by Tristan Vick
“Makes sense,” Julie agreed. “We could assume that the consequences of having accidentally murdered a U.S. senator weighed so heavily on their consciences that they saw no way out but to commit suicide. It’s possible.”
“Then again, they could have been high as kites prior to the incident and simply may not have noticed,” Wolfe added, wanting to change his answer to something more plausible. “The overdoses could have simply been accidental.”
“Negligent homicide followed by accidental suicide, then? Is that your final answer?”
“Yeah, I’m sticking with it.”
“What about the fourth victim?” Julie asked as she and Wolfe turned toward a beautiful, porcelain-skinned woman who sat in the adjoining room of the hotel suite. She was propped up on a leather sofa, eyes wide open, staring vacantly at the living. “How do you explain her?”
“She probably overdosed on the same bad batch,” Detective Wolfe said, tucking his hands into his pants pockets.
Julie took a sip of the black brew and looked over at John Scarecrow, who was crouched in front of the third victim, eyeing her with a piercing gaze. “Care to enlighten him, Scary?”
John smiled to himself. He liked it when she called him Scary. Scratching his chin, John said, “The problem with the kid’s theory is that nothing is as it seems. First, there’s no suicide note. If this was a suicide pact, at least one of the girls would have had loved ones she’d want to inform. An accidental overdose is more plausible, but they’re using top grade drugs, so it doesn’t seem likely that a bad batch simply slipped in. So if it wasn’t an accident, then it had to be something else. And the only thing I can think of that isn’t a case of accidental manslaughter or suicide is, well, murder. This is a case of outright homicide.”
“Wait a minute,” Wolfe said, raising his hands and gesturing for everyone to hold on. “Are you trying to tell me the senator was assassinated?”
“No,” Scarecrow replied, standing back up. “The senator appears to have been collateral damage.”
“Okay, you lost me,” Wolfe admitted as a perplexed look solidified on his face. “I don’t even see how that is a valid inference. By all accounts, it appears like an open and shut case of accidental manslaughter.”
“Exactly. That’s the first clue that everything is not what it appears to be,” Julie asserted. “The crime scene is too perfect. Everything is right in its place, leading you to that conclusion. In all my time with homicide, I’ve never seen a crime scene so perfectly laid out. Crime scenes are always messy. It’s the one thing you can count on. But this one is merely putting on the pretense of being messy.”
“The question is,” Scarecrow chimed in, “why is this pristine figurine of a woman sitting alone on her own little island, frozen in a moment of sadness for all time? What is she looking at? Why is she here? Who is she? If you were to walk into this room and she wasn’t sitting here, everything would seem normal. But here she is, an oddity caught in the aftermath of a clichéd tragedy.”
“Sure, it’s odd. But it’s not out of the realm of impossibility that she just happened to be here.”
“But why is she dead?” Scarecrow said, looking over at Jack. “If she’s alone over here, and the party was going on over there, why is she dead?”
“Like I said,” Jack insisted, “they all overdosed.”
“Don’t you think that if she had overdosed first, the others would have noticed and avoided the bad drugs? Or if they overdosed first, she would have either called 911 or fled the scene of the crime? Why hang around and take the same bad drugs only for housekeeping to stumble upon this whole tragic mess after the fact?”
“You see, rookie,” Julie began as she walked over to the two women sprawled out on the bed. “There’s a blonde and an Asian girl here next to the senator. The blonde is draped over the bed face down, and the Asian girl is lying flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling with a trickle of dried blood under her nose. But if you look closer, Detective, what do you see?”
“Just your standard fare hookers, ma’am.”
“This is a Yin and Yang combo-platter,” Julie informed him. “East meets West meets cock n’ balls. It’s a standard package for those home-grown, blue-collar American boys who have grown up on a steady supply of white bread but maybe want to feel a little bit daring and try some whole wheat instead. What you need to keep in mind is the fact that the Asian is out of place.”
“How so, Lieutenant?”
“Senator Durrell was a homophobe and a racist,” Julie added. “Republican big shots like him almost always are. So how do you explain a homophobic racist being caught up in a bi-racial, bi-sexual sex orgy?”
“If the senator was a racist and a homophobe, it’s not a stretch of the imagination that he was also a hypocrite. Maybe he had a white-male superiority complex and wanted to play out some sadistic fantasy of dominating some non-white girl.”
“You seem to be forgetting that he was the gasper. In other words, he wasn’t the sadist type, he was the masochist type,” John reminded Jack. “So, you see, this is how we know the Asian was out of place.”
“Makes sense,” Jack said, rubbing his chin.
“Which brings us back to this girl.” Looking over at Jack, she informed, “Okay, hotshot. This is your last chance to give us a working theory.”
“Perhaps …” Jack said, drawing out his sentence as he thought aloud. “Perhaps she’s the killer?”
Julie almost spit out her coffee, then took a hard gulp and looked at Jack with widened eyes. Once she regained her composer, her eyes narrowed into her trademark hard-boiled, Remington-steel gaze.
“Ah man!” Wolfe said, throwing up his arms.
“That’s right, genius. Bagels for a week.”
