“What difference does that make?” Atler demanded. “If the room was broken into—”
“It wasn’t,” Ron said flatly.
“How do you know that?”
“It’s my profession, Mr. Atler. If someone tried to pass off a carload of horse manure as strawberries and cream, you’d know wouldn’t you? Well, me too. I know horse manure when I see it, I had a good teacher. Take my word for it, Mr. Atler, that money was taken by someone who had a key. Who had a key, Mr. Atler?”
Atler was silent. He looked like a man who was facing a particularly nasty fact.
Ron thought he’d help him out. “Look, you don’t teach the course all by yourself, do you? You have a graduate assistant, right, to grade papers and things? I’ll bet he has a key.”
Atler looked stunned. “She,” he said. “A young girl named Leslie Bickell. Of the Providence Seafood Bickells.” This was quite the worst day of Harold Atler’s life. He had rather liked Leslie.
“But she has a key?” Ron asked. He’d never heard of the Bickells.
“Yes,” Atler said, “yes, she does.”
“Where does she live?” Ron asked. Atler gave him her address, in the Albert-Runyon apartment complex, a residence for grad students north and west of the campus.
“Listen, Mr. Alter, is there any reason you’d want me to be gentle with this girl’s feelings?”
Atler exploded at him. “What is that meant to insinuate, Gentry?”
Ron met his eye and stayed calm. “Just what the words say, Mr. Atler. Is there?”
“No, none at all.”
“Then I think I’ll head over there right away, see if she’s home. I’ll report to you later, Mr. Atler.”
Ron left, already thinking over the case in retrospect. The easiest two hundred dollars he ever made, but a bore, a real bore.
FOUR
THE WEDNESDAY MORNING SUNRISE had meant nothing to Inspector Fleisher. As far as he was concerned it was still Tuesday night. If he had to be away from his wife of thirty years, though he still loved her as much as ever, he almost wished it was because of an affair with another woman—at least then he could lie down.
He rubbed his bloodshot eyes and glared at the reporter across the desk from him. Tatham was as fresh as a hint of mint, for Christ sake. How does the bastard do it? Fleisher wondered wearily. He’s been with me every minute since yesterday afternoon, why hasn’t it gotten to him?
You fall apart when you let down, the inspector knew. When the wacko parade finally stopped, he had a chance to remember how exhausted he was.
He wanted Hog. Oh, how he wanted Hog. Actually, Fleisher was a tough, shrewd, dedicated cop, who wanted every criminal. But not as bad as he wanted this fruitcake. It had gotten to be a personal thing ...
The town was going nuts, and it was Hog’s fault. Little boys were sneaking up on little girls and scaring them with pig masks, which some shitheel was selling downtown. Requests for gun permits were setting all-time records. Two nights ago, a young housewife heard a noise at the window, so she did what her husband had told her and grabbed the shotgun. She wound up blowing away that same husband who had lost his keys and was trying to get in without waking the wife. Things like that were going to zoom, Fleisher knew.
Also, he, Fleisher, was going nuts, and that too was Hog’s fault. If his thirty-three years on the force had taught him anything it had taught him the necessity of getting a jump on an investigation, to start gathering facts before the victim’s blood stopped dripping. If you could. With Hog, though, since he made each death look like an artistic little accident, the only way to accomplish that was to start in on every accidental death, visit every scene, and treat every victim as though Hog had been waiting just to kill him.
Which meant, among other things, tons of useless work for Joe Fleisher. Like tonight (to Fleisher it was still tonight). Three car wrecks. Two fires. Fifteen, count ’em, fifteen drug overdoses, and, to even it up, the beating, by person or persons unknown, of the prominent drug dealer Jorge Ruiz Vasquez, aka Juan Bizarro, aka the Pope of Dope. No fatalities (thank God), but Bizarro was a near thing. He was technically under arrest since he had a quantity of cocaine on him when he was found. They had him in the hospital, next door to the Elleger girl in what was becoming a de facto police ward.
It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Fleisher said. He looked at Sergeant Shaughnessy and Tatham for agreement. They both agreed. Shaughnessy always agreed, which suited Fleisher fine, at least for now. He wasn’t in the mood for an argument.
