The name of her fiancé, delivered to me like that – like some kind of confession – caught me by surprise. ‘Sorry?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I heard you right. Did you say, “Richard Wadding”?’
Masters nodded, relieved, perhaps because the secret was out in the open.
I wasn’t so sure. That’s because I knew the guy. Only I knew him by a different name – the one he’d been given by the Gulf War I and II vets flocking to join the growing class action against the military for exposure to depleted uranium ammunition. A buddy of mine by the name of Tyler Dean was one of them. Tyler used to drive an M1 Abrams tank and lived around the stuff in the Iraqi desert for eighteen months. A year ago he went to the doctor to complain about a sore throat and ended up in hospital having most of his oesophagus removed. While they were mucking around in his insides, they also found that one of his kidneys had died inside him. They stitched his stomach to his tonsils, removed the kidney and introduced him to a dialysis machine. Tyler was only twenty-nine. Masters’ fiancé was point man for the defendant, the Armed Forces of the United States of America, doing his best to see that the vets got nothing more or less than a kick in the keester. So, like I said, I knew this Richard Wadding by a different name. I knew him as Colonel Dick Wad.
‘So you do know him?’ she asked, exercising that annoying ability of hers to read my thoughts.
Before I could answer, the front door opened and more folks surged in. Music blared and the party reached critical mass in an instant. A young boy crowd-surfed from the front of the café to the back on a roar of approval. An old guy with five-day growth on his face and wearing a coat tailored from what looked to me like compressed lint materialised in front of Masters and pulled her up and out of her seat. He wanted to dance with her. She protested but gave up when it seemed he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
A large old woman came over to me, her hair clamped down by a colourful scarf tucked into a beige ankle-length coat buttoned to the neck. She was holding a plate of pastries doing breaststroke in what I assumed was honey. ‘Here, here,’ she said, waggling the plate under my nose. I smelt nuts and cinnamon. ‘We cele . . . celebrate – you eat.’
I gave her the only look I could manage, which was blank.
‘Please, please . . .’ she insisted, waggling the plate more urgently this time. I accepted one of the pastries being offered because, like the dancing for Masters, following orders appeared to be the only option here. I took a bite.
‘Very good,’ I said, because it was. The music and the laughter were loud enough to feedback through my ears like they were old speakers about to blow. ‘What are you celebrating?’ I shouted.
She shrugged, unable to penetrate the language barrier.
‘Married?’ I yelled, holding my arms out to indicate the party. ‘Someone getting married?’
The woman frowned. And then what I was saying seemed to dawn on her. ‘No, no. No marry,’ she said, cackling, revealing the remaining three teeth still planted in her gums. ‘Bir ca? Um . . . circum . . . Ünnet! Ünnet!’ And in case I still didn’t get it – because I obviously still didn’t – the woman used a couple of fingers to snip at the air.
And then I got it. ‘You’re celebrating . . . a circumcision?’ The kid did another turn of the café above the heads of the crowd and everyone cheered their approval.
‘Yes, yes!’ she replied, again using her fingers as scissors.
Masters managed to disengage herself from the dancing. ‘C’mon,’ she shouted. ‘Let’s get out of here. This place has gone mad.’
We stepped out the door and closed it, sealing off most of the noise behind us. I noted that the weather had warmed up a little and the wind had dropped. My jacket and T-shirt were now able to cope with what remained. ‘Do you know what all that was about?’ I asked Masters as we stood for a moment to get our bearings.
‘Yep,’ she replied, zipping up against the cold. ‘The boy had been circumcised. That’s a big deal hereabouts.’ She threw me a wry smile. ‘You got a problem with that?’
‘Me? Problem? I think it’s great that the penis is celebrated. There should be more of it. There should be a World Penis Day. I can see it being a hit back home in the Bible Belt.’
I stepped off the sidewalk to hail a cab. It was coming up to 11:00 hours – time to put in an appearance at the scene where Colonel Portman had been julienned by a crazed Veg-O-Matic.