Scarecrow leaned over and whispered into Julie’s ear, “And he was doing so well too.”
Grabbing Detective Wolfe by the tie, Julie led him over to the porcelain-skinned blonde. “What is she?”
“I don’t follow.”
“She a third party?” Scarecrow added.
“Yeah, so?”
Julie sighed. “We know the senator is a racist, so we have to account for the Asian girl. The only way to do that is to assume he ordered two girls, but one of them being Asian, the senator called another service to have a different girl brought up.”
“Or he had someone else get another girl for him,” Scarecrow added.”
“Okay, I’m following you guys so far.”
“So why is the Asian girl still here? If he replaced her, why didn’t she just leave?”
Jack Wolfe nodded in the affirmative but quickly switched to the negative, “I have no idea.”
“Because the second girl was late getting here,” Julie stated. “If she had gotten here on time, the Asian would have been dismissed. But it still takes two women to cater to the senator’s needs. One to choke a man as large as the senator and the other to do the sexual favors. And if you were putting your life in the hands of a person and were a racist, would you give that privilege to the white girl or the ethnic girl who you despise and who despises you back?”
“Oh, I see what you’re getting at,” Wolfe said, scratching the back of his head. Another pushy forensics investigator pushed by, shoving Wolfe out of the way. Wolfe ignored him and tried to keep his focus on figuring out the riddle. “So the senator, assuming if anything went wrong, didn’t want to die by the hands of a person of ethnicity due to his racial biases. But he would have no problem allowing her the ‘honor’ of pleasuring him, the white master, even as he was a submissive little scalawag.”
“Exactly,” Julie said as she stood in front of the mysterious woman, gazing at her contemplatively and taking another sip of her coffee.
“She has hauntingly attractive eyes,” Scarecrow interjected.
“Whoever she was,” Julie added, “she’s not your stereotypical pimp-battered crack whore. She has no marks of any kind, which means she most likely worked for a professional escort se
rvice. Someplace that makes sure its girls are well cared for.”
“So what’s your theory, Lieutenant?” Wolfe inquired, taking out a pen and pad to take notes. “I’m dying to know.”
“The fourth girl killed him.”
“I have to ask,” Wolfe said, raising his eyebrow in curiosity, “what makes you so certain there was a mysterious fourth girl?”
Julie pointed back toward the senator and the two hookers lying on the bed with him. “Because the senator obviously wanted two girls. You can’t have a kinky threesome without two girls, now, can you?”
“You see,” John chimed in, panning his gloved hand across the entire crime scene. “We’ve been assuming this whole time that the two prostitutes on the bed arrived first.”
“Oh, now I get it,” Jack Wolfe chirped in excitement at the realization. “What you’re saying is that he ordered two girls, but they were late coming, so in his impatience with his aide’s lack of experience in dealing with such delicate matters, he went and picked up another two for himself from right off the street.”
“Go on,” Julie encouraged.
Tapping the pen to his chin, Wolfe continued, “So the evening’s activities commenced, and halfway into the orgy, the late women arrive. Only now, they’re incensed because they might not get paid, so things escalate as they often do, and then somebody cries foul play. The only question is, why would the fourth girl kill her colleague? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Julie agreed. “It’s why we have to assume that this woman was singled out.”
Just then, an officer in blue stepped up to Scarecrow, whispered something in his ear, and handed him a slip of paper. John looked down and smiled.
“What is it?” Wolfe pried.
Holding up the slip of paper, Scarecrow informed, “They caught up with the senator’s aide. As it turns out, he did order two call girls. He was escorting them to the room when he found the senator in the middle of a happy ending. After which he headed down to the bar to try and drink himself stupid and wipe the memory of everything he’d just seen.”
“It says all that on that slip of paper, does it?” Julie asked, her green eyes narrowing and a slight smirk crawling onto her face.
John winked at her, but it was clear that Wolfe was more than a little confused. Wolfe just looked back and forth at the two of them, pen tapping rhythmically on his note pad.
“You guys are just messing with me. You already questioned the aide, didn’t you?”
Julie laughed and slapped Wolfe on the back. “It’s called detective work. You might want to try it sometime.” With that, she turned and exited the hotel suite.
“Well, rookie, look on the bright side. Now, all we have to do is track down the escort service and interview some pretty ladies.”
“Do you think she hates my guts?”
“Who? Lieutenant Kingston?”
“I mean, how are you not totally terrified of her?”
“Because,” John informed, his voice growing deep and raspy. “She’s not the one you should be worried about. I am.” Making the gesture of pointing at his own eyes, his fingers tracking until they latched onto Wolfe’s, he made it crystal clear that he was watching him. With that, John Scarecrow slowly backed away for dramatic effect, and slipped out the door.
Jack Wolfe turned back around and stood for a while, tapping the pen on the pad and looking at the sad expression on the girl’s face. Suddenly, he heard a faint voice whisper, “Don’t forget the bagels.”
Turning around, Jack found himself face to face with Scarecrow’s wholly inhuman face.
“Holy mother of pearl!” Jack squealed, completely frightened out of his wits. “Can you not sneak up on me like that?” Some days, being the rookie just wasn’t any fun. It was a lot like being the bottom rung on a ladder. You were always the first one everybody stepped on to get where they wanted.
