The Sleeping and the Dead (2 page)

I helped him out. “I'll call you tomorrow.”

“OK.” We hung up, but there was a new tension between us and I didn't know what it was. I didn't have time to think about it.

The marquee lights of the Orpheum Theatre were dark but Beale Street was lit up like Vegas. I parked beside an MPD squad car in the middle of South Main. The three local news stations had their vans set up across the street. The sidewalk was packed with people, curbs blocked by cop cars, a fire truck and an ambulance idling in front of the main entrance. Busy night for everybody.

I was climbing out of my car when a young male traffic cop grabbed my door and told me I couldn't obscenity park there. “She's with me!” Sergeant Adam McPeake shouted from the front door of the theater. He waved me over. I smiled at the traffic cop as he reluctantly stepped aside, then ducked under the police tape and hurried through the rain. Adam held open the door next to the box office. “Jesus, Jackie. You don't look like shit for once,” he snarked, looking me up and down. My friend.

They had all the crystal chandeliers lit up inside, bright as opening night. The lobby was filled with cops dicking the dog and scuffing up the carpet with their wet shoes. Nothing like a murder to flush the bastards out of the walls. I stopped beside the concierge desk and waited while Adam spoke to a guy with bruised shadows in the hollows of his eyes. Adam brought him over and introduced him as the theater manager. “Dave found the victim,” he explained. We shook hands. His grip was weak and shaky, his hand hot and damp, like he had just washed it. He had short dark hair combed back from a sharp widow's peak, and thick, close-set eyebrows that drew closer together as he glanced at the cops in the lobby parlor. Some were leaning against a wall decorated with publicity photos of celebrities who'd played the Orpheum over the last umpteen years. The theater was built in 1890, burned to the ground in 1923 during a striptease vaudeville, rebuilt in 1928, and completely refurbished and reopened in 1984, my senior year in high school. I remember my parents bringing me for the grand opening, but not what they were showing that night—I just remember hating it on principle because I was too Fonzie-cool to enjoy anything my parents liked.

Advertisements around the lobby announced several upcoming shows—
Rent
opened the day after Thanksgiving,
High School Musical
in December, and Verdi's opera
Macbeth
in January. I wouldn't have minded seeing
Rent
, or maybe
Holiday Inn
, which was showing just before Christmas, if I'd had money for tickets, which I didn't. I thought about asking the manager if he could hook me up, but I had already forgotten his name.

The doors opened again and Dr. Paul Wiley, city medical examiner, entered lugging two tackle boxes full of equipment. He spotted me right away and glared, his liver spots flushing. He had his own people to take crime-scene photos. I smiled, extended my hand. He stopped but he didn't return the gesture. He smelled like Old Spice and latex.

“Jacqueline,” he said. “I hope you don't plan to walk all over my evidence this time.”

“I'll try to stay out of your way,” I said.

“See that you do.”

“If you promise to keep your big head out of my pictures,” I added. I had nothing personal against him but he was dreadfully famous old money and didn't like dealing face-to-face with us peons, especially peons of the female persuasion, unless we were dead. Being an early disciple of Spanky and Alfalfa's He-Man Woman Haters Club, he was almost as famous for his militant, anachronistic misogyny as his talent as a professional body snatcher. He refused to be interviewed on air by female reporters and had gotten himself in trouble a few times with the Equal Opportunity bureaucrats. Paul Wiley came from an old Memphis family, mostly surgeons; his great-uncle Ted had been a part of Boss Crump's political machine. Wiley sat on the board of just about everything of consequence, from the hospitals to the utility company to the Memphis Ballet.

Deputy Chief of Investigative Services W. E. Billet swept down the grand stairs from the mezzanine, entering the lobby in his dress blue uniform, polished brass buttons sparkling under the crystal chandeliers. The only person Wiley hated more than me was Billet.

