by Lee Lamothe
“I guess, I guess. But I’m not going to hide behind them. I killed them —”
“Sally, no. I haven’t given you your rights. Tell it to Hambone’s guys after they read to you. They’re waiting. My case was the poor dead ladies. And it’s down.”
“I was thinking. You never got to the alibis, did you? Where Ansel was at the time of the murders.”
“Doesn’t matter now, Sally. You’ve got more important stuff to deal with.”
“Do you know the dates?”
Djuna Brown didn’t, offhand. She had a vague timeline. “Ah, I’d have to check. June, first week or ten days, that was for two of them. I don’t remember the other one.” She thought for a moment. “June ninth was one. My father’s birthday. Another one, a few days later.”
“Then there might be a problem. I got a call from the Maricopa County sheriff’s office that they were holding Ansel down there on a gun charge. He told them he was doing undercover work for us, he was operating. I confirmed it, but I had no idea he’d left town, was out there. I think it was around that week. You should call Arizona, check the dates they had him.”
“I’ll give them a call, Sally.”
“Or not. I’m not telling anyone.”
“That won’t work for Marty Frost. She wants the right guy.”
“However you like. You do what you want with Arizona.” She gave Djuna Brown a beautiful bucktoothed smile. “If I’d met you, well … If you were that way, I mean, my way. I don’t get to meet a lot of humanists.”
Djuna Brown stood up and knocked on the door. “You can’t be all things to all people, Sally. But …” She gave Sally Greaves a small sweet smile, “sometimes you get to be what you are.”
In the hallway Hambone Hogarth asked if Sally Greaves gave it up.
He got a small sweet smile, too.
When Martinique Frost left the lockup she found Brian Comartin sitting on his bench, looking like the retiree he was destined to become, soaking up sunshine. She thought, starve some of the extra weight off him, reduce the jowls, grow out a Hemingway beard. She sat on the bench beside him. It would be good not to have to move until they needed paella. “Traffic man, we need wheels. We have to do some cleanup. There might be a problem with Ansel.”
“I’m retired soon as I sign the final papers. I don’t have problems. I make problems.” But he got up. “Let’s walk over to Sector Four. They got a ton of cars there, and nobody to drive them.”
They strolled down the streets like a long-time married couple. There were few masks being worn. People bustled. They stopped to look into windows. At Sector Four they went to the lot.
Brian Comartin whistled up a clerk. “We need a car.”
“You got a req? You need a req. Two signatures.”
“Chief’s special squad.”
“Chief’s. I guess, then, you’re commandeering?”
“How’d you know?”
“There’s a black Chrysler over by the fence. Keys in. Abandoned traffic car. That do?”
“Perfect.”
“But I didn’t see nothin’. I was taking a piss when you took it.”
They found the car and boarded, and Brian Comartin rolled out of the parking lot. “Did he have something? Joe Carr? Or was he just lonely?”
As the car went past the lockup she glanced back with a little sadness at the pattern of tiny cell windows in the brick wall of the back of the building. She wondered if it made her a bad cop, to care about the victims and to care about the doers. She felt Joseph Carr was a victim of something, and that made all those dead Chinese people victims of something, too, something beyond him. The Chinese people were dead and without hope of change; Joseph Carr was alive and change was a possibility available to him, although he’d never walk free again.
Change was all around, some of it generated internally, some of it imposed externally. You had to deal. Djuna Brown had almost lost it in the dark streets of Stonetown, Marty Frost knew, not so much because she was afraid, but because she’d almost become a victim. Cops aren’t supposed to be victims. As much as there was sympathy and caring for an injured or even dead cop, there was an underlying feeling that he’d failed. Djuna Brown had got off light with an earring shot off the side of her head, but she was young and had an imagination and she had Ray Tate. A couple of inches to the left. Dead in the street. Her lover watching her bleed out. Poor girl, they’d say with harsh sorrow, how’d she fuck that one up?
“Marty?”