John Scarecrow simply repeated his gesture; eyes, fingers, eyes, and eyeballed Jack suspiciously. Again, he slowly backed away. With that, Scarecrow disappeared around the corner once more.
11
ALL IN A DAY’S WORK
City Hall in downtown L.A. gleamed in the mid-day sun. The white monolith shone like a beacon of inspiration to the people of The City of Angels. At least that’s the impression Julie got as she climbed the stairs and walked underneath the Parthenon-like pillars on her way to the district attorney’s office.
Julie stood in the hallway outside the DA’s office nervously pacing back and forth. Julie rarely ever got worked up about anything, but if there was one thing that truly made her uneasy, it was having to go toe-to-toe with the DA. She knew that whenever she was called into the office, it was because she’d become an insurance liability to the city and a huge legal hassle, so it was no wonder the DA, Megan Powers, never seemed all that pleased to meet with her.
The past year had been a whirlwind of one crazy event after another. First, there was the circus and the incident with the mad clown, and the hot-air balloon chase that ended up with her dangling from the balloon as it wafted overly slowly through downtown L.A. It didn’t help matters that the event leading up to the aggravatingly slow chase left her wearing nothing but her underwear.
Then there was the snake-man assassin, who poisoned his victims with snake’s venom. It took her darn near a week to figure out why hikers were entering the parks only to be discovered dead somewhere along the trail. Only with the toxicology report was she able to figure out that they had all died of snake venom, despite the absence of bite marks.
Now, Julie had just been in the biggest shootout since the Prohibition, and the new DA was seeking to establish a name for herself, which meant she intended to play hardball. Julie knew she was going to get mostly flak and little to no slack with Powers.
It didn’t help matters that Julie had fast become the city’s celebrity super-cop either. She was known for her volatile personality and a temper hotter than a jalapeno.
It was no secret what the rest of the precinct thought of her, and she knew that they all called her “Hot Tamale” behind her back. But even though she made a fuss about it anytime somebody used it within earshot, she secretly liked it.
It seemed everywhere she went, the paparazzi were there waiting for her to do something wild and reckless. In fact, she had once kneed a paparazzi in his groin for flashing unsolicited shots of her coming out of a trial in which she was being sued for reckless endangerment of the whole city of L.A. When the idiot stepped right in front of her, asking when her next big mistake would make headlines, she simply replied, “How about a scoop?”
She didn’t know what it was, but she had the unlucky habit of making the evening news more than most celebrities; just this year, she’d started getting invites to official celebrity functions, which she made an effort to attend in order to try and keep a positive PR image for city law enforcement. It seemed to work for the most part.
The only problem with being the new face of justice, however, was that the bad guys were all gunning for her, and the city had to take out an extra insurance policy on her just to cover the cost of the destruction that she often left in the wake of her unique style of law enforcement.
But at the end of the day, every single one of her choices, reckless or not, was justified. To her, it didn’t matter what everyone else thought. If she couldn’t justify something to herself, chances were it was the wrong thing to do. And of course she did her best to work within the confines of the law. If she didn’t, she would have been canned a long time ago. It’s just some days, her effort was wanting.
Megan Powers’ secretary led Julie through the large office doors and gestured for Julie to take a seat in front of her desk. The tall bookshelves built into the walls, the leather furniture, and the rich colors of the burgundy walls and navy carpet made the room seem more regal somehow, more like the Oval Office than a regular office. Legal books lined the shelves on either side, and the antique mahogany desk
was complimented by two burgundy leather chairs.
A few minutes later, Powers entered through a side door of the office with a folder of paperwork; she looked over the wine red-colored eye-glass frames she wore and smiled at Julie.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Megan said as she took her seat at her desk. She quickly finished signing her name to some important documents and then looked up at Julie with a look that seemed as though she were summing her up.
Old Glory dangled majestically behind Powers, stars and stripes acting as contrast to her charcoal grey suit, giving her an air of authority. Julie smiled politely and waited for Powers to speak first.
“You’re probably interested in why I called you in here?”
“I can take a guess,” Julie responded, her otherwise cheerful smile fading into an anxious grin.
“The mayor is breathing down my neck to work on a better PR image for the way we handle business. This isn’t the Wild West anymore; it’s the twenty-first century, and I have it on good authority that the taxpayers of L.A. do not like to clean up the mess of reckless law enforcement agents.”
“If you read my report …” Julie began.
“I’ve read it,” Powers interrupted as she tossed a file on the desk in front of Julie. “And no surprises here, it’s full of reckless stubbornness.”
Julie bit her bottom lip but couldn’t find anything worthwhile to say in her defense. There was no denying the facts..
“Although I commend you on apprehending the offenders who caused today’s incident, the fact is, you lucked out. If there had been one, just one civilian casualty, you would have been handed your job.”
“I get that, but …”
“Let me finish,” Powers asserted. Julie bit her tongue. “Two of the thugs you assaulted are pressing charges against the city for cruel and unusual punishment, police harassment, police brutality, and failure to properly read them their Miranda rights.”
