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Kneeling uncomfortably in a closet and peering through a keyhole in that same cramped retreat, Mr. Groak sensed a balletic flurrying of nostril hairs when he saw what he very much wanted to see and heard what he needed to hear.
For there she was: most likely now Constantine’s ex-protege. Her arched, surprisingly ample rump pointed toward the veteran scribbler as she began her frantic S.O.S., in dulcet tones, then pouted to overcome her savior’s reluctance. When this and other gambits failed, she traded threats with the celebrated woman on the other end of the line, who was apparently something of a lost love of Sadasia’s, and whose name and reputation soon would be smeared across the front page of the New York North Star.
Groak envisioned that killer headline in VE Day-sized letters, but first had to lay the groundwork for its accompanying feature like the true Perry Mason addict he was. The publicist tried his best to recreate the old eyeball eavesdrop trick, immortalized by Paul Drake, TV gumshoe, only to discover he couldn’t snag the telephone number she was dialing because his storage hideout was just too distant. But Mr. Groak (who in his younger, chunkier days, might have done stunt work for Raymond Burr) continued to keep watch while Sadasia Trayne stood just as nature had made her, juggling a Newport and a small green Bic, as she whipped that little dial around in a fifth-floor bedroom.
“C’mon, baby,” Constantine encouraged. She cradled the receiver, gave the disposable lighter the gas, briefly incinerating the tip of her nipple. (“Yeowww!” gasped the peeper, as if he’d been seared.) But Sadasia couldn’t heard him (too far away) and didn’t cry out because her desperate call for help had been connected and was ringing now in a downtown Manhattan office. “Bugger!” was Sadasia’s sole concession to pain as a few carbonized hairs fluttered to the floor.
Connie’s excitement was turning to impatience when someone must have answered. He overheard an alarmingly rude “Give me Chase!” and froze. “Oh, I think she’ll take this call!” Never expecting a bolt from the blue to follow as Sadasia just stood there, burning butt in mouth, scratching navel lint from her tightly sculpted tummy. “I’m a close personal friend of Chief Ellia Chase!” Groak pinched himself, just to make sure he was awake and heard that name right. If so, this would be a scandal of seismic proportions.
Contemplating Trayne at her most vulnerable, he also began feeling the after-effects of the kicks she’d landed to his pelvis and guts. He let a gnarled right hand brush his pink-tinted crotch, and thought back to Sadasia’s alcoholic flying squirrel. In one fell sticky swoop, the cocktail had shot him off his romantic high, then down several flights of Umbrella Man stairs, forcing him to take a humiliating turn around the nightclub’s bar and stage.
—Frame number 313.—
—Cranial impact.—
“Hello, Mr. G,” Tinkerbell had said.
“Evening, freak,” Connie had replied. Moments later, he’d exercised a little self-control and even taken some satisfaction when he saw that the tasteless establishment he’d spent the past few months expanding was still bustling after hours, earning its keep, that Donny’s ice had been replenished, and that a last group of fans had settled up and now lay in wait for Sadasia at the stage door.
Groak downed a quick one and joined them, at least in spirit. He stood in the shadows across from the club, almost in an alley. It was an ill-smelling vantage point where Connie gave long and deep thought to his magnum opus. He looked The Umbrella Man up, down, and sideways, wondering what exactly the glue was that held it together, and how the whole thing might easily fly apart.
At this particular moment, something in an orange fright wig passed him by without giving him a thought, concealed as he was among shades and shadows, clacking its boot-heels like Hitler’s war machine and shaking an ass that Groak would have known anywhere. He broke from hiding and peered down the sidewalk toward the receding buns and a sweater that had somehow ridden up Sadasia’s back, a sloppiness he believed almost begged to be punished.
Following Trayne’s path and darting in and out of sight at her cue, Connie saw the bright shining star he’d helped create try to give him the slip and trash everything he’d worked for. To his surprise, he discovered that nothing could be easier to swallow than this betrayal because the bad blood it stirred up against Sadasia let him mark her trail, like a wounded deer’s, and follow her tracks until they led directly to the ladies’ bar we’ve already visited. It was a snug little nest on the wrong side of the tracks, and the kind of place that Groak had learned to spot, long ago, during his tabloid apprenticeship. How could he have missed that his little queen would belong to such a hive?
Connie stood alone, off to the side, and could see clearly inside, between the curtained windows. Denying himself like Stella Dallas, he watched his warbling baby-cakes cruise and angle among the waterfront lesbians, cut a little rug, get lucky and leave arm-in-arm out the shameless front entrance.
What Trayne left with didn’t really matter. (“It’s the thought that counts,” Constantine had always believed.) But her escort’s hands were not empty. One cupped Sadasia’s butt, while the other dangled a huge, janitor-sized mess of keys, one of which, Groak knew, must surely bring a four-wheeled beast to life, and speed the couple out of his sight and harm’s way. And since that scenario simply would not do, Connie proceeded to prowl the streets for a car to hot-wire.
—“Are those your wheels?”—
—“Hop in. Fasten that seat belt.”—
Greenbergér’s Picchionetti drew away from the curb while New York’s newest and most unlikely auto thief sat scrunched behind the wheel, pleased no end with his timing, and gunning his newly pilfered VW Rabbit until he had locked on his quarry, an underpowered, slow-moving eyesore whose farting tailpipe served as a convenient homing signal.
Groak let some blocks open between them, then increased that distance once they had crossed Brooklyn Bridge, turned left, barreled through Williamsburg and headed out toward a land where nothing grew and nobody lived. Except, apparently, the senior member of this spanking new couple.
Her ridiculous contraption ground to a halt in front of an enormous brick pile, red-and-black and more like a fort than a residence, set in a lunar landscape, and impossibly tall. Like a cock, he joked, in this gray sunken world.
