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The Disappearing Body

Page 21

by David Grand


  Freddy turned and found Reynolds smiling at him probingly. The big cop slowly eased himself back over onto his side of the car and slipped a cigarette into his smug grin. Freddy looked Reynolds over some with a touch of malice in the bent corners of his eyes, then turned back to his window. With the tone set for their trip downtown, Reynolds kept his mouth shut for the rest of the ride and just blew smoke. The three men drove in silence as the City’s buildings and neighborhoods on either side of them increased and decreased in scale. The mass of congested architecture gave the flat topography of the island the texture of a manmade mountain pass, cut straight through with sheer brawn and determination equivalent to blasts of dynamite.

  When they reached the horseshoe of white granite buildings that made up the City Civic Center, Shaw parked the car in front of police headquarters. They all got out, stepped into the accumulating snow, and walked down a flight of stairs leading to the basement, to the City Morgue.

  “When you say you found her,” Freddy said nervously, “where did you find her?”

  “Down in the boiler room of the Beekman,” Reynolds said.

  “In the boiler room?”

  Reynolds opened the door to the morgue and immediately the sweet smell of formaldehyde filled all their lungs.

  “Who did you identify her as?”

  “Janice Gould . . . Name still doesn’t ring a bell?”

  “No,” Freddy said, sticking to his story, feeling his story about to shatter into pieces. “No, it doesn’t.”

  “She was a hatcheck girl up at the Triple Mark. Very pretty. Like you said, ‘Thin neck, slim waist.’ ” Reynolds continued to smile as though someone were pinching his cheek.

  “We’re still trying to contact next of kin,” Shaw said.

  They walked down a long hallway, where men in white lab coats crisscrossed back and forth from one frosted-glass doorway to another. “She was nicely folded up in that powder-blue robe you described to us yesterday,” Reynolds continued, “and stuffed into the coal bin by the furnace. Hog-tied. Not exactly the nicest place to be put to rest, is it?”

  “It’s horrible,” Freddy said, thinking of Janice’s delicate, pliant features covered in coal dust.

  “Ain’t it though?” Reynolds said.

  The thought of someone disgracing such a beautiful girl that way, the thought of Reynolds talking about her like she was a broken piece of luggage, tightened Freddy’s chest and filled his throat full of hot air. He felt like a radiator about to burst open.

  “It just so happens that the coal man made his delivery last night. Funny enough, it wasn’t the first time he found a body in a coal bin. Seems that it’s a popular place to dispose of bodies, in a coal bin. Kind of funny, don’t you think so, Mr. Stillman?”

  “No,” Freddy barked as though the release valve in his throat had been opened all the way up. “And it ain’t a funny thing to make light of.”

  “Is that so?” Reynolds started to laugh.

  Freddy had become truly incensed. He stopped walking and turned to Reynolds. “What’s so funny?”

  “There’s just something about you, something funny. I don’t know exactly how to say it, Mr. Stillman, but you’re a stitch and a half.” Reynolds wasn’t making light now. He looked serious and angry himself. His large body became erect and his broad chest threateningly stuck out of his coat.

  But Freddy didn’t avert his eyes from Reynolds’s face.

  “Enough of that,” Shaw said. “Let’s go, Mr. Stillman.”

  “Keep moving, you worm,” Reynolds said under his breath.

  Freddy turned away from Reynolds and continued walking, feeling those words sink into him through the unsettling silence of the morgue’s white-tiled walls. Freddy imagined himself in jail, locked away, feeling as miserable as he had been, and he couldn’t stand the thought of it, not for a second. When they reached the middle of the hall, they turned a corner, at which point Shaw told Freddy to stay put. The two cops walked over to a door labeled Medical Examiner’s Office and stood in the doorway talking to someone Freddy couldn’t see. They occasionally shot glances over their shoulders at Freddy, either checking on him or making reference to him. Freddy couldn’t tell which, but it made him even more nervous.

