by Lee Lamothe
Evening Evans was barely visible under the bandages. The machines beeped rhythmically. Her eye moved when the door swished open and she lifted her hand slightly when she saw her father. He sat beside her and held her hand, still clutching the bible to his heart in the other.
Djuna Brown introduced herself.
“Eve, I’m looking for the guy that did this. I have some questions. I want to show you a photograph. Are you up to it? If not, no problem, I can come back tomorrow.”
Evening Evans’s voice was soft. “I fine. Dad here. I fine now.”
“Okay. I’ll try to keep my questions to yes or no answers as much as I can. First, can you tell me if you’ve ever seen this man before?” She held the photograph of Ansel Partridge in front of her face, moving it in and out to be sure the single eye focused.
“That man?”
“We don’t know. Is he familiar to you?”
Eve Evans shook her head slightly.
“Did you see the man that night? Or maybe before the attack, on the street, anywhere?”
Eve Evans shook her head slightly.
“Did he say anything?
“Dog. Call me dog.”
“Before or during? Wait. Let’s do it the quiet way. Before?”
Evan Evans shook her head.
“During?”
She nodded.
“Did you get any sense of how big he was?”
Evening Evans nodded and licked her lips. Her father gently rubbed an ice cube across them. She spoke. “Pick me up neck held me one hand. Big man.”
Djuna Brown waited while Samual Darius rubbed another ice cube on his daughter’s mouth.
“Did you have a purse, to carry Horace in? Or your ID.”
“Just Horace pocket. Key. Just quick walk. Purse home.”
“Did you see anything on the river?”
She nodded. “Vol’teers think. Lights water.”
“Now, I need longer answers to some of the questions. If you can, good. If not, like I said, another time.”
“’Kay.”
“Why were you down there that night?”
“Film.”
“Did you have a camera? Did he take that?”
“No ’quipment. Look see. Scout. Out.”
“What were you doing when he … got you?”
“Noth’.” She paused. “Stop lit cig’rette. He came.”
“Is there any chance, any chance at all, that it was someone you knew? Who knew you? Might have followed you?”
Evening Evans shook her head.
“Boyfriend? Old boyfriend? Anyone who might have targeted you?”
“Not.”
Djuna Brown couldn’t think of anything else to ask.
The nurse came in quietly and checked the monitors. “How you doing, Eve? You want some privacy? Some rest? Just say so.”
“Fine. Dad here.” The hole in the bandages where her mouth was made a small smile. “Two hundred. One pack. Kool menth’. And lighter.” She inclined her eye slightly to Djuna Brown. “Find my luck lighter?”
“I’ll check, Eve. I’m going now. I’ll come back, soon, maybe with good news.”
It didn’t take long to come over the rover.
“Sector Four, Two, come up.”
“Sector Four, Two.”
“Your ten-twenty?”
“In front of the bank, Shirley Street, north of Manitoba. Idle and available.”
“Maintain and hold, Four, Two.”
“Ten-four.”
Five minutes after Ray Tate heard the maintain-and-hold on his under-dash radio, they came up Shirley in a black Volkswagen Jetta, slowed at Billy Stiles’s ghoster, then continued on. Two minutes later they came the other way, slowed again, passed by.
Ray Tate, slumped in the Mercury, called Billy Stiles’s cellphone. “That might be them.”
“Well, they do that again to me, I’m interacting. That’s creepy. You want me to stop ’em if they don’t stop next time?”
“Well, Billy, officer safety is always a foremost concern. Find your comfort level.” He clicked off and called Marty Frost. “I think that’s them in the Jetta. I’m afraid Billy’s gonna act up here.”
“Okay. I like this guy.” She laughed. “That was pretty great lasagna. He’s a great host.”
Five minutes later the Jetta came up the block and stopped with its headlights on, twenty-five feet off the front of Billy Stiles’s ghoster. No one disembarked.
On the rover, Ray Tate heard him broadcast. “Desk, Sector Four Area Two solo unit immediate backup Shirley north of Manitoba suspicious auto black Jetta possible officer jeopardy I’m out interacting at gunpoint.”
