Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 21 - Infernal Angels (7 page)

“I wanted to see the world.”

We turned onto Marcus, and that was the end of the small talk. “Someone called nine-one-one last night and hung up,” she said. “Police responded, of course. Victim’s name is Crossgrain, but you knew that.”

“You can’t make that case just because he had one of my cards. I stick them in magazines on drugstore racks.”

“From the location and position of the body,” she went on, “they thought at first he fell downstairs, but a lot more was broken about the place than just his bones. He put up a fight, but he was overmatched.”

The brick house looked almost gaudy in the glare of police searchbeams and ribbons of yellow tape, satellite trucks quarantined in the nosebleed section thirty feet from the front walk.

“A lot of media we’re having,” I said. “I thought you had to be dismembered and eaten to make breaking news.”

“They’ve got footage on this one, alive and well, only hours old. A thing like that drives up the stock.” She stopped in the middle of the lane and killed the motor. That got the attention of neighbors with robes and overcoats thrown on over their pajamas and from the people standing fully dressed near the TV trucks. Thaler fixed me with her amber gaze. “Heel. Whatever you do, don’t make eye contact.”

We got out and hit the tsunami head on. Feet pattered, voices rose, strobes broiled unprotected skin. The deputy marshal didn’t break stride. When a gap opened she plunged into it and I followed. She flashed brass at a uniform in crowd control, who held up the tape for us to duck under while others moved in to plug the leak. The noise behind us subsided into a collective groan: the voice of the Fourth Estate.

The cardboard was missing from the broken pane in the door. Crossgrain couldn’t have made things easier if he’d left it wide open. All the ground-floor lights were burning, including a dusty ceiling fixture in the narrow bare entryway. It looked like we’d crashed an unsuccessful party.

The kitchen seemed somehow less cheerful with all the under-the-counter lights ablaze as well as the fluorescent overhead, but modern morgues are always bright. A detective I recognized from Homicide, a man with the long face and large hands of a yankee farmer, sat at the table where I’d drunk coffee, playing solitaire with Polaroids; he was stirring to rise when Thaler swung open the cellar door and I trailed her down the earth-smelling steps. At the bottom, someone had drawn a figure in abstract with masking tape, bending it up over the edge of the last step to suggest a stylized human foot in profile. I almost collided with Thaler from behind when she stopped to curse at it.

“I told that creep medical examiner not to move him till I got back.”

A gob of animated flesh waddled into the base of the stairwell and planted a pair of square-toed oxfords on top of the tape. “
I
told him to take him back to the barn. This is my crime scene.”

“Sergeant Hornet.” The deputy marshal’s tone flattened. You couldn’t have pushed a spatula under it.

“Lieutenant. Remember? They kicked me upstairs when I transferred back from city hall. I got Alderdyce’s old job.”

“How could I have forgotten.”

“You and me, Mary Ann, we’re movin’ on up to the East Side.” He actually sang it. His high-pitched tenor was nasty enough when he spoke. “Not like Walker, there. He’s been stuck in the same rut so long he thinks it’s the penthouse.”

You could talk yourself out of how fat Hornet was when you weren’t actually in his presence; the imagination plays cartoonish pranks when you’re standing close to the source, and the department has physical fitness standards. Then you ran into him again, almost always without expecting it, and you saw a massive coronary waiting for the paperwork. His green sportcoat hadn’t buttoned since Molly Ringwald mattered and the waistline of his crumpled tan Dockers made a smiley face under one of those bellies you wanted to look away from but couldn’t, like the aftermath of a high-school massacre. An amethyst the size of a duck’s egg fastened a bolo tie on a shirt with an amphibian embroidered above the pocket. I decided he had excellent fashion sense. No one dresses that badly by accident.

Thaler said, “You’re standing on evidence.”

