The Cleopatra Murders

by Mic Palmer

  As to why a machine made carpet was used in the strangulation and not the other two crimes, Jack speculated that it had been improvised, perhaps taken from Michelle’s home, which fit in with the fact that the killer was rushed. With the other two attacks, however, he had plenty of time, most likely because they involved some degree of planning. As a result, he utilized his own carpets, but authentic Moroccans? Why throw away that kind of money?

  Jack was stumped. They didn’t even promote the killer’s narrative. The carpet used by Cleopatra was a Persian, not Moroccan.

  Still lying in bed, he recalled an incident from the night before. For whatever reason the man sitting next to him had two full beers and some sort of shot in front of him. Being drunk, however, he decided to light a cigarette, only to be quickly reprimanded by the manager. As a result, he put it out, not in the plate next to him or the sink, but in his own beer.

  Jack chuckled, and then his eyes lit up. All at once he had the answer, and it was as simple and perfect as anything he had ever come up with – so perfect in fact that it had to be right. The killer had carpets to burn, Moroccan carpets, which could mean only one thing. He owned or at least managed a carpet store.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Having awakened bright and early, Jack felt uncharacteristically energetic, even optimistic. Now that a plan was coming together, he took a moment to appreciate the effect of hundreds of aromatic compounds as they toyed with his nasal passages. With half a dozen pots brewing, he could detect hints of vanilla, caramel, and butter intermingling with the nutty, almost burnt crispness of roasted coffee beans.

  Looking for a waitress, he again came across the lanky Chinese woman with an eye for pennies. Well past thirty, she was lithe and perky, with a bright smile and soothing voice.

  “Why don’t you have another cup,” she told him, “and try a raspberry scone. They’re delicious.”

  “Just a coffee,” said Jack, conscious of the fact that the police were looking for someone about thirty pounds overweight.

  “Watching your calories?” joked the waitress, with a frown that somehow didn’t leave any lines.

  “Every time I look at my belly,” said Jack.

  “Like the Buddha,” jested the woman.

  “Exactly,” said Jack, suddenly realizing that he should keep his comments to a minimum.

  “Are you contemplating your navel?” the waitress went on.

  Jack turned away to look at the screen, as a sign that they needed to end the conversation. “Not right now,” he smiled.

  “I’ll get your coffee,” she responded, in a tight black sweater and leotards. Wearing something like wrestling shoes, she glided away by fully extending her legs and coming down softly on her heels. Swinging one foot in front of the other, toward the center of her body, her hips swayed with every step.

  Returning to the keyboard, Jack was determined to put together a list of suspects. What he didn’t want, however, was a list of rug cleaners, fine art sites, Moroccan travel agents, Moroccan restaurants, or stores dealing in carpets from Africa, Arabia, India and the Far East. Unfortunately, this was what he came up with.

  Hundreds of sites were offered up before him, but not one referred to a wholesaler or retailer who dealt only in Moroccans. The closest he came to what he was looking for was a shop called Euphrates, which imported items not only from Morocco, but Turkey and Iran as well. “Shit,” he groaned.

  Jack’s theory was that the killer used Moroccan carpets, because that’s what he had. Was it possible that he was running a giant outlet with dozens of styles and brands? Sure. Could it be that the Persians were chosen as a matter of random selection? Of course – only Jack wasn’t buying it; for if he did, he’d have nothing to go on.

  Placing his coffee on the table, the waitress raised a pencil-thin eyebrow. “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m just trying to find something.”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” he responded, while turning his head toward the floor. “So has your father said hello lately?”

  Looking down, she noticed a penny next to the table. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “I know what you did,” she said, with exaggerated insolence. Picking up the penny, she dropped it in front of him and strutted away.

  “I was just trying to help,” laughed Jack, as he decided on a course of action. Enough with the internet. He needed some human intelligence – someone in the field who could give him some guidance.

  Leaving a ten-dollar tip, he took one last look at the long limbed server and then headed out to Euphrates, where in return for a fifty dollar bill the assistant manager gave him the names and addresses of every retailer and wholesaler in the tri-state area who dealt exclusively in Moroccans. Surprisingly, there were only two, which indicated one of two possibilities: either the information he had been given was wrong or lo and behold he had finally caught a break.

  “No way,” he mused. “I’m not that lucky.” This being the case, he followed the same routine with two more retailers, both of whom gave him the same answer. Jack was perplexed. “Could it really be that simple?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Feeling as though he were truly on to something, Jack celebrated that night with a light meal and more drinks than he probably should have, but instead of waking up hung over, he felt rather good.

  Up before dawn, he was anxious to not only acquit himself, but to reap the rewards of his celebrity. Yes, it had finally dawned on him that the whole misbegotten affair could in fact turn out to be a blessing in disguise, and that once he had cleared himself, he’d have a million dollar story on his hands.

  Envisioning himself before the usual array of fawning talk show hosts, as he explained how he had come up with his theory about the rugs, he felt as though he couldn’t miss, but this was while he was still in bed and only half conscious. Once he got up and actually considered what he had to do, not to mention the odds of his being right, he quickly developed a headache.

