“Yeah, it is.” Carlucci sighed and nodded. “All right, then. Everything’s clear between us?” Hong and LaPlace both nodded. “Good. Then let’s get to work, see if we can find anything in this freaking place.”
They split up. Each man would go through the entire apartment separately, hoping somebody would spot something the others missed. Wasn’t much of a hope, Carlucci thought, but it was worth a shot.
As he worked his way through the apartment, Carlucci had to struggle to keep from being distracted by all the extravagance and luxury, the fortune in high-tech gadgets and the incredible views, even though he’d seen it all the day before. Picture phones and internal video systems were built into the walls of every room, including the bathroom, along with control panels for the Bang and Olufsen entertainment system, which also had speakers and monitors in each room. The larger of the black bedrooms had a set of neural head-nets, and hanging in the closet was an assortment of exotic sexual electronics, some of which Carlucci didn’t even recognize. The other bedroom, aside from the friction bed, had a set of bunked bubble tubes, one of which was still half filled with a pink, gelatinous fluid.
The blue room was filled with computers, data-scanners, and more electronic equipment that was only vaguely familiar to Carlucci. Most of the equipment had been damaged or destroyed, presumably by the nephew’s killer. The department’s electronic salvage crews had been in and removed what few disks and chips and bubbles were left behind, and were working to recover any data that remained. Carlucci didn’t hold out much hope for that line of investigation, either.
Saunas and whirlpools and automated massagers in the bathrooms, auto-chef and espresso machine and ionizers in the kitchen. A heat scanner in the dining room, digitizing paintings on the hallway walls. And the entire penthouse wired with the most sophisticated alarm and shield system Carlucci had ever seen, which hadn’t prevented the mayor’s nephew from being gutted in his own living room.
The nephew. He had a name, Carlucci reminded himself. William Kashen. Except no one referred to him by name. He was the mayor’s nephew, which was his most significant feature as far as the investigation was concerned.
Carlucci didn’t spot anything in any of the rooms that seemed worthwhile, and an hour after they had begun, they met back in the living room, where they stood looking down at the largest of the bloodstains on the carpet. Hong was on his fourth or fifth cigarette, which actually helped cut the leftover stink in the apartment. Nobody had found a thing.
“Bet we get the autopsy report pretty damn quick,” LaPlace said.
Carlucci nodded. “Prelim’s due on my desk this afternoon. Maybe we can go over it later today, or first thing tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Hong said. “My grandmother-in-law is one hundred today. We’re having a dinner celebration in our flat tonight. Twenty people, and I’m the cook.”
Carlucci smiled. “Tomorrow, then.”
“Bet the report says he was still alive through most of the gutting,” LaPlace said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Carlucci ran his gaze over the wide scattering of blood once again.
“I suppose they’re going to put the slugs on it, aren’t they?” Hong asked.
“Yeah,” Carlucci said. “They’ve got one on it now, and they’ll put all of them on it once the autopsy report comes in and a good chunk of the lab work is done. Everything’s got a goddamn rush on it. Info-Services is already putting together the Prime Level Feed for them, and a few people are working on the sublevel feeds. They might start the rest of the slugs tomorrow or the next day.” Carlucci didn’t look forward to it. It had been years since he’d had a session with the slugs, and the thought of doing another made him queasy. The slugs were repulsive—bodies, limbs, and faces twisted and distended by the frequent injections of reason enhancers and metabolic boosters. He had a hard time even thinking of them as human.
Hong put out his cigarette in an immaculate white porcelain ashtray atop a quartz table; then, as if reading Carlucci’s thoughts, he frowned and said, “The slugs aren’t people, not anymore. We don’t need them.”
No one was going to argue with him. Most cops hated the slugs and felt they got a lot more credit than they deserved, felt they got in the way more than they helped. Carlucci knew they had been responsible for real breakthroughs in several major cases that had dead-ended before the slugs were put on them, but if he had a choice he would as soon do without.
“Anything else?” he asked.
