City of Saviors, page 15
Colin’s skin flushed and he cleared his throat. “So what happens if you don’t raise the seven hundred thousand by the end of the year?”
Charity smiled her Cheshire Cat smile and her whiskey eyes sparkled. “No idea. The board came up with that deadline. Somebody read a book about fund-raising, and said we needed a deadline.” She turned back to me. “I thought y’all said his girlfriend killed him.”
I regarded Colin. “We never said that to you.”
“Oh,” she said, her eyes flicking at my partner. “Yes. Anyway . . . You’re gonna have to talk to my husband about budgets and deadlines. I do know that every cent we raise goes back into Blessed Mission and our programs. Every cent helps people in this community.” She sniffled, then dabbed her fingers at the corners of her eyes. “Forgive me— this is a little stressful. I’m not used to dealing with the police in this capacity.”
“We have to ask questions,” Colin assured her. “And don’t worry: we know you do good work here.” He smiled and lifted his glass. “And you make great sweet tea. Thanks again.”
As we stomped back to the car, Colin wouldn’t speak to me.
“What the hell?” I said. “Why are you talking to her about the case?”
He didn’t answer.
“Why are you telling her about suspects?”
“Are you gonna write me up like you wrote up Pepe?” he spat. “Oh, wait. You haven’t written up Pepe.”
“Don’t change the subject,” I snapped. “I’m not there to be nice.”
“And I’m not there to beat up—”
“Beat up?” The cords in my neck stood against my skin.
“Yeah. With your words and your attitude.”
“If she looked like Phyllis Diller, would you be this pissed at me?”
“Who the hell is Phyllis Diller?”
“Blessed Mission has just as much motive as Bernice Parrish,” I said. “Stop and think with the head on your shoulders, not the one dangling between your legs.” I blinked at him. “Why are we having this conversation?”
Ben Davis. During the Chatman murder investigation, I had cozied up to Christopher Chatman’s best friend to get answers. Was Colin doing the same with Charity Tate? Was this his strategy for gaining a confession?
But my partner was done talking to me. He threw himself behind the Ford’s steering wheel and turned the ignition.
The Bobcat driver over at the yellow Craftsman had ditched the heavy machinery. He and two others now sat on the tailgate of a battered pickup truck and guzzled bottles of Gatorade.
This was now the third day of my investigation, and all I knew for sure was that I had lost my partner to a pastor’s wife with Sophia Loren’s eyes.
My phone rang.
“Sergeant Norton?” The man speaking had a Spanish accent. “You don’t know me, but I a’work at Mr. Gene’s house right now. You should come cuz my friend . . . ? My friend . . .” He stopped, then whispered, “My friend found something.”
I opened the car’s passenger’s-side door. “Well, that’s expected, sir. That house is filled with all kinds of things.”
“Yes,” he whispered, “but my friend . . . ? What he found . . . ? He found hands.”
21
PROTECTED BY BUNNY SUITS AND RESPIRATORS, WE CROWDED THE TINY BATHROOM off the den at Eugene Washington’s. The medicine cabinet mirrors reflected nothing—just a platter for decades-old layers of dust, cat hair, and cobwebs. Fossilized porno magazines, including the issue that had forced Vanessa Williams to surrender her Miss America crown, had been ripped from their petrified stacks. Roaches of every variety roamed around a large cherrywood humidor sitting in the center of the tower of boobs. And inside the wooden box: a pair of mummified hands.
“Are they . . . real?” Colin asked.
“Just eyeballing,” Zucca said, “I’d say ‘heck yeah.’ Geez . . . This house is like Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”
The skin of the hands smelled musty and resembled turkey jerky wrapped around bone. No smell of decay wafted off of them.
Standing there, in that bathroom, with those hands made my stomach churn, and Charity Tate’s sweet tea burned my esophagus.
“This box has been here a few years,” Zucca said. “I’m not a forensic anthropologist, though, so I’ll rope in Dr. Goldberg.”
Just a year ago, Douglas Goldberg, M.D., Ph.D., had helped search the basement of Crase Liquor Emporium near my childhood home. He had examined the bones we’d found there and identified them as my sister’s.
