by C R Trolson
The Chief came up. “What’s your verdict?”
“He’s been on ice.”
“On ice. What ice?”
“In a cooler. He can’t have been killed more than twelve hours ago because that’s when I saw him. It’s been warm all day, it’s still warm. In these temperatures a body loses, at the most, one degree per hour, but his skin is ice cold. He’s been in a freezer. He’s been on ice.”
The Chief thought about this while chewing on his thumb and looking from Reese to the body, as if trying to figure how Reese had killed him
“How did you know?” Reese asked.
“How did I know what?”
“I’d talked to Cheevy?”
“Thomkins saw you.”
“Tailing me?” He didn’t think Thomkins was that good. He would have spotted a tail. “Then he must have also seen Cheevy heading for the mansion, heading for Ajax.”
“No one is tailing you. Thomkins was driving by and saw you walk into the store. He didn’t see Cheevy heading anywhere. You were the last person seen with Cheevy. I’ve also got the kids’ statements who were in the store. You going to tell me why?”
“Why I killed him?”
The Chief hooked his thumbs into his belt. “If you want.”
Reese ignored him. He wanted to be with Rusty, but everything, especially romance, was timing and that time, at least for today, was gone. There was always tomorrow and the thought of that perked him up, slightly. “Did you know I have my own card? I’m featured as the man who killed the Anaheim Vampire.”
“You must be proud.”
“It’s nice to be appreciated.”
The Chief stepped closer to him, a slight smile on his face like they were buddies or maybe that Reese had something important to tell him “You going to tell me who killed him?”
“You think I know?” He knew one thing. He’d talked to Cheevy about Ajax and now Cheevy was dead. Earlier, he’d been sure that Ajax had wanted Cheevy to tell him something. Then why kill your messenger? Was Ajax beyond his imagination?
“I think you have an idea.”
The bar, a mahogany pier with brass rails, was empty except for a bartender polishing glasses. It was after one. Ajax had read her mind: She hadn’t liked being alone in the room with him. They decided on brandy. Martells. The bartender brought huge snifters. Ajax listened while she finished describing the two skeletons. She left out a few details.
“Tell me about the stakes,” he said at last.
“Two stakes. Hammered through the hearts. Suicides were buried outside of consecrated ground, suicides were staked.”
“Did Ramon destroy the first skeleton or did the bones deteriorate on their own?” Ajax asked. He had not touched his brandy.
“You know anything about it?”
“How would I?” Ajax said, raising his eyebrows as if she’d touched a nerve, as if she’d actually accused him of not telling her everything. “Will it be difficult to determine identity?”
“Whose identity?”
“The skeletons, of course.”
“Their names, you mean?”
“Is it possible?”
It was as if Ajax already knew who they were and was afraid she would find out or already had. “They didn’t carry ID’s, the Indians.”
Ajax shrugged. “Gender and age?”
“Females, I think, between fifteen and twenty. I’m using length of femur and lack of joint erosion to determine age. It’s a loose calculation. They were definitely Indian, definitely female.”
He nodded slowly. It seemed he was trying to discover exactly how much she knew or had guessed. Discover what she’d discovered. “You didn’t find anything extra?”
“Extra?”
“Besides the bones.”
“Nothing extra,” she lied. Ajax had not touched his brandy. She finished hers and signaled the bartender. He glided to the table, replaced her empty glass with another, and bowed slightly before leaving. The bar towel over his arm smelled of bleach.
She took a small sip. Ajax had not taken his eyes off of her face for almost a minute. Was he asleep? His eyes were clear black and without depth. She’d seen rocks with more life. “You’ve lived in Santa Marina for a while?”
“Do you mind if I call you Penelope? I like Rusty, it’s solid if a bit provincial, but Penelope seems more…poetic. It’s a charming, old fashioned name.”