  Freddy remained where he was, standing next to the doorway of a small lecture hall. The room was full of unusually still, quiet students, all of whom sat with a tangible sense of anticipation in their eyes as they looked in Freddy’s direction. Directly across the way was a long narrow dissection lab in which eight bodies were laid out on metal slabs, their heads wrapped in cheesecloth. Three men in lab coats sat on stools at various sections of the bodies, and with an assortment of sharp instruments cut, plucked, and scraped away their skin as they intermittently sipped on coffee and ate cinnamon buns. Freddy could vaguely hear them joking about one of the dead men, in particular, who had played professional ball and had had a horrendous slump over the past few years. “If you ask me, we’re better off he’s here with us,” one of the men said, the one working on his body. He reached between the ballplayer’s legs, took hold of the scrotum with his bare hand, and lifted it up for the others to see. “I’ve been wanting to do this for I can’t tell you how long,” the man said, laughing. The other men laughed along. They sipped their coffee and bit into their buns and laughed some more.

  A man wearing a lab coat and red bow tie wheeled one of the bodies in the dissection room past Freddy and into the lecture hall. The cadaver was a tall lean woman with particularly wide hips. It had already had its skin and fascia removed and was ready for its final cuts. With its braided musculature exposed, the specimen looked like a large floppy rubber toy, which the students immediately started sketching when it was rolled into the room. Freddy couldn’t take his eyes off the corpse. He’d seen bodies blown apart, bones shattered, skulls split open, dismembered feet still in their boots, but he’d never seen a body so meticulously preserved and cared for, never one made to look so benign and anonymous and inhuman.

  Just as the professor started his presentation, Shaw and Reynolds returned from the Medical Examiner’s Office followed by a short, bald man with a beard.

  “This way,” Shaw said.

  Freddy hesitated as he waited to see what the professor would do with the cadaver.

  “Let’s go,” Shaw said. Freddy followed them. They walked back around to the main hall, and as the lab man continued on down the hall, Freddy and the officers entered a small dark room with a large plate-glass window looking into an examination room. The exam room was empty and was lit by a single bulb screwed into a socket by the door. “We just want to be sure this was the woman you saw yesterday,” Shaw said.

  “Is this necessary?” Freddy asked.

  “Yeah, it’s necessary,” Reynolds said bluntly. Reynolds’s eyes had not stopped squinting since their last exchange.

  A few uncomfortable moments passed and then the man with whom they had just walked down the hall wheeled a gurney into the examination room. On the gurney was a body—toes, breasts, nose, head contoured by a white sheet. The man set the gurney in the center of the room and turned on a pair of overhead lamps. The lamps shined onto the white sheet, which cast the stark light onto the faces of the three men in the observation room. As the man pinched the edge of the sheet with his fingers, Freddy suddenly felt both aroused and sickened. He could feel his palms dampen as the man slowly pulled the sheet off the woman’s head. He pulled it down so it revealed Janice Gould’s face and her neck and the upper part of her chest. Her thick auburn hair, which Freddy had so many times wrapped around his knuckles, was carefully tucked underneath her head, under the nape of her neck. Her chin, which angled up toward the ceiling, was tilted in the direction of Freddy and the officers. Even in the bright light, there was a blue tint to her skin, and even with the discoloration, Freddy could see the very distinct marks on her neck from the murderer’s hands.

  “Is that her?” Reynolds asked.

  Freddy took a second to
answer him. He was transfixed by Janice’s face, by how even in her death, she was so radiant, she seemed so alive. The image he had kept in his mind, the fantasy that he had only imagined the day before, suddenly recurred in his thoughts, and he couldn’t get over the fact that what he reported to Shaw and Reynolds was now real.

  “Yeah, that’s her,” he said, trying to maintain his composure.

  Shaw leaned over to a small hole in the glass. “Thank you. That’ll be it.”

  The man slowly pulled the sheet back over the woman’s face and then rolled her out of the room. Then Shaw turned on a light in the observation room. “Have a seat, Mr. Stillman,” Shaw said to Freddy. There was a small table and two chairs. Freddy sat on the edge of the chair’s wooden seat, Shaw sat back in the other. Reynolds stayed on his feet, hovering over Freddy’s shoulder. “Now, Mr. Stillman,” Shaw continued, “my partner and I have a curious problem.”

  “What’s that?” Freddy asked.