The thick gnarled fingers in the humidor looked like they’d belonged to a man. On the left ring finger, there was a tarnished gold ring with an onyx center engraved with the square-and-compasses symbol.
“Z.,” I said, “get good pictures of that ring. Looks like he was a mason.”
A moment later, I clomped out of the house with my team behind me. I unzipped the front of my Tyvek suit and exhaled as cool air hit my sweaty shell.
The three sisters stood a few yards away, arms outstretched, eyes squeezed shut. They had greeted Colin and me as they’d done before: The detective and the chief join us today.
Ike and his men were huddled on the sidewalk—once again, police tape surrounded the property. They had made great progress during their short time cleaning. They had attacked the living room, and now countless black trash bags were piled in the room’s center. Ike had rented a giant Dumpster trailer, and a lot of the junk from the front yard sat in its bowels. Cats camped about the mountains of plastic. Some had ventured forth and perched on the top bag.
“We need to look for bodies with missing hands,” I told the team. “John Does. Dead homeless. We’ll search the house, and if we don’t find him here, then we’ll search citywide.”
“We can’t do this alone,” Pepe groused. “It took us three days just to find the hands. Which we didn’t find.”
Colin’s face reddened. “Dude, stop whining so fuckin’ much. What the hell’s wrong with you lately?”
Pepe took a step toward Colin. “You know what, Taggert? You can kiss my—”
“Hey,” I snapped. “Chill the hell out, both of you. I’ll get cadets from the police academy to help out, all right?”
Hands on his hips, Colin watched Pepe and Luke zigzag to their car. “We in trouble?” he asked me.
“For?”
“Not finding the hands.”
Vises were locking down my joints, and dull aches pounded in my left arm. “L.T. called me off yesterday, remember? Told me to release the house? I have a signed, dated form saying that. And I dare anybody to soar while working two days in a junkyard. What matters now is what we do next. I’ll need to get a search warrant for an extended amount of time.”
“Like, for how long?” Colin asked. “Another week?”
I gazed back at the house—at all the broken and junky and . . . “Make it two weeks.”
“Miss?” The heavily accented voice belonged to a sweaty man with rust-colored skin covered in scars. His strong hands twisted a dusty Margaritaville baseball cap.
“I’ll call for the cadets,” Colin said, “and start on the extension request—the pair of mummy hands should make it a ‘gimme.’ ”
I smiled at the worker and beckoned for him to meet me at the end of the tape. “Thanks so much for contacting me.” After reassuring him that I didn’t care about his or anyone’s immigration status, he told me that his name was Guillermo Velasquez and that he’d come from Guatemala to work and provide for his family. And then he looked past me and froze.
Behind me, Ike Underwood paced closer to the driveway. He tried not to look in our direction but couldn’t help stealing peeks.
My stomach kept churning iced tea and acid as I led Guillermo Velasquez to a side yard and out of Ike’s line of sight.
“Don’t speak so good English,” Guillermo Velasquez said.
“Donde esta cerando . . . box? Umm . . .” I made a square. “Caja?”
“El baño. I was a’working. Shovel. All this trash.” He pantomimed digging with the shovel. “Boom. I hit a’somethin hard, and I a’dig and it was there. Mr. Ike, he told us not to open but I open and it was there. Los manos.” Tears filled his eyes as he swiped his mouth.
“What did you do then?” I asked.
“I call Mr. Ike. He get mad. He say . . .” He pointed his finger at me. “You not supposed to go through Mr. Washington’s a’stuff. I say ‘sorry’ and . . .” He shook his head, kneaded the cap. “You give me card a’yesterday to call. So I sneak to call. Mr. Ike, he don’t look like he call. He tol’ me, trabajo, trabajo.’ And I go back to work and he close the door and walk away. You come in time.”
“Trabajo mucho con Ike?” I asked.
The man nodded. “He give me a’many job. I need work.”
I thanked the man for his courage and honesty. Then, I asked him to come to the station for a formal interview.
Ike, hands on his hips, was now glaring at Zucca and the forensics team.
“Mr. Underwood,” I shouted.
He peeped in my direction.
I beckoned for him to come over to me.