He had chased them on a parallel course. Arriving, he killed the lights on his homely German ride, set its emergency brake, stretched his varicosed legs and began picking his way through the street rubble, swiftly enough to let him watch a zig-zag path of lights fly on and up inside the dwelling. Once they couple reached the top floor and settled, since no additional bulbs winked on, Groak peered through the front gate’s flaking bars, a wrought-iron buckle for concrete walls, then down the driveway, past Capers’ Picchionetti, to her bomb-proof front door, which was open just the tiniest crack that let a narrow strip of light fall through it onto the deck of the verandah.
Sensing an opportunity, Connie leaned his weight against the gate and, much to his surprise, felt it give way. It swung open just enough for the publicist to sneak through and find no attack dogs, no watchmen, no mantraps. Just the hideous, poorly selling import car standing guard, with the hood still warm, squirrelly motor still ticking.
The hinges on the front door squeaked. Constantine crept up the stairs as far as the burning lights would take him, onto the top fifth-floor landing where voices could be heard behind a closed door. Connie assumed the position like a naughty child. Kneeling with his eye glued to the bedroom keyhole he remained transfixed for hours—listening, watching, being attracted and repelled and even learning a sexy trick or two after the initial shock wore off.
Trayne rambled on through her tale of honey-colored lost love. After she’d finished, Greenbergér slipped her some kind of mickey and dashed to the shower, leaving the field completely unattended, except for a leaky cache of steam, which swirled a hot gauzy curtain around the room, with Sadasia’s nipples serving as a rosy dual centerpiece that floated low or high on her voyage through a heavily drugged sleep.
Groak’s palms grew sweaty as he thought, “Why not?” He’d snuck in next to the bed, just for a taste or feel, when an unexpected warning pricked his ear, deflating his manhood. He heard a low drawn-out rattle, like a bear in a garbage dump.
Even with both women unable to hear, for differing reasons, Groak took no chances, he abandoned the bedroom and leaned out over the banister just in time to be shaken by another crash from downstairs. It was startlingly loud, as if a service for eight had crashed to the floor, but had gone unheard by the women once again. It was caused by the three-quarter-size Huntress Diana statue on the ground floor.
He continued peering down through the many flights of stairs and, from that height, could begin to make out a flat blue military-style cap moving slowly upwards, turning corners on the stairs, but never once changing its angle on the wearer’s head. Here, quite clearly, was a man on a mission. Groak beat a hasty retreat to a closet, where he carefully hid himself. It occupied a corner of the bedroom that was easily overlooked and, from that vantage point, he learned straight away why this intruder had gone about his business so deliberately and boldly. It was because tall broad-shouldered men generally have little to fear, especially when they are wearing police uniforms smeared down the front with gold glitter.
Groak saw this impressively built officer, trailed by a small piece of rolling luggage, enter and survey the sitcom maven’s bedroom. He was in no obvious hurry to get the business he’d come to perform underway. But that still begged the question: Why was he even here in the first place?
Leaving the door open and moving past Greenbergér’s empty luggage, the patrolman paused to listen in front of the bathroom’s entrance, then forced it noiselessly open with a burglar’s touch without removing his service revolver, which only intensified the silence of the bedroom when he shut that door behind him.
He re-emerged in due course, looking every inch the gentleman brute in his service blues and softly masculine features, set off by a mustache straight out of The Village People. He briefly straddled Sadasia to determine whether she indeed remained dead to the world. Then he rose to his full muscular height, gave the room a quick check and dove back into the bathroom’s steam, the hot white cloud gasping and sucking in his gym-hardened body when the john door opened.
Groak tried to concentrate while the bug zappers popped, the steam grew warmer and twenty minutes or more passed until the policeman emerged once more, still cool, calm and collected, carrying one of Capers’ severed legs in one hand, one of her severed arms in the other. Both limbs were swiftly arranged in the first of Greenbergér’s suitcases. He repeated the process for her remaining extremities in the second valise.
Snapping the locks shut on this horrible matched set of luggage, the patrolman returned to the bathroom one last time. To freshen up, Groak imagined, because he came out without any additional grisly loads but with his arms dry enough to select a pair of the deceased celebrity’s diaries and tuck them firmly under one of his blue-shirted arms when he straddled Sadasia for a final check of her pupils. Appearing to be satisfied, he unconcernedly vacated the premises with his luggage on wheels, along with Greenbergér pilfered secrets—a safe bet for being one of the murder’s key motives.
With Sadasia still out, Constantine made his way to the little girl’s room, where the steam remained thick enough to cut with a knife. He shut the toilet lid for decency’s sake, pulled the curtain on the shower to get at the knobs, and saw the carcass, belly up in the tub, lacking arms below the shoulders, legs below the hips, and with its cruelly cropped neck pointing toward the drain.
He decided to cut the water. Watching it run noisily out, he knelt down and leaned over the rim to get a closer look at the sad, black muck where her vagina had been. A gray muck actually. Sort of a soup. And Mr. Groak thought of that old joke.
Waiter! Waiter!
The soup was thick and occasionally bubbled, a shade of gray he had seen before, poured, he remembered, from cans of Campbell’s Cream of Oyster. A comforting thought perhaps, under other circumstances, but one which now scared him nearly shitless. Because if the killing and dismemberment had been controlled and methodical, the disfigurement staring him straight in the face seemed savage, to the point of lunacy. Its catalyst, he recognized, was a can of drain cleaner nearly hidden behind the door of the bathroom vanity, with beads of water trailing down its sides. To the right of the sink, on the bathroom floor, lay a beautifully designed red and white object that the cop had apparently dropped, forgotten or, in any case left, behind. Seeing what it was, Groak smiled broadly, more than if he’d spotted two $100s on the street, and slipped it into a pocket of his tux.
