Known Devil

by Matthew Hughes

  “So how was your night?” she asked, but then quickly added, “If you don’t feel up to talking, it’s alright. You can tell me about it later.”

  “No, I’d rather do it now,” I said. “Talking will help take my mind off the way my head feels. The ice is helping, though – that was a good idea. No wonder you’re my favorite daughter.”

  She pulled out a chair opposite me and sat down. “So, tell me – what’s been going on?”

  I told her everything I’d seen and heard at the crime scene, leaving out only the couple of times when I’d nearly passed out from the pain in my head.

  When I’d finished, she remained in the position she’d assumed for most of my account – elbows on the table, face cupped in both hands. Finally, she put her hands down on the table. “Talk about a fucking mystery.”

  “You mean, how vampires can’t be killed by an explosion? Yeah, that’s–”

  She shook her head. “No, I mean all of it. A car bomb goes off in front of Calabrese’s restaurant, but it couldn’t have harmed the Don or any of his guidos.”

  “Uh, I think that’s considered an ethnic slur.”

  She looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “What, guidos? And since when did you get all politically correct?”

  “I’m just sayin’.”

  “OK, so the bomb wouldn’t have killed Calabrese or any of his Mafia murderers. Better?”

  I shifted the ice pack around a little. “More accurate, anyway.”

  “And the bomb didn’t do any serious harm to his business interests. You’d think the Delatassos would know both those things.”

  “Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you?” I said. “Makes me wonder if the Delatassos had anything to do with it.”

  “But, shit, if they didn’t do it, who did? Who’d be mad enough to car-bomb Calabrese, and dumb enough to think it would do him serious harm?”

  “You figure that one out, be sure and let me know. I can probably get you hired by the Police Department as a detective.”

  “Oh, boy – Karl and I could work the night shift together.”

  I asked myself if I wanted to pursue that subject – her and Karl together, I mean – and myself got back to me immediately: No fucking way, Markowski. Not now. Maybe not ever, but especially not right now.

  While I was congratulating myself on my good judgment, Christine said, “I didn’t go right home after I left you at the hospital tonight.”

  “Oh? What’d you do, instead?”

  “Stopped off at Varney’s for a drink.”

  Varney’s is another supe bar, but it tends to attract mostly vampires, instead of the kind of mixed crowd you find at Renfield’s. I didn’t know where Christine was going with this, so I just said, “Uh-huh.”

  “You were wondering, earlier, who’s going to replace Victor Castle.”

  “I still am,” I said. I took the ice pack off my bump and put it on the table in front of me. “You hear something?”

  She took the dish towel from around the plastic bag of cubes and re-wrapped it more neatly. “I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but once a week, Varney’s has open mike night, although they don’t call it that.”

  Despite my throbbing head, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. “Vampire stand-up comedy? Really?”

  “No, I’ve never heard anybody using it to tell jokes,” she said. “Half the times I’ve been there on Thursdays, nobody got up at all.”

  “What did they do, the rest of the time?”

  “It varies. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of announcements – somebody’s looking for a house sitter, somebody else is trying to unload a used coffin, stuff like that. Other times, you’ve got one of the community up there whining about how tough life is for a vampire these days.”

  “And is it?” I asked. “Tough, I mean.”

  She shrugged. “You have good nights and bad nights, just like anybody else. In my experience, whining doesn’t help much.”

  “No, it usually doesn’t,” I said.

  “One time, they had a poetry slam.” She did a face-palm. “God, that was awful.”

  “But that’s not what happened last night.”

  “No, last night we got to hear from Dimitri Kaspar about how supes, especially vampires, have been taking shit from the Man for too damn long, and it’s time we stood up for ourselves.”

  “There’s a vampire named Casper?” I said. “Like the friendly ghost in the comics?”

  “He spells it differently, and from what I hear, he’s not all that friendly. There’s a story about how one time some human made a ‘friendly ghost’ joke in front of him.” She studied the pattern in the dish towel as if it were the most interesting thing she’d ever seen. “Supposedly, Dimitri tore the guy’s throat out so fast, he didn’t even realize he was dead until he hit the floor.”

  “That’s murder,” I said.

  “It’s just a story, Dad. Anyway, if it really happened, I don’t guess anybody who saw it is going to be in a hurry to testify against Dimitri Kaspar.”

  “Probably afraid the same thing would happen to them.”

  “That’d be my guess,” she said.

  “So what makes you think this sweetheart wants to succeed Victor Castle?”

  “He said so. He told us that Castle was weak, and had been collaborating with the fascist police to keep supes from gaining true equality with the bloodbags.”

  I gave her a look. “Bloodbags?”

  She had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “It’s a… term some in the community use for humans.”

  “Never heard that one before,” I said.

  “I expect you’re going to be hearing it a lot – especially if Dimitri Kaspar has his way.”

  “I was going to ask you just how the leader of the supe community gets chosen. Is there some kind of election, or what?”

  She made a face and shook her head slightly. “Nothing that formal. But at some point there’ll be a meeting, and each of the different species of supe will send a representative.”

  “You mean one from the vamps, somebody from the weres, a witch, a troll, and all that?”

