The Crime Studio (8 page)

Auto-Rhino was the living embodiment of Hitler’s theories - he was never anything but amused by the guttural assaults he committed upon those more intelligent than himself. It seemed he had sneezed out an entire brainlobe in early adolescence, and what remained swam in his skull like a crouton. He counted as wasted every day in which he did not strangle a man.

Yet despite all these disabilities, there was a single smart idea waiting inside him like a statue inside an unhewn boulder. At the time of Auto’s stay in the pen it was the fashion to punish crooks severely so as to encourage their assimilation back into the underworld - a process known as ‘recrimination’. It was thought that prisoners should learn something before they escaped, and this often took the form of a popular correspondence course in locksmithing. The syllabus entailed one lock per month accompanied by make and twirl details. Every wing in the pen chirped cicada-like with the switching of pin tumblers.

Only Auto’s cell reverberated with animal yells of impatience and fury. Auto was clumsy with delicate work as he was yet fully to master the opposable thumb - though everyone in the pen agreed that when he did, he’d do great things. In fact everyone in the pen agreed with anything Auto snorted, for fear of being the centrepiece of an impromptu garrotting.

Nobody realised how serious Auto was about changing his vocation. A cellmate briefly assigned with Auto had read him extracts from a Wardial novel in the course of sobbing for mercy, and Auto had believed himself touched by the truth. He’d reform - become a burglar like Wardial, Panacea, Savage and everyone else. But lacking the dexterity even to strike a match, he felt unjustly denied the secret of fire.

An instant after busting out with a group of other shitheads, Auto realised a way around it. As he shook the rubble from his ears and stumbled through smoke into the forest, he saw that with his size and strength, he didn’t need to bother with locks and combinations. Even Auto understood that every crime is as unique as a snowflake, and that he couldn’t help but set a personal stamp upon his burgling career.

An hour later, Viscount Strange and a brace of chinless wonders were dining in a room so full of filigree it appeared to be awash with earthworms. The guests took measured bites of amoeboid delicacies in an atmosphere laced with unintelligible, raging protocol. A butler stood by as though knocked upright and insensible by a semi truck.

The irony was lost upon no one as a semi truck exploded through the front wall and entered the dining room, flattening the butler before he could announce it. The driver was already yelling, but as the door fell open the unceasing bellow increased in volume and the source balked into view. It was some sort of primate in a state of primitive emotionalism. Ignoring everybody, foam hailing from its mouth, it charged hollering out of the room.

There was a momentary - and not unpleasant - silence.

‘Benworth,’ said the Viscount to a colleague. ‘Be a lad and call the constabulary.’

Auto-Rhino bullroared up the hallway, crashing into a large glass swan and scattering dozens of crackers. What kind of a place
was
this? He thundered grunting up the stairs. Wardial said you could tell the value of a premises by dividing the diameter of the main stairwell with the number of circles described by the banisters, inclusive of the upper landing. Auto couldn’t count, though a guy in the pen had once beckoned him into the shadows and furtively flashed a series of sketches by a sap called ‘Escher’. Auto had not appreciated it at the time, but now felt assured of a fortune and rammed the door of the master bedroom, struggling through the splinter-ragged hole and baying like a newborn hellhound. His cellmate had remarked with his dying croak that there was a floorsafe in this very room. Auto laid hold of the carpet and began to rip as though at a tenor’s beard. Within moments the room was a scene of plaster-dusted devastation, cop sirens were growing audible and the safe lay bare. After careful examination, Auto identified it as a modified extra-heavy treasury with ten-layer sandwiched five-ply drill-resistant steel, anti-blow, beryllium/copper alloy outer and relockers. He wrenched it out of the floor, staggered bellowing across the room and heaved it through an unopened window, its landing regrettably broken by the windshield and roofsparker of a squad car. Cops were streaming up the driveway as Auto watched pop-eyed and yelling from the smashed window. The safe was in pristine condition. Auto disappeared from the window with a snort.

The Viscount and his guests had reached the top of the stairs in hesitant silence when Auto roared onto the landing and sent them screaming down again. Auto glared back and forth, the veins in his forehead standing out like ill-advised volunteers. He slammed into the music room as a mazurka of lawmen pounded up the stairwell.

Auto was cornered and unarmed as he believed that anything which could not be said with his bare hands was not worth saying. His last attempt to kill with a rifle had shattered the observation window of a Seaworld exhibit aptly entitled ‘Shark Encounter’. Auto began piling tubas and harps against the door, considering whether he was hungry enough to eat his pursuers. It’d sure beat the meals at the pen.

