The Highway (A Benny Steel and Marisa Tulli Novel - Book 1)

by Steven Grosso

  Williams frowned and tugged his shirt. “I’m hot. Are you hot? It’s hot. Anyway, push for an autopsy tomorrow—I want it fast. Push forensics. Knock on doors, talk to neighbors. He’s got a wife or girlfriend, I think, from the file I read…give her today, but tomorrow, go and talk to her.” Williams squinted and scratched the top of his head with one finger. More cologne jumped off him with every body movement and floated up to Steel’s nostrils. “Oh, and I’m pairing you up with a new transfer, rookie, Marisa Tulli. Let her work with, and learn from, one of my best detectives.”

  “I don’t need a partner, Lieutenant.”

  If I need to get this done quickly, I need an experienced partner, Steel thought but refrained from saying it.

  “Break her in, show her the ropes. She’s a new detective.”

  Steel sighed under his breath. He snatched a pen from the cup holder on his desk, leaned back in his chair, and chewed the cap. He stared straight without blinking, lost in his thoughts.

  An awkward moment passed. Neither spoke.

  “Where is she?” Steel finally asked.

  Williams jerked a thumb back at the door. “I sent her to lun—”

  The door creaked open, and Williams turned his head as the sound cut in and out. Steel slid his chair to his right and angled his head around Williams’ wide torso.

  “Speaking of the devi—” Williams said.

  “What devil? I’m an angel,” Marisa said, her voice as angelic as she’d implied. She smiled and tilted her head. She cupped her left hand around her hip and gripped a coffee in the other, one leg straight, the other sideways.

  “Um-hm…yeah, this pair will work out just fine,” Williams said, then laughed deeply and slowly.

  Steel couldn’t help but check her out for a few seconds. It was male instinct; the eyes navigated to a woman and couldn’t be pulled away with any amount of will or force. He guessed it was nature’s way of a male subconsciously checking for a fertile woman, but he knew most men consciously looked for another reason. He estimated she couldn’t have been older than thirty-two, could’ve even been younger. Maybe her natural beauty was playing tricks with his mind. Her pitch-black hair dangled below her shoulder blades, and her cheekbones arched through naturally tan skin. Her full lips thinned out as she smiled, revealing her teeth—a straight line of ivory. And her eyes sparkled while catching a shot of fluorescent light from the ceiling above, enhancing their dark chocolate color. For a moment, Steel just stared in her eyes in awe, almost forgetting he was in work, floored by her beauty. His stomach flipped several times, the nerves inside iced. She kept smiling, gentle and sincere, and stuck out her hand.

  “Hi. Marisa Tulli.”

  Steel sprung up from his seat and held her warm hand in his own. “Benjamin Steel.”

  After catching himself almost letting his guard down, he narrowed his eyes and tightened his facial muscles, putting on his cop face to remind her she was working under his lead, not side-by-side. Steel had a peculiar way about him sometimes.

  Williams cut in. “Marisa, you two will be working together. This is the guy I was telling you about.” A telephone rang rhythmically in the distance. Williams circled a finger at the two of them. “Steel, give her the rundown. I gotta take this.” He scurried past cubicles along the wall and closed the door to his office behind him.

  Steel watched Williams answer his phone through the glass cutout next to his door before turning back to his new partner and motioning his head toward the exit. “I need coffee. You wanna get one?”

  Marisa smiled and jiggled the Styrofoam cup in her hand. He read the orange and purple letters—DUNKIN’ DONUTS.

  “Well, I need a cup, so, if you don’t mind, let’s head to the café down the street,” he said. “I’ll show you what we have going on with this case. Sound good?”

  “Yes, Captain,” she said, smiling.

  Steel cracked a closed-lip smile, barely reacting to her joke. He wrapped his black suit jacket around his body, fought his arms through the sleeves, and led the way to the door. He held it open for her and smiled to himself at the joke without letting her see. Two quick thoughts crossed his mind.

  One: He felt Williams’ instincts were right that he and Marisa would make a good team.

  Two: He’d better inhale deeply because Marisa’s perfume smelled a whole lot better than Williams’ cologne.

  6

  The heat punched Steel and Marisa in their faces as they exited the building. It wasn’t the sit-on-the-beach-and-take-in-the-sun-with-a-cool-breeze-type, but rather the type that made everyone it touched irritable and angry. Within ten minutes of someone stepping outside into the thick heat, water was needed to moisten his or her cotton mouth. Saliva was almost non-existent, and if there at all, it was bright white, lumped together and thick. Sweat soaked pedestrians’ clothes, making the fabric stick to their skin. People moved slower than usual. If someone stayed outside for too long, nausea was sure to follow, and if someone exercised in the heat for too long, heat stroke was more than probable. Even the shade felt like a sauna. The heat wave had been brewing for a few days and was just as dangerous as a major snowstorm in the winter. The news called it an extended heat wave with a dangerously high heat index, warning Philadelphians to stay in their houses. Steel didn’t have that luxury. Who’d pay his bills?

  “So, where are we going?” Marisa asked.

