City of Saviors, page 3
Bernice Parrish had just uttered one of the most magical words in a possible homicide investigation: WILLS.
“This required seminar,” I said, “is that where you saw Mr. Washington making his will?”
The proprietor of Who Do Yo Hair grinned like a dwarf who’d just discovered a mine. “Uh huh. He got all kinds of stuff off in there, just sittin’. And most of it officially belongs to me now. He told me so. I just need to find where he put his will at.”
“When was the last time you saw him alive?” I asked.
She sat back down in the squad car. “Our church picnic on Sunday evening, over at Bonner Park.”
Bonner Park. Tiny razors cut up and down my spine. Even though I had no memory of it happening, I knew that I’d been rolled away on a gurney after my last visit there.
“Sister Elliott drove the church van,” Bernice Parrish was saying, “so she picked him up and brought him since Gene don’t drive no more. The picnic was really nice this year. We had a lovely time. Played dominoes, spades—you know how we do. People made potato salad and chicken, ham and lemonade. We ate a little bit of everything. Best thing was, way up in the park, you didn’t feel all scratchy-eyed from the fires over in the mountains.”
Mention the gun? Nope—I’d keep it in my pocket just in case Bernice had used it and hadn’t realized that she’d left it behind.
“You cook for him recently?” I asked.
“You askin’ if I made that cobbler he was eating?”
“Is that what that was?”
She pushed moist strands of hair from her face. “Uh huh. Peach cobbler. But no, I ain’t made that.”
“You said . . . peach?”
“That’s what it look like to me.”
“You know if anyone else who went to the picnic got sick?”
“I ain’t heard nothing about people getting sick.”
“Does he have a food allergy?”
She closed one eye as she thought. “He eat nuts all the time.”
“What about shellfish or mangoes or milk? Wheat, maybe?”
She shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t pay much attention to what Gene eat and don’t eat.” She jiggled her knee, then glanced past me to look at the house again. “How did he die?”
“We’re not sure,” I said. “Could’ve been the heat. Where did he get the peach cobbler?”
She shrugged. “Gene freezes a lot of stuff. That cobbler coulda been made back at Easter. I coulda made it. Sister Green coulda made it. Don’t look like my dish, though, with them blue flowers.”
“You touch that dish?”
“No.”
“I’ll still need your fingerprints.” For the dish and the gun.
“My fingerprints are gonna be all over that house.”
“Right. That’s why I need them.” I shrugged and smiled. “So did you hear from him at all yesterday?”
“No,” she said, fanning her face again. “He usually shut himself in on Mondays, especially after being in church and then going to the picnic on Sunday. He get cranky, and so I leave him alone until Tuesdays. He ready to see me on Tuesdays. I give him a trim and a shave, fix him some lunch and dinner for the week, straighten up a bit, do our thang, you know?”
“Did he have health problems?” I asked.
“Gene just had his physical last week for his new insurance policy—he hadn’t been to the doctor in ages.” A far-off look filled the woman’s eyes. “The doctor said he had high blood pressure. That’s about it. He was supposed to get some blood work done but never got around to it. But he ain’t ever complained about feeling bad. He was in high spirits on Sunday, sayin’ that he was about to come into some money, and he wanted to take me to Fiji to celebrate his birthday.” Her wet eyes glimmered with joy, and a smile softened her hard face. “And I kissed him, and I told him, ‘Gene, just tell me when to pack,’ see, cuz I always dreamed of—”
A sob burst from her mouth. She flung her head back and threw her hands in the air. “I can’t believe he’s gone. He’s gone, Lord. That ol’ buzzard . . . He left me. Why he leave me, Lord?”
She flapped her face as she dropped back into the passenger seat of the patrol car. Finally, she took a deep breath and slowly released it.
“You okay?” I asked. “You need a paramedic?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.” She dried her cheeks with the heel of her hands, then said, “So, Officer, when y’all gon’ let me in?”
4
ALIVE ON SUNDAY EVENING. DEAD BY TUESDAY MORNING. NO DECAY. NO MAGGOTS. Peach cobbler and Schlitz malt liquor for a last supper. A fortune-hunter girlfriend.
