school together and went immediately straight up the corporate ladder.”
Funny thing about high-priced corporate lawyers. They know their way around a law suit and the courtroom. They can smooth talk their way through the front doors of a convent if they had to. But they are not used to seeing a dead body. Especially a messy one.
Franklin Pierce became physically sick when we asked him to identify the body. We had to shuffle him over to one side and allow him to hurl up his Starbucks and rolls over the hand railing two or three times before he caught his breath. Eventually, standing up straight and wiping his lips with a silk handkerchief, and as pale as fresh alabaster, he nodded and turned to face us.
“My god! Poor Dan. Who could do something so horrible as this?”
“Apparently someone who had a major time disagreement with him,” Frank answered, his big frame dwarfing the small frame of the lawyer in front of us. “Got any ideas who that might be?”
“We had our share of those who disliked our successes, detective. But in the business world you can’t become as successful as rapidly as we did without stepping one someone’s toes. Our reputation as a firm is our intense aggressiveness in defending our clients. But we do no criminal litigation. We don’t represent organized crime. Or, at least, not to our knowledge. Admittedly a number of firms would like to see terrible things happen to us. I can’t deny that. But not this. Not murder. This is unbelievable. Insane.”
I saw it. And glancing at Frank I knew he saw it as well. The way Pierce used his hands as he spoke; the dark gray silk suit. The dark gray button down shirt and the black silk tie. The once perfectly folded white silk handkerchief placed just so in the suit’s breast pocket. And finally, Franklin L. Pierce himself.
The lawyer was a small man. Smaller than even a normal sized woman. Dark curly blond hair, thinning up front, with dark brown eyes made the small man visually impressive. In an effeminate sort of way. Glancing at my troglodyte friend and partner I read his unreadable face and said nothing.
“So you think none of your associates or competitors are capable of murder.”
A brief hesitation, a narrowing of the eyelids and a shift in his stance told me there was something. But Pierce shook his head and shrugged elegantly.
“For the life of me I can’t think of a soul, officer. I’m at a loss for words.”
Yeah. Sure.
No matter. We’ll get back to that little part he forgot to mention. All in due time. I nodded and half turned to look at the office.
“When did you see your partner last?” Frank asked, picking up something off the dead man’s precision-lined desk and in the process forging a look of disapproval from the man standing beside me.
“Last night. Here, in the office, around seven or eight o:clock. At the end of the day the partners usually get together for a twenty or thirty minute confab to touch base with everyone. We’ve decided to go away from formal staff meetings during the day. Too stressful. In this work there is more than enough stress to work through. So we’ve become more casual in our approach.”
“How did he act last night? Was he tense? Was he relaxed? Did anything strike you as being different?” I chipped in turning to look at the little man again.
“Tired. I would say he was very tired. The last couple of months he has
been working on a rather large piece of litigation involving patent rights. A smaller company is suing one of our clients over who owns the patent. Such cases involves lots of detail work and reams of reading pertinent decisions. They are time consuming and can sap the strength from you.”
“What about his home life?” Frank grunted, putting an expensive pen down on the desk not exactly like he found it. Causing the look of irritation on Franklin Pierce’s face to increase in severity. “Was our victim married?”
“Oh, indeed. Old college sweet. Became engaged when Dan was in his last year at law school. Married the day after he graduated. A beauty. Or so they tell me.”
I tried not to smile.
The last statement sounded like something pushing awfully hard toward jealousy. Was Franklin Pierce jealous of our victim’s wife? Could that mean more than a business relationship between Pierce and the deceased? Jealousy was one of the oldest reasons to murder someone. Especially someone who had been as good looking as our dead man out in the parking garage. I glanced at Frank and saw him nod slightly. We agreed. It was a string in the investigation we would have to follow up on.
“What’s the wife’s name?” Frank grunted, folding his arms across the massive span of his chest and frowning as he looked down on Pierce.
Frank, when frowning, and as big as he is, could make a canonized saint fidget nervously with his prayer beads. It wasn’t that Frank was just taller than Pierce. It was like looking at Mt. Everest hovering over an anthill. It was about mass. Density. Strength. Oblique intimidation.
Intimidation.
A gravely misunderstood tool. When used in the hands of a craftsman intimidation can open up entirely new lines of investigation. It can reveal clues which otherwise would have remained hidden.
“Margaret. Margaret Ellaine.”
“We’ll need to ask some questions to everyone in the office. And the deceased has a personal secretary?”
“Certainly. Two, actually. Vivian Spears is Dan’s personal assistant. If you’re interested in Dan’s itinerary she would be the one to talk to. Deborah Charles is Dan’s records assistant. She keeps track on all of Dan’s legal briefs, documents. Things like that.”
We nodded and said we needed to talk to them.
Two hours later we had nothing.
Nothing suspicious. Nothing to point to a possible motive for murder. Nothing for a suspect.
Nothing.
And as usual, when we had nothing, something always came along to break up the monotony.
Riding the elevator down from the law officers Frank’s cell phone began singing “Take this Job and Shove It.” A country/western tune I really disliked in general, and certainly despised as a ringtone for a phone. But it was his phone. Not mine. Sighing, but keeping my mouth closed, I eyed the big grunt beside me and waited until he flipped his phone closed and drop it in his sport coat.
“That was Yankovich. Apparently we’re getting a new case handed to us. A new old case, to be precise.”
“Huh?”
“Just wait, you’ll see what I mean. We’re gonna meet Yank at the morgue in a half hour.”
Demitri Yankovich was our shift commander at South Side. Generally Frank and I pulled the four to midnight shift in the detective division at South Side. Yank was the looey in charge of the eight detectives assigned to this shift. He was also second in command of the precinct–which basically met he kept an eye on everyone–uniformed officers and detectives–who worked with us on that shift. Frank and I and one other set of detectives worked the homicide desks. A third team worked Narcotics while the fourth team of detectives worked Robbery/Larceny cases.
Yeah, business was that good down on our side of town.
Walking out of the office building and into the sunlight walkway which would take us over to the adjacent parking building I slipped a pair of aviator’s sunglasses on and glanced at my watch. It was almost nine in the morning. We had been on duty for almost seventeen hours. Tired, brother, wasn’t even close to describing how we felt. If I didn’t get a hot shower soon and about nine hours in the sack I knew I was going to go to do something stupid. Really stupid.
Three
Lieutenant Yankovich stood facing us a frown on his lips. Nothing unusual there. Yank’s usual expression was a frown on his lips and a somber resignation in the rest of his face. The resignation of a man who had fought the wars and seen way too much crime and corruption in his life before eventually coming to the conclusion he could do very damn little to stop it. The tall, slightly stooping shift commander had hands in his slacks while underneath his left arm was a thick folder. A very thick folder.
A blue folder. A cold case file.
Which seemed odd to me. Discussing a cold case file standing in the semi-empty morgue seemed odd. Between us a white sheet covering a body lay on the steel top of an examination table. Obviously it was no longer a cold case. Glancing at the white sheet, noting the contours of a woman, I suspected it was a very active case now. The question still–why here? Why drive across town to come to the morgue and personally hand the file over to us? Why not just drop the file on our desk, as he usually did, mumble something and walk away.
The lieutenant nodded as we stepped up to the metal table and handed me the folder. There was no greeting–no small talk. He acknowledged us with a nod of the head and went right into his speech.
“Fifteen years ago a fourteen year old girl by the name of Yasmine Hollender disappeared from her home in the dead of night. While the parents slept in their bedroom down the hall from her room, someone came in through the kitchen door, walked through the kitchen and dining room, went up the staircase and walked down the hall to Yasmine’s bedroom and kidnapped her.
In the back yard they found the threadbare old teddy bear she liked to sleep with lying in the grass by the gate in a wooden picket fence. In the alley behind the house was a set of tire tracks. Also the tracks of a man wearing a size twelve set of shoes. And her tracks. Yasmine’s.”
He didn’t look at the white sheet covering the body. His voice was calm and soft. Casual. Sounding like he was giving a lecture to a group of police academy rookies. But there was something else here. This wasn’t the lieutenant we were used to. Usually there was more animation in the man’s voice. Something was here which was of real interest to the lieutenant. There was this sense of secrecy–of conspiracy–I couldn’t shake off.
“There was no evidence of the kitchen door being forced open. Someone had key and let themselves in. He left no evidence behind him. How he got up those creaky old stairs and not make a sound is a puzzle. The Hollender’s had a dog, a German Shepard, which usually slept at the foot of the Hollender’s bed. If it was a stranger entering the house the dog would have alerted everyone.”
“So the abductor was well known by the family,” Frank grunted, nodding. “That sound’s like a very close family friend. Or a close relative. Who became the prime suspect?”
Yankovich eyed Frank for a long time. What little color was in his already pale face left it. In seconds he looked a white as the corpse under the white cloth. But, slowly, color returned. Clearing something out of his voice he glanced down at the cloth and then back up to Frank.
“Me,” he said quietly.
Damn.
We expected a lot of possible answers. An uncle, maybe a brother. . . possibly a cousin. But this was totally out beyond the center field fence line. This was like getting hit in the back of the head with a cement block. We stood there eyeing the lieutenant not knowing what to say.
“Yasmine’s father was Franklin Hollander. City commissioner Franklin Hollander from the Tenth District. An honest politician, if you can believe that. He was the man who told me the police force needed honest cops. More honest cops. So he got me this job. He was my mentor, if you will, who kinda helped me along in my career. Behind the scenes he worked tirelessly to get me promoted. And I was. Went up the ranks far faster than most cops. Too fast, way too fast for a lot of men. You two know the score. Promotions are not that common. One man goes up another rank, ten are bypassed. Hell, Turner, I’ve been asking you for years to take the lieutenant’s test and go before the promotions board. The same with you, Frank. Both of you should be lieutenants by now. But neither of you are interested.”
It was true. Frank and I were held the rank of Detective Sergeants, First Class. A gold badge. If we wanted to, and if there were openings, the two of us could go after a lieutenant’s badge. But getting that badge meant giving up working Homicide. Our promotions could shove us in some supervisory’s job anywhere in the department. But it guaranteed it wouldn’t be in Homicide. Rookie officers didn’t get that promotion. Didn’t matter how many years in Homicide you may have spent.
“Why you, Yank?”
The lieutenant looked at me and smiled weakly, shaking his head.
“The Hollanders had be over their house two, three times a week. Yasmine was their only child and she developed a kinda hero’s worship for me. I was the only one over at their house so many times a week. The neighbors knew me. Everyone. Suspicion fell on my shoulders almost immediately. Especially when, in the investigation, they found the silly diary of hers where she constantly talked of me in a girlish romantic way.”
“You were interrogated?”
He looked at Frank and nodded.
“Who were the lead investigators on the case?”
“Iggie Johannson and Mickey Mulligan.”
Jesus Christ.
Hit up the side of the head twice with a cement block. I blinked a couple of times and tried to put it together. But the way I felt inside you could have knocked me down waving an ostrich feather in front of me. The same could be said with Frank.
Iggie Johannson and Mickey Mulligan.
If there were any two pieces of low life shit it had to be these two. They were two homicide dicks working out of the Downtown Divison. And to say that Frank and I despised these two creeps would be a vast understatement. They were two slick numbers who worked both sides of the street. On one hand they were good at their jobs when it came to finding the common criminals. They were Downtown’s top performers. Which made sense, if you asked me, since they were criminals themselves. They could smell a crook a mile away.
But they also were the prime muscle for a crime boss and professional gambler by the named Nathan Brinkley. Brinkly was into local politics. He liked sticking his fingers in the city’s bidding on construction jobs. He liked buying off commissioners. Many said he liked friends in the police department. Friends like Iggie Johannsson and Mickey Mulligan.
For years Frank and I had been looking for a way to tie Brinkley with come kind of corruption and or murder rap. The word on the street was Brinkley wouldn’t hesitate to rub someone out if they become too much of an obstacle. The word also was his two best men knew how to do it and never leave a clue behind. They were in the system.
Who would be more in the system than two homicide detectives like Iggie and Mickey?