  “Right. And each one expresses the consensus of his species as to who should be leader. Or hers. Way I hear it, everybody sends a rep, except the fucking goblins.”

  “It being impossible to get a bunch of goblins to agree on pretty much anything,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s about it.”

  “So when is this big conclave supposed to take place?”

  “No date’s been set yet. It probably won’t be until after Victor Castle’s memorial service, which is this weekend.”

  “But this Dimitri Kaspar is an early favorite?”

  “I don’t know if you could call him a favorite,” she said. “But nobody else has stepped forward so far. Maybe they’re afraid to. And I hear that Dimitri’s been spreading a lot of money around – buying goodwill, I guess.”

  “He’s rich?”

  “Not as far as I know,” she said. “I think he works for the Postal Service. But he’s got money from someplace.”

  “And money’s the lifeblood of politics – even among supes, I figure.”

  “You figure right,” she said. “But who’s gonna give a bunch of it to Dimitri Kaspar? I mean, whiskey tango foxtrot?”

  Military radio code for WTF or “What the fuck?” I wondered if she’d picked that up from Karl, who’s been known to say it occasionally.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Seems all I’ve been getting lately is a bunch of questions I don’t have any answers to.” I looked up toward the ceiling. A little louder, I said, “If God’s taking requests tonight, some enlightenment would be greatly appreciated.”

  I kept looking a few seconds longer, but the ceiling didn’t dissolve in a flash of bright light to admit a Heavenly messenger bearing the solutions to all my problems. I should be used to that by now.

  I went to bed soon after that, even though it was still a while before dawn. Chr
istine said she’d see me at breakfast.

  I fell asleep while my head was about a foot above the pillow and slept like the undead for a few hours. But after that, whenever I changed position, the lump on the back of my head would give out a jolt of pain that woke me up. I’d fall back asleep, until my next movement repeated the process and brought me back to the surface again. It was frustrating, but I was so exhausted that I stayed in bed until sundown, when the alarm I’d set got me up.

  By the time I got downstairs, Christine was up, drinking a cup of lightly warmed Type O, which is her favorite. I knew what it was, because the empty bottle was still on the counter. She’d put it in the recycling bin later.

  “Good morning, Daddy.”

  “Morning.”

  She peered at me in the harsh light from the kitchen fluorescent lights. Of course, she could have seen me even if the room had been pitch black.

  “Well, you look a little bit better,” she said.

  “Only a little bit?”

  “I’d say you’ve made the transition from ‘death warmed over’ to ‘death over easy’.”

  “Any improvement’s better than none, I always say.”

  She’d made a pot of coffee for me, which I thought ought to qualify her for canonization – even if the Pope does hate vampires. That won’t last forever, and neither will he.

  As I sat down with my steaming cup, she said, “Would you like me to make you some eggs?”

  Although my stomach was empty, the thought of eggs made me want to break out in dry heaves. “No, but thanks.”

  “Solid food doesn’t appeal right now, huh?”

  “No, not hardly.”

  “Try to eat something later, OK? And not junk from the vending machine at work.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  I left the house an hour earlier than usual – but not because I was eager to get to work. The way I was feeling, it was likely to be a long shift tonight, and I had no desire to make it even longer. But before I headed for the station house , there was somebody I needed to talk to.

  The Brass Shield Bar and Grill sits on Mulberry Street, on the edge of downtown. If you heard the name and guessed that it was a cop bar, you’d be right. Alcoholism is a big problem in my profession because of all the stress, not to mention those things you see on the job that burn themselves into your mind – images that you’d give anything to be able to forget, if only for a few hours.

  And even those on the force who haven’t made booze into a problem often like a couple of drinks to help relax before they go home. It cuts down some on the domestic violence, I figure – although there’s a lot of it that still goes on anyway. When you spend eight hours ready to fight or shoot at a moment’s notice, it can be hard to let it all go as you walk through the front door and call, “Honey, I’m home.”

  That’s not meant to be an excuse, by the way. I never laid a violent hand on my wife all the years we were together, and I despise men, cops or not, who come home and use somebody they swore to love and cherish as a punching bag. But that’s why cops are drawn to the booze – some cops, anyway. And when cops drink, they mostly like to drink among their own.

  I walked in and headed for the bar, nodding at several guys who I know pretty well. Frank Murtaugh, the owner, waited on me himself and I asked for a bottle of Stegmaier that I could pretend to drink while waiting for the guy I was there to see.

  I found an empty booth near the back and sat down. I had a sip of the beer, the only one I planned to take. I wasn’t on duty yet, but I would be in an hour. And the pain in my head was making it hard enough to concentrate without adding alcohol to the mix.

  I’d been waiting maybe five minutes when consigliere Louis Loquasto slipped into the seat opposite me, holding a glass of what looked like a double bourbon on the rocks. His elegant suit was blue this time, and I would’ve bet that its price tag could’ve put some kid through college for a year – at a state school, anyway. I’d figured Loquasto’s drink was just a prop, like mine, to avoid drawing undue attention, but then he brought the glass to his lips and took a good-sized pull from it.

