Mean Business on North Ganson Street (10 page)

Decided upon what he would order, the detective folded his menu and reached for the Elaine James file.

“Don't show that 'til our food's on the table.” The big fellow took the folder and set it on an empty chair, which he then slid under the table. “You didn't tell them we were cops, did you?”

“I didn't.” Bettinger tilted his head. “Why?”

“If he's got any kind of operation goin'—gamblin', immigrants, hookers—he'll tell the cook to give us the shits. Discourage us from comin' back.”

The detective's eyes flashed with disbelief. “They poison policemen in Victory?”

“Not everywhere. Claude's welcomes cops.”

“Their food tastes law-abiding.”

The waiter returned to the table and surveyed his customers. “Would you like to start off with some chicken wings?”

Bettinger laughed for the first time since the previous night, when he had bumped his elbow on the nightstand during a vigorous carnal engagement with Alyssa. “I'd like the dandan noodles, the wontons with chili oil, and the braised snow pea shoots.”

Dominic closed his menu. “Spare ribs.”

“Half order or full order? Half is five ribs.”

“I want twenty.”

“Two orders,” the waiter said as he scratched an ideogram that looked like a map.

“Twenty ribs.” The big fellow wanted no mistakes.

“You get two orders of fried rice with that.”

“You ever see any stray dogs 'round here?”

“Sometimes.”

“Give it to them.”

“Okay.”

“For real. And bring some ginger ales with my ribs.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

The waiter departed, and ten minutes later, the food landed upon the table. Dominic seized a dripping, odiferous rib as the Asian departed.

“Excuse me,” said Bettinger.

The waiter paused.

“Is the manager in?”

The Asian fellow adjusted his flap of silver hair and turned around, transformed into his own superior. “Want to complain about the service?”

“No complaints. And the food smells great.” The detective set his badge upon the corner of the table, where it turned into a chunk of sunlight.

“You're policemen?”

Bettinger nodded his head, and Dominic ripped sinew from a rib.

“I follow the laws,” stated the manager.

“We're not investigating you or this establishment. I'm Detective Bettinger and this is Corporal Williams.”

“Harold Zhang.”

“We're looking for information.” The detective reached into the manila file and withdrew a photograph that showed Elaine James as a teenager, sitting on the hood of a blue sports car while holding a cigarette and talking to some friends. “This woman was murdered, and her last meal might've been here.”

Bettinger gave the picture to Harold Zhang, who treated it like a flower petal.

The detective dropped a wonton inside of his mouth, and across the table, the big fellow sank his incisors into a rib. Chewing, the policemen watched the face of the balding manager who was his own staff.

“She comes here,” announced Harold Zhang. “Though she looks different.” The fellow cupped the air in front of his chest.

“That's her.” Bettinger swallowed a pulverized wonton and reclaimed the photograph.

Dominic slurped ginger ale. “She's like a band with two smash hits.”

“She's dead?”

“Yeah.” The detective withdrew a mechanical pencil, thumbed the eraser, and opened his notepad. “When did you last see her?”

“Last week.”

“Do you know what day?”

“Monday or Tuesday.” Harold Zhang adjusted his flap of silver hair and ruminated. “Tuesday I think.”

“That fits. Was she with anybody?”

“No.”

Bettinger was disappointed by the response. “Are you sure?”

“She always came alone. Ordered everything very, very spicy—hotter than most Chinese people can eat.”

Dominic set a fleshless rib upon a spare plate and cracked open a second hissing can of ginger ale. “Sounds like she wanted a colonic that went top to bottom.”

Bettinger wrote,
Spicy food
=
Day off?
and returned his attention to Harold Zhang. “Did she eat here or take out?”

“Ate here. Just before closing.”

“When do you close?” asked the detective.

“Ten. Earlier if it's empty.”

Bettinger considered the partially digested contents of the victim's stomach and wrote,
Death occurred between 11:30
P.M
. and 2
A.M
. upon his notepad. “Anything different about her that night? How she looked or behaved? Anything she said?”

