Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (9 page)

And she took advantage of always knowing what she wanted to do, which was to be a cop. Here she was, bang, a female on the Detective Squad at age thirty-two, hammering out fifty words a minute on the old Selectric, finishing a page without having made a single mistake. Arnie’s four-fingered method frustrated her, though Arnie thought he did well, and he did, for a cop, compared to the old-timers he used to work with. Fifteen, twenty years on the job, fully half their time spent doing paperwork, you’d think a guy would learn to type in self-defense.

Lili could be sexy, very sexy if Arnie let himself think of her that way. He was more attracted to the all-American blue-eyed blonde type, but there was no denying Lili had a lot of what a lot of guys went for. He asked her once, and he hoped he wasn’t out of bounds, why she wasn’t dating some nice young fellow. She blushed and that made Arnie blush, but her answer was a hundred percent honest: If I met some guy I liked and that guy asked me out, don’t you think I’d go out with him?

He knew for a fact that Lili and Robotaille saw each other a few times during Robotaille’s divorce proceedings, but it hadn’t worked out between them. Nobody’s fault and no hard feelings, just one of those things. Martinson had been pulling for Robotaille. He was a good cop and a good man, handsome enough for Lili, but it was supposed to be this big secret, so Arnie never opened his mouth about it to Lili or Robotaille or anybody else.

Feeling his eyes on her, Lili looked up from her typing. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

“I thought you were with the French girl.”

“I handed her off to Robotaille. What’re you doing?”

“Going over to the morgue,” Arnie said. “Cranston’s still on vacation, I think.”

Lili typed a few more words. He was distracting her.

“I hate dealing with that assistant of his,” Arnie said.

“Which one?” Lili said, still typing. “Williams? Not exactly the life of the party, is he?”

“He gives me the creeps, that guy.”

“Whereas Cranston leaves you with a fuzzy glow.”

“Cranston I’m used to. Williams is in a different league of creepy. What is it, the accent?”

“I’m trying not to draw any racial inferences here, I want you to know that.”

Lili had attended the same sensitivity training session as Martinson. It was one of their running jokes. “Race, gender, and socio-economic background,” the sensitivity trainer summed up, “these are the three categories most likely to arouse prejudice in any of us. Break the pattern of stereotypical thinking. This,” he allowed, “will be more difficult for some of us than for others.”

The last comment seemed to be directed at Martinson. Afterwards, Arnie and Acevedo got a good laugh out of the bias suffered by overweight Miami Beach natives from Jewish families whom nobody thought of as Jewish.

Martinson did not much identify with being a Jew. He couldn’t remember the last bar mitzvah he’d been to, and in the last wedding he was at, his niece got married by a Unitarian minister. Anybody who would’ve said a peep about it on the Martinson side had been dead for a decade, and when he’d been married briefly himself, it was to a Catholic girl of German-Irish ancestry.

This, Martinson remembered his mother saying, was how a Jew lost his Jewishness. She had a Yiddish word for it, though the truth of it was, she had never been what you’d think of as religious, and his old man believed in nothing, ever, and had encouraged the same in his children. In his opinion, it would only hold them back in life. That sensitivity trainer would’ve had a field day with Arnie’s father, but he’d been gone twenty years before afternoons like that were ever dreamt of.

“It’s all that hoogus-boogus island shit,” Arnie said of Williams. “Where’s he from, Haiti?”

“I believe his country of origin is Trinidad. He is now, however, an American.”

“Tell me the truth, Lil,” he said, leaning in toward her, his palms on her desk. “Couldn’t you just see the guy as a witch doctor?”

“Stop it,” Lili said.

“Grass skirt, headdress, whiteface?”

“I am not hearing this.”

“Dancing with a torch, maybe casting a spell?” He had his fist balled and he opened it twice quick, throwing the fingers at Lili, casting a spell of his own.

