Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (13 page)

Like bees to honey, they cluster around him, Anibal Aguille y Wilkins, the golden boy of the Califa Police Department, thrice decorated, always decorative. Eyes like honey, skin as rich as molasses, a jaw square enough to serve as a cornerstone. He's a dish, is Detective Wilkins, but that is only half of his charm. More than just ornamental, he gets the job done. When he is on the dog, no criminal is safe. He's taken stealie boys and jackers, cagers and rum padders, sweeteners and dollymops. He's arrested mashers and moochers, B-boys and bully rocks. He's a real hero. Everyone adores him.

Well, not everyone. Not the shady element in Califa, who prefer their unlawful livelihoods and criminal hobbies to go unmolested. Not the families of those he has sent to the drop. They hate and fear Detective Wilkins. But the honest citizens of Califa consider him a real trump. Except for one lone constable, who thinks he is a real jackass. And whose opinion matters to this story as we shall soon hear. Hold that thought; you'll need it later.

It's after hours at the police department's favorite saloon, the Drunken Aeronaut, and jubilation, centering on Detective Wilkins, is in full swing. The PD is celebrating a successful conviction in the detective's biggest case yet, a hard case, the worst crime that Califa has seen in a hundred years. For three months, until Detective Wilkins snared him, the Califa Squeeze had the city in an uproar. He was crafty, and busy, with a modus operandi quite chilling: he crept up on his victims—in the bath, in an alley, at breakfast, weeding the garden—and squeezed the life out of them. Then he stole their jewelry and vanished. The city is not unfamiliar with the petty thief, but normally its murderers confine themselves to those who are asking to be murdered: other criminals, dollymops, street orphans, to name but a few unfortunates.

The Califa Squeeze was a different breed of homicide, shameless and daring. He chose his victims from the ranks of the utterly blameless: a city gardener, a lawyer, a lamplighter, a nanny. Innocent folks who kept to the law and expected, therefore, to die old and happy in their beds. By itself each murder was shocking, but when it became apparent that the heinous crimes had been committed by the same maniac, the city had erupted into a frenzy of fear and shrill indignation: the Califa Squeeze must be stopped!

Well, the great Detective Wilkins stopped the Califa Squeeze. Using his wiles, and his extensive underworld contacts, with a hefty dose of charm, and then some deadly browbeating, Detective Wilkins tracked the Califa Squeeze and caught him, red-handed, with the boodle. The terror of the city turned out to be a small mumbling shambling old man known as Nutter Norm, who had been living in a crate not far from the Islais Creek Slaughterhouse.

The boodle, no longer quite so shiny after spending so much time in close proximity to offal, was discovered in a sack in the crate. When arrested, Norm protested that he had found the loot, but gentle (and not gentle) pressure from the Great Detective finally persuaded the old man to confess tearfully that he was indeed the dreaded Squeeze, though he couldn't explain exactly why he had done such great crimes for such little reward.

The trial lasted barely an hour. The jury, primed by Detective Wilkins's silky smooth testimony, delivered a verdict after only twenty minutes of deliberation: guilty on all charges. Nutter Norm will hang. The jury went home, pleased that they had done their duty. The police adjourned to the Drunken Aeronaut to celebrate their hero, who would no doubt soon be called to Saeta House to be congratulated there by the Warlady Sylvanna Abenfarax herself. Until then, they are drinking champagne, eating oysters, and boisterously toasting the man of the hour.

Remember how I said not everyone in the department loves Detective Wilkins? Well, here we come to the one who does not: Constable Aurelia Etreyo, not splendid at all, but small and round and scowly. She sits in a dark corner, chewing furiously on a cheese waffle and furiously watching the other police officers pet Detective Wilkins. If Detective Wilkins is the department pride, Constable Etreyo is the department crank. She came to the PD the youngest graduate from the police academy ever, full of fever and fire to do good, catch criminals, make the city a safer, better place. Instead, she patrols the Northern Sandbank, the coldest foggiest most forlorn part of the city, where nothing at all happens, because there is almost nothing there. The Sandbank encompasses a series of tall hills, too tall to build upon, intermixed with sand dunes too sandy to build upon. Only two structures stand in the Northern Sandbank: the Califa Asylum for the Forlorn and the Nostalgically Insane and a windblown octagon-shaped house, now abandoned. The Northern Sandbank is the worst beat in the city.