He looked down, but left his feet where they were. He took what she’d said on faith. There was no way he could see them. He made a noise like a teakettle with a stuck valve; he thought he was chuckling. “Oh, that. Memorize it for your grandkids. In a few years the photogs will snap the stiffs in three-D digital, prints too. The prosecution will project holograms for the jury. No more powder, no more tape, no more chalk. Best of all, no more dweebs from forensics getting Clearasil stains on everything. Virtual crime scene.” He looked up. “
My
crime scene.”

“We had this all worked out between the MacNamara Building and Thirteen Hundred. It’s a cooperative effort.”

“I worked it out with the department manual. This is city jurisdiction.” He stuck a finger at me. “The only reason I let him get this far is he’s a material witness.”

I said, “And here I thought you liked to have me around to scratch behind the ears.”

I was standing two steps behind and above Thaler, close enough to iron my shirt in the steam from her ears. It cooled by half degrees. When she spoke it sounded like conversation.

“We’ll sort things out during business hours, after I talk to my chief. I don’t suppose you’d object to
sharing
the investigation until then?”

“When you put it that way, I’d be an asshole to refuse.”

“The suspense is killing me,” I said. “Is it yes or no?”

His face, which under ordinary circumstances was the gay shade of chopped sirloin, darkened.
This is it,
his aorta seemed to be saying, and I was sorry for the sake of the city budget he’d sent away the morgue wagon. Then he backed up, turned, and paddled deeper into the basement and out of sight.

Thaler spoke low over her shoulder. “Try to tie a knot in it for an hour. This country’s in no shape for another civil war.”

EIGHT

We’d missed the crowd. A prowl-car officer in uniform was tamping down a yawn in an uncluttered corner and one of Hornet’s forensics dweebs, a slender youth with a Brazilian-wax goatee, was shutting up his evidence case, showing no sign of having heard the lieutenant’s remark. A chemical smell of acetate sharpened the air and patches of fingerpint powder—white on dark surfaces, black on lights—decorated everything an intruder might have touched. Crossgrain had gotten his thorough job in the end.

The basement didn’t bear much resemblance to the tidy browser-friendly place I’d visited twenty hours earlier. The ends of the aisles of merchandise nearest the stairs looked as if they’d collapsed under their own weight: Sleek, early atom-age small kitchen appliances lay in heaps; a set of steel utility shelves had been dumped over, spilling its cargo of portable radios, Roy Rogers board games, whimsical cookie jars, and bolts of upholstery fabric onto the concrete floor; someone had put a foot or an elbow or his head through the picture tube of an Admiral TV in a walnut cabinet.

Blood made a zigzag trail on the floor from the debris to the taped outline at the base of the stairs. The round spots were so nearly perfect I’d have thought they’d been stenciled there if I hadn’t known they weren’t there before.

Mary Ann Thaler pointed at the trail. “He made a break for it while they were knocking him around, got to the stairs and maybe three steps up before he was tackled, hit his head on the floor or got hit with something as hard, and that’s the story on Reuben Crossgrain. Is that how you make it, Lieutenant?”

The red splotch inside the tape didn’t look stenciled.

“That or he tripped on his feet and fell. M.E. said most of his ribs were busted on top of the skull fracture, his right eye socket—orbit, he calls it—nose, jaw. Jaw almost torn clean off. Honey of a working over, and not beginner’s luck.”

“How many?” I asked.

Thaler said, “Two or more.” Hornet said, “One.” It was simultaneous. They looked at each other. “Beating like that,” Thaler said, “someone had to hold him while the other got busy.”

Hornet shook his head; parts of it kept moving after he stopped. “No pressure marks or ligatures on the arms, M.E. said. Somebody stood him up like a heavy bag and went to town.”

“Baseball bat?” I said.

That was a minor mistake, but they both picked up on it. Hornet spoke first. “How’d you know there was a baseball bat?”

“It’s what I’d use if I ever wanted to play the violin again. Beating a grown man bare-handed is rough on both ends.”

“He had your card in his shirt pocket.”

I laughed. He reddened.

