by Chris Bauer
“Well damn, no matter, you’re in luck. I know a place. An old building near North Broad and West Glenwood, looking to make a comeback too. A gym. You’d be perfect for each other.”
The cross streets sounded familiar, but Philo couldn’t picture the place. “Again, Hump, not a comeback. Five minutes throwing some heavy hands, then I’ll be back at my day job. I’ll be in Center City later today. Give me a time we can get together.”
Philo called Patrick to ask if he was busy this afternoon.
“I got tickets for a concert, sir.”
“I’ve got some Saturday OT for you at a crime scene in Old City if you want it. You sure?”
“Um, I need to get to the concert, sir. Can you drop me off in time for the concert? If you can drop me off at the concert afterward, I can do it, sir.”
“Where?”
“The Troc.”
“I’ll drop you off at the concert, Patrick,” he said, staying with the theme.
“Great, sir. See you soon.”
“Wait. How’s Grace?” Grace was getting additional rest before she returned to work, but more rest wasn’t going to be enough.
“She says she’s fine, sir. Hank tells her she isn’t.” A pause. “Hank is right, sir.”
“I think Hank is right too, Patrick. See you in a bit.”
The Sixth District police were headquartered in a single-story red brick building on North Eleventh Street in the heart of Philly’s Chinatown. It was walking distance from the Trocadero Theater, an opera house turned vaudeville joint turned stripper burlesque theater that eventually settled down in the eighties to become a small music venue, its long entertainment history making it yet another Philadelphia landmark on the National Historic Register. Philo double-parked their unmarked Blessid Trauma van, the company’s small one, outside the cop station. Patrick slipped between the seats, moving from shotgun to rear. Detective Ibáñez climbed in to ride shotgun.
She was dressed for the weather in a cop hat with earmuffs, a zippered bomber jacket with a badge on her chest, gloves, and a Styrofoam cup of coffee carried above a black skirt and pumps. A thin valise occupied her non-coffee hand. Philo greeted her. “Detective.”
“Mr. Trout.” She turned in her seat and showed some on-the-job cop disdain for the rear passenger. “We won’t need him. Nothing to clean up.”
“He’s got a good eye for detail,” Philo said, the van reentering traffic. “Plus, he needed a ride. He’ll be fine.”
Patrick beamed. “Seeing Tassho Fearce today, ma’am, in concert. Tassho’s at the Troc. Gonna see him there.”
She faced forward, no acknowledgment of his exuberance, no remarks, no smile, only indifference, or what appeared to be. Or maybe she knew about this rap artist and was smart enough not to comment. Philo hadn’t known who Tassho Fearce was until today, when he’d made the mistake of volunteering a listen on Patrick’s earbuds on their ride here. He was treated to the most incendiary language he’d ever heard about cops and hos and drugs and guns. When young Patrick saw Philo’s serious what the fuck was that face, he turned sheepish. “Sorry, sir. He’s a nice man in person.” Patrick tucked his earbuds back in.
Philo started his conversation with the detective with a patronizing comment. “Kids today and their music, right? Thug rap, promoting unhealthy minds and bodies in the disenfranchised for decades. Whaddya gonna do.”
Ibáñez stayed professional, non-committal, and spoke past the sarcasm. “The crime scene is an address on Elfreth’s Alley. Ten minutes tops without traffic. The concern is, bad as the scene was, it might not have been a mob hit.” A coffee sip, then a grimace; she was less than thrilled with the cup’s contents. “The coroner pegged the date and time of death as last Thursday. You’re seeing it so you’ll have a better frame of reference when I show you the photos before it was cleaned up. We want a second opinion.”
“Sure. But why Blessid Trauma?”
“The car dealership slaughter. You kept us from missing a few things.”
“Park here,” she said, motioning at a space too close to a fire hydrant on Front Street, adjacent to Elfreth’s Alley. “Any issue, I’ll take care of it.” She exited the van and started walking.
“Ready, chief?” Philo said to Patrick, who hadn’t budged from his seat.
