Signature Kill

by David Levien

  Before long the older woman appeared in the doorway with a man, the man, behind her. She sent him in and then left, and the tough kid let the images slow to regular speed. Behr watched as the man stepped inside. He was just beyond medium height, perhaps five foot eleven, squared off and solid looking, but it was hard to tell because of his tan canvas coat and roomy-cut khaki pants. On the monitor, Jasmine smiled at him and closed the door. There was no sound, but it appeared she offered to take his coat. He shook his head and kept his hands jammed in his pockets as he sat on the edge of the massage bed. The camera position was high, probably cut into the ceiling or placed in a light fixture or a vent, so the brim of the man’s beige-colored baseball cap obscured his face. Despite there being no truly identifying factors, Behr found something familiar about the man.

  Jasmine stood across from him and gestured for him to lie down. The man shook his head. He said something to her, reached for a back pocket, and pulled out his wallet.

  “Freeze it there,” Behr said. The kid stopped the clip. Behr stared at the open wallet, trying to see a driver’s license or other identification, but the image was hopelessly small and would lose resolution if it were blown up to any decent size. “All right, run it,” Behr said.

  The man continued with his wallet, taking out two bills, placing them on the massage bed and putting away the wallet.

  “So this guy had never been in before?” Behr asked.

  “Never,” grunted the squat older Asian man.

  “Those are hundred-dollar bills.” It was Jasmine peeking in from the doorway of the office.

  “What did he say to you?” Behr asked.

  “He say he want to punch me, like I tell you.”

  The Jasmine on the computer monitor grew agitated, while the squat man spoke in Korean and the real Jasmine in the office averted her eyes. Behr glanced back to the monitor to see the khaki-clad man rear back and nail the poor girl in the side of the face with his clenched right fist. Her head jerked and her neck whiplashed, then she went stiff and collapsed in the way that knockout victims do—like a felled tree and without her arms extended to help break the fall.

  The man loomed over Jasmine’s unmoving figure, and his right hand went straight down the front of his pants and he began tugging. After a moment Jasmine’s legs started twitching, and the man pulled his hand out. Whether he was finished or not was hard to tell.

  “The hundred-dollar bills,” Behr said, feeling a surge of excitement over the possibility of a fingerprint. But almost as if the man on the video heard him, he picked up his bills and pocketed them.

  “Shit,” Behr breathed.

  Then the man looked around the room, spotted a small folded towel on the edge of the massage table, took off his cap, and swabbed his face with it, and in the moment he moved the towel and replaced the cap, Behr realized he’d found his few frames of a chance. Then the man ran out, wiping the doorknob with the towel on his way.

  “Freak motherfucker!” the tough kid who wasn’t working the computer said.

  “How would you feel about calling the police with this?” Behr asked. Maybe Breslau and his resources could help track the guy down.

  “Fuck the cops,” the kid on the computer said. Behr looked to the older squat man. All he saw were dead eyes and the man shaking his head emphatically no.

  “You find him, we pay you to bring him to us,” the kid on the computer said.

  The squat man nodded gravely in agreement. “We pay you ten thousand for the chance to fuck him up.”

  Not nearly enough, Behr thought.

  “I’m going to need some stills from that security footage,” Behr said.

  64

  Quinn has made it. Somehow he’s pulled through and is under guard now most likely. But that dark-haired slut from the community meet—how can he find her? Or the big guy. How to find him and track him and discover whether he has a wife, or children? He’d like to make him watch as he tore their skin from their muscle …

  He doesn’t have answers for the “how” though. For now. But he will. He’ll plant the questions deep, and his subconscious will sort it out. It always does. That’s the way it works. And then when the answers present themselves, he’ll know what to do, and he will do those things to make everything right. He will restore order.

  The night was okay. It had its moments—moment anyway. But sleep isn’t coming easy. It just won’t come.

