The Clouds Roll Away (32 page)

“I got his blood all over my hands,” Zennie said, whispering.

I walked over to the window. A light was on in the chicken shack, and I dragged the octahedral stone across the corner of the glass, right next to the wooden pane. I ran my finger over the scratch.

“What do I tell my boy?” Zennie looked at me. “What do I say, ‘Merry Christmas, Daddy's dead'?”

I touched my hand to the radiator under the window. The painted iron was hot, so I held the stone against it, counting to sixty. Zennie was plucking at her comforter, rocking almost catatonically, and when I lifted the stone, it felt cool. Not even warm.

“Zennie.” I held up the stone. “Do you know what this is?”

She had tears in her eyes. “Moon's idea of a joke. He's getting the last laugh now.”

“I don't understand.”

“I asked him for a ring every single Christmas,” she said. “And every year it was the same stupid joke. He'd say, ‘I got you a box of rocks.'”

“Do you know what these rocks are?”

“Ugly. Look at 'em.”

“How many boxes did he give you?”

“Four. I would've thrown them out, but he was always checking to see if I did.”

I walked over to the bed and sat down. The box was in my hands. “Zennie, I need you to come down to the morgue.”

“Uh-uh, no way. I ain't looking at him like that.”

“It might not even be Moon,” I said. “But if it is, and you don't go identify him, he'll stay on that cold metal cart for weeks.”

“My last look at Moon is not going to be that way.”

“Then I'll get a court order. You want your son to see you get served with papers?”

She looked at me with rage and despair. Her next breath was long and bumpy, as if the air was rippling over the jagged pieces of her broken heart.

The drive into the city was punctuated by the sound of Zennie sipping from a silver flask, and by the time I turned onto Jackson Street two hours later, her words were so slurred I decided to park at the snow-packed curb and leave the hazard lights blinking on the Benz's big tail.

Taking her elbow, I guided her across the snow and into the medical examiner's building. The front desk receptionist wore silver bell earrings. When she turned to look at us, the earrings produced shimmery music. I showed my credentials and signed us in.

“You got my man,” Zennie said, leaning over the counter. Her breath smelled like butane.

The receptionist pulled back. The bells made a sound like a question.

“She's here to identify,” I said.

“My Moon,” Zennie breathed.

I clipped a temporary ID to my coat and another to Zennie's jacket. But I sat her down in a seat in the corner of the waiting room.

“Stay here.” I wanted to make sure everything was ready for her.

She pulled a second silver flask from her purse. I was about to say something but instead walked down the hall to the double swinging doors. The room smelled of death and dissection, that weird stench peculiar to pathology. Isopropyl putrification. The ME was standing at the head of a steel gurney, her rubber apron and gloves bloody. She glanced up, staring at me through the clear plastic face shield, then went back to her work.

“We've got two more bullets for you.”

I moved my eyes to the body's face. Sid, the gold tooth.

“Two,” she said, “both in the chest. I sent one to firearms. I saved one for you.”

“Unmarked?”

She nodded.

“What about the other guys?”

“The faceless wonders,” she said. “They have something else.”

She stepped down from the riser giving her height over the gurney. Jabbing her elbow into a button on the wall, she called in an assistant.

The ME described the autopsies in medicolegal terms, making them almost sound like cars. I walked over to the gurney across from Sid. A sterile evidence sheet draped the entire figure. But it was shaped like a mountain. I decided there must be a body block under his upper back, the rubber brick that caused the neck, head, and arms to fall back, making it easier for the ME to carve her Y-shaped incision down the chest.

The assistant was a young woman with large brown eyes. She lifted the evidence sheet.

“Look at the skin,” the ME said.

The brown arms and belly were covered with blisters weeping with pus and blood. I turned to look at Sid, under her knife. “Is that on all three?”

“Not like that,” she said. “This guy with the pretty tooth has a very mild case. It looks like what was on those guys at the river. Only fresher.”

“He's the bodyguard,” I told her. “His name was Sid.”

“Well, Sid died of two gunshot wounds to the chest,” she said. “Probably from the handgun this nice fellow was holding.” She nodded at the body before me, and then at the other white mound. “But these two didn't die in that cellar.”

“Pardon?”

“The faceless wonders. They were dead when their faces were shot off.”

“How can you tell?”

She looked at me through the protective shield. I rephrased it.

“I'm not challenging your expertise, Dr. Bauer. But can you explain it to me?”

“The circulatory systems were already down.”

I thought back to the cellar. “But I saw blood.”

“Under this guy, the bodyguard. He died down there, no doubt about it. But these two died somewhere else, and of something else. They were probably dragged down there. One leg's broken, heels are damaged.”

“When will you have something definitive?” I asked.

“I'm working as fast as I can. Every year this happens. People like to shoot each other over the holidays.”

I looked back at the swollen mounds, that elusive element from the cellar coming to me. It wasn't just the brutality. I recalled walking down the gray stones, my hand on the wall.

The wall.

“Humidity,” I said.

The ME didn't look up from Sid's open chest cavity. “What about humidity?”

“Down in the cellar, the walls were damp.”

“It's underground,” she said dismissively.

“Yes, but the injuries we're seeing look like reactions to lewisite, possibly mustard gas. Lewisite doesn't work in humid atmospheres. It's one reason our military stopped using it. Which means you're right. If these guys were gassed first, it was somewhere other than a damp cellar.”

For once, I saw appreciation in her eyes.

It increased when I said, “I have somebody here to identify one of the faceless bodies.”

“I'll cover this guy up,” she said. “Bring her on back.”

