Death by Nostalgia

by Andrew Stanek

  Then, finally, there was a loud exclamation from somewhere nearby. The stranger closed his eyes, a pained expression crossing his face. He shook his head and sighed. Distant sirens became audible, and a series of police cars pulled into the parking lot, followed by an ambulance. Officers spilled out of the black and white cars labelled “GRPD” and were shown onto the construction site by agitated-looking workers.

  The stranger stood stock still and listened to the urgent chatter of the police officers, the whispered consultations between the construction workers, the arrival of men in uniforms and other costumes and the departure of the ambulance. He listened as the sirens grew in number and intensity until, finally, a police officer approached him.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said tersely. “You’ll have to leave this area. This is the site of a murder investigation.”

  Chapter 2

  A rather important-looking man was trudging down the ancient concrete steps into the bunker. Virtually everything about him looked important, from the chest full of medals he wore on his GRPD police uniform, to the grizzled, inveterate gray of his hair, to the flat, wide brim of his cap. In addition to looking important, this man also looked very upset. The ends of his grizzled, important-looking mustache were curved into bobbing, frowning anger. Unfortunately, in the experience of Detective Sam L. Alders, angry, important people descending the stairs onto his crime scene was usually bad news.

  “Chief,” Alders said, saluting him quickly.

  Chief Breckinridge gave Alders a withering, scathing look that made Detective Alders quite sure he was going to have a very bad day. He plunged his hands into his jacket pockets to warm them. Unlike Breckinridge, Alders was in plain clothes, and had a sneaking suspicion that the Chief was about to start yelling about his somewhat patchy appearance. However, his suspicions were proven wrong in the next instant as the Chief began to yell about something else entirely.

  “Do you have any idea how much of a scandal this is going to be?” the Chief barked furiously. “While I was up there giving a speech about how the destruction of these ancient projects buildings - this - this urban squalor - was going to bring down crime,” he paused dramatically. “At exactly the same time, someone was down here, just under my feet, murdering some poor woman?”

  Alders felt it best to say nothing. The Chief continued.

  “Not a word of this to anyone. I don’t want the media to catch a whiff of this, you understand? Not a whiff.”

  “Yes sir,” Alders replied stiffly.

  “Now where the hell are we?” the Chief added, looking around his surroundings for apparently the first time. He eyed the drab concrete floor and walls with a certain amount of distaste. What looked like a lifetime’s worth of muck, grime, and dirt, had accumulated in a patchy layer on the ground. Ancient-looking army helmets hung from one wall, on a table above numerous rows of boots were lined up in a row. A series of vicious looking cracks ran along the floor, leading to a sort of flimsy-looking wooden wall with a chain link fence around it, and a rusty iron door ajar leading through it.

  “We’re looking into that,” Alders answered quickly. “There’s no record of this place existing in city hall. It’s apparently some kind of military bunker. After they demolished the building, the construction workers punched through the roof. They thought it was part of the foundation. I spoke to some of the residents and they said that there were old tunnels beneath the apartments.”

  “And the victim?” asked the Chief.

  Alders nodded quietly and led him deeper into the room.

  A large hole had been cut in the roof of the room and light was streaming through the top. It illuminated the body of a woman, lying face-up on the ground, a look of surprise outlined on her face. An obvious, crimson wound had been inflicted in her chest, and blood was pooled around her feet.

  “We were just about to move her,” Alders commented, dragging a white cloth over her lifeless form. “Her name is Adriana Kettering according to her personal effects. It looks like she was a doctor. We have yet to contact her family or her place of work.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Single gunshot wound through the heart. Estimated time of death is around noon.”

  “Definitely murder then?”

  Alders nodded solemnly.

  “Well, if you’re going to move her, then move her.”

  Alders barked some orders up the stairs and the body was removed.