“It was their first case as detectives. And they latched on the fact Yasmine had a crush for me and I was already well known. We had had our run-ins before. We didn’t like each. Still don’t like each other. So they tried every way they could think of to pin the rap on me. But there was nothing which would stick. Yasmine Hollander simply disappeared. She didn’t leave a trace anywhere. Iggie and Mickey hounded me on this case for over a year. They cost me a couple of promotions early on. And then I put a stop to it. I got Internal Affairs to step in and clear my name. When they seemed reluctant to do so I found a lawyer. A ruthless lawyer who had no love for the top brass. He rattled some cages. Made some threats. The case became a cold case file. Staid that way for fifteen years. But as you can see, it ain’t a cold case anymore.”
I glanced down at the body. She would be about twenty-nine now. Frowning, I found myself wondering. What had happened in that fifteen lost years? How was she abducted? Why did she return? And how did she die?
The last question I looked up and studied the lieutenant’s face. It was as if he was reading my mind.
“Found her in the river night before last. Drowned. No indication of any foul play. But I’m not buying it. Something happened. Something made her come back. I’ve got this ugly feeling her return forced others to act and act quickly. And leave no clues behind.”
“So we’re back to Iggie and Mickey,” Frank grunted, glancing at the body and nodding. “You think this has something to do with Nathan Brinkley?”
The lieutenant nodded.
“Like I said, Franklin Hollander was an honest man. Too honest, many would tell you. But he was charismatic. He had a way in persuading a crowd and make them believe in him. He promised to clean up crime and corruption in the Tenth. He was working hard to make good on his promises. Which meant he became a direct threat to Nathan Brinkley. But six months after Yasmine disappeared Franklin Hollander was killed by a drunk driver. A head on collision while he was coming home from a political rally. Both Hollander and the drunk died instantly. Two months after that Linda Hollander, Franklin’s wife, committed herself to an asylum. She had a nervous breakdown. A year later she died from a drug overdose.
It was Iggie and Mickey who investigated Hollander’s death. They were the ones who said a drunk swerved across his lane, jumped a median strip while driving a Chevy pickup, and slammed into Franklin Hollander’s Lincoln. It didn’t sound right. It just didn’t fit.”
“So you suspect Iggie and Mickey?”
“Yes,” the lieutenant–and friend–nodded quietly, his eyes darting behind us to see if anyone was within hearing distance. “But no proof. Those two clowns have been getting away with murder for years. Along with their boss. It’s time we closed the case on this. That’s why I’ve asked you two to come down here. I want you two to wrap it up. Pen something on the three of them. Bring them in cuffs and let’s send them to the chair. These three thugs have gotten away with murder for years. Ruined people’s lives. Destroyed reputations. Enough is enough.”
The two of us nodded at the same. It would be our pleasure to take out these three. All we had to do was prove they were guilty. Something we had been trying to do on other cases for years.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Two Deadly Little Affairs opening chapter
Book four of the Turner series is called Two Deadly Little Affairs.
I thought I'd post here now and see if I could get some feedback. Leave a comment and tell me what you think.
One
Blood.
Black–long since dried and buried deep into the carpet.
A big stain, spreading out like arthritic fingers–three of them–with one long crooked finger pointing seemingly to the open door of another room. Blood. An ugly, mean stain. Dark and dirty and filled with violence. Yet strangely absent a body. But in the bedroom . . .
Ah, the bedroom.
Two bodies. Lying in bed. One male and one female and neither wearing anything. But to be honest you had to really examine them to determine which was the male and which was the female. An examination frankly I was more than happy to leave to Joe Weiser and his boys down in forensics.
Someone walked in on the couple hot in the act of flying to the moon. They were too busy to notice. Whoever it was emptied at least two big clips of 7.62 mm ammo from a submachine gun into the bed. Shredded the bed and its occupants with a virulent intensity. Bullet holes were everywhere. The bed looked like it had went through a madman’s blender. The bed’s headboard looked like a gigantic rat had gnawed about half of it off with dull but strong choppers. The wall behind it looked like a cheese grater. Through half a dozen holes punched through the chapter plaster and clapboard wall I could see the bright points of sunlight shining through.
“Christ, why do we get the messy ones?”
I turned and glanced at my partner, Frank Morales. A big, ugly monster of bone and muscle and no neck. Stringy red hair that refused to comply to tonsorial regulations, always blowing in the breeze. About two seventy pounds of hard cement for beef with an IQ of a couple of Eienstein’s tucked in for good measure. Some said he looked like a well preserved Neanderthal. I smiled, thinking of some of the other sobriquets he’d been called. None of them complementary.
“Karma, buddy. We’re the saps the lieutenant want’s to use when something odd or weird happens.”
Frank, hands in slacks, stepped to my side and stared at the bloody bed. Around us Joe and his forensic’s team were quickly and efficiently working their trade. The click of their big Cannon 35 mm cameras taking in all the grisly sights permanently. Out front, surrounding the motel bungalow were various marked patrol cars of both the city and the county sheriff’s department.
Five miles outside the city was the Timberline Bungalows–an inexpensive motel of about ten small bungalows sat in among huge pine trees residing on the shores of the sprawling Lake Teuton. Lovers, adulterers, and a few other crazies came out here get out of the city for a few hours. The motel didn’t ask questions–didn’t care what happened inside his bungalows as long as there was no damage. If the credit card or color of the money looked good they’d take it and not care what you did.
“Well, this is weird, brother. The clerk said these two love birds checked in about eight last night. Just showed up in front of the office door. No bags. No car. How they got out here is a mystery to him. But they had money, and from what he could see bulging in the man’s wallet, lots of it. They checked in and didn’t come out. About four this morning the gunfire began. Lots of gunfire.”
“Anyone see anything?”
Frank almost grinned, the slight movement of the corner of his lips indicates something amused him, and nodded.
“Apparently two men dressed in camo and waving around Kalishnikovs is enough to keep most people hiding under their beds. One guest, two bungalows down, is ex-army just back from Iraq. Recognized the sound of the gunfire. He was the only one to take a peek outside. Said he saw two guys wearing old camo fatigues come walking out of here with their weapons and climb into an F-150 Ford pickup. Couldn’t see the color of the truck nor pick up a license plate number. Did say, though, the truck looked muddied. Like just coming off the farm or from one of those off-country tracks they like to wallow in.”
“Uh huh,” I nodded, half turning and checking out the bed again and frowning. “Want to know what else is funny?”
“I think I know what you’re gonna say,” Frank nodded, twitching his lips again. “Been wondering about that since the Yank told us to come out here and take over the investigation.”
“Why us?” I asked, nodding and looking at Frank. “This should be a county investigation. Lewis Peck or Ben Jones should be the lead investigator. They’re good. And Odel Jenkins isn’t the kind of sheriff who like’s to share an investigation with anyone. So what’s going on here?”
Odel Jenkins was the county sheriff. A raw, blunt, yet powerful politician who got himself elected twice as county commissioner and then decided to run for the sheriff’s office. The man was an ex-city cop. He had put himself through night school and picked up a law degree. He was fierce in his hates and fierce in his loyalties. His loyalties swung toward his men and his department–and his hate toward the city and anything to do with the city coming into his territory.
Neither Lewis Peck or Ben Jones, the top two detectives in the sheriff’s department, had even stuck their noses in for a quick peek of the crime scene. Again, something completely out of kilter. We know both of them. Both were good cops. Honest cops. They not being around made me feel uneasy.
“Come on, let’s take a walk.” I said, turning and walking out of the bungalow.
Outside birds were flashing over head, zooming and diving in a happy ballet of the first warm day of Spring. The wind, soft and still with a tang of sudden cold, whispered through the pines as Frank and I made our way past the bungalows and down toward the lake. As we did, I glanced at the narrow country black top which wound its way around the lake and past the small huts and noted the four or five cars and spectators who had come out to see what they could see.
The grim fascination people had with violent murder.
Smiling, shaking my head, I wasn’t surprised. People are people. We will never change.
As we approached the lake the bite in the breeze become pronounced. Lake Teuton was the main city reservoir and served as a major boating/camping site as well. It sprawled for about six miles in a long but modestly wide lake just north of the city. Fed by the Brown River and couple of smaller streams coming in from the northeast, the lake was as a magnet for fishermen and the wealthy. On the far shore were several huge mansions. Homes of the rich and powerful in this state. One of them being the governor’s house. His private residence. Several more powerful men I could name lived over on the far side. Some honest. Some almost honest. Some who didn’t have an honest bone in their body.
“You think they came from over there?” Frank asked, lifting an eyebrow in surprise. “Yeah, that make’s sense to me.”
A couple shows up. No bags. No mode of transportation. No indication that anyone dropped them off. They had to come from somewhere. Grinning, stuffing hands in my slacks, I turned and looked at the big hulk behind me.
“Okay, boy scout. Show me your woodsman’s tracking talents. Let’s find something to show this isn’t a wild goose chase.”
Actually Frank is a Boy Scout. He has four sons, three of which are boy scouts and he happens to be their pack leader. A devoted father, Frank and the boys mess around out in the woods as much as being a homicide detective will allow for a family. He’s also married to a knock out Italian ex-model–yeah, I’m not kidding–who can be as crazy eccentric as a woman can be.
Me? Not me, brother. Neither married nor interested in being a Boy Scout. Grew up on a farm and hated each day of it. Went to college on a football scholarship and never went back to the farm. Got married once, lived five years in hell with her which drove both of us to desperation. Got a divorce.
And then I come into money. An inheritance. Lots and lots of money–along with a grandfather I never knew I had. Money. Sudden wealth–you’d think my worries would be over. Right? Sorry, buddy. Doesn’t happen that way. Money is money. And if you suddenly find yourself buried in it where, the day before, you worked from pay check to pay check, people start asking questions. Especially if you’re a cop.
But those are my bags to carry. I deal with it. For all the money, for all the problems, just remember this. My name is Turner Hahn. I’m a cop. An honest one–and I’d like to keep it that way. I think I’m good at what I do. And odd, strange, out of the ordinary cases I like to work the most.
Like this one. From the moment Lieutenant Demitri Yankovich, our shift commander, told us to go out here to take over the investigation I knew it was going to be one of the odd ones. Frankly, I was glad it came along. Of late I was feeling bored and run down. My mind needed a challenge. My gut feeling was telling me there was far, far more to this case than what was directly in front of us. It was going to be more than just a murder.
“Hey, Turn . . . look at this,” Frank grunted, kneeling down in the grass just up from the sandy beach.
He was pointing to a large stain in the grass. Blood. Blood and the indications of two people hurrying through the tall grass coming from the lake and heading toward the hotel. Frank stood up and we both turned toward the lake. Directly in front of us was a large, powerfully built speedboat with two 150 horse Mercury Marine engines setting on its stern bulkhead. It had come in fast and slid high up on the sandy beach before coming to a halt. The sand around the boat was churned up where people had jumped off hurriedly. On the side of the hull was a long smear of blood. A startling red streak sliding across the white fiberglass hull.
“Somebody caught one earlier, Turn. Bad wound too from the amount of blood they left behind.”
I nodded in agreement.
Glancing up, looking out over the dark waters of the lake, I smiled, narrowed my eyes, and felt quietly pleased. Yes, something happened over on the far side of the lake. In one of those big houses. A rich man’s house. That would mean power. Big named lawyers to defend the accused. Politicians high and low possibly involved. Cover ups. Lies. Deceptions.
Yep. I do love my job.
I thought I'd post here now and see if I could get some feedback. Leave a comment and tell me what you think.
One
Blood.
Black–long since dried and buried deep into the carpet.
A big stain, spreading out like arthritic fingers–three of them–with one long crooked finger pointing seemingly to the open door of another room. Blood. An ugly, mean stain. Dark and dirty and filled with violence. Yet strangely absent a body. But in the bedroom . . .
Ah, the bedroom.
Two bodies. Lying in bed. One male and one female and neither wearing anything. But to be honest you had to really examine them to determine which was the male and which was the female. An examination frankly I was more than happy to leave to Joe Weiser and his boys down in forensics.
Someone walked in on the couple hot in the act of flying to the moon. They were too busy to notice. Whoever it was emptied at least two big clips of 7.62 mm ammo from a submachine gun into the bed. Shredded the bed and its occupants with a virulent intensity. Bullet holes were everywhere. The bed looked like it had went through a madman’s blender. The bed’s headboard looked like a gigantic rat had gnawed about half of it off with dull but strong choppers. The wall behind it looked like a cheese grater. Through half a dozen holes punched through the chapter plaster and clapboard wall I could see the bright points of sunlight shining through.
