Back on Murder

by Mark J. Bertrand

  “I’ve never seen these before,” she says, taking the sketchbook in hand, flipping the pages slowly. She bites her lip.

  “I think they’re meant to be you.”

  She laughs. “I doubt that.” Then, frowning. “They don’t look like me, do they?”

  I answer with a noncommittal shrug. But yes, they do. Stephanie Thomson’s suspicions come to mind, the fear that her husband had gotten involved with one of his fellow artists. Maybe there was more truth to this than she realized.

  “How often would you say Joe was down here?” I ask, glancing into a couple of boxes on a nearby shelf, which contain mostly clay-covered books and abandoned tools.

  She’s still transfixed by the sketches. “I don’t know. Maybe once or twice a week. I’ve been here constantly – I’ve got a show coming up – and I’ll typically see him early in the morning, sometimes late at night. He’s unpredictable, I guess you could say. The way it seems to work for him is, he gets this inspiration and rushes over here to do something about it.”

  “Always the same inspiration, it looks like.” I pick up one of the heads. It’s surprisingly light. Plaster dust transfers to my hands.

  “He’s one of those people who can’t get it to come out right. So he keeps doing it, different variations, like he’s obsessed, you know? There’s a shape in his mind, a certain face, and he keeps trying to capture it again and again.”

  She closes the sketchbook and returns it to the table, putting the rock back on top. The halting repetition of her own face on the page has given her pause. I can see the wheels turning as she realizes the implications of her own words. Hers was one of the shapes in his mind, the latest obsession. Before letting her leave, I ask all the usual questions, but she can’t say whether Joe seemed depressed or not, whether he’d been behaving differently.

  “Had he given away any prized possessions?”

  “No,” she says, then pauses. “When he was up here a couple of days ago, I did hear him talking to Vance – that’s the guy next door – asking him to hold on to a box of stuff. He said he didn’t have room for it.”

  Glancing along the shelves, I find that a little hard to believe.

  “He gave it to this Vance individual, and not you?”

  “We weren’t that close.” Her eyes cut to the sketchbook. “Really.”

  “You have a number for this guy?”

  She crosses the hallway, retrieving a BlackBerry from her purse, scrolling through the numbers to find the right one. I copy Vance’s information into my notepad, then thank her. As she leaves, I have the feeling she hasn’t told me everything. I get that a lot, and sometimes it’s hard to know whether what’s being held back is important or not. One thing I’m fairly certain about. When Jill Fanning said she was not close to Joe, that was a lie.

  I leave a message for Vance, asking him to get in touch as soon as possible, then try Cavallo’s number again. She doesn’t pick up, so I call the station, which routes me over to the task force desk, where a secretary asks me to hold. A few minutes later, Wanda’s voice comes on the line.

  “Theresa isn’t here,” she says. “She took a personal day.”

  “Oh. Well, I guess you heard about my new assignment?”

  “Congratulations. I can tell you, your friend Lieutenant Rick is green with envy. He’s been scampering all over the place looking for a way off this sinking ship.” She frames the observation as an ironic joke, but her tone is pure bitter. “I just spent the last half hour listening to him argue why, in spite of being here to handle the media, it shouldn’t be him in front of the camera. He’s afraid having his face associated with this would tank his career.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that. There’s a reason why I’ve never had the urge to chase after rank. Listening to the resignation in her voice, I feel guilty for abandoning her team, even if it was at my captain’s request. Guilty but also relieved, which makes me feel even worse.

  “I’ll talk to her later,” I say, hanging up.

  Downtown, back at my own desk, I start working my way through Thomson’s personal effects, broken down into a series of inventoried evidence bags. Most of these things I examined quickly at the scene, but I have some time to kill before heading over to see the medical examiner, so I might as well use it.

