The Immortal Game (August Riordan Series Book 1)

by Mark Coggins

  Stockwell bulled through the door and closed it behind him. He was wearing a dark blue suit with a tie that came closer to being fashionable than the one from the day before. His eyes measured the place. “Jesus, Riordan. This dump is messier than my teenage kid’s room. And what the hell are those things?” He pointed at the Altec Lansings. “Loudspeakers from the Paleolithic age?”

  I turned heel on him and went into the bedroom, where I put the gun back in its holster and threw on my ratty bathrobe. When I returned, Stockwell was sweeping Pop-Tart crumbs off the couch preparatory to sitting down. He looked edgy and uncomfortable. I pulled the high-back chair around to face him and fell into it.

  “So,” I said. “Did you come by to pass on some decorating tips, or did you have something else in mind? Yesterday you said you were too busy keeping your head above water to waste time dicking around with me. And then, by golly, you show up at my door. Miles out of your jurisdiction, even.”

  “Sure, rub my nose in it. I didn’t have to come here, and I damn well don’t have to stay. But if you’d keep your trap shut for a minute, there might be some advantage to it.”

  “All right, Lieutenant. I’m listening.”

  “Chuck Hastrup is dead.”

  I whistled under my breath. “How’d he get it?” Then after thinking a bit: “Hold on. You members of the fraternal order of law enforcement don’t think I had anything to do with it, do you? Because if that’s your idea of an advantage, I don’t see it.”

  “Got a guilty conscience, Riordan? They did tell me he has a broken nose.”

  “Nobody dies of a broken nose. A broken neck, a broken heart- maybe. But not a broken nose. Now what’s the story?”

  “It’s simple. He went to a South San Francisco shooting range this morning, rented a handgun, shot three rounds at a range target, and then put the gun under his chin and capped himself.”

  I looked at Stockwell carefully. It occurred to me that this was some sort of trick. “No,” I said. “I don’t believe it. That’s like a rattlesnake biting itself.”

  “If you don’t believe me, then maybe you’ll believe the videotape from the surveillance cameras. The whole thing is recorded on the first ten minutes of today’s log.” He stood up suddenly. “They’re holding things for me down at the range. Throw on some clothes and you can see for yourself.”

  This was getting stranger and stranger. “Why? Why include me on this?”

  “I’ve got my reasons. For now, let’s just say that I need somebody who can ID the body. All we’ve got to go on is the stuff from his wallet. Let’s go, Riordan. Chop-chop.”

  I got up and went to the bathroom. I did what I could at the basin with a washcloth and a comb and then put on some clean clothes. Stockwell was pacing up and down in the living room when I came out.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ll take my car.”

  We went out and I locked the apartment door. As we were hustling down the stairs, I said, “I think I should just meet you there. That way you don’t have to drive me back to the city.”

  “No. I don’t have time for fooling around with two cars. And I don’t want you showing up there first.”

  “Why ever not?”

  Stockwell stopped short on the stairs and I almost ran into him. He looked back at me. “Listen. Taking you to a crime scene isn’t exactly playing it according to Hoyle. It’s better if the South City cops think you’re a detective on the EPA force. I don’t want you to lie about it exactly, but I also don’t want you to do anything obvious to tip them off. Get it?”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “I feel so proud. It will be an honor to serve with you on the East Palo Alto force, Lieutenant.”

  “Shut up.”

  Stockwell had an unmarked Chevy that had seen better days. I let him ball himself up in San Francisco traffic trying to find one of the few freeway on-ramps they hadn’t torn down with quake damage. After he got done cursing and pounding the dash, he finally did something productive and hit the siren and then I directed him down Fourth and the entrance to Highway 80. From there we got on Highway 101 going south and drove less than five miles. The shooting range was on the freeway access road on the northbound side. It was one building in a strip of prefab tilt-ups that lined the road, and there were two South San Francisco patrol cars, an obvious unmarked car, and an ambulance parked in front.

