by Richard Hoyt
I wanted to say, Was there ever, lady! But I didn’t. I said, “Gee, I don’t think there’s anything you can do. My muscles ache from the standing. Maybe I’ll make myself a hot toddy or something. A hot bath might be nice.”
“Sue them.”
I laughed and thought it sounded genuine enough. “Oh, that’s lawyer talk, Janine. I couldn’t do anything like that. I have to deal with these guys in the future. Some times you just have to grit your teeth and take your lumps.”
“I think I should go to your place. We should talk this over. I need to know what you found out.”
“I don’t know if I’m up for a report now. Mostly I need to relax, a back rub or something. Ahh, wouldn’t a back rub be nice?” This was a moment of truth; I licked my lips in anticipation.
Janine said, “I do want to talk to you, Mr. Denson.”
She hadn’t said flat no to the back rub. There was hope. I sighed, a civilized good guy, taking defeat gracefully. “Sure, come on over, Janine. I know you need this information. I’ll do my best.”
My hormones got me all worked up while I waited for her to arrive. I took a hot shower, going lather, lather, lather with the soap; Janine was so fastidious that I wanted to be as sterile as possible. I doused myself with after-shower lotion — although for my part I like a woman to smell like a woman. My mother had given me the lotion for Christmas five years earlier and I’d never opened it. I thought about shaving again, but then thought better of it. I wanted to look a bit haggard if possible.
Janine Hallen arrived bearing a large bottle of brandy, several small bottles of vitamin pills, and a hot pad. She poured me an enormous slug of brandy and insisted I eat several pills, after which she retired to my easy chair while I stretched out on my couch. “So what were their names?” she asked. “In a case like this you have to know who you’re dealing with. The first thing we do is get the details on paper, now, while the whole thing’s fresh in your mind.”
“Janine, listen. A private investigator really can’t go around suing the police. I depend on them too much. Every once in a while I run across some bastard who’s envious of my freedom and he takes it out on my hide.”
“John, it’s your duty to sue. The police shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that kind of thing. You owe it to the community, if nothing else. Here, have some more brandy.” She got up and brought me the bottle.
I held my glass up weakly. It was good brandy, and I was game for another good slug but didn’t want to appear eager. Remain wan, I told myself. Pale and wan, fond lover. I wished I hadn’t put on the after-shower lotion. I couldn’t stand the smell. I sighed. “It’s just a cost of doing business, Janine.”
“You look exhausted.”
“You would, too, if you had to stand there and answer the same damn questions a couple of hundred times. You have to understand, they’re under a lot of pressure from this butcher murder business. God, my back!”
Janine took a small sip of brandy. She looked determined. Whoa, did she ever have a lovely body! I hoped there would be no stirring of the Biblical loins to give me away.
“There is no excuse for police brutality. None. You know that. I think in a case like this every citizen has a responsibility. You included, John Denson.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “Right now all I want to do is get the knots out of my muscles.”
Janine looked resigned. “All right, turn over on your stomach. I’ll do your shoulders if you tell me what you learned the past couple of days.”
I turned over slowly, remembering that I was supposed to be exhausted, and accepted Janine’s kneading. It was wonderful. Her thigh was by my hip on the couch; it felt like a warm fire on a winter afternoon.
“You do seem a little stiff,” she said.
I spaced out the stories so as to make the massage last longer. I threw in all kinds of details: Willis’s bow tie, Augustus Poorman’s white hat and black gloves, Jensen’s dog, Egan’s chainsaw sculptures. How I’d seen Poorman in Ilwaco. Janine stayed with it for twenty minutes. She had surprisingly strong hands. They felt better and better. The presence of her thigh got more and more disconcerting. She smelled marvelous. I went back over my investigation. My mind raced for any tidbit that I might have inadvertently omitted the first time through. I knew I couldn’t keep that up all night. I had to take a chance, go for it. “Do you like massages?” I asked.