We retreated farther down the block, away from the noise. “You seem very interested in all that Mr. Velasquez was telling me,” I said.
“His English ain’t so good. I just didn’t want him to, you know, say one thing when he meant something else.”
I cocked my head. “So, why don’t you tell me what happened.”
Ike took a deep breath, then launched into his account. He paralleled Velasquez’s story until: “And I closed the bathroom door because I didn’t want him taking the box and selling it. The guys were breathing and talking over it, and I seen CSI and I know about the DNA in people’s spit and the open air messing up evidence. I was just trying to protect it.”
“Why didn’t you call?”
He gaped at me. “Did he say that I didn’t?”
“Well, you didn’t. I talked to him.”
“Billy, he didn’t wanna call cuz he thought you all would run his name and call Immigration.” He plucked a soiled hankie from his back pocket and mopped his face.
“Do you know why Mr. Washington would have a man’s hands in a wooden box?” I asked.
“No. Who’d think a thing like that?”
“Do you know of a man who’s missing his hands?”
“No.”
“Did you know that you could possibly find hands in this house?”
Ike glanced back at the house—at Judith and Nina, the prophetesses, and the patrol officers manning the perimeter. He scratched his nose, then swiped it with the hankie. “Gene collected all kinds of things. No telling what he got off in there. And after finding those hands, I now know that anything’s possible.”
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold bullion. Collectible Penthouse magazines. A man’s hands. Anything’s possible. No truer words.
It couldn’t get worse than this.
But then Brooks called.
22
I TAPPED SPEAKER ON THE PHONE, THEN SAT IT ON THE CROWN VIC’S CENTER console. “Okay, Brooks. Let me have it.”
Colin pushed the seat back from the steering wheel, then found a clean page in his notebook.
“So we’ve already established that his last meal was the cobbler and the malt liquor,” Brooks said. “I’m pretty sure now that had been his dessert because tests found something else.”
“What was the main course?” I asked. “More poison?”
“Umm . . .” Brooks paused, then said, “Human flesh.”
My pulse damn-near stopped. Nausea washed over me, and I covered my mouth with a hand.
Colin had also paled. Eyes closed, he said, “Whuh-huh?”
“There was flesh in Mr. Washington’s stomach that tested positive for human DNA that did not belong to Mr. Washington.”
No one spoke.
Outside the Crown Vic, an LAPD van of fresh-faced police academy cadets wiggled out of their seats. Real police work, yeah! But then, they saw. Enthusiasm dwindled, they stumbled in their steps with their faces crumpled. The horror, oh, the horror.
I swallowed. “Umm . . . Brooks?” Goose bumps formed on my arms, then spread across every inch of my skin. “Can you tell us . . . like . . . from where or from whom?”
“I cannot identify the specific location from which the flesh derived,” Brooks said. “Nor can I tell you whose flesh it is. Stomach acids destroyed those specifics.”
I closed my eyes and groaned. “But I guess ‘who’ and ‘what’ ultimately doesn’t matter right now.”
“Our vic’s a fucking . . . cannibal?” Colin asked. “No wonder somebody killed his ass.”
Even Brooks had to say, “Yeah.”
With numb fingers and a weak will, I scribbled notes even though Brooks’s words had seared into my memory. “So, we’re . . . uh . . . We’re back at Mr. Washington’s house right now,” I said, “cuz some workers found a pair of hands. Hands that have been separated from the owner.”
Silence, then Brooks said, “What the hell?”
Colin grinned—it wasn’t every day to hear the deputy ME use nonclinical terms.
“The flesh you found,” I said, “could be the hands’ owner. But we wouldn’t be able to determine that, correct?”
Brooks said, “Correct.”
I sighed. “I’ll keep this information about Mr. Washington’s . . . diet a secret for now. We’re already in Bat Boy territory with all the people here knowing about the hands.”
“Anything else?” Colin said, chuckling.
“Nope.” Brooks then offered one last “what the hell” before hanging up.
Colin and I sat in the car, gawking at each other, until he said, “I need a drink.”
“There’s not enough wine in Napa Valley. So. Well . . . We need to take the food that’s in the fridge.” I shuddered with revulsion. “This is crazy.”
