Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mysteries 3-Book Bundle

by Lee Lamothe

  He went up to a protective charger. “Tate, Ray. They called me to see Hambone.”

  “Okay, be careful, don’t queer things for them, okay?” He called, “Inspector Hogarth? I got a Ray Tate?”

  Bob Hogarth detached himself from the group. He wore the same clothes he’d worn at the briefing the day before, when he pronounced Marty Frost the champ after she took out the headquarters hump, and he still hadn’t shaved. He held up his cellphone. “Ray, you got pals I never imagined.”

  “I don’t know nobody, Ham.” Ray Tate shrugged. “I’m just an asshole.”

  “Well, you done good, anyway, here. Somebody noticed. We got your three viables down at the local Sector, we got blood off each of them. We got bottles that bounced off the windows, we got six baseball caps with hair evidence. Nice, nice freeze on the stage, you did.” He shook his head. “Mutts. They thought they didn’t need to wear gloves because the bottles would melt. Of course that presupposes minimum competence in making sure the bottles didn’t bounce back off the window. And too stupid to take the red hats with them. Guess they thought it would help them blend in with all those Chinese folk not wearing red hats. What ever happened to the diabolical criminal mastermind? I really miss that bygone era.”

  “Bummer, Ham.” He yawned widely, tasting the vomit in his mouth. He wanted to book off sick and bang Djuna Brown into the Left Bank of the Seine. “So, I’m here.”

  “Who do you know? I just got a call that the chief’s task force is expanded to include this mess. Take out the Volunteers for the women and this too. And someone at the Jank wants you prominent on the team.”

  Ray Tate thought, That was fast. Six Fingers Wong and his theory of sergeants, having to tell a friend about him. Willy Wong to the police chief, Pious Man Chan; Pi Chan to the Chief of Ds, Chief of Ds to Hambone Hogarth. He wished he’d parked a couple in Willy Wong’s stickpin. He didn’t know how long Djuna Brown would be in the city and he wanted to squeeze every Parisian minute out of the time they had. “Can you get me a pass, Ham? I don’t need the profile. I got a life.”

  “Sorry, Ray. If they want you on this bus, then you get on this bus. Trust me, you don’t want to know where the other one goes. I’ll oversee it, if you want, but somebody wants your face above the crowd.”

  “Okay.” Ray Tate had an inspiration. “Okay, but I’ll need some people.”

  Hogarth shrugged. “Limitless budget on this. Pick who you want, out of what we got.”

  “That Statie, the little black chick, Brown. Comartin from Traffic. Marty Frost.”

  “I get the Statie, she’ll be a good decoy if we still go that way. Marty Frost, sure, you put her in the room with white Volunteers and she’ll have them slapping on black face and singing old Jolson tunes. Comartin? Why? You need valet parking?”

  “You got a better place for him?”

  “Good point.” He looked around to make sure no one was nearby. “Am I going to have trouble with you, Ray? No matter how this looks to outsiders and up at the Jank, I’m running this. We on the same page? You might have a good pal somewhere up the chain, but you’ve got a lot more enemies. You don’t need another one. My advice? We break this in two, work the overlaps together. There’s the dead women and there’s this mess. Fifteen dead, so far. I want this.”

  Ray Tate thought of the gallery of photographs of the ladies on easels in the briefing room, their faces fractured into some kind of a demented Picasso art project, how one of them in life had evoked Djuna Brown into his mind, minutes before he felt her hand on his shoulder and turned to find her magically there. “I’ll go at it from the women, then. I’m going to want to go at the guys in custody, first, see if they want to cop to anything on that. If they drop something about the fire, I call you.”

  Hogarth looked relieved. His crew had investigated all three of Ray Tate’s fatal shootings and on the iffy middle one that Ray Tate himself wasn’t sure of, they’d cut him slack. Hogarth didn’t want to deal that card. It was something that shouldn’t have to be said aloud, a debt never to be collected. It was enough, he knew, for Ray Tate to hear the echo.

  “You go at them for the women until we get the fingerprints back off the bottles matched to Chinatown. And then they’re ours. Don’t ask a word about what went on here, though. If they go that way, head ’em off. I need them clean for my guys. We got a deal?”

