The Awful Truth About the Herbert Quarry Affair

by Marco Ocram

  “Not necessarily, Detective. Sometimes life’s not so simple.” I added the stock phrase to give myself time to think of a reason why I wouldn’t know about Herbert’s love life. Not enough time, as it happened.

  “Where were you three days ago?”

  I worked the dates in my head. “New York, why?”

  “Anybody see you there?”

  “Millions, probably.”

  “Huh?”

  “I was on the Noosha Winfrey show. Talking about my book.”

  I meant my other book—the one about tau muons—not this one.

  “Let me tell you why we’re holding Quarry.” Lieutenant Galahad scanned my face for reactions. “Three days ago, we get a call saying Herbert Quarry’s up to no good at his house. We get here, and guess what.”

  I couldn’t guess, so he told me.

  “We find your best friend Herbert kneeling on the floor of his living room in a pool of blood. Lola Kellogg’s body was in pieces around him. He didn’t even register we were there. He was staring ahead and sliding his fingertips through the girls blood.”

  I was horrified by his revelation.

  “Girl’s, Lieutenant, girl’s.” What were they teaching in police college nowadays?

  “You can spell it any way you like, Writer, but the fact is your best friend is facing the chair. He’s killed a fifteen-year-old girl, and all the evidence says he was sleeping with her too.”

  I flopped back in Herbert’s chair, swiveling it as an aid to thought, my eyes swiveling too as I tried to absorb what I’d just typed. Herbert, a murderer! There was no way I could believe it. There and then I formed an unshakeable conviction that Herbert had been framed.

  The odd thing was, when I shared my conclusion with Lieutenant Galahad, he didn’t laugh derisively, call me a dumbass, and generally pooh-pooh the suggestion. Instead, he looked straight at me, one eyebrow raised.

  “What?” I said.

  He paused a moment, giving me a chance to catch up with my typing.

  “Let me level with you, Writer.”

  “Sure, Lieutenant.”

  “But this stays between you and me. Understand?” He prodded the air with a forefinger the size of a… of a huge forefinger.

  I nodded.

  “And if it doesn’t stay between you and me, I’ll have you slammed up with some real mean pieces of shit as Herbert Quarry’s accomplice. Get me?”

  It seemed an ungracious way to treat the writer who had gone to so much trouble to invent him, but I nodded, hoping he would get to the point.

  “Everything points to Quarry having done this. And I mean everything,” he said. “There’s almost too much evidence.”

  “That can happen sometimes, can’t it?” Especially when the writer makes it up as he goes along.

  “Maybe.” He looked around, checking we were alone. “But there are things I’ve seen at HQ.”

  “What sort of things?”

  He shook his head. “Best if you don’t know. But enough to make me wonder whether this whole thing’s a setup.”

  My chair-swiveling paid off as I thought of a question I should have asked earlier.

  “What did Herbert say when you arrested him?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “But…I thought…but…” I redoubled my swiveling in the hope I might make sense of the Lieutenant’s bewildering admission.

  “Let me explain something,” he said, much to my relief. “Clarkesville County has a small police department with a small budget. Three days ago, for the first time in more than five years, Chief McGee decided to send someone on a training course. It was me. I’m the lead homicide detective. On the day Quarry’s arrested, I was out of town.”

  LESSON FOUR

  ‘Herbert, does a writer need to experience love in order to write a truly great book?’

  ‘No, Marco. A truly great writer can find inspiration in other emotions: greed, envy, pride, hatred, self-satisfaction, narcissism, rage, insecurity, overconfidence, a misplaced belief in one’s ability, the desire to impress, repressed sexual perversions, resentment, fear of being outdone by contemporaries, escapist delusions, unconscious misogyny or misandry, nauseating complacency. You just need to let these emotions out, Marco.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In which Marco is put on the spot.

  “Forensic taxidermy?”

