Detective D. Case (7 page)

“It’s not the chief,
goddam. . .” The bloody officer’s voice faded as he continued. “I don’t take
orders from him. He told me you would know him more than I ever would. See,
rumors spread around here and . . . and . . .” He swallowed thick blood. “A
ghost . . .”

Just the sound of
the word brought unwanted presence. “Spirits don’t exist.”

“You think they
don’t exist, but they’re here. And no, it’s not the babbling floating
see-through bullshit.” He lowered his voice, so low D. had to lean in close to
hear it. “He’s haunting the place.”

“The police
department?” he asked.

“Not just that,”
said the bloody officer. “He wants the government, too. He used to work here,
and he was one of us until . . .” The bloody officer went to his feet and ran
off.

“Go then!” D. cried.
“See what’ll happen to you when the chief gets here!”

Whatever he said,
the bloodied officer didn’t say anything about it. Later on there would be a
special on a news program somewhere at 6 or 8 in the evening, and there would
be a mystifying report on the murder of Officer Princeton Sun. Pictures of him
would be shown, the most iconic one to date being the shot where his screaming
face covering half the photograph, everywhere else there were holes scattering
all over his chest, blood oozing out of his eyes. Stumps were left where his
arms should have been.

D. searched the
station. Nobody else seemed to be there, so he did a quick look to see if maybe
Advert was captured and hidden somewhere. He searched through every room,
looking for the chief. He wasn’t found. Jokingly D. thought about going through
the lost and found box to see if anyone dropped him there. D. even went to the
records of jailed people, where he witnessed something he probably shouldn’t
have.

All the files were
marked with red tabs, which probably meant the dangerous one possibly. For a
police department station, it sure wasn’t organized like one, with all the
regular things D. saw in departments from the upper part of the city. Maybe things
were different, like the lack of lights on the ceiling. It gave a dingy look to
the place, like a long lost attic.

One of the files he
went through was so dirty you needed to wash your hands clean before going back
out, either that or use latex gloves. He flipped through them all, wishing he
would find something that might add to the case he was working on. Three
profiles seemed to fit with the disappearance of McDermott: a man named West
Lake, another by the name of Apollo Stone, and Douglas Teague, a teenager
locked away in a prison, it said, far away from the mainland. Alcatraz shut
down many years ago, he heard, so he ruled that one out. San Francisco seemed
too far away to travel there, if it still existed. All or none of these people
could relate to the McDermott case, but at least it was something. Maybe they
were marked with red so that Chief Advert could look at them later, possibly searching
for info he would never tell the old detective.

D. shut the file cabinet. Stomping sounds came from upstairs.
There were some other people still here . . . the sound receded for a moment or
two, but then returned.

His eyes were filled
with too much white and too little pupil. The old detective ran, not caring if
some papers flew or if he crashed into a trolley cart of books. His mind and
eyes were the crosshairs, fixated at the door, seeing nothing else. Before the
footsteps reached the floor he was on, D. had already left the records room and
was in the hallway. He made a quick hunt through the locker room for a second
time. The place had been emptied before he had gotten to it in the second run,
and all the lockers were ajar like a human jaw pin unhinged. They were painted
in multiple colors and showed possible, more-than-likely vandalism. At the end
of the hall was no web of madness that D. had found in the visit here earlier.
Merely a blank wall with everything taken down as if somebody didn’t want
anybody noticing that it had been there before.

D. arrived, not exactly in a loop, at the chief’s office.
He needed as much information as he could find so it’d be better to look
through Chief Advert’s things in case the man was hiding something vital to the
problem--you know, things that might be important but put away for foolish
human reasons. But when D. went through all the drawers, filing cabinets,
hidden cases, briefcases, boxes, and other receptacles Advert could possibly have
used for storing information – including his desktop computer and laptop – a
few crumpled up notes ready to dispense into the wastebasket was all he found.
They were about him, outlining possibilities on how to treat the conversations
he already had with him and ones the chief would use in the future. Placed in
the center was a reminder to look underneath the desk, and open the latch. And
so the old detective did as the chief told.

