I watched his jalopy sputter down the street, the smoke kicking up a cloud like Pigpen from Peanuts. Pinto mentioned two agencies in the car. FBI and DEA.
He was mistaken to think the agents in town didn’t know about the auditor. The deceased forensic accountant from the Treasury Department was working a case with the FBI at the time of his death. He was wrong about the other alphabet men. The average citizen, like Pinto, thought the DEA came into existence when Nixon had one honest thought while in office when he declared war on the ‘drug menace.’
Wrong.
Lyndon Johnson, before Tricky Dick, had merged two drug enforcement agencies, one under the FDA and the other under the Treasury Department. Nixon’s DEA was nothing more than an old message with new letters from the Ouija board. The DEA filled its ranks from familiar places, such as the FBI, the FDA, and Treasury. Federal agencies all wear some shade of blue, and they all have their quarrels with each other, but Fed is Fed, and they remembered their dead.
City Morgue before me was a four-story building dressed up in the Egyptian Revival style, popular after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. It’s not City Hospital proper. The hospital was behind me, which meant the journey to the afterlife began with a gurney ride instead of a ferry, a tunnel under Albany Street instead of crossing a river.
Two male sphinxes flank the set of stairs, down to the dead. Two men in suits, one tall and one shorter than his partner, protected all the marble in the lobby. These two stood at attention like members of the Old Guard at the Tomb for the Unknown Soldier. Their uniform of dark slacks, white shirts, and dark ties said boring as a Sears Catalog, circa 1955. They were government men. The tell was their sunglasses, dark Ray-Bans, worn indoors. Neither a warm breeze nor a kamikaze fly during winter would stay them from their mission to note all who entered the necropolis. I saw them, and they’d already counted the change in my hip pocket and estimated my height and weight, down to the ounce, including the .38 inside my coat. I maintained my course and walked down the steps into The Land of the Dead.
Jean-Claude Toussaint looked up from his clipboard when he heard footsteps. He was busy writing something on his latest tenant. In addition to his former life as a physician in Haiti, JC believed in voodoo, curses, and zombies. Unlike most doctors, JC talked to his patients, and he listened to them. The dead were no exception. He said the dead spoke all the time, walked among the living, day and night, if only we learned to listen to them. He reached into a box for a pair of latex gloves and lifted his chin. “See our friends upstairs?”
“Friends weren’t what came to mind, but the word does begin with the letter F.”
“They blocked the back entrance with their car.”
“Dealers will deal, and the working girls will turn tricks elsewhere then.”
He grinned at that, and I asked if the Feds had said anything to him.
“They requested I log visitors and who they wanted to see.”
“Busier than usual lately?”
“Ain’t rush hour, so who do I tell them you asked to view?”
“James Hoban. Please tell me he’s here.”
“Oh, the brother is here. I’ll tell the boys upstairs you were a veteran.”
“It’s not a lie, but keep the name generic on the clipboard.”
“Yes, Mr. Jones. Right this way, sir.”
JC was sarcastic, on occasion. Today was one of those days. When he exceeded his dose of the white man’s authority, he resorted to imitations of Stepin Fetchit or, my favorite, Cleavon Little from Blazing Saddles. I grabbed hold of his arm. “There’s someone else I’d like to see first.” I gave him the name. “Pedro Gonzalez.”
“Off the record?” he asked, and I nodded. “Anything else?”
“I’d like to hear your opinion on what happened to Mr. Gonzalez.”
I followed JC along the wall of trays until he pulled the drawer. I waited for Jean-Claude’s ritual with the dead. Without moving the sheet, his hand reached inside and held the man’s hand for a long, solemn minute. He looked up and said, “He fought the hard fight.”
“He did not go gentle into that good night, then?”
“See for yourself.” JC pulled the sheet halfway down. The face and chest were exposed. His dark hair and the Freddie Prinze mustache contrasted with the alabaster skin. A hole in the chest, left of center, indicated the kill shot. JC pointed. “Bruises on his forearms. You were a boxer. What does that tell you?”
“He blocked some punches. Besides the obvious bullet hole, anything else?”
“Look at the artwork.”
A tattoo of a rosary encircled Gonzalez’s neck and ended with a medallion over his heart. “The man was religious?” I said.
