Soft Case (Book 1 of the John Keegan Mystery Series)

by John Misak

Geiger glared at me, as if to say my attitude better stay in check on this one. I never really had any problems with him, but he didn’t always appreciate my laconic wit. I caught that word off someone a few years back and kept using it. But people rarely get my humor. I never can find the right audience.

  Rick and I made our way to our desks, and I checked my phone for messages. I had none. Rick did the same. He made a call. By the manner in which he spoke, I could tell it was his wife. She had him by the balls. He kept nodding and saying “okay” a lot. I wondered if she let him take his genitals out of the box she had them stored in when he had to go to work. I could hear it. “Please honey, all the other guys at work get to take theirs. I’ll look like an idiot not having mine.”

  “You know how you get when you wear your balls, dear."

  “I’ll be good, I swear. Please?”

  “Maybe next time.”

  I couldn’t imagine an existence like that. Yeah, Rick certainly had sissy tendencies, but he was a decent looking guy who had a lot going for him. A little annoying, I suppose, but still an okay guy. Instead of finding someone to mutually get along with, he got stuck with a woman who controlled his life from top to bottom. His fault, I know. And maybe he made the situation worse. I know men can be as bad as women, but I don’t date them, so I can’t comment in detail. Still, I almost felt bad for Rick.

  Rick hung up the phone, and caught me watching him. I could see the embarrassment on his face. Defeated. By a woman. He must have known my opinion on that. He fumbled with some papers, took a swig from a bottle of water he always kept at his desk, and then got up to come over to me.

  “Okay,” he said, dropping a file on my desk, “That’s Coltrain’s report.” He seemed proud of himself. Couldn’t figure why.

  “You told me what was in it. I don’t need to read it.”

  “I thought you might want to take a look at it.”

  “To check your ability to read?”

  Rick just looked at me for a second. “Okay.” He took the file back. “You want to go speak to him?”

  “So he can tell me what it says in the report?”

  Rick shrugged, and I wondered exactly how he got the gold badge in the first place. After thinking about it, I attributed his temporary stupidity to his enthusiasm. He wanted to get rolling, and I couldn’t blame him. He was just a little too much for me. I think he was a little too much for anyone. Especially his wife.

  “Any word on the wife?” I asked.

  “9:15 flight out of the Bahamas. Commercial.”

  “No corporate jet?”

  “The partner has it, in Amsterdam.”

  “Anyone contact him?” One would think the second in command, at least on the corporate side of Mullins’ life, would have been notified of his death. Then again, you never know with people. They can be shockingly inept.

  “Yes. He’s at a convention. Will be back Friday.” If you can’t already tell, Rick’s short answers indicated his excitement. He didn’t mean to be rude, but his ball sack, devoid of testicles, rose higher and higher in his crotch as he thought about this case. Nice visual, I know.

  “We should talk to him as well. If anyone will know something about Mullins’ state of mind, it’ll most likely be him.” Rick jotted something down.

  “What time is Mrs. Mullins getting in?”

  “Flight touches down about 12:45,” Rick said.

  “Someone greeting her there?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Maybe we should,” I said.

  “At the airport?” Rick asked.

  “Why not? This way she doesn’t get a chance to formulate any kind of story. I don’t want her concocting something. She’s already had some time on the plane to think of a plan. You never know.”

  Rick’s face took on a strange look. “We’re not considering her a suspect, are we?”

  I took a breath. Mrs. Mullins was a suspect. Though in the Bahamas as far as I knew, with a rock solid alibi, we had to look at her. I learned a long time before that nothing should be taken for granted. If you wait, you get burned. I wanted to talk to Mrs. Mullins as soon as possible. If I waited, lawyers might get involved. That sucked. They only complicated things. Even more so, the media. I need to get to her ASAP.

  “I’m not ruling out anyone. Maybe we should have a couple of uniforms go pick her up, and bring her down here. Tell her she has to see the body, then we question her.”

  “Maybe we should give her time to grieve. Get herself together.” Rick had learned to temper that excitement of his, I noticed. Strange for him.

  “Not too much time, trust me on that,” I said.