I dragged Zennie down the hall, her rubber-soled boots squealing protests on the linoleum.

“He ain't in bits and pieces, is he?”

I tightened my grip on her elbow, her butane breath mingling with the putrid antiseptic scents. When I pushed through the door, the lights had been turned down, obscuring everything except the two swollen shapes under the white sheets. The ME and her bloody apron were gone, leaving the female assistant to supervise. She stood between the two gurneys. She did not look happy.

Zennie stopped just inside the door. “I can tell you right now,” she said. “That's not his shape.”

I pulled her forward. “He has a tattoo?”

“But I don't need to look. It ain't him.”

I glanced at the assistant. Her expression said patience had left the building.

“Right ankle,” I said. “The letter Z.”

“For my name,” Zennie said, staggering to a stop beside me.

“You're identifying,” the assistant said. “You have to look.”

“Fine, I'll look,” Zennie snapped. “Because it ain't him.”

The assistant lifted the bottom edge of the first sheet, exposing a brown right ankle.

“I told you,” Zennie said.

The assistant dropped the sheet and pulled back the second one.

Zennie stared.

She didn't gasp. She didn't cry. Standing like a post, she stared. Her eyes traveled up his leg, moving over the mounded sheet to where his face would have been. “Oh, baby,” she whispered, leaning down. “What they done to you?”

“Don't touch him,” the assistant said.

“I ain't about to.” She turned to me. “I saw that on him before.” She pointed to the oozing blisters on his shin. “He had that when I was pregnant.”

I looked at the dark leg. “You're sure it's the same rash?”

“I ain't but so drunk.”

It was true. When the sheet was pulled back, it was as if the sight of him hit her like cold water. The tragic romance was gone. Now she looked resigned and sad, even angry at the waste. And I finally saw her grandmother in her.

“I thought maybe it was some STD,” she said. “Something he picked up over there.”

“Over where?”

“Africa.”

I gazed at her, trying to gauge her sobriety. “When was Moon in Africa?”

“Back when Zeke was in my belly. Five, six years ago. He went over on some mercy mission. He came back oozing like a leper. I told him, ‘If that's some sex disease, you are gonna need mercy.'”

“Was he sick?”

“Yeah. But it went away.”

The assistant gave the sheet a little shake, looking at me.

“Thank you,” I said.

Dropping it over the ankle and foot, she lifted a clipboard off the stainless steel counter, checking off boxes. She glanced once at Zennie, her eyes dismissing her. I guessed it was a long assembly line of gang death in here.

When she held out the pen, she said to me, “You're going to help her with the paperwork, right?”

chapter thirty-eight

T
hat night, Broad Street's deserted lanes sparkled, crystallized with ice. Rather than attempt the drive back to Chopping Road, I took Zennie to the Lucky Strike building and explained to Milky what happened. I told him to keep her safe and he wrapped his arms around her, cradling her like a child, telling her this was gang life. And gang death.

I drove slowly through downtown and parked in the alley. When I opened the patio door, the kitchen smelled amazing. My mother was in the den watching television.

“What are you cooking?” I asked.

“Roasted turkey. I found your grandmother's cookbook.” She lifted the book on her lap.
Housekeeping in Virginia
. “Don't you think roasted turkey is the best thing on Christmas Eve?”

She was watching
A Christmas Carol
. The good one, with Alastair Sim, but I excused myself. Walking upstairs, I headed for the percussive assault of sound behind Wally's bedroom door. I knocked loudly. There was no reply. I tried the knob. It was locked.

I could have walked away.

But I didn't.

Stepping back, I drove my foot into the door. The old iron lock cracked and the door hit the wall with a bang.

White smoke curled inside the glass pipe. He gasped, inhaling like a man going underwater.

When he tried to stand, I pushed him back down in the chair. A cold breeze blew through his open window, but the unctuous odor of crack was unmistakable. Words pounded from the sound system, lyrics of hate. I twisted down the volume and held out my hand.

“Give me the pipe.”

His eyes were molten. “You barge into a man's room?”

“I knocked, plenty.” I grabbed his wrist, twisting until his fingers released the pipe. The glass felt warm, sticky with saliva. “Your new friends hook you up with this garbage?”

“Something to help me work.” He gave a dopey grin. “It's not like I'm a junkie. My pictures are in
Newsweek
. Big time.”

“You're a pipehead.”

“You're crazy.”

“You need help.”

“I don't need nothin'.”

“You need another place to live.”

“Say
what
?”

“The lease says no drugs.”

His jaw fell open and I realized how emaciated he'd become. Cheekbones protruding like elbows, eye sockets cavernous, hollow.

“You're kicking me out—at Christmas?”

“Or jail. Which one?”

“You call yourself a Christian.” He hissed the last word. “You know what you are? A cop, a stupid white cop who—”

I held out my hand. “Give me the drugs.”

His bloodshot eyes darted, wondering if this was a bluff, whether he could keep his precious drugs. But he guessed right. He slapped a baggie in my palm.

“Is that all of it?” I asked.

“You want my wallet?” he said. “How about my cameras, my computer?”

“Call me when you're ready to get help. But I want you out of here. Tonight.”

I turned, walking for the door.

“Merry Christmas, you—”

I closed the door on his last word.

In the half-bath downstairs, my hands shaking, I opened the plastic baggie and dumped the white rocks into the toilet. I wrapped the glass pipe in layers of toilet paper, set it on the porcelain rim, and crushed it with the seat. I threw that in the small wicker trash bin, then flushed, washed my hands, and carried the trash out as though performing a helpful chore.