Lethal Fetish

by Jeffrey Alan Lockwood

  “Okay, we treated the place for a flea infestation awhile back. Papadopoulos found our business card and connected us to the Linfords’ peculiar death scene—flea collars not being considered a fashion accessory among the upper class. So, I’m trying to figure out if we’re going to be dragged into this case.”

  “Could be,” he said.

  “Could be what?”

  “Could be that they were poisoned.”

  “I thought you told Papadopoulos that was your finding,” I said.

  “My preliminary finding, yes.”

  “Did you find anything else that you could share with me?”

  “Not with you, but I might be willing to chat with Mr. Jameson,” he took a slow drag on the cigar.

  “Suppose you tell me what you found while we’re here, and I bring Mr. Jameson, wearing his Limited Reserve label of course, to your corner of the Medical Examiner’s office later this week?”

  He closed his eyes and slowly exhaled a cloud of smoke. “I suppose I can trust you to deliver,” he said, knocking a lump of ash onto the ground. “I didn’t give Papadopoulos the full story. The pretty boy has a stick up his ass, and he can wait for the official report.”

  Papadopoulos was about as smooth as Malcolm was coarse, although the body bagger was a season ticket holder to the San Francisco Opera. I’ve always said that classical music has a bad rap for being snooty—and Malcolm pretty much makes my point.

  “And so Malcolm, to borrow from Paul Harvey, what might be ‘the rest of the story’?”

  “I believe that they probably died convulsively, given the fecal material smeared on the carpet as well as the anterior and posterior surfaces of the bodies.”

  “So, they rolled in their own shit?”

  “How delicately put, my friend. In addition, the male decedent’s arms were oddly tucked beneath his body, and the female’s legs were positioned in a way that suggested a seizure rather than simply losing consciousness. Hence, I’m tempted to guess acute poisoning.”

  “But the flea collars shouldn’t have delivered a lethal dose. And certainly not an acute poisoning,” I said.

  “True enough. But did you notice the white film on their torsos, like the deposit you’d expect from a deodorant?” I hadn’t and Malcolm nodded sagely. “It was the remnant of two products we found on the bathroom counter and bagged as evidence.”

  “I’m guessing it wasn’t roll-on antiperspirant.”

  “Try bottles of Major’s Mange Cure and Centurion Flea Dip.”

  “Damn, so they drenched themselves in insecticides?”

  “Ah, but it gets better, my boy,” Malcolm said, taking a series of light puffs.

  “Do tell.”

  “I don’t suppose you detected anything unusual about their scalps?” he said, enjoying the professorial tone that came from forty years of examining corpses.

  “They looked to have thinning hair and bad cases of dandruff.”

  “Very good. You noticed the obvious. But you missed the white powder and the pungent chlorine scent,” I hadn’t wanted to spend overly long with the reeking bodies, but Malcolm could focus on a whiff of chlorine and set aside the stench, like most of us could chat on a downtown sidewalk while blocking out the traffic noise.

  “They used bleach on their hair?”

  “It certainly was white, and bleach would account for the chlorine odor. But you’re overlooking the powdery material.”

  “An organochlorine insecticide?” I offered.

  “I’m guessing that they dusted their scalps with chlordane.”

  “That’s quite a witch’s brew of toxins that they used.”

  “Exactly. No single product was deadly. Most likely they were cumulatively intoxicated by the flea collars and chlordane dust. Swabbing themselves with mange and flea dip—we didn’t find anything to suggest that they diluted the concentrates—pushed their nervous systems to the breaking point.” He nipped the end of the cigar and spat the wet mush into the roses.

  “So that’s how it went down?”

  “We’ll have to run toxicology tests and perform autopsies, but I’m betting that the final report will be some version of what we just covered.”

  “It won’t look good for exterminators in general or my business in particular when this goes public. I’ll have to check to see if we provided any of the products to the Linfords.”

  “Might be a good idea, Riley. As it stands, the newspaper story written by some hack reporter will be that your company sprayed the mansion of a trusting, elderly couple and callously poisoned two of the city’s venerable business leaders.” He took a final drag on the cigar butt and tossed it into the roses.

