Fear and Trembling

by Robert Bloch

  “True. But in spite of what you may think, police work isn’t a science either. It too is an art. And part of that art consists of waiting.”

  “For what—inspiration?”

  “Information.” I leaned forward over the desk. “Give your people everything you can on the vans still unaccounted for and tell them to be patient. And if we’re lucky—”

  “We’d better be,” Shires said.

  And we were.

  Two nights later, just as I was leaving the office, Shires came racing in.

  “We got him!”

  “Vestro?”

  He nodded, grabbing my arm. “Come on, I want you to see this. Romberg’s waiting for us downstairs in the car.”

  Shires hustled me out front and into the back seat of a departmental limo, wedged between Romberg and himself. As we took off, his voice rose over the siren’s wail.

  “Two squad men in a black-and-white spotted a guy answering to Vestro’s description coming out of a fast-food place over on South Sixteenth, just as he was climbing into a van in the parking lot. They had a make on it too—a brown ’80, reported missing early in July.

  “When they hailed him he panicked—pulled a pistol and opened fire. First shot went through the windshield, damned near hit the driver. His partner got a bead on Vestro before he could shoot again. Blew off the top of his head.”

  “Any chance he’s still alive?” I said.

  “Not with his brains scattered all over the pavement. You’ll see—”

  “I don’t want to see,” I told him. “That’s why I stick to my office. I have a thing about violence.”

  “You were in at the beginning,” Shires said. “I figure we owe you a chance to be in on the end.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” I murmured. “Tell the driver to let me out at the corner. I’ll read about it in the papers.”

  “Too late,” Shires said. “We’re here.”

  We weren’t the only ones. Half a dozen police cars were already on the scene, along with a paramedic ambulance. Crowds had been roped-off but nothing stilled their excited outburst. In the lights flashing over the parking-lot I noted two live-remote TV camera crews swarming around their vans.

  Vans. I shrugged, then surrendered to Shires and Romberg as they pressed me forwards towards the other van and what lay before it.

  Joseph Vestro was dead, no doubt about it. Enough of his brains had spilled out to fill a teacup. But nobody had a teacup and I closed my eyes quickly to avoid a second look.

  It was all I could do to control my stomach, let alone my voice. “Did you have to show me this?” I said.

  “There’s something else you ought to see,” Shires answered. “Over here.”

  He led me to the rear of the brown van. The back was closed but Shires opened it—not all the way, just enough for me to get a quick look at what was inside; enough to realize Joseph Vestro hadn’t been traveling alone.

  There was a figure sitting on the jump-seat, facing out and staring at me. Staring out of dead, bulging eyes set in a dead woman’s rotting head, sewed with catgut to the decaying flesh of a nude male torso. Sutured to the shoulders on either side were the putrescent portions of amputated arms; dangling from them, the almost unrecognizable remnants of unmatched hands. Below the naked waist was a joined jigsaw of pelvis and lower limbs, stitched together to complete a human body—a body composed of the fragments of twelve separate corpses.

  I’d put the pieces together, all right, but so had Vestro.

  Still, it wasn’t the sight of the fearsome form or even its hideous stench that most appalled me. The worst was the final fleeting glimpse of the cardboard placard wired to the butchered chest—a placard crudely lettered in red crayon to spell out the name of Judge Amos B. Kelly.

  The door closed swiftly and mercifully, just as I turned away and threw up on the pavement.

  And that’s how criminal cases often end in real life: not with rejoicing but with regurgitation.

  Or almost end.

  I still had to listen to Shires’ praise as he led me back to the waiting limo. “You were right all along,” he said. “About the loony, about the motive being more important than the method, about the jury and the van and revenge—”

  “Like hell he was,” Romberg muttered. “We’d have got the guy anyway, sooner or later. You ask me, this art of criminology is just like astrology—nothing but a bunch of lucky guesses.”

  I didn’t pay any attention to him, because I knew Romberg couldn’t help being stubborn.

  That’s what you’ve got to expect when you’re dealing with a Taurus.