  65

  It was around dawn when he heard a faint tapping and looked up. The sound was actually Mistretta banging on her plate-glass window to get his attention. After stopping by home, recognizing how hopeless the idea of sleep was, Behr had driven over to her place, getting there by around 5:45, and parked in her driveway since he hadn’t wanted to wake her.

  He was out of his car, computer bag in hand, by the time she’d reached her front door.

  “You my bodyguard or just some kind of freaking gargoyle?” she asked.

  “Not sleeping much, huh,” he said.

  “Just an early riser.” She stepped aside and let him in. One look at her weary eyes told him the truth. “What’s happening?”

  “I got something and wanted you to be a part of it.”

  He set up his laptop at her dining table, and she got him coffee while he spouted wearily about DNA and lack of hair and what he’d learned from Shantae Williams. She sat down next to him as he opened an e-mail from the screen name “daesoodrift,” one of the tough kids at the Oriental Grand, and quickly downloaded the images.

  “Who’s this?” she asked, as Behr opened and began scrolling the faces from the community meeting.

  “A bad, bad man, I believe,” Behr said. He knew exactly where to look. He’d spotted the guy after five or six minutes of searching the footage before he had driven over. He’d gone ahead and sent the picture to Breslau to cross against the crime computer. The department had better software for this kind of thing, which would save hundreds of hours of combing. If the man had a record, eventually he would come up. Behr set the images next to each other on his desktop—a shot of the man with and without his hat from the massage joint and an image of him in similar hat, clothes, and pose in the church basement.

  “Holy shit, Behr,” Mistretta said. “Lookit that.”

  They both stared at the pictures of the man at their staged meeting, and of him as he was captured the previous night: with his hat off, intense slate gray eyes, his shoe-polish-brown toupee and drawn-on eyebrows. Behr told her how he’d stumbled into the massage place, what had happened to Jasmine.

  “You manage to get a name on this scumbag?”

  “No. Not that lucky,” he said, “but I have an idea. Just need to wait for the stores to open.”

  66

  Hope for a break and fear of failure wrestled in Behr’s gut as he parked in front of Williams Photographic. And fear was winning. The world had changed. Years ago, before shopping online had become ubiquitous, there would have been two dozen brick-and-mortar photography stores to investigate, to see if anyone recognized the picture Behr held. Now there were four. Five if you counted this place, down toward Franklin, which seemed too far away, but which now represented a last chance. The day had bled away in a spiral of dead-end questions and futility, including a call from Breslau’s office around lunchtime informing him that the department’s software had come up blank on the face in the picture from the Oriental Grand. So whether it was the software’s shortcomings, or the man wasn’t in the system—either way, it was bad news.

  Hope: Behr believed his man was a photographer. That taking pictures was integral to his obsession.

  Fear: He could shoot digitally, download to his computer, and print his pictures at home.

  Hope: Something about the man, his age, his methods, felt analog, not digital. And Quinn had said something about recognizing the smell of film-developing chemicals during his encounter.

  Fear: That Quinn was brain damaged. And after visiting a few Walgreens and Walmarts with photo section
s, Behr had learned they didn’t even sell developing supplies and they processed their color film in-store while sending out their black-and-white to a lab in Chicago. There was no way this guy would let his images be handled publicly.

  Hope: That if Quinn was right about what he smelled, and if Behr was right about the guy being analog, the man might insist on buying his chemicals in person.

  Fear: That the other shops he’d stopped in, Courtland Camera and Winter’s Imagery, had tiny chemical sections and none of the salespeople recognized the man in the photos.

  Fear: That even the most analog types these days just went ahead and ordered hard-to-find shit online when they had to, and if his man did, Behr was all the way back to nowhere.

  Fear: He was down to his final stop.

  Fear was kicking hope’s ass at the moment.

  Behr got out of his car and entered the store. As soon as he walked in he felt the pretension of photo snobbery in the air. He quickly found a clerk, wearing a velvet vest over his T-shirt and a straw porkpie on his head, fiddling around with a tripod. Behr showed him the photo from Oriental Grand and asked if he knew the man in it. Velvet Vest hardly gave it a look.

