Wild Cards [07] Dead Man's Hand (10 page)

"What about Downs?" Jay demanded.

"Fuck if I know. He ain't been home. The cops checked his door, but it was still locked. He's just off doing some write-up for that fuckin' magazine. He's gonna be pissed when he finds out what he missed. What a laugh."

"A riot," said Jay, who didn't think Digger would be pissed at all. "Hey, you ever been in Newark city jail?"

"Fuck no," the man said, with a frown.

"Oh, good," Jay said. "I spent a night there once. It really sucks." He pointed. Air rushed into suddenly empty space with a pop that sounded almost like a hiccup, and Jay was alone in the hallway. He started up the stairs, smiling. That was pointless and petty, and if he kept doing stuff like that he was going to get himself sued one of these days. But sometimes it just felt so good.

He spotted red-brown traces on the third-floor landing, and droplets on the wooden banister between three and four, but the serious bloodstains began on the fourth floor. The faded wallpaper showed long dark streaks in two places, where the custodian must have staggered against the wall as he tried to flee, maimed and bleeding, holding himself together with his hands.

That was pretty bad, but the fifth-floor landing was a lot worse. There were dried brown smears where a body, or a piece of a body, had struck the wall. The carpet runner had soaked up so much blood it looked black in places. The spray had gone everywhere. The walls were spotted by it, as if the hallway had come down with measles. Over his head was a trapdoor to the roof, and even that had caught a few stray droplets.

Jay looked around and tried to reconcile what he was seeing with what he'd seen yesterday morning in the Crystal Palace. It didn't add up. A buzz saw, the asshole downstairs had said; it sure as hell looked like it. The West Village Chainsaw Massacre; no wonder the Post had had a field day. By comparison, Chrysalis had hardly bled at all. A few drops on her blouse, a little down low on the walls, but nothing like this.

He tried on the theory that was all coincidence, that this little exercise in atrocity had nothing to do with what had happened to Chrysalis, but every gut instinct he had told him that was bullshit. What the hell was going on here? Disgusted, Jay turned to Digger's door. It was locked, as advertised. He opened the spring lock easily enough with a credit card, but there was a dead bolt as well. For that he needed a lock pick and a good ten minutes of work. Jay had deft, practiced hands and a real nice set of lock picks, but this was a good lock. Finally he heard the tumblers click, and the door pushed open. There was a chain, he saw as he stepped through, but it hadn't been used. Neither had the police bar, which meant the apartment had been locked from the outside. Jay took one look around and said, "Oh shit."

The place had been trashed. Thoroughly and savagely trashed.

He moved through the cramped little rooms carefully. Things had been thrown, smashed, stepped on. At every turn he expected to find a body, or what remained of a body. The living-room floor was buried in a blizzard of paper. A gigantic old Zenith console television had been reduced to ground glass and kindling, and what might have been an impressive collection of old LPs crunched underfoot as Jay stepped on the pieces. In the bedroom, the bed was in pieces, sheets razored, stuffing torn out of the mattress and scattered, books sliced in half right down their spines. The kitchen was covered with decaying junk food, the riper bits already crawling with roaches. All the cupboards had been shattered, their contents strewn wildly about. A huge old refrigerator lay facedown on the linoleum. When Jay bent to examine it, he found a jagged gash in the thick metal of the door. "Jesus Christ," he said. He stood up.

Back in the living room, he noticed the bars on the window. He went through the apartment once again to check. There were thick iron bars on
every
window, even in the white porcelain ruins of the bathroom. The bars looked new. Installed within the past year, Jay would be willing to bet. It looked as though Digger had been as security conscious as Chrysalis, not that it had done him much good. The windows were all locked. Whoever had done this had come in the same way Jay had, through the front door.

Unless maybe they'd come in through a wall.

Jay looked around for an ace of spades, not really expecting to find one. Yeoman might be a psychopath, but his killings had always been accomplished with a certain cool, professional efficiency. This, and the butchery out in the hall, looked like the work of some rabid animal. Jay could easily imagine the killer foaming at the mouth as he went from room to room, destroying.