  There were media hordes in front of the Sector station. Marty Frost drove past and Ray Tate called inside on the cellphone. The duty sergeant directed them to the rear garage and told him to hold back. “If you don’t want to have to tell a fib later, Ray, give me a minute to move things around in there. We’ll put them in interview rooms. We’ll get your guys in interviews A to C.”

  Two Asian chargers were coming out of an interview room when Ray Tate and Marty Frost emerged from of the door to the garage, walking slowly. One of the chargers had a split lip and was licking blood and ragging out his partner with good humour. “You’re right-handed. I told you, stay on the right. I’m left-handed, I stay on the left. Nobody gets hurt except the guy getting the business. Police Fucking Brutality 101. Did you skip that class?”

  Ray Tate asked, “He went off on you?”

  The charger shook his head. “Naw. Bruce Lee here can’t figure out left from right. We’re getting basic bio-data off the guy in the garage, you know, chatting him up, and this hero here gets over on my left. In the middle of the interview his elbow takes me out on the back swing.” Handing Ray Tate a sheet of paper, he burlesqued peering around and raised his voice. “Guy’s not even Chinese. Fucking Filipino. They eat, like, dogs.” He called, “Bruce, you eat dogs.”

  “Yum,” the other charger said, “lunch on me.”

  “How are they, those three in the rooms? Anybody stand out real stupid?”

  “Well, it’s close. They’ve got one brain between them and I think they take turns thinking with it. Right now, I’d say the guy in the middle interview room has temporary custody.”

  They went down the hall bitching each other out.

  “This is your kind of thing, Marty. How do you want to do it?”

  “My kind of thing?” She smiled at him for a moment. “I figured you’d checked me out.”

  “The guy in B might have a clue, but the other two? Tweet tweet.”

  “Let’s fuck with heads a little, okay? What do we really care about?”

  “The dead ladies.” He told her what Hogarth had said, to stay off the Chinatown arson murders. “The minute this becomes viable for them, the hammers come in.”

  “So, we do A first, we bend his brain a little. He thinks he’s in here for the fires, right? He’s anticipating, thinking, ‘They’ll ask this, and I’ll say that. They’ll ask that, I’ll say this.’ We don’t have to be subtle. These guys are going for Chinatown anyway, we just want them to carry the dead ladies when they go. So, we go in and you work the preliminaries. You start out sitting, I’ll eye-line him. But when I sit down, you step back, you stand behind him, just out of his eye-line. Humming, maybe, clicking your tongue. But real soft. If my hands are folded on the table, you can’t talk, no matter how much you want to.”

  “What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

  She smiled. “Put your hand up like a good pupil.” She rubbed her face briskly for a few seconds. “Showtime.”

  A shirtless man with a shaven head was in A, slumped over the table, his right wrist manacled to a ring welded into the metal top. A fresh WPP, white people’s party, logo was engraved on his right chest. Mom Forever Always was tattooed in a red heart over his left breast. He had a black eye and fat lips and was having trouble breathing through his nose and was coughing and moaning softly.

  “Those fucking slope cops tuned me. I wanna lay a charge.” He turned his face up to the video camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling and shouted with exaggeration, “Bru-Tal-It-ee-I-want-to-lay-a-charge.” With his damaged nose he sounded like the guy in all the harelip jokes.

  Ray Tate
sat opposite him and put the page of bio data on the table. Marty Frost remained standing, moving just out of the man’s eye-line, and folded her arms.

  “I’m Sergeant Ray Tate. In the room is Martinique Frost, city police. We’re conducting a multiple-death investigation.”

  “Fuck you. I want to lay a charge.”

  Ray Tate held up his hand. “We’ll get to that. We’ll get you a use-of-force complaint form, help you fill it out, if you want, okay? Let me read this over, correct me if I’m wrong, okay? I say something not right, you should help me keep the record straight. Before we start, do you need anything, a cold drink or coffee, or to use the bathroom?” He looked up at the guy as if having an afterthought. “Wait. That’s a question. Rules say, before I ask you any question, I have to read you your rights, just to be safe, okay?” He took the square card with the poem printed on it from his pocket and held it so the camera picked it up. He read slowly, stopping at the end of each numbered sentence. “You get all that? I can read it again, if you want, slower.”

