by Robert White
I read the Globe headlines, sipped a coal-black Starbuck’s espresso, and waited for my flight to be called at ten-fifteen. Elizabeth Taylor had died while I was slumming in East Boston. My getting home at dawn and managing three hours’ sleep had lulled me toward numbness. I usually enjoyed watching the parade of people coming and going. So much activity, like a beehive and everybody with a cell phone clamped to their heads. I’m here, come and get me. I’m in an airport and I miss you. I’ll be home soon . . . Some physicists believe time doesn’t exist; they just don’t know how else to explain the fact that everything doesn’t happen at once.
I was thinking of my grandmother. I had returned from the ore boats with a terrible wound to bury her; that’s when I asked Micah to marry me. That’s when I entered the police academy. She was eaten up by her cancer and lived only a few days after my return. The pain was horrifying to behold. A little song she used to sing in German came back to me: Ich bin hier, da bist du. I heard her singing it in my dream last night and when I awoke, I realized I had been humming it while reading the paper.
Ozzie’s Black Sabbath tune went off in my pocket. It was Detective Cooney. I didn’t remember giving him my cell number.
“Where are you, Haftmann?”
“Logan,” I said. “Waiting for my flight.”
What he said took a moment to get through, but when it did, I felt that lurch inside you whenever life throws a suckerpunch and puts its hip into the blow: Annaliese O’Reilly was just found dead, murdered in a motel room in East Boston. I had to delay my flight home to answer a few questions.
One dead actress with a tabloid Hollywood history does not change the misery or the happiness quotient of the world’s population. A hundred million people scraped from earth’s bulk might, but not an aging prima donna much less a young woman who intended to turn her back on her sordid past. I riffled the pages for the crime beat section: she hadn’t even made the news yet.
I watched the crowds of people lining up in rows or coming through the security queues. I felt like a man falling through a trap door. Annaliese was dead. How? Why? Had Marcus killed her? Was I a cause of it by showing up as I did?
Cooney had a unit coming out to fetch me. I was to remain at the Delta gate and they’d send security down to retrieve me. When I hung up, the tiredness I felt was gone. My hand was shaking. Had I been able to pry her away from Marcus, maybe she’d still be alive. I wanted to get far away from the sanitized and slightly scented air of the concourse.
I sat still and waited to be called back.
Existentialists are by definition above superstition. There’s no God, no Grim Reaper whetting his scythe—just a ticket in your back pocket or your purse that says on such and such a day and at such and such a time, you’re going to be canceled. Finis. Yet I had a raw feeling in my stomach and on the back of my neck that something big and mean was glowering at me just then.
“Haftmann, I’m not saying you weren’t a good cop in your day. I’m just pointing out that things are a little different nowadays, is all. We’ll pick up Marcus Gordon and that’ll be all she wrote,” said Cooney over the phone.
I told him about my short meeting the night before. I also told him that, based on his description of the murder, Marcus didn’t seem right. I talk to him and less than three hours later he stabs Annaliese in a frenzy? That dog don’t hunt.
“You’re goofier than a bag of dicks if you think these guys actually premeditate their crimes, Haftmann. The guy was out of rock, he was desperate, he starts fiending. She said something—hell, she did-n’t need to say anything to get sliced up like that.”
I couldn’t disprove Cooney’s theory. I’ve seen a crack addict left with his own baby tear his place apart looking for one more rock to keep the high going. He did a real fuck-o tracheotomy on the kid’s throat and used a straw to suck out the infant’s insides because he thought the kid might have put one in his mouth.
“I know what you’re saying, Detective,” I said. “He fits. He’s probably right. But something’s off. What time was the body found?”
“M.E. can’t say but the congealing of the blood—some technical bullshit about blood and sere separating, whatever, she says maybe between three and five, latest.”
“Check-out time is usually eleven.”
“True but this place they’re staying is a notorious party place. Booze bottles lined up like tin soldiers in the hallways, bed bugs—not exactly four stars.”
