Puppets

by Daniel Hecht

  They went through the back door and stood a few yards away from the house, looking around. The yards were fully greened up already, and a little apple tree next door was shedding pink blossoms in a slight breeze. Flannery was several inches taller than Mo, a big guy in his mid-fifties who had learned to cover his sadistic side with a glad-handing, smiling, bearish charm that he exploited well. His premature baldness didn't hide his muscular body, another personal characteristic he'd learned to use to his advantage—sometimes he liked to talk to the press while working out on the treadmill he kept in his office, good for the image of prosecutorial vigor. Or maybe he wasn't actually bald, Mo thought, just shaved to look like Jesse Ventura or somebody. Now he crossed his arms and stood staring down at Mo with a speculative look.

  "Detective Morgan Ford. You really catch the goodies, don't you."

  "Seems that way," Mo agreed.

  Flannery looked around the neighborhood in an appreciative way."Frank Marsden—I really admire that guy. In fact, I'd call him a good friend." He paused, but when Mo just waited for the bullshit to continue, he frowned. "I bring it up because Marsden's word on your behalf is what's allowing you to keep your badge for the moment. Your stunt in the parking garage may go down okay with some people, but you should know my office will conduct a thorough investigation. This being the second time for you. I won't have it said I condone or turn a blind eye to bad police procedure in Westchester County."

  "Go ahead. Please. Tell Marsden to take me off." Mo pointed his thumb at the house. "You saw what was in there. You really think I want any piece of it?"

  Flannery'seyes narrowed, and he smiled slightly. He put his arm around Mo's shoulder and steered him down the sidewalk that bisected the backyard. Two guys having a friendly, confidential chat. This was Flannery's idea of political suavity. Mo hated the controlling pressure of the big arm but avoided showing it.

  "Take you off?When you're perfect for the job?" Flannery said. "You kidding? Let's be frank, Detective, I think you deserve to know where things stand. A, you're good, my good friend Senior Investigator Marsden says you're the best he's got. B, you're the perfect fall guy if anything fucks up—we can all blame the rash, impetuous cop who is already under scrutiny for his past sins. You're my cover! Best of all, C—" Flannery coughed self-depreciatingly. "Well. Those are reasons enough, aren't they?"

  "C," Mo said for him,"with the Big Willie thing, you have something you can jerk me around with whenever you like. I'll do things the way your office wants." He was grudgingly impressed: Flannery had been here for only ten minutes and already he'd seen all these angles.

  "You are smart!" Flannery clapped him on the back. "But that's a little blunt. I'd put it, oh, I'd say that it's always good for an investigation when the various police agencies keep the interests of the district attorney's office in mind. We're the ones who'll prosecute this in the end. We're the ones who need to look forward to the overarching legal strategy we need to put this guy away. Right?"

  The Westchester DA's office maintained a powerful investigative and prosecutorial staff, but was always complaining of being shorthanded on the investigative side. Flannery holding Big Willie over Mo, pulling his strings, would be almost like getting another employee without having to pay his salary. Better, because Mo would co-opt some State Police resources, and Flannery would have a scapegoat outside his own shop. And if they caught the copycat, he could use Mo to make sure the credit flowed to the DA's office and to himself personally.

  "Pdght," Mo said.

  Flannery walloped him on the back as they turned and strolled back toward the house.

  "There we go. It's nice to think we're on the same page here!" When he saw Mo wasn't sharing his enthusiasm, he said, "Hey, don't take it so hard. Think of this as part of your political education. You'd do the same thing in my shoes. Wouldn't you?Honestly, now—wouldn't you?" Flannery saw it as a rhetorical question. His big grin was completely sincere.

  5

  ST. PIERRE HELPED WITH the first neighborhood canvass, then got a ride back to the barracks with one of the uniforms. Mo got out of there at eighto'clock, after sundown, one of the last to leave. The neighborhood's nine-to-fivers were home again, the cars were back at the curbs and in the driveways, it was a beautiful Friday night in mid-May and the air was sweet with the smell of tree blossoms. But the lawns and sidewalks were deserted. Lights were burning in all the houses, but the curtains were drawn and Mo knew the doors were locked. The streetlights had come on and insects spun in the cones of light, the occasional bat zapping through to feed. Something about the mild humidity, the cooling air, reminded Mo of when he was a kid, the evenings after school as summer approached, the excitement of just being loose in the streets, gliding on your bike through the spring air. He wondered how long it would be before the kids here would feel good about being outside again.

