The Other Side of the Mirror

by Lex H Jones

  “That’s the one. You know he’s dead, right?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Right. See, I actually knew that you weren’t aware of it yet. That’s why you’re here. You were going to go and kill him tonight, weren’t you? That’s why you’re here praying, like you always do before a hit.”

  “I wasn’t aware that you knew so much of my methods.”

  “I know you always kill them fast, painless. Death with mercy, that’s your thing. You want them dead, but you don’t want them to suffer. I also know that it was White’s wife who hired you, and her own faith might have given her reason to request that you didn’t leave too many wounds on him.”

  “How did Judge White die?”

  “At the moment we’re thinking he was poisoned. Had what looks like a heart attack during a trial. Which might be nothing giving the fact he wasn’t exactly healthy, but he has no history of heart problems so I’m treating is as foul play. Until I’m proven wrong, at least.”

  “And you don’t believe I had anything to do with this?” asked Pope, turning to look Carl right in the eyes.

  “No, I don’t,” Carl replied firmly. “Poisoning isn’t your thing. Too messy, too prolonged.”

  “Then why are you here?” asked Pope, reaching into the inner pocket of his floor-length black coat. As he did so, Carl tensed and prepared himself to reach for his weapon. Pope saw him do this and stopped, opening his coat so that Carl could see the phone he was taking out. As he did so, he remarked; “You can relax. I would never attack you in here.”

  “Can’t ever be too careful,” Carl shrugged “You catching up on some work e-mails?”

  “I’m transferring my fee for White’s murder back to the sender. I won’t be earning it now.”

  “You’re a strange kind of murderer,” Carl said with a weary sigh, shaking his head slightly.

  “I’m not a murderer,” Pope said quietly.

  “Right, you’re an Angel of Death and Mercy or whatever. Except that you’re not. The way I see it, we each become our own monsters, Pope. Kids who get smacked around become violent wife beaters. Kids who get molested turn into paedophiles or rapists. And you? Well, you’ve marked out an entire set of people and decided by your own authority that they deserve to die. Sound familiar?” Carl remarked. “Like I said, we become what we feared.”

  “And what are you going to become, Detective?” Pope asked with narrowed eyes.

  Carl met Pope’s stare but didn’t have an answer to the question. Instead he simply looked around at his surroundings and commented, “You know, this is quite a nice church.”

  “You’re not a religious man, are you?”

  “Can’t say as I am.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’ve never seen anything that would make me believe in a God that could love us the way he’s supposed to.”

  “Do you live your life the way your parents want you to? To the letter?” Asked Pope.

  “No, but what does that have to do with...”

  “And do they come your home all the time to interfere with your life?” Pope continued.

  “No, but then they’re both dead, so...”

  “My point is that God lets us make our own mistakes, so that we might learn from them.”

  “And that’s what you’re doing, huh? Correcting our mistakes?”

  “Some decades ago, it was decided by the law makers that we would allow most evil, sinful men to continue to live, whatever their crime. Since then, the world has become increasingly more horrid and depraved. I would therefore cite the decision as a mistake, wouldn’t you?”

  “I got enough on you to put you away for the rest of your life. You know that, right?” Carl asked.

  “Yes. But I also know that you won’t.”

  “True,” Carl nodded. “Mainly because putting you with the prison population isn’t smart, no matter how much it might help the overcrowding situation.”

  “That’s not the reason you’re going to leave the church without arresting me.”

  “Then what is, smart guy?”

  “Because you know that I’m right, and you’d rather have me out there than not,” Pope said with a soft curve of his lips. “If you wanted to arrest me, you would have done it two years ago when you broke three of my ribs and cut my face open with the butt of your gun. I was down, you had me... and you let me go.”

  “Let’s talk about why I’m here tonight, shall we?” said Carl.

  “As you will.”

  “I know that you don’t associate with the other guns-for-hire, but you know their patterns, how they work. Can you think of anyone that might be hired to poison a guy?”