  “Nah, bro, I don’t. I’m kinda new. Ask Benj, he’s been here forever. He might.” Behr’s eye went to where the clerk was pointing, and he saw a lanky salesman with a chin beard who was playing with his iPhone near the back of the store.

  Behr glanced around for a moment and spotted a display of the most expensive cameras in the place and went to it.

  “Can I help you with something there, chief?” Benj, the lanky salesman, inquired. Behr could see his shoes behind the glass counter: hipster sneakers with the white toe caps.

  “Maybe,” Behr said.

  “You a photographer?” Benj asked. “Do you currently own an SLR?”

  “Have a Nikon D-90,” Behr said.

  The hipster salesman nearly stifled his snort. “Solid body,” he allowed.

  “Yeah. Might be time to upgrade,” Behr said.

  “Well, there’s plenty of room to move up from there,” the salesman said. “Plenty.”

  “Uh-huh,” Behr said. “Let me see that one, please,” Behr said, pointing at a boxy black number that rested on a velvet-covered pedestal.

  “That one?” the salesman said reluctantly.

  “Yeah.”

  Benj took the camera gingerly from the case and handed it over.

  “That’s a Hasselblad H4D-60,” he said reverentially.

  “Is that right?” Behr said and ran his hands over it like a low-rent pimp checking out some new flesh. “Pricey?”

  “A little over forty thousand.”

  “Wow.” That’s when Behr pretended to almost drop it. Benj leaned forward, almost keeping his cool. Behr regained control of the camera and said, “Must take a hell of a picture.” Then he drifted down the counter, camera still in hand, toward the film-processing section, knowing Benj would follow.

  “It’s a professional’s tool,” Benj said, his pretension evaporating. “Regardless of income level, it’s more camera than most people need. You could save plenty and still come away with a great product if you look over here.” The suddenly helpful salesman pointed at a nearby glass case.

  “That’s a relief,” Behr said and practically tossed the Hasselblad back to him.

  “Look, the truth is I’m old-school. I’m interested in getting back to shooting film, not digital, and there’s this guy who’s supposed to know a lot about this stuff. I was hoping to ask him for some advice. Maybe you know him?” Behr took out the photo and showed it. Behr studied Benj, while Benj studied the picture.

  “Well, sorry, can’t help you,” the salesman said.

  “So you don’t know him?” Behr said.

  The suggestion that he might not know something seemed to rankle Benj. He cocked his head with an air of superiority before answering. “Look, man, ours is a shrinking business, and I’m not in the habit of giving out sensitive information on customers.”

  “So he is a customer?” Behr asked.

  Now Benj looked pissed. “Is there anything camera related I can help you with? Otherwise—”

  Behr picked up a large bottle of film-cleaning solvent and hefted it in his hand. “Is this flammable? It says here on the label it’s alcohol based, must be pretty flammable. Oh yeah, it is, I see the warning now. You have a lot of it? You keep it stored in back? Man, if this stuff caught fire, this whole place would go up like a Roman candle and burn for days. Hasselblads and all …”

  Behr craned his neck and glanced around. “I’m sure there’s a shitload of security cameras here, so whoever started something like that would probably cut power to the store and come in with a black mask on in case of battery backup, that way no one would know who did it and he’d never get caught.”

  Behr let that hang out there for a minute, then finished. “Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’d only burn for like five hot minutes and there’d be nothing fucking left, not even helpful employees.”

  “Are you threatening … are you saying you’re gonna come burn down the store?”

  Behr fixed him with a flat gaze. “I’m just a solo P.I. on a case who doesn’t give a shit about anything except getting a name. So you can tell whoever you want about this conversation, but I promise you this: if this place ever goes to torch, I’ll be sitting across town somewhere in public with lots of people, maybe even a cop or two, and it will never, and I mean never, track back to me.”