Underneath the
chief’s desk, after opening it of course, were tons of photos and newspaper
clippings. He could suspect the chief of trying to solve the case for himself
(taking all the credit) but then an article floated like a fallen leaf, landing
on his face. Snatching it, D. read:
DO OLD PEOPLE LOOK LIKE
CHILDREN WITH WRINKLES? A web of schizophrenia was sent from the dwellings of
the unknown. Chief Advert must have found it while going through the locker
room, and then took it down for investigation. And to think he didn’t say any
of this to him!

Some photos were the
ones that D. had found in the penthouse when searching right before the
bathroom deteriorated. What was it doing here? The photographs seemed to make
less sense when you got a good look at them. Again it reminded him of the
photos that came from McDermott, some of them taken from the very bathroom they
were in. He was thinking about how this might all be connected in one web of
madness when he read the note in the center that read: PLEASE READ THIS.

So D. read the tale and followed a different trail to
where the chief would go to next. Seemingly, a story branched out from the
opening (the one he already read) that told of the chief who struggled with his
failing marriage. There was a case involving a mad policeman, but he decided to
trace his finger elsewhere. He went to the part where it was said that the
police chief had hired an investigator (hopefully not him) in partnership so he
could finish the case and probably fix things up with his family. This was not
so when fire struck a building, hundreds of innocents dying. It did not take
long to make connections with the penthouse that occurred not too long ago.
Numerous funerals were held, but not one spoke loud enough to deem it a normal,
public conversation. Everyone wore white. The chief hadn’t gone mad but was
sober this time, as if the magic of storytelling pulled a different turn, and a
darker one at that. His wife found a new man who really loved her – and how
could he not, for his last name was Love? John Regal Love, newly wed to the former
wife of the chief. His son became a mute and joined a strange religion that
nobody liked speaking about. The chief, in turn, made secret arrangements with
the mayor, doing what they pleased. Politics never mattered anymore: only their
lives mattered. He quit the force and began reading books, living an all right
life until the mayor declared a final act against the investigators pushing
crime away. This was all wrong, thought the chief as he scrambled in what D.
thought a fictitious journal entry. The mayor, my all-time friend, doing such
tragedies like this! Surely he’s gone mad by now. Weeks later, the mayor
proposed a new act. No one agreed with it except him, who had learned to wear
two costumes where everybody could see only one. The world was afire and about
as literal as it was metaphoric. The unnamed police chief didn’t die as in the
first run D. read in this strange tale from an unknown source, but instead was
trained to become the best slave that the mayor saw fit.

What a story.

*****

After all it's the middle of June of the West Lake
The beautiful view is really different
 
from the other seasons.
The lotus leaves are so wide and endless,
 
they are connecting the skyline
 
with their so much bluish green
to set off the beautiful water lilies
especially red in the sunshine.

He thought: West Lake, huh? Of course it had to be the West
Lake in the city since somehow – and luckily – it matched the profile of the
criminal D. had found in the records at the police department. He reread the
English translation of the poem, pressing it until he could memorize it.  West
Lake was located somewhere in the lower part of the city, and he remembered
going there once. Noisy children and quacking ducks more annoying than blaring
horns from sailor boats distracted him from the wondrous beauty of the trees. Nature
brightened in it, so he preferred the upper part where there were more
beautiful rivers and lakes and less bothersome distractions. Nowadays he barely
went out at all, usually tinkering with book spines and other pointless things.
Going down there at night wouldn’t be too bad, so he walked. 

          If only he could drive there. The police station
parking lot had less than five cars parked, but none of them was D.’s. He could
take the chance of “borrowing” one of the cruisers, but sooner or later
somebody’s gonna notice.