“Christ, why do we get the messy ones?”
I turned and glanced at my partner, Frank Morales. A big, ugly monster of bone and muscle and no neck. Stringy red hair that refused to comply to tonsorial regulations, always blowing in the breeze. About two seventy pounds of hard cement for beef with an IQ of a couple of Eienstein’s tucked in for good measure. Some said he looked like a well preserved Neanderthal. I smiled, thinking of some of the other sobriquets he’d been called. None of them complementary.
“Karma, buddy. We’re the saps the lieutenant want’s to use when something odd or weird happens.”
Frank, hands in slacks, stepped to my side and stared at the bloody bed. Around us Joe and his forensic’s team were quickly and efficiently working their trade. The click of their big Cannon 35 mm cameras taking in all the grisly sights permanently. Out front, surrounding the motel bungalow were various marked patrol cars of both the city and the county sheriff’s department.
Five miles outside the city was the Timberline Bungalows–an inexpensive motel of about ten small bungalows sat in among huge pine trees residing on the shores of the sprawling Lake Teuton. Lovers, adulterers, and a few other crazies came out here get out of the city for a few hours. The motel didn’t ask questions–didn’t care what happened inside his bungalows as long as there was no damage. If the credit card or color of the money looked good they’d take it and not care what you did.
“Well, this is weird, brother. The clerk said these two love birds checked in about eight last night. Just showed up in front of the office door. No bags. No car. How they got out here is a mystery to him. But they had money, and from what he could see bulging in the man’s wallet, lots of it. They checked in and didn’t come out. About four this morning the gunfire began. Lots of gunfire.”
“Anyone see anything?”
Frank almost grinned, the slight movement of the corner of his lips indicates something amused him, and nodded.
“Apparently two men dressed in camo and waving around Kalishnikovs is enough to keep most people hiding under their beds. One guest, two bungalows down, is ex-army just back from Iraq. Recognized the sound of the gunfire. He was the only one to take a peek outside. Said he saw two guys wearing old camo fatigues come walking out of here with their weapons and climb into an F-150 Ford pickup. Couldn’t see the color of the truck nor pick up a license plate number. Did say, though, the truck looked muddied. Like just coming off the farm or from one of those off-country tracks they like to wallow in.”
“Uh huh,” I nodded, half turning and checking out the bed again and frowning. “Want to know what else is funny?”
“I think I know what you’re gonna say,” Frank nodded, twitching his lips again. “Been wondering about that since the Yank told us to come out here and take over the investigation.”
“Why us?” I asked, nodding and looking at Frank. “This should be a county investigation. Lewis Peck or Ben Jones should be the lead investigator. They’re good. And Odel Jenkins isn’t the kind of sheriff who like’s to share an investigation with anyone. So what’s going on here?”
Odel Jenkins was the county sheriff. A raw, blunt, yet powerful politician who got himself elected twice as county commissioner and then decided to run for the sheriff’s office. The man was an ex-city cop. He had put himself through night school and picked up a law degree. He was fierce in his hates and fierce in his loyalties. His loyalties swung toward his men and his department–and his hate toward the city and anything to do with the city coming into his territory.
Neither Lewis Peck or Ben Jones, the top two detectives in the sheriff’s department, had even stuck their noses in for a quick peek of the crime scene. Again, something completely out of kilter. We know both of them. Both were good cops. Honest cops. They not being around made me feel uneasy.
“Come on, let’s take a walk.” I said, turning and walking out of the bungalow.
Outside birds were flashing over head, zooming and diving in a happy ballet of the first warm day of Spring. The wind, soft and still with a tang of sudden cold, whispered through the pines as Frank and I made our way past the bungalows and down toward the lake. As we did, I glanced at the narrow country black top which wound its way around the lake and past the small huts and noted the four or five cars and spectators who had come out to see what they could see.
The grim fascination people had with violent murder.
Smiling, shaking my head, I wasn’t surprised. People are people. We will never change.
As we approached the lake the bite in the breeze become pronounced. Lake Teuton was the main city reservoir and served as a major boating/camping site as well. It sprawled for about six miles in a long but modestly wide lake just north of the city. Fed by the Brown River and couple of smaller streams coming in from the northeast, the lake was as a magnet for fishermen and the wealthy. On the far shore were several huge mansions. Homes of the rich and powerful in this state. One of them being the governor’s house. His private residence. Several more powerful men I could name lived over on the far side. Some honest. Some almost honest. Some who didn’t have an honest bone in their body.
“You think they came from over there?” Frank asked, lifting an eyebrow in surprise. “Yeah, that make’s sense to me.”
A couple shows up. No bags. No mode of transportation. No indication that anyone dropped them off. They had to come from somewhere. Grinning, stuffing hands in my slacks, I turned and looked at the big hulk behind me.
“Okay, boy scout. Show me your woodsman’s tracking talents. Let’s find something to show this isn’t a wild goose chase.”
Actually Frank is a Boy Scout. He has four sons, three of which are boy scouts and he happens to be their pack leader. A devoted father, Frank and the boys mess around out in the woods as much as being a homicide detective will allow for a family. He’s also married to a knock out Italian ex-model–yeah, I’m not kidding–who can be as crazy eccentric as a woman can be.
Me? Not me, brother. Neither married nor interested in being a Boy Scout. Grew up on a farm and hated each day of it. Went to college on a football scholarship and never went back to the farm. Got married once, lived five years in hell with her which drove both of us to desperation. Got a divorce.
And then I come into money. An inheritance. Lots and lots of money–along with a grandfather I never knew I had. Money. Sudden wealth–you’d think my worries would be over. Right? Sorry, buddy. Doesn’t happen that way. Money is money. And if you suddenly find yourself buried in it where, the day before, you worked from pay check to pay check, people start asking questions. Especially if you’re a cop.
But those are my bags to carry. I deal with it. For all the money, for all the problems, just remember this. My name is Turner Hahn. I’m a cop. An honest one–and I’d like to keep it that way. I think I’m good at what I do. And odd, strange, out of the ordinary cases I like to work the most.
Like this one. From the moment Lieutenant Demitri Yankovich, our shift commander, told us to go out here to take over the investigation I knew it was going to be one of the odd ones. Frankly, I was glad it came along. Of late I was feeling bored and run down. My mind needed a challenge. My gut feeling was telling me there was far, far more to this case than what was directly in front of us. It was going to be more than just a murder.
“Hey, Turn . . . look at this,” Frank grunted, kneeling down in the grass just up from the sandy beach.
He was pointing to a large stain in the grass. Blood. Blood and the indications of two people hurrying through the tall grass coming from the lake and heading toward the hotel. Frank stood up and we both turned toward the lake. Directly in front of us was a large, powerfully built speedboat with two 150 horse Mercury Marine engines setting on its stern bulkhead. It had come in fast and slid high up on the sandy beach before coming to a halt. The sand around the boat was churned up where people had jumped off hurriedly. On the side of the hull was a long smear of blood. A startling red streak sliding across the white fiberglass hull.
“Somebody caught one earlier, Turn. Bad wound too from the amount of blood they left behind.”
I nodded in agreement.
Glancing up, looking out over the dark waters of the lake, I smiled, narrowed my eyes, and felt quietly pleased. Yes, something happened over on the far side of the lake. In one of those big houses. A rich man’s house. That would mean power. Big named lawyers to defend the accused. Politicians high and low possibly involved. Cover ups. Lies. Deceptions.
Yep. I do love my job.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Murderous Passions: Chapter One
ONE
Murder is such an up-close and personal venue.
Especially if the weapon of choice is a garrote made with piano wire. The C-string. With wood handles carved with a craftsman’s precision to fit the end of the wires for a firm, deadly grip.
Yes. A garrote is a very intimate form of death. It requires strength. Perseverance. Patience. It’s not like shooting someone with a 9mm. Stand ten feet way. Aim at the chest. Pull the trigger and then walk away. The garrote is not mundane and pedestrian. To kill with a garrote means you have to stand close to your victim. As close as two bodies intertwined in a lover’s embrace. You have to stand close enough to feel the victim’s body heat. Smell the victim’s fear. Taste the victim’s blood.
It’s messy.
The victim doesn’t die by strangulation so much as by drowning. If the proper technique is used the carotid artery is severed. Blood spurts everywhere. The victim downs in his own blood. A macabre sense of retribution. Dying by drowning in your own blood.
Yes. Garroting is very personal. Someone choosing this method meant the killer wanted to enjoy the act of snuffing someone’s life out. Like a wine connoisseur wanting to savor ever passing second of a rare wine.
The victim was Dr. Walter Holdridge. The Walter Holdridge. Nobel prize winner in Physics and for the last dozen years the academic catch for our own Anderson University. The victim lay sprawled across a computer terminal in the basement of the campus’ Computer Sciences building. Very dead. Very messy. And promising to be a case which would bring a lots of publicity to the university. Publicity of the unwanted kind.
Anderson University is a synonym for ‘money.’ It’s in the dictionary. Look it up in Webster’s and the number three definition will say, “Anderson University–and lot’s of it.” The campus is six blocks of downtown prime real estate. Sculptured lawns, big platters of well manicured flower beds, and red brick buildings of various architectural styles which somehow blend together describes the school. It has 3,000 students and each student is in the top three percent in the nation. Smart kids. Rich kids. Money and lots of smarts.
For a cop that’s a bad combination.
The tiny room the victim claimed as his own was all white. White walls. White ceiling. White tiles for floors. The only thing not white in the room was the black vinyl office chair, two small black chairs sitting against one wall, the CRT screen, and the keyboard. There was also the professor’s scruffy looking leather briefcase lying on one of the chairs. A big thing, looking as old as the professor himself, heavy and locked tightly shut. Everything else was pure white. Add in the fluorescent lights in the ceiling and one had the impression of the movie character HAL in the movie, 2001.
The professor’s dark blood contrasted sharply with the white. Reminding me, gruesomely, of a surreal painting. Ah! Murder as an art form! The ultimate sacrifice to create the ultimate piece of art. A thin crease in my lips told me I was grinning. Sometimes I have very bizarre thoughts. And my sense of humor needs working on as well.
The price you pay, I suspected, for working in Homicide too long.
Behind me I heard my partner, Frank Morales, step into the room and grunt in curiosity. Turning, I nodded and he looked at me and shrugged.
“Must have been a bleeder.” Frank grunted, shoving hands into his pockets.
“Yeah, must have,” I nodded my eyes returning to the body. “Who called in the report?”
“Campus security. The prof’s student-assistant came down here and found him. Dispatch sent Gonzales and Charles over in a black-and-white to take the initial squawk.”
Officers Alonzo Gonzales and Tubby Charles were two beat officers who’s beat would include the campus. Good men. Good beat cops who preferred remaining beat cops.
“Where are they now?”
“Upstairs interviewing anyone who was in the building at the time the body was discovered.”
I nodded, frowned, and looked at the blood again.
“Lot’s of blood.”
“Yeah, a lot of blood,” Frank repeated softly, nodding. “Garroting someone is messy. But this. This is really messy.”
“The prof put up a heck of a fight. Maybe some of this belongs to the killer. When are the lab boys due?”
“Any time now.”
I nodded.
“Okay, find the security guys who found the body, and the ones who were on duty during the approximate time of the murder if there was a shift change. Interview everyone.”
Frank turned on a heel and left. I frowned and glanced at my watch. Technically the lab boys are supposed to come in and do their thing before the investigating detectives begin poking around. Technically. They weren’t here yet, so what was I supposed to do? Frowning, I turned and stepped out into the hall directly in front of the room.
The hall was an exact copy of the room. All white. White ceiling, white walls, white tile floors; fluorescent lighting. I read somewhere about polar explorers worried about walking into a situation where everything turned white, leaving no way to ascertain a horizon or any sense of direction. Snow blindness they called it. I could understand the worry. I actually felt a slight sense of vertigo. Welding goggles came to mind. Something to cut down the glare of everything white.
