CHAPTER SIXTEEN

If I’d known at this point how well my efforts to throw Daly and Robles together were going, I’d have been more sanguine about my chances of making landfall before I was taken off by a bullet or a wire around the neck. But I couldn’t depend on that. In fact, I’d put her in Robles’ direction to keep her safe while I kicked up my heels in Phoenix and waited for hell to roll in on great cat feet. Now, as I kept Arthur Morrison at my right hand, I threw more fuel under the cauldron. Things were boiling nicely.

“In the line of entertainment, there’s nothing like an autopsy on a hot afternoon,” I told him as we rolled south on Arizona 51, a sweeping dart of a thoroughfare aimed at the heart of Phoenix. “Would you like to see what happens when things go badly wrong for a member of Rhea’s gang?”

His left hand flickered in a throwaway gesture. Sweat brightened his brow, and his eyes boggled as if they were trying to escape from his face. His body heat, working with the outside temperature, had crumpled his white shirt, and his tie was loose and straggly. He seemed to have resigned himself to the fact that, willy-nilly, he was going on a madman’s adventure.

“Talk,” I urged. “I love company, and you are providing me very little.”

“You hate company.”

“If that’s true, my future’s bright. Nobody comes around any more except to do me harm.”

He turned away, looking out the window at the low houses capped by palm trees slithering toward the sky.

“You’re not getting anywhere taking me on this ride,” he said, and his voice had an edge of satisfaction. He seemed to know things were in the wind, bad things for me. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had the sand to defy me. Well, that was fine. I’d hoped for information, but action can be revealing too.

“Who cares if we get somewhere? You are far too goal-oriented,” I replied. “I never make that mistake. I simply try to keep moving, drinking in the passing scene.”

Down we went through the Valley, peering through the shallow man-made canyons of development, struggling against the mucus-like pollution, noting the street names whipping past us—Bethany Home, Camelback, Indian School. South Mountain butted up against the horizon, and downtown was glitzy and full of hollow hope. Bank One Ballpark, America West Arena, the Renaissance Center—great, shiny new commercialism rising on the grave of the old, dead commercialism. Phoenix had started as a city of boosters and it had never looked back. To hell with history and preservation and the environment, and hoorah for jobs and profits and growth. The city was clamorous with cotton-mouthed pieties and bustling with leaders who prated about the public good while they gave the high sign to the bulldozers and clinked the cash in their pockets. I loved the damned vicious place. Phoenix was perfect for me. It was the city that didn’t care.

We slipped down off the freeway onto Washington Street and pressed west past horrid new apartments with the prefabricated look of egg cartons, franchise pizza palaces that had morphed from the shells of porno shops, breakfast restaurants with sea-faring themes. Past Pioneers’ Park, with its rearing metal sculpture clutching dead laser-light globes like grapefruits pinned in a barbed wire fence.

And then there it was, as we drove south on Seventh Avenue, swung left to Sixth and pulled into a surface parking lot. A low barracks-like building enclosing a refrigerator for humans, metal tables, and bright cutting tools. The morgue. In a couple of years, the operation would move to a three-story forensic-science palace a block away. But for now there was no fear that the Chamber of Commerce would be showing it off to a gaggle of German tourists or Kansas housewives or backpacked schoolchildren. This operation could not be cleverly promoted, and Arthur Morrison looked a little sick.

“What’s the point of bringing me here?” he said.

“Two things,” I replied. “We’ll visit an old friend, and we’ll check out our future accommodations.”

* * * *

Inside, I looked around for Rathbun, but the detective was not present. Sometimes they aren’t, when the cause of death is obvious and there are other cases afoot. But there, peering over a post-mortem report, was Dr. Hans van Lubo, Bavarian by extraction, “Dr. V” in the parlance of local journalists. Dr. V was a sturdy little cliché of an exit sawbones—glowing bald pate, spade beard, glittering eyes. Hatchet scar on his forehead where a killer had registered an objection.

“Look, will you, at this fat man,” Dr. V had once said to me, his forearms dewed to the elbows in the bloody guts of a deli owner. “How can I hope to find .22 caliber bullets in this?”

Perhaps the public, if it cared, might have asked for a politically correct professional to do up their suspicious corpses—a woman, say, or a Native American or a violin-playing Mormon. Someone sensitive. But the public does not care. And, left to its own devices, the work of probing the dead embraces the strangest personalities. A good thing in this case, for Dr. V could sort out his corpses with the best of them.

“Michael, Michael,” said the medical examiner, “You have come for our garroting. I know you. You enjoy the bizarre. And your friend?”

I glanced at Arthur, who was skulking behind me.

“Mr. Morrison, a former member of the bar,” I said. “He’s heard of your touch with a scalpel.”

“Let us hope we do not disappoint,” said Dr. V. “Shall we go introduce ourselves to Mr. Sweeney?”