“Shaughnessy,” Fleisher said, “call the lab and find out if they’ve been able to find out anything about the latest note.” Fleisher pushed some limp strands of hair off his forehead as the sergeant set to work. Grasping at straws, he thought. The lab won’t be able to tell me anything new.
As far as Fleisher was concerned the last useful thing the lab had been able to do was clear Tatham. In spite of everything, he had his suspicions of the reporter; that was why he decided to keep him around. Then the lab decided that there was no way Tatham could have gimmicked that sign and gotten back down to the highway without leaving traces on the hillside. No one had gone in either direction between the highway and the overpass, that much was certain.
Of course, now that he knew Tatham was okay, he could have thrown him out of the case, but what the hell, the guy had gotten the notes and probably would continue getting them, so why not have him handy? Besides, he was a good guy. Fleisher liked him.
Shaughnessy finished his call. “Looks like a washout, Inspector,” he said, “though they haven’t finished all the tests yet. They’ll call us back.”
The phone rang. Shaughnessy said, “That was fast,” and picked it up. After a couple of seconds, he said, “Inspector, I think you better get this one.”
The water that had refrozen during the night, after having melted yesterday, was melting again in the morning sun, making the roads as slick as though they’d been coated with silicon. A car sledded through the intersection of Vale Avenue and University Place, barely avoiding doing a rhinoplasty on the unmarked car. Shaughnessy, at the wheel, cursed with profound sincerity.
“Keep your mind on your driving, Mike,” Fleisher warned him.
“Yes, sir,” Shaughnessy agreed.
The inspector sat back again, mumbling to himself. He tried to decide whether that phone call had ruined his old day, or his new one. The question would have been academic if that skidding car had hit them, he realized. He was sorry he told Shaughnessy to be careful.
He didn’t know he’d been mumbling so loud. Buell Tatham said, “Can I quote you on that, Inspector?”
Fleisher turned a bleary eye on him. The bastard had a kind of sick smile on his face. Things aren’t so bad yet, Fleisher thought, I can at least recognize a smile.
“No, you can’t quote me. I’m a career cop. I love my job. I love the mayor, and the city council, and I love tooth decay just as much. I love everybody, Tatham, in this whole goddamn city. Except the Hog. I don’t love the Hog. That you can quote.”
“Sorry, Inspector,” the reporter’s deep voice drawled. “Just trying to ease the tension a bit.”
The inspector seemed not to have heard. “A kid, Tatham, a little kid. Eight years old, the patrolman said. A mess, he said. Not some high school girls trying to make it safe to get laid, no, that ain’t enough. Now it’s some little kid. Damn!”
The inspector’s last word was so vehement and explosive that it startled Shaughnessy into not agreeing. “Excuse me, sir, but we don’t know our boy is responsible for this. We haven’t even seen the body yet.”
Fleisher was so surprised at Shaughnessy’s sudden independence that he cooled off immediately. “You’re right, Mike, you’re right. But I got a hunch, you know? You mark my words, Tatham, you’ll get the note on this one before too long.”
“Come on, Inspector—” Buell began, but Fleisher cut him off.
“You mark my words,” he repeated. “In thirty years on the force I’ve learned this if I learned anything: crooks will lie to you; honest citizens will lie to you; the brass will lie to you; sometimes fellow cops will lie to you; your wife will lie to you. But hunches never lie. That don’t mean they’re always right, but if your gut is telling you something, it’s probably for a good reason you can’t think of at the moment.”
Buell nodded wisely. He knew what the inspector meant. Reporters had hunches, too. “Well, Inspector, until and unless that note comes in, all you can do is the same things you’ve been doing. You’ve got to investigate, think, make out reports in triplicate ...”
“Fourplicate,” Fleisher corrected him. “The lady shrink gets one of everything now.”
“Think Dr. Higgins can come up with anything?”
“Ha,” Fleisher said simply. Over the years (many years) Fleisher had grown to respect, or at least tolerate, Dr. Jacob Issel, of the university hospital, who had been the consultant on those rare occasions the Sparta Police needed one. Usually, it was to talk to a suspect and give a horseback opinion on his sanity.
