Sins of the Flesh (15 page)

He never saw a squad car or a highway patrol as he rode. Facing the magnificent Green, City Hall was imposing, but behind it lay a different world, one that suited Walter perfectly. No dwellings, just premises. Killing the bike in a pool of darkness fairly close to the back of City Hall, he listened to its engine tick as it cooled off while his eyes roamed in every direction. Then, satisfied that the bike was safe and the area deserted, he moved off into an alley, examining the doors of the buildings as he went.

Someone moved; Walter froze against the wall, fused into it. If there were neighborhood kids the street lamps would have been shot out long ago, but an occasional lamp was lit in a privacy pattern the prison inmate Walter had no way to understand: loiter under the lamp, move into the darkness for an against-the-wall fuck. The loitering woman was a light-colored African-American, mini-skirted but knickerless, and talking with her was a burbling, bopping black man counting the bills she was handing him.

“Yo’ done good, Hepzibah,” he said, ceasing his dance.

“Sattidy night, Marty—mah big night.”

“Get yo’ ass back on yo’ beat, woman!”

“Fuck that,” she said. “Home fo’ me.” And melted away.

Marty Fane resumed his burbling and bopping in Walter’s direction, pleased with the night’s takings. This was his patch, had been for so long that it never occurred to him anyone might try to take it off him. As pimps went, he was a good one, in that he cared for his girls, made sure they were clean, didn’t beat them up for the fun of it, and gave them enough to pay for their habit or their kids, though both was a hassle Marty preferred to avoid by kicking the real hags off of his patch.

His car, a moderately old Cadillac pimpishly embellished, was parked in an area adjacent to City Hall’s rear end. As Marty undulated gracefully along, Walter paralleled him, insubstantial as cigarette smoke reflected off a polished table. At the car Marty paused, eyes busy, ears listening; he unlocked it, walked around to the passenger’s side, opened that door and knelt on the seat to rummage in the glove box. A hand snaked over his mouth and yanked him to his feet in the same movement, then two hands went around his neck and he collapsed onto the road, unconscious but not seriously harmed.

Walter saw the path on his cerebral plan divide, but the decision as to which branch he would take was made in a flash. Flipping the inanimate form over, he drove the knife, absolutely centered, into the base of Marty’s throat, then ripped the blade upward to the chin before pulling it free. As he’d imagined, not much blood in the midline, but the guy would drown in it, voiceless.

He extricated a roll of bills from Marty’s pocket; there were two more rolls in the glove box, as well as a .45 semiautomatic and a spare clip. Everything was stowed in Walter’s jacket, but all of that was done absently; Walter’s mind dwelled on Marty’s eyes, which had opened just before the knife went in.

He was back inside his wall, not a spot of blood on him, at three in the morning. By the light of his lantern he counted his takings, mostly fives and tens: nearly fifteen hundred dollars. Now he could buy gasoline!

At three-thirty he beeped his room intercom.

“Hi, it’s Walter. I know the night isn’t over, but could I come out for a while? I’ve been in here now for almost a day, and my legs are seizing up. Just a walk, please!”

Jess answered. “Guess who’s back early? Like a game of poker or chess? Or—after that walk, of course!—like to talk?”

“Walk, then talk,” he said. “It’s been so boring.”

Another breakthrough! Walter knew what boredom was.

W
ondering why Marty Fane had been parked there too long, the crew of a routinely patrolling squad car had found Marty lying beside it in the road at three a.m. This was the true witching hour, when even the cats and cockroaches had done their thing, when Marty’s girls could expect no further customers, and Marty himself was back home in his little Argyle Avenue palace.

Carmine took the case himself with Delia as backup; Abe and his team were moving on the Does. Donny could handle the street stuff, Buzz was on vacation and Delia so frustrated over her Shadow Women that she’d probably think processing parking tickets a boon.

