by C R Trolson
She looked at him. “Are you my boyfriend?”
“Do you want a boyfriend?” he asked, but suddenly thinking to himself that it was an idea that had been in his head since he had seen her this afternoon.
“I’m not over the last one.”
“Maybe the Chief can tell me what he wants,” he said.
“I’ve got a dead man.”
“That’s not an emergency,” she said. “Not if he’s already dead. If he’s already dead, then his troubles are over.” She paused. “Another skeleton?”
“He’s not that dead. In fact, he was alive not too long ago. Far as I know your boyfriend here was the last one to see him alive.”
On the elevator to her room, she realized that he hadn’t even kissed her good-bye. He’d simply touched her hand when she got out of his car and said good-night. On the ride over he’d told her that the Chief might be setting him up, but he seemed strangely unconcerned, almost disconnected, like he was in a dream, or a movie he’d seen too many times. He’d told her he’d see her in the morning, but did not seem overly affectionate or disappointed that the Chief had broken in on them. No telling what would have happened if the Chief hadn’t barged in.
She wondered why the Chief couldn’t handle a body without Reese’s help. He hadn’t mentioned homicide, only that a body had been found. She hadn’t taken seriously the Chief’s suggestion that Reese might have had something to do with the death. Maybe in Santa Marina, considering it’s suffocating tranquility, finding a body was an emergency. She’d offered to go, but the Chief had said “no”, one expert was enough for him, thank you. Reese hadn’t seemed interested in her tagging along either. It was almost as if he did not want her involved. Involved in what was the question. Besides, she was already involved up to her neck.
She opened her door, swept through the dark room, and turned on the bathroom lights. In the mirror, she straightened her sweater and touched her hair. She looked tired in the bright light. She slowly peeled the wrapper off a new toothbrush, compliments of the house.
She heard a rustle in the bedroom and turned. A spring squeaked. A figure rose from the chair. “Goddamn,” she said and picked up the hair dryer like a club.
Then a man’s slightly hoarse voice, “Miss Webber?” and the lights came on. Ajax. Dressed in black and carrying a cane.
“I apologize for letting myself in,” he said primly. “Actually, the night manager let me in. I had fallen asleep in the chair waiting for you. I hope you don’t mind.”
She took a step toward him. “Mind?” She looked at him and back at the hair dryer in her hand. She turned, saw herself, slightly manic, in the mirror, Ajax looking hapless now, a bit apologetic. “It’s fine.” She put the hair dryer down hard. After the shit with Ramon and now this. She was ready to drive back to Burlingame. Tell Ajax go to hell and drive off.
When she turned, he backed up. He’d been expecting more of a welcome. “I’m sorry if I surprised you,” he said quickly. “Really, I am. I simply wanted to see if you were settled in, how your first day had gone.”
“You’re the welcome wagon?” She took a deep breath and let it out. When working for an eccentric, expect lapses in etiquette. Take it easy. No sense in leaving Santa Marina before she found out what he was really up to. “Forget it,” she said.
Ajax tried to look contrite and embarrassed at the same time. “I’m very sorry I startled you.” He started for the door, bowing slightly. “I’ll speak with you in the morning - ”
“Stay,” she said. “I’ll tell you about the dig. You’re paying for it.” She went around the room, turning on more lights.
“Thanks for helping out in Romania,” she said, trying to ease the tension. “If you hadn’t lit a fire under Harrington, I’d still be there.” Lying under a garbage pile or at the bottom of a cesspool was her guess. No way had Bugazi intended to turn her body over to Harrington. Of course, if it hadn’t been for Ajax she wouldn’t have been there in the first place.
“It was the least I could do,” Ajax said and dipped his head. He sat back down on the red velour chair. The top of the cane was silver, a lion’s head, mouth open, teeth bared, ready to bite. He rested his hands softly on the head as if it were a pet. “You look well. How are things at the mission?”
“I’ve uncovered another skeleton in addition to the one Father Ramon found.”
Ajax nodded as if he knew exactly what she’d found. “Are they giving you any trouble? The priests, I mean.”
