It's Killing Jerry: A Comedy Thriller

by Sharn Hutton

  “There’s no fucking escape, is there,” Adam slurred, rolling his head back round to his drink.

  “What did you say? What did he say?” The man thrust his head out toward Adam and waved a pointed finger.

  “Nothing. He just drunk is all,” Rita replied.

  “Well he better start ordering up some business or he be dead.” He pushed Adam in the back for emphasis, slopping a little Jack over the top of his glass. Adam felt his heart jump with the adrenalin release and instinctively drew in oxygen to fill his lungs. He pulled his head up to look straight ahead, then round to Rita.

  “Oh sure. We just negotiating, ain’t we, honey. Don’t you worry, Seb.” Rita fiddled with the zipper that ran down the front of her short black nylon jacket. She swished her head to flick back a sheet of jet black hair. Her lip beaded with sweat.

  “Time is money, Rita. You got your own debt to pay.” Seb pinched at Rita’s chin and turned away to swagger into the crowd. She crumpled against the bar when he disappeared from view.

  “You gotta cut a girl a break. I’m real cheap. I’ll even give you an introductory deal. Four hundred. You won’t regret it.” She slid a flat palm up her high and over denim hot pants.

  “Not interested.”

  When would she get the message? It wasn’t a hooker Adam wanted, it was oblivion. He took a hearty mouthful from his glass and Rita leaned over the bar to hail the bartender. He brought her a tall, free glass of water.

  Adam let his attention drift in the beat of the music and glazed over. His mind’s eye transporting him back to the hotel room and Jerry’s desperate scrabble to escape. He felt ashamed about the monster he’d become and searched back to find his motivations. Rachel pressed against his chest and the taste of her tears. The sorrowful empty windows of his childhood home. The note that Gracie’d left the day he’d got home late again: the one that said she wasn’t coming back. McGinty: ‘Don’t you want to know what I gave her?’ One grim brick upon another. The pain welled up and he choked it back with another slug of bourbon.

  “You really putting that away. It ain’t good for your health, you know. In here, it could be real bad.” Rita looked around the room, sizing up its shabby clientele.

  “I need it.”

  “Shit, don’t look like it doing you no good.” She turned and leant her back against the bar. “Alcohol’s a depressant you know? Looks to me like you could do with cheering up.”

  Adam snorted with a nod.

  “There’s better things to put a smile on that handsome face…”

  “I told you…”

  “No. I mean, how about I find you some snow? That’d do it. Ain’t no shortage of primo drugs in this town. How about it? We could get you happy in five damn minutes.”

  Adam had had a line or two of coke on a big night out in the past, but it was by no means a habit. He knew the risks, but he didn’t think his one-offs had done him any harm. He wanted to be free of this pain and it was an answer.

  “How much?”

  Rita’s face lit up. “I’ll go see my man, Seb. You stay put.” She hustled away into the crowd, skipping back to him a few minutes later. Adam didn’t care about the cost. The deal was done before she’d even named her price.

  “Come out back,” she said and led him by the elbow through the roomful of sweaty strangers.

  Dark wooden floor and mirrored walls had misled his eye from the bar and he realised now that the room stepped away to the left, opening out into a square of booths with a central space where people leaned against each other and swayed. Rita slid onto an empty bench, pulling Adam in behind her and he shuffled up the sticky PVC, not quite by her side. They took turns at the lines that Rita chopped and she was up before him, laughing and jiggling in her seat.

  The fine white powder swept through Adam’s head and brushed out the weight that had held him down. The music was better now. He saw the bodies moving on the dance floor and wanted to be amongst them. He slid out of his seat and stood tentatively at the edge, watching, then feeling the beat and starting to move. The mass of people opened up and swallowed him in. He forgot about it all, just absorbed the beat and felt the sweat on his back. He shimmied up behind girls who laughed and seemed to appreciate his slightly bedraggled good looks until thoughts of Rachel burst his bubble and he returned to the booth for another line and then another. He hated his own obsessive mind and wanted to turn it off. He drank and swayed and slurred into strangers’ ears, all the while watched by Seb and his unsavoury friends. Rita danced around in his peripheral vision, simultaneously predatory and protective, and when the high of his final line ebbed away, Adam was glad to see her leaning on a pillar close by. The bar was closing and the suddenly empty space around him brought back the loneliness and he didn’t want to bear it. Panic crept up through his bones.