“Ah, yeah. Sorry. Off on a little voyage.” She turned down the radio. Unlike Ray Tate, she wasn’t a radio rider. Ray Tate liked to find action, to check on the young cops, to find scenes in progress. She preferred to go from A to B, do her job, then wait for the next one. Do her little piece of a case. She liked to be in the aftermath when things were less crazy and the human element emerged, not the wild, spitting anger that preceded it. “So, our man Joe. Joe was out on the river the night Evening Evans was attacked. He heard a gunshot. He told me he heard what might have been a bullet hitting a sign along the river, a man yelling.”
Brian Comartin turned the Chrysler into the entry to the Riverwalk. They cruised slowly; Marty Frost got out a couple of times to examine the signage. On the fourth stop she returned to the car and told Brian Comartin to park it, they’d found the place.
“We got a No Swimming sign with what might be a bullet skip off it. There’s a bit of blood on it, I think. Ground’s all churned up. We’ll need some guys down here to do a scrape.”
She called the Homicide Squad and told one of Hambone Hogarth’s minions where she was, that she needed a vampire to do some blood work on Riverwalk, and gave the location of the sign.
“They’re pretty busy, Officer.”
“Chief’s special squad. You tell it to Hambone.”
Chapter 28
They saw Ray Tate slumped on the terrace drinking coffee. Even from a distance his eyes were shot. Brian Comartin parked the Chrysler in the driveway. The valet came down the steps; Marty Frost showed him her palm and he nodded and backed away.
“Ray, you look like you had a bad night dancing with that slut, Widow Cliquot.”
“That stuff, Brian. Goes down good, comes out pretty raw through the nose.”
“Oysters, you need oysters for breakfast.” Brian Comartin was jovial. He held a chair for Martinique Frost and got a sweet smile, then sat. “Djuna still out of it?”
“She got called to the Jank. Where you guys been?”
“Detecting.” Marty Frost put her cellphone on the table, and poured coffee for herself and Brian Comartin from a carafe. “Just cleaning up.” She told him about Joseph Carr wanting to see her and what he’d said. “So we went down by the Riverwalk. Found the sign. Found what looks like blood spatter.”
Ray Tate thought for a moment. “Oh, oh.” He pointed to her phone. “Gimme.” He squinted at the number pad and punched in the Homicide number. “Ham? Ray Tate. Djuna leave there, yet? Well, look, are they done with Partridge down at the abattoir? I need to know if he had any gunshot wounds, other than what Sally parked in him. Okay.” He asked Marty Frost the cellphone’s number and passed it on to Hambone Hogarth. “We’ll stand by.” He clicked off.
“So, maybe Sally was right. Ansel Partridge might not be good for our ladies, if he has no wounds and Eve Evans got one into the guy that jumped her.” He poured more coffee. “Fuck, two good viable heads and no one with the right hat size. This is the case that wouldn’t die.”
A taxi pulled into the roundabout and Djuna Brown got out. Ray Tate lit off a whistle and she skipped up onto the terrace. “Bongo, you look like you been shot at and missed, and shit at and hit.” She gave him a sympathetic kiss, sat, and greeted Marty Frost and Brian Comartin with a smile. “A city guy. I’m going to own his ass in Paris.” She poured herself a cup of coffee. “So, we might maybe got a problem.”
“Huh.” Martinique Frost said, “Tell me about it.”
“Why, what’s up?”
�
�You first. We’re waiting for a call from Hambone about something.”
“Well, our old pal Ansel might have an alibi after all. We didn’t get to alibis before Sally shot him. But if we had we might’ve found out he wasn’t in town for at least one of the poor ladies. Sally says he was behind the pipes in Arizona. Gun charge. I’m going to call the Maricopa County sheriff. But she was pretty sure.”
Marty Frost’s cellphone buzzed. She answered.
“Hey, Marty,” Hambone Hogarth seemed happy to hear her voice. “My guys tell me you’re down on the Riverwalk, want a blood scrape? We got a vampire heading down there now. What’s it about? Your case is down.”
“Well, maybe, maybe not, Ham. The last victim, the survivor, might have put a round into the guy as he was beating her. That’s the blood on the sign. Ansel have anything like that?”
“Nope. Three .38 loads in the face. That’s it.”
“They did it right, right? Armpits, body hair? She only had a little .22.”