“Ramon is an ass.” She gave him a brief rundown of current events. She did not mention Reese. She did not mention a lot of things.
Ajax cleared his throat. “Father Ramon claims the first body was intact? Isn’t that impossible? Wouldn’t the body have decomposed after a certain time?”
“I didn’t mention time,” she said.
“Well, how old are they?”
“You mean how long have they been in the ground? Judging that they’re both Indian and skeleton number one was wearing mission sandals, I’d say several hundred years.”
He did not question this. “Isn’t it strange to find skin on a body that old?”
“Very strange,” she said. “Exceedingly strange. But that’s only what Ramon said at first, then he recanted, said he found nothing but bones. It doesn’t really matter, because the first set of bones disintegrated, turned to dust.”
“Dust?” Ajax scratched his chin and stared levelly at her. “Does that happen often? Not that it matters, because I’m sure you’ll find an explanation.”
Something told her that Ajax would be at the bottom of any explanation. “Since you own the land, can we keep Ramon out? I don’t like the church breathing down my neck.”
“They can be bothersome.” Ajax pursed his lips and caressed the lion’s head. “But the church has certain rights.” He smoothed his upper lip with thumb and forefinger, lost in thought. His nails were longer than she remembered and slightly yellow. His face was white and shaped like a stretched triangle. His lips were thin and bloodless. She could not imagine Ajax on anyone’s most eligible bachelor list. He was too sterile. Sexless and airless, as if he had just stepped out of a coffin. Hermetic. “Ramon is probably the least of your worries.”
“And my biggest worry?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“All you want is whatever artifacts I find for your museum? And if no likely descendants claim the bones, you want those as well?”
“Precisely. But if the bones keep disappearing, we won’t have to worry about notifying the descendants. How does the second skeleton look?”
“It looks fine,” she said. “For a skeleton. And then you agree to back an expedition to Pakistan.”
“Yes. The Temple of Aryzur. I don’t want you to think that the search for Alexander hinges on what happens here, but I need this favor and a chance to get to know you better.”
“Do you know the cost?” she asked, thinking that after nearly getting her killed, he should know her well enough. “And how long it can take? That is, if we can even get permission from Pakistan.”
“I do know,” he said. “Tens of millions of dollars and many years of hard work. I’ve already started the wheels turning, so to speak. I’ve already spoken to our ambassador in Pakistan. He has agreed to facilitate our plans. Getting permission from the Pakistanis is really only a matter of negotiating a price. Pocketbook diplomacy.”
“I hope this ambassador is better at negotiating than Harrington was.” She was going to mention that they really had no plans, until the nagging thought came up that Ajax had agreed to back the dig only to lure her to Santa Marina. “After what happened in Romania I’m surprised you’d want me.”
“Nonsense. Romania was simply bad luck. The truth is, you’re the best person for this job. As I explained earlier, I read your thesis on Arysur. You wrote the book, as they say. You also mentioned the figure of three tons. Do you really think there is that much gold?”
Gold, she thought, always
that. Maybe that was all he wanted. But why? He was rich enough. “Three tons is a rough equivalent of what Alexander’s funeral train is purported to have carried. The gold was war booty, mostly. A lot of emeralds and rubies from the east. Alexander wanted to control the Silk Route, the main trade artery between east and west. I relied on the papers of Harskand and Dulles, papers over a century old, and they never thought enough of their own information to mount an expedition.” She wondered how much research he had done on her paper and if he realized how tentative her conclusions had been. “There is no historian or Greek scholar who will agree with my thesis. Most think Alexander’s body was kidnapped by Ptolemy and taken to Alexandria, a symbol of Ptolemy’s link to Alexander, a power play. Some say Memphis. Some think Alexander is buried in Macedonia. Whatever they say, they all swear by it.”
“But you say that Ptolemy hi-jacked a fake body, a decoy sent by the regent Perdikkas to fool Ptolemy. It was Perdikkas’ job to preserve the empire for Alexander’s son. He actually sent Alexander’s body to Pakistan, the ends of the empire. He had a temple built to hold the remains until Alexander’s son could solidify his power. But it didn’t work. Roxanne and her son were killed.”