  “Rita. I need some more. Can you get some more?”

  “Sure, honey, but we gonna have to go for a ride. My man has left the building.”

  “Like Elvis.” Adam ran the back of his hand under his nose.

  “That’s right.” She swung a chain-handled bag over her shoulder. “Come on. We’ll get a cab.”

  Adam followed her hot-panted bottom through the dwindling punters and out into the street. He stumbled through his fog and into the back of a cab and came around as Rita hauled him out onto the pavement.

  The street was wide and dark, a single round pool of light picking out an entrance. Rita tottered up to the oversized door and Adam slouched in after her. A tatty stairwell stretch up ahead and the stench of piss hung in the air. Rita climbed a couple of steps and turned back to Adam to appraise his condition.

  “I don’t think you gonna make it. Wait here. I’ll be back.”

  The stairs did look like hell. He could barely stand, let alone climb stairs. He slid down the tiled wall to sit on the bottom step and took in his new dubious surroundings. Graffiti stretched across the metal face of an out-of-order lift and empty beer cans rolled clunking over concrete tiles in the breeze. He was alone again and felt like shit. Who was he trying to kid?

  That was when his emotions overwhelmed him. He knew he had to tell her and the phone was in his hand and ringing before he’d had a chance to think better of it.

  “Rachel? Rachel, I, it’s me, Adam.” He rubbed at his forehead and swallowed hard.

  “Adam, hi.” Her voice in his head brought both elation and terror.

  “Look, I just need you to know, I just wanted to tell you myself, it wasn’t meant to be this way.”

  “Sorry?” Rachel’s voice was so clear, she could have been right there next to him. His heart beat harder in his chest.

  “It wasn’t meant to be like this. I, I did it out of love. Fucked up, confused love. A fresh start. A bit of hope, you know? After everything.”

  “No. What? What do you mean?”

  “It was supposed to make it easy, easy for us.” Adam’s head spun with the effort of conversation and he turned to lean his forehead against the wall, willing it to steady him. “Pathetic.” He let out a desperate laugh that sent a spasm across his torso. “I couldn’t even stitch him up properly. I’m pathetic.”

  “What..?”

  Adam’s chest grew tighter and he rubbed at the centre, trying to push away the pain. “God it hurts.” He pulled himself up by the handrail and wobbled across the grubby foyer to turn and perch on a windowsill, somehow hoping that being higher up might ease the cramping behind his ribs. “It’s nothing more than I deserve.” His breath came out in gasps.

  “Adam? Where are you?” Rachel sounded more distant now and it was too hard to hold the phone up to his ear, so he let his hand drop and the phone fell to the floor.

  Adam heard footfall on the stairs, two sets of feet and then Seb came into view, a black-denim-wearing copycat by his side. He looked Adam in the eye and raised one eyebrow in a sneer. A belt of daggers gripped tight around Adam’s heart and he flinched out from his perch and crumpled at the knee. The pain lit up his brain
more brightly than the cocaine had all night.

  FIFTY-NINE

  BEYOND THE DIRTY GLASS, YELLOWING ASTROTURF HUGGED AT A SMALL POOL. A couple of leaves floated there, caught in a rainbow slick of suntan oil. Dinwiddy told himself that the leaves weren’t his to clear and set about folding his laundry. He folded his tighty whities inward, from the edges on both sides—side seam to centre and then again closing them like a book, repeating the process for every pair before placing them in a neat stack in his underwear drawer. Socks were paired, smoothed flat and rolled, toes first, into woolly swirls that were wedged at the drawer’s other end, each providing the pressure for the last to keep the roll in place. Of course, this would mean that as the drawer emptied pressure would be lost and the rolls would unravel, leading, inevitably, to a repeat of the process. Dinwiddy didn’t mind. He found reassurance in knowing that everything was as it should be. It would be time well spent. There was little to do with his evenings currently, anyhow.

