Last Ditch

by G. M. Ford

  "Just turn it so the headlights point down here." She walked my way. "What's down there?" I pointed. "See the other set of tire tracks?" "Oh . . . yeah."

  I tried to keep the anxiety out of my voice.

  "Would you please move the car?"

  She fixed me with a baleful stare and then began to move. As she turned toward the car, I clearly recalled why it is I work alone.

  The power steering belt screamed as she" first cut the wheel to the right, looping out toward the front of the warehouse, and then all the way back to the left, to get the lights pointing directly at the river.

  I shielded my eyes with one hand and waved at her with the other. She stuck her head out the side window.

  "What?"

  "Turn your high beams off," I yelled above the engine.

  When she snapped down onto low beams, I could see it clearly for the first time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the part of me that always tries to stay optimistic had been hoping that maybe there'd been a delivery. That maybe some light trunk had pulled in here to leave a load. Bad news. If it had, this was its last delivery of the day. The muddy tracks led all the way to the edge. Anything that was still rolling at that point in the incline had ended up in the river.

  I was busy enacting and then rejecting scenarios wherein there was some other explanation for the tracks. Anything other than the possibility that some no-eared maniac had sent Bermuda and his Buick careening down into the waterway. Duvall was suddenly at my elbow.

  "Couldn't those be the tracks from the tow truck that rescued your car?"

  I shook my head. "No way." I pointed to the warehouse on our right. "It floated way over past the building there. They pulled me and the car out about fifty yards downstream."

  She took my arm. "We'd better wait in the car. They won't like it if we've been stomping all over a potential crime scene."

  As we turned back toward the lights and the surging of the engine, I caught a glimpse of something out of place over by the corner of the office porch. I knew right away. Nothing in a place like this was that gende shade of brown. Dry-rot brown, creosote brown, rust brown, but never beige, baby, never beige. My heart sank toward my shoes.

  I pulled Rebecca along with me. "You still have the flashlight?"

  She rummaged around in one pocket, then the other, and handed over a small black rubberized flashlight. I flicked the button and pointed the weak yellow fight A brown wool beret rested on its edge, held perpendicular to the ground by the side of the porch.

  "It's his," I said.

  "You're sure?"

  I told her about watching Bermuda leave his house last night

  "We'll have to let them identify the hat on their own," I said.

  She was a quick lass. Ornery, but quick. "Or they'll know you've been withholding information." "Exactly."

  Over the top of the Explorer I could plainly see the pulsing red and blue rights as they reflected off the sea of containers and, in the distance, I could hear the rushing of tires on gravel.

  TRUJILLO AND WESSELS must have had the night off. Trujillo arrived an hour or so after the first cruiser, wearing a brown ski jacket and a pair of stonewashed jeans. Wessels never put in a guest appearance at all. I figured a boozer like Wessels was well into the shank of his drinking night by now and couldn't risk showing up half in the bag. Couldn't say I missed him.

  By the time Trujillo showed up, the forensics team had collected the piece of cane we'd found, along with several other shards we'd missed, and discovered the beret on their own. The two police divers had been down to the bottom of the river twice, the first time to confirm that, yes, there was indeed a car down there, the second to attach the cable lines for the pair of heavy-duty tow trucks which had showed up a half an hour ago.

  About that same time, Gordon Chen had brought a gleaming blue Lexus SC400 skidding to a halt among the drab pack of official vehicles.

  He hit the gravel running, trotting up to Trujillo.

  He jerked a thumb in my direction.

  "I want this man arrested," he shouted.

  Trujillo stayed calm. "Take it easy, Mr. Chen," he said. "We have the situation in hand."

  Gordon Chen came at me hard. "You son of a bitch."

  As I wasn't in the mood to be attacked by amateurs, I bumped myself off the fender of the Explorer, timed his imminent arrival and stiff-armed him hard in the solar plexus. He staggered backward two steps and began gasping for breath.

  I wagged a finger in his face.

