Jericho Iteration

by Allen Steele

  The bar was almost empty. Given its usual clientele, though, it only made sense that the regulars would have cleared out as soon as the cops arrived on the scene. A big, burly policeman was standing beneath the front awning, listening to his headset as he watched the sidewalk; he blocked my way as I approached the door.

  “Sorry, pal, but you can’t go in right now. Police business—”

  “Outta my way,” I muttered as I tried to push past him, “I gotta get in there—”

  And found myself being shoved backward so fast I lost my balance and fell against two more cops who were standing on the sidewalk. One of them, a thin Latino cop, snagged the back of my jacket. “Hey, sport,” he said as he began to usher me away, “find another place to get a drink, okay? This is—”

  “Fuck off.” I shrugged out of his grip, headed for the door again. “My friend’s—”

  The Latino cop grabbed my right arm and twisted it behind my back. I yelped as I was forced to my knees, and all of a sudden I saw nothing but shiny black cop shoes all around me as a riot baton was pressed against the back of my neck, forcing my head down while yet another officer grabbed my left arm and pulled it behind me.

  “Ease down, pal! Ease down!”

  Ease down, hell. The cops were all over me, securing my wrists with plastic cuffs while I struggled against them. I was halfway through most of the words your mother told you she’d wash your mouth out with soap if she ever heard you say them again when I heard a new voice.

  “Stimpson! Who is this man!”

  Stimpson was the first cop I had confronted. “Just some jerk who wouldn’t take no for an answer, Lieutenant,” he said. “We asked him to leave, but he’s decided he wanted to—”

  “Did you bother to ask him his name first?” I tried to look up, but the riot baton continued to force my head down toward the brick sidewalk. “Sir, can you tell me your name?”

  “Rosen,” I managed to gasp. “Gerry Rosen. I’m with the Big Muddy—”

  “Shit. Let him up, D’Angelo.” The grip on my arms relaxed a little. “I said, let him up,” the lieutenant demanded. “That’s the man I called down here, for chrissake.”

  “Yes sir.” D’Angelo hesitated, then let go of my arm and grabbed me beneath my arms to gently lift me off my knees. As he produced a pair of scissors and cut off the handcuffs, the rest of the cops who had encircled me took a powder, their batons and tasers sliding back into belt loops and holsters.

  My savior was a tall, gaunt plainclothes cop in his late thirties. He wore a calf-length raincoat and a wide-brimmed fedora, and a cigarette dangled from thin lips in a pockmarked face that looked as if it had once suffered from chronic acne. He brushed past Stimpson and thrust out his hand.

  “Michael Farrentino, homicide division,” he said by way of formal introduction. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Rosen. Sorry about the rough treatment.”

  I ignored both the hand and the apology. “You said you found my friend in here,” I said, my voice rough as I massaged my chafed wrists. “Where is he?”

  I started to push past him, heading for the door again. “Hey, whoa … hold on. Just wait a moment.” Farrentino stepped in front of me as he reached up with both hands to grab my shoulders. “Just let me ask you a couple of questions first—”

  “Fuck that,” I snapped. “Where’s John?”

  We stared each other eye to eye for another moment, then Farrentino’s hands fell from my shoulders. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and flicked it into the street. “Okay, have it your way,” he murmured. “Follow me.”

  To my surprise, he didn’t escort me directly into the bar. Instead he led me past the front door and about twenty feet farther down the sidewalk, past a high brick wall, until we reached the narrow iron gate that led into Clancy’s open-air beer garden. Two more cops were guarding the red tape—marked CRIME SCENE DO NOT PASS—that had been stretched across the open gate. They moved aside as Farrentino ducked under it, then held it up for me so I could pass through.

