The Heaven Stone

by David Daniel

  “What about Bhuntan Tran?” I asked.

  “Bhuntan’s dead!”

  “That’s right.”

  “He was my friend!”

  “Is that why you went to see him the night before he was killed?”

  The dish of Khoy’s face filled with panic. He shouted some words I didn’t know. I was pretty sure that his mind was taken over by the drugs. I was searching for my next stall when he must have sensed movement. He swung around, and we both saw Walt Rittle padding toward us fast in a crouch.

  “Down!” I shouted to Rittle.

  Khoy gave a spasm of words I didn’t catch and bolted past the dead woman, blasting three more rounds as Rittle fell. Headed for the railing, Khoy wheeled and fired in my direction, but I was already rolling behind a crate, my hand on the Smith.

  I banged off a shot and saw Khoy spin backwards, but he wasn’t hit. My aim was wide. He had the automatic in both hands, crouching. Before either of us could fire again, a grumbling made the floor shake. Khoy’s eyes darted, and we both saw a heavy cable reel rolling toward him. Rittle had shoved it. Panicked, Khoy emptied his gun, spraying rounds at the heavy drum, splintering wood, but it rolled on like a dump truck through daisies. At the last instant he tried to fend it off with his hands. The collision knocked him back. He hit the railing. The dry wood crackled with a sound like summer lightning.

  There are no language barriers for a scream.

  When I had scurried out of cover to peer down, I knew Khoy was never going to make a sound again. He had fallen onto the sheet metal star. Two points had gored through his back and come out his chest. I turned away.

  Walt Rittle stirred among the boxes and crawled out shakily. I put my gun away. “It’s over,” I said. “You okay?”

  He nodded. He got up slowly and adjusted his glasses. He edged to the shattered railing on Gumby legs. He gazed down for a moment, then backed away. His shirt was covered with dust and splinters, and a few strands of tinsel decorated his hair. He made no move to brush them off.

  “You were supposed to be the outside man,” I said with what I hoped was a grin. I hadn’t been sorry to see him come through that door. “How’d you get there?”

  “Climbed a fire escape. When I heard those gunshots, and you didn’t come out … I got scared. I thought you might need me.”

  I held out a hand and he gripped it. “Thanks. Khoy wouldn’t have been brought back alive. He was too far gone.”

  Gingerly Walt picked up a plastic bag of white powder that lay open on one of the crates. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “Most likely.” I nodded toward another crate. “Just a warning—there’s a woman over there who’s dead.”

  He recoiled. “Oh, jeezum. He killed her?”

  “OD’d, I think. We better leave things for the cops to sort out.”

  He peered around, waiting maybe to feel steadiness return to his legs. I did not complain about the delay. After a few minutes we walked out together.

  Walt seemed a little steadier and said he would wait with his truck while I hiked over to Middlesex Street and found a phone. I gave the message to the woman who answered and asked to have a cruiser and an ambulance sent. A directory hung on a chain in the booth. The shriveled book inside the hard plastic covers looked like it might have Alexander Graham Bell’s number in it. I got Ada’s number instead and called it but hung up when her answering machine came on.

  There was already a cruiser in the outer yard and a pair of cops, one of each gender, when I got back. The male cop was standing with one foot on the shiny ball of Rittle’s trailer hitch, notebook open on his knee, jotting notes. Walt was working to keep steady as he talked to them. In the distance a siren wailed. Deep in my mind a submerged perception moved, but I could not get it to surface. In a few minutes an ambulance arrived. We got the rusted gates open.

  By the time dusk was falling, a host of black-and-whites and another ambulance occupied the courtyard, engines running, light-bars splashing the dark walls with circus colors. Cops aren’t energy smart.

  It was the wrong time of day in the wrong part of town for much of a crowd to gather. What spectators there were had shuffled over from bars and flophouses and stood among the weeds, perhaps dimly aware that one of their fraternity had bought a one-way ticket out of skid row. St. Onge showed up and went inside. When he emerged, he ordered the place sealed until floodlights could be brought in and he got back to head the investigation himself. He motioned for Rittle and me to come with him in his car. Walt gave the keys to his truck to a cop, who promised to park it on the street outside police headquarters.