  Benj grew very uncomfortable and looked around as if searching for help, but none was coming and Behr wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Fine. I know him,” Benj said in a small voice. “It’s not like he’s some friend of mine, fuck it. We don’t see him much in here, but when he comes in he buys heavy quantities of developer, fixer, and stop bath.”

  “Name?”

  “It’s … slipped my mind,” Benj said.

  “You have records of your transactions?” Behr asked.

  “Yeah …” Behr followed as Benj went behind the counter and got on the computer. “He … I don’t see any credit card information. I see where we’ve sold a lot of developer—that goes into the system for automatic restocking—but no purchase info.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He must’ve paid cash.”

  Shit, Behr thought. He envisioned sitting out in front of the store for weeks, months on end, hoping for the guy to show up to resupply while bodies piled up and the reward went unclaimed.

  “Oh, there’s an old note in here …” Benj said, almost emitting a nervous laugh at what he read off the computer. “There’s a phone number. It says: ‘Call Hardy Abler when Kodak D-76 back in stock.’ ”

  And just like that Behr finally had a name.

  “We’re good now, right?” Benj said. “You’re not gonna do what you were saying …”

  But Behr was already out the door.

  67

  Something is bothering him, and nothing ever bothers him. Not that he can remember. Last night was a little stupid. As delicious as it had felt to crack that Chink hooker—the bitch hadn’t even been a real blonde—it might not have been smart to go into that place and to do what he’d done. And smart is a thing he’s always been. But so far, so good. He’s seen no news coverage. There’s no indication that the police have been called and are looking for anyone. His picture isn’t on any news websites, so they must not have had cameras. How could they call the cops for help anyway, he wondered, a filthy joint like that? He should be feeling better now, but he isn’t.

  It’s because the sensation of the punch has worn off too quickly, he realizes. His knuckles aren’t even sore. Maybe it’s an age thing, a midlife crisis. He’s heard about how people lose their taste for their pleasures in life. But that doesn’t seem right either. He still has plenty of appetite. Too much. It’s that merely hitting some girl isn’t enough. He is jumping out of his skin.

  The sounds of the break room invade his thoughts. Someone is
causing everybody to laugh. He looks up from his coffee and sees it is Kenny. Three women are Kenny’s audience, Claudia, Beth, and Stacie, and Kenny is really busting them up. Claudia is an old battle-ax of a secretary who’s been with the company for twenty-five years. Beth is a married woman about his age, but Stacie, in her early thirties, is a different story. She’s worked here for a bit over a year. He’s seen her around, but he hasn’t really noticed her. Maybe it’s because of his strict policy not to act on ones he knows or works with.

  But looking at her now, as she tosses her butter-colored hair back while flirting with Kenny, the swell of her breasts against her blouse, her sheer white pantyhose stretched over her ample thighs and rustling against her dress skirt, he thinks he must’ve truly blinded himself, because she is incredible. He feels the thrill of need and desire. He suddenly knows it plain and simple: here’s a project sitting right in front of him.

  Why the hell not? Back to the beginning with one I know.

  He’ll take her right away. Tonight.

  Three ways to go about it pop into his head. He can disable her car so it breaks down on the way home and he happens by to help her. But he discounts that one right away. It is too inexact. He can’t be sure exactly where she’ll stop. It will likely be too public. Option two: he can just wait outside in the parking lot and follow her home. Of course he’ll have to find a minute to dart home to get his kit and get back before she leaves. But why work that hard? He has access to the company’s personnel records. He’ll pull her address and show up at his leisure.

  She stands with her coffee, her back to him, rearranging her skirt over her buxom hindquarters. She has what regular guys call a “heart-shaped ass.” He already has ideas forming as to what she’ll look like legless, when she turns to go and sees him sitting there.

  “Hi, Hardy,” she says. “How are you doing today?”

  “Top of my game, Stacie, thanks for asking. How are you?” He wonders if she can read the thoughts behind his eyes. Of course she can’t, no one can, because she’d run screaming in horror if she could.