“Have you read any of the Ancient Greek Historians? Diodorus?”
Ajax touched his chin. “Diodorus Siculus. I have C. H. Oldfather’s complete translation.”
“A lot of historians don’t think Diodoros of Sicily was very accurate. His history is filled with mistakes and outright lies. Even Oldfather thought that the only reason Diodoros was so prominent was because his was the only history that survived.”
“I trust you.”
“I have as much proof as the other historians, which is no proof. We’re not even sure who William Shakespeare was and Alexander died almost two thousand years before that.” She paused. “I’d be surprised if we even found the ruins of Arysur.”
“But you quoted research directly from the Duke Papyrus Archive.”
“I did?” He had read her paper. She also remembered that her antiquities professor had said her thesis was a clever but absurd notion.
“Are you trying to talk me out of putting you in charge of one of the largest archeological enterprises of the century?” Ajax smiled as if talking him out of anything was more foolish than looking for Alexander’s tomb.
“I’m trying to talk myself out of it.”
“Don’t be afraid of success.”
“It’s not success that scares me.”
He smiled. “What then?”
“There are Muslim rebels, terrorists in the area who, like all rebels and terrorists, hate Americans, especially when we go after their treasure. We have a war going on in Afghanistan. It’s a war zone. There’s that and the fact that the Pakistani government is aware of the rumors and the general location of the temple but have never thought enough of the rumors to bother looking. We could be years researching and years searching for a site, years before we screen the first shovel of dirt. It could be a huge waste of time. It doesn’t exactly scare me. None of it does. It’s what I do. I just want you to know what you’d be getting into. The energy involved.”
“It won’t be any worse than Romania.”
“You said that about Santa Marina.”
“Did I? But you’ve had no trouble here, not really. Well, besides Father Ramon, but you don’t have to worry about him hanging around anymore.”
“You’ll talk to him?”
“I’ll take care of it.” He stood, grasped the walking stick in the middle, and pointed to the door. “The bar is still open. Would you allow me to buy you a drink and continue our discussion?”
She decided to go with him. Anything to get out of the room. His presence there had so surprised her that she had forgotten to tell him about the Chief’s dead man.
After he dropped off Rusty, Reese followed the Chief’s car through the dark streets and silent neighborhoods and through the alley that ran behind Cheevy’s store.
He parked behind the dumpster, the same dumpster he’d watched the wino crawl out of yesterday. The Chief was already out of his station wagon and talking to the same red-headed cop, Thomkins, who’d stopped him this morning.
Police tape ran haphazardly from the dumpster to the building, over to some bushes, and back again. The body lying nearby seemed diminutive, like an afterthought. He recognized the frilly cuffs.
Thomkins walked over, freckled and wearing a gun. He even had handcuffs. “Can I get you anything?”
“Gloves,” Reese said with little enthusiasm. In a way, Thomkins reminded him of Cheevy. Both young. Both wearing uniforms, of a sort. Both in over their heads. He felt like he was the world breaking into their dreams. “If you have them.”
“To keep from contaminating the evidence?” Thomkins said.
“To keep my hands clean.”
Thomkins fetched a new pair of tan latex gloves from the back of a patrol car. Reese put them on, pulling the cuffs high and snapping them into place. Not a lot of protection. The latex let you feel everything, a second skin you could peel off, but part of you always came away with it, part of you always went into the trash with whatever was on the outside of the gloves. The Chief looked on but said nothing.
He knelt beside the body. Cheevy looked remarkably good for a dead person. His skin showed none of death’s blue mottling. In fact, the face was as white as it had been yesterday. Where was the floppy hat?
There was no blood or swelling or bruising to suggest that Cheevy had been alive when his head glanced off the dumpster and tore a jagged line across his forehead. He felt along the edges of the cut and peeled back the skin. No blood.