With the piano in place, he sat down on a stool. Gazing at the keyboard, he became gradually inspired, forming thoughts which the rest of us conclude in the crib. Potshots began to spatter the window behind him.

Beyond the barricade, Blince’s men were weighed down by defences and respect. The cop who took the Viscount’s call had been paralysed with laughter and, after four gasping minutes, had finally recovered enough to mime Auto’s harrowing visitation for the rest of the department, which exploded into hilarity. It was well known that Auto’s subtlety was at a premium. But now, as the cops neared the music room, they heard an unlikely sound.

It was like musical scales. Piano exercises, repeating over and over.

In the perjury room, the judge was weary. ‘As usual,’ he said, ‘this is the most appalling crime I have ever encountered. This guy didn’t have the common courtesy to wait for night to fall or the occupants to go out to lunch. I say that grade of insolence calls for life and change.’

Auto stood in the dock, drumming his fingers on the sill.

Harpoon Specter argued for a sentence as light as a dandelion seed, pointing out that human body cells replace themselves every six months and that when such time had elapsed the authorities would be holding the wrong guy. To his surprise the court agreed and decided to gas Auto before such a transformation could occur.

Strapped and silent in the killing jar, Auto held his breath. Everyone watched as the gas filled the chamber and Auto tensed as though giving birth. He busted his restraints, remained calmly seated and, gazing at his accusers, struck a match.

In his tender years Henry Blince went to sea and was punished repeatedly for his slack appearance. All anyone remembered of him was a belly and a vest. They sat him in a corner with a pile of potatoes and an order to get peeling. When the skipper dropped by to check his progress, the potatoes were gone and Blince could only move his eyes.

‘Jesus Christ you aint tellin’ me you
ate
’em all?’

‘Indeed sir,’ Blince remarked, with difficulty. ‘I am proud to say that I have.’

‘There aint nuthin’ to be
proud
of, you bigot! God al
mighty
!’

Now he sat in the Nimble Maniac on
Breed Street
, the inside of his head roiling like a lava lamp. What about hippos - was it possible that their teeth were simply stubs of chalk? If tortoises lived so long, why didn’t they learn to speak up? Do trout cry? Blince shook his head grimly. There was still so much he didn’t know.

As he bit into the next sandwich, Benny the trooper entered the eatery. ‘Been a prod in the right direction on
Pill Street
, Chief.’

‘Stabbing? Get a man to the scene Benny - tell him to hover gaping like a paddlefish till we get there. This pastrami’s dynamite.’

On arriving at the premises they detected a guy who was bristling with knives and strung by the legs from a ceiling pipe. The kitchen floor was an action painting of bodily fluids.

Blince gestured with a cigar. ‘This is the most gruesome offence I’ve seen since we got out of the car, Benny,’ he rumbled, and shoved the stiff into a slow spin. The effect was impressive. ‘Get a loada that.’

As the cop photographer finished up, Blince expressed his regret that he hadn’t a sea rod to pose with. He was still laughing when a kid wandered in.

‘Pizza boy.’

‘Who let this kid in here?’

‘It’s a kid with a pizza, Chief,’ said Benny with mirth and patience. ‘A
pizza
boy
.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, Benny.’ Blince swiped the pizza from the startled kid, ate a piece and spat. ‘This pizza’s been thinned with turpentine! That how
he
liked it?’ Blince gestured sharply at the cadaver.

The kid gaped and swallowed, speechless. Blince drew himself to his full height, and pushed the door firmly closed. He approached the kid like a Goya giant, blocking out the light.

‘What’s in the sportsbag, kid - a Parabellum? Cover me, Benny ... Well, get this. Kid’s walkin’ round with a jar of maraschino cherries.’

‘Tell me you’re kidding.’

‘Guess you got some explaining to do, pizza boy.’

‘Sir?’

‘Well aint that sweet. Kid returns to the scene of the crime with a cherry jar and an attitude of respect.’ Blince let out a sigh which resembled the wheezing of stomach gas from the recently dead.

‘Looky here Chief,’ said Benny, at the stove. ‘Fresh char over the burners. Oven’s cool. Guess that rules out a pizza.’

‘Hold your horses, Benny. This here pizza’s as warm as a baby’s backside - no reason to think the first was any cooler. The guy didn’t reheat a thing. And those scorchmarks resemble blast-burns from a Mac-10.’

‘Well now Chief, a Macky’s pretty accurate.’

‘Not with a kid at the helm, Benny - in a state of panic. You believe gun nuts braggin’ they take the head off a termite at twenty yards?’

‘Better not say that to the boys at ballistics, Chief.’