  If Goat Hill Extermination and my people were going to avoid being thrown into the thorn bush of public opinion, I needed to get back to the shop, figure out what we had done, and devise a plan to avoid stinking as much as the Linfords.

  CHAPTER 5

  I should’ve been listening to one of the radio stations reporting traffic conditions every few minutes, but I was intrigued by a program on KDFC. I caught the end of Suite No. 1 in G minor by Johann Berhard Bach (the obscure second cousin of the renowned J.S. Bach), then Frederic Chopin’s Minute Waltz brilliantly played by Arthur Rubinstein, followed by the catchy Radetsky March by Johann Strauss I (the lesser known father of the famed composer). Although perplexed by the eclectic selections, I was enjoying the music far more than the drive. There was complete chaos heading up Van Ness toward Market.

  The tangled mess of music and traffic made sense when the program host revealed the unifying theme. All of the composers died in a year ending in 49, which was the announcer’s attempt to connect classical music listeners to the mindboggling celebration of the 49ers Super Bowl championship. Half a million people were starting to pack the parade route along Market. The insanity wouldn’t peak for hours, but I had the sense to detour over to 3rd and make my way back to the shop.

  Arriving late meant that Dennis and Larry had already picked their favorites from what Carol had bought for us. She’d refused to acquiesce to the gloomy weather and walked the nine blocks over to The Sandwich Shop in Dogpatch. It was one of the least cleverly named lunch spots located in the most intriguingly named neighborhood of Potrero Hill. Nobody really knows why it’s called Dogpatch. Some people argue that in the Forties any obscure backwater was called “Dogpatch” after the middle-of-nowhere setting in Li’l Abner. Others contend that it was named for the weedy dogfennel that grew in the vacant lots—a plant that resembled chamomile from the Old Country and fooled our Hungarian neighbors into trying to make tea out of the stuff (but only once, as the story went). But my favorite explanation is that the neighborhood hosted packs of dogs that used to scavenge discarded meat from the slaughterhouses up the bay.

  Whatever the origin, Dogpatch never gentrified. The area boomed with the shipyards during World War II and kept its gritty feel. The residents were screwed by the city in the Sixties when Interstate 280 cut through Potrero Hill and folks were paid a pittance for their homes. But the freeway gave the Dogpatch neighborhood a separate identity with a brawny blend of industrial operations, boxing gyms, working class neighborhoods, and unpretentious restaurants, which is a long way of saying that I ended up with a BLT after Dennis and Larry nabbed the pastrami and roast beef sandwiches. No complaints—The Sandwich Shop makes the best BLT in San Francisco, with generous bacon, crisp lettuce, ripe tomatoes and just the right amount of mayo on toasted sourdough. No frou-frou sprouts or fancy spreads.

  We ate in the back, where the guys had arranged low bookcases of crumbling particle board to set aside a corner of the warehouse as their “living room” which Carol called “the dump.” In their defense, there was something homey about the decaying couch, decrepit chairs and sagging coffee table holding down an unraveling, braided rug. To refute Carol’s claim, the guys had gone out and bought an almost respectable, floral upholstered Louis XV-style chair—which they referred to as the “throne”—for her vi
sits to their lair. She was not amused, mostly.

  “S’up, boss?” asked Larry, while unwrapping the remaining half of his sandwich.

  “Thanks for waiting,” I said, as Dennis shoved the last of a roast beef on pumpernickel into his mouth. Carol was having something with cucumbers and a fringe of sprouts poking out.

  “This is some choice grindage,” said Dennis, dabbing at his lips.

  “You’re an absolute Pac-Man,” Larry said, “I’m betting that if any mustard was on the napkin, you’d be scarfing it down too.”

  “Okay Riley, out with it,” said Carol, “I assume you have something to tell us that will justify our falling behind before the week’s barely started.” I had a half dozen, pink, “While you were out” notes taped to my office door, so I could see why Carol wasn’t too happy about my absence.

  “There’s a good reason, but not good news,” I said. Then I explained the whole situation, or as much as I’d been able to understand—two rich senior citizens who died naked and collared; a wary grandson who played amateur shrink; an assistant district attorney on a crusade to save the city from perverts, a detective who doubted the grandson and suspected deviancy, and a medical examiner who suspected poisoning with the tools of our trade.