Ten minutes later we were in a cab crawling along streets where the folks who were loaded lived – lawns and walls and towering gates with intercoms. Even the trees looked snooty. Overhead a massive suspension bridge joining two continents blocked out the sun. I was busy making architectural comparisons between the homes on either side of the street when Masters spoke.
‘So, you didn’t answer my question.’
‘Didn’t I?’ I replied.
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Hey, look at that pink building with the columns,’ I said, attempting a diversion. I knew where Masters was going. ‘You could cut that into slices and serve it at a wedding reception.’ Duh – cake . . . marriage . . . fiancés . . . Colonel Dick Wad.
‘I asked you whether you knew Richard Wadding.’
The cab pulled to a stop. We paid and got out.
‘Well, do you?’ she asked again.
I compared the address of the residence in front of me with the one scribbled in my notebook. I didn’t need to do that – check we had the right house. This was Portman’s place, all right. How many others in the street were guarded by uniformed policemen behind portable bulletproof shields? I couldn’t stall any longer. ‘Yeah, I’m familiar with a guy by that name. From a rich family been farming cotton down in Mississippi for half-a-dozen generations?’
‘Yes, that’s him.’
‘Then you’re going to marry a known fuckwit,’ I informed her.
‘What?’ She was staring at me, her cheeks suddenly red and her hands moving to her hips, unsure about whether she’d heard it right. But she had, she knew she had, and she also knew she didn’t want to hear me repeat it. ‘Jesus!’ she said, and spun away like a twister off up the worn stone steps to the front door.
Six
Masters flashed her badge at the two uniformed officers armed with weathered, early-model MP5 sub-machine guns who were holding the fort. The men discussed our arrival between them before unlocking the door. Masters stomped past them. I showed my shield and followed her in, one of the uniforms in tow behind me.
It was dark inside. A wide stairway with ornate carved banisters climbed upwards. A radio was playing somewhere. I did a circuit of the ground floor, which was empty, and arrived back at the stairway. From information I’d already seen, I knew this to be a three-storey house that was three centuries old, arranged around a central courtyard. The house was cool and still and smelt of various chemical solvents doing battle with aromas that most people fortunately never have to experience. I followed those smells up the stairs to the top floor. They grew stronger with each step, along with the radio’s volume.
I heard laughter and voices. A woman was singing along tunelessly to a radio, or maybe it was the tune that was tuneless. I came down a wide hallway, walking on a dark red Turkish runner that turned my footsteps into whispers. The rug was laid over ancient black floorboards, the walls a light green colour and hung with paintings – old paintings of sea battles and landscapes and portraits of mostly Asiatic faces with wide, high cheekbones.
As I moved through the house, the aromas that smelt industrial were getting the upper hand. I turned a corner and saw a set of double doors that had been thrown open. Masters came around another corner and arrived on the other side of the room. Behind me, I sensed the uniform from the front door. Yellow crime-scene tape, which had, until recently, sealed the double doors shut, was rolled into an untidy ball and left on the rug. The radio, the singing, the voices and the smells were all coming from inside this room.
Masters didn’t acknowledge my prese
nce, still annoyed at me for calling her Dick Wad a fuckwit. She kept walking, into the scene of the crime. I completed the pincer move. Our arrival stopped the singing and the talking. The uniform accompanying us said something in Turkish and I picked out the word ‘Amerikali’ a couple of times. The cleaners gawked at us like we were from another world, which, I guess, we were.
The cleaning detail was a three-man team, two of whom were women. They all stood and continued staring at us. Both women were middle-aged and about as shapely as a couple of concrete mixers. Both wore black headscarves. The guy was older and bigger, with a broad face and a thick salt-and-pepper moustache twirled at either end like an old-fashioned villain’s. We needed an ice-breaker. I went up to one of the women and presented her with the ketchup stain on my T-shirt. I gave her a shrug that said, ‘What do I do here?’
‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, and said something that made everyone laugh.