  I locate the bag containing Thomson’s phone, then limber up my writing hand for some extensive transcription. We have software to do all this, but call me old-fashioned. I like to do some jobs myself. Every call he placed, every call he received, every call he missed, I record them all. Then I work my way through his programmed numbers, seeing what I can find. Jill Fanning is there, though no calls have been recently placed to her or received from her. There’s no listing for Vance, but the number she gave me is on the list of placed calls two days back.

  This morning’s incoming calls are all from Stephanie. Just after midnight, though, he received one from Reg Keller’s home, and then he placed one to a number I recognize, Tony Salazar’s mobile phone.

  On the back of the phone there’s a peephole camera. I thumb my way through the menu layers, then find Joe Thomson’s stored photos. They’re the usual jagged, low-quality images, random photos of the skyline, of himself, of the world viewed from behind his steering wheel. There’s one of Stephanie grilling in the backyard, her moving hand blurring her face. Nothing surprising.

  The last picture on the roll is the exception.

  It’s worse than the others, taken in dim light, the face not much more than a white smudge framed in black, the features vague. The torso, equally washed out, cropped halfway down the chest. If I hadn’t seen the sketches, if I hadn’t just come from meeting Jill Fanning in the flesh, I’m not sure I could have made the identification. All I could have told from the picture is that the woman’s eyes were closed, and she was undressed.

  But since I did just see the sketches and meet Ms. Fanning in the flesh, since I heard her tell me the two of them weren’t close and recognized it immediately as a lie, I don’t have much trouble imagining who this woman is, or what it means that Joe Thomson carried around a photo of her in the nude. His wife’s suspicions are more than confirmed. I’ll have to have another talk with the woman now.

  Remembering Stephanie, though, my thumb hovers over the erase button. Bascombe had a point earlier. The man killed himself. You don’t have to trash his memory. Ignorance being bliss, it might be better for his wife to go on thinking she was wrong, that there was nothing between Thomson and this other woman. I can spare her this much with the push of a button.

  But like I said, I don’t have the whitewash gene. Part of me wants to cover for him – not so much for his sake as for hers – but I know deep down that the unvarnished truth is better than even a well-meaning deception. I’m not here to pretty things up, to give Stephanie Thomson or anyone else a reassuring vision of the world as she thinks it is. All I have to do is uncover the way things really are. I didn’t make them that way, and I don’t have the power to change them. Even if it’s tempting to think I do.

  My thumb moves away from the button and I turn the phone off. Maybe she’ll find the photo once his effects are released, and maybe she won’t. That’s not my decision to make.

  The autopsy is why I’m the designated suicide cop, simple as that. Nobody wants to see a fellow officer on the slab, whether you knew him or not. Hedges could spread the burden around, but he chooses to let it rest on his least favorite, no doubt thinking this will motivate better performance. In my case, it only seems to make things worse.

  Bridger waits until my arrival to begin work, starting with some observations about the state of the body and the visible wounds. By the time we reach the Y-incision, I’ve tuned out, retreating a few steps, letting the soft-focus blinkers fall over my eyes. Organs are transferred to various stainless-steel vessels for weighing, samples are taken. The process is methodical, one I’ve witnessed so many times over the years I have actually lost count, something I never would have imag
ined when I first joined the unit.

  Toxicology results don’t come back overnight. The preliminary reports on the Morales shooting were exceptional, not just for their superfluousness but for their speed. As much as I’d like to know by tomorrow morning whether Thomson was coked up when he pulled the trigger – assuming he pulled it – I don’t make a fuss when Bridger says “as soon as possible.” There’s no doubt, after all, about the cause of death.

  He follows me outside after stripping down to his scrubs. Out on the curb, we watch the thunderheads roll by and Bridger lights up a cigarette, quickly generating a cloud cover of his own. We’re silent awhile, because we have to be. Jaded as we are under the professional veneer, the fact is we’ve just finished cutting someone up, and that’s not the best way to initiate conversation.

  Bridger stubs the butt out in an ashtray near the side exit, then returns to the vigil.

  “There’s a storm coming,” he says. “That’s what they’re saying on the news.”

  I glance at the sky. “Looks like.”

