The Death Collectors

by J. A. Kerley

  “…one of the great tragedies of my life…had I known Marsden was thirty miles north in his studio, I would have been with him…”

  There had been no caviar and talk of the weather. She led me straight to the “gallery”, leaning against me on a love seat beneath the twisted photographs. I had maneuvered her into talking about Hexcamp, and she seemed almost hypnotized by her own words.

  “I would have been a few years older than the others, but it would have given me an advantage. I would have been his inspiration, his triumph, his glory.”

  “I’m sure you would have, Ms Baines.”

  Her perfume filled the air. It wasn’t the cloying floral scent of older women, but something tart, youthful. She’d added crimson highlights to her hair, now lacquered in unruly spikes. Iridescent green shadow pushed the boundaries of her eyes. Her lips were the purpled red of venous blood, her teeth wet and somehow obscene.

  “He would have died for me, and I for him. That’s what love is, Mr Ransburg.” Her eyes were distant, her words spoken from afar. I wondered if she was using a drug.

  “You would have been perfect, Ms Baines.”

  When she crossed her legs I noted how high the slit in her dress was cut. One long leg floated before me, blue-green veins visible beneath white hose garter-belted in place. She leaned harder against me, and I felt her hand rest on my thigh.

  “Marsden worked only by candlelight, did you know that? He said when you work by fire, the fire reaches inside your work, illuminates it from within. That was Marsden, Mr Ransburg, lit from within, drawing so many beautiful wings to his light.”

  “Moths die in pursuit of fire,” I said.

  Her hand began crawling upward, her nails red flames on my black suit. “Butterflies, Mr Ransburg. They exalt in the sun.” Her mouth was inches from mine, her eyes glazed. “Where was I at the time? Married to a succession of fools and eunuchs. Hiding in my room with my collections of coins, using them to discover who I was, to make sense of life, find its fire. All the time Marsden Hexcamp was a few miles north, seething with magic, burning with genius.”

  “Miss Baines, Marcella -”

  Her nails scratched at the top of my thighs. “He had to see them die, you know, see the whole of the final moment. It’s all there if the moment is done correctly, everything is revealed. My fellas, my beautiful boys, they knew that. But they could only enjoy, not create.”

  Her hand reached my crotch, began kneading. Her breath was shallow, her face flushed. Her eyes looked through me. “He’s coming back, Mr Ransburg,” she purred. “Marsden’s coming back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someone’s been found.”

  “Who?” I gasped, closing my legs tight.

  “Someone with the voice to say, ‘Yes, Marsden Hexcamp created this work…it can finally come alive!’”

  “Who? Who is this person?”

  Her bright nails hissed across the fabric of my pants, burrowed beneath my testicles, squeezed. “It doesn’t matter, Mr Ransburg, it only matters that Marsden will be alive again! Oh my god, I’m about to…”

  She grabbed my hand and jammed it under her dress. “I’m flowing like a river,” she choked. “Like a fucking goddamn river.” She clamped her thighs around my hand while hers clawed at my zipper.

  “When will…the work…be reviewed?” I gasped. She dropped her huge mouth into my lap and began gnawing and licking. I felt saliva falling from her mouth.

  “Ms Baines, I can’t…”

  “Don’t fail me, Ransburg,” she grunted, her breath hot against my groin. “I own you.”

  I pushed away. Standing on shaking legs, I jammed my shirt back into my pants, retreated to the door. She wobbled erect. Her hair had fallen to one side, her dress clung between her thighs. Her lipstick had smeared to a crimson slash. The glassiness in her eyes was replaced by hatred. Her lips were drawn back and I saw the full fury of her teeth.

  I spun wordlessly and escaped from the penthouse, feeling the room about to burst into a black fire kindled long ago.

  Chapter 28

  “She was howling and growling in your lap?” Harry stared from his desk across from mine. It was ten a.m., my visit to Marcella Baines accomplished in two and a half hours, travel included. If nothing else, I was efficient.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” I was working on my written postmortem of the visit to Ms Baines. They’d be strange notes.

  “Carson?”

  “What?”

  “You said she ran her hand up the inside of your -”

  “Briefly.”