As much time as Martinson spent around the morgue, he’d have thought by now it wouldn’t faze him, but the combination of florescence and formaldehyde left him cold with a sense of futility that fell just short of panic. The sheet spread over the body, the repeating squares along its fold lines screaming for order, mocking the scientific discipline that could give you what and when, and where and how, but wasn’t going to tell you why. But if you got yourself all twisted up in why, you’d eventually take your service revolver and hold it to your temple and send your brains steaming out one side of your head, just like Frank Matzalanis.

Matzalanis was the best homicide investigator the Beach Detective Bureau ever had, and as far as Martinson was concerned, ever would have. Because Matzalanis was possessed. No wife, no family, no life outside of work, and no interest in one. He drank too much whiskey and soaked up the booze with fried chicken and donuts and solved every homicide that had the balls to cross his desk, except two.

The first was at the very beginning of his career. It involved a little girl who was thought to have drowned in Indian Creek, but an autopsy revealed ligature marks on her throat. She’d been strangled and dumped, and she’d been raped. The kid was nine. Her killer was never found. Twenty-some years after the fact, Matzalanis would periodically re-open her file, putting in whatever hours of his own that he could spare. That was Matzalanis. Haunted.

Then in 1987 there was a series of murders that scared the living shit out of every grandmother living in South Florida. The actor had done three. All women, none under sixty, all rape-strangulations. Martinson worked the case with Frank. They had it narrowed down to one very strong suspect, an ex-Florida Power and Light employee by the name of Karl Bogosian. Bogosian had read all the meters of the victims during his tenure with FPL and would have been able to ascertain that each of them lived alone. During a break-in of Bogosian’s apartment, they found a uniform he neglected to return after he’d been terminated, and a trove of porno magazines and videos that featured old broads.

They couldn’t match a single shred of evidence at any scene to Bogosian. That hurt their investigation. No judge would allow a blood test with such flimsy circumstantial facts. Maybe due to the strain of the investigation, or maybe just because his time had come, Bogosian died of a heart attack. The wave of murders stopped. Matzalanis was more convinced than ever that Bogosian was their man, and Martinson thought he was right.

But why hadn’t he left anything behind? Not a fingerprint or a cigarette butt or a thread from the FPL uniform, nothing. Matzalanis theorized that Bogosian had gone in with a hand vacuum, which they did
not
find in his apartment, and was deliberate and meticulous and compulsive about cleaning up his various messes. He would have had all the time in the world.

Near the end, Matzalanis re-opened the case of the nine-year-old, and was attempting to establish a connection between her murder and the ’87 series, defying the wild dissimilarities in their ages, the fact that the little girl had been dumped and the women left in their homes, and his own inability to tie any successive rapestrangulation to the original, the one that had eluded him, had escaped his instinct and his investigative genius. Matzalanis must have concluded the little girl’s murder and the old women had to be linked, if only because he couldn’t solve them.

A couple of interesting coincidences: the four of them, the three senior citizens and the little girl, had been strangled with a rope or a cord or a wire. In each case, a different instrument was used, but it was some kind of ligature device, not the hands. And every victim had suffered severe vaginal trauma, indicating violent sexual assault, but no semen was found. Not in the nine-yearold, not in the old ladies.

These bookends of failure would be Frank Matzalanis’s legacy. That’s what he thought. When Matzalanis was facing mandatory retirement with nothing to look forward to except directing security at some godforsaken shopping mall, Martinson encouraged him to take a teaching position. Or to write a book. His memoirs, at least. He had an obligation to share his knowledge. But when Matzalanis didn’t show up for work one bright morning and didn’t call in, Arnie knew it meant the worst.

He drove to Frank’s house in Miramar, and let himself in through the front door Matzalanis had so thoughtfully left open. He’d known Martinson would come. He was in the kitchen. Happy, kitcheny yellows rang false as fire drills. Eyes squeezed tight in anticipation, finger still on the trigger, a single unuttered syllable dead on his lips.