The uniform surprised me by speaking English. ‘Ha, ha . . . she says Istanbul has already left its mark on you. She doesn’t want to take it off.’
Nevertheless, the woman walked to a bucket, took out a bottle and squirted a clear liquid over the stain, which made it instantly disappear.
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ I said.
She smiled – they all smiled – and went back to what they were doing, including the singing. I should join the UN.
I took a circuit around the room. It was a mess. I recalled to mind Captain Cain’s happy snaps. The chair the Attaché had been sitting in just prior to his murder had been removed. The square of pale green carpet over the floor safe was also gone and its door open. I squatted beside the safe for a closer look. The door, lock mechanism and internal walls were still covered in fingerprint dust and prints were clearly visible. The safe was empty.
The rest of the carpet had been ripped up in one corner and rolled back almost to the centre of the room, where the safe was set into the floor, revealing the old floorboards beneath. I could see that attempts had been made to get the Attaché’s blood out of the carpet pile, but these had obviously failed and there were several large black stains spread into wide circles by the cleaners’ labours – which, I assumed, marked out the area where the victim had been dismembered. There was the smell of decay in the air, as if an animal had recently died within a nearby wall cavity. The women were scrubbing at blood spatter on the upper walls with bristle brushes on the ends of poles. Their efforts were simply moving it around, like on the carpet. The guy with the mo was mixing paint in a two-and-a-half-gallon drum. The stains they couldn’t remove were going to be painted over.
‘The wall safe is this way.’ Masters nodded back behind her, the way she’d come in, and moved off, leading the way to an adjoining room. It was some kind of sitting room with more old paintings of people long dead and gone – longer gone than the Attaché perhaps, but by no means more dead.
Crime-scene tape stretched across the painting of an elephant being attacked by a party wielding spears. The beast was on its knees, a bloody rent in its gut. Something that looked like a large sausage hung from the gash. Guys wearing turbans appeared to be cheering from atop another elephant nearby. The uniform cop interrupted my viewing pleasure, peeling the tape away from the painting.
‘Behind here,’ he said. He pulled one side of the painting away from the wall and it swung open, revealing a small safe recessed into the masonry. The door, which was steel an inch-and-a-half thick, hung from a single hinge and curled back on itself like a potato crisp. Some seriously powerful explosive had done that. The door was powdered in the fine, light grey fingerprint dust, as were the safe’s inside walls, ceiling and floor. No prints had been revealed.
‘Whatever did that to the wall safe was probably military,’ I observed.
Masters nodded.
‘C’mon, let’s go play in the sewer.’ I wanted the snooping around over and done with before Istanbul’s Starsky and Hutch turned up at the agreed time.
According to the briefing notes supplied to us back in DC, local crime-scene investigators believed that activity by the killer had been limited to just these two rooms on the second floor. Nevertheless, all the doors and doorframes throughout the place had been dusted for prints. Good and thorough.
We made our way down the stairs to the ground floor and the door to the courtyard. I unlocked it, opened it wide and examined the frame – no jimmy marks in the woodwork, though a pane of glass had been punched out of a window beside the door. The killer must have found the door locked. Smashing the pane, reaching in and unlocking it was a simple matter. Forensics had gone crazy in the general area around the broken window, and the framework was wearing more powder than a Colombian drug lord’s nostrils.
Outside, winter sunshine washed over half the courtyard while the other half remained in shadow. Ancient tiles paved the ground and lime-green moss filled the spaces between most of them. There was sea-salt and mildew and cat’s urine in the air. A birdbath sat in one sunny corner, a couple of pigeons copulating in it. Our arrival startled them and they flew off. I felt momentarily guilty, but then I thought, what the hell . . . I wasn’t getting any so why should they?
The manhole cover mentioned in the case notes was easy to find, on account of the fact that a couple of pieces of outdoor furniture had been dragged over it and lassoed together with yellow crime-scene tape. I shifted one of the chairs to get at the cover.
‘How’re we going to get that opened?’ Masters asked.
‘Room service,’ I suggested.
‘What?’
