by Alan Russell
ALSO BY ALAN RUSSELL
No Sign of Murder
The Forest Prime Evil
The Hotel Detective
The Fat Innkeeper
Shame
Exposure
Political Suicide
Burning Man
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2005 Alan Russell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612186115
ISBN-10: 1612186114
eISBN: 9781611095890
This one is for the sibs. In chronological order from oldest to youngest: Joan Roxane (a.k.a. “J.R.”), Bret (who pushed his way forward thirteen minutes ahead of his twin sister), and Ronni.
“What is your name?” Jesus asked.
“My name is legion,” he answered, “for there are many of us.”
—MARK 5:9
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes).
—WALT WHITMAN
For he that lives more lives than one, More deaths than one must die.
—OSCAR WILDE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER
ONE
She thought of Chaos, and the original confusion, and felt as if she were a part of that tumult. Earth and sea and heaven and hell were mixed up, and everything inside of her was a whirligig. The Greek chorus was screaming in her head, all of them wanting out.
Cube state. She tried to hold on to the phrase. That’s how the doctor described her states of flux. Everything was multiplied, squared, cubed, a Picasso painting.
The yellow tape stopped her: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. The words repeated themselves throughout the tape, runes for rumination.
“Gordian knot,” she said, talking over all the vying voices.
What was the oracle telling her? She decided the words on the tape had to be an anagram, but there were so many possibilities.
She looked at the words and deciphered a welcome among the letters. PROCEED IN. She didn’t bother with the remaining letters, just slipped under the yellow banner, dragging her bag behind her. As she walked into the gallery, she thought, What if the words are a warning? They could be saying, Sirens Plot, or Cronos Inside.
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke, Freud had said. Her analyst had once told her that.
She was at the art gallery because one of the voices had clamored louder than the others, had insisted that she change the statues’ clothing, to show her respects that way. She avoided the display area, walking down the corridor toward the garden. Not for the first time she wished for blinders to help her when she was like this. She remembered watching a program on insects and being given a bee’s-eye view of the world. Bees perceive scores of images and look out into a different universe than humans. In cube state, so did she.
There was a buzzing in her head and a sting in her heart as she entered the garden.
CHEEVER WAS THINKING about death. That’s what homicide detectives do, but in this instance there was a merging of mortalities. The all-nighter had taken its toll on him. The echoes were getting assertive, were shouting back from the caves. You’re too old for this. And you’re bucking the odds. Cops who retire at fifty have the same mortality stats as butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, but those that stay on the job until they are fifty-five or older usually die within two years of leaving the force. Cheever contemplated his fifty-four years. Then he thought about Bonnie Gill. She hadn’t done very well by the actuary tables herself, dying at the age of thirty-seven. That was how they had been introduced.
Bonnie Gill had been murdered in her own art gallery, Sandy Ego Expressions, a one-story structure on Tenth and J near the old Carnation Building. She had died in a garden out back, an area full of wind chimes, flowers (especially carnations), crafted pottery, and ornamental fountains that expanded on the usual motif of little boys peeing. Her throat had been slashed adjacent to an exhibition that a placard announced as Garden of Stone. Daylight hadn’t improved Cheever’s opinion of the display, but it had been worse the night before when everyone had kept being confronted by the statues. Most of the damn things were clothed. That had made it worse, especially in the semidarkness. He had kept mistaking them for human beings.
The statues weren’t the kind found in public squares or the park, the men on horses and the women saints. These were statues with faces of pain and fear and anger. He had almost pulled his gun on one of them. The piece looked real enough, and threatening enough—a man holding a knife with both hands over his head. That’s how Bonnie Gill had died, or close enough. She had been killed with two knife wounds—had been stabbed in the back, then had had her throat slashed.
He sought out the offensive statue with his eyes, wasn’t sure whether it was the morning light or the softer stone around the knife wielder’s face that gave the head such a glow. Maybe both. Cheever supposed the man with the knife was some kind of priest. That didn’t seem to matter to the woman being sacrificed. Her expression was one of terror.
Cheever decided he had indulged himself too long at the crime scene. He liked to take his own impressions without the jostling of the evidence tech, and the ME, and the rest of his homicide team. He wrote down a few notes, not for himself, but for the opposing lawyers in case he ever got called to the stand. Around the department Cheever’s memory was legendary. The other detectives knew he didn’t need to write anything down once it was in his head. He liked to go out on a call, spot somebody he had popped ten, even twenty years back, and yell out a first name greeting. Many didn’t like to be remembered. They felt uneasy, marked, like Big Brother was watching them, monitoring everything they did.