Yes, indeed we should, though Mr. Sweeney seemed indifferent to the proceedings. A dry-faced attendant in a long blue medical blouse hauled him from his 38-degree refuge in a metal-enclosed back room, gurneyed him under the fluorescent lights of the operating theater, and—with the help of another attendant—ripped the zipper of his plastic body bag and rolled him up onto a perforated stainless-steel table with a trough at the bottom and a hose attached. Under his head went a curved wooden block. Bridged over his feet was a metal tray with a handy assortment of tools—forceps, scissors, brain knife and garden shears for chopping ribs. Dr. V stood by in medical blues, latex gloves on his hands, plastic booties tied over his shoes.

“An interesting case,” he said. “We’ve had a boring run of death lately. Gunshot, smash-up, overdose.”

As he spoke, he was busy with the scalpel, making the Y-shaped incision from the shoulders to the crotch. Then he was scooping out the internal organs and weighing them, describing them for the tape recorder.. The heart was unremarkable, the lungs were smoky, the liver was hammered by booze—I’m not giving you an exact blow-by-blow, but you get the idea. Morrison was off in a corner, clutching the edge of a counter and struggling to stay upright. When Dr. V worked the buzz saw and exposed the brain, the lawyer gave up and slumped into an office chair, hands over his face, gasping shallowly through his fingers.

“You see the pinpoint hemorrhages, those tiny scarlet dots?” Dr. V said, his pointer finger prodding Sweeney’s brain. “Little explosions of blood vessels, caused by the garrote squeezing the neck. A quick job. Somebody knew what he was doing.”

I leaned closer to examine the phenomenon. “Or what she was doing?”

His eyes above the green surgical mask were attentive.

“A woman? Possibly, yes.” He tapped the groove in the neck, a clean cut running right around the throat and back under the ears. “But if so, an athletic woman. And ruthless. You see, the wire made just this one mark. There are no sawing marks, no subsidiary cuts, which there would be if there had been hesitation.”

I stepped back. The smell of death, like meat that has begun to turn, was making things slightly difficult. Bright lights, hard metal, the pungency of guts on display—it was all a bit much even for me, despite the fact that I was experienced. But it was doing over Morrison worse than me, and that was the point. It’s one thing to say death, murder, killing, and to talk about how it might happen to you, but when you actually see someone parceling out another man’s insides, well, that brings things home. It’s the realization that you—bubbling, gurgling, farting you—could be turned into a pile of cardboard and styrofoam, not a person with spiritual aspects wafting through the vast landscapes of space and time. That’s what makes you turn away and gag—just as Morrison was doing now, as he bent his head, clutched his stomach and staggered from the room.

I pointed at Sweeney.

“Did he struggle?”

Dr. V moved around the body, picked up one hand, then the other.

“Not effectively. His fingers are free of cuts or bruises. I don’t think he even got his hands up to go for the garrote before his brain shut down. Someone he trusted, or who surprised him, came at him from behind. The wire comes out in a flash and, zip, the job is done! It’s a job worthy of a soldier. They used to do sentries that way, you know.” Dr. V leered. “But then, of course you would know. You’re Irish, and the Irish make poetry out of killing.”

I ignored the truism. “You don’t see many garrotings, you said. Why kill him this way?”

Dr. V had stepped to a nearby sink and was scrubbing his gloved hands. He placed them under a flowing faucet, and the dark blood smearing his hands turned pale pink and ran down the stream of water.

“To keep him quiet, I suppose, if there were witnesses in the next room or around the corner. Or to tell everyone that a certain person had killed him this way, as a signature. Perhaps the killer was speaking to someone—other members of the inner circle.” He removed his gloves, washed his hands and began to dry them. “Or perhaps the killer was speaking to you, Michael. Yes, wouldn’t that be helpful?”

He cast the towel aside, as if dismissing this theory.

“But who would speak to you? You play only your own game, isn’t that so? No friends, not even the bottle. Who would speak to you?”

I thought of someone who might, but I didn’t share the thought. It wasn’t my way to share. I started out to the anteroom to collect Morrison. Van Lubo’s voice stopped me.

“Oh, the results,” he said.

I turned. “And what results would those be?”

“The ones for our latest slashed-up immigrant. You asked, remember?”

I had, indeed. Dr. V had been monitoring these deaths, and the last one had turned up in the desert south of Chandler a week ago. A young man, early twenties, naked like the others.

“Well?”

“He was missing many vital organs,” said Dr. V. “Nothing remarkable, at least compared to the rest. But there was one thing.”

“Yes?” I said.

“We identified him. Mauricio Valdez.”

“Nothing to me.”

“Nor to most people, I suppose. Landscaper, day laborer, fry cook. Those were his honest occupations. But his latest employer was interesting. We took prints off his body and the police ran him. The computer came back with a burglary arrest a couple of days before he was found. When he was booked he said he worked at Rhea’s Place.”

Well, well. “And he’d been bailed out?”

“The same day.”

“So, did a chupacabra rip him up?”

I’d shared Daly’s theory with him, you see, and my variation of it.

“There is no such thing as a chupacabra,” Dr. V said, “but many people think there is. Perhaps people who knew Mauricio Valdez.” He was pulling off his smock. “I’m sorry I didn’t reach you sooner. My secretary was supposed to leave a message for you, but she got busy. I tried to call you two days ago, but you weren’t answering your phone.”

“I was occupied,” I said. “Attending a funeral.”