  “We’ve found the murder weapon,” Alders said after the body had gone. He led the chief to the back of the bunker, where the wooden wall in front of the chain link fence stood. They passed through the open door into the rear of the room. Alders braced himself, quite sure that the Chief wasn’t going to like this. Behind him, he nearly felt his superior explode with anger.

  Hanging on the walls were weapons of every sort - rifles, pistols, knives, grenades, shotguns, machine guns, boxes of ammunition, and more. But standing out in front of all the weapons was a single large and wicked-looking rifle, mounted on a nearby stand. It was positioned and pointed exactly at the spot where Adriana Kettering must have been standing before she was shot. The rifle looked quite ancient, covered in dirt and dust, with cracks running along the wooden stock and barrel, but mounted on the stand it appeared quite deadly.

  “Dear god this is going to be a scandal,” Breckinridge said, shaking his head. “A dead woman and room full of weapons? I want this case sorted out and cleared quickly and quietly,” the Chief was saying. “Who are the chief suspects?”

  “Sir, we don’t have any suspects yet. I’ve only just arrived on the scene. I don’t know anything about this woman and probably won’t until I’ve spoken to her family and learned who might want to do her harm. I’d say that this was obviously a premeditated murder. Someone must have stood behind this wooden separator and waited with the rifle for the victim to enter, then fired. I think they must have forced this door as well - it’s open, but it’s still locked. This lock looks rusted through. I doubt it could be unlocked even with the key.”

  “It sounds like you have a lot of unanswered questions in your investigation, Alders,” the Chief said gruffly. “You’d better start answering them.”

  “Yes sir.” Alders paused. He couldn’t see how he could possibly be held responsible for not having solved the crime, having only been at the crime scene for less than an hour, and was weighing his next words carefully. “If it’s just me investigating, this could take some time. I actually could use more manpower on this case-”

  “Well, you won’t get any. Between security for the Governor’s Convention and the other open cases we’re trying to clear, there’s no one to spare. Besides, I want to draw as little attention to this as possible. I don’t want any media buzzing around here. So yes, Alders, it’s just you. And you’d better damn well solve this case.”

  This was so unreasonable that Alders was about to protest but thought the better of it at the last moment. He coughed. “Yes, sir. However, I will have some trouble taking statements from all the people who were in the area around noon if it’s just me working on this investigation.”

  The Chief snorted. “Witnesses? That raises another question. This stairwell leads straight up, doesn’t it?” he said, gesturing to the stairs he’d entered by. “Sound ought to carry. A shot, particularly one from a large rifle like that one, should have been easy to hear from where the crowd was. Why didn’t anyone report hearing the gunshot?”

  “I- I don’t know, sir,” muttered Alders.

  The Chief looked as if he was about to respond when another voice cut through the still air of the bunker.

  “So glad to hear that the GRPD has sent its best and brightest to conduct this investigation.” There was the sound of light footfalls as a man descended the concrete stairs and came into view. He was a lithe, tall man with dark hair intermingled with streaks of gray, wearing a large baggy coat that hung off at odd angles. It was the same man who had stood for hours on end at the construction si
te. The Chief’s eyes widened in surprise as he looked up and saw the man, while Alders merely frowned at him.

  “For your information,” the stranger continued, “no one reported the gunshot because no one heard the gunshot - except, of course, for me. The shot was fired as the explosives above were being detonated and was masked by the sound of the demolition. Therefore, no one, not the crowd - nor yourself, Chief Breckinridge, standing up above, noticed it, because it merely mixed in with the ambient noise and sounded like another explosion. I, however, have slightly more discriminating ears.” The stranger smiled. His face was quite pale, almost ghostly. Chief Breckinridge’s face, on the other hand, was red.

  “Who the devil are you?” Alders asked, his frown deepening.

  “Felix Green, Private Investigator,” he answered with a curt nod to Alders.

  “He’s a hack who’s running around calling himself a detective,” Breckinridge said between clenched teeth. “And you, Felix, will get the hell out of this crime scene before I have you arrested!”

