A BLACK VEIL of flies hung in the air. The corpse lay supine on a green vinyl sofa. Inspector Henry Nash pressed a white handkerchief to his nose.
The stench of decay burned his nostrils.
Dried blood smeared the sofa cushions. The victim—male, Caucasian—was dressed in tan chinos, a blue and brown madras shirt. A toy store Halloween mask covered his face. What was left of the victim’s eyes under the plastic mask was long past recognizing a trick or a treat.
Nash’s stomach churned. He sometimes wondered if he was just a garbage man, sent into dark maggoty rooms to clean out the leftovers of life and death, send it to the refuse heap. Like the garbage scows dumping trash into San Francisco Bay. It was easy to imagine sometimes, the scows loaded with the corpses the San Francisco Police Department scraped off the streets.
Six feet from Nash a row of four Halloween masks hung on the apartment wall. Nash recognized Doctor Frankenstein’s monster, and Casper the friendly ghost. Between the third and fourth mask was a bare nail where the mask on the victim’s face had presumably hung.
Nash glanced at his partner, Inspector Ross Belcher. Belcher also held a wadded handkerchief to breathe through.
“The thing about death is, everybody talks about it but no one does anything,” Belcher said. The crooked expression behind the handkerchief might have been a smile.
Belcher had said the same thing twenty minutes before. He and Nash, travelling southbound through the Mission District in an unmarked SFPD Ford Fairlane sedan, punching the clock. It was 1240 hours. Belcher drove. They’d just eaten lunch at the Wienie King Restaurant, on Eighth Street.
The police radio crackled. Code 10-54—unidentified dead body. The 100 block of Clipper Street.
Belcher and Nash had just passed Clipper.
Belcher was an imposing man with a head like a cement block. He was a full inspector, nineteen years on the force, while Nash was a newly-minted assistant inspector. Belcher had the experience on the job, in every way that counted, and his $903 monthly paycheck trumped Nash’s by $72 bucks. Even so, Nash knew there was no good reason why two inspectors from the Homicide Detail should respond to a routine call for assistance from a harness bull.
Except that Belcher was bored.
At the intersection of Church and Army Streets Belcher spun the steering wheel. The sedan slid into a tight U-turn, and Belcher made his comment on death and doing something about it.
The remark had reminded Nash of a photograph he’d seen that morning, in the Chronicle. A ball of flame, erupting around the seated figure of a Buddhist monk in the South Vietnamese city of Hue. The monk soaking his robes in gasoline and striking a match to protest the policies of South Vietnam’s military government. The accompanying news story noted that the gasoline used was high octane, emphasizing that the monk had gone the extra mile to achieve his goal.
For whatever good it did him, or South Vietnam.
On Clipper, Belcher pulled up behind a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide motorcycle with SFPD markings. A woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a soiled blue house-dress met Belcher and Nash on the sidewalk. The apartment house behind her was two-tone brown. The cat she clutched to her bosom was black and white.
Nash flipped his leather ID wallet open to reveal the seven-point star—the SFPD joy buzzer.
The woman was rattled. She was the landlady at the apartment house. Fifteen minutes ago she’d gone to the fourth floor to check on a resident who owed back rent. She entered the apartment with a pass key, found a bloodied corpse on a bloodied sofa.
“I came outside for air,” the woman said. “The officer”—she pointed to the motorcycle at the curb—“rode by and I flagged him down. He went upstairs and came back down. Then he used his radio and went back upstairs again. I heard a gunshot—just a minute ago.”
It was apartment 406—Nash took the stairs at a run. Belcher jogged around to the back of the building to cover the rear fire escape. On the second-floor landing Nash nearly stumbled over a wicker basket full of wadded gift box ribbon. It sat in a shaft of sunlight where the apartment manager’s cat no doubt slept. Nash slid the Colt .38 revolver from the holster under his sport coat and continued up the stairs.
A dead body. A gunshot.
The patrolman didn’t reappear.
Nash didn’t see a great many things those facts could mean. The few things that came to mind didn’t look rosy.
Nash reached the fourth floor. He raised the revolver, moved forward cautiously. The silence in the building sounded like stretched nerves just before they snap. The door to apartment 406 stood ajar.
Nash kicked it open the rest of the way.
Followed the door in.
Shadows filled the room beyond. The swinging front door came into contact with something that wasn’t a door stop or the wall. Nash jigged to the right, brought the revolver up higher.
“Freeze,” Nash said.
The shadows moved.
A bulky figure raised one hand.
The fingers of the other hand were pinching his nostrils closed.
“Snodgrass,” the figure said. “Traffic Enforcement.”
It was the motorcycle cop. His voice was nasal. And muffled, understandably. The patrolman was standing behind the door when Nash kicked it open.
The acrid smell of burned gunpowder hung in the room. It was mixed with a stronger smell that was putrid and unmistakable—the smell of a stale corpse.
Nash heard a sharp noise.
He turned quickly. Raised his revolver again.
The patrolman reached for his own sidearm.
Across the room a set of thin curtains billowed in the draft from an open window. A shout, from outside: “Police officer—freeze.”
Belcher had come up the fire escape. Now he leaned in through the open window, pistol drawn.
“Ross, it’s all right,” Nash said.
