The Memory Killer

by J. A. Kerley

  “Mice? I called after her, caught flat-footed and running to catch up.

  She stopped in the center of the lobby and laughed. I’m not sure I’d ever heard her laugh before.

  “Actually, I want to work with living bodies for the rest of my career. In a hospital instead of a morgue.”

  “This idea just hit you?”

  “Last year a friend was in a car accident, hospitalized for a month. I spent a lot of time in the hospital during her recovery. I started talking with the hospital staff, getting interested in cases. I saw the body’s incredible ability to sustain injury and yet, with care and the latest in medical science, regain health and wholeness. It was inspiring and I wanted to be a part of it.”

  “You’d not seen such things during your training?”

  “My late father was a pathologist. My aunt still is, up in Atlanta. When I went into medicine, my world seemed preordained.”

  “But that’s changed.”

  A nod. “The people in the morgue come to me in past tense. I can usually determine why they died, but that’s all I can offer. I want to work in present tense.”

  An orderly rolled an exiting patient between us and Morningstar disappeared behind a bobbing wall of helium balloons. On a job she could be near tyrannical. But temperament aside, Morningstar was one of the best I’d worked with, a consummate pro. I expected she’d be the same among the living.

  The balloons floated past and we stepped together. “When’d you give your notice, Doc?” I said.

  “Almost two months back.”

  It took me aback. “That long?”

  “Everyone in the department knows, almost no one outside of it. I’ve already started some of the re-training.” She grinned. “And doing observations at hospitals.”

  Suddenly things made sense. “You haven’t been shirking your morgue duties. You’re already entering the new world.”

  A nod. “A couple of retired paths came back to fill in my schedule. I’m doing my observations, studying, and basically considering what specialty I’ll ultimately go for.”

  “You don’t have to train a successor?”

  “Roland Espy is stepping in as acting director. He’s from Tallahassee, an interim administrator. We just hired a forensic pathologist from Chicago. She’s worked in Indiana and then, for the past seven years, put in her time in Cook County as an assistant director.”

  “Chicago? She’ll know gunshot wounds.”

  “She wants a position a little closer to the sun.”

  “A seamless transition. Espy takes over, you stuff mice.”

  Morningstar made a scissor motion with her fingers. “You use tweezers and pack batting in their tiny bungholes. I’ll mount them holding cocktail umbrellas and make a killing selling Geisha mice.”

  I laughed. She had a weird sense of humor, a hidden side. I decided to try something considered but never explored during our working tenure.

  “It’s Friday. Can I take you to a celebratory dinner tonight, Doctor? To celebrate your big jump?”

  It was a long shot into total darkness. I held my breath until she responded with light.

  “What a lovely thought. Of course.”

  I stared. “Uh, really?” was all I could say.

  “I’m thinking supper club, Detective Ryder. Drinks, dining, and dancing.” She turned and started for the door, her smile a thousand watts of sunshine. “Sounds like fun, no?”

  22

  My elation returned to tension by the time I got back to the department. Gershwin’s office was a former storage room for my office, which he had to traverse to get to his space. I’d been at my desk for several minutes when he entered with a stack of files in his hand.

  “I’m gonna shuffle through reports from Ruiz just to see if there’s anything there.”

  Ruiz, Tyler and Bell were the investigative-pool dicks assigned to follow up on sightings based on the retouched photos of Gary Ocampo, potential ways Donnie might look. The photos had been sent to all law-enforcement entities in the region.

  “They’re overwhelmed, right?”

  “Swamped. Were you the one authorized the general release of Gary’s retouched photos to gay bars and organizations?”

  “What? No.”

  “If not you, Big Ryde, who?”

  “No idea.”

  “The hits are coming in, but the guys are barely able to check a dozen a day.”

  I sighed. The FCLE had dozens of active cases – murders, drug dealers, counterfeiters, bank robbers – all handled from two floors in Miami’s Clark Center building. I’d been lucky Roy’d allowed me three pool investigators.