  Beyond an inexpressive grunt or two, St. Onge drove the unmarked Ford in silence. He stopped on Middlesex in front of a taproom with black plywood over the windows and a propped-open door and told us to come inside. The place was dim and aromatic, deserted except for a few drinkers mumbling to themselves over shot glasses. No one was drinking Harvey Wallbangers or Tequila Mockingbirds. Still following Ed’s example, we sat at the bar. The bartender ran a careful hand over his pompadour and left it on the back of his neck, waiting. “Three whiskeys,” St. Onge told him and threw down a five-dollar bill, glaring at Walt and me, daring us to object. We didn’t.

  The barman set up glasses and got a bottle, Old Thom if you believed the label. “You gents hear about those folks they found out back?” He clucked his tongue. “Terrible thing someone dies like that. What was it, gooks?”

  “Pour them level,” St. Onge said. He did not say another word until we got downtown.

  31

  AT JFK CIVIC CENTER the cops took my gun. They got Rittle in one room and me in another. They dispensed with the bright lights and stage-dressing third degree, but they had questions. Lots. Topping the list was why hadn’t I gone to them with the photo of Khoy and the report that he was in town. Deemys, in a rare moment of largesse, admitted that I had been by that morning looking for St. Onge. Maybe I was just a smaller-bore threat to Deemys than Francis X. was. The Ogre stood by the door with his thick arms crossed, watching the show.

  “You should’ve given us a call when you found the apartment,” St. Onge said.

  “And say what? Only a hundred-sixty shopping days till Christmas? A strand of tinsel would’ve gotten me a laugh.”

  It went on like that for awhile, then Droney pushed away from the wall and came over. The others fell silent. In the fluorescent light, the embroidery of blood vessels in Droney’s cheeks was impressive. He said, “I’m still gauging how deep in the shit you are, Coin Op. Figure I already got you for criminal trespass and B and E. I find you interfered with the investigation, I’m gonna whack you with an obstruction charge so fast the fillings in your teeth’ll rattle. Quote me.”

  I made a pretense of noting it on my palm. After awhile he stalked out. There were more questions, then the cops left the room to confer. St. Onge came back in alone.

  “Rittle’s story backed yours,” he said.

  “See?” I said. “Tell Droney.”

  “Droney makes noise. There’s nothing on you and he knows it.”

  I wiped fingers across my brow and made a sidelong flinging motion with the hand. St. Onge said, “I thanked Rittle and told him he was free to go. You stay.”

  He got us Styrofoam cups of burnt coffee and took me down to his own office, where he parked a haunch on his desk, his eyes lidded against the curl of smoke from a Camel, and had me go over everything again. My gaze kept straying to the mountain meadow in the Sierra Club poster behind his desk. At last, even he seemed to tire of the questions. He sighed. “Finding corpses is getting to be a habit of yours,” he said.

  “I’d rather find money.”

  “Looks like you’re going to. The Stewart woman must be into you for some long green.”

  “Am I free to walk?”

  “Who’s stopping you?”

  My feet stayed where they were. St. Onge said, “Well?”

  “Now we just wait for the red tape to arrange itself in n
eat ribbons and bows,” I said.

  “Got a different idea?”

  I shrugged.

  “Rasmussen.”

  I was still tentative on Khoy’s link to Bhuntan Tran’s death. I told him so.

  “It’s circumstantial,” he granted. “But the coke computes. And maybe Khoy wanted the money he’d lent Tran to buy the house. Druggies get desperate enough, they get crazy. So we wait for ballistics on his weapon. The point is, I like Khoy for the Castle burn. That one’s pretty straightforward.”

  “And that’s the one that’ll get headlines,” I said.

  For an instant, I thought he might come at me, or swear at me, at least. But he didn’t. It was late. He took his time squashing the cigarette butt. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s the one.”

  Outside, I stood among the locust trees in the cooling dark and watched the traffic lights on the corner go through a few cycles. A Firebird with fat tires did some roadwork on Dutton. A pair of thirteen-year-old girls in tight jeans and spike heels walked by, practicing for when they grew up. St. Onge would smoke a cigarette, get another cup of coffee and call Leona to say he was going to be late, then he would go back to the crime scene and pester the techs. I figured on being in dreamland by then.