  Many of St. Louis’s saloons have biergartens, a fine old tradition that the city’s first settlers brought with them from Germany during the 1800s. Even though this particular beer garden now sported an Irish name, it resided behind a three-story building and was just old enough to have a real garden. Picnic tables and iron chairs were arranged between small Dutch elms and brick planters; from the number of half-empty beer bottles and plastic cups left abandoned on the table, it seemed as if there had been a fair number of people in Clancy’s beer garden before the law had arrived in large numbers.

  But the scene of the crime wasn’t down here; instead, it was an enclosed balcony on the second floor in the rear of the building. I could see a number of people clustered around the corner of the balcony overlooking the street; portable camera lights had been rigged on tripods around the wooden balustrade, and they were all aimed down at something on the porch floor, but I couldn’t see what it was.

  Farrentino silently led me up the weathered pinewood stairs to the balcony. More cops, a couple of bored-looking paramedics with a stretcher, two more plainclothes homicide dicks—Farrentino led me through the crowd as they parted for us, until we reached the end of the balcony and I got a chance to see what all the fuss was about.

  The body sprawled across the porch floor was definitely that of John Tiernan. His trench coat, his tie, even his patent-leather shoes: I had seen him wearing those clothes only a few hours earlier. But it took me a few moments to recognize his face.

  That was because it looked as if someone had taken a white-hot fireplace poker and had shoved it into his skull, straight through the center of his forehead.

  The black moment had come for John so quickly that his eyes were wide open, seeing only those things dead men can see.

  When I was through vomiting over the rail, Farrentino led me back downstairs to the beer garden. He sat me down at a picnic table out of sight from the balcony, gave me a handkerchief so I could dry my mouth, and left me alone for a couple of minutes; when he came back, he had a shot glass of bourbon in one hand and a beer chaser in the other. The dubious benefits of having a murder committed at a bar.

  I belted back the shot of bourbon, ignoring the chaser. The liquor burned down my gullet and into my stomach; I gasped and for a moment my guts rebelled, but the booze stayed down, and after a moment there was quietude of a sort. I slumped back in the chair and tried not to think of the horror I had just seen.

  “Ready to talk?” Farrentino asked, not unkindly. I nodded my head; he pulled out a palmtop and flipped it open. “Is that John Tiernan? Can you give me a positive identification?”

  I slowly nodded my head. Farrentino waited patiently for a verbal reply. “Yeah … yeah, that’s John,” I said. “I’m sure that’s him.”

  “Okay.” The homicide detective made an entry in his computer. “I know that was rough on you, Mr. Rosen, but we had to be sure. We’ve got to call his family next, and even though we got his driver’s license from his wallet, I wanted to have someone else identify him before I put out a call to his wife. You were convenient and … well, I hope you understand.”

  I nodded. Poor Sandy. I was glad that she hadn’t seen him like this. “Thanks, Officer. Do you want me to call her?”

  “No, I’d just as soon do it myself.” Farrentino pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and offered it to me. I shook my head, he took the cigarette for himself, lighting it from the bottom of the pack. “I hate to say it, but I’ve gotten used to this part of the job,” he went on. “I think it’d be better if she got the news from me instead of you. Me, she can hate for the rest of her life and it won’t matter much, but if she hears it from you …”

  “Yeah, okay. I understand.”

  He shrugged as he exhaled blue smoke. “So … when was the last time you saw the deceased?”

  I actually had to think about it; all of a sudden, it seemed as if days instead of hours had passed since I had last seen John alive. “Around six, six-t
hirty, I think. We were closing down the office for the day.”

  “Uh-huh.” Farrentino typed another note in his PT. “Do you have any idea where he was going?”

  I became wary. Sure, I knew where John was going, and why … but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to tell these things to Farrentino. “He said he was coming down here, but I’m not really sure what he was doing.”

  Farrentino continued to make notes. “You knew he was coming here,” he said, “but you don’t know why? Maybe he was just going out for a few drinks. That’s what most people do when they go to a bar after work.”