The hall was one side of the basement. It was wide, empty, and ran past nine other rooms exactly like that of the crime scene. To my right and to my left the hall ran maybe one hundred feet in each direction. Staring in one directly and then the other I found it most curious. All that blood in the room behind me. Lots of blood which covered both the victim and had to cover the killer as well, yet the pristine white halls were absolutely spotless. Not even a shoe scuff mark could be seen decorating the white tile. Either our killer was damned lucky in getting nothing on him. Or damn fastidious. Pulling on my ear thoughtfully I turned and reentered the room.
I quickly searched the man’s pockets. I know I should have waited for the crime team to arrive first. Although, I didn’t and I hurriedly, but efficiently, searched the corpse. Keys, wallet, change in his pockets, a second set of keys on a single key ring, and two pens and a mechanical pencil comprised the man’s possessions. His wallet had three credit cards and fifty bucks in cash in it. There was a driver’s license, a university medical card, a couple of phone numbers hurriedly written on two pieces of paper and folded in half before being inserted into the wallet. There were two library cards; one for the campus library and one for the city’s. What was not in the billfold was any kind of a photo. No wife, no kids, not precocious grandchildren. Nothing. As I carefully put everything back into the billfold and inserted it back into the man’s rear trousers pocket I found myself wondering what that meant. No photos.
Although, I did find one curious item. A torn paper, ripped from a memo pad, with the words “Gamma-ray outbursts!!!!!” scribbled across it. Written so fast it was barely discernable. With five exclamation points. Folded in half, it was in the man’s upper left hand shirt pocket. It appeared like something one might find in a physicist’s pocket. However, there was something in the way it was so hurriedly scribbled which made me curious, as I folded it and slipped it back into the pocket.
There were bruises around the man’s mouth and jaw. The man’s well manicured fingernails looked messy. Meaning, with luck, there might be some skin material of his killer there. Only a good going over in the morgue would tell me that. Coming to my feet I turned and decided to take a good look at the briefcase.
It was a big clunker of a leather briefcase. Engraved into the metal latch were the letters WH. The leather handle was sweat-stained from years of toting things around in it.
Where it opened the leather was worn and grooved. Old, worn, but still serviceable. Like an old friend who should retire but can’t because he would be missed too much. Nevertheless, the clasp showed no markings of someone trying to open it. Gently lifting it with a finger it weighed enough to make-do for a temporary anchor for the Queen Mary.
Frowning, I stepped back to the cubicle’s single entrance and looked the scene over again. We had a murder of a physics professor, a professor in a small private, and I should say very expensive, college who prided itself on its academic reputation of elusiveness in its selection of students. First glance suggested it was not a murder by impulse. No thief suddenly caught in the act of burglary turning and killing his discoverer here. The garrote, a weapon of intimacy, suggested premeditation. To use a garrote one had to be willing to take a chance; a chance of his would-be victim being more ferocious in his defending himself, and taking the chance of being caught in the act itself. This grisly picture before me looked more like an execution. Someone really disliked the idea of the good professor taking one more unnecessary breath on this planet.
I stepped out of the room, and looking down the white hall, saw the lab boys lugging in their gear herding down the hall, and behind them, Frank strolling down the hall with a scowl on his face. Nodding and waving the tech boys into the room I waited for Frank to pull up beside and tell me what, or who, had just rained on his parade.
“Christ, this is going to be a bitch, Turn. A royal bitch.”
“How so?”
“Finished talking to the security guards. Get this; in order to get down here you have to have an identification card. It’s a magnetized card which directly connects into the campus’ mainframe. It recognizes your number and then unlocks the door to let you in. Except, you don’t automatically get in. After the computer scans the card you then have to have your thumb print scanned.”
“That’s a lot of security for a computer research area like this. What’s down here so important?”
Frank’s scowl darkened as he nodded in agreement.
“Apparently the research computer they’ve got down here is very fast, very experimental, and very expensive. The Air Force is interested in it and they have a couple of research grants being worked on here. So they added a third layer of security to monitor anyone coming or going. At each end of the hall there is a guard assigned to monitor those who come and go. Anyone who wants in has to scan his card, scan his thumb print, and then sign his name in a log book, indicating the time he entered and the time he left.”
“So we should know who was in the basement at the time of the professor’s death, right? We find out approximate time of death, then we check the log book and computer logs, and we have our killer.”
A wicked little grin spread across the thin lips of my pasta-loving partner. Frank had this twisted sense of humor I found amusing. He loved to irritate others. He enjoyed portraying himself as a thick-headed, stupid cop who wore badly fitting cheap suits. Furthermore, then he would say something or do something which was astonishingly brilliant. He hated to investigate cases which contained any form of a puzzle in it; an incongruity, if you ask me because of his high I.Q., yet he loved to torment me by adding layers upon layers of additional complexity to an already complex case. The little twist of his lips on his cement-block head told me another little wrinkle was coming.
“Oh, but you’re gonna love this, Turn. Ready? From 2: p.m. to 5:40 p.m. the only person is the victim. His student assistant comes in at 5:40 to see if he needs anything before she goes back to the dorm. That’s when she found him.”
“Well, before the professor arrives? Anyone check in but not check out?”
“Nope. The two security officers covering this area swear the students who came in before two were gone by the time the stiff arrives. When the professor comes swinging down the steps with his briefcase, something he did like clock work every day, he was alone. No one was down here, except for security, during that time.”
So there it was. A genuine, honest-to-God puzzle. Someone knows the professor’s habits; knows he comes down here to do work, precisely at two. Either the killer is down here waiting for the professor, and somehow knows he is going to be in that given cubicle and no other, or he somehow has a way to bypass all the layers of security and enters unseen. Or there was, possibly, a third alternative.
“Yeah, don’t say it,” Frank grunted, frowning and shaking his head no. “It could be one of the security officers. I thought of that too. No joy there, chum. My hunch is both are squeaky-clean boy scouts and ex-marines. If it was one of them it’d have to be one hell of a reason. Except, I doubt that’s gonna pan out. So, my bucko, you have one hell of a case in front of you! Moreover, I am sooooo glad you have it and I don’t!”
I smiled, sighed, and shrugged. Glancing at my watch I noticed it almost seven o:clock. I actually had hopes of going down to where I kept my cars stored and working on the Road Runner for an hour or two tonight. That wasn’t going to happen. We still had the initial investigation to do. Hours of assembling the sometimes dissimulate pieces of the puzzle, and doing it by the numbers in a procedure every working cop knows inside and out. We’d be lucky if we rolled into our beds by midnight.
“No surveillance cameras?”
“Nope. To be installed next week.”
I nodded, wondering if this too was planned or if it was just a dumb stroke of luck for the killer.
“Who’s the student assistant?”
Frank looked down at the small spiral notebook he used to jot down everything, flipped a couple of pages, and found the name.
“A graduate student by the name of Alicia Addams,” he said, looking up and grinning even more insidiously. “ She’s up stairs in the professor’s office waiting to be interviewed. I thought you might want that one. You know . . .playing the brilliant young Shylock of a detective and interviewing the pretty young damsel in distress.”
I grinned and patted the little man on the shoulder as I stepped around him.
“That’s Sherlock, bub. Not Shylock. So, why don’t you go talk to the security guys again. See if they can give you more about our victim and about anyone who might want to see a physics professor dead.”
The computer lab in the basement was only half of the basement. Also down there were a series of chemistry, biology, and physics laboratories. The building we were in was called Aimes Hall. It housed the departments of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Four floors up from the basement was the floor where most of the professors had their offices. Stepping off the elevator I found Dr. Holdridge’s office quickly enough. I followed the sounds of someone sobbing, and between her sobs, blowing her nose into a wad of tissues.
“Alicia Addams?”
“Yes . . .yes, I’m Alicia.”
Surprise. I had this impression female grad students in physics had to look like some Russian female mud wrestler. Foolish me. Alicia Addams was in her twenties, with long brown hair, green eyes, and long, finely chiseled gams. Her face was not pretty. Nevertheless, it wasn’t ugly. However, save for her legs, she was wearing a one-piece blue dress, her legs were crossed as she sat in a chair in front of the dead stiff’s desk. They were long and nice to look at. Very nice.
Her eyes were red and her face was puffy from a long jag of crying. The wad of Kleenex in her hands looked like shredded mush. On the corner of the desk, and just out of reach, was a freshly opened box. Stepping into the closet-room sized office I reached for the box and handed it to her.
“Detective Sergeant Turner Hahn, Southside Division. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Yes, I know. The two officers in uniform told me you would want to talk to me.”
I nodded and glanced at the office. It looked like what you might expect a Physics professor’s office should look like. Books everywhere. The wall immediately behind the desk was nothing but books from ceiling to carpeted floor and a small computer desk with a very large CRT screen. The interior wall was bare except for a set of photos of a living Dr. Holdridge standing either beside, or shaking hands with, a number of distinguished looking men. The exterior wall had a long and narrow slit of a window which looked down on the campus commons below. The last wall was more photos.
I was impressed with the man’s desk. It had the look of precision to it. Mostly bare, with the few papers on it stacked in a neat stack, yet what caught my eye were the three pens placed with unerring accuracy directly onto the middle of the desk’s surface. They were precisely aligned. Looking at them the word ‘perfectionist’ crossed my mind.
“You were the professor’s student assistant?”
“Yes. For two years now. I’m working on my Master’s degree in physics and chemistry.”
“When did you see the professor last? That is, before you found him in the lab below.”
“Oh, let me see . . .” she sighed, sniffling, and starring up at the ceiling for a moment or two to think. “This morning around ten, I think. He was here in the office working and I just popped in to ask if he needed anything.”
“Okay, how did he look and sound?”
“He was upset. Really angry. He told me he didn’t want to be bothered until later this afternoon when he went down to work on the computer. Really, I’d have to say, it was just another normal day.”
“Normal? An upset professor is normal?”
A whiff of a smile momentarily played on the girl’s lips before disappearing. Tears welled up and she hurriedly pulled out of the Kleenex box a dozen or more and buried her face in them for a short jag of crying. It ended with her blowing her nose loudly before she looked up at me.
“That was Dr. Holdridge, detective. He was always mad at someone. He was a great teacher and a brilliant mind. I have never heard anyone explain Quantum Mechanics so clearly like he could. Except, he was . . . he was . . . hard to get along with. He was tough. Tough and abrasive. He made a lot of demands on his students and on his peers. He often said he could not tolerate fools and he thought humanity in general were fools of the first order.”
Ah. A perfectionist and egotist.
“So who had angered him this time?”
“Oh, that’s simple. The head of the department, Dr. Murphy. Lots of his peers angered the professor. Although, Dr. Murphy was special. He would usually become livid if he got into a row with her.”
“Dr. Holdridge was not the department head?”
“Oh, no. No way. He wanted to be. He campaigned for it. Plus, he made no effort to conceal his ire at being superceded by a woman as chair. Furthermore, there was no way Dr. Holdridge would ever become the Physics department head. He was just too . . . too severe. He could make the most brilliant of his students feel like a stuttering idiot when he dressed them down. He could have the entire faculty on the verge of mutiny with some of his biting commentary. To be a department head, especially the department head in physics, you have to be something of a skilled diplomat and politician. You have to smooze with the alumni and with big-time business leaders. To be a top-drawer department you need lots of people and lots of corporations donating huge sums of money. You have to be colleague with your peers. I am afraid Dr. Holdridge was not that kind of personality.”
The personality of the late Doctor Walter Holdridge sounded like that of a Rottweiler with rabies. That kind of personality guaranteed the creation of a lot of enemies. The question was, was the killer on the campus? Or were there more out there we hadn’t heard about?
“So who else on the faculty could yank the professor’s chain?”
Again, that whiff of a smile played across the plain, yet attractive, face of the student. For a brief moment a small flicker of humor lit her green eyes, making her ever more attractive. I wondered if this smiling girl, this feminine geek, might also have a motive for murder.
“Oh, goodness. Everyone, at one time or the other, yanked the professor’s chain, detective. Just get a campus directory and go down the list. That would include the janitors for this building and the gardeners, the electricians, the plumbers. Everyone.”
I sighed and sat down in one of the small chairs beside the desk and directly opposite the child. Funny, here she was in her twenties, and not bad looking, and I was a single male barely in my forties. Nevertheless, somehow I was thinking her as if she was a child. A kid. Someone barely out of puberty. I was looking at her more like a father might look at his daughter.