  “It could just be the wife herself.” Pope suggested.

  “I’ve spoken with her, and I don’t think that it was.”

  “She could be lying to you, Detective. I know that it seems unlikely she would kill him herself after hiring me to do the job for her, but trust me when I say that I have seen such things before. For someone as rich as the Whites, money would be irrelevant. Quite simply she wanted him dead. If she saw an opportunity to achieve this goal herself, say by slipping something into his drink, then she’d take it.”

  “I agree with your logic, and she could certainly afford to lose twenty grand… but I usually know when someone is lying to me. I didn’t get that vibe from her.”

  “Are you ever wrong about such things?”

  “Yeah, but I’m fairly confident this time. She’s letting us do the autopsy, which might just prove her guilt if she did kill him. I called my guy before I came to find you, he’s cutting into the fat shit even now.”

  “When you know which poison was used, contact me on this number,” said Pope, handing Carl a small black card, similar in size to the one that Felicity had given to him. “and I shall endeavour to find out which assassin would use it in their work.”

  “Thanks,” Carl nodded, standing up to take his leave of the church.

  “Before you go, which gun are you carrying now?”

  “You wanna get out the tape-measures or something?” Carl sneered.

  “Your weapon bulks out your jacket more than it used to, so I know you have changed it. You used to carry a revolver, from my recollection of the wooden handle hitting my cheek.”

  “Yeah, I upgraded to a Colt. Bigger clip, have to carry less in my pockets.”

  “Do you still have the revolver?”

  “Yeah, I keep it hidden in my apartment. Why?”

  “I wanted to buy it from you, if you’re interested.”

  “Buy my old gun? Why would you want to do that?”

  “As a souvenir of the only man who has ever gotten close enough to pistol-whip me,” Pope smiled.

  “I’ll think about it,” Carl replied. “Good night, Pope.”

  “Take care, Detective Duggan. God is with you.”

  “Yeah. Sure he is.”

  Chapter Thirteen;

  Homophobic Bastard

  “C arl, where the hell have you been?” Trent yelled down the phone, the spit leaving his mouth with such violence that Carl could almost hear it land against the receiver. “Couldn’t get hold of you at all last night.”

  “Been working the White case, had to go West.”

  “Jesus Christ, Carl, what did you go and do that for?”

  “Chief wants the answers to who killed the fat shit, and we’re not gonna find them on this side of the fence, Trent. No-one on the East side could get close to White and we all know it.”

  “None of the West side blue boys saw you, did they?” Trent sighed.

  “Don’t worry, Trent, you won’t have to explain why some real cops dared to set foot in that crap-hole. Would hate to think the bribes they send you to keep your nose out might get cut back.”

  “I don’t take any bribes, Carl.”

  “Yeah, like spit you don’t,” Carl said under his breath. Out loud he said “Relax, no cops saw me. I got some answers and left as soon as was pra
ctical. Got Glass looking over the corpse right now.”

  “His wife dropped the restraining order?”

  “I persuaded her that it was in her best interests.”

  “You didn’t hit her, did you?”

  “Jesus Christ, Trent, I don’t hit women!” Carl snapped.

  “You hit everyone, Carl, it’s what you do.”

  “I find it hard to believe you’re checking up on me, so I can only assume you want something. What is it?”

  “We got a dead guy that needs a look-over. Killed in his own home, looks like.”

  “So what’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “You left me with all the paperwork from the dead hooker and the pimp you shot in the ‘nads, remember? I ain’t having more piled on my desk, so this one’s yours.”

  “Fine. What and where?”

  “East Side this time. Fifth Street Apartments. There’s some blue boys on scene, they’ll talk you through it.”