  “Uh … yeah. That’s what he was doing—”

  “Except when I talked to the bartender, he told me that Mr. Tiernan hardly ordered anything the whole time he was here. He remembers him buying one beer when he arrived at …”

  Farrentino checked his notes. “A quarter to eight, and he nursed it the entire time he was here. I suppose he must have gone somewhere for dinner before then.”

  I picked up my beer and took a sip from it. The bottle was slippery in my hand. “Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “That would make sense.”

  “Hmm. Maybe so.” The detective coughed, his eyes still on the miniature screen. “Do you know if he was … well, y’know, fooling around with anyone? Had a girlfriend on the side his wife didn’t know about?”

  I felt a rush of anger but tried to keep it in check. “I’m not sure that’s any of your business, Officer.”

  “Well? Did he?” He shrugged indifferently. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but still it’s something his wife might want to know when I call her—”

  “Hell, no!” I snapped. “If he was meeting anyone here, it sure as hell wasn’t a …”

  My voice trailed off as the realization hit me. Farrentino had skillfully led me into a trap, forcing me to contradict myself. His eyes slowly rose from the PT. “I didn’t ask if he was meeting anyone here, Mr. Rosen,” he said. “Maybe you do know something about what he was doing here, after all.”

  From behind the garden wall, there was the wail of a siren approaching from down the street. I could hear the metallic clank from the balcony as the paramedics unfolded their stretcher. A couple of barmaids stood watching us from the back door, murmuring to each other.

  Farrentino was about to say something else when a uniformed cop approached our table, carrying several plastic-bagged objects in his hands. “This is all we found in his pockets,” he said, holding them out for the detective to examine. “Do you want us to have ’em dusted?”

  I recognized some of the items: his house keys, his car remote, his wallet, an old-fashioned fountain pen Sandy had given to him as a birthday present, some loose change, the ever-present pack of chewing gum …

  And, in a bag of its own, Dingbat.

  “Hmm?” Farrentino barely glanced at the collection. “Uhh … naw, I don’t think we need to do that. The only prints we’d find are his own. Just leave ’em with me. I’ll give them to his wife when I see her.”

  The cop nodded his head and carefully laid them on the table between us before walking away. It occurred to me that John might have entered a few notes into Dingbat during his meeting with Beryl Hinckley. If there were any important clues as to why he had been killed, perhaps they might be stored on the PT’s floptical diskette.

  “Okay, Rosen,” Farrentino said, breaking my train of thought, “let’s level with each other.”

  “Sure.” I shrugged, trying not to stare covetously at Dingbat; it was just within hand’s reach. “Anything you want to know, Officer.” As I spoke, I picked up the beer and started to raise it to my mouth …

  And then, at the last moment, I let my fingers slip from around the bottle.

  It fell out of my grasp, bounced off the table, and fell between my legs, splattering beer across everything before the bottle broke on the concrete under the table. “Aw, shit!” I yelled, jumping up from my seat, staring down at the wet splotch that had spread across the crotch of my jeans. “Goddamn fucking …!”

  When I want to screw up a conversation, I can outdo myself. Beer spilled off the table and onto the broken glass scattered across the ground. Farrentino stood up from his chair, alarmed and irritated at the same time. “What a fucking mess!” I whined. “I can’t believe I just … look, lemme go back to my place and get some dry pants on. It’ll just take a—”

  “No, no, don’t do that,” Farrentino said, already moving away from the table. “Just stay here, okay? I’ll go get someone to clean all this stuff up …”

  Then he turned his back to me and headed for the barroom’s back door; the two barmaids had already gone inside, presumably to get some towels and a broom and dustpan.

  For a few precious moments, I was alone in the beer garden. I snatched up the evidence bag containing Dingbat. There was a red adhesive seal across the plastic zipper, but there was no time to worry about that now. I hastily unzipped the bag, breaking the seal, and shook the palmtop out into my hand, all the while keeping one eye on the door.