I didn’t bother to tell him I was staying in that kind of place. People mind their own business in these kinds of motels. I said, “It’d be unusual for someone to complain then, right?”
“Normally, but in this shithole, I guess they have standards or else they made a helluva lot of noise. Victims generally do when sharp objects are being thrust into them.”
Cop humor. “The timeline still bothers me.” I said.
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll grab the little fuck soon. They always turn up.”
“I can guess the next part,” I said. “Don’t leave town yet.”
“Be a sport, huh? You’re a material witness,” Cooney said.
“I want to see her,” I said. “The father will expect me to.”
“She’s being posted this afternoon at four. A little back-up problem with stiffs right now. Fuckin’ bodies are falling all over the city.”
“Life and death in the big city,” I said.
“It’s either a full moon or the Red Sox lost three straight at Fen-way.”
“I’ve already checked out,” I said.“Stay put until your ride gets there. When they drop you here, take the elevator to third floor, turn left. Help out with the composite, huh? He’s down there doing the sketch right now. This Marcus doesn’t have a recent photo in his jacket anywhere, can you believe it?”
“Cooney, my bags are already on the plane,” I said.
“So use your credit card and buy some clothes and shit, what the fuck.”
Nothing’s ever easy.
At the precinct desk I was given a message to call a number. I figured Cooney had forgotten something. A voice answered on the first ring and a breathless male voice said, “Who this?”
“My dime,” I said, “but your number.”
“You know me,” the voice said.
Jesus H. Christ. Marcus. What balls.
“Why are you calling me here? How did you get my—”
“I don’t have time for fuckin questions, man. I’m getting out of here, so don’t bother with any bullshit right now. Just listen. I called every hotel in town and left the same message. I just want to put out the word on this, case I get bagged.”
“You want me to alibi you, asshole?”
“Just listen to me, God damn it! I didn’t do it! I didn’t kill her! I don’t know what the fuck’s happening but you—you put yourself in the middle of this. Now you gotta listen.”
“Why me, Marcus?”
“Because you came after me, remember?”
“What do you want from me?”
“Fuck, I don’t know who them is, man! I don’t know. Something’s been happening. I thought you were working for them—”
“Who’s them?”
“That’s the whole fuckin’ thing that’s so crazy, yo. We was stalked, man! People watching me. I don’t fuckin’ know why. I thought it was the fucking cops, you know? Watching me, like, you know, in my business and shit.”
He meant drugs obviously.
“Look, man, there are people I know with some, uh, legal-type problems. I happen to know those people, see? You walk into that bar the other night, see? Like, see, a lot of people were expecting something when you showed up.”
“I’m not interested in your bullshit and your fucking crimeys,” I said. “I want to know what this has to do with Annaliese’s murder.”
“Man, I’m telling you. I don’t know, man. I had to make a run, I come back fifteen, twenty minutes later, and I see wall-to-wall cops, sirens—all that shit. I loved her, ma
n!”
Some lover, I thought.
“That doesn’t square, Marcus. The killer was in the room long enough to tie her up and rape her. Were they looking for you and found her there?”
“Fuck, man, I don’t know. Don’t nobody want me dead that bad. Little business rivalry here and there, you know?”
A drug dealer’s life, a mixed bag of problems.
“What do you expect me to do for you?”
“Shit, man. I gotta—I gotta just, like, tell somebody. Just in case.”
“I can’t help you. I haven’t heard anything yet that convinces me you didn’t kill her.”
“Listen, motherfucker. I loved her. I really loved her. I would never—”
“You used to slap her around.”
“Fuck you, you been talking to that Brenda bitch, I s’pose. She hates my fuckin’ guts. Man, she had a lesbian thing going with my old lady.”
“Listen to me. You’re wasting your time. Every cop in the city will know what you look like by the second shift.”
“I’m real good at not being found.”
“You’re better off coming in, clear your name. You want to get who did it, right? Did you hear how she died? What they did to Annaliese?”
I heard the slow susurration of breath. He knew. “I’ll take care of that myself. I have friends.”