  Steel shifted his head right, then left. “You know what…forget the place down the street. Let’s take a ride to the Starbucks in Rittenhouse. I think they have one inside the Barnes & Noble. I could go for a cup from Starbucks.”

  “Williams didn’t tell me about an adventure on my first day…I like it,” she said, staring straight ahead, laughing at her own joke, not caring if Steel did or not.

  Steel pointed east to the parking lot. “My car’s over there.”

  They walked and worked up a sweat, the air thickening with each step through the humidity. Steel unlocked his doors from afar. The door handles burned their hands as they opened them. The seats were even warmer, and the car smelled of summer—stale air freshener and trapped heat. Steel didn’t waste a second. He turned the car on and spun the air conditioner dial as far as it could go. Marisa leaned close to the vents and fanned herself. “Shew, it’s hot out there.”

  He laid his right arm around her headrest and backed out of the parking space. The exits out of the police station were directly in front of him, so he drove a few blocks toward Sixth Street, then toward Walnut, and turned left onto it. Barnes & Noble was on Eighteenth, not too far away. He figured he’d use the twelve-block drive for some questioning—maybe tap into a few interrogation methods to find out a little about his new partner, see who he was working with.

  He gathered his thoughts and drove the first few blocks in silence. As usual, the streets of Center City were packed. Lunchtime on a Monday afternoon meant sitting in traffic a little longer. All types of workers busting their asses to put food on the table to feed their families or support themselves walked, sat, and stood on the concrete pavements on either side of the street. People-watching was one of Steel’s hobbies, just observing strangers going about their day, wondering what they were thinking, where they came from, where they were going.

  Traffic reached a standstill, and his eyes wandered over to the masses pushing and weaving through the overcrowded streets. Some wore business suits, some hard hats; some medical workers dressed in long white coats with stethoscopes around their necks or green or blue scrubs; and some legal couriers zipped by his side window on bicycles, wearing spandex clothing with large backpacks strapped to his or her shoulders. The mix of workers relaxed on street benches, a few chomping on homemade sandwiches that were scrunched between foil. Others read books, drank coffee, or talked on their cell phones. The sun had escaped the few morning clouds, leaving nothing standing in its path.

  He turned toward her, then back to the road. Conversations or ice-breakers weren’t his st
rong points, but he’d worked on each and had improved from his painfully shy high school days. His face reddened a bit. “These people are crazy. It’s too hot out here.”

  “Nobody listens until they get a heat stroke,” she said, shaking her head.

  He eyed the road and workers and got lost in his thoughts again. Jobs, and job titles, and societies creating a need for labor had always fascinated him. It was as if all the adults in society played dress-up in the game of life, just like kids, but life had consequences if one decided to quit or couldn’t find a groove as an adult. Everyone did something for a living—well, at least most people. The two of them were law enforcement, others doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers, painters, and so on. And somehow it all worked. The ingenuity of man to think of ways to make money fascinated him. And it all boiled down to servicing one another. He always reasoned that everything in this world ran and was serviced by and for people—that the world worked together, that cooperation made things happen, that it was people who controlled all the operations that satisfied human needs. He’d often use his farming analogy. Farmers grew food and then processed it. They shipped the goods by cars (machines), which were built and made by people; people operated those machines for the product to reach its destination; the food was cooked and prepared by people and then eaten by people. The police department, lawyers, store owners, contractors, teachers, and so on were just people assisting other people. Steel laughed whenever he’d hear someone say the government this or the government that as if it was some obscure entity or machine that continually operated and had always existed and will always exist. The government was created by people. The highest officials were just people. It all boiled down to people. From every decision made by Congress, or private sector business that opened its doors for the day, or website that appeared on computer screens—all had people behind them. Man, he told himself, how we’ve grown as a civilization throughout our short history on Earth.

  He shook his head and told himself to slow the racing thoughts. He could’ve gone on for hours if he hadn’t caught himself. He’d seen a shrink once, a few years back, mainly out of curiosity, who told him that he was prone to obsessive thoughts and depression. She’d assured him that the thoughts were harmless—just over-analytical idiosyncrasies, as she’d put it. His sometimes strange and irrelevant thoughts rarely left his own head, but they were constant when he was stressed. He had a difficult time relating or expressing himself to others, so he thought about trivial things and debated them in his own mind. Steel’s world, better that way, safer that way. If he phrased half his thoughts the wrong way, he’d be liable to get sent to another shrink for a psychiatric evaluation. But he knew he was far from insane. If anything, he called himself an eccentric introvert. Sometimes he enjoyed, and sometimes he tolerated the analytical side of his brain—a blessing and a curse. It was a blessing when he needed it to solve a case or find a way to survive life’s inevitable curveballs, but he dreaded the relentless anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies it threw his way.

  His tires rolled and inched up in traffic to Tenth and then Eleventh Street. He waited a minute before it broke just in front of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. He was familiar with that emergency room because it was where he’d often interview witnesses and suspects to homicides. The hospital employees dominated those streets at lunchtime.

  He reached up and twirled his rearview mirror, then glanced at Marisa, and she gazed out the window. “So, ah, Marisa, how long have you been on the force?”