  “Looks like you needed that drink, Counselor,” I said. “Life getting a bit stressful for you lately?”

  “I find your infantile sense of humor difficult to endure at the best of times, Markowski,” he said. “Which these demonstrably are not.”

  “Is that why you wanted to meet here – because nobody in his right mind would bomb a bar full of cops?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind. Now, you said you wanted to talk – so talk.”

  “I said I wanted to talk to your boss, remember?”

  “Mister Calabrese is otherwise engaged. But you may be sure that I will relay to him the details of this conversation, although it has been singularly uninteresting thus far.”

  Lawyers know more ways to say “Fuck you” without ever using those exact words than any bunch of people I’ve ever met.

  “Somebody set off a car bomb outside of Ricardo’s Ristorante last night,” I said. “You know anything about it that I don’t?”

  “Detective, the sum total of what I know that you don’t would probably fill the Scranton Eagles Stadium.”

  Arrogant prick. “Maybe we could focus on the bombing and leave all that other stuff for some other time – like maybe some Friday night when we’re knocking back a few brewskis at the Polish-American Club.”

  Maybe to hide the distaste that had appeared on his face at the thought of hanging out with me socially, Loquasto took another pull from his drink. Setting the glass down, he said, “Some of our people saw the arrival of the car containing the bomb.”

  “Did they, now?”

  “They didn’t know what it was at the time, of course. The car, which was described as a late-model blue Mazda Skinwalker, stopped in the street outside the restaurant, blocking one lane of traffic.”

  “Probably stolen,” I said.

  “Yes, I expect so – although I gather so little was left of it after the explosion that identification would likely be impossible, anyway.”

  “So this car parks in front of Ricardo’s – then what?”

  “Almost immediately, what appeared to be a gnome got out from behind the wheel, dashed across the street, and hopped into the passenger seat of another car that had apparently been waiting, its engine idling.”

  “A gnome.” I realized that I’d just taken another swig of beer without really thinking about it.

  “That’s what our people say. Short, nimble, white beard. He even wore that little conical hat they’re known to sport.”

  “You trust the accuracy of the description your guys provided?” I asked him.

  “By and large, yes,” Loquasto said. “They are reliable people, or they would not be in Mister Calabrese’s employ. Further, each was questioned separately – and provided essentially the same account.”

  I nodded slowly. My head protested the movement, but not quite as loudly as it had been doing yesterday.

  “In that case, somebody’s fucking with you.”

  He gave me the kind of look you’d expect from a duchess who’s just been patted on the ass by one of the help – but I don’t think his heart was in it. After a couple of seconds, his face lost its haughty expression and returned to its default setting of cold and hostile. His voice was flat when he said, “Explain.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” I said. “They’re fucking with me, too. Maybe they’re fucking with all of us.”

  “Is that your idea of an explanation?”

  “No, but this is: gnomes don’t wear conical hats.”

  Loquasto scratched his jaw. “I was under the impression that such headgear was a trademark of the species.”

  “You and lots of other people,” I said. “It’s a cultural stereotype, like vampires wearing capes or witches riding brooms. Maybe once upon a time, in Europe or wherever, gnomes actually used to wear those stupid things. Stereotypes have to start someplace, I guess.”
r />   “But the gnomes don’t do so any longer – that’s what you’re telling me.”

  “Exactly. I’ve met quite a few gnomes over the years, Counselor. They might wear baseball caps in the summer or stocking caps in the winter like the rest of us. When the weather’s nice, lots of them don’t wear anything on their heads at all. But those conical hats? No fucking way.”

  Loquasto swirled ice around in his glass but didn’t drink this time. “I see.”

  “For a gnome to wear one of those cones out in public would be like a black guy walking down the street with a bucket of fried chicken in one arm and a watermelon under the other one.”

  I know, I know. Some black people actually like fried chicken, with watermelon for dessert. So do I. But I was trying to make a point here, political correctness be damned.

  “So, it’s your contention,” Loquasto said, “that the driver of the car bomb couldn’t have been a gnome?”

  “Not necessarily. Shit, you can find members of all species, including human, who’ll do just about anything if the money’s right. Maybe the guy was a gnome, maybe not. My point is, whoever sent him wanted us to think he was a gnome.”

  Loquasto gave me a dubious look. “Why on Earth would the Delatassos do something like that?”

  I paused for a second – dramatic effect, I guess. “Maybe they didn’t.”

  Loquasto stared at me, then picked up his glass and drained it. “I need another,” he said. “You want another beer?”

  “No, I’m good, thanks.”

  Loquasto was smart – he wouldn’t be a Mafia consigliere otherwise. By the time he was back at our booth, he’d figured out what I meant and started considering its implications.

  “How could whoever sent this faux gnome with a car bomb be sure that there would be surviving witnesses to describe him?”

  “Last time I was at Ricardo’s, my partner and I were braced by three guys from Calabrese’s crew, all vampires. Are those guys out there all the time?”

  “Ever since the war started, yes. Mister Calabrese stationed some soldiers at the door. They were in place for as long as the restaurant was open every night. Rotating shifts, of course.”