  The beige plastic phone trilled on his nightstand and Dinwiddy sat himself down on the bed beside it to put the receiver to his ear. “Dinwiddy speaking,” he said in his southern drawl.

  “This is Captain Kabawitz, Robbery and Homicide. I know it’s your day off, but can you come in? There’s all kinds of hell breaking loose down here. The whole department’s swamped. The Monte Carlo’s tipped us over.” Kabawitz sure sounded tense.

  “I’m not in Robbery and Homicide, sir. I’ve been invested in the Tourist Crimes Division.”

  “I know that,” the captain sighed, “It just so happens that the Gang Crimes Bureau were already flat out working on a long planned bust in Naked City so TCD are pitching in with all the looting over at the Monte Carlo. Your number came up. Congratulations. Check in with Robbery and Homicide. Can you be here in half an hour?”

  “Right away, sir. You can count on it.” Dinwiddy hung up.

  “My, my. Momma will be proud. Calling on me already to get them out of a jam.” He lifted his laundry basket from the bed to its position on top of the wobbly pine wardrobe and shrugged out of his dressing gown. He slid its shoulders onto a hanger, tied the cord in a single bow and hooked it onto the back of his bedroom door. Then he buttoned and hung his pyjamas next to it, to air.

  Dinwiddy’s Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department uniform was crisp and new. He pulled on the sand-coloured shirt and slacks, fingered the neat embroidery of the badge and admired his proud reflection, sucking in his paunch. Perhaps he’d been a little economical with the measurements he’d provided.

  When he’d looked into a transfer, the LVMPD had stood right out. The team exuded military confidence and organisation that Dinwiddy was drawn to. Not one of them was under six feet in their buzz cut and all as fit as fiddles. He needed to build himself up, Momma said so—he cracked open the tin of home baking she’d sent along with him and eased a muffin from its wrapper.

  In just under a week he’d settled himself into the Tourist Crimes Division, which more than anything, it seemed, was about shuffling paper and being the butt of their jokes. He didn’t mind. They just needed to get to know him. They had a different way of going about things in Alabama: slower, more methodical. It got the job done. Here in Las Vegas everyone was always in such a hurry.

  He smoothed a wrinkle from the bed and straightened the picture beside the door: a hasty vase of flowers, faded to a spectrum of blues by the desert sun. He smoothed the bed again and checked the lights were off by switching them on and off just once. His room was as neat as he could make it so he shut the door carefully and went in search of his landlady.

  She was working in the kitchen chopping vegetables.

  “Mrs Hong. I’m heading into work today. They called me in.”

  She grunted and carried on chopping, not lifting her head.

  “I’ll be back at my usual time. Nineteen hundred hours, you can count on it.”

  Mrs Hong made no comment.

  “Well goodbye then.” Dinwiddy turned to leave, uncertain if she’d even noticed him. Chief cook and bottle washer, always busy.

  Dinwiddy’s economy rental started first time. He clicked the indicator stalk up and down, tested all three speeds on the wipers and checked the angles on the air vents. Then he buckled up and flipped down the sun visor to reveal a precise hand-drawn map of the best route from his digs to Area Command. He was pretty sure that he’d learnt it, but liked to refresh his memory all the same and sure enough, twenty minutes later he’d made the journey through wide dusty streets.

  The elevator opened on the third floor into a broad buzzing office. It was a mass of six-by-six cubicles. Grey felt panels chopped shoulder-high cells out of open space. Officers buzzed along pathways under fluorescent landing strips. Those that came close swooped around him and on.