  We fall silent again. I can sense him working up to something. “I know you pretty well,” he says.

  I nod in agreement.

  “There’s nothing on the scene to suggest he didn’t kill himself ?”

  I shake my head.

  “But you don’t think he did it.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He ponders this, scrubbing his sole against the pavement. “All right, well here’s something. It isn’t much, but since you’re thinking along these lines . . .”

  My ears perk up. “What have you got?”

  “The trajectory of the bullet. The entrance is low, right by the ear, and the exit is high, almost the top of the head. So the gun would have been held like this.” He puts his index finger against his temple, adjusting the angle to roughly forty-five degrees. “If you wanted to be sure, though, you wouldn’t hold the gun at an angle like that. You’d be afraid of ending up a vegetable instead of dead.”

  “If you put the muzzle right under your chin and fire straight up, you’re good to go.”

  “Right,” he says, adjusting his finger accordingly. “That’s what I’d expect. Or maybe you’d hold it sideways right at the center of the head, so you know the bullet’s going straight through.”

  “So it doesn’t look consistent with a self-inflicted wound?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m not saying that, Roland. His hand might have slipped, he might have been distraught – I can think of a thousand reasons why he’d end up doing it this way. But there’s just that little twinge of doubt, you know? Because I’m not seeing exactly what I’d expect.”

  The problem is, a medical examiner’s gut feelings are no more admissible than a detective’s. If the shooting doesn’t sit right with Bridger, all I can take from that is encouragement. And I need more. A shared hunch isn’t the leverage I need in the interview room with Keller and Salazar. Unfortunately, when it comes to the pathology, it looks like that’s all I’m going to get.

  CHAPTER 18

  It’s not my house. Better not be. But the closer I get, the louder the music – the peculiar thump and whine of the dirty South. And the cars get thicker, too, lining the curb on either side of the street.

  Rolling up to my driveway, I find a Toyota suv squatting halfway over the line, with a queue of others sitting bumper-to-bumper all the way up to the garage. The windows of Tommy’s apartment glow orange, silhouettes grinding in and out of view.

  As I sit there, foot on the brake, a group of young men in jeans and V-neck shirts thread their way toward the back, hoisting twelve-packs of Shiner and Lone Star to keep from clipping an antenna or side-view mirror. The one bringing up the rear pauses, cups a hand to his mouth, and howls into the night “Whoooo-hoo,” already lit up from the previous stop on their evening crawl.

  A fantasy reel flickers to life in my mind: I’m dragging Tommy down the apartment steps by the scruff of the neck, kneeling him down on the curb, dispatching him execution-style. But violence isn’t the answer. Except when it is.

  Down at the end of the street I find a parking spot, then double back along the sidewalk. The neighbors have taken refuge behind closed drapes and lowered blinds, but my house emits no light.

  I let myself in the front door. Inside, the only illumination comes through the back windows, a grid of shadows with the occasional figure ducking past. The only sound is the muffled music and the vibration of hundred-year-old glass in the windowpanes. Otherwise, the house is so still it could pass for abandoned.

  I head to the back, lifting a shade with my finger. The yard is empty, but a crowd of people congregates on the stairs, most sitting while a few cling to the railing, trying to pick their way to the top. I count fifteen, maybe sixteen heads, and I’m guessing there are as many more again packed into the small apartment.

  Another reel: the wooden stairs collapsing under the weight, Tommy teetering on the threshold to keep his balance, arms wind-milling through the air, then falling with a gasp onto the jagged tip of a two-by-four.

  I told him to keep things low-key. I told him there would be trouble.

  “Satisfied?”

  Her voice makes me jump. Behind me, veiled by the dark, Charlotte sits gargoyle-like in a wing chair, her feet on the cushion, knees drawn up to her chin.

  “I didn’t see you there.”

  She keeps very still. “You said you were going to have a talk with him. You promised to at least do that.”

  “I did,” I say. “I told you that.”