  “Well, yesterday, after we got the call from the Beekman’s super about the body, we went back to Janice Gould’s apartment. When we got there and took a closer look at things, we found this piece of paper brushed under the curtains.” Shaw removed a small piece of paper from a pocket in his shirt and placed it on the table. It was torn in half and read:

  319 West

  Triple Ma

  Midn

  Freddy wasn’t sure what to say, so he just looked at the paper and then pushed it back at Shaw.

  “It’s not exactly much to go on, I realize,” Shaw said, “but . . . Mr. Stillman, can you tell me your home address, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Three-nineteen West Eighty-third Street,” Freddy said.

  “You see how that’s a little interesting to us?”

  Freddy’s composure cracked. “Are you implying that I had something to do with this?”

  “Maybe so, Mr. Stillman,” Shaw continued. “There are lots of buildings with a three-nineteen West address in this city. Maybe she knew someone at such an address. Maybe that piece of paper had been sitting there from before she moved in. There are a good number of possibilities how such a coincidence can come about. But you gotta understand—in our line of work, it’s rare to have those kinds of coincidences. Usually, these things are what they appear to be.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Freddy said. He didn’t know what to tell him. He didn’t know what to say, so he thought he should continue saying as little as possible.

  “Well, my partner and I, we went up to the Triple Mark last night, just on the outside chance that something might explain the other part of this piece of paper. And at midnight, we were struck by another small funny thing. . . . At midnight, who walks in other than Stu Zawolsky. That name ring a bell, Mr. Stillman?”

  “No, no, it doesn’t.”

  “Stu Zawolsky, he’s a contract killer. Stu Zawolsky came into the Triple Mark alone last night and he sat at the bar drinking vodka, kind of with a look on his face that he was waiting for someone, if you know what I mean. He kept leaning his head over to the door at everyone who’s walking into the joint. You see where I’m going with this?”

  “I see where you’re going with this, yeah. But I don’t see how this Stu Zawolsky being at the Triple Mark tells you too much. The joint ain’t exactly known for its sophisticated clientele.”

  “True, true,” Shaw said. “Only, the two of us stayed up pretty late and kept an eye on him. When we got tired, we called in for a little help. Well, this morning, when we got into work, what did we find?”

  Freddy could feel his eyes widening. He had to fight himself to keep from jumping out of his seat.

  “We found a message saying that first thing in the morning Stu Zawolsky took a ride over to three-nineteen West Eighty-third Street. He stayed for ten minutes and then got back in his car and drove home. Now, Mr. Stillman, let me ask you again: Are you acquainted with Stu Zawolsky?”

  “No, I don’t know Stu Zawolsky.”

  “Then Stu Zawolsky didn’t come visit you this morning at your home?”

  “No, I don’t know anyone by the name of Stu Zawolsky.”

  “Did you have any guests this morning, Mr. Stillman?”

  Freddy shook his head. “No,” he said quietly.

  “Well . . . will you tell me again what happened to your face?”

  “I already told you,” Freddy said, his thoughts drifting back a few minutes to the sight of Janice’s neck. He could feel the hot air rising up in his throat again. “I took a bad fall,” he blew. “Now, you tell me this: Are you two arresting me for being clumsy?” He looked up at Reynolds.

  Reynolds smiled that stupid smile of his. “Not just yet, Stillman. Only because if you’re in the kind of fix that we think you’re in,” Reynolds said knowingly, “we want to see what the outcome’s gonna be.”

  “Well then,” Freddy said, feeling relieved, thinking that if the outcome was as bad as all that, that was fine with him. “I think I should go.”

  Freddy got up from the table and carefully walked past Shaw and Reynolds. He walked out into the hall. The smell of formaldehyde was noxious and his nerves were so tight and twisted that he felt like he was going to be sick. He passed the dissection lab and could see, inside the lecture hall, the professor pulling the woman’s abdomen apart with his hands and reaching inside it. Freddy’s pace quickened. He ran through the hall, past the lab technicians, and out onto the street, where his feet slipped out from under him on the thin sheet of snow on the sidewalk. He fell facedown in it.

