Carlucci's Edge

by Richard Paul Russo

  “I’ve been requesting an interview for two weeks,” Tremaine said. “I wonder why you agree to one now.”

  “I haven’t,” Carlucci said. “You won’t be asking the questions. You’ll be answering mine.”

  “Will I?”

  “Yes. This is a police investigation.”

  “An official investigation?”

  Carlucci looked at him, but didn’t say anything.

  “I think I’ll just wait for the subpoena,” Tremaine said. “That’s a crappy attitude, Tremaine.”

  “It’s a crappy business.”

  “What, murder? Or journalism?”

  “Both. And being a cop,” Tremaine said. “All of it.” Neither of them said anything for a while. The sky was still clear, and the sun was shining down on them, not quite hot. The break in the heat was a good change. It brought the crazies out into the open, though, and they were filling the plaza as they woke up, stumbling and wandering around.

  “Want some coffee?” Carlucci asked.

  Tremaine smiled. “Add some acid to the grease congealing in my stomach? Sure, sounds terrific.”

  They got up, walked back to the pond and bought coffee from the pregnant teenager. They circled the pond, and stopped near another bench, but didn’t sit. Someone had puked all over it.

  “Which murder are you investigating?” Tremaine asked. “This is all off the record,” Carlucci said. “Every fucking word. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Tremaine sipped at his coffee, grimaced. “So, which murder?”

  “The mayor’s nephew. William Kashen. What did you think?”

  “Not Chick Roberts?”

  “No. Should I be?”

  “You know about Chick Roberts being killed, don’t you?” Carlucci shrugged. “Something. Wasn’t my case. Some punk. A drug killing.”

  Tremaine shook his head. “You don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No. He was Paula Asgard’s boyfriend.”

  “I don’t really know Paula Asgard. Only because she’s a friend of Mixer’s.”

  “Yes, Mixer. A dead guy who’s still alive.”

  “Are you trying to tell me the two murders are connected?” Tremaine shook his head. “No. You already know that. I know you do.”

  “The Chick Roberts case is closed.”

  “Buried, you mean.”

  Carlucci started to put his foot up on the bench, then remembered the vomit. He found a clean spot for his shoe and leaned forward, stretching his other leg.

  “Why don’t you tell me what the connection is between the two?” Carlucci said.

  “Why don’t we make a deal, an information trade?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Carlucci said. “No deals. I’m a cop.”

  Tremaine laughed. “Cops are always making deals.”

  “What’s the connection?” Carlucci asked again.

  “You do know it’s there, don’t you?”

  Carlucci nodded. He guessed he had to give Tremaine something. “I know it’s there. I just don’t know what it is.” Tremaine drank some more of his coffee, then dumped the rest of it in the trash can next to the bench, shuddering. “Awful stuff.” He paused, then went on. “I can’t be sure of any of this, you understand. Not completely. But I believe it.”

  A few feet away, a trio of trance walkers formed a circle, arms linked, and began humming. The plaza was filling with people on lunch break, but the crowds avoided the trance walkers, giving them plenty of space.

  “Chick, Mixer, a woman named Jenny Woo, and the mayor’s nephew were all spliced together. They had business. Body-bags. I don’t think the body-bags had anything to do with this, that’s just how they knew each other.”

  So he doesn’t know everything, Carlucci thought. But then, none of us do.

  “Something’s going on up in New Hong Kong,” Tremaine continued. “That’s the real missing piece. And the mayor’s tied up with it, the mayor’s wrapped up tight inside whatever it is. He was doing something with his nephew, connected to all this somehow. But the nephew got hold of something he shouldn’t have had, and was getting ready to sell it. He was getting ready to fuck over his uncle and New Hong Kong both. Now, what I believe happened is this. Chick Roberts got hold of the same thing, probably from the nephew. And Chick tried to cash in. Kashen wasn’t stupid, and he’d managed to be discreet. No one knew what he had, except his potential customers. But Chick Roberts was not so smart, and he was not so discreet, and it wasn’t long after he put out the word that he got himself three bullets in the head.”