  Stockwell flashed his badge to a uniformed cop who was guarding the door and asked for somebody named Lewinski. The cop said, “Yeah, they been waiting for you. He’s in the office, talking to the manager. It’s the door behind the front desk, just inside there.”

  We went into the building. On the right was a reception counter with a cash register and a sign-in sheet. Behind that was a wall with cubbyholes-some open, some covered by locked doors. The open ones had earmuffs for protecting your hearing while shooting. I assumed the locked ones had guns for rent. Hanging from the ceiling was a TV monitor that cycled through different views of the shooting range every few seconds. One view showed a police officer looking down at something on the floor, just off camera. Stockwell and I went around the counter and through a door that opened in the back wall.

  Two men were in the room beyond. One was sitting in an elaborate ergonomic chair behind a modern looking desk. He was bald, fat, and had a pitted face with a thin black mustache like a skid from a bicycle tire. He didn’t look too happy. The other man was slouched in a plain chair in front of the desk, a leg dangling elaborately. He had blond hair cut like a Marine’s, a pinched nose, and a big, sloppy body.

  “You the guys we’re waiting on?” said the fat guy peevishly. “’Cause I got a seniors’ tournament in an hour, you know. I can’t have those gray hairs waiting out in the parking lot while you haul the stiff out in a body bag. What would they think?”

  “They might think they were witness to a tragedy of the sort caused by unrestricted access to handguns in America,” said Stockwell.

  “Yeah, right,” said the fat guy. “More likely they’ll just pee in their Depends and cancel the tourney. And I can’t afford that. So let’s snap it up with this fancy-schmancy detecting. The guy took a gun and blew his brains out. How hard can it be?”

  The blond guy stood up to face us. “I’m Lewinski. You Stockwell?”

  Stockwell said he was and shook hands with Lewinski. “This is Riordan,” said Stockwell, almost reluctantly.

  That earned me a handshake with Lewinski too. Lewinski gestured to the man behind the desk. “Meet Mr. Frankel. He’s the manager of the shooting range. That gives him a particular interest in seeing that the wheels of justice turn quickly.”

  “So I noticed,” said Stockwell. “How about we go and look at the body so you can move it out. Then we can take a gander at the other stuff.”

  “Fine by me,” said Lewinski. “This way to the main attraction.”

  We went out of the office in a small procession and around the reception counter to a corridor that ran along the front of the building. We passed through a heavy door and continued down the corridor until we came to a set of stalls that looked out onto the range. Each stall had a pulley gizmo running along the ceiling to the back of the building to move paper targets to and from the range. There were also controls for running the pulley in each stall and a metal bucket sitting on the floor in front to collect expended shell casings. There were numerous signs urging shooters to practice the NRA rules for handgun safety and reminding them to dump their shells in the bucket and not on the floor. The lighting was an intense fluorescent that made my hangover reassert itself with a passion. The thing on the floor didn’t do a whole lot of good either.

  Chuck Hastrup had fallen backwards after he shot himself, and as a result, was lying face up with his arms and legs spread like a kid making angels in the snow. He was wearing the same white clothing he was on the night he jumped me, but there was nothing else angelic about him. Under his chin was a nasty, blackened hole with a trickle of dried blood that ran down his neck and led
to a coagulated pool on his sternum. A strip of adhesive tape over a misshapen nose marked his last encounter with me. His eyes were wide open in a startled expression, and he had a shrunken, wizened appearance that made him look like an old man who’d been surprised in a horrific fall down the stairs. As for the top of his head, it simply wasn’t there.

  The cop I’d seen on the TV monitor was leaning on the counter of the stall in front of Hastrup, watching our approach. A couple of paramedics sat on a bench further down the corridor, their wheeled gurney standing next to them. One of us in the procession-very likely me-must have looked a little green, because the cop waiting for us said:

  “Please be sure to place your expended shell casings-and the contents of your stomach-in the metal buckets, not on the floor.”

  “Thank you for that, Beauchamp,” said Lewinski. He turned to us. “The lab ghoulies have already come and gone, but this is pretty much how we found him. Does he look like the guy you’re interested in?”