“It’s my name.” Her father, a pathological academic, had named her after Ulysses’ wife. He said it had come to him the moment he saw her in the delivery room. Even as a child, he was fond of saying, she’d had a certain air of wisdom and loyalty. Her father had been a Homer scholar of some renown, a Princeton professor given, at times, to spontaneous and lengthy recitals of Homer’s Odyssey, some of which he made up. Probably what had driven her mother off. “Use it if you want.”
“Good. To answer your question, I was born here. I’ve been here forever, it seems.”
“One of your ancestors was a Spanish Don?”
“Yes, his brother, my great-great-great uncle, was a priest. Father Delgado. He built the mission. Father Delgado was the reason the mission exists.”
“What about the Balkans? Romania? Any family there?”
She caught a look of caution. A flicker. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious. You have a face….” She wasn’t sure how to put it, how to tell him he matched a Romanian knight carved on a casket.
“Yes?”
“You look like people in the Balkans, that’s all. Dark. Slavic.”
Ajax rolled the brandy. Sniffed at it as if he’d just realized it was in his hand. “I’ve heard that before. But all my people, as far as I know, are from Spain and Scotland. I’m positive I have no relations in Eastern Europe. There could be a trace of the Hasidic Jew in my blood, according to legend. That may account for the look.”
“But you’ve been there?”
“Many, many years ago.”
“In Romania,” she said. “After the fight with the soldiers, after they killed the guide, after they tried to rape and kill me, I passed out in the snow.”
“You told me on the phone. Again, I apologize. It must have been dreadful. In retrospect, I should have sent a platoon of bodyguards with you.”
“I told you someone carried me back under the castle and put me inside the coffin, and called the police, anonymously. This good Samaritan also bandaged my head.” She did not mention that her benefactor had then decapitated three soldiers. “But when the guide and I drove to the castle, there were no tracks in the snow, the ice over the creek was solid.”
“There must have been another way in.”
“The guide, Radu, said not. Whoever saved me had been there for awhile, at least overnight. Had been waiting for us is what I’m thinking.”
“Waiting?” Ajax asked, but in his eyes she saw that he knew exactly who’d helped her. “A hunter perhaps? Trapper? Not waiting for you, I think, just there. A happy coincidence.”
“Whoever it was, I’d like to thank him,” she said. Ajax nodded strangely and looked away. She wondered if she just had. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that I went to Romania to look for vampires and now I’m in Santa Marina up to my neck in the same thing?”
“The same thing? I don’t understand.”
“Stakes and bones turning to dust. It has the vampire ring to it.”
Ajax paused. “As for the peculiar state of the remains, Father Ramon could have imagined a skin instead of bones. As for the stakes, you said it yourself, the remains could have been suicides.”
“Yes,” she said, “they could have been suicides and they could have been something else.”
“Something else?”
“In Romania, the Orthodox church makes a habit of checking graves, the bodies, three or four years after burial. They note the condition of the corpse and if it still looks fresh, they hammer a stake in the heart.”
He did not smile. “That is absurd.”
; She did not feel like arguing. She pushed her chair back. “Thanks for the drink, Ajax. I’ve an early morning.” It was as good an excuse as any to get away from him.
“Shall I walk you to your room?”
A thought struck her: How bad did Ajax want her here? What was he up to? “I’d like a contract. Something in the form of a legal contract. Something to keep us both honest.”
His ears perked up. “Contract?”
“Your promise to sponsor the Alexander dig, with a pay-or-play clause. I want five hundred thousand dollars if we don’t start work in one month, and if we do start, I want the same amount up front.”
“Start digging in a month?”
“No. Start planning. A serious look at what we need.”
He didn’t even blink. “I’ll have a contract ready within the week. But why quibble? I should think an even million would be appropriate, a woman of your qualities.”
13
He woke at seven and knocked off fifty push-ups. He scrambled his last three eggs and ate them with the single remaining sausage link. He drank his last beer, the reserve can he kept in the vegetable bin.
“Call me tomorrow,” was the last thing she’d said. He knew three things about her. She was pretty. She was sexy. She was smart. She was tough. She was working for Ajax Rasmussen. She was…yes, she was very hot. Five things.
