Keegan 00 Soft Case (4 page)

“You know how you get when you wear your balls, dear.”

“I’ll be good, I swear. Please?”

“Maybe next time.”

I couldn’t imagine an existence like that. Yeah, Rick certainly had sissy tendencies, but he was a decent looking guy who had a lot going for him. A little annoying, I suppose, but still an okay guy. Instead of finding someone to mutually get along with, he got stuck with a woman who controlled his life from top to bottom.

Rick hung up the phone, and caught me watching him. I could see the embarrassment on his face. Defeated. By a woman. He must have known my opinion on that. He fumbled with some papers, took a swig from a bottle of water he always kept at his desk, and then got up to come over to me.

“Okay,” he said, dropping a file on my desk, “That’s Coltrain’s report.”

“You told me what was in it. I don’t need to read it.”

“I thought you might want to take a look at it.”

“Waste of time.”

“Okay.” He took the file back. “You want to go speak to him?”

“So he can tell me what it says in the report?”

Rick shrugged, and I wondered exactly how he got the gold badge in the first place. After thinking about it, I attributed his temporary stupidity to his enthusiasm. He wanted to get rolling, and I couldn’t blame him. He was just a little too much for me. I think he was a little too much for anyone. Especially his wife.

“Any word on Mrs. Mullins?” I asked.

“9:15 flight out of the Bahamas. Commercial.”

“No corporate jet?”

“The partner has it, in Amsterdam.”

“Anyone contact him?” One would think the second in command, at least on the corporate side of Mullins’ life, would have been notified of his death. Then again, you never know with people. They can be shockingly inept.

“Yes. He’s at a convention. Will be back Friday.” If you can’t already tell, Rick’s short answers indicated his excitement. He didn’t mean to be rude, but his ballsack, devoid of testicles, rose higher and higher in his crotch as he thought about this case. Nice visual, I know.

“We should talk to him as well. If anyone will know something about Mullins’ state of mind, it’ll most likely be him.” Rick jotted something down.

“What time is Mrs. Mullins getting in?”

“Flight touches down about 12:45,” Rick said.

“Someone greeting her there?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Maybe we should.”

“At the airport?” Rick asked.

“Why not? This way she doesn’t get a chance to formulate any kind of story. I don’t want her concocting something. She’s already had some time on the plane to think of a plan. You never know.”

Rick’s face took on a strange look. “We’re not considering her a suspect, are we?”

I took a breath. Mrs. Mullins as a suspect. She was in the Bahamas as far as I knew, with a rock solid alibi. Still, I learned a long time before that nothing should be taken for granted. If you wait, you get burned. I wanted to talk to Mrs. Mullins as soon as possible. If I waited, lawyers might get involved. That sucked. They only complicated things. Even more so, the media. I need to get to her ASAP.

“I’m not ruling out anyone. Maybe we should have a couple of uniforms go pick her up, and bring her down here. Tell her she has to see the body, then we question her.”

“Maybe we should give her time to grieve. Get herself together.” Rick had learned to temper that excitement of his, I noticed. Strange for him.

“Not too much time, trust me on that.”

“Okay. We’ll try and get to her sometime today or tomorrow.”

I fumbled with a few things on my desk, a sign for Rick to go back to his cave. He didn’t get the hint. He stood over my desk, like a teacher in class, looking at a kid’s work. I looked up at him, and glared at him, sort of, but he still didn’t get the message.

“Why don’t you go see when Geiger will have the warrant?” I asked. Translation, shoo.

He looked around the station. “Okay.”

