by Mike Markel
Harold Breen was kneeling next to the bed, his big frame blocking my view of the stiff. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said, without looking up.
“Good morning, handsome.” I glanced around the tiny bedroom. There was a cheap dresser with an unframed mirror sitting on top, leaning against the wall, a small closet with accordion doors, and the queen bed covered in a plain white fitted sheet.
One of the uniforms had covered up the vic with the top sheet. Harold had pulled the sheet down to the vic’s waist and was looking at him. On the night table to the left of the bed was an almost empty bottle of white wine next to two half-full glasses.
I bent down to look at the glasses. I could see faint prints. It didn’t look like anyone had drunk anything from the glasses.
“Robin been in here yet?” I said.
“No,” Ryan said. “No touching, please.”
“How come this room’s okay and the living room’s all busted up?”
Ryan smiled. “We’re going to have to devote some thought to that, Karen.”
“Don’t you hate that?”
“No, actually.” Ryan treated my crankiness like caffeine: he was fine with others indulging, but it was against his religion.
I walked around to the other side of the bed, carefully avoiding two Trojan wrappers, a pair of sex handcuffs covered in phony fur, and a foot-long black dildo as thick as an oar handle. It was a deluxe model with a set of balls molded into it and a couple leather straps attached to it. In the world of dildos, black is a more common color than you would imagine, given the demographics, I mean. I’ve never discussed the issue with black guys, so I don’t know whether they think it’s racist or just a compliment. I could see both points of view.
Having worked Vice, I’m familiar with all kinds of weird-ass toys, but in the typical bedroom it’s mostly vibrators. I crouched down next to the dildo. There was some dried sticky stuff covering the first six inches or so of it. So either the dead guy partied with lesbos or he used the strappy dildo on his girlfriend because he didn’t have a strapless bargain model. Or he figured out how to strap it on his own ass so he could drill two girls at the same time, each back-and-forth doubling as a forth-and-back. I don’t even know if that’s possible. I made a mental note to ask my ex-husband.
I stood up and looked down at the vic’s face. He was a good-looking guy. I put him in his early twenties, with a long, straight nose, full lips, and strong cheek bones. Dark hair, thick and wavy, swept back, not parted, like he was moving forward and his hair was blowing back in the breeze. He had a moustache and goatee, carefully trimmed. The whole look said, Yeah, I’m a handsome son of a bitch, and I’m willing to make the effort. You’re welcome.
“Jesus,” I said as my gaze landed on the sheet covering his tent pole a couple feet south. “That’s all him?” I said.
Harold turned to me. “You want to see?”
I sighed. “I have so little in my life, Harold.”
He knew my story. He nodded in agreement, then pulled back the sheet.
This was one significant dick. It was circumcised, sticking straight up in the air seven or eight inches, couple or three inches across. His balls were as big as a good-sized Golden Delicious.
I’m not that into size as a measure of anything important, but any woman who looked at that package and didn’t think, “Oh, my Lord, you have outdone yourself”—well, that woman would be dead, blind, or … no, there’s no third possibility: dead or blind.
“You done, Karen?” Harold said.
I was somewhere else. “Excuse me?” I said after a moment.
He lifted an eyebrow. “I asked if you’re done.”
“I guess so.”
Ryan said, “Did you notice anything interesting?”
I looked at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No hair,” he said.
“What?”
“I said, ‘No hair.’ He’s got no hair on his chest or his stomach. And no pubic hair.”
I hadn’t noticed. “You mean like he’s got some kind of disease or like he shaved it all off?”
“My guess, Karen,” he said gently, seeing that I hadn’t completely re-focused my attention, “since he’s got hair on his head and his face and his legs, is he liked to shave.”
“Guys shave down there?”
“Not most guys, at least guy cops and guys who go to my gym, but apparently some guys.”
“This is very interesting,” I said. “Maybe I should look again down there.”
Ryan nodded. Harold ignored me.