  So he was about to meet with a couple of importers – big deal!

  Maybe the killer just happened to have a couple of Moroccan carpets lying around his house. On the other hand, maybe they weren’t even Moroccan. For all he knew they could have come from Turkey or Afghanistan. What did he know? Did a few hours on the internet really qualify him as an expert – he who couldn’t even get through art school and had always been considered a slow learner? Faced with the prospect of having to actually act on his plan, he felt sillier by the minute.

  And yet what choice did he have? He could either sit around and drive himself crazy or do something constructive, even if it involved nothing more than play acting. At the very least, it would keep him occupied, and given the circumstances, that was an accomplishment.

  Without even thinking about it, he jumped into the shower, got dressed and headed out the door, determined to carry out his plan.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Late October is a time of seesaw battles between the heat of solstice and the chill of equinox, but on this particular day, the winds of summer prevailed, causing women to wear flip flops and men short-sleeve shirts. Some even had their air conditioners going, which explains why Jack felt water dripping on his head. Looking up to see where it was coming from, however, he was taken aback by something he thought he’d never see in the city.

  “What the hell is that?” he couldn’t help but say out loud.

  “I think it’s a hawk,” noted the man standing next to him.

  Large and angry-looking, it had wide predatory eyes, thick grey wings, and a ruffled chest like a white tuxedo shirt.

  “It looks prehistoric,” commented a doorman. “It don’t belong.”

  Perched on a ledge about twenty stories up, it glanced downward upon its prey with the all of the gravitas and poise of a stone gargoyle. Except for a quick robotlike rotation of the neck, it was completely immobile. Then, without warning, it t
ook off like a bolt, causing a woman to shriek.

  Snatching up a rat from a nearby sewer grate, it glided down the avenue, with fingers pointing skyward.

  “Never saw that before,” said Jack under his breath, but the effect was quickly superseded by something even more surprising.

  Passing a kiosk, he happened to notice the front page of a local tabloid. “Massacre In The Bronx!” read the headline.

  Next to that was a photo of the blond-haired kid being carried off on a stretcher, his tattooed arms dangling from the sides.

  Handing the vender a dollar, Jack grabbed the paper and flicked the page.

  Apparently, the police had come to the same conclusion he had: a rival gang, but the more he thought about it, the more incongruous it seemed. How was it that only Ernesto was shot, and with Bogie’s gun no less?

  No, this was spontaneous, and right at the moment Jack was about to die. Could it be that someone was looking out for him?

  Searching for a clue, he returned to the newspaper, much of which consisted of photos of the “victims.”

  Dressed in a cap and gown, Chuck Pilsudski was said to have loved animals, especially dogs. As a matter of fact he had planned on becoming a veterinarian. Leaving a mother and two older brothers, both of whom were in jail, he was said to be a troubled boy scarred by the early disappearance of his father.

  The way the article was written, they made it seem like he didn’t have a choice, that he was nothing more than a calculus problem, that from the time he was an infant he was predestined to have his neck wrenched.

  Bogie, however, was just the opposite. Growing up in an upper middle class home to a real estate broker and union electrician, James Martinez Bogner would have appeared to have every advantage, except perhaps for the fact that he expected too much.

  Having been voted by his high school class the boy “Most Likely To Want It All,” his parents reported that he initially aspired to be a singer or athlete, but upon earning his Associate’s Degree in Marketing decided upon a career in business, hoping one day to have his own record label. The drug lord business apparently was just a stepping stone, a sideline, something he fell into while waiting for an opportunity to pursue his dream.

  As for Ernesto Francisco Castro, the only photo they apparently could find of him was from grammar school, but even then he had the alert yet demented expression of a killer. Unable even to sit still while the photograph was being taken, he sported a crooked baseball cap and toothpick. A fellow student described him as funny, but “kinda mean,” having bullied a child with a learning disability so badly that he was forced to change schools.

  “Big surprise,” Jack reflected.

  By the age of 16 it was said that he had been convicted of armed robbery, the upshot of which was that he was sent away to a juvenile facility, where he soon stabbed one of his teachers. The article concluded by noting that no friends and family could be found to give a statement.

  “The gun!” Jack all at once thought to himself. Whatever it was, it had to be expensive, raising the question of why it was left there. Could a rival gang really be that stupid or was it something else?

  Perhaps Jack was reading too much into it; nevertheless, he couldn’t help but think that something strange was going on, that there were too many coincidences, too many contradictions, too many corpses.

  Imagining himself as the grim reaper, he almost felt that his mere presence was enough to doom people to the most brutal of ends, and yet it was perhaps this very quality that had saved his life.

  Stupidly, he began entertaining the thought that he had some kind of supernatural power wherein anyone who inspired his wrath would soon meet a grisly fate, not the least of which Michelle.

  Actually becoming anxious over these rather silly but uncontrolled thoughts, he forced himself to instead focus on the leads he had been developing. Before the day was out he was determined to see them through, even while he felt they wouldn’t amount to much. Again, he was going through the motions, distracting himself, or as the professor from the bar might have said, role playing.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  First on his suspect list was John Pelletier, a second-generation American whose grandfather had been a colonial administrator in Morocco. According to a quick search Jack did the night before, the family relocated to the United States in 1955, shortly after the French pull-out. Nevertheless, they maintained their connections, which eventually lead to a small time import-export business.