  For an instant he thought yearningly about going home, back to the house and the unlikely but possible comforts of Carla's arms, maybe even the cleansing heat and abandon of making love to her, they'd slipped a couple of times since agreeing to sleep apart. And then his body remembered the awful embrace of O'Connor's corpse as the last strand was cut and its weight fell onto him as he and Angelo wrestled the rubbery, clutching thing onto the gurney. Maybe he'd need to get a little distance on that before holding Carla, or anybody, again.

  He lifted the crime-scene tape, got into his car, started the drive back toward the barracks, thinking,Maybe this really isn't the job for me.

  When he'd first moved up to investigator at Major Crimes, despite knowing several MCU cops and having seen some bad stuff, he hadn't been ready for what it did to you. The stresses and strains, the opposing forces. The movies had it wrong, it wasn't about car chases and shoot-outs and sexy encounters. Ninety-five percent of the job was sheer tedium—depositions, triplicate paperwork, reviewing regulations, debriefings, reading files, hassling with schedules, go-nowhere interviews, conferences, waiting on bottlenecks at the lab or some other department. The other five percent? Sheer horror. Going into somebody's kitchen and slipping on half-coagulated blood, the smell that doesn't come off your clothes, the contorted face you can't forget. Poking around in some guts or brains or jism or vomit or shit. All the Major Crimes people knew about it: the female victim who looked kind of like your wife, the boy who looked like your own kid, the way you could never, look at your own family or friends again the same way.

  And the only break from this was the remaining one tenth of one percent of the job, which was the dubious pleasure of chasing down and having it out with a killer.

  All this for forty-five K a year.

  So why do it?

  Mo had pondered that a lot lately. Most of the other Major Crimes types he knew were motivated by a sincere desire to serve, a lot like armed services people, which many of them had been. They wanted to combat evil, maybe they had religious beliefs that kept them going and more or less in one piece. Few of them would admit it outright, because it didn't seem hip or flashy enough. But despite the popular image, these were not hip or flashy people. Most were thoughtful, worried people who had originally, at least, felt the pain of victims and survivors acutely and had sworn something like a private blood oath to avenge their suffering. Even the hotshots who were in it for guns and glamour—they usually adopted the jaded pose because it was easier than admitting that what they saw and did got to them.

  Even Valsangiacomo, a real cowboy. Once Mo had run into him down at The Edge. He'd joined him at the bar and watched him toss back shots of Jack Daniel's for a while, then asked him what was with the rapid intake of whiskey. Valsangiacomo, six-one and a bodybuilder, let his shoulders slump. "This morning, Helena and I, we're about to make love, but the baby comes in the bedroom. So we knock off and take a rain check for tonight, right?" Helena was a gorgeous, dark-haired, full-breasted woman Valsangiacomo had met while visiting relatives back in Napoli, had courted madly and brought back to the U.S. Mo could easily imagine how much you'd
look forward to that rain check. "So then today Estey and I get called to a scene upin Bedford. Woman, naked on the bedroom floor, great body, I'm thinking, What a waste. She's been cut all over, bled out, circumstances indicate rape, too, so we have to check for semen. We're exploring her orifices, natural and man-made, with Popsicle sticks and swabs and flashlights. Kneeling in the blood? And now Helena, she's at home, expecting me back, got all kinds of great plans. And I know I'm not gonna be able to do anything tonight, but I don't want to tell her why? Trying not to bring the stuff home, but what're you supposed to say?"

  There wasn't really an answer for this problem, so you stopped off at The Edge and poured them down.

  Some people were constituted to take it better than others. They shook off the images of the day. They took each case as it came and didn't think in terms of combating all the world's evils. Carla had been on Mo for years to see it like that, but maybe if you had certain kinds of sensitivities, or the habit of looking for the big picture, you couldn't see all the crimes and hurts except in some kind of cumulative way. And the burden had been adding up, Mo felt as if every day on the job eroded his sense of human worth and goodness a little further. How far could you let that go before you bought a big bottle of Thunder bird and lay down in the gutter and gave up on it all?