  “You won’t have me arrested,” Felix answered calmly. “Because if you do, I’ll talk to the media, who I’m sure will be very interested to know how you - the Chief of Police - failed to notice a murder beneath your own feet. And you will forgive me for saying so, but I’m somewhat ahead of you. This murder has every appearance of premeditation, as it required the killer to secret himself - or herself - behind that wooden barricade and wait for the victim. What’s more, it required very exact timing. The shot had to be fired precisely as the explosion was going off. Now, Adriana Kettering met with six friends today - her brother, Jack Kettering, Mr. William Hamilton and Mrs. Reva Hamilton, Davey Kempt, Vicky Melbrush, and Staff Sergeant Peter Ulverson, US Army. She mentioned to them that she was thinking about visiting this bunker, where they apparently used to play as children. I assume she was unaware of the weapons stored on the other side of this wall,” he said, gesturing to the wooden divider and the old iron door. “I find it reasonable to assume that the murderer must, therefore, be one of these six people.”

  Alders was rapidly writing down the names that Felix had ticked off.

  “How do you know all this?” Alders asked suddenly.

  “I believe I mentioned I have a very discriminating ear,” Felix replied smoothly. “I happened to be standing nearby as they discussed the matter and I listened in. Nothing malicious, I assure you. It was a simple matter to discover the identities of the speakers. There was an old list of residents of these buildings that the media was examining and I simply looked through them.”

  “But how could the murderer have been sure that she was in the bunker at the right time?” Alders asked. “Unless it was simply coincidence that -”

  “-Do not discuss the case with this man,” Chief Breckinridge broke in suddenly.

  “And why not?” Felix asked. “I won’t charge a fee.”

  “Of course you won’t,” Breckinridge said between gritted teeth. “Alders? A word?”

  The Chief drew the detective aside and began to speak to him. “Listen, Alders. Felix getting a hold of this case could be even more disastrous than the media.”

  “Why?” the detective asked with surprise. “He seems as if he has a reasonably good handle on what’s happening, and at the very least I have to interview him as a witness.”

  “A reasonably good handle? Oh yes, he always has a good handle on things. He’s nearly a perfect investigator. Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

  “No,” Alders replied slowly. Breckinridge took a deep breath. He appeared to be starting on an unusually personal rant.

  “I’ve encountered people who have used him as a private investigator. They always say the same thing. Oh, Felix Green. He was very clever. Polite. Discrete. Intelligent. Solved the case, found my missing cat or what have you. Fee very reasonable. Nice man.”

  “Then what’s the problem with him?”

  “He steals things!” hissed Breckinridge. “Not just evidence from crime scenes. Valuables, trinkets, anything! He’s a kleptomaniac. I know he is. We’ve just never been able to catch him at it - or rather, we have, but he always wriggles his way out somehow. He gets near this case and all those weapons we saw hanging on the wall will be gone by the end of the day, and then I’ll have to answer questions about what happened to a dozen rusty assault rifles.”

  There was a certain manic glint in Breckinridge’s eye as he said this, and Alders was quite sure there was more to the story than this, but he did not inquire further. Instead, he walked back to the center of the room, the Chief fuming in the tow.

  “Are you done speaking your biased and unfounded slanders against my good name?” Felix asked with mock courtesy.

  “Good name my foot,” spat Breckinridge. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “Suit yourself,” Felix said with a shrug. He turned to go. “But you know, if the media does find out about this, they’d probably start asking even more inconvenient questions for you, Chief. For example, why you only assigned one officer to a murder investigation, for a start...”

  Breckinridge stared daggers at the back of Felix’s head.

  “Are you threatening me?” the Chief grunted. “Because, Green, I can have you locked up in a heartbeat.”

