I am just back from softball, kind of waiting for Koob, when Tonya calls about ten thirty on Thursday night, and I almost don’t pick up the phone. On Tuesday, after that talk about his wife and my mother, Koob and I just burned ourselves up when we got it on again, every second spent with that kind of last-breath intensity. It was another velvety Midwestern evening, typical July, and even with the AC on overdrive, we were two slithery panting creatures when we finished. Koob fell asleep almost immediately. I watched him until I was sure he wasn’t simply dozing, and then I drifted off, too, sleeping until I felt him jolt awake. It was close to three and he was reaching toward the foot of my bed for his clothes.
‘No one says you have to leave, you know,’ I told him.
He thought about that and laid down for another half hour, but by then he was wide awake and decided to go. At my bedroom door, he said, ‘So maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.’
When he didn’t show Wednesday night, I was a little, okay, disappointed, much as I know better, but then I heard his front door slam sometime between two and three a.m., followed by footsteps next door and then the plumbing, and I realized he’d been out working, whatever it is he does.
That’s why I expect him tonight. But I’m not going to let myself get into that, circling the field for anybody, and so I take Tonya’s call.
“Toy, tsup?”
“Hey,” she says. I can hear a police radio squawk behind her. “Hey, listen. I need you to meet me someplace. It’s about the Chief and it’s really important, but I kind of want to tell you this in person, all right?”
Does not sound good, but I don’t ask more. I copy the address, which takes me to a buff-colored brick five-story tenement in Anglia, a sketchy part of town on the east side. There is a lot of gang activity around here and my first thought is that maybe some of the bangers are threatening the Chief, although it makes no sense that Tonya would need to call me, rather than reporting that internally. Two cruisers with the Mars lights spinning are double-parked in front of the building, and a boxy younger cop bars the way when I go to the front door. She demands ID.
“Fourth floor,” she says after radioing up to Tonya. The building is in bad enough condition to make me appreciate Arturo and the Archer, which looks to have been built at the same time. The wood trim along the stairway and the railing haven’t been varnished in forever, leaving splintery spots. Nobody’s bothered to replace the light in a couple fixtures over the stairway, and the oriental-style carpet, close to a hundred years old, I bet, is worn through to the backing on the front half of each tread. There are a lot of smells here, none good: sour cooking scents, an odor of mold and something else displeasing. The door to one of the fourth-floor apartments, 4D, is open. The door jamb is splintered around the brass cup for the dead bolt, and I can smell something super foul as I get close.
It’s a studio, one big room, so it doesn’t take long to see the problem or to feel my body rinsed with intense alarm. Fabian Blanco looks like he got hung over a wooden chair like a pair of soiled jeans. His head is thrown back at an angle severe enough to inspire a wince, and his tongue’s protruding in what EMTs I know call ‘Giving the Q sign.’ His legs are positioned crazily, his feet pointing toward each other, and his bluish color says it all. He’s dead.
There’s no dignity in dying, they say. The poor guy puked all over his shirt and trousers, and maybe even shit his pants. That’s the intense odor I could smell across the room.
When I was in the academy, I did some ridealongs and saw dead people twice: One a gang member who was gutshot and bled out on the pavement within a five-foot circle of his own blood. The second was some poor old man in an SRO who’d bought the farm sitting on the can in the shared john. Tonight, same as the first times, I find that there is something about the sight that is both shocking and not shocking at all. I think, Yeah, that’s where this is all headed, that absolute stillness.
So it’s not so much death as who it is that sets the world shaking.
“Oh, fuck me,” I say when I take a few more steps inside.
“I hear that,” Tonya answers. I’m just seeing her now, in the galley kitchen, on the other side of a breakfast bar. She’s writing stuff on her mini tablet. It’s pretty clear that she got the call and rushed over. She’s wearing khaki shorts and a very old black Rolling Stones T-shirt with a tongue hanging out of what I guess is supposed to be Mick’s mouth. I see a female evidence tech, in uniform, dusting surfaces right near her.