  But what would he do instead? He could get books and read about the color of his parachute or how to define his midlife crisis or whatever it was when you changed careers later in life. He could pay an arm and a leg to some career counselor to give him skills and affinities tests and tell him that he should have been a brain surgeon or a park service ranger or something. More likely, take a big pay cut and start a career microwaving frozen beef patties at a burger place.

  Mo braked the car in the left lane as he waited for a trio of bicyclists to pedal past the entrance to the barracks parking lot. Thinking about all this had made him irritable and sad, and he waited impatiently for the bikers to slide past, peddling with tiny red lights flickering madly on their bike frames. There were two men and a woman, sleek as plastic greyhounds in skintight spandex in black with rainbow neon stripes, walnut-shaped helmets with tiny spiffy rearview mirrors clipped to their temples, special gloves and shoes. The three of them all seemed to have the same build, slim and long-limbed with standout sinews, as if they were a distinct species, bionic aliens from some streamlined planet. What's this, the fucking Tour de France? Mo groused. Can't even go for a bike ride without three grand worth of clothesand equipment. Something the matter with a T-shirt and shorts? He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen an adult bicyclist wearing anything but high-tech,Euro-styled outfits, and suddenly the whole trend seemed symbolic of the decline of Western civilization, the universal collapse of values.

  Then the last of them cleared the entrance, and he pulled into the lot. He found his space and shut off the car and spent a moment looking up at the bright windows of the barracks building, fifty feet away. People were moving inside, silhouettes in the windows, somebody showing papers to somebody else, talking about it, moving on. Cops came and went under the lighted portico at the entrance, purposeful and competent-looking.

  Looking out at it, he suddenly understood Marsden's inexplicable intimacy, what was really troubling him. Marsden was mother-henning, he really loved his squad and was worried about how it would hold up if he wasn't there to oversee it. Marsden didn't always get along with his wife, and he'd never had any children. But everybody had some nesting instinct, and for Marsden the shop had become his home, Mo and Valsangiacomo and the others were his kids. It was kind of touching. Marsden had been there so long he saw this as something precious and worth working for. For a moment Mo glimpsed the place as Marsden must have seen it. Something about the senpe of quiet industry here, even this late at night. Confidence and camaraderie. Professionalism, teamwork. A little citadel of comparative order, a bulwark against the world's craziness.

  For no reason a tall, Mo suddenly felt better, the problem of why more distant. A Howdy Doody copycat, he thought, maybe it could be interesting.He got out of the car and headed toward the brightly lit building, beginning to like the idea of looking into the files and getting a handle on this thing. Anyway, he was in no shape to deal with Carla right now.

  6

  MONDAY MORNING AFTER ONE of the worst weekends in recent memory. Feeling driven from the house and the problems of domestic life, or rather the lack thereof, Mo sought the refuge of preoccupation and got to the shop bright and early. He put in a call to SAC Biedermann at the Manhattan FBI field office, and as he waited for a call back he reviewed the Howdy Doody files he'd pulled off VICAP on Friday night. He'd been at his desk less than an hour when his phone rang and he took a call from someone who introduced himself as Roland Van Voorden, chief of police of the town of Buchanan. Marsden had patched him through.

  "What can I do for you, Chief Van Voorden?" Mo asked.

  "We have a body, a homicide. Some kids found the corpse late yesterday afternoon in the old power station here."

  "Okay . . ." Mo said, putting a question in his voice and wondering why Marsden had sent this one to him.

  Van Voorden answered his thoughts. "Your SI said it might tie in with a case you're working on. That's kind of a pun—whoever did it tied the body up? Like to the wall, with fish line, lots of lines tied to eyelets in the wall?"

  Holy shit, Mo thought.O'Connor was killed just three days ago, if thisguy's killed another already, he's on areal tear.

  Mo got the location from Van Voorden, instructed him on securing the crime scene, made calls for technical assistance. Then he signed out and drove to Buchanan, twenty miles northwest of White Plains on the banks of the Hudson Paver.