  "Not tonight, Gordo. I've had a hard day."

  Trujillo took him by the shoulder and turned him back toward the Lexus, but Gordon Chen wasn't through. Still gasping, he flung Trujillo aside and came stiff-legging it back my way.

  "You stay away from my mother," he wheezed.

  Trujillo had recovered his balance and grabbed Chen by the elbow.

  "Take it easy," he was saying. "Take it easy."

  "My mother is very frail," he whined to Trujillo. "This man is lolling her. She's not strong."

  Trujillo did a good job. Slowly, in stages, he managed to stuff the young Chen back into his sixty-thousand-dollar chariot and get him on his way. He even had presence of mind enough to get far off to one side so he wasn't pelted by the rooster tail of dirt and gravel that Gordon Chen left in his wake. Trujillo fanned the air in front of his face.

  He looked over at me and shook his head.

  "Don't know how anybody that out of control can run a company," he commented.

  "He certainly is an excitable boy," I agreed.

  From the whoops and shouts emanating from the far side of the warehouse, I guessed that the car had breached the water and was in the process of being dragged up the bank. I couldn't tell for sure, because I'd been relegated to sitting in the Explorer, while Duvall had immediately been made part of the forensics investigation team.

  Trujillo sauntered over and began asking me the same questions he'd been asking me for the past hour and a half.

  "So let's go back over this supposed guy with no ears . . ." Trujillo asked. "I mean, what is he? Norman Bates or something? What ... he just kills anybody who shows up down here? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

  "I don't know," I said truthfully. "All I know is that he took one look at me and decided he wanted to punch my ticket. Why? I don't have the foggiest"

  Trujillo stroked his chin.

  "And then of course it follows that whatever problem this mythical no-eared man had with you, he also must have had with Edward Schwartz."

  I shrugged again. "I don't see how that could be. Before this week, I hadn't seen Ed Schwartz in nearly twenty years."

  He touched his temple with his index finger. "Maybe it's just a coincidence."

  "Maybe if you guys had put more effort into finding the guy in the first place, we wouldn't be here doing tins tonight"

  I watched as the color ran up his neck and darkened his face. Before he could open his mouth to respond, however, one of the police divers, his black wet suit gleaming in the lights, came around the corner of the building and called out, "Detective."

  Reluctantly, Trujillo switched his focus to the sound of the voice.

  "Yeah?"

  "Car's about up." "Thanks."

  He poked me in the chest with a finger.

  "You stay right here. I'm not through with you yet"

  With that, he went crunching off across the gravel and disappeared around the rusted corner of the warehouse.

  Although I was making it a point not to show it, that same question was bothering the hell out of me. Either this guy was a serial killer of some sort or something about both Bermuda and me had immediately set him off. Problem was, I couldn't imagine anything Bermuda and me had in common . . . except of course Wild Bill Waterman.

  I was still massaging this idea about ten minutes later when Rebecca and Trujillo came back around the warehouse. Whatever flush Trujillo had in his face when he left me had disappeared. He was fish-belly white, walkin
g stiffly along beside Duvall, mindlessly wiping the comers of his mouth with his thumb and index finger.

  And that wasn't the bad news. Rebecca was the bad news. Here was a woman who spent her days up to her elbows in bloated cadavers, and much like Detective Trujillo, she had the look of someone who'd seen something they were unlikely to forget. My stomach shrunk in toward itself like a dying star.

  Trujillo walked right past me without a word, let himself into the unmarked Ford and began to talk into the radio mike. Rebecca hooked her arm in mine. "An old Buick," she said.

  "Was he . . . ?" "Uh-huh."

  I took several deep breaths before I spoke.

  "Could you tell . . . you know . . . how . . ."

  "Someone crushed his skull," she said evenly. "Then whoever it was drove pieces of his canes through his eyes and ears."

  A groan slipped from my chest.

  "Not by hand, either. With something like a hammer."

  I wanted to speak but wasn't sure I was able.