  But when I had walked the long blocks to Kearney Square where my car was still parked behind number ten, I was wide awake.

  * * *

  The Victorian on Christian Hill was dark behind the screen of maples. Ada’s Celica was not in the driveway. For the first time I realized I had been thinking about her all day. I wanted to say to her that we would find a way to make it all come up roses, or words to that effect. Not finding her at home now, I felt disappointment take a crisp bite out of my hope.

  I was not ready for my apartment walls. I drove around the city, checking the pulse of the streets, killing time. Bars and self-serve gas stations, all-night quick marts and diners were the only places still open. As I waited for a traffic light, a woman in halter top and high shorts glanced my way. If vice picked her up, the blotter would call it common nightwalking. We were both out there in the wee hours, searching the streets for something. I had grown aware again of my vague earlier perception nagging me, some little jigsaw piece that did not have a corresponding gap in the big picture. Maybe it had to do with Suoheang Khoy’s final acts. Like why hadn’t he shot me when he had the chance? Why hang around the city in the first place? Some of the irrationality could be laid to the coke—perhaps he imagined he was safe, immune, superman. But did someone with that much blood on his head go down bluffing, trying to explain? Explain what?

  On Thorndike I waited while a little yard-locomotive chugged a long train of cars past to an empty siding. It seemed an enormous labor. When the last freight car was gone and the crossing gate went up, I drove through with an idea.

  * * *

  Mine were the only wheels in the darkened lot behind the DSS building. I took a flashlight from the glovebox, locked my revolver in there, locked the car.

  My hunch about the back door was right. Because it had swelled, it was hard to close all the way, so somebody had not quite managed the task. A few hard yanks and it quivered open. I didn’t pause to wonder what I would have done if it hadn’t.

  I knew from past visits there was no electronic security—it’s the kind of thing I notice. Human-service organizations are low rung on the public ladder, so there is little anyone would bother to steal. State-of-the-art here meant reconditioned office equipment passed down from the Sewer Commission. I flicked on the flashlight and located Ada’s desk in the little cubicle in back.

  I was not sure what I was looking for. I checked a file cabinet, desk drawers. Beside the computer was a plastic diskette box. I flipped through the disks, reading labels: correspondence, case reports belonging to Ada and other caseworkers, an unlabeled disk. I turned the machine on and put that disk in. When the machine had booted, I called up an index and began scrolling through lists of documents. One document name interested me, so I pulled it up on the screen. Nothing good. I tried a second and a third document. I yawned. As the files scrolled past, I yawned some more. Go home, I told myself. Getting caught here would be the thing Droney needed to hang me.

  The last item in the index was a document with the simple title “X List.” What the hell, one more, then I was out of there. I hit the keys.

  My heartbeat quickened.

  Names moved on the monitor screen.

  Names I knew because I had sent a list of them to John Potter.

  Names of the dead.

  32

  BY SEVEN A.M., showered and shaved, I broke starch on the last clean shirt in my dresser. I got a speck of blood on the collar from a razor nick as I knotted my tie. At quarter past I dialed her number. Her hello was thick with sleep.

  “It’s Rasmussen.”

  “Hi,” she purred. “Goodness, it’s early.”

  “Or late. I haven’t been to bed yet. How are you?”

  “Sleepy. I got in late myself.” Her lips made a contented smacking sound. I could see her stretching, one arm behind her tousled head; maybe she had on the blue silk kimono. Then it caught her. “You haven’t slept?”

  I didn’t think she had heard the news, but I asked anyway.

  “No, what’s going on?”

  “Your former husband is dead.” I let her bobble that one for a few seconds then tossed the next one. “He was killed in Lowell last night.”

  Her reaction was immediate, without time to be faked. “Oh, no. Oh my God, Alex.” Then she did pause. I expected her to ask how I had made the connection, but she didn’t. She knew I had, and that was enough. “Was he the one who…?” She didn’t finish.

  “It appears that way. It’s up to the police now. I want to see you.”

  “Of course. When?”

  “I’ve got a few things to do,” I said. “Ten o’clock, your office?”

