Deep Pink, page 3
part #1 of Magis Series
Police Detectives have a perfectly sensible belief that if you hang out around the scum of the Earth a lot, there’s a good chance you’re one of them.
If you don’t want to find yourself in a lineup of likely suspects, at least in an Detective’s mind, you’ll keep friendly relations, and make sure the Detectives know that your business is – most of the time – at the other end of the spectrum from petty thieves, drug dealers and pimps.
The other part of it is that sometimes you do get leads that help you get business. Say they just booked someone for drug dealing. Chances are this person wasn’t the cleanest in town and that there are other things that can be traced to him or her, and people who were wronged by them.
If nothing else, if they’re of a certain social class, there will be someone looking to divorce them, and perhaps wanting other kinds of evidence to make sure this person doesn’t get custody.
So Mike and I were on friendly terms.
Garbled – through chewing a jelly doughnut – platitudes were exchanged, about how great the jelly doughnuts were, and how Jill’s coffee was so much better than the stuff in the police station.
“I think they make it with battery acid,” Mike said, which wasn’t an original observation. Having tasted it, I’m also going to say it probably wasn’t wrong, but somehow fell short of the truth. They’d made it with battery acid that had been strained through someone’s dirty gym socks.
I empathized, took a swig of my coffee, and after judging enough time and enough friendliness had been expended said, “So, about Schneider.”
“Ah. That. It’s going to hit the tabloids so hard, Leb. It’s not just that it’s a murder. Or that it seems to be a ritual murder. It’s that it is the weirdest ritual murder I’ve ever even heard of.”
He proceeded to tell me the same stuff Rod had told me. About the drawing on the wall, and the weird misspelled warning, but then he made a face. “The weirdest part?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“There were footprints on the floor.” He paused again. “Not human. We haven’t had an expert in yet, but one of our guys used to work at the zoo, and he said he could see lion and bear and wolf, but all in one and all … wrong.”
“Uh huh,” I said. It was probably easy to fake that sort of thing, but what kind of person wore animal-paw shoes to commit a murder?
I mean, sure, I didn’t investigate murders. But that was mostly because most murders had nothing whatsoever to investigate. No, really.
Your average, run of the mill murder usually was someone who got mad and shot, stabbed or hit someone else over the head with a blunt object and the most puzzling thing about it all – possibly, in some cases after why – was why the dumb sonofabitch who’d committed it hadn’t run, but just sat there – or made a sandwich – until the police that nosy neighbors had called came to arrest him.
I’d brushed around the edges of murder once or twice, when looking for a missing person or a runway. The number of times that had turned into finding a corpse in some field, or worse, blanched bones in someone’s car or under some tarps in their yard wasn’t more than the number of times I’d actually found the person alive, well, and – usually – stupid, but it was running close to it.
This one though….
Mike had slowed down on his chewing. I didn’t disturb him, as he seemed to be deep in thought. He took a swig, and put the coffee cup down on the table. “Wanna see him?” he asked. “The stiff?”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure.” And finished my jelly doughnut and took a swig of coffee, before putting it down. “I presume there’s something you want me to see?”
He nodded, but frowned at the same time. Then stood up, scribbled something on his note pad that I knew, from other occasions, was something like “Morgue. Back soon.” And got up.
As normal in our neighborhood – which started German with shades of Scandinavian, changed to Irish, then Italian, and by the time I was born was getting a strong infusion of South American – Mike is an undefinable mix of humanity. His last name is Spanish, his first name is Irish, and judging from his height he had some German in there, even if it was all subsumed in tan skin and black hair so straight it stood up even at two inches of length. But his eyes were green, and his legs way too long. By which I mean I had to run to keep up with him, as we walked through the hallways filled with policemen, secretaries, and other police administration.
If it weren’t for the fact that people stopped him with questions about various cases, I’d have got lost, drowned in the sea of humanity, never to be found again.
That’s one thing movies and books get wrong about the police. They don’t work one case at a time, and a Police Detective doesn’t have days to sit around, mooning over some murdered girl or whatever. In a big city like Cleveland, he’s usually solving twenty crimes at once, and juggling details in his head, like someone juggling chainsaws. Running chainsaws. Under water.
The other thing books and TV series get wrong is the morgue.
Sure, it has big drawers to store the bodies. The bodies sometimes wear toe tags with a name, or at least the place the body was found and the number of the case it pertains to. Sure, there are stainless steel tables.
But it is neither an hygienically cold place, sterile looking and scientific, nor are the coroner and assistants cold, cerebral people.
The morgue itself doesn’t have any décor. It wouldn’t unless you wanted the décor to get covered in aerosolized human fat, from the use of rotary cutting implements and other such over many, many years. But the coroner at the Dinkhelsbuhl precinct was a chubby, jovial man.
He didn’t wear a white coat. Most coroners don’t. They wear scrubs instead, of the sort you see on any nursing assistant, in your local hospital. Those are usually green or blue.
His were black. Because … why not? And in the chest area he had and emblem embroidered with Evil Scientists Union, Local 47 which was probably a made up thing. Probably.