Ajax was everywhere. Hannah Everett and Cheevy had both connected Homer Wermels to him. The Chief was Ajax’s puppet, according to Hannah Everett, and, from what he’d seen of the Chief, he’d no reason to doubt her. And now Cheevy was dead, and the last time he’d seen Cheevy, he’d been heading for Ajax’s castle.
By 8:30 he’d screwed the pull-up bar against the door jamb and done fifteen pull-ups. He’d done seventy-five sit-ups and another fifty push-ups. He now swept the kitchen, realized that he needed to buy a vacuum cleaner for the rug, and carried one large trash bag to the dumpster.
He made a shopping list. He added broccoli and carrots as a concession to his health, even though he couldn’t stand them. The vegetables would sit in the refrigerator until he felt guilty and ate them or they turned bad and he threw them out and bought more. Mostly he got his vegetables from the TV dinners. They tasted better. As conscious as he was about exercising, he was not a careful eater and chalked it off to fifteen years of robbery/homicide work, eating on the run, whatever was handy, filling whatever hole the work made.
On the way to the store, he drove past the mission. He saw three ambulances parked behind two tourist buses and a crowd of about fifty tourists milling about. Ambulance lights swept the crowd crimson and sapphire. He parked down the street and walked back.
Tourists strained against yellow police tape. A patrolman kept the crowd back, slapping his palm with a nightstick he seemed nervous to use.
He elbowed his way through the crowd. Cameras smacked his sides. The layered smell of deodorant and suntan lotion floated shoulder high. Anxious, excited eyes crowded in as he swung his leg over the tape.
The patrolman rushed over. “Can I help you?” he said and raised the stick slightly.
“I’m the Chief’s new boy.” Or was he Ajax’s new boy? It wouldn’t matter to the cop anyway. It didn’t even matter to him. He stared at the young officer. His official get the hell-out-of-my-way stare. Daring him to a confrontation.
The patrolman lowered the stick. He wasn’t sure who Reese was except that he looked like he had been on the job before and he spoke with authority. Reese went around him. “It’s real bad,” the patrolman yelled after him. “Second floor.”
Someone in the crowd hollered, “Hey! How come he goes in? What gives?”
He walked up the circular stairway, wooden treads creaking and smelling of mold, voices echoing down from above. At the top of the stairs, he came to an open walkway connecting the second story rooms. A handrail, made from gnarled pine, polished from use, bordered the right side. He pushed through a half a dozen cops, a crowd in the narrow space. The Chief stood in a doorway, wearing a long sleeve dress shirt with no jacket. Sweat stained the shirt at the neck - the Chief had pulled his tie loose - and under both arms. He did not look happy. He eyed Reese. “Let him through. Let the investigator through.”
The cops parted and looked at him suspiciously. He was new. He was on their turf. The term “investigator” gave him a status they lacked.
The Chief said, “This may be right up your alley, Tarrant.”
He looked past the Chief. This was not the best crime scene etiquette he’d witnessed. Various cops’ shoes had rubber-stamped the stones inside the door a faint pink.
Inside the dark room, a large man hung by his feet, the head distended, the tonsure black and rubbery. Under the body, blood was stacked like tropical mud.
The fog was burning off and the room slowly brightened. Sunlight from a high, narrow window focused on the body. The arms, drawn up and out by rigor, aped crucifixion or a lazy, bloated weather vane.
“It’s Father Ramon,” the Chief said, as if introducing them.
The brown robe, stiff with blood, had flipped over itself, leaving Ramon exposed from the waist down, or, in this case, from the waist up. The hem of the tattered robe hung to Ramon’s neck. There was an open wound between the legs. The genitals lay barely recognizable on the table next to what he guessed was the murder instrument, a sickle covered with blood.
He consider the corpse. And how are you this fine morning, Father Ramon? And why are you hanging upside down?
Ramon did not answer. It would have been hard for him to have talked. Sinus fluid had fallen from his nostrils and gelled to form a greenish transparent sinew to the floor. His upper lip curled to reveal brown teeth, spiky and small, like a Chihuahua or a mean child.