“So, what?” Bernice Parrish asked me. “Two, three hours before y’all let me in to get what’s mine?” Her voice sounded flat. Her tear ducts were drier than all of California.
Not a good look, especially to murder police.
“Not sure yet when I’ll be able to let you in,” I said. “Stick around a bit, though, just in case. And give me your address and phone number. Someone’s gonna take your fingerprints so that we have them on file. You’ve been inside Mr. Washington’s home—you know what we’re dealing with, what we’re up against.”
She snickered. “Sweetie, you ain’t gotta tell me.” Then she recited her address again, and corrected me twice on the proper pronunciation of ‘Arbor Vitae,’ her street’s name.
“I know you have a key,” I said, “but you cannot go in until I say you can. Understand?”
She sucked her teeth, then nodded. “I got it, Officer.”
I thanked my first person of interest, then trudged back to the front yard.
Cats darted, crept, and skirted around the towers of trash. High in the sky, that white ball of death, now in its ten o’clock position, pounded the city, and the ibuprofen I’d taken in Dr. Popov’s elevator had quit me—every vulnerable nerve burned, from the wound hidden in my hair to the small callus on my left pinky toe. I needed to pop another Advil, but there was no popping-pill privacy. And Tavaris Fitzgerald hunkered beneath the giant magnolia with his eyes pecking at me like a backyard chicken. He’d sound the alarm if I popped a Luden’s.
“Keep an eye on Miss Parrish over there,” I told him. “Make sure that she stays.”
“She’ll be pissed off,” he said.
“Yeah, well, we’re all frustrated.”
“She under arrest, though?”
I squinted at him. “No, she’s not under arrest, but the day’s still young.”
Colin and I reunited to walk the perimeter. As we climbed over stereo speakers and televisions and hopped over bricks and wooden beams, I recounted my conversation with Bernice Parrish.
“Soup pennies?” Colin said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Soup is to bouillon and bullion is to gold. Penny is to coin and—the struggle is real with the heat, all right, so just go with it, damn.”
“Fine. So gold coins—that’s why we’re looking for clues in a junk pile?”
“For that, for his will, and to be sure that no one hid a bottle with a skull and crossbones label on it.”
“Coulda been regular old food poisoning,” he said. “Back in the Springs, when I was twelve, thirteen years old, there was a church picnic and the entire congregation got sick from Sister Perry’s ambrosia salad. For real: puke and shit everywhere. I got sick. My mom got sick. The pastor and his wife got sick. After that, Dad put the kibosh on us eating other people’s food. Fly, fight, win—you can’t do that if you’re crappin’ and hurlin’ everywhere.”
“We didn’t do church much after Tori disappeared,” I said. “We went a few times asking for their help, but we stopped. Mom said that she’d rather be a miserable failure in private. And all those special prayers and laying on hands just got to be embarrassing. Not that any of it worked in the end.” Sadness had lodged in my throat next to the buildup of asbestos and cat hair.
But forensics would make it all better. Maybe.
Lead criminalist Arturo Zucca looked far too relaxed. His black hair touched the tops of his ears; his shoulders sloped and rested in their natural position. The side effects from three weeks of vacationing in Turin. Zucca had witnessed countless strange things around this city, and I had stood beside him on many of these occasions. No shocks. No surprises. But now this veteran of horrors gawked at the mess before him as though Ed Gein, Leona Helmsley, and the Blob were all bathing together in a rusted tub of raw eggs and ground pork.
“Today, you become a man,” Colin announced.
“And if you need help during the journey,” I said, “you’ll probably find a pair of dusty balls somewhere in that pile of rusty nails near the tower of beer cans.”
Eyes wide, Zucca turned to me. “You’re . . . kidding about this. I’m . . . ?”
“Excited?” Colin asked.
“Challenged?” I suggested.
Zucca sighed. “I wanna go back to Italy.”
“Brooks is on his way,” I said. “In the meantime, let me give you a personal tour of the premises.”
Assistant criminalist Krishna Houzanian hadn’t torpedoed a crime scene in six days. But ability now took a day of rest as the blue-eyed bottle blonde half-assed stapled plastic sheets to the beams of Washington’s front porch. “What?” she snapped at me. “I’m setting up a staging area.”