“No.”
“What? C’mon, dude, we’ve got some things to look at in here. Just trying to help the cops.”
“No.”
“Patrick, what is it?”
“‘A great tourist place to visit,’” he said, repeating someone else’s words. “‘Beautiful old homes. Oldest street in America. 1702—’”
Sounded like words from a brochure or a flyer, or maybe from a walking tour guide.
“Not going inside, sir, can’t, unh-unh, not allowed, people live there.”
“Okay, Patrick, calm down. You don’t need to go inside if you don’t want. Sit tight, I’ll be back.”
Philo caught up to the detective, already busy unsticking the door-size X made of yellow crime scene tape. She unlocked the door and they entered. “We’re going downstairs,” she said.
Descending carved stone steps to the lower level, Philo could smell the disinfectant and the enzyme cleaners. The basement was a stone and brick personal retreat that looked like an indoor grotto, an underground spring the only thing missing. An elevated hot tub sat in an alcove adjacent to the large empty room, the tub’s padded cover off. No visual evidence of a biohazard event in this room, far as Philo could tell, but the lingering bleach odor indicated there’d recently been some aggressive cleaning either in here or nearby.
“Let me see the luminol impact,” Philo said, jumping ahead.
“Or lack thereof,” Detective Ibáñez said. She turned off the lights.
In the dark, there was no phosphorescent blue anywhere near the hot tub, which meant the sprayed luminol showed no evidence of an event, the walls and raised planked flooring clean of visible blood spatter. He leaned over for a peek inside the hot tub’s dark, shadowy interior. No phosphorescent indigo there either.
“No indications of a blood event in here. Same thing with all of the floors above,” she offered. “Follow me.”
The smaller room next door was a sauna. When the detective opened the room’s cedar door, the sauna’s overhead light automatically turned on. She let Philo enter first.
Nice, Philo thought. A large sauna in this room, one room removed from a hot tub. A resort-style basement; incredible ambience. What a great house.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Go for it.”
She closed the door and turned off the sauna’s overhead light.
“Whoa,” Philo said, wide-eyed.
Here was a ten-by-twelve cedar-paneled planetarium of blood splatter completely outed by phosphorescent indigo that overwhelmed the walls and left only portions of the room’s surfaces uncompromised. After thirty or so seconds with the light off, the luminol’s horrific show started fading.
She turned the light back on. “Now for the photos.” She removed them from her valise, handed them to Philo. More than fifty forensics shots of the body and its pieces, its innards strewn across all surfaces in the sauna, on the bench and under it, and on the raised wooden floor, with sprays on the ceiling as well. Philo could have been convinced the body had exploded from the chest outward.
“I know what you’re thinking; it looks like the body blew up. Not according to the medical examiner. Look at these individual marks on these organs.”
Bite marks, and chunks of flesh torn from the thighs and the stomach, plus at least one chunk from a kidney, the missing part about the size of an adult mouth.
“No zombie wisecracks, Trout,” the detective said, “but whoever did this, shall I say, is fairly fucked up.”
“Huh,” Philo said, shaking his overwhelmed head, still busy absorbing the photos. He raised them up in the light, piecing the room together with them. Yes, what he was looking at did show some major fucked-up-ness.
“I need more than a ‘huh,’ Trout. You see anything odd in here?”
What seemed odd was what he wasn’t seeing. At the most recent organ-snatcher crime scene, someone with experience had performed the surgeries. But here, the organs in these shots didn’t look cleanly severed from their cavities. They were ripped out à la a horror movie scene that actually could have featured, um, zombies.
“Overkill,” he said.
“Ya think?”
“Seriously. Either someone extremely sick did this, or someone staged it to make it look that way. Might be hard to tell the difference. No matter, you do have a body, and you have organs from the body, so one question is, do you have them all?”