  The man was silent.

  “You’ve got to nod for the camera, or say something. It’s the rules.”

  The man nodded.

  “So, you want a coffee? Use the bathroom? Anything?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Okay, let’s go through this. Your name is Peter van Meister. You’re thirty-one years old. Married, three kids. Work as a groundskeeper at the Riverview Golf and Country, nine years. No criminal record. We okay on this, so far? Peter? You have to speak or nod.”

  The man looked up at the camera and nodded.

  “Okay. That’s okay. I wouldn’t say much if I were you looking at multiple murder charges. The charges, I have to tell you, are capital. The needle in this state. It might take a few years to get you through the appeals, but at the end of it? The needle. I’m going to ask you some questions. You can answer or decline. Some guys like to use this time to figure out what we know or what we don’t know, to head us off later. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Your choice. You can invoke at any time, just like I read you off the card. Like I said, I’d be careful. We good, man? Tell the camera.” He stopped talking when Martinique Frost unfolded her arms and eased into Peter van Meister’s eye-line and sat down. Ray Tate stood up, stretched, and moved slightly behind him. He very softly hummed the tune from Dragnet.

  “This is very serious, Peter,” she said, her hands folded primly. “If it was straight murder? You might dodge the needle. But multiples? With a hate crime add-on? Good luck with that. Very, very hard to justify to a jury, serial hate rape and murder. Juries, even in this town, can’t get their mind around racial rapes.”

  His head jumped. “What? Rapes?”

  “Relax, Peter. This might be the simplest part of your day. We know how you did the women, we know where you did them. But we don’t know why you did them. Or who with. Maybe you’ve got a motive we haven’t thought of yet. Maybe they asked for it. To start with, what were Belinda Clarke, Mariam Smith, and June Flowers to you, can you tell me?”

  “Who?” The man was startled. “Belinda what? What the fuck?”

  Ray Tate switched to the sound theme of Law & Order and softly shuffled his feet. He yawned and cracked his jaws but otherwise remained silent.

  “Clarke, Smith, Flowers, and a woman to be named later. Your last victim. Serial sex murder. With a hate added on.” She kept direct eye contact. Someone had once told her during an interview that she had beautiful eyes. You got great eyes, he’d said, I forgot you were a nigger. She’d thanked him very much, as it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her. “You got kids, Peter, any of them girls? Girls you want to beat to mush, Peter? Maybe do other stuff? How’s things with your wife? Does she go along with that, you and your daughters fooling around?”

  “Fuck. What are you talking about? I don’t touch my kids. Those dead ones were all Chinese. Burned. I saw it. I heard them screaming in there, like fucking rats.” He made a high-pitched singsong. “Fucking diseased rats.”

  “Peter, what are you talking about?” She spoke very softly as if she really wanted to know, to clear up her confusion. “All the victims were black females.”

  “No. In Chinatown. That’s why we’re here, right? The fires? Those diseased hordes that we burned up. Fuck ’em. I’m proud of what we did. As a white Aryan man I can hold my head up in my own country.” In his honking voice he began chanting up at the camera. “Sink the boats, feed the fish, sink the boats, feed the fish,” and pumping his fist in the air. “White power.”

  Martinique Frost leaned over the bio data sheet and pretended to read it. She picked it up and glanced at the back, as though she might have missed something. She folded her hands and shook her head, as if confused, and looked at the bio sheet.

  Ray Tate tried humming the theme from Hawaii Five-O.

  She looked up. “Peter, what the fuck are you talking about? There’s nothing on here about fires. We don’t do fires. Fires is some other department, the sparky squad. We do sex murder. Not fire murder. They bring us in for the real heavy on-hands stuff. The sick pervo shit.” She made her face into confusion. “Sex murders, you know what that is, right? That’s our game and we think you’re our player.”

  The man shook his head and tried to push away from the table, to get away from her. The chain was tight from his wrist to the table. “No, no.”

  “You like the dark, Peter? It’s okay. Even at my age, I get a lot of white dudes hitting me up. They can’t help it. A lot of you white power guys have got some underlying desire to be the plantation man, jump the dark bones. I get that, that’s biology. But why kill them all, after you got off? That’s some sick shit. What you did.”