D. used a few minutes’ space looking at the nearly empty
parking lot, and then broke into a run. His legs ached, his head ached,
everything ached, but he couldn’t leave West Lake alone for everybody to grab.
No, he couldn’t let that happen. Light rain sprinkled his face as the old
detective dashed through the nightlit streets. A few streetlamps were on. An
orange glow softened the scene. D. was running out of breath. Still in his
short-lived, premature sprint, he checked his pistol – not too many bullets
left. He didn’t slow down until he had a good five minutes ahead of him before
collapsing. 

          “Get me up!” he cried. “By hell, get up!”

          His hands were soaked with water and gravel, his
knees scraped beneath bloodied pant legs. Although he never glanced back, D.
had the feeling he was being followed. He didn’t know by whom, but the feeling
stuck. His paranoia chased him like a frenzied dog.

          West Lake couldn’t be far from where he was, D.
thought. “Lake, must find the lake,” he repeated. He never tired of saying it.
He did cartwheels with his arms so they circled like the spokes of windmills on
a wind farm. When his eyes saw the lake, his breath ran low, depleted, his
heart beating too fast for his age so that it slowed almost to a deadly stop.
Each beat imploded in his mind, bearing its mark, every beat sounding like
death giving him one more second to live, not sure when he would stop playing
children’s games and give him the kick.

          “The lake!” he cried. “Get me to the lake!” If
anyone was there, they’d be wondering who the old detective with an initial for
a name was talking to.

          D. found himself crash landing again. Hopefully
this didn’t happen too often, he made sure of that. Now what to do when he
reached the bank? If he reached West Lake, what was he to do next?

          Like a toddler, D. was on his arms and knees
crawling. Every inch counted, they mattered to him like the air he breathed and
the food he ate. The lake got closer – no, he got closer as he went on. He was
the one who got closer, not the lake. West Lake would always be in that part of
the city no matter how far D. was, or anybody else living for that matter.
It’ll stay there unless massive evaporation or worldly destructions and/or
changes happened hundreds of years in the future. But by then he’d still keep
this in mind, and he still thought this when the longest of his fingers reached
the water, cupped some into his hands, which went into the parched mouth of the
old detective who thought he couldn’t go any farther.

          But West Lake held nothing new. It was still the
same lake he had seen before, nothing special about it to deepen the case he
held responsibility for. He doubted it had anything to do with the man named
West Lake who coincidentally shared the same name. Reading the profile
description again, none held information about him or the lake. All that was
left was something D. found strange:
Failure in attempted fire at police
department and mayor office in synchronized time. Continues to stalk the
department for unknown reasons except for cryptic reasons both officers and
investigators are still searching for
– could this be related to the web he
found earlier in both Chief Advert's office and the locker room before? 

D.’s heart sank deeper
into the internal hell provided in his stomach when he read the poem and
searched the lake. None of this had to do with the case he begged from Chief
Advert earlier, but it brought chills and pain nonetheless. He surveyed the
whole bank in a loop, searching for anything that might take him to another
clue. The unidentified sender must have known what he/she was doing; otherwise
this would all have been a waste of time. When it looked like he was done, D.
went over to the trees and observed from a higher standpoint.

          The Chinese poem mentioned lotuses, but D. didn’t
find any lotuses surrounding the lake or pressing onto its shallow surface.
Color didn’t matter; if it was there, it meant something. It’d be symbolic or
literal but it had to be something, D. knew it in his heart and in his mind (or
was it only in his mind and never in his heart?). Like a child looking for
something that can never be found, again D. reenacted the same poses and
reactions. On the ground where he landed, D. inspected tiny blades of grass,
going through them like hairs. Denial always came before acceptance, but D.
still kept himself in the denial stage. He choked up on his tears, preventing them
from flooding all over the place like projectile bile filled in sadness. There
had to be something in the poem that might help. He read it until he could
remember it (and would soon forget the whole damned thing from his near-perfect
memory loss) and even read in between the lines, probably giving it too much
credit for what it was worth.