  Tremaine paused, sighing heavily. “Here it gets more speculative. My sources are pretty weak and incomplete, but this is the picture I’ve put together, and it makes a kind of sense. I think the New Hong Kong people had Chick killed. As soon as they scented their property in the wrong hands and up for sale, they took care of the problem. The first problem. The second problem was finding out where Chick had gotten his stuff. They traced it back to the nephew, and then did him. But... they didn’t tell the mayor, because they didn’t know whether or not the mayor was in on it with the nephew. So you had the mayor putting on the squeeze to solve his nephew’s murder. Politics, family loyalty, whatever.

  “But New Hong Kong stays on this thing, tracing everything back. They’ve got to find the hole in their security and plug it up, and they have to be certain about it. I think they found it, and it wasn’t the mayor. Probably someone up in New Hong Kong who is now a piece of space debris. When they were sure the mayor wasn’t a part of it, they told him what had happened, and told him to take the pressure off the case. You have been asked to bury the nephew’s case, haven’t you?”

  Carlucci didn’t answer, and Tremaine nodded.

  “Anything else?” Carlucci asked.

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s all speculation,” Carlucci said. “I can’t do a goddamn thing with it.”

  “I won’t give you my sources,” Tremaine said. “Even if I did, they’d never testify in court, they’d never even give you a statement.”

  “I’m not asking for your sources,” Carlucci said in disgust. He pushed off the bench with his foot, walked over to the trash can, and shoved his empty coffee cup into it. “It does make a kind of sense,” he said to Tremaine. “But I’m not going to get any names, am I? The name of the guy who put three bullets in Chick’s head. The name of the guy who gutted the mayor’s nephew. The names of any of the people who are responsible for this goddamn mess.”

  “I don’t think so,” Tremaine said.

  “And what the hell is it you want from me?”

  “Any information you have about these cases that I don’t have.”

  “There isn’t anything,” Carlucci said. He was lying, but not much. “You know more than anyone. Christ.”

  “Confirmation that the Chick Roberts case was buried. Confirmation that the mayor has asked you to bury his nephew’s case.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’ve got to ask.”

  Carlucci had to laugh. “Christ, you’re something else.”

  “Is that a ‘no comment,’ or a denial?” Tremaine asked. “It’s jack shit, is what it is. I told you, not a fucking word is on the record. There is no response to your questions.”

  “They weren’t questions. They were statements. I’m just asking for confirmation.”

  Carlucci shook his head. “You’ve been a lot of fucking help,” he told Tremaine. Actually, Tremaine had been a help, but he wasn’t going to admit it. “We’re done.” He turned and started walking away. “See you.”

  “Wait. Lieutenant.”

  Carlucci just shook his head and kept on walking.

  One last meeting, this one at night with Hong and LaPlace. Carlucci felt they were getting close, so close to the answers, but he was afraid they wouldn’t be able to make it all the way. They sat at the table in the Hong family kitchen; Hong’s entire family had gone to the cinema to see Ghost Lover of
Station 13 for the second time.

  Carlucci told them everything he’d learned from Tremaine, from Sparks, the odd bits of information he’d gleaned from Monk. And he told them about Mixer.

  Hong smiled. “So the spikehead’s still alive, stirring up the shit.”

  “Yeah, except he’s not a spikehead anymore. It all got burned away.”

  “Well, we have something, too,” LaPlace said. “Monk may have been wrong about Butler.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Joseph and I found this guy. You know, a guy who knew a guy. Name’s Little Johnny. Wanted to buy his way out of an intent to distribute bust. Kanter had him, called us in to see the guy. Little Johnny seemed to think Butler had killed the nephew. Didn’t know why. Little Johnny doesn’t know Butler himself. He knows a guy. The guy he knows is Totem the Pole.”

  “The porno star?” Carlucci asked.