I whipped my head around to glare at Zucca. “Dude. Really?”
“Sorry,” Zucca said to me, red-faced. “Krishna, get a real tent and set it up on the side of the house, along with a covered plastic path leading to the front door. Thank you.”
Krishna rolled her eyes, yanked off the plastic, then smartly got the hell out of my way.
Colin pat my shoulder. “You didn’t Ike Turner her. Guess therapy’s working.”
I grinned. “Today, I choose to embody our core values, partner. Krishna’s trying to force me to disrespect her. Nope. Not this time.”
It took Krishna only ten minutes to set up the staging tent. In the realm of homicide investigations, ten minutes equated ten hours—and a year from now, a defense attorney would make hay of the time span during cross-examinations. And I planned to blame it on her being born a Leo and a general-purpose basic bitch. The judge and jury would certainly understand.
At most crime scenes, homicide detectives didn’t slip into bunny suits. On this occasion, though, because of the miserable conditions inside the Washington house and the rapidly deteriorating state of its owner, I decided that I’d given enough of myself to the job. Bunny suits for everyone!
The staging tent offered enough space for three people but no space for any air or privacy. Quiet and dark, it was still a nicer retreat from the sun.
Colin stepped into a white Tyvek suit. “Bet when you rolled out of your empty twin bed this morning, you didn’t think you’d be doing this today.” He tugged at the zipper. “I need a suit with a bigger crotch.”
“A bigger crotch and a bungee cord to yank you from the pit of your delusions.” I stuck one of my loafers into the suit’s built-in booties, then eased my hands through the armholes.
“So, Sherlock,” Colin said, “how did Miss Bernice kill Eugene Washington?”
“She slipped something into his beer and/or his peach cobbler. Notice how she can’t wait to get off in this piece of crap house?”
Colin handed me a full-face respirator. “Why would a woman date an old man who lives in a filthy house?”
“Hidden treasure has led many women to do the unthinkable. Consider Anna Nicole Smith, Rupert Murdoch’s wives, et cetera. Shall I continue?”
Colin breathed heavily through his respirator, then said, “Luke, I am your father.”
“Low hanging fruit, Taggert. How about this?” I took a deep breath from the respirator, then said, “Shut up! It’s Daddy, you shithead! Where’s my bourbon?”
Colin blinked at me.
“Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet?”
Colin shrugged, shook his head.
“One of David Lynch’s best films?” When he shrugged again, I shouted, “Get off my lawn.”
Zucca stepped into the tent and grabbed a suit from the box. “What did young Mr. Taggert do this time?”
“Claims he’s never heard of David Lynch,” I said.
“Is he, like, some famous actor?” Colin asked.
We stepped out from the tent and walked the plastic corridor to the blue-tarped front porch. A few bug-eyed neighbors backed away from the barrier tape. Tyvek suits meant Ebola, contamination, and danger.
Over near my car, Luke and Pepe were climbing out of a dusty silver Impala. Pepe had recently interviewed for an open position with Internal Affairs, the cops that policed the police. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Okay, I did—I didn’t want him to leave my team and Southwest Division for a bunch of rules-spouting cubicle dwellers down at Parker Center.
“I’m still not sure why I’m here,” Zucca said. “It’s hot, and an old man died in his filthy house. It’s been happening all summer.”
“There’s a gun near him,” Colin said, “and money may be involved.”
“Hence, suspicious death,” I added.
Zucca pointed at Colin. “You said ‘may.’ ”
“And if his death were natural,” I said, “there should never be a ‘may.’ ” I nodded in Bernice Parrish’s direction. “She’s why you’re here.”
The woman now paced behind the yellow tape with the pink cell phone to her ear.
Colin smiled. “Thank her when you get a chance.”
“And if it’s natural,” I said, “and this ends up being a wasted trip for you, I’ll buy everybody an ice-cream sandwich. How’s that?”
“Exciting. This isn’t the best scene,” Zucca warned. “It’s gonna be hard to get good prints with all the dust and cats and dead things everywhere. I spray Luminol, everything’s gonna glow. And I can’t really set up a proper field lab cuz everything’s contaminated.”