  “All right.”

  * * *

  I went by the Sun offices. Bob Whitaker was out, but one of the other photographers let me look on the desk, and there I found the shots Bob had taken at the cemetery the day of Joel Castle’s funeral. Yesterday, when I had looked at the pictures, my mind had been elsewhere—but not totally, I saw now as I scanned the faces. I put the pictures back and left.

  There were two mobile news vans outside JFK Civic Center. They were illegally parked, but I’d bet they wouldn’t get ticketed. As I headed inside, stepping over cables as thick as rattlesnakes, I glanced into a conference room and saw Droney smiling at reporters. He was wearing a man-of-the-year suit, and under the lights his shrewdly beaming face was pink as a boiled ham. What I heard of his statement declaring a close to the Castle murder case sounded as genuine as a major leaguer’s postgame interview. I didn’t listen long.

  At the end of the corridor I knocked on St. Onge’s door and went in. Ed was squinting into a round mirror perched on his file cabinet, a cigarette doing a Robert Mitchum droop from his lower lip as he mowed stubble with a cordless shaver. Magnified in the mirror, his nostrils looked like a snout of a double-barrel 12-gauge. I was not a bit surprised to find him still in yesterday’s shirt.

  “If they put you on camera,” I said, “there’s this thing they can do with a silk stocking over the lens.”

  “Bullshit. I feel sound as a dollar.”

  “Then I’d get to a hospital right away.”

  He gave it the response it deserved. When he finished shaving, he fingered his cheeks and throat, then put the shaver and the mirror in the file cabinet, shut the drawer and came over to his desk. He drew the last smoke out of the cigarette and crushed the stub. His eyes didn’t widen much beyond the squint. He used a bottle of Canoe he must have got in high school and patted some on. “So?” he said.

  I rolled my head to indicate the doings down the hall. “How are things with the ribbons-and-bows detail?”

  “Droney knows this’ll be good for the rest of the week. He’s right. I’ve already spoken with Rosen-face do
wn there in Texas.”

  “Rosenheck.”

  “The pieces are starting to come in. When the ballistics report gets back, I think we’ll tie Khoy and his weapon to the Tran hit, and probably the others.”

  “The dead blonde have any connection?” I asked, saying nothing about having met her once before.

  “No. A wiggle-tail named Rita Girard. Used to strip at the Blue Moon and hook a little. She had a habit. Probably linked up with Khoy on account of his stash. Too bad, she was a good-looking head.”

  “Some people aren’t to be trusted with the keys to the candy store. You find the jade?”

  “We will. The little bastard had nearly ten bills in his pocket. Figure he fenced the stuff.”

  “I doubt it.”

  St. Onge gave me the look.

  “That was old Chinese-carved jade,” I said. “Nephrite, if it matters. Yunung-kash. More than likely the cash is what’s left of his sale to Castle, the little that didn’t go up his nose.”

  “Then he’s got it ditched somewhere. His fingerprints place him at Castle’s. It’s a good bet he stole the jade back, iced Castle and was waiting to find another pigeon to sell to.”

  “You may be right,” I said. “Yep, probably are. Well, I’ll let you get back to the beautification project.” I headed for the door.

  I stopped. “Oh, yeah. Almost, forgot. Have you guys finished sniffing my gun?”

  He dug it from a drawer in his desk and handed it over. “Anything else?” he said.

  “Well, I was hoping the TV stations needed a presence for the six o’clock news, but I can see you and Francis X. have got everything covered.”

  He showed me his longest finger.

  * * *

  Back in my office I could have used my own phone and patience, but I didn’t have all week. I found the number John Potter had told me would snip the barbwire at Immigration and Naturalization. He didn’t answer himself, but someone willing to accept minimal explanation once I’d asked for Potter did. In about twenty seconds Potter was on the line. I told him how things stood, about the death of Khoy—which he had caught on the morning news—then I laid out the reason I’d really phoned. He gave himself a meditative span of silence then ran through the rudiments of a plan aloud. I was glad I had called him. He was my inside man, and he knew a few tricks. He said he would get back to me as soon as he could. I didn’t press for a time. I knew he wouldn’t take any longer than he had to.