“I love them.”
“I’ll give you a short one before you go, how’s that? Turnabout’s fair trade.” I pleaded silently to any gods that might have been listening. Emma doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Come on, give me a break …
Janine hesitated.
I didn’t breathe.
“Well, okay. A short one,” she said. She looked at me warily and took her place on the couch. I liked her eyes.
I started with the back of her neck and moved onto her shoulders. I made an elaborate effort to seem objective and nonsexual but it wasn’t easy. She had sweet, soft down on the back of her neck. I massaged the backs of her arms. Then I started down her back. The heat rose from her body like a sidewalk in August. I suddenly realized, without really thinking about it, that Janine was far less restrained than I had thought. When I slid my hand onto the inside of her thigh, she said, “I thought you said a short massage,” and moved her legs to give me more room.
I slid my hand between her legs. The heat was humid, primordial, beckoning. Her odor made me giddy, sent hormones surging. It was hard to breathe. I would have done anything for her. Anything to be inside her.
She moved herself against the back of my hand. “You give good massages,” she said.
“Does that feel good?”
“I’ll give you a week to take your hand away,” she said.
“It might be even better if you took your jeans off.”
Janine said, “You think maybe?” She raised her hips and unzipped the front of her trousers.
I slipped her jeans off. She was wearing a pair of see-through red underpants that gave me a tantalizing, hazy, furiously erotic view.
“Like those underpants?” she asked.
“They’re great,” I said.
She raised her butt, driving me to a frenzy. She had a wonderful body. No man could have desired more. “I thought you’d like them,” she said. “The cops didn’t mistreat you, did they, John?”
“I talked to a detective named Daniel Harner. Nice guy. Had a broken ankle from skating with his kid. Should I take those things off now? When did you figure that out?”
“Don’t be in a hurry there. The minute you said you needed a back rub.”
I slipped my hand down onto her place again, marveling at what an extraordinary woman she was — smart, accomplished, yet capable of uninhibited, honest physical play. She turned, suddenly, and began taking off her blouse while I unbuckled my pants.
“I suppose these aren’t the largest you’ve ever seen?” She kissed me softly.
“I like ‘em a lot. I like ‘em a lot.” I wasn’t lying. She had fine firm breasts that would look as good in twenty years as they did now. “That business about the cops was just a little fish story,” I said. “No harm done, was there?”
“I agree. No harm done. I’m glad you wore your smoking six-shooter shorts.”
“Just for you,” I said. I slipped them off.
Janine gripped my barrel tightly and grinned mischievously. She could see I was plenty worked up. She ran her other hand under my cylinders and gave them a couple of gentle turns, sending little click, click tremors shuttling up and down my spine. “I hope it doesn’t go off here in my hand,” she said. “Accidents like that are such a waste.”
“Oh, it’s got a pretty steady trigger. I don’t like to waste ‘em either,” I said. I couldn’t help but swallow, doing my best not to discharge by mistake.
“Is it really a six-shooter? That’s impressive.”
“Well, a one-or two-shooter, usually. Maybe three if the target’s right
and it gets a chance to cool off between shots.”
“Since it’s cocked and all, I suppose you want to try it out.”
“I was thinking of it mightily,” I said.
Janine Hallen settled unselfconsciously onto the couch and gave me a wonderful target. She grabbed me by the barrel which had grown to magnum proportions — sort of — and aimed it properly. She was a screamer under fire. As I gunned her down, she arched her spine and moaned most piteously. Then she lay back, exhausted, smiling, game for more. I got three big, booming rounds off that night, blasted her again and again without mercy. It was the first time that had happened in so long I couldn’t remember.
The next morning, after the smoke had finally cleared and we were lying back, relaxed, Janine said, “Say, what’s the name of that lotion you’re wearing, John?”
“Billy Gruff, something like that. Aspen Stud, maybe. They’re all the same.”
“Do you wear it often?”