He opened the toilet lid and turned on the shower spigot, then moved to the bedstead and, from there, to the bedroom closet that he’d previously occupied. There he would wait for the sleeping Trayne to rise and make those grimmest of grim discoveries in the john. The he’d fit the jigsaw together until the picture it formed left no room for escape. And a frantically remembered “Do Not Call” number drove Sadasia to the phone and into Groak’s clutches.
But not before the dialing had concluded and the right side of Sadasia’s chest had burst into flame like a mini-Lakehurst. (“O, the humanity!”) Not that it deterred her from smoking whatever butts she had left down to the nubs while she tapped her foot off rhythm to the zappers. She blew smoke rings until the downstairs buzzer rang and she could crush that last one out. Trayne leaned enticingly over the wooden banister and shouted “It’s open! C’mon up!” hard enough for her voice to crack.
The stairs creaked and in time Sadasia cooed “Well, hi!” sotto voce while the friend she had summoned stepped onto the landing in sensible shoes, outwardly composed but jittery inside. Groak noticed she was older than Sadasia, by a decade, maybe more, but nothing to sneeze at. She looked as she would continue to look, aging like Hofmannstahl’s countess, and sporting her trademark velvet suit, cruelly at odds with the death scene’s steamy heat.
The two embraced, neither spoke. Instead they toured the scene in silence, erasing whatever evidence they could, then turned the shower back on and made plans to leave.
On her way out, Trayne found herself wrapped in a sheet like Gandhi. The city’s chief of police detectives carried her former lover’s folded duds and, together, she and Sadasia hobbled down the many flights of stairs, as if the carpets nailed to them might slip free at any moment. They shut the front door, quietly reflective, so that the publicist, unseen, could follow their every step to the chief’s police Lincoln.
Groak got her license number, just to make sure, and once the pair had gone, strolled on the porch, which offered a lovely bit of relief from the heat, below a fetid uncleared sky. He had turned off Greenbergér’s bathroom shower again, just to mess with the chief, give her something to think about. Looking to the days ahead, he wondered, but couldn’t be sure, how long the good luck safely guiding his path would last.
* * * * *
HOAGLAND NEWELL, WHOM Constantine Groak was destined to wake from late slumber that morning, had come into this irritating world in an age when racist epithets still found their way into print and he had survived long enough, despite his best efforts, to disprove an observation made by the immortal Reggie Jackson—something to the effect that “I earn a couple of million dollars a year, and I’m still just a nigger on this ball team.”
“Me and Reggie both,” Newell mused. Seeing his handsome overachiever’s face distorted by the shaving glass of history always cut him to the quick.
Suddenly older (he was now only 46 but already felt closer to 60) and with job satisfaction clearly on the wane, Hoagy sought new ways to keep his justified silent rage in check. One of his brightest ideas in this arena was to increase his intake of drink (he had imbibed since early youth for medicinal purposes), usually on the sly and often to excess. These occasional binges lent a cynical edge to both his thought and prose style and, ironically, only added to his staying power as the New York North Star’s premier columnist. “Yeah,” he thought, “me and Reggie. Joined at the hip, maybe separated at birth.”
Back in the spring of 1962, North Star scouts were beginning to snoop around the five boroughs, eyes peeled for an obscenely talented segregation-buster who was ready to smilingly take on reams of abuse from dyed-in-the-wool racist colleagues, but who was also squeaky clean in his private life, “like Jackie Robinson.”
A far younger Constantine Groak led that fateful expedition. He and his liberal chums took the historic flights of stairs two steps at a time, invading the offices of “The Brooklyn College Kingsman” like a strong front four. There they soon tracked down Hoagland P. Newell, hunched over an Underwood Noiseless, lit smoke on lip, banging out that weekly’s lead editorial. The emerald-green eyeshade he wore struck Groak as seriously pretentious. Then again, he had worn one himself (didn’t we all?) back when he was just starting out, imitating H.L. Mencken. Besides, the young man’s portfolio was outstanding. He showed the kid’s copy around, got the preliminary green light from his associates, then passed the hat and took the boy wonder out to lunch where, like Branch Rickey before him, he explained both the situation and its attendant risks in a 20-question format. “You sleep with white girls?” was the first thing he asked him.
“No, sir,” young Hoagland answered into his napkin.
“And you’re in no way a faggot?”
“Uh, no.”
“How’s that? Speak up!”
“No, sir!”
“All righty, then,” Groak said with an approving nod. “Now, do you have any questions for me?” Only three queries had been on his list.
The young man knew this last gotcha was purely rhetorical. He kept his stiff upper lip buttoned, and the old pro made him a life-changing offer over brandy and coffee, then headed back to Manhattan. Alone with his Hennessy 5-Star, Hoagland felt at once elated and kind of dead inside because, while he hadn’t lied and was more than qualified for the grueling challenges ahead, he hadn’t “‘fessed up” to all of his story’s nooks and crannies.
He hadn’t let on about his health, for example, which Groak assumed would be excellent in so young a man, or and about whether he drank, which doubly surprised him since his “people” were supposed to. Well, the fact was this one did. Heavily. Whenever his chest pains kicked in. Not even tasting the stuff. Until the episodes subsided or he passed out near the bottom of his bottle. Once on a beach, when the tide was coming in.
The doctors said there wasn’t the slightest hope of a cure. But since he’d always heard that fortune favors the brave, Hoagy decided he would cure himself, believing he had a future at the North Star. He paid the restaurant bill that Groak should have, rode to the clinic on a bus that had nothing on the recently retired Brooklyn streetcars and told the staff there to deep six the medical records his prospective employers had never asked to see. It was the biggest risk he ever took in his life, freeing him to pursue the career he’d always dreamed of and fought for. And if Hoags discovered after coming on board that the fabled newsroom he was working in brought him considerably less money than the union specified, and far more crap from peers than he’d expected, he figured both were just part of the deal and worth it.