But this wasn’t like that, not by a long shot, and worse than that, it wasn’t even Issel. He had retired and moved to Israel. So now, the mayor’s gopher sends in Issel’s successor on the campus to consult, a lanky, spinsterish bimbo that couldn’t be any older than Fleisher’s own daughter. Well, carbon paper was relatively cheap, so Janet Higgins, Ph.D., could have all the reports she wanted, as long as she stayed out of the inspector’s hair.
If they wanted to help him so badly, why didn’t they find out where the hell the Wonder Wop was, and bring him in? Sure he came high, and he was, in Fleisher’s humble opinion as a layman, a wacko. But this case was a wacko, and the record showed Benedetti got results. Who cared that part of his fee was two hours alone with a perpetrator after the arrest was made? The criminals hardly ever objected, they seemed to think it was an honor. They could have their lawyer present, too, if they wanted, so the DA was safe. So what was the administration’s gripe? Benedetti had to catch the guy to collect, for crysake.
As Shaughnessy turned off the main road on to the suburban cul-de-sac the squeal had come from, Fleisher made himself a promise. If this did turn out to be a Hog murder, he would lock the goddamn city council in their chamber and pump tear gas through the air ducts until they came up with the dough to hire Benedetti. He didn’t care where the money came from, Fleisher thought decisively—then, an afterthought: as long as they don’t touch my pension money.
The house they were heading for looked to Buell as if it had been designed for hunchbacks. The huge snow drifts at curbside, and the accumulations on the lawn gave the house an out-of-proportion low-roofed look that added to the feeling of unease he had come to feel whenever he was confronted with what might have been Hog’s latest victim.
There was a young patrolman waiting for the inspector. He had his jacket unzipped and was taking long controlled breaths. Buell saw him take off his hat, then wipe his brow with the back of his hand. The reporter wondered why. It was relatively warm, today, sure, but it was still only in the low thirties.
The inspector looked the young cop over intently. “Are you okay, Fiali?” he asked.
Officer Fiali gulped, but said, “I’m fine, Inspector.”
Fleisher still looked suspicious, but he went on. “Okay, then, where is it.”
“It’s uh, in the driveway, sir.” Fiali’s complexion, which had been bright red, was now turning pale. “The boy’s mother found the body, Jefferson is inside with her. She—she’s pretty broken up. We’ve called her family doctor, managed to get that much out of her at least.”
Buell and Shaughnessy reached for notebooks at the same time. Both started scribbling as the inspector said, “Who’s the victim?”
Fiali referred to his own notebook. “Reade, R-E-A-D-E, Davy, I guess David, the mother was pretty incoherent. Age eight.”
“Mother’s name?”
“Joyce Reade, Mrs. John. They’re divorced, he lives in California somewhere, according to what the doctor told us on the phone.”
This will get them back together again, Buell thought bitterly, at least long enough to have the funeral.
“Okay, Fiali, let’s see the body. Medical Examiner’s men are on the way.”
Fiali gulped again, said, “Yes, sir,” and led them up the curving macadam drive. About halfway to the house Fleisher stopped to point to a foul-smelling patch of yellow-orange that lay steaming on the snow.
“What’s this, Fiali?”
The patrolman reddened. “I did that, sir. I—I couldn’t help it.” Which, thought Buell, explained Fiali’s appearance when they’d first seen him. He needed the air.
Fleisher told him not to worry about it.
Because of the curve of the driveway, and the high walls of snow on either side, Buell didn’t see what lay in the driveway until he was quite close to it. Now he could understand why Fiali had had to vomit. Even though he’d been steeling himself, the sight forced Buell to fight down a gorge of his own.
He looked at it, said “Dear Lord!” closed his eyes and spun away. Shaughnessy whistled, long and low. The inspector kept clearing his throat.
Buell forced himself to turn back to the scene, to look at it intently, to burn the details in his memory. He felt obliged to do that much.