The murder of the long time pimp caused a universal sensation, and if grief were not mentioned nor tears detected in official eyes at the news, nonetheless it provoked shock, concern, a definite and complex sorrow. For Marty Fane had gone on long enough to become an institution of sorts, and his particular world, deprived of his steadying influence, was in for all the troubles that went with a vacant patch, rudderless girls, greed, and violence. Despite his history he’d been relatively young: a mere forty-five. Certainly not old enough to have seen any sharks cruising in the periphery of his patch waiting to close in. Now there would be a turf war fought through the dog days of August.

“He died quite slowly, poor fellow,” said Gus Fennell in the autopsy room. “Interestingly unusual technique, not something taught in a Quantico boot camp or anywhere else I can think of.”

“But silent,” Carmine said. “No voice box.”

“True, but think for a while, Carmine. First, his attacker got Marty around the neck and part-throttled him—he’d have been out cold for a minute or two. Then—this! Initially bloodless because it started the way you’d do an emergency tracheostomy, puncturing the airway below the swallowing reflexes. Had the attacker stopped there, Marty could well have lived, but he didn’t stop there. Instead, he drove his knife deep enough to make contact with the ventral side of the spinal column, and dragged it upward to the under-jaw without severing anything capable of bleeding out fast. No spray, no huge lake. I estimate that Marty regained consciousness about the moment the knife tracheostomized him, so he endured the rest awake. I mean, the notochord—the fetal tube—folds over and closes in the front midline, hence the lack of major blood vessels and nerves there. I ask, did the attacker know that? I must presume so, but anyone with that degree of anatomical sophistication would have other, better ways to kill, including with a knife.”

“Are you implying a torture element, Gus?” Delia asked.

“I don’t honestly know, Delia. The most I can tell you is that the attacker had fantastic control over the knife—the cut was absolutely straight, no matter what structures it bisected.”

“Paul says he wiped his knife clean on Marty’s fake-fur upholstery,” Delia added.

“And wore gloves—no prints anywhere,” Carmine said.

“And that’s it as far as I’m concerned, Captain,” said Gus. “A very resourceful and individualistic killer.”

The two detectives set off upstairs grim-faced.

“I’ll have to brief Fernando,” Carmine said, plodding up the stairs one at a time. “The uniforms are going to be busy until the whore-pimp equation solves itself. I liked Marty because he got on well with his girls and kept them clean. When his best girl was murdered a few years back, he was genuinely grieved.”

“A world wherein no one needed to pay for sex and therefore no one peddled it,” said Delia with a sigh, “would be an ideal answer to the Marty Fanes, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist. There are always more people wanting sex than there are people willing to give it out freely.”

Carmine laughed. “Muddled thinking, Deels, but true for all that. Time to go to the scene of the crime.”

Its being a Sunday, he reflected, was a great help; Carmine and Delia walked the area behind City Hall secure in the knowledge that the entire tangle of streets and alleys was cordoned off, and that he had been called in early enough to ban an invasion of squad cars and uniforms. No insult intended to Fernando Vasquez and his boys, but it had meant that Paul Bachman could send someone to go over a fairly pristine murder site. As this had been done, he was free to go where he pleased.

The 1964 Cadillac hadn’t been towed away yet. Sitting with her long legs planted on the roadway and a cigarette in one hand, Hepzibah Cornwallis waited in the shotgun seat of a lone squad car, rather pleased with herself; she had categorically refused to ride in its caged back quarters, since she was a cop witness, and had wallowed in the pleasure of seeing the female squaddie ride in the cage while she rode shotgun. Another part of her was devastated at Marty’s death—what would happen to her now? She was Dee-Dee Hall’s replacement, her speciality blow jobs, so she was a big earner, a valuable whore.

She eyed the couple walking toward her in some amusement; they belonged together about as much as a lion belonged with a miniature poodle. The guy was Carmine Delmonico, who she knew was a shit-hot cop, but that couldn’t sour her feminine appreciation of his dynamic attractiveness. Tall, bull-necked, flat in the belly, always dressed like a Chubber, with black hair fighting curls by a short cut, eyes a kind of goldy-brown, and a face she had a weird feeling should have been a king’s. A real lion, leader of the pack or whatever a harem of lions was called. The woman was that Brit bitch Delia Carstairs, ugly as sin, clad today in loose pajamas of tie-dyed cotton in every color that clashed.