“They gave him the full service massage. Nothing but Sally’s rounds.” Hambone Hogarth made a bitter laugh. “You guys just can’t be satisfied. Each time you get a viable, he dies, so you clear him. Just pick one, we’ll make it fit him, and we’ll go out and get a beer.”
“And it gets worse. Ansel might have an alibi for one or more of the murders.”
“Goodbye, Marty.”
“A good official alibi.”
“Been nice, chatting, Marty. Glad you chief’s special guys took this case and not us. Goodbye. Good luck. Write if you get work.” He laughed and hung up.
“So,” Djuna Brown said, “we wait on the blood work, we check Arizona. Anything else we can do? They got a good pool here, let’s get some bathing suits in the gift shop, go for a swim.”
Martinique Frost looked depressed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck-fuck. Where did we go wrong? What did we miss?”
“Maybe it was one of the other Volunteers?” Brian Comartin bit his lip. He wanted to help but all he had were maybes, no fresh ideas. He was glad he wasn’t going to be a cop much longer. “Maybe it was just random nut after all.”
A black Buick with a lot of gleaming chrome wheeled into the roundabout. A woman got out of the passenger seat and opened the rear door. She took a garment bag out, started to head to the revolving doors, then turned back.
When the driver powered down the window and leaned across the passenger seat to speak to the woman, Ray Tate had a holy-fuck moment, the cop version of satori.
“Djun’, who’s that? The Buick?”
She leaned to look. “Gail the receptionist. Coming on shift, I guess.”
“The guy?”
“Don’t know. She said she’d started seeing somebody. Him, I guess.”
“I know that guy. Marty? Brian?”
They looked. The man lifted his hand and waved goodbye to the receptionist, sat up and powered up the window. He rolled to the edge of the sidewalk, pausing to let people pass.
Neither Marty nor Brian had seen him before.
“Brian, grab the plate, okay? Djun’, see if you can catch Gail on her way in, chitchat, girl stuff, maybe ask about the dude in the Buick. Casual, like.”
Djuna Brown headed for the lobby door and Marty Frost asked what was going on. “Is he a Volunteer?”
“Dunno. Dunno, but I know I know him. From someplace. He’s a wrongo.” He sat, thinking, running things though his mind. Through the door he could see Djuna Brown and Gail gabbing, Gail doing all the talking. Laughing. “Run the plate, Brian, see what comes back.”
Brian Comartin called in, gave his badge number and put the plate through. He dug out a pen and they waited. It took a while. “Yep, still here. I’m ready to write … Really? I never met one before … Got it.” He hung up and said, “I never met an actual John Smith before. I met a Joe Doakes and a John Hancock, but never a John Smith. Anyway, that’s who he is. Middle name Harold. Fifty-five-fifty Harrison Hill. DOB February 14, 1970, born on Valentine’s Day, six-foot-two, two-thirty-five, blond and blue. No unpaid moving traffic or parking citations. One parking violation, not paid, but still in the discretionary grace period. He’s got to get it in today.”
“Okay. Okay. We’re working.” Ray Tate felt his heart racing a little. “We need some stuff. Marty, put him through for nation-wide criminal. Brian, we need the photo off his driver’s licence and we need it sent here. Can you access email off your phone? Do it that way. And we need to know when and where he picked up all his parking tickets, rolling stops, whatever.” While Brian Comartin was on the phone loading it in to Records, he added, “And his previous addies, every place he’s ever lived.”
“Who ever lived?” Djuna Brown was at his shoulder. She sat down. “What I miss?”
“Maybe a viable. Maybe not. I think so, though. John Smith. Guy that dropped Gail off.”
“Yeah, Johnny. Gabby Gail’s beau. Real love going on there, Bongo. I should be so lucky.”
“Tell us what you got from her. About John.”
“Well, it started in tragedy. John’s wife, Mariam, was killed, she was actually the second poor lady killed. She worked here, with Gail on the desk. Killed up that alley around back, heading to her car after work.”
“So what else did she say?”