  He scanned around for name plates. “Excuse me, can you tell me where Captain Kabawitz’s office is?” The woman he’d intended to ask didn’t slow, didn’t see him, didn’t respond, just steered around. He tried again, this time stepping side to side to block the path of a man in plain clothes. He was drawn out of his preoccupation and looked Dinwiddy up and down, focussing on his sparkling clean and razor sharp uniform. He was impressed, Dinwiddy could tell. “Far side, to the end, name’s on the door, buddy.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The man snorted and bustled on.

  Dinwiddy picked his way along the central aisle, avoiding oncoming traffic and excusing himself. From time to time he peered into the private cells, noticing half-eaten snacks and empty coffee cups, piles of paper and flashing lights on telephones: an unexpected shoddy state. Most of the officers were head down and working, tapping away at their keyboards or on the phone.

  The captain’s office was in the far corner. Dinwiddy knocked, went straight in, closed the door and stood beside it, waiting to be acknowledged. The captain was on the phone in the midst of a heated conversation.

  “I don’t care what colour it is. A twisted ankle won’t stop you doing admin. Get yourself in here or you’re on traffic for a month.” He slammed down the phone and noticed Dinwiddy for the first time.

  “Who the hell are you? In fact, I don’t care who you are. See these files?” He pointed to the pile on his desk. “I need people working on these files today. Take them.”

  Dinwiddy stumbled forward and scooped them to his chest. “Yes, sir.” The pace here sure was a lot quicker than he was used to. He didn’t want to disappoint his new captain. Best to just to go with the flow. He stepped backward to his previous spot, eyes front and high, soldier-style.

  Kabawitz leant back in his chair and considered him. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Detective Dinwiddy, sir.”

  “Well, Dinwiddy, you’ve got yourself a nice pile of administration there and a murder call from the MGM. A murder with no body. Ha, sounds like a fat waste of time to me, but you’d better check it out. You can tell us all about it at tomorrow’s briefing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kabawitz looked him up and down and let the suggestion of a smile creep up. “Find yourself a desk to call home. There should be an empty one out there somewhere.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  Kabawitz waved him out.

  Turned out the only vacant spot was the one right outside the captain’s office. That suited Dinwiddy just fine.

  SIXTY

  DINWIDDY FOLLOWED THE MANAGER DOWN THE CORRIDOR, a zip-up wallet tucked snug under his arm. It was a pack of his own devising and contained everything an investigating officer might need. This investigation was a step up alright and he intended to make his mark.

  Diverting himself from the pressure of this first opportunity, he counted his paces along the golden carpet of the corridor, flipping open his file to make a note of the total when they drew to a halt outside the room. Two plump Hispanic women, dressed in the plain grey cotton suits of maids, waited there, wringing their hands. Dinwiddy estimated them to be between forty and forty-five years of age.r />
  “This is Marcie, one of our 4th floor housekeeping staff,” said the manager, “She discovered the room this morning.”

  Marcie, the more flushed of the two women, attempted a shaky smile. She looked nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs to Dinwiddy’s eye and he smiled at her with a mind to put her at her ease.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Ma’am.” Dinwiddy said with a nod, poising pen over paper. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Marcie stepped forward, squeezing her hands together. “I was doing my round and reading the roster and saw this room got missed out yesterday so made sure to check it. I noticed the blood on the door right away, though I didn’t know what I was looking at then.” She shuddered. “It’s such a mess and I seen enough of that all right, but not the blood. That’s when I called Marjorie.” She thumbed over her shoulder to the nodding woman behind.

  “Did you touch anything, Ma’am?”

  “I know you’re not supposed to so I used a towel to open the door and pull it shut after me.”

  That was the fingerprints on the door blown. Dinwiddy gestured toward it. “Would you mind?”

  Marcie obliged and Dinwiddy stepped in, gauging the minimum number of steps he could take into the room and still make a reasonable inspection. He rounded the bed and looked at the furniture, smashed to firewood. Then, craned his neck to look through the wide open door of the bathroom. The floor was a slick of raspberry with smears and shoves that could easily have been down to the effort of shifting a corpse, but there was the nub of it: no body.