He turned and was startled to find a woman standing at the entrance to the garden. This time he was the one under observation. Shaken, it took him a moment to get his breath back, but when he did, he put his win
d to good use. “What the hell are you doing in here?”
His yelling helped her. It was louder than her chorus. The cacophony submerged into the background. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them her world had changed again.
She had big eyes, he noticed. They were alert and blue and aware. She was like one of those Margaret Keane paintings where the kids’ eyes take up half the picture. He had started angrily toward her, but stopped now that he saw her terrified look. He was afraid she would bolt if he breathed hard. She looked like she was ready to drop her athletic bag and run.
“I’m Detective Cheever,” he said. His words didn’t put her at ease.
“I’ll show you identification,” he said. From a distance, he offered up his brass shield. She relaxed, but just a little.
“You’re trespassing,” he advised her, “on a police investigation scene.”
She considered his words and finally spoke: “I am the sculptor.”
Cheever motioned with his head. “You did these?”
The smallest of nods claimed credit. Cheever took his time examining the artist, could tell by her body language that it was still not the right time to approach her. He figured she was in her mid-twenties. She stood around five eight and was quite thin—weighed maybe one-fifteen. The woman liked jewelry. Her ears had been pierced more than Custer’s body, with at least six earrings hanging from each lobe. She went for the shiny metallic look, jewelry that could have been mistaken for fishing lures or perhaps was. Bracelets ran up her arms, and baubles and bangles had found their way to most parts of her body. She wore plenty of rings, but no apparent wedding ring. The only non-ornamental piece among her trimmings was a medical alert bracelet, but she might have been wearing it as another misplaced fashion statement. She had done a yin-yang kind of thing on her mane so that it was half black and half white. Cheever was surprised. It detracted from her natural beauty.
“What are you doing here?”
Her words came a little faster now: “Checking on my pieces.”
“The Garden of Stone,” he said, the slightest hint of sarcasm in his words.
“That wasn’t the name I wanted for the exhibition.”
“Oh? What name did you want?”
She mumbled her answer: “What the Gorgon Saw.”
“What the Gorgonzola?”
“Forget it.”
Words invariably uttered when there was something that should be remembered. In his mind Cheever made sense of what she had said. What he couldn’t make sense of was why she was here.
“I wouldn’t worry about anyone trying to make off with your rocks,” he said. “They’re too heavy.”
“They’re not as heavy as you’d think,” she said. “They’re faux marble.”
Cheever didn’t like her answer. It sounded too goddamn superior to him. He knew lack of sleep was coloring his mood, but he still didn’t like her statues. He wanted to tell her that they were pieces of crap, and not even faux pieces of crap. Her stuff disturbed. To his thinking, the best art showed a way out of the cesspool, didn’t offer a wallow in it.
“You know about the murder?” he asked.
She could hear the anger in his voice even if she didn’t know the source. “Yes,” she said.
He closed the distance between them. “How well did you know Bonnie Gill?”
“She’s represented me for several years.”
Cheever let the silence build. People usually started talking about the dead, saying all kinds of things, but not this one. “That’s all you have to say about her?”
She didn’t immediately respond. Her expression was sad, despondent, then, to his surprise, he thought he saw a momentary smile, a glee. Her posture shifted, her face went slack, and she straightened. Her chin tilted up and her manner became imperious.
So, she thought. Cop wants a confrontation. I can play that game. “I’m not good at eulogies,” she said.
They had a little stare-down. She was acting tough now. Yeah, she was a rock, he thought. Faux rock. What was that children’s game? Scissors, paper, rock. It was time for paper to wrap rock. “What’s your name?”
The smallest hesitation: “Holly Troy.”
“Got some ID?”
“Not on me.”
He flipped open his pad. “What’s your address and phone number?”
Monotone, she gave him both.
“Any reason for Ms. Gill to be dead?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” she said.
The words were offered without any feeling. Holly Troy was young to be that uncaring, he thought. Usually you have to live for a while to earn the right.
“And you don’t give a damn, do you?”
Holly ignored his question. “It’s going to be a bother,” she said, “finding a new gallery. Not many take on statuary, or at least pieces of any size.”
She was avoiding the issue of a body, playing scissors now on his paper, cutting out lines of inquiry she didn’t like. It was time to rock her. Smash her scissors.