“Hi, Hepzibah,” Carmine said, smiling at her. “I’m sorry about Marty, I really am.”

“I’m sorry too,” said Delia warmly.

“Yo’ ain’t sorry like me. Why yo’ bring me here?”

“I thought you might be of more help here than down in County Services,” Carmine said easily, and keeping to the singular; it didn’t escape him that the whores detested female cops. Taking the hint, Delia wandered off into the distance. Carmine indicated the Cadillac. “There’s not much blood, so it won’t be a horrible ordeal, but if I ask you very nicely and politely, would you look at the car with me? If anything’s missing, you’ll know what it is.”

“Fo’ you, honey, I would go down on the Pope. An’ fo’ my Marty too. Anything I can do, I do. Jus’ catch this motherfucker fo’ us, Cap’n.”

“When did you last see Marty?”

“Around two. By then, he closin’ shop. I went home.”

“No customers in the neighborhood?”

“Nope. Place was stone dead.”

Carmine extended his hand and pulled Hepzibah out of the car with what struck her as courteous respect, and walked, hand under her elbow, to the Cadillac. In honor of Marty’s death she was wearing knickers, but her skimpy mini-skirt of cherry-red satin fully displayed her quite beautiful legs as she paraded on Captain Delmonico’s arm; at twenty-five years of age and an expert in the art of fellatio, she still had a long career ahead of her. Eat yo’ heart out, female cop!

“Tell me anything different about the car,” Carmine said.

Avoiding the blood puddle, old and browned, she went for the glove box immediately, flipped it open. “Marty keep the world in here,” she said, rummaging but not removing anything. “Money’s gone. So’s his .45 gun an’ a spare clip. Nothin’ else.”

“Do you think his attacker was someone moving in on his turf?” Carmine asked as they moved away.

She thought—and she could think, as she earned to support two children, not a drug habit—then shook her head. “Nope, no one movin’ in on Marty. The mother-fucker wanted his cache.”

“And got it. Why would the attacker have killed Marty? Our doctor says he didn’t need to kill.”

“’Cos he bad news, Cap’n. He kill fo’ fun.”

“Have you girls gotten a plan?”

The big, tear-filled eyes widened, the white teeth flashed in a smirk. “We’s jus’ ho’s!
Ho’s
plan?”

“Hepzibah, you’re a natural leader. Remember, the best way to defend is to attack.”

“I remember that. Yeah, us ho’s might have a plan, but it depend on things. Yo’ got a suggestion?”

He installed her in the shotgun seat of the squad car, and shook her hand. “Get in first, Hepzibah. Choose your own pimp.”

The squad car sped away.

“The beautiful part about murder scene interrogations is that they’re impossible to immortalize on tape,” said Delia demurely. “Choose your own pimp indeed! They’ll end in getting their own throats cut. Compared to Otis Fly-by or Chester the Pollack, yon dead Marty Fane was a pushover.”

“No, Marty’s stable is all superior girls. That’s why he lasted so long in a cut-throat business. I’ll back his girls if they’re well led and get in first. Hepzibah has a brother.”

“That’s insider trading!” Delia said. “Whoever their pimp ends up being, the girls will be exploited.”

“Yes, they will. However, not all lashes inflict the same degree of punishment. Some cats are kinder than others.”

“Touché!”

They walked the ground together then, using a powerful beam from a flashlight as a precursor that banished shadows, penetrated niches and cracks, bounced off tiny objects that an overhead and flatter light would have missed.

In what at night would have been a smallish section of dense blackness under the lee of a garbage Dumpster they found a hint.

The nocturnal concealment would have been complete, but in daylight it could be seen that the area was a carpet of vegetable matter from the same Dumpster, littered there each time it was emptied; dark in color, a trifle oily, and tamped down by time’s heavy hammer. The source of the Dumpster’s contents was a little factory that made frozen egg rolls for the grocery trade. So venerable was the carpet that it didn’t even smell.