Just as I said this – and as I expected – the uniform accompanying us stepped up with the appropriate tool and began putting it to use.
‘See?’ I said.
I wasn’t sure whether to thank the guy or give him a tip. I also wondered whether being so helpful to us wouldn’t get him into trouble with Karli and Iyaz. I was more familiar with police cooperation delivered with a snarl than a smile, but I wasn’t complaining. Maybe the watchword on this case really was ‘co-operation’. Or maybe these uniform guys just hadn’t yet learned to be assholes. Whatever the reason, our number-one helper spat on his hands, rubbed them together and then, with a grunt, hoisted the metal plate out of its seat.
Masters and I peered down into the hole, getting the angle of the sun just right so that we could see the bottom. There was a vertical shaft of maybe a couple of feet opening out into a pipe that was around a yard and a half in diameter – wide enough to crawl through at a crouch. I could see some sort of trickling fluid. I doubted it was Perrier.
‘Well,’ I said to Masters, indicating the way down with a gentlemanly sweep of my hand, ‘zeal before flair.’
‘Thanks, Cooper. I didn’t expect you to throw your coat on the ground, but I thought as the senior investigator you’d –’
‘What?’ I said. ‘Let my subordinates prove themselves? Thrust them forward into the light? Revel as they snatch the initiative?’
‘I was going to say, “lead by example”.’ Masters stood to one side to give me room.
This was one I wasn’t going to win. With a hand on either side of the hole, I lowered my body down into the drain and dropped the last couple of feet. I spread my feet so as not to land in whatever was making its way to the sea, but my boots slipped against the walls, and I went down on both my good hand and the fibreglass cast, my face inches from the stinking, running flow. ‘Shit,’ I said, pushing myself up and getting back on my feet, my right hand and the cast greasy with pipe slime. I crouched and backed away from the overhead hole to give Masters room. A ladder came down the shaft, followed by Masters’ Nikes.
‘Where did that come from?’ I asked up, annoyed.
‘The ladder? Found it propped against a wall. I figured people had been going in and out of this pipe for days.’
Grinding my teeth, I turned around carefully and followed the pipe, using a small LED on my key ring to light the way. The air in the pipe smelt like you’d expect the breath of a 2000-year-old
city to smell, and one that wasn’t in the habit of cleaning its teeth.
Wide cracks fractured the pipe in numerous places as we worked our way along, and the occasional tree root hung down into the cold, moist air. There were other manhole covers overhead indicated by keyholes of white light – openings to more courtyards and gardens.
Soon enough, the downward angle of the pipe increased and came to a junction with a bunch of other pipes. We climbed down into it and found a tangle of crime-scene tape marking the spot where forensics had made their discovery of the murder weapons. I decided I’d be surprised if tests on the recovered articles revealed anything of interest about the person who’d left them behind. The murder seemed to have been too cold-blooded, and too meticulously planned and executed for anyone to have made any obviously dumb mistakes. So why leave anything behind at all, I wondered – especially the murder weapons – when it would have been just as simple to disappear without a trace?
Other than the tape, there was nothing to see in the junction box. We continued for another thirty feet or so, working our way towards the light at the end of the tunnel. As we came around a kink, we surprised half-a-dozen black rats having a meeting. One of them (maybe it was the union boss) was the size of a rabbit. It shrieked aggressively and sat up on its hind legs and sniffed the air, its grimy pink snout twitching and quivering at us, brown teeth gnawing at our scent. The other rats took its lead and joined in. I heard Masters gasp. She went to grab my arm and slipped. If we’d had a kitchen chair handy, she’d have jumped up on it.
‘Christ!’ she said as she slipped, stepping into the rivulet of effluent. Her turn to go for a paddle.
The rats stood their ground.
‘I hate those fucking things,’ Masters whispered hoarsely, steadying herself.
A couple of the animals scampered forward a few feet towards us and squeaked. Masters flinched. ‘You just hurt their feelings,’ I told her.
Hard Rain - 03 Page 7