  “Perfect,” Jack ruminated, allowing his fantasies to get the better of him. He envisioned Pelletier as being rather small and effeminate. Most likely he was a dandy, a tyrant, a coward.

  At one time powerful and wealthy, his family had to give it all up and move to the U.S., where suddenly they were nothing – hucksters, peddlers, petit bourgeois nobodies, whose only purpose was to haggle over nickels and dimes, while just managing to scrape by.

  Trapped in some seedy rat hole by the docks, where boisterous merchants fought off petty thieves and the stench of fish coalesced with the aroma of cumin and frankincense, he would live out his miserable days dreaming of what could have been, what should have been, all the while forging his bitterness into a finely honed blade.

  Ultimately, Jack was conjuring up the image of a medieval bazaar; what he got, however, was a medium-sized store, no larger than about two thousand square feet, with no sign, no customers, and no spices. In fact aside from a couple of French-looking lamps and an imported but dull-looking table, all of the goods appeared to be crated, labeled, and stacked into tidy little rows, none of which contained any indication of carpets.

  In the front was a large Mexican fellow loading a wooden crate onto a hand truck. He told Jack that the owner could be found in his office, in the back.

  Walking over, Jack tried to tell himself that he may very well be placing himself in the path of a serial killer, but the reality of that possibility never really sunk in, perhaps because he never quite expected it to pan out.

  Upon reaching the office, Jack found a tall, bony, almost consumptive-looking man with big white teeth and unflinching eyes. The way he stared at people one might have suspected some sort of thyroid condition.

  Jack took an immediate dislike to him.

  “Lanny Klemp,” he told the man. “I have a little retail outlet in South Jersey.”

  While shaking hands, Jack couldn’t help but stare at the man’s fingernails. Trimmed right down to his cuticles, there wasn’t a hint of soil, bruising, or sharpness. They were the well-manicured nails of a fallen aristocrat.

  Seated behind his fastidiously organized desk, Pelletier slid the monitor to the side and told Jack to pull up a chair. “What can I do for you?”

  The space was full of shelves stuffed with catalogs and invoices, all neatly stacked, so that the ends were in perfect alignment.

  “He’s a control freak,” Jack reflected.

  On the walls he noted a couple of cheap prints, including a self-portrait of Van Gogh. Green and sallow, the artist can be seen staring off into the distance, perhaps mulling over the torment that led to his bandaged ear.

  As it hung directly over Pelletier’s desk, Jack tried to divine some sort of meaning from it, a clue, something that would tend to indicate what this man was about, but aside from coming to the conclusion that it was a pretty good painting, his mind drew blanks, which was likewise the case with the work just to his left.

  With its Spanish influence, The Bullfight had been a favorite of Mr. Orlando; Jack, however, didn’t care for it and made the mistake of saying so.

  “Who’s got the PhD?” said his teacher. “Trust me, your tastes are unrefined, much like that of an infant’s. Weaned on cotton candy and bubble gum, you wouldn’t know subtlety if it smacked you in the head. The painting eludes you, it bores you, it might even anger you – the reason being you’re not equipped to know any better. For that you’d need to work, and that goes against your very being.”

  “Ass hole,�
� Jack thought to himself. “How could a guy who spends half the time bragging about his martial arts skills have a doctorate in the visual arts? Did such a thing even exist?”

  Standing about six feet tall, with short dark kinky hair, a gaunt face, and well-cropped beard, Orlando had the rubbery, relaxed, most likely practiced stance of a cobra ready to strike.

  Following a kind of prison philosophy, he regularly took out the biggest guy on the first day of class, just to set things straight; unfortunately that was Jack, who, upon making some kind of wise retort, was informed that remarks like that were a kind of FU and that the last guy to say FU to him went home with a dislocated trachea, whatever that meant.

  “What’s with this guy?” Jack would often ask himself.

  Nevertheless, he had his admirers – two athletic types, named Jorge and Evan. When not sketching powerfully-built men, they were talking to Orlando, often times about holds and throws, many of which they tested out on some poor schnook named Eugenio, usually under the approving eyes of their instructor, who, upon witnessing the young man being thrown over a desk, responded by noting that a firmer grasp of the neck should have been applied.

  But the poor schnook had his revenge. Of all the people Jack knew from the school, he’s the only one who made it – as the creator of a comic book action hero, no less. Patterned on Bruce Lee, his once bullied protagonist somehow acquires the power of “tactile animation,” meaning that whatever he draws comes to life; otherwise he does a lot of fighting, often defending himself against the patented trachea dislocation move of his archenemy and former mentor, Dr. Learnless, who bearing a strong resemblance to both Orlando and a billy goat, has the ability to not only erase his living drawings, but to alter them for his own purposes. Along with his two sexually ambiguous henchman, George and Ivan, he goes about the world manipulating culture in an effort to prepare the way for his “enlightened” dictatorship.