Hong and LaPlace both shook their heads, then LaPlace said, “I’d like to keep the apartment sealed off another couple days or so. I’d like to be able to come back and look around.”
“Sure.” Carlucci understood. They were all afraid they had missed something important, and probably all three of them would come by here at least one more time, alone, most likely in the middle of the night. “We done here for now?” Both men nodded. “All right, then, let’s get out of here.”
Back in his office, there was no preliminary autopsy report, which was just fine with Carlucci; it would shift some of the heat from him to the coroner, at least for today. He punched up Santos’s number on the phone, and a woman answered.
“Weathers.”
“Toni, this is Frank. Ruben around?”
“Yeah, somewhere. I’ll go see if I can find him.”
“Thanks.”
“By the way,” Weathers said, “how’s progress on that paragon of virtue, the mayor’s nephew?”
Carlucci snorted. “We’re pursuing several potentially fruitful lines of inquiry,” he said, imitating the PR hack who’d been on television the night before.
Toni Weathers laughed. “You haven’t got jack shit.”
“That’s about right.”
“I’ll go see if I can find Ruben.”
He heard the clunk of the receiver being dropped to the table, then a scattering of background noises as he waited, including what sounded like an incredibly long and loud belch.
Toni Weathers, like Ruben, was a good homicide cop, and as straight as Ruben. They’d been partners for more than ten years. Carlucci wondered what she thought of the Chick Roberts case.
More clunking sounds, then, “Frank?” Santos’s voice.
“Yeah, Ruben.”
“What’s up?”
“Got a half hour? Buy you a cup of coffee.”
Santos didn’t answer at first. Carlucci could hear his deep, raspy breath over the phone.
“There something you need to talk to me about?” Santos asked.
“Oh, just this and that, get your thoughts on the mayor’s nephew.”
Another hesitation, then, “You want to come by here and talk to me while I write up these interviews?”
“I thought we’d take a walk. Get out of this damn hot box. Get some fresh air.”
This time the pause was even longer. Santos probably had a good idea what Carlucci really wanted to talk about, and didn’t want to touch it. But he would also know he couldn’t avoid it for long.
“Sure, Frank,” Santos finally answered. “I’m suffocating in here anyway. Meet you downstairs in, say, fifteen minutes.”
“Fine,” Carlucci said. He hung up.
They met in the station lobby, and immediately left the building. Santos was thin and wiry, with curly hair the color of rust, and was growing a beard again. Carlucci figured it was about two weeks along, and there was more gray in it than there was the last time around.
It was late afternoon, and hot. It looked like it might finally rain for the first time in days, orange-brown clouds moving across the hazy sun, the air heavy and charged and damp. Carlucci stopped at the Cuban bakery on the corner and bought two large cups of coffee, then he and Santos continued down the street, sipping at it through openings torn in the lids. The coffee was strong, and so hot it burned Carlucci’s tongue and lips.
“Chick Roberts,” Carlucci said when they were several blocks from the station.
“Fuck the Virgin Mary,�
�� Santos said. “I knew you were going to ask me about that goddamn case. Mayor’s nephew, my ass. God damn!” He turned to glare at Carlucci. “I’m not saying a fucking word about it.”
“Come on, Ruben. This isn’t like you. What the hell’s going on?”
“Frank, I’m not screwing around. I’ve got nothing to say.”
“Ruben, shit, it’s me you’re talking to. Why are you burying this thing?”
Santos didn’t answer. He led the way across the street and down half a block to a vacant lot that had only recently started filling up with garbage. Five kids around nine or ten years old sat in a shallow cave dug out of the side of the garbage mound, playing some kind of game with a batch of dead green neurotubes.
“Hey!” Santos called to the kids. “Why aren’t you in school?” They looked up at him but didn’t respond. Santos repeated his question in Spanish. Still no response. Santos shrugged. “Hell, they probably don’t even know what school is.”
“Why, Ruben?” Carlucci asked again.
Santos drank some more of his coffee, then suddenly threw the cup at the mound of trash. The lid flipped off and coffee sprayed in twisting arcs through the air. Santos turned to Carlucci, eyes glaring.