  “She had on hose and garters? Without any, uh -”

  “Not a stitch.”

  Harry twirled a pencil in his fingers for a few seconds, then tapped a nervous rhythm on the desk. “Um, was there any point in the process, Carson, where you felt, uh, the least bit…?”

  “Never.”

  The eraser tapped for another minute. “Cars…?”

  “What?”

  “When she jammed your hand up her dress, talking about rivers and suchnot, an old lady like that, was she, was it…?”

  I closed my eyes. Did a half-millimeter nod.

  “Lawd,” Harry whispered, then retreated across the room to seek the solace of a donut. Bertie Wagnall’s voice wheezed from my speakerphone.

  “Ryder, there’s a Lydia Barstool for you, line five.”

  The name threw me until I remembered she was the AWOL Coyle’s paralegal.

  “Barstow, Bertie.”

  “Close enough. Hey, what happened with that Danbury broad? She ain’t leaving call slips down here. You guys have a tiff, or what? You did, you can send her my way. I’d sure like to -”

  “Hello, Ms Barstow. How can I help you?”

  “I’m - I’m not sure if you can. I was going through Rubin’s raincoat in the closet this morning. I found some kind of tape.”

  “Recording tape, like a cassette?”

  “From one of those pocket recorders. He doesn’t sound right. Like he’s nervous or something.”

  “What’s the tape about?”

  “That’s another thing. I can’t tell. Usually I know the project, it’s immediately evident. Not this time. Maybe it’s nothing, but…”

  I looked at the paperwork on my desk, sighed. “We’ll be right there, Ms Barstow.”

  “I’d like to meet somewhere other than the office, if that’s all right. There’s a coffee shop two blocks to the west?”

  “Give us twenty minutes.”

  The coffee shop was a multinational corporation masquerading as a neighborhood establishment. The paralegal was at a table hidden behind a potted plant with fronds the size of canoe paddles. Above her was a huge painting that looked as if a chimpanzee had dipped its ass in paint and scootched across the canvas. I peeked through fronds. “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” The table held a cup of coffee and a silver microcassette recorder.

  Lydia managed a half-smile. Harry pushed past me and sat, meaning I was supposed to fetch the brews. I jogged to the service counter, considering getting him a Caramelized Frappacilious Macarena or whatever, then, sane again, asked for two regulars. I went back to the table, set a cup in front of Harry and sat across from Miss Lydia. Harry was saying, “And the tape you found this morning was where?”

  Lydia was muted for business - beige skirt, jacket, shoes. The past few days seemed to have aged her, or maybe the sun from the window laid harder shadows into the corners of her eyes.

  “The recorder was in his raincoat, Detective Nautilus. In the office closet. It’s not unusual, he was always dropping things like his good pens and his cellphone and whatnot in his raincoat. It’s one of those coats with all the pockets. We laughed about it, called it his ‘second office’.”

  “Anything else in there - his raincoat?”

  “No, just the recorder. Oh, and a map, sorry.”

  She reached to her purse and produced a folding map of the Mobile area. Harry took the map and set it aside, pi
cked up the recorder.

  “Why didn’t you take the tape to the head of the firm, this Mr Hamerle?”

  Her eyes skittered from the floor to the wall to the fronds to the door.

  “Miz Barstow,” Harry said. “You all right?”

  “I don’t know quite how to say this. I’m…frightened of him.”

  “Mr Hamerle?” I said.

  She nodded, two small twitches. “Since Rubin’s disappearance, Mr Hamerle’s become very demanding and quick to anger. He’s also been very interested in Mr Coyle’s office, sometimes going in and closing the door. I hear things. He’s searching. When I found the tape, I wondered if…”

  “The tape was the object of his search.”

  “I’m just a paralegal, part-time at that. There might be legal ramifications, confidentiality. It’s beyond me. That’s when I thought I’d kind of…” she pushed on the half-smile again, “pass the buck to you people.”

  Harry patted Lydia’s hand without making it an invasion of space, something I had yet to learn. “You did good, Miz Barstow.”

  I said, “What made you think the tape was important?”

