Zombie Pulp (18 page)

“I’ve been sleeping, I guess. I like to do that sometimes.”

I looked at the clock. Christ. I’d been out for almost fourteen hours straight. Not surprising, really, when you took into account that for the past three weeks I’d been chasing an errant husband and his twenty-year old mistress throughout the tri-state area. And for those three weeks I bet I hadn’t slept more than three or fours hours a night. The entire case was a comedy of errors, a comedy with me as the lead clown. Not exactly duck soup but I’d brought the duo in and it had paid off in heavy green. Good or bad, it was how guys like me made our meat.

I cleared my throat. “What the hell’s so important? You know I gotta get all the beauty rest I can.”

“And then some,” he said. “I was about to send a couple uniforms over there, have them kick in the door and drag you over here.”

“I don’t think I’d like that.”

Tommy went on to tell me he’d been calling me just about every half-hour all day long. “It happened this morning,” he went on. “Our boy…surely you remember the one that decided his wrists would look better laid open with a razor? Yeah, well, guess what? Guess what happened this morning?”

“You remembered you were engaged to him?”

“Ha. No, and let’s keep that between us, shall we? No, I’m afraid our boy disappeared from the morgue.”

I was awake now. “What do you mean
disappeared?”

“Just what I said.”

It hit me hard. Like a hammer to the skull. “You telling me those county ghouls lost him?”

“Yup. Either misplaced him or someone took him. Unless you think he might’ve wandered off on his own,” Tommy said. “But you gotta remember how sweet he was on you, Vince. Probably out dragging his dead ass to a florist, buying something special for you.”

The man we were talking about was named Quigg. And he was sweet on me like I was sweet on razor blades in my shorts. He hated me and I hated him and wasn’t the world a beautiful place to live?

But let me tell you about this guy.

It was a homicide case. Strictly something for the precinct boys, definitely not the province of a private dick like me. I got pulled into it when the sister of one of the victims hired me to do what the police weren’t doing: tracking down the killer. And, somehow,
killer,
doesn’t seem to really cut it here. Maybe a better word would be
maniac.
Our boy here, you see, was a cannibal. Yeah, he was killing ‘em with a knife—post mortem knife it turned out—just as sharp as you please, slitting open their throats like the bellies of hogs and having himself a spot of cold lunch when they were down and out. I saw a few of the bodies. Tommy Albert showed me the crime scene photos of the others. It was enough to put you off red meat for life. The bodies were all the same—young women, throats slit, meat from their bellies and thighs cut free with a knife, throats and faces and wrists chewed-up. The bodies were generally drained of blood. Thing that we never did understand is why he cut the hearts out. No other organs, just the hearts. Maybe he was eating them. That was the general presumption. But even then, I didn’t believe it.

I’d been on the case a month when the eighth and final body in as many weeks turned up. I had narrowed down my cast of revelers to three men by then—one was a former mental patient, another just a big mean bastard with a history of sadism, and the third, a mild mannered guy who just happened to be a professor of anthropology of all things. It turned out that our boy was Quigg, the professor. I caught him in the act. I got there too late to save the girl’s life, but at least I stopped him from carving her up like the Christmas ham at grandma’s house.

I’ll be the first to admit that I worked him over pretty good before I called in Tommy and his boys. When the black and whites finally rolled in, Quigg was in need of some prolonged dental care. But the fact that this twisted, sick piece of shit was even breathing when the bulls slapped the bracelets on him was testament to my self-restraint. Given what he’d done, I should’ve made him the suck the end of my .45 like a 10 cent lollypop before I urged his brains out the back of his skull.

Anyway, Tommy’s boys took him away. His lawyer—some hot shot greaseball garbage-eater with all the morals of a child molester—tried the insanity plea, but Quigg was convicted and sent upstate. His first night there, he opened his wrists and the angels sighed.

And that’s all she wrote.

Or was it?

“Who the hell would spring a stiff?” I said.

Tommy said, “Who knows? But I’m just bringing you up to speed here. All that happened twelve hours ago, chum. It’s what’s happened since that’s yanking my chain.”

He dropped the bait and I bit.

And it was worse than I thought.

2

An hour later, after a hot cup of Joe and a hotter shower, I pulled on my rags and went uptown to the townhouse residence of the district attorney, Bobby Tanner. He was a good egg for a prosecutor. He’d hired me numerous times to do background checks on cases he was working on. We were tight. Bobby’s family had money like geese have feathers: he could’ve stuffed mattresses with it. Bobby had attended some ivy league college, but had decided to go into public service much to the chagrin of his people who wanted him to join some upscale whiteshoe firm on Fifth.

But that was the kind of boy Bobby was: honest, decent, principles so high you would’ve needed a ladder to climb over them. Problem was, Bobby didn’t have anything anymore.

Bobby was dead.

His living room was crawling with cops and coroner’s people. They were thick as eels swimming upstream. Tommy and I were standing over in the corner next to a bookshelf, smoking, not saying a hell of a lot. Bobby wasn’t just another stiff, he was our friend.

The condition of the body was eating at us…much the way someone else had been eating at Bobby. He’d been partially devoured, you see. Most of the flesh had been stripped from his face and throat. His belly had been ripped apart. His head had been opened like a can of soup and sucked clean. His left arm was missing beneath the elbow. This time, the killer hadn’t used any tools, the coroner informed us, he’d used teeth and nails.

“I know what you’re gonna say,” Tommy said to me, “but there can’t possibly be a connection between Quigg and this.”

“And why not?”

“Because he’s dead.”

“He’s also missing,” I pointed out.

“That don’t buy beans,” Tommy said.

And maybe it didn’t. I started thinking about Quigg. It was something I dearly wanted to put out of my head forever. But now it all came back like a bad rash. The same old questions that I never could answer, but ones that I knew were important. Somehow. “I’m still wondering about Quigg,” I said. “What did we really know about him?”