“How the hell do I know why I’m burying it? Jesus Christ, Frank, you think they tell me why? You know better than that. ‘Bury it, Ruben.’ That’s all they said. So I’m fucking burying it.”
“Ruben…Christ, Ruben, why not demand reassignment?” Automatic reassignment was an option that had always been available, to allow any cop to stay as straight as he wanted. The vast majority of investigations proceeded on regular tracks, but there were always a few that the top hogs, for whatever political or financial reasons, wanted buried, or fouled up, or just ghosted, and anyone involved in one of those cases had the option of being reassigned so they wouldn’t have to be a part of it. It was an informal arrangement that had worked well over the years. Any cop could get off a dirty case, and in return they agreed not to raise a stink—they let it go. A clean cop could stay a clean cop.
Santos seemed to sag, and he slowly shook his head. “You think I didn’t ask, Frank?”
“They turned you down?” Carlucci could hardly believe it. The reassignment option was one of the few things cops counted on.
“They fucked me, Frank. That shit McCuller, he’d bend over for anyone above him who said ‘asshole’ in his hearing. Called me before I even got to the scene, asked me if I wanted my job and my pension and my health benefits. I asked for reassignment right then, before he had a chance to tell me what he wanted done. I didn’t even want to know.” He stopped, gazing at the mound of garbage and the kids playing in their cave. “McCuller said there would be no reassignment on this case, unless I wanted to resign and forfeit all my pension and benefits.” Santos turned to Carlucci. “I’ve got twenty-three years in, Frank. I’d never get another job as a cop, you know that. What the hell am I supposed to do, start all over again someplace? Doing what? At my age? With Consuela and the kids?” He paused, breathing deeply, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Frank, they’re not supposed to be able to do this to us.” He stopped again, ran his hand through his hair, then rubbed at his neck. “I had about thirty seconds to make my decision. I thought about fighting it, bringing it to the Association, threaten to go public, whatever, but I didn’t think about it long.” He looked at Carlucci. “I couldn’t afford to lose that one, Frank. So I made the decision, and I’m stuck with it.”
They started walking again, slowly, neither speaking. When they came to a liquor store, Santos went in, then came back out with a pack of cigarettes. He opened it, shook one out and lit it.
“I’ve been trying to quit,” he said. “I’d been doing all right until you called. God damn you, Frank.” He dragged in deep on the cigarette, and they continued along the street.
“How’s Toni feel about it?” Carlucci asked.
“The same. She hasn’t said anything, but I think she’s going along with it mostly for me. She’s younger, she’s got no kids. I think she’d have been willing to fight it, try to blow these fuckers out of the water, if it wasn’t for me. Which only makes me feel worse about the whole fucking mess.”
“But why wouldn’t they let you and Toni off the case?”
Santos shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about that. Two possibilities. One, they want clean cops on the file so it looks like nothing funny’s going on. Or two, they just don’t want more people to know about the case.” He shook his head again. “I don’t know, Frank. I think someone panicked on this thing.”
“Why?”
“You know anything about this Chick Roberts? A part-time rocker, part-time two-bit petty thief, ex-junkie who probably still popped too much shit. If nobody says anything to us, how much time and effort were we going to put into the case? Not a hell of a lot. We’d have written it off to a drug deal gone to shit, something like that. Probably would have just faded away all on its own. Now? Who knows, it might stay buried. But it just might blow up in somebody’s goddamn face.”
A shimmering flash of light appeared in the clouds, followed a few moments later by a roll of thunder. The first drops fell on the two men. They hurried around the corner and under the shelter of an abandoned bus stop just as the rain poured full force from above. Santos dropped his cigarette to the ground, crushed it with his shoe, then turned to Carlucci.
“This isn’t some kind of official inquiry, is it, Frank?”
“Ruben. You know me better than that.”
Santos shrugged. “I had to ask.” He lit another cigarette, dragged on it. “How the hell did you find out about this thing? The files and reports were supposed to bypass you completely.”
“They did,” Carlucci replied, but he didn’t say any more.