He was making one final, methodical sweep through the apartment when he spotted the notebooks on the bedroom floor, jumbled up with the latest celebrity bios, a few reference books, and a wide selection of paperbacks by Anonymous with soft-focus covers of women in Victorian undergarments. Not more than one book in five was intact. The corner of one wire-bound notebook was sticking out from under a snowdrift of loose pages, and the plain cardboard cover caught his eye. He dug through the paper and found three more of them, and parts of a fourth. Reporter's notebooks, filled with a hurried, semilegible scrawl. A long diagonal chunk was missing from one book, but you could still read most of it.

Each notebook was dated. Jay sat gingerly on what remained of Digger's mattress and opened the most recent. The last article Digger had worked up was called "The Farmer of Park Avenue," about an eight-year-old girl whose miniature farm filled an entire floor in her daddy's Park Avenue town home. The farm had model houses, painted rivers, felt grass, toy cars and trucks, and an electric train that circled the property. Her farm animals were real. Cows four inches long, tiny little sheepdogs, suckling pigs the size of cockroaches, all shrunken to their present diminutive size by the freckle-faced little farmer, who just loved animals.

Somehow Jay didn't think eight-year-old Jessica von der Stadt was a likely suspect. He flipped back to older material, looking for any mention of Chrysalis, death threats, or homicidal maniacs with or without buzz saws. He found the address of a photographer who had gotten some spicy shots of Peregrine breast-feeding, bios of the government aces assigned to protect the presidential candidates, Hiram's recipe for chocolate mango pie, quotes for a cover profile of Mister Magnet, and Mistral's fond reminiscences of the day her daddy had taught her to fly.

Jay flipped the notebook aside in disgust, and found himself possessed of an overpowering urge to get the hell out of this place.

Brennan sat in a booth in Hairy's Kitchen, sipping occasionally from his cup of tea and ignoring the irritated stares from the passing waitress when he refused to order anything else. He was surrounded by a litter of newspapers that he'd read looking for news about the killing. Chrysalis's death was already relegated to the back pages, pushed aside by the political craziness in Atlanta where a huge platform fight on the jokers' rights plank was brewing. Barnett was marshaling his holier-than-thou forces and the big clash between him and Hartmann was looming on the near horizon.

Chrysalis's death was already old news. Only the
Jokertown
Cry was still running the killing as a front-page item, including a photo of the detective team heading the investigation, jokertown's own Harvey Kant, and his partner, Thomas Jan Maseryk.

Brennan put his teacup down, oblivious to another hard stare from the waitress, and looked closely at the grainy newspaper photo of two men standing outside the Crystal Palace. Kant was the joker on the left. A tall, scaly reptiloid, he reminded Brennan of his old Shadow Fist foe, Wyrm. The other was Maseryk. Brennan nodded to himself. He slid out of the booth, went to the public phone booth in the back of the restaurant, and dialed the Jokertown precinct. It took a moment for the connection to go through, and then he heard a deep, gruff, tired voice on the other end. "Maseryk."

It was definitely him. Brennan hadn't heard the voice in almost fifteen years, but he still recognized it. There was a shadow in it, a brooding, sepulchral tone that hinted at the blackness that had followed Maseryk everywhere when Brennan had known him in Nam.

"Long time no see," Brennan said quietly.

There was a short silence. Brennan could almost hear the gears whirring in Maseryk's head. "Who is this?"

"Brennan. Daniel Brennan."

"Brennan?"

"It's me."

"Christ. I guess it's been a long time. So is this a social call to renew old acquaintances?"

"Of a type," Brennan said. "I'd like to talk to you."

"About what, after all these years?"

"About Chrysalis's murder."

"What's your interest in that?"

"Personal. She was a friend of mine."

"Mmm. You always did take things personal. Okay. Where shall we have this chat?"

Brennan thought it over. He wanted to pump Maseryk for information, but Maseryk was always a closemouthed sort. It wouldn't hurt to meet in a place that might smooth Maseryk's often-touchy feelings, a place Maseryk would also be disinclined to bust up if their talk went sour. "How about over lunch at Aces High?"

"That's a little rich for a cop's pay."

"My treat."

"How can I resist?"

1:00 P.M.

"More coffee, Jay?" Flo asked him.