“I don't think so.”

“Did anybody talk to her?”

“Just me.” Harold Zhang pointed at the far corner of the restaurant. “She sat over there—where she usually did—ate her usual, and paid. She always tipped a lot.” His last remark had a wistful timbre.

Dominic set a fourth fleshless rib upon his spare plate, completing a square of bones.

“What was she wearing?” asked Bettinger.

“Baggy clothes—like she was a jogger. Gray or blue.”

“Sneakers?”

“I think so.”

“Did she walk here?”

“I never saw a car.”

The big fellow started to construct the second floor of his bone edifice.

“You know which way she went when she left?”

“East.” Harold Zhang shook his head. “You don't want to go the other way at night.”

“Okay.” Bettinger withdrew a business card and gave it to the manager. “If you remember something else—or hear anything—call.”

“I will.”

“Thanks for your help.”

“It's my duty.” Harold Zhang pocketed the card. “I hope you find the guy.”

“We will.”

“This city,” the manager lamented as he departed.

The policemen focused on their food, and ten minutes later, Dominic completed his five-story bone condominium.

Bettinger motioned east. “Let's take a stroll.”

The big fellow drained the remainder of his third ginger ale and set a twenty atop the one that his partner had already yielded. “To eighty-four Margaret Drive?”

“So you can read.”

Together, the policemen left the table, watered urinal cakes, washed their hands, crossed the restaurant, and walked outside.

 

XVI

Sidewalk Rambling

The cold attacked. Bettinger shoved his covered hands into his jacket as he entered the parking lot, flanking Dominic, whose mind was again on Jupiter. Shivering, the detective marveled at the existence of sprawling cities in places that were cold enough to murder improperly clothed Homo sapiens. The businessman who had shot himself in Arizona was probably a direct descendant of the idiot who had settled Alaska.

Surrounded by air that was seventeen degrees (and lethal), Bettinger considered the Caribbean and then returned his mind to the case. “Has it rained or snowed since Tuesday?”

“No.”

“Then there's a chance of finding something along the way.”

Dominic snorted.

“Keep an eye out for signs of a struggle.” The detective gestured at their concrete surroundings. “Scuffs, scratches, blood. A watch, earrings. Something that could fall out of a purse or a pocket.”

“Like a gun with a name tag?”

“Find that and you can play rap all day.”

The policemen reached the sidewalk and turned east. Parked in the middle of the road at the far end of the block was a long black car that had tinted windows. Sonic thuds resonated inside the vehicle like exploding depth charges.

Keeping an eye on the suspect automobile, Bettinger scanned the immediate area for evidence. “How far's her apartment?”

“Ten, eleven blocks.”

The black car shuddered, awakening, and rolled forward, turning a pigeon carcass into feathered pulp.

“There are a lot of dead birds in Victory,” remarked the detective.

“You're pretty observant.”

Fifty feet remained between the creeping automobile and the policemen. Depth charges thudded at forty-two beats per minute.

“How come?” asked Bettinger.

“How come what?”

“How come there're so many dead pigeons everywhere?”

The music stopped, and its absence was a warning that the detective felt on his nape. Silent as a shark, the car continued its slow approach.

Dominic threw a hard look at the vehicle and rested a palm on the handle of his gun. Tires screeched, and the long, four-wheeled organism shot past the policemen.

Bettinger gleaned the car's license plate number and wrote it down in his notepad.

“That ain't nothin' but some niggas with nothin' to do.”

“Probably,” the detective agreed, “but there's no harm in running the plate.”

“You can get those here for ten dollars.”

“License plates?”

“Yeah.” Dominic led his partner across the street. “I once busted a nigga who had more than three hundred in his crib—he took the metal from construction sites and junkyards and had his grandma paint on the numbers.”

“Did you make that bust with Tackley?”

Prior to that moment, neither policeman had uttered the name of Dominic's former partner, the short man with vitiligo who stirred his coffee with a knife.