Frankly, I didn’t like the thought. Although women and I was like mixing nitroglycerin and gasoline together, and any relationship with a woman, including my brief marriage, usually fell apart with a sudden finality to it, nevertheless I still liked to gaze upon a good looking woman. I thought there might be a chance I might find a girlfriend. One who actually found me both attractive and interesting. One I could actually tolerate and appreciate.
Hell, it was a thought. A hope. Everyone has to have a measure of hope in their souls.
“So who else on the faculty could repeatedly anger the professor?”
“Hmmm, let me see,” she began, furrowing her eyebrows and thinking for a moment before answering. “There’s Dr. Armand Pellieur. He’s head of the Chemistry department. His office is next door. Dr. Pellieur is very good at agitating the professor.”
“And then there’s Dr. Hodgeskins. He’s one of the professors in the Archeology department. There’s no love lost between there. Between those three, Dr. Murphy, Dr. Pellieur, and Dr. Hodgeskins, that would be the list.”
I nodded.
“So tell me about this afternoon. Was it usual for the professor to be in the basement at that time of the day?”
“Yes. Every day. You could use the professor to set your watch. Every day exactly at the same time.”
“So, you usually checked in to see how he was doing?”
“Every day,” she smiled weakly, more tears flowing down her ruby cheeks, her lower lip beginning to tremble. “Clockwork.”
“It was you who found the body?”
For an answer she broke into a fit of hysterical crying. More Kleenex left the box in one rapid sweep of the hand. I waited in silence for the moment to pass. You learn to be patient as a cop. Especially when you’re investigating a murder.
“Yes, I came in precisely at 4:15. That’s when the professor wanted me to interrupt him. That’s when I . . .found him like that.”
“What did you do?”
“I . . .I screamed. Screamed like a silly little girl. It was then I went running to find Ralph.”
“Who’s Ralph?”
“He’s the campus security officer on duty at the south entrance. I say hello to him every day at that time. I found him and we both ran back to see if the professor might still be alive. However, he wasn’t. Ralph told me to follow him. We called the police from the phone down in the basement.”
So. There it was. A dead professor with a piano wire around his neck and an entire university as primary suspects. Swell. I smiled with an appreciation, again, of Frank’s uncanny ability at sniffing out tough cases with the least amount of knowledge and handing it to me with a smirk on his face.
Well, that’s okay. That’s why I’m paid by the city. I’m a cop. Besides, truthfully, I like what I do.
“Thank you, Miss Addams.” I said, coming to my feet and stepping toward the entrance. “We might need to contact you again with more questions later on. Please stay in town until the investigation is done. Here is my card. If you think of anything else don’t hesitate in giving me a call. Okay?”
She reached out and took the card I held in my hand. Her face came up and there was this certain look, a look I was all too familiar with, clearly painted on her face. Shit. Here it comes again.
“Detective, somehow you look familiar. You look like an old movie star. Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean old. Just, your face, seems so familiar to me. Although, I can’t seem to remember the actor’s name.”
Clark Gable. Yeah, I know. You must think I am an arrogant sonofabitch with an ego problem of my own if I think I look like Clark Gable. However, that’s a mistake. It’s not an ego problem. It’s genetics. One look at my mug and you can’t help but have the impression a bigger, taller, Clark Gable is standing in front of you. Besides, I don’t like it. It’s a curse.
I’m not Clark Gable. I don’t think I look like the dead actor. Although, others do. Then women, for some reason, latch onto it right from the get-go. Maybe you think that’s good. Women being attracted to me. Nevertheless remember; my wife tried to poison me. Twice. At the time we were only married for three months. That should tell you something about my success with women.
I smiled and half turned as I stepped out into the carpeted
hall.
“Where might I find this Dr. Murphy?”
“I think she’s downstairs in one of the labs.”
“Thanks,” I said, nodding, and turning away.
No. I’m not Clark Gable. I’m Turner Hahn. Cop. Nothing more and nothing less. Deal with it.
Murder is such an up-close and personal venue.
Especially if the weapon of choice is a garrote made with piano wire. The C-string. With wood handles carved with a craftsman’s precision to fit the end of the wires for a firm, deadly grip.
Yes. A garrote is a very intimate form of death. It requires strength. Perseverance. Patience. It’s not like shooting someone with a 9mm. Stand ten feet way. Aim at the chest. Pull the trigger and then walk away. The garrote is not mundane and pedestrian. To kill with a garrote means you have to stand close to your victim. As close as two bodies intertwined in a lover’s embrace. You have to stand close enough to feel the victim’s body heat. Smell the victim’s fear. Taste the victim’s blood.
It’s messy.
The victim doesn’t die by strangulation so much as by drowning. If the proper technique is used the carotid artery is severed. Blood spurts everywhere. The victim downs in his own blood. A macabre sense of retribution. Dying by drowning in your own blood.
Yes. Garroting is very personal. Someone choosing this method meant the killer wanted to enjoy the act of snuffing someone’s life out. Like a wine connoisseur wanting to savor ever passing second of a rare wine.
The victim was Dr. Walter Holdridge. The Walter Holdridge. Nobel prize winner in Physics and for the last dozen years the academic catch for our own Anderson University. The victim lay sprawled across a computer terminal in the basement of the campus’ Computer Sciences building. Very dead. Very messy. And promising to be a case which would bring a lots of publicity to the university. Publicity of the unwanted kind.
Anderson University is a synonym for ‘money.’ It’s in the dictionary. Look it up in Webster’s and the number three definition will say, “Anderson University–and lot’s of it.” The campus is six blocks of downtown prime real estate. Sculptured lawns, big platters of well manicured flower beds, and red brick buildings of various architectural styles which somehow blend together describes the school. It has 3,000 students and each student is in the top three percent in the nation. Smart kids. Rich kids. Money and lots of smarts.
For a cop that’s a bad combination.
The tiny room the victim claimed as his own was all white. White walls. White ceiling. White tiles for floors. The only thing not white in the room was the black vinyl office chair, two small black chairs sitting against one wall, the CRT screen, and the keyboard. There was also the professor’s scruffy looking leather briefcase lying on one of the chairs. A big thing, looking as old as the professor himself, heavy and locked tightly shut. Everything else was pure white. Add in the fluorescent lights in the ceiling and one had the impression of the movie character HAL in the movie, 2001.
The professor’s dark blood contrasted sharply with the white. Reminding me, gruesomely, of a surreal painting. Ah! Murder as an art form! The ultimate sacrifice to create the ultimate piece of art. A thin crease in my lips told me I was grinning. Sometimes I have very bizarre thoughts. And my sense of humor needs working on as well.
The price you pay, I suspected, for working in Homicide too long.
Behind me I heard my partner, Frank Morales, step into the room and grunt in curiosity. Turning, I nodded and he looked at me and shrugged.
“Must have been a bleeder.” Frank grunted, shoving hands into his pockets.
“Yeah, must have,” I nodded my eyes returning to the body. “Who called in the report?”
“Campus security. The prof’s student-assistant came down here and found him. Dispatch sent Gonzales and Charles over in a black-and-white to take the initial squawk.”
Officers Alonzo Gonzales and Tubby Charles were two beat officers who’s beat would include the campus. Good men. Good beat cops who preferred remaining beat cops.
“Where are they now?”
“Upstairs interviewing anyone who was in the building at the time the body was discovered.”
I nodded, frowned, and looked at the blood again.
“Lot’s of blood.”
“Yeah, a lot of blood,” Frank repeated softly, nodding. “Garroting someone is messy. But this. This is really messy.”
“The prof put up a heck of a fight. Maybe some of this belongs to the killer. When are the lab boys due?”
“Any time now.”
I nodded.
“Okay, find the security guys who found the body, and the ones who were on duty during the approximate time of the murder if there was a shift change. Interview everyone.”
Frank turned on a heel and left. I frowned and glanced at my watch. Technically the lab boys are supposed to come in and do their thing before the investigating detectives begin poking around. Technically. They weren’t here yet, so what was I supposed to do? Frowning, I turned and stepped out into the hall directly in front of the room.
The hall was an exact copy of the room. All white. White ceiling, white walls, white tile floors; fluorescent lighting. I read somewhere about polar explorers worried about walking into a situation where everything turned white, leaving no way to ascertain a horizon or any sense of direction. Snow blindness they called it. I could understand the worry. I actually felt a slight sense of vertigo. Welding goggles came to mind. Something to cut down the glare of everything white.
The hall was one side of the basement. It was wide, empty, and ran past nine other rooms exactly like that of the crime scene. To my right and to my left the hall ran maybe one hundred feet in each direction. Staring in one directly and then the other I found it most curious. All that blood in the room behind me. Lots of blood which covered both the victim and had to cover the killer as well, yet the pristine white halls were absolutely spotless. Not even a shoe scuff mark could be seen decorating the white tile. Either our killer was damned lucky in getting nothing on him. Or damn fastidious. Pulling on my ear thoughtfully I turned and reentered the room.
I quickly searched the man’s pockets. I know I should have waited for the crime team to arrive first. Although, I didn’t and I hurriedly, but efficiently, searched the corpse. Keys, wallet, change in his pockets, a second set of keys on a single key ring, and two pens and a mechanical pencil comprised the man’s possessions. His wallet had three credit cards and fifty bucks in cash in it. There was a driver’s license, a university medical card, a couple of phone numbers hurriedly written on two pieces of paper and folded in half before being inserted into the wallet. There were two library cards; one for the campus library and one for the city’s. What was not in the billfold was any kind of a photo. No wife, no kids, not precocious grandchildren. Nothing. As I carefully put everything back into the billfold and inserted it back into the man’s rear trousers pocket I found myself wondering what that meant. No photos.
Although, I did find one curious item. A torn paper, ripped from a memo pad, with the words “Gamma-ray outbursts!!!!!” scribbled across it. Written so fast it was barely discernable. With five exclamation points. Folded in half, it was in the man’s upper left hand shirt pocket. It appeared like something one might find in a physicist’s pocket. However, there was something in the way it was so hurriedly scribbled which made me curious, as I folded it and slipped it back into the pocket.
There were bruises around the man’s mouth and jaw. The man’s well manicured fingernails looked messy. Meaning, with luck, there might be some skin material of his killer there. Only a good going over in the morgue would tell me that. Coming to my feet I turned and decided to take a good look at the briefcase.
It was a big clunker of a leather briefcase. Engraved into the metal latch were the letters WH. The leather handle was sweat-stained from years of toting things around in it.
Where it opened the leather was worn and grooved. Old, worn, but still serviceable. Like an old friend who should retire but can’t because he would be missed too much. Nevertheless, the clasp showed no markings of someone trying to open it. Gently lifting it with a finger it weighed enough to make-do for a temporary anchor for the Queen Mary.
Frowning, I stepped back to the cubicle’s single entrance and looked the scene over again. We had a murder of a physics professor, a professor in a small private, and I should say very expensive, college who prided itself on its academic reputation of elusiveness in its selection of students. First glance suggested it was not a murder by impulse. No thief suddenly caught in the act of burglary turning and killing his discoverer here. The garrote, a weapon of intimacy, suggested premeditation. To use a garrote one had to be willing to take a chance; a chance of his would-be victim being more ferocious in his defending himself, and taking the chance of being caught in the act itself. This grisly picture before me looked more like an execution. Someone really disliked the idea of the good professor taking one more unnecessary breath on this planet.
I stepped out of the room, and looking down the white hall, saw the lab boys lugging in their gear herding down the hall, and behind them, Frank strolling down the hall with a scowl on his face. Nodding and waving the tech boys into the room I waited for Frank to pull up beside and tell me what, or who, had just rained on his parade.
“Christ, this is going to be a bitch, Turn. A royal bitch.”
“How so?”
“Finished talking to the security guards. Get this; in order to get down here you have to have an identification card. It’s a magnetized card which directly connects into the campus’ mainframe. It recognizes your number and then unlocks the door to let you in. Except, you don’t automatically get in. After the computer scans the card you then have to have your thumb print scanned.”
“That’s a lot of security for a computer research area like this. What’s down here so important?”
Frank’s scowl darkened as he nodded in agreement.