Billy Stiles activated his overhead rack lights and, with his shotgun, was out of the ghoster, around to the trunk side, with his flashlight up on the windshield of the Jetta and the short shotgun up, one-handed to his shoulder.
The rover was crowded with responses. Lonelys, the Sector sergeant, a transport van diverting from a night-court run. Cars from the surrounding areas and one from Sector Eight.
Ray Tate began laughing. It would have been better to follow the SPA people back to Sally Greaves and have the upper hand, some control, but this was okay. This was creative anarchy. He stopped laughing when the Jetta started rolling slowly forward and Billy Stiles parked a sparky load of pellets into the front-left wheel and grill, about a second before he yelled, “Halt.”
The driver’s door opened.
Billy Stiles yelled, “Stay in the vehicle shut off engine do it now hands on your head do it now.”
Ray Tate went on the cellphone to Marty Frost. “You guys seeing this?”
“Yeah. I’m really liking this guy. I guess we ain’t followin’ no one nowhere tonight. And … here come the troops.”
Sirens running, three unmarked ghost cars fishtailed onto the block, wedging themselves around the Jetta to block escape. Behind them came a sergeant’s marked car that hit the turn too heavy. It crashed square into the back of the Jetta, jumping it forward. Two people in the Jetta jacked forward into the dashboard and the air bags blew up. Car alarms went off.
Billy Stiles went around to his dash radio. He was very calm, almost indifferent. “Desk, we got at least three injured in departmental traffic event, one an on-duty sergeant and two civilian suspects and we have shot fired by one on-duty, ambulances and fire requested this stage asap and supervisor. All calm this scene.”
Hambone Hogarth and Sally Greaves sat opposite Ray Tate in a conference room in the Intelligence offices at the Jank. The shooting and takedown had gone out on the radio, that two of Sally Greaves’s amateurs had almost got aced by a real cop. Rumours were wildfire that the bosses were trying to shut down a serial killer investigation because a cop might be involved. The chief might be involved. The temporary mayor might be involved. The media centre had already received a dozen enquiries. It was suddenly going public and damage control was going to kick in.
Sally Greaves looked depressed, sucking at her bucked teeth, frantically rubbing the fingertips of both hands into her scalp as though she had a rash. “Hambone, I don’t know where to start with this guy. This guy’s a … fucking … fucking menace.” She glanced down at the flakes of dandruff she’d snowed onto the table, and looked up at Ray Tate. “You’re a fucking menace.”
Ray Tate felt sorry for her. She was still a cop. She was ugly and tragic and she’d just had an example of how she wasn’t all-powerful, didn’t control the world around her, not the real cops out on the real streets. And, he thought, she’s scored herself some primo blonde lieutenant action. There must be something more to her than that voice.
“Look,” he said, “you guys came up with the Volunteer angle to the ladies murders. You set up the task force. Hang it on them, you said. So we looked around in there. And we find Ansel Partridge but then he disappears. None of the other goofs we’ve come up with has it in them to just kill women. And then you try to steer us away from the Volunteers with some sex-perv Quantico bu
llshit.” He shrugged. “All I did was put through a suspect in multiple homicides. That’s my job. Ansel Partridge.” He had a buff envelope on the table in front of him. “This guy.” He slipped a photo out, a tight three-quarters of Partridge, with no references to suggest the location it was taken.
Sally Greaves looked at it. “Where’d you get that?”
“It was taken by a surveillance camera near the scene of one of the murders, just before.”
She shook her head. “No, that’s impossible.”
Ray Tate told Hambone Hogarth he wanted to conduct an interview with Sally Greaves and Ansel Partridge. “We can go off the record, if you want, with Sally. I don’t give a shit if he organized the Volunteers and caused that mess in Chinatown. But I’ve got dead ladies and she’s hiding my viable.”
“You know, Ray, the chief’s gonna shut you down first thing tomorrow. Willy Wong or no Willy Wong. You’re fucking with in-house stuff, now.”
“I don’t care, Ham. I got tonight. What more can any of us ask? If Sally co-operates we can have three homicides down by dawn. This thing is going public, I promise you. Other people on my team are willing to leak this to the press and wear it, take early retirement.” He looked at their faces. “What you don’t understand, living up here in Jank, is there’s cops on the street who give a shit for victims.”