Someone, or something, had caught Davy Reade on his way out of the house to go to school. Sheets of paper with pale blue lines from his burst spiral-binder were floating on the surface of the blood-pool that surrounded the boy. The blood was bright red and had left its mark not only on the macadam, but as far as ten feet straight up the front of the garage door. The blood had probably spurted from an artery in the boy’s neck when whatever had hit him had nearly severed his head from his body.
Whatever had hit the boy had hit him close to the garage door; one foot was almost touching it, with the boy stretched out down the drive the other way.
“Watch that piece of ice, Shaughnessy,” the inspector said, pointing. Buell took his eyes off the body long enough to see the sergeant standing guard over something that gleamed dull gray, a heavy piece of ice that had built up on the garage-roof overhang through the course of that wicked winter until it had become a weapon; a pronged guillotine blade, hard and heavy and deadly.
No one could ever prove this wasn’t an accident, Buell knew. No one could ever prove that chunk of ice hadn’t just grown so much since the first snow fell last fall that the first time it got above freezing for more than a few hours it had to break loose from its hold on the edge of the roof. But Buell also knew, with a horrible certainty, that a note signed “HOG” would be on his desk before too long, gloating over the death of Davy Reade. Fleisher’s hunch would be right.
This death had the right elements to be a Hog case—the pitiful inoffensiveness of the victim, and the frightful way the victim had died.
Buell rubbed his eyes and turned away from the body. He felt weary. His Uncle Willy had warned him about keeping late hours. “Your daddy tried to preach too much in too many places, boy,” Buell could hear that deep voice say. “He didn’t get him enough sleep. That’s why that accident happened. It was the Lord’s way of gettin’ him to take a rest.” Then Uncle Willy would try to hold his laughter until he got out of the room. Sometimes, he even made it, but Buell heard the laughter anyway; Uncle Willy had the loudest laugh in Knox County.
Good old Uncle Willy, Buell thought. May he fry in hell. Soon.
The morgue wagon turned up, and the reinforcements he’d had Shaughnessy call for, and the lab boys, and the victim’s mother’s doctor. So the inspector had his hands full.
The ME’s boys and the lab boys knew what to do, so Fleisher ignored them. He sent the g.p. inside to minister to the hysterical mother, told his detectives to start a canvass of the neighborhood to try to find a witness who saw, heard, or smelled something (and fat chance of that, he told himself bitterly), then devoted
his attention to Dr. Dmitri of the Medical Examiner’s Office.
For all the emotion Dmitri showed, he could have been making a ham sandwich. All right, Fleisher didn’t want him to burst into tears for crysake, but couldn’t he at least look grim? Grim, Fleisher knew, was the proper expression for the investigation of a murder case.
Also, Dmitri clicked his tongue while he worked, a habit that had gotten on the inspector’s nerves for years and years. What was he doing it for? To reassure his patients?
After a few minutes of listening to the clicking, Fleisher said, “Do they teach you to do that in medical school, or what?”
Dmitri looked up at him blandly. “Teach me to do what?” he said, with a click of his tongue.
The inspector waved it off. “What can you tell me?”
Dmitri shrugged. “In a horseback opinion, nothing that isn’t obvious to anybody. The boy is dead. He died from exsanguination—loss of blood.”
“I know what exsanguination means, for crysake.”
“Good. Maybe I wasted my money going to medical school. Anyway, he lost that blood from his neck, and it’s not a bad guess that frozen machete over there is what hit him. As for the agency that caused him to get hit with it, I can’t say. All I know about ice is keeping cadavers fresh. Of course, I’ll do the complete job back at the shop; you never know when you’re going to be surprised in this business.”
“Rush him through, will you, Dmitri? I got a hunch about this one. Maybe I can get a head start on the bastard.”
Dmitri shrugged again. “I’ll do my best. I’ve got bodies down there stacked up like cordwood—traffic fatalities, people frozen to death, electrocuted by space-heaters—this is a good winter for dying.”
Fleisher caught Joyce Reade in those twilight-world moments when the tranquilizer her doctor had given her was just taking hold, with her mind still feverish and hysterical, but the slowing effect of the drug giving her the appearance of being in calm reasoned control.
So when the inspector walked in, she looked up at him and said, “Have you come to arrest me, Inspector?”
Hog Murders Page 4
