A Passing Curse (2011)

by C R Trolson

  He blocked out Carsabi’s voice and inspected Ajax’s little toy. Whoever had made the finger had even added a little dirt beneath the plastic fingernail. “Hernandez is missing?”

  “He told everyone that he was going to Santa Marina to confront you.”

  “You already told me that.” He re-cocked the finger. It was too well made to be sold at a gag shop. He guessed the talon was surgical steel, probably made in Switzerland.

  “Three days he’s missing,” Carsabi said.

  “You’re asking me because he’s missing and I’m supposedly his last appointment?” Reese asked.

  “That doesn’t sound like you trust me. Should I be mad?”

  “He was supposed to be back at his desk three days ago,” Carsabi said. “That’s a long time. I start worrying when a man’s that late.”

  It was the second time in a week that he was the last person to see someone alive, if you disregarded that both victims were on their way to see Ajax. And was Hernandez a victim or out on a jag? He put the finger in his dresser. “He’s probably drunk. Shacked up somewhere. Didn’t he go missing for a week last year and the Mexican policia had him locked up on drunk and mayhem charges.”

  “This just seems different,” Carsabi said. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know. And in case you see him, tell him to call me. You never told me why you picked Santa Marina.”

  “It’s the climate and it’s small,” Reese said, wondering if he should mention the two killings, but deciding against it. He did not need Carsabi interfering. He did not need Carsabi second guessing him. “I got tired of all those people.”

  “It’s also where Richard Lamb grew up,” Carsabi said, scolding him. “The Anaheim Vampire case is closed. I don’t care what everyone is saying. You got the right guy. If I even thought this Rasmussen guy was guilty of anything, I’d back you on this, but the case is closed.”

  “I’m retired, Steve. It’s that simple. I like it here.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Reese. You’re up there sticking your nose into something, mindlessly fucking around when I can get you a job as chief of security at one of these software companies in the Valley. The pay’s good….”

  “It’s subtle,” he said, irritated now because he’d already told Carsabi he wanted nothing to do with being a rent-a-cop, a door knob shaker, no matter how well it paid. “Santa Marina is subtle. That’s why I moved here. I can relax.” In fact, Ajax Rasmussen might be one of the subtlest killers he’d known.

  Before Reese hung up, they spoke briefly about how the Captain wished he were retired and fucking off like Reese. He hadn’t told Carsabi that he’d seen Hernandez earlier because it might bring more police and that was the last thing he needed. He did not want to cloud the water Ajax was swimming in. He wanted a clear shot. Besides, Hernandez could take care of himself. He had three pistols and a hair-trigger temper. He wouldn’t be a push-over like Cheevy and Father Ramon. Anyway, Reese thought, I warned him. Besides, it seemed early in the game for Ajax to be killing a cop.

  He drank a beer and glanced outside. It was late afternoon. So far, a busy day. Outside, Thomkins was looking from his watch to the apartment. It struck him as crazy how Ajax had discussed Gentileschi as if she were still alive. But what bothered him even more was the billionaire’s obsession with Rusty.

  Thomkins drove the rusty sedan like it was a tractor. The two-way radio had been gutted. The security grill between the front and back seat had holes you could slip your head through. The seats had been duct taped.

  “It’s the back-up patrol car,” Thomkins said. Reese shrugged and hit the seat to re-stick a piece of silver tape that was coming loose.

  “Your car’s in the shop?”

  “This is my car,” Thomkins admitted. “The one I’m assigned. The medical examiner will start the autopsy at four,” Thomkins said. “We haven’t had a murder in ten years, and that was only a heart attack that we thought was a murder, and now we have two - bam - you been to many autopsies, Reese?”

  “My share,” he said, and, remembering what Hannah Everett had told him, added, “You’ve had a few missing persons lately. I want reports on each case going back twelve months. I want pictures, witness statements.”

  “I’ll check with the Chief.”

  “Check with who you want. Just get me the reports. And Thomkins, if it was a heart attack then it wasn’t a murder, so you haven’t had a murder in over ten years or maybe twenty.”

  “True.”

  “A very quiet town.”

  “It’s that, alright,” Thomkins said.

  They walked down a corridor of faded linoleum and bare light bulbs hanging from gray metal shades and through a blue metal door stenciled, MORGUE.

  Green tile, brightly glazed, went halfway up the walls, edging six stainless steel doors. Like stone fountains, twin marble pedestals sprouted from the floor. The marble autopsy tables belonged in a museum. Stainless steel had been the vogue for fifty years. Hanging from the ceiling, a mechanical arm held a Nikon camera.

  Each marble slab held a body. Father Ramon and Cheevy. Cheevy was still dressed.

  Standing next to Ramon was a small man, fortyish and smooth-faced, wearing a white lab jacket, plastic gloves, sleeve protectors, visor, and a cotton mask over his mouth. He glanced their way, nodded, and picked up a scalpel. He guessed the ME knew exactly who they were. The ME started the mandatory Y cut high above Ramon’s left nipple, nearly to the shoulder.

  Except for the humming of the vault’s compressor and the barely tangible, slight tearing of the scalpel, there was little noise.

  Ramon looked no better than he had hanging. Blank eyes. Black face. Stiff tongue poking between yellow teeth. He could have been a Pekinese. A swath of small puncture wounds circled his waist.

  After detouring around the belly button and ending the cut below Ramon’s waist line, retracing the lines three times to lay open a good six inches of belly fat, the medical examiner planted his feet, inserted one hand into the cut and pulled, deftly working the scalpel back and forth to separate fat from muscle. The sound was like removing old wallpaper, but wetter. The body rolled with each tug. When it was over Ramon looked like a heavy-set man who had opened his overcoat to reveal the paltriness of his skeleton.

  The action of it all disturbed the intestines. Gas fluttered from the flabby backside. Reese breathed through his mouth to avoid the foulness and fought the urge to vomit. Thomkins turned slightly orange, opened the door, and left.

  “I hate it when they do that,” the ME said. He sprayed the room with a small can of air freshener, lilac and gardenia, that didn’t help. Sweat glistened on his forehead.

  Reese breathed carefully though his mouth. He wasn’t sure whether the ME was talking about Ramon’s flatulence or Thomkins’ escape. A brown fluid spread between Ramon’s legs. The ME nozzled off the dark-veined marble. Tan water sheeted to the gutters, dropped through a clear tube, and splashed into a white plastic bucket, complete with Sears sticker and long fingers of crusted beige paint, the same color as the wall above the green tile.

  “I hate a man with a weak stomach,” the ME clarified.

  Reese nodded and watched him peel the other side of the chest, leaving fat waxy-yellow against the blanched, purple muscle. With a small circular saw, the ME whistled through the sternum, red mist spotting his white coat.

  The ME put the saw up and popped out the sternum with a baby crowbar, oddly chromed, the blood translucent and candy-colored against the shiny chrome.

  The room was hot now. The baby crowbar lay blood smeared on the counter. The ME snapped off his latex gloves, turning them inside out, and into the trash like old skin. He removed his visor and mask. He introduced himself as Dr. James Halloran. They did not shake hands.

  “I have to write,” Halloran said. “The county morgue has ceiling mikes, de-comp fans, air conditioning. Stainless steel autopsy trays. Here, you have to improvise.” Halloran opened three steel doors of the body lockers. White mist rolled into th
e room. He put his head inside the first vault. His voice echoed. “The Chief thinks this guy bled to death.”

  The whip lay coiled inside a plastic bag on the main counter next to a brown paper bag. “And you think?”

  “When you hang a three hundred pound man by his ankles, the first thing you have to worry about is heart attack or a stroke.”

  “Or the roof caving in,” Reese said and glanced at the hole between the legs.

  Halloran pulled his head out of the freezer. “It’s in the paper sack.”

  The bag was checkered with patches of grease. Halloran slid it over to make room for his notebook, leaving a clear glaze on the counter. “I counted one hundred and eleven recent cuts on the body.”

  “Recent?”

  “In addition to a lot of old scar tissue. He’d whipped himself for years, is my guess. See the puncture wounds around the waist? Cops found a corset with metal spikes, some other toys. Nothing new for priests, I guess, self-abuse. But he did not cut himself one hundred and eleven times with a sickle and then hang himself by the feet. I don’t care if the door was bolted from the inside. He had help.”

  “Go on.”

  Halloran moved his index and middle fingers to simulate walking. “Ramon climbs a ladder. Then his buddy ties the whip around his feet, a simple square knot. The whip is half-hitched to the beam and Ramon, with his friend’s help, climbs down the ladder. The whip tightens, Ramon is swinging inverted, his head two feet off the floor.”

  “How’s a three hundred man climbing down a ladder with his feet tied?” Reese asked. “I mean, Ramon was not exactly agile. He wasn’t a gazelle.”

  “Maybe he fell,” Halloran said.

  “The beam would have snapped.”

  Halloran held his hand out as if to say, just listen. “While Ramon is swinging back and forth, his friend cuts him one hundred and eleven times with the sickle. His friend removes Ramon’s testicles and the ladder, and once outside, somehow throws the bolt, locking the door from the inside.” Before Reese could laugh, Halloran added, “He used a piece of stiff wire, threaded it through the space in the plank door, pulled the bolt and left.”

  “Some friend,” Reese said. The bolt would have had to have been pushed not pulled, hard to do with a thin piece of wire. “Ramon cooperated?”

  “Can you imagine hanging Ramon if he hadn’t? More than likely a sexual thing gone bad. Of course most of that is some variety of auto asphyxiation and Ramon was hanged by his ankles, but still there is a commonality.”

  Or a murder that had gone very well was Reese’s thought. A murder that had gone extremely well. “Did you find anything inside of the good Father?”

  “Inside?”

  “Had he been penetrated?”

  “No semen in the usual orifices. There was rectal scarring. Quite a bit of it. No recent abrasions. He had a cut on the outside of his mouth and one knuckle cut slightly. Almost like he’d hit himself. Like I said, they’re big on self-abuse.”

  Reese nodded. “One of the priests?”

  “It’s a place to start….” Halloran said, his voice trailing off. “Who knows? A monastery, all those men up there alone.”

  He thought the whole theory ridiculous. He knew who did it. He did not know how or why. “You mind if I check the whip?”

  Halloran said it would be okay and went back to his paperwork. From a box on the counter, Reese grabbed a pair of latex gloves. He laid the plaited rawhide along the counter. It was about fifteen feet long and circling around it for most of the length was a scuffed strip. “Burring,” he said. “Ramon was hoisted over the beam. No ladder, I think.”

  The morgue was quiet except for Halloran’s scribbling and a faint hum from the florescent lights. The compressor had shut down. After a moment, Halloran said, “I’d hate to meet him.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who pulled Ramon over that beam. Five cops and two ladders to get him down, so maybe it was more than one. It was probably three or four of the priests.”

  “It wasn’t a priest. They all had alibis. Their stories checked.” Reese had a good idea of who’d be strong enough to pull Ramon over the beam - Ajax Rasmussen’s circus-freak butler. Ajax’s whipping boy.

  “All right,” Halloran conceded, “it could have been strangers.”

  “A bunch of guys come into the mission at night and hang a priest with no witnesses? Father Lavour was three doors down the hall reading his Bible. He heard nothing.”

  “Maybe Lavour helped.”

  “Lavour’s sixty and weighs about one hundred pounds. He’d have trouble hanging a picture of the Pope.” Reese looked around, but did not see the sickle. He was curious why Halloran hadn’t mentioned Rusty as the lead suspect. “What about the murder weapon?”

  “They’re taking prints. I heard it belongs to the archeologist who’s working in the graveyard. A Miss Webber. She’s lovely, I heard.”

  “Maybe she did it.”

  “A woman did this?”

  “Have you talked to her?” Reese asked. He guessed Halloran had never seen a woman cut up a man. They did it good. And sometimes they cleaned the mess.

  Halloran shrugged. “It’s not my job to figure out who did it, just how it was done. The fashion in which the murder was committed.”

  Reese was not sure why Rasmussen had killed Ramon. How it was done didn’t matter. He’d never get Ajax into a courtroom, at least he wasn’t planning on it. Ajax had gone to the trouble of using Rusty’s sickle, and he wondered how that would play out. What was Rasmussen up to?

  “You’ll have enough trouble figuring out that much,” he said.

  Halloran didn’t argue. He handed Reese a clear plastic envelope holding two improbably long teeth. The fangs inside were stained yellow, over an inch long and broken at the gum line. “I found these in Ramon’s robe.”

  “Human?”

  “No, no,” Halloran said. “It’s a porcelain substance, man-made. Dental prosthetics. They could be for a dog. They’re long enough. You’ll notice the porcelain is stained. Could be tobacco and coffee. But since dogs usually don’t smoke or drink coffee, the teeth might have yellowed from the food and water.”

  “A dog dentist?”

  “Sure. Dog psychiatrists. Dog dentists. There’s a vet in Beverly Hills who does plastic surgery on dogs. Dogs even have personal stylists. We spend billions of dollars on our pets.”

  “Could they be for a human?”

  “Who wants permanent fangs?”

  Reese didn’t know but wanted to find out. Maybe Ajax Rasmussen handed out fake fangs to his apprentices. He jiggled the bag. “Can I hang on to them?”

  “Sure. No significance between them and cause of death. Sign a custody slip and take them. Maybe you can come up with something. The Chief said to cooperate with you. Right?”

  Halloran closed his notebook. He snapped on a clean pair of gloves and new paper mask. He put on his face shield and selected a large knife from a wood block, whisked it across a butcher’s iron four times, moved to Ramon, and quickly cut across the top of the scalp from ear to ear, then quick lines down the side.

  He worked his fingers into the cut and jerked down. When he took his hands away, Ramon’s face was folded over on itself, the fringe of hair hanging off the chin like a French goatee, the wet skull reflecting the overhead lights.

  Thomkins shuffled in, grinned sheepishly, but would not look at the corpse. Reese hoped his stomach was empty. Thomkins’ gun belt had fallen past his hips and he pulled it up.

  Halloran let the saw wind up to full speed. The skull was heavy cutting, lugging the engine until he eased pressure, and over the high-pitched whir, the rotten ash smell of burning bone and blood.

  After he finished cutting, Halloran picked up the baby crowbar, not bothering to rinse, saying cheerily, voice muffled by the mask, “I learned three things in medical school: one, the patient will always stop bleeding; two, the patient will eventually die; and three, if you drop the baby, pick it back up.”
>
  Halloran popped out the quarter sphere of the crown. Thomkins covered his mouth and looked for something to throw up in, unfortunately picking the brown paper bag.

  The bottom fell out, leaving Ramon’s parts in full view.

  Thomkins made a barely audible shriek and ran for the door, hands to mouth, vomit shooting through his fingers, showering the doorknob.

  Thomkins’ stomach was definitely empty now. He struggled with the door, frantically gripping the knob, but it was too slippery to open. He turned, grinned bleakly, and tried to compose himself.

  Halloran cupped the brain in both hands and pulled. A sucking noise and Ramon’s eyes sunk half an inch. Halloran plopped the brain in the pan beneath a hanging scale. Thomkins kept wiping his hands on his uniform pants until he finally got the door open and left. The smell of vomit rose above the lilac and gardenia.

  “I hate it when they do that,” Halloran said and handed Reese the nozzle. He washed the contents of Thomkins’ stomach off the door and into a drain set deep in the tiles. When it plugged, he pushed the heavier pieces through with his toe.

  “We have five incorruptible witnesses,” the Chief said to her, “all priests, who’ll swear you had several very heated arguments with Father Ramon, the deceased.”

  “Ramon’s dead?”

  “I just said that.”

  “And this is all about telling me?” she said. He was a whale of a man. He overflowed the chair. He was also solid and a man on a mission.

  “Telling you what?”

  “That Ramon is dead.” They’d been waiting for her at the Sheraton when she’d returned from Hamsun’s office - three police cars and four cops. With no explanation, she was handcuffed at gunpoint. She shin kicked one of the cops but settled down when they threatened to use the pepper spray and hobbles. At least the Chief now felt safe enough in his own office to have her uncuffed. She rubbed her wrists. “Well, I’m sorry about Ramon. And thanks for going to so much trouble informing me. Now if - ”