  “There’s an edge to his voice, an intensity I’ve never heard before. Usually, even on a major project, he’s almost chatty when recording, like talking to a friend. But this sounds like he was scared, like he didn’t want anyone to hear. Plus I can’t tell what client he’s working for.”

  “Let’s take a listen,” I said.

  The cassette hadn’t progressed much from start point. Harry rewound it, pressed Play. A voice came from the silver box.

  “That’s Mr Coyle,” Lydia said. “He always started with the client name and project number. He doesn’t mention either here.”

  “Off the books? Or a personal project?” Harry mused.

  Coyle had a reedy but well-modulated voice with a soft whisper of southern accent, the aristocratic version, or what passes for it. Even if Lydia hadn’t clued us in to the tension she’d found in Coyle’s voice, I’d have picked up on it. He spoke in the sotto voce of a person carrying on a clandestine conversation. There were pauses between his sentences as he formed thoughts.

  “…negotiations must be conducted in utmost secrecy and will involve moving quickly between parties. It should be considered that the object of the bidding may frequently wish to be viewed by the involved parties while bidding is under way. This is not a negative in this situation, the nature of the object will, by its viewing, spur additional bids…”

  I heard him writing in the background, then a sheet torn from a notepad, crumpled.

  “Object?” Harry said.

  “…consider a resort setting. Or a motel where the units are individualized. Bidders may not wish to see one another. Secure one unit per party to allow bidders privacy. There are several almost unwholesome places which actually might be better suited than more expensive venues…”

  “Individualized unwholesomeness,” Harry said. “Is that the Fodor’s listing for Cozy Cabins?”

  “…I anticipate bidding to become very intense near the end…”

  “Whatever it is, it sounds big,” Harry said.

  “…at a set time the final bids will be reviewed. Care must be taken that the departing participants have no contact with one another, again respecting their privacy.”

  The tape hissed for several more seconds, then the sound of unrecorded tape. “That’s all,” Lydia said. “On the whole thing.”

  Lydia looked between us, perplexed. Harry snapped open the map found in Coyle’s pocket. He studied for several long seconds.

  “My, my,” he mumbled.

  “What?”

  He pushed aside his coffee and set the map on the table, tapping it with his finger. “A half-dozen locations circled in red. It looks like one of them is our old friend, the Cozy Cabins.”

  I felt a buzz of excitement, a sense that we were finally touching something that might lead us forward. Harry called them the invisible lines. We rarely saw them until closing in on a case, when it was revealed that we had been tripping over them all the time.

  “Privacy’s real big,” Harry said, more to himself. “Doesn’t want whoever to bump into one another.”

  “And you have no idea if this is a project for the firm, Ms Barstow?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing I ever worked on,” she said, fear in her voice. “Though he had been giving some thought to upcoming negotiations for Lewis Aragorn. That’s nothing specific, it’s kind of like an on-going project.”

  “Lewis Aragorn?” I said. “The Lewis Aragorn?”

  “A genius, he’s a fucking genius. When you guys called and told me he was missing, I felt so sick I nearly ralphed, the Big Gorgonzola all across my desk, y’know?”

  Lewis Aragorn slapped the top of the desk he’d nearly done the Big Gorgonzola on, then stood and walked to a window overlooking the Mobile River, a vista of cranes and containers and ship superstructures.

  Aragorn was the approximate size of a channel buoy, and when he stood in front of the window, the room darkened. It wasn’t that bright to begin with - a single bank of fluorescents above mason-block walls with faded blue paint, brown industrial linoleum on the floor. The desk’s warpage suggested Cuban refugees had sailed it to Miami by way of Juneau. Aragorn jammed his hands into the pockets of unpressed khakis and made a guttural sound I took as a sigh. His thick-furred forearms jutted from rolled-up white sleeves and resembled phone poles with a slight taper at the wrists. Aragorn’s hard-worn face looked like his parents were Charles Bronson and Keith Richards, and there was genuine sadness between the crags and wrinkles.

  “The man was a fucking genius, a born negotiator. He saved our ass a couple times; everybody’s ass.”