Leviticus Williams didn’t strike Arnie as a guy who was too hung up on why. Steeled against the whims of a vicious world behind the glasses that made him look like an African dictator, Williams radiated faith in science, in his own training, in weights and measures.

Martinson said, “Good afternoon, Doc.” He called everybody in a lab coat Doc, from the dentist to the ophthalmologist to the psychiatrist they made him go see after he found Frank Matzalanis in his kitchen.

Williams was crossing the T’s on Manfred Pfiser’s autopsy report. “It’s ironic, detective, but without concerted medical attention, this man would have been coming to the close of a rather short life. He had the lungs of a coal miner, and he was in the nascent stages of heart disease. Also, his liver was enlarged to about oneand- a-half times the size of a normal organ, indicating the onset of cirrhosis, a far more painful death than the one he suffered, and a direct result of his chronic alcoholism.”

Okay, he was an alcoholic. No big deal there. Arnie knew a lot of those.

“My assumption is, he ingested a liter or more of hard liquor per day for at least the last five years, though there’s no way to be certain.” Williams’s swaying Caribbean accent made him easy to listen to, even when he got all esoteric and started babbling about things Arnie had neither the time nor the desire to hear.

“The level of alcohol in his blood at the time of death was point two-five percent, which again, just an opinion, could only be achieved over a prolonged period of consumption without producing acute alcohol poisoning.”

“So he was really loaded when he got shot.”

“He would have been extremely intoxicated,” Williams said, “yes.”

“I’m betting he liked his cocaine, too.” This cold feeling started in Arnie’s fingertips, which began to tingle. He rubbed his palms together, then on the legs of his trousers. He wasn’t cold. Just his fingers.

“It would be safe to conclude he was a drug addict, as well. In addition to a medication he took for high blood pressure, we discovered trace amounts of marijuana, and a variety of amphetamines and barbiturates. I’ve noted them individually on the report.

“An extremely high level of cocaine, which indicates habitual use. The man was a toxic time bomb. He had, in fact, ingested cocaine shortly before he died. Nasal passages clogged with undissolved powder. He also had a deviated septum that had been surgically repaired.

“Death was caused by severe trauma to the brain, a metal object entering the base of the skull, ripping through the cerebellum and shattering the jawbone, which, not incidentally, resulted in the gross exit wound you noted. There is absolutely no possibility that the wound was self-inflicted.”

Williams’s bottle-bottom lenses magnified his eyes, giving them an eerie, bulging effect. He looked up at Martinson. “Unfortunately, lividity was difficult to determine because of the temperature of the room. The airconditioning was set for sixty-eight degrees, making the body much colder than if it had lost heat in natural climatic conditions. We were forced to rely on the degree of rigor mortis, and the rate of coagulation of the blood to approximate his time of death.”

“Which in your opinion was when?”

“Not before ten p.m. and not after ten a.m. Detective, are you certain the victim was standing when he was assaulted?”

“No,” Martinson said, “I’d have to check CSU’s final report. But I was operating on that assumption.”

“If your assumption is correct, he was murdered by someone shorter than himself. From the angle and trajectory of the object, a person no taller than five feet, eight inches, and possibly shorter.”

Martinson watched Williams’s eyes move over his report one more time before he signed it. The chill in Martinson’s fingers inched past his wrists and up his arms, but he fought it, asking himself what his problem was with Williams. The man was a bit lacking in personality, without a whole lot about him to like, but that wasn’t something that should make Martinson feel like he was going to freeze solid in the man’s presence. Williams was just one of those guys with no interest and no ability to speak outside of his immediate field of expertise, kind of like Frank Matzalanis, a cop who got drunk with cops and rehashed homicides.

Leviticus Williams dedicated his life to a lonely, grisly function somebody had to perform. Without it, Martinson’s job would have been impossible, and for gratitude and a couple of cheap yuks, Arnie had compared him to a witch doctor.