Cooney told me Annaliese had shallow, defensive cuts all over her face and hands. She was tied to the bed post and bruising around the vagina and anus suggested she was raped and sodomized.
“Marcus, you said somebody was stalking you. Who?”
“Man, I keep telling you I don’t know! Lots of white dudes hanging around. Ain’t real.” I tried to remember: his eyes last night, jumping and bulging, but was it over the confrontation with me or the user’s paranoia?
“Why don’t you meet me somewhere tonight?” I suggested.
“Shit, man. You could set me up,” he said.
“If you run, the trail to the killer gets cold. You’ll be the one they’ll nail. They never close the books on uncleared murders. You’ll be looking over your shoulder all your life.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“Give me a time and place or get the fuck off the phone,” I snapped.
The push in my voice must have done it. He gave me an address in South Boston, the Sobin Park, at the entrance at six in the evening, near Necco Street and Mt. Washington Avenue. I was to look for three trees by the gate, he said.
I had to fill out a sheet of information at the front desk to get my plastic visitor’s card and wait for Cooney to come get me. It was four twenty-seven when he stepped off the elevator and crooked a finger at me.
“Let’s go, we’re late,” he said.
We took the elevator down to the parking lot and Cooney showed me to an unmarked Crown Vic, standard cop undercover car. These things are so well known in the hood it’s almost reverse psychology to use one on surveillance.
He drove through Boston without the siren. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Traffic in this city borders on third world. We were lucky it wasn’t rush hour.
“You don’t like our fair burgh?” Cooney asked at some point while swerving between lanes. We were near Copley, the jewel in Boston’s crown.
“I’m closing my eyes because I didn’t get much sleep,” I said. The glare from the high rises and the chrome glancing off all the shiny high-end SUVs, sleek foreign jobs, Bentleys, and Porsches was bothering the nerve muscles around my bad eye.
“Got anything like that in—what city you say you’re from?”
I looked up. A shimmering turquoise Trinity Church was perfectly replicated in the massive glass panels of the Hancock Building beside it.
“Amazing,” I said. “Let’s stop and I’ll see if I can get a postcard.”
“Fuck you, gumshoe,” Cooney said.
Most people think morgues have to be in the basements of buildings. There’s something in us that almost requires a subterranean resting place for the dead, especially those who perish violently. The M.E.’s office was on the fourth floor. By the time we got there, the Y-incision had been made, the organs and tissue samples extracted, and the bone saw was busy slicing off the top portion of her head. Her skin had already been pulled over her face in preparation for the removal of the brain.
From where I stood, I could barely hear Cooney’s voice above the saw. He followed the pathologist around the body, talking all the while, but keeping a distance from the spray that dotted the pathologist’s smock. He and the doctor had a good rapport, it seemed, because both made animated gestures and I could see the doctor’s eyes show laughter above the mask; occasionally she ignored Cooney and attended to her work on Annaliese. When the doctor set the brain in the scales, Cooney leaned over her shoulder and said something that made her laugh. The doctor made frequent notes on a clipboard set off to the side and, finally, began peeling off the latex gloves.
I approached as Cooney was finishing a story about an M.E. who had misdiagnosed a killing because he couldn’t find the bullet holes in a victim’s face.
Cooney introduced us and I shook hands with her. She gripped my hand once, shook it, and let go. Cooney thanked her and wagged an eyebrow to me to signal that we were all through here.
“Just a minute,” I said.
I asked the pathologist if she would pull the scalp back so that I could see Annaliese’s face. Without hesitating, she put on new gloves and grabbed the skin on both sides of Annaliese’s head and pulled it back over her face. There was only a little sag.
The knife wounds were many, mostly short and shallow cuts along both cheeks and bridge of the nose. Some ran laterally across her face. There was a rusty trail of blood from one ear hole. I juxtaposed the newspaper photo of her onto this face, and I could see that three years had been a long time for her.
“C’mon, Haftmann,” said Cooney, leading me off.
Back in the parking lot, he said, “Fucker played tic-tac-toe on her face with a steak knife and then he put the barrel right in her ear.”