  Stockwell looked over at me. “That’s him,” I said. “Or at least most of him.”

  “Yeah, well, they already cleaned up the rest of his brains,” said Lewinski. “Sorry about that. We also got his wallet, some other stuff in his pockets, and the gun he rented: a Ruger Blackhawk .44 Magnum.”

  “Christ,” said Stockwell. “He used enough gun, didn’t he? Isn’t that one of those Wild West revolvers?”

  “That’s right,” agreed Lewinski. “They rent all kinds of shit here. And if you look above you at about eleven o’clock you’ll see where the slug went into the ceiling, still zipping along after it took off his brain pan.”

  Stockwell and I looked up at the hole. It was about a foot away from one of the surveillance cameras. “Ain’t physics wonderful?” said Stockwell. “What’s next on the tour?”

  “We can show you the videotape, I guess,” said Lewinski. “Then you can look at the stuff we took off the body.” Lewinski shouted down to the paramedics, “Okay, you guys can take him now.”

  One paramedic started wheeling the gurney toward us, while the other stood up and looked at Lewinski with a wise-ass expression. “So, Sarge,” he said. “You want us to say he died on the way to the hospital like usual so you don’t have to mess with the paperwork?”

  Lewinski reddened. The cop leaning on the counter smothered a grin. “That little bastard,” said Lewinski in an undertone. “You know how it goes: if they die in the wagon it saves you about two hours of paperwork. So, once in a while we’ll get them to take a fresh one on board and say he croaked on the way. Nothing like this of course.”

  “I know the drill,” said Stockwell.

  Lewinski and Stockwell started back up the corridor, but I lingered to talk to the paramedics. “You guys know Ronan O’Grady in San Francisco?” I asked them. “He’s in your biz.” O’Grady and I had played jazz together in a couple of pick-up sessions.

  Both men had come up with the gurney now and were pulling on rubber gloves. The one who had mouthed off said, “That Irish pirate? Of course we know him. We see him drinking at The Rat and Raven almost every week.”

  “Well, tell him Riordan says hello.” I looked down at the gurney where the plastic body bag was already unzipped and waiting. A tag on the zipper said, “Caution, Bio-Hazard.”

  “What’s with that tag,” I asked, curious.

  “It’s nothing,” said the other paramedic. “It’s standard operating procedure nowadays.”

  “Hey Riordan,” yelled Stockwell from the door leading to the reception area. “Let’s get with the program here.”

  I jogged up to the door. “Gee,” I said when I reached him. “I hope you’re not gonna report me to the chief of detectives.”

  He glared at me and mouthed the words, “eat shit.”

  Lewinski was waiting for us in the reception area when we came through the door. He was monkeying around with a videotape machine on a shelf below the counter. “Now,” he said. “I think I’ve got it cued up to the place we want. Take a look at the monitor.”

  We did-and it wasn’t pretty. Watching Hastrup kill himself was twice as bad as looking at the dead body afterwards. The tape had a gritty, surreal, this-can’t-be-happening aura. It reminded me of the footage from the Vietnam War of the South Vietnamese officer executing a Vietcong prisoner.

  As the tape started Hastrup was loading the revolver with cartridges from a box. The gun was a monster: black, long-barreled with the distinctive curved hammer of a western-style six-shooter. Hastrup snapped the cylinder of the gun in place and pressed a button to send a paper target attached to the pulley mechanism to the back of the range. He didn’t appear nervous or tentative in any way-just another pedestrian day on the shooting range. He fired three rounds at the target, pausing to take careful aim before each shot. There was still nothing out of the ordinary about his actions, except that he hadn’t bothered to put on hearing protection before shooting. Then, in one movement-as if part of a standard routine-Hastrup took the gun with both hands and shoved its barrel under his chin. Given the placement of the camera, all we could see was Hastrup standing upright, his elbows sticking out at his side, his head tilted back slightly. It almost looked like a yoga position.

  Until he pulled the trigger.