Tonya meets me in the center of the room.
“Thanks for getting here so fast. The old guy next door was smelling something really funky. No one answered when he knocked. You know, it’s the kind of neighborhood where a lot of strange shit is always happening, so he phoned the property manager, but when he didn’t show up, he called us. The guy on patrol found the door locked, so he forced it with a crowbar. Obviously, he recognized Frito. As soon as the officer reached me, I was like, ‘Don’t notify anybody else yet. Especially the Chief.’”
“‘Especially the Chief?’”
“Especially.”
It’s another of those moments when the air in the room seems too thick for me to get her meaning. I’m about to ask, ‘Why not call the Chief?’ when the point arrives like some heavy spacecraft thudding to a landing on my planet. Leaving aside a lot of the dudes Blanco’s cracked over the years, who talk a lot of trash but almost never do anything about it—leaving those guys aside, the list of people who wanted Frito dead is probably not very long. And the Chief is right at the top.
Tonya goes on before I can ask anything else.
“I need you to go see the Chief right now and tell her to stay the hell away from here and not to ask questions, because I can’t answer them. I have to call this in to the commander soon, but I wanted you to get to her first.”
That’s why she didn’t want to say anything on the phone. So I could give the Chief a firsthand report that would leave no question about her supervising the investigation.
“And my recommendation to her, by the way,” adds Tonya, “is that she bring in the Feebies.”
“Why the Feds?”
“Well. A: Blanco was a witness in their investigation, so they’re going to claim jurisdiction anyway, that’s how they are, they always want anything juicy. B: Our department shouldn’t be investigating alone, so that if this turns out to be a homicide, a defense lawyer for the killer can’t say we rushed to judgment because we were so unhinged about the death of one of our own officers. And C: If Lucy brings the FBI in immediately, she’ll look like she’s not hiding anything.”
I nod. “Good thinkin, Detective. And we’re saying homicide for sure?”
“There’s the dude who may be able to tell us.” She points to a tall slender guy who has plastic gloves on and is gently lowering one leg of Blanco’s khakis. This dude, the pathologist, is definitely something else. He is wearing a white short-sleeve shirt and a black bow tie, but if he’s Nation of Islam, it’s a new sect, because he’s got a full black beard and big-time dreds, the kind that take years to grow. He’s teased them out and sprayed them so they are wound around his head in a form resembling a treble clef. Last, he has got on a pair of white Beats headphones and is literally bouncing his chin to the music as he looks over the body.
“What the fuck?” I say to Tonya.
“Yeah, I know,” she says. “But he’s good. He’s the top pathology resident at the U. Super super sharp.”
In addition to the hip pathologist, I’ve noticed a second evidence tech, a gut-heavy guy in uniform, who’s moving slowly around the room with what looks like a glorified flashlight called a forensic light source. It beams out ultraviolet and can show a lot of stuff, especially bodily fluids, like the sweat leavings that make up latent fingerprints. The female tech has continued dusting and taking lifts in the kitchen. I’m sure they photographed the entire scene already. These days in Highland Isle, the techs just use their cell phones.
The pathologist, still moving in rhythm, bops over to Tonya while I’m standing with her. He lowers his headphones to his neck.
“So. Anything?” she asks.
“Nothing much, at least not that I can see without disturbing the body. Only thing of note is what look like ligature marks, faint bruising, on his wrists and calves.”
“Pre- or post-mortem?” I ask, and Tonya’s head swivels so sharply I’m afraid she might have hurt herself. I lift a hand to show I understand her message—‘Shut the fuck up, you’re not even here.’
The pathologist thinks nothing of me speaking and answers, “Definitely pre.”
“You think he was tied to that chair?” Tonya asks.
“That would fit the marks.”
“Time of death?” asks Tonya.