  Carl sighed as he replaced his phone in his inside pocket. The shit in the City had swelled in the last few weeks, flowing up and out of the drains with increased frequency. Three deaths in as many weeks, each one random and not even remotely connected to each other, which was actually worse. If there was a serial killer it could still be judged as one thing to be dealt with, but random meant there was no greater reason. No singularity of cause that could be cleaned away. Random meant things were just bad everywhere. A dead girl floats ashore on the banks of the Styx. A fat old judge gets poisoned in the courtroom. And now a guy gets killed in his own apartment. One of the worst ways to go, by any standards. Home should be safe, the last refuge against the world’s evil. Not here, though. Not in the City. Home was just one more place you were likely to find the shit creeping under the doors.

  Stu, the Coffee vendor, had already prepared Carl’s beverage as the Detective walked towards his stall. Carl didn’t stop to talk tonight, though, as he wanted to get to the crime scene. Trent had said that the blue boys were already there, which meant he was on a clock. Cops had a way of messing up crime scenes, whether they’d intentionally been bribed to do it or just because they were goddamn retards. A footprint here, fingerprints, loose hairs messing up the place. Carl could no longer remember the amount of times a case had pointed to a cop who just happened to be at the crime scene. It wouldn’t have surprised Carl if some of them had actually been the guilty party in some cases, but the truth was simply that they’d left their mark over the crime scene and messed up the actual forensics.

  The coffee in Carl’s Styrofoam cup had just about run empty when he reached the Fifth Street Apartment building. There was a homeless man seated on the stairs of the derelict building next door, his hands tucked under his own armpits to stave off the cold. As Carl tossed the coffee cup into an already-overloaded trash can, the homeless man remarked, “You should recycle that, man.”

  Carl contemplated whether or not to tell the homeless man to go fuck himself, but decided against it. The guy clearly had enough to deal with as it was. This wasn’t a city you wanted to be homeless in, West or East. You wouldn’t get any sympathy, even if you were holding a starving baby in your arms. People on the East side had no spare change to give to you, people on the West had it but wouldn’t part with it. Either way, you were getting nothing.

  Sure enough, Carl found two cops loitering in the hallway outside the apartment in which the crime scene could be found. One of them was actually leaning against the door, and Carl cursed under his breath at the prospect of how many fingerprints this prick might have eradicated already. Evidently they knew Carl by reputation, however, as they promptly moved aside and let him onto the scene as soon as he arrived. The two cops waited in the hallway whilst Carl was left alone in the apartment. He looked around at the room first, before taking in the body itself. This was always his way, know the person before you jumped to any conclusions. If you took in the body and just the body, you’d never be able to see anything but a corpse. Carl needed to see more than that, the puzzle always demanded it. See the person they were before, where they lived, what they liked. It might give answers, it might not, but at least it made them seem human. No corpse is ever just a corpse. It’s someone’s son or daughter, someone’s best friend, someone’s wife or husband. Carl knew it was impossible for men like Glass to see things this way, but not for him.

  The apartment was a large single room, with the bed in the far corner and the kitchen near the entrance. There was a separate bathroom, but everything else was in the same room. Carl instantly noticed how clean everything was, taking care not to touch anything but having no real need to either. His eyes glanced over the extensive CD collection, the DVDs that were stacked in genre rather than alphabetical order, the contents of the fridge that had been left open by one of the idiot cops who’d helped himself to a beer. The doors to the wardrobe were open as well, although Carl wasn’t sure if they had been that way before the cops arrived. He convinced himself as he glanced through the various items of clothing that were hung inside the wardrobe that taking a dead man’s clothes was a step too far, even for the most corrupt cops in the force.

  Finally, Carl walked over to the bed and looked down at the motionless figure that lay there. It was a man in his early thirties, slim built and naked, laying face down on the bed. The side of his face was covered in the pool of blood that had stained the sheets beneath it. Some of the blood had ran over the side of the bed and formed a sticky puddle on the hardwood floor beneath. From where he lay, Carl could see that the young man had a bullet hole in the middle of his back. A soft sigh left Carl’s lips as his gaze momentarily met the dead man’s own, and then he took out his phone.

  “You fucking prick,” he snapped as Trent answered.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Paperwork my ass, you’ve already seen the body, haven’t you? Or the cops told you about it before you called me.”