Tommy just stared at me. His was a big fellow, went an easy three-hundred plus, was built like something that could’ve pulled a beer wagon for a living. He wasn’t pretty. He was balding, his face a roadmap of Death Valley, a cigar butt shoved in the corner of his mouth. Maybe not campaign poster material, but effective as hell. Only reason he hadn’t brought in Quigg himself was that Quigg, though under suspicion, was connected like the water works.

“He was a sick sonofabitch,” Tommy said. “He ate goddamn people and now he’s dead. And don’t start with any of that ‘cult’ bullshit with me again. I’m not in the mood.”

It had been my pet theory. You see, Quigg, although technically employed by City College as a professor of anthropology and folklore, had been on the last leg of a five-year leave of absence at the time of his arrest. According to the college, he had been gathering information for some paper he was writing. He spent two years in Haiti, another in Ecuador, and two more hopping around Asia and the Middle East. I’d never been able to connect up any of that unless he had learned how to be a cannibal from some jungle tribe. But I knew there was a connection. I could feel it like a fat man can feel cool air blowing up through a hole in the seat of his pants.

But the cult angle?

One of the few witnesses to the murders claimed he saw not just a lone man leaving the crime scene, but a group of people. And when I was following Quigg around he was always in the company of three or four others. And that night I found him doing his thing…well, I could’ve sworn I heard footsteps running off as I approached. Many of them. I hadn’t bothered following because I’d thought I had my man.

But were there others?

Was Quigg operating alone?

Somehow, I started to see a connection here. Whatever Quigg was part of, maybe it was still in operation. But why Bobby? Why a high-profile victim like the district attorney? It made no real sense…or maybe it made all the sense in the world.

“I’ll be in touch,” I told Tommy, heading towards the door.

“Where the hell you going?”

“Following a hunch,” I said.

Tommy looked at me. “I don’t give a rat’s hairy ass how you spend your free time, Vince, but don’t get yourself in trouble. You know how you are. When you get going, things happen.”

“Things?”

“You know what I mean. Try and keep the body count low, will ya?”

But I was already out the door.

3

It was midnight and rain was pissing down from a slate sky and I had spent the past three hours parked in the darkness. I was watching the house of Marianne Portis. Why? Because she was really all I had. Marianne was a slight, pale woman who looked like central casting’s idea of a librarian. She didn’t look to me as the sort that could hurt a fly…but you never knew. She showed up every day at Quigg’s trial and, more than once, I saw the two of them pass secretive looks. So I’d had her checked out. When Bobby bought it, I thought of her right away.

But nothing was happening. I didn’t know what I was expecting or hoping for, only that when it happened I’d know it. It was getting on one in the morning and I was starting to nod off when a black sedan rolled up. Marianne came out and hopped in. They drove off and I followed them all the way over to the East Side where they pulled into a small parking lot behind a funeral home. That definitely raised my curiosity a notch. Traffic was light so I didn’t hang around. I drove up to the next block and parked my heap across from some second-rate clip joint and struck out on foot.

The funeral home was stuck in between a boarded-up factory and a row of old houses. It was a two-story brick job with withered ivy climbing all over it like hair on a monkey’s back. There was a gray and weathered sign out front which proudly proclaimed it was the Douglas-Barre Funeral Home and had been since 1907…in case I was counting.

I strolled casually past the front and then circled around back. I came through the alley, a chill wind blasting rain into my face. My overcoat flapped around me like a flag on a high pole and rain ran off the brim of my fedora in tiny rivers. It was so wet even the rats were staying home. I positioned myself beneath the overhang of a warehouse loading dock, hiding in a pocket of shadow like a spider in a crevice.

I waited over an hour before something happened, cigarette butts gathering at my feet. The delivery/receiving doors at the back of the funeral home were opened and secured. There were two cars parked back there and neither of them were hearses. Just that sedan and a wood-paneled delivery wagon.

Cigarette dangling from my lower lip like a steaming icicle, I watched. Two men carried out a body—and I could see by the way they carried it that it was just as dead as my mother’s virtue—and unceremoniously dumped it into the back of the wagon. Then the doors were closed and the wagon drove off, followed by the sedan and Marianne. I could’ve made a mad dash for my heap, but I decided I wanted to look around first.

I was curious.

I wanted very much to know where they were taking the stiff, but there was no real chance of catching up with them at night. Not in this city. Not without breaking a few traffic laws and having coppers crawling up my backside like mites. And I didn’t want to spend the night in the jug.

Those delivery doors were locked, but the lock wasn’t much. I took out my little case of picks and went through it in about a minute. Inside, the place was lousy with shadows. All the darkness in the world was gathered here. It stunk of sweet flowers and age. I made my way through winding corridors and past darkened viewing rooms. All I could hear was the rain on the windows and the beat of my own heart. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not afraid of dead people. Death and me go way back. I’ve sent plenty of business His way. But places like this always remind me of my mother buying it when I was eight…or of Helen. Helen was my wife. Three months after we were married we were still nuts about each other and then she got sick. Two months later, we planted her. The cancer. Got into her blood. She was two weeks shy of her twenty-fifth birthday. But that’s the way it works sometimes. Guys like me aren’t designed to be happy in life, we’re designed to stumble drunkenly from one scene to the next like a two-bit actor without the benefit of a script.

I looked around and didn’t see a thing worth noting. Then I went upstairs, found the offices, some storage rooms. In one of the offices, one that had been recently occupied judging by the clouds of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, I found an address book in the top drawer…after I jimmied it open, of course. There were notations and phone numbers scribbled down. Names of florists, mortuaries, a few business cards clipped to the back cover.