I nodded. “There will be little yellow tents everywhere. Understood. Let’s just do our best, all right?”
Minutes later, we congregated at the front door. Everyone on Zucca’s team held fancy equipment: cameras, brushes, light meters, whizzy-wigs, and dumbledores. My crew wielded pens and pads, as though we were working at a simpler crime scene.
“So you thought the Chatman fire was bad,” I told the small team. “But this? We haven’t worked a hoarder scene quite like this.”
“Mr. Maghami,” Pepe said. “Over on Denker.”
“He hoarded dogs,” I pointed out. “Today, we have cats, trash, kitchen sinks, the yeti, and a Bermuda Triangle forming off the back porch. If you think it, it’s there, so please be careful and focus on solving this case. And wear protective everything at all times.”
“What are we looking for?” Luke asked.
“All official-looking legal papers,” I said, “especially a will and insurance papers. Also, look for medications, household poisons . . . I want everything around him—the Smith and Wesson, the goopy stuff, the dish that it’s in, the beer bottle, remote control, all of it. The coroner should be here soon to claim our victim. Once Mr. Washington’s gone, I want anything that had been beneath him, so use your fancy Dustbusters. There may also be valuables scattered throughout the property. Gold coins, jewelry, cash. Take pictures, log it, tag it, and bag it. Be thorough cuz who wants to come back into this house again?”
Luke raised his hand. Some people laughed.
Before disappearing behind the tarp and trekking back into the house, I glanced at Victoria Avenue.
People were taking selfies with the hoarded house behind them. And Bernice, phone still to her face, waved her free arm at someone down the block.
Zucca’s photographers wasted no time capturing on film the inside of the filthy Craftsman. Their cameras clicked and whirred as they murmured, “See that?” “Oh my gosh!” and “What the hell?”
Camera and sketchpad ready, I stepped into a well-lit room with built-in shelves and piles of clothes in bags, clothes out of bags, and clothes hanging on a clothesline that crossed from wall to window. I spotted the edge of a mattress—this was a bedroom. A wicker basket was filled with pens, pill vials, and wires. There were towers of shoe boxes, empty and full suitcases. Golf clubs stuck out of piles like tarnished silver gophers. Cobwebs heavier than lace tablecloths draped from each corner of the room.
Somewhere else in the house, Colin shouted, “Oh shit.”
Pistachio shells cracked beneath my feet. Yeah. Sure. Pistachio shells. I glared at the golf clubs, at the dirt and webs and all of the mess. If you’d taken more time off, perhaps you wouldn’t be here right now. Leave, Elouise. Just leave.
Eugene Washington had issues. A man couldn’t live in this house with a mob of cats and a multitude of roaches without having issues.
I pushed aside a hip-high pile of clothes to open the mirrored closet. Boxes, dresses, men’s suits, a fluff of gray fur . . . A small skull had been crushed beneath a stack of Del Monte crates. A chill zigzagged up my spine and broke apart at my shoulders. My heart dropped to my feet, and I groaned.
After snapping pictures of the closet and that poor flat cat, I lugged each crate to the porch.
Colin stumbled out of the front door, nearly crashing against the blue tarp. “Freakin’ unbelievable. It’s just . . . just . . . It’s like . . .”
“Like your place but in a better zip code.”
“It’s all crushed and re-formed and cat skeletons and dirty underwear and old food with . . . with . . .”
“Cheese and bread, Taggert,” I said. “Take a knee. You’re stressin’ me out.” I pulled a petrified towel off the first crate.
Medals, clean and glistening, sat in the clutter of batteries, business cards, and paper clips. I tugged at a purple ribbon—with it came a heart-shaped fob imprinted with George Washington’s profile. “Is this a Purple Heart?”
“Yeah. Wow.” Colin pulled from the crate a red, gold, and white ribbon. The medallion on the end was star-shaped and stamped with a bald eagle and sword. “My dad’s got this one. A National Defense Service Medal.”
Hot tears stung my eyes and fogged my face mask. I pointed to my left bicep. “He has a Vietnam tat . . .” My words spun in my mind like a gyroscope. A vet dying like this . . . So wrong.