“Okay,” I said, shaking the images out of my head, “so who was this guy?”
“He was Austin Sulenka, age twenty-four, apparently some kind of student here at Central Montana. He has a Montana license, with this place listed as his home address.”
“How did he die, Harold?”
The Medical Examiner looked up at me. Then he pointed to the vic’s neck, which had a pink band about an inch wide, as well as a big red-speckled bruise over the Adam’s apple. “My guess is asphyxia. He was strangled. Or he strangled himself.”
“During sex?”
“I think he was having sex, what with him being nude and on his bed.”
“Plus the rod,” I said.
“The rod might be nothing.” He shook his head. “Could be a death erection. We used to see that quite a bit at hangings.”
“Well, I’ll be. So someone could have staged the scene to look like he was getting laid?”
“I’m only a doc. That’s for you two to figure out. I’m just saying it could be a death erection.”
“Wait a second,” I said. I leaned my head down toward it, studied it for a few seconds, then walked around to the other side of the bed to examine it from another angle.
Ryan was looking at me. “I could ask Robin to print you an extra set of pictures.”
“Very funny,” I said. “Just wanted to see if this dick’s seen any action lately.”
“And?”
“Yes.” I was a couple inches away from it, and I didn’t want to bother trying to find my glasses in my big shoulder bag. “I do believe it has.”
“Yeah?”
“If he was just jerking off, there’d be some balled-up tissues around, or some sticky stuff on his crotch or his legs or on the ceiling or the windows or something, but it wouldn’t be all over the shaft where his hand was. This dick’s got a clear high-tide mark on it.” I paused. “Ryan, did you find whatever it was strangled him? It wasn’t a set of hands, right?”
“No, I didn’t find a cord or a belt or anything on the bed. Harold, can you tell if it was a set of hands?”
Harold shook his head. “If it was just hands, we’d see a pattern, particularly where the thumbs pressed in. No, it wasn’t hands. The petechiae in front says it was a cord or rope or something like that. It was knotted, broke the blood vessels.”
“So,” I said, looking at Ryan, “this wasn’t auto-asphyxiation, like he was jerking off, right?”
“Unless he used a noose, so he could strangle himself with one hand and jerk off with the other, he would need three hands: two to tighten the cinch around his neck and one to jerk off.”
I noticed a tiny smile on Ryan’s face, which probably meant he was making fun of me. I didn’t mind. It was early; the shift hadn’t officially started. Anything dumb I say before eight am doesn’t count. “He probably wouldn’t have trashed his own living room.”
Ryan put on the mock-thoughtful expression he used when I was particularly slow-witted. “So you find the trashed-living-room anomaly more troubling than the three-hand-masturbation paradox?”
“I have no idea what the hell you just said.”
Chapter 2
When I caught up with Robin, her head was in the guy’s bathtub. She always does the bathrooms first. She thinks stiff towels, hairy drains, and stray specks of vomit that missed the bowl tell the most interesting stories. Usually, I’m afraid I agree with her, but with this guy, I got the
feeling there’d be no shortage of biologicals in every room.
“Hey, Karen,” she said, looking up from the tub drain and giving me a big smile. She wiped her brow with the sleeve of her white jumpsuit. She had on her paper booties. She was a stickler on methods.
“Are we having fun, Robin?”
“I can’t speak for you,” she said cheerfully, “but I could spend a whole day just in the shitter.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Look at this,” she said, sweeping her arm to take in the tiny bathroom. “Four different wet towels on the floor, two others hanging on the shower-curtain rod. Enough pubes to stuff a small pillow. There’s birth-control pills, tampons, douches, pink plastic razors, makeup, body spray, perfume. Shit, there’s enough girlie crap here to outfit a women’s dorm for a year. Plus all the guy crap—lotions, creams, skin softener, rubbers, three kinds of razors. You might as well work another murder this week, ’cause it’s gonna take me two days just to collect and label the stuff in this place.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Where are you so far?”