“Good thought. The answer is no. Per the coroner one internal organ, a kidney, wasn’t here, and the second kidney had a bite-size chunk out of it. Maybe our perp, or perps, weren’t as hungry as they first thought. All the other organs and body parts were strewn around here, in the sauna,” she said, “tenderizing.”
“The one organ missing, the kidney,” Philo said, “happens to be the most expensive organ on the black market.”
“Your point?”
Grace’s skepticism—some of it had rubbed off on him. He’d researched organ trafficking when viewing public info about Dr. Andelmo, Patrick’s trauma physician.
“If you assume it was someone with a lunatic zombie fetish,” he said, “then whatever is missing doesn’t mean squat. That person’s nuts, and you’ll catch up with him at some point. If you go with a staged scene assumption, then the missing kidney says they tried to make it look believable as a gruesome flesh-fest but got greedy staging it. What’s one missing kidney? To forensics folks, maybe not much to care about, considering what else was in here. But to an organ trafficker, a kidney’s worth two, maybe three hundred thousand bucks. Maybe their greed got the better of them. Then again, maybe someone did eat the fucking thing. How about active oxygen? Any traces of it?”
“No bleach, far as we could tell.”
“Was there blood anywhere else in the house?”
“Ah, no.”
“Does that seem right to you, considering the bloodbath in the sauna? Maybe the upper floors got super-cleaned with oxygenated bleach, and the sauna was the only mess left for you to find.”
“A possibility.”
“What about the victim?”
“He was the homeowner. Asian. Single. He had a housekeeper. The neighbors they interviewed felt she was undocumented. If the maid was involved…I don’t need to tell you that undocumented aliens are good at making themselves scarce.”
“She might be scarce for a different reason. She might be dead.”
“Yes. We’re looking for her.”
The detective ushered Philo outside the sauna. “So here’s the quid pro quo, Mr. Trout. About your red door at the car dealership: investigators decided it was the same door in the train suicide photo. We checked with the suicide’s family. The man in the photo was the husband.”
“No surprise there. Thanks.”
“Here’s the thing. The guy died weeks after an organ donation and before her suicide, from ‘complications.’ An organ donation he made, no doubt, for money. Although her family denied they received anything.
“I already knew what a kidney brings on the black market, Trout. The doctors get the two hundred grand. The donor husband probably got maybe five to ten thousand; a fortune to an immigrant. It’s not too difficult to see what’s happening here. Undocumented aliens are being exploited. Sometimes the exploitation kills them.”
Detective Ibáñez, close talker that she was, suddenly pulled back. She misted up, something Philo didn’t see coming, something he reckoned she wasn’t capable of, hard-assed as she carried herself.
“I was born into that kind of community, Trout. Born in the States, but my parents weren’t. I made my way out of the poverty, out of that hidden life. My parents didn’t.”
“Sorry to hear that, Detective.”
“And I’m sorry I mentioned it. Let’s move on. Time to wrap things up here. Anything else you can offer?”
He scanned the sauna again. “About these cedar pallets…”
The wood planks were in squared pallet configurations, four heavy cedar pallets fitted together to form the sauna floor. They could be lifted out of the way for cleaning underneath. “Is it clean under them, too?”
“Now it is. The blood and body effluence, it’s all gone. Check it out. The ‘before’ is in the photos.”
Philo did, more closely this time. Two sets of photos of the underlayment, a layer of a washable vinyl, then one of hardwood, then red brick. On the light-colored vinyl flooring under the pallets, the luminol showed where the bloody carnage had leaked through. With it, there was something written.
“What is it, Trout?”
Ho—lee—shit.
“I, ah…”
Block letters, on a space the size of a car window, in Sharpie-black against the tan vinyl. The first two rows of it:
THINK
HAWAIIAN
“Oh, that,” she said. “Yeah. Two words that kept us from ruling this out as a mob hit. Another friggin’ mob in Philly nowadays, supposedly from Hawaii. We saw this note at another crime scene, too. Just what the city needs, a mob war. Anything else?”
No, nope, nada, Philo thought. Nothing I’m sharing.