“Apparently the research computer they’ve got down here is very fast, very experimental, and very expensive. The Air Force is interested in it and they have a couple of research grants being worked on here. So they added a third layer of security to monitor anyone coming or going. At each end of the hall there is a guard assigned to monitor those who come and go. Anyone who wants in has to scan his card, scan his thumb print, and then sign his name in a log book, indicating the time he entered and the time he left.”
“So we should know who was in the basement at the time of the professor’s death, right? We find out approximate time of death, then we check the log book and computer logs, and we have our killer.”
A wicked little grin spread across the thin lips of my pasta-loving partner. Frank had this twisted sense of humor I found amusing. He loved to irritate others. He enjoyed portraying himself as a thick-headed, stupid cop who wore badly fitting cheap suits. Furthermore, then he would say something or do something which was astonishingly brilliant. He hated to investigate cases which contained any form of a puzzle in it; an incongruity, if you ask me because of his high I.Q., yet he loved to torment me by adding layers upon layers of additional complexity to an already complex case. The little twist of his lips on his cement-block head told me another little wrinkle was coming.
“Oh, but you’re gonna love this, Turn. Ready? From 2: p.m. to 5:40 p.m. the only person is the victim. His student assistant comes in at 5:40 to see if he needs anything before she goes back to the dorm. That’s when she found him.”
“Well, before the professor arrives? Anyone check in but not check out?”
“Nope. The two security officers covering this area swear the students who came in before two were gone by the time the stiff arrives. When the professor comes swinging down the steps with his briefcase, something he did like clock work every day, he was alone. No one was down here, except for security, during that time.”
So there it was. A genuine, honest-to-God puzzle. Someone knows the professor’s habits; knows he comes down here to do work, precisely at two. Either the killer is down here waiting for the professor, and somehow knows he is going to be in that given cubicle and no other, or he somehow has a way to bypass all the layers of security and enters unseen. Or there was, possibly, a third alternative.
“Yeah, don’t say it,” Frank grunted, frowning and shaking his head no. “It could be one of the security officers. I thought of that too. No joy there, chum. My hunch is both are squeaky-clean boy scouts and ex-marines. If it was one of them it’d have to be one hell of a reason. Except, I doubt that’s gonna pan out. So, my bucko, you have one hell of a case in front of you! Moreover, I am sooooo glad you have it and I don’t!”
I smiled, sighed, and shrugged. Glancing at my watch I noticed it almost seven o:clock. I actually had hopes of going down to where I kept my cars stored and working on the Road Runner for an hour or two tonight. That wasn’t going to happen. We still had the initial investigation to do. Hours of assembling the sometimes dissimulate pieces of the puzzle, and doing it by the numbers in a procedure every working cop knows inside and out. We’d be lucky if we rolled into our beds by midnight.
“No surveillance cameras?”
“Nope. To be installed next week.”
I nodded, wondering if this too was planned or if it was just a dumb stroke of luck for the killer.
“Who’s the student assistant?”
Frank looked down at the small spiral notebook he used to jot down everything, flipped a couple of pages, and found the name.
“A graduate student by the name of Alicia Addams,” he said, looking up and grinning even more insidiously. “ She’s up stairs in the professor’s office waiting to be interviewed. I thought you might want that one. You know . . .playing the brilliant young Shylock of a detective and interviewing the pretty young damsel in distress.”
I grinned and patted the little man on the shoulder as I stepped around him.
“That’s Sherlock, bub. Not Shylock. So, why don’t you go talk to the security guys again. See if they can give you more about our victim and about anyone who might want to see a physics professor dead.”
The computer lab in the basement was only half of the basement. Also down there were a series of chemistry, biology, and physics laboratories. The building we were in was called Aimes Hall. It housed the departments of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Four floors up from the basement was the floor where most of the professors had their offices. Stepping off the elevator I found Dr. Holdridge’s office quickly enough. I followed the sounds of someone sobbing, and between her sobs, blowing her nose into a wad of tissues.
“Alicia Addams?”
“Yes . . .yes, I’m Alicia.”
Surprise. I had this impression female grad students in physics had to look like some Russian female mud wrestler. Foolish me. Alicia Addams was in her twenties, with long brown hair, green eyes, and long, finely chiseled gams. Her face was not pretty. Nevertheless, it wasn’t ugly. However, save for her legs, she was wearing a one-piece blue dress, her legs were crossed as she sat in a chair in front of the dead stiff’s desk. They were long and nice to look at. Very nice.
Her eyes were red and her face was puffy from a long jag of crying. The wad of Kleenex in her hands looked like shredded mush. On the corner of the desk, and just out of reach, was a freshly opened box. Stepping into the closet-room sized office I reached for the box and handed it to her.
“Detective Sergeant Turner Hahn, Southside Division. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“Yes, I know. The two officers in uniform told me you would want to talk to me.”
I nodded and glanced at the office. It looked like what you might expect a Physics professor’s office should look like. Books everywhere. The wall immediately behind the desk was nothing but books from ceiling to carpeted floor and a small computer desk with a very large CRT screen. The interior wall was bare except for a set of photos of a living Dr. Holdridge standing either beside, or shaking hands with, a number of distinguished looking men. The exterior wall had a long and narrow slit of a window which looked down on the campus commons below. The last wall was more photos.
I was impressed with the man’s desk. It had the look of precision to it. Mostly bare, with the few papers on it stacked in a neat stack, yet what caught my eye were the three pens placed with unerring accuracy directly onto the middle of the desk’s surface. They were precisely aligned. Looking at them the word ‘perfectionist’ crossed my mind.
“You were the professor’s student assistant?”
“Yes. For two years now. I’m working on my Master’s degree in physics and chemistry.”
“When did you see the professor last? That is, before you found him in the lab below.”
“Oh, let me see . . .” she sighed, sniffling, and starring up at the ceiling for a moment or two to think. “This morning around ten, I think. He was here in the office working and I just popped in to ask if he needed anything.”
“Okay, how did he look and sound?”
“He was upset. Really angry. He told me he didn’t want to be bothered until later this afternoon when he went down to work on the computer. Really, I’d have to say, it was just another normal day.”
“Normal? An upset professor is normal?”
A whiff of a smile momentarily played on the girl’s lips before disappearing. Tears welled up and she hurriedly pulled out of the Kleenex box a dozen or more and buried her face in them for a short jag of crying. It ended with her blowing her nose loudly before she looked up at me.
“That was Dr. Holdridge, detective. He was always mad at someone. He was a great teacher and a brilliant mind. I have never heard anyone explain Quantum Mechanics so clearly like he could. Except, he was . . . he was . . . hard to get along with. He was tough. Tough and abrasive. He made a lot of demands on his students and on his peers. He often said he could not tolerate fools and he thought humanity in general were fools of the first order.”
Ah. A perfectionist and egotist.
“So who had angered him this time?”
“Oh, that’s simple. The head of the department, Dr. Murphy. Lots of his peers angered the professor. Although, Dr. Murphy was special. He would usually become livid if he got into a row with her.”
“Dr. Holdridge was not the department head?”
“Oh, no. No way. He wanted to be. He campaigned for it. Plus, he made no effort to conceal his ire at being superceded by a woman as chair. Furthermore, there was no way Dr. Holdridge would ever become the Physics department head. He was just too . . . too severe. He could make the most brilliant of his students feel like a stuttering idiot when he dressed them down. He could have the entire faculty on the verge of mutiny with some of his biting commentary. To be a department head, especially the department head in physics, you have to be something of a skilled diplomat and politician. You have to smooze with the alumni and with big-time business leaders. To be a top-drawer department you need lots of people and lots of corporations donating huge sums of money. You have to be colleague with your peers. I am afraid Dr. Holdridge was not that kind of personality.”
The personality of the late Doctor Walter Holdridge sounded like that of a Rottweiler with rabies. That kind of personality guaranteed the creation of a lot of enemies. The question was, was the killer on the campus? Or were there more out there we hadn’t heard about?
“So who else on the faculty could yank the professor’s chain?”
Again, that whiff of a smile played across the plain, yet attractive, face of the student. For a brief moment a small flicker of humor lit her green eyes, making her ever more attractive. I wondered if this smiling girl, this feminine geek, might also have a motive for murder.
“Oh, goodness. Everyone, at one time or the other, yanked the professor’s chain, detective. Just get a campus directory and go down the list. That would include the janitors for this building and the gardeners, the electricians, the plumbers. Everyone.”
I sighed and sat down in one of the small chairs beside the desk and directly opposite the child. Funny, here she was in her twenties, and not bad looking, and I was a single male barely in my forties. Nevertheless, somehow I was thinking her as if she was a child. A kid. Someone barely out of puberty. I was looking at her more like a father might look at his daughter.
Frankly, I didn’t like the thought. Although women and I was like mixing nitroglycerin and gasoline together, and any relationship with a woman, including my brief marriage, usually fell apart with a sudden finality to it, nevertheless I still liked to gaze upon a good looking woman. I thought there might be a chance I might find a girlfriend. One who actually found me both attractive and interesting. One I could actually tolerate and appreciate.
Hell, it was a thought. A hope. Everyone has to have a measure of hope in their souls.
“So who else on the faculty could repeatedly anger the professor?”
“Hmmm, let me see,” she began, furrowing her eyebrows and thinking for a moment before answering. “There’s Dr. Armand Pellieur. He’s head of the Chemistry department. His office is next door. Dr. Pellieur is very good at agitating the professor.”
“And then there’s Dr. Hodgeskins. He’s one of the professors in the Archeology department. There’s no love lost between there. Between those three, Dr. Murphy, Dr. Pellieur, and Dr. Hodgeskins, that would be the list.”
I nodded.
“So tell me about this afternoon. Was it usual for the professor to be in the basement at that time of the day?”
“Yes. Every day. You could use the professor to set your watch. Every day exactly at the same time.”
“So, you usually checked in to see how he was doing?”
“Every day,” she smiled weakly, more tears flowing down her ruby cheeks, her lower lip beginning to tremble. “Clockwork.”
“It was you who found the body?”
For an answer she broke into a fit of hysterical crying. More Kleenex left the box in one rapid sweep of the hand. I waited in silence for the moment to pass. You learn to be patient as a cop. Especially when you’re investigating a murder.
“Yes, I came in precisely at 4:15. That’s when the professor wanted me to interrupt him. That’s when I . . .found him like that.”
“What did you do?”
“I . . .I screamed. Screamed like a silly little girl. It was then I went running to find Ralph.”
“Who’s Ralph?”
“He’s the campus security officer on duty at the south entrance. I say hello to him every day at that time. I found him and we both ran back to see if the professor might still be alive. However, he wasn’t. Ralph told me to follow him. We called the police from the phone down in the basement.”
So. There it was. A dead professor with a piano wire around his neck and an entire university as primary suspects. Swell. I smiled with an appreciation, again, of Frank’s uncanny ability at sniffing out tough cases with the least amount of knowledge and handing it to me with a smirk on his face.
Well, that’s okay. That’s why I’m paid by the city. I’m a cop. Besides, truthfully, I like what I do.
“Thank you, Miss Addams.” I said, coming to my feet and stepping toward the entrance. “We might need to contact you again with more questions later on. Please stay in town until the investigation is done. Here is my card. If you think of anything else don’t hesitate in giving me a call. Okay?”
She reached out and took the card I held in my hand. Her face came up and there was this certain look, a look I was all too familiar with, clearly painted on her face. Shit. Here it comes again.
“Detective, somehow you look familiar. You look like an old movie star. Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean old. Just, your face, seems so familiar to me. Although, I can’t seem to remember the actor’s name.”
Clark Gable. Yeah, I know. You must think I am an arrogant sonofabitch with an ego problem of my own if I think I look like Clark Gable. However, that’s a mistake. It’s not an ego problem. It’s genetics. One look at my mug and you can’t help but have the impression a bigger, taller, Clark Gable is standing in front of you. Besides, I don’t like it. It’s a curse.
I’m not Clark Gable. I don’t think I look like the dead actor. Although, others do. Then women, for some reason, latch onto it right from the get-go. Maybe you think that’s good. Women being attracted to me. Nevertheless remember; my wife tried to poison me. Twice. At the time we were only married for three months. That should tell you something about my success with women.
I smiled and half turned as I stepped out into the carpeted
hall.
“Where might I find this Dr. Murphy?”
“I think she’s downstairs in one of the labs.”