“This required seminar,” I said, “is that where you saw Mr. Washington making his will?”
The proprietor of Who Do Yo Hair grinned like a dwarf who’d just discovered a mine. “Uh huh. He got all kinds of stuff off in there, just sittin’. And most of it officially belongs to me now. He told me so. I just need to find where he put his will at.”
“When was the last time you saw him alive?” I asked.
She sat back down in the squad car. “Our church picnic on Sunday evening, over at Bonner Park.”
Bonner Park. Tiny razors cut up and down my spine. Even though I had no memory of it happening, I knew that I’d been rolled away on a gurney after my last visit there.
“Sister Elliott drove the church van,” Bernice Parrish was saying, “so she picked him up and brought him since Gene don’t drive no more. The picnic was really nice this year. We had a lovely time. Played dominoes, spades—you know how we do. People made potato salad and chicken, ham and lemonade. We ate a little bit of everything. Best thing was, way up in the park, you didn’t feel all scratchy-eyed from the fires over in the mountains.”
Mention the gun? Nope—I’d keep it in my pocket just in case Bernice had used it and hadn’t realized that she’d left it behind.
“You cook for him recently?” I asked.
“You askin’ if I made that cobbler he was eating?”
“Is that what that was?”
She pushed moist strands of hair from her face. “Uh huh. Peach cobbler. But no, I ain’t made that.”
“You said . . . peach?”
“That’s what it look like to me.”
“You know if anyone else who went to the picnic got sick?”
“I ain’t heard nothing about people getting sick.”
“Does he have a food allergy?”
She closed one eye as she thought. “He eat nuts all the time.”
“What about shellfish or mangoes or milk? Wheat, maybe?”
She shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t pay much attention to what Gene eat and don’t eat.” She jiggled her knee, then glanced past me to look at the house again. “How did he die?”
“We’re not sure,” I said. “Could’ve been the heat. Where did he get the peach cobbler?”
She shrugged. “Gene freezes a lot of stuff. That cobbler coulda been made back at Easter. I coulda made it. Sister Green coulda made it. Don’t look like my dish, though, with them blue flowers.”
“You touch that dish?”
“No.”
“I’ll still need your fingerprints.” For the dish and the gun.
“My fingerprints are gonna be all over that house.”
“Right. That’s why I need them.” I shrugged and smiled. “So did you hear from him at all yesterday?”
“No,” she said, fanning her face again. “He usually shut himself in on Mondays, especially after being in church and then going to the picnic on Sunday. He get cranky, and so I leave him alone until Tuesdays. He ready to see me on Tuesdays. I give him a trim and a shave, fix him some lunch and dinner for the week, straighten up a bit, do our thang, you know?”
“Did he have health problems?” I asked.
“Gene just had his physical last week for his new insurance policy—he hadn’t been to the doctor in ages.” A far-off look filled the woman’s eyes. “The doctor said he had high blood pressure. That’s about it. He was supposed to get some blood work done but never got around to it. But he ain’t ever complained about feeling bad. He was in high spirits on Sunday, sayin’ that he was about to come into some money, and he wanted to take me to Fiji to celebrate his birthday.” Her wet eyes glimmered with joy, and a smile softened her hard face. “And I kissed him, and I told him, ‘Gene, just tell me when to pack,’ see, cuz I always dreamed of—”
A sob burst from her mouth. She flung her head back and threw her hands in the air. “I can’t believe he’s gone. He’s gone, Lord. That ol’ buzzard . . . He left me. Why he leave me, Lord?”
She flapped her face as she dropped back into the passenger seat of the patrol car. Finally, she took a deep breath and slowly released it.
“You okay?” I asked. “You need a paramedic?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.” She dried her cheeks with the heel of her hands, then said, “So, Officer, when y’all gon’ let me in?”
4
ALIVE ON SUNDAY EVENING. DEAD BY TUESDAY MORNING. NO DECAY. NO MAGGOTS. Peach cobbler and Schlitz malt liquor for a last supper. A fortune-hunter girlfriend.