  I’d asked Lieutenant Galahad what the subject of the training had been, thinking he might have read too much into Chief McGee’s decision to send him on a course—perhaps McGee considered the training essential for the performance of homicide duties.

  “Does that sound essential to you, Writer? It was the only course with places free. In fact, all its places were free. I spent a day by myself with the taxidermy teacher while Clarkesville’s biggest murder was going on.”

  Lieutenant Galahad kneaded his fist into his palm as if he needed to work off his frustration. I wondered if the readers would appreciate my wordplay on kneaded and needed, or whether I’d wasted the five seconds it had taken me to craft the sentence.

  “I have a suggestion, Lieutenant.”

  “A good one, or a next-thing-that-comes-into-your-head one?”

  “I think you will find it an excellent one. Why don’t you confront the rascal McGee, forcing him to reveal the truth with rapier-like questioning?”

  His fist kneading became more frenetic.

  “That’s an excellent suggestion? Writer, that’s such a dumbass suggestion, I ain’t gonna waste a breath explaining why.”

  I tipped back Herbert’s chair to give myself something to write about other than swiveling it, while I waited for the next thing to come into my head. I could see Galahad’s point. Confronting his Chief without evidence might not be a skyward career move. I, however, was not dependent on the goodwill of the police chief.

  “What if I confront the rascal McGee?”

  “What with? You gonna ask him why he sent me on a dumbass course the day the murder happens? I wonder how many milliseconds he’s gonna take to figure out you got that from me.”

  I was beginning to wonder whether Herbert’s advice about writing the first thing that comes into your head was more suited to literary fiction. In crime novels, you seemed to need a logic for everything. No wonder Como was kneading his fists—it was driving me nuts too.

  I sprang from Herbert’s chair. For the first time in four chapters I had an idea that made sense.

  “Okay, then let’s work together to find evidence. You can’t go around making enquiries about whether this is all a setup, or you’ll be shunned, spurned, snubbed, and ostracized by your police fraternity. But I can. I’m Herbert’s protégé and friend. I’ve every right to ask the awkward questions no one else is prepared to ask.”

  A hot rush of moral righteousness inflamed my mind as I thought of Marco Ocram, the defender of Truth, single-handedly smiting her foes. Well, perhaps not single-handedly, as technically there would be four hands if I was working with Como Galahad—and since his were twice the usual size, I suppose an argument could be made for there being the equivalent of six standard hands, so I would be six-handedly smiting the foes of Truth. Anyway, don’t get me bogged down in an irrelevant hand count. Where was I? Oh yes…

  “That’s nearly a good idea, Writer. But you got it the wrong way around. The moment Chief McGee finds you’re investigating him, he’s gonna have you banged up for something. Better if you seem to be writing a book to show what a great job McGee’s doing. You said yourself, you were Quarry’s big pal. Tell McGee you feel cheated by him. Say you wanna nail Quarry for being a sick bastard. You’re gonna let the world know the truth about what he’s done. McGee’ll swallow a story like that.”

  The hot rush of moral righteousness abated a tad as I thought of how disloyal I would be to Herbert if I followed the Lieutenant’s advice. How could I pretend Herbert was a sick bastard when he was my closest friend? How could I…

>   Thankfully Como’s phone beeped, sparing the readers several boring sentences about my moral dilemma. He took the call with his back to me. I heard the usual meaningless interjections someone uses to move along a one-sided conversation, after which he said:

  “I’m at Quarry’s place. I need to call in at HQ, but I’ll call round after that.” He stuffed his phone in a pocket. “We’re leaving. Come on.”

  “Great. Does that mean you need me to help?”

  “No, it means there’s no way I’m leaving you here to fuck up the evidence.”

  We took our own cars. I followed Como, my mind half on the job of keeping up with him—he drove like a maniac—and half contemplating the fact that I had started to think of him as Como rather than Lieutenant Galahad.