After he walked away, I leaned back in my seat. Our area of the station looked old, with dark paneling on the walls and a white tile floor that was so worn, the seams didn’t show anymore. I never really looked around the place much. Not much to look at. The detectives had six small desks gathered in the right comer of the room. I had the one on the far left. Rick had the one on the far right. By the entrance, sat four offices - well, more like cubicles. Geiger occupied one of them, the smallest, actually. He picked it because it was in the center of the room. He had four windows that almost reached the ceiling. From there, he could keep an eye on all of us. He did that a lot. He wasn’t a ball buster or anything. You could describe him as meticulous. I liked that in a superior. I did my job, submitted my paperwork on time, and didn’t spend idle hours on the department computer chatting with women on the Internet. I’m not pointing any fingers, saying that any of my co-workers did such a thing. Of course, they did, and I never saw the use. You can’t talk to someone you can’t see, or hear. These guys were trying to meet women, whether they wanted to admit that or not. Desperate, I say. There was no way to be sure that the people they were talking to were females in the first place. Other guys played a golf game, pretending that they were doing work. They turned the sound down, which basically took the fun out of the game. Guys actually gambled on the game. Sergeant Peters lost two hundred bucks last week. Two hundred bucks on a video game.

No one was doing much at almost eight in the morning. Peters was in his office, probably staring at the computer across the room, thinking about his stupidity. He had a lot to think about. Peters was in his forties, had been on the force for about twenty years, and was damn close to burnout. From what I knew of him, which wasn’t a hell of a lot, he was a gambler, both with money and with his work. Geiger was always on his case, mainly because Peters always tried to find his way around the hard stuff, and never got his paperwork done on time. I worked two cases with him. One of them, a murder of a convenience store clerk, went so bad I feared we were headed for a demotion. He was rough with interrogation, pressing witnesses that were supposed to be on our side, and he never went by the book. I didn’t mind that so much, mainly because I rarely followed “the book.” Actually, I doubted the existence of such a manual. Everyone did things their own way. Peters just had a more creative way about doing it. A dangerously creative way. I always wondered how he’d made Sergeant. Rumor said it was because of his father, who was a Sergeant himself, and had died on the job back in the seventies. I didn’t put much value on that rumor, but, after getting to know a little about Peters, it made more and more sense.

Geiger was in his office, on the phone as usual. I figured he was talking to someone about getting the warrant. He made eye contact with me, and nodded his head - my indication that things were going well. Geiger always came through when needed. That’s how he got the respect of his men. That, and the fact that he never asked anyone to do something he wouldn’t do himself. I didn’t know too many people like that.

Besides Rick, those two were the only other ones in the department. It was quiet. We all knew the media was outside, waiting for any of us to walk out. It wouldn’t be long before the captain paid us a visit, and gave us his usual speech about dotting out “I’s” and crossing our “T’s.” Nobody listened, but he felt the need to go through the whole thing any time we had a high profile case. He was more concerned about what the Mayor thought than anything else.

As if on cue, Captain Agnelli walked through the double doors into the department. He didn’t acknowledge anyone in the department, and went straight to Geiger’s office. Agnelli was a tall, thin man, who looked more British than he did Italian. He had jet-black hair, which was dyed for sure, and stood at about 6”4”. He was a smart guy, graduate degree and all that. The story went that he worked hard at making it to where he was, starting off in the Bronx, and moving to undercover Vice before getting the gold badge. From there, he set records for indictments, and had a good relationship with the DA. Agnelli was about 52, but looked younger because of the dyed hair and his baby face. The face had a roundness to it that made him look almost like a cartoon. He didn’t talk much and had a deeper voice than one would expect from the face. He always looked impeccably clean. Guess what? I didn’t like him.

I watched as Agnelli and Geiger talked for a few moments. I pretended to be on the phone when they looked my way. They never looked at Rick, who was busy doing something. God knows what. They kept looking at me, and Agnelli looked stressed at the fact that I was on the case. It might have been too obvious to everyone in the department that I didn’t really care where my career was headed. Content people bother eager people. They can’t understand why someone doesn’t want to move up and become the boss. I had no such desire. Give me my cases, let me do my work, and hand me my paycheck every two weeks. You’d think that people would be happy with that.

Rick noticed the stares I was getting and smirked at me when he looked up from a stack of paperwork. Wiseass. I had to laugh though. I just hoped Agnelli didn’t see it. When I looked back at them, Geiger gestured for me to come to the office. I hung up the dead phone, went to the cart to get a cup of coffee, and walked into Geiger’s office.