Constable Etreyo's been on the job a year, and she's bitter.

Constable Etreyo is an acolyte of the great forensic investigator Armand Bertillo, whose book
A Manifesto of Modern Detection
created the template for modern police work. A modern police officer, says Professor Bertillo, uses facts, not fists, to solve crimes. A modern police officer understands that crime can be measured, that criminals leave behind clues, which, when properly interpreted, make the resolution of the case obvious. Fingerprints, bloodstains, murder weapons, murder scenes, all these help the police answer the only question that truly matters in police work: who did it. The Bertillo System categorizes crimes and criminals into types that can be tracked, anticipated, and caught. It is a thoroughly modern way of solving crime, as aloof from the dark old days as day is from night.

Unfortunately for Constable Etreyo, Califa is not a modern police force. Sure, the chief of police frowns upon interrogation via thumping, and they've done away with the old dirty overcrowded prison in favor of the clean silent penitentiary system, but otherwise the police force remains old-fashioned. Crimes are solved with a carrot or a stick, and order is kept through intimidation and fear—all practices that Detective Wilkins has made perfect, and the reason he sits at the apex of the list of people that Etreyo hates. Etreyo's attempts to persuade her fellow officers to employ the Bertillo System have gained her only ridicule. Her attempt to get the chief of police to endorse the Bertillo System failed miserably. Banished to the worst beat in the city, Constable Etreyo has grown snappish and mean.

So, snappish and mean, she sits in a corner listening to the jolly police officers bombard the Great Detective with praise and free beer. You probably wonder why she pains herself so. If the sight of Detective Wilkins makes her so sick, why not go where he is not? Well, first, she'll be fiked if she'll quit. And she'll be fiked if she'll be driven from her dinner. Also, she can't afford to quit. She's the second of ten children, and all her paycheck goes to the support of the other nine siblings, her parents, an elderly aunt, and a blind gazehound. She can't afford to eat elsewhere; the Drunken Aeronaut gives a police discount.

So Constable Etreyo sits and stews, cheese waffle growing soggy and heavy in her stomach. Detective Wilkins is recounting for the fourth time how he leaned on Nutter Norm: ". . . said to him, 'Dear man, I want to help you, I really do, but I cannot,' and here I paused and offered him a cigarillo; he took it, poor soul. I said, 'I want to be your friend, but you will not let me,' and he began to cry, and I knew he'd crack, the Califa Squeeze — I'd squeezed him —"

"Not!" Constable Etreyo's shouted interruption is so loud that the other officers are startled. Detective Wilkins is astounded by the interruption. He turns his gaze toward Etreyo's dark corner, sees her there, smiles, and says genially, "Ah, Constable Etreyo, welcome. How is your waffle? A bit sandy, maybe?"

The other officers giggle, and one of them slaps Detective Wilkins on the shoulder in a friendly sort of way. This friendly slap cockeyes the detective's straw boater and earns the slapper a most unfriendly look in return.

"Better to have sand in my teeth than sand in my eyes," Etreyo says. She hadn't meant to speak. The word had just exploded out of her, but now that she's said one word, it's easy to say a whole lot more.

"I cry your pardon, what do you mean?" Detective Wilkins asks.

"I mean, you've got the wrong man."

"But, dear Constable Etreyo, Nutter Norm confessed."

"He was scared and hungry and you promised him a bacon supper."

"Who would confess to murder — four murders — for a bacon supper?" Subdetective Wynn asks scornfully. He's one of Detective Wilkins's chief cronies.

Constable Etreyo can think of several occasions in her life where she would have happily confessed to murder for one slice of bacon, much less an entire bacon supper. But none of these fat plods looks like he's ever missed a meal, so they have no idea what a driving force hunger can be.

"I never get the wrong man," Detective Wilkins says.

"You've got the wrong man now."

"The jury said not."

"The jury did not know all the facts."

Detective Wilkins says, "What do you know of the facts, you who have spent the last weeks traipsing about sand dunes, looking after the safety of cows and crazies, whereas I have examined every crime scene, interviewed every witness, recovered the stolen goods —"