  He sat silent and shook his head as though she was hopeless to try to talk to. He twisted his head to see Ray Tate. “What’s she talking about?”

  Marty Frost’s hands were folded. Ray Tate was out of TV themes so he moved to a slightly bouncy “Finiculì, Finiculà.”

  “Or maybe, maybe you’re denying your own self? Who you really are?” She leaned forward. She was going at him now and her voice was even softer, confidential, sympathetic. “You got that dark crinkly hair. You shave it off your head, but I see it in your eyebrows, on your arms. You’re pretty dark complected. Somebody there, in the woodpile. Is your family from down south? You ever do one of those ancestry searches, look for interesting relatives? You getting back some at big buck daddy?”

  “No darky in me, bitch.”

  “If you say so.” She shrugged and reached over to put her hand on his under the manacle. “My brother.”

  He snatched his hand away; the chain rattled.

  Martinique Frost sat back and stared at him, her hands unfolded.

  “Good motive, though, for the jury, if you want to go for it.” Ray Tate said, moving into his eye-line. “Your mother was raped by a black guy? Fuck, man, who needs that shit? You suffered for it. Rejected by your own people, had to head north to make a fresh life for yourself as a white man. I can dig it. So you joined the Volunteers, you’re just light-skinned enough, get some back for your mom. Who wouldn’t? Natural you’d want to kill all those women after you raped them so they couldn’t have any black sons to suffer like you. You’re gonna have to work on that part, the rapes, and those mommy issues you got.”

  “Leave my mother out of this.” Peter van Meister was getting wound up and confused. “I didn’t rape no darkies. I wouldn’t stick my dick in any of them. I didn’t kill no black broads. That Chinatown stuff, okay —”

  Ray Tate warned him, “Don’t say it, okay?”

  “Shut up about that Chinatown stuff, Peter,” Martinique Frost said. “Don’t go there.”

  “We don’t want you to talk about that,” Ray Tate said. “We’re the fuck-and-kill squad. Some other guys might want to talk to you about that. But we’re not those guys.”

  “Unless you banged the girls in Chinatown before you burned them.”

  “Then we got a game
,” Ray Tate nodded positively. “Definitely a game.”

  “Peter, just focus on sex crimes. Focus, man.”

  They were piling on. Peter van Meister seemed to shrink

  Martinique Frost liked the rhythm and she folded her hands on the table. She’d found somewhere to go with him. His pride. “We don’t want to know about Chinatown. Just shut the fuck up about Chinamen. I been all night counting dead bodies in Chinatown. I just come from East Chinatown. I’ve had a fucking lifetime of Chinamen. That’s someone else’s case. They can have it.”

  “Yeah?” Peter van Meister seemed happily curious. “Yeah? You were there?”

  “Yep. All morning. You guys fucked my day. My day off, actually.” She glanced at Ray Tate and arched her eyebrows, then crept into his shit; she’d read his pride and was going to poke it a little. “Three dead. Big fucking deal. I’ve seen three dead in a collision on the Eight.”

  “Three? We only got three? Bullshit. A dozen at least.”

  Martinique Frost unlocked her fingers and glanced at Ray Tate.

  Ray Tate, out of his eye-line, glanced up at the camera. “Well, they’re still counting them up. Three so far. Maybe it goes to four, five. That’s your business, what happened in East Chinatown. My advice? If you’re going to go down for something, Peter, go for the women. That’s a man’s work, a son’s work. That’s at least fucking normal, how they raped your mom and all.”

  “Don’t talk about my mother.”

  Martinique Frost spoke to Ray Tate. “Except for the part, Ray, where he fucked them before killing them.” She shook her head. “That might work against him. Rape is tough to explain to the family the best of times.” She said to the man, “Do they know what happened to your mom?”

  Ray Tate came into eye-line and before he could answer, he said to Martinique Frost, “Maybe he didn’t know you weren’t supposed to fuck them first? But he got overwhelmed, realized on some level they were sisters and needed his action? They were all good looking black chicks. I looked at their pictures, the ones taken before he got at them, and I got to say, I’m a red-blooded guy and dig blonde chicks, usually, but I’d have a little trouble keeping it in my pants.”