Living mostly on corn flakes over the next few years, Hoagland held his temper and learned the difficult art of patience. Both served him well professionally until Groak decided he was ready for a really tough assignment—racial violations of the Fair Housing Act. Hard investigative reporting made his reputation and, not for nothing, dramatically boosted North Star circulation as well.
Management was very pleased. Newell’s career took off on a comfortable trajectory. Whenever his angina pectoris raised its ugly head, he would try drowning his sorrows with a vengeance, reminded that his days were numbered. He drank alone from a very large bottle to handle gigantic letdowns and coped with his more routine attacks by inviting fellow cardiac sufferers (neighbors or strangers recruited in bars) over for what he liked to call his “chest-pain parties” where guests swilled, smoked, guzzled, and snacked until they passed out somewhere in their host’s apartment after a wide range of embarrassing behaviors and an even wider range of provocative conditions.
Groak had known about Hoagland’s drinking problem since one particular Pulitzer Prize year. But he hadn’t known about Hoagland’s adult toga parties. Groak expected to find the columnist his usual, amusingly ironic, stricken self when he drove back into the city that airless, sticky post-dismemberment morning. He climbed Roebling’s gothic bridge over coolant-colored water, darted through Manhattan’s high wall and reached the Upper West Side in no time flat. There he dumped his little ragtop clown car in a low 70s no-parking zone, just off Riverside, where he knew it would be towed.
No one was on duty that morning in the brightly lit lobby of the Ansonia. Groak pocketed the expired “PRESS” pass he’d had out and at the ready and elevatored up to Mr. Newell’s apartment, where he surprisingly found the front door open. All-news radio softly wafted into rooms pervaded by the smell of half-empty wine and liquor glasses that had sat out overnight.
Connie remembered Newell’s cleaning lady wasn’t due until the following day and guessed he was seeing the aftermath of yet another “few people in” that Hoags had mentioned. Little did he know that the more Newell increased his alcohol intake the sicker he became, like most addicts.
Four to five couples lay passed out in varying stages of undress in the living room they’d demolished. The space looked as if several vacuum cleaners had switched to Reverse and emptied themselves. He stepped over a female leg with a filthy crinkle-soled foot attached, then stabbed at Newell’s shoulder as he lay face-down on the couch, only to discover that it wasn’t his friend but more likely an arrhythmia sufferer from down the hall or else some guy who’d come to fix the AC and just decided to hang around.
Maybe Hoags was in the kitchen, under the fridge. Wrong again. That burly bare-ass and his even burlier mate were a one-time high-wire act from Ringling Brothers, who’d retired once their weak hearts brought on fainting spells inside the Big Top and were now in residence on the building’s fourth floor. This left only five rooms to cover, six including bath, a time-consuming task, given the number of cat’s-away timers littering each.
Groak eventually found his way to the bedroom and, then, the jumbled sack. He lifted the four corners of the covers, looking for the face he knew and loved like a brother which, when it finally turned up, turned out to be welded to a stranger’s behind. Strangely prudish in his late-middle age, Groak pried the two apart like dogs with a hose, and the woman slipped away into the bedding. The publicist couldn’t help noticing how time had withered his old friend, as if he were suffering from exposure instead of a failing heart.
“Morning, Hoags!” he greeted. Excusing himself to his neighbors, some of whom included the aerialists’ friends, Newell rubbed his eyes and wondered how they were doing on time. “It’s early yet,” Connie said, handing him his blue flannel robe with the red candy piping, a color scheme he’d already seen enough of this week. “About 7:30. How’s the ticker?”
“Ticking,” quipped Newell. “I could use some juice around now.”
“Grapefruit?”
“Yes, please, gotta get my mouth working.”
They would need some privacy, so Connie asked the threesome on the floor to leave, kicking them awake with his EEE Thom McAns. They left, hunting their duds. Newell’s crow-footed mouth asked what it was his old friend wanted.
“Help,” Groak explained, which still left Hoagy hanging. “Girl trouble.”
“Already?”
“Afraid so.”
“That singer we’ve been pushing?”
“Yeah, her.”
“Aw, Christ, that’s too bad.”
“You’re looking well.” Newell actually looked like week-old crap waiting for rain to flush it off a sidewalk.
“You know, I feel pretty well.”
“Are you sure you should be entertaining the ladies? In your ‘condition,’ I mean.”
He poured more juice, ignoring Groak’s question, and adjusted the robe so his package fell free from the drawstring. “I made my will, you know.”
“Really? Who’s feeding at the trough this time?” A remark that might have embarrassed Newell, had death been distant. “Last time it was Brooklyn College?
“Right.”
“And before that?”
“Who remembers?” Newell felt a little better, but still looked like he just learned about a five-hour wait on tap before his flight. Hoagland just held another smoke from Groak, tip unlit, showboating his depression. “I’ve left everything to you.”
“You’re kidding,” Groak said, and would have said more only Newell’s companion from the night before, naked except for raspberry knee-highs and what she regarded as “exciting” underwear, chose that moment to demand payment for her talents.
This opened a very interesting can of worms because the woman, in her mid-20s, wasn’t normally a “pro” but the friend of a friend of a friend of a friend who occasionally freelanced in the world’s oldest profession. The reasons underlying this brash part-time career choice were 1) because the money she earned as a New York substitute school teacher barely kept her afloat financially, and 2) because her well-intentioned acquaintances thought a sexual last hurrah for Hoags would do him good before his health failed completely. Regarding the latter, Jocelyn, the substitute teach, thought so too, as did Mr. Newell, proving that, sometimes, good intentions really do open the bedroom door to hell.
Hoagy soon became accustomed to the fair-priced joyrides that preceded his increasingly frequent angina attacks and the parties he would hold in their honor. He was also extremely careful to cover his bets, column-wise, with “evergreens in the bank.” Freelanced work, already on file, to be used if he couldn’t produce the Family Newells column himself.