He rolled up Cheevy’s frilly white shirt. The veins in his arms had collapsed. The only other mark he could see, besides the cut, was a circular stamp of blue, very feint, the color of a meat inspector’s stamp, two inches wide, at the right side of the neck. He turned the head. Under the left ear he noticed two faint puncture marks, depressions really.
The skin was cold, almost as if Cheevy had been standing in the snow, outside, all his life. He remembered Cheevy, the emptiness in his eyes, as if he’d known immediately that Reese had brought nothing but trouble.
“What do you think?” Thomkins asked. He stood ready with a pen and notebook. “Time of death? Looks like somebody whacked him on the head. Would that have killed him?”
He let the head drop and thought of all the sounds the dead made. Empty sounds. Dream sounds. The rustle of clothes against the plastic bag. The hollow, thudding inside the black van.
Suffocating sounds. Later, the hog brush and water jets.
“Did some one hit him?” Thomkins asked. “Are you okay?”
Reese looked up. Thomkins there with his pen raised. “See the scuff marks on his clothes where he was dragged across the asphalt and the bunched-up collar where the person dragging him held on? See those short tire skids? There’s at least twenty feet between the front and back tires, so it was a big car, maybe a pick-up. They threw his head against the dumpster hard enough to break the skin but there’s no bruise, no blood. His veins have collapsed because he’s blood empty. No blood here means he wasn’t killed here.”
Thomkins knelt behind Cheevy’s head and sighted in on the imaginary car. Four uniformed police officers were standing around with crossed arms. Nearly half the force, he guessed. Two were smoking. The same faces he’d seen for years at crime scenes. Dull faces, drones trying to slug their way through thirty years, some of them slowly going crazy, waiting for the trapdoor pension at the end. Why were people surprised that more cops shot themselves than were shot on duty?
He looked at the skid marks again, the angle of body drag. He asked Thomkins to measure the tracks. He stretched out his tape. “A little over seven and a half feet wide.”
He thought limousine, possibly an older car, a boat, a sternwheeler. Nobody made cars that wide anymore, even SUV’s were small in comparison. He made a mental note of it but did not tell Thomkins.
Thomkins mentioned a witness. Lung Butter Bill had found the body and flagged down a passing cop.
Thomkins pointed to the man sitting in the back of a patrol car, the same guy he’d seen crawling out of the dumpster yesterday. Bill seemed to be having a good time hawking spit out the window. A pastel of greens and milky yellows spotted the asphalt.
He opened the front passenger’s door and slid in. Even with a cross wind, he smelled old socks, a moldy putridness, the perfume of bad wine. “His head woke you up?” Bill turned. His eyes a dirty green. The veins in his nose, scraggly and varicose. “When the victim’s head hit the dumpster, you woke up?”
“That his head?”
“Tell me what you saw?”
“I thought it was Dirty Steve.”
“Who?”
“Just a bum. He’s got a plate in his head and claims he can walk on his own water. Talk is he used to be a policeman who went on the sauce.”
“But it wasn’t Dirty Steve?”
“Nope. It was that kid that worked in the store. Not a bad kid. Throw maybe half a pizza out most nights and kept it neat in the box. Not a bad kid at all.”
“Anyone else around?”
Lung Butter Bill shrugged. “Nope.” Bill wasn’t much of a talker. He wasn’t much of a liar, either, Reese thought, and removed a twenty dollar bill from his wallet and put it on the top of the seat. Bill tucked the twenty away and rummaged deep in the pockets of his wasted coat. He held up a pair of plastic fangs. Halloween stuff, but real looking, the gums bright red.
“I found these.”
The points of the long incisors were tinted dark brown. “Where?” The distance between the fangs equaled that of the punctures under Cheevy’s ear. Of course it did. “You searched the body?”
“No. They was on the ground. In plain sight.”
He turned the fangs over in his fingers. Maybe some of Cheevy’s buddies had played their vampire games a little too rough. “You got any ideas?”
Lung Butter Bill cackled. “You think, sonny, maybe I could use those teeth to chew meat again?” Reese put the teeth in his jacket and got out of the car. Lung Butter Bill kept cackling.