Corpus Vile: Death in the City, Chapter 1: The Red Judge

by Jim Beard

  ***

  The blazing morning sun forced his eyes closed; great globes of light danced on the inside of his eyelids as he shook off the effect. Couldn’t the man have a little compassion for others around him?

  Beyond that, he couldn’t quite get the sour smell of the body down at the river out of his notice. To his annoyance, it seemed like the odor had followed him to his present location.

  Henry Wildenburg sank a bit deeper into the chair he occupied in the Mayor’s office and held his hand up to shade his eyes. The great figure before him, almost as wide as it was tall, standing in front of the open window facing away from him and holding back the curtains on both sides, grunted.

  “That was for me. For my sake.”

  The D.A.’s immediate thought was to how the man could stand the sunlight, but, for the hundredth time, reminded himself of the situation.

  “Not necessarily, Pat…” he began, shifting himself around in the chair, wondering if he could get a drink that early in the day.

  “Bull,” came the rock hard reply. “Eyes gone completely? Not eaten by fish or gouged out by trash?”

  “Well…yes.”

  “Wearing a tuxedo?”

  “Pat, yes, but—”

  The Mayor turned around to face Wildenburg, his features like chiseled, living stone.

  “Then that was for me.”

  The District Attorney sighed and decided to not argue. He’d learned a lot since the turn of the year and his settling into the job, but perhaps the most important lesson of all was that Pat Battle was rarely someone you argued with.

  The Mayor, a big man of muscle and bone, stepped over to his immense oak desk and took his seat behind it. He fixed the orientation of his face in Wildenburg’s direction – not general direction, mind you, but upon the exact spot that the man was sitting across from him.

  If the D.A. didn’t know better, he’d swear the man could see. But, contrary to that, Mayor Patrick J. Battle was quite blind.

  “Listen, Pat,” said Wildenburg, flopping one hand about in front of him with a weak gesture of dismissal, “someone finds a body in the river, it’s fished out, has no eyes, you think its some kind of message to you. Well, I’ve been around a bit and—”

  Battle leaned forward in his chair, barely an inch, but the effect was monumental. When his attention was on you, you ducked or held fast for the barrage.

  “Mr. District Attorney, you may have ‘been around a bit,’ but you don’t know this city.”

  “Now, see here; I’m getting a bit tired of people telling me—”

  “And furthermore, you were around in November and you did witness, as did we all, the events that scarred this city deeper than any other event I’ve ever known here. I know what I’m talking about. That body was meant for me, to be brought to my attention.”

  Wildenburg remained silent for a heartbeat, then two, then three.

  “And you think…that it has some connection to…?”

  “Yes,” said Battle simply.

  The D.A. got up out of his chair and took a few steps toward the door to the office. The Mayor’s face tracked him unerringly.

  “Don’t say another word, Wildenburg; just listen to me. It’s April, winter’s over, the sun’s out again. The city’s taken a hell of a beating, and on my watch. And you think its all in the past.”

  Wildenburg suppressed a chuckle that started to well up from the deeper depths of his sense of sarcasm; the Mayor was known as “the Blind Eye” to much of the populace. His reputation for watching over the city despite his blindness was both legendary and a source for amusement in some quieter quarters of the great metropolis.

  “We lost a lot of good people in November,” Battle continued. “Cops, citizens – all of them irreplaceable. Christmas was pretty somber in my house, and in quite a few others, I’m sure, but now that spring is here and everyone’s starting to talk about the Festival…we need to insure that the nightmare’s really, truly over, not about to begin again. You see?”

  “What do you want me to do about it, Pat? I can’t catch criminals, just prosecute them.”

  Something came over the Mayor’s face that smacked of great disappointment; Wildenburg blanched at it, wiped at his mouth unconsciously.

  “Be vigilant,” Battle said, his blank eyes unblinking. “Be ready.”

  “I’ll do my job, Mr. Mayor,” replied the D.A., heading out the door. Behind him, he thought he heard Battle mutter to himself, something to the effect of “A good man once held that job.”

  The D.A. closed the door behind him and opened the other one at the end of the short passage that led to the outer office of the Mayor’s rooms at City Hall. A man on the other side of that door stumbled backwards, his eyes widening at Wildenburg’s appearance.

  “Totty, goddammit, what are you doing? Listening at keyholes?”

  Lynwood Totty, Jr., Assistant to the District Attorney, wiped at his forehead with a handkerchief and across his blubbery lips.

  “No, of course not, Mr. Wildenburg,” he insisted, his feminine voice rising several octaves in feigned injury. “I was—”

  “Never kid a kidder,” cut in the D.A., grabbing his hat and coat from where he’d tossed them on a nearby desk. “You heard the man; let’s go.”

  “Go?” Totty asked, confused. “Go where?”

  His boss wheeled around on him, his face laced with signs of anger.

  “To be vigilant! To be ready! Now, shut up and let’s go…”

  “Yes, sir,” said Totty, waddling after the D.A., but stealing a glance back at the Mayor’s large oaken door before they departed the area.