The Glitter Dome (40 page)

Al was coming up the steps when Martin Welborn stepped very cautiously into the ominous wood-frame house. There were three mottled puppies in the house. Urine and defecation from the puppies was everywhere. The house was rank with it. And with the smell of spilled beer and port wine. Martin Welborn was proceeding very carefully through the stink and debris when Al came through the door, gun in hand. They didn't know what they were looking for
.

Al Mackey nudged open a bedroom door and they both ducked back on either side. Al went into the bedroom first. The mattress was without sheets and stained with menstrual blood and urine and semen. The slipless pillows were as mottled as the puppies. As far as unfit homes go, this one wasn't bad enough, not by legal definition. There was no broken and jagged window glass. No cans of toxic paint or chemicals, no vials of sedatives or other deadly substances
.

The radio broadcast had called it an ambulance cutting. But who was cut? And where? Then they heard the whimpering from the service porch
.

Martin Welborn walked through the befouled living room as the fat puppies squealed happily and bit at his pants cuffs. At first he thought the sound was from another puppy. Then he knew better. It was human whimpering. Then Martin Welborn met Danny Meadows
.

He was lying on the service porch, huddling like a ragbag beneath the free-standing washtub. There was a pool of blood on the grimy linoleum in front of the washtub. One of the prancing puppies pattered through the puddle and hopped on Martin Welborn's leg with bloody little paws when the detective knelt to peer at Danny Meadows
.

Danny Meadows was eight years old. His face was ghostly. He was in shock. He stared with enormous blue eyes and said “Daddy?” to Martin Welborn
.

Danny Meadows wore a filthy green T-shirt, socks, sneakers. He held his blue jeans in front of him as though he was ashamed. The jeans were blood-soaked. He looked Martin Welborn in the eyes and said, “Daddy?” The fat puppy splashed through the blood and scampered around Martin Welborn, trying to play with him
.

Martin Welborn reached and gently took the bloody jeans away from Danny Meadows. The boy whimpered, but released his hold. Martin Welborn gasped and dropped his gun into the blood. It struck the puppy's toe and the puppy yapped and ran crying into the living room. Danny Meadows looked at Martin Welborn and said, “Daddy?
”

There was a yawning hole where the penis should have been. Most of the bleeding had coagulated and the gaping vertical wound oozed and drained, but was not pumping
.

Al Mackey heard the siren first. His voice was unrecognizable. He said something to Martin Welborn about the ambulance
.

“
Who … hurt you?” Martin Welborn asked
.

Danny Meadows said, “Daddy?
”

Then through the storm of horror, it struck Martin Welborn! Where? Where?

“
Son!” he said. “Where … where did … where …
”

Martin Welborn started crying. The ambulance was pulling up in front of the house. Martin Welborn leaped up and began searching frantically. He tore at piles of dirty clothes. He ran to the sink. He stuck his hand in the garbage disposal. Martin Welborn slipped in the blood and fell down when he lunged into the living room
.

He didn't see the paramedics enter the house. He didn't hear Al Mackey's frantic instructions to them. He had to find it! He ran into the bedroom and looked first for the knife. He looked for more blood. He never heard Al Mackey yelling at him. The toilet!

He ran to the bathroom. He plunged his hand into the yellow water. Al Mackey was yelling at him
.

Martin Welborn pushed his partner out of the doorway and surged back into the living room while the paramedics were running down the sidewalk with Danny Meadows wrapped in a blanket
.

Martin Welborn found it in the living room. It was in an ashtray covered with cigarette butts. It had been burned. He was crying brokenly when he took it out of the ashtray. He went reeling into the bathroom and washed it in the sink. Al Mackey was shuddering and screaming in his ear
.

“
For God's sake, Martin! Stop! For God's sake!
”

Martin Welborn wrapped it in a handkerchief and took it to Children's Hospital. A surgical team worked for five hours reattaching it. They weren't certain for ten days. Then they admitted that the operation was a failure. A second amputation was finally performed to save Danny Meadows' life
.