“Looking at color and the degree of rigor mortis, I would say around twenty-four hours. We can tell you for sure when we see what’s going on with his digestion.”
Now that I am past the point where all my attention is on Blanco, I am beginning to take in what a weird space this apartment is. It’s a little like the surface of the moon. There is nothing here, not so much as a calendar on the wall, and no furniture except the simple slat-back wooden chair Blanco croaked in, and another one that is positioned at a little white table, no more than thirty inches square, which holds a desktop computer with a huge monitor. Other than that, nada. No sofa. No bed. It’s very clean, not so much as a dust ball in a corner, which makes it feel even more austere.
Dr. Hip, who Tonya calls “Potter,” is answering her question about the cause of death.
“Nothing obvious now,” he says. “No lacerations, no trauma to the head, no blood so far as I see. Right now, I’m feeling a heart attack. But we have to get him downtown.”
“So not a homicide?” she asks.
He wags his head back and forth. “Possibly not. Just guessing.”
“Suicide?”
“There’s nothing here. I patted down his pockets for pills, and the medicine cabinet in the bathroom is empty. The stove’s not on or anything like that.”
He puts his headphones back on and picks up his black doctor’s bag on his way out. I want to ask what tunes he’s listening to, but I decide that’s a little too Pinky.
“Anything else for me?” I ask Toy.
“Well, you’re here,” she says. “Look around for a sec and see if there’s anything that strikes you. You always notice the strangest shit,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“You do. And obviously, don’t touch anything or get in anybody’s way.”
“Obviously. Did you turn on the computer?”
“Nope. I’d be afraid to do it without some expert to watch. Assuming the Feds come in, that’s the kind of thing where they’re on their own level. My cell is picking up a wireless signal, and the router’s in the closet. But I mean, talk about strange. Internet but no bed?”
“Maybe he was moving out?”
She shoots a finger at me.
“Good thinkin, Detective.”
“Anything else like that?” I ask.
“He’s got his wallet but not his phone. But I suspect he turned that over to the lawyer who filed the appeals for him. You know, for safekeeping while they’re waiting for the court to rule.”
I go to the kitchen first to look over the shoulders of the techs, who are now working together. They are like dogs with their noses to a trail, looking for the stuff normal people don’t see. As for me, after a few minutes, I feel like I am both in my body and out of it. The fact that Frito, who’s been the object of such intense attention in the weeks since his testimony, is dead now has me shook, the collapse of all the expectations built up even more upsetting in its way than the sight of him. But the detached manner that Tonya and the techs are working is instructive. Just do your job. At a time like this, that’s what’s required. Clear your head and work carefully.
There are a lot of prints on the counter, which is no surprise. The guy with the light has the refrigerator door open, and the only things inside are a couple diet drinks on the shelf and two bottles of water. It’s an old model, like everything else here, and there’s a crack in the plastic lining at the top. He pulls out his cell and takes some more photos.
I move across the room, over to where the closet door is ajar. There’s enough light that I can see what is inside. Aside from the square router tower, there is a change of clothes pretty much identical to what Blanco has on—another pair of khakis and a gray polo shirt on a hanger. There are boxers and socks on top of a cheap set of white laminate drawers, which makes it pretty clear Blanco was spending some time here, God knows why.
In the bathroom, there’s an oval of used soap on the sink and a soiled towel hanging limply on a bar on the shower door. I notice something else and call out for the evidence techs.
“Looks like somebody mashed a mosquito,” I say, pointing to the back of the bathroom door. There’s a little smear of blood where it was crushed. “Does the blood look recent?” I ask him.
“Recent enough. A day maybe. We’ll test it.”
The forensic light, however, doesn’t show much on the high-gloss paint. Prints are easier to find in the summer, when everybody sweats more, but a quick blow that doesn’t linger on the surface still might not leave residue.
“This may be something,” the tech grants me, before he goes to get the equipment he’ll need to preserve the bug and lift the stain.