The Cleopatra Murders
Page 1
MIC PALMER
THE CLEOPATRA
MURDERS
Published Internationally by Tractatus Press
PO Box 164, Merrick, New York 11566
© Mic Palmer 2015
micpalmer12358@aol.com
Terms and Conditions:
The purchaser of this book is subject to the condition that he/she shall in no way resell it, nor any part of it, nor make copies of it to distribute freely.
All Persons Fictitious Disclaimer:
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.
eBook editions by eBooks By Barb for booknook.biz
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Prologue
Time leaks backwards, not in the big things but the small – minor shifts in perception, trivial insights, delicate variations in mood and desire, all gratuitous and often times disorienting, but is there a way of knowing, of reading the signs, or are we so caught up in our daily habits and tribulations that we hardly even notice?
We have bills to pay, romances to sustain, insults to brood over – definite problems, clear cut conflicts, leaving less familiar thoughts, such as those rippling their way against the normal flow of things, all but forgotten.
Caught up in a flood of distractions, they seem out of place, unimportant, anomalous, but if we could look back on our lives and chart their history, we would see how what appeared to be a few harmless albeit alien ideas and sensations slowly took root until finally they colonized not just a few petty aspects of our personality, but our very soul, the metamorphosis of which was so gradual that it passed without the slightest bit of detection. This, however, is how it should be, how it must be.
Can you imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning and find that you weren’t at all who you thought you were – not in the superficial tags that people find so important such as bloodline or nationality, but in the very way in which you exist: your predilections, your antipathies, your character, your talents, your failings, your capacity for evil – what if they and therefore you turned out to be nothing like you imagined?
Fortunately, these kinds of days are relatively rare, but every once in a while, perhaps every decade or so, there occurs an improbable confluence of events which by inflaming the senses makes us more responsive, more discerning, more aware, and so what was once invisible becomes not only conspicuous but tyrannical.
Like the volcanic activity caused by the shifting and grinding of tectonic plates, time-present can suddenly be felt pressing up against time-future, and the result is no less violent, incinerating our thoughts, overwhelming our faculties, leaving us awash in flame, which depending on the person may either purify or destroy.
Chapter One
Waiving a rather beat-up camcorder around as if it were a trophy, Jerry Gomez bragged about the most outrageous example of marital infidelity he had ever come across. “Four men in four hours!” he shouted across the tiny office consisting of four desks, worn grey carpeting, and a couple of windows overlooking Broadway. “And get this, they all left within about twenty minutes.”
Seated across the room, Ed Bundy was hunched over a keyboard, using his index fingers to fill out a subpoena. “Sounds like a pro,” he maliciously chuckled.
Gomez had caught loads of cheating spouses, but never anything like this. “You would think, but no money changed hands.”
Forgetting to breathe, Bundy’s words sputtered out as if being choked. “Ya ever heard of a credit card? That’s how it’s done these days – by phone.”
Pressing the camera between the palms of his hands, Gomez seemed to be praying for an answer. Wispy yet melodious, his voice trembled with excitement. “But she was so brazen about it; She didn’t even bother to close the shades.”
This caused Bundy’s eyes to light up. Spinning around in his chair, he had the naughty yet greedy look of a child stumbling upon his parents’ stash of candy. With a voice both deep and gravelly, he seemed to croak when he spoke. “You mean to tell me you actually have them doing it?”
Having been married for over thirty years, Bundy felt in a way neutered, and so he’d leer and jest, not so much out of lust, but to again feel he was one of the boys. “Pop in the tape already,” he told Gomez, his frayed brown tie having been whipped over the shoulder of his green collared shirt.
Having ejected the disc from the camera, Gomez pulled it toward his chest. “First of all it’s a DVD. Second, wipe the drool from your mouth; you’re making me sick.”
Bundy jumped from his chair and grabbed the DVD, his pink jowls shaking from the sudden movement. “Screw you,” he said, as he slid it into the machine.
“I didn’t even think you knew how to use it,” jibed Gomez. “It’s amazing what you can do when sex is involved.”
“She’s not bad,” said Bundy, as the camera zoomed in beyond the curtains.
Glancing over from a stack of invoices, Jack Lorenz wasn’t particularly impress
ed by the woman or the johns, until he noticed something.