“You’ve got to put a stop to it, Ray. What do you want? A bump? Station sergeant? Done. Your team? Whatever they want. Let’s just hang the dead women on that lunatic Volunteer. Corey Garnett. If there’s someone else involved, we’ll take care of it. You got my word.”
“What fucking happened to you, Ham?” Ray Tate felt a rush of anger. “What happened to fucking you? Nobody walks on murder. Not even in this town.”
Sally Greaves said, “He isn’t a cop. Ansel. Ansel’s an operator.” She looked for a few seconds at Hambone Hogarth and licked her lips and then asked Ray Tate, “What do you want? End of the day, what makes the happy you? Not the crazy you.”
“An interview with Partridge. Maybe strap him to the truth machine. I don’t know. What I do know is I’ve been given this thing, and even though it turned into a steaming piece of shit, it’s mine.”
“I want to be there, Sergeant. He won’t lawyer up, but I need to be in the room. Does that work for you?”
“Time, place, up to you. You want to sit in, sit. I’ll have someone from my guys there. She’ll want to work this. She cares. Imagine that.”
“Two hours,” Sally Greaves said. “In the conference room. Best light on this, I guess, is you’ll have him ruled out and you can go look for the real killer.”
“More like, Ray,” Hambone Hogarth said, jovially, “you’ll be driving a prisoners’ bus, in the wee dawn hours, picking weevils out of your beard with tweezers. This was your chance back, man, out of the wilderness. Somebody was pulling for you in the chief’s office. But now? Now you’ve gone nuts. Fuck, Ray. Cops shooting at cops? Cops crashing into cops? I know you were the ringmaster behind that little circus on Shirley. Man, you are so fucking fucked.”
Sally Greaves shook her head. “Let him run it out, Ham. He’s right. We forgot something. We’ll do some back and fill, after, once he gets off Partridge as a viable.”
Chapter 24
Just after midnight Ray Tate and Djuna Brown met up with Martinique Frost and Brian Comartin at China-Mex, an all-night bucket of blood where the outskirts of Chinatown was being squeezed by Little Juarez. The place was almost empty; what was there were dregs who recognized the Chrysler crash car and the Mercury and the cops and choreographed a not-so-subtle moonwalk out the rear door. Two women slept at tables with their heads on their arms. The guy behind the hot table was black and looked pretty miserable about it. An espresso machine was set up beside a percolator holding a glass pot with sticky-looking sludge at the bottom.
Djuna Brown went up to the counter. “Espresso. Double.” She looked at the others. “Everybody?” They nodded. “Make four.”
The black guy took some little paper cups from a shelf and started jerking a lever.
“Whoa, there, my brother.” Martinique Frost leaned on the counter, friendly, ready to pass on global cuisine wisdom. “In Italy they put the sugar in the cup, then shoot in the coffee. It caramelizes it.”
“Yeah,” the guy said. “But this ain’t It-aly, I ain’t no wop. And you ain’t Mario Ba-fuckin-tali. This is Mur’rer City. Here you put your own sugar in. I ain’t paid that rate, do no special orders. So, you want four ax-pressos or not?”
They sat at a booth in the front window watching their cars. Cop shotguns were a prime item on the street. Not worth going hand-to-hand with chargers for, but an empty cop car was an enticement and might be worth the risk. If you lost a scattergun it was bad. If that scattergun was used to take out a cop, you’d be wanting to apply to a teachers’ college out of state under another name.
The guy behind the counter called, “Yo, you ax-pressos are ready for pickup.” He loomed massive and leaning against the counter behind him and waited. “You wanna eat?”
Djuna Brown said, “You got any forno?”
“Girl, I got hor-no and I got por-no but none of that for-no.”
“Then we’re okay.”
“You gonna pay? If you ain’t gonna pay, I won’t ring it in.”
Brian Comartin got up and gave him a ten. “Keep the change.”
The black guy didn’t ring it in anyway and put the ten into his pocket. “This time of night, it’s all change.”