“Keegan,” Geiger said, slightly distressed. It was no secret that he didn’t enjoy it when Agnelli came into his department. The two had a personality conflict. Agnelli worried and tried to give his advice and two cents. Geiger went about his business without saying much, and didn’t like being told how to do something. They had a big argument about two years ago and, if I was keeping score, Geiger won, but the record books didn’t show that. You can’t win a battle with a superior.

“Good morning,” I said, taking a sip of coffee. “Captain,” I said, nodding toward Agnelli.

“Detective,” Agnelli replied, without the nod.

“I need you to be careful on this one, John. A lot of people will be watching all of us and, most likely, you will be investigating this case on TV, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded.

“I spoke to the mayor today,” Agnelli said. “He’s upset at the loss of Mullins. Turns out they were pretty good friends. He wants everything covered. He wants to be updated every day, and more often, if necessary. I don’t like having such a responsibility, and I am sure you don’t either.” Agnelli was actually being human, almost taking me off guard. “If you want to drop the case, I understand. It won’t be easy.”

“I’ve already done a lot of work.” I lied. “I don’t want to throw in the towel now.”

“That’s fine,” Agnelli said. His face said otherwise. I noticed his bushy eyebrows. I’d never really noticed them before. They looked ridiculous. I almost laughed.

“Keegan’s the man for the job. He and Calhill got an early start last night.”

“What have you got so far?” Agnelli asked. “Look like a suicide?”

“Tough to tell. The evidence, so far, points to that, but I find it hard to believe. It wasn’t like he was down on his luck.”

“I knew the man. I agree with you there. Just be careful. Don’t come to any hard conclusions without checking everything.”

Like I didn’t know that. “Of course not, Captain. If you’d like, I’ll discuss any new developments with you.”

He shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. I’m going to be real busy on some work for the Mayor. Just keep Geiger posted, and I’ll speak to him.”

“Okay.” I took another sip of coffee, waiting for the next battery of questions.

“I’ll have the warrant for you by 9:15. Rick told me the housekeeper gets there at eleven. Go then.”

“Wouldn’t it be a good idea to get there before that?” I asked. “Why,” Agnelli asked.

“Well, this might be stretching things a bit, but, if there was foul play involved, and if someone gets a hold of the housekeeper, she might get rid of things we’d be interested in.”

“At the mother’s house? I doubt it.”

“So do I. But I’d rather be careful. I don’t want anyone making this more difficult on us than it has to be.”

“And I don’t want this to be a forceful investigation. We’re treading on fragile ground here.” Agnelli thought for a second. I wondered if it strained him. “I’ll tell you what. Get there for 10:30. This way you can greet her at the door, and she won’t have an opportunity to do anything. I just don’t want you barging into an innocent woman’s house. You’re really only there to get the tape.” I nodded. “I doubt there’s anything else there.”

“Get the tape, and make sure Geiger gets the scoop.”

“I will.”

With that, Agnelli said his goodbyes and made his way back to the Ivory Tower he thought he resided in. Geiger looked at me and rolled his eyes.

“Just be careful, alright John.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“To be honest, I’m happy you’re on the case. You and Rick will complement each other well.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You know what I mean.” He sighed. “I want this to end quickly, but be sure of yourself. Take the time you need, and avoid the press like the plague.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“It will be. And they’ve probably dug up both of your records already.”

“Mine’s clean.”

“I know it is. But you know how they can interpret things.”

“I have my share of indictments.”

“So does Calhill. But still, just watch yourself. Try not to go to your local haunts.”

“I don’t think that matters.”

“I’m asking, okay?”

“Alright.” Where was I going to go if not Kasey’s?

“Thank you. I’ll get you the warrant as soon as possible.” “Great,” I said.

No more than a second after my ass hit my chair, Rick made his way over. His eyes were wide, and he was half-smiling, like he got a kick out of the fact that I just got grilled, but worried that it might have some implications for him.

“Everything’s fine, don’t worry.”

“I didn’t think it wasn’t.”

“Sure you did.”

“What did they say?”

“Usual bullshit. Agnelli wanted to let me know how important the case was, and Geiger just wants us to be careful.”