“So, what?” Bernice Parrish asked me. “Two, three hours before y’all let me in to get what’s mine?” Her voice sounded flat. Her tear ducts were drier than all of California.
Not a good look, especially to murder police.
“Not sure yet when I’ll be able to let you in,” I said. “Stick around a bit, though, just in case. And give me your address and phone number. Someone’s gonna take your fingerprints so that we have them on file. You’ve been inside Mr. Washington’s home—you know what we’re dealing with, what we’re up against.”
She snickered. “Sweetie, you ain’t gotta tell me.” Then she recited her address again, and corrected me twice on the proper pronunciation of ‘Arbor Vitae,’ her street’s name.
“I know you have a key,” I said, “but you cannot go in until I say you can. Understand?”
She sucked her teeth, then nodded. “I got it, Officer.”
I thanked my first person of interest, then trudged back to the front yard.
Cats darted, crept, and skirted around the towers of trash. High in the sky, that white ball of death, now in its ten o’clock position, pounded the city, and the ibuprofen I’d taken in Dr. Popov’s elevator had quit me—every vulnerable nerve burned, from the wound hidden in my hair to the small callus on my left pinky toe. I needed to pop another Advil, but there was no popping-pill privacy. And Tavaris Fitzgerald hunkered beneath the giant magnolia with his eyes pecking at me like a backyard chicken. He’d sound the alarm if I popped a Luden’s.
“Keep an eye on Miss Parrish over there,” I told him. “Make sure that she stays.”
“She’ll be pissed off,” he said.
“Yeah, well, we’re all frustrated.”
“She under arrest, though?”
I squinted at him. “No, she’s not under arrest, but the day’s still young.”
Colin and I reunited to walk the perimeter. As we climbed over stereo speakers and televisions and hopped over bricks and wooden beams, I recounted my conversation with Bernice Parrish.
“Soup pennies?” Colin said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Soup is to bouillon and bullion is to gold. Penny is to coin and—the struggle is real with the heat, all right, so just go with it, damn.”
“Fine. So gold coins—that’s why we’re looking for clues in a junk pile?”
“For that, for his will, and to be sure that no one hid a bottle with a skull and crossbones label on it.”
“Coulda been regular old food poisoning,” he said. “Back in the Springs, when I was twelve, thirteen years old, there was a church picnic and the entire congregation got sick from Sister Perry’s ambrosia salad. For real: puke and shit everywhere. I got sick. My mom got sick. The pastor and his wife got sick. After that, Dad put the kibosh on us eating other people’s food. Fly, fight, win—you can’t do that if you’re crappin’ and hurlin’ everywhere.”
“We didn’t do church much after Tori disappeared,” I said. “We went a few times asking for their help, but we stopped. Mom said that she’d rather be a miserable failure in private. And all those special prayers and laying on hands just got to be embarrassing. Not that any of it worked in the end.” Sadness had lodged in my throat next to the buildup of asbestos and cat hair.
But forensics would make it all better. Maybe.
Lead criminalist Arturo Zucca looked far too relaxed. His black hair touched the tops of his ears; his shoulders sloped and rested in their natural position. The side effects from three weeks of vacationing in Turin. Zucca had witnessed countless strange things around this city, and I had stood beside him on many of these occasions. No shocks. No surprises. But now this veteran of horrors gawked at the mess before him as though Ed Gein, Leona Helmsley, and the Blob were all bathing together in a rusted tub of raw eggs and ground pork.
“Today, you become a man,” Colin announced.
“And if you need help during the journey,” I said, “you’ll probably find a pair of dusty balls somewhere in that pile of rusty nails near the tower of beer cans.”
Eyes wide, Zucca turned to me. “You’re . . . kidding about this. I’m . . . ?”
“Excited?” Colin asked.
“Challenged?” I suggested.
Zucca sighed. “I wanna go back to Italy.”
“Brooks is on his way,” I said. “In the meantime, let me give you a personal tour of the premises.”
Assistant criminalist Krishna Houzanian hadn’t torpedoed a crime scene in six days. But ability now took a day of rest as the blue-eyed bottle blonde half-assed stapled plastic sheets to the beams of Washington’s front porch. “What?” she snapped at me. “I’m setting up a staging area.”