“Then…?” Santos cocked his head, then nodded to himself. “The girlfriend, right?” Carlucci didn’t answer. “Yeah, has to be; she’d been dogging me about it. I thought she’d finally gotten the message and dropped it.” He shook his head. “You talk to anyone else about this, Frank?”
“Of course not. I came to you first, Ruben.”
“Then leave it that way, for Christ’s sake. And tell the girlfriend the same thing. I don’t know why they want this thing buried, and I don’t want to know. You don’t either, Frank. Go find out who killed the mayor’s nephew, get a citation, and leave this case the fuck alone.”
“You really don’t know why it’s being buried, Ruben? Not even a hint?”
“Shit, Frank, if I did I wouldn’t tell you. Forget this goddamn case. I’m trying to. And forget we even talked about it.”
They stood under the shelter, the rain pouring down all around them. Another flash, then rolling thunder. It pissed Carlucci off, what McCuller and Vaughn had done to Santos. It just wasn’t fair. Well, shit, he told himself, not much was fair. Santos knew that, and Paula Asgard probably knew that as well. He was going to have to talk to her soon, and what the hell was he going to say?
Carlucci turned to Santos and nodded. “You’re right, Ruben. We haven’t talked about this.”
Santos nodded back, but didn’t say anything. They remained in the shelter, silent, waiting for the rain to stop.
5
WHAT A FUCKED day. Paula lay back on Chick’s bed and closed her eyes, incredibly tired. Her arms and legs felt heavy, and the heat seemed to drain all the energy from her; the air was so still and quiet, and she didn’t want to move. So don’t move, she told herself. Why bother?
First there had been the horrible stench of the place after being closed up for almost two weeks. Then, seeing the bloodstains all over the rug. She’d almost walked away and left everything, but in the end she just couldn’t do that. So she’d stayed, and spent the day going through all Chick’s stuff, trying to decide what to keep, what to get rid of.
There were surprises. Like tens and twenties stashed all over the apartment, in books, wedged onto shelves; she must have found over three hundred dollars so far.
A collection of twentieth-century Hungarian postage stamps. A complete set of Torelli’s fifteen vortex novels. And finally, she’d found a box of all the letters she’d ever written to Chick over the years. She’d had no idea he’d saved them, no idea that they would be important to him, and that had made her even more tired and depressed.
Paula was nodding off, almost asleep, when someone pounded on the front door. Before she could get up and out of the bedroom, the pounding was repeated, louder this time.
“I’m coming!” she called as she came into the entryway. At the door, she looked through the peephole. It was Graumann, the building manager. Paula unlocked the door and opened it.
Graumann was huge; not much taller than she, but at least three hundred and fifty pounds, large arms and legs and an enormous gut. His puffy face glistened with sweat and he was breathing heavily.
“You’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “I gotta rent this place.”
Good afternoon to you, too, asshole, Paula thought. “I’m going through Chick’s things now,” she said. “I need some time to sort through it all, pack it up, and move it.”
“You haven’t got time,” Graumann said. “You want me to call the cops? The owner’s on my butt. You’ve gotta get out, unless you wanna make up all the back rent. Chick was behind again.”
Of course he was. Chick was always getting behind on his rent, and then he’d pop something, catch up, maybe even pay a little ahead, and slip Graumann three or four hundred dollars for letting it go so long. It had worked out fine for both of them.
“Give me a fucking break,” Paula said. “I’ve got a lot of shit to go through.”
“No one’s paying rent,” Graumann said.
“Chick’s dead, for Christ’s sake!”
Graumann looked down at the floor for a moment, but then returned his gaze to her. A bead of sweat hung from his chin. He shrugged, knocking the bead free, but didn’t say anything.
The telephone rang. Oh, terrific. Graumann looked over her shoulder. What did he expect to see, Chick appearing to answer the phone? It rang again. Okay, okay. Paula dug her hand into her pocket and pulled out the wad of bills she’d collected. She shoved it all into Graumann’s hand and said, “I need three or four days.” A third ring. Fuck.
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