  At Police HQ, Como stuck a beefy arm out of his window to point me at one of the bays marked Police Vehicles Only. I wasn’t sure I should be parking there, but I did as he said, or, rather, pointed. He continued the pointing theme by tapping the dial of his watch as a gesture of impatience while I searched through the pockets of my clothes and my satchel for my key to lock the car.

  “Sorry. Where are we going?” I jogged to keep up with his long strides as we crossed the car park.

  “You’ll see.”

  I followed him through an open office where people were performing the entire spectrum of activities shown in TV police procedurals: drinking coffee, making coffee, spilling coffee, making telephone calls with feet up on desk, making them with feet off desk, swiveling in chairs, shouting Hey, Miko, throwing pens and other items to denote a range of negative emotions, suffering the whoops and catcalls of a line of prostitutes awaiting interview, rewinding CCTV images, failing by one second to complete the trace of a telephone call, opening filing cabinets, punching a colleague, surrendering both badge and gun to begin a period of unjustly imposed suspension, comparing striations on closeup photographs of bullets, tampering with evidence, printing and photographing suspects, supervising lineups, revoking minor penalties in return for bribes, conducting case-conferences, sticking photographs to walls and drawing arrows between them, and countless other clichés I didn’t have time to type.

  We stopped at a pair of half-glazed doors, one of which bore the nameplate for Chief McGee.

  “We need to give McGee the story,” said Como. “That way, I’ve got a reason for letting you poke around in the case.”

  In a panic, I grabbed his arm.

  “Christ, Como, you can’t drop me in it like this—I don’t know what to say.”

  “You need to have another look at your special picture of Herbert Quarry, Writer.”

  He knocked, pushed open the door, and pushed me into the room.

  Como’s hijack of the scene gave me no time to think. I did a natural Jackson Pollock and wrote the first thing that came into my head.

  A heavyset man in a police chief uniform was standing near a window, a phone to his ear. He waved us toward his conference table and turned away to finish his call in confidential tones. After locking the phone in a drawer, he wandered over to join us.

  “Who’s your friend, Galahad?”

  “This is Marco Ocram, Chief—the scientist guy off TV.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mister Ocram.”

  He squeezed my hand so tightly I hopped on tiptoe with the pain.

  “Likewise,” I squeaked.

  “Mister Ocram thinks it’s time someone wrote a book about what a sick pedo Quarry’s been, and what a great job the PD’s done taking him off the street.”

  Como nudged my thigh with his knee to pass me the baton of the dialogue.

  “Absolutely, er, Chief. This needs to be a lesson for all the other, er, sick pedos. Let them know Clarkesville PD is on their case.”

  “Great. About time we got a little credit instead of all the shit the papers say.”

  Chief McGee gave my shoulder a slap of appreciation, almost knocking me over.

  “Mister Ocram’s asked if I can show him around,” said Como, “tell him about proper police procedure and stuff.”

  I didn’t wait for another painful knee-nudge.

  “Absolutely. Authenticity’s my watchword. We can’t have the readers thinking we’re making things up as we go along, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”

  “He says he’ll need some quotes and pictures of you for the publicity.”

  Chief McGee straightened his tie and put on his best police chief face.

  “No problem, Mister Ocram. You let me know whatever you need. Galahad here will tell you, my door is always open.”

  “Thanks, Chief. Let’s go.”

  Como ushered me out before I could say anything else off the top of my head. We went back to the car park.

  “You did real good, Writer. I almost believed you myself. Notice anything about his office?”

  “The new blinds?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What about them?”

  “He got’em three months ago—two days after he’d had a particular visitor in his office.”

  “Who?” I gulped the bait.

  Como checked no one was close by.

  “Lola Kellogg.”

  LESSON FIVE

  ‘Are there techniques, Herbert, that writers use to keep readers in suspense?’

  ‘Indeed, Marco, there are many. A sudden change in location, perhaps. Finishing a chapter prematurely to underline the significance of a revelation. But they are the cheap tricks of the hack. No serious writer would adopt them.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In which Marco unexpectedly changes location and finishes a chapter prematurely to underline the significance of a revelation.