  “I’m not threatening you,” Felix answered cooly. “I’m just trying to show you that you can serve both the cause of justice and public opinion at the same time. I understand you’ve been campaigning to have these old projects apartments knocked over for a long time. GRPD claims that they’re the center of much of the city’s criminal activity and it would be a rather large embarrassment for you and the department if the media discovered there had been a murder on the site, right under your nose, with the towers scarcely demolished. But if they did find out, you wouldn’t want the story to be that you assigned only one officer to the murder, would you? Surely at least two officers is typical for a murder. You can appreciate how that might look... suspicious, from the media perspective?”

  Alders stared, astonished at Felix. He had never heard anyone talk to the Chief of Police in this way, and when he turned to stare a Breckinridge, Alders saw the police chief’s face had gone from brick red to deep blue, his important-looking mustache quivering with emotion. The Chief’s features rearranged themselves as the gears turned in his head.

  “Fine, Felix. In light of how thinly stretched our force is at the moment, I’ll contract you to work with Alders for this investigation. But if there’s one object missing from this crime scene, I’ll have you locked up and the key burnt to ashes. Understand?”

  Felix nodded.

  “Keep an eye on him Alders. He’s a slippery character.” And with that, Breckinridge stormed out of the little bunker.

  Felix watched him go with a sigh, then turned back to Alders.

  “I suppose we’ll be working together,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Alders shook it.

  “So I see your name is Sam Alders,” Felix continued calmly. Alders blinked. Felix had somehow gotten a hold of his wallet. “Detective, GRPD. You seem to have ascended the ranks rather quickly. Is this your wife? Very pretty.”

  “How did you get my wallet?” Alders demanded.

  “You dropped it,” said Felix calmly.

  “I did not drop my wallet,” Alders replied angrily “When did you pick my pocket?”

  “Pick your pocket? I’d never dream of doing such a thing. Here are your keys back, by the way,” Felix said, offering him a small key ring while continuing to leaf through the wallet. “AARP membership? You’re a bit young for that, aren’t you? I thought you had to be fifty.”

  Alders snatched his wallet out of Felix’s hands and began to quickly count the money inside. Only when he was satisfied that nothing, credit cards, cash, or otherwise was missing from the wallet did he look up to discover that Felix had disappeared.

  “This is curious,” said Felix’s cool, low voice. It was coming from the other side of the divide. Alders, mind
ful of what the Chief had said about Felix possibly burgling the armory, quickly sped around the side of the divider to find Felix inspecting the murder weapon with interest.

  “Don’t touch that,” Alders said a bit more imperiously than he’d intended. “It might have forensic evidence-”

  “Perhaps,” Felix agreed. “And you might even eventually get it analyzed, but with the backlog in the city forensics lab, I doubt it will be any time soon.”

  Even so, Felix did not touch the weapon. He bent over it and inspected it carefully.

  “Would you much mind moving?” Felix asked Alders. “You’re blocking my light.”

  Alders shifted a little and Felix squatted down, looking closely at the weapon. It was a long, ancient-looking rifle, propped up on and securely fastened to two wooden stands with a curve to them.

  “These stands look as if they were already here, judging from the dirt and dust,” Felix commented. “The murderer did not bring these with him.”

  “How do I know you’re not the murderer?” Alders demanded. “You seem to know an awful lot about this.”

  “What I know, I am deducing,” Felix replied calmly. “I can prove I’m not the murderer. If you find the TV crew that was filming here this morning and afternoon and acquire the video they took, you’ll discover I was in picture the whole time, and since you’ll also be able to verify that I was in-picture at the time of the gunshot when you replay the video, I think you’ll find my position quite unimpeachable. Besides, whatever your Chief thinks of me, he doesn’t seem to imagine me capable of murder. The thought didn’t even cross his mind.”

  Alders gave an unconvinced snort, but Felix seemed to be largely ignoring him, inspecting the murder weapon from various angles.

  “Why didn’t you call the police when you heard the gunshot?”

  “It was rather noisy. I could have misheard. Besides, I couldn’t place the gunshot, and as your Chief’s reactions probably told you, I’m not exactly in good standing with the GRPD.”