Still, it beat the scrubs his next-in-line assistant wore and which were almost certainly custom made, out of a fabric with big-eyed kittens. Which at the moment were scarier than evil scientists, as far as I was concerned.
They did wear the shower-cap type hair covering, and gloves. And the other assistants looked more normal, though one wore pink scrubs, which in the present circumstances also made me shudder.
The coroner himself, Doctor Diggem – don’t blame me, I didn’t name him – grinned when he saw Mike. It was a type of grin I’d seen before, though not often. It was the sort of delighted grin a kid would give when he’d just found a particularly interesting type of insect.
Mike didn’t actually step back. He just shifted his weight from his front foot to his back one, and his face went to what now? Aloud, in a suspicious voice, like the parent being proffered the self-same interesting insect, he said, “What now, John?”
“Oh, you’re going to like this,” Doc Diggem said.
“Somehow I doubt it,” Mike said.
Doc Diggem nodded to me, then led us to a table in the far corner and pulled the sheet back from Albert Schneider’s face. It didn’t improve anything. His forehead was indeed carved with a pair of ears, and a smiley face. Which didn’t lend any levity to his very pale, waxy-looking skin, or his wide-open, glazed eyes.
Then he pulled the sheet lower, leaving it draped over Albert from the waist down.
Some of it was as I expected, and let me just say that even flabby dead-white skin looked better on the man than pink. But the hole in the middle of his chest didn’t.
“Did someone use a rocket launcher on him?” I asked.
Doc Diggem looked serious. “Oh no. His heart and the area around it were… eaten. But then there’s this.” He made to turn Albert Schneider over, and his assistant with the cat scrubs moved in and helped.
On his back, there were long, parallel marks, like a giant claw – say a lion or bear – had raked his bare back.
I took a deep breath in and held it, and was glad the morgue was so cold. Look, I’m not a sensitive plant. I know that death is rarely pretty, and that anything being investigated as murder was horrible. But something had clawed him, and … eaten his heart.
“So attack by wild beast?” Mike said. He sounded bored. I suspected the ability to sound bored at the most horrifying developments was something taught in the police academy. “People keep them, you know? Against all rules and laws, people keep lions and bears and tigers and–”
“Oh my,” Doctor Diggem said drily. “They sure do. You don’t have to tell me that, since most of those who do, or their visitors, end up on my table. But you only wish this were a wild beast attack.” He pulled the sheet back the whole way, and on Bertie’s butt there were … human bite marks.
I almost jumped back, in surprise, but I could see the unholy gleam in the doctor’s eye, waiting for me to do just that, so of course I wouldn’t.
“Schneider was into some kinky stuff?” Mike said, tentatively.
The doctor shook his head. “Probably not,” he said. “There are no older marks, which there would be, if he made it a part of his sex life. As far as we can tell these marks were made at or about the time of death. But more importantly–” he paused till Mike prompted him. “Yes?”
“As far as we can tell, the bite marks match the dentition of whoever ate his heart and the area around it.”
Now I was going to throw up. I looked at the hole on his chest, which went all the way through. Someone had done that. Someone had ripped human flesh and eaten…. “Did anyone find the parts that were ripped out?” I said.
The doctor looked at me like I was nuts. “No, I said they were eaten,” he said.
I moved around to be right under the air conditioning vent, cold air blowing in my face for a while and concentrated on not throwing up.
When I managed to pay attention, Mike was saying, “–don’t need all the headlines blaring cannibal murderer.”
“Sure,” Doctor Diggem said. “But you know it will get out. I have a dozen assistants, and for all I know one of them is married to a journalist. Or has a secret blog. Expect the press to come calling soon.”
“Oh, I do,” Mike said. “I’ll just have to figure out how to tell them as little as possible.”
We returned to his office in a subdued mood. He fished in the bag for another jelly doughnut, but I was all right, really. I took a couple of sips of my now cold coffee, and dropped back in the chair.
“You see why I told you it was out of your league?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice dry. “Or at least out of my ability to look at and still eat.”
He gave me an amused glance.
“I don’t suppose it could be gangs?” I said. “I mean, is it possible that this is some kind of tactic to put fear in the heart of snitches, or whatever?”
“If Schneider was involved with gangs, we never heard of it, which would be weird,” Mike said. “And besides, I never heard of a raw flesh cannibal cult gang. Some of the Mexican ones do pretty weird things, but not chew all the way through a man’s chest and eat it. I don’t know if you noticed it, but someone chewed through his ribs. That’s like….”
“Steel jaws,” I said.
“Something like that. I just keep thinking this embodies biting someone in the ass and eating one’s heart out.”
“Metaphors?” I said.
He shrugged. “I’m also fairly sure he wasn’t killed by a roving gang of English teachers. Probably.”
“Mrs. Kaufman was pretty tough,” I said, referring to the woman who’d taught us both grammar in high school. “I guess she’s been dead for years, though.”
It only got him a slight smile, followed by the kind of distant look people get when thinking really hard. “Look, this has bad juju written all over it, Leb. If I were you, I think I’d leave it alone.”
I couldn’t, of course. The presence of cat ears and what was written on Albert’s wall made it solidly part of my case, and I didn’t back off from cases, damn it.