Jocelyn got used to the extra cash and increased her spending. This was all well and good, but tonight she’d gotten greedy and was foolish enough to claim, “We said $200!” when Newell knew for a fact he’d played by the rules and paid in advance. Still, Jocelyn argued otherwise, threatening to make a stink his other guests might overhear.
“Could you wait a minute?” Hoagland asked, smiling sweetly.
“That’s sixty seconds, honey. Fifty-nine. . .”
“And counting, I get it.” He eased himself out the kitchen door, buried the bedroom phone under covers and made a quick call.
“Twenty-three,” she continued.
“Yeah, sure,” thought Connie, and tweaked her little bosom, just to be a jerk. “Put it on the tab,” he told her.
“Seven. . . Six. . . Think I won’t? Four. . . Three. . . Oh, my god!”
Three being the point in the countdown when Newell returned, sifting through his billfold. “$200?”
“That’s right. And grandpa here just added $50 to your tab!”
Bills were being counted. (Hoags motioned “No, please,” even before Groak reached for his wallet.) A harsh ring came from the apartment’s back entrance, startling Jocelyn. Newell remained perfectly calm, excusing himself to rap twice. Two raps came back, along with a kind of scratching to get in.
“Wrong side, Arriago!” Newell called. The unseen presence moved a few steps to the right. “Now you’ve got it!” The door swung open on the building’s handyman, who had ridden the freight elevator to answer Newell’s call. Groak had seen smaller trees blocking sunlight in Central Park.
“Is this the party?” Jocelyn recognized the setup and began to cower. “This one here?”
“All depends,” Hoagy said.
“On what?”
“Entirely up to you, sweetheart.”
“I want my money!”
“I’ve paid you,” Hoagland countered in his most soothing oil-on-water voice.
“Where’s it at?” asked Arriago.
“Shove it, clown!”
“I wouldn’t go there if I were you,” Groak advised.
“We want the money!”
“Let’s not be hasty, Arriago. Give her a moment, maybe she’ll change her mind.” But there was nothing doing, Jocelyn stuck to her guns. “All right,” said a disappointed Hoagland. “Go on! Fetch!”
The muscleman slipped his arm around the woman’s waist, hoisted her over his shoulder and retrieved the tiny folded bills that she’d stuffed in her bra.
“You see,” Newell said after he’d finished counting, “here’s the $200 we agreed on, paid in advance, plus a little extra. You’re more than welcome to it. But I won’t be inviting you to any more of my little parties. Please show our guest the door.” Which meant a brutal drag by the hair into the freight elevator, across the cellar’s concrete floor, out into the alley. “What a shame,” was Hoagy’s only comment. “Nice girl otherwise.”
After Newell’s other revelers finally went home, he and Groak made a big pot of coffee in the Melita and worked out all the necessary details, regarding how the North Star would manipulate its coverage of the Greenbergér murder and how appropriate punishments should be meted out to sexy songbird Sadasia Trayne and Municipal Chief of Police Detectives Ellia Chase.
* * * * *
THE CALL CAME INTO Homicide at 2:24 p.m. on the 11th, a week following Labor Day and less than 24 hours after the Yanks took four from Boston by a combined score of 42–9. This pulled them even in the standings (86-56).
Detective R. (for Rainer) Tagrowd, just back from a foul but leisurely air-conditioned lunch of chili and fries, answered the phone on the third ring and filled out the preliminary reports. It sounded bad. A hot and sticky case, like the weather that Tagrowd had been avoiding off and on all day. “Name?” Rainer asked the caller.
“Murph.”
“Full name.”
“Salvatore Murphy.” He was a deliveryman for “Baby’s Breath Cleaners” who had swung his truck out by this woman’s place, a private residence, for his weekly pickup.
“Of what?”
“Dirty laundry. We also dry clean, do a little tailoring.” The woman hadn’t seemed to be home, so Salvo used his key.
“Girlfriend of yours?” the detective kidded.
“Uh-uh, no. Writes for TV and travels a lot. I let myself in.” He’d gathered washcloths, towels and such from the ground floor, then went up the stairs where he’d found her butchered body.
“You there now?”
“Yes.”
“Stay put,” Rainer said. “And don’t touch anything.”
Rainer mumbled, then added “Fuck” after he’d hung up, not recognizing the address he’d written. Unless it was way the hell out where they’d been demolishing old-timey Brooklyn for god knew how long. He’d ask the new dispatcher; she knew those areas really well. And while he had her, he’d ask where the hell Miodrag Badaracz had gone to. Badaracz was his partner in crime, so to speak.
First things first, though.
Call Forensics. Get the shield, the piece, the car keys, notebook, mechanical pencil, and wintergreen Tic-Tacs from his side desk drawer. That just about covered it. Except for Detective Badaracz who, like all cops, seemed never to be around when you needed him.
“Golden Boy?” went his question, while the new girl covered her dispatcher’s mike.
“Rain, he was just here.”
“Hmm.”
“Got another stiff?”
“Another day/another downer.”
“Must be this heat.” More than likely. But Tagrowd didn’t much care, since they only smelled worse, and you got used to that.
His short search had an OK ending. He found Miodrag seated at their workstation, smoking WBOA (Without Benefit of Ashtray). The detective left lit butt ends standing on their filters, smoldering tips upwards, while they burned themselves out. This usually meant several-packs-worth of extinguished cigs littering his desk or anywhere else he wandered. Or else, random conflagrations slowly taking hold across the squad room. “Hey!”
Tagrowd had swept Miodrag’s cigarette forest into the trash and tossed the one he had going into his coffee. “The cleaning lady is beginning to complain.”
“Well, fuck her!”
“I’m sure you’ve tried.”
“Then, fuck you!”