"Please," Jay said, pushing the cup across the Formica counter. It was his fourth cup. Flo had removed the evidence of his patty melt and fries twenty minutes ago.

"Working a puzzle?" the waitress asked as she refilled his cup. Some of the coffee slopped over into the saucer. "Something like that," Jay admitted. The list was spread out on the counter. He'd been going over it name by name while he ate. A translucent smudge on the paper marked the spot where a bit of onion had slid out of his patty melt. "Well, call me if you need any help," Flo said. "I work them
TV Guide
crosswords every week." She went off with her coffeepot to a booth in back, where a chicken hawk in a white linen suit was trying to recruit a blond boy fresh off the bus from St. Paul. The Java joint was on Forty-second Street between Times Square and the Port Authority Bus Terminal, sandwiched in between the Wet Pussycat Theater and an adult bookstore. The food wasn't quite up to Aces High, but Jay liked the prices. Besides, it was a half block from his office.

He chewed on the pencil he'd bummed from Flo and looked at the list again. The original nineteen finalists were down to eleven. Snotman was in jail at the moment; he'd gone first. Most of the one-star candidates had followed in short order. Chrysalis's office wasn't big enough to hold an elephant, which eliminated Radha O'Reilly. Modular Man and Starshine had both made the list strictly on the basis of geography; neither had any particular reason to want Chrysalis dead. Carnifex had been in Atlanta, as had Jack Braun. Jay knew Elmo hadn't done it, no matter how many stars the computer had assigned him. That left the list looking like this:

X BRAUN, JACK&       GOLDEN BOY         *

  CRENSON, CROYD     THE SLEEPER        ****

  DARLINGFOOT, JOHN  DEVIL JOHN         ***

  DEMARCO, ERNEST    ERNIE THE LIZARD   **

  DOE,JOHN           DOUGHBOY           ***

  JONES, MORDECAI    THE HARLEM HAMMER  **

  LOCKWOOD, WILLIAM  SNOTMAN            ****

X MAN, MODULAR       N/A                *

  MORKLE, DOUG       N/A                **

  MUELLER, HOWARD    TROLL              ***

X O'REILLY, RADHA    ELEPHANT GIRL      *

X RAY, WILLIAM       CARNIFEX           *

X SCHAEFFER, ELMO    N/A                ***

  SEIVERS, ROBERT    BLUDGEON           ***

  NAME UNKNOWN       BLACK SHADOW       **

  NAMES UNKNOWN      THE ODDITY         **

X NAME UNKNOWN       STARSHINE          *

  NAME UNKNOWN       OUASIMAN           ***

  NAME UNKNOWN       WYRM               ****

Jay considered the names that remained. Ernie the Lizard DeMarco owned a Jokertown bar, but it was strictly a neighborhood place, no competition for the Palace. He crossed him out. Devil John Darlingfoot was hired muscle with a record as long as a joker's dork, but all his strength was in one deformed leg. Maybe he kicked in Chrysalis's face? Somehow it didn't feel right. Besides, Jay had the vague impression that Devil John drew the line at murder. He crossed out that name, too. Doughboy had tremendous strength and the mind of a child. He'd become somewhat of a cause when the cops arrested him for murder a few years back. But he hadn't done that one and Jay didn't think it was very likely that he'd done this one either. He went. Mordecai Jones lived in Harlem, half a city away from Jokertown. Except for that world tour last year, he didn't move in the same circles as Chrysalis. He went, too.

He hesitated for a couple minutes over Howard Mueller, better known as Troll, the chief of security at Dr. Tachyon's Jokertown Clinic. Mueller was a Palace regular, and the nine-foot-tall joker was up there with Golden Boy and the Harlem Hammer in the strength department, but as far as Jay knew, Troll was one of the good guys. Maybe he wasn't as clean as he looked. Maybe Chrysalis had dug up some dirt on him, a secret out of his past, and tried to leverage him with it. It was possible, Jay supposed.

Of course, it was also a complete supposition. You could make the same theory fit Ernie the Lizard, the Harlem Hammer, Starshine, hell, any of them. What a great theory, one size fits all. No, that road would take him back to three hundred nineteen names in no time at all. He put pencil to paper and resolutely scratched out Troll.