  The top of his head vaporized in an instant and Hastrup seemed to jump backwards as the force of the slug launched him off his feet. The camera shook as the bullet embedded itself in the ceiling. Then there was nothing left but a wisp of drifting smoke. The body and the blood and the viscera on the floor could not be seen.

  Lewinski shut off the videotape machine. We all stood silent, avoiding each other’s eyes.

  “My God,” said Stockwell finally. “Talk about being cold-blooded. He did it like he was flipping a light switch.”

  “He probably knew he was being taped,” said Lewinski. “Wanted to put on a good final show.”

  “I was wondering about that,” I said. “Why do they run the cameras in here?”

  Lewinski smiled grimly. “Guess you haven’t been reading the police wire much, bud. Shooting range suicides are the new thing. There’s been about four in the last year. The range owners have put in cameras to monitor the customers, but it really doesn’t do much for prevention. Ends up being a good way for the owners to protect themselves from lawsuits, though. Hard to argue that your loved one died as a result of negligence when you look at something like that.”

  “You probably don’t have a lot of loved ones in the first place if you do that to yourself,” said Stockwell. The paramedics came by with the gurney and wheeled Hastrup out the door into the parking lot. Stockwell watched them absently, then said, “Okay, let’s wrap this up. You got the stuff from the body, you said. No suicide note, I take it.”

  Lewinski kicked at a gray evidence lockbox on the floor. He opened the hinged lid and took out several plastic bags containing personal articles. “No,” he said. “No note. We got his wallet, keys, some change, and some breath mints. That’s it.”

  “Breath mints,” I said. “Then it’s true what they say. It is always important to have fresh breath.”

  Stockwell looked at me with a martyred expression. “I knew you weren’t going to let that one pass.” He turned back to Lewinski. “The keys fit any of the cars in the lot?”

  “No, there were no cars we couldn’t account for after we sent all the other customers packing. The manager thinks Hastrup may have taken a cab here anyway.”

  “I suppose that makes sense,” said Stockwell. “Why leave any more loose ends than you have to. Well, how’s to rifle the wallet? Or have you already done that?”

  “Sure, we looked through it. It was pretty slim pickings.”

  Lewinski put on a pair of plastic gloves from the lockbox and took the wallet from its bag. He pulled out all the cards, money, and other papers it contained and spread them on top of the counter. He was right-it was pretty slim pickings. I saw just two things of interest: one was a snapshot of Terri McCulloch very similar to th
e one Bishop had given me, and the other was a business card. The card was for a guy named Dale Pace who was in the used car business. Hastrup had said the black guy who helped work me over was named Dale, so I figured it belonged to him. I pointed at Terri’s picture. “There’s your gal, Stockwell.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know it. Can you flip it over for us, Lewinski? I want to see if there’s anything written on the back.”

  Lewinski flipped it and the back was clean. “That it?” said Lewinski.

  “Just let me copy down the stuff on the business card and you can pack it up,” said Stockwell. He took a small notebook and pen from his breast pocket and wrote down the information. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Riordan, you know who the card belongs to?”

  “Yeah, probably. I think it’s the guy who, ah, participated in the assault and battery with Hastrup.”

  “Great. Thanks for coming across with that so quickly.”

  “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. I would have told you back at the station house.”

  Stockwell narrowed his eyes at me. “Okay, I think that covers it for us,” he said. “I appreciate your holding things until we got here, Lewinski. I’ll be in touch about the lab work and such.”

  Lewinski took off the plastic gloves and reached over to shake Stockwell’s hand again. “No, problem. Happy to help. Good luck on the Teller kill, and I’ll give you or Riordan here a call when we get the lab work back.”

  “Call me,” said Stockwell quickly. “Riordan isn’t going to be working on the case any longer.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Got me a cush assignment guarding the mayor’s eighteen-year-old daughter. You see, she’s been getting these threatening calls from-”

  “Let’s get going,” said Stockwell. He hustled me out the door and we walked back to his car without any more conversation. Once inside, I said:

  “Okay, let’s have it. You didn’t take me down here to be a nice guy. Maybe you needed me to identify the body, but that could have waited.”