“Are you kidding? Wore it for you. Stuff smells like a French whorehouse, whatever that’s like.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Janine said. “You might think about staying with your old habits. You probably smell better without that stuff on.” She cuddled up a little closer.
19 – RENEGADE
According to the radio news, the count was up to two chops, three steaks, a foot, and two slices of buttock. That’s a lot of corpse, but if the police had the victim identified they weren’t saying who it was. The wire-service reporters were now giving the radio people cute little features on famous butcher murderers. The hall of fame included a Midwesterner named Ed Gein, who was the featured psychopath as I drove over to see the quick-tempered Richard Willis. However, Ed had gone one step beyond Seattle’s nut. I remembered jokes about Ed Gein sandwiches when I was a kid.
The folks at the police station were in a serious mood. The public paid cops to keep butcher murderers off the street.
Richard Willis looked trapped and bored in his office. He had been mauling the top of his Styrofoam coffee cup with his thumb. He pursed his mouth in a tight little circle and squeezed so hard his lips turned pale. “Have you been listening to that crap on the radio?” he demanded. “Butcher murderer!” he said scornfully. “Just what we need is for the bastard to think he’s some kind of hero.”
“You’d think people’d be satisfied with the Sonics’ win streak.”
Willis scowled. “It sucks.”
I shrugged. “I assume you’ve been watching Pioneer Place Park.”
“‘Me’? You mean ‘they,’ Denson. I don’t have anything to do with it. Have they been watching it?” Willis dug his thumbnail into the rim of his cup. “I want to tell you something. They started out with half the goddamn department down there. They’ve got a couple of so-called Indians on the force, but they look about as much like Indians as Thurgood Marshall looks black. They even brought in a theater professor from the university to put makeup on ‘em. They wound up looking like drag queens.”
“They should have paid more attention to affirmative action.”
“They got a couple of Indian brothers on loan from the force at Sioux Falls. That’s South Dakota. They flew ‘em in.” Willis smirked. “True-blue Redskin cops, fresh off the reservation.”
I said, “I get the picture they’re on your rear about something.”
Willis’s face hardened. He looked at me through narrowed eyes. “If I wasn’t a good cop these pansies would have had me out of here long ago. They want to drag everybody down to their level of incompetence. The truth is I’m one of the best cops in the department and I’m having to sit this one out.”
“Last time I was in here you mentioned something about a departmental hearing.” I was curious about Willis’s version of his problem.
“They’ve got some high-blown complaint. The truth is what I’m up for is saying a stupid asshole was a stupid asshole.” Willis paused, grinning at a memory. “This is a guy who’s the cause of a violent rapist being allowed to walk the streets until he hurts somebody again. Somebody had to say something, for God’s sake. The worst thing you can do in a police department, Denson, the very worst, is to be competent. Competence gets everybody agitated. They hop about like starlings crapping on a sidewalk. They crap, heads bobbing, watching one another. When one starling craps, they all crap. When one flies, they all fly. That way everybody’s taken care of. When one cop is allowed to be casual in a rape case, well …” Willis’s voice trailed off. “No damn wonder women are sore at us. You ever watch birds, Denson?”
“I like killdeers and meadowlarks. Solitary birds.”
“I know what you mean. The ones who fly in flocks don’t like it, though. You have to watch ‘em twenty-four hours a day.”
“All a male pelican needs is a female pelican. The cops down here aren’t all bad. I thought Gilberto was a pretty good cop. I had a decent feeling about Gilberto.”
“I agree Gilberto was a solo bird. What you’re really wondering is, what do I have on the line. Let me put it to you this way: as things stand now I’m very apt to be a security guard in a shopping center next month.” Willis stopped, as if he’d suddenly gotten an idea. He turned and opened a file drawer and took out what I saw was a printout of the dossier required for my private investigator’s license. He read it silently, apparently oblivious to the fact that I was sitting across from him waiting. He looked up at me, down at the file again, then he closed it, grinning. “Why not?” he said. “I’m going to tell you a story, Denson. Break my confidence and I’ll figure out some way to have your balls.”