Billet was young, brilliant, black, photogenic, and a favorite of the mayor. He and Wiley had an ongoing feud and were forever seeking new ways to sabotage each other. That's why I was there; that and the deputy chief liked having his own crime-scene pictures. For his part, Wiley was habitually slow with his findings, forcing Billet to wait days for even the most basic forensic test results. Meanwhile, a serial murderer was walking the streets and these two politicians conducted ongoing ratfucking evolutions preparing for the day when one would be named director of the Memphis Police Department and the other forced to retire or run out of town completely.

Sergeant Adam McPeake was my connection to this bag of dicks. He recommended me to Chief Billet four years ago, before the Playhouse Killer had cooked his first victim. McPeake was younger and better-looking than Billet, carved from mahogany so rich he almost glowed, and smart where it counted. Smart enough never to cross his boss or get between him and a camera. I had brought him up from traffic when he was a rookie and introduced him to vice. He made it into homicide through a combination of hard work and the golden horseshoe lodged up his ass. He'd overcome a cocaine addiction that nearly cost him his career, but he was also a shrewd politician and knew how to play the system, so he'd been able to hang on to his job. I had pissed mine away.

Chief Billet trailed Wiley into the theater. Adam and I followed, along with what appeared to be half the police department. “Don't these people have jobs?” I said as I turned on my cameras. I had brought my Canon, my work camera, in addition to the new Leica.

“Everybody thinks it's the Playhouse Killer,” Adam said.

“Isn't it?”

“I don't think so.” For some reason, I was relieved by that. I had learned a long time ago to treat this like a job, but the Playhouse murders got to me.

From the back of the auditorium, the body looked like a pile of old bedding left on stage. It lay in a pool of white light. Wiley's assistant was already circling it, snapping photos. The victim lay facedown under an old mattress freckled with overlapping liver-colored stains, with only his naked brown legs visible from the knees down. As soon as we got on stage, I secured a flash to the top of my Canon and started shooting.

At the first snap, Dr. Wiley glared up from his open tackle boxes. “Keep her back!” he shouted. Chief Billet smiled and waved me on, so I continued to shoot. I took several photos of the bottoms of the victim's feet, which were black with grime. I saw no signs of blood on either the stage or the mattress.

Dr. Wiley had his techs spread a sheet of plastic next to the body and then lift the mattress aside and lay it on the sheet. Dave, the theater manager, turned green and asked Adam if he could leave. Adam nodded and he hurried up the aisle with one hand over his mouth.

I snapped some shots of the cops standing around the stage in this surreal overhead light, with the darkness stretching up and away behind them. At the rear of the highest balcony, I noticed a young girl standing under an Exit sign, watching us work. I turned my Canon on her and looked at her through the viewfinder, but the screen was empty. I didn't say anything. Nobody else would be able to see her.

Wiley spoke into a digital recorder, describing the state of the victim. “Black male, early twenties, approximately five-ten, one hundred and thirty pounds, nude, discovered lying facedown beneath a mattress. A three-foot length of electrical conduit is lodged in the victim's anus.”

“I think the cause of death is obvious,” Chief Billet said.

Dr. Wiley laughed once, derisively, as he knelt over the body. I locked myself up cold and tight and kept shooting pictures. Treat it like a specimen, an object of study rather than horror. Focus on the details, the minutiae of visual data. Ignore the person, no matter how familiar he seems. This was a stranger, not a ghost from my past. Luckily, I couldn't see his face.

Wiley continued, “There are no other signs of external trauma. Deep coloration of the buttocks suggests cause of death to be
asphyxiation
.” He glared at Chief Billet as he said this.

“Get it?” one of the cops grunted. “Ass-fixiation?” A sophomoric snicker circled the stage. Wiley rolled his bloodshot eyes.

“TOD?” Billet asked.

Wiley extracted a long probe thermometer from the torso and examined it. “Less than four hours.”

“What about an ID?”

“He's naked,” Wiley said. “If I see his wallet lying around, I'll let you know.”

“You don't have to be a smartass, Paul,” Billet said. He turned to Adam. “Well, McPeake? Is this the work of our boy?”

“I don't think so.”

Several cops groaned or swore. “Why not?” Billet asked.

Adam said, “It's not consistent with his pattern. The Playhouse Killer stages his victims in murder scenes from famous plays.”