  “That’s him. King of prong. Little Johnny says Totem the Pole told him that Butler had killed Kashen. According to Little Johnny, our man Totem the Pole, in contrast to his screen persona as the great humper of women, in real life, well, he likes men, too. Robert Butler, for one. Butler did something for Totem. Apparently Little Johnny did, too, which is why Totem got so confessional with him. Little Johnny tried to get specific about what they did for each other, but I didn’t think we needed those kinds of details. The details we needed, though, he wasn’t so good with. How did Totem know? Was Butler as confessional as Totem? Little Johnny doesn’t know. Little Johnny says Totem heard something the night Butler got killed, that Totem was in the building when it happened, he was downstairs with the woman who lived under Butler. What he was doing with the woman, no one knows. Changing orientation again, maybe. But Totem seemed to think Butler was killed as his reward for killing Kashen. Yeah, to shut his mouth, permanently. We went around and around with Little Johnny, he said this, he said that, cha cha cha. It doesn’t all make sense. But some, maybe. We kept Little Johnny in a holding cell, with a promise for release, and tried to track down Totem the Pole.”

  “You didn’t find him, did you?”

  LaPlace shook his head.

  “We got to his agent,” Hong put in. “She said Totem the Pole was shooting a new movie, he was on location.”

  “Let me guess,” Carlucci said. “New Hong Kong.”

  Hong nodded. “New Hong Kong.”

  “I don’t think we’ll be seeing Totem or his Pole in San Francisco any time soon,” LaPlace said.

  “What about the woman who lived under Butler?”

  “She’s gone too,” Hong said. “We can’t find her.”

  “Shit,” Carlucci said, his voice little more than a whisper. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed at his neck. “What do you think, Joseph?”

  “Like Pete says, it makes a kind of sense, but we can’t do much with it. Butler’s dead, Totem’s gone and probably wouldn’t be much help anyway, and Little Johnny is useless. It just doesn’t lead us anywhere.”

  LaPlace got up from the table, shaking his head and pacing. “This whole thing is going to shit on us,” he said. “I mean, I’m not worried that we’re in trouble, but everything goes nowhere. We know more, but where does it get us? We’re never going to get anything to go to court with, are we? Are we going to get the guy who put holes in the punk’s face? We don’t know for sure that Butler killed the nephew, but even if he did, he’s dead, and are we going to get the guy who put a meat hook through his neck? And the mayor? We can’t touch him, and we sure as hell aren’t going to be able to get to anyone up in New Hong Kong, are we?” LaPlace shook his head. “Not fucking likely.”

  Carlucci couldn’t disagree with LaPlace. He’d been thinking pretty much the same thing himself. The closer they got, the worse things looked.

  “The one thing we can get out of this,” Hong said, “is knowing what happened, and why. That’s worth something. Sometimes it’s worth a lot.”

  Carlucci nodded. “Yes, Joseph, that can be worth a lot. But we don’t even have that yet, do we? We’re close to knowing what happened, but we sure as hell don’t know why.” Carlucci shook his head. “What is it? What is worth killing all these people for?”

  Carlucci looked back and forth between Hong and LaPlace, but neither man had an answer for him.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “ETERNAL LIFE,” MIXER said. “That’s what’s getting people dead.”

  “Eternal life,” Paula repeated. It didn’t seem real. Maybe it wasn’t.

  They were sitting around the table in the kitchen of the Saints’ place: Paula, Mixer, St. Katherine, and St. Lucy. Early evening, dark outside, two bright overheads lighting the kitchen. On the table in front of Mixer was a stack of eight or nine discs. Chick’s discs.

  “Not eternal life,” St. Lucy said. “Life extension. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Close enough,” Mixer said. “People who will want it won’t make the distinction. Or won’t care. And who won’t want it?”

  “I’ve heard rumors about New Hong Kong all my adult life,” Paula said. “Rumors about this, the New Hong Kong medicos finding the key to life extension. Nothing ever happened, and I stopped paying attention a long time ago. Now you’re telling me it’s for real?”

  “Maybe,” St. Lucy said. “Yes, it’s for real, though it appears that they don’t have all the answers yet. But they’re probably very close.” She pointed at the discs. “It’s laid outhere, what they’re trying to do, the directions they’re working in, how they’re going about it. Not a complete picture, but enough.”

  “What do you mean by not complete?”

  “We’ve got eleven images, eleven ‘pages,’ you could say. But there are at least twelve. We’re missing Part Seven. We can’t find it anywhere.”