  "He was killed in a frenzy, Leo. The kind of frenzy I've only seen from angel dust cases. Just howling mad rage."

  Over her left shoulder, an orange coroner's van backed out of sight behind the Triad warehouse, its yellow light flashing, its backup safety device beeping in four-four time.

  Trujillo was still ashen as he came trudging over from his car.

  "I want you at the Downtown Precinct at eight o'clock sharp tomorrow morning. I'll have a departmental artist on hand. We're gonna need a composite."

  "Better make it about nine-thirty," I said.

  "Don't screw with me, Waterman, or I'll send you down there in a cruiser right now. That way, you'll be there when I need you."

  "I need to pick up my car at eight," I said. "Somebody impounded the damn thing."

  He pointed a stubby finger at me. "All right, nine-thirty."

  He started to leave but changed his mind.

  "Waterman. For the record, I'm going to tell you one more time. You stay out of this. I don't want to see your face again. You understand what I'm telling you here?"

  I said I did, but he wasn't finished. "I don't know how, but I've got a feeling that you poking your nose in where it doesn't belong is responsible for poor Mr. Schwartz here." He wiped his mouth again. "I ought to drag your butt over there and make you look at what some sick son of a bitch did to that poor old guy. Maybe then you'd have sense enough to let professionals do their jobs."

  "Professionals like your partner Wessels?" I asked.

  He turned his attention to Rebecca. "Do us both a favor, Miss Duvall. Get him out of here."

  We stood and watched as he tromped off around the corner of the building. "Let's go home," she said.

  Chapter 21

  It took the better part of three hours to create a reasonable likeness of the Man With No Ears, and even then, it was unsatisfactory. While each of the individual features was more or less correct, and we'd duplicated the general shape of the face and fall of the hair, something remained amiss. All in all, what with the racial difference, I figured the average person, shown this drawing, should be able to distinguish between the suspect and, say . . . Karl Malden.

  "Can I have a copy?" I asked.

  The police artist was a woman whose name tag read SGT. TASKER. She said to call her Fran. A redhead with so many freckles it nearly constituted a tan. She was a pleasant woman, who seemed to be at ease with pushing forty and straining at the seams of her blue uniform.

  "Sure," she said. "Hang on, I'll make you one."

  I rested one of my cheeks on the desk as she left the room. This morning's headline had read WATERMAN DRIVER

  MURDERED. POLICE PROBE LINK TO PRICE CASE. Same MAN

  ON THE MOON typeface. Pat had left me four, progressively snottier messages since seven-thirty this morning. If he was pacing around waiting for a callback, he was going to get a lot of exercise. Cur this!

  Tasker sauntered back into the room with one of our Identi-Kit pictures in each hand. "It just can't recreate the anima,'' she said.

  "The what?"

  "The anima. The soul of a person. The person that's always in there looking back at himself."

  I looked at our final product. She was right. We'd selected the right pieces, but the pieces had failed to yield a person.

  "You know what's funny about these Identi-Kit pictures?" "What?"

  "They work great for some people and not at all for others." "How so?"

  She wobbled the picture in her hand.

  "It's the anima thing. Some people can look at one of these things and make the jump to a real living face. They see the perp in the street, they're all over him. Other people . . . you could make one of these that was dead bang on of their mother, and they wouldn't have a clue. They just can't make the jump from paper to flesh. Can't be trained to do it either. Department's gone nuts trying to train them. Doesn't work. Either they got it or they don't It's weird."

  She held the other picture out. "Here, take this one too."

  I folded both pictures twice and slipped them in my pocket.

  "How do painters manage it?" I asked. "Manage what?"

  "To create real people when they paint."

  "Talent," she said. "They put the anima back in. They take it from inside themselves and put it into their work."

  She caught me taking stock of her and said, "I went to Cornish. Way back when. I wanted to be a fashion illustrator." She put her hand on her hip and took a couple of fancy steps across the room. She let go a hearty laugh and slid behind her desk.

  "Pretty glamorous, huh?"