Around the table they chatted for a while about the night. About Sally Greaves’s little minions being pulled out the van through the windows, one of them visibly pissing his pants. Billy Stiles becoming the hero of the Sector when it was learned he’d braced two SPA goofs from the Jank, opened up on them, made ’em eat an airbag and shit their pants.
“Man, Billy.” Martinique Frost said, “If Billy Stiles had already killed his wife, and if he could speak Spanish and write poetry like Traffic man here, well I dunno. If he was this cute, I mean, as my poet. That boy is on wheels.”
Djuna Brown, who’d heard the story from Ray Tate, said she wished she’d been there. “Yeah, Billy Stiles is fab. So, Ray, what’s the deal?”
Ray Tate shot back his espresso and made a face. But it was coffee. He called, “Yo, another round. This time we don’t pay, so fuck you.”
Martinique Frost called, “Don’t you be spittin’ in there, my brother. I got my eye on your ass.” She was only partly kidding and watched him work.
“So,” Ray Tate said. “They know we’ve got a picture of Ansel Partridge. I told them it was a surveillance photo from near one of the body dumps. Sally didn’t like that much. She’s been around long enough to know that there’s never one picture of anything. She says he’s one of hers, an operator, but he isn’t viable for our poor ladies. Word’s getting out. They’ve been getting press calls about a serial killer cover-up. They’re clamming, but she’s bringing Partridge into the Jank at one o’clock. We can go at him, but she wants to be there, in the room. I said okay.”
“Are we all going to do him?” Marty Frost asked. “All at once? I don’t like that. That tells him we think he’s so smart it takes a bunch of our brains to keep up with one of his. That won’t work.”
Ray Tate shook his head. He went to the counter and got the espressos. After he sat and poured a bag of sugar into his, he said, “I figure that, and if you guys have a problem with this say so, that Marty and I’ll take him first. Mostly Marty after I do the prelims, set the scene for him. Then, if we don’t go anywhere, after we take a break, Marty stays and Brian goes in. He looms in the background in and out of the guy’s eye-line. Marty, you can give him some pointers on the eye-line thing. Last resort? Djuna goes in. She’s the same colour and body type as the victims. Maybe she sets him off.” He looked around. “I’ve got to tell you, I told Hambone and Sally we’re dedicated to our ladies. We’re ready to go all-in, go public, take early retirement, rather than let
it go. Was I out of line?”
They all shook their heads.
“Okay, that’s that then. Djuna? Anything from the victim, Eva? Evans?”
“Eve. For Evening. The most beautiful time of day.” She took out her notebook. “Down and dirty. Evening Evans was out walking on the river, close to midnight, looking over sites for a film about the Chinese migrants on the boats from Canada. She’s a filmmaker. She sees something, she thinks are Volunteers on the river, waits, and when they’re gone she goes to light a cigarette and he gets her. Holds her up by the throat against a tree and just goes to work on her with the other hand, his right, I guess. Calls her a dog. After that, she doesn’t remember nothing. She had no purse, just the gun, her house keys, her smokes, and her lighter. He’s away with the gun. Presumably the smokes and lighter, too. When I left she was offering the nurse two hundred bucks for a pack of Kool menths.”
Ray Tate asked if anyone had anything to add. “Okay? We go. We’re only going to have one kick at this fuck. After that, we lose him and Sally sends him back under.”
They went to the Jank in two cars so everyone would have flexibility when the Ansel Partridge interview was completed. Only two of them would have to stay to book him over to a body snatcher. Ray Tate pulled in at an all-night mom and pops to get some Kool menthols. When he came out he stood on the sidewalk and lit one. He made a face, but kept smoking it. He thought his way through the case. Something itched him. When the cigarette was half gone, he pitched it, tried to spit away the minty taste, and got in behind the wheel.
“What, Ray? You were off in space-land there. Maybe we should put off Partridge until tomorrow, go at him fresh.”
“Naw, no I’m okay. Just something rubbing me the wrong way.”
Martinique Frost and Brian Comartin were leaning on the Chrysler in front of the Jank. “He just went in,” Brian Comartin said. “This is one scary-looking dude.”