  When Freddy’s fat acquaintance Feldman saw Freddy drop to the ground outside the morgue, he nonchalantly stepped from behind a parked patrol car and approached Freddy. He walked quickly, his footsteps in sync with Freddy’s spastic breaths, timing his approach so well that he lifted Freddy off the ground by his collar just as Freddy had finished wiping the snow from his face.

  “Don’t speak,” Feldman said. “Just walk.”

  “What is this?” Freddy said, his voice tight from his coat collar constricting his breath.

  “Like I said, don’t speak.” Feldman jabbed Freddy in the back with something blunt.

  Freddy turned and looked at him.

  “Gun,” Feldman said. “Walk,” Feldman said. “We need to talk,” Feldman said. “Serious,” Feldman said. “Very serious.”

  As Freddy and Feldman walked away from the Civic Center, the winds that had lulled at the start of the storm started to pick up again and the falling snow became more and more like fists of ice. Cars appeared to be moving more sluggishly. Men and women walking into the arctic gales shielded their eyes with their hands.

  “Into the alley,” Feldman said after a short walk to Bowdler Lane in South End. He pushed Freddy from between the shoulder blades and Freddy plunged forward into a narrow alley, under a skyward erection of fire escapes. Chiseled in stone over the alley doorways were “Bromberg Hosiery,” “Knights of Columbus,” “Shineburg’s Kosher Wine,” “Max Fishburg’s Deli.”

  “Through that door,” Feldman said, pointing to Fishburg’s. Freddy walked through a door propped open by a chair and could immediately smell pastrami and corned beef. He walked through a narrow corridor, through the kitchen. He passed a sink full of blood and a chopping block covered in cow tongues, and he entered into a back room, red velvet, with three tables covered with checkered tablecloths. The room was empty of people. One table was set. “Sit down,” Feldman said.

  Freddy didn’t see a gun, but Feldman kept reaching into his pocket to move something around. “What’s this all about?” Freddy asked.

  “I’ll get to that,” Feldman said. “Heshey! Where are you?”

  “How’d you know I’d be at the morgue?”

  Feldman looked at Freddy as if he were stupid. “Your arrogance astounds me, Freddy. But your lack of judgment astounds me even more. . . . Heshey!!!”

  A waiter dressed in an overly starched white shirt and a red velvet jacket turned a corner. He said something to Feldman i
n what sounded to Freddy like German. The waiter jotted down a list of items on his order pad as they spoke, and as they continued to speak the waiter stopped writing for a while, as if he were digressing, and he kept pointing up to a set of photographs on the wall, signed photographs of actors, in costume, mid-scene, onstage, in a play. When the waiter kept pointing with his pad to the pictures, Freddy noticed that the same actor was consistently in each of the pictures, dressed in a different costume, playing a different portly character in each role. The more Freddy studied the pictures, the more he saw that the man in those pictures was the man who he knew as Feldman. Freddy started to stand, to take a closer look at one of the photographs.

  “Did I say to stand up?” Feldman said as he waved the waiter away.

  The waiter walked off, back into the kitchen.

  “That’s you,” Freddy said. He read the signature. Shlomo Feldman, it was signed. “That is you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shlomo Feldman.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re an actor?”

  “It’s sort of a sideline. Something to take my mind off shmucks like yourself.” Feldman grabbed hold of his fat face and ran his hand from his forehead down to his chin, and held on to his jaw.

  Heshey the waiter returned with a bowl of chicken soup and a plate of thick slices of brisket soaked in gravy. He was followed by one of the cooks, who was carrying two bowls, two plates, and a ladle. Feldman ushered them away and started serving himself and Freddy. “Eat,” Feldman said to Freddy. “You need your strength with what I’ve got to tell you.”

  “What happened to Janice?” Freddy asked.

  “We’ll get to that. You just keep your trap busy with the brisket.”

  “It’s a little early for brisket.”

  “Shut up and eat it.”

  “What happened to Janice?” Freddy asked again, not touching the brisket.

  “From what I hear, you set her up for a hit.”

  Suddenly the arrogant and stupid comment made sense to Freddy. “You know I had nothing to do with that.”

 

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