“You can't get a bigger stage than the Orpheum.”

“But it's not from any play I know. Dave agrees.” He nodded at the theater manager, who seemed even paler than before. “I think maybe this guy's a copycat.”

“Great,” Billet said. He paced the stage with his hands behind his back, while Wiley smirked and bagged the victim's hands. “That's just fucking great. That's all we need right now.” His voice boomed through the auditorium, resounding in the shadows of the balconies and galleries. I looked for the little girl beneath the Exit sign, but she wasn't there anymore. Two in one day—that was a bad sign.

“I think the killer felt remorse and tried to cover up the body with the mattress,” Adam said, but something about this didn't ping. The mattress looked like it had been pulled out of a Dumpster. He must have brought it with him, which meant he had planned it this way, for whatever reason.

“You're the expert, McPeake,” Chief Billet said. “Now tell me what I'm supposed to tell the cameras.”

Adam shrugged.

“Jesus!” the crime-scene tech swore. Dr. Wiley hurried over with a plastic bag to catch the sludge flowing from the pipe rammed up the victim's anus.

“Flesh is cauterized and fused to the metal,” he said as he examined the point of insertion. “It must have been red hot when inserted.”

“Marlowe!” I shouted. Everybody stared at me. I had known some of these cops from when I was on the force myself, but most of them wouldn't speak to me now. To them, I was just a junkie mooching off the chief's generosity. A few of them had heard about my bad habit of seeing people who weren't there, and I'm sure they thought I was talking to one of my special friends again.

Billet was one of them. He lifted a curious eyebrow. “Well?”

But I wasn't crazy, not this time. I had read about this scene in an English history course in college. “This is from
Edward the Second
by Christopher Marlowe,” I said. “According to Thomas More, Edward was smothered with a mattress, then a red-hot copper pipe was shoved up his butt.” The brutality of historical British executions had been one of Professor Cromwell's favorite subjects. Writing about a truly grisly one, like Edward II's, was a good way to get an A in his class.

“Adam?” Billet turned to his expert.

Adam shrugged. “That scene was never in Marlowe's play.”

I said, “Edward's death was. The killer's not re-creating, he's interpreting. He's making it his own. Maybe he's a frustrated playwright.”

“Write us a book report,” Billet said. “What I want to know is why did they shove a pipe up his ass?”

“You ever see the movie
Braveheart
?” Billet nodded that he had. “Edward the Second was Longshanks' gay son.”

It was like a light came on over the heads of the cops around me. “That movie's fucking awesome,” one said.

“Then this is the work of our killer?” Billet started straightening his tie.

“Provided the victim is gay,” Adam said. We wouldn't know for sure until he was identified, but there wasn't much doubt anymore. It fit his pattern. The Playhouse Killer's last victim had been staged in a scene from Shakespeare's
Richard III
, but this was his first murder in a long time, and his boldest and most public staging by far.

Chief Billet winked at me and slipped out to talk to the reporters, while Wiley continued his work in sullen silence. He wouldn't look at me now, not even when I took a picture of him bending over the body. Adam was talking to some guys dusting for fingerprints near the backstage door. It was pretty clear from the placement of the body and the lack of blood that the victim hadn't been killed here. He must have been brought in, but how had he done that in a public place like the Orpheum without being seen?

Adam waved for me to follow him. I started putting my cameras away, but as Wiley and his assistant turned the body over, I almost dropped the Leica.

I hurried across the stage and grabbed Adam by the elbow, pulled him behind some scenery so the other cops wouldn't overhear. “Adam,” I said. “I know this kid.”

I had met him about five hours ago.

 

3

A
LIGHT MIST WAS FALLING
through the sycamore trees. The driveway was packed with cars of all makes, models and conditions, from brand-new Acuras and BMWs to rusted-out junkers with hocked titles and plastic sheeting duct-taped over busted windows. The house rose up in the darkness beyond the driveway, bowed and swollen, light streaming from every window like a house afraid of its own shadows. Adam and I climbed the steps to the porch.

“You met the victim here?” he asked. I nodded and shook the water from my hair. “How do you know Michi Mori?”