“I’ve photo’d the whole apartment, but I haven’t bagged and tagged any of the stuff.”
“Can Ryan and I go over the living room?”
“Go ahead. I’ll need another hour in here, at least.”
“All right, thanks.” I snapped on a pair of gloves and walked out to the living room, where Ryan was already rummaging around. “You find his wallet yet?”
He waved it at me. “Yup. It’s got his license, credit cards, all his plastic. Plus about forty bucks.”
“Okay, let’s see if we can identify some of his fuck buddies from this landfill, then we’ll do a canvass and meet back here. Sound good?”
“Absolutely.” He was bent over, leaning on his cane, sifting through the papers, photographs, and assorted busted junk all over the floor. There was stuff everywhere, but most of the papers seemed to be clustered around the desk in the corner of the room.
We spent about ten minutes looking through the scattered remains of Austin Sulenka’s life. Ryan moved to the desk and fired up the guy’s laptop.
“Looking for anything in particular?” I said.
“Trying to figure out who this woman is.” He held up a photo of the vic with a good-looking woman, long medium-brown hair, big smile aimed at the camera. They were in a canoe, bright sunshine reflecting off the water. “I’d nominate her as his favorite girlfriend,” he said, fanning a bunch of photos of her like playing cards.
“Good,” I said. “Tell me what you figure out.”
It took him the better part of thirty seconds. “Name’s May Eberlein. Graduate student in English, just like Austin.” Ryan was pointing to a gallery of a few dozen pictures of her in the picture folder on the vic’s computer.
“How’d you get her name?”
“His Facebook page.” He clicked a button and pulled up Austin’s wall, then swiveled the laptop so I could see it head-on. He clicked on the photos, and there was her name beneath a big set of photos.
“She’s the only one he tagged?”
“Seems so,” he said, back at the keyboard. “He’s got lots of photos of other guys and girls, but May seems to be his true love.”
“Okay, let’s bring the laptop in.”
He nodded. “Haven’t found a phone yet,” he said. “Be on the lookout for that, okay?”
“Yeah.” I was scanning the layers of debris. “Who called this in?”
“The woman in Unit 4, next door.”
“You got a name?”
Ryan pulled his notebook out of his inside suit jacket pocket. “Jessica Allen,” he said.
“Okay, let me start with her. You start working the other three units, okay? Then we’ll meet back here.”
He nodded and I left the apartment. What passes for morning traffic in Rawlings was starting to pick up. The gas and diesel fumes from the street that passed within fifteen feet of the little apartment block were a pleasant contrast to the funk in the stiff’s place. Because of the traffic noise, I knocked hard on the door to Unit 4.
Footsteps came clomping toward me. The door opened. “Ms. Allen.” I pointed to the gold shield on the chain around my neck. “Detective Karen Seagate, Rawlings Police Department. You got a minute to speak with me about this?” I pointed next door.
A car honked behind me so loud I jumped. I turned around to see a guy in a Saturn flipping off a woman in a Honda. Good morning, everyone.
She shook her head as she looked out onto the street. “Yeah, sure,” she said. Jessica Allen was about forty, tall, thin, and tired. Her body had started to go concave, shoulders slumping forward, chest pulling in. She was smoking a cigarette, her bleached blond hair tied back in a rubber band. Her skin was pale, a cluster of zit scars running up both sides of her neck toward her cheeks. She was wearing a sweatshirt, no bra, and plaid men’s flannel pajama bottoms.
“You phoned the police about an hour ago, right, about Austin?”
She closed the door behind me. “That’s right.” She motioned for me to sit at her small kitchen table. “I’m making some coffee. Want some?”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.” She turned toward her counter. “What made you think something was wrong?”
“I was walking Richard to the bus stop like I do every morning,” she said. “I glance in Austin’s living-room window. Usually he’s got the shade closed—you know, when he’s partying—”
“He partied a lot?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Big time.”