  Aragorn headed the dockworkers’ local, a hard and hardcore occupation. He’d held it for fourteen years, after spending almost twenty as a dockworker himself. He looked down as if studying his loosened blue tie, maybe wondering how’d he ever come to wear such a useless item. When Harry leaned forward, the folding chair squeaked beneath him; Aragorn wasn’t big on office furniture.

  “And you’d meet him in motels to hammer out these negotiations or whatnot, Mr Aragorn?” Harry asked.

  “Hell-fucking-yes, we’d meet in motels for planning sessions. I’m not high on trusting my opponents. No big deal; they don’t trust me. You never know who can get into a fancy office and lay out some electronic shit, pick up on your positions, what’s real, what’s fallback. Shit, I’d do it to them if I could.”

  “You had no quarrel with Rubin Coyle?”

  Aragorn’s eyes widened. “Quarrel? He fucking kept us out of nasty strikes, wildcats. There are new things going on in the industry, new loading, unloading facilities. Containerization’s getting sophisticated, computers doing more. We got to balance getting our honest cut with keeping the work flowing. That’s what Rubin did. He’d take their position, ours, then diddle a line here, a benefit there, keep us moving together. It’s hard to find someone both sides trust, but everybody trusted Rubin Coyle. Damn, if he’s gone…” Aragorn shook his head and upended palms the size and texture of baseball mitts. He looked like tears were about to flashflood the gulleys of his face. “What it is, I think, he knows people. You can’t learn that shit in school, you just know it.”

  I fired a shot in the dark. “What about the Cozy Cabins? They ever enter the negotiations?”

  “Hunh? The what cabins?”

  “Nothing. Just a part of the investigation.”

  “You ever hear him talk about art, Mr Aragorn?” Harry asked. “Or maybe a portfolio, a collection of art?”

  The cragged face showed confusion. “Rubin? I know shit about art, buddy. That means Rubin probably knew like minus shit. He never cared about fancy stuff like that. But I’ll tell you what, you got some kind of negotiation has to do with art - or fuckin’ anything - Rubin Coyle would be your go-to guy.”

  Chapter 29

  We figured it was time to talk to the senior par
tner at the law firm, Warren Hamerle. Since it appeared he wasn’t going to come to us - convalescing from what Lydia Barstow referred to as an attack of angina - we went to him. We had to play it light, no inference that we’d talked to Miss Lydia, sensing Hamerle would take it as betrayal and boot her out on the street.

  The lot of Hamerle’s large, two-story Spring Hill home was canopied with live oaks and sunlight broke through the leaves and spangled the ground with gold. Harry and I wound back the long drive to a parking area beside a threebay garage. The house was so white it looked painted yesterday, the windows framed with blue shutters, the front door an imposing wall of dark and heavily shellacked wood.

  When the door opened, I recognized Warren Hamerle from his participation in several of the photos on Rubin Coyle’s wall. He was over six feet tall, wide-shouldered, the shoulders sloped by six-plus decades of fighting gravity. Like hurricanes and earthquakes, gravity always wins. In contrast, his white hair was victoriously full, and made his water-blue eyes seem bluer than genetics built. The effect was enhanced by a white Oxford-cloth shirt above cream twill pants, beige bucks on his feet. He shook our hands in introductions made somber by our mission, and led us to a glassed-in sun porch at the rear of a home furnished with wood and leather and brassy accessories. It was a masculine home without trace of a woman’s input.

  “You’ll have to bear with me at times, gentlemen,” he said, tapping an ear. “My hearing’s deteriorating, comes and goes. Getting old holds its own set of trials.”

  We sat in slat-back chairs surrounding a circular glass table thick as your average novel. An insulated urn, cups, and attendant necessaries centered the glass. Without urging, Harry and I poured coffee. It was the good stuff, plucked by Sherpas from the cliffs of Shangri-La, or whatnot. We asked about Rubin Coyle’s potential enemies, and heard of accomplishments stacked against awards, of recognitions buttressed by achievements. Hamerle claimed little knowledge of his employee’s personal life, seemingly unaware Coyle was occasionally negotiating Miss Lydia. I poured another cup of the fragrant coffee and shifted to Coyle’s business life.