I whipped my head around to glare at Zucca. “Dude. Really?”
“Sorry,” Zucca said to me, red-faced. “Krishna, get a real tent and set it up on the side of the house, along with a covered plastic path leading to the front door. Thank you.”
Krishna rolled her eyes, yanked off the plastic, then smartly got the hell out of my way.
Colin pat my shoulder. “You didn’t Ike Turner her. Guess therapy’s working.”
I grinned. “Today, I choose to embody our core values, partner. Krishna’s trying to force me to disrespect her. Nope. Not this time.”
It took Krishna only ten minutes to set up the staging tent. In the realm of homicide investigations, ten minutes equated ten hours—and a year from now, a defense attorney would make hay of the time span during cross-examinations. And I planned to blame it on her being born a Leo and a general-purpose basic bitch. The judge and jury would certainly understand.
At most crime scenes, homicide detectives didn’t slip into bunny suits. On this occasion, though, because of the miserable conditions inside the Washington house and the rapidly deteriorating state of its owner, I decided that I’d given enough of myself to the job. Bunny suits for everyone!
The staging tent offered enough space for three people but no space for any air or privacy. Quiet and dark, it was still a nicer retreat from the sun.
Colin stepped into a white Tyvek suit. “Bet when you rolled out of your empty twin bed this morning, you didn’t think you’d be doing this today.” He tugged at the zipper. “I need a suit with a bigger crotch.”
“A bigger crotch and a bungee cord to yank you from the pit of your delusions.” I stuck one of my loafers into the suit’s built-in booties, then eased my hands through the armholes.
“So, Sherlock,” Colin said, “how did Miss Bernice kill Eugene Washington?”
“She slipped something into his beer and/or his peach cobbler. Notice how she can’t wait to get off in this piece of crap house?”
Colin handed me a full-face respirator. “Why would a woman date an old man who lives in a filthy house?”
“Hidden treasure has led many women to do the unthinkable. Consider Anna Nicole Smith, Rupert Murdoch’s wives, et cetera. Shall I continue?”
Colin breathed heavily through his respirator, then said, “Luke, I am your father.”
“Low hanging fruit, Taggert. How about this?” I took a deep breath from the respirator, then said, “Shut up! It’s Daddy, you shithead! Where’s my bourbon?”
Colin blinked at me.
“Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet?”
Colin shrugged, shook his head.
“One of David Lynch’s best films?” When he shrugged again, I shouted, “Get off my lawn.”
Zucca stepped into the tent and grabbed a suit from the box. “What did young Mr. Taggert do this time?”
“Claims he’s never heard of David Lynch,” I said.
“Is he, like, some famous actor?” Colin asked.
We stepped out from the tent and walked the plastic corridor to the blue-tarped front porch. A few bug-eyed neighbors backed away from the barrier tape. Tyvek suits meant Ebola, contamination, and danger.
Over near my car, Luke and Pepe were climbing out of a dusty silver Impala. Pepe had recently interviewed for an open position with Internal Affairs, the cops that policed the police. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Okay, I did—I didn’t want him to leave my team and Southwest Division for a bunch of rules-spouting cubicle dwellers down at Parker Center.
“I’m still not sure why I’m here,” Zucca said. “It’s hot, and an old man died in his filthy house. It’s been happening all summer.”
“There’s a gun near him,” Colin said, “and money may be involved.”
“Hence, suspicious death,” I added.
Zucca pointed at Colin. “You said ‘may.’ ”
“And if his death were natural,” I said, “there should never be a ‘may.’ ” I nodded in Bernice Parrish’s direction. “She’s why you’re here.”
The woman now paced behind the yellow tape with the pink cell phone to her ear.
Colin smiled. “Thank her when you get a chance.”
“And if it’s natural,” I said, “and this ends up being a wasted trip for you, I’ll buy everybody an ice-cream sandwich. How’s that?”
“Exciting. This isn’t the best scene,” Zucca warned. “It’s gonna be hard to get good prints with all the dust and cats and dead things everywhere. I spray Luminol, everything’s gonna glow. And I can’t really set up a proper field lab cuz everything’s contaminated.”