  He took 287 west, then cut north on Sprain Brook Parkway. The motions of driving were soothing, permitting some good thinking. The proverbial clarity that comes from the open road, he thought. But then, turning onto 9A, he came up behind a big beige Land Rover that he couldn't pass or see around or over, and he lost that fantasy quick. The roads were choked with traffic.

  Still. Friday night he'd called Angelo, who had just finished packing O'Connor's twisted corpse away for the weekend. Angelo had anticipated his request for an expedited autopsy but told him there was no way, even bumping back a couple of other customers, that he could get to it before Tuesday. Then Mo had gotten the FBI's Manhattan field office on the phone, where the twenty-four-hour operator told him there was no way to reach Biedermann before Monday. He'd downloaded some files on Howdy Doody from the FBI VICAP site and had a good read for a few hours until his eyes began to water and he went home to the big house and Carla. It was almost midnight.

  She was on the couch, reading by the light of the goosenecked lamp, the only light burning in the whole echoing place. She had put on music, a big Mahler symphony that seemed incongruous played that quiet. When he walked in he was glad to see her still up, looking lovely and shadowed in her exotic pajamas.

  He said, "Hi," she said,"Hi," and she put down her book. He started toward her to give her a kiss, then thought better of it. His clothes might have a smell on them from bear-hugging O'Connor's corpse, and anyway she didn't look as if she wanted a kiss. Instead he went into the kitchen for something to eat.

  "I made some soup, just heat itup," she called in.

  That sounded good. Without turning on the kitchen light, he washed his hands, then lit the gas beneath the pot and took a bowl from the cabinet. He got a beer from the refrigerator, popped it, went out to the living room. He stripped off his jacket and shirt, down to the T-shirt, so he could feel better about being near her. "How's it going?" he said. She said, "Fine." The kind of openings people fell back on when they felt the pressure of more important things to say but couldn't get there yet. "Don't ask me about my day," he said, a code they'd worked out for saying it had been gruesome. Of course, what'd it leave to talk about?

  The symphony went into a brooding minor-key movement, and Carla looked unbearably lovely as she told him she
would be moving out. She'd get a place with her friend Stephanie in Mount Vernon, which might be better anyway because it was closer to her client base. There was no hurry for Mo to find another place, Mom liked him, probably if he did ever get around to the painting and stuff, he could stay on here as long as he liked.

  She had obviously planned what she was going to say because it came out smoothly, well-reasoned, logical. In fact, it was surprising how many of the details she had worked out, how far it had gone in her mind while he'd still been thinking the relationship was worth trying to salvage. He said that to her, sitting on the coffee table dangling the beer can between his knees, and she reached over to put a warm hand on his cheek and said,"I think we both would like a relationship that's not about'salvaging' something." And the way she said it hurt him, as if it were about rescuing junk and recycling it maybe. But she was also right, that was almost as bad, he'd suddenly seen himself as hanging on to a relationship rather thanthis relationship. Suddenly he saw that in the three years they'd spent together it had never really felt right, despite some real tenderness and some good sex, there'd always been that disconnect, that sense of coming from behind. Of, yes, salvaging something.

  The soup had burned. They'd slept apart, again, and he'd spent the weekend helping her organize her things for the move.

  The traffic clotted up again near Briarcliff Manor, and he came out of his thoughts to barely avoid slamming into the rear end of another damned Land Rover. In fact, there was an identical one behind him, a Toyota version, and when he looked down the road, it seemed that every vehicle was some kind of heavy-duty safari truck, with massive, knobby tires and tube-steel grilles and huge luggage racks rearing on the high, square roofs. Big gunboats built for the deep outback, for driving on the thorny, hard soil of African savannas, with plate-steel running boards and spare tires bolted to the back gates. Massive as military vehicles, and getting ten miles per gallon, and all of them driven over the smooth roads of Westchester by anorexic housewives on their way to their manicurists, aerobics classes, orthodontists. What's happening to us?he thought with alarm. For a minute he fumed at the vagaries of fashion, mankind's lemming instincts, then decided the hell with it. He put his flasher on the dashboard, lit it up, and carved a path for himself through the intersection.