“What about whatever’s going on with Emma?” I asked.
“Emma?” he said. His face was completely blank. Now, I know that he went to school with Emma, just like I did. So how could he possibly have forgotten her? “Emma Accorso?”
Mike frowned. “From the neighborhood? Sure. I know Emma. What’s going on with her?”
At least that was a relief. They’ve long since stopped having murder divisions in the police – oh, beg your pardon, peace keeper departments. In a sensible move, probably unheard of for any civic institution, they’d made it a “Serious Crimes” department, because sometimes, of course, kidnapping or blackmailing or something turned into murder, and it was good to have some continuity of investigation.
So one of the many cases Mike was dealing with might have been the kidnapping of Lilly Michal Jones.
I just didn’t want to think Mike – who was pretty solid as a Police Detective – was considering Emma as a real suspect. Because if he were, then there might be something behind the suspicion. And I didn’t want to consider it. I’d just recovered Emma from possible marriage to a dentist, and wasn’t ready to lose her to she was a murderer after all. I mean, I’d probably never date her – I’d have to find the courage to ask her out first – and the way things were, our acquaintance would probably never even be real friendship. But at least for a while, I’d be able to have my image of her restored and the hope that I’d somehow find the courage to ask her out. Because miracles can happen, right?
I realized I could stomach a doughnut again, and grabbed one, so I had something to do, when I said “Lilly Michal Jones’ disappearance.”
“What? What does Emma have to do with that?”
I told him about my morning phone call. Mike looked stunned for a moment, then snarled, “That asshole.”
“Emma?” I said.
“No, not Emma. Joe Scarlatti. I didn’t even realize he was doing that. That’s insane!”
I conjured up an image from high school. He’d been class president, captain of the football team, and all around golden boy. About a foot taller than my 5’7”,”, dark blond, blue eyed, and definitely someone who was made in a factory. A factory that made very tall men. “I thought he was in computers?”
“Sure. He was. But his company crashed and he decided he wanted to do something for the community. At last that’s what he says. He became a Detective, and is bucking hard for promotion. He’s investigating the Jones case, and man … he’s practically kissing the parents’ feet.”
“Huh?”
“The kid’s parents. Harrington-Jones. They’re pieces of work. And in my opinion they should be prime suspects. But apparently they go to the same parties as Scarlatti. Or something. So be refuses to even consider them, even though the house was a mess of contaminated evidence and we’re ninety percent sure the mother got rid of the kid’s clothes and stuffed animals to make it look like she’d come back for them.”
To my blank look, he said, “Two days after she disappeared, most of her clothes disappeared from her closet, and also three stuffed kittens and two teddy bears.”
I blinked. “She could be a runway, you know?” the idea terrified me. A little innocent kid out there on the streets of Cleveland would neither stay innocent nor probably alive for very long.
“Yeah, we know, and we’re making all the enquiries, but this is just weird. Emma often took the kid after school, and until the parents got home. As far as I could tell, she never got paid, either, and the parents didn’t care, except for being glad the kid went there. Saved them paying someone to watch her. But now they keep saying she’s a dangerous spinster, jealous of their lives and their having a family. At first they said she must have helped Lilly run away, then they said she must have kidnapped Lilly. Emma let us look all over her house. Well, not me, but you know, the department. And then the parents said that she must have killed the kid.” He sounded disgusted.
“Yeah,” I said, “and buried her in the backyard.”
“Which is nonsense. It’s a tiny backyard, overlooked by three neighbors. You know, her mom’s house. She would never be so crazy as to think she could get away with burying a kid there.” He rubbed his forehead, as if he had a headache come on. “The worst part of it? Emma is in a pretty bad place, you know, looking after her mom. She doesn’t need this. She’s looked after her mom for ten years, and all of us on the block keep an eye on them, in case something goes wrong.”
“You live on the same block?”
He nodded. “Three doors down.” He looked sheepish. “Okay, so she takes little Mike and Joana after school too, and yeah, she won’t let us pay her, so we do things for her, like mow the lawn, and look after her mom when Emma has to go to the doctor, and stuff. Look, Emma is good people.” He took an almost ferocious bite of a new jelly doughnut. “Yeah, sure, we know she takes those kids in after school as a form of amusement for herself, maybe compensation for the kids she never got to have, the life she never got to live, but she’s still good people, and she helps the kids with homework and all. It’s a good thing she’s doing. Then Lilly disappeared, the parents started raising a stink, and all of a sudden people are afraid to let the kids go there, and she’s down from 8 to our two. And she’s heart broken.”
I finished my coffee. “I’m going to go there,” I said, announcing it like it was some great act of courage. “To stay with her while her backyard is dug up.”
I don’t know what I expected: resistance or a pat on the back.
Instead, I got approval. “Good, someone should.” He paused. “I always thought you two would end up together. I guess it didn’t work out. But I’m glad she can still count on you.”
He got up to shake my hand, though we normally didn’t do that. And I was rewarded for my trouble as I got nearer to shake his hand. You see, Albert Schneider’s file was still on the desk, open, face up. And there were a bunch of notes on the corner, including “Pupper Cuddles” and a name: Brian Lee Gnad.