“An aluminum bat turned up in the upstairs bedroom,” Thaler said before he could erupt, “next to a smashed lamp from the nightstand. He was getting ready to turn in; all he had on was a corny bowling shirt and boxers, pair of socks. His pants were folded over the back of a chair. He hears a noise, picks up the bat, but he doesn’t make it out of the room. The bat gets taken away from him and tossed, smashing the lamp. Then he gets frog-marched downstairs to show where he kept the TV converter box he had on the news.”

Hornet said, “We don’t know that’s all he came for.”

“It hasn’t shown up, even in this mess. Crossgrain had eighty-nine dollars in his wallet upstairs, a wristwatch, all untouched. Everything’s orderly up there except for the lamp. Without an inventory of the stock it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what else might have been taken.”

“Speak for yourself, Marshal Dillon,” said the lieutenant. “The department didn’t get dumber after you left.”

She bore in tight, sparing him the obvious but clever rejoinder. “The box is important, that much we know. It got overlooked the first time and someone came back for it after he saw Crossgrain with it on TV. I don’t buy random burglaries at the same house two nights in a row, even in this town. Also he wasn’t beaten up for kicks. He was never intended to leave this basement alive.”

I asked how she knew that. Dark patches showed on her cheeks, as if she’d outrun her better instincts, but they faded quickly. She looked at the kid from the lab. I’d almost forgotten he was there. “Tell him.”

Hornet said, “We’re withholding that from the public.”

“Walker isn’t public. He’s barely a citizen. I didn’t bring him here just as a witness. He’s sat in on more homicide investigations than Boston Blackie.”

“Who the hell’s that?”

I was a little vague on it myself, but she made an impatient noise and told the kid again to tell me. But he was afraid of the fat lieutenant and hesitated. Thaler said, “He wasn’t beaten with a bat or a lead pipe or a Hummer or the National Bank of Detroit. The killer used his hands and feet, nothing else. You don’t waste a man with talent like that on your garden-variety B and E.”

“You’re the medical examiner?” I asked the kid. He didn’t look like a creep, just shoved out into the world with the crust still soft.

He flicked a glance at Hornet, then shook his head and cleared his throat. I expected his voice to crack, but he’d been through all that. “I’m blood and semen.”

“He’s the M.E.’s pet,” Thaler said. “He’s first-year med at the U of M. The doc opened Crossgrain’s shirt and asked him if he saw anything significant about the bruises on the chest and abdomen.”

“Chiefly the costal cartilages.” Enthusiasm overcame fear. The kid couldn’t stand by and let a layman botch the story. “If you’re going to use
abdomen,
you could at least say thorax too and be consistent. Subcutaneous hemorrhage patterns not in conformity with blows from a single blunt instrument,” he said. “Clear contact evidence of phalanges, metacarpals, metatar—”

“Hands and feet,” translated the deputy marshal. “One of the kung fu boys.”

I had a sudden image of Gale Kreski in his music store, going into fighting stance. I erased it. Even a lunk like Hornet had been a cop long enough to learn to read minds.

But I wasn’t fast enough for Thaler, who caught the expression on my face if not what made it.

“You were here. Walker. Not because one of your cards turned up, and not just because we say it. You were here because Sergeant Ivan Mansanard, a fifteen-year veteran with the Tactical Mobile Division, caught the squeal on the first burglary at this address and put you on to Crossgrain as a personal favor. It’s up to Lieutenant Hornet whether Mansanard faces a disciplinary hearing for sharing police information with a civilian before he filed his report with his superiors. Did you think Homicide wouldn’t talk to the responding officer when that complaint scrolled up on the computer?”

“No kidding, his first name’s Ivan?”

Hornet wobbled his chins at the uniformed officer in his corner. “Read this character his rights. Obstruction of justice for starters. Leave plenty of room at the bottom of the report.”

The cop abandoned the yawn he’d been building and came out of his slouch, unhooking the cuffs from his belt; a quiet couple of hours until the end of his tour, gone up in smoke.

I said, “Hadn’t you better ask me if I was here, so I can lie about it first? You can’t make a case for obstruction until then.”

Hornet gestured, halting the uniform. He glared at Thaler. “What’d he tell you on the way over?”