  “It’s a pure crapshoot,” I said. “But it’s gotta be done.”

  “Ruiz says next time you want them to check a suspect make sure he’s ten feet tall with purple hair and one eye in the center of his forehead. I told Ruiz that wouldn’t solve anything … it’s Miami.”

  He continued for his office. I cleared my throat. “Uh, hang on a sec, Zigs. Morningstar wants me to take her to a supper club. Any recommendations?”

  He jumped into his office, threw the files on his desk and was sitting across from me in a flash, leaning forward. “Oy caramba, Big Ryde. Give me the juicy details.”

  “There are no juicy details. She’s resigning to re-train for standard physician-type work and I offered to take her to dinner to celebrate. The supper club was her addition.”

  “Does la señorita want Latin dancing?” I saw his grin widening. “That’s pretty sensuous stuff, sahib.”

  “Don’t start,” I said. “Just give me some suggestions.”

  He snapped his fingers. “The Calypso Club, an institution. Full Latin orchestra. Low lighting, too, jefé. Candles on every table.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  He put a hand above his head, one below, snapping his fingers like a flamenco dancer. “Es muy r-r-r-r-r-romantico.”

  I muttered and waved for him to beat it, but as soon as the Cheshire-grinning Gershwin trotted to his office I made reservations at the Calypso.

  Auguste Charpentier, né Jeremy Ridgecliff, leaned back in his Herman Miller Aeron chair and looked between the computer monitors and Bloomberg terminal on his desk. The US trading day had just ended and he approximated his winnings: over eleven thousand bucks, on the low side of average.

  “Eleven thousand bucks and change, Brother,” Ridgecliff chuckled. He often included his brother in his talks with himself, as if the brother were there in person. “How’d you do today, Carson?”

  He rolled back from the desk and took a final look at the equipment. He shut the computers down, and began removing the connecting cables, reflecting on his life since beating it from Manhattan with the police on his heels.

  After moving to the backwoods of Kentucky, he’d been so fiercely bored he cataloged all flora on his ten-acre property, simultaneous teaching himself French to fit with his new guise (and to read Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Valéry without a translator’s intervention). He’d also taken to watching business news in the afternoon while preparing dinner. He’d had no prior knowledge of business, a quotidian endeavor practiced by a financio-merchant class that seemed devoid of scruples, though tended to dress rather well.

  While he watched the pot simmer with a rabbit ragout or whisked his sauce hollandaise, he flicked between Bloomberg and CNBC. At first it was gibberish, numbers and symbols and icons and a never-ending procession of men and women with second-tier minds (though conducting themselves as though they were first-tier) spouting conclusions about the markets that were immediately contravened by the next series of talking heads. Bond merchants said one thing, stockbrokers another, sellers of precious metals had their own spin.

  But as he watched and whisked, listened and ladled, Ridgecliff discerned one vital trait: though comprised of thousands of interwoven parts too complex and ever-shifting to create an over-arching analysis, the market – as a whole; as an entity – had a personality. And because it was co
mprised of humans, it was a human personality, subject not to logic, but trends and phobias and false confidence and insecurities and idiot worship and self-aggrandizement and the need to see itself as the exact center of the universe.

  Ridgecliff had arrived at his moment of enlightenment just as the roux in a chicken-okra gumbo had come to the boil, meaning absolutely nothing, but something many people would take as a sign that gumbo was his lucky food. Which was the whole point: the market did not make mathematical sense, but humanized sense.

  The market had a personality and it was neurotic.

  Even better, this neurotic personality was moronically simple, with only two true states: blustering drunkard and scared child. Anything else was just transition. When the drunkard was ramping into a screaming, self-centered bender, Jeremy Ridgecliff played the bull. When conditions changed and the scared child began mewling and simpering, he played the bear. When the market was in transition, he put his winnings elsewhere, like real estate, hedges, or venture-capital funds.