That bothered me. A killer’s savagery and then to do a coup de grace like that—why?
She was a long time dying.
“The slug’s flattened out, no good for comparison purposes, but without the gun, the slug doesn’t matter anyhow, and we’ll not get the gun, most likely, right? Or do killers do it differently in Ohio? Like leave the gun lying around on the coffee table, make it easy for forensics.”
“Sometimes,” I said. “I’ve never known killers distinguished for brains.”
I was getting a headache and losing patience with Cooney’s wisecracking and attempts to get my goat. I just wanted to sleep, clear the cobwebs, pretend last night never happened, that Annaliese wasn’t in a chilled steel tomb upstairs, hollowed-out like a cored apple with crude black stitching across her chest. I started out thinking I was on a mission to bring a daughter home to her grieving father, a family reunion, tears of joy and hugs. That changed and now this sordid catastrophe—a daughter viciously slaughtered, a father who would never see her alive, never ask her for forgiveness.
“Fuckin’ .22’s. They bounce around too much. That’s the problem with them.”
“None of the knife wounds deep enough?”
“Nah, too shallow. No vital organs. He did put a couple in her post mortem. For fun, you might say. Deep wound channels. Enough to kill her if she weren’t already dead—nearly severed her liver, the doc said.”
I almost snapped: I was right there. “So what are we looking for?”
“Not we, Haftmann, and not what. Who. Marcus Fucking Gordon. Who else?”
“You got any leads?”
“Better. Got me two witnesses. A waitress at the motel cafe saw a slender back male walking across the parking lot as she got out of her car at 5:45 A.M. Got a back-up witness who says he spotted the same figure walking very fast just northeast from the motel five minutes after the waitress says she saw him. Trouble is, the second wit’
s a pipehead. He got up early to score. But we’re still canvassing. Even without more witnesses, that puts him at the scene just inside the time-frame the doc figures on.”
“She was in rigor on the table,” I said. “I saw the effort it took to move her arm.”
“So what? Fuck rigor. Too many things affect it. Body size, heat, room temperature—”
“Twelve hours. She must have been seen alive checking in with him. He leaves right away. Your witnesses didn’t see blood, right?”
“No.”
“Maybe Gordon was just leaving and the killer came in right after. He comes back twelve hours later and finds the body.”
“Yeah. Maybe he stepped out for a cigarette break, give his arm a rest from all that stabbing. One thing, Haftmann. We sure as shit ain’t going to take the spotlight off him at this point on any flimsy hunch from you. You’re a guest here.”
“I know it. Have you called her father?”
“Yes, I left a message this afternoon. I’m calling back tonight.”
“What about phone calls to and from Marcus’s room?”
“We checked. The telephone company says one call. To the room. From a Beacon Hill exchange.”
“Who?”
“Book publisher. A pay phone in the lobby. Knock it off, Haftmann. You’re not assisting the case. In fact, your flight is leaving soon, am I correct?”
“Who would be calling a hood like Marcus Gordon at that time of the morning?”
“Maybe somebody who wants to sell him a fucking book.”
“You send anybody up there to check?”
“Fuck you, that’s it.”
I called O’Reilly, told him how Annaliese died and that the police were close to arresting the suspect. His voice broke when he asked about the body’s return, because I told him that as long as the investigation was open, the coroner’s office had to keep Annaliese’s remains.
He concluded our conversation by telling me he knew all along this was going to happen and that he tried to prevent it, didn’t he do everything a father could be expected, Haftmann? I agreed. He said she wasn’t really his own daughter, and then I heard racking sobs, oddly high-pitched like nails being pried out of wood, come through the line. I would be returning to Ohio the day after tomorrow and I would talk to him then. I was sick of the man and sick of trying to fix broken lives. Mostly I was sick of Boston, and I wanted to go back to my grubby office in a third-rate resort town on Lake Erie. Drop by Tico’s, play mah jongg, work out again. Sometimes, Jack used to say, you get the bear . . .