“Hello, what’s this?” Carmine asked as the flashlight beam hit the squashed litter.

Delia crowded up; they examined the ground together.

“Someone parked a motorcycle here last night, and this is a very strange place to leave a big bike. It is big—see the tire width? A Harley-Davidson, maybe?”

“A customer for the whores?” Delia asked.

“Not parked here, I hazard a guess. This bike was hidden, intentionally hidden. There are confused marks around it that could be footprints, though nothing definite. No oil leaks …. If it belongs to our killer, then he’s riding, not driving,” said Carmine, pleased. “So he’s very mobile and potentially elusive. Deels, I don’t like this guy. He’s new to Holloman, and for reasons too murky to grasp, he decided that the best way to get hold of some cash was to rob a pimp. Except he went further—he murdered the pimp. Hoods don’t pick on the guys who run ladies of the night, they’ve all killed to get there. This is Mystery Man, in more ways than one. Why a pimp? Why Marty? Why kill? What would his take have been? Relative peanuts, I can answer that question. He sets a low value on murder, and hoods are generally smarter than that. Connecticut doesn’t execute, but the sentences are long and the parole boards tough.”

“You’re making a case for a psychopath,” Delia said.

“Yeah, I think I am. If so, then he just blew into town on his bike. Let’s hope he keeps on going.”

“Rubbish!” Delia exclaimed, snorting. “You want him to stay just long enough to nab him.”

He wasn’t late home to the house with the square tower on East Circle in East Holloman; The Sunday
New York Times
as a consolation prize and a long, weakish bourbon-and-club-soda as an additional prize, Carmine went out onto the deck behind his house and settled to watch the late afternoon bleed away into dusk across the reaches of Holloman Harbor, which lapped at his front boundary. Windless conditions and a long heat wave had bronzed the sky, its edges somber. Holloman was a working port, especially by the tankers filling the reservoirs of the hydrocarbons farm at the end of Oak Street; there was plenty of industry in the region, from howitzers and jet engines to instruments for microsurgery, so the cargo ships continued to come and go, but these days they were too big for the Pequot River.

He was missing his family terribly, and caught in that old, rusty-toothed trap that forbade him to let his plight show to Desdemona and the kids when he talked to them by phone. What he wanted to do was scream and yell and howl and holler “Come home! Come home!” Yet he didn’t dare; did he, Desdemona would be back in a flash with all her precious rest-and-recreation leave imperiled. No one knew why some women got the blues after childbirth, except that their hormones were out of whack, and it had happened to his wife after the birth of Alex. If he left her in Sophia’s and Myron’s tender loving care for another month or six weeks, she’d be okay—provided there were no more kids. Which could best be ensured if he had a vasectomy. As far as he was concerned that was no sacrifice; he had a girl and two boys. But he wasn’t sure Desdemona would agree, and he was still marshaling his arguments. Still, time had a way of sorting problems out if no one pushed too hard, he had to insert that fact in his calculations. A dog and a cat were great, but they were a flea bite on a mammoth’s ass compared to the presence of his wife and kids. He missed them so!

He had left it so late to marry the right woman and sire the sons of his heart; nor was Desdemona a spring chicken anymore at thirty-six. Nowadays he absolutely wallowed in what family life a demanding job permitted him, his enjoyment enhanced because Desdemona, rarest of wives, understood his ethical commitment to his job; he must never short-change either family
or
job, and that was quite a juggling act. A professional herself, Desdemona took the brunt of domestic life as if she had never run a research institute, and he knew that wasn’t fair to her. Days went by if he was busy or away when she never heard any but baby talk. Enough to drive anybody into a depression! Maybe her breakdown had been a manifestation of resentments she couldn’t even admit to herself?

And now, missing her, and Julian, and Alex, and her superb cooking, it looked like he was lumbered with a biker psychopath. A new man in town. He
had
to be a new man! Such men were like all human fruit; there had to be a growing and ripening process before the fruit attained maturity. Were he a Holloman man, he would already be marked and noticed.