  It was so simple he wondered why no one had figured it out before. But then realized that a decade in an institution for the criminally insane was excellent backgrounding in analyzing the patterns of greed, dysfunction and insecurity.

  Ridgecliff was setting a small monitor into a packing crate when his desk phone rang. He leaned over the screen on the console, saw CARSON listed as the caller. He sighed and shook his head as the words spread from the speaker into the room.

  “JEREMY! CALL ME, GODDAMMIT! I’M WORRIED ABOUT YOU!”

  The caller paused as if to add more, but clicked off. Ridgecliff rolled the chair to the phone’s connection to the wall and pulled it out. “If you’re worried now, Brother,” he chuckled, “I’m afraid things are going to get even tougher.”

  He padded the phone with bubble wrap and set it in one of the large boxes provided by the moving company, then went to the door and turned to see the entirety of his office in three packing crates sitting beside his chair, desk, and lamp. The moving company had taken the rest of the contents of his home, his office all that was left.

  He started to turn off the light, but paused to take a final look at the room where his fortunes had begun and were daily changing for the better. He felt an odd quiver somewhere near his heart: a sense without analog or precedent.

  My God, he thought. Is that wistfulness? He flicked off the light.

  She was right. It could happen.

  23

  When it came time to take Morningstar to dinner, I first wondered if I’d made a mistake – a night of escape in the midst of a horrendous case seemed irresponsible – but I justified it with the realization that I’d been averaging fourteen-hours days for over a week. I headed home early, changed into fancier threads, made one angry and pointless call to my idiot brother, then headed back to Miami to take the simple-black-dressed Madame Morningstar to dinner. My blackened grouper, fried platanas and hearts-of-palm salad were superb. Morningstar opted for shrimp marinated in lime, peppers, and garlic over arroz con frijoles negros, and a mango-coconut salad. Being more a beer and bourbon fancier, I let her pick the dinner wine, a California Riesling she pronounced to be “bodaciously good”.

  When the plates were cleared we declined dessert in favor of rum drinks, daiquiri for her, collins for me. The orchestra, which had been playing a kind of Latin swing for the first set, ratcheted up several notches, like the musicians were waking up from naps. Chairs crunched back as diners took to the dance floor. Act two had begun, heralded by flourishes of conga.

  We watched for several numbers. Actually, I was watching Morningstar watching the dancers, her shoulders bobbing and toes tapping. Our dining conversation had been relaxed and delightful and without a single reference to workaday hassles. We’d spoken at length about her decision to leave pathology, and she seemed buoyed by the prospect of the intensive study and work required to enter a different field of medicine. But that had been blown away by the new volume of the band, the music now trembling with energy and intensity.

  The music continued. Morningstar tapped my hand and leaned across the table. “Do you samba?” she asked, speaking loudly over the music.

  “I’m a dance illiterate. I Dougie’d once.” I illustrated the point by gyrating my legs and waving my hands across my hair.

  She laughed. “The Dougie’s not a dance, it’s a series of spasms.”

  “Then perhaps samba is beyond my ability.”

  She stood and offered her hand. “The samba is about passion and fluidity. Let’s see how you score in those areas.”

  Morningstar stripped the motions to a minimum and within minutes I had traded self-conscious caution for an immersion in blaring trumpets and frenetic congas. The moves arrived as if borne by music and for the first time in my life I knew what dancing was all about. We kept it up song after song, returning to our table only to finish old drinks and call for new ones.

  “Are your legs tiring?” she asked as the musicians started the third set.

  “I think they’re finally waking up,” I said.

  Somehow, the hours passed in minutes and the orchestra was packing away their instruments. “Could I get you to do this again?” Morningstar said.

  “I’m ready for Carnevale,” I said, stealing from Gary Ocampo.

  When I pulled in front of her home, the moon was rising through the palms like a beacon. The Rover’s windows were open and the breeze was sweetened by dream scents rising from sleeping flowers. Her hand touched mine.

  “Would you like to come in and have a nightcap?”