I nodded. “There will be little yellow tents everywhere. Understood. Let’s just do our best, all right?”
Minutes later, we congregated at the front door. Everyone on Zucca’s team held fancy equipment: cameras, brushes, light meters, whizzy-wigs, and dumbledores. My crew wielded pens and pads, as though we were working at a simpler crime scene.
“So you thought the Chatman fire was bad,” I told the small team. “But this? We haven’t worked a hoarder scene quite like this.”
“Mr. Maghami,” Pepe said. “Over on Denker.”
“He hoarded dogs,” I pointed out. “Today, we have cats, trash, kitchen sinks, the yeti, and a Bermuda Triangle forming off the back porch. If you think it, it’s there, so please be careful and focus on solving this case. And wear protective everything at all times.”
“What are we looking for?” Luke asked.
“All official-looking legal papers,” I said, “especially a will and insurance papers. Also, look for medications, household poisons . . . I want everything around him—the Smith and Wesson, the goopy stuff, the dish that it’s in, the beer bottle, remote control, all of it. The coroner should be here soon to claim our victim. Once Mr. Washington’s gone, I want anything that had been beneath him, so use your fancy Dustbusters. There may also be valuables scattered throughout the property. Gold coins, jewelry, cash. Take pictures, log it, tag it, and bag it. Be thorough cuz who wants to come back into this house again?”
Luke raised his hand. Some people laughed.
Before disappearing behind the tarp and trekking back into the house, I glanced at Victoria Avenue.
People were taking selfies with the hoarded house behind them. And Bernice, phone still to her face, waved her free arm at someone down the block.
Zucca’s photographers wasted no time capturing on film the inside of the filthy Craftsman. Their cameras clicked and whirred as they murmured, “See that?” “Oh my gosh!” and “What the hell?”
Camera and sketchpad ready, I stepped into a well-lit room with built-in shelves and piles of clothes in bags, clothes out of bags, and clothes hanging on a clothesline that crossed from wall to window. I spotted the edge of a mattress—this was a bedroom. A wicker basket was filled with pens, pill vials, and wires. There were towers of shoe boxes, empty and full suitcases. Golf clubs stuck out of piles like tarnished silver gophers. Cobwebs heavier than lace tablecloths draped from each corner of the room.
Somewhere else in the house, Colin shouted, “Oh shit.”
Pistachio shells cracked beneath my feet. Yeah. Sure. Pistachio shells. I glared at the golf clubs, at the dirt and webs and all of the mess. If you’d taken more time off, perhaps you wouldn’t be here right now. Leave, Elouise. Just leave.
Eugene Washington had issues. A man couldn’t live in this house with a mob of cats and a multitude of roaches without having issues.
I pushed aside a hip-high pile of clothes to open the mirrored closet. Boxes, dresses, men’s suits, a fluff of gray fur . . . A small skull had been crushed beneath a stack of Del Monte crates. A chill zigzagged up my spine and broke apart at my shoulders. My heart dropped to my feet, and I groaned.
After snapping pictures of the closet and that poor flat cat, I lugged each crate to the porch.
Colin stumbled out of the front door, nearly crashing against the blue tarp. “Freakin’ unbelievable. It’s just . . . just . . . It’s like . . .”
“Like your place but in a better zip code.”
“It’s all crushed and re-formed and cat skeletons and dirty underwear and old food with . . . with . . .”
“Cheese and bread, Taggert,” I said. “Take a knee. You’re stressin’ me out.” I pulled a petrified towel off the first crate.
Medals, clean and glistening, sat in the clutter of batteries, business cards, and paper clips. I tugged at a purple ribbon—with it came a heart-shaped fob imprinted with George Washington’s profile. “Is this a Purple Heart?”
“Yeah. Wow.” Colin pulled from the crate a red, gold, and white ribbon. The medallion on the end was star-shaped and stamped with a bald eagle and sword. “My dad’s got this one. A National Defense Service Medal.”
Hot tears stung my eyes and fogged my face mask. I pointed to my left bicep. “He has a Vietnam tat . . .” My words spun in my mind like a gyroscope. A vet dying like this . . . So wrong.