  “It wasn’t enough.” Her voice rises. “It obviously wasn’t enough.”

  “I guess not. And you’ve been sitting here all this time? In the dark? You should have at least called me, babe – ”

  “And said what?” She throws up her hands, but without much force in the gesture, weary of repeating the complaint. “Anyway, there’s no telling where you’d be this time of night. No, wait.” A stiff laugh escapes her lips. “You’d be where you always are. Even though you promised me you wouldn’t go there anymore.”

  “Charlotte – ”

  “I’m tired,” she says. “Tired of what’s going on under my nose. Tired of every conversation turning into some kind of argument.”

  The fight goes out of her, and in the gloom I can see her gazing at me, her bottom lip in a swollen pout. That gesture strips years off her. I feel my heart moving in my chest.

  “So am I.” I perch on the edge of the sofa, stretching my arm toward her, resting a hand on her knee. “I have a blind spot when it comes to that kid. I know that.”

  She covers my hand with hers. “You identify with him.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Roland, it is. Trust me, I know you.” She rubs at my knuckle with her thumb, smiling in the darkness. “You cut him slack because you’ve been cut so much slack yourself. Do unto others, you think. You have this crazy take on the Golden Rule.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?”

  “No, honey, it’s not. But you do it because you’re afraid.”

  “Of what?” I ask.

  “Of the world coming down on you. It’s like he’s your good luck charm or something. So long as you let him run wild, you can run wild, too.”

  I squeeze her knee, then slip my hand away. “I’m not running wild. And I don’t identify with that slacker, either. And to prove it, I’ll go talk to him now. I’ll throw them all out.”

  “My hero,” she says with a girlish laugh, not even a hint of irony. Then she uncoils and puts her arms around me, pulling us close. “It’s the right thing to do. And don’t worry about the consequences.”

  “I’ll go right now.”

  She draws my head down, hands warm on my cheeks, anointing my forehead with a kiss.

  I throw the back door open, pound my way across the deck. Seeing me coming, the more perceptive people on the stairs realize the party’s over. They stand and make way for my ascent, slipping down the driveway once I pass them.
Near the top, a shaggy-haired boy squints appraisingly at me, blowing smoke through his pursed lips. He starts to gesture toward me with the lit cigarette, starts to open his mouth to speak. I swipe the cancer stick out of his grasp, sending it somersaulting into the night, then shoulder him out of the way.

  The apartment door hangs wide. I give it a kick anyway, to get people’s attention. The furniture’s shoved into the corners to accommodate more people, all of them youngish, probably a mix of college kids and Tommy’s fellow grad student instructors. And strangers, too, I bet.

  “Tommy!”

  Heads turn, couples break up, but my tenant is nowhere to be seen. I squeeze through the door to the bedroom, but he isn’t in there. I head for the narrow galley kitchen.

  “Tommy!”

  In the kitchen, sitting on the counter with her feet propped on the opposite cabinet, the waitress from the Paragon. Marta. She sips from a red plastic cup, gazing absently through the arrow-slit window. The others packed into the kitchen file out at my appearing. She glances over, recognizes me, and chucks her cup into the sink.

  “What is this?” she says. “Police harassment?”

  “Where’s Tommy?”

  “He left not long after I showed up. Didn’t want to talk, I guess. But listen, you should leave him alone. He hasn’t done anything.”

  “He’s done this,” I say, sweeping my hand inadvertently against the refrigerator. I try again, motioning carefully at the party still ebbing along over my shoulder.

  “So what?”

  “So I told him not to.”

  “What does it matter to the police if he invites some people over?”

  “It matters to me,” I say. “I live here.”

  She cocks her head, then smiles wryly. “This is your place? You’re the landlord? So that’s how he knows you.” Her eyes roll. “Now it all starts to make sense.”

  I don’t have time for this. There’s a neck to wring. But there aren’t many places to hide in here, so I suspect she’s right about Tommy taking a hike. Who throws a party and then leaves? The more I think about it, the more my tenant fits the bill.