  “What is that supposed to...”

  “The dead guy’s gay and you knew it. That’s why you didn’t want to take the case, you just couldn’t force yourself to give a shit.”

  “So I don’t like queers, so what?”

  “You’re the most homophobic bastard I ever met, Trent. You disowned your own son, for Christ’s sake. Even when he got sick you couldn’t force yourself to see past it!”

  “I fail to see what this has to do with...”

  “It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out this guy’s lifestyle. I hadn’t even finished looking at his CD collection before it hit me. Once you heard, however that might’ve been, you decided that you honestly didn’t give a crap how he died, so put it on me instead. Like I don’t have enough to deal with right now!”

  “All right, look. I don’t like gays, I admit. That’s why I asked you in on this one. I ain’t gonna bring my A-game to the table for a queer and we both know it. If I took the case and you found out that I’d half-assed it, you’d be even more pissed,” Trent explained.

  “I’ll take care of it. Get Glass to call me when he’s done cutting into White,” Carl snapped with a frustrated sigh.

  “Thanks Carl, I appreciate...”

  Carl didn’t give Trent the chance to finish his sentence before he hung up the phone. People had their prejudices, especially in somewhere like the City. Everyone had more problems than they could deal with. The kind of problems that led most people to a bottle of pills or the edge of a bridge. Those kind of problems build an anger in you, an anger that either becomes self destructive or turns itself into hate. The second option is easier, find someone to hate and put it all on them. Blacks, gays, women, whatever you want. It’s all their fault; your life sucks because of them. You’re not a failure, not a worthless sack of crap. It’s all because of the immigrants, the Democrats, the fill-in-the-blanks. Carl understood that, and he knew that it was no different for the cops, which was why he surprised himself at how he railed off as Trent. It was because of Jimmy, Carl knew that without giving the matter much thoug
ht. He’d always felt guilty for the crap Jimmy had been forced to put up with. Jimmy was white, American, physically able and intelligent. No different from Carl, except for his sexuality. One tiny difference that made a huge change in the way people treated him. Collectively, the world is a fucking child and always has been.

  “Detective Duggan?” Came a soft, nervous voice from the doorway. It belonged to CSI Reeve, a bookish little guy who was probably the best in the East side. Like Carl, he was far too qualified and skilled to stay on this side of the river, but his sense of duty to the worse-off in the City stopped him from moving. Carl liked him, and always had. There were few people on the force that he respected, but Reeve was one of them.

  “Hey, Reeve. How’s it going?”

  “I’m here, to, uh... that is, if you...” Reeve answered sheepishly, still as nervous around men like Carl as he had been when they met five years ago. Carl reminded him of the jocks that used to kick the crap out of him at school, and no amount of pleasantries from Carl would change that. He was a big guy and Reeve wasn’t. Sometimes it was that simple, no thirty-dollar-an-hour therapist needed. Just nature at work.

  “Yeah, I’m done. Come on in, kid, do your thing,” Carl nodded.

  “You find anything?” Reeve asked.

  “No evidence of forced entry, no signs of struggle. Whoever did this didn’t break his way in here, he was invited. Can’t see that the guy was forcibly undressed, either, which says to me they were having sex when he was shot in the back.”

  “Looks like it was intentional... not accidental,” Reeve remarked as he carefully studied the bullet wound.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, gun play is pretty common in sex these days,” Reeve remarked. “Not that I’ve ever...”

  “Reeve,” Carl said with a tone of slight frustration.

  “Sorry. Anyway, playing with loaded guns, pretend rape, that sort of thing, it’s quite a big scene right now. It’s quite common for people to get shot accidentally, that kind of thing. But it’s rare for that to result in a killshot. This was right over the back of the heart. Which means either it was intended, or they were being very risky. And when the barrel is aimed at the heat, it’s not the kind of mistake you can correct, you know?” Reeve explained. “But my professional opinion? I highly doubt the gun just accidentally went off.”