“She said Johnny and Mariam were married. They’d met here. He did some contracting, plumbing, they had a lot of trouble with the sauna, the showers, the swimming pool. So Johnny’s around and he hooks up with Mariam. And they get married. Mariam, when they met, was doing rooms and linens. With Johnny she blossomed. Took night courses in hotel management, moved eventually to the desk. Started dressing better. She was in line for middle management when she was killed. No kids. They lived in an apartment on Harrison Hill. Gail was really distraught after the funeral and had to take some time. Mariam was her only real friend at work. She was an example. Gail admits she has some self-effacement issues, but, she said, if Mariam could do it, then so could she. With Johnny’s love and support.”
“How’d Gail hook up with Johnny?”
“They saw each other at the funeral. She said the usual, you know, if you need to talk to someone, to call her. So he did. They talked. Hambone’s guys were still all over him. See, the first poor lady hadn’t been found yet, so Mariam looked like a one-off domestic, maybe. He got fired from here. Then they found the second. And then the third. So he moved off viable. And then the plague hit and everyone had newer fresher cases. Meanwhile, Johnny and Gail took things real slow. He does odd jobs, now. He’d worked in a slaughterhouse but quit. She was real happy when he didn’t come home stinking of hog shit. They kept themselves on the down-low until just recently, but they’re going slow, just breaking cover a little, now.” She looked around, brightly. “So, what I miss?”
Ray Tate took out his cellphone and scrolled through the images. He passed the phone around. “That’s him, right? I’m not nuts? That’s the guy doing the poor ladies and I’m a fucking asshole.”
They looked at the image on the screen of the fella who’d been shot in the shoulder, ducking away from the cellphone, the fella who wondered if he could be a weatherman, even if he didn’t have the big head action going on, the fella smoking Kool menths, careful of his ash.
They took over the table on the terrace into the lunch hour.
It came fast. The motor vehicle licence photo was the same John Smith. He came back from criminal with an of-interest flag attached to his name, put up by Homicide when he was still viable in his wife’s murder, to notify them of any incidents or contacts. A couple of paired drunk-assaults, bar fights, it seemed. That was it.
His parking tickets were all around the city. Overtime parking. Fail to pay meter. They mapped the locations on a napkin and crossed them with what they knew of the poor dead ladies. There was a hit. June Flowers, victim number three, waitress at Stoney’s on Erie, killed cutting through a vacant lot on her way home to her apartment on Harrison Hill. John Smith had an overtime parking the same
night, two blocks away.
His employment record from the State showed several plumbing jobs: he was unlicenced, he had no union membership, he’d worked in a car wash, a restaurant kitchen, a lumberyard, and at Bradshaw’s animal processing plant.
They were winding it down when Hambone Hogarth called on Martinique Frost’s cellphone. She handed it to Ray Tate.
“Ray, a heads-up. We’re doing a press briefing at four this afternoon. On the shootings at headquarters and an update on the Volunteers conspiracy, tying the serial murders into it, hooking it on Ansel.”
“I’d hold off on that, Ham, if I were you. We got a viable.”
“Bullshit. Who?”
“We got a good guy and we’re working it.”
“Gimme something, Ray. I gotta call the chief’s office.”
“A guy you guys had, Ham. And you let him go. You let the case go.” He didn’t say he himself had let the killer go.
“Ray …”
Ray Tate hung up.
Brian Comartin and Martinique Frost went to the plumbing contractors that had employed Johnny Smith to talk to bosses and workers. Only one worker, at a small firm on the outskirts of town, remembered him.
“Pussy hound. He’d’a fucked a U-joint if we let him. Mr. Lube, he called himself. Really liked a black chick that used to work in payroll. He said black chicks always had issues, needed some guidance from Mr. Plantation Man. One day he showed up with rips down his face, the boss came out and told him the black chick was more useful to the company than him. Fired his weird ass.”
At the carwash where Johnny Smith used to work, the owner said he was a loon. “Most of the time he was okay. Always reading on his break. Those books. How to build your self-esteem. Be the person you can be. I said to him, one day, you trying to better yourself? Give the fucking windshields an extra wipe. He said he didn’t need to improve, but a lot of people did, especially chicks, and he wanted to help them. I fired him when an NFL player’s wife said he asked her about where she saw herself going in life, as a black woman. Her husband’s a fucking quarterback and she’s getting sacked every night by ten million bucks. Where’s she gonna wanna go?”