“I forget.”

The duo reached the end of the block, and the big fellow motioned south, redirecting their ramble onto a street of high walls, iron gates, and tall apartment buildings. Bettinger circumvented an open manhole and returned to the sidewalk, stepping over a dead pigeon that was wedged against the curb. Rigid talons extruded from its feathers like the legs of a cancan dancer.

“Any idea what's killing these things?”

“Birds can go anyplace they want, right?” Dominic gestured at the sky. “Flap their wings, and these niggas is in Hawaii, enjoyin' the sun, or maybe over in Paris, shittin' on ridiculous hats. So it figures that the ones who stay in Victory are damaged.”

“Psychologically?”

“I'm thinkin' somethin' with their radar or whatever. Either way, it's been like this for years. Niggas just droppin'.”

Something occurred to the detective regarding the Elaine James case. “Who's the best clerk in the pillbox?”

“Ain't like you got a lot of choices.”

“Of them?”

“Irene.”

Bettinger recalled a stuffy, middle-aged white woman whose orange perm resembled a planetoid. “The one with the hair?”

“She's in there.”

“She's reliable?”

“You got any idea what these people get paid?”

Passing a concrete playground, the detective stripped off a glove and withdrew his cell phone, which was an old device that looked like a calculator.

“Arizona didn't pay too good,” remarked the big fellow.

“Disposable technology isn't where I put my money.”

“I seen your automobile.”

“In a city like this, I'd classify a car as ‘disposable technology.'”

“So then you must live in a mansion.”

Bettinger thumbed the preset number for the front desk and brought the receiver to his ear.

The receptionist answered on the second ring. “Police Precinct of Greater Victory.”

“Hello, Sharon. This is Detective Bettinger.”

“Hello, Detective Bettinger.” The woman spoke with a formal flourish.

“Please connect me to Irene.”

“She likes to be called Miss Bell.”

“I'll respect her wishes.”

“Hold.”

The connection clicked over to a doo-wop track that featured a falsetto singer whose keening voice was almost a bird noise. Listening to the high-pitched tale of love gone awry, Bettinger followed Dominic onto Margaret Drive. A verse spilled into a chorus, and as the vocalist repeated the refrain, “Put your love in my lunchbox,” the detective noticed a broken streetlamp and stopped walking.

“Williams.”

The big fellow looked at his partner.

Bettinger said, “We should—”

“Miss Bell speaking.”

“Hello, Miss Bell. This is Detective Bettinger. We met earlier.”

“Yes. I remember. Good afternoon.” The woman sounded like a robot the day before it received the chip that contained its personality.

“Good afternoon. Are you familiar with the Elaine James case?”

“Mrs. Linder built that file. Shall I transfer you?”

“I'd rather you assisted me, if you don't mind.”

A keyboard rattled like a machine gun. “Murdered. Raped postmortem.” A vacuum of silence followed these proclamations.

“I'm looking for cold cases that might be connected to this one.”

“Mrs. Linder found no viable matches. Necrophilia is very rare—even in Victory.”

Bettinger constructed a careful question that he hoped would not offend the clerk. “Is it possible that we have an unsolved murder case where the act of necrophilia occurred but was not identified?”

There was a click on the line, and the detective wondered if the robot had ended communications.

“It's … possible,” said Miss Bell, her voice betraying a glimmer of humanity.

“Then I'd like files on every woman who died in Victory during the last eighteen months—accidental deaths, natural causes, murder victims—all of them. Put the last six months on top, and put prostitutes on the very top. Please.”

“The information that you have requested will be on your desk by five o'clock today.” The robot had returned. “I shall also send digital files to your e-mail account.”

“Thank you very much, Miss Bell.”

“Have a good afternoon.”

“You too.”

Bettinger cut the connection and pocketed his phone. Gloving his frozen right hand, he examined the overhead streetlamp. Bits of sheer plastic that looked like baby teeth sat in the broken fixture, as did a bird's nest and a few rocks.