Despite the different clothing, footwear, hair coloring and styles, all of the men seemed to share the same rather below average physique, which neither obese nor toned had the rumpled quality of a bag of laundry. Then again how many middle aged men didn’t look like that?
What Jack needed to do was to focus in on their features, but given the feed the way it was – all grainy and out of focus – it wasn’t easy.
“Nice work, Spielberg,” said Bundy. “I can barely see what I’m looking at.”
Peering over Bundy’s shoulder, Jack watched in mild bemusement – not so much over the sluggish gymnastics, but rather the wispy nature of his straining observations. For as much as he tried, he just couldn’t quite get a handle on what he was looking at – not with the men at least.
Whether partially dressed or tangled up in the sheets, they just never quite let you see enough of them to form a lasting image. Like drunken mirages, they’d stumble into Jack’s consciousness with all of the subtlety and poise of dancing bears, but just as quickly they’d fall right out again, all brusque and hurried, as if by intention. Could it be that the men had an inkling of being watched?
If it were so, they handled it with almost preternatural skill, as if possessing some sort of chameleonesque adaptation, but instead of changing colors, they knew just when to move. Remaining still just long enough to offer a glimpse, but not so long as to be remembered, they inhabited the misty realm between sensation and consciousness.
Nevertheless, something remained, not their images mind you, but their reverberations. Like the waves of a pebble after it strikes the water, they radiated through Jack’s mind with such prevalence and intensity that he felt he actually knew something, even if the details remained somewhat murky.
Squinting to make out the few anatomical details left exposed, he appeared engrossed, almost painfully so.
Gomez was pleased. “You’re really getting into this, aren’t you?”
“Pervert,” said Bundy.
“I knew it,” Jack finally concluded. “They’re all the same guy, unless of course they all just happen to have shrunken ears, arthritic index fingers, and bowling ball sized calves.”
Jack, however, had been wrong before – many times as a matter of fact – making him loath to offer his opinion. “Can you back it up a little?”
Bundy glared at him like he was crazy. “Is there something about this guy’s ass you find particularly interesting?”
Despite the constant often deserved ribbing, Jack was happy to be working. As a marginal student, whose only training involved nine months at the Guadalajara Institute of Art and Design and twelve stifling years at Inter-Oceanic Insurance, where he worked as a claims adjuster, he was secure in the knowledge that he didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of options.
Sometimes he’d consider that maybe they were right. Maybe he was drawn to being a run of the mill private investigator out of sheer laziness, an aversion to risk, a not so latent desire to avoid the slightest possibility of going beyond his comfort zone. On the other hand, how many people get paid to sit around watching what amounted to hardcore porn?
A high end production, however, it was not. Having the drawn, wiry appearance of a drug addict, the star of the show dragged around what had to have been a fifth of her body weight in breasts so full and taut they seemed invulnerable to manipulation. They just stood there like two concrete basketballs, even while being grasped, fondled, and poked.
Diminishing in intensity with each passing encounter, the final bout of lovemaking appeared strained and mechanical, even while the players attempted to make up for it with contorted expressions and emphatic vocalizations.
“You geniuses notice anything?” asked Gomez, his wide, almost Asian looking, coal black eyes shimmering in the glow of stark fluorescent lighting. He was a fun loving character with thick black hair, impossibly white teeth, and a huge head, the skull of which seemed too large for the amount of skin he was given. Thinly stretched, it appeared on verge of tearing with every exuberant smile. “Here it is,” he told them, as he paused the image. “See that, near his wrist?”
Jack spoke in a deep monotone. “A birth mark.”
“So what?” said Bundy, as he stared at the burgundy colored impression.
“So they’re all the same guy,” remarked Jack, angry with himself for having missed something so obvious.
“You stole my thunder,” smiled Gomez.
“Back it up,” said Jack, “let’s have another look.”
“Every one of them?” griped Bundy, as if he’d been cheated.
“Hold on,” said Gomez. “It gets better.” Pulling from his pocket a photo of the husband, he handed it to them.
Bald, except for a few lonely tufts in the front, which were obviously the remains of an aborted transplant, the client was happily holding his wife’s hand in front of what appeared to be a merry-go-round.
“Shit,” said Bundy.
On the husband’s forearm was the same purple, tree-shaped stain.
“The funny part,” chuckled Gomez, “is that when I reported my findings, he tried to make it seem as though he was genuinely upset.”