  “And to make matters worse,” I added, “the Linfords were richer than God, so if this goes public, we can be sure that the lawyers will make us the villains.”

  “According to Anna, the herbal market is booming. So maybe HerbalVitae isn’t as profitable as it once was,” Carol said. I figured that if anyone knew what was happening in the world of botanical scams it would be someone in the world of New Age nonsense. Carol’s girlfriend, Anna, was a sweetheart, but selling tinctures, crystals, incense and past life guides at a store called Unblocked Chakra was equivalent to curing the plague with posies.

  “Whether they’s worth a million less than before, it sounds like we’s in deep trouble,” said Dennis.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” said Larry, crumpling his sandwich wrapper and aiming for a trash can in the corner. He missed, as had several Styrofoam cups, a few candy wrappers, and a half-eaten burrito in a microwave sleeve. The microwave had been my Christmas gift to the guys.

  “Fuck you, Watson,” said Dennis, who got up and went over to the repurposed aquarium that we used for the colony of Madagascar hissing cockroaches to impress potential clients. When he lifted the lid to drop a crust of his sandwich among the egg cartons where the insects hid, a musky scent reminded me of what I’d smelled in Lane Linford’s bedroom. He evidently had a thing for rearing insects, which counted in his favor as far as I was concerned. Little did I know.

  “Enough of the clever repartee,” said Carol. “This could be bad news in lots of ways.”

  “It’s bunk,” declared Dennis, and Larry nodded agreement.

  “Maybe, but we’re involved,” Carol said, reaching to grab a folder that she’d set on the bookcase. She winced in pain.

  “Still working out at Marty’s?” I said.

  “Yeah, sparring is one thing but boxing hurts even when nobody’s getting hit,” she said, opening the file. “According to our records, the Linfords called us on September 7th of last year because they had red welts on their ankles and legs. Dennis did the inspection on the 9th and found flea activity in the carpet of the master bedroom. Then on the 10th, Riley and Dennis applied FleaGon to all of the carpeted areas where the dog spent time, including the grandson’s bedroom. The family was instructed to sleep in the guest rooms for a few days. A note here says that the Linfords were also advised to have their dog treated for fleas, as he was the likely source of the infestation. They paid their bill with a check on the day of treatment.”

  “Nothing unusual so far,” I said. “The mix of permethrin and methoprene usually does the trick.”

  “It gets weird, trust me. Mr. Linford called on October 21st and complained that ‘bugs’ were infesting their house again. Something was crawling on them and the itching was intolerable. Dennis went out the next morning. According to his report—and Dennis, your handwriting is atrocious—the Linfords were very upset. So, he did an exceptionally thorough inspection.”

  “That be me. Sloppy writing, awesome inspections,” Dennis said, leaning into the mushy cushions of the couch.

  “From what I can read,” said Carol, clearing her throat and giving Dennis ‘the look,’ “he checked the dog, the dog’s bed, and the bedroom carpet with a magnifying glass and found no fleas, no eggs, and no flea dirt.” She paused. “Flea dirt?”

  “That’s the nice word for flea shit,” Larry said.

  “Looks like black pepper,” said Dennis, “but smear it with a damp cloth and you get bloody streaks. Them’s some badass insects.”

  “The report also says that Dennis put on white socks and walked through every upstairs room, which I presume is a good way to find fleas.”

  “The hungry little bastards hop out of the carpet and they’re easy to see against white socks,” Larry explained.

  “Just like in the city. They’s no way to hide yo’ black ass when surrounded by whiteness.” Dennis had grown up in the projects, so he knew the deal.

  “We all have our burden to bear,” said Carol. Being lesbian has its own challenges, even in the land of free love. And Larry’s being a Vietnam vet was not without its difficulties, especially in the land of peaceniks. They were all damaged goods, like me. But we sometimes needed to remind each other to just play the cards we’re dealt. No whining, no excuses.

  “Mos’ definitely,” Dennis said. “But this boy didn’t stop with the socks.”