“We don’t have time.” He spoke at a tough-cop clip that impressed Badaracz, the junior partner of this duo. Tagrowd threw him out of kilter with his wise-cracking pose, into silence, and into a half-empty pack of Camel Wide Filters. He sat on the passenger’s side of their unmarked car. A complex-faced fellow, wide in the hip and lower thighs, with tiny terra-cotta hands searching his pockets for additional smokes. He’d need them. “You know, you’re disgusting. . .”
“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know. What’s the story on our little jaunt today?”
“Hack-job,” Tagrowd replied curtly, committed to doing the best job her could. He covered the basics: arriving quickly at the crime scene, getting all you needed from a witness or suspect, acing the paperwork.
“Sounds great.”
“My guess is routine.” Rainer opened the vents and, cop radio squawking, drove their unit through unfamiliar streets and increasingly rubbled vistas to the address they sought, rising like Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria’s castle in the outer borough, with Greenbergér’s hideous bilious green Picchionetti parked just inside the gate. Rather green himself, Salvo Murphy was found parked on the verandah. “You guys cops?” he asked, a clotted hanky glued to his lips.
They flashed their badges. “There’s more of us coming.”
“You the one I spoke to?”
“No, that’s me,” Rainer said.
“Sorry for not staying inside.”
“That’s OK. But you’ll still have to show us. Where’s your truck?”
“I loaded up and called Baby’s Breath for backup. That’s the laundry I work for. Someone’s gotta finish the rest of my route.”
Tagrowd couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I thought I told you not to touch anything.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, dickhead. . .”
The two detectives didn’t even have to swap a glance; Murphy was going to be one of those.
The door to the place was locked; Salvo had left his key inside. The butt of Miodrag’s revolver soon took care of that. Such a shame when you had to break antique beveled kitchen glass.
They stepped inside. The place had once been very fine indeed. Too bad when people let it go to hell. They asked the nervous deliveryman to retrace his steps. “What’s with the coffee?” Tagrowd asked. He saw the cup, still on the table, with Salvo’s butts still on the saucer.
“She gives me the run of the house,” Murphy explained. “Travels a lot on business.”
“The key too,” Miodrag grumbled as they began to move. First, through the ground floor, then higher up the stairs, examining the house’s middle register, then higher still until the trio finally stood at the death chamber’s painful threshold.
When, wouldn’t you know? The doorbell rang far below, forcing them to pad slowly downward once again to the back entrance. Where an orange-sized flashbulb blinded them, while the door flew inward, rattling its curtain rods, and a far-too-husky voice demanded, “Which of you guys is the stiff?”
“Oh, my god!” Murphy blubbered, down on his knees since four intruding hand guns had been drawn. “Please! Don’t shoot me!” he pleaded, while the camera popped its top once again, sending Salvo spread-eagle. And a peculiar, tulip-shaped coiffure stepped over him in advance of her forensic quartet (she was a dead-ringer for the Duchess of Windsor, whose name also just happened to be Mrs. Simpson) to crank up her film, refocus, and squeeze off a neutrally sinister study of Capers’ toaster, crowned with crumbs, then move on to Capers’ moldering sink of dishes. “You didn’t touch anything?”
“Oh, no way! Honest!” Rainer said, renewing an old stinging acquaintance. The detective wasn’t entirely sure that Salvo hadn’t touched, much less killed anything in the house, but was instead “winging it,” as the kids and old-timers both liked to say. He saw once again that this lady shutterbug must surely rank among the world’s worst-stacked decks, which was tragic since Tagrowd knew for a fact that she fucked like a bunny with anyone but him.
“Still wearing those showboats, Tagrowd?” This was a swipe at the brown and white wingtips, made especially for him, that were a point of pride for Rainer and, he liked to think, also served as his calling card within the department. They weren’t strictly by the book, of course, but the guys on the squad were used to them, paying the shoes no more mind than if he had one of those ugly port wine stains splashed across his face. But Simpson never stopped, would never let it go. And who was she to talk?
Way too tall, she had skin that would stick to metal and eyes like matching halves of a center-cut kiwi. Her little black dress, topped by a single strand of oversized costume pearls, only heightened Simpson’s unsettling effect. But this was the outfit she routinely chose to wear, along with heels closer to spikes that probably ran straight up into her ankles. And this wouldn’t have surprised the detective one little bit since every movement she made looked just that pained.
“We drove up and he was standing outside,” Rainer told her as they moved past Capers’ toppled Diana statue.
“Just standing?” she asked, changing bulbs.
“Uh-huh.”
“Think he’s our man?”
“He was shaking,” Badaracz reported. “White as a sheet!” and white as the cold slabs of meat that they would find upstairs, after the forensic boys did as they’d been trained and told to do. Diagramming the house’s smallest details, they’d unlocked their little crime kits, which might have been mistaken for make-up cases and made themselves busy as bees dusting for fingerprints, collecting fiber samples and generally minding other peoples’ business because that was what they got paid to do. And they were expert enough to have Salvo on the ropes, many floors before Greenbergér’s earthly remains came into view. And smell.
“Whaddaya think, George?” Mrs. Simpson asked the guy dusting for prints, who’d been with her for years. “We got our man or not?”
“That’s real hard to say, Maeve. There’s a butcher knife missing from a set in the kitchen. Maybe that just up and flew away on tiny wings.”
“Yeah, it’s been known to happen. Smile, sucker!” she barked, and caught Murphy clutching a banister just as his knees were beginning to buckle.
“Step it up!” one of the other bulls told him and gave Murphy a well-placed boot in the ass while Detective Badaracz drew even with Tagrowd, who was high up on one of the landings, a bit winded but paying no mind in the excitement. “Whaddaya think, Rain?”
“What about?”
“I dunno, are they on target?”
“Have been before.”
“But with this guy?”
“Anything’s possible,” Tagrowd admitted. But under the circumstances he also had his doubts.