  “Okay. We’ll try and get to her sometime today or tomorrow.”

  I fumbled with a few things on my desk, a sign for Rick to go back to his cave. He didn’t get the hint. He stood over my desk, like a teacher in class, looking at a kid’s work. I looked up at him, and glared at him, sort of, but he still didn’t get the message.

  “Why don’t you go see when Geiger will have the warrant?” I asked. Translation, shoo.

  He looked around the station. “Okay.”

  After he walked away, I leaned back in my seat. Our area of the station looked old, with dark paneling on the walls and a white tile floor so worn, the seams didn’t show anymore. I never really looked around the place much. Not much to look at. The detectives had six small desks gathered in the right comer of the room. I had the one on the far left. Rick had the one on the far right. By the entrance sat four offices—well, more like cubicles. Geiger occupied one of them, the smallest, actually. He picked it because it sat in the center of the room. He had four windows that almost reached the ceiling. From there, he could keep an eye on all of us. He did that a lot. He wasn’t a ball buster or anything. You could describe him as meticulous. I liked that in a superior. I did my job, submitted my paperwork on time, and didn’t spend idle hours on the department computer chatting with women on the Internet. I’m not pointing any fingers, saying that any of my co-workers did such a thing. Of course, they did, and I never saw the use. You can’t talk to someone you can’t see, or hear. These guys tried to meet women this way, whether they wanted to admit that or not. Desperate, I say. There was no way to be sure that the people they were talking to were females in the first place. Other guys played a golf game, pretending that they were doing work. They turned the sound down, which basically took the fun out of the game. Guys actually gambled on the game. Sergeant Peters lost two hundred bucks last week. Two hundred bucks on a video game.

  No one did much at almost eight in the morning. Peters sat in his office, probably staring at the computer across the room, thinking about his stupidity. He had a lot to think about. Peters was in his forties, had been on the force for about twenty years, and was damn close to burnout. From what I knew of him, which wasn’t a hell of a lot, he was a gambler, both with money and with his work. Geiger was always on his case, mainly because Peters always tried to find his way around the hard stuff, and never got his paperwork done on time. I worked two cases with him. One of them, a murder of a convenience store clerk, went so bad I feared a demotion. He was rough with interrogation, pressing witnesses that were supposed to be on our side, and he never went by the book. I didn’t mind that so much, mainly because I rarely followed ‘the book.’ Actually, I doubted the existence of such a manual. Everyone did things their own way. Peters just had a more creative way about doing it. A dangerously creative way. I always wondered how he’d made Sergeant. Rumor said it was because of his father, who was a Sergeant himself, and had died on the job back in the seventies. I didn’t put much value on that rumor, but, after getting to know a little about Peters, it made more and more sense.

  Geiger was in his office, on the phone as usual. I figured he talked to someone about getting the warrant. He made eye contact with me, and nodded his head—my indication that things went well. Geiger always came through when needed. That’s how he got the respect of his men. That, and the fact th
at he never asked anyone to do something he wouldn’t do himself. I didn’t know too many people like that.

  Besides Rick, those two were the only other ones in the department. It was quiet. We all knew the media waited outside for any of us to walk out. It wouldn’t be long before the Captain paid us a visit, and gave us his usual speech about dotting our “I’s” and crossing our “T’s.” Nobody listened, but he felt the need to go through the whole thing any time we had a high profile case. He was more concerned about what the Mayor thought than anything else.

  As if on cue, Captain Agnelli walked through the double doors into the department. He didn’t acknowledge anyone in the department, and went straight to Geiger’s office. Agnelli was a tall, thin man, who looked more British than he did Italian. He had jet-black hair, dyed for sure, and stood at about 6'4". He was a smart guy, graduate degree and all that. The story went that he worked hard at making it to Captain, starting off in the Bronx, and moving to undercover Vice before getting the gold badge. From there, he set records for indictments, and had a good relationship with the DA. Agnelli was about 50, but looked younger because of the dyed hair and his baby face. The face had a roundness to it that made him look almost like a cartoon. He didn’t talk much and had a deeper voice than one would expect from the face. He always looked impeccably clean.

  Guess what? I didn’t like him.

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