I was curious. “I give you my word,” I said.
“They sprung for all the Thunderbird these Redskin cops could drink, see. A cop’ll drink anything, and them being Indians made it worse. The South Dakotans went down there, got sloshed and listened and watched. Nothing. More and more bullshit in the papers. Every son-of-a-bitching day the media kept hitting the department. We needed help, Denson. Then …”
Willis leaned over confidentially. “Some crafty Japs dumped this wonderful machine square in the collective lap of this group of bewildered cops. To them, it was as if the fucking gods had intervened: Toba.”
I sat straight up, looked right, looked left. “Toba?”
“A machine. Now they’re always hoping they’re gonna find some kind of machine that’ll make up for their lack of intelligence and common sense.”
“What kind of machine?”
“A Toba, Denson, is a surveillance device made by Toba Manufacturing Ltd. of Kobe. They’ve been selling them as private security systems for years and now are looking around at the police market. After we got our second chop, or was it a roast of thigh, they called and wanted to know if we wanted to give Toba a try. They’d even send technicians from the Kobe police force, which has had great success with Toba. They’d give us terms, they said. The Grand High Pooh-Bahs said yes.”
“The Japanese make wonderful cars,” I said.
“What Toba is essentially is a video camera that gives a computer the license numbers of all vehicles entering and emerging from a given street. It works like the scanner in the post office department that reads zip codes. If you cover all streets leading to an intersection — as is the case with Pioneer Place Park — Toba can tell you what license numbers enter the area, how long they stay, and whether they go left, right, or straight ahead. We can input the names and addresses of all people with vehicles registered in Washington; Olympia has that data on tape. Toba can pull the licenses that are out of the norm of the traffic.”
“I suppose Toba gives you the names and addresses of the registered owners.”
“From the Olympia tapes. Sure, we get a list of suspect vehicles, arranged in groups of priority. There’s zone red. The best bets. There’s a yellow zone. Strong possibilities. And there’s a green zone, Denson. Acceptable risk.”
“How about blue?”
“We got blue.” Willis ran his tongue along the front of his teeth. “The neutral zone. T
he computer takes into account traffic lights, ball games at the Kingdome, rush-hour traffic — everything. It constantly recalculates how long it takes an average car to pass through the intersection. If there is a sudden surge of usage of an intersection by one particular car, that vehicle may be moved up to a higher risk list. You see what this means, Denson?”
“I sort of get the picture,” I said.
“You can buy extras, like maybe you’re buying a tape deck for your car or adding a turbo to the engine. For example, you can buy this camera — which we’re using — that gives an ear-piercing whee-woo, whee-woo, whee-woo when somebody breaches a designated perimeter — a hallway, say, or a sidewalk. When he leaves, the camera follows him for a block, still going whee-woo, whee-woo, whee-woo. Baby Toba, the captain calls it. Isn’t that sweet? The captain’s got surveillance teams ready to scramble when Baby Toba squawls the alert and sends the data to the main computer.”
“Expensive, I’ll bet.”
“Oh, yes, it costs. In this case they’ve set up monitors on five streets leading to the pergola. If it works, the chief thinks the City Council will spring for the system.”
I grinned. “Catch the butcher, get Toba to play with.”
“I’ll tell you again: if any of this gets in the newspapers, I’ll strangle you, Denson. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you. I gave you my word.”
“So the word comes down. You know how it goes. The chief leans on the captain; he says produce, Charles. The captain leans on his incompetent lieutenants; he says produce, swine. Use the machine and produce. If the department can make it work to find this killer, the Pooh-Bahs can invite the television people in to tape a Japanese lady technician smiling and with her delicate hand resting on Toba, an expensive but necessary toy to combat crime in Seattle.”
“But it hasn’t worked.”