“Thanks,” I said, nodding, and turning away.
No. I’m not Clark Gable. I’m Turner Hahn. Cop. Nothing more and nothing less. Deal with it.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Another short story "Justice"
Here's another one of my Turner and Frank stories. It's called 'Justice.'
The windows of the warehouse stared down at my partner and me with a sullen, gray insolence framed in moving shadows and simmering anger. As Frank and I climbed out of my car and closed the doors our eyes never left the ominous pile of brick and battered windows.
It was a slumbering slum of discarded stonework on the south side of town. It sat empty in a long row of empty buildings just like it. Most of the windows were boarded up, the wood weathered and splintered from maleficent neglect. A security fence, with faded signs in big letters saying “Keep Out” hanging from it in thirty foot spaces, did nothing in keeping people at bay. Weeds, coated in a starling silver-white luminescence of moon light, jutted up rudely from several cracks and crevices in the empty parking lot facing it. From somewhere the hot breath of summer was playing with an open door. The door’s hinges squealed; the noise adding a tint of grim reality to an already grim night. As I watched shafts of bright moon light race across the front of the building a thought crossed my mind;
Not a warehouse.
A mausoleum. A tomb.
From underneath my left armpit I pulled out the .45 caliber Kimber and slid the carriage back and clicked off the safeties as I thumbed the hammer back. The weight of the big gun felt reassuring in my hand. Reaching inside my sport coat I felt for the spare clips. I would need them tonight. Laying the Kimber on the hood of the car I reached behind me and pulled out the small framed Walther PPK .380 I carried as a back up. It didn’t have the knock-down power of the Kimber if you hit someone in the chest with it. But if I had to use it I wouldn’t be aiming for the chest. To my right I knew Frank had his 9mm Glock in hand and would be checking the snub-nosed .38 caliber Smith &Wesson he had for his back up.
Someone was going to die tonight.
There was no other way around it.
Debts had to be paid. Justice had to be metered out.
Inside the warehouse were four men and a woman. The men, Mick O’Toole, Chucky Mickelson, Bobby Hardaway, and ‘Beep’ Nickles, were together. A gaggle of young toughs who thought they were good at knocking off jewelry stores and small time bookie joints. Most of the time they were successful. They would target a jewelry store, cut the power to the alarm systems, drill a hole through the roof of the building and slide down ropes. Beep was a talented safe-cracker. He could crack a safe’s tumbler faster than I could pour a cold beer from the bottle into a glass. If he couldn’t, Bobby Hardaway was good at explosives. He knew how to use just enough plastique to shape a charge and blow open a safe door making the least amount of noise. When it was time to get away Chucky Mickelson was the driver.
But the man who was the brains of the outfit was Mick O’Toole. A true Irishman, said to be on the lamb from the IRA. Somehow he had pissed them off. Pissed them off enough to force Mick to leave Britain permanently.
That takes talent. How do you piss off the IRA that much and still live?
All four of them had two things in common. Two traits which made them hook up together and work as a team. Greed was one trait they shared in common. Meanness the other. Each one them wanted dough. Each one wanted to hurt people getting the dough. That’s why they liked knocking off small fry bookies. They’d stroll into a bookie joint, splatter the bookie with a shotgun, kill anyone else who got in the way, grab the take and leave.
The woman in there with them was a young girl by the name of Lois Hogan. Nineteen. Her father was Gill Hogan. Bookie—or more precisely, dead bookie. About a half hour ago Mick and his boys walked into the small restaurant Gill ran for his boss just as the place was closing up for the night. They pistol whipped Gill and then shot him three times in the chest before throwing the night’s bets into a bag and leaving. Gill’s daughter had been sitting out in the restaurant waiting for her father. Mick and his thugs grabbed Lois and threw her into the van they used for a getaway car and came out here. We knew this because twenty minutes ago a guy by the name of Caesar Ortega called me on my cell phone and told me he wanted to talk to Frank and me. Told us to meet him underneath a burnt out lamp post on the corner of Monroe and 113th Street South. Just two blocks away from where we now were standing.
And as the old saying goes, when Caesar calls, one answers. If they valued living.
Caesar Ortega was Gill Hogan’s boss. Gill ran one of Ortega’s bookie joints plus the restaurant. Ortega played the numbers, ran a string of strip joints and whore houses, had his hand in smuggling illegals up from Mexico. He stayed out of the drug business because he didn’t want to butt heads with larger crime syndicates and/or the crazy drug lords coming up out of Mexico and South America. He was a tough hood who knew the streets. A smart businessman who knew how to make a profit and stay out of a police lineup at the same time. That was Caesar Ortega.
When we pulled up to the curb we saw Ortega leaning against the grill of his black Mercedes, dressed in white slacks, a yellow Hawaiian print shirt, and white tipped loafers. He looked tan and in shape. And—from the frown on his face and the way he had his arms crossed—about as pissed off as a man could get.
“Turner. . . Frank,” he grunted, nodding his head, as we stepped around the front of our car and faced him.
“Caesar,” I said, nodding.
“You two working on the Hogan killing?”
Frank almost smiled and nodded.
“Word gets around fast, Caesar. Gill was killed only ten minutes ago.”
“I know, I was there when it happened.”
That was a surprise. I grinned as Frank popped off the obvious line.
“A confession, Caesar? From you?”
A dry, cruel smile stretched across Ortega’ lips as his hot, blazing dark eyes stared at Frank. It wasn’t a smile one would call humorous. Unless the smile of a Great White just before his attack could be considered humorous.
“I was setting across the street when those four creeps came in and wasted Gill. They killed him, took the cash, and threw his daughter into the back of a van and drove off. I know who they are and I know where you can find them.”
“Why are you telling this to us, Caesar?” I asked as I looked at the expensively dressed hood standing alone in front of his Mercedes. “What’s your game?”
“It’s vermin like that that gives a man in my position a bad name, my friend. People in town think these guys work for me. They think I give the orders to hit this joint or kill that fool. Word gets around. People higher up in the food chain start to get nervous and ask questions. When they start to get nervous I start to get nervous.”
Feeling a little pressure from the mob are you Caesar? Starting to look over your shoulder some? Interesting.
“So why don’t you take them out?” Frank asked bluntly.
Ortega flashed us that shark’s mirthless grin and spread his hands out eloquently as he shrugged.
“I’m just an honest businessman, Frank. My organization tries to stay away from trouble like this. But suppose, god forbid, someone in my organization took it upon themselves to clean house and take out the trash? A situation would arise which could easily spiral out of control. These four punks do have friends in certain parts of the city. These friends could become irritated at me. Rivalries could be established. It would be an unfortunate time for all of us.”
“But if we cleaned up the mess for you . . . ,”
“Exactly, Turner. If the police took care of the situation my hands are clean. There’s no room for doubt. Everybody remains friendly. Know what I mean? But Hahn, Morales . . . I gotta tell you. These guys are not going away peacefully. All of’em are fucking crazy. They’ve been in and out of the slammer so many times they’ve got permanent reservations waiting for’em. I’ve been told all of’em have said they’d rather die than go back in. Your work is cut out for you.”
So here we were—standing across the street in deep shadows which kept prying eyes off us as we checked our weapons for the second time and then slipped into our bullet proof vests. Frank, my no-neck lookalike Neanderthal clone flicked open his snub-nose .38 and checked the cylinder before flicking it close and glancing at me.
“How you want to play this?”
I shrugged, curled a finger around the trigger of the Kimber and gripped the Walther in the other.
“They’ve got the girl. We can’t wait for the TAC squad to arrive. She could be dead by then. We go in and take’em out as fast as possible.”
Simple.
Yeah, right.
Getting into the building was easy. We moved from one dark shadow to the next, slipped across the big parking lot and found an open window. Slipping into the darkness of the warehouse we paused until we heard sounds of men laughing and bottles rattling on the floor above us. We found stairs and moved quietly up the rickety thing making as little noise as we could. On the second floor we found lights burning in a room which was away from any exterior windows. We also heard the moans of Lois Hogan. Moans coming from a woman who had been beaten and abused. Moans from a woman who was alive but knew she was dead.
Our backs against the wall I motioned to Frank I would circle around and enter the rooms where our friends were from the opposite side. He nodded as I moved off and slid around the corner at the far end of the hall. So far we had not been discovered. So far no gun play had happened. So far no one had died.
It all changed in the blinking of an eye.
Leaving Frank, I made a right hand turn down a long hall moved down it without making too much noise. I came to an intersection of a third hall and carefully peaked around the corner to make sure the coast was clear. Seeing it was I slid around the corner and took three steps before Beep Nickles stepped out of an office door unexpected and turned toward me. Beep was a tall straw of a man with thin arms and thin legs. He had a face that a weasel could appreciate and slick, oily black hair. When he came through the door and turned toward me he was looking down at the shotgun in his hands, an oily rag stuffed into the belt of his slacks, chewing on a toothpick and grinning to himself. Apparently he had just finished cleaning the shotgun. But looking up and seeing me his mouth dropped open in sheer surprise and instinctively he pumped the gun once and brought the barrel around and toward me.
The Kimber in my right hand exploded twice in two rapid shots. The noise of the .45 was loud enough to chip plaster off the walls. Both slugs smacked into Beep’s chest so close together one could put a quarter down and cover both holes. He flew back into the wall and slid down to the floor leaving a long red trail on the faded plaster wall behind him in the process.
Men began screaming. Guns were going off in rapid succession. I hard the sharp bark of Frank’s Glock go off twice. Someone had grabbed a shotgun and was pumping double-0 buckshot through the cheap plaster walls in front and behind me. I ducked and slid into the room where all the commotion was going on.
On the floor to one side of Frank was the body of Chucky Mickelson. There was a 9mm hole in his forehead just above the bridge of his nose. Where there had been the back of his head now was nothing but blood, brain matter and pieces of flesh surrounding a gaping hole about the size of a man’s fist. On the other side of Frank was Bobby Hardaway rolling on the bare linoleum floor gripping what was left of his right knee cap with a set of bloody hands. He was screaming in pain and bleeding like a broken bowl of cherry jello. In the opposite corner from Bobby was the trussed up figure of Lois Hogan lying on the floor. Hands and feet were tied together. Her face was nothing but a bloody mask She was alive. Barely.
But there was no Mick O’Toole.
“That way,” Frank said pointing the barrel of his Glock toward a door I had not seen entering. “I’ll stay here and make sure he doesn’t double back. Be careful, buddy. Be careful.”
I nodded and went after the Irishman. It didn’t take long to find him. He was four rooms away trying his best to open a window. But the old window had been welded shot from years of neglect. So Mick used the shotgun in his hands to blow the window out just as I entered the room behind him.
“Drop the gun and hands above your head, O’Toole!”
For an answer the Irishman whirled around, stepped to one side and let go a round of double 0 toward me. He was fast. Unfortunately for him I was faster. The moment I saw him begin his move I leapt to one side and rolled on a shoulder, coming up on my feet in a squatting position. The roar of the shotgun filled the room and a huge chuck of the wall behind and above my head disintegrated into a fine white powder of plaster and sawdust.
I didn’t let him get a second shot off. The Kimber barked two more times in my hand. The slugs found their mark. Each leg just above the Irishman’s knees caught some lead, buckled visibly, and collapsing the madman onto the floor in howling rage and pain. But he still wasn’t finished. He rolled onto his back, slid himself back to lean against a wall and reached inside his shirt for a weapon. But too late. I was too close to him. He brought a 9mm Smith & Wesson auto out and started to lift it up toward me. I used my left foot to kick the weapon from his hands and then brought the foot down hard onto the gaping hole of his left leg.
“Not getting out of prison time today, boyo!” I said, grinding my foot into his wound.
The pain was too much. The Irishman’s eyes rolled up into his skull and he slid down onto floor unconscious. I cuffed him, searched him, then grabbed him by his shirt collar and dragged him back to the room where his comrades were.
“Jesus. What a fucking mess.” Frank grunted, a wiry smirk on his face, coming to his feet after checking the woman’s wounds. “We’ll be up all night with the fucking paperwork. And the lieutenant’s not going to be happy we had to use deadly force.”
“Yeah, it’ll just tear him up, won’t it,” I said, grinning.