“Traffic,” the patrolman said again, louder than he needed to. His black leather Motor Division jacket creaked as he holstered his sidearm. Belcher pushed the billowing curtains aside, ducked his head, climbed over the window sill. When he caught the smell of death he pointed his revolver in the direction of the sofa, feeling a renewed interest in protecting himself.
Nash had just spotted the corpse too.
Nash found a switch near the front door and turned on the ceiling light.
The apartment was littered with trash, and house-hold furnishings that looked like trash. Nash removed his handkerchief from his pocket, held it to his nose. Belcher had already pulled out a handkerchief.
Belcher kneeled beside the corpse.
“Hot diggity,” Belcher said, stone-faced. “Business is picking up.”
Judging from the skin on the victim’s hands and arms, he was not an older man. Maybe not middle-aged. Dried blood covered the victim’s neck and upper torso. Blood also matted the thick black hair on the victim’s head.
The Halloween mask on the victim’s face was a depiction of a white male. The mask face also had a mop of black hair. Along with a bulbous nose and a dopey grin. A thin elastic band was tied to small holes on either side of the mask, but the elastic wasn’t holding the mask in place. Dried blood had affixed the mask to the dead man.
Belcher lifted the victim’s left arm.
Moved it experimentally.
The arm muscles were flaccid. Rigor mortis had come and gone.
Belcher let the arm drop. He remarked that there was no discernible pattern to the blood smears on the sofa cushions.
“I found the victim on the couch,” the patrolman said. He didn’t let go of his nose. “I went downstairs to call for back up. When I came back to secure the premises, I heard a crash.”
The patrolman motioned toward a bookcase standing near a coat closet. Scattered on the floor were three photograph frames amid shards of broken glass. An oblong patch of plaster was missing from the wall above the bookcase.
“I had my sidearm out when I turned,” the patrolman said. “The noise could’ve been anything. It startled me. I discharged my weapon.”
Nash slapped at flies on the back of his neck. “What happened to the pictures?”
The patrolman paused. His explanation was getting poorer by the second. “There was a cat. On the bookcase. This building is lousy with cats. I suppose I’ll have to turn my weapon in.”
Nash agreed. It was standard procedure within the department to perform an administrative review whenever a firearm was discharged in the line of duty. SFPD wanted to confirm that the weapon was fired, and how many times, and who did the firing, and how many grains of gunpowder had been expended. The event had to be scrutinized, dissected, notated, indexed, spindled. Maybe someone at the Hall of Justice was interested in comparing this particular gun shot to other instances of patrolmen shooting at domesticated animals of roughly ten pounds.
Belcher, breathing through his mouth, scribbled observations about the corpse and its milieu in his notebook. He’d stuffed his handkerchief loosely in his mouth to keep from swallowing flies. Nash was grateful for the open window. The stench in the room would have paralyzed all three of them without the draft from outdoors.
The floor of the dead man’s apartment was littered with newspapers and empty beer cans, food wrappers, wadded pieces of clothing. The surface of the square Formica-topped table near the kitchenette was littered with more empty beer cans, some of which had been used as ashtrays. In Nash’s estimation the one ashtray on the table had been used most recently as a bowl to eat cold cereal from, judging from the dried-out corn flakes stuck to the inside surface.
“There’s not much in the bedroom,” the patrolman said. “A mattress, dirty clothes.” His voice sounded weaker now. He gulped air, pinched his nostrils more tightly together. When the patrol-man had his queasy stomach under control again he pointed at the mask on the victim’s face. “If it helps, I think it’s a Beatle. Those masks were popular, last Halloween. They came with a tiny plastic guitar. My nephew had one.”
Nash made no comment. He didn’t know much about the English musical group that called themselves the Beatles. He’d heard of them though—it would’ve been difficult not to. They were all over the radio and television and in movie theaters. A few days ago he’d seen on the news that the Beatles had performed in Memphis, Tennessee, where the Klu Klux Klan burned Beatles records in the street outside the venue. The Klan was protesting a remark one of the Beatles recently made, something to the effect that the group was now more popular than Jesus Christ.
Nash recalled that the Beatles had played a concert at Candlestick Park the year before. They were returning to San Francisco to play at Candlestick again, in a few days.
Nash watched as Belcher tried to lift the Halloween mask off the dead man’s face with the tip of one finger. The dried blood holding the mask in place had excellent adhesive properties. Belcher pulled the handkerchief out of his mouth, sighed. He pressed the saliva-damp handkerchief to his nose again.
“Patrolman,” Belcher said, over his shoulder, “how about going downstairs and calling for the Crime Lab. We need a print man, a photographer, all the rest of the hocus-pocus.” Belcher pushed his straw porkpie hat back off his forehead. “We also need a morgue wagon and a gallon of bug juice. The requesting inspector is R. Belcher, Homicide Detail.”
There was no response.
Belcher and Nash both turned in time to see Patrolman Snodgrass of Traffic Enforcement bend forward and regurgitate his most recent meal onto the hardwood floor.
Nash grimaced.
The entry Belcher wrote in his notebook referenced a semi-circular vomit pool, roughly 24 by 30 inches. It rested near the eastern wall of the living room, and it was assuredly not left by the victim or persons related to the crime.