  I opted for brandy, she for Chardonnay. Her home was light and open, the cream walls hung with bright-hued paintings by local artists. We retreated to a screened-in veranda to stand side by side and study a wild garden strung with vines and bleached by moonglow. Backyard palms swayed against an indigo sky.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “My own little paradise in the heart of the city.”

  She turned to me and we kissed, tentative at first, then deep and searching, our hands sliding along one another’s contours. When we parted her eyes were low-lidded and her voice husky. “What do you think about making love?” she said, her hands gliding to my hips and pulling them close.

  “It’s like a samba, right?” I suggested. “Passion and fluidity?”

  “Exactly,” she smiled. “But a bit like the Dougie, too.”

  “How’s that?”

  She put her lips beside my head. Her whisper was a warm breeze in my ear.

  “Correctly done, it ends in a series of spasms.”

  I was awakened with a hand on my shoulder and a voice at my ear. I blinked my eyes open and saw the luscious Vivian Morningstar looming above me with her cell phone in hand.

  “It’s your understudy,” she said, holding out the phone. “Why did Gershwin call me?”

  “My phone is turned off.”

  A raised eyebrow. “I mean, how did he know you’d be here?”

  “I swear I only told him we were going to dinner.”

  A sly smile. “He has a lot of faith in you.”

  I took the phone. “What is it, Zigs?”

  “Donnie’s claimed another victim, sahib. Maybe.”

  “Why maybe?”

  “There’s something different. I’m at the hospital and you better come and look.”

  I arrived a half-hour later. Gershwin was in the lobby and had just received the latest news from Dr Costa. Ziggy had had assembled the information, scant as it was, one page in his notepad.

  “Where was he found?” I asked as we rode up in the elevator.

  “On a road beside the Wildlife Management Area just across the Palm Beach County line. He was lying in the center of the lane.”

  We went to the room to find the victim’s eyes blackened and a gauze compress on the crown of his head. I knew he was Harold Brighton, having gone through the Missing-Person files so often the young male faces were imprinted in my mind. Brighton was the radiant, cl
ean-cut visage with close-cropped blond hair and teeth no orthodontist would make a nickel from. He was smiling as if his life knew no bounds.

  Dr Costa was writing on a clipboard; he turned and saw me looking at the head compress. “He was hit with something,” Costa said. “Blunt object. Two stitches required. No major trauma indicated, although the blow probably induced unconsciousness.”

  “Is his back scratched with—”

  “The infinity sign? Yes.”

  I turned to Gershwin. “So what’s different?”

  “Can I see the victim’s leg again, Doc?” Gershwin asked.

  When Costa lifted the sheet covering Brighton’s legs, I sucked in a breath. The legs were swathed in thick wrapping discolored by seeping blood and body fluids. A tube emerged from the wrapping, dripping pink juice into a plastic bag under the bed. Two purple-black toes peeked out from the dressings on the near leg.

  “It seems Donnie-boy went ballistic on the knees and ankles with something hard and heavy,” Gershwin said. “Ball bat, truncheon, pipe. The soft tissue and bone were basically pulped.”

  Costa stepped close. “The left leg will have to be amputated,” he said. “The specialist doesn’t think there’s much left to save.”

  “Brighton’s the dancer,” I said, staring at the ruination until Costa lowered the cover.

  “Was the dancer, Big Ryde,” Gershwin corrected. “He’s had his last waltz.”

  Gershwin and I went to Brighton’s street-level apartment, one of a dozen in a stucco building just north of the U of M. The landlord supplied a key and I pushed open the wooden door, stepping in with Gershwin on my heels.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “I think Donnie’s been by.”

  The walls had been covered with posters from the Dance Theater of Harlem, Joffrey Ballet and the like. They were now in tatters on the floor, taped corners still sticking to the wall in places. The same had happened in the kitchen and the bedroom, anything representative of dance stripped from the wall to the floor.

  “Disarray,” Gershwin said. “Like in Caswell’s place.”