Our lieutenant down at South Side wouldn’t say a damn thing about the use of deadly force. The Irishman’s gang was well known to us. Nobody was going to be second guessing our use of force tonight. No one.
The windows of the warehouse stared down at my partner and me with a sullen, gray insolence framed in moving shadows and simmering anger. As Frank and I climbed out of my car and closed the doors our eyes never left the ominous pile of brick and battered windows.
It was a slumbering slum of discarded stonework on the south side of town. It sat empty in a long row of empty buildings just like it. Most of the windows were boarded up, the wood weathered and splintered from maleficent neglect. A security fence, with faded signs in big letters saying “Keep Out” hanging from it in thirty foot spaces, did nothing in keeping people at bay. Weeds, coated in a starling silver-white luminescence of moon light, jutted up rudely from several cracks and crevices in the empty parking lot facing it. From somewhere the hot breath of summer was playing with an open door. The door’s hinges squealed; the noise adding a tint of grim reality to an already grim night. As I watched shafts of bright moon light race across the front of the building a thought crossed my mind;
Not a warehouse.
A mausoleum. A tomb.
From underneath my left armpit I pulled out the .45 caliber Kimber and slid the carriage back and clicked off the safeties as I thumbed the hammer back. The weight of the big gun felt reassuring in my hand. Reaching inside my sport coat I felt for the spare clips. I would need them tonight. Laying the Kimber on the hood of the car I reached behind me and pulled out the small framed Walther PPK .380 I carried as a back up. It didn’t have the knock-down power of the Kimber if you hit someone in the chest with it. But if I had to use it I wouldn’t be aiming for the chest. To my right I knew Frank had his 9mm Glock in hand and would be checking the snub-nosed .38 caliber Smith &Wesson he had for his back up.
Someone was going to die tonight.
There was no other way around it.
Debts had to be paid. Justice had to be metered out.
Inside the warehouse were four men and a woman. The men, Mick O’Toole, Chucky Mickelson, Bobby Hardaway, and ‘Beep’ Nickles, were together. A gaggle of young toughs who thought they were good at knocking off jewelry stores and small time bookie joints. Most of the time they were successful. They would target a jewelry store, cut the power to the alarm systems, drill a hole through the roof of the building and slide down ropes. Beep was a talented safe-cracker. He could crack a safe’s tumbler faster than I could pour a cold beer from the bottle into a glass. If he couldn’t, Bobby Hardaway was good at explosives. He knew how to use just enough plastique to shape a charge and blow open a safe door making the least amount of noise. When it was time to get away Chucky Mickelson was the driver.
But the man who was the brains of the outfit was Mick O’Toole. A true Irishman, said to be on the lamb from the IRA. Somehow he had pissed them off. Pissed them off enough to force Mick to leave Britain permanently.
That takes talent. How do you piss off the IRA that much and still live?
All four of them had two things in common. Two traits which made them hook up together and work as a team. Greed was one trait they shared in common. Meanness the other. Each one them wanted dough. Each one wanted to hurt people getting the dough. That’s why they liked knocking off small fry bookies. They’d stroll into a bookie joint, splatter the bookie with a shotgun, kill anyone else who got in the way, grab the take and leave.
The woman in there with them was a young girl by the name of Lois Hogan. Nineteen. Her father was Gill Hogan. Bookie—or more precisely, dead bookie. About a half hour ago Mick and his boys walked into the small restaurant Gill ran for his boss just as the place was closing up for the night. They pistol whipped Gill and then shot him three times in the chest before throwing the night’s bets into a bag and leaving. Gill’s daughter had been sitting out in the restaurant waiting for her father. Mick and his thugs grabbed Lois and threw her into the van they used for a getaway car and came out here. We knew this because twenty minutes ago a guy by the name of Caesar Ortega called me on my cell phone and told me he wanted to talk to Frank and me. Told us to meet him underneath a burnt out lamp post on the corner of Monroe and 113th Street South. Just two blocks away from where we now were standing.
And as the old saying goes, when Caesar calls, one answers. If they valued living.
Caesar Ortega was Gill Hogan’s boss. Gill ran one of Ortega’s bookie joints plus the restaurant. Ortega played the numbers, ran a string of strip joints and whore houses, had his hand in smuggling illegals up from Mexico. He stayed out of the drug business because he didn’t want to butt heads with larger crime syndicates and/or the crazy drug lords coming up out of Mexico and South America. He was a tough hood who knew the streets. A smart businessman who knew how to make a profit and stay out of a police lineup at the same time. That was Caesar Ortega.
When we pulled up to the curb we saw Ortega leaning against the grill of his black Mercedes, dressed in white slacks, a yellow Hawaiian print shirt, and white tipped loafers. He looked tan and in shape. And—from the frown on his face and the way he had his arms crossed—about as pissed off as a man could get.
“Turner. . . Frank,” he grunted, nodding his head, as we stepped around the front of our car and faced him.
“Caesar,” I said, nodding.
“You two working on the Hogan killing?”
Frank almost smiled and nodded.
“Word gets around fast, Caesar. Gill was killed only ten minutes ago.”
“I know, I was there when it happened.”
That was a surprise. I grinned as Frank popped off the obvious line.
“A confession, Caesar? From you?”
A dry, cruel smile stretched across Ortega’ lips as his hot, blazing dark eyes stared at Frank. It wasn’t a smile one would call humorous. Unless the smile of a Great White just before his attack could be considered humorous.
“I was setting across the street when those four creeps came in and wasted Gill. They killed him, took the cash, and threw his daughter into the back of a van and drove off. I know who they are and I know where you can find them.”
“Why are you telling this to us, Caesar?” I asked as I looked at the expensively dressed hood standing alone in front of his Mercedes. “What’s your game?”
“It’s vermin like that that gives a man in my position a bad name, my friend. People in town think these guys work for me. They think I give the orders to hit this joint or kill that fool. Word gets around. People higher up in the food chain start to get nervous and ask questions. When they start to get nervous I start to get nervous.”
Feeling a little pressure from the mob are you Caesar? Starting to look over your shoulder some? Interesting.
“So why don’t you take them out?” Frank asked bluntly.
Ortega flashed us that shark’s mirthless grin and spread his hands out eloquently as he shrugged.
“I’m just an honest businessman, Frank. My organization tries to stay away from trouble like this. But suppose, god forbid, someone in my organization took it upon themselves to clean house and take out the trash? A situation would arise which could easily spiral out of control. These four punks do have friends in certain parts of the city. These friends could become irritated at me. Rivalries could be established. It would be an unfortunate time for all of us.”
“But if we cleaned up the mess for you . . . ,”
“Exactly, Turner. If the police took care of the situation my hands are clean. There’s no room for doubt. Everybody remains friendly. Know what I mean? But Hahn, Morales . . . I gotta tell you. These guys are not going away peacefully. All of’em are fucking crazy. They’ve been in and out of the slammer so many times they’ve got permanent reservations waiting for’em. I’ve been told all of’em have said they’d rather die than go back in. Your work is cut out for you.”
So here we were—standing across the street in deep shadows which kept prying eyes off us as we checked our weapons for the second time and then slipped into our bullet proof vests. Frank, my no-neck lookalike Neanderthal clone flicked open his snub-nose .38 and checked the cylinder before flicking it close and glancing at me.
“How you want to play this?”
I shrugged, curled a finger around the trigger of the Kimber and gripped the Walther in the other.
“They’ve got the girl. We can’t wait for the TAC squad to arrive. She could be dead by then. We go in and take’em out as fast as possible.”
Simple.
Yeah, right.
Getting into the building was easy. We moved from one dark shadow to the next, slipped across the big parking lot and found an open window. Slipping into the darkness of the warehouse we paused until we heard sounds of men laughing and bottles rattling on the floor above us. We found stairs and moved quietly up the rickety thing making as little noise as we could. On the second floor we found lights burning in a room which was away from any exterior windows. We also heard the moans of Lois Hogan. Moans coming from a woman who had been beaten and abused. Moans from a woman who was alive but knew she was dead.
Our backs against the wall I motioned to Frank I would circle around and enter the rooms where our friends were from the opposite side. He nodded as I moved off and slid around the corner at the far end of the hall. So far we had not been discovered. So far no gun play had happened. So far no one had died.
It all changed in the blinking of an eye.
Leaving Frank, I made a right hand turn down a long hall moved down it without making too much noise. I came to an intersection of a third hall and carefully peaked around the corner to make sure the coast was clear. Seeing it was I slid around the corner and took three steps before Beep Nickles stepped out of an office door unexpected and turned toward me. Beep was a tall straw of a man with thin arms and thin legs. He had a face that a weasel could appreciate and slick, oily black hair. When he came through the door and turned toward me he was looking down at the shotgun in his hands, an oily rag stuffed into the belt of his slacks, chewing on a toothpick and grinning to himself. Apparently he had just finished cleaning the shotgun. But looking up and seeing me his mouth dropped open in sheer surprise and instinctively he pumped the gun once and brought the barrel around and toward me.
The Kimber in my right hand exploded twice in two rapid shots. The noise of the .45 was loud enough to chip plaster off the walls. Both slugs smacked into Beep’s chest so close together one could put a quarter down and cover both holes. He flew back into the wall and slid down to the floor leaving a long red trail on the faded plaster wall behind him in the process.
Men began screaming. Guns were going off in rapid succession. I hard the sharp bark of Frank’s Glock go off twice. Someone had grabbed a shotgun and was pumping double-0 buckshot through the cheap plaster walls in front and behind me. I ducked and slid into the room where all the commotion was going on.
On the floor to one side of Frank was the body of Chucky Mickelson. There was a 9mm hole in his forehead just above the bridge of his nose. Where there had been the back of his head now was nothing but blood, brain matter and pieces of flesh surrounding a gaping hole about the size of a man’s fist. On the other side of Frank was Bobby Hardaway rolling on the bare linoleum floor gripping what was left of his right knee cap with a set of bloody hands. He was screaming in pain and bleeding like a broken bowl of cherry jello. In the opposite corner from Bobby was the trussed up figure of Lois Hogan lying on the floor. Hands and feet were tied together. Her face was nothing but a bloody mask She was alive. Barely.
But there was no Mick O’Toole.
“That way,” Frank said pointing the barrel of his Glock toward a door I had not seen entering. “I’ll stay here and make sure he doesn’t double back. Be careful, buddy. Be careful.”
I nodded and went after the Irishman. It didn’t take long to find him. He was four rooms away trying his best to open a window. But the old window had been welded shot from years of neglect. So Mick used the shotgun in his hands to blow the window out just as I entered the room behind him.
“Drop the gun and hands above your head, O’Toole!”
For an answer the Irishman whirled around, stepped to one side and let go a round of double 0 toward me. He was fast. Unfortunately for him I was faster. The moment I saw him begin his move I leapt to one side and rolled on a shoulder, coming up on my feet in a squatting position. The roar of the shotgun filled the room and a huge chuck of the wall behind and above my head disintegrated into a fine white powder of plaster and sawdust.
I didn’t let him get a second shot off. The Kimber barked two more times in my hand. The slugs found their mark. Each leg just above the Irishman’s knees caught some lead, buckled visibly, and collapsing the madman onto the floor in howling rage and pain. But he still wasn’t finished. He rolled onto his back, slid himself back to lean against a wall and reached inside his shirt for a weapon. But too late. I was too close to him. He brought a 9mm Smith & Wesson auto out and started to lift it up toward me. I used my left foot to kick the weapon from his hands and then brought the foot down hard onto the gaping hole of his left leg.
“Not getting out of prison time today, boyo!” I said, grinding my foot into his wound.
The pain was too much. The Irishman’s eyes rolled up into his skull and he slid down onto floor unconscious. I cuffed him, searched him, then grabbed him by his shirt collar and dragged him back to the room where his comrades were.
“Jesus. What a fucking mess.” Frank grunted, a wiry smirk on his face, coming to his feet after checking the woman’s wounds. “We’ll be up all night with the fucking paperwork. And the lieutenant’s not going to be happy we had to use deadly force.”
“Yeah, it’ll just tear him up, won’t it,” I said, grinning.
Our lieutenant down at South Side wouldn’t say a damn thing about the use of deadly force. The Irishman’s gang was well known to us. Nobody was going to be second guessing our use of force tonight. No one.
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