“Er, no, Detective. Nothing else.”
The Sharpie message had two more rows to it. This was the part that had taken his breath away, and had kept him from volunteering anything else.
NOT
ALASKAN
“We haven’t figured out what Alaska’s got to do with this, if anything,” the detective said, “other than to suggest these head cases might really be off-the-chart bizarros. You’ll see what the media’s doing with it later today. Headlines about cannibalism. Real bottom-feeders. Something comes to you later, Trout, let me know. Let’s go. We’re finished here.”
17
Patrick was out of the van and standing at the foot of cobblestoned Elfreth’s Alley, his shoulders hunched, his coat collar up, no gloves or hat, with earbuds a-jamming. His exposed phone hand shook in the sub-freezing temperature. Philo and Detective Ibáñez approached while she continued to chat Philo up. Hawaiian mob this, Asian mob that, your Satanics, your one-offs. Philo heard little of it, caught up in his own internal monologue fueled by the message in the crime scene floor’s underlayment. They closed in on Patrick, who shifted his weight from foot to foot.
It was like Philo was seeing him for the first time.
He’d already bought into it. Hawaiian, not Alaskan. Not Eskimo, not even the politically correct Aleut, not Inuit. There was no longer a reason to make the distinction regarding anything Patrick wasn’t. Someone, a person known to one of these mobs, noticed something about him; enough to make the assertion, to call out the obvious.
Patrick’s Pat’s Steaks saviors had declared Patrick an Eskimo. What the hell did blue-collar white guys from Philly know about indigenous peoples anyway? Typical insensitive white guy description: “That guy is black.” Not African, not Caribbean, not South American, not Aboriginal. The nonwhite bucket to some white people was often all encompassing and imprecise, especially in a life or death situation, even when disrespect wasn’t intended.
Seeing that pronouncement there, at so gruesome—so cannibalistic—a scene, had implications that invoked other considerations.
Meat value. Raw meat. Words that scared him on Patrick’s behalf.
They reached the end of the block, the detective not slowing down. Philo beckoned to Patrick to fall in behind them as they turned the corner. To the detective, this man-boy was at best an afterthought, at worst invisible, a non-Caucasian non-person with his brain injury and amnesia. Her callousness was ironic, considering the revelation about her undocumented parents, and that her family was left to conduct their lives in the shadows, under the undocumented immigrant radar. Patrick wasn’t far removed
from the same marginalized existence.
Then again—
Ibáñez stopped short on the sidewalk, did an about-face. “Where are your gloves?” she asked Patrick.
“Dunno, ma’am. Home maybe.”
“Here, take mine. They’re too large for me. I’ll get another pair at the station. In case you need them at your show.”
“The concert’s inside, ma’am.”
“Take them anyway. And don’t be practicing what that rapper preaches, okay? It’s only an act. Cops are good people.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thanks.”
Detective Ibáñez—less hard-assed cop, more human being, doing some good here with Patrick. Philo was impressed.
“You have my card, right, Mr. Trout?”
“I do.”
“Good. I want to hear from you if something else clicks.”
“Will do, Detective.”
“Now get me back to the Sixth.”
Patrick climbed into the front seat after Detective Ibáñez exited. They watched her enter a back door to the police station, Patrick smitten both with his new gloves and the woman who gave them to him. “She’s a nice person, sir. I like her.”
“Me too.” Philo had no opinion of her before, but he had one now. He fished in his pocket, found her card, then tucked it back away. Their van left the rear of the police station and merged into traffic. It was time to unload on Patrick; interrogate him about his crime scene manners.
“I wanted your help in there, bud. What was the problem?”
“That street, sir. I don’t like it. I been there before. Two times.”
A wee bit of a red flag. “Really? When?”
“First time was maybe before I got beat up and ended up in the hospital.”
“You remember why you were there—what the occasion was?”
“‘Step away from the doorbell,’” he said, mimicking a scolding voice, his finger raised. “‘These houses are NOT open to the public.’”
“Tour guide?”