“When we discovered Bonnie Gill’s body last night,” he said, “she was already cool. Not cold, not in San Diego. When the dead are described as being cold that’s sort of a myth. After the heart stops pumping, the body loses heat. Gradually it becomes the temperature of its surroundings. Of the air, of the ground...”
Cheever walked over to a small statue of a little girl crying. One of Holly Troy’s horrors. The statue had been clothed in a yellow dress with red polka dots. The girl’s mouth was open. She was scared. She was terrified. Cheever wished he could tell her everything was all right.
“...of the stone,” he said.
The anger rose in him unexpectedly. “By the time we got here she was the temperature of your fucking faux marble,” he said. “But your stone doesn’t bleed, lady. She did. But then you don’t care, do you?”
The same question again, and another silence. Her shifting of posture was the only indicator that she had heard.
Bonnie Gill didn’t fit the profile of most San Diego homicides. She didn’t use or abuse, didn’t have a record, was a business owner and community leader. She was an attractive woman whose death would make the taxpayers uneasy. San Diegans weren’t going to like seeing Bonnie Gill’s smiling, freckled face staring at them from their morning newspaper.
Cheever didn’t have one of the smiling pictures. He had the other kind. The crime scene shots had been processed that morning. When Cheever had first started in homicide all the pictures had been black and white. Now they were color, the better to see with, and the better to sicken juries. To make an impact, even on the jaded.
“Two wounds,” he said, holding up one of the pictures to Holly’s face. She looked different now, diffident even, but Cheever didn’t care. “One in the back here.” Cheever slapped the spot hard, did it so she could hear the impact, and feel it. “And one here, across the throat.” He pushed the second picture almost to her nose, tapped on it to show the wound, then demonstrated on his own throat with particular savagery, leaving an angry red line across his neck.
In the pictures, Bonnie looked small. Only her wounds looked large. She had red hair and looked like a fallen Raggedy Ann doll.
For some reason Cheever had lost it with this woman, something he rarely did. He prided himself on his control. It made the job possible, but something had kicked in.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Cheever told her as he shoved the pictures into his coat pocket, “for mistaking you for someone who cared.”
CHAPTER
TWO
“Lady crazy about flowers. Car—nations.”
Flamingo had two legs, but preferred standing on one. He was a familiar character, doing his one-legged sentry duty at corners around the downtown area. Flamingo was a tall black man of indeterminate years, but probably around sixty, and his pose had delivered him his nickname. He liked to talk, enjoyed having an audience, but was known to chatter amiably to himself for hours on end when no one else was arou
nd.
“While back there she sent out artists, pretty girls they was, to paint car—nations everywhere. You can’t miss them, Captain. They be on sidewalks and stores and fences. Flower power.”
Cheever had seen them. The carnations were Bonnie Gill’s trademark, her metaphor for the area. Near her gallery was the old and decrepit Carnation Building. Its ruins had inspired Bonnie to establish the ReinCarnation Foundation, a group dedicated to the rebirth of her downtown neighborhood. As part of a beautification program, she had installed planter boxes around the area. The planters had not only managed to remain standing but had somehow sprouted carnations hearty enough to survive a too steady diet of urine and cigarette butts.
“Where have all the flowers gone,” Flamingo sang, but forgot the rest of the words. He remembered part of the tune and continued to hum it.
“You know Bonnie Gill?” asked Cheever.
“Sure. Nice lady. We talked. I’d see her and say, ‘Hey, pretty flower mama, let’s see that green thumb of yours.’”
“Know anyone who had a beef with her?”
“No one I know. Hurtful world out there, though. Some people just like to hurt.”
“Anyone in the neighborhood like that?”
“Must be, Captain. But those the kinds of people I try not to know.”
That was how Cheever’s day was going. No one was even offering up the usual bogeyman, the drunk who always made a nuisance of himself, the hairy, crazy street person who started fights, or the kid who liked to set fires. For once, it would have been nice to have had one of those.
The night before, Homicide Team IV had canvassed the neighborhood talking mostly to the homeless. Cheever and the other detectives had gone from one bedroll to another. The way the homeless had been laid out along the sidewalks, cocooned and unmoving, had reminded Cheever of body bags put out to be collected. The team had spoken to at least a hundred homeless people in a five-block radius, but none remembered seeing anything out of the usual. In the light of day the remembering hadn’t gotten any better.
“You ever go inside of her gallery?”
“Nuh-uh. I look from the outside in. Like to do my viewing from the garden. Always something going on in there. Parties and such. People working at their pots and the ovens always cooking. Times you’d think the place was a bakery. Or a flower shop. All those pretty flowers.”