As if to illustrate gravity, gray-yellow tallow poked from the many cuts slicing the enormous legs lengthwise, most of the cuts a foot long and not one of them, in itself, lethal, but as a sum adding up to a hard way to die.
The Chief closed the door and stood with his back against the wood. “Looks like some of that LA shit.” The Chief bit into an unlit but half-smoked cigar.
With the door closed, the only light came from the high window and seemed to skewer the body. Suddenly heliotropic, the corpse rotated. The black face shined in the new found light.
In a corner of the ceiling, stretching from timbers, a spider web spotted delicately with blood. On the floor, a spider tiptoeing across the mess, leaving eyelash tracks until it bogged down, its wire thin legs stuck in the congealing blood.
The Chief clamped down on the cigar and spoke through his teeth. “Priest saw blood coming under the door. We had to break it down.”
Reese touched the splintered door. The bolt, now bent backwards, was a foot long.
The Chief nodded to the table. “The killer used a sickle.”
“A sickle?” Offhand, he couldn’t think of many people sliced to death with a sickle, not in this modern age of firearms and carbon-steel knives.
“Used to be on the Russian flag,” the Chief said.
He remembered that Rusty had a sickle, no doubt the same sickle on the table. She had also conveniently brandished the sickle while arguing with Ramon. He wondered how long before the Chief put the facts together or had them put together for him. And who wanted to frame the young archeologist? He shook his head. No, it was too clumsy for a set-up. The locked door didn’t fit. But someone was sending a message. “I’ll look for the hammer later.”
“You’re a funny man,” the Chief said. “But I’ve got work to do. We haven’t had a homicide in ten years and now I’ve seen two in twelve hours.”
“If this is homicide, how did the killer escape? Not through the door.”
“Good question.” The Chief went over to the stone wall and kicked it. “No secret doors. Solid rock. I’ll figure it out. I know it’s not suicide.”
Reese nodded. “I have a suspect description, if you’re interested.”
“Already?”
He
looked up to the single window. “He or she is about three feet high and six inches wide. Somewhat athletic.” He did not know why he enjoyed goading the Chief. It was probably for all the lies the Chief had already told him and for all the lies he was planning to tell. “That should narrow it down for you.”
It was past nine when Rusty Webber got out of bed. The hotel maid had knocked ten minutes earlier and peeked in. She’d told her to come back in an hour. She’d been dreaming about Reese. She was on the bed and he was walking away. She reached for him. They were both naked.
She showered. She dressed in forest twill pants and a khaki safari shirt. From room service she ordered Guatemalan coffee with cream and honey, the eggs benedict. She smoothed down the bed and opened the window.
She asked the waiter to set the tray on the bed and tipped him three dollars. The coffee came very hot. When she raised the plate’s cover, smoked Canadian bacon and sweet Hollandaise sauce filled the room. She sat on the bed and ate quickly, burning her tongue on the bacon.
Last night with Reese had been good, the first time in months she’d enjoyed herself, the first time in months she hadn’t thought about Clark. In fact, it would have been a perfect night if Ajax and the Chief had stayed home.
Reese was good-looking, tough-looking, and smart, but what was he doing in Santa Marina? Who was he? Maybe he’d been kicked off the police force because he wasn’t any good or crooked. No. He seemed too solid, too stable. Reserved. Wild on the inside? A man who moved quickly in an emergency. That about summed up Reese. One other thing she’d noticed - he was searching for something. She was a searcher herself and recognized the detachment, the placid front, the way he asked questions and listened to answers, the way he watched everything going on around him while acting, at times, a bit dull. But Reese wasn’t just watching, he was searching.
He’d lied about being retired - he was still on the job, still hunting. She knew it.
And she was pretty sure he was hunting Ajax. At first she’d thought he was working for Ajax, but Reese was too intelligent, too much of a lone wolf to be part of the Ajax coterie.
She wondered if Reese thought she was running with Ajax. Probably. And he would be half-right.