‘The boys at ballistics can bite my ass. Don’t I enter the lab to find I’m welcome as an adder on a narrow ledge? All cos I caught ’em namin’ rats in the basement. Every one of ’em’s a fairy in ballistics.’

‘Coulda been suicide, Chief.’

‘If he’d fixed the pizza himself I’d agree with you Benny, but as it is he hadn’t a motive.’ Blince reminded him of the Beerlight rules for Russian Roulette. A group of people sit around a table on which rests a fully loaded gun. The first one to pick it up and shoot himself is the Russian. ‘What I think today,
Benny
,
New Guinea
thinks tomorrow.
New Guinea
, you hear? So just consider that next time you feel the urge to hammer at the portico of my intellect.’

Benny sniggered silently, turning puce. ‘You’ll be the death of me, Chief,’ he gasped.

‘What’s your name, pizza boy?’

‘Timmy Bedlam, sir.’

‘Timmy Bedlam he says. How old are you Timmy?’

‘Twelve, sir.’

‘Twelve, no less. How long you been in the pizza trade?’

‘A week, sir.’

‘And this is your second delivery to this address isn’t it Timmy.’

‘No sir.’

‘How d’you figure that?’

Timmy stared up at him like a hooked bream.

‘Lemme reconstruct the fashionable events which occurred here,’ said Blince, re-lighting his cigar. ‘It’s the old, old story. The porcupine orders a pizza, which is brought to him by little Timmy, a child of evil masquerading as a pizza boy. Sampling the merchandise, our topsy-turvy friend finds it is fit only for the military and states his intention of expressing dismay to everyone this side of the international dateline. Timmy, I can only imagine the vortex of sick fear and insanity which thundered in your brain like bugs in a drum. Your boss was just about at the end of his tether with your persistent unexplained lateness, verbosity, downright rudeness and threatening aspect, and you could not afford this brand of attention. The victim must have wondered what the world was coming to as he was bound like a hog at the point of a Macky 10 and forced to eat the rest of his funeral dinner, after which he was sublimated by a medley of gunshots. Fearing you’d awake to strobe-lights and the word “surrounded”, you stood on - this chair here - and began to feverishly pry out the ammo in an attempt to confuse the evidence. Guilty as hell, your sins stacked up like vertebrae, you mistook the skitter of a passing rodent for the approach of an innocent neighbour and fled the premises leaving the corpse in the condition we see this evening, jampacked with kitchenware.’

‘So why’d he come back, Chief?’ asked Benny, as Blince finished eating the pizza he had roundly condemned.

‘Wanna tell him, kid?’ asked Blince, wiping his hands on his shirt. Tears trembled on the brink of Timmy’s eyes. Blince took it as a no. ‘The fact is, Timmy’s scheme was deeply flawed. Paperwork at the pizza house would note a delivery shortly before the time of death. Timmy realised he would have to leave an uneaten pizza on the premises to conceal the shocking facts of the homicide - it had to seem as though the victim had never touched the merchandise Timmy had delivered. But amid the onrushing nightmare he didn’t suspect the cops’d already be on the scene. We’ve broken this case beyond repair.’

‘But -’

‘Forget it kid, we thought of everything. Tell the boys in the hall, Benny.’

‘Right. ’

‘This was an airbreathing mammal, kid - it didn’t need a blowhole.’

The kid was yanked thrashing and squealing from the room.

‘Seems to me, Benny,’ said Blince, sitting heavily onto a chair and taking a new cigar from his shirtpocket, ‘that if a guy didn’t have an internal skeleton, then when he died he’d produce no fossil remains, and it’d be impossible to tell how long folk of that nature have been roaming this Earth.’

Benny did not reply.

‘What, am I talkin’ to myself here?’

‘Oh, Chief, do I gotta spell it out? Don’t you know what you’ve done?’ Benny was amused and incredulous.

‘Well for god’s sake break it to me Benny before my ears explode.’

‘It is the plain fact that unless we detect an uneaten pizza here on the premises we cannot support the kid’s return to the crime scene, and subsequently he will never enter a correctional facility and undergo his induction into the underworld.’

‘Did I eat the evidence again?’

‘You know you ate it Chief. For god’s sake, you even ate the box.’

‘I guess I did, at that. Now just simmer down, Benny, simmer down.’ Blince went and poked his head out the door. ‘Hey - they booked the kid yet?’

The boys in the hall were barely visible through fingerprint dust. ‘Yeah Chief. Van just left.’

Blince returned to his chair, looking thoughtful. There was a moment’s silence.

‘So whatta we do now, Chief?’

Blince lit the cigar. ‘Send out for pizza, Benny.’