Colin cocked an eyebrow. “And we’re keeping the cannibal part . . . ?”
“On a need-to-know basis.” I closed my notebook, then exhaled again. “We’ll tell Zucca, L.T., Pepe, and Luke. Eventually, we’ll need to wrangle in a few more dicks cuz . . . The original case combined with the case of those hands and meat, and now . . .”
We sat in silence for a few moments more. The police cadets were now listening intently to Zucca about the proper ways to search a crazy scene like this. He was so calm and so level-headed . . . until we told him about Eugene Washington’s main course.
Zucca’s eyes bugged, and he lost his ability to speak. In silence, we tromped back to the kitchen.
I opened the refrigerator door.
Even without the tubs of hidden gold coins, there were other countless plastic containers and foil-wrapped who-knows-what shoved into the freezer.
“Well?” Zucca said. “Do we take everything or . . . ?”
My heart pounded in my ears. “I’m sick of coming to this house.”
Colin grunted. “We lucked out, you know? Ike’s men hadn’t reached the fridge yet. This could’ve all been gone.”
I pointed to a tub of frozen dark gravy. “You think he kept the hands in the bathroom and the guy’s spleen in one of these?”
“Dahmer had four heads and a heart in his freezer,” Zucca said. “And a box of baking soda. Nothing like your milk tasting like dead male prostitute.”
I sighed, then closed the freezer door. “Let’s just seal it and take the whole damn thing.” I tapped Zucca on the shoulder. “Merry Christmas.”
After stepping out of that house, the ordered disorderliness found in the streets of Los Angeles was a welcome sight. The weeds, the traffic cones, and the illegal lamppost posters advertising Reggae Fest seemed quaint, old-fashioned, and honest, especially compared with a closed home filled with poisoned cobbler, severed hands, and tubs of human meat.
So.
Eugene Washington was a cannibal.
When I said that aloud, the person on the other end of the phone line didn’t speak.
“L.T.,” I said, “you there?”
Colin chuckled, then dumped Tic Tacs into his mouth.
“Yeah,” our boss said. “I’m . . . What the hell else are you gonna find in that house?”
A body, maybe?
23
NO THURSDAY NIGHT KRAV MAGA.
“You were doing so well coming in,” my trainer, Avarim, told me.
But as Marie Curie said, progress is neither swift nor easy.
Zucca’s crew rigged up bright lights in the front and backyards. And like moths to flames, one reporter and cameraman and then another reporter and news van found us digging through junk just in time for the six o’clock news. The blonde reporter from KTLA5 was interviewing Nina and Judith. I’d already thrown a bunch of “no comment” to whomever asked. I’d let the public information officer do her job and talk to the media. I had other crap to do.
Neighbors stood on their front porches and driveways. All the noise from the newcomers had scared the cats, and they escaped deep into their Igloos and Magnavox boxes.
“You ain’t heard one word I’ve said,” Lena complained. Then, she pushed a bunch of numbers on the phone’s keypad.
“That’s because I’m working, and I’m only taking a break now—”
She pushed the keypad again to show her displeasure.
I snapped a selfie of me dressed in a bunny suit and sent it to her. “Does this look like I’m cavorting about? Do I look like I’m having the time of my life?”
“You look like a Hefty bag,” she said.
“Thanks, pal. I have two minutes. Answer the question: are you gonna have Chauncey’s baby or what?”
“Qui sait. You texting Dominic back or what?”
“After the day I’m having, I may just call him. See if he Photoshopped all his goods, then make him slather Icy Hot all over my naked, broken-up body.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Worse. Way worse. Right now, I’m standing near a window of a room piled high with cat skeletons, old Sunset magazines, and broken souvenir plates from Delaware, Nebraska, and Texas.”
I didn’t tell Lena that, in the kitchen, CSI techs were taping up the refrigerator with intentions of testing whether the foil-wrapped loin in the fridge came from a pig or a man. I didn’t tell her that another tech would have to study the fingerprints of a pair of dismembered hands to find their owner. That I still needed to catch the person who had murdered my cannibal-victim.