  She didn’t respond at first, seemed lost in her own thoughts, then his words registered and broke her stare. She blinked rapidly and shook her head. “Oh, I’m sorry. I was daydreaming.” She slapped a hand on her thigh. Her eyes flipped upward in thought. “Um, let’s seeeeee…I’ve been on the force for seven years, patrol. Took the detective’s test last year, and now I’m on my first case out of training, here with you.”

  He raised both eyebrows, but his eyes remained on the road. “Oh, yeah? Seven years? Where were you before the transfer?”

  “They had me on patrol in West Philly. My partner was Olson. You know him?” She blinked a few times and angled her head toward him.

  He sensed that she was looking at him but avoided eye contact. Eye contact was reserved for those he’d known and trusted for years. “Yeah, I met him a few times.”

  Steel kept his mouth shut. He knew Olson well and thought he was the biggest prick on the force but didn’t want to start a war of words. For all he knew, she’d go back and tell him. “You from the area, Marisa?”

  “South Philly,” she said and laughed. “Where else in Philadelphia with a name like Marisa Tulli?”

  He’d noticed that the second he met her—the South Philly accent, dark hair, and Italian last name were dead giveaways.

  A car in front of him came to a sudden stop. He gripped the wheel and slammed on his brakes. Their shoulders and heads jerked back and forth, and the car froze inches between Steel’s bumper and the bumper in front of him.

  “Whoa!” Steel yelled. After collecting himself, he rubbed his neck and grimaced, turned toward Marisa. “You all right?”

  She smoothed her clothing out with her palms. “Yeah, I’m fine. You?”

  He shrugged as a proverbial tough guy would. “I’m fine.” He beeped, and the car in front of him moved only an inch. “Damn traffic.”

  “Anyway, where was I?” Marisa said. “Oh yeah, I was raised near Pat’s and Geno’s before my family moved near the stadiums, Packer Park area.”

  “It’s nice around there.”

  “Yeah, it is.” She ran two or three fingers through her silky, dark hair that dangled sideways. “What else? Oh, and I never wanted to be a cop.”

  Steel laughed under his breath. “Then what the hell are you doing in my car?” He snorted, laughed louder.

  “Funny guy, Steel. This is shaping up to be an interesting partnership.” She laughed and faced the road.

  He could tell the laugh was genuine and he shivered a bit before flipping the air conditioner dial to the lowest level.

  A bright beam of warmth wrapped around a tall building and flashed right through his windshield; both slapped their sun visors down.

  She held a hand in front of her face and squinted. “I went to college and all, but, ah, nine to five’s not for me.”

  “Where at?”

  “Temple.”

  “What for?” he said as he checked the time on his car radio. He knew he had to speed up this conversation because they were approaching Fifteenth Street.

  “Criminal Justice, of course. I wanted to be a lawyer. After graduation, I worked at a law firm as a paralegal before law school. Lasted four months, hated it. That life was too boring for me. The cubicle world is slow death. You die more and more each day. I felt like a caged animal at the zoo on display for the trainers and customers to use for their own benefit. It’s not like Law & Order—I need action in my life.”

  Steel laughed, barely opening his mouth. “You got that right, Pisan. Everybody needs a little action here and there.” He took his eyes off the road but soon regretted his comment, fearing it would be taken out of context. He’d said it without sexual connotation.

  She pouted and shot him a give-me-a-break-look. “Pisan,” she said as she laughed out loud, “don’t do that.”

  Steel whistled under his breath, relieved that she had overlooked the action comment.

  “Annnnnyway,” she said, staring directly at him as he faced the road, a half-smile across her face. “I had a friend on the force who got me in. I’ve been here ever since. Love every minute of it.”

  He heard her, but his attention was divided between her words and the green and white Barnes & Noble sign on Eighteenth Street.

  “Look at this, my lucky day—a parking space in Center City.” He glanced at her and noticed that he was way more excited about the parking spot than she was.

  Steel hit hi
s turn signal, aligned himself with the car in front of the parking space, and jerked the wheel left and right and left and right and fought into the opening. Vehicles behind him honked their horns.

  He threw up his arms. “Wait a minute. Everybody’s in a hurry.”

  She laughed. “When they drive by, flash them the badge.”

  Steel gripped the wheel and turned to face her.

  “Ya’ know, just to mess with them. Hey, they wanna beep. They’ll shit their pants when they see the badge,” she said like a teenage girl getting into mischief. She peered through the side mirror attached to her door, combed her hair with her fingers, and ran a stick of lip balm across her lips that let off the aroma of potent mint.

  He shifted the car into park, and the two got out. He walked over to the kiosk machines and inserted two one-dollar bills. He fidgeted and acted as if his black suit jacket attracted and trapped all the sun in Philadelphia inside it. His body movements set off a chain reaction throughout his body as if someone was constantly throwing a lit match down his shirt and pants. Sweat didn’t have anywhere to go, so it stuck to his skin and clothes like it had been glued. He couldn’t escape the heat and felt like punching a wall for the hell of it. The machine processed his request, and he waited, running his hand across perspiration on his forehead.