“Four times with your own wife?” said Bundy. “That’s a lot of Viagra.”
Grinning so wide that his head looked as though it were about to explode, Gomez jabbed the screen with a thick brown index finger. “You see how he tried to cover it up with makeup.”
“But then he started to sweat,” commented Jack.
“Like a pig,” added Bundy.
“I guess he didn’t notice what it was doing to the makeup,” chortled Gomez.
“What do you mean guess, you never told him?” asked Jack.
“If he wants to pretend his wife’s a ho, that’s his business. I’m not going to ruin a good gig.”
“Why?” said Bundy. “Why would someone do something like that?”
“It’s all about propaganda,” said Gomez, “marketing.”
“For who?” said Bundy.
Gomez plunked his foot on the edge of his desk and began tying his shoe. “For them. I bet they put it up on the internet.”
“If you’re not being watched, why do anything?” said Jack, having returned to his tidy little cubicle.
“That’s what makes it real,” said Gomez.
“Nice house,” said Bundy. “Look at that TV.”
“Must be sixty-two inches,” said Gomez.
Bundy sneered. “It’s always the rich ones.”
Pushing back his thinning blond hair, Jack rolled his eyes. “Damn rich people.”
“What are you kidding? We come across sickos all the time, and they always have money.”
Jack chuckled. “Who the hell else is going to hire us?”
“It’s true,” chimed in Gomez. “The poor are just as screwed up as anyone else, only guys like you never get to see it.”
“I know poor!” interjected Bundy. “I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, before the fancy bars and condos. There were five of us in a two-bedroom apartment.”
“Ok, my bad, but growing up the way you did, in that tiny little apartment, I bet you were outside a lot.”
“So what?”
“So that’s how it is. Everybody’s outside, so you get to know their business.”
“That’s right,” rasped Bundy, “that’s what kept us in line.”
“Let me get this straight,” probed Gomez. “In all those years growing up there, you never once saw anything funky going on?”
“Not like this,” barked the older man, as he tapped the monitor.
Gomez appeared skeptical. “Ok, maybe you’re right. I respect that.”
Bundy was adamant. “There’s no maybes about it. That’s how it was. I mean people cheated and I’m sure did other things they weren’t proud of, but they kept it quiet for Christ’s sake.”
“Ok,” intoned Gomez deferentially, “but me. I got a lot of stories. I’ll never
forget this one time I was sitting on my porch – I was just a little kid, no more than nine or ten – when all of a sudden this woman comes flying out of her house like a bomb’s about to go off. She was young, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, but according to my mother, ‘experienced,’ and you could tell. Even though something terrible was obviously going on, her expression was kinda blank, like she knew what she was doing. After all these years I can still remember how she smelled, all sweaty and sweet, like an overripe banana. To this day it still makes me feel kinda strange, like when you’re not quite sure whether you like something or if it just makes you sick. Sitting there on the curb, just a few feet from me, I remember the way she was panting, kinda like the woman in the video, but as tired as she was, she never stopped looking at the door she came out of. That’s how I knew it wasn’t over. Sure enough, about five seconds later, a second woman comes bolting out, only she’s waving a cleaver. Like I said though, the first woman didn’t seem particularly phased. Every time the one with the cleaver went for her, she’d just back up or circle around a car. Being about twenty years younger, she knew she’d never get caught, but the older one wouldn’t quit, and for about ten minutes they went up and down the street yelling about some man.”
“Is that it?” interjected Bundy. “I thought you were going to say she chopped her hand off or something?”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You call that a story. I once saw a woman push her husband’s girlfriend off a fire escape. Damn near killed her.”
Wondering whether this perhaps occurred in the idyllic neighborhood Bundy had been boasting about, Jack started to say something. Quickly, however, he thought better of it.
“A thing like that can stay with you,” commented Gomez, hoping that Bundy would betray his whereabouts.
“Shit happens,” said Bundy. “What are you gonna do.”
“For me,” Gomez continued, “it wasn’t so much the violence, as what they said.”
“Which was?” said Bundy, somewhat impatiently.
“Well, to get at one another, they began going off about the guy’s dick.”
Jack found this amusing. “What do you mean?”
“You know, how big it was, how it felt, all sorts of crazy shit, right in front of the whole neighborhood.”