There were the endless stairs. And the awfulness they led to.
The lady photographer popped off, “Hey, Murphy! Wanna bargain manslaughter?”
And Salvo, looking like he was going to take the rap, was sorry he had ever been born.
Put a little motive in this quadratic cop equation and somebody would have a pretty good case. But would a motive put Rainer back in control of his emotions? The detective didn’t think so—not while Simpson kept on with her endless sniping on top of the obscene popping—or while the corners of his eyes kept smarting from the artsy crap that Greenbergér had hanging in her house. No doubt intended as decoration, it was far off the mark in Rainer’s opinion.
This great gash of color, for instance, raw against its frame was “Black Iris,” the detective learned—identifiable only because Capers had stuck the commemorative poster from a museum show in behind the glass without trimming it at all, which was also how this Georgia O’Keeffe woman seemed to create her art: taking her private parts (Rainer assumed they were hers) then forcibly combining them with the shape of the flower. That was just wrong. Then there was this other piece of so-called Art with a capital A, hanging on the walls that Tagrowd didn’t get at all. “Mona Lisa with a mustache penciled in?” Rainer complained. “‘L.Q.H.O.O.?’ What’s that all about?”
“This is more than a crime,” Mrs. Simpson told her team. She arranged the scene through her camera’s viewfinder, standing first over Capers’ gape-mouthed head and, later, over the mutilated torso, all against a background of fresh towels and a freshly emptied hamper. “This is a crime against women!”
“Maybe so,” Tagrowd thought in controlled silence. But wasn’t Simpson losing sight of the bigger issue—waving your thing in somebody’s face, like that human turd he and Miodrag had collared, months before. Making a spectacle of himself in that nightclub, until his grotesque Emmett Kelly sidekick gushed all over Rainer’s fancy footwear. He’d cleaned them up but they’d never quite felt the same, like Chucky’s defilement would always stay with them.
The detective remembered how the anger stemming from that violation felt eerily similar to the slow burn he now experienced in front of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower composition, and that also coursed through him when he viewed the dead woman’s genitalia continuing their slow dissolve into mush. Like Chinese boxes fitting together, all of it stuck in Tagrowd’s craw.
Behind him, one of Simpson’s colleagues knelt beside the toilet, in research not distress. One hand was covered by a clear plastic sample bag marked “EVIDENCE,” while the other held something like a miniature pooper-scooper, actually a sculptor’s tool, that was combing the hair on the dead woman’s head, shaving off little curls of the human excrement caked on top of it like a sort of Masai mud helmet.
Rainer fumed, standing aside from all the action. Meanwhile, the sample bags grew heavy with hardening, sweet-fragranced, hair-spiked clumps whose purpose Badaracz didn’t quite understand. He turned to his partner and was told “Enzyme analysis.”
Just then, department big-wig Ellia Chase, always on site for high-profile carve-ups, drove up in her department Lincoln, its siren whistling up the inside of the house to quickly reach Simpson, who leaned out of the death-stilled bedroom window, just in time to catch a glimpse of the chief of police detectives, known throughout headquarters as “The Velvet Badge,” slam the door on her blue-black chariot, and nose upstairs, giving the crime scene photographer valuable seconds to down tone her act.
A lot of questions and second-guessing went on about the Badge. How did someone who combined personal integrity, a flair for solving cases, and superb administrative skills rise from junior officer to head a major department in less than seven years while others had put in more than 20 and gone nowhere? The proof, as they say, was in the pudding: a 25% increase in closed investigations under the new regime. Bottom line: This rookie chief was good.
Tagrowd and his normally glib partner had salaamed and generally sucked up to the chief and then watched her cute, double-dimpled ass snake its investigative way around the carcass-filled luggage into the carcass-filled bathroom. The pear-shaped hams on her were held in check by the knee-high velvet skirt (split-pea green today) of a custom velvet suit. A far-fetched yet fetching chief of department outfit that, rumor had it, played just the tiniest part in an extensive velvet wardrobe.
Enzymes?” Miodrag asked Tagrowd. Badaracz, of course, still hadn’t a clue. So, Rainer gave him that good, hard word once again.
“Oh, yeah, huh? What about ‘em?”
“Sometimes enzymes are like fingerprints. Understand?”
But Miodrag predictably didn’t.
“These boys will just run ‘em through the lab and see.”
“See what?”
“See,” the detective pointed discreetly, “whose shit that is. . .”
“Aw, c’mon!” The face Badaracz made was priceless. “They got a file of shit downtown?”
“Not exactly,” Tagrowd said. He patiently explained how an old acquaintance of his in the forensics lab over at One Police Plaza would run tests on this sample, then compare those results with results from samples they’d obtain from Murphy and any other suspects that came up out of the sewers on this case.
“Well, Christ! That’s some hat trick!”
“No, that’s the job,” his partner corrected.
As these wise words were spoken, Chase emerged from the carnage-filled can looking fairly frazzled, limp of velvet nap, sapped of muscle tone, and literally wringing wet with perspiration. Beads of sweat dropped from her hair onto her little cowbell earrings. A shock of salt ran down her stockings. But despite her discomfort, the Velvet Badge showed nothing less than a brick-hard face to her “troops,” as she called them, never admitting that gore, especially this gore, shook her insides since it soon would be her baby, her mess alone to clean up. Only her hands were completely tied in this case since past passion, once again tightening its fingers on her windpipe. had trapped her.
Still, Ellia Chase stood in that doorway, taking charge, ordering Badaracz to turn off those damn zappers.
“What do you think?” Tagrowd asked her. The two cops went back a long way, with grudging respect felt on both sides.
“Is there a suspect?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said and gave Chase the story.
“No details?” she asked. “Did he get the third degree?”
“He was questioned,” Rainer answered.
“Anyone see it?”
“Just investigative personnel.”