  “It’s possible Chick never even had it,” Mixer put in. “And there might be more than twelve,” St. Lucy said. “But it probably doesn’t matter. All the parts most likely would still provide only an incomplete picture. The key thing is, what’s on these discs would be enough for some other group with sufficient resources to start up their own research program along the same lines. Atlantis Two, for example. Gottingen Gesellschaft, for another, or any of the other big biotechs. Any of those people would be willing to pay a fortune for what’s on these discs.”

  “Okay,” Paula said. “So tell me what’s on the discs.”

  “We brought in someone to make the text translations first,” St. Katherine said. “Someone we felt we could trust. But when he’d finished, and he’d given us the translation, we realized what this was worth, and we were no longer sure about him. This is one hell of a temptation.”

  “So what did you do, kill the translator?”

  St. Katherine smiled. “No, of course not. But we do have him... in protective custody until we decide what to do next.” St. Katherine shrugged. “He understands. It’ll all work out.”

  “And what about the medical expert you were going to bring in?” Paula asked.

  “We brought her in next, and she confirmed what we and the translator had guessed at. She’s a doctor, the one who kept Minor Danzig alive after the trial. The texts are highly technical and advanced, and she didn’t understand some of the details, had to make some guesses of her own, but it’s pretty clear what they’re after, and how they’re going about it.”

  “Is she in protective custody, too?”

  St. Katherine shook her head, smiling again. “No. She’s my sister, and I’ve trusted her with my life more than once. I trust her with this. She also has serious reservations about their research methods, and their projected treatments.”

  “What kind of reservations?”

  “Moral.”

  Paula was almost afraid to ask. “Why?”

  St. Lucy sighed heavily. “They’re doing all their primary experimentation on people, that much is clear. Testing and evaluation on human subjects. Teresa, Saint Katherine’s sister, feels fairly certain that a lot of the evaluation has to be done through auto
psies. Or vivisection. Neither option is a pleasant one.”

  “Jesus,” Paula whispered. “Where are they getting...?” She didn’t finish the question, the most obvious answer leaping into her thoughts. “The recruiting vans.”

  “Probably,” Mixer said. “Probably some other source as well, because a lot of the people the vans pull in aren’t in such great health, and we’re not sure how much use they’d be. Except as a source of raw materials.”

  “Raw materials?”

  “My sister thinks the longevity treatments themselves involve live tissue, blood products, brain tissue.”

  “So we’ve got testing done on human subjects, followed by autopsies or vivisection, and treatments developed from materials harvested from other human beings.”

  St. Lucy nodded.

  “And this is what Chick was selling,” Paula said. “A blueprint for this fucking shit.”

  “I doubt he had a clue,” Mixer said. “He didn’t read Chinese. Probably all he knew was that it was about longer life, and he knew that was worth a fortune.”

  Paula looked again at the discs. This was what Chick died for. Fucking great. “Longer life,” she said. “How much longer? Forty, fifty years?”

  Mixer laughed.

  St. Lucy shook her head. “They don’t know for sure, of course; they won’t until somebody actually does it, but the text in these things,” she said, pointing at the discs, “talks about a lot more than that. A hundred and fifty, maybe even two hundred extra years. Bringing the aging process nearly to a complete halt.”

  “And they want it now,” Mixer said. “There’s not going to be any miracle of reversing the aging process, and who wants to live an extra hundred years as a decrepit old fuck with a body that’s falling apart? No, you want to start this as young as possible.”

  “But you don’t think they actually have it yet,” Paula said. “Teresa doesn’t think so,” St. Katherine said. “Another guess on her part, but it’s probably a good guess. Two things, she says. One, that’s the impression she gets from the text, the way they talk about promising avenues, dead ends. Two, if they thought they had it—and they’ll never be sure, of course, until someone tries it and lives for an extra two hundred years—but if they thought they had the answer, they wouldn’t be able to keep it secret. They’ll want customers, for one thing. They probably won’t care so much then. But for now, they’re still experimenting. They can’t afford to let this get out. They don’t want the competition, and they don’t want the bad PR.”