  It took me only a second to eject the mini-disk from Dingbat’s floptical drive and stash it in the pocket of my jacket before I returned the PT to the bag and zipped it shut again. I had barely placed the bag back on the picnic table when Farrentino and one of the barmaids came out the door again.

  We spent the next few minutes wiping up the spilled beer with paper towels and letting the barmaid sweep up the broken glass. I made a big deal out of sponging beer from my pants, although I kept one eye on the evidence bag. If you looked closely, you could see the split in the tape seal; someone would notice eventually, but I hoped to be long gone by then.

  “Okay,” Farrentino said at last, after the mess was cleaned away and the barmaid was gone. He sat down at the table, clasping his hands together as he stared at me. “Here’s what happened …”

  “Go on,” I said, adjusting my posture so that he wouldn’t have to look at both the evidence bag and me at the same time.

  “A lady arrived here at the bar shortly after Tiernan showed up,” he went on, his voice lowered. “Black lady, nervous looking. Witnesses say they went up to that balcony together and were up there for a long time, talking. Seems they wanted to be someplace where they couldn’t be overheard. He was getting up as if to leave when he was shot—”

  “How was he killed?” I asked. Farrentino hesitated. “That wasn’t a normal gunshot either,” I went on as my memory put together a picture of what I had seen up there. “He should have had his brains splattered all over the place if it had been from a gun, but I didn’t see any blood …”

  Farrentino reluctantly nodded his head. “No, there wasn’t any blood. No one heard a gunshot either. Witnesses say that they heard the woman scream, that’s all. A second after that, a van parked across the street took off, but no one got its make or license number. The woman ran off before anyone could stop her.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” I said. “How was John killed?”

  “We have some ideas,” he said tersely. “We’re looking into it right now—”

  “Wonderful. I’m overwhelmed.”

  “Don’t be a smartass,” Farrentino said, giving me a sour look. “Off the record, though, we think that it might have been a laser weapon of some sort. Remember the ‘Dark Jedi’ slayings in Chicago a couple of years ago?”

  A chill ran down my back as he said that. Of course I remembered; it had been national news for several months. A serial killer—who, in a letter sent to the Chicago Tribune, had called himself the “Dark Jedi”—had picked off seven people at random over the course of several weeks, using a high-energy laser rifle. When the FBI and Illinois State Police finally tracked him down, the Dark Jedi turned out to be a rather sociopathic high school student from an upscale Chicago suburb. The scariest part of the case, though, was the fact that he had devised his weapon from a science-hobby handbook available in most bookstores, using equipment purchased through mail-order catalogs. In fact, the feds had found h
im because he had previously showed off a prototype of his laser rifle at a science fair; his “light saber” had won a second-place ribbon.

  “So you think it’s a copycat killer?” I asked.

  Farrentino shrugged. “That’s a possibility, but we don’t know yet. That’s all I can tell you right now.” He then jabbed a finger at me. “You next. Shoot.”

  “Okay.” I folded my arms across my chest. “He told me he was investigating a murder—”

  “Whose murder?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Which was the truth.

  “Who was the lady?”

  “I don’t know that either,” I said. Which was a lie.

  “C’mon, Rosen—”

  “All I know was that he was supposed to meet someone here at eight o’clock, and it had to do with the story he was doing.” I shrugged, gazing back at him. “That’s all I know … but I’m telling you, whoever she was, it wasn’t a girlfriend. John didn’t cheat on his wife. That’s a fact.”

  Farrentino’s dark eyes searched my face. He said nothing for a few moments. He knew that I hadn’t told him everything I knew about the circumstances leading up to John’s murder, and I knew that he wasn’t playing entirely fair with me either. In John’s memory, we were playing one final game of quid pro quo, and this round had just reached a stalemate.

  I glanced toward the entrance to the beer garden. A couple of cops were holding open the gate; I could hear the ponderous clank of the stretcher’s wheels as the parameds carefully inched it down the stairs from the balcony. In a few moments there would be nothing left of my buddy except a yellow chalk mark on a wooden floor.