“Well, then, that’s fine.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, goodness me,” she suddenly said. There was a faint breeze blowing in from the window. Chase let her neck uncoil to catch it. You couldn’t say this refreshed her, but inspiration seemed to follow. “Would you be comfortable heading this one?”
Tagrowd agreed to lead the investigation after assurances he could boss Simpson around.
“Tell you what,” the Velvet Badge concluded. “I’ll grill this Mick.” She stopped with her mouth hung open.
“Murphy.”
“Right. I’ll grill Murphy and you and the troops poke around.” She patted his arm. “See what you can find.”
“Sure thing.”
“Nice pow-wow?” Badaracz asked him, after the big boss had flown the coop.
“A little respect, please?”
“Huh?”
“For the dead,” Rainer joked. “By the way, I’m driving this bus.”
Miodrag was glad to hear it and, on Tagrowd’s orders, discovered on the top of the dead woman’s armoire, carefully hidden behind a screen of used handbags, the darker side of the Vatican Library, or items of the same rumored ilk.
First, objects d’art that doubled as dildos. Creams and rare ointments with purple prose labels and contents that burned.
Second, a yard-thick collection of girl-on-girl skin magazines.
Third, most of the foolscap diaries Capers had reviewed just before her throttling and dismemberment. These were filled with jottings in a surprisingly child-like scrawl, recounting close encounters of the most intimate kind. Blow-by-blow accounts of Greenbergér’s prodigious sexual exploits, with names unflinchingly named. This was rather a pity, because the participants in those trysts would have to be contacted by the police, likely resulting in a storm of embarrassment and negative repercussions for a surprisingly large number of very important people.
“Hey, will you look at this!” Miodrag giggled, thumbing the stash of joy rags. “There’s pages stuck together!”
“Give ‘em here,” Tagrowd ordered. He gingerly peeled one iron-strong bond apart, or tried to, for the bond held fast, tearing the pages.
“I dunno, Rain, do they really screw like that?” Tagrowd said nothing. “I’ve read stuff about it,” his young partner continued. “But, jeez. . .”
Rainer, too, had heard those rumors. He flipped through more sections (“Mama!” opined Miodrag) until he found an especially graphic pictorial, featuring long-limbed black-and-white models with a busty Asian gal sandwiched in-between. (“Look at them do each other!”) Detective Tagrowd raised the periodical to his nostrils, expecting a mackerel smell from the human glue, only to find a lighter, more familiar scent mingled with the printer’s ink. A touch like stale candy. Caramels? The lab would identify this as a male’s calling card.
“It’s just Nature,” Rainer answered. But the older hand’s mind was already miles away, a floor or two down, with Salvo Murphy, stringing information together like Lifesavers on a wire abacus.
“I mean, they know about men, right?”
Well, Ellia Chase sure did, and had one. Right this minute, doubtless on his knees, handing her some story about driving up to the house (like he did) and finding Greenbergér (like she was).
“Are they scared of what we’re packing?”
Chase certainly wasn’t. She had more balls than the two of them put together. She’d shake a story out of Murphy for sure. Like him finding that sitcom writer, sliced and diced.
—But when and after what?—
Yeah, Rainer thought. Salvo used that ashtray. Made himself coffee. And trucked away the dirty laundry when the detective told him not to.
“And using fingers, Tagrowd? Fingers? Don’t they have a clue what they’re missing?”
“I’m no judge on that, but we’ve got plenty of work to do here.” Always a take-charge guy, Rainer was happy to start pushing Simpson around. “Is that bathroom done yet?”
“Enough to print and assemble life-size.”
“And the bedroom?”
“Yeah-yeah!” she said, photographing everything in sight and sending the entire enchilada to the lab for analysis She even bagged the zapper’s bug tray because you just never knew.
In the meantime, Simpson’s assistants had zippered up all the carrion they’d found in the tub, tossed Capers’ head in besides and lugged their burden hiked over the shoulder, and down the stairs like Santa coming down the chimney. “Ho-ho-ho!” they joked. Then it was time to open the dead woman’s luggage.
“Whoa! Not so fast, boys!” the photographer instructed. “Remember,” she teased, pointing to her bread and butter, “this old fella’s got to be clicking!” She set her apertures, uncapped the lens.
Which gave Rainer time enough to run his thoughts back to the little man from Baby’s Breath. He had made himself so at home, having the run of the house. He would know where all the dirty linen was and would look forward to this particular stop with its rich cache of his favorite: lesbian porn.
Salvo would sense that no one was home and run quick like a bunny to the upstairs bedroom to open her treasure chest armoire, reach for his favs, unzip, and merrily pleasure himself into pages that would now be thoroughly scrutinized by experts.
Then he’d stop, light a cigarette, and drift, ever so slowly, back to his livelihood: a dreary line of dampness on the towel rack and soiled underclothes in the hamper. He’d been incompletely absorbed gathering those cast-offs, until the complications started and he noticed something dead out of the corner of his eye, and then something obviously more dead, covered with filth, and placed dead-center in the bottom of a toilet.
Finally, he’d see her luggage leaking blood in the bedroom as he ran to the phone downstairs. This was the very same luggage that Detective Tagrowd was now about to open, because Mrs. Simpson had signaled, “OK, boys, let’s get this going! We’re ready! We’re shooting!”
Meanwhile, Detective Badaracz latched onto a superbly mean thought, which he wanted to share with his partner. He led things off with a hearty “Hey, Rain!”
To which Tagrowd, annoyed and unable to work the latches, replied “What?”
“Did you know there’s only one sure way to kill a dyke?”
“What?” This was all Rainer said because here his persistence finally paid off. Greenbergér’s suitcases popped open and a bloated pair of legs and arms, released from their prison, whizzed across the room. It was the old snakes in the peanut brittle gag.
“Only one sure way! Drive a cock through her heart!”