“Anyway, go ahead,” I said. “You’re looking in his window.”
“Yeah, and I see what you guys saw: the place was trashed. So I phoned him, no answer. I knock on his door. Nothing. He’s not an early riser, you know what I mean? I just got this bad feeling. So I called the cops.”
“There’s no manager here who could’ve opened the place up—I mean, in one of these five units?”
“No, there’s nobody here.”
“So, you said he partied last night?”
“Yeah, it was about eleven-thirty, maybe midnight. Started hearing a real ruckus, stuff flying, crashing.”
“How long did that last?”
“Just a few minutes.”
“You didn’t think maybe something was wrong?” The refrigerator cycled on, the hum filling the small kitchen area.
“Not really,” she said. “There was stuff going on earlier in the night. I could hear girls’ voices, some laughing.”
The coffeemaker started gurgling. Jessica Allen poured the coffee, then grabbed a quart of milk from the refrigerator. There were sugar packets in a shiny container on the table, like you see in diners. “Austin parties three or four times a week. Guys, girls. There could be ten people in there. They start up any time, go for a few hours, rest up. Then start up later and go a few more hours.” She pointed toward her living room. “His place is the exact same size at this. Of course, he could get a lot more people in there ’cause he’s got some in the bedroom, some in the living room, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I get the picture. You say there were guys and girls, right?”
“It was mixed, you know. There’d be guys there in the afternoons, weekends, watching football, guy shit. But at night, for the partying, there were girls and guys. I could tell sometimes there’d be two or three sets of people humping away.”
“You could hear it?”
“Through these paper walls?” Jessica Allen tapped an ash off her cigarette into a plastic restaurant ashtray. “You see that bed in the living room?” I nodded. “That’s where I have Richard sleep. Can’t have him with me in the bedroom ’cause that wall’s up against Austin’s. The noise used to wake Richard up two or three times a night. You know, I try to get him down by nine. That’s just when Austin’s getting into high gear over there.”
“Did you ever ask him to keep it down?”
Jessica Allen took a pull on her cigarette and shr
ugged. “Every once in a while I send Richard off to my ex’s and I make some noise myself, you know what I mean? Besides,” she said, “it’s not like I got a lot of housing options. I make three bucks an hour working Sally’s Diner, plus tips. Economy this bad, a lot of people cut back on the tips. My rent’s late half the time. I’m lucky I got this place. It’s four seventy-five, utilities included. Not gonna find a better deal in this school district.”
“Okay, so getting back to last night. You hear some crashing around eleven-thirty, midnight. Lasted a few minutes.”
“That’s right.”
“Then, you hear anything else?”
“No, it goes quiet.”
“Did you hear anybody leave? Did you see anyone?”
“No, I don’t keep track of comings and goings. Like I said, it could be a bus depot in there.”
“Let me ask you, did Austin have one girl he partied with more than the others?”
She shook her head. “I think he was just a pussy hound.”
I put a photo of May Eberlein on the kitchen table. “How ’bout this girl? You seen her before?”
Jessica Allen looked at the photo, then nodded her head. “That girl can take a photograph, know what I mean?”
“She’s good-looking.”
“Yeah, I think I’ve seen her. Maybe, I’m not sure.”
“Do you know who she is?”
“Sorry.” She shook her head. “Might’ve run into her once or twice, but, tell you the truth, only real thing me and Austin had in common was that wall over there.”
“So,” I said, “you and Austin never partied?”
She exhaled a stream of smoke. “Just between you and me?”
I nodded. Jessica Allen could have been from my neighborhood when I was a kid. She asked me if I’d keep it quiet, I said I would, and that was good enough for her.
“Only once. It was maybe a year ago, year and a half. He’d just moved in. We ran into each other. One thing led to another, you know how it is.”
“Yeah,” I said. Which was true.
“So I find myself at his place. We’re drinking, a little smoking. We’re both half wasted. He shows me what he’s got.” She paused.