It was determined that both parents had played important roles in the six-month ordeal of their middle child, Danny Meadows, a chronic bed-wetter. Their other children had been neglected but never abused. The final act was in response to his final warning for bed-wetting. It was never precisely determined which one actually wielded the knife. They blamed each other
.

And their son, Danny Meadows, met Martin Welborn and became an unrelenting little specter, among a host of other specters, who rose up to torment Martin Welborn in the night
.

At last the blinding pain had begun to ease. He stopped weeping from the agony of it. He released the buckle and fell onto the floor of his bedroom. His naked body was drenched with sweat. He tried to sit up but had to lie down again. He tried a second time. He felt that all the blood in his body was surging and sloshing in his skull. He was too nauseous to get up. He pulled the blanket off the foot of the bed. The hardness of the floor offered some relief from the pain. He drew the blanket over him and fell asleep on the floor. He was terrified that the pain would return, but it didn't.

18

The Crimson Slippers

The next afternoon they would get the biggest break in the Nigel St. Claire murder case that they could possibly get. The break was so sudden and so dramatic it virtually assured Al Mackey that he would never have to make an arrest in the Nigel St. Claire case. And that was the biggest break of all.

In the morning, Al Mackey arrived as usual at Martin Welborn's apartment. Martin Welborn was not waiting out front so Al Mackey went to the door and knocked. He waited only a few seconds before reaching for the laminated police identification card. He thought of Marty hanging like a dead marlin, and started to panic as he struggled to slip the lock.

Then the door opened. Martin Welborn said, “You taking up housebreaking, Aloysius, my boy?”

He was showered and shaved and brushed and tailored. As neat as ever. But he was exceedingly pale, and dark under the eyes, and there was a wisp of a tremor in his voice when he said, “Well, my son, do you like my new suit? Do I glitter when I walk?”

Al Mackey didn't like the way Martin Welborn glittered
in the eyes
. And he didn't like the way Marty walked, or talked, or did anything else that day. Marty was out of focus most of the morning, which was devoted to playing catch-up on the mountain of paper work. They both shuffled paper until noon. Al Mackey was a wreck, and looked at Marty's work for telltale lapses of coherence or continuity.

During his twenty-two years Al Mackey had known too many who succumbed to the Ultimate Policeman's Disease. He had had a radio car partner in 1968 who, during a roll-call harangue on firearms safety which warned that twenty percent of the nation's policemen shot on duty had been accidentally shot by other cops, had startled the assembly by crying out: “But what percentage shoot
themselves?
” He had that glittering, thousand-yard stare. Two weeks later, in the station parking lot, he shot himself and became part of the fearful statistic which the Department
didn't
keep.

Just after noon Schultz and Simon invited the other team of homicide detectives to go for a bout of dysentery at their favorite burrito stand.

“Come on, Marty, let's go. I haven't done the chili cha-cha since yesterday,” Al Mackey said.

“You go, Al. I'm not hungry.”

“Come on, Marty. Get a bite to eat.”

“I'm not hungry, Al. You go ahead.”

Al Mackey reluctantly accompanied the behemoths, and got sick watching them consume four burritos each.

It was after one o'clock when they got back. Martin Welborn was not in the squadroom. Al Mackey checked the sign-out sheet and saw that Marty had listed his destination as personnel division. What would Marty be doing at personnel? But before he had time to give it much thought, The Big Break came.

The Ferret received a call from robbery downtown. When he hung up the telephone he screamed “
SON OF A BITCH
!” so thunderously that Gladys Bruckmeyer came up out of her typing chair, ripping the knees of her pantyhose clear off her varicosed old wheels.

“What the hell is
wrong
with you, Ferret?” Schultz demanded.

“They shot the gook! And Just Plain Bill! They shot them both!”

There was no time to wait for Marty to return. There was no time for anything but for Al Mackey and the Ferret to drive code-three in a black-and-white radio car out the San Bernardino Freeway to the county hospital, where two robbery detectives met them at the elevator. On the way to the intensive care unit they learned that Bill Bozwell and his Vietnamese companion, whose California driver's license showed his name to be Loc Nguyen, had experienced an even worse run of luck than usual when, at ten minutes past noon, they had held up a diamond merchant in a parking lot on Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles. After slugging the merchant, who fought for his goods, they ran smack into three detectives from bunco-forgery who were screwing off in a department store looking for a sale on golf balls. In a one-sided gun battle the detectives put seven .38 rounds into Bill Bozwell and Loc Nguyen. Just Plain Bill Bozwell was D.O.A., and Loc Nguyen was not expected to survive the afternoon.