  Astonished by his news, I followed Como in a trance all the way to 276 West 24th Street where a sign said Clarkesville County Pathology Center.

  Como led me into reception where we completed the tedious formalities to record the start of our visit. I followed him through a warren of corridors to a laboratory in which I, as a scientist, felt at home after the alien surroundings of police HQ. My expert eye roved over the room, clocking various types of scientific equipment far too specialized for me to describe without holding us all up. We passed between the benches to where someone was attacking a side of pork with a harpoon. Hearing our steps, she turned to face us. Before I had a chance to pad out a few lines by describing her appearance, bearing, and manner of dress, Como introduced her.

  “This is Doctor Flora Moran—Chief Forensic Scientist. She’s a specialist in knife crime.” Como pronounced her name with an emphasis on the last syllable as if to avoid it sounding like Flora Moron. “This is Marco Ocram.”

  I held out a hand.

  “The Marco Ocram?”

  I gave a modest nod to show the beautiful pathologist I was indeed the Marco Ocram, the scientist and TV personality renowned for his bold theories about the tau muon. We exchanged various pleasantries too humdrum to document, the gist of which being that Flora Moran was thrilled and delighted to find me there. Como cut it short by asking Flora to summarize her provisional findings.

  “The body is female, mid-teens. The blood group, DNA, appearance, hair color, eye color, dental configuration, and other distinguishing features match those of Lola Kellogg, who disappeared on the day the corpse was discovered. The rare Japanese cooking knife with which the corpse was dismembered matches a set of rare Japanese cooking knives in Herbert Quarry's kitchen. Herbert Quarry's DNA and fingerprints are all over the corpse. There are distinctive handprints on the sections of corpse showing where the body had been held steady as it was cut up, and the prints match those of Herbert Quarry.”

  I digested the implications of Flora’s words—whoever framed Herbert knew what they were doing. I asked if I could inspect the corpse.

  “Of course. The body is in the top drawer of the freezer,” she said. “The head, arms, and legs are in the next drawer down.”

  I almost fainted at my first peek insi
de the drawer. I’d invented poor Lola’s sensational death without a thought; now, confronted with its hideous reality, I was overcome by regret—not to mention squeamishness and the need to find a toilet. My blood seemed to have run off for a long weekend with my feet. Bucking the downward trend, my stomach was trying to climb out of my mouth. I cast desperate eyes around the lab for a chaise longue upon which I might swoon, and a brandy decanter to supply an antidote.

  “You okay, Writer? You’re looking a bit grey.”

  “I’m fine, thank you, Como, just a little tired after all the excitement.”

  I pulled myself almost together. If I was going to make a career of writing dramatic true-crime novels, I would need to master my weaknesses. Imagining myself a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, icily detached and objective, I removed the contents of the drawers and laid them upon a table.

  I inspected the various parts with a scientist’s eye and my rusty magnifying glass—sorry, my trusty magnifying glass—taking care not to contaminate the evidence with ash from my pipe. Nothing escaped my gaze. I deduced that Lola had received a pedicure and manicure shortly before she died—there had been little nail growth since the distinctive opalescent varnish had been applied. I also noticed she had no unusual birthmark on her right heel. Yes, that’s right—I said no birthmark. I even checked it twice to be sure, just in case it became important later in the book.

  Removing my heavy plaid Ulster, I donned surgical gloves to examine the poor victim’s head. Dr. Moran was an expert in knife crime, so it was possible her professional bias might cause her to overlook other important signs. Yes, it was just as I expected: there was a slight softness to the right of the sigmoid talmata, a little-known area of the skull found only in the most advanced anatomical textbooks.

  Having found nothing else of note, I curtailed my examination before the readers had time to realize a frozen head would have no soft spots. I pulled off the gloves and dropped them in a bin, signifying that we had just disposed of several paragraphs of trashy prose.