“More like patriotic,” JC answered. “Consider the colors.”
“Red, white, and blue beads. The American flag?”
JC traced his finger around the medallion when it hit me like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus when I remembered his ethnicity. “Beads are the colors of the Puerto Rican flag.”
Dark brown eyes drilled into me. “Take a closer look at the wound.”
I leaned forward, examined the hole. “Small caliber. Single shot.”
Small was 50 caliber and below, and caliber referred to the diameter of the cartridge, or the diameter of the gun barrel. In the military, we called 22 ammo Good & Plenty candy because you’d hurt someone more by throwing it at them than shooting them with it, but that was far from the truth. Most contractors used a 22 for the up-close and personal dispatch. The killer had to move in, get close, almost on top of the target. A hitman needed intimacy, which is why the mafia ordered a friend to kill a friend. Without that familiarity, the killer would have to ambush his victim. The bruises on the man’s arms suggested two possibilities. Either Pedro didn’t know his killer, or he did, and the assassin had lost the element of surprise.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“Say it out loud. What doesn’t make sense?”
“A small caliber doesn’t cause this kind of external damage.”
While JC walked over to one of the tables and grabbed a magnifying glass, he described to me the clothes Pedro had been wearing when he was killed. He said he’d show me photos of the body at the scene later.
“Money in his wallet matched a payroll stub.”
“Address on the stub?” I asked.
“Some cleaning company in your neck of the woods.”
I flipped through my mental Rolodex and couldn’t come up with names for any janitorial companies in the South End. There were plenty of women who banded together, filed the paperwork to form a small company, and hit the small businesses as a brigade with mops, brooms, and Windex. I asked JC where the body had been found. He said a warehouse in Fort Point.
“On the waterfront,” I said. “What kind of warehouse?”
“Coffee. There were traces of grounds on his clothes and shoes.”
JC handed me the magnifying glass. “Look at the tissue surrounding the wound.”
Like Sherlock Holmes with his lens, I leaned in and examined the chest. A small caliber, especially a .22-caliber, did a lot of internal damage because it danced around inside the victim until bone flattened it. The person didn’t die right away, either. “Talk me through this, JC.”
“What do you make of the bullet’s trajectory?”
“Downward, which could mean the killer was taller than Mr. Gonzalez, or Pedro was on his knees.”
“Leave his first name out of it. Stay objective,” JC said. “The bullet entered him at a downward angle, but now look at the surrounding tissue and tell me what you see.”
I read the flesh with the magnifier. “Abrasions are all at a right angle.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Dead or dying, he was on his back, and the killer was over him.”
“Doing what?” JC asked.
I reviewed the body once more and dreaded what I was thinking. I glanced up at JC, who had the look of the griot, a poet who was patient with his audience. “Say what you’re thinking.”
“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking.”
“Say it.”
“The killer wanted his bullet back. He dug the bullet out of the man’s body.”
“Let’s hope for Mr. Gonzalez’s sake that he was dead.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Take the shot and move fast.”
JC asked, “Why would he want the bullet?”
“No bullet. No ballistic evidence.”
“I checked the notes on the scene. What do you think I didn’t find?”
“A casing,”
“Look again at the tissue, Shane.”
I reviewed the wound and the vandalized area. “He wanted to destroy the medallion?”
“It’s Our Lady of Divine Providence of Puerto Rico,” JC said.
“We discussed the beads, but how do you know it wasn’t Jesus or some other saint?”
JC pointed to the rosary around Gonzalez’s neck. “I know the islands. Our Lady of Divine Providence is the patroness of the island. Either the killer hated religion, or Puerto Rico.”
“Good work, Watson. Moving on, what can you tell me about Hoban?”
“Waiting on toxicology.”
We joked how crime shows on television made toxicological results seem as instant as Quaker oatmeal. In reality, it took weeks.
I’d asked him if he had held Hoban’s hand and communed with his spirit. Jean-Claude Toussaint measured words the way the ancient Egyptians equated the weight of the departed soul with a feather. He said that he had spoken with Hoban, so I asked him, “And what did he say?”
“I’ll be talking to you soon, Mr. Jones.”