The robbery dicks said that there was a wise-ass young doctor in I.C.U. who knew that if a suspect doesn't truly
believe
he's going to die, and if he doesn't
in fact
die, then a dying declaration is no good, legally speaking. Hence, he felt that detectives hovering over deathbeds giving a patient the Final Word was very bad for the prognosis of survival, however slim.

Al Mackey was nearly bonzo when they arrived at I.C.U. He was ready to throttle any young croaker who tried to prevent him from getting them out of this case so that they might go on a goddamn fishing trip or something, and get Marty some rest.

The doctor was not a problem. He was in the corridor writing on a chart when he saw the four detectives. “Have at him,” the doctor said, with a toss of his perm toward the flattened figure at the far end of I.C.U. “You can't hurt him now.”

“Is he dead, goddamnit?” Al Mackey exclaimed.

“As good as,” the doctor said, glancing up curiously. “He's in a coma.”

“Could you guys wait here?” Al Mackey asked the robbery dicks, who nodded and headed for the coffee machine as Al Mackey and the Ferret strode toward the little man breathing the last oxygen he'd ever consume. Two nurses left them and walked into the corridor, and Al Mackey drew the curtain around the bed.

“Well, is it him?” he whispered to the Ferret.

Suddenly the Ferret discovered something extraordinary. Seeing him lying there with the I.V. and the plasma, and the oxygen mask, and the spurious expression of repose, he looked so
different
. The Ferret didn't, couldn't
hate
him. “He looks so small,” the Ferret said. “He looks like a little kid.”

“Goddamnit, Ferret, don't say they all look alike! Is it him or not?”

“He looked so different when he was grinning at me.”

“Do you want me to rip off that fucking oxygen mask and make him grin?” Al Mackey said, and the Ferret looked at him and shook his head.

“It's him,” the Ferret said. “I think.”

“Now get outa here so I can take his dying declaration,” Al Mackey said.

“A statement from
him?
” the Ferret said incredulously.

“Get the fuck outa here!” Al Mackey said.

The Vietnamese assassin made quite a complete dying declaration, according to Al Mackey's report. After expressing a clear understanding that he was going to die, the assassin told the detective that he and Just Plain Bill Bozwell did indeed shoot Nigel St. Claire to death that night in the parking lot. It happened after they'd spontaneously kidnapped the hapless mogul from a street in Hollywood where Nigel St. Claire had apparently stopped to buy a newspaper. The team of robbers simply seized an opportunity, overpowered the obviously wealthy victim, took him to a lonely parking lot near Gower in Bozwell's car, and shot him dead. They were frightened off by a passing car before they had a chance to rob the corpse.

The assassin barely got the story out before he expired. But he managed. And the Nigel St. Claire case was cleared. The sister of Loc Nguyen later told police through a translator that she knew her brother would come to no good, but she'd certainly misjudged his potential after having the police report translated for her. She'd always thought he was a dumb little thug who'd never learned more than a few words of English, yet look how beautifully he'd confessed his crimes at the end. And all in English! It just goes to show that all people have potential, she said.

There were lots of huzzahs and backslapping around the squadroom that afternoon. The captain had borrowed poor old Cal Greenberg's electric shaver and was getting himself all gussied up for a report to a television news team on the happy ending to the Nigel St. Claire murder case. He was rehearsing several phrases upon which to end his formal statement regarding the sudden break in the murder investigation. He settled on: “He works in mysterious ways.”

And he-who-worked-in-mysterious-ways was at that moment sitting in the squadroom wondering where the hell Martin Welborn went after he returned from personnel division. Al Mackey was dictating the dying declaration to Gladys Bruckmeyer when Martin Welborn came in the door.