  I reckoned how it was indeed tres haute and then asked, "You'll tell Trujillo I did my duty as a citizen?"

  "I'll E-mail him instantly," she assured me.

  I put my hand on my hip and flounced from the room in a grossly exaggerated sashay. I could hear her laughter booming behind me as I stepped out into the hall.

  Gaylord LaFontaine answered the door himself. He was wearing rubber gloves. Carrying a toilet brush in his right hand.

  "Oh—I was—" he stammered.

  "Brushing your teeth?" I queried.

  He brandished the brush. "Maybe yours if you're not careful."

  I held up my hands in surrender. "I'll be good," I vowed.

  "Come on in," he said.

  I waited while he trotted down the hall to the bathroom and divested himself of his armor and lance. He came back drying his hands on a paper towel and reading my mind.

  "My sister takes the kids on Sundays. Takes 'em to lunch and then a movie. Gives me a little break in the action."

  "Nice to see you're using your leisure time so wisely," I said.

  He scoffed. "Leisure. What's that?" I followed him into the family room. The floor was a minefield of brightly colored plastic toys. "Davey got

  E-mail privileges," he said as we picked our way across the floor. "Jason and Megan have been sending him messages every night before they go to bed. They're real excited about it." He began picking up toys from the floor. "Kind of gives the kids a way to be connected to their dad, even while he's away."

  "E-mail's great, isn't it?" I said.

  "I'm just now getting into it"

  He stood in the center of the room with his hands on his hips. He went into his grammar-school teacher voice. "Toys gotta stay in this room. That's the rule. It's rough in here, but at least a body can walk around the rest of the place without breakin' a leg."

  We spent the next ten minutes picking up toys and lobbing them into the big cardboard box in the corner. We got most of the big stuff.

  "So how you doing on your investigation?" he asked as we ambled over to the couch and sat down.

  "I'd like to think I'm making some progress," I hedged. ' 'What I know for sure is that, somehow or other, it all stems from that container full of bodies."

  "I wouldn't be surprised," he said. "Tragedies like that have a way of takin' a divot outta people."

  I pulled one of the Identi-Kit pictures from
the pocket of my jacket, smoothed it on the edge of the coffee table and handed it to him..

  "You ever seen this guy before?"

  He looked it over carefully.

  "Can't say as I have," he said.

  "How about without the long hair?"

  He shook his head. "Guy his age oughtn't have hair like that. Makes him look like a horse's ass," he said.

  "Since I was here last, have you thought of anything else? Something you didn't remember the other day."

  He bowed his head. "Just the smell," he said. "The smell inside that metal box." He looked up at me. "Ever since you come the last time, I been cleaning like a madman, tryin' to get that smell to go away."

  Not exactly what I had in mind. I got to my feet.

  "Sorry," was all I could think to say.

  "You don't forget something like that," he said. "Changes your whole life." He looked up at me. "I was never quite as gung ho again. Knowin' . . . you know . . . that something like that could happen and then the whole thing could get swept under the rug 'cause it was political."

  He got to his feet and, together, we started for the door. Halfway across the room Gaylord LaFontaine spied a red fire truck hiding in the magazine rack and sent it spiraling back toward the box.

  The way I figure it, investigations come in four styles and two of them are easy to spot. When you're asking the right people the right questions, everything goes like clockwork and everybody's happy. Case closed. Another satisfied customer.

  The opposite extreme is equally as easy to spot. When you're asking the wrong people the wrong questions, nothing at all useful happens, and the case likewise tends to be over in a big hurry. Except that, in that scenario, nobody's happy. It's the other two possibilities that are hard.

  It takes years of experience to differentiate between those situations where you're asking the right questions of the wrong people and those situations when you're asking the wrong questions of the right people. Today, I had the overwhelming feeling that I just wasn't asking the right questions. That's probably why I was wracking my brain, trying to think of something else to ask Gaylord LaFontaine as we walked to the front door. And then ... it was out of my mouth before I thought about it.