  “That’s right,” said Carol. “It says here that you set up a ‘bubble bath trap,’ whatever the hell that means.”

  “Allow me,” said Larry. “What my homey means is a shallow bowl filled with water and a few drops of liquid soap, set on the floor with a desk lamp to provide mood lighting and warmth. Fleas are all about body heat ...”

  “That was one fine movie,” Dennis interjected.

  “I’d hop into a bubble bath with Kathleen Turner,” Larry said. “But in our case, the fleas jump toward the light and into the bowl.”

  “And the soap?” Carol asked. The guys shrugged. Larry moved over to the weight lifting bench and started one-arm curls with a forty-pound dumbbell.

  “Riley says do it, and we always do what the boss man says.” Larry grunted agreement.

  “Since when?” I asked, and then added, “The soap assures that the fleas sink and drown. And as long as we’re reviewing Dennis’s report, that’s one helluva service call. You weren’t getting tipped, were you?” We had a no-tipping policy. Everyone earned a good salary and the best benefits I could afford.

  “No way. They was nice folks and they liked me, which can’t be said of all our customers.” He was right. Even the liberal capital of the country had its share of bigots. “And, they shore seemed uptight about whatever was messin’ with ’em. They blamed the dog, but he was clean. Prob’ly had him washed and fluffed at one of them fancy grooming places.”

  “The report says that you consulted with Riley and returned on the 22nd with flea dip and a package of flea collars that you picked up from Pat’s Perfect Pets.”

  “I remember that,” I said, “we were running full tilt around here, and I told Dennis to give them some off-the-shelf flea treatments. I didn’t figure it’d do the dog any harm. But I also didn’t figure that they’d start using the collars on themselves.”

  “Is that what killed ’em?” asked Dennis, leaning forward and looking very serious.

  “Maybe, in part,” I said.

  “So, the thing is I gave the old folks the poison they used on themselves. Sheeit.”

  “That’s heavy, man,” said Larry, referring to the poisoning, not the dumbbell that he switched to his other hand. “But you ... didn’t do ... anything wrong ...” he said between curls. He set the weight between his feet and looked at Dennis, “You were trying to help.”

  “He’s righ
t, Dennis. If anyone’s to blame it’s me,” I said. “I should’ve gone back over there and talked to them. And I shouldn’t have sent you with flea dip or collars without confirming a new infestation. It just gave them ideas. They were loading up their bodies with organophosphates between dichlorvos in the pest strips and flea collars and chlorpyrifos in the flea dip and mange treatment.”

  “Probably a pyrethroid in the bug bomb, so that wouldn’t be as bad,” said Larry. He reached for the dumbbell.

  “Maybe not, but their nervous systems must’ve been fried. I suspect they were diluting the flea and mange dip until that last dose, when they swabbed themselves with the concentrate,” I said.

  “The file indicates Dennis had one more visit in November. There’s just a short note saying he found nothing,” Carol said.

  “That be right,” Dennis said. “They was lookin’ mighty bad by then, what with their skin being red and flaky. I could tell they both lost weight.”

  “Looked as scrawny as you?” Larry teased, trying to lighten the mood. Dennis went on.

  “The mister, he showed me some baggies with hair and lint and other messed up stuff. He wanted me to tell him there was bitty insects crawling in there. I had my magnifying glass but I couldn’t see nuthin’ but what you’d get out of a vacuum bag.”

  “Was he upset?” I asked.

  “Not so much angry as disappointed. Or maybe frustrated. He kept askin’ me to look closer in better light. But I couldn’t lie. I noticed the dog wasn’t around, but I saw a bottle of flea dip on the dresser. I should’ve asked to take it back.”

  “Were they wearing flea collars?” Larry asked.

  “Lemme think. He was wearing one of those nice blue coats with a gold patch on the pocket ...”

  “A blazer,” Carol offered.

  “Yeah, a blazer with a white turtleneck. Now that I picture that, I also remember she was wearin’ a turtleneck sweater. I remember thinking to myself that they were both so old and wrinkled that they looked like turtles.”

  “Sounds like they were already wearing flea collars and hiding them from visitors,” I said.