by Casey Doran
“You really think I would kill somebody over a guitar?”
Torrez shrugged.
“I’ve seen people kill for all kinds of shit. I once arrested a guy who killed his neighbor because he could hear his alarm go off at four thirty in the morning every day through the wall. He finally got sick of it, knocked on the guy’s door and stabbed him sixteen times with a kitchen knife.”
“Nice story. But chopping a guy’s head off because he broke into my friends bar still seems kind of excessive, doesn’t it?”
“To most people. But it seems like excessive is kind of your thing.”
“It’s called fiction, detective. I don’t’ actually kill people.”
“Except your father, right?”
I winced, ashamed at myself for letting Torrez bait me into a trap that should have been obvious.
“You say you did not know that the detectives talked to this guy, Booker?”
“How would I? The Peoria Police Department doesn’t exactly come and check with me every time they do something. If they suspected this guy of being responsible, it’s news to me.”
“So you would have no reason to kill him?”
I was beginning to second-guess my decision to speak to the detective without a lawyer present. But I knew that Torrez was just fishing, trying to get me to admit to something I normally wouldn’t. If I had been guilty, I would have been toast.
“No, detective. I have no reason to kill a person I’ve never met nor heard of.”
I waited, knowing anything I said would be used against me. Of course, staying quiet would be used against me as well. Torrez leaned forward.
“Look, let’s stop fucking around, okay? There is a dead body forty feet from where you park your car. You have a shaky alibi, plenty of means and, a history of violence. So if there is anything you want to tell me, I assure you, now is the time.”
“Like if I have to pee?”
A scowl passed over Torrez, darker than any I have ever tried attributing to Christian Black.
“Are you sure that sarcasm is how you want to play this, Jericho?”
“Why would I kill this guy in my own building? Why would I copy my own book?”
“To use that very logic. You make it look so much like you did it that you couldn’t have done it. How about the number that was written on the wall?”
“What about it?”
“The number five. Like a countdown. Also from your book. Do you have any ideas about that?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Any ideas on who some of the other victims might be?”
“No.”
“How about when other murders may occur? Somebody at the scene has read the book. He mentioned that your character, Christian Black, was on some sort of a schedule.”
“It wasn’t really a schedule.” I said. Except it was. In the book, Christian Black killed his victims three days apart. It was a random number I had used at the time. Three strikes and you’re out. Bad news comes in three’s. It made sense. I explained it to Torrez, who continued to write without looking up at me.
“Three days from last night would be Halloween,” he said.
“That’s right. If it happens again.”
“Why would somebody go to all of this trouble and then stop?”
“I don’t know, Torrez. You’re the detective. I’m just a guy that makes this shit up as I go.”
There was a knock at the door. Rourke poked his head in and told Torrez that he was sorry to interrupt, but Torrez had a phone call from a Detective Jagger. Without saying anything, Torrez left the room, shutting the door behind him. It was back to just me and the mirror. I wondered who was behind it. Maybe Torrez’s partner. Maybe his boss. Or maybe the district attorney, dragged out of bed in the middle of the night for what was bound to be a high-profile case.
Torrez returned and took his seat across the table.
“Okay ... how about those footprints?” He asked. Torrez was using a pretty typical technique of throwing out seemingly random questions to keep me off-balance.
“What about them?”
“They are between sizes eleven and eleven and a half, and were likely made by a work boot or hiking boot. I checked your closet. You wear size eleven. I didn’t see any work boots.”
“That’s because I’m wearing them, detective. And lots of people wear size eleven.”
“True. The shoe size would indicate a pretty big guy. What are you, six-two?”
“Six-one.”
Torrez wrote it down and asked his next question without looking up. “About one eighty-five?”
“Close enough.”
He once again placed the pen perfectly aligned with the notepad.
“Booker was five-ten, one seventy. You’re plenty big enough to have overpowered him, tied him up, and hacked his head off.”
It was a trap. And a pretty blatant one. I stayed silent while the detective just stared at me. He thought the killer was sitting across from him. Clearly. He just needed proof. And he was working hard to trick me into giving it to him. Torrez waited for me to fill the silence. I’m sure it usually worked for him. Most people feel a compulsive need to fill silences. It is a principle that interrogators live by. But I have no problem with silence. I prefer it. It took ten minutes for Torrez to change tactics.
“I think you did it,” he said. “I think you plotted it like one of your books and are silently congratulating yourself on how well you pulled it off. But this is not fiction. This is real life, and in real life, the bad guy always gets caught because bad guys are stupid.”
“There’s no way I did it. That crime scene looked like a Walking Dead marathon. I couldn’t have possibly cleaned up that fast.”
“I understand that Christian Black likes to wear rain slickers when he kills people. The kind with a hood that pulls shut on a drawstring. Seems to me you have spent years coming up with ways to orchestrate messy crime scenes while staying clean.”
“Did you find a bloody rain slicker while you were tearing apart my building? Has anybody found one?”
“You had plenty of time to get rid of it before you made the 911 call.”
“So I dispose of the rain slicker but I leave the murder weapon?”
“The chainsaw belongs to you.” Torrez said. “Your prints being on it would not be overly damning. It would be a lot harder to explain your prints on a bloody slicker.”
“Prints? So now I’m not wearing gloves?” I asked. “How the hell did I forget to do that? And anyway, now we are back to cleaning up. Because if I didn’t wear gloves, then I would have dead guy in my fingernails.” I held them up for effect. Torrez was not impressed.
“Don’t worry, Jericho. I’ll have it all figured out, nice and neat and ready to hand over to the prosecutor before you can say capital punishment.”
“Whatever, Torrez. Am I free to go now? ‘Cause I really do need to pee.”
I was surprised when he said that I was. Torrez powered off the video camera and escorted me out to the hallway. Cops looked at me like I had killed their dog. I had worked hard to lose the stigma, kept my head down, and changed my name. The stink left from my legacy had not washed completely away, but it had faded, like a stain in the living room carpet you can still just barely make out. Now it was back. I was the guy these things happened around. And I always would be. Cops have a sense for things like that. They have to. They even have a term for it: shit magnets.’ They, above all others, would always see me for who, and what, I truly was.
Sunrise was just breaking over the river as I left the police station. My building was only four blocks away. It was also still crawling with cops and possibly still containing pieces of a dead drug dealer. I took a course in the opposite direction further into downtown. Up Main Street, past the courthouse, was the club district. It was a four-block section crammed with nightclubs catering to every taste, every vice, and every desire. There were the trendy dance clubs with names like Comatose and sports bars cal
led the End Zone. Centrally located was the Gentleman’s Club that boasted the highest cover charge and most outrageous drink prices in town, but that never failed to pack the house. Sitting on the corner like a big gothic bookend was the Dungeon. Peoria, Illinois, had a local music scene to rival Seattle in the early nineties. Over the past few years, a half dozen bands with ties to the area had signed on with major labels. They all had to cut their bones in the converted chapel turned nightclub. It was consecrated ground, and any band wanting to take a piece of the local pie had to receive their blessing on its stage. Its current headliner was Hell Kat, the latest band to take the area by storm. Word was they were talking to a major label.
I stopped at a Starbucks and ordered a large coffee with plenty of room for cream and sugar. Coffee can’t cure everything, but sometimes it can come pretty damn close. And I had to wash out the aftertaste of the motor oil they had at the police station. Back on the street, I kept walking until I reached the Blue Note, happy to see a white Ford F150 parked out front.
Like I told Torrez, the Blue Note is not my bar. I helped a friend with the down payment, and he repaid me by never charging me, a decision Gus has probably regretted in the past few weeks. I stepped inside, proceeded directly to the vending machine and fed in nine dollars for a pack of Camels. Smoking has been banned inside bars for years, but Gus kept the machine since it still makes money. At the bar with my coffee, I took a long drag, watching the smoke drift toward the bottle lining the wall, when Gus came from the back room.
“It’s bad enough you are decapitating drug dealers, but now you’re smoking in a public establishment.”
“My run of despicable deeds knows no bounds.”
“That’s an understatement. You look like shit.”
“I look better than the guy in my garage.”
Like me, Gus Tanner is something of a local celebrity. Unlike me, his notoriety comes from an act of heroism. Gus spent twenty-four years riding a squad car for the Peoria police department before being forced to pull the pin. His involuntary retirement came after being involved in a shootout with five armed bank robbers. Gus took a bullet in the shoulder during the gunfight, but still managed to take down the suspects and perform CPR on his partner until the paramedics arrived. He still had plenty of friends on the force, all of whom wondered what he was doing associating with the local pariah. He pointed at my cigarette.
“Back to square one,” he said. Two months before, I had begun having violent coughing fits and dry heaves. Doctors noted my pack a day habit as the obvious culprit and warned that the symptoms would only continue to grow worse if I did not quit. They showed me pictures of lungs that looked like balls of dough rolled in charcoal ashes. Reluctantly, I began a campaign to quit, an endeavor that has had more stops and starts than a NASCAR race.
“I think finding a decapitated corpse in my parking garage is cause for one.”
“Rationalization is a slippery slope, my friend. But speaking of the mess in your garage, what are you planning to do about cleanup? You know the cops won’t take care of it, right?”
“I hadn’t even thought about it.”
“I know an outfit that handles crime scenes. I can give them a call.”
“Thanks.”
“How’s Doomsday?”
“He’s good. Probably back asleep slobbering all over my pillows.”
Tanner poured himself some coffee.
“Who are the detectives working the case? Tell me it’s not the Hall of Famers.”
“Who?”
“Ben Marino and Andrew Cobb. They’re called the Hall of Famers because they both share names of ex-athletes who are in their respective Halls of Fame.”
I nodded. “Clever. But no, it’s not them. And I only met one of them. Guy named Torrez.”
Tanner sipped his coffee. “I’ve heard of him.” There was something about his tone, so I waited, knowing that Gus would elaborate.
“He’s an outstanding cop. Probably the best they have. But he’s a real hardass. Served as an MP in the Marines. I hear he can’t keep a partner because he either drives them all crazy or scares the shit out of them.”
“That sounds like an awesome person to have on my ass. He’s thoroughly convinced that I’m guilty.”
Gus shook his head.
“No. It would take a dumber investigator than Torrez to believe that you did it. If he really thought you were the guy, you would still be in the box and confessing to everything from killing that guy to downloading Internet porn by now.” Tanner refilled his coffee. “Do you have any ideas on who could have done this?” he asked. I had spent the past two hours answering all these questions, but Tanner wasn’t going to let me off the hook.
“None.”
“Think. Have you had any hang-ups lately? Anybody hanging around the building? Anybody following you?”
“No, nothing like that. At least not that I’ve noticed.” I took a long drag from my cigarette, stifling the urge to cough.
“Could this be the work of one of Peter’s disciples, maybe?” My parents had been psychotic. But they were not without sympathizers, like-minded people who believed that mass murder was justified, as long as it was carried out on individuals who were ‘evil’ enough to “deserve” it.
“It’s possible,” I said. “God knows, there are enough of those freaks out there. I still hear from them, time to time. This guy Booker apparently fits the profile.”
“Until this thing gets figured out, you need to watch your back.”
“Always.”
The television set above the bar was turned on and on mute. The news screen cut to a shot of Congressman Preston Masters standing outside the courthouse. I felt bile rising from my gut, the usual reaction to seeing the city’s’ esteemed politician. Everything from his suit to his hair was overdone. The press was gathered around like groupies at a rock concert, putty in his hands. I grabbed the remote and turned up the volume as Masters took a deep, thoughtful breath, as though every word about to come out of his mouth had not already been written.
“I have been made aware of the details of this horrible crime,” Masters said. “Clearly, this is the act a sick, twisted, and violent individual. The police department is already working diligently, and I have no doubt that their efforts will ultimately lead to the capture of this monster.”
A reporter raised a question about the identity of the victim.
“I’m sorry, Jaime, but that name is still being withheld.”
“Can you comment on the initial rumors that Jericho Sands was the murder victim?”
Preston frowned. He looked past the reporter and into the camera. He’d been taught by his father, who was a former governor, to always speak into the camera and he took the message to heart. For whatever else Preston Masters was, he was a skilled public speaker and could manipulate his audience like a snake charmer.
“You will have to take that up with him. Unfortunately, it seems as though Mister Sands saw an opportunity to turn this horrific event into some sort of publicity stunt. Maybe his book sales are down.”
“Publicity stunt!” I yelled.
“Calm down,” Tanner said.
“How about later reports that Mister Sands was questioned by detectives? Is Jericho Sands a suspect?”
“Obviously, I cannot comment on any details, as this is an ongoing investigation. But I am certain that whatever role Jericho Sands may have played in this terrible tragedy, the police will bring it to light.”
“Whatever role I played?” I yelled.
“Easy,” Tanner said.
“What is your personal opinion? Do you think Jericho Sands committed this crime?”
It was a softball, lobbed up for him to knock out of the park and completely devoid of any kind of journalistic integrity. Right up Preston’s alley.
“Well, I can certainly attest to the fact that Mister Sands is unstable and prone to acts of unprovoked violence.”
“Unprovoked?”
“Easy,�
�� Tanner said.
“I am also sure that, unlike throughout his previous sordid history, Jericho Sands will pay for his wrongdoing.”
I picked up my coffee mug and flung it at the screen. The mug, screen, and plastic all shattered in a burst. Coffee dripped lazily down the ruined unit. As quickly as it had come, my anger fled. Tanner looked down at the wreckage.
“That TV was brand-new, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“Yeah. Just got it last month. And it wasn’t cheap, either.”
“Sorry. I’ll write you a check.”
“Forget it. I’ll just put it on your damages tab.”
“I really hate that asshole,” I said, by way of explanation. None was needed. My feud with Preston Masters was well documented. And growing by the day.
“You think he would have eased up,” I said. “Kat and I aren’t seeing each other anymore.”
“Maybe he’s still upset with you for throwing him into a Dumpster.”
The memory brought a smile. Preston had come in to the bar waving papers from the Board of Health that condemned the Blue Note as untenable. They were of course as much a work of fiction anything I have ever written, but they were official and would hold up in court. Masters’s ultimatum was that I stop seeing his sister immediately or else the papers would be served and the bar shut down. I had a counteroffer. I threw the papers in the Dumpster behind the building, along with their messenger.
I served one week in county with another month probation. It was a slap on the wrist considering the “victim” was a United States Congressman. Luckily, the judge was a Democrat and not the largest supporter of the young congressman. In fact, I was sure that during the sentencing I had detected his honor suppressing the tiniest of grins. Katrina, however, had no intention of letting me off the hook so easily. On the day of my release, as I was turning out of the parking lot, a brick crashed through the windshield of my truck and ended up in my lap with splinters of shattered glass. On it were written two words in thick black letters ‘